Networks, Narratives and Nations: Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond 9789048553266

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Networks, Narratives and Nations

Networks, Narratives and Nations Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond

Edited by Marjet Brolsma, Alex Drace-Francis, Krisztina Lajosi, Enno Maessen, Marleen Rensen, Jan Rock, Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez and Guido Snel

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Peder Severin Krøyer, Hipp hipp hurra! Konstnärsfest på Skagen (Hip, Hip, Hurrah! Artists’ Party at Skagen, 1888). Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden. Image: Wikimedia Commons Frontispiece: Pieter van der Borcht the Elder, Allegorie op de moeilijkheid van het besturen (The Difficulty of Ruling over a Diverse Nation, 1578). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Cover design: Coördesign Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 075 5 e-isbn 978 90 4855 326 6 doi 10.5117/9789463720755 nur 694 All authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

A Collection of Studies in Honour of Professor Joep Leerssen



Table of Contents

List of illustrations

11

Introduction

13

Of Networks, Narratives and Nations Alex Drace-Francis

Part I  National Questions 1 National Stereotypes in Early Modern Europe

31

2 Constructed or Primordial?

41

3 Nationalism and the Rhine

51

4 Cultural Nationalism beyond Europe

63

Some Reflections Peter Burke

The European Nation-State Murray Pittock

A Matter of Perspective? John Breuilly

Genealogies of Mankind, Imperial Custodianships and Anticolonial Resistance John Hutchinson

Part II  Networked Nations 5 Firebrand Folklore

75

6 The Nation as a Network

85

Musical Memory and the Making of Transnational Networks Ann Rigney

Rizaeddin Fakhreddinov’s Islamic Biographies Michael Kemper

7 A Network in Search of an Alternative Modernity Artists’ Colonies in Europe (1870–1914) Anne-Marie Thiesse

8 A Dutch Journal with a European Programme De Muzen Marita Mathijsen

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105

Part III  Canonicity and Culture 9 Cultural Nationalism and the Invention of Dutch Literary Icons

117

10 Colonial Legacies in European Folklore Studies

127

11 The Canonization of the Artisan around 1900

137

12 Sigurður Guðmundsson and Jón Árnason’s Icelandic Folktales

147

13 Songs His Mother Taught Him

157

14 The Genesis of a National Product

167

Lotte Jensen

Diarmuid Ó Giolláin

Eric Storm

Terry Gunnell

Émile Legrand’s Collection of Lacemakers’ Ballads David Hopkin

Henry Havard and the Renewed Interest in Delftware, 1850–1920 Jo Tollebeek

Part IV  Historicity and Narrative 15 Travelling Westwards

Finding Europe in the Irish Middle Ages Ann Dooley

189

16 Finding Oneself within Germania

203

17 The Faces of Crisis

211

18 The Extension of Traditions

223

19 The Buried Tombstone, the Melting Iceberg, and the Random Bullet

243

20 Reconstituting the European Historical Novel in Latin America

255

Karl Viktor Mühlenhoff’s Reading of Widsith Tom Shippey

Rethinking a Key Concept in View of the Transnational Intellectual History of Europe Balázs Trencsényi

King Stephen I of Hungary and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism Krisztina Lajosi

History, Memory and Antagonism in Ireland R. F. Foster

Mario Vargas Llosa in the Backlands of Brazil Ina Ferris

Part V  Imagology, Identity and Alterity 21 The Shape of Things to Come

265

22 Auto-exoticism and the Irish Colonial Landscape

275

23 Ordinary Eyesight?

285

Thomas Pennant’s Tour of Ireland in 1754 Mary-Ann Constantine

George Petrie’s Paintings of Clonmacnoise (1828) and Dún Aengus (1827) Tom Dunne

Cultural Comparisons between Ireland and Wales Claire Connolly

24 European Constructions of the Asian East in the Novels of John Buchan

295

25 Prerequisites to the Study of “Social Perception”

305

26 Considerations of an Imagined Land

313

Acknowledgments

325

List of Contributors

327

Index

333

Michael Wintle

Empathy and Immunity to Nationalism Hercules Millas

Manfred Beller



List of illustrations

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 14.1 Fig. 18.1 Fig. 21.1 Fig. 22.1 Fig. 22.2 Fig. 22.3 Fig. 24.1

Völkertafel (Panel of the Peoples, c.1720–30). Title page of De Muzen (1835). “Jantje zag eens pruimen hangen” (Johnny Saw Some Fine Plums Hanging). Hieronymus van Alphen, Kleine gedigten voor kinderen (Poetry for Children, 1783). Photograph of an artisanal cheesemaker at work at the Village Suisse at the Swiss National Exhibition in Geneva in 1896. Bust of King-Stadtholder William III (attributed to Lambertus van Eenhoorn, c.1700). Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger, The Coronation of St Stephen (c.1870). Map of Thomas Pennant’s journey in Ireland (1754). Ruins of Clonmacnoise, King’s County (1826). Engraving after George Petrie, from J. N. Brewer, Beauties of Ireland (1826). George Petrie, The Last Circuit of Pilgrims at Clonmacnoise (1826). George Petrie, Dun Aengus Fort, Inismore, Aran Islands (c.1827). Cover of the first edition of John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916).

32 107 121 143 180 224 268 279 280 283 298

Introduction Of Networks, Narratives and Nations Alex Drace-Francis Abstract Do narratives make nations, and if so, did networks make this happen? The notion that national and other group identities are constructed and sustained by narratives and images has been a widespread postulate for several decades now. This volume contributes to this debate, with a particular emphasis on the networked, transnational nature of cultural nation-building processes in a comparative European and sometimes extra-European context. Keywords: national identity; cultural nationalism; literary genres; social networks; European identity

Do narratives make nations, and if so, did networks make this happen? The notion that national and other group identities are constructed and sustained by narratives and images has been a widespread postulate in the study of nationalism in Europe and beyond for several decades now. While some, more sociologically oriented theories have seen the creation of national cultures as a mere by-product of large-scale political and economic transformations, others have seen both the content and the form of national narratives as central to the process of creating identities.1 A large body of literature has now appeared addressing questions of nation and narration, whether through edited volumes or monograph studies.2 1 Classic works arguing these respective theses were published in 1983: Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Anderson, Imagined Communities. For a review and a position statement, see Leerssen, “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture.” 2 In lieu of an exhaustive review of theories, suff ice it to cite two influential collections: Bhabha, Nation and Narration; and Berger, Eriksonas and Mycock, Narrating the Nation. The Brill book series National Cultivation of Culture showcases a variety of approaches.

Brolsma et al. Networks, Narratives and Nations. Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022. doi: 10.5117/9789463720755_intro

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This volume contributes to this debate, with a particular emphasis on the networked, transnational nature of cultural nation-building processes in a comparative European and sometimes extra-European context. It stresses the centrality and agency of literary, artistic and cultural practices and modes of representation. In one way or another, literary, cultural and historical narratives and artefacts have shaped national identities. They have done so not just as “content” accompanying a general sociohistorical process but by the specific nature of their means of representation and ways of transmission; and not just within but across linguistic communities. The objects of study and interpretive methodologies applied in this collection are varied. Chapters deal inter alia not just with poetry, prose and political ideas but with painting, porcelain and popular song. They draw on examples in languages ranging from Icelandic, Arabic and German, to Irish, Hungarian, French and beyond. They study transcultural phenomena from the medieval and early modern periods to the modern and postmodern, with frequent attention to challenging conventional temporalities and periodizations. Some treat general themes and ideas, while others focus on quite specific texts, motifs or personalities. But all speak to the above questions . More particularly, all engage with and take inspiration from the work of Joep Leerssen, who for over forty years has been producing learned, challenging, innovative but also highly lucid and readable contributions to the comparative history of modern European literature and culture. Before introducing in more detail the contents and structure of the volume, and setting out its salient findings, a – necessarily brief and incomplete – review of the most relevant of Leerssen’s principal areas of research, together with some of his more prominent publications and their theories, will help orient the reader. Already in his MA dissertation, defended at the University of Aachen in 1979, Joep Leerssen offered an original account of the development of comparative literature in Great Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. Unlike most interpretations before or since, this work sought to analyse the development of literary studies in Britain in a transnational light, taking into account both the internal national and linguistic diversity within the United Kingdom and the continental connections and networks of key protagonists. Published in German in 1984 in the Aachen-based Contributions to Comparative Literature book series (Aachener Beiträge zur Komparatistik), it remained little-known to specialists in British cultural history until it was finally revised and published in an English edition in

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2019.3 Leerssen went on to research the role of literary activity in forging an image of Irish nationality. Continuing his preoccupation with a multilingual and transnational approach but going back in time to the period before the nineteenth century, he interpreted both learned and popular configurations of Irishness across three linguistic traditions (Gaelic, Latin and English) while situating the Irish case in a comparative European context. His doctoral work on this topic was published in book form in 1986. 4 It was supplemented a decade later by a book-length study of Irish literary nationalism in the nineteenth century, which took up the themes of “remembrance and imagination” and combined a discursive approach to historical memory with analysis of literary images.5 In 1991, Leerssen was appointed to a professorship in European literature at the University of Amsterdam, in which capacity he played an important role in setting up the interdisciplinary teaching programme in European Studies. In line with the department’s transnational preoccupations, he applied the methods of imagology and comparative literary and cultural history to a broader canvas. In terms of publications, this resulted in the survey work Nationaal denken in Europa, published by Amsterdam University Press in 1999. It bore a disarmingly modest subtitle, claiming to be simply “a cultural-historical outline” (een cultuurhistorische schets). But its interpretive boldness and thoroughgoing comparative approach meant that it furnished not just an outline but material for a broader interpretation of cultural nationalism in a European context. This potential was signalled in a programmatic article published in Poetics Today in 2000,6 and more completely realized in the considerably expanded English edition, National Thought in Europe, put out by the same press in 2006. The volume was a success among students and scholarly readers for several reasons. Firstly, it provided a clearly written overview in a comparative and long-term framework. Secondly, it did not simply take its cue from the paradigmatic nation-building projects that unfolded in the larger countries, but attended to developments among smaller national groups and peripheral regions of Europe and showed that their history was part of an integrated story. Thirdly, it eschewed the pitfalls of “methodological nationalism” or country-by-country case studies, looking instead at processes such as the remediation of images across times, 3 Leerssen, Komparatistik; in revised form in English as Leerssen, Comparative Literature in Britain. 4 Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael. 5 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination. 6 Leerssen, “Rhetoric of National Character.”

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places and languages and the transmission of ideas about national culture through scholarly and popular networks. These approaches ensured that the book spoke not just to literary and cultural historians, but to those in nationalism studies who sought to understand the political significance of these phenomena from a sociological or historical viewpoint.7 It came out in a third edition in 2020 and continues to inspire researchers today. Always a catalyzing and collaborative spirit, Leerssen has not confined his output to single-author works. His analytical survey of national thought in Europe was underpinned and exemplified through the editing, in collaboration with Manfred Beller, of a handbook of Imagology, which brought together ample and wide-ranging material for the comparative cultural study of national character. The handbook drew on the paradigm of Imagologie established in German comparative literature circles; but the original concepts were extended to encompass a much wider frame of reference. The volume contained, along with overviews of key concepts, a series of articles covering the development of national and regional stereotypes, with accompanying bibliographies for further research; a series of theoretical/methodological entries surveying tropes, motifs and techniques of representation; and introductory surveys of different media, including not just standard literary genres but also popular ones such as cartoon strips, travel writing and cinema.8 In 2008, in recognition of his contributions to the field of comparative literary and cultural history, Joep Leerssen was awarded the Spinoza Prize (Spinozapremie, the annual award of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and generally considered the highest academic honour in the Netherlands).9 With funds from this award, Joep was able to set up the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms (SPIN) and to plan the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe. After a decade of writing, planning, coordinating and editing, this panoramic reference work was launched in digital and book formats in 2018. The Encyclopedia – or ERNiE, to cite its amiable acronym – surveys national cultures across Europe through a vast range of sources and media drawn from larger and smaller cultures alike. With its vast array of visual, textual and musical documents, survey articles, and studies of specific currents and fields of cultural production across over seventy cultural-linguistic communities in Europe written by 7 See, for example, the roundtable debate, with responses from the author, in Brinker et al., “Seventh Nations and Nationalism Debate.” 8 Beller and Leerssen, Imagology. 9 NWO, “Prof dr. J. Th. (Joep) Leerssen.”

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over 600 scholarly contributors, ERNiE provides a many-sided summation of Leerssen’s approach to analysing culture in “space, time and cultural praxis.”10 At this point, Joep Leerssen’s colleagues considered it was time to take stock of this prodigious activity, not in the form of a conventional inventory or homage, but rather in that of a critical response, an applied evaluation of his postulations and paradigms in the form of new research.11 At the beginning of 2020, we started “networking,” and invited national and international scholars and collaborators to contribute chapters which spoke to one or other of the many threads of Leerssen’s work, testing them, engaging with them critically, and also in several cases advancing them with new documentation, case studies or dialogical argumentation. The response was exciting: no fewer than twenty-six papers were received from international scholars in literary and cultural history and related fields. All of them engage with the broader theme of networks, narratives and the transnational configuration of national identities in a number of different ways. Many of them drew on new primary textual analyses or archival research; others innovated conceptually. The contributions, we believe, reflect new critical thinking. If the point of departure bore the familiar name of Leerssen, the destinations arrived at here were novel and various. Thematic areas nevertheless emerged clearly, and it was possible to identify clear strands of analysis around which to structure the volume.

Structure and Thematics: Nations, Networks, Canons, Histories and Images The first of these thematic areas, entitled simply “National Questions,” groups together historical and sociological reflections by senior scholars on conceptualizations of culture and its role and function within nationalism studies. Peter Burke sets the stage by giving an overview both of the development of discourses and images of national character in early modern Europe, and of recent scholarship about it. Burke emphasizes – as do other contributors to this volume – questions of representation and perspective, the need for analysis of xenophilia as well as of xenophobia, and the extent to which national stereotype-formation processes have varied both across 10 Leerssen, Encyclopedia. 11 For SPIN, see https://spinnet.eu; on Leerssen’s other activities, see the home page of Joep Leerssen, https://leerssen.nl/.

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time and according to spatial and cultural contexts. Murray Pittock starts out from some general considerations of the constraints a “national” framework has placed on the writing of history in a modern European context. Then, by examining the particular case of Scotland in a comparative framework, he shows how the apparently transnational and comparative paradigms of nationalism studies tend towards a relativist position which neglects the role of premodern traditions and do not necessarily adopt a neutral position in defining what is “modern” and “national.” John Breuilly revisits the question of the role of cultural mobilization on the Rhine, both as a site of physical and cultural encounter and as a competing object and symbol of reverence in French and German discourse. While engaging with Leerssen’s paradigm of transnational cultivation, he argues for a more political reading of the appearance of certain key texts, by approaching the question from the perspective of the biographies of key actors as well as of both immediate conjunctures and longer-term political traditions in German lands and France respectively. Finally, John Hutchinson looks at the function of European cultural nationalism in consciousness-raising in the non-European world, with particular attention to the ambivalent effects of the doctrines of two eighteenth-century philologists and theoreticians of culture – Herder and Sir William Jones – both in governing populations under imperial rule and in creating alternative readings of world history and memory that made room for global cultures. Looking particularly at anticolonial movements in Egypt and Afghanistan, Hutchinson considers the extent to which they were either anti-European or part of an expansion of European ideas. The second section, “Networked Nations,” considers in particular the role of networks in the formation, transmission and remediation of ideas of nationhood in a wide variety of geographical contexts and media. Ann Rigney focuses in on the cultural practices of socialist-anarchist circles in Britain and France in the 1880s. Culture, Rigney argues, is not only encoded in texts, but reproduced and re-embodied in performances. Her chapter shows how discourses manifest themselves across different media, such as singing and performance, as well as traditional outlets such as newspapers and journals. She also shows how national cultural artefacts were reappropriated and redefined by internationalist networks, promoting forms of transnational class- and cause-based solidarity that transcended and sometimes explicitly rejected national boundaries. In another cultural context, Michael Kemper examines the attempts of Tatar mufti and nation-builder Rizaeddin Fakhreddinov to use the genre of the biographical compendium to develop a historical and territorial

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identity for the Tatars in the Volga-Ural region over the period from 1900 to 1936. Spanning late imperial Russian and early Soviet rule, Fakhreddinov’s compilatory efforts both depended on and consecrated a “national network,” which, however, was no longer serviceable as an instrument for political mobilization under the later, Bolshevik dispensation. A third approach to the question of networks is adopted by Anne-Marie Thiesse, who surveys the development of artists’ colonies in late nineteenth-century Europe. Covering sites from France and northern Italy to Hungary and Scandinavia, Thiesse observes both commonalities of practice across different artists’ representations of “national originality,” and personal connections between key actors in this typically fin-de-siècle artistic phenomenon. Marita Mathijsen offers a case study of a single Dutch-language literary journal, De Muzen (The Muses, originally called Europa). She shows that this journal rejected the culture of a circumscribed and self-sufficient Dutch Vaderland in favour of one in need of positioning itself in relation to, and sometimes in imitation of, other European literary currents. The prominent role of translation in this short-lived but influential national project was an outcome of the editors’ understanding that a national literature could only establish a set of values and aesthetic criteria when placed in an international reading context. The theme of networks is important to the overall argument of the volume, and engages with Leerssen’s conceptualization of the rise of nationalism in several ways. As the contributors to this section demonstrate, national cultures developed in Europe in an atmosphere of enhanced social communication. But individual linguistic communities did not just talk among themselves – in fact their development was enabled by the existence either of supranational languages or of other factors facilitating mutual intelligibility and more generally enabling access to broader patterns of thought. People, texts, ideologies and motifs moved repeatedly and sometimes wilfully across political, linguistic and cultural boundaries. “Nationalness” emerged as a paradoxical consequence of this, as networks and processes of exchange bred stylistic similitude across groups claiming to be unique.12 Moreover, the “wiring” of nationalism was not just geographical but related also to artistic genre: within national cultures, tropes and images were spread across different forms of representation, whether textual, visual, auditory or concerned with different media. Networking also took place between 12 For Leerssen’s conceptualization of this process, see especially Leerssen, “Viral Nationalism”; for datasets exemplifying processes of transnational communication, see the section “Geographic Networks” in the online edition of Leerssen, Encyclopedia, at https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/59/ scenario/75/geo.

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so-called high- and low-cultural output (a process which worked both ways) and between inward-directed nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The third section, entitled “Canonicity and Culture,” showcases several studies which both reconstruct and deconstruct particular processes of national canon formation by situating them in comparative contexts. Lotte Jensen looks at the problems of Dutch “literary icons,” a topic which has gained prominence in the contemporary Netherlands, as in other countries, due to various government-led canon-building initiatives. Looking variously at authors, works and characters, Jensen demonstrates that several Dutch “icons” were forged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries not on purely Dutch templates but on textual and narrative sources adopted from German, British and sometimes French models. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin compares the development and institutionalization of folklore studies in late nineteenth-century Ireland and Italy. By considering these developments in the light of the colonial relations of both countries, Ó Giolláin shows how nationalists such as Douglas Hyde in the former country and Lamberto Loria in the latter owed their conceptions of the cultural and ethnic purity of their home countries at least partly to their experience conducting fieldwork in colonial, extra-European contexts, in North America and Eurasia, respectively. Eric Storm also takes a comparative approach, looking at both institutional developments and individual contacts and agents who came together at the end of the nineteenth century to revaluate and mediatize the figure of the artisan in various European countries. The section concludes with three biographical case studies. Terry Gunnell sheds new light on the formation of Icelandic national culture through the examination of the role of painter Sigurður Guðmundsson and his personal social networks in the 1860s and early 1870s, including meetings with folklorist Jón Árnason and other figures from Iceland’s burgeoning national movement, in different locations both in Iceland and Denmark. David Hopkin tells us about Emile Legrand – better known as a specialist in early modern Greek bibliography and folk epic – and his interest in folksong and lacemaking in his native Normandy. Focus on Legrand’s apparently more dilettantish preoccupations sheds fascinating light on the way in which paradigms of cultural classification and interpretation travelled not only across national and regional boundaries but also across those of medium and genre. Meanwhile, Jo Tollebeek reviews a comparable but different individual French life trajectory, that of critic, connoisseur and collector Henry Havard. Havard’s critical and promotional writings almost single-handedly initiated an international resuscitation of interest in early modern Delft porcelain in the second half of the nineteenth century. I say “almost,” because, as

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Tollebeek documents, this was once again a networked process, involving travel and transnational communication as well as national codification. “Historicity and Narrative” is a significant component of most European cultural nationalisms today, and is treated in one way or another by a large number of contributors to this volume. Those gathered in this section pay particular attention to the interpretation of historical narratives in a wide range of contexts, from medieval Ireland to twentieth-century Brazil. In her chapter, Ann Dooley proposes an alternative dating for a fragment of an early Irish praise poem found in the fifteenth-century manuscript known as the Yellow Book of Lecan. She questions earlier attributions of the subject of the poem to the twelfth-century King of Connacht Toirrdhealbhach Ó Conchobhair, and suggests alternative solutions among figures from the fourteenth century. In doing so she also points out thematic and stylistic borrowings from European chivalric poetry, as part of a general European translatio studii. Also considering the revalorization of medieval poetry, Tom Shippey discusses nineteenth-century readings of the Old English poem Widsith, in particular that advanced by the German scholar Karl Viktor Müllenhoff. Shippey ascribes Müllenhoff’s interpretation both to advances in comparative European philology and textual criticism and to his identification with his home region of Ditmarsh in Holstein, formerly part of Denmark, and for which he was eager to secure a cultural-historical place in the new pan-German canon emerging at the time of political unification. The processes of “historification”13 and nationalization of iconic cultural works was, in these cases as in others analysed here, subject both to transnational and subregional influences. Taking an approach from conceptual history, Balázs Trencsényi charts the fortunes of the idea of “crisis” in early twentieth-century political thought. Using a wide range of sources across languages, Trencsényi shows how this period witnessed “a new way of temporalization and dynamization of concepts undermining the linear modernist narrative and bringing back cyclical and other ‘anti-modernist’ visions of history” (p. 214). In this way he both deconstructs the modernists’ own interpretation of what was happening and illustrates how various discursive currents around the concept of crisis influenced history itself. Krisztina Lajosi considers the controversial legacy of King Stephen I of Hungary. As the widely acknowledged founder of the medieval Hungarian kingdom, Stephen ought to have secured a comfortable place in the canon of national heroes. But as Lajosi 13 A term proposed by Harris, Linguistics of History. Its utility lies, among other things, in being applicable both to textual and non-textual representations of the past.

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explains, his positioning there – effected across a wide range of genres from medieval chronicles to Baroque plays, nineteenth-century high opera and twentieth-century rock opera – was controversial and deeply interwoven with political ideologies in the respective periods. No less controverted are the legacies of historical trauma in Ireland, analysed by R. F. Foster in his contribution, in relation to three objects. The “buried tombstone” is that of a participant in the Rebellion of 1798 in Ulster – buried not to erase his memory but to prevent its desecration. The “melting iceberg” is the title of an installation by artist Rita Duffy, bringing an iceberg to the Belfast dock where the Titanic was once moored, and letting it melt. The “dodged bullet” refers to an uncertain incident in the author’s own family history. Starting from these symbolic objects, Foster reflects on aspects of narrating and forgetting Irish national history, in comparison to other past-making processes in a European context. This section is completed by Ina Ferris, who focuses on Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1981 historical novel La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World). Ferris looks at the novel’s treatment of the War of the Canudos in late nineteenth-century Brazil, both in relation to earlier Latin American treatments such as that in Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões (The Backlands, 1902) and in terms of the overall paradigms of the historical novel as pioneered by Sir Walter Scott. In this way, the section showcases the huge variety of genres and media through which history is imagined across a wide range of locations and contexts and over a long time span. The final section, “Imagology, Identity and Alterity,” treats, like previous ones, a theme which echoes through many of the contributions, but brings together studies more particularly focused on self-other relations. As with the other sections, the sources used are wide-ranging: they include travel writing, fiction, historiographical discourses and visual representations, and in some cases the authors meditate on the relationship between them. Mary-Ann Constantine taps the unpublished journals of the well-known eighteenth-century British “home tourist,” Thomas Pennant, to shed light on his visit to Ireland, via Wales, in 1754. She finds not only differing degrees of identification and othering, but also “an early thread in cultural Celticism” (p. 267). Constantine’s chapter exemplifies how travel writing can be an incubator of essentialist notions of character and even race that find their way into later, formal cultural and anthropological discourses. Tom Dunne also writes about certain images of Ireland, but executed in a different medium, and several decades later. The paintings he studies, those of Dublin-born artist George Petrie, are not “hetero-images” in the classic acceptation of imagology. Rather, they partake of an auto-exoticizing gaze,

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including through the adoption of the recently developed theories (and ideologies) of picturesque landscape painting. Claire Connolly returns to the theme of “the proximate other.” Reviewing the imagological relationship between Wales and Ireland, she focuses partly on political strands in Celticist scholarship produced in Wales at the beginning of the twentieth century, but also refers to earlier sources such as the Dutch physician Gerard Boate, who produced the earliest natural history of Ireland but approached it symbolically via the view from Wales.14 Michael Wintle rereads the novels of Scottish imperialist soldier, politician and writer John Buchan, paying attention to the Orientalist portrayal of Middle Eastern characters, with particular reference to categories such as religion and gender, but also to conceptions of continental identities (European and Asiatic). Hercules Millas returns to the conceptual vocabulary of nationalism with particular reference to the modes of image-formation that have coloured Greek-Turkish relations in the post-Ottoman period. And, concluding this section, and the volume, Manfred Beller offers an overview of images of Albania and Albanians in Western-language literature and travel writing in the modern period.

Arguments and Advances Taken together, the chapters themselves build up into a networked narrative or series of interlocking narratives about the phenomenon of cultural nationalism in modern Europe and elsewhere. Contributors treat the circumstances in which national cultures arose, with a concentration on the classic period of nation-building from the second half of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, but they also challenge standard sociological explanations in a number of ways. Firstly and perhaps most obviously, the comparative method enables researchers to surmount what Anthony Smith called methodological nationalism, the fallacy whereby “basic social data are always collected and evaluated in terms of large-scale entities called ‘nation-states.’”15 Contributors mostly identify the rise of national cultures not in the primordial roots of individual national pasts, but in processes of translation, travel (of both ideas and people), reinterpretation 14 The role of foreigners in elaborating topographical discourses is well-known, especially in colonial contexts, but little attention has been given to the role of Dutch and other topographers in the British Isles. Other examples include the first on-site drawings of Stonehenge, made by Lucas de Heere in 1573–75. See De Heere, “Corte Beschryvinghe.” 15 Smith, “Nationalism and Classical Social Theory,” 26.

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and remediation through literary and cultural means across political borders as well as those of artistic genre. In doing so they make clear the centrality of cultural processes to the making of national identities. However, their findings do not lead to a simplistic endorsement of “modernist” theories either. Many of them situate the process of image-formation in a longer historical trajectory. We may speak perhaps not of a simple “invention of tradition” but of “traditions of invention” with roots in the early modern period, or, in the formula of one contributor, the “extension of tradition” as a longer-term process.16 Secondly, as already noted, the contributors are alive to the variety of genres and media in which image-formation takes place. Overall, the sources range from classical social-scientific affirmations concerning nations, through more liminal but important intermediary modes such as travel literature and popular song, or autobiographical and topographical writings, to a wide variety of visual and musical evidence. Material culture is not neglected, with attention paid not just to consecrated representational formats such as landscape painting but to objects such as porcelain and lace, or art installations. At the same time, genres that have been the more traditional focus of comparative literary research, such as fiction, theatre, poetry and epic, as well as broader historical narratives, find their place here. Numerous contributors work from unpublished sources. Several focus in different ways on the role of editorial or interpretive practices. The process of changing valorizations of different cultural styles, modes and materials is also considered at many points. Taken together, the volume offers the reader a special insight not just into images but into their making. Thirdly, we hope the book offers the reader a good insight into the cultural geography of networks. This geography is not the universalist “monarch-ofall-I-survey,” “from China to Peru,”17 approach of normative social science; and in fact many of the studies gathered here focus on developments in northwestern Europe. In one light, that may be taken as a criticism, an admission of Eurocentrism.18 But these chapters offer, we would submit, a northwestern Europe analysed and deconstructed in ways rarely seen before in previous studies.19 The construction of Dutch national culture, for example, is shown to have taken place in dialogue and competition with 16 Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition; cf. Drace-Francis, Traditions of Invention. For “the extension of tradition,” see Lajosi’s chapter in this volume. 17 Lindsay, “Monarch-of-all-I-Survey”; Johnson, Vanity, 3. 18 De Bruin, Brolsma and Lok, Eurocentrism; Wintle, Eurocentrism. 19 On the fact that “western Europe” has remained an unmarked and underproblematized category in narratives of Europe, see Berger, “Western Europe.”

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German, French, British and other paradigms. Chapters focusing on culture in Britain and Ireland consider the role not only of the different national traditions (Scottish, Irish, Welsh, etc.) and languages, but of their complex interrelation; and not only with each other but with both continental European influences and the peculiar dynamics of colonialism. Western Europe emerges more provincialized, perhaps even more “Balkanized,” than before.20 Other chapters, are, as already noted, much wider in their geography: contributors variously consider the making and at times unmaking of national cultures in Germany, Scandinavia, Hungary, Italy, Albania, Russian/Soviet central Asia and Latin America. Still others, such as those by Thiesse, Storm and Trencsényi, offer transnational comparative approaches to specific problems; or, in the case of those by Hutchinson, Ó Giolláin and Ferris, the relationship between European and non-European nationalisms and internationalisms. Overall, and irrespective of the geographical extent of the source material analysed, nearly every chapter illustrates in some way or another the transnational nature of national culture-making processes. Finally, we believe this edited volume demonstrates that such an approach – combining insights from literary and visual analysis, imagology and cultural history, and from theories of nationalism and transnational networks – can also be very fruitful beyond the specific examples presented here and can enhance our understanding of contemporary Europe. Even a casual observer of the political scene in Europe today could hardly avoid noticing the ever-present role of cultural artefacts or historical imaginaries in structuring political debates and attitudes. Whether it is in controversies over the remembrance or forgetting of colonialism through statues and street names, the invocation and operationalization of stereotypes in discussions of migration and border policy, or the continuous remediation, meme-ification or instant GIF-ification of familiar tropes across new media, the networked narration of ideas about nations is clearly ongoing. Relatively few of the contributors treat contemporary political issues. And yet this exploration of the role of cultural prejudices and stereotypes, of historical narratives and memories, as well as of national thought and ideas of Europe, can help us make sense of present-day cultural politics and the current politicization of identity formation.21 20 Arguably in ways not envisaged by the postulations of Meštrović, Balkanization; or Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. On “West-European Balkanization,” see also Leerssen, “Culture, Politics and Borderlands.” 21 Barkhoff and Leerssen, National Stereotyping.

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Wide-ranging and diverse as it may be, a collection such as this cannot be exhaustive. Further study of other cultural phenomena, whether from different historical periods, in different genres and media, or in different languages or regions, could have enriched it. But by the work of gathering together these well-researched contributions the editors hope to have built on and advanced many of the hypotheses and approaches developed by Joep Leerssen, and to have done so in a spirit of critical dialogue directed not only to colleagues and collaborators but also to new generations of researchers into whose hands this book may fall.22

References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Rise and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Barkhoff, Jürgen, and Joep Leerssen, eds. National Stereotyping, Identity Politics, European Crises. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Beller, Manfred, and Joep Leerssen, eds. Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Character; A Critical Survey. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Berger, Stefan. “Western Europe.” In European Regions and Boundaries: A Conceptual History, edited by Diana Mishkova and Balázs Trencsényi, pp. 15–35. Oxford: Berghahn, 2017. Berger, Stefan, Linas Eriksonas and Chris Mycock, eds. Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008. Bhabha, Homi, ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Brinker, Benedikte, Jonathan Hearn, Oliver Zimmer and Joep Leerssen. “Seventh Nations and Nationalism’ Debate: Joep Leerssen’s National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History.” Nations and Nationalism 19, no. 3 (2013): pp. 409–33. Bruin, Robin de, Marjet Brolsma and Matthijs Lok, eds. Eurocentrism in European History and Memory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. De Heere, Lucas. “Corte Beschryvinghe van Engeland, Schotland ende Irland,” [c.1573–1575]. British Library, Add. MSS 28330, f. 36r. Facsimile accessed November 8, 2021. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/stonehenge-corte-beschryvinghevan-engheland-schotland-ende-irland/. 22 This introduction has benefitted from full and detailed comments and suggestions from the editorial collective, to whom I extend my sincere thanks.

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Drace-Francis, Alex. The Traditions of Invention. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Harris, Roy. The Linguistics of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Hobsbawm, Eric J., and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Johnson, Samuel. The Vanity of Human Wishes. London: R. Dodsley, 1749. Leerssen, Joep. Comparative Literature in Britain: National Identities, Transnational Dynamics 1800–2000. Studies in Comparative Literature 27. Cambridge: Legenda, 2019. Leerssen, Joep. “Culture, Politics and Borderlands: A Small-Scale Case History.” Revue des études sud-est européennes 31, no. 1 (1993): pp. 11–20. Leerssen, Joep, ed. Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Online version at https://ernie.uva.nl. Leerssen, Joep. Komparatistik in Großbritannien, 1800–1850. Aachener Beiträge zur Komparatistik 7. Bonn: Bouvier, 1984. Leerssen, Joep. Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century. Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature 22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986. Leerssen, Joep. Nationaal denken in Europa: Een cultuurhistorische schets. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999. Leerssen, Joep. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Third edition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. First published 2006. Leerssen, Joep. “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture.” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 4 (2006): pp. 549–725. Leerssen, Joep. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Cork: Cork University Press, 1996. Leerssen, Joep. “The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey.” Poetics Today 21, no. 2 (2000): pp. 267–92. Leerssen, Joep. “Viral Nationalism: Romantic Intellectuals on the Move in Nineteenth-Century Europe.” Nations and Nationalism 17, no. 2 (2011): pp. 257–71. Lindsay, Claire. “Monarch-of-All-I-Survey.” In Keywords for Travel Writing Studies, edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoe Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester, pp. 157–58. London: Anthem. Meštrović, Stjepan. The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism. London: Routledge, 1994. NWO (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek). “Prof dr. J. Th. (Joep) Leerssen, Letterkundige, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Spinozalaureaat 2008.” Prize citation. Accessed at 8 November 2021. https://www.nwo.nl/ prof-dr-jth-joep-leerssen.

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Smith, Anthony D. “Nationalism and Classical Social Theory.” British Journal of Sociology 34, no. 1 (1983): pp. 19–38. SPIN (Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms). Project website. https://www. spinnet.eu. Wintle, Michael. Eurocentrism: History, Identity, White Man’s Burden. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2020.

Part I National Questions

1

National Stereotypes in Early Modern Europe Some Reflections Peter Burke

Abstract This brief comparative survey of both literary and visual representations of European nations (including the Austrian Völkertafel, or Panel of the Peoples) between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries emphasizes the importance of viewpoint, of context (war or peace, for instance), of “xenophilia” (along with the better-known xenophobia) and of both change in traditions over the centuries and their persistence over the long term. Keywords: alterity; imagology; national character; xenophobia

Stereotypes have become a topic for research in a number of disciplines, sometimes but not always in communication with one another. They have also been claimed by sociologists, psychologists, art historians and most recently by scholars such as Joep Leerssen who study literature, under the banner of what the Germans call Imagologie, a term much easier to pronounce than its equivalent in English, “imagology.”1 This is the literary equivalent of what Erwin Panofsky, adapting an older usage, called “iconology” (revealing “the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class,” and distinguished from the more descriptive “iconography.”2 As a historian, I view stereotypes as central to the history of l’imaginaire sociale, a French phrase that does not lend itself to exact translation – as 1 Stanzel, Europäer; Beller and Leerssen, Imagology. 2 Panofsky, Studies, p. 7.

Brolsma et al. Networks, Narratives and Nations. Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022. doi: 10.5117/9789463720755_ch01

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Fig. 1.1 Völkertafel (Panel of the Peoples, c.1720–30). Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art, Vienna. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

an approximation one might suggest “the collective imagination.” The imagination of early modern Europeans was populated by stereotypes of witches, Jews, Jesuits, Papists (for Protestants), Mahometans (for Christians), cannibals, and so on – in short, what cultural theorists (especially French ones) call the “Other.”3 Within this theatre of representations, we find stereotypes of nations. The following image sets the scene, on the principle that images speak louder than words. If you are in Vienna and happen to visit the Museum für Volkskunde or folklore museum, it is likely that your attention will soon be drawn by a remarkable visual document, the Völkertafel (Panel of the Peoples, Fig. 1.1). The Völkertafel is an anonymous painting produced in Steiermark (Styria) in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Besides the one in Vienna, there are six other versions, together with a similar engraving, so it cannot be dismissed as eccentric. 4 The artist and the patrons of the seven paintings are unknown. 3 Todorov, La conquête; Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote; Certeau, Heterologies. 4 Stanzel, Europäischer Völkerspiegel.

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Ten national types are represented in the painting: Spanish, French, Italian, German, English, Swedish, Polish, Hungarian, Russian and finally “Turkish or Greek” (a conflation that may seem odd today, but was less so in the eighteenth century, when the Greek Phanariots were a power to be reckoned with in Ottoman Europe). The ten nations are all represented by men in national costume, in contrast to the feminine tradition of Britannia, Marianne and many other personifications. The one oddity here is the image of the Italian, whose clothes resemble those of a Protestant clergyman rather than a Catholic priest or layman. Below the images, the characteristics of the ten nations are arranged in tabular form in seventeen categories (Sitten [customs], Kleidung [clothing], Krankheiten [illnesses] and Gottesdienst [religious worship], etc.). The artist employs – or parodies – the official tables that were becoming increasingly common in eighteenth-century Europe, in the Habsburg Empire as elsewhere.5 The picture is unusual (for western Europeans, at least) in its preoccupation with central and eastern Europe. The Netherlands, North and South, are absent. The Austrians themselves remain invisible, as if observing the system from outside. Their neighbours the Hungarians are presented in a generally negative manner, like the Poles and the Russians. The description is unusually systematic – creating problems, since all the boxes have to be filled, even if there is no obviously appropriate entry to insert. The Völkertafel is illuminating not so much in its details as in its illustration and codification of the general tendency to see the Other in a stereotyped form. It belongs to its period, but it should also be placed in a tradition, as the following pages attempt to do. Among historians of early modern Europe there is a debate, no longer a focus of attention but not extinct either, over the question whether or not it is anachronistic to speak of “national consciousness” at this time, in contrast to the age of “Romantic nationalism.”6 Those who oppose extending the idea of national consciousness in this way point to the importance of regional identities. Those in favour point to discussions of national character, of the self or of others, in the latter case including not only xenophobia but also its opposite, which might be described as xenophilia.7 One well-known example of stereotyped xenophobia comes from the Dutch Revolt, when the songs associated with the so-called “Beggars” describe their enemies as marranos, transferring to the Spaniards themselves a 5 Becker and Clark, Little Tools of Knowledge. 6 Ranum, National Consciousness. 7 Florack, Tiefsinninge Deutsche; Häseler and Meier, Gallophobie; Heitz et al., Gallophilie.

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hostile stereotype that was employed in Spain to describe converted Jews.8 Another vivid instance comes from the Elizabethan poet George Turberville: Wilde Irish are as civil as the Russies in their kinde Hard choice which is the best of both Each bloody, rude and blind.9

For a milder form of xenophobia, one might take the nicknames used by the people of one nation to describe another. They often followed what might be called the “Feuerbach principle” (Man ist was er isst or “Man is what he eats”), illustrated by French frogs, German krauts and English rosbifs. As in the case of nicknames for relatives, friends and colleagues, they are sometimes ambivalent. They can neither be taken completely seriously nor dismissed as mere jokes. A semi-humorous example of a (relatively) mild form of xenophobia is John Donne’s characterization of the “spongy hydroptic Dutch,” waterlogged like their recently reclaimed territories, in his well-known elegy “On His Mistress.”10 Turning to xenophilia, in seventeenth-century Italy, when cultural models from the two Great Powers, France and Spain, competed for dominance, there was considerable discussion of what contemporaries called the genio spagnuolo and the genio francese, made visible for instance in the choice of clothes. The architect Francesco Borromini was one of those who demonstrated their preference for Spain by wearing black.11 Stereotypes often take the form of images, but a few are concerned with sounds, especially the characteristic accent of different languages. The Portuguese João de Barros cited a proverb to the effect that the “Spaniards weep,” the “Italians howl” and the “French sing” (Espanhaes choram, Italianos uivam, Franceses cantam), while the French Jesuit Dominique Bouhours allowed a character in one of his dialogues to claim that “Les Chinois, et presque tous les peoples de l’Asie, chantent; les Allemands râlent; les Espagnols déclament; les Italiens soupirent; les Anglais sifflent. Il n’y a proprement que les Français qui parlent” (The Chinese, and almost all the peoples of Asia, sing; the Germans rattle; the Spaniards declaim; the Italians sigh; the English whistle. Only the French truly speak).12 8 cf. Horst, De Opstand, pp. 288–99. 9 Quoted in Mund, “Discovery of Muscovite Russia,” p. 367. 10 Donne, “Elegy XVII: On His Mistress.” For other examples, including Andrew Marvell’s notorious “Character of Holland,” written in the context of the First Anglo-Dutch War, see Schama, Embarrassment, pp. 261–67. 11 Wittkower, Studies, pp. 153–66. 12 Quoted in Burke, Languages and Communities, p. 67.

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All these stereotypes, friendly or hostile, may be described in the famous phrase of the late Benedict Anderson as “imagined communities” of others, opposed to and so linked to auto-stereotypes or the imagined community to which the speaker or writer belongs. In the eighteenth century, the favourite term for the main features of such a community was “national character.”13 The writers are usually thinking of men, but one eighteenth-century text compares women, from different countries: “in Germany, domestic and cold, in Italy bad, in Spain like slaves, in England queens and all too free.”14 What the writer might have said about Dutch women can only be imagined. Stereotypes may be simple or complex. Simple, as in calling an enemy “French dog” or “German pig”, or complex, as in the remarks on nations in many early modern travelogues. A particularly elaborate example is the bilingual volume by the Spanish physician Carlos García, who lived in Paris, where he published a double portrait of the French and the Spaniards in 1617.15 The author presented his collective sitters in a series of “structuralist” binary oppositions in their clothes, food, manner of walking, speaking, and so on. Thus the French walk rapidly and the Spaniards slowly, the French speak loudly and the Spaniards quietly, and so on. The context for this work was the double marriage, which took place in 1615, between Philip IV of Spain and Elizabeth of France, and between Louis XIII of France and Anne of “Austria.”16 Events such as these, or the Anglo-Dutch wars noted above, are a reminder of the importance of particular moments when traditional stereotypes, which sometimes seem to be latent or “sleeping,” are reactivated.17 However, the success of García’s book, both geographically (with Italian, English and German translations) and chronologically (still reprinted in the eighteenth century) transcended the original context. In a manner less formal and self-conscious than the work of García, some early modern travelogues offer the reader a rich harvest of stereotypes. As the English essayist G. K. Chesterton once declared, “travel narrows the mind.”18 Chesterton had a penchant for paradox, but, to put it mildly, experience does not always dissolve prejudices, national stereotypes among them. 13 Roche, Humeurs vagabondes, pp. 420–30; Langford, Englishness, pp. 7–9; cf. Mandler, English National Character. 14 Quoted in Stanzel, Europäischer Völkerspiegel, p. 27. 15 García, La oposición. 16 Gutierrez, La France. 17 Leerssen, “Imagology: On using Ethnicity,” p. 25. See also the chapters by Breuilly and Rigney in this volume. 18 Chesterton, What I Saw in America, p. 1.

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Take the case of early modern foreign travellers in Italy, already a cultural nation though not yet a nation-state. The critique of the culture that these travellers were visiting may reveal something important about their own culture or at least their collective self-image. Joseph Addison, for instance, revealed his English affection for understatement when he wrote that “[t]he Italian epitaphs are often more extravagant than those of other countries, as the nation is more given to compliment and hyperbole.”19 The Scottish clergyman Gilbert Burnet presented Catholic Italy as a land of superstition, tyranny and idleness, in other words as an inversion of the enlightenment, freedom and industry of Protestant Britain. British visitors to Naples expected to see the so-called lazzari or lazzaroni, able-bodied men lying in the sun and engaged in what would later be described as il dolce far niente. But how was an outsider to distinguish one of the lazzari from a man enjoying a brief and well-earned rest between bouts of work? Since 1978, when Edward Said published his study of the topic, many “Westerners” have become aware of observing the “East” through a system of stereotypes that he labelled “Orientalism.” Since, as John Donne wrote, the “imagined earth” may be said to have “four corners,” Orientalism is one of four easily available systems (unless we think of the Völkertafel as illustrating a fifth, “Central Europeanism”). Occidentalism has been under discussion for some time; “Borealism” (a term that I believed I had coined when I used it in 2000–1) is understandably popular in Scandinavia.20 It might be illustrated by images of cold, angst-ridden Swedes living in their “clean, well-lighted place.”21 As for the British travellers in Italy, some of them might be described as suffering from “Meridionalism,” had the term not been employed to discuss the problems of southern Italy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It may be argued that national stereotypes are at least in part examples of what has been called “the principle of least effort.”22 To understand an alien culture with the minimum of effort, there are two opposing approaches, both of them unconscious. One is to see others as like oneself, as Chaucer’s knight did when he called Theseus a “duke” and attributed to him the virtues of “chivalry.” The other approach is to see the other as the opposite of the self, as in the famous contrast between Greeks and Egyptians in the pages of Herodotus.23 It was this option that British Protestants tended to select 19 Addison, Remarks, p. 378. 20 Carrier, Occidentalism; Buruma and Margalit, Occidentalism; Burke, “Directions”; Burke, Eyewitnessing, p. 131; Krebs, “Borealism.” 21 Nott, Clean, Well-Lighted Place. 22 Zipf, Human Behavior. 23 Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote.

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when describing Italian Catholics, without realizing that they did so. In one case, as revealing as it is entertaining, the native wrote back, in the person of Joseph (formerly Giuseppe) Baretti. In 1766 Samuel Sharp, a well-known London surgeon who had just taken early retirement, embarked on a visit to Italy. On his return he published letters, a common genre of travelogues at the time. His account is a litany of complaints about the “gnats,” the damp sheets of bedrooms in inns, the “very bad” wine, the filth, the smell of Venetian canals, the general “nastiness” and of course the idle lazzaroni in Naples who “lie basking like dirty swine.”24 The author clearly belonged to a certain class of writers of travelogues, that of the irascible traveller, exemplified in Sharp’s time by Tobias Smollett and more recently by V. S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux. Baretti’s title offers a clear warning about its inflammatory contents: An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy, with Observations on the Mistakes of some Travellers with regard to that country. It was Sharp’s ill fortune that this particular Italian was a man of letters, himself of irascible temperament and a lover of sarcasm. Baretti had become notorious in Italy for his critique of literary classics, including Goldoni, published in the pages of his own journal, appropriately named The Scourge of Writers (La frusta letteraria). Indeed, Baretti probably left Italy to avoid his victims, moving to London and making friends with Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds. Baretti commented at some length (he was a prolix writer) on what he called Sharp’s “asperity,” his ignorance of Italian, the “great assurance” with which he spoke about a country that “he only visited in a cursory manner” and his reliance on current stereotypes of the poor, idle, emotional and superstitious Italian. Hence readers of books like his are “confirmed in a narrow way of thinking, and in those local prejudices of which it ought to be the great end of travelling and books of travels, to cure them.”25 In short, travelogues narrow the mind. To conclude, this brief contribution on a large subject might be summed up in five general points: – National stereotypes are usually – and most memorably – hostile but “xenophilia” may be found as well as xenophobia. – A given stereotype of the “other” is often an inversion of an autostereotype. The Germans called the French “frivolous” or superficial, for instance, as an antithesis or complementary opposite to their sense of themselves as serious and deep. 24 Sharp, Letters from Italy, letter 19. 25 Baretti, Account, p. 3.

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– Stereotypes are often latent, sleeping in cultural memory. They may be awakened or reactivated by particular events. – National stereotypes persist for centuries, but they may be transferred from one kind of foreigner to another. A traditional English dislike of foreigners was focused in turn on the Spaniards, the Dutch, the French, the Irish and the Germans. – It is sometimes difficult to tell whether a given stereotype, or better, a given employment of a stereotype, is intended to be taken seriously or not. I give the last word to Joep Leerssen himself, commenting on the Völkertafel: “if they are used half-jokingly,” the categories “are also used half-seriously.”26

References Addison, Joseph. Remarks on Several Parts of Italy. 1705. New edition. London: Murray, 1890. Baretti, Giuseppe Marco Antonio. Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy. 2 vols. London: T. Davies, 1768. Becker, Peter, and William Clark, eds. Little Tools of Knowledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Beller, Manfred, and Joep Leerssen, eds. Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters; A National Survey. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Burke, Peter. “Directions for the History of Travel.” In Rätten: En festskrift till Bengt Ankarloo, edited by Lars. M. Andersson, Anna Jansdotter, Bodil E. B. Persson and Charlotte Tornbjer, pp. 176–98. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2000. Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence. London: Reaktion Books, 2001. Burke, Peter. Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Buruma, Ian, and Avishai Margalit. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. London: Atlantic, 2004. Carrier, James G. Occidentalism: Images of the West. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Certeau, Michel de. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Chesterton, Gilbert K. What I Saw in America. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1922. Donne, John. “Elegy XVII: On His Mistress.” In The Complete Poems. Edited by Robin Robbins. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. 26 Beller and Leerssen, Imagology, p. 75.

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Florack, Ruth, ed. Tiefsinninge Deutsche, frivole Französen. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2001. García, Carlos. La oposición y conjunción de los dos grandes luminares de la tierra […] Con la Antipathía entre Españoles y Franceses. Edited by Michel Bareau. Edmonton, AB: Alta Press, 1979. Gutierrez, Asensio. La France et les français dans la littérature espagnole: Un aspect de la xénophobie en Espagne (1598–1665). Saint-Étienne: Université de Saint-Étienne, 1977. Hartog, François. Le miroir d’Hérodote: Essai sur l’interpretation de l’autre. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. Häseler, Jens, and Albert Meier, eds. Gallophobie im 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Berliner Wissenchafts-Verlag, 2005. Heitz, Raymond, York-Gothart Mix, Jean Mondot and Nina Birkner, eds. Gallophilie und Gallophobie in der Literatur und den Medien in Deutschland und in Italien im 18. Jahrhundert. Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift: GRM-Beiheft 40. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011. Horst, Daniel. De Opstand in zwart-wit: Propagandaprenten uit de Nederlandse Opstand (1566–1584). Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2003. Krebs, C. B. “Borealism.” In Cultural Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by Erich S. Gruen, pp. 202–21. Los Angeles: Getty, 2011. Langford, Paul. Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Leerssen, Joep. “Imagology: On Using Ethnicity to Make Sense of the World.” Iberic@l: Revue d’Études Ibériques et Ibéro-américaines, no. 10 (2016): pp. 13–31. Mandler, Peter. The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Mund, Stéphane. “The Discovery of Muscovite Russia in Tudor England.” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 82 (2008): pp. 351–73. Nott, Kathleen. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: A Private View of Sweden. London: Heinemann, 1961. Panofsky, Erwin. Studies in Iconology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939. Reprint. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Ranum, Orest, ed. National Consciousness, History and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. Roche, Daniel. Humeurs vagabondes. Paris: Fayard, 2003. Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Collins, 1987. Sharp, Samuel. Letters from Italy. London: W. Nicoll, 1767. Stanzel, Franz K. Europäer: Ein imagologischer Essay. Second edition. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999.

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Stanzel, Franz K. ed. Europäischer Völkerspiegel: Imagologisch-ethnographische Studien zu den Völkertafeln des frühen 18. Jhts. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999. Todorov, Tzevetan. La conquête de l’Amérique: La question de l’autre. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Wittkower, Rudolf. Studies in the Italian Baroque. London: Thames & Hudson, 1975. Zipf, George K. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1949.

2

Constructed or Primordial? The European Nation-State Murray Pittock Abstract This chapter posits that the foundational national quality of historiography remains a major challenge for global history. It notes that the predominant modernist theory of nationalism assumes the relativism of national histories without examining it, largely separating “nationalism” as a concept from the contemporary international order of states, many of which are excused being identified as “nationalist” at all. The chapter argues that this is an incoherent position and that modernist theories of nationalism that attack the phenomenon – as a number do – are very far from either addressing the evidence of ancient and medieval history or of adopting a neutral position in pursuit of scientific enquiry, which would acknowledge the perennial relevance of statehood and the sentiments which support it. Keywords: nations; nationalism; Declaration of Arbroath; Scotland

One of the persistent themes of global historiography is that history has had less impact as a field of scientific enquiry than it deserves, because of its foundational inflection towards the national. Sebastian Conrad describes the fact that “the genesis of the social sciences and humanities was tied to the nation-state” as a “birth defect,” while George Iggers and Edward Wang note how “historical studies have lagged behind” globalization and that “history […] is abused in the pursuit of political, particularly nationalist agendas.”1 This is but too true. Often history has exhibited a 1 Conrad, What Is Global History?, pp. 3 and 67; Iggers, Wang and Mukherjee, Global History of Modern Historiography, pp. 1 and 15.

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tendency to document the rise of the political order of its own country: in the crudest terms, the state that funds the subject buys the framework of its enquiry. Traditionally, the academies of major states in particular have been dominated by specialists in their own national histories. Calls for “Black History” or a history focused on other minority groups or cultures can be seen as among the forms that the demands of persistent protest take for a corrective to the self-apotheosis of national history, particularly in states which were former colonial powers. In a more muted fashion, cultural history itself serves the same purpose, for histories of material culture, objects or the reception of the natural world lend themselves to the crossing of borders in a way which government, power and war cannot. As E. H. Dance and others pointed out long ago, large nations tend to have solipsistic narratives of their own significance and success.2 In the case of the Anglo-British narrative, this is increasingly tied in to the unique (for Europe) experience of being on the winning side in both world wars. The power of this narrative is deepening all the time. As the great-nephew of a prominent conscientious objector, sentenced to death in 1916, and of one of the few survivors of his regiment at Gallipoli, I grew up well aware that First World War veterans were unenthusiastic about public celebration and commemoration.3 But once they were all dead, public memory has been uninhibited by the traumatic recollections of the agents it pretends to celebrate. Similarly, VE Day (Victory in Europe Day) on 8 May 1945, though never celebrated in my own youth, is now in England the excuse for flag-waving street parties, which continued to be held – and approvingly reported by network media – even in the Covid-19 medical emergency of 2020. It has become a lieu de mémoire, in Nora’s famous formulation, without ever having been a milieu. 4 National histories, as Susan Reynolds wisely remarked many years ago, imply Platonic claims about the national self. Whatever nations exist now were always destined to exist; those that have fallen by the wayside were never really nations in the first place. This lack of awareness of alternative, displaced or lost national histories derives, according to Reynolds, from a “historiography, firmly set within the separate academic traditions that have developed within the boundaries of modern states,” which ultimately exists to justify the right of those states to be considered as Platonic entities. 2 Dance et al., History Teaching, passim. 3 Alfred Evans (1895–1970): for a commemorative sculpture based on his words, see Etchells, “Conscientious Objectors.” 4 Nora and Kritzman, Realms of Memory, vol. 1, p. 19.

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A kingdom was never thought of merely as the territory which happened to be ruled by a king. It comprised and corresponded to a people (gens, natio, populus) which was assumed to be a natural, inherited community of tradition, custom, law and descent.5 An inability to perceive the essentials of nationality in medieval kingdoms can lead to the neglect of national features that they held in common, such as the “community of the realm,” which as a concept could be found in England, Scotland and France. Just as an Anglo-Saxon lord could die defending  folc and foldan (folk and land) against the invader as passionately as a Russian might defend Mother Russia in 1941,6 so the communitas regni or commun du royaulme might take collective action to preserve the kingdom-state in the medieval era, for kingdoms were perceived “as peoples,” each an “inherited community” in Reynolds’ terminology. This was not a Romantic ethnolinguistic “nation,” but one where “descent” was only one of a number of factors, diversified by cultural practice, memory and institutional frameworks. This seems unproblematic, but it flies in the face of most modern theory concerning nations and nationalism. For Ernest Gellner (1925–1995), nationalism was modernization; for Elie Kedourie (1926–1992), “a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century”; for Benedict Anderson (1936–2015), it happened earlier, but was still inextricably linked to the early development of modernity, particularly as realized through print; and for Eric Hobswbawm (1917–2012), it was a top-down elite construct of nineteenth-century origin. Yet Gellner, Hobsbawm and others are also hostile to this “nationalism” (“nationalist and racist” is a not untypical Hobsbawmian conjunction), although not nations per se: the usual curious paradox of nationalism theory, wherein the subject of study is an object of hostility as much as enquiry.7 Gellner offers a stadial model of nationalism which includes “Ethnic Cleansing” (stage 4), and one of the chapters in his classic study is termed “The Murderous Virulence of Nationalism.” Terms like “anger,” “bitterness” and “enormous suffering” are linked to a subject of study which a social scientist should approach with neutrality, but while Ernest Renan was well aware that diversity of background, language and the incorporation of minorities are not untypical of modern nations, the demonization of nationalism requires it be boiled down to a caricature 5 Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, pp. xiii, 250, 264, 271, 274, 276, 287 and 331. 6 The expression folc and foldan appears in the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Maldon, line 54. Foys, “Battle of Maldon.” 7 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, pp. 2, 14, 73 and 131.

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of its extreme Romantic form. Gellner also claims that “nationalism is conspicuous by its absence” in certain societies: these, one infers, must be righteously un-national: we are back with Platonic verities.8 There are of course a number of more subtle positions which identify “nationalism” in the modern sense with its national epics, festivals, histories and collections as arising in the Romantic era, replacing earlier filial sentiments directed towards a native country or monarchy: the dignity and piety of a pro patria loyalty is understood to arise ultimately from the classical tradition, represented in its final phases by Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).9 This position does not depend to the same extent on contrasting an unspoken perennialism with a hostility to what it sees as a factitious account of human societies, but – despite the major changes which took place in notions of nationality in the Romantic period, which have found no greater cartographer than Leerssen – the shifts of that era can nonetheless be rhetoricized by some as providing too sharp a disjunction between loyalty to nation and country, terms that many people would find it difficult to separate. Examples from the deep past are not often discussed by theorists of nationalism, perhaps because they might prove that the nature of things provides a sturdy adversary to the modernist thesis. For the Egyptians, Egypt was “the rationally ordered world” with “vile enemies” at its gates: and long before the Völkertafel of the early modern era, the inhabitants of ancient Egypt cut numerous caricatures of Libyans, Levantines and Nubians on the infrastructure of their state. The tomb of Seti I in the fourteenth century BC depicts Syrians, Nubians, Libyans and Egyptians as the four nations of the world. Egyptians also developed dynastic histories and cultivated both sites of public cultural memory and excision from such memory. Economic surpluses arising from agriculture and trade in distinctive goods from different markets, the symbiotic relationship of throne and temple (sometimes combined with warehouses and supply centres), collectivity in funerary practices, growing consistency in governance and the creation of affections arising from prestige and social order were all central in the creation of nationality. As the first state, Egypt was formed from the society with the highest agricultural surplus in the world and the most to gain from the allocation of surplus resources to exchange through trade and via capital expenditure to provide state control 8 Leerssen, National Thought in Europe, pp. 13, 15 and 42; Gellner, Nationalism, pp. 41, 45 and 49; Renan, “What Is a Nation?,” pp. 75 and 82. 9 See Joep Leerssen, “Nationalisms in Romantic Europe,” in Leerssen, Encyclopedia, vol. 1, p. 49; see also pp. 122–23, 136–37, 149, 157 and passim.

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or employment.10 In other contexts, Steven Grosby has gathered evidence to undermine the modernist nationalist case in its stress on the persistence of the imagined nation through time – not least in the coinage of the Bar Kokhba revolt, which carries the legend “year one of the freedom of Israel.” In Grosby’s view, ancient Israel’s “relatively uniform national culture” and “historical uniqueness” enabled it to be a pattern for the extension of the concept of nationality far beyond its own borders. In a very different context, the epitaph on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae penned by Simonides of Kos (556–468 BC) – or one using his name – summed up in its brief line the nature of national selfhood, shared custom and memory, borne witness to by a passing foreigner: “ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενο” (“O Stranger/foreigner, tell to the Spartans that here we lie, obedient to their customs/values/laws”).11 I am going to conclude this brief contribution with an analysis of a single document which has been seen by many as a clear statement of nationalism: the letter now known as the Declaration of Arbroath (1320), which is a product of the political practice of the community of the realm in Scotland and – in all probability – the political theory and concept of freedom articulated by the Scottish philosopher “John of Duns” (1265–1308), the blessed Duns Scotus. For a leading medieval historian such as Geoffrey Barrow, “no finer statement of a claim to national independence was produced in the period anywhere in western Europe”; for Ranald Nicholson, it was “the most impressive manifesto of nationalism that medieval Europe produced.”12 The most often quoted part of the document (which is a partial paraphrase of the words as reported by Sallust of the plebeian ex-centurion Gaius Manlius) runs: As long as a hundred of us remain alive, we shall never accept the lordship of the English on any conditions. It is not for truth nor glory, riches or honours that we fight, but for liberty alone, which no honest man will lose but with life itself.13

Quotes from or traces of Arbroath can be found in John Barbour’s epic The Brus (1375), in the work of Walter Bower (1385–1449) and probably Hector 10 Charvát, Birth of the State, pp. 62, 97, 116–17, 270, 278, 286, 296, 315 and 318–21; see also Romer, History of Ancient Egypt. 11 Conrad, What Is Global History?, p. 18; Grosby, “Chosen People,” pp. 359, 360 and 365. 12 Barrow, Robert Bruce, p. 430; Nicholson, Scotland, p. 101. 13 “Declaration of Arbroath”; Simpson, “Declaration of Arbroath,” p. 31.

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Boece (1465–1536) and John Mair (1467–1550) among others. Arbroath was mentioned by Sir James Balfour (c.1600–1658) and “an abbreviated text” was published in 1654. Parts of its constitutional arguments seem to appear in the 1560s, the National Covenant (1638) and the Claim of Right (1689). Used in the Union debates, it was published many times between 1688 and 1760 and was cited in support of Corsican independence by James Boswell in the 1760s, and (possibly directly, more likely via the philosophy of Francis Hutcheson [1689–1746]) in the American Declaration of Independence (1776).14 Among the American patriots, James Wilson (1742–1798), the founder of the Supreme Court and John Witherspoon (1723–1794), president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), were Scots signatories of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Witherspoon’s grandfather had signed the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant; his grandson taught James Madison, Aaron Burr and nearly eighty US senators and congressmen, besides other social leaders of the new republic. Witherspoon referred to Arbroath’s language in recalling Scotland’s history of being prepared to cashier kings for misconduct, though whether he knew the Declaration – and it has been surmised as very probable that he did – is a matter of debate. James Wilson, however, undoubtedly went one further and paraphrased the Declaration’s paraphrase of Sallust, speaking of “Essential Liberty, which […] we are determined not to lose, but with our lives.”15 On 20 March 1998, the US Senate passed Resolution 155 to celebrate the contribution of Arbroath and the Scottish nationality it expressed to the foundational nationality of the United States: Whereas April 6 has a special signif icance for all Americans, and especially those Americans of Scottish descent, because the Declaration of Arbroath, the Scottish Declaration of Independence, was signed on April 6, 1320 and the American Declaration of Independence was modelled on that inspirational document; Whereas this resolution honors the major role that Scottish Americans played in the founding of this Nation, such as the fact that almost half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were of Scottish descent, the Governors in 9 of the original 13 States were of Scottish ancestry, Scottish Americans successfully helped shape this country in its formative years and guide this Nation through its most troubled times; Whereas this resolution 14 See Pittock, “Declaration.” 15 Pittock, “Declaration.”

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recognizes the monumental achievements and invaluable contributions made by Scottish Americans that have led to America’s preeminence in the f ields of science, technology, medicine, government, politics, economics, architecture, literature, media, and visual and performing arts; Whereas this resolution commends the more than 200 organizations throughout the United States that honor Scottish heritage, tradition, and culture, representing the hundreds of thousands of Americans of Scottish descent, residing in every State, who already have made the observance of Tartan Day on April 6 a success; Whereas these numerous individuals, clans, societies, clubs, and fraternal organizations do not let the great contributions of the Scottish people go unnoticed: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the Senate designates April 6 of each year as “National Tartan Day.”16

Some of Senate Resolution 155 – not least the direct link to Arbroath – may be doubtful, partial, or overstate the case; but that is true of all national narratives. Taken as typical rather than exceptional, it underlines national belief in the continuity of nationality before the French Revolutionary era; and the fact that documents and events from the remote past which articulate national selfhood can remain relevant even to other nations so far into the future should give us pause in accepting nationalism as a modern phenomenon. In the same way, the celebration in Resolution 155 of the legacy of a presently stateless nation to the greatest world power should give pause to those who attribute – implicitly or otherwise – a Platonic perennialism to the members of the United Nations and no other countries, attributing to nations without states an unanalysed extinction born of political irrelevance, rendering them cartographic variants of Darwin’s Irish elk.

References Archival Sources University of Leeds Special Collections. Alfred Evans Papers. GB206 Liddel CO 030. Accessed 14 December 2020. https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/ be72d225-3058-3594-8590-52cca5bd9ac1/. 16 Cowan, “Tartan Day in America,” quoted in Pittock, “Declaration”; Mailer, “Anglo-Scottish Union,” p. 710; and “Resolution 155.”

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Published Sources Barrow, Geoffrey. Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965. Charvát, Petr. The Birth of the State: Ancient Egypt, Mesopotomia, India and China. Translated by Daniel Morgan. Prague: Karolinum Press, 2013. Conrad, Sebastian. What Is Global History? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017 [2016]. Cowan, Edward J. “Tartan Day in America.” In The Transatlantic Scots, edited by Celeste Ray, pp. 318–38. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Dance, E. H., et al. History Teaching and History Textbook Revision. Strasbourg: Council for Cultural Co-operation of the Council of Europe, 1967. “The Declaration of Arbroath.” National Records of Scotland, Scottish Government. Accessed 14 December 2020. https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/Declaration. Etchells, Tim. “Conscientious Objectors.” Tim Etchells, 2015. Accessed 14 December 2020. http://timetchells.com/projects/conscientious-objectors/. Foys, Martin, ed. “The Battle of Maldon.” Old English Poetry in Facsimile: Restorative Editions. Accessed 14 December 2020. https://uw.digitalmappa.org/58. Gellner, Ernest. Nationalism. London: Phoenix, 1998. Grosby, Steven. “The Chosen People of Ancient Israel and the Occident: Why Does Nationality Exist and Survive?” Nations and Nationalism 5, no. 3 (1999): pp. 357–80. Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Hunt, Lynn. Writing History in the Global Era. London: Norton, 2014. Iggers, George G., Q. Edward Wang and Suprinya Mukherjee. A Global History of Historiography. Harlow: Longman, 2008. Leerssen, Joep, ed. Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Leerssen, Joep. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Mailer, Gideon. “Anglo-Scottish Union and John Witherspoon’s American Revolution.” William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2010): pp. 709–46. Nicholson, Ranald. Scotland: The Later Middle Ages. Edinburgh: Barnes & Noble, 1974. Nora, Pierre, and Lawrence D. Kritzman. Realms of Memory. Abridged English edition. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Pittock, Murray. “The Declaration of Arbroath in Scottish Political Thought, 1689–1789.” In Scotland and Arbroath 1320–2020, edited by Peter Mueller, pp. 165–80. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020.

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Renan, Ernest. “What Is a Nation?” In Ernest Renan, Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Essays. Translated by W. G. Hutchinson, pp. 61–83. London: Walter Scott, [1896]. “Resolution 155.” National Tartan Day website, Washington, DC. Accessed 14 December 2020. http://dctartanday.org/resolution-155/. Reynolds, Susan. Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900–1300. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1984]. Romer, John. A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid. London: Penguin, 2013 [2012]. Simpson, G. G. “The Declaration of Arbroath Revitalised.” Scottish Historical Review 56, no. 1 (1977): pp. 11–33.

3

Nationalism and the Rhine A Matter of Perspective? John Breuilly Abstract In his recent chapter on cultural mobilization on the Rhine, Joep Leerssen contrasts French with German national discourse over the nineteenth century. Here I take a different approach. Focusing mainly on Germany, I highlight political discontinuity against Leerssen’s emphasis on cultural continuity, and the latent functions of nationalist ideology instead of the manifest meanings of key texts. The key discontinuity is marked by the “existential crisis” of 1811–15. The latent function is how nationalist ideologies enable collective action in pursuit of national political goals. These ideologies were distanced from individual German states, whereas they were identified with the unitary French state. My emphasis is on difference in political context, not contrasts between cultural and civic meanings in key texts. Keywords: nation; state; crisis; ethnic nationalism; civic nationalism; language

In his recent study of French and German cultural mobilization on the Rhine, Joep Leerssen makes a powerful case for understanding nineteenth-century French and German nationalisms as conflicting discourses.1 He draws on many texts to make his case. Notions of crisis and continuity enable connections to politics.2 Many texts were central during crises: the “Marseillaise” in 1792; Ernst Moritz Arndt’s “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?” in 1813–14; Nikolaus Becker’s 1 Leerssen, “Never-Ending Stream.” The book in which this chapter appears (Beller and Leerssen, Rhine) contains many other relevant essays, including a second one by Leerssen; and, in the appendix, translations of the key texts under discussion here, with further references to material in the SPIN database. 2 Compare Balázs Trencsényi’s contribution to this volume.

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“Rheinlied” in 1840. The Arndt and Becker songs resurface in 1870–71, and the “Marseillaise” in many periods.3 They echo through intervening periods. To demonstrate their significance, Leerssen not only points to public performances and high print circulation, but also invokes Michael Billig’s idea of banal nationalism: emotions kept “lukewarm” through everyday repetitions become “hot” in a crisis. Leerssen juxtaposes “moments of political crisis […] [as] merely pulsations,” against the “lingering cultural effect of each discursive stance”:4 Germans in 1840 recall the rhetoric of 1813; the rhetoric of 1870 recycles that of 1840 and of 1813; 1914, for all parties concerned, is a rerun of 1870. This textual echo-chamber gives continuity and adds intensity to the political conflicts which it helped shape and colour over the century.5

It is a beguiling argument, but one can interpret these connections differently. In what follows, I approach the subject from a more political perspective. I do not so much analyse Leerssen’s argument as present short assertions on large questions, building those into an alternative argument. There is an English saying: “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” In the world of scholarship “critical dialogue” should replace “imitation.” This essay is written for Joep Leerssen in that spirit.6 “Cultural” and “political” nationalism are separate subjects insofar as they are studied differently. One can connect them, for example claiming culture underpins politics, or politics instrumentalizes culture, or noting “elective affinities.” This requires conceptualization: Leerssen does this, advancing the “civic/ethnic” binary. In his formulation, the discourse of “civilization” (France) is set against that of “culture” (Germany). This contrast is a central motif in Romanticism and ideologies of anti-Western nationalism. However, the texts contain more meanings than one binary can capture.

Difficulties with the Civic/Cultural Binary Statism is central to the French discourse. Military success and expansion were legitimized in legal-dynastic terms, later giving way to a 3 For a case study on the “Marseillaise,” see Ann Rigney’s contribution to this volume. 4 Leerssen, “Never-Ending Stream,” p. 225. 5 Leerssen, “Never-Ending Stream,” p. 225. 6 The present argument is underpinned by documentation and interpretation in, among others, Breuilly, Nineteenth-Century Germany; a new study is Smith, Germany. For the Rhinelands during this period I rely heavily on Brophy, Popular Culture; and Brophy, “Rhine Crisis of 1840.”

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“natural-frontiers” discourse. French claims to cultural superiority were cosmopolitan and many Germans agreed, notably Frederick the Great. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was commonplace to contrast superior to inferior languages: French, German, English and Italian were claimed by many to be superior to Breton, Czech, Welsh and Sardinian respectively. Language and ethnicity make different identity claims, if by ethnicity we mean belief in common descent. Claims of cultural superiority by “historic” nations over “unhistoric” ones imply assimilation. Bretons learning French become French; Czechs learning German become German. Before ethnicity and race acquired prominence, ethnic diversity in “civilized” nations was assumed and celebrated. One might project the binary as a spectrum with ethnic and civic at its two ends. For this we require a constructing principle. It cannot be “natural,” like the colour spectrum, for example. It must not be normative, such as ranging from “good” (civic) to “bad” (ethnic). One could contrast “thin” against “thick” ideologies: bare identity claims against sketches of an ideal form of life. Political ideologies combine the two, mixing description and prescription. When only one feature is apparent, investigation will uncover the implicit role of the other. Language, on its own a bare identity claim, can be used to exclude or assimilate opposite functions linked to different ideal forms of life. Nevertheless, in the texts Leerssen analyses, language is central to German discourse, and statism to French discourse. How do we explain and evaluate this? I stress “moments” of crisis, not “lingering” culture; discontinuity, not continuity – the “double” nature of nationalist ideology.

France: State-Nation; Germany: Institutional or Cultural Zone From a constitutional point of view, France was a unitary state; before 1871, “Germany” was many polities ranging from cities to sprawling dynasties. “France” equates state with the king and his subjects before 1789, or its citizens thereafter; “Germany” denoted the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and its successors (the Confederation of the Rhine, 1806–13; the German Confederation, 1814–66), or a cultural zone. Subjects or citizens were equated with individual polities. These polities, bar Austria and Prussia, lacked formal external sovereignty. Hohenzollern Prussia and Habsburg Austria therefore could not legitimize statehood with national discourse. Divine right, hereditary monarchies cannot identify with their subjects. Even if Germany had experienced a French-type revolution whereby the citizenry, not monarchy, came to legitimize the state, identifying this citizenry as

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“German” would involve transferring statehood from the individual polities to a German one. One could legitimize existing states as national if “nation” meant the body of citizens. Such “nation-building” was attempted after 1815 but failed. The “medium” states were Napoleonic creations, lacking traditional loyalties. The imperial Habsburg title (adopted 1804, imitating Napoleon) covered culturally diverse territories. Beyond Brandenburg and East Prussia, Prussia had no stable territorial, institutional or linguistic identity. There was a well-established language of nations as cultural entities (Germans, Poles, Italians, etc.), but these were territorially vague and culturally overlapping (e.g. Saxons/Germans, Tuscans/Italians). This German culture zone did not fit the German political map. Indeed, Arndt’s song (printed in English translation in an appendix to the book in which Leerssen’s essay is published) angrily denounces such a fit.

The Political Marginality of Arndt until 1811 Arndt was born in 1769 in Pomerania, then under Swedish rule, and studied at the universities of Greifswald and Jena. Brought up Lutheran, Arndt began training for the ministry but renounced that career. He imbibed Herder’s view of language as constituting the heart of national identity and Herder’s animus against the French Enlightenment and its cosmopolitan pretensions. In Jena he encountered Fichte who, in his Addresses of 1806–7, would describe the “dead” language of Latin, foundation of Romance languages, as infecting the living German language. Arndt first saw the Rhine in 1798. He was struck by the ruins, which were partly historical, and partly a result of the recent wars between France and many of its neighbours. Although Arndt had initially sympathized with the French Revolution, he turned against it as it radicalized. This radical France had conquered western Germany, northern Italy, and the Low Countries. These three phases – reading Herder and Fichte, becoming disenchanted with the Revolution, seeing the war-ravaged Rhinelands – primed Arndt to nurse a bitter hatred of the “French” for what they had done to the “Germans.” Such views meant little to Germans, especially Rhinelanders. If they were not bilingual in German and French, most understood the “other language” for the purpose of everyday transactions. Rhenish business elites required literacy in French. They constantly moved across “national” borders in the region, while few travelled to more distant parts of “Germany.” From a nationalist perspective, Austria and Prussia had “betrayed” the German cause, negotiating with France to gain territory from western German polities, heart of the Holy Roman Empire.

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The shattering defeats of Austria (1805, 1809) and Prussia (1806–7) and the formal abolition of the Reich (1806) made German discourse relevant, though limited to elites. When national movement was presented as educational process, as in Fichte’s Addresses, this was tolerated by French occupying forces in Berlin. Arndt got shorter shrift when he urged active resistance. He fled to Sweden, remaining there until 1810. This German discourse was elaborated in both literary (plays, poems, songs) and political (reform memoranda, policy documents) forms. It spoke to Prussian elites whose state world had been shattered. It was less important in Austria which retained much of its territory and independence. Nevertheless, Austria first invoked it in 1809 when, inspired by the Spanish uprising, the Habsburg court dressed in peasant costumes and spoke of popular resistance. This flirtation with the idea of the German people was abandoned after Napoleon defeated Austria and occupied Vienna. Metternich, hostile to all popular politics, was appointed foreign minister and chancellor, signalling a different approach with the arranged marriage between Maria, daughter of Emperor Francis, and Napoleon. Western Germany quickly accepted Napoleonic rule. Territories on the left bank of the Rhine became French départements. These prospered between 1807 and 1811. French reforms – trial by jury, oral legal proceedings, civil and commercial legal codification – were welcomed at elite and popular levels. Most Rhinelanders were Catholics and reassured by the Concordat between Napoleon and the papacy and by the return to social conservatism.

Discontinuity: The Existential Crisis of 1811–15 and the “Selection” of Arndt Napoleon’s invasion of Russia changed everything: the war was no longer a series of regional conflicts albeit on a larger scale than previously, but an existential crisis for millions of people. The German lands were at the centre of this. France, personified as Napoleon, became the object of deep and widespread hatred. This was novel. There had been existential crises before – the Black Death, the Thirty Years War – but not blamed on one state, let alone one person.7 Arndt’s intellectual formation, and his ability to express hatred of France in poetry and song, was superbly apt for the 7 I originally developed the idea of 1811–15 as a special type of crisis in Breuilly, “Making Connections,” esp. pp. 331–32. However, my focus was on modernity and large-scale connections, pointing out that some connections are “natural,” not human-made and not limited to modern

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new situation. At this point Arndt became secretary to Baron vom Stein – former prime minister of Prussia, now close adviser to Tsar Alexander, and appointed to administer reoccupied German lands – and was thus strategically placed to give his writings maximal impact. Resort to the cultural concept of “Germans” suited diverse political interests. For Stein, the German princes were traitors to the Holy Roman Empire, his “Germany.” Metternich, on the other hand, wished to preserve the political order embodied in the Confederation of the Rhine, pursuing a balance of power including France. To achieve this aim, Metternich needed the German princes to abandon Napoleon. The appeal to the “German nation” was one way of pressuring them to do this. Ironically Stein’s sincere hatred of the princes was used by Metternich to make them behave in ways which ensured their survival. The myth of a national uprising centres on Prussia. To regain great power status required radical measures to enable massive military mobilization. It is easy to equate this mobilization with “national rising.” I would argue against this but there is not space to do so; my aim here is not to debunk the myth but to show how the situation shaped German discourse. Prussian power, dependent on regaining and adding to territories in western Germany, needed a German discourse. However, this jostled with others. In his March 1813 address to his people, King Friedrich Wilhelm avowed that “[i]t is not necessary for my true people, as for Germans, to provide an account of the reasons for the war which is just beginning” (my emphasis). He differentiated the Prussian Volk into “Brandenburgers, Prussians [inhabitants of East Prussia], Silesians, Pomeranians, Lithuanians.” He referenced other brave nations which fought against powerful enemies: Spanish and Portuguese, Dutch and Swiss. In Friedrich Wilhelm’s conception as quoted above, the Prussians are seen as the inhabitants of one of the regions ruled by the king, who may or may not also be regarded as possessing particular linguistic or ethnic or cultural qualities. In another sense Prussians are all the subjects of the king of Prussia: a Staatsvolk. “German,” by contrast, is either a cultural concept, usually referring to German speakers, or a broad, territorial concept meaning those who live in the lands designated as “Germania” since Roman times, and then as the Holy Roman Empire since at latest the fifteenth century. Some Prussians are Germans; others are not; most Germans are not Prussians. Even the Tsar could subscribe to this vague German discourse, regarding Germans as subjects of numerous rulers, not potential national citizens. times. The current Covid-19 pandemic has since widened my perspective to the concept of an “existential” as well as “large-scale” crisis.

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Non-national discourses also appeared. Most important was simple hatred of the (multinational) army which had massively ravaged lands and ruined lives, but especially of its leader, frequently distinguished from the French – “the Corsican tyrant.” Spanish guerrillas and Russian peasants shared this hatred. There was a discourse of “good old times,” possibly the old empire, but principally attachment to a Heimat (locality), and loyalty to a prince and to traditional religion. In an age before elections and a popular press, let alone focus groups and social media, no one knew how to generate mass support, so there was a scattergun quality to the different appeals. It is impossible to gauge their relative significance in the chaos of the time. However, one can see how they fared after 1815.

Discontinuity after 1815 The former “German” order was not restored. It was replaced by fewer, tougher, more bureaucratic states, by Metternichian diplomacy and by a German Confederation (Deutsche Bund) dominated by Austria and Prussia. This deeply disillusioned reactionary conservatives, liberals and nationalists. There were fears of liberal and nationalist resistance, giving rise to restrictive laws in 1819 and 1830–32, but soldiers were rarely called upon to enforce them. People wanted peace and stability. The shift from “Romanticism” to “Biedermeier” captures this. It was not Billig’s “lukewarm” nationalism which mattered, but the warm bath of Biedermeier sentimentality. The popularity of Arndt’s song made it available for later revival, but this is different from Billig’s idea. It is explicit, unlike Billig’s image of the “limp flag at half-mast,” which works subconsciously. It was confined to bourgeois German groups, most located beyond the Rhineland. In that region, many songs and poems celebrating France, even Napoleon, were in wide circulation. There was anxiety about the reimposition of Prussian rule and reversal of French-inspired reforms. The Prussian state accepted most reforms, although there were breakdowns of trust, notably between Protestant state and revivalist Catholicism. The few nationalists had little anti-French feeling. A defeated France was no threat. The main impetus behind liberal and radical national movements arose from recognition that state-level reform could not succeed without Bund reform. After 1830, France became more acceptable to liberal and radical Germans, while the Confederation, with its reactionary policies, became less acceptable. The 1813–15 generation gave way to one with no memories of that existential crisis. Only from the 1830s do novels and autobiographies about the Napoleonic period flourish. This new generation was more sanguine about war and receptive

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to the myths of “national liberation.” The key binary was not civic/ethnic but reactionary/reformist. France was reformist, Russia the archetypal reactionary power repressing the Polish rising of 1830–31. It was also a crucial prop to Prussia and Austria, the most immediate obstacles to the nationalist goal.

1840: A “Normal” Crisis This was a very limited diplomatic crisis. It was over in months. Naturally there was anxiety, especially in the Rhineland, and France was – rightly – held responsible. Precipitating a crisis over the Rhine, along with its public rehabilitation of Napoleon, were regime efforts to boost its popularity. The crisis had little impact and met with popular indifference, even indications of pro-French feeling. Becker’s “Rheinlied” contrasts sharply with Arndt’s song. Arndt asserted grand claims based on language. Becker’s lyrics are defensive; not “where is Germany?” but, “they [the French] shall not have it [the Rhine].” Once clear that the French would not have it, the song dropped out of the popular canon and was even mocked for its inferior lyrics.

The Absence of Franco-German Conflict: 1848–70 Leerssen skips the 1848 Revolution, a “real” crisis compared with 1840, although not an existential one like that of 1811–15. It was initially feared that a French republic might presage expansionism and war. Lamartine, the new foreign secretary, was at pains to reassure Europe. Subsequently, liberals and radicals in Germany, Italy, Poland and Hungary regarded France as a potential ally in pursuit of national projects. The main enemy was Russia, supporting reactionary Austria and Prussia. The only war Germans fought was against Denmark. Enemies to the north, south and east, but not the west. This geographical distribution of enemies continued. Austria and Prussia came close to war in 1851. Austria adopted a position of hostile neutrality towards Russia during the Crimean War. In the war against France in 1859, Austria’s aims were to defend dynastic territories rather than a national principle; its defeat promoted Italian unity and emboldened German nationalists. In 1864, Bund military forces, soon displaced by Austrian and Prussian armies, went to war against Denmark. Secret agreements made by Napoleon III with both Prussia and Austria enabled the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. Apart from the “moment” of 1840, what is striking about the period between 1815 and 1870 is the absence of Franco-German hostility.

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War as Cause, Not Effect of Franco-German Enmity: 1870–71 So why did war break out between Germany and France in 1870? The cultivation of “public opinion” had massively advanced from mid-century, linked to industrial and urban growth, parliamentary politics, mass schooling and a popular press. War was not anathema to a generation with no experience of 1813–15, only its myths. War itself had changed radically. The Crimean, Austro-French, Danish and Austro-Prussian Wars were industrial wars, massive but – with the exception of Crimea – short. German nationalists, though hostile to Bismarck, saw war against France primarily as an instrument to complete unification. However, war can generate extreme and enduring hatred. If war against France had ended like the war against Austria – a quick surrender following battlefield defeats, no territorial losses – it would not have poisoned FrancoGerman relations. However, in 1871 the war entered a second phase with the occupation of France, the raising of new armies by the Third Republic, guerilla warfare and grim German countermeasures, and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. It was at this point that the myths of 1813–15, with its songs and sentiments, could gain new purchase. Ethnicity and Race in French and German National Discourse: 1871–1918 At the same time, ethnicity and race began to figure prominently as a strand within national discourse, both in France and Germany. Nationalism hitherto had been associated with liberalism and radicalism, opposed by conservative forces. With two nation-states based on mass politics, those forces needed other nationalist discourses. This was more fateful in Germany with its monarchs, powerful landowning class, privileged state elites, and big industrialists. Similar discourses of race and antisemitism, opposing liberals, democrats and organized labour also arose in France, indeed more virulent than in Germany. There was nothing in Imperial Germany on the scale of the Dreyfus affair. Yet secular, republican national discourse came to be dominant in France when war broke out in 1914, while reactionary nationalism increasingly took hold in Germany during the war and following defeat.

Concluding Remarks The assertions I have made have developed out of a critical dialogue with Joep Leerssen. It leads me to a very contrasting conclusion. This “thin”

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nationalism of race and ethnicity, based on opposition to certain ideal forms of life rather than underpinning its own ideals , needed historical nourishment.8 Projecting itself back to the eighteenth century and beyond, it then reversed that projection and presented a narrative of ethnic discourse driving nationalism from the beginning. Yet one can uncover “thick” “forms of life,” which underpin national identity claims, forms constant if changing. This develops from a multipolity political culture, unlike that of the French unitary nation-state. It was not the German lands which unified in 1870–71 but the German states, minus Austria. As for the “German tongue,” Bismarck valued the presence of communities such as the German speaking Baltic nobility in Imperial Russia, many of whom were close advisers to the Tsar. He believed such ties, along with the elite German domination of the Habsburg Empire, helped sustain a stable, dynastic European order. By contrast Imperial Germany increasingly grew away from a broader, central European concept of German culture. It also grew away from a multi-polity political culture of the pre-1871 German lands. It was technically federal, but this was a federalism in which one state – Prussia – constituted two thirds of the population and territory. Even this deformed federal structure was swept aside by the Nazi dictatorship. This older federalist tradition was revived in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, albeit as part of the architecture of a sovereign nation-state. That tradition was strengthened by the reunification of 1991, in which the former German Democratic Republic was reconfigured as a number of federal Länder (states) which individually were added to the existing west German Länder. (In part, this was a way of evading the requirement for a referendum on unifying two sovereign states.) That federalism is also available as a model for the European Union.9 Arndt’s sweeping claims about where Germany was to be found look very different in the context of the multi-polity political culture of the pre-1871 German lands than when projected in ethnic terms on to a unitary nation-state. Such a state would have been difficult, if not impossible for Arndt to imagine. However, it did represent the views of a later generation of nationalists. They in turn ascribed such views to Arndt himself, indeed going so far as to see themselves as his followers. 8 Here I adopt the terminology of “thin” nationalism proposed by Freeden, “Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology?” 9 For the argument about the centrality of a federal or multipolity political culture in modern German history, see Langewiesche, Vom vielstaatlichen Reich zum föderativen Bundesstaat.

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References Beller, Manfred, and Joep Leerssen, eds. The Rhine: National Tensions, Romantic Visions. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Breuilly, John. “Making Connections in Germany in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In Nineteenth-Century Germany: Politics, Culture, and Society 1780–1918, edited by John Breuilly, pp. 329–55. Second edition. London: Routledge, 2020. Breuilly, John, ed. Nineteenth-Century Germany: Politics, Culture, and Society 1780–1918. Second edition. London: Routledge, 2020. Brophy, James. Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Breuilly, John. “The Rhine Crisis of 1840 and German Nationalism: Chauvinism, Skepticism, and Regional Reception.” Journal of Modern History 85, no. 1 (2013): pp. 1–35. Freeden, Michael. “Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology?” Political Studies 46, no. 4 (1998): pp. 748–65. Langewiesche, Dieter. Vom vielstaatlichen Reich zum föderativen Bundesstaat: Eine andere deutsche Geschichte. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2020. Leerssen, Joep. “The Never-Ending Stream: Cultural Mobilization over the Rhine.” In The Rhine: National Tensions, Romantic Visions, edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, pp. 224–61. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Smith, Helmut Walser. Germany: A Nation in Its Time; Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500–2000. New York: Liveright, 2020.

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Cultural Nationalism beyond Europe Genealogies of Mankind, Imperial Custodianships and Anticolonial Resistance John Hutchinson Abstract This chapter examines how cultural nationalism became a global phenomenon. It argues this occurred though the interplay of three processes in tension with each other, a drive by European historicist intellectuals to uncover the most distant origins of peoples and their affiliations, a global expansion of empires which claimed to be custodians of world civilizations, and countervailing movements of anticolonial resistance. I briefly illustrate this through the cases of Egyptian and Afghan nationalism. Keywords: imperialism; anticolonial nationalism; Afghanistan; Egypt; linguistics; archaeology

Joep Leerssen has been seminal in developing a transnational approach to the rise of cultural nationalism in Europe. Recently, he has proposed extending his study to non-European cultural nationalism.1 In this spirit, this essay addresses the question: how do we explain cultural nationalism as a near global phenomenon? In this necessarily schematic contribution, I shall propose that this modern European formation became global through the interplay of three apparently opposed processes. The first was a transnational movement of western European historicist thinkers and scholars (revivalists), who as part of a general programme of regeneration sought to uncover the most distant origins of peoples and their affiliations. The second was the huge global expansion of the European empires that competed to present themselves 1

See Leerssen, “Valediction.”

Brolsma et al. Networks, Narratives and Nations. Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022. doi: 10.5117/9789463720755_ch04

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as protectors of the world’s cultural patrimony, even as they threatened to pulverize all other living cultures. The third was a countervailing movement of resistance by anticolonial intellectuals who, though subject to “Westernization” used the investigations of European scholars to combat imperial notions of native decadence and to chart new directions for their “emerging nations.” These anticolonial nationalisms in turn have inspired a fourth process (which for reasons of space I cannot pursue here) reacting back on Europe, whereby minority nationalisms in western Europe have revolted against their nation-states, proclaiming themselves to be “internal colonies.” I will focus on some novel syncretizations deriving from this interplay, notably in Egypt and Afghanistan. Particular attention will be paid to the agency of interstitial agents (ethnic or religious minorities, religious reformists and diaspora figures), the impact of linguistic and archaeological findings, and the battles over the ownership of both the professions of knowledge and their discoveries. These conflicts have contributed to the formation of various forms of national consciousness. As we shall see, attempts by nationalists to establish a collective patrimony defined in secular-cultural terms have also led to a resurgence of religious-civilizational movements that threaten to destabilize many contemporary nation-states. This is exemplified by the Taliban destruction of the Buddhist statuary of Bamiyan and ISIS’s demolition of Assyrian gates in Mosul. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder is often seen as the founder of cultural nationalism, but he was only one f igure of a larger transnational complex of intellectuals emerging in the metropolitan centres of Europe. Convinced that their civilization was deracinated, they sought for sources of inspiration in a life force outside an ossified Christianity and the mechanistic philosophies of the Enlightenment. Some found sources in Greek antiquity, but others looked to the “founding” civilizations of Egypt, Persia and India. They presented a polycentric conception of humanity as diverse, and of world progress as a result of the mutual interactions of a family of nations, each having its own unique contribution to make. An important outcome was the “discovery” in the 1780s by British Orientalist scholars in Calcutta, led by Sir William Jones, of a Hindu Aryan Sanskrit civilization in north India developing from the second millennium BC, which they proclaimed the “original” civilization of humanity. Early Orientalists, including Jones, convinced of the Mosaic conception of history in Genesis and equating language and nationality, sought evidence of the Flood in ancient India, of a genealogy of nations descended from Noah and of a dispersal of peoples after the Tower of Babel. Jones’s conjecture

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of an original (lost) language preceding Sanskrit as the mother language of Europe was given “scientif ic” status in Franz Bopp’s Indo-European language classification in 1816.2 A vision of a human family tree based on ethnocultural principles spurred a transnational network of thinkers and scholars to rediscover and record the most distant origins of peoples of the world and their interrelationships, as a way of making sense of the present. This gave rise to new disciplines of archaeology, philology, folklore and comparative religion. Philology, notably grammar, provided a means of discovering relationships between cultures now lost to the historical record, whereas archaeology through the materiality of ancient sites gave an apparent objective proof of the nation and its longevity. Where it reached a receptive audience, this cultural movement had four far-reaching consequences.3 First, it subverted the existing status order within Europe and between Europe and the rest of the world. Within Europe prestige had been based previously on the relationships of rulers and peoples to biblical figures or to Greco-Roman antiquity. Jones’s discovery was interpreted by August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel as declaring the Asian origins of the European peoples who had migrated in successive waves, the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans and Slavs. Friedrich Schelling declared the German mission to become the new “mother” Aryan civilization of the modern age fusing the mythological traditions of humanity (Indian, Greek, Scandinavian and Persian) into one mythology that would redeem a world distracted by rationalism. Second, it resulted in the vital transfer of modern academic resources outside “the West”, enabling intellectuals there to develop their own histories and cultures. Groups of philologists, historians and archaeologists competed to uncover the lost treasures of world civilization and build a correct evolutionary view of humanity. Just as German thinkers and universities inspired intellectuals of the stateless peoples of Europe, outside Europe British Orientalist scholars in Bengal felt a duty to educate Indians about their forgotten golden age because of Britain’s debt to ancient India. This contributed to the codification of laws and of languages and the systematization of Indian high and vernacular culture. 4 Admittedly, the control of the process of knowledge construction outside “the West” was generally maintained by European scholars, but the key breakthrough to the development of an Indo-European classification was a result of a conjunction 2 Trautmann, Aryans and British India, pp. 177–82. 3 For a fuller discussion of these four consequences, see Hutchinson, “Cultural Nationalism.” 4 See Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance.

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of European with Indian traditions of language analysis (deriving from the ancient Sanskrit philologist, Pāṇini).5 Third, a sense of indebtedness to their civilizational inheritances inspired European intellectuals to rally public opinion in support of the Greek struggle for independence against the Ottoman Empire. A commitment to the discovery of the earlier civilizational achievements in the Dutch East Indies inspired leading Dutch archaeologists to educate Indonesian nationalists about their Buddhist and Hindu heritage. Fourth, a vision of a polycentric world civilization dynamically evolving through the interchange of national cultures justified a mutual borrowing of cultures. Nationalists might claim that although currently backward, their nation had once been a teacher of other nations, so borrowing selectively from the advanced was no more than reclaiming their patrimony. This undermined a traditionalist resistance to change and encouraged nationalist groups – for example in Japan, the Ottoman Empire and China – to look around the world for modernizing models by which to stave off European imperial threats. Such cultural interventions by European scholar-intellectuals often preceded expansions of European empires during the nineteenth century, and teams of archaeologists and historical scholars operated independently of imperial or indigenous polities throughout the modern period, with the aim of acquiring valuable artefacts for private or public museums. These enterprises, however, were both enabled by and could give validation to the huge competitive imperial drive of European states into Asia and Africa. Through a combination of military power, industrial penetration and the command of communications, by 1914 European states controlled over eighty percent of the globe. Justif ied by global civilizing missions that presented Europe as the zenith of human evolution, such imperialism at first sight appeared to run counter to visions of cultural diversity. Much indigenous heritage was destroyed in military conquest, and by the looting of local treasures. Colonial administrations together with settler populations and Christian missions disrupted local traditions and economies and established schools whose purpose was to westernize a native elite, who would staff the lower reaches of the administrations. However, accompanying colonization were linguists, topographers and archaeologists who as part of the apparatus of rule sought to identify and classify the languages, customs and histories of their new subjects. These often uncovered the existence of ancient high cultures, which they sought to periodize and relate to a world history of human civilization. 5 Trautmann, Aryans and British India, chap. 2.

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Imperial apologists rushed to portray their nation-state as the culmination of an evolutionary story and to link their achievements to patterns of earlier civilizational glory. Intense competition occurred between imperial states to claim the prestige of a relationship to founding cultures. Pharaonic Egypt, like Aryan India, was one such mother civilization, the teacher of the Greeks and hence a precursor of western modernity and a target for “Orientalist” scholars across Europe. French and British rivalries increased after the French expulsion from India in the eighteenth century and after Napoleon’s flight from Egypt. Nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt by 1882 had become a de facto British protectorate, though the British were unable to overthrow French control of the archaeological societies. This archaeological enterprise was both selective and paternalist. Europeans for long maintained control of excavations and left natives in subordinate roles, before the later development of trained indigenous professionals. They favoured heritages significant to the self-images of the colonizers and what appeared to be emblematic of civilization.6 In Egypt, the focus was on the imperial Pharaonic and classical Greek past, to the neglect of the Coptic and Islamic heritage. In the Middle East, the French, claiming Gallo-Roman origins, could assert rights to ownership of Algeria and the Maghreb by identifying evidence of Roman residence. The French downplayed or ignored remnants of a Punic past found in Morocco and Tunisia. These were regarded as traces of a failed civilization, demolished by Roman triumph, though this heritage was later claimed by Tunisian nationalists. The true heirs of these civilizations were often assumed to be the colonialists or their settler populations rather than the native populations, whose associations (religious or cultural) with these artefacts were denied in favour of a previous colonizing race, now extinct.7 This was reinforced by ideas of scientific racism, influential in the later nineteenth century which portrayed groups as on an evolutionary spectrum and viewed the colonized as inherently inferior. Where there was no direct relationship to be claimed by European colonizers, colonial administrations could assume for themselves a guardianship role as protectors of an ancient civilization that belonged to the world heritage. Benedict Anderson observed an archaeological push around 1900 to endow the colonial administrations with historical regalia and symbolism to support their roles as benign caretakers of native heritages. In the process 6 Reid, “Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism.” 7 Effros, “Indigenous Voices at the Margins”; McCarty, “French Archaeology and History in the Colonial Maghreb.”

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the meaning of such remains was transformed. In the early twentieth century, the Dutch in the largely Muslim East Indies downplayed the religious significance of Buddhist and Hindu temple complexes such as Siwa and Borobudur. They portrayed them as products of the aesthetic creativity of a great external (Indian) civilization that had been allowed by the degenerate current population to decay.8 In Cambodia, the French established a protectorate in support of the local dynasty in 1867, and legitimized their power and influence through their claim to discover Angkor Wat in 1860 as the centre of a vanished high civilization supposedly forgotten or neglected by the illiterate Cambodians. They ignored its continued religious significance for local populations. The French restoration of Angkor to former glories would be used to buttress a French mission to guide Cambodia into modernity. One manifestation was the construction in the 1930s of a new capital, Phnom Penh, European in style but decorated with older Cambodian motifs and symbols.9 “Enlightened” colonialism went hand in hand with religious renovation, either in alliance with Christian missions which sought to eliminate profane practices or with reform-minded members of local religions that were critical of traditionalist practices and sympathetic to modernization. How then did an indigenous nationalism develop? One factor was that European overseas empires, for all their cultural prestige and military power, had thin roots, since the colonists were a tiny minority who relied on diverse networks of collaborators to sustain their rule, and on strategies of divide and rule. This often privileged minority groups who acted as mediators between empire and the colonized. These included a small social stratum, some from elite backgrounds and others arising from colonial schools who, attracted by the emancipatory promise of western universalism, repudiated native traditions as inferior. In addition, members of indigenous religious reform movements, often sympathetic to imperial reforms, under the impact of Christian propaganda sought to systematize their religious tenets and practices and make them compatible with modernity and a spirit of improvement. Many of these figures were drawn into imperial circuits that led them to the centres of the West. Although this intensified their awareness of the backwardness of their societies compared to contemporary Europe, in experiencing racial or ethnic exclusions they also realized they would not 8 Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Conserving the Past, Mobilizing the Indonesian Future,” pp. 414–15. 9 Edwards, Cambodge, chap. 2.

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be accepted as equals, which raised doubts about the supposed universality of western values. Stung by invidious contrasts made by European colonists between a once great civilization in their territories and the present backwardness of their people, they often sought to reclaim this past as the basis of a programme of sociopolitical regeneration. This too could be re-enforced by a knowledge that even within “the West” there were concerns that its current superiority was likely to be transitory and claims that it built on cultural exchanges with earlier civilizations. It is important, in this context, to note that the cultural officials and archaeological societies funded by colonial authorities were by no means ideologically monolithic. There were divisions in the Dutch East Indies between Dutch archaeologists who wished simply to excavate and conserve archaeological remains and those often in sympathy with nationally minded local elites, some from a Hindu background, who wished to inspire the indigenous populations with a love of their heritage.10 It is noteworthy how many well-educated religious minorities were overrepresented in the early stages of many nationalisms – for example Copts in Egyptian, and Maronite Christians in Lebanese nationalisms – although those identifying with nationalism may themselves have been a minority of their minority. Their sense of marginality led them to find a “pagan” ethnic past preceding and relativizing the religious traditions of the Muslim majority that would give them a role in the political community. The result might be attempts not just to preserve but to restore ruins so that they became once again a living part of a national culture, in the process often following the colonial scholars in divesting them of regional and religious associations. The emergence of such native educated groups resulted in culture wars, as they sought to challenge the foreign intellectual and physical appropriation of the past and its culture. They contested European domination of archaeological professions and ownership of the cultural artefacts. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, just months after Britain’s declaration of Egypt’s independence, hastened the transformation of Egyptology into a scholarly profession open to Egyptians and resulted in a prolonged decolonization struggle between Egyptian nationalists and western archaeological interests. The new Egyptian government insisted that Tutankhamun’s treasures were all retained in Cairo to become the glory of the Egyptian Museum.11 Attempting to nationalize historical remnants that 10 Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Conserving the Past, Mobilizing the Indonesian Future.” 11 Reid, “Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism.”

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were embedded in broader civilizational networks could lead to international tensions, for example between Indonesian and “Greater India” nationalists who contested the heritage of the temple complexes of Siwa and Borobudur. It could also trigger a resurgence of religious sentiments against infidel nationalists. From the 1930s the neopagan Pharaonic version of the Egyptian past was challenged by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, the spearhead of an Islamic resurgence that has steadily grown in strength throughout the Middle East against secular nationalism, and is directed against minority Christian groups. A similar pattern has occurred in twentieth-century Afghanistan where a secular nationalism crystallized from the interchanges between French archaeologists, the Afghan monarchy, members of the Shi’ minority, and a new Kabul urban middle class.12 After the achievement of independence from the British in 1919, the Afghan kingdom distanced itself from British and Russian influence. The French were allowed to establish lycées in Kabul and given a thirty-year monopoly on archaeological excavations, which in the 1920s and 1930s discovered the great Buddhist statues at Bamiyan and the Kushan ivories at Begram. These findings were absorbed in the 1930s by the Afghan revivalist scholar Ahmad’ Ali Kuhzad, who was a member of the (Turkic) Qizilbash Shi’i clan and one of several hundred graduates from a lycée in Kabul. Kuhzad, who became director of the Afghan Historical Society (1942–61), created a national historiography that distanced Afghanistan from its dependence on Persian and Islamic cultural influences. Linking French archaeological discoveries to European scholarship, Kuhzad overthrew older Persian-derived dynastic and genealogical views of an Islamic Afghanistan. Instead, he constructed a continuous myth-history of his country as the product of an ancient pre-Islamic civilization centred in India during the heroic age of Guptas that nurtured successively all the major religions of Asia: Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Islam. Renaming this land as Ariana, the land of Aryans, Kuhzad staked Afghan claims to a primary role in world history, arguing that the Bactrian region rather than Indian Gandhara was the cradle of “Graeco-Buddhist” culture that spread throughout Asia and that Afghans had created a civilization challenging China in its antiquity. Supported by the royal family, he propagated a secular conception of an Afghan nation with its centre in the Bamiyan region to a new urban middle-class readership in Kabul. In doing so, he not only challenged the previously dominant Pashtun- and Sunni-based nationalism, but also 12 Green, “Afghan Discovery of Buddha.”

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transformed the status of the inhabitants of the rural region of Bamiyan north of Kabul, despised by the Pashtun as backward Shi’a infidels. The historian Nile Green suggests this intensified an ideational war with Sunni Islamists that had occasionally provoked the iconoclastic destruction of Buddhist artefacts. Green interprets the Taliban destruction in 2001 of the great Buddhist statues at Bamiyan and the collections in the National Museum as only the culmination of such a struggle against the secular nationalism of the Afghan state. The Taliban iconoclasm, he argues, was not an unmediated response to an offensive pagan past. Rather it was part of a conscious transnational Islamic repudiation of the nationalist challenge to embedded religious traditions, earlier exemplif ied in the Muslim Brotherhood’s rejection of the Pharaonic heritage of Cairo, and later in ISIS’s iconoclasms. In conclusion, cultural nationalism appears to be an ideology of mobilized but relatively marginalized minorities, alienated from dominant religious and secular world views. Outside “the West”, it was adopted in particular by ambitious individuals who saw themselves as a minority and looked to nationalist ideologies through which they could establish a more inclusive community (in the “historical” nation) and achieve a leadership role. Later nationalists would suppress the memory of the foreign contribution to the national past, asserting its revival as a native achievement. Nationalist attempts to construct authoritative national pasts, however, have always come under challenge from other powerholders, local and civilizational. Indeed, the very radicalism of their challenge both to western imperialism and the authority of indigenous traditions has often provoked countermovements, notably religious, that can reveal the thin roots of their enterprise.

References Bloembergen, Marieke, and Martijn Eickhoff. “Conserving the Past, Mobilizing the Indonesian Future: Archaeological Sites, Regime Change and Heritage Politics in Indonesia in the 1950s.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 167, no. 4 (2011): pp. 405–36. Edwards, Penny. Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945. Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, Memory. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. Effros, Bonnie. “Indigenous Voices at the Margins: Nuancing the History of French Colonial Archaeology in French Algeria.” In Unmasking Ideology in Imperial and Colonial Archaeology, edited by Bonnie Effros and Guolong Lai, pp. 201–26. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2018.

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Green, Nile. “The Afghan Discovery of Buddha: Civilizational History and the Nationalizing of Afghan Antiquity.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, no. 1 (2017): pp. 47–70. Hutchinson, John. “Cultural Nationalism.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, edited by John Breuilly, pp. 75–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kopf, David. British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Leerssen, Joep. “Valediction” to the conference Cultural Mobilization: Cultural Consciousness-Raising and National Movements in Europe and the World, Amsterdam, 19–22 September 2018. https://spinnet.eu/activities/culturalmobilization. McCarty, Matthew M. “French Archaeology and History in the Colonial Maghreb: Inheritance, Presence and Absence.” In Unmasking Ideology in Imperial and Colonial Archaeology, edited by Bonnie Effros and Guolong Lai, pp. 359–82. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2018. Reid, Donald Malcolm. “Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism: The Struggle to Define and Control the Heritage of Arab Art in Egypt.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, no. 1 (1992): pp. 57–76. Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and British India. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 1997.

Part II Networked Nations

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Firebrand Folklore Musical Memory and the Making of Transnational Networks Ann Rigney Abstract What is the place of music and specifically of collective singing in political mobilization? This chapter builds on Joep Leerssen’s work on the role of choral societies in Romantic nationalism to examine the role of singing in radical, internationalist circles in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on two songs in the socialist-anarchist repertoire – the traditional Scottish love song “Annie Laurie” and the “Marseillaise” – it examines the role of musical performance in mobilization around a common cause. It argues that music helped in creating embodied communities at particular locations while also connecting people transnationally across time and space. Keywords: embodied communities; cultural memory; internationalism; connective action; “Annie Laurie”; the “Marseillaise”

On the evening of 30 November 1888, a crowd gathered on the platform of St Pancras Station in London to bid farewell to Mrs. Lucy Parsons. She was the widow of American anarchist Albert Parsons and had been visiting Great Britain for various commemorative events marking the first anniversary of the execution of her husband and the other “Chicago Martyrs.” She had been invited to Great Britain by the Socialist League and had been hosted by William Morris, editor of the Commonweal: The Journal of the Socialist League, a journal which for several years had been denouncing the execution of the Chicago anarchists as a miscarriage of justice and an attack on civil liberties. There had been huge publicity around Lucy’s visit within radical circles, although her firebrand, anarchist-inflected rhetoric had also created

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some tension with her socialist hosts.1 Nonetheless, the visit seems to have been a success and the report of her leave-taking, as she set off for home through the port of Liverpool, makes no mention of any visible rifts between her and her hosts. According to the Commonweal (8 December 1888) the platform was crowded “with Socialists of all opinions and nationalities” who, among other expressions of allegiance to Mrs. Parsons and the workers’ cause, sang “Annie Laurie” together. Subsequently, as the train left the station “amid cheers” the “strains of the Marseillaise” could be heard. Why did the crowd in London choose these particular songs, a traditional Scottish love song and the anthem of the French Revolution? And what does this tell us, more generally, about the role of singing in bringing together activists “of all nationalities,” including the pre-eminently American Lucy Parsons, a former slave claiming mixed-race Mexican and native American ancestry?2 Long before the “We Shall Overcome” of the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, music was an important feature of political assemblies in the nineteenth century and, as we shall see, an important vector of networking. Singing had an added value as a mobilizing tool in an era of limited literacy, while it also provided a lingua franca in contexts where people “of all nationalities” were mixing and matching, as they were in radical circles in London where, thanks to political exile and immigration, German, Yiddish and French were commonly heard alongside English in political meetings. Reflecting the importance of music as well as speechifying in political movements, meetings of socialists, anarchists and related groups included choral performances (at regular intervals the Commonweal mentioned choir practice or advertised for new singers), and their meetings were almost invariably closed off with collective singing in a show of unity and common purpose that was not only politically effective, but also pleasurable.3 As Joep Leerssen has shown in extensive detail, choral societies and collective singing were an important element in nation-building in nineteenthcentury Europe. 4 Singing in harmony was a way of achieving the sense of an “embodied community”5 at particular locations and hence provided an important counterpart to the “imagined communities” linked to print 1 Keeble, “William Morris Meets Lucy Parsons.” 2 Jones, Goddess of Anarchy. 3 For an attempt to recruit new members for the choir, see, for example, Commonweal, 7 July 1888; the phrase “propaganda through song” was also used. 4 Leerssen, “Romanticism, Music, Nationalism.” 5 Rigney, “Embodied Communities.”

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culture.6 In the multiscalar process of nation-building, music helped to link the intimately personal and physical experience of music to the sense of belonging to a larger community. This insight, as the present chapter will show, can be extended beyond nationalism to other social movements in the nineteenth century. Precisely because of its ability to link the personal to the social, music has had an important role to play in political mobilization more generally. Music, especially when it takes the participatory form of collective singing, extends the boundaries of individual selves in a physical and pleasurable way.7 Physically sharing melody, rhythm and harmony, be this as singer or as listener, helps both to forge new relations and to reinforce existing communities. In this way, music is an agent of networking and answers to what Bennett and Segerberg, with respect to digital media, have called “connective social action.”8 Musical performances in political assemblies did not just link people in the here and now, however. They also served to link contemporaries with predecessors through memory. As reports of political assemblies show, participants drew on a song repertoire which, while showing some deviation over time, by and large drew on a limited number of familiar songs and melodies; perhaps inevitably so, since the idea was that everyone could (learn to) sing along. The role of music as a carrier of cultural memory is still an under-researched topic,9 but it is already clear that music creates a powerful link between past and present which, in operating through rhythm, melody and lyrics, allows past iterations of a song to be physically re-enacted and not just cognitively recalled. In the context of political mobilization, those earlier iterations could be a matter both of personal memory (individuals recalling their participation in earlier performances) and of cultural memory: the shared sense of being part of a longer tradition of singing. The fact that other groups at other moments had already sung these songs (a fact known through hearsay as well as through print) could give an extra intensity to the present by rooting it in the past. This leads us back to that November evening in 1888: what memory was being carried by “Annie Laurie” and the “Marseillaise”? At first sight, the love song “Annie Laurie” was an odd choice for a political meeting. Purportedly based on a seventeenth-century poem, but with the murky 6 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 7 Eyerman and Jamison, Music and Social Movements; on how music connects the individual and the collective, see also Halbwachs’ “Chez les musiciens.” I am grateful to Daniele Salerno and Marit van Warenburg for our discussions on the role of musical memory in activism. 8 Bennett and Segerberg, Logic of Connective Action. 9 Erll, “Vorwort.”

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origins characteristic of many nineteenth-century folklore collections, the lyrics of “Annie Laurie” were first recorded in Charles Sharpe’s Ballad Book (1823) and subsequently put to music by Alicia Spottiswoode (Lady John Scott) in 1834. The song entered the US repertoire of parlour music through the hugely popular performances of the Swedish singer Jenny Lind in the 1850s. So well-known did it become that it lent its name to the Annie Laurie Melodist, a compilation of eighty-four songs from 1860. There is evidence that it was one of the most popular songs during the Civil War, joining other sentimental ballads evoking memories of singing in domestic settings to become a staple in the repertoire of the troops.10 It was perhaps in the context of the Civil War, where he served for the Confederacy, that the future Chicago anarchist Albert Parsons became acquainted with the song. The only sure thing is that Parsons, on the night before his execution, sang this love song in his prison cell. There are several different versions of the story extant as, in the manner typical of folklore, it went on to have a life of its own in anarchist hearsay. By all accounts, Parsons also sang “Marching to Liberty” to the tune of the “Marseillaise” during that long evening; he also read out some political work to his fellow prisoners. But it was his singing of “Annie Laurie,” as it echoed across the prison cells, that came to define the memory of his last evening.11 This was presumably because it helped to highlight the innocence of this victim of “legal murder,” as his execution was called, by associating him with domesticity and romantic love rather than with the dynamite of which he had been accused (and which indeed had figured largely in his own writings and speeches). In line with the aesthetics of the period, the melodramatic combination of a love song in Scots dialect with the imminence of death, of private love with a political persona, had an enormous sentimental appeal. It certainly kept on coming back in the afterlife of Parsons: to begin with during his funeral, when, despite a police prohibition against music, a band struck up the tune of “Annie Laurie,” followed by the “Marseillaise,” in the presence of an estimated crowd of 200,000 supporters.12 Fast-forward a year to the scene at St Pancras Station. By that point, the traditional Scottish song had been reimported into the British Isles from the United States and, while never losing its value as a timeless carrier of 10 Kelley and Snell, Bugle Resounding, pp. 159–60. 11 Green, Death in the Haymarket, p. 266; for variations, see Parsons, Life of Albert R. Parsons, p. 220; Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, p. 381; Avrich and Bateman, Anarchist Voices, p. 479. 12 Green, Death in the Haymarket, p. 275.

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romantic love, it had also accrued a new meaning in its transatlantic crossing as a specific evocation of a highly sentimental, almost mythical moment in the memory of anarchism. It was sung at a meeting in Norwich attended by Lucy Parsons, as reported in the Commonweal on 1 December 1888, before being repeated at her farewell in St Pancras. And on that occasion, as during the funeral in Chicago, the lyrical “Annie Laurie” resonated alongside the martial “Marseillaise.” There was in fact nothing surprising about singing the “Marseillaise” in the London railway station. To be sure, methodological nationalism has meant that the afterlife of the “Marseillaise” has above all been linked to its vicissitudes as the national anthem of France or, as in the famous scene from Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), as emblematic of the French spirit of resistance.13 But it also had a rich afterlife in other national and political frameworks. There is evidence that, already in the 1790s, it had provided a model for a Greek nationalist version which used the same melody in combination with locally inflected lyrics composed by Rhigas Velestinlis.14 Its appropriation within the Greek context illustrates the principle at the heart of Leerssen’s Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism, namely that national cultures across Europe were produced transnationally through a process of borrowing, adaptation and imitation.15 The “Marseillaise,” however, was not only adapted in the production of national identities. It also figured prominently within international socialism and other related movements that were self-consciously internationalist in orientation, cutting across national and linguistic borders to make common cause around the rights of workers and the quest for a new society based on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. Within this framework, the “Marseillaise” was a key point of communal reference. Until it was replaced by the “Internationale” towards the end of the century, it was the signature tune of international socialism and other related left-wing movements that traced their genealogy to the French Revolution. Despite its militaristic overtones and its association with France in particular, the “Marseillaise” had become the “song of fraternity” (chant de fraternité), as Jules Michelet had memorably called it. It was a vector not just of multiple nationalisms, but also of transnational internationalism.16 13 On the history of the “Marseillaise” as the national anthem of France and its contested status across different regimes, see Fiaux, La Marseillaise; Vovelle, “La Marseillaise.” 14 Dascalakis, “Greek Marseillaise.” 15 Leerssen, Encyclopedia. 16 Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution Française, vol. 1, p. 734: “If it had only been a song for war, it wouldn’t have been adopted by the nations. It is a song of fraternity” (“Si ce n’était qu’un

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Studies of the loose network of socialist-anarchist movements in the second half of the nineteenth century all show that the “Marseillaise” was a regular feature of the activist soundscape. The Commonweal, for example, during the eight years of its existence made at least 109 references to the singing or playing of the “Marseillaise” at various political gatherings in Great Britain; it also published an English translation by J. A. Andrews of the original lyrics (8 August 1889). While it is not clear from the reports if the song was sung in French or in English, or indeed which version of the lyrics was used on any given occasion, it is evident that the melody provided a rallying point and identity marker for a wide range of left-wing groups, allowing them to enact their shared affiliation with the French Revolutionary tradition. At the same time, later movements, most notably the Paris Commune of 1871, adapted the original lyrics to suit their particular causes and to mark their difference from the militarism of the original.17 Indeed, the text of the “Internationale,” composed in 1871 by Eugène Pottier, a leading Communard, had originally been intended for singing to the melody of the “Marseillaise.” Across all these different versions and iterations, the song provides a fascinating example of how a cultural artefact can travel across different linguistic, national and political borders while being adapted en route. Because of its associations with so many earlier iterations, the playing of the “Marseillaise” on any new occasion could build on the momentum and political capital generated by the memory of earlier usages in different locations. The case thus provides a prime illustration of the importance of studying not just the production but also the reception of cultural artefacts: it is only through the latter that one can gain insight into their mobilizing and “connective” power at different locations and in different historical contexts. Studying the subsequent procreativity of texts and songs is crucial to understanding their social impact.18 If we were only to study these songs in relation to the national context in which they were produced we would fail to understand their cultural and political role as agents of networking. A song which originated within a particular national context and served to bolster a sense of national identity within that framework, as this has been studied across Europe by Joep Leerssen, could also be appropriated within a quite chant de guerre, il n’aurait pas été adopté des nations. C’est un chant de fraternité”; translated by A. R.). 17 Cases in point are various Russian versions, including the “Marseillaise of the Workers,” with lyrics by Pyotr Lavrov composed in 1875 (Figes, People’s Tragedy, p. 355) and “The Women’s Marseillaise,” the official anthem of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), with lyrics composed by Florence Macaulay in 1909 (Crawford, Women’s Suffrage Movement, p. 363). 18 Rigney, “Embodied Communities.”

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different “social framework,” to recall Halbwachs’s term.19 In the case we are looking at here, the “socialists of all opinions and nationalities” actively resisted, in a spirit of international fraternity, the compartmentalization of culture and society into national groups. Making common cause for a better future prevailed in such cases over the desire to defend national boundaries. The role of cultural memory in creating a sense of community remained constant, but the “social frameworks” of memory were defined in relation to a community of purpose rather than to ethnic origins, and those involved drew on a mnemonic repertoire (of events, heroes, songs) that crossed national boundaries. Future research will hopefully address in more detail the entanglement between the competing frameworks of nationalism and internationalism in the production of identity, memory and social engagement. When on that November evening in 1888 at St Pancras, the playing of the “Marseillaise” followed the singing of “Annie Laurie” by “socialists of all opinions and nationalities” it brought a richly layered memory into play and brought the highly specific story of Albert Parsons in all its romantic sentimentalism into the same frame as the international struggle for labour rights and the century-long tradition of revolutionaries. The two songs had travelled a long way – across time, languages and space – before they came together in London to bring their memory to bear on a singular moment. The combination itself of such different songs exemplified the complex ways in which music operates at the interface between the personal and the collective, past and present, here and elsewhere. The event in St Pancras Station marked the end of Lucy Parsons’ visit, but it did not itself mark an endpoint. Instead, it was just one moment, albeit a particularly intense and memorable one, in the ongoing circulation of songs and the mobilization of political actors within different constellations. “Annie Laurie,” despite its Scottish origins, became the carrier of a mythical moment in Anglo-American anarchism. The “Marseillaise,” despite its French origins, had long been associated with socialism, and with specifically European traditions in both Great Britain and the United States. In retrospect, their highly public convergence in London on 30 November 1888 masked a growing divergence between anarchism and socialism, and arguably also a tension in British political culture between a north American and a European orientation.20 19 Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. 20 Research for this article was financially supported by the European Research Council (ERC), under grant agreement 788572: “Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe.”

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References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. First published 1983. Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Avrich, Paul, and Barry Bateman. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Bennett, Lance W., and Alexandra Segerberg. The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Commonweal: The Journal of the Socialist League. London, 1885–94 (irregular publication; changing subtitle). Microfiche, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam. Crawford, Elizabeth. The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928. London: Routledge, 2003. Dascalakis, Apostolos. “The Greek Marseillaise of Rhigas Velestinlis.” Balkan Studies 7, no. 2 (1966): pp. 273–96. Erll, Astrid. “Vorwort.” In Musik als Medium der Erinnerung: Gedächtnis–Geschichte– Gegenwart, edited by Lena Nieper and Julian Schmitz, pp. 9–10. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016. Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamison. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Fiaux, Louis. La Marseillaise: Son histoire dans l’histoire des Français depuis 1792. Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1918. Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. London: Bodley Head, 1996. Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Anchor Books, 2006. Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994. First published 1925. Halbwachs, Maurice. Chez les musiciens.” In La mémoire collective, pp. 168–201. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968. First published 1950. Jones, Jacqueline. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical. New York: Basic Books, 2017. Keeble, Stephen. “William Morris Meets Lucy Parsons.” Useful and Beautiful 2, no. 8 (Winter 2018): pp. 8–17. Kelley, Bruce C., and Mark A. Snell, eds. Bugle Resounding: Music and Musicians of the Civil War Era. St Louis: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Leerssen, Joep, ed. Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms, Amsterdam. Accessed 28 January 2021. https://ernie.uva.nl.

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Leerssen, Joep. “Romanticism, Music, Nationalism.” Nations and Nationalism 20, no. 4 (2014): pp. 606–27. Michelet, Jules. Histoire de la Révolution Française. 2 vols. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1979. First published 1847–53. Parsons, Lucy E. Life of Albert R. Parsons, with a Brief History of the Labor Movement in America. Chicago: L. E. Parsons, 1889. Rigney, Ann. The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Rigney, Ann. “Embodied Communities: Commemorating Robert Burns, 1859.” Representations, no. 115 (2011): pp. 70–101. Vovelle, Michel. “La Marseillaise: La guerre ou la paix.” In Les lieux de mémoire, edited by Pierre Nora, vol. 1 of 3, pp. 107–52. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. First published 1984.

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The Nation as a Network Rizaeddin Fakhreddinov’s Islamic Biographies Michael Kemper Abstract This chapter discusses the biographical work of the well-known Tatar historian, publicist and Islamic authority Rizaeddin Fakhreddinov (1858–1936). I focus on Fakhreddinov’s biographical compendium Āthār (Monuments), and suggest that Fakhreddinov understood the Tatar nation as a network of an Islamic elite with overlapping religious, family and business links. I then go on to analyse the fate of the third volume of Āthār, which Fakhreddinov could not publish during his lifetime and to which he added materials and notes up to the last years of his life. Āthār III began in 1906/11 as a celebration of the pious Tatar nation, but it soon reflected Fakhreddinov’s despair over the Bolsheviks’ destruction of the Muslim elite – and of Islam. Keywords: Muslim biographies; Volga-Ural region; Imperial Russia; Tatar historiography; Muftiate; Soviet nationality policy

A Web of Pious Biographies For historians of Muslim societies in eastern Europe, collections of Islamic biographies are a major source of information. Among the Tatars of the Volga-Ural region, this genre became fashionable in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Ḥusayn Amirkhanov’s Tavārīkh-I bulghāriyya (VolgaBulghār Chronicles), published in Kazan in 1880, contained legends but also biographical sections on personalities of the nineteenth century.1 The first book that completely focused on biographies of Islamic personalities 1 Amirkhanov, Tavarikh-e bulgariia.

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from the Volga region – imams, shaykhs and authors of religious works, mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – was the second volume of Mustafād al-akhbār (Useful Information), composed by the Kazan theologian and historian Shihābaddīn al-Marjānī (1818–1889) and published posthumously in 1900.2 Rizaeddin Fakhreddinov (Riḍā’addīn bin Fakhraddīn, 1858–1936) was clearly inspired by Marjānī, whom he regarded as his model in critical Islamic scholarship and historical text analysis. In his multivolume biographical compendium Āthār (Monuments), Fakhreddinov significantly enlarged Marjānī’s scope and source base, as well as chosing a different format. Marjānī, working in Kazan, had clustered his biographies according to the village communities where the respective imams and teachers worked, thereby essentially producing a history of Muslim communities of the Kazan area through the lives of their imams. Fakhreddinov included many more personalities, and he arranged his material not geographically but chronologically, by years of death. As a result Fakhreddinov’s Āthār covers a wider geographical area, with more philological detail and historical depth. Āthār reflects Fakhreddinov’s two roles in Islamic public life: that of a functionary working at the Muftiate (1891–1906 and again 1918–36) and that of a publicist whose mission was to educate his nation. The Muftiate (Orenburgskoe Dukhovnoe Upravlenie Musul’man, or Orenburg Spiritual Assembly of Muslims) was Imperial Russia’s institution for leading and controlling Russia’s mosque communities. All kinds of documents from Russia’s Muslim communities came together here: population registers from the mosques that documented births, marriages, divorces and deaths; correspondence about imam appointments and dismissals; conflicts, litigations and negotiations; travel accounts and diplomatic reports; and historical narratives. Fakhreddinov spent much time studying these items in the Muftiate’s dusty archive, which he then copied into his volumes of Āthār. After Russia’s 1905 Revolution the Muslims of European Russia received permission to start publishing Tatar newspapers, and in 1906 Fakhreddinov quit his job at the Muftiate to become a journalist in Orenburg. With financial support from a Tatar merchant family, he founded and edited the famous Muslim journal Shūrā (Consultation), for which he also wrote hundreds of articles on Muslim historical personalities.3 As editor he now enlarged his professional network, corresponding with contributors, readers and informants. 2 Marjānī, Al-Qism al-thānī. 3 For Fakhreddinov’s life and work, see Baishev, Obshchestvenno-politicheskie; Türkoglu, Rusya Türkleri; Farkhshatov, “Fakhretdinov.”

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Fakhreddinov’s professional networks are reflected in Āthār, his continuing collection of information and materials about Muslim authorities from the Volga-Ural region and adjacent territories. Between 1900 and 1908, he published fifteen fascicles of Āthār, which he grouped into two volumes. Āthār was an enormous enterprise: in these two volumes, Fakhreddinov offered no fewer than 465 entries on Muslim personalities from the Volga-Ural region – mostly imams and madrasa teachers but also Sufi masters – from the tenth century to 1873. In each biographical entry, Fakhreddinov discussed the individual’s genealogy as well as his teachers and students.4 He furthermore paid special attention to the writings of the respective personalities – which mostly fell into the fields of Islamic law, theology, Sufism, poetry and historiography – and analysed their positions in contemporary controversies about Islamic ritual and reform. While all the biographies in Āthār were devoted to men, Fakhreddinov also discussed the fate of prominent wives and daughters, often referring back to the biographies of educated Muslim women from the region that he had published in a separate volume Mäshhur khatïnnar (Famous Women) in 1903.

Nation and Country With these hundreds of interwoven biographies, Āthār ref lected an expanding Tatar Muslim network that crossed central Eurasia. Many of the personalities had spent years at the feet of professors in Bukhara and Samarkand, the traditional centres of persophone Islamic learning in what is today Uzbekistan. After returning to the Volga-Ural region, these graduates obtained licenses from the Muftiate in Ufa, and started to work as imams and madrasa teachers in the villages and towns of their wider region. Volga Tatar imams also settled among the Bashkirs in the Urals and in Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe south of Orenburg. Their mosques and madrasas were often financed by Volga Tatar merchants who made their fortunes by trading with central Asia, Siberia and Kazakhstan.5 Danielle Ross has recently described this Muslim network of pious and trading families from the Volga region as a “Tatar Empire” that operated in the shadow of the Russian Empire.6 As Ross shows, Volga Tatar imams and merchants acted as junior partners in the Russian colonial expansion, 4 On the structure of Āthār see Baibulatova, “Asar.” 5 Frank, Bukhara. 6 Ross, Tatar Empire.

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benefitting from the security and stability brought by the Russian military and administrative advance into the Urals, the Kazakh Steppe and, from the 1860s to the 1880s, central Asia. The Russian administration benefitted from the Tatar religious and trade networks, and Catherine the Great established the Muftiate in Orenburg (staffed mainly by Tatars) to facilitate the Tatar pious penetration of the Kazakh communities. The Tatars fully embraced this role and used imperial Russian protection to establish Tatar settlements, mosques and schools throughout the broader region, and to build close relations with the Islamic teachers and muftis in Bukhara. Starting around 1800 this led to a boom not only in the spread of basic literacy but also in the production of Islamic high literature in various languages: for the Volga Tatars, Arabic served as the language of Islamic law and theology, Persian was much used for poetry, and Tatar for historiography and correspondence. In his biographical compendia, Fakhreddinov reproduced documents in all three languages. Fakhreddinov’s Āthār bears the subtitle “Biographies of the Islamic Scholars of Our Own Country.”7 But what was this “country,” and who were the “we” implied by this title? Fakhreddinov did not use the term “Tatar” to clarify the ethnic background of the personalities whose memory he preserved. In the first two volumes of Āthār, he still referred to the Volga region as Bulghār; in fact, until the late nineteenth century most authors of Islamic treatises from the Volga area had called themselves al-Bulghārī, in the sense of “coming from the region of the former Bulghār Khanate on the Volga and Kama rivers,” a political entity that was destroyed in the 1230s by the Mongols.8 In the Muslim world, the word “Tatar” had traditionally designated the infidel Mongol conquerors who had destroyed many flourishing Muslim city states in central Eurasia before eventually accepting Islam and assimilating with the local Muslim elites. But by the late nineteenth century, the Muslims of the Volga area started accepting the name “Tatar”; as the above-mentioned Shihābaddīn al-Marjānī had argued, if the Russians and all the world know the Volga Muslims as “Tatars,” then it is time that they themselves accept this term, and drop the self-designation “Bulghārīs” (the latter also being confusing given the recent establishment of an autonomous Bulgaria in 7 Āthār: Öz mämläkätemezdä ulghan islam ‘ulamalarïnïng tärjümä-i hälläre vä tabaqalarï, tarikh-i väladät vä väfatlarï vä bashqa ähvallarï haqqïnda yazïlmïsh ber kitabdir (Monuments: A book written about the Islamic scholars who lived in our country, with the dates of their births and deaths and other information about them). Here and in what follows all translations from Āthār are mine. 8 Frank, Islamic Historiography.

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the Balkans). Marjānī opposed the “Bulghār” identity also because it was cemented in anachronistic Islamization legends and hagiographies. Marjānī’s Muslim “Tatar” identity came with a critique of these “Bulghār” legends, shrines and hagiographies, and with a rational historiography that relied not on miracles but on the critical analysis of documents. What, then, is “Our Own Country” in the subtitle of Fakhreddinov’s Āthār? The term he employed, mämläkät, can mean “country” and “state” as well as “empire.” It is not unthinkable that Fakhreddinov meant the Russian Empire – all the communities that Fakhreddinov covered through his biographies were, at the time of writing, subjects of the Tsar. But it is more likely that he imagined this area of Tatar Muslim settlement – from Nizhnii Novgorod in the west to Tobolsk in Siberia, and from Kazan in the north to Tatar diasporic neighbourhoods among the Kazakhs – as an alternative, Islamic mämläkät, one that lacked statehood but that existed through networks of religious scholars, bound together by overlapping student-master relations, correspondence, family relations and business, as documented and cherished in Fakhreddinov’s biographical works. Even though, according to Fakhreddinov, only three out of five of all the personalities mentioned in Āthār were really outstanding, taken collectively the biographies were meant to serve as models for improving the social situation (ijtimä‘i ḥälläre) of the nation and people (millät vä qäüm).9

From Memory to Obituary of Islam The culmination of Fakhreddinov’s biographical work was his third volume of biographies, which however remained unpublished. The manuscript (today preserved in the Ural National Center of Sciences in Ufa) discusses around 200 personalities who died after 1873.10 The fact that Fakhreddinov had been acquainted with many of these men gives Āthār III a new quality. More than the previous two volumes, Āthār III reflects the personal contacts, concerns and preferences of its author and compiler. An analysis of the manuscript evidence suggests that Āthār III grew in stages and that Fakhreddinov made several attempts to bring it to press. It 9 Riḍā’addīn b. Fakhraddīn, Muqaddima, pp. 10 and 13. 10 Riḍā’addīn b. Fakhraddīn, Āthār III, MS 112-S, Fakhreddinov fond, Nauchnyi arkhiv UNTs RAN. See Bulgakov, “Kratkii obzor.” Fakhreddinov also prepared a fourth volume, consisting of additions to Āthār I–III. The third and fourth volumes were published in 2010 in the form of a transliteration into modern Tatar, without comments: Rizaeddin Fäkhreddin, Asar.

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should be noted that Āthār III came down to us in two manuscript volumes, one containing the corpus of the book – the individual biographies as well as an index – and the other containing the Introduction (Muqaddima) to Āthār III (as well as including other materials). The cover of this latter manuscript has in its header “part 16,” and bears a note of the Imperial Censor Vasilii D. Smirnov, professor of Turkology at the University of St Petersburg, dated 6 February 1906, to grant permission to publish.11 From this we must conclude that Fakhreddinov initially intended to publish Āthār III not as one coherent volume but in parts (with the first fascicle of Āthār III running as part 16, that is, as a direct continuation of the first fifteen fascicles that together constitute the first and second volumes). What prevented Fakhreddinov then from publishing the first fascicle of Āthār III (part 16) already in 1906? We must remember that this was the year when Fakhreddinov resigned his post at the Muftiate and became a journalist, which must have absorbed much of his energy. At the same time Fakhreddinov was still busy publishing the last fascicles of Āthār II, and perhaps he did not want to publish the first fascicle (part 16) of Āthār III before the last fascicle of Āthār II (part 15, Orenburg 1908). In 1911 Fakhreddinov again intended to publish Āthār III, and by this time the manuscript had already grown into a coherent volume for which he now designed a separate muqaddima, dated 10 February 1911.12 But again his plan was thwarted: as he later noted in the same manuscript, in the same month of February 1911, the Russian police searched his apartment in Orenburg in the middle of the night and confiscated the manuscript of Āthār III and other items from his library. Āthār III was returned to him only after a year.13 We do not know what prompted this police raid; it is possible that one of Fakhreddinov’s Muslim critics denounced him to the Tsarist authorities. Fakhreddinov therefore had no nostalgia for the Tsarist times when the February Revolution of 1917 put an end to Romanov rule. After the Bolsheviks seized power in October, Lenin abolished all privileges held by religious authorities: starting with the Russian Orthodox Church, but the Muslim communities were not targeted until later. Liberated from the constraints of imperial rule, in 1917–18 the Muslims of Russia – Tatars, Bashkirs, Kazakhs, Azeris and many others, among them Fakhreddinov – participated in all kinds of congresses to discuss projects of Muslim cultural and religious autonomy. The Bolsheviks indeed gave Russia’s minorities their ethnic homelands, including 11 Riḍā’addīn b. Fakhraddīn, Muqaddima, cover page (paginated as “page 2”; see note 14). 12 Riḍā’addīn b. Fakhraddīn, Muqaddima, pp. 3–19. 13 Riḍā’addīn b. Fakhraddīn, Muqaddima, p. 20.

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the Tatar and Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics in the Volga-Ural region that hosted most of European Russia’s Muslim communities. They also allowed Russia’s Muslims to elect their own Mufti – before the Revolution the Mufti had been selected and appointed by the Tsarist administration. As the Islamic publishing industry collapsed in 1918, Fakhreddinov resumed work at the Muftiate. In 1921 the elected Mufti under whose authority he worked, his friend ‘Ālimjān Bārūdī, passed away, and Fakhreddinov succeeded him in the office of Mufti. He would remain in this position until the end of his life. Perhaps Fakhreddinov hoped that at the helm of Russia’s Islamic establishment, he might be able to steer the Muslim mosque communities through difficult times. In these years he continued to enlarge his manuscript of Āthār III. By 1924 he had added another thirty-three entries on persons who died after April 1911. He also produced a table of contents which comprised all entries up to those of 1924.14 This suggests that in 1924 he made a third attempt to publish Āthār III. But the Bolsheviks did not tolerate a revival of Islamic publishing; the only Islamic outlet that Fakhreddinov could still use for placing short articles was the meagre newsletter of the Muftiate, and by 1928 this was discontinued as well.15 It seems that between 1925 and 1929 Fakhreddinov did not have time to work on his Āthār III: the surviving manuscript contains no biographical entries about personalities who died in those years. This period must have been sobering for Fakhreddinov. We know that during the great famines of the 1920s when the Volga Tatars were in desperate need of humanitarian aid, Fakhreddinov was forced to sign political statements blaming Great Britain for the hunger of the USSR’s Muslims. In 1926, Fakhreddinov was allowed to undertake a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and this was a personal highlight of his time as Mufti; but here again he was on a political mission, for the primary goal of the trip was to head the Soviet delegation at an 14 The manuscript volume as it has come down to us has two paginations: one from page one to the end (obviously added by archivists) and one that goes in reverse direction, that is, against the logic of the reading direction of a book written in the Arabic script. I assume that this last “European” pagination was added (in numbers not handwritten but stamped onto the manuscript pages) in 1924 for the printing house to offer orientation to functionaries not familiar with the Oriental tradition. Curiously, in Fakhreddinov’s handwritten index the individual biographical entries are linked to the “reverse” page numbers, thereby assigning the highest page numbers to the personalities who appear in the beginning of the volume. The last person included in this index (the one with the lowest “reverse” page number) died in 1924, which allows me to assume that Fakhreddinov composed the index in that year, as the last step before submission. Biographies of personalities in Āthār III who died after 1924 are not included in the index. There is no external information to corroborate this assumption. 15 Kemper, “From 1917 to 1937,” p. 164.

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Islamic Congress in Mecca about the Caliphate question – to demonstrate the USSR’s benevolent support of Islam and to denounce the British who were lending organizational support to a rival congress in Cairo at this time. By the end of the 1920s, during the course of collectivization, the Bolsheviks closed down almost all mosques, expelling, exiling or imprisoning their imams and caretakers. Mufti Fakhreddinov repeatedly complained to the authorities in Moscow, but to no avail. He became sidelined, cut off from the mosque communities he was supposed to direct and coordinate, and fearful of arrest. It is in this grim situation that Fakhreddinov once again turned to the Āthār III manuscript to add new biographies. But the pious nation that Āthār was meant to celebrate had already ceased to exist, and Fakhreddinov’s additions of the early 1930s reveal his despair. Now convinced that his manuscript would never see the printing press, Fakhreddinov saw no reason to hide his personal reflections. A telling example can be found in his biography of a certain Muḥammad-Fātiḥ b. ‘Abdannaṣīr (d.1875). Describing how he had obtained a collection of letters written by this person, he wrote: These letters were sent to me from the village of Ṣaṣnā by ‘Abdalḥaqq Afandi b. Ḍiyā’addīn. I initially wanted to include these letters into Āthār and therefore made complete copies of them, and sent the original letters back to the owner. But then the world changed, and our hopes turned out to be mere phantasies. There was no longer any reason to include the letters word-for-word. It is doubtful that there is anybody left in this country [mämläkät] who would now read our writings, nor even the Noble Quran. We are from God, and to God we will return. For this reason we cut the letters at many places, and will now only present a few parts of them.16

This passage reflects Fakhreddinov’s practice of securing the trust of his informants by always sending the letters back, and by including the materials as close to the original as possible. But at the time of writing, this enthusiasm had given way to the conviction that all his efforts were in vain. If nobody reads his works, nor even the Quran, then the Islamic nation is dead, and what remains is to write its obituary. Fakhreddinov now also documented Bolshevik violence – never systematically but in his biographies of individual personalities. About a certain Muḥammad-Ṣādiq bin Shāh-Aḥmad he noted: 16 Riḍā’addīn b. Fakhraddīn, Āthār III, fol. 44 (emphasis mine).

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[While he was serving as imam in Kazan] the Bolsheviks threw him into prison, and afterwards sent him into exile. He passed away on the twelfth day of the month Rabī‘ Awwal 1351 [16 July 1932], in the city of Prisher. In addition to being a virtuous and knowledgeable person he also produced perfect poetry.17

A certain Aḥmad, son of Ḥāfiẓaddīn from the village of Paranga, passed away in 1924. Around 1912 this person had produced a history of the Muslim village of Paranga,18 and Fakhreddinov must have felt much sympathy for this man who, like he himself, attempted to document the heritage of his nation. While the biographical entry is written in black ink, Fakhreddinov later made an addition to it, for which he used purple ink to mark the later date of this addition: “When I heard of his death I was sad and happy at the same time. […] Happy I was because [by dying early, in 1924] he was untouched by the oppression and outrage, and was spared the calamity that befell other pious and fine personalities.”19 About Muḥammad-Najīb Tūntārī (d.1930) – one of his closest colleagues in the Muftiate, and like Fakhreddinov himself a proponent of Islamic reformism – he reported: In the context of the general catastrophe that fell on the heads of the Islamic scholars of this mämläkät, and of the unprecedented calamity and disaster, [Tūntārī] was imprisoned, and he was forced on a march, at gun point, in the cold days of January. People say he did not recover from that cold, and died.20

Conclusion Āthār III has several layers: (1) the original first fascicle of 1906 (“part 16” in the overall Āthār project), for which he received permission from the censor; (2) the expanded text of 1911, now already a whole volume to which he added a hopeful introduction; (3) new biographies that Fakhreddinov had added to the corpus by 1924, again in the hope of publishing this volume; and then, after a gap of several years, (4) the final additions and desperate 17 Riḍā’addīn b. Fakhraddīn, Āthār III, fol. 63r. 18 Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions, p. 29. 19 Riḍā’addīn b. Fakhraddīn, Āthār III, fol. 290r. 20 Riḍā’addīn b. Fakhraddīn, Āthār III, fol. 327r.

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notes of 1929–32. In this last period Fakhreddinov ceased to write for an audience, and did not need to please any censors. If Āthār III began as the culmination of nation-building through the biographical documentation of a network of pious leaders, towards the end of his manuscript Fakhreddinov documented the elimination of that very network and thereby of the Islamic nation it had formed and maintained. Āthār III is more than a valuable source of information on the Volga Tatar religious network. The manuscript also deserves attention as an autobiographical document that reflects Fakhreddinov’s personal thought, documenting how the fundamental changes in the state and society impacted him. What started as a celebration of the nation, in a virtual country (mämläkät), ended as an obituary of that nation’s foundational elites, the Islamic scholars. Fakhreddinov passed away on 11 April 1936. Shortly thereafter the Bolsheviks closed the Muftiate and arrested his remaining colleagues.21

References Archival Sources Nauchnyi arkhiv UNTs RAN. Bulgakov, Ramil’ M. “Kratkii obzor tiurkskikh rukopisei Rizaeddina bin Fakhreddina i ego islamovedcheskikh rabot sovetskogo perioda, khraniashchikhsia v nauchnom arkhive UNTs RAN.” Unpublished document. Nauchnyi arkhiv UNTs RAN. Riḍā’addīn b. Fakhraddīn. Āthār III. Fond 7, opis’ 1, delo 12 (staryi akt) (= Fakhreddinov fond, MS 112-S). 337 fols. Nauchnyi arkhiv UNTs RAN. Riḍā’addīn b. Fakhraddīn. Muqaddima (introduction) to Āthār III. Fond 7, opis’ 1, delo 13 (staryi akt) (= Fakhreddinov fond, MS 113-S), pp. 1–20.

Published Sources Amirkhanov, Khusain. Tavarikh-e bulgariia (Bulgarskie khroniki). Translated by Azat M. Akhunov. Kazan: Mardzhani, 2010. Baibulatova, Liliia F. “Asar” Rizy Fakhreddina: Istochnikovaia baza i znachenie svoda. Kazan: Tatarskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 2006. 21 I am grateful to the director of the Institute of History, Language and Literature of the Ufa Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Prof. Dr. Aibulat V. Psianchin, for allowing me to consult the manuscript of Āthār III, and I am indebted to Prof. Dr. Marsil N. Farkhshatov for collegial support and advice.

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Baishev, Fanil’ N. Obshchestvenno-politicheskie i nravstvenno-eticheskie vzgliady Rizy Fakhretdinova. Ufa: Kitap, 1996. Farkhshatov, Marsil’. “Fakhretdinov, Rizaetdin.” In Islam na territorii byvshei Rossiiskoi imperii: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, edited by Stanislav M. Prozorov, vol. 1, pp. 400–2. Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura RAN, 2006. Frank, Allen J. Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia: Sufism, Education and the Paradox of Islamic Prestige. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Frank, Allen J. Islamic Historiography and “Bulghar” Identity among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Frank, Allen J. Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and he Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780–1919. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Kemper, Michael. “From 1917 to 1937: The Mufti, the Turkologist, and Stalin’s Terror.” Die Welt des Islams 57, no. 2 (2017): pp. 162–91. Marjānī, Shihābaddīn. Al-Qism al-thānī min kitāb Mustafād al-akhbār fī aḥwāl Qazān wa- Bulghār. Kazan: Tipo-Litografiia Imperatorskago Universiteta, 1900. Riḍā’addīn b. Fakhraddīn. Āthār. Fascicle 1, Kazan: Tipo-Litografiia Imperatorskago Universiteta, 1900. Fascicles 2–15, Orenburg: Karimov, 1901–8. Rizaeddin Fäkhreddin. Asar: Öchenche häm dürtenche tomnar. Edited by Mirkasym A. Usmanov. Kazan: Rukhiyat Näshriyäte, 2010. Ross, Danielle. Tatar Empire: Kazan’s Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. Türkoglu, Ismail. Rusya Türkleri arasindaki yenileşme hareketin öncülerinden Rizaeddin Fahreddin (1858–1936). Istanbul: Ötüken, 2000.

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A Network in Search of an Alternative Modernity Artists’ Colonies in Europe (1870–1914) Anne-Marie Thiesse

Abstract In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, dozens of “artists’ colonies” were created by small groups of painters, writers and musicians who wanted to rediscover nature and rural traditions that urbanization and industrialization were effectively erasing. In these communities the artists came also to experiment with alternative ideals of modernity: equality, the emancipation of women, the importance of healthy bodies, criticism of the social order and the search for happiness. The artists’ colonies were the result of a new artistic mobility whose goal was to immerse artists in a peer group; most of them became vibrant centres of cultural cosmopolitanism. Keywords: networks; alternative modernity; Europe; artists’ colonies; nature; rural traditions

In the spring of 1875, Robert Louis Stevenson accompanied his cousin, a painter, to Barbizon, and thence to a nearby village, Grez-sur-Loing, where Scandinavian artists had been settled for some years. During his stay, Stevenson fell deeply in love with another visitor, the American artist and painter, Fanny Osbourne. The following year, Swedish painter Carl Larsson, coming also from Barbizon, decided to stay in Grez-sur-Loing where he too met the love of his life, the painter Karine Bergöö. In 1885, while August Strindberg was conducting an anthropological and economic survey in the village that would form the second chapter of his book Bland Franska Bönder (Among Peasants in France), his wife Siri von Essen was in

Brolsma et al. Networks, Narratives and Nations. Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022. doi: 10.5117/9789463720755_ch07

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Grez-sur-Loing, living out a burning passion for Marie David, an aspiring Danish writer. Starting in the 1890s, some twenty Japanese painters, taking advantage of the incentives to travel in Europe during the Meiji era, also sojourned in Grez-sur-Loing. In Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, dozens of villages like Grez were becoming artists’ colonies. Painters, writers and musicians would set themselves up in such places – often for the summer when the studios and workshops in the city were shut, or even for several years. Some stayed there the rest of their lives. Often young and with few resources when they arrived, they would find lodging in local inns and farmhouses and could enjoy living more cheaply than in the city. They wanted to rediscover what urbanization and industrialization were obliterating: nature, traditions, country people and light coming from less polluted skies. The artists’ colonies represented not only the move to a Bohemian countryside without the misery of urban life, but also communities where criticism of capitalist and bourgeois society was expressed. The artists came to experiment with alternative ideals of modernity: equality, the emancipation of women, the importance of healthy bodies, critique of the social order and the search for happiness. Two products of industrial modernity proved to be decisive for these relocations to the countryside: the paint tube and the railway. The first, patented by American painter John Goffe Rand in 1841, was commercialized not long afterwards in the United Kingdom and in France. It enabled painters to leave their studios, travel with their materials and paint out of doors. Thanks to the network of trains becoming more and more intricate, the return to nature could be practiced while maintaining close links with art galleries, newspapers and the artistic circles back in the large towns.

A Model Swarming through Europe Starting in the 1830s, a core group of so-called pleinairist painters set themselves up in Barbizon at the Ganne Inn. The village was only sixty kilometres from Paris, but it was in the heart of the Fontainebleau forest, which could be painted as a wilderness setting the way Jean-Baptiste Corot had accentuated it. From 1849, a railway line increased Barbizon’s accessibility. Foreign painters (English, Irish, American, German, Belgian, Dutch, etc.) came in growing numbers. By the end of the nineteenth century, the intensity of creative activity in Barbizon and its international consecration had led to tourist development in

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the village that disrupted the initial principle of bringing creators together far from the bustling city life. But the “model” soon spread out as artists swarmed to neighbouring localities close to the forest as well as to colonies throughout the whole of Europe. During this time, Barbizon became a generic term applied to numerous artists’ colonies: Oosterbeek (Netherlands), Nagybánya (Hungary, today Baia Mare, Romania), Newlyn (Cornwall), Olot (Catalonia), etc. These cultural transfers were often introduced by painters who had frequented Barbizon or one of its first French replicas. The Scandinavian painters who had settled in Grez, attracted by the pleasures of canoeing and swimming in the river Loing, eventually returned to their respective countries after some years. But Larsson and his wife went on to create a house that became iconic for Swedish homes in the village of Sundborn on the banks of the river Falu. Danish painter Peder Severin Krøyer – whose tableau painting Konstnärsfrukost i Grez (Artist’s Breakfast in Grez) illustrates the convivial gatherings of the Scandinavian art colony in France – became the best-known painter in the Skagen colony, located in a Jutland fishing village. The landscape painter Otto Modersohn made explicit references to Barbizon when, together with Fritz Mackensen, Heinrich Vogeler and Hans am Ende, he founded a colony in Worpswede, in the Teufelsmoor region near Bremen. The community was consolidated by some amorous relationships (Modersohn married Mackensen’s student, Paula Becker) as well as friendly ones (Carl Hauptmann, a close friend of Modersohn’s, came with his brother, the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann). Rainer Maria Rilke, invited by Vogeler, sojourned in Worpswede where he married the painter Clara Westhoff, a friend of Paula Becker’s. Shortly after, he published a study about Worpswede and its principal painters. Artists’ colonies were vibrant centres of cultural cosmopolitanism. Discovered by Josef Israëls, the village of Laren, thirty kilometres outside Amsterdam, rapidly attracted Americans – among them the painter and collector William Henry Singer – Germans, and later Belgians. Some colonies were even initiated by foreigners. Pont-Aven in Brittany became the place for creative Americans starting in 1864, followed by British, Irish and Scandinavian painters with whom French artists intermingled. Gauguin went there for the first time in 1886. Artists’ careers had been marked for centuries by the transience needed to study with masters or to execute commissioned works. Yet the artists’ colonies were the result of a new artistic mobility whose goal was to immerse artists in a peer group. Coined in 1891 by an English critic, the term “Barbizon School” is deceptive: in Barbizon there were no masters or formal teaching. These communities came together as complements – and often

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as antitheses – to the official structures of training and formal recognition. They were places of intense encounters between artists but on an equal footing, where their emulation and stimulation of each others’ creative work developed in total freedom. The principle corresponded to the new conceptions of artistic excellence, founded on originality and the individual’s investment in their work. While the female artists had not been treated very well in the studios and even denied access to many of them, their significant presence in the colonies attests to their will to live and create on the fringes of the predominant system. The artists’ coming together out of affinities was an expression of the contemporary artistic identity. With the end of guilds, the bourgeois era saw the creation of new professional organizations. Conversely, the artistic field took shape with the refusal of professionalism and certification by diploma. It was founded on the invention of an identity that escaped all external labelling. From now on, the artist was no longer defined as such by anyone other than themselves and those they recognized as their peers at a specific time in history. The colonies, which proposed working together in sympathy according to ever-changing elective affinities, became the heart of artistic modernity.

The Return to Traditions as an Aesthetic Revolution In the same way that the outlook of artists in nineteenth century had created the desire to protect or restore historical monuments, painting out of doors established nature as a patrimony to be preserved from the destruction wrought by economic modernization. Under pressure from painters whose representations of the Fontainebleau forest had become famous, Napoleon III established a réserve artistique of around 2,400 hectares, to be protected from the modifications induced by the exploitation of the forest resources. This was the first natural reserve in the world. The artists did not advance a “back-to-nature” ethos as a reactionary approach. It was rather presented as a weapon in the avant-garde offensive against prevailing aesthetic hierarchies, proposing instead a quest for authenticity. The colonies experimented with realism, impressionism, symbolism, fauvism, expressionism and even abstraction (Mondrian lived in Laren during the First World War). During the nineteenth century, peasants in their work clothes or regional costumes were the picturesque subjects par excellence. In the artists’ villages, rural workers posed as models for the artists for a well-appreciated remuneration. They were anonymous figures in paintings that are now

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well known locally or universally: Ernest Biéler’s Deux jeunes valaisannes (Two Girls from Valais), painted at the Swiss colony of Savièse, Polish artist Włodzimierz Tetmajer’s Tańce w karczmie (Dancers at an Inn), at the Bronowice colony, near Kraków, or Paul Gauguin’s Femmes de Pont-Aven (Women of Pont-Aven). Territories once deemed unpleasant or frightening became spaces endowed with aesthetic and salutary value. Attracted by the effects of light and shadow on the ocean, at a time when wealthy Europeans were discovering the benefits of bathing in the sea, artists set themselves up in fishing ports such as Concarneau in Brittany, St Ives in Cornwall, Katwijk in the Netherlands, Ahrenshoop in Mecklenburg and Varberg in Sweden. Fishermen became great pictorial and literary subject matter. At the end of the nineteenth century, mountains became a place of leisure sports and healing urban illnesses. The first Alpine clubs were created around 1860, and sanitariums opened at the same time. Some artists set up their colonies in mountain villages, such as Amden in the Swiss canton of Saint-Gall, created by painters from Württemberg and from German-speaking parts of Switzerland. Artists envisaged popular crafts as a rich repertory of forms, motifs and materials able to nourish new creation. In the Bavarian colony of Murnau, where Russian and German artists founded the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group, Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky took inspiration from peasant paintings on glass with pious imagery. Influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement launched by William Morris, many artists’ colonies became centres for neo-artisanal art applied in the construction of villas, the decoration of public buildings and the manufacture of furniture for the home. Painters participated in the iconographic promotion of local food products, as Ernest Biéler did when he created the décor for the wine festival in Vevey. Artists’ colonies participated with patriotic enthusiasm in the aesthetic representation of the nation-states that were coming into being. During the period 1880 to 1913, artists and intellectuals of the Young Poland movement wanted to create a national art form for their fatherland, whose lands lay partitioned across three empires. Zakopane, a thermal spa at the foot of the Tatras Mountains, connected to Kraków by train, developed into a vacation resort and a place for artists to stay. The architect and painter Stanisław Witkiewicz designed the “Zakopane style,” adapting the artisanal building and furniture-making traditions of the Tatras to bourgeois leisure customs. In Finland, then a duchy of the Russian Empire with an emerging national movement, painters, writers and musicians close to the Young Finnish Party – notably Sibelius – set up the artists’ colony of Tuusula. They developed a “Finnish style,” applied in both their artwork and the design of their houses.

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Most artists’ colonies were informal gatherings whose membership was changing. Yet some were founded by a patron who wanted to group artists together to create an ambitious project for national culture. The industrialist Savva Mamontov, endowed with a fortune derived from railway companies, brought together the most reputed artists onto his Abramtsevo estate, near Moscow, from 1879 until his financial ruin in 1900. Painters, writers and musicians were encouraged to produce national art for modern Russia. Workshops were built for the production of wooden objects or pottery inspired by peasant craftsmanship. At the incentive of the painter Ilya Repin, Rilke visited Abramtsevo with Lou-Andreas Salomé, a short time before he went to Worpswede. Ernst Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse, attentive to the development of his country, created a colony of artists on the domain of Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt in 1899. Sculptors, architects, decorators and ceramists were asked to create a collection of works associating beauty, simplicity and functionality. The results were presented to the public at exhibitions. The first, in 1901, was entitled “A Document of German Art.”

Reforming Life In the framework of the Lebensreform (Life Reform) movement that took place mainly in the German-speaking countries at the end of the nineteenth century, artists’ colonies associated criticism of the predominant art with the development of a counterculture. Sensual contact with nature and a simplified lifestyle were put into practice to bring about a regenerated “new man”. This alternative modernity was based on a critique of bourgeois institutions, capitalism and consumerism, in a market already globalized by colonization. They tended to refer to diverse intellectual and spiritual currents: the Tolstoyan movement, the occult, theosophy, Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach’s naturist and vegetarian theories. Artists living with their families in the Hungarian colony of Gödöllő were vegetarians, sported beards and wore their hair long; they dressed in clothes they wove themselves and practised nudism as an immersion into the benefits of sunshine and fresh air. The colony had been created by Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch and his brother-in-law Sándor Nagy, and was joined by the Swede Leo Belmonte who had learned tapestry-making at the Manufacture des Gobelins. Gödöllő became famous as the centre of the “Hungarian Secession” style for textiles and furniture, as well as the paintings on canvas and on glass created in its workshops.

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The colony of Monte Verità in the Canton of Ticino, Switzerland, was a countercultural Mecca during the early 1900s. It was founded by Henri Oedenkoven, the son of a rich businessman from Antwerp. With the pianist Ida Hofmann, his companion, and several friends, Oedenkoven experimented in creating a social utopia. The monteveritani practiced vegetarianism, manual labour, sunbathing, nudism, free love and rhythmic dance. Carrying out their initial project to create an avant-garde sanitarium inspired by naturopathy, they welcomed paying guests who came to take a course of treatment based on sunlight and frugality. The community was enormously attractive to artists and intellectuals all over Europe. Hermann Hesse, Max Weber, the anarchist Erich Mühsam, the psychoanalyst Otto Gross and the painter Fidus (Hugo Höppener, a disciple of Diefenbach) were among the numerous visitors. Pacifist Arthur Aron Segal, co-founder of the Neue Secession, settled in Monte Verità during the First World War, and opened a painting school, hosting artists like Jean Arp and Marianne von Werefkin. The Hungarian Rudolf von Laban, a great dance theoretician and reformist, along with Mary Wigman, the creator of the famous Hexentanz (Witch Dance), set up a school whose influence spread internationally. Isadora Duncan was among its visitors. Henri Oedenkoven sold the estate in 1920 to set up other utopian colonies in Spain and later in Brazil. The banker who bought it had a luxury hotel designed by a Bauhaus architect built on the domain. The First World War brought cosmopolitanism and the circulation of artists and intellectuals to a grinding halt. The great period of artists’ colonies was over – even if some stayed behind in these places where so many creative people had passed through. Nevertheless, their influence would be decisive for alternative modernity throughout the twentieth century. These laboratories of the aesthetic and social avant-garde continued to inspire all sorts of movements for a long time up to the hippie and backto-nature communes. The model for the artists’ colony, first established in Europe, spread to other continents. In the United States, the first colony was Birdclyffe, near Woodstock, created in 1902. Some critics in the 1970s blamed the artists’ colonies: in particular their cult of getting back to the land was seen by some as a precursor to the Nazi ideology of Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil). In fact, Nazism took certain themes from the Lebensreform movement, mixing them with occultism. It drew on the artistic avant-garde for the spectacular conception of its ceremonies. Solicited by Goebbels, Rudolf von Laban devised the choreography for the athletes participating in the Berlin Olympic games in 1936 before fleeing to England the following year. The painter Mackensen was active

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in and honoured by the National Socialist regime. In contrast, Heinrich Vogeler, another co-founder of the colony in Worpswede, became a pacifist and communist activist after the First World War. Barkenhoff, his house in the artist’s colony, evolved into a working-class community of mutual assistance. An anti-Nazi militant, Vogeler set himself up in the Soviet Union and participated in performances on the Kolkhoz agricultural cooperatives and in anti-Nazi propaganda productions. Banished to central Asia after the Nazi invasion, he died miserably in Kazakhstan. The artists’ colonies were revived after the fall of the Iron Curtain as places of memory and creativity. The intensive search for a European cultural identity to support the creation of a supranational political union favoured the creation of a dedicated network. EuroArt (the European Federation of Artists’ Colonies) was launched in 1994, under the auspices of the European Parliament and the European Commission. It brings together eighty colonies in twenty different countries to carry out common joint projects and events.

References Gallais, Jean-Marie, and Marie-Charlotte Calafat, eds. Folklore, artistes et folkloristes, une histoire croisée: Catalogue de l’exposition “Folklore”, Centre Pompidou-Metz/ MuCEM. Paris: La Découverte, 2020. Gimeno Martínez, Javier, and Joep Leerssen. “Dress, Design: Introductory Survey Essay.” In Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, edited by Joep Leerssen. Electronic version. Amsterdam: Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms. Changed 3 November 2020. https://ernie.uva.nl/. Leerssen, Joep. “Visual Arts: Introductory Survey Essay.” In Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, edited by Joep Leerssen. Electronic version. Amsterdam: Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms. Changed 10 March 2021. https:// ernie.uva.nl/. Lübbren, Nina. Rural Artists’ Colonies in Europe, 1870–1910. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Pese, Claus, ed. Künstlerkolonien in Europa: Im Zeichen der Ebene und des Himmels. Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2001. Rilke, Rainer-Maria. Worpswede. Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1903.

8

A Dutch Journal with a European Programme De Muzen Marita Mathijsen

Abstract The Dutch literary journal De Muzen (The Muses, 1834–35; originally meant to be titled Europa) aimed at enhancing the level of literary criticism and of literature itself by drawing attention to international literature both modern and classic. It was to become the first in the Netherlands to publish full-fledged reviews, informative and comparative but also critical. Due to the premature death of the journal’s founder, Aarnout Drost, it came to an end after only six volumes. Even so, it gave rise to the establishment of the main cultural journal of the nineteenth century, De Gids (The Guide, 1837–present). Keywords: Aarnout Drost; De Muzen; nationalism; internationalism; literary criticism; Everhardus Potgieter

Historians have often characterized Dutch nineteenth-century nationalism as constrictive. It allegedly induced a sense of self-sufficiency, causing the nation to erect fences behind which to protect itself against foreign influences.1 One of the most salient and significant findings to have emerged from Joep Leerssen’s numerous works is how international nineteenth-century nationalism really was. Everywhere in Europe a search was going on for what was characteristic of the nation, but always in close connection with the particularities of neighbouring or far-away regions. The whole point was to discover the cultural variety proper to one’s own nation through 1

See, for instance, Berg, “Nationalisme,” p. 349.

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the process of comparing it with other cultures. This is how the paradox of international nationalism comes about.2 The paradox is clearly present in the first journal in the Netherlands that aimed to improve the level of Dutch criticism and literature by means of international comparison. Remarkably enough, the first title chosen for this journal with its ambitious European program was Europa, and yet even before the first volume came out the editors switched to De Muzen.

The Journal Established The occasion for founding De Muzen (The Muses) was a conflict in the journal De Vriend des Vaderlands (The Fatherland’s Friend), where since early 1833 a few young and ambitious authors had formed an opposing alliance. When this conflict proved unresolvable, its co-editor Jan Pieter Heije looked around for a publisher willing to give these youngsters a chance with a journal of their own.3 A well-known Amsterdam publisher, M. Westerman, proved ready to invest in the project. He had already demonstrated his openness to fresh talent as well as to modern foreign literature in a book series Verzameling van voortbrengselen van uitheemsche vernuften (Collection of the Products of Foreign Wit). We know little of how the journal was actually established – all those involved lived in Amsterdam and met regularly, so they left little correspondence. If they wrote to each other at all, it was mostly about work they sent each other for comment. Even so, we do possess an intimation of how it happened in a letter from Aarnout (also: Aernout) Drost to Everhardus Potgieter (23 June 1834): “Europa has a publisher of a kind we figure a suitable publisher should be – Mr. Westerman will risk it.”4 Potgieter’s response lacked enthusiasm: “Europa, that so ominously sounding Europa has a hesitating, tardy publisher.”5 The name Europa also failed to find favour with him. He mockingly asked Drost, “Why not ‘the five Continents’?”6 Apparently Drost took this to 2 In this chapter I develop certain insights first discussed in Mathijsen, “Paradox.” 3 Exactly how all this came about is not known. In his PhD thesis Asselbergs quotes a letter by Heije in which he observes that Aarnout Drost enthusiastically “adopted my long-fostered plans and promised to help me and to take part in the entire effort” (letter of 9 November 1834; Asselbergs, Heije, p. 99). See also Mathijsen, “Aanval,” passim. 4 Waal, “Briefwisseling,” p. 138. 5 Waal, “Briefwisseling,” p. 139. 6 This note has not been preserved, but Potgieter quotes it in Potgieter, Leven, p. 394.

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Fig. 8.1 Title page of De Muzen (1835). Private Collection.

heart, so the title was changed to De Muzen, with for subtitle Nederlandsch Tijdschrift voor de Beschaafde en Letterkundige Wereld (Dutch Journal for the Cultured and Literary World). Typographically the word “world” was set apart on the title page, thus giving it so much emphasis that it looked as if the journal wished to reach the entire world. Was this a little mark of revenge for Potgieter’s making fun of the title Europa (Fig. 8.1)?

The Journal’s Program In a brief introductory piece in the first issue, the editors declared it their aim to offer “a fair and impartial journal, based on philosophical/aesthetic principles, that offers a critical overview of literary and artistic products both domestic and foreign.”7 A journey through the 558 pages of the journal clarifies what this should be taken to mean. The level of Dutch literary writing had to be raised, and so did the level of reviewing. For the latter category, this entailed keeping all reviews anonymous. In a small literary culture like that of the Dutch in 7 De Muzen, [p. iii].

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the nineteenth century everyone knows everyone, so when you sign your review you are not free to form a frank judgment. Reviews needed a more solid foundation, and taking an international perspective might help to improve what was national. The letters exchanged by these young editors show that they expected reviewing to be done in a new way. As Drost wrote to Potgieter, critics “eulogize everything to the point of making themselves ludicrous.” He argues in favour of passing judgment without being influenced by an author’s name, by his professional occupation or by public opinion with its “disastrous and cowardly parroting.”8 The same objectivity applies to literary work. In various essays the editors pointed out that literary authors needed to be aware of what was going on abroad, that they should be familiar with the outstanding authors of the past and present and nonetheless avoid emulating them but remain original. So once again the message was: be sure to be internationally well-informed to further the national interests. The first issue opens with a complaint about the lack of good translations of high-quality work, while plenty of “novels selected without judgment and intolerably translated which offend either good manners or good taste” are put up for sale.9 As an example of a book really worth being translated, the reviewer mentions Consolations in Travel or the Last Days of a Philosopher, the last book by Humphry Davy, who used the latest scientific geological insights to rewrite the history of the world. The book’s strong point, so the reviewer observes, is that science and religion are not seen as each other’s enemies, as he goes on to demonstrate by means of a solid piece of text translated from the Consolations into Dutch. It testifies to the editors’ determination and ambition that they opened a new journal in this period with so pithy a contribution. To play to the public’s taste by opening with a sentimental poem by, for example, Hendrik Tollens, “the poet of the fatherland,” or with an attention-catching translation of a satire by Byron, clearly did not fit their program. The editors’ eagerness to improve Dutch literary taste shows itself to best advantage in two pieces in particular: a review of a collection of poems by the forgotten poet C. Withuys, and a review of an English literary history. In studies about De Muzen the former piece is customarily regarded as the journal’s manifesto.10 Formally it is a review, but in reality the piece takes 8 In a letter of 1 November 1833; see Waal, “Briefwisseling,” p. 108. 9 De Muzen, p. 7. 10 Aarnout Drost is supposed to have been the author, but this is disputed by Kees Thomassen, who attributes the review to Jan Pieter Heije. See Thomassen, “Wie veegde Withuys?” (directed

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a stand. For the first time in the history of Dutch literature, specific standards are set for how to write a review: those of impartiality, international comparison, firmness and objectivity. So far reviewers had passed judgment “with a pen governed by mood, partisanship, and passion”; they had scorned their enemies and flattered their friends, but delivered nothing “to ennoble the public’s taste and enlighten its judgment.” The public needed to be convinced that “no beauty can exist without truth, no eminence without inner force, no grace without simplicity.”11 These views turned the journal into a milestone in the development of literary criticism, in deliberate opposition to the main Dutch review journal at the time, the Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (Patriotic Literary Essays). That journal was not selective but simply reviewed every work that its editors received, no matter how small or insignificant. Its reviews were full of praise and contained little more than summaries and some nitpicking criticism. There were almost no mentions of foreign authors or comparisons with their works. If the Withuys review can be regarded as De Muzen’s declaration of principle for literary criticism, its counterpart for literature itself is to be found in a review of Allan Cunningham’s 1834 Biographical and Critical History of the British Literature of the Last Fifty Years. The reviewer was Aarnout Drost, and the position he takes in the piece is a firm one. Editorial correspondence shows that the piece was meant to open the new journal, but for some reason it was moved to a later issue. Drost argued that authors ought to take guidance from what was done well abroad. That happened far too rarely, thus standing in the way of progress and of a truly flourishing literature. All the shortcomings in our literature, he claimed, were to be attributed to a lack of awareness and understanding of past and present European authors.12 In the review, he informs the reader of an array of modern British poets: Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Robert Southey, Samuel Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. By carefully examing their works the Dutch could find their way upward. Even so, he issued an explicit warning against imitation: the poet has an obligation to be original. The Withuys review offers one more piece of advice to literary authors: the classics have to be read as well. Not just Dutch classics like Vondel, Hooft and Bilderdijk, but also Racine, Boileau, Pope, Addison, Lessing and against Johannes, “Manifest”). 11 De Muzen, p. 44. 12 De Muzen, p. 20.

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Goethe. And here, too, the rule obtains that comparison will broaden and enrich the narrow circle of Dutch literature. Versifiers and poetasters will give up their efforts, either on their own initiative or because the audience for them dries up. All this illustrates the same rule: nationalism and internationalism go harmoniously together; only by turning international can one become truly national. De Muzen pleads for what may be called a Dutch Romanticism: a more intellectual one, not so amoral as its French counterpart and less given to infatuation than the German variety was alleged to be. Indeed, amorality and infatuation were considered to be characteristics foreign to the Dutch.

The Journal’s Contents Everything the program announced was actually carried out in the six issues that did appear. Along with twelve reviews of Dutch works there were seven of foreign ones. Goethe’s sensational poem “Prometheus” appeared in translation, as did some poems from Victor Hugo’s Les feuilles d’automne (Autumn Leaves) and poems by Thomas Moore, Ludwig Hölty and Lord Byron. Annoyance with the poverty of current translations drips from these pages. Our translators are “innumerable as the locusts in Egypt,” yet they miss the truly important works. They confine themselves to books in French, German and English, and if from time to time something must be taken from another language, they make use of a French translation.13 This is why the editors published substantial portions of a direct translation of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) and of Pellico’s Dei doveri degli uomini (The Duties of Men), just to show how it ought to be done. They also, quite remarkably, translated and published a range of short essays about literature, poetry, history, and the like, by well-known European writers. There is a piece by Jules Michelet about history; a eulogy on poetry by Abel-François Villemain, who regarded this literary genre as the most intimate possible blending of language and thought; a piece by Johann Gottfried Herder on the prejudices of “popular pride” in the sense of the wrong kind of nationalism; and an essay on Shakespeare by Victor Hugo. Several letters exchanged between Goethe and his friend Carl Friedrich Zelter also found a place. As for contributions to Dutch literature, the occasional poetry so characteristic of other journals was noticeable only for its complete absence. 13 De Muzen, pp. 61–62.

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What Dutch poetry they did publish concerned impressions of nature and scenes of historical events, as well as several programmatic poems. Some contributions managed to exert a certain influence on the perception of specific authors. One example was the complete translation of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi appearing within a year of its author’s first appearance in De Muzen. Another was a treatise in three parts on the Dutch eighteenth-century philosopher Frans Hemsterhuis, who wrote in French. In Germany and France, people like Herder and Mme de Staël had acknowledged him as a systematic thinker, whereas in his own country very few people had even heard of him.

The Journal’s Demise Was the journal too ambitious? The number of subscribers suggests it was. It seems there were only eighty of them, so Westerman is likely to have made up for the loss out of his own pocket.14 This was not, however, the cause of the journal’s demise. Jan Pieter Heije may have been its editor in chief and its business leader, but Aarnout Drost was the energizing force behind it. And yet, even before the first issue came out of what then still went by the name of Europa, his friends became aware that Drost’s health was far from stable. By the end of July 1834 he informed Potgieter that he had “not been well, not well at all.”15 From late August onward it must have become clear to them that he would not recover. In his last known letter to Potgieter, Drost expressed the hope that his health would return, and proceeded to address concerns about the contents of the upcoming issue.16 On 5 November, he died of consumption. Whether or not De Muzen would keep going now depended on Heije or Potgieter or, perhaps, Bakhuizen van den Brink. Heije’s job as an Amsterdam physician left him with no extra time to spare for the journal. As to Bakhuizen van den Brink, Drost himself had already observed that he was really too lazy to make it possible for people to count on him. And Potgieter? He was so depressed that very little came out of his hands.17 True, together with Bakhuizen van den Brink he took care of Drost’s literary estate. They completed a few stories, and framed him in true Romantic fashion 14 Drost, Eer, p. 19. 15 Waal, “Briefwisseling,” p. 148. 16 Waal, “Briefwisseling,” p. 150. The letter is dated 16 October 1834. 17 See Staverman, “Muzen,” passim.

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as a prematurely departed young poet.18 Heije did attempt to found a new journal, but that enterprise was not to succeed until two years later with the establishment of De Gids (The Guide), the well-known journal that was run primarily by Potgieter and did indeed pursue with the same vigour what had originated as the leading ideas of De Muzen – indeed, the journal has survived to the present day.

Finally “De Muzen was too new, too elegant, too well-appointed,” a friend of the editors wrote in 1835. The journal lacked appeal to a large audience that felt perfectly at ease with mediocrity rather than caring for excellence.19 Its message of a nationalism based on international ambitions was not understood. It may nonetheless be maintained that the journal made good on the promise of its original name, Europa, by noting the importance and significance of European literature. There was no conflict here with the journal’s nationalist ambition to enhance the level of “our” literature. The journal’s authors were given to expressing their core message in metaphors of ripening and growth. The editors regarded literature as a Dutch orchard in which fruit must flourish and ripen and not be picked until ripe. Whether or not it was ripe could only be decided once a foreign piece of fruit was placed beside it.20

References Asselbergs, Alphons J. M. Dr. Jan Pieter Heije, of De kunst en het leven. Maastricht: Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1966. Berg, Willem van den. “Nationalisme, een rem op de romantiek.” Spektator 18 (1988–89): pp. 347–50. [Beynen, L. R.]. Lotgevallen der Rederijkerskamer voor Uiterlijke Welsprekendheid […]. Leyden: La Lau, 1835. De Muzen: Nederlandsch Tijdschrift voor de Beschaafde en Letterkundige Wereld. Amsterdam: M. Westerman, 1834–35. Drost, Aarnout. “De eer des Vaderlands gebiedt, dat men streng zij”: Kritieken. Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 2004. 18 See for this Mathijsen, “Drie vrienden.” 19 [Beynen], Lotgevallen, p. 38. 20 Translation, also of the citations, by Floris Cohen.

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Johannes, G. J. “Een romantisch manifest? Het verbeeldingsbegrip in een recensie uit het tijdschrift ‘De Muzen.’” De Nieuwe Taalgids 84 (1991): pp. 289–302. Mathijsen, Marita. “De aanval op de prulpoëten.” In Nederlandse literatuur in de romantiek 1820–1880, pp. 101–9. Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2004. Mathijsen, Marita. “De paradox van het internationale nationalisme in Nederland 1830–1840.” In Naties in een spanningsveld: Tegenstrijdige bewegingen in de identiteitsvorming in negentiende-eeuws Vlaanderen en Nederland, edited by Nele Bemong, Mary Kemperink, Marita Mathijsen and Tom Sintobin, pp. 49–64. Hilversum: Verloren, 2010. Mathijsen, Marita. “Hoe drie vrienden een jonggestorven schrijver romantiseerden.” In Nederlandse literatuur in de romantiek 1820–1880, pp. 32–40. Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2004. Potgieter, E. J. Leven van R. C. Bakhuizen van den Brink. Edited by J. C. Zimmerman. Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1890. Staverman, W. H. “De Muzen.” De Nieuwe Taalgids 28 (1934): pp. 214–57. Thomassen, Kees. “Wie veegde Withuys? Aernout Drost versus Jan Pieter Heije.” Nieuw Letterkundig Magazijn 22 (2004): pp. 16–19. Waal, J. M. de. “Briefwisseling van Aernout Drost met Potgieter en Heije.” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Taal- en Letterkunde 37 (1918): pp. 81–151.

Part III Canonicity and Culture

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Cultural Nationalism and the Invention of Dutch Literary Icons Lotte Jensen

Abstract A transnational approach shows that many works of the Dutch literary canon that have been characterized as typically Dutch have in fact foreign origins. This can be seen by examining several icons from Dutch literature: Jantje, created by Hieronymus van Alphen; Sara Burgerhart, invented by Elisabeth Wolff-Bekker and Agatha Deken; and Oene van Sneek, a fictional character from a poem by Hendrik Tollens. Although it is the literary scholar’s task to remind readers that these authors did not express the Dutch nation’s soul or spirit, it remains of vital importance that scholars keep stressing the need for an in-depth knowledge and the uniqueness of Dutch historical literature to policy advisors, board members of universities and the broader public. Keywords: Dutch; literature; national identity; transnationalism; canonization

“Nothing is more international than nationalism.”1 This quote, taken from an interview with the Dutch-Limburgish literary scholar Joep Leerssen, perfectly describes the paradoxical nature of any attempt to single out a nation’s unique character. Demonstrating the exclusiveness of national traditions, cultural habits and iconic literary figures is inevitably part of a dynamic, international process: nations are always interdependent in successfully defining and redefining their cultural boundaries. In particular, neighbouring countries are indispensable points of reference. For example, what makes the Danes typically Danish can only be expressed by contrasting 1

Leerssen, “Niets internationaler dan nationalisme.”

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them to the Swedes and Norwegians. As Leerssen puts it: there is no such thing as a “durable, objective entity called ‘Germany,’ but rather the set of changeable images of a hypothetical and historically variable Germany; in studying these images we must place them in their discursive environment.”2 Nevertheless, the remnants of nineteenth-century political, cultural and Romantic nationalism remain omnipresent in our present-day society. We are surrounded by all sorts of manifestations of what Michael Billig calls “banal nationalism”: everyday practices, cultural symbols and habits of language, which ingrain nationality in people’s brains.3 The persistence of these imaginative national patterns can be explained by the fact that from early childhood we learn to think in simple schemes, which draw clear boundaries between nations, peoples and languages. Up to the present day, these schemes are reproduced in our educational systems: literary education is, for example, still firmly rooted in the nineteenth-century construction of national literary canons, which emerged from a political desire to express the uniqueness of the nation’s soul. Studying Dutch literature, in particular in secondary schools, still means in practice: reading a selection of “original” Dutch works, which preferably represent something typically Dutch. As Leerssen and many others have shown, transnational approaches may serve as an antidote against the use of simplified national schemes in traditional literary historiography. They can be applied to unravel the supranational dimensions of the cultural artefacts (which includes artistic production, knowledge production and critical reflection) as well as the international dissemination of those artefacts (the spread of cultural production through all sorts of media). 4 Writing literary history from the perspective of reading and translation brings forgotten literature ‒ often the work of women authors ‒ to the foreground. Mapping mobility patterns of cultural practitioners is also a way of broadening the horizon: authors did not work in isolation, but operated in international networks. Their epistolary networks make visible how trends and ideas spread across nations.5 Focusing on influences from abroad on cultural production is revealing as well: many canonical works from Dutch literary history appear to have foreign origins. Let me illustrate this by discussing several writings of major Dutch 2 Leerssen, “Echoes and Images,” p. 129. 3 Billig, Banal Nationalism. Leerssen, Nationalisme, pp. 91–95, offers several examples of Dutch banal nationalism. 4 Leerssen, “Women Authors and Literary History,” pp. 256–57. 5 Leerssen, Encyclopedia, vol. 1, pp. 20–21.

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authors from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: Hieronymus van Alphen (1746–1803), the duo Elisabeth Wolff-Bekker (1738–1804, better known as Betje Wolff) and Agatha Deken (1741–1804), and Hendrik Tollens (1780–1856).

Two “National” Icons of Dutch Literature: Jantje and Sara Hieronymus van Alphen is known as the champion of Dutch children’s literature. His collection of children’s poetry, published as Proeve van kleine gedigten voor kinderen (Sample of Little Poems for Children, 1778), became an instant success: expanded versions and sequels were reprinted time and again. Translations appeared in English, French and German. The collection contains one of the most well-known poems of Dutch literature. The opening verses are still familiar to most Dutch people: Jantje zag eens pruimen hangen O! als eijeren zo groot. ’t Scheen, dat Jantje wou gaan plukken, Schoon zijn vader ’t hem verbood.6

Johnny saw some fine plums hanging, Oh! like eggs, so very large, Johnny seemed about to pluck them, Though against his father’s charge.

The poem, entitled “De pruimeboom” (The Plum Tree), is about the little boy Jantje. He is hesitating whether to disobey his father, who has forbidden him to pick plums. Jantje decides to listen to his father and is rewarded for his virtuous behaviour with a hat full of plums. Young readers could learn from this poetic tale that virtuous behaviour was most rewarding in the end. Van Alphen became the Dutch icon of children’s literature, and was celebrated for having created such an appealing figure as the obedient Jantje. Literary scholar Piet Buijnsters has pointed out the huge influence of German authors on Van Alphen’s work.7 Van Alphen was in particular inspired by Christian Felix Weisse’s Lieder für Kinder (Moral Songs for Children, 1767–69) and Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann’s Lieder für kleine Mädchen und Jünglinge (Songs for Little Girls and Boys, 1777). The similarities in form, style and even choice of words are, in fact, abundant. Some poems might be called free translations, others free adaptations. An example of the last category – not 6 Alphen, Kleine gedigten voor kinderen, pp. 56–57; Alphen, Poetry for Children, pp. 20–21, trans. Millard. 7 Buijnsters’ epilogue in Alphen, Kleine gedigten voor kinderen, pp. 181–82.

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explicitly mentioned by Buijnsters – is the poem about prudent Jantje. Van Alphen took his inspiration from Weisse’s verse about the young boy Hans, who finds an apple: Als jüngst Hänschen in dem Gras Sich ein Blumensträuschen las, Fand er, welch Vergnügen! Einen Apfel liegen. Hänschen hüpfte froh daher; ‘Ey wie wunderschön ist er!’ Sprach er; meinem Magen Soll er wohl behagen.8

As young Hans picked himself a bouquet of flowers in the grass He found, what joy! An apple lying there. Hans hopped happily along; Hey, how beautiful it is! He said, my stomach Will enjoy it.

Van Alphen clearly echoed this poem, but made his own version of it: Jantje and Hans are both tempted to eat a piece of fruit. The ending, however, is different. Hans cannot control himself, and finds a worm in his apple, while Jantje is the more prudent boy and is rewarded for that. Van Alphen borrowed from other poems by Weisse as well, and combined them into one story. Obedience is, for example, the main theme of the poem “Der Gehorsam,” which contains the following verses: “Bestrafet mich mein Vater nun,/ Will ich seinen Willen thun,/ Darf ich es den, so übel nehmen?” (If my father punishes me now,/ If I want to do his will, need I take it so badly).9 Van Alphen does not literally copy these verses, but also writes from the perspective of the inner voice of a little boy who is struggling with daily issues (Fig. 9.1). Van Alphen’s “plum tree” became immensely popular. Its continuing success is due not only to the many reprints of the poem, but also the many parodies and repackaging efforts, in songs, rap and television sketches. Today, there is even a child-friendly restaurant in the province of Limburg carrying the name Jantje zag eens pruimen hangen. Sara Burgerhart, the protagonist in the epistolary novel Historie van mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart (History of Miss Sara Burgerhart, 1782) can be seen as the female equivalent of Jantje. She was created by two female authors, Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken. Their novel became an instant classic of Dutch literature. In 2020 it attracted new attention because it was included in the Canon of the Netherlands, a list of fifty canonical Dutch works, topics 8 Weisse, Kleine lyrische Gedichte, p. 71; see also Honings and Jensen, Romantici en revolutionairen, pp. 120–21. 9 Weisse, Kleine lyrische Gedichte, p. 117.

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Fig. 9.1 “Jantje zag eens pruimen hangen” (Johnny Saw Some Fine Plums Hanging). Hieronymus van Alphen, Kleine gedigten voor kinderen (Poetry for Children, 1783). Image: Wikimedia Commons.

or historical events.10 Their novel tells the story of a nineteen-year-old orphan, Sara, who is seduced and kidnapped by the villain “R.” She manages to escape, repents her sins and then marries the wonderful Hendrik Edeling, with whom she has five children. Wolff and Deken created the first originally Dutch Bildungsroman for women readers: by making mistakes Sara learns to distinguish virtuous from vicious behaviour, and turns into an exemplary young woman. There are all sorts of ingredients which have made critics and literary scholars label this novel typically Dutch. Firstly, the names of the characters sound very Dutch. Sara Burgerhart, Hendrik Edeling, Abraham Blankaart and Everard Redelyk: it is as if these characters breathe Dutch values, such as virtuous behaviour and reasonableness. Secondly, all characters use authentic language (filled with typically Dutch expressions) and proverbs. The novel consists of 175 letters, written by a total of 24 correspondents, each with unique linguistic habits. The conceited Wilhelmina van Kwastama 10 The Canon of the Netherlands (Canon van Nederland), a list of fifty canonical Dutch works, topics or historical events, was launched in 2006, and revised in 2020. Sara Burgerhart is part of this revised canon. See Nederlands Openluchtmuseum, “Sarah Burgerhart.”

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constantly sprinkles her sentences with learned French words, the maid uses simple and down-to-earth words, and the conceited young man Jacob Brunier excels in fabricating complicated sentences. Finally, themes such as homeliness, religious tolerance and practical moralism, which are key ingredients of Sara Burgerhart, were seen as prototypical of Dutch society at that time. The novel reinforced the ideal of the enlightened Dutch people, depicted as living in a harmonious society which celebrated family values. However, there are many reasons to question the typically Dutch nature of all this. In fact, Wolff and Deken imitated their English, French and German predecessors. The celebration of family values was, for instance, just as much part of other European societies. The epistolary novel travelled across Europe, and owed its success to the works of Samuel Richardson, Madame de Genlis and Sophie von La Roche. Leerssen points out that the combination of bourgeois settings and psychological, everyday realism can be witnessed all over Europe: it was a literary trend which pervaded the entire continent’s cultural production.11 Copying daily life was also part of a broader literary trend, and not something invented by Wolff or Deken. Although the characters of Sara Burgerhart seem very realistic (Sara could be the girl next door), there are many elements that undercut this grain of realism.12 The characters’ names, to begin with, point to the ideological message that the authors wanted to communicate: young female readers should behave just as prudently as the protagonist, using their common sense, following enlightened ideas and refraining from religious fanaticism. Sara Burgerhart (“civic heart”) and Edeling (“nobleman”) show exemplary behaviour, while the villain R is reduced to a consonant (just like “Mr. B” in Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded). On closer inspection, the characters do not behave or speak realistically at all. Abraham Blankaart, guardian of Sara Burgerhart and living in Paris, for instance, is constantly contrasting French aristocratic manners with Dutch civic virtues, such as sobriety and honesty. This is not so much typically Dutch behaviour, but it fits in a European literary trend. Leerssen convincingly argues that Blankaart is the Dutch version of the English John Bull figure.13 However, framing Sara Burgerhart as typically Dutch, both in the contemporary press and in literary histories, was key to the success of the novel. In the early nineteenth century, when the first Dutch literary histories emerged, patriotism and nationalism were used as criteria to judge the 11 Leerssen, “Tussen huiselijkheid en kosmopolitisme,” p. 115. 12 See also Honings and Jensen, Romantici en revolutionairen, pp. 87–100. 13 Leerssen, “Tussen huiselijkheid en kosmopolitisme,” p. 119.

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value of literary works. The better they fitted the nationalistic paradigm, the greater their chances of being incorporated into the Dutch literary canon. This might explain why another epistolary novel, published in the same year as Sara Burgerhart, never reached the same canonical status: De kleine Grandisson, of de gehoorzame zoon (Little Grandisson, or The Obedient Child, 1782) by Margaretha de Cambon-van der Werken (1734–after 1796). This epistolary novel aimed at boys and girls from the ages of eight to fourteen years, and was a huge international success: it was translated into German, English, French, Swedish and other languages. However, the name of the protagonist, Karel Grandisson, sounded more English than Dutch and made people think it was an adaptation of The History of Sir Charles Grandisson (1753) by Richardson (which it was not). Moreover, the Dutch novel was set in London, which also made it less suited for patriotic ends. Remarkably enough, De kleine Grandisson has made a comeback in surveys of Dutch literature since the 1990s due to the growing attention to female authorship and transnational approaches.14 But whether it will ever become part of collective memory, like Jantje and Sara, is doubtful.

The True Dutch Poet Tollens The last Dutch literary icon discussed here is Hendrik Tollens. He is considered one of the most nationalistic poets in Dutch literary history and therefore carries the nickname “poet of the fatherland.” His patriotic poems were immensely popular in the nineteenth century. His collected poems, published in 1820–21, circulated in an unprecedented edition of more than ten thousand copies.15 Tollens combined national-historical themes with topics from everyday life (birth, marriage, grief), which appealed to a broad audience. He was also the author of the national anthem, “Wien Neerlands bloed” (Those in Whom Dutch Blood, 1817), and Tafereel van de Overwintering der Hollanders op Nova Zembla in de jaren 1596 en 1597 (The Hollanders in Nova Zembla in the Winter of 1596–97: An Arctic Poem), an epic tale of the Dutch sea hero Willem Barentsz, which became a bestseller. In short, no other author seems more entitled to be called the true Dutch poet than Tollens. Nevertheless, looking at his work from a transnational perspective leads to a more complex picture. During his lifetime he translated and adapted so 14 For example, Van Dijk, Van Gemert and Ottway, Writing the History of Women’s History, pp. 120–21. 15 The following is based on Jensen, “Dichter des vaderlands?”

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many foreign literary works that the qualification “typically Dutch” needs some correction. A quantification of Tollens’s work shows that almost half of his entire production consisted of translations and adaptations from German, English and French authors.16 Take for instance one of his bestknown poems “Op den eersten tand van mijn jongstgeboren zoontje” (On the First Tooth of my Youngest Son, 1812), a close reading of this text shows it was an adaptation of a poem by the German poet Matthias Claudius, of whom Tollens was a great fan. Tollens translated many of his poems, and often used Claudius’s verses as inspiration for his own work. Bearing this in mind, one should be cautious in qualifying his work as typically Dutch, even if the title of a poem seems to suggest Dutch roots. The romance “Oene van Sneek,” published in 1839, is a telling example.17 It tells the tragic love story of a young Frisian woman, Griete, who must marry Gijsbert, but is in love with somebody else, namely Oene van Sneek. Griete does not show up at her own wedding but flees with her lover, leaving Gijsbert broken-hearted. The reader is made to believe that Tollens told an old folk tale derived from local Frisian sources, but he in fact adapted a poem by Walter Scott, “Jock o’ Hazeldean.” Tollens copied the contents and literary form from Scott, but changed the names and environment to make it all sound very Dutch. This was not in the least an authentic Frisian tale. The fact that the poem was recorded by several Dutch folk singers added to the myth that this was an original Dutch story. Not only did the Zangeres Zonder Naam (1919–1998), who was immensely popular in the 1980s, perform the song;18 it was also part of a collection of school songs recorded by Duo Karst, a well-known folk duo. Few listeners will probably have realized that they were actually hearing a poem by Tollens, who largely copied Scott.

Unique Selling Points of Dutch Literature Although Jantje, Sara Burgerhart and Oene van Sneek are unmistakably less Dutch than their names suggest, they are framed as such in traditional literary historiography. On the one hand, it is a literary scholar’s task to remind readers of the fact that such characters did not express the nation’s soul or spirit but that they were the literary offspring of authors who found 16 Jensen, “Dichter des vaderlands?,” pp. 172–73. 17 I analyse this poem in Jensen, “Hoe vaderlands was de eerste dichter des vaderlands?” 18 De Zangeres Zonder Naam was the stage name of Maria (Mary) Servaes-Beij. She was known for her sentimental songs and protest songs.

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their inspiration abroad. They were just as European as Dutch. On the other hand, there is something particularly Dutch about them as well, which is reflected in the use of typically Dutch expressions and the way these characters are embedded in a historical context that looked familiar to native speakers. Besides, there are all sorts of institutional and strategic reasons for emphasizing the Dutchness of these literary characters, and teaching literary histories along national lines. Future generations do not have to worry whether Shakespeare will still be part of their curricula, but there is no guarantee that Vondel, Wolff and Deken, or Tollens will be endlessly taught at high schools or universities. With the decreasing number of students in Dutch language and literature, and the switch to English-taught bachelor’s and master’s programmes only, language-specific literary specializations are gradually vanishing from educational programmes. For strategic purposes, it therefore remains of vital importance that scholars keep stressing the importance of in-depth knowledge and the uniqueness of Dutch historical literature to policy advisors, board members of universities and the broader public. Therefore, I fully support the literary historian Marita Mathijsen, who once claimed Tollens outclassed Victor Hugo in all respects, even though we know that Tollens took much of his inspiration from French, German and English authors.19 Besides, nothing is more national than internationalism.

References Alphen, Hieronymus van. Kleine gedigten voor kinderen. Edited by P. J. Buijnsters. Delta. Amsterdam: Athenaeum/Polak & Van Gennep, 1998. Alphen, Hieronymus van. Poetry for Children. Translated by F. J. Millard. London: Partridge, 1856. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage, 1995. Buijnsters, P. J. “Nawoord.” In Kleine gedigten voor kinderen, by Hieronymus van Alphen, pp. 173–200. Edited by P. J. Buijnsters. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998. Dijk, Suzan van, Lia van Gemert and Sheila Ottway, eds. Writing the History of Women’s History: Toward an International Approach. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. Honings, Rick, and Lotte Jensen. Romantici en revolutionairen: Literatuur en schrijverschap in Nederland in de 18de en 19de eeuw. Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2019. 19 Mathijsen, “Tollens is beter dan Victor Hugo.”

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Jensen, Lotte. “Dichter des vaderlands? De transnationale Tollens.” De Negentiende Eeuw 40, no. 3 (2016): pp. 169–201. Jensen, Lotte. “Hoe vaderlands was de eerste dichter des vaderlands? Over Tollens en zijn ‘Oene van Sneek.’” Nieuw Letterkundig Magazijn 35, no. 2 (December 2017): pp. 6–9. Leerssen, Joep. “Echoes and Images: Reflections upon Foreign Space.” In Alterity, Identity, Image: Selves and Others in Society and Scholarship, edited by Raymond Corbey and Joep Leerssen, pp. 123–38. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. Leerssen, Joep, ed. Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Leerssen, Joep. “Interview Joep Leerssen: ‘Niets internationaler dan nationalisme.’” With Martin Sommer. De Volkskrant, 28 August 2018. https://www.volkskrant. nl/cultuur-media/niets-internationaler-dan-het-nationalisme~b1de34c4/. Leerssen, Joep. Nationalisme. Elementaire Deeltjes 23. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Leerssen, Joep. “Tussen huiselijkheid en kosmopolitisme: De Nederlandse identiteit in Wolff en Dekens Sara Burgerhart.” In Typisch Nederlands: De Nederlandse identiteit in de letterkunde, edited by Karl A. E. Enenkel, Sjaak Onderlinden and Paul J. Smith, pp. 113–22. Voorthuizen: Florivallis, 1999. Leerssen, Joep. “Women Authors and Literary History.” In Writing the History of Women’s History: Toward an International Approach, edited by Suzan van Dijk, Lia van Gemert and Sheila Ottway, pp. 251–57. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. Mathijsen, Marita. “Tollens is beter dan Victor Hugo.” NRC Handelsblad, 7 September 1998. Nederlands Openluchtmuseum. “Sara Burgerhart: Rebelse vrouwen in tijden van Verlichting.” Canon van Nederland. Modified 22 June 2020. https://www. canonvannederland.nl/nl/saraburgerhart/. Weisse, C. F. Kleine lyrische Gedichte. Vienna: F. A. Schrämbl, 1793.

10 Colonial Legacies in European Folklore Studies Diarmuid Ó Giolláin

Abstract Folklore studies are rightly traced from the ideas of Herder and the Grimm brothers and are usually seen as a kind of domestic ethnography. This chapter explores a wider non-European dimension, both in the conceptualization of folklore studies and in the continued engagement of folklorists with non-western cultures. Referencing Irish and Italian case studies, it shows how the research field carries its own colonial legacies. Keywords: folklore; folklife; ethnography; colonialism

Joep Leerssen stresses the seminal importance of Herder’s cultural relativism to European “national awakenings,” and points out that “all of the Romantic (and later) preoccupation with popular culture, from the Grimms’ collection of fairytales to the birth of folklore studies” is due to it.1 This cultural relativism was informed by the non-European world. Unlike Vico, who showed little interest in exotic cultures, and Rousseau and philosophes such as Montesquieu whose interest in them was more philosophical than ethnographic, Herder sought out and was well-read in non-western ethnographic accounts.2 The concept of oral tradition, central to folklore studies, originally emerged from the field of theology, but took an ethnographic turn early in the eighteenth century through its application to indigenous American societies. The most important example is Mœurs des sauvages amériquains, comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps (Customs of the American Indians 1 Leerssen, National Thought in Europe, p. 97. 2 Wolff, “Discovering Cultural Perspective”; Broce, “Herder and Ethnography.”

Brolsma et al. Networks, Narratives and Nations. Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022. doi: 10.5117/9789463720755_ch10

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Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, 1724), by the Jesuit missionary Joseph-François Lafitau, in which he stressed how the sophisticated arts, laws and customs of the Iroquois were transmitted by oral tradition.3 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s ideas on language were an important influence on the German scholars who were to the fore in official Russian expeditions to Siberia in the eighteenth century.4 Gerhard Friedrich Müller, who had read Lafitau, wrote of the new research field of historia gentium, “history of peoples,” and in 1740 coined the term Völker-Beschreibung, the “description of peoples.” August Ludwig Schlözer, his junior colleague, brought his research programme to central Europe, where new terms emerged in the 1760s, 1770s and 1780s: Ethnographia, Völkerkunde, Ethnographie, Ethnologia and Volkskunde.5 The difference between Volkskunde and Völkerkunde was between the historical and descriptive study of one’s own people and the comparative study of many, or of all, peoples.6 “Ethnography” and “ethnology” arose in Russia and the Holy Roman Empire, polities that expanded overland and were characterized by great linguistic and ethnic diversity, and it was from this scientific perspective and conceptual matrix that Volkskunde emerged.7 Most histories of folklore studies begin with Herder or the Grimm brothers, but neglect this global dimension. As with ethnography and ethnology, Volkskunde began in administrative programmes of scientif ic enquiry before, under the influence of Romanticism, becoming – in essence – the science of the Volksgeist, or “spirit of a people.”8 William Thoms’s term “folk-lore” (1846) was modelled undoubtedly on Volkskunde, though English “folk,” unlike Volk, does not oscillate between the national and the popular, as befitted a country – England – in which the question of national identity was long settled. Nevertheless, in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s “folklore” was used “more often in the titles of books on Serbia, China, and Madagascar, and on the tribes of the North West Provinces of India, South Australian Aborigines, and Bushmen, than in works on the English counties.”9 This global dimension was always implicit in folklore studies, and the rest of this chapter will look at how it informed the perspectives of European folklorists. 3 Hudson, “Oral Tradition,” pp. 162–67; McDowell, “Mediating Past and Present,” 238–40. 4 Vermeulen, Before Boas, pp. 439–40. 5 Vermeulen, Before Boas, pp. 443–45. 6 Vermeulen, Before Boas, pp. 311–14. 7 Vermeulen, Before Boas, p. 456. 8 Brückner, “Histoire de la Volkskunde,” p. 224. 9 Roper, “Sternberg,” p. 202.

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In his seminal 1892 lecture, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland,” Douglas Hyde (1860–1949) wrote: “On the whole, our place names have been treated with about the same respect as if they were the names of a savage tribe which had never before been reduced to writing, and with about the same intelligence and contempt as vulgar English squatters treat the topographical nomenclature of the Red Indians.”10 For a scholar best known for his work on Irish folklore – his Beside the Fire (1890) and Love Songs of Connacht (1893) were major works of the Irish cultural revival – the reference to indigenous Americans seems gratuitous, and the terms “savage” and “Red Indian” are offensive. One reading of the sentence is that Hyde “indignantly insisted that the Irish were not to be compared with ‘a savage tribe’ or ‘Red Indians,’” though this conveniently omits his judgement on the vulgarity of the English colonists.11 Did Hyde know anything about indigenous Americans? A one-year position brought him to the University of New Brunswick at Fredericton in 1890.12 The Maliseet, or Wəlastəkwewiyik, were the principal First Nations people in the region, early allies of the French and collaborators with them in the fur trade. They accepted Christianity, but their exposure to epidemic diseases led to catastrophic demographic decline. Following British conquest, the impact of settlers was great, especially through hunting. In the 1780s, thousands of loyalists poured in, encroaching on the best hunting and fishing grounds. Extensive lumbering devastated forests and game habitats.13 Maliseet culture was targeted; schools separated children from their parents to “civilize” them.14 Hyde’s own background was similar to that of the elite in Fredericton, English Protestant by birth or origin, and where social life was “not unlike that of a garrison town in Ireland: in both places the officers of the British Army provided the mainstay of upper-class social life.”15 He taught French, German and English at the university, and at weekends hunted and fished in the company of friends from the town or from the army barracks.16 On 10 Hyde, “De-Anglicising,” p. 166. On Hyde, a folklorist, literary scholar and leading figure of the Irish cultural revival, see Leerssen, “Hyde, Douglas.” 11 Howe, Ireland and Empire, p. 44. 12 Hyde, “On Some Indian Folk-lore: Algonquin Stories” appeared in the Providence Journal on 12 April 1891; see also Hyde, Language, Lore and Lyrics, pp. 135–44. 13 Bear Nicholas, “Role of Colonial Artists,” pp. 27 and 30; McMillan, Native Peoples, pp. 3, 44 and 50–51. 14 Fingard, “New England Company,” p. 30. 15 Sealy, “Hyde in New Brunswick,” p. 237. 16 Sealy, “Hyde in New Brunswick,” p. 237.

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St Stephen’s Day he set off on a hunting expedition with two rich young traders from Fredericton and three “Indians or half breeds,” spending the evenings storytelling: “I got many stories from the Indians and told them many, and learned a couple of hundred Milicete words, but did not get far enough to reduce the language to any kind of grammar, or even learn the conjugation of verbs.”17 He thought some of the stories were borrowings: The genuine Indian stories, however, were, like the stories of every primitive race, of two kinds; the first of war and hunting and personal adventures, the other, and to me the most interesting, consisted of what I may call folk-lore, pure and simple, in which the supernatural or extravagantly impossible plays the largest part […].18

One of them he recounted in detail, and he found it paralleled an Irish tale so closely that he gave the latter narrative’s conclusion.19 In Fredericton Hyde acquired further information about the Maliseet. Their number was decreasing, from disease, scarcity of game and, contended Hyde, “partly through his inability to adapt himself to the new civilization, though I must confess that the most of those with whom I came in contact appeared as capable of taking care of themselves as anyone need wish […].” Indeed, those who had worked as guides or hunters to army officers had “completely acquired the offhand manners of the English officer […] with all the charming insouciance and polish of club or mess room.” Their major vice, he thought, was improvidence, “and it seems probable that another generation or two will be necessary to eradicate this failing from the breed.”20 The Maliseet strongly defended their language and cultural traditions, the women often refusing to speak English. Unlike Irishspeakers, Hyde noted, the Maliseet were resistant to borrowing English words and phrases. The men learnt some English through work, but spoke Maliseet at home, and he compared them to the people of his native Connacht, where women kept Irish alive in the home and men learnt English through work. Speakers of both languages learnt English, but in neither country did English settlers or their descendants learn the indigenous language, and in both they distorted 17 18 19 20

Cited in Ó Conaire, p. 43. Hyde, “On Some Indian Folk-lore,” p. 137. Hyde, “On Some Indian Folk-lore,” pp. 140–44. Hyde, “On Some Indian Folk-lore,” p. 136.

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native place names.21 What Hyde seems to have most admired in the Maliseet was fidelity to their language and customs, and this was the basis of his appeal in his 1892 lecture to the Irish to reclaim theirs.22 In Italy, Lamberto Loria (1855–1913) was an early proponent of the term folklore – opposing the alternative demopsicologia (or “psychology of peoples”), which had been proposed by Giuseppe Pitrè on the basis of Wilhelm Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie.23 He went on to found the Florentine National Museum of Italian Ethnography (1906), the Società di Etnograf ia Italiana (Society for Italian Ethnography, 1910) and the folklore journal Lares (1912–present). The museum’s collection was soon moved to Rome as the nucleus of an ethnographic exhibition for the International Exhibition of Art held in that city in 1911; and under his direction an ambitious ethnographic project began, with some 40,000 objects eventually exhibited and a new museum promised to hold the increased collection. 24 Loria identified ethnographic methods according to “whether civilized populations or savage peoples were the object of research.” Among the former, oral poetry was diligently collected “with […] profundity of doctrine,” while handmade objects were disregarded. Ignorance of the language and “psyche” of the latter peoples, however, meant that most of our knowledge was due to “collected objects, to travel notes, to the personal observations of individual explorers,” while few oral traditions were recorded. He argued that material culture was often superior as a historical document, maintaining its primitive form better than language or customs. A distinction, nonetheless, ought not to be made between the artefact and “popular documents” of other kinds.25 21 Dunleavy and Dunleavy, Douglas Hyde, p. 134. 22 More than a century later, the Maliseet again came to Irish attention. Lieutenant Stepney St. George, an Anglo-Irish Army officer in New Brunswick, acquired a birchbark canoe presented to the Lieutenant-Governor in 1825, and brought it home to his castle. A landlord from Co. Galway remembered in local folklore, he died of fever in 1847 during the Great Famine. The canoe was donated to what is now the National University of Ireland, Galway, and was largely forgotten until rediscovered in 2007, sent to Canada for restoration, and identified as a major Maliseet cultural artifact. See King, “Colonial Restitution.” 23 Afternoon session of 23 October, presided by Prof. Aldobrandino Mochi, in Società di Etnografia Italiana, Atti del Primo Congresso, p. 42. In 1882, with Salvatore Salomone-Marino, Pitrè founded Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari, the third folklore journal to be founded in Europe. 24 Puccini, L’itala gente. It was finally inaugurated in 1956 – the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari “Lamberto Loria.” 25 Loria, “Due parole,” pp. 18–19.

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Beginning in 1883 with an expedition that brought him from Lapland to Turkestan, Loria spent decades as an explorer and collector, donating to Italian museums large collections of photographs, ethnographic and zoological artefacts and human crania, from New Guinea, Russian Turkestan and Eritrea.26 He was already fifty years old when he resolved to dedicate the remainder of his life and his ethnographic experience to the study of Italian folklife.27 In 1911, at the inaugural session of the first Congress of Italian Ethnography, he argued that the ethnography of the Italians could not be studied apart from that of other peoples, “whether they be civilized, semi-civilized or savage.” Among the “less evolved classes” of Italians were still “some of the instincts and character of savage people.”28 In his last article, “L’Etnografia strumento di politica interna e coloniale” (Ethnography as an instrument of domestic and colonial politics, 1912), he argued that if understanding “the usages and customs of peoples subject to a civilized nation facilitates the latter’s maintenance of its rule,” for the Italian nation to understand its own people would be even more valuable. Knowledge of the different customs of each province ought to lead to special laws attuned to those usages, “[a]nd this, far from being harmful to the national spirit, will be the cement that will indissolubly unify the diverse Italian regions.”29 Considerations of space limit our discussion to Hyde and Loria. Just as Loria is responsible for both Italian and exotic ethnographic collections in Italian museums, similar collections coexist in other European countries that were the product of “national awakenings”: in Ireland, for example, one of the largest folklore archives in the world and an important folklife collection, but also an important and long-neglected non-European ethnographic collection.30 Elli Köngäs-Maranda once argued that colonizing nations had anthropological museums whereas colonized nations had folklore archives, but it cannot be said that colonial legacies have not informed folklore and folklife research, although the subject remains underexplored.31 32

26 Di Gennaro, “L’eredità di Lamberto Loria,” pp. 5–6; Roselli, “Lamberto Loria e il Museo,” pp. 9–10; Doria, “Lamberto Loria,” pp. 15–16; Baldasseroni, “Lamberto Loria.” 27 Loria, “Due parole,” pp. 9–10. 28 Società di Etnografia Italiana, Atti del Primo Congresso, p. 19. 29 Loria, “L’etnografia,” pp. 78–79. 30 Hand, “Ethnographic Collections.” 31 Köngäs-Maranda, “Ethnologie, Folklore.” 32 For “colonial legacies,” see L’Estoile, “Past as It Lives Now,” pp. 269–70.

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References Baldasseroni, Franceso. “Lamberto Loria.” Lares: Bullettino Sociale 2, no. 1 (1913): pp. 1–16. Bear Nicholas, Andrea. “The Role of Colonial Artists in the Dispossession and Displacement of the Maliseet, 1790s–1850s.” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’Études Canadiennes 49, no. 2 (2015): pp. 25–86. Broce, Gerald. “Herder and Ethnography.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 22 (1986): pp. 150–70. Brückner, Wolfgang. “Histoire de la Volkskunde: Tentative d’une approche à l’usage des Français.” In Ethnologies en miroir: La France et les pays de langue allemande, edited by Isac Chiva and Utz Jeggle, pp. 223–47. Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1987. De Simonis, Paolo, and Fabiana Dimpflmeier, eds. “Lamberto Loria e la ragnatela dei suoi significati.” Special issue, Lares 80, no. 1 (2014). Di Gennaro, Francesco. “L’eredità di Lamberto Loria nel Museo Nazionale ‘Luigi Pigorini.’” In “Lamberto Loria e la ragnatela dei suoi significati,” edited by Paolo De Simonis and Fabiana Dimpflmeier. Special issue, Lares 80, no. 1 (2014): pp. 5–6. Doria, Giuliano. “Lamberto Loria e il Museo di Storia Naturale di Genova.” In “Lamberto Loria e la ragnatela dei suoi significati,” edited by Paolo De Simonis and Fabiana Dimpflmeier. Special issue, Lares 80, no. 1 (2014): pp. 15–16. Dunleavy, Janet Egleson, and Gareth W. Dunleavy. Douglas Hyde: A Maker of Modern Ireland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Fingard, Judith. “The New England Company and the New Brunswick Indians: 1786–1826; A Comment on the Colonial Perversion of British Benevolence.” Acadiensis 1, no. 2 (1972): pp. 29–42. Hand, Rachel. “The Ethnographic Collections of the National Museum of Ireland.” In Exhibit Ireland: Ethnographic Collections in Irish Museums, edited by Séamas Ó Síocháin, Pauline Garvey and Adam Drazin, pp. 23–55. Dublin: Wordwell, 2012. Howe, Stephen. Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hudson, Nicholas. “‘Oral Tradition’: The Evolution of an Eighteenth-Century Concept.” In Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, edited by Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker, pp. 161–76. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Hyde, Douglas. Language, Lore and Lyrics, edited by Breandán Ó Conaire. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986. Hyde, Douglas. “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland.” In Language, Lore and Lyrics, edited by Breandán Ó Conaire, pp. 153–70. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986.

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Hyde, Douglas. “On Some Indian Folk-lore: Algonquin Stories.” In Language, Lore and Lyrics, pp. 135–44, edited by Breandán Ó Conaire. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986. King, Jason. “Colonial Restitution and Indigenous Vessels of Intercultural Performance: The Stalled Repatriation of the Akwiten Grandfather Canoe.” In Interculturalism and Performance Now: New Directions?, edited by Charlotte McIvor and Jason King, pp. 115–31. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Köngäs-Maranda, Elli Kaija. “Ethnologie, folklore et l’indépendence des majorités minorisées.” In Travaux et inédits de Elli Kaija Köngäs-Maranda, pp. 164–78. Cahiers du CÉLAT 1. [Québec]: [CÉLAT], 1983. Leerssen, Joep. “Hyde, Douglas.” In Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, edited by Joep Leerssen. Electronic version. Amsterdam: Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms. Article version 1.1.1.1/a. http://show.ernie.uva.nl/DHy. Leerssen, Joep. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. L’Estoile, Benoît de. “The Past as It Lives Now: An Anthropology of Colonial Legacies.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 16, no. 3 (2008): pp. 267–79. Loria, Lamberto. “Due parole di programma.” Lares: Bullettino Sociale 1, no. 1 (1912): pp. 9–24. Loria, Lamberto. “L’etnografia strumento di politica interna e coloniale.” Lares: Bullettino Sociale 1, no. 1 (1912): pp. 73–79. McDowell, Paula. “Mediating Past and Present: Toward a Genealogy of ‘Print Culture’ and ‘Oral Tradition.’” In This Is Enlightenment, edited by Clifford Siskin and William Warner, pp. 229–46. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. McMillan, Alan D. Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada: An Anthropological Overview. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1988. Ó Conaire, Breandán. Introduction to Language, Lore and Lyrics, by Douglas Hyde. Edited by Breandán Ó Conaire. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986. Puccini, Sandra. L’itala gente dalle molte vite: Lamberto Loria e la Mostra di Etnografia italiana del 1911. Rome: Meltemi, 2005. Roper, Jonathan. “Sternberg, the Second Folklorist.” Folklore 125 (2014): pp. 202–17. Roselli, Maria Gloria. “Lamberto Loria e il Museo di Antropologia di Firenze.” In “Lamberto Loria e la ragnatela dei suoi significati,” edited by Paolo De Simonis and Fabiana Dimpflmeier. Special issue, Lares 80, no. 1 (2014): pp. 9–10. Sealy, Douglas. “Douglas Hyde in New Brunswick, 1890–1891.” In The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada, edited by Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, pp. 237–50. Toronto: Celtic Arts of Canada, 1988. Società di Etnografia Italiana. Atti del Primo Congresso di Etnografia italiana. Rome, 19–24 ottobre 1911. Perugia: Unione Tipografica Cooperativa, 1912.

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Vermeulen, Han F. Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Wolff, Larry. “Discovering Cultural Perspective: The Intellectual History of Anthropological Thought in the Age of Enlightenment.” In The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, edited by Larry Wolff and Marco Ciolloni, pp. 3–32. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

11

The Canonization of the Artisan around 1900 Eric Storm

Abstract Around 1900 the artisan became a national symbol throughout Europe. While the peasant had been lionized ever since the Romantic era, the craft guilds were denigrated as remnants of feudalism. This changed with the Arts and Crafts movement. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the artisan began to appear as a representative of the nation at international exhibitions, which focused increasingly on vernacular arts and traditions. In this way, craft products became a part of the national heritage, while artisans were cherished as sources of national authenticity. In the early twentieth century, traditional crafts were increasingly appreciated by artists, collectors and consumers, and many of their most extraordinary products were seen as embodying the nation’s Volksgeist or folk-spirit. Keywords: artisan; national symbol; Europe; belle époque; interwar era

In 1934, one year after the Nazis came to power, the German city of Düsseldorf took the initiative in organizing a grandiose exhibition thematizing the “new era in the new Reich,” which would open its doors in 1937. The idea was to promote the collaboration between artists, manufacturers and artisans in order to ensure the competitiveness of German products on the international market. The exhibition would combine a model housing settlement and a garden display with an arts and crafts exhibition. Although traditional crafts were in clear decline, each region had to provide its own “typical” artisanal workshop.1 1 Schäfers, Schaffendes Volk, pp. 61–79.

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This Nazi exhibition is a particularly clear example of how an idealized rural world could be made to function as a model for contemporary society: settlements in which peasants and artisans constituted a community rooted in the soil of the homeland where class struggle did not exist. What was most surprising was that a small-scale economy, where artisanal labour dominated and each family had a barn and vegetable garden, was considered a realistic solution in times of economic crisis. This idealization of the rural world and its artisanal traditions as the essence of the nation was not particular to the Nazis but could also be found in other countries and under a great diversity of political regimes.2 Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the artisan has personified the identity and traditional values of the nation. So the question is: how can this idealization of the artisan as the embodiment of the nation be explained? Hitherto, historians have paid little attention to the nationalistic lionization of the craftsman. In socio-economic histories, artisans have primarily been seen as a residue of the past.3 The growing interest of artists and intellectuals in traditional crafts has, however, been studied by art historians and is generally regarded as a nostalgic reaction to the unstoppable march of progress, while others have focused on the role of some of these artists as forerunners of the avant-garde, presenting, for example, the Arts and Crafts movement and the German Werkbund as important steps towards functionalism and the Bauhaus.4 The impact of nationalism on the decorative arts has recently started to attract attention; however, until now nearly all existing studies have focused only on specific cases.5 As yet, there are no studies that examine how the artisan became a national symbol.6

Origins The Romantic era generated a rapidly growing interest in peasant culture, particularly in oral tales such as those collected by the Grimm brothers. However, this revaluation of the traditional rural world did not extend in the same way to artisans. The guilds had been suppressed during the French Revolution as obstacles to free trade and enlightened individualism. As 2 On the artistic idealization of the rural world see also Anne Marie Thiesse’s contribution to this volume. 3 Farr, Artisans in Europe, pp. 276–300; see also Zdatny, Politics of Survival. 4 Cumming and Kaplan, Arts and Crafts; Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus. 5 Gimeno-Martínez, Design and National Identity. 6 Storm, “Artesano como símbolo nacional.”

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traditional corporations, they were seen as remnants of a feudal past that had to be overcome. It was only during the second half of the nineteenth century that British intellectuals such as John Ruskin and William Morris began to esteem the medieval guilds for their supposedly harmonious cooperation between masters and apprentices. In addition, they praised the artistic quality of traditional handicrafts and advocated a closer collaboration between artists and craftsmen so as to beautify the modern world. Morris even founded a decorative arts company, which would become the nucleus of a broader, international Arts and Crafts movement.7 The use of traditional craft techniques was also one of the starting points of Art Nouveau, which became fashionable throughout Europe in the last years of the nineteenth century. Although artisanal traditions were generally supposed to be connected to certain territories, both Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau were cosmopolitan movements that did not place much emphasis on the national aspects of craftwork. This was quite different in the case of regionalism, which emerged when Art Nouveau began to decline during the first decade of the twentieth century. Regionalist activists opposed the arbitrary and exaggerated forms of Art Nouveau, instead advocating that cultural expressions be rooted in the terroir. In the case of architecture, this meant using natural materials of local origin, fitting buildings into the landscape, taking account of local climatic conditions and using regional craftwork. In this way, buildings were explicitly rooted in the soil and connected with vernacular traditions. Artisans were now reimagined as privileged interpreters of the “popular spirit” and thus became a symbol of the patria, representing the regional homeland as well as the nation at large. Louis Sézille, one of the main advocates for regionalist architecture in France, stated in 1909 that architects should follow the example of traditional artisans who had perfected their own characteristic ways of building over the centuries, reaching “the mastery that surprises us so much” while creating a style that was perfectly suited for the local geographic and climatic conditions.8 But if artisans were the true guardians of the popular spirit, their legacy had to be protected. Therefore, museums of applied arts were created in the great capitals of Europe following the example of London, where the South Kensington Museum brought together many of the collections from the Great Exhibition of 1851. Ethnographic museums, which also focused largely on the minor arts, would follow in the 1870s with Stockholm’s Nordiska 7 8

Cumming and Kaplan, Arts and Crafts. Sézille, “Une maison”; Storm, Culture of Regionalism, pp. 73–195.

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Museet as the pioneer.9 Although these institutions aimed to improve the education of artisans, in practice they recommended copying historical ornaments that might come from any place or period. At the beginning of the twentieth century this method became increasingly problematic because it was thought that it led to artisans losing contact with their own vernacular roots. In Germany, education in the arts and crafts was thoroughly reformed; students were no longer expected to follow existing conventions and were encouraged to experiment with various materials.10 At the same time, companies were created in which craftsmen produced simple furniture in a neo-vernacular style designed by renowned artists and architects, such as at Karl Schmidt’s German Workshops for Art in Handicrafts. Schmidt understood that artisans could only do the quality work that was needed if they were provided with a healthy environment, a decent home and a well-designed workshop. To this end, Schmidt moved his company to the outskirts of Dresden where he built Hellerau, the first garden city of the German Empire.11 In this way, the artisan was connected with the soil and traditions of the homeland, while the company was also indirectly helping to fight off the danger of a violent internationalist revolution by the labour movement. In France there was no similar reform of artisanal education. The consequent concern over the decline of French crafts led to an initiative to organize a major exhibition, to be held in Paris in 1916. The International Exhibition of Decorative Arts would not be inaugurated until 1925, but it was at this famous exhibition that the new Art Deco style was launched. In addition, the exhibition helped France to recover much lost ground, especially in the field of high-end artisanal products.12 Nevertheless, it was becoming increasingly evident that craft work was excessively expensive. Both the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau aimed to produce beautiful handicrafts for the masses, but unique handicrafts were only affordable for the affluent classes. The same was true for regionalist architecture, since incorporating artisanal work into new buildings inevitably made them more expensive. For example, in 1908, Sézille complained that building a house in a traditional Norman half-timbered style cost about a third more than a modern construction, although this did not induce him to abandon artisanal purism when offered 9 Thiesse, “Transnational Creation.” 10 Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus, pp. 104–37. 11 Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus, pp. 217–48. 12 Troy, Decorative Arts, pp. 159–227.

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cheaper ways of creating the half-timbered effect, such as using strips of wood or plaster to give the appearance of a timber frame.13 Thus, successive attempts to reactivate the artisanal sector were never totally successful, and traditional craftwork only survived in small niches, mainly aimed at a wealthy clientele.

The Nationalization of Artisans at World Fairs Traditional artisans could f ind new markets by targeting tourism and – closely related to this – international exhibitions. As a result, the link between crafts and national identity was reinforced. The Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1867 introduced national pavilions in which each country could display its cultural heritage in a characteristic building. Russia and Austria chose to showcase their diversity in several rural buildings which celebrated crafts from various parts of the two empires. The Vienna World Fair of 1873 also contained a small international village inhabited by real peasants.14 The presence of original inhabitants in an “authentic” setting was a success, and similar ensembles quickly became a prominent feature of international exhibitions. The celebration of “authentic” life often meant representing an idealized past. For example, at the South Kensington International Health Exhibition in 1884, one enclosure was built containing twenty-five life-sized copies of historic buildings. Known as Old London, it became one of the most popular attractions.15 This formula was quickly copied at almost all subsequent world fairs. The “soul” of a nation could also be captured in more contemporary settings. Such an approach was first applied to exotic or colonial exhibits. For example, the 1878 Paris Universal Exposition recreated a Cairo streetscape and a Quartier Marocain, while the 1883 Amsterdam International Colonial and Export Exhibition featured a Javanese village. The Midway Plaisance at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 included no fewer than ten ethnographic villages, including settlements representing Lapland and Turkey, a large German village and two Irish villages. These picturesque recreations were inhabited by natives dressed in traditional costumes and engaged in typical activities. Artisans displaying their traditional manufacturing techniques occupied a privileged place. Most of these ethnographic 13 Sézille, “Reconstitution.” 14 Rampley, “Peasants in Vienna.” 15 Smith, “Old London.”

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villages were organized by commercial companies, although ethnologists often provided their services to make them as “authentic” as possible.16 Around the same time, nationalists began to adopt the format for representations of traditional arts and crafts, although they focused on providing a faithful representation of the national community. Thus, at the ambitious Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition held in Prague in 1895, nationalist intellectuals assembled twenty-one vernacular constructions from various regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia to support their claim that the Czechs were a nation worthy of recognition.17 Similar nationalist ethnographic villages were mounted in Budapest in 1896, Bucharest in 1906 and Rome in 1911. Probably the most ambitious attempt to represent rural areas in an exhibition was the first assembled for the Swiss National Exhibition in Geneva in 1896. It consisted of fifty-six vernacular constructions representing all cantons, was inhabited by over three hundred villagers in traditional costumes and was rebuilt four years later at the Universal Exhibition in Paris (Fig. 11.1).18 Ethnographic villages also served as inspiration for open-air museums, which generally projected a nostalgic image of an idealized rural world with peasants and artisans in traditional costumes. Again it was the Scandinavian countries that took the lead, with Stockholm’s Skansen Museum created in 1891. These exhibitions and museums played a crucial role in defining national identities, transforming distinctive and sometimes eccentric pieces of furniture, costumes and vernacular buildings into integral elements of the national patrimony. The same happened with traditional crafts, especially those that were attractive and unusual. The very distinctiveness of such craftwork helped to give it the aura of national “authenticity.” Although other artistic trends would come into vogue after the First World War, such as classicism and functionalism, many international exhibitions continued to dedicate a privileged place to vernacular traditions and craftsmanship. A fascinating example can be found in the Barcelona International Exposition. The idea was to underline the modernity of Catalonia by organizing an exhibition of the electrical industries in 1917. However, the organizers were aware that in terms of strict modernity they could not compete with the United States, where San Francisco was organizing an ambitious world fair for 1915. Therefore, in the spring of 1914 the leader of the Regionalist League, Francesc Cambó, argued that the exhibition should include something that the Americans did not have: a brilliant national past. As a consequence, a new National Palace 16 Wörner, Vergnügung und Belehrung, pp. 72–82. 17 Filipová, “Peasants on Display.” 18 Hirsh, “Swiss Art.”

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Fig. 11.1 Photograph of an artisanal cheesemaker at work at the Village Suisse at the Swiss National Exhibition in Geneva in 1896. Collection Albin Salamin. Image: NotreHistoire.ch, public domain.

was built to exhibit artistic highlights and historical artifacts from all parts of Spain. In addition, traditional crafts were to be displayed in “an exhibition of Spanish cities” that was ultimately realized in 1929 through the construction of a Spanish Village of 117 buildings from all regions of the country. Naturally, the buildings contained many cafes, restaurants and craft workshops.19

Epilogue Two later exhibitions in France and Germany showed the ideological limits of this adulation of the artisan as a national symbol. The International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques of Modern Life, held in Paris in 1937, was 19 Solá-Morales, Exposición Internacional de Barcelona, pp. 54–61; Storm, Culture of Regionalism, pp. 197–205.

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intended to aid in the revival of the French economy. It was decided that France would not have a large national pavilion at this exhibition but would be represented by seventeen regional pavilions in a modernized regionalist style. Each region could display its typical foods and best craft products. However, several regions complained that they no longer had any traditional craftsmen. Moreover, the organizers themselves rejected various regional submissions for lack of character. In both cases, in lieu of appropriate local talent, Parisian artists were commissioned to invent typical products that the artisans could make during the exhibition. Another challenge to the 1937 exhibition was the electoral victory, in May 1936, of the Popular Front of León Blum. The new government gave preference to trade unions and leftist youth organizations and was not interested in pavilions reflecting the cooperation of regional associations. The Popular Front was busy mobilizing the working classes and showed little interest in artisans and peasants.20 The French left no longer supported an idealized image of the countryside and traditional crafts by the 1930s, but what may come as more of a surprise is that the same was true for the Nazi leadership. Initially the local organizers of the 1937 Düsseldorf exhibition wanted to promote crafts and show a bucolic Germany. However, in 1935 the government appointed a new director who encouraged the participation of German industry and determined that the event would be a good opportunity to exhibit the raw materials that the Third Reich needed for its rearmament programmes. As a consequence of these changes, the exhibition ultimately emphasized the production of synthetic materials and the need for Lebensraum. The craftsmen disappeared entirely from the programme and were replaced by machines in full operation. Apparently the economic realities and dreams of imperial expansion were more important than the idealization of the artisan.21

References Cumming, Elizabeth, and Wendy Kaplan. The Arts and Crafts Movement. London: Thames & Hudson, 1995. Farr, James R. Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Filipová, Marta. “Peasants on Display: The Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition of 1895.” Journal of Design History 24, no. 1 (2011): pp. 15–36. 20 Storm, Culture of Regionalism, pp. 220–46. 21 Storm, Culture of Regionalism, pp. 262–79.

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Gimeno-Martínez, Javier. Design and National Identity. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Hirsh, Sharon L. “Swiss Art and National Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” In Art, Culture and National Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, edited by Michelle Facos and Sharon L. Hirsh, pp. 250–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Maciuika, John V. Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics and the German State, 1890–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Rampley, Matthew. “Peasants in Vienna: Ethnographic Display and the 1873 World’s Fair.” Austrian History Yearbook 42 (2011): pp. 110–32. Schäfers, Stefanie. Vom Werkbund zum Vierjahresplan: Die Ausstellung “Schaffendes Volk,” Düsseldorf 1937. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2001. Sézille, Louis. “Reconstitution d’une gentilhommière normande.” La Vie à la Campagne, 15 June 1908, pp. 343–44. Sézille, Louis. “Une maison en Pays Basque.” La Vie à la Campagne, 1 September 1909, pp. 153–54. Smith, Wilson. “Old London, Old Edinburgh: Constructing Historic Cities.” In Cultures of International Exhibitions 1840–1940: Great Exhibitions in the Margins, edited by Marta Filipová, pp. 203–29. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Solá-Morales, Ignasi de. La Exposición Internacional de Barcelona 1914–1929: Arquitectura y ciudad. Barcelona: Feria, 1985. Storm, Eric. The Culture of Regionalism: Art, Architecture and International Exhibitions in France, Germany and Spain, 1890–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Storm, Eric. “El artesano como símbolo nacional.” In De relatos e imágenes nacionales: Las derechas españolas (siglos XIX–XX), edited by María Cruz Romeo, María Pilar Salomón and Nuria Tabanera, pp. 65–75. Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2020. Thiesse, Anne-Marie. “The Transnational Creation of National Arts and Crafts in 19th-Century Europe.” SPIN Lecture, 2012. Accessed 8 November 2021. http:// spinnet.humanities.uva.nl/images/pdf/Thiesse2012.pdf. Troy, Nancy. Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Wörner, Martin. Vergnügung und Belehrung: Volkskultur auf den Weltausstellungen, 1851–1900. Münster: Waxmann, 1999. Zdatny, Steven. The Politics of Survival: Artisans in Twentieth-Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

12 Sigurður Guðmundsson and Jón Árnason’s Icelandic Folktales Terry Gunnell

Abstract This chapter deals with a key figure in the creation of Icelandic national culture, Sigurður Guðmundsson the painter, and the central role he played in the early collection of Icelandic folktales. Keywords: folktales; Iceland; Sigurður Guðmundsson; national culture

“I will miss Sigurður for a long time; I cannot remember missing any person who is unrelated to me any more than this.” These words were written by the Icelandic folklore collector, Jón Árnason in a letter to Jón Sigurðsson, the Danish-based leader of Iceland’s struggle for independence, on 18 October 1874,1 several weeks after Sigurður Guðmundsson málari (the painter) had died of consumption in Reykjavík at the age of just 41. Jón and several of Sigurður’s other friends had then been doing their best to keep him alive for several years.2 Sigurður Guðmundsson’s key role in the creation of national culture in Iceland is unquestionable. While scholars have discussed his role in the design of the Icelandic national costume, the development of a national theatre and the institution of a national museum,3 much less has been said about his involvement with Iceland’s central folk-tale collection, Jón Árnason’s Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri (Icelandic Folktales and Wonder Tales, or Icelandic Legends, 1862–64). Indeed, Sigurður is given special 1 Úr fórum Jóns Árnasonar, vol. 2, p. 217. 2 Matthías Jochumsson, Bréf, pp. 226–27, 235, 240–241 and 322; and Matthías Jochumsson, Sögukaflar, p. 259; Indriði Einarsson, Séð og lifað, p. 143; Guðrún Borgfjörð, Minningar, pp. 33 and 80–84; Úr fórum Jóns Árnasonar, vol. 2, pp. 170, 186, 208 and 211. 3 See the various articles in Aspelund and Gunnell, Málarinn og menningarsköpun.

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mention in the introduction written by Guðbrandur Vigfússon as being one of those who “tell stories best and deserve special thanks for their role in this collection.”4 Worth underlining immediately is the fact that when Jón Árnason was working on Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri in 1861, he spent some time living in the same house as both Sigurður and Matthías Jochumsson, at Aðalstræti 7 in Reykjavík.5 These three made up a very influential group: Jón Árnason, the 42-year-old town librarian, was already collecting folktales; Sigurður, at 28 years old, was working on a range of projects relating to the creation of national culture; while the 26-year-old Matthías Jóchumsson, later to become the national poet, was writing the first “national” drama, Útilegumennirnir (The outlaws), for which the painter would make the scenery and costumes.6 Matthías describes their life together as follows: “During the first part of that winter […], I was living in the same house […] as Sigurður the painter. Also there was Jón Árnason […] – both obsessed with – and full of – Icelandic knowledge; they had a great […] influence on me.”7 What originally brought the men together was the Kúld family on the island of Flatey, in western Iceland, with whom Sigurður had spent the summer of 1858 after returning from his studies in Denmark.8 Eiríkur Kúld, the son of Ólafur Sívertsen Kúld, the cleric on Flatey, had been a schoolmate of Jón’s, and his wife, Þuríður Sveinbjarnardóttir, had asked Jón to help Matthías with his studies in the grammar school in Reykjavík.9 Both Jón and Sigurður came from Skagafjörður in northern Iceland. There were, however, other reasons why Jón Árnason and Sigurður – whom Jón would later call “Siggi the genius” in letters10 – became such good friends. One of them was that Sigurður was marooned in Iceland. His plan had been to return to Copenhagen after his stay in Flatey, but he had lent someone his travel money, 4 Guðbrandur Vigfússon, “Formáli,” p. xxxvii. 5 Matthías Jochumsson, Sögukaflar, p. 159; and Þórunn Erla Valdimarsdóttir, Upp á sigurhæðir, pp. 146, 153–54 and 583. 6 See also Sveinn Einarsson, “Sigurður málari og áhrif hans.” 7 Matthías Jochumsson, Sögukaflar, p. 159; and Þórunn Erla Valdimarsdóttir, Upp á sigurhæðir, pp. 153–54. A letter to Jón Sigurðsson, dated 12 October 1868, gives some impression of how limited the space was here. Sigurður writes: “some of this [poetic material] can be found in Jon Arnason’s collection of poetry which I had access to mainly when I slept in the same room as him, because the books were in the same room”: ÞÍ, MS E10: 13. 8 Sigurður Guðmundsson to Guðbrandur Vigfússon, 15 September 1858, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Icelandic d1 SG, 422r–423r. 9 Úr fórum Jóns Árnasonar, vol. 1, pp. 40 and 170. With regard to Þuríður’s connections to Sigurður, see also Þjms, SG 02, 204. 10 Úr fórum Jóns Árnasonar, vol. 1, p. 304, and vol. 2, pp. 39 and 170.

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and never got it back.11 He was thus totally penniless and needed both work and somewhere to stay. Flatey was a good place to start, since it was a cultural centre. It nonetheless soon became clear that he and Jón Árnason had similar interests. In addition to the Kúld family, they also had other mutual friends. Sigurður had become acquainted with Guðbrandur Vigfússon, Jón Sigurðsson and Konrad Maurer in Copenhagen, all of whom had great respect for him, and would later play key roles in getting Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri published. Maurer met Sigurður again on Flatey in 1858 when Maurer was on his way back to Reykjavík after travelling around the country. Maurer had been collecting material for his own Isländische Volkssagen der Gegenwart (Present-day Icelandic folktales, 1860) and would encourage Jón and Magnús Grímsson to continue the collection they had started with Íslenzk æfintýri (Icelandic Wonder Tales: 1852). Maurer gives a lively description of an evening’s entertainment on Flatey in August 1858 in his travel journal, underlining Sigurður Guðmundsson’s evident popularity in spite of his being “sharp-tongued” and “dirty-mouthed.”12 Maurer writes: that evening, we visited that noble old cleric, Ólafur Sívertsen and his son, the Rev. Eiríkur Kúld […]. There too was a good friend from Copenhagen, Sigurður Guðmundsson the painter. The day ended with an entertaining meal along with the usual drinks, and I added many stories to my collection. Sigurður is particularly at home in this field; he is capable of doing what few others can: making stories mysterious and amusing.13

Sigurður was clearly not only an artist, amateur scholar and folktale collector; he was also a great storyteller and entertainer. It did not take long for Jón Árnason to discover the talents and wide-ranging knowledge of this young man when he moved to Reykjavík. On 20 June 1859, when Jón is writing about the difficulties he is having with gathering material for his folktale collection, he already mentions Sigurður: I have been asking all over the place for material relating to this collection […] I’ve gained no small amount from Sigurður Guðmundsson the painter in this regard. He is a man with a great deal of knowledge about many things and remembers numerous oral accounts.14 11 Þjóðólfur, 3 March 1888, p. 66. 12 See Indriði Einarsson, Séð og lifað, p. 99; Þjóðólfur, 3 March 1888, p. 66; and Úr fórum Jóns Árnasonar, vol. 2, pp. 6 and 179. 13 See Maurer, Íslandsferð 1858, p. 232. 14 Úr fórum Jóns Árnasonar, vol. 1, p. 128.

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Both men were highly interested in what Jón called “popular antiquities,”15 and had similar worries about ancient manuscripts and archaeological artefacts being taken out of the country rather than being preserved in a national library or museum in the capital of the country. These interests resulted in their both becoming founding members of the influential secret debating society, Kvöldfélagið (the Evening Society) when it was established in Reykjavík in 1861.16 Arguably Sigurður had already sensed that a collection of folktales had a key role to play as inspiration for new forms of national literature, art and drama, ideas earlier expressed in a lecture by the art historian Niels Laurits Høyen in 1844, which Sigurður was well aware of.17 Such views are clearly reflected in a letter Sigurður wrote to his friend Steingrímur Thorsteinsson in Copenhagen on 8 May 1861, in which he tries to encourage Steingrímur to start composing such “national” dramas: Even though it is a long time since I heard [your] Redd-Hannesar ríma [the Ballad of Redd-Hannes], I can’t imagine that anyone who could compose that could not make people in a drama speak in a sensible fashion, although I can well believe that […] you are lacking in knowledge about how people do things here [in Iceland], but Jón Árnason’s collection could well help in that regard […]. There is a great need for such works, both to give poets better direction and also to encourage people to start practising acting.18

With regard to his growing collection of material, Jón Árnason wrote to Konrad Maurer on 22 November 1861 that he already felt himself to be “indebted” to Sigurður.19 Here, he was referring not least to the narratives in the collection. As Guðbrandur Vigfússon writes in his introduction to the first volume: “There are a number of stories by Sigurður Guðmundsson the painter in this collection, all of them noteworthy and in some way original.”20

15 Jón Borgfirðingur, “Hugvekja um alþýðlega fornfræði,” p. 56. 16 See further Eiríkur Valdimarsson and Aspelund, “Svipmyndir”; and Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson, “Frá bókmenntavakningu til ræðuæfinga.” 17 See Lárus Sigurbjörnsson, Þáttur Sigurðar málara, pp. 18–19; and Madsen, Málaralist Dana, p. 20. 18 Þjms, SG 02, 218. 19 Úr fórum Jóns Árnasonar, vol. 1, p. 351. 20 Guðbrandur Vigfússon, “Formáli,” p. xxxvii.

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Indeed, Sigurður Guðmundsson was either the source for, or had some role in over twenty narratives in the collection,21 which include some of Iceland’s most famous migratory folk legends, such as the changeling story, “The Father of Eighteen Elves”; the selkie story, “The Seal’s Skin”; the ghost legends, “Mother Mine, Don’t Weep, Weep” (about a child left out to die of exposure) and the “The Deacon of Myrká” (which Maurer must have heard Sigurður tell either in Flatey or Copenhagen22); the humorous legend of “The Goblin on the Church Beam”; and well-known verses about a marbendill (merman) and the ogress Grýla. All in all, we know relatively little about how Sigurður behaved in his daily contacts with other people. His letters and notebooks naturally tell us a great deal about his inner personality, his feelings and those things he found important.23 The letters and autobiographies of his friends meanwhile underline his popularity and the respect people had for him, in spite of his temperamental nature. Sigurður’s repertoire of stories meanwhile provides some explanation for this popularity. It also adds weight to Maurer’s suggestion that he was a born entertainer, implying that he was also a dramatic talent. So what would an evening listening to Sigurður Guðmundsson telling stories have been like? It is evident that many of the stories that Sigurður is credited with deal with the supernatural, and especially ghosts. The form of these legends also says a great deal about the exemplary way in which Sigurður told stories: “Give Me My Bone, Gunna” is a good example: One winter, a woman called Guðrún who worked in the stable of a church had lost or broken the oil-lamp used in the stable, and decided to use as a replacement part of the skull of a man that had appeared in the churchyard […]. On New Year’s Eve, when the old dear had taken the light out into the stable […], she heard a voice calling to her through the stable window: “Give me my bone, Gunna!” Without hesitation, Guðrún took the piece of skull in which the light was burning, threw it on the dung-heap, squashed it down, and said: “Go get it yourself and be damned!”24 21 See further Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir, “Jón Árnason þjóðsagnasafnari,” pp. 134–37; and Jón Árnason, Íslenskar þjóðsögur, vol. 1, pp. 43–44, 123, 127–28, 130–31, 207, 217–218, 229, 233–34, 265, 270–72, 284–86, 333–34, 386–87, 479–81, 501–2, 511–12, 516–17, 526, 610–11, 618–19, 629–30, 640–41; vol. 2, pp. 9, 73–74; vol. 3, pp. 371, 486; vol. 4, p. 40; and vol. 6, pp. 49–50. Sigurður was also one of Konrad Maurer’s main sources: see Maurer, Isländische Volkssagen, pp. 73, 243, 294 and 324. 22 See Maurer, Isländische Volkssagen, p. 73. 23 These materials are available on Sigurður Guðmundsson málari website, https://sigurdurmalari.hi.is/. 24 Jón Árnason, Íslenskar þjóðsögur, vol. 1, p. 229.

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It is noticeable how often in many of these stories, the climax is reached with the words of the dead person, often expressed in verse form, helping them burn themselves into the memories of those listening. Famous examples are: “The moon glides, death rides, can you see the white patch on the back of my neck, Garún, Garún,” in “The Deacon of Myrká”; “Mother mine in the fold, fold/ Have no worries at all, at all,/ For I will lend you my shroud,/ To dance in, dance in,” in “Mother Mine, Don’t Weep, Weep”; and “A dead man rarely uses a knife, he just stands there and rips,” uttered by a recently drowned man who appears in his wife’s kitchen, in “A Dead Man Rarely Uses a Knife.” One can imagine Sigurður had some sympathy for the deceased drinking colleague who appears to a friend in a dream, saying “Pour out of a barrel without any grief/ right down into my grave/ my bones will soon/ be longing for some booze.”25 All these stories are very visual in nature and demand some form of dramatic presentation. Sigurður clearly also liked strange or eccentric types of people: he seems to have enjoyed telling stories of foul-mouthed old women, like those who argue in church and win the admiration of “The Goblin on the Church Beam,” or old Gunna in “Give Me My Bone, Gunna.” He also appears to have been drawn to narratives about people who are mean or greedy, and those dealing with the north of Iceland where he grew up. Perhaps the most interesting feature of Sigurður’s repertoire is his evident sympathy for women and his understanding for their position. This is especially clear in the legend of “The Seal’s Skin” in which a seal-woman is forced to marry a man she has never met before and at the end of the story feels the need to flee back to the sea, sadly leaving her children behind. The same sympathy (and respect) for women can be seen in “The Deacon of Myrká,” in which the heroine “was never the same again” after her experience of nearly being taken into her dead lover’s grave; in two legends of guilt-ridden young mothers who have left their children out to die of exposure; and in “The Father of Eighteen Elves,” where a mother has her child replaced by a changeling while she is forced to briefly leave it.26 One of the most powerful stories about women in Sigurður’s repertoire is “He Lived,” which tells of an arrogant man who mistreated his young wife for a year and then abandoned her. When he arrives at a neighbouring farm soon afterwards, the farmer’s three dogs leap up at him barking. The farmer then interprets what the dogs are supposed to have “said.” The larger dog said with a deep voice: “He lived/ he lived.” This was followed by the 25 Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur, vol. 1, p. 233. 26 Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur, pp. 43–44.

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middle-sized dog, who apparently said with a softer voice: “For one year/ one year.” The smallest dog added with a yelp: “in shame/ in shame.”27 Sigurður’s heroines offer powerful role models for women. They regularly answer back, refusing to be browbeaten even by ghosts, as in “Give Me My Bone, Gunna,” “The Deacon of Myrká” and “Lost My Lusty Complexion” (in which a girl even dares to kiss a ghost). Sigurður’s high respect for the female sex is well summed up in a letter he wrote to Jón Sigurðsson on 26 July 1870 in which he writes: I have always been of the same opinion as you that women are possibly the elite of our nation; they may well be often temperamental but their sense of national pride is almost unconscious and instinctive […]; they are starting to get more excited about our cause, very excited indeed.28 He adds: “I will not hold back in encouraging them and helping them as much as I can.”29

Sigurður Guðmundsson’s early death in 1874 was a tragedy on many levels, and not least because of his potential. One can only imagine what might have come out of the shared dream that he and Jón Árnason had in 1861 of emulating those folktale collectors in the other Nordic countries who actively carried out f ieldwork in the countryside for several summers, simultaneously collecting manuscripts and archaeological artefacts for their planned museum. On 10 August 1861, Jón Árnason wrote to Jón Sigurðsson: I want to travel around the country for five years, if NB I manage to live that long, and I want to have Sigurður the painter with me, and we would get between 1,500 and 2,000 Rdl [Rigsdalers] for each year, so that we could spend a month or longer in each area, collecting everything that we can get, ancient and new […]. I want to be in Reykjavík in the winters, but to go off collecting as soon as spring approaches.30

Unfortunately, nothing came of this dream. Nonetheless, Sigurður’s legacy can be said to live on in the shape of modern-day Iceland with its art festivals, libraries, museums, galleries and theatres. While his grave may be silent and hard to find, the folk legends that Sigurður passed on (along with his 27 Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur, pp. 511–12. 28 Sigurður Guðmundsson to Jón Sigurðsson, 26 July 1870, ÞÍ, E10, 13. 29 Sigurður Guðmundsson to Jón Sigurðsson, 26 July 1870, ÞÍ, E10, 13. 30 Úr fórum Jóns Árnasonar, vol. 1, p. 316. The letter reflects Sigurður’s own dreams which are also reflected in a letter to Guðbrandur Vigfússon written around the same time, on 21 September 1861: Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Icelandic d1 SG, 438v.

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letters) arguably bring him back to life for a moment, giving us some sense of what it might have been like to spend a little time with him discussing life, the universe and not least matters relating to Romantic nationalism.31

References Archival Sources Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS Icelandic d1 SG, fols. 422r–426r. ÞÍ (Þjóðskjalasafn Íslands, Icelandic National Archive). E10, 13. Þjms (Þjóðminjasafn Íslands, National Museum of Iceland). SG 02, 218 and 222.

Published Sources Aspelund, Karl. “‘Skáldskapur þjóðanna’: Sigurður, búningarnir og ímyndin.” In Málarinn og menningarsköpun: Sigurður Guðmundsson og Kvöldfélagið 1858–1874, edited by Karl Aspelund and Terry Gunnell, pp. 93–135. Reykjavík: Opna, 2017. Aspelund, Karl, and Terry Gunnell, eds. Málarinn og menningarsköpun: Sigurður Guðmundsson og Kvöldfélagið 1858–1874. Reykjavík: Opna, 2017. Borgfirðingur, Jón. “Hugvekja um alþýðlega fornfræði.” Norðri, 30 May 1859, p. 56. Borgfjörð, Guðrún. Minningar. Reykjavík: Hlaðbúð, 1947. Eiríkur Valdimarsson and Karl Aspelund. “Svipmyndir af Kvöldfundum.” In Málarinn og menningarsköpun: Sigurður Guðmundsson og Kvöldfélagið 1858–1874, edited by Karl Aspelund and Terry Gunnell, pp. 249–76. Reykjavík: Opna, 2017. Gunnell, Terry. “Clerics as Collectors of Folklore in Nineteenth Century Iceland.” Arv: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 68 (2012): pp. 45–66. Gunnell, Terry. “Sigurður Guðmundsson og þjóðsögurnar.” In Málarinn og menningarsköpun: Sigurður Guðmundsson og Kvöldfélagið 1858–1874, edited by Karl Aspelund and Terry Gunnell, pp. 415–33. Reykjavík: Opna, 2017. Gunnell, Terry, and Karl Aspelund, eds. Málarinn og menningarsköpun: Sigurður Guðmundsson og Kvöldfélagið 1858–1874. Reykjavík: Opna, 2017. Guðbrandur Vigfússon. “Formáli.” Introduction to Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri, vol. 2, pp. xv–xxxviii. Reykjavík: Þjóðsaga, 1954. Høyen, Niels Laurits. Om betingelserne for en Skandinavisk nationalkunsts udvikling: Et foredrag, holdt d. 23 de Marts 1844 i det Skandinaviske Selskab. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1844. 31 A longer version of this chapter appeared in Icelandic as Gunnell, “Sigurður Guðmundsson og þjóðsögurnar.” All translations from Icelandic are mine.

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Indriði Einarsson. Séð og lifað: Endurminningar. Second edition. Reykjavík: Almenna Bókafélagið, 1972. Jón Árnason. “Formáli.” Introduction to vol. 1 of Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri, by Jón Árnason, xvii–xxiii. Reykjavík: Þjóðsaga, 1954. Jón Árnason. Icelandic Legends. 2 vols. Translated by George E. J. Powell and Eiríkur Magnússon. London: Richard Bentley, 1864–66. Jón Árnason. Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri. 2 vols. Leipzig: Möbius, 1862–64. Jón Árnason. Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri. 6 vols. Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfan Þjóðsaga, 1954–61. Jón Árnason and Magnús Grímsson. Íslenzk æfintýri. Reykjavík: E. Þórðarson, 1852. Lárus Sigurbjörnsson. Þáttur Sigurðar málara: Brot úr bæjar- og menningarsögu Reykjavíkur. Reykjavík: Helgafell, 1954. Madsen, Karl. Málaralist Dana. Reykjavík: Dansk-Íslenska Félagið, 1927. Matthías Jochumsson. Bréf Matthíasar Jochumssonar. Akureyri: Bókadeild Menningarsjóðs, 1935. Matthías Jochumsson. Sögukaflar af sjálfum mér. Reykjavík: Þorsteinn Gíslason, 1922. Maurer, Konrad. Isländische Volkssagen der Gegenwart, vorwiegend nach mündlicher Überlieferung gesammelt und verdeutscht. Leipzig: Möbius, 1860. Maurer, Konrad. Íslandsferð 1858. Translated by Baldur Hafstað. Reykjavík: Ferðafélag Íslands, 1997. Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir. “Jón Árnason þjóðsagnasafnari og heimildarfólkið hans.” In Grashnoss: Minningarrit um hjónin Rögnu Ólafsdóttur og Ögmund Helgason, edited by Gísli Magnússon, Hjalti Pálsson, Sigurjón Páll Ísaksson and Sölvi Sveinsson, pp. 127–42. Sauðárkrókur: Sögufélag Skagfirðinga, 2014. Sigurður Guðmundsson málari og menningarsköpun á Íslandi 1857–1874. Research project website. Accessed 21 May 2020. https://sigurdurmalari.hi.is/. Sveinn Einarsson. “Sigurður málari og áhrif hans á íslenskt leikhús.” In Málarinn og menningarsköpun: Sigurður Guðmundsson og Kvöldfélagið 1858–1874, edited by Karl Aspelund and Terry Gunnell, pp. 357–95. Reykjavík: Opna, 2017. Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson. “Frá bókmenntavakningu til ræðuæfinga.” In Málarinn og menningarsköpun: Sigurður Guðmundsson og Kvöldfélagið 1858–1874, edited by Karl Aspelund and Terry Gunnell, pp. 277–96. Reykjavík: Opna, 2017. Úr fórum Jóns Árnasonar: Sendibréf, edited by Finnur Sigmundsson. 2 vols. Reykjavík: Hlaðbúð, 1950–51. Þjóðólfur, 3 March 1888, p. 66. Þórunn Erla Valdimarsdóttir. Upp á sigurhæðir: Saga Matthíasar Jochumssonar. Reykjavík: JPV Útgáfa, 2006.

13 Songs His Mother Taught Him Émile Legrand’s Collection of Lacemakers’ Ballads David Hopkin Abstract Émile Legrand was the leading scholar of modern Greek in late nineteenthcentury France; he also made a collection of songs sung by his mother and her neighbours, all lacemakers, in the village of Fontenay-le-Marmion in Normandy. Lacemakers in many parts of Europe had a distinctive work culture characterized by ballad singing, but this is the only evidence of lacemakers’ repertoire from Normandy. I speculate that Legrand’s experiences growing up within this culture influenced his career as the progenitor of Akritic studies. Keywords: Émile Legrand; Digenes Akrites; Gérard de Nerval; folksongs of Normandy; lacemakers; work culture

The Frenchman Émile Legrand (1841–1903) is best remembered as the progenitor of a subdiscipline in Greek letters – “Akritic studies.” In 1875 he was the first editor of a recently discovered manuscript of the Byzantine epic poem “Digenes Akrites,” the border warrior.1 And he was the first to propose a relationship between this medieval epic and modern ballads concerning the exploits of one Digenes Akritas. Four further manuscripts of the poem were located before the First World War, one of them also edited by Legrand.2 Scholars still debate their relationship to the oral ballads, whether the written poems rely on oral precursors, and if they concern any identifiable historical persons.3 In ways familiar to readers of Joep 1 Sathas and Legrand, Les exploits de Digénis Akritas. 2 Legrand, Les exploits de Basile Digénis Acritas. 3 Legrand’s place in Akritic studies is addressed by Mavrogordato in the preface to Mavrogordato, ed. Digenes Akrites; see also Beaton and Ricks, Digenes Akrites.

Brolsma et al. Networks, Narratives and Nations. Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022. doi: 10.5117/9789463720755_ch13

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Leerssen’s work, such philological and folkloric erudition has had political repercussions. 4 The poems and songs of Akrites/Akritas were used to bolster the resurrected Greek state’s ambitions over the lost territories of the Hellenes, stretching deep into Asia Minor.5 Though Legrand showed little interest in classical Greek, he was devoted to the modern language; in addition to the two Akrites manuscripts he edited hundreds of other texts drawn from other manuscripts, early printed works and oral literature, some collected by himself.6 But the path which led him to the Chair of Modern Greek at the Paris School of Oriental Languages in 1887 was tortuous. The son of a village carpenter from Normandy, his parents encouraged him to enter the priesthood. He studied at the seminaries of Lisieux and Bayeux, but while he retained a religious sensibility he did not feel a vocation. After obtaining his baccalaureate, he moved to Paris and took a succession of minor office jobs while editing his Greek texts in the evening. His work slowly earned him the respect of scholars and, after a government paid trip in 1875 to uncover oral and manuscript sources in Greek-speaking lands, he was appointed to a teaching post. In person Legrand was unassuming, but at a time when questions of language stirred violent controversy, he was blunt in his view that the language of modern Greece should be the language that modern Greeks spoke, rather than a resurrected ancient simulacrum.7 The development of Akritic studies is an exemplary case for students of Romantic historicism and the instrumentalization of culture for nationalist projects. However, in this article, I examine a different and lesser known facet of Legrand’s activity, namely his fascination with vernacular culture and traditional song in particular. Legrand never described his motivations, but I trace their origins to his home village of Fontenay-le-Marmion on the Caen plain. Almost the entire female population of this region was employed making pillow lace. At its height in the 1850s this industry involved 45,000 women in Normandy.8 Lacemakers could work at home, but in the summer they gathered together in groups on the street: “in the villages, in the towns, nay, even in the cities, you every day see people sitting before their doors working, especially the lace-makers […] so inveterate their passion for shewing themselves,” wrote a British visitor in 1831. In winter they collected in paillots – that is, in the barn straw – to benefit from the heat generated 4 Leerssen, “Introduction.” 5 Herzfeld, Ours Once More, pp. 116–17. 6 Pernot, the main source for Legrand’s biography, lists more than a hundred: Pernot, “Notice.” 7 Psichari, “Les études de grec moderne en France,” pp. 236–37. See Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece. 8 Noé, L’Industrie de la dentelle.

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by the cattle.9 Their work was accompanied by singing, and this mix of sociability, labour and traditional entertainment meant that lacemakers developed a large, but conservative, repertoire of songs. Lacemakers have an important role in the history of folk-song collecting in many countries, including France. Gérard de Nerval’s article on the “Vieilles ballades de France,” originally published in 1842 and an important stimulus to collecting projects, was subsequently appended to his novella Sylvie: the eponymous Valois lacemaker excites the imagination of the narrator with her ballads until she takes up the less romantic trade of glove-making, and simultaneously abandons her old songs for charmless airs emanating from the Parisian stage.10 A lot could be said about the singing lacemaker as a literary trope.11 For Nerval, and many others, she represented an ideal of femininity and domesticity, and epitomized ideas of the unalienated nature of labour in the pre-industrial world. However, there is evidence that lacemakers did indeed sing while they worked. In Normandy, journalists, travel-writers and sometimes even lacemakers’ themselves mention the practice.12 Yet the only substantial record of their repertoire is that provided by Legrand. In 1876, Legrand returned to Fontenay for the summer to work on a collection of Greek folksongs, some of which he had collected himself during his five months of travel the previous year. Presumably the experience of listening to Greek singers led him to think about songs closer to home – those sung by his mother and her neighbours on the “street of the lacemakers” (now the rue de la République). In October 1876 he noted down forty-nine song texts, without music, which he sent to the philologist Gaston Paris; they were published in the journal Romania in 1881.13 Although “ancient lays” were regularly invoked in Romantic descriptions of Normandy, the only substantial prior work on Normandy folksong was an essay with illustrations rather than a collection.14 The absence of comparable collections has led some to doubt the veracity of Legrand’s testimony.15 However, all the evidence suggests he was a scrupulous scholar. 9 St. John, Journal of a Residence in Normandy, pp. 11 and 24. 10 Bénichou, Nerval et la chanson folklorique. 11 Haxell, “Woman as Lacemaker.” 12 See, for example, the letters of Ernestine Lebatard, a lacemaker in Bossis, Ursin et Ernestine, p. 103. 13 Legrand, “Chansons populaires,” pp. 365–96. 14 Beaurepaire, Étude sur la poésie populaire en Normandie. 15 In 1920 Lechevrel sought out a singer named by Legrand to see if he could obtain any more songs, but she replied “I don’t remember any more”: Lechevrel, “Le folklore normand,” p. 375.

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Legrand’s mother Célina (born in Fontenay in 1818) was the most important source for these songs, providing more than half of them. The other singers were Adelaïde Le Paulmier (Fontenay 1807) with nine songs, Delphine Lacroix with five (probably born in Fontenay in 1834), and then Clélie Péronne (Fontenay 1838), Marie Roger, Blanche Lecarpentier and Marie Dausmesnil, with one each, as well as a solitary male informant, Pierre Guillot. Marie Dausmesnil was the village baker’s daughter but all the other women, where they can be identified with certainty, were lacemakers.16 Neither Legrand nor Paris provide any information about the circumstances in which these songs were performed, but it seems likely that we are eavesdropping on the songs lacemakers sang while working together. Two of these texts are unknown from any other source, and a couple of others are rare, but the bulk of Legrand’s collection was made up of songs that could have been heard in other parts of France. This was not, then, a repertoire restricted to lacemakers: none of the songs make direct mention of the trade. Nor is there any evidence that Normandy lacemakers used “tells” or songs to regulate the rhythm of their work of the kind used by their counterparts in the lace schools of Flanders, the English Midlands and the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) of central Europe. In one aspect, these texts are also at odds with what we know of lacemakers’ musical tastes in Normandy and in other regions. In 1839 the journalist Emile Souvestre described the lacemakers of nearby Aunay as singing hymns on their doorsteps, but no religious songs appear among those recorded by Legrand.17 Conversely there were several in which ecclesiastics are engaged in sexual shenanigans – these were mostly sung by his mother. “To love is not a crime,/ God does not forbid it,” she claimed in another song, and while it would be a mistake to assert that a singer’s words represent their own views, Célina certainly had a pronounced taste for such playful and slightly bawdy material. Nonetheless, there are some similarities to the kind of songs we know lacemakers sang in other districts. Because lacemaking was sedentary, and because lacemakers rehearsed the same repertoire regularly, they could perform the long, narrative and seemingly historical ballads that were particularly prized by song collectors. The most striking group of songs are those performed by Adelaïde Le Paulmier, Legrand’s oldest informant. By the 1870s she was a widow living with two of her sisters, all lacemakers. She 16 Information gleaned from the État Civil and the recensements de population (censuses), Fontenay-le-Marmion, available for 1817, and then at roughly five-year intervals from 1836 to 1896. 17 Souvestre, “Pierre Rivière,” p. 173.

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specialized in long ballads, some full of the “lurid, gruesome, clammy or grizzly terrors” that Thomas Wright found to be the preferred singing matter of Buckinghamshire lacemakers.18 Such songs feel old, even if evidence for medieval origins is quite tenuous. In her ballad of “Marianson” (Coirault 9904),19 a ballad of thirty verses, the eponymous heroine is tricked into lending three gold rings that her husband Renaud (the generic name for male protagonists in French narrative songs) had gifted her when he went to the wars, which are then counterfeited. On his return the unnamed villain shows the counterfeit rings to prove his claim that Marianson has been unfaithful and that the boy she has borne is not his. Without more ado Renaud takes the baby and dashes its brains out on the cobbles; he ties Marianson to his horse’s tale and drags her from Paris to Saint-Denis, and “there wasn’t a hedge or bush that was not marked by the blood of Marianson.” Her mother runs after, begging Renaud to return her daughter’s bloody body. On her deathbed Marianson produces the real three rings, and thus proves her fidelity. Renaud, overcome with remorse, burns his own face off, and both die within hours of each other. Such violence was far from unusual in lacemakers’ songs. Another example drawn from Le Paulmier’s repertoire concerns Marguerite who lives with her mother at the “castle of martyrs” (Coirault 8910). By night Marguerite is a woman, but by day she is a white hind hunted through the forests by her own brother Julien and his men; no explanation is proffered for this metamorphosis. She is finally caught, killed and served as the evening meal: Julien asks where his sister is, and she replies “Sit down, gentlemen, I was the first at the table;/ My head is on the serving dish and my organs are cooking,/ and my poor entrails are being torn to pieces by your great dogs.” It has been suggested that the song metaphorically relates the story of Marguerite and Julien de Ravelet, incestuous brother and sister from Normandy executed in 1603, though the connection is speculative.20 Célina Legrand knew and sung some similar ballads, but her preferred material was lighter: dance songs, songs of love – particularly illicit love – pastorals in which girls trick the boys and the boys trick the girls. Her songs overflow with flowers and fruits to be planted, gathered or plucked. Some are so pared down that their meaning is unclear; others combine lines from a number of different songs, disorientating the reader. Such confusion is 18 Wright, Romance of the Lace Pillow, p. 180. 19 In this chapter, I collate the songs collected by Legrand to the standard numerotation of Coirault, Répertoire des chansons françaises de tradition orale. 20 Brunel-Reeves, “Les États-Unis et la Blanche Biche,” p. 70.

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often assumed to be the result of faulty memory: the singer – reliant on oral transmission –skips lines and becomes lost. However, Gerald Porter, in his study of English lacemakers’ tells, suggests another possibility. Lacemakers’ songs are condensed and elliptical because they were performed so often by many members of the same group: “At each performance, the sung part stands metonymically for the whole,” the listeners being able to fill in the gaps because they too were participants in this communal work culture. For outsiders the songs were meaningless but that was part of the point: comprehension was restricted to insiders, the group of women who shared their working lives.21 Singing was a way of passing the time, of enjoying oneself with one’s friends and neighbours, and finding pleasure in a repetitive task. In their songs lacemakers travelled to Paris and Nantes, to England and Spain, visited palaces, encountered princes and magicians. These songs were not straightforwardly “escapist” – several focus on the suffering of women – but they introduced fantasy and drama into their toilsome lives. Yet while the settings may have been exotic, the issues addressed were not. A king banishes his daughter’s suitor, another king marries his daughter against her will, a duke departs for war leaving a pregnant, unmarried princess to face the consequences […], strip away the aristocratic titles and these would be familiar situations in any nineteenth-century village. In almost every song some domestic conflict is evoked that pitted daughters against fathers – and occasionally mothers – or wife against husband, or the complaint of jilted lovers. Many songs turn on the vulnerability of women workers, for example as shepherdesses alone in the f ields or market women trying to make a sale, preyed on by men, particularly men of superior rank. Sometimes they find a ruse or clever words through which to escape the threat, sometimes not. One could hardly describe these texts as a manual for interpersonal relationships, but they did allow singers and their audiences to think through some of the difficulties that faced people like them – those who because of their sex or their social position were relatively powerless. In their imagination they could consider the consequences of their choices. In other words, lacemakers’ songs were a cultural fit with the lives of working women. Unlike other villages in the region where commercial lacemaking was defunct by 1900, one could still find groups of lacemakers gathered in the streets of Fontenay even after the Second World War. At some point they had developed a specialty: lace made from human hair used for wigs worn 21 Porter, “Work the Old Lady Out of the Ditch,” pp. 35–55.

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in Paris theatres.22 The survival of this domestic craft industry – and the associated culture – enabled Marthe Moricet to collect songs there in the 1950s that Legrand had noted eighty years before.23 This is an intriguing example of the resilience of a work culture, even when there was no formal institution to uphold it. The Romantic cultivation of culture depends on a perception of cultural difference. The scholar-cultivator is separated – by class or by time or by distance – from the objects of his or her attention. Unfamiliarity lends such objects glamour. In the case of Legrand, who started his career when klephtic songs were once again inspiring Cretan rebels – just as they had when Claude Fauriel published his Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne (Popular songs of modern Greece) in 1824 – the exoticism of the material must have been part of the attraction. But as cultural separation was also narrated as a loss, so the cultivation of culture could be expressed as a restoration: the alienated scholar – and alienated modernity – was absorbed back into the body of the people through a renewed appreciation of folk aesthetics. Legrand, like many other folklorists of his generation, grew up in a demotic, oral culture, associated with all things maternal and feminine, but from which he was removed by his education. Separated geographically and socially from this culture, his interest in the Greek demotic tradition, and in particular its ballads, was part discovery but also part homecoming. What might appear exotic was simultaneously familiar, and welcoming. Not just his collection of Norman folksongs but his entire career could be interpreted as an attempt to reconnect to his childhood world and its auditory soundtrack, the songs sung by his mother and her neighbours on the “street of lacemakers.”24

References Archival Sources Archives du Calvados. État Civil and Recensements de population, Fontenay-leMarmion, 1817–96. https://archives.calvados.fr/. 22 Garnier, “Dans un village du Calvados.” 23 Boüard, “Marthe Moricet,” pp. 86–87. Moricet died before she was able to publish any of these songs, and I have not been able to track down her archives. 24 On other French folklorists who followed a similar trajectory see Hopkin, “Intimacies and Intimations.”

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Published Sources Beaton, Roderick, and David Ricks, eds. Digenes Akrites: New Approaches to Byzantine Heroic Poetry. Aldershot: Variorum, 1993. Beaurepaire, Eugène de. Étude sur la poésie populaire en Normandie et spécialement dans l’Avranchin. Avranches: Tostin, 1856. Bénichou, Paul. Nerval et la chanson folklorique. Paris: José Corti, 1970. Bossis, Mireille, ed. Ursin et Ernestine: Amours paysannes en Normandie (1863–1866). Condé-sur-Noireau: Corlet, 2006. Boüard, Michel. “Marthe Moricet.” Obituary. Annales de Normandie 10 (1960): pp. 86–87. Brunel-Reeves, Francine. “Les États-Unis et la Blanche Biche.” Rabaska 2 (2004): pp. 51–89. Coirault, Patrice. Répertoire des chansons françaises de tradition orale. Revised by Marlène Belly and Georges Delarue. 3 vols. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1996–2006. Garnier, André. “Dans un village du Calvados, à Fontenay-le-Marmion, vingt paysannes tissent les perruques de la Comédie Française.” Paris-Normandie, 6 March 1953. Haxell, Nichola Anne. “Woman as Lacemaker: The Development of a Literary Stereotype in Texts by Charlotte Brontë, Nerval, Lainé and Chawaf.” Modern Language Review 89 (1994): pp. 545–60. Herzfeld, Michael. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece. Expanded edition. Oxford: Berghahn, 2020. Hopkin, David. “Intimacies and Intimations: Storytelling between Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century France.” Journal of Social History 51 (2018): 557–91. Lechevrel, Joseph. “Le folklore normand.” Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de Normandie 36 (1924/25): pp. 359–82. Leerssen, Joep. “Introduction: Philology and the European Construction of National Literatures.” In Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Dirk Van Hulle and Joep Leerssen, pp. 13–27. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Legrand, Émile. “Chansons populaires recueillies en octobre 1876 à Fontenay-leMarmion, arrondissement de Caen (Calvados).” Romania 10 (1881): pp. 365–96. Legrand, Émile, ed. Les exploits de Basile Digénis Acritas: Épopée byzantine publiée d’après le manuscrit de Grotta-Ferrata. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1892. Mackridge, Peter. Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Mavrogordato, John, ed. Digenes Akrites. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Nerval, Gérard de. Les filles du feu. Paris: Giraud, 1854.

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Noé, Georges. L’Industrie de la dentelle à la main dans le Calvados. Caen: Domin, 1910. Pernot, Hubert. “Notice sur la vie et les oeuvres d’Émile Legrand.” In Bibliographie hellénique ou description raisonnée des ouvrages publiés par des Grecs aux XVe et XVIe siècles, edited by Émile Legrand, vol. 4, pp. vii–xliii. Paris: Leroux, 1906. Porter, Gerald. “‘Work the Old Lady Out of the Ditch’: Singing at Work by English Lacemakers.” Journal of Folklore Research 31 (1994): pp. 35–55. Psichari, Jean. “Les études de grec moderne en France au dix-neuvième siècle.” Revue Internationale de l’Enseignement 47 (1904): pp. 220–39. Sathas, Constantine, and Émile Legrand, eds. Les exploits de Digénis Akritas: Épopée byzantine du dixième siècle publiée pour la première fois d’après le manuscrit unique de Trébizonde. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1875. Souvestre, Émile. “Pierre Rivière.” Le Journaliste 1 (1839): pp. 171–207. St. John, James Augustus. Journal of a Residence in Normandy. Edinburgh: Constable, 1831. Wright, Thomas. The Romance of the Lace Pillow. Olney: Armstrong, 1919.

14 The Genesis of a National Product Henry Havard and the Renewed Interest in Delftware, 1850–1920 Jo Tollebeek Abstract The publication of the Histoire de la faïence de Delft (History of Delft Earthenware, 1878) by Henry Havard renewed interest in Delft porcelain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Written by a French exile working in The Hague, the work was simultaneously a homage to the liberty of the Dutch Republic and contributed to the nationalization of Delftware. But three decades later he refused to publish a new Dutch edition, and now regarded Delftware as exclusively a product for an international collectors’ community. However, the national dynamic was unstoppable, and in 1916 the Rijksmuseum formally declared Delft porcelain to be a high point of the Dutch Golden Age. Keywords: Delftware; Henry Havard; cultural nationalism; museumization

How was it that Delft faience developed into an icon in the hall of Dutch stereotypes, along with tulips, windmills and Volendam maids in traditional dress?1 It did not happen automatically. In the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many factories were producing Delftware, turning out plaques, bowls and plates, vases, jugs and salt cellars, Chinese figurines and animal figures, in blue-and-white or polychrome, for the domestic and international markets and with a string of artistic and technical innovations. By around 1850, however, this industry had lost momentum; the interest in Delftware had evaporated.

1

See, for example, Grever, “Visualisering en collectieve herinneringen.”

Brolsma et al. Networks, Narratives and Nations. Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022. doi: 10.5117/9789463720755_ch14

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The focus in this chapter is on the role played by Henry Havard in the rediscovery and renewed appreciation of Delftware in the second half of the nineteenth century.2 Havard was born in 1838 and moved with his parents from the town of his birth (Charolles in Burgundy) to Paris, where during the Second Empire he became involved with republican and radical organizations such as the Ligue Internationale de la Paix et de la Liberté (International League for Peace and Freedom).3 This in turn led him to become an active member of the Paris Commune in 1871. The suppression of the rebellion ushered in a long period of exile for Havard in Belgium and mainly in the Netherlands. How was a French exile able to enrich the Dutch canon with a product that came to be prized not just in the Netherlands, but among collectors throughout Europe? This is the story of the (re-)birth of a quintessentially Dutch national product in a transnational context.

Exile Havard spent more of his period of exile in The Hague than in Brussels or Amsterdam, until an amnesty in 1879 enabled him to return to Paris for good. He would later look back on his time in The Hague with nostalgia; in a letter to the widow of his friend Jan Willem baron de Constant Rebecque 1894, he described it as “the best time of my life.”4 The poldermann de mon cœur (the “polderman of my heart”), as Havard often referred to his friend,5 was typical of the – somewhat surprising – Hague milieu in which the former Communard now moved: aristocratic, wealthy, but at the same time artistic and bohemian. For Havard, this did not rule out a radical social politics, as evidenced by a diary he kept in 1872.6 But above all he portrayed himself as someone steeped in literary activity. In the first place this included travelogues (part of an extensive tradition)7 describing Havard’s travels through La Hollande pittoresque in the 1870s, in 2 The literature on Havard is limited. The most in-depth study is by Froissart Pezone, “Havard, Henry”; see also Looper, “Nawoord,” and Aronson and Ariaans, “Henry Havard’s Studies on Delftware.” 3 Archives Municipales, Mâcon, Henry Havard fonds, B2, 6–9. 4 Havard to H. S. de Constant Rebecque-Hora Siccama, 10 August 1894, Nationaal Archief, The Hague, De Constant Rebecque family archive, access no. 2.21.008.01, no. 126 CC. 5 For example, Havard to J. W. de Constant Rebecque, 25 January 1879 and 30 November 1879, Nationaal Archief, The Hague, De Constant Rebecque family archive, access no. 2.21.008.01, no. 124 B. 6 Havard, “Notes de travail,” diary, for example, 2 December 1872, Archives Municipales, Mâcon, Henry Havard fonds, unnumbered. 7 Andringa, L’Imaginaire des Pays-Bas, pp. 360–61.

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the company of the marine officer and painter Jacob Eduard van Heemskerck van Beest or De Constant Rebecque: through the towns dotted around the coast of the Zuiderzee, along the border with Germany, and through the old “heart of the Netherlands.” As an ethnographer, he noted down the things that struck him in a land that sometimes seemed to him to be very exotic.8 But politics was never far away: the deadness of the Zuiderzee towns marked an urgent need for an economic renaissance; the Netherlands was not a “natural complement” of the German Empire; and above all, the freedom that the Dutch had won in the revolt (against Spanish rule) had been a guarantee for the future.9 For many this made Havard, who in a separate work published in 1876 also idealized seventeenth-century Amsterdam, “one of the best friends of our nation” (despite the occasional preacher who continued to distrust his “Frenchness”).10 In addition to these travelogues, Havard also published several art critiques and works on art history during this period. An exhibition in Amsterdam in 1872 led him to describe Les merveilles de l’art hollandais (The Wonders of Dutch art, 1873) and prompted him to begin archival research on seventeenth-century painting; the results appeared in a series of syntheses a decade later. Havard’s interpretation of these works of art was no different from what had become the norm since the time of another French exile, Théophile Thoré-Bürger: the Dutch masters were regarded as realistic and bourgeois; their work reflected their pride in the liberal institutions of the Republic and in its economic and intellectual power.11 This gave rise to a “Golden Age” which further fuelled the self-confidence of his Dutch contemporaries.12 Delft faience was also given a place in this context of cultural nationalism. Havard’s interest in ceramics was testimony to the growing appreciation of the applied arts that had been developing during the time of the Commune: artists and artisans had been thrown together, threatening the traditional hierarchy of the arts.13 At the “retrospective exhibition” organized by the Arti et Amicitiae (Artists and Friends) association in 1873 in Amsterdam, 8 Jong, De dirigenten van de herinnering, pp. 173–74. 9 Especially the address in Havard, La Hollande pittoresque: Les frontières menacées (1876), pp. 472–74. 10 Brink, review of La Hollande pittoresque: Les frontières menacées, p. 702; and Craandijk, review of De bedreigde grenzen, p. 178. 11 See, for example, Carasso, “Een nieuw beeld”; and McQueen, Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt, pp. 40–41. 12 More generally, see Sas, “Nationaliteit in de schaduw van de Gouden Eeuw.” 13 For example, Ross, Communal Luxury, pp. 53–65.

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Havard was able to view a large number of Delftware pieces alongside work in Italian maiolica. He devoted a good deal of attention to this in his discussion of the exhibition.14 It was the start of a period of intensive “cultural practices”: Havard hunted and investigated, catalogued and searched, ordered and described, thereby turning the pieces by the Delft potters, or plateelbackers, into “cultural objects.”

French Ceramic Connoisseurs and Dutch Collectors Havard was not the first to display a new interest in Delftware;15 it had happened before, especially in France. Already in 1835, Alexandre Brongniart, the director of the famous ceramics museum of Sèvres, exhibited a few pieces of Delftware in his museum, and travelled to the Netherlands for this purpose.16 The ceramics enthusiast Albert Jacquemart had followed him in 1852, when he observed to his dismay that Delftware was almost entirely absent from collections such as that of the Royal Cabinet of Rare Objects (Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden) in The Hague. Auguste Demmin showered Delftware with praise in his successful Guide de l’amateur de faïences et porcelaines (Faience and Porcelain Lover’s Guide), first published in 1861. In his view, the seventeenth-century Delft plaques had been created by great painters such as Jan Vermeer and Jan Steen, and were therefore true masterpieces. France remained the natural horizon for Havard when he was writing about Delftware in the 1870s. Even as an exile in the Netherlands, his gaze remained focused primarily on the French ceramics connoisseurs. That varied community of scholars, collectors and museum curators included Jacquemart (whose Les merveilles de la céramique went into a second printing in 1871); the writer, journalist and art critic Jules Champfleury (who among other things was the author of Histoire des faïences patriotiques sous la Révolution, published in 1867); the collector Paul Gasnault, attached to the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris; and the somewhat younger Edouard Garnier, who along with other accomplishments published works on the museum collections of Sèvres and Limoges. 14 Havard, Objets d’art et de curiosité, pp. 54–63 and 144–46. 15 Earlier publications on the renewed interest in Delftware in the second half of the nineteenth century include Scholten, “Delfts aardewerk, een reputatiegeschiedenis”; Dam, “Van onbekend en onbemind tot zeer gezocht en peperduur”; Dam, “Delfts aardewerk,” pp. 30–61; and Aronson and Ariaans, “Collecting Delftware in the Nineteenth Century.” 16 Lahaussois, “De interesse van Alexandre Brongniart.”

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But in addition to this network of French ceramics lovers, a new interest in Delftware had also developed in the Netherlands (and Belgium) – ironically enough, just after the factories had ceased production.17 An exhibition organized in Delft in 1863 which displayed many historical pieces was an important catalyst in this context. It led to the birth of a first generation of collectors, born around 1820, whose number included F. M. T. Gijsberti Hodenpijl in Delft, as well as two foreign diplomats in The Hague: Ferdinand Freiherr Baron von Langenau and Charles Antoine Edouard baron de la Villestreux. The retired colonial entrepreneur, John F. Loudon, bought the latter’s accumulation of works and proceeded to add to it until 1876 – including by purchasing at auctions such as Frederik Muller in Amsterdam – to create far and away the most important collection in the Netherlands with ultimately more than 550 pieces.18 He kept them on display in his home in The Hague – in the salon and the reception room, but also in the dining room, sitting room and vestibule, on the stairs and in the stairway, and in fact all the way up to the attic. Delftware was also increasingly included in broader collections of antiquities, such as those created by Jan Pieter Six van Hillegom, Abraham Willet and Louisa Holthuysen, Daniël Franken Dzn. and Paul Tétar van Elven.19 Art dealers such as J. I. Boas Berg and the Nijstad family maintained this interest.20 The first generation of collectors in Belgium included Frédéric Fétis and Baron Albert Evenepoel, the latter’s collection surpassing even that of Loudon. All these collectors were a source of inspiration for Havard in his study of the work of the Delft plateelbackers. Havard knew these collections, too, and their owners came to appreciate his growing expertise. His work as an art critic in the early 1870s was now followed by the compilation of two catalogues of collections of Delftware: in 1875 Havard published a catalogue of the wide-ranging collection of the Utrecht antiquarian W. G. F. van Romondt, followed two years later by his catalogue chronologique et raisonné of the Loudon collection. The critic Carel Vosmaer praised Havard’s work: the way in which this “foreigner” had contributed to the rehabilitation of Delftware was in stark contrast to the Dutch “lethargy in appreciating their own art in deed, not in words.”21 17 Van der Meulen and Smeele, “De Delftse plateelbakkers.” 18 See the short description of “John F. Loudon’s Collection,” by Aronson and Ariaans. 19 For example, Six, De genen van de kunstverzamelaar, pp. 130–34; Vreeken, “Bij wijze van museum,” pp. 107–11; Vreeken, Abraham en Louisa Willet-Holthuysen; Groeneweg et al., “Oosters porselein en Delfts aardewerk”; Hoftijzer, Kleinood aan een Delftse gracht, pp. 40–41. 20 Aronson, Ariaans and Serra, “Nijstad Collection.” 21 Vosmaer, “Het delftsche aardewerk.”

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Erudite and Engaged Meanwhile, Havard continued his archival work on Delftware production. This led to the publication in 1878, a year after the catalogue of Loudon’s collection, of the book that would make “Havard” the point of reference in the world of Delftware. The Histoire de la faïence de Delft (History of Delft Earthenware) was a monumental work, published by E. Plon in Paris and the Amsterdam publishing house L. van Bakkenes,22 with more than 400 pages including over 159 illustrations by Léopold Flameng and Charles Goutzwiller. Havard could justifiably stress the enormous efforts he had invested in writing the book. Equally justifiably, he was able to present the Histoire proudly as the redeeming of a debt of honour: now that he was about to swap the Netherlands for France again, this was a parting gift, a mark of his “deep attachment” to the country that had accepted him in his exile.23 The amount of work involved was especially evident from the almost 800 biographical notes on the Delft plateelbackers which together made up the second part of the book. Its erudition recalled the rigorous, document-based methodology with which the gentleman scholar Baron Jean-Charles Davillier, author of Les porcelaines de Sèvres de Madame du Barry (Madame du Barry’s Sèvres porcelain, 1870), discussed with his guests the collection he had built in his Paris apartment; the effect, as one commentator put it, was that the apartment resembled a “scientific laboratory.”24 Havard took pride in offering reliable knowledge in his book, both because he had studied so many collections and because he had gone through the various archives with the greatest possible care. At the same time it made clear that he had not only focused in his study on the network of French ceramic connoisseurs, but had also drawn on a wide network of archivists in the Netherlands and Belgium. These archivists, who often also fulfilled a role as librarian or museum curator, had been his sherpas, his petites mains or workshop assistants – though this also implied that he occasionally ran into less helpful archivists.25 This erudite part of the Histoire was preceded by what Havard himself regarded as an “artistic” part: an accessible account of the global development of Hollants porceleyn (Dutch porcelain). Threaded through this account was the theory developed by Hippolyte Taine that the history of Delft porcelain 22 On Van Bakkenes: Kruseman, Bouwstoffen, vol. 1, pp. 771–72. 23 Havard, Histoire de la faïence de Delft, p. ii. 24 Stammers, “Historian, Patriot and Paragon of Taste,” pp. 2 and 9–10. 25 See, for example, J. van de Velde, city archivist in Oudenaarde, to Havard, 29 November 1876, Henry Havard fonds, unnumbered (“Notes de travail,” in “Notes diverses: Le pays Flamand”).

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had been shaped by race, milieu, and moment (Havard had undoubtedly also read Philosophie de l’art dans les Pays-Bas, published in 1869).26 But the core of the narrative was the division of the history of Delftware into distinct periods. Havard distinguished three phases in “the evolution of this beautiful and delicate industry.”27 The first period (the first half of the seventeenth century), the enfantement or “childhood,” was an experimental phase, a period when selfcontrol was still lacking. The second period (the second half of the seventeenth century) was the grande époque, a period characterized by balance and high quality of production. The most striking description was of the third period (the eighteenth century). This was a period of décadence, of democratization and degeneration in which tastes had evolved to the production of extravagant and bizarre pieces (including the legendary violins, which in 1862 formed the subject of Champfleury’s novel Le violon de faïence).28 And so a paradigm of decline was born, which Havard was to describe as a general trend in his 1882 L’Art à travers les moeurs. Aesthetic and moral opinions became intertwined: in the author’s view, the extravagance that characterized the pieces produced in the third period betrayed a sense of violence, disorder and a lack of control.29 This was no coincidence: the Histoire was after all not just an erudite work, but also an challenging book, which sought to confront the reader, just as his account of his travels through the towns on the Zuiderzee had done a few years earlier, with the opposition between the vitality and glory of the past and the deadness and silence of contemporary Delft. It sought to engender a renaissance and to act as a reminder of what had made the Netherlands great in the grande époque: the Batavians’ traditional love of liberty, the existence of a strong bourgeoisie, and the long period of shared prosperity. But the striving for (artistic and moral) simplicity had also contributed to that greatness. And so a scholarly book about ceramics also became an homage to the Republic. Havard had remained a Communard.

A Process of Nationalization Havard’s Histoire was the first major study of the history of Delftware. In the decades that followed the book’s publication, Delftware increasingly – and in 26 See also Wiarda, Taine et la Hollande. 27 Havard, Histoire de la faïence de Delft, p. 81. 28 Havard, Histoire de la faïence de Delft, pp. 127–31. See Romijn, “Een viool en een kraantjeskan”; cf. Stammers, Purchase of the Past, p. 174. 29 Havard, Histoire de la faïence de Delft, p. 94.

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increasingly wide circles – came to be seen as a national product that expressed the Dutch character and formed part of the Dutch canon. In this process, attention shifted from liberty to national identity. Where Havard himself had associated Delft faience primarily with a Republic built on liberal and bourgeois principles, prominence was now given to an association with the Dutch nation.30 There were many testimonies to this growing national popularity. The most notable was the return of Delftware as an artistic product in the last decades of the nineteenth century: alongside the historical products now designated as “old Delft,” there was now the new “old Delft.” These imitations were produced by the Tichelaar brothers in Makkum and by the only remaining factory from the seventeenth century in Delft, De Porceleyne Fles (the “Porcelain Bottle”).31 Their work was not only widely distributed, it also received royal approval: in 1887 King William III gifted his collection of Delftware to De Porceleyne Fles – as material for study, but also in recognition of the efforts made by the factory to bring about the revival of this national product.32 Four years earlier, the king and Queen Emma, accompanied by her sister and brother-in-law, had visited Loudon’s house in The Hague to view his collection there as if it were a pilgrimage.33 This tapped into the “national tradition” that had been created two centuries earlier by William and Mary.34 At the same time, the problem of restitution reared its head: the idea that items of Delft porcelain held in foreign collections or museums should be brought back to the Netherlands because they belonged there. A Dutch correspondent wrote to Havard in 1907 to express his excitement about the fact that “very valuable pieces from abroad had been returned to Holland,” enabling old Dutch collections, which had become dispersed over time, to be reconstituted.35 By around the turn of the century, Delft porcelain had become the property of the nation. This property proved to be valuable, as the prices of antique Delftware rose steeply towards the turn of the century. Havard followed this trend closely, 30 For a clear thematic description of this process of “nationalization of culture,” see Leerssen, National Thought in Europe, pp. 186–203. 31 See Tichelaar, Tichelaar Makkum; Eliëns et al., Delftware: History of a National Product, vol. 3; and Erkel, De Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles Royal Delft. 32 Erkel, De Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles Royal Delft, pp. 24–25; Lambooy, Koninklijk Blauw, pp. 249–51. 33 Aronson and Ariaans, “John F. Loudon’s Collection,” p. 179. 34 Erkelens, “Delffs porcelijn” van koningin Mary II; Lambooy, Koninklijk Blauw. 35 A. Klene to Havard, 1 August 1907 (466), Bibliothèque de Mâcon, Médiathèque, Mâcon, Henry Havard personal archive, no. 262.

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noting on cuttings from the Gazette de l’Hôtel Drouot or on lists from the sale days at the Frederik Muller auction house the “fabulous” prices achieved by Delft vases and other pieces at the auctions in Paris or Amsterdam, far exceeding their estimates.36 Collector friends such as Fétis informed him that pieces which he had illustrated in his Histoire had since sold for large sums.37 With some pride, Havard attributed this to the impact of his work. This impression was confirmed by others; in his Dutch Pottery and Porcelain published in 1904, the Scottish collector William Pitcairn Knowles wrote about the significance of the Histoire: “it also opened the eyes of the dealer to the value and importance of the examples in his possession. The number of collectors increased, and prices rose in unison. But this made the hunting more exciting.”38

A National Codification? The rising prices paid for Delftware – often exotic pieces showing Chinese or Japanese influences or decorated in what were now called “cashmere colours”39 – demonstrated how sought-after they had become. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Loudon’s generation was followed by a second generation of collectors in the Netherlands, born in the 1840s, once again primarily (though not exclusively) in aristocratic circles in The Hague. A. H. H. van der Burgh, W. F. K. baron van Verschuer and Jonkheer Victor de Stuers were the primary exponents of this (Jonkheer C. H. C. A. van Sypesteyn was a generation younger). 40 In Belgium, Baron Evenepoel was the leading light for a new generation of collectors, which among others included Count Maurice de Ramaix, Fernand Maskens and Gustave Vermeersch. At the same time, the existing Delftware collections in Dutch museums were catalogued. The Dutch Museum for History and Art (Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst) – which was founded in The Hague in 36 Cuttings (including 188–90), Bibliothèque de Mâcon, Médiathèque, Mâcon, Henry Havard personal archive, no. 257; and cuttings (156–65), no. 262. 37 Fr. Fétis to Havard, 23 October 1883 (219), Bibliothèque de Mâcon, Médiathèque, Mâcon, Henry Havard personal archive, no. 257. 38 Knowles, Dutch Pottery and Porcelain, pp. xii–xiii; for Knowles’ indebtedness to Havard, see Hudig, Delfter Fayence, p. 16. 39 See, for example, Aronson, Ariaans, and Serra, “Cashmere Palette,” and Aronson and Ariaans, “Inspiration from the Orient.” 40 For the first two: Eliëns, “Mr. A. H. H. van der Burgh”; [Duysters,] Delfts aardewerk uit de collectie van Museum Arnhem.

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1875, and which largely absorbed the Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden (Royal Cabinet of Rarities) before moving to the Rijksmuseum building in Amsterdam in 1885 – showed a greatly increased interest in Delftware under the curatorship of Adriaan Pit. In 1907, H. P. Bremmer published a portfolio containing “97 collotype prints of the most notable originals in this collection.”41 Ida Peelen, who a few years later became the first female director of a state museum, compiled a catalogue in 1917 for the Municipal Museum (Gemeentemuseum) in The Hague, which had acquired the Van der Burgh collection in 1904. 42 The success of the new “old Delft” porcelain, the royal attention, the national appropriation, the rising prices, the growing group of collectors in the Netherlands, the incorporation into museum collections – all these factors prompted the Amsterdam publisher Vivat, led by the Klene brothers, to contact Havard in Paris in the spring of 1907. Almost three decades after the publication of the Histoire de la faïence de Delft, the publisher was proposing a Dutch translation of the book, alongside a limited French reprint: “our intention is to make a Dutch edition of your fine book.”43 It was a patriotic reflex: a Dutch “Havard” would signify the codification of the process of nationalization of Delftware that had taken place since the book’s publication. Although Havard felt honoured by the Vivat proposal, he hesitated. He was now nearly seventy years old. Since his return to Paris in 1879, he had made a career in the Office of Fine Arts. Although he did not obtain the post of director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs,44 he had still been able to devote his entire career to the history of the applied arts. In 1887–90, he had published a four-volume Dictionnaire de l’ameublement et de la décoration (Dictionary of Furniture and Decoration), followed by a series of booklets on Les arts de l’ameublement (The Art of Furniture). In the two little volumes that he had devoted to ceramics in 1891, he had included a short chapter on Delftware in which he told the same story as in the Histoire. 45 But he now felt fatigued. His hesitation also had a deeper foundation. Havard had little enthusiasm for the Amsterdam initiative if its purpose was indeed to produce a 41 Bremmer, Delftsch aardewerk in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam. 42 Peelen, Catalogus der verzameling Nederlandsch aardewerk; on Peelen: Marcus-De Groot, Kunsthistorische vrouwen van weleer, pp. 255–74. 43 A. Klene to Havard, 31 May 1907 (474), Bibliothèque de Mâcon, Médiathèque, Mâcon, Henry Havard personal archive, no. 262. 44 Havard to an unknown recipient, 14 March 1883 (175), Henry Havard fonds, B3. 45 Havard, Les arts de l’ameublement: La céramique, vol. 2, pp. 102–9.

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Dutch-language edition. While the Histoire might have bolstered Dutch self-awareness, its author now had eyes for a different audience: an international one. He wanted to reach readers across Europe, the connoisseurs and the collectors, who – wherever they lived – understood the value of the old Delft pieces and could moreover afford them. Any new publication of the Histoire should therefore be in the language of this international elite – French – and should be designed as a luxury edition. The Klene brothers allowed themselves to be persuaded, telling Havard that they were willing to produce a new French-language edition of the Histoire aimed at the true amateurs of Delftware, readers who had to be sought above all parmi les gens les plus considérables et les grands de la terre (“among the most important and noble people on earth”). 46 The price of their book would be high, but it would also attest to a goût exquis (an “exqisite taste”). 47 There was no longer any talk of producing a more popular edition in the Dutch language.

For the International Community of Collectors And so it was that the work of the former Communard was now aimed at the rich and powerful. The Delft pieces that he had praised as expressions of a free and egalitarian society had now taken on the guise of an exclusive product for the happy few. This irony also led to a reversal of perspective: the target audience was no longer the Dutch nation, but the international collecting community. In principle, that community knew no borders, a fact the publisher was also aware of; the amateurs not only lived dispersed throughout Europe, but also in America. 48 This too marked a change: De Constant Rebecque had written scathingly to an American correspondent in 1887 “that your people have not yet the slightest idea of art and artists, nor what an artist feels.”49 Yet twenty years later an American elite was also being appreciated for their good taste. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was among the institutions that now housed a collection of Delftware.50 46 A. Klene to Havard, 1 August 1907 (469), Bibliothèque de Mâcon, Médiathèque, Mâcon, Henry Havard personal archive, no. 262. 47 A. Klene to Havard, 5 June 1907 and 10 September 1907 (252–53 and 472), Bibliothèque de Mâcon, Médiathèque, Mâcon, Henry Havard personal archive, , no. 262. 48 A. Klene to Havard, 1 August 1907 (469), Bibliothèque de Mâcon, Médiathèque, Mâcon, Henry Havard personal archive, no. 262. 49 J. W. de Constant Rebecque to H. Mattson, 5 November 1887, Nationaal Archief, The Hague, De Constant Rebecque family archive, access no. 2.21.008.01, no. 124 Y. 50 Schaap, Delft Ceramics; Schaap, “Een exemplarische collectie Hollands aardewerk.”

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The plans came to fruition in 1909 with the publication of La céramique hollandaise (Dutch Ceramics), as the second edition of the Histoire de la faïence de Delft was titled. It was indeed a luxury product. Even more richly illustrated than the first edition, the work now extended over two volumes. This expansion was also due in part to the broadening of the theme: in this edition Havard devoted more attention to the precursors of Delftware, described the production of faience in centres such as Haarlem, Rotterdam and Arnhem, devoted a separate chapter to the enigmatic red teapots and concluded with a presentation of Dutch porcelain. In addition, the narrative now extended into the nineteenth century. Like its predecessor, La céramique hollandaise was also a model of erudition. Havard once again called on the help of Dutch archivists to update the second part of the book, which now contained more than a thousand biographical notes. Although his network of French ceramic connoisseurs was now a thing of the past, his network of archivists in the Netherlands had strengthened and renewed itself, with figures such as Johannes Hendrikus Scheffer in Rotterdam, A. J. Servaas van Rooijen in The Hague, F. D. O. Obreen, also in Rotterdam and Samuel Muller Fz. in Utrecht, and Havard gladly made use of their services. This stood in stark contrast to his continued aloofness from the small, heterogenous group of Dutch ceramic connoisseurs that had formed in the meantime. The “practical aesthetic study” (Delftsch aardewerk: Een practisch aesthetische studie) of Delftware published by Bremmer in 1908, for example, was regarded by Havard as a “vulgarizing” work of little value.51 In taking this attitude, he was simultaneously reaffirming his own authority. Arriving at this point had not proved an easy process. The production of the book had been long and arduous, with an endless series of negotiations between a demanding author who unleashed tirade after tirade upon his publisher in Amsterdam, and a publisher that was not really up to the task and whose main feeling when the book finally appeared was perhaps one of relief. La céramique hollandaise was well received and contributed to the fame of its author (who received requests for photographs of himself both from young women and admiring archivists).52 But it was not a commercial success. When Havard suggested producing an English translation, Vivat was not enthusiastic.53 And so it came no further than a French edition; the book was no longer a 51 Havard, La céramique hollandaise, vol. 1, p. 6. 52 G. Buringh Boekhoudt to Havard, 2 February 1909, and E. Wiersum to Havard, 4 March 1909 (238 and 270), Bibliothèque de Mâcon, Médiathèque, Mâcon, Henry Havard personal archive, no. 262. 53 A. Klene to Havard, 30 April 1909 (315), Bibliothèque de Mâcon, Médiathèque, Mâcon, Henry Havard personal archive, no. 262.

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progressive project, as it had been in 1878, but rather an authoritative voice in the closed world of the international collecting community.

A Process of Museumization This change of perspective did not however prevent the continuing dynamic of the nationalization of Delftware. The next step in this process was the bequeathing of private collections to national museums. The great Evenepoel collection was bequeathed to the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels in 1911.54 Five years later the children of Loudon’s brother gifted their uncle’s collection, which had been catalogued by Havard in 1877, to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam,55 where it was given a place in the Gallery of Honour, close to Rembrandt, Vermeer and Jacob van Ruisdael – the great masters of the Golden Age whom Demmin had described a few decades earlier as porseleinschilders (porcelain painters). In the “secular cathedral” that the Rijksmuseum had by now become,56 the Delft blue porcelain was consecrated as the pinnacle of artistic expression by the Dutch people (14.1). And so the process of nationalization became linked to a process of museumization. This drew delighted reactions. Just before its transfer to the Rijksmuseum, the artist Gorinne Smit took her readers on a tour of the Loudon collection as it had been displayed by the collector’s brother in the house in The Hague. She was lavish in her praise of the beauty of “old Delft,” but with a hint of contemporary cultural criticism: in an era of mass compulsion, degeneration and noisy industries, Loudon’s collection and the restful displays in the De Porceleyne Fles factory evoked a world that could serve as an example for the nation.57 Wilhelm Martin, director of the Mauritshuis Museum and a professor at Leiden University, welcomed the gift as “an inestimable service to art and the fatherland.” Delftware had become something for the many: no longer the exclusive preserve of the aristocracy, but a glorious asset that belonged to the entire nation. The news that the collection was to be exhibited in the Rijksmuseum was received by Martin as “the joyful news of the assured preservation [of the collection] for the Dutch nation.”58 54 See Helbig, Faïences hollandaises. 55 Lunsingh Scheurleer, “De collectie John F. Loudon”; Hoop Scheffer, “Het Rijksmuseum en zijn begunstigers,” pp. 94–95; Dam, “De collectie John F. Loudon”; and Drieënhuizen, “Koloniale collecties, Nederlands aanzien,” pp. 99–158. 56 Leeuwen, “Het Rijksmuseum, een wereldlijke kathedraal.” 57 Smit, “De collectie Loudon.” 58 Martin, “De Verzameling Loudon.”

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Fig. 14.1 Bust of King-Stadtholder William III (attributed to Lambertus van Eenhoorn, c.1700). A showpiece from Loudon’s bequest, formerly the property of Queen Sophia. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Havard died in 1921 but was not forgotten. Martin expressed his great appreciation for the catalogue that “the famous connoisseur of Delftware” had compiled earlier. Smit, for her part, continued to build her narrative about the development of Delftware on the paradigm of decay and degeneration that had been developed in the Histoire de la faïence de Delft. Havard himself, meanwhile, had become a prolific writer, bringing together more and more material in a steadily growing stream of studies, though without the zeal and inspiration of his earlier work. He had become a conservative who kept himself well apart from the modernist debates that spread through the world of art after 1900, instead choosing the “good old days,” the bon vieux temps.59 But his contribution to the genesis of the national product that Delftware became in the three-quarters of a century between 1850 and 1920 was considerable. The Communard with the patience of a Benedictine could justifiably lay claim to the title of pioneer.60 59 Froissart Pezone, “Havard, Henry.” 60 For the comparison with a Benedictine, see the prospectus of La céramique hollandaise, Bibliothèque de Mâcon, Médiathèque, Mâcon, Henry Havard personal archive, no. 261. I owe a debt of thanks for the help I received with the research for this chapter from Marieke de Baerdemaeker, Josette Gonzalves, Timo van Havere, Franck Metrot and Amandine Pacaut.

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References Archival Sources Archives Municipales, Mâcon. Henry Havard fonds. B1–8 and unnumbered dossiers. Bibliothèque de Mâcon, Médiathèque, Mâcon. Henry Havard personal archive. Nos. 255, 257–62 and 300. Nationaal Archief, The Hague. De Constant Rebecque Family Archive. Access no. 2.21.008.01, nos. 124 B, 124 V, 124 Y and 126 CC.

Published Sources Andringa, Kim. “L’Imaginaire des Pays-Bas dans la littérature française du XIXe siècle.” PhD diss., Université Paris IV, 2007. Aronson, Robert D., and Celine Ariaans. “Collecting Delftware in the Nineteenth Century.” In Below the Glaze, edited by Robert D. Aronson, Celine Ariaans and Sacha Serra, vol. 2, pp. 166–71. Amsterdam: Aronson Antiquairs, 2017–20. Aronson, Robert D., and Celine Ariaans. “Henry Havard’s Studies on Delftware.” In Below the Glaze, edited by Robert D. Aronson, Celine Ariaans and Sacha Serra, vol. 2, pp. 172–75. Amsterdam: Aronson Antiquairs, 2017–20. Aronson, Robert D., and Celine Ariaans. “Inspiration from the Orient.” In Below the Glaze, edited by Robert D. Aronson, Celine Ariaans and Sacha Serra, vol. 2, pp. 136–39. Amsterdam: Aronson Antiquairs, 2017–20. Aronson, Robert D., and Celine Ariaans. “John F. Loudon’s Collection.” In Below the Glaze, edited by Robert D. Aronson, Celine Ariaans and Sacha Serra, vol. 2, pp. 176–81. Amsterdam: Aronson Antiquairs, 2017–20. Aronson, Robert D., Celine Ariaans and Sacha Serra. “The Cashmere Palette.” In Below the Glaze, edited by Robert D. Aronson, Celine Ariaans and Sacha Serra, vol. 1, pp. 82–86. Amsterdam: Aronson Antiquairs, 2017–20. Aronson, Robert D., Celine Ariaans and Sacha Serra. “The Nijstad Collection.” In Below the Glaze, edited by Robert D. Aronson, Celine Ariaans and Sacha Serra, vol. 1, pp. 126–31. Amsterdam: Aronson Antiquairs, 2017–20. Bremmer, H. P. Delftsch aardewerk: Een practisch aesthetische studie. Amsterdam: W. Versluys, 1908. Bremmer, H. P. Delftsch aardewerk in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam: 97 lichtdrukken naar de merkwaardigste origineelen in deze verzameling. Amsterdam: W. Versluys, 1907. Brink, Jan ten. Review of La Hollande pittoresque: Les frontières menacées by Henry Havard. Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen 1, no. 115 (1876): pp. 701–17.

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Carasso, Dedalo. “Een nieuw beeld: Duitse en Franse denkers over de zeventiendeeeuwse Nederlandse schilderkunst, 1775–1860.” In De Gouden Eeuw in perspectief: Het beeld van de Nederlandse zeventiende-eeuwse schilderkunst in later tijd, edited by Frans Grijzenhout and Henk van Veen, pp. 161–92. Nijmegen: SUN, 1992. Craandijk, Jacobus. Review of De bedreigde grenzen, by Henry Havard. De Gids 1, no. 41 (1877): pp. 175–86. Dam, Jan-Daniel van. “De collectie John F. Loudon, een bijzondere schenking uit 1916.” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 40, no. 3 (1992): pp. 232–39. Dam, Jan-Daniel van. “Delfts aardewerk: Een proeve tot her-ijking.” PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2004. Dam, Jan-Daniel van. “Van onbekend en onbemind tot zeer gezocht en peperduur: Delftse faïence in de negentiende eeuw.” Vormen uit Vuur, no. 145 (1992): pp. 4–13. Drieënhuizen, Caroline. “Koloniale collecties, Nederlands aanzien: De Europese elite van Nederlands-Indië belicht door haar verzamelingen, 1811–1957.” PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2012. [Duysters, Kristin]. “Delfts aardewerk uit de collectie van Museum Arnhem: De verzameling van W. F. K. baron van Verschuer.” Special issue, Vormen uit Vuur, no. 229 (2015). Eliëns, Titus M. “Mr. A. H. H. van der Burgh: Een negentiende-eeuwse verzamelaar.” In Delfts aardewerk: Geschiedenis van een nationaal product, edited by Marion van Aken-Fehmers et al., vol. 1, pp. 9–11. Zwolle: Waanders, 1999. Eliëns, Titus M., et al. De Porceleyne Fles. Vol. 3 of History of a National Product. Zwolle: Waanders, 2003. Erkel, Jessica Wallien van. De Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles Royal Delft. Amsterdam: Bekking & Blitz, 2013. Erkelens, A. M. L. E. “Delffs Porcelijn” van koningin Mary II: Ceramiek op Het Loo uit de tijd van Willem III en Mary II. Zwolle: Waanders, 1996. Froissart Pezone, Rossella. “Havard, Henry.” In Dictionnaire critique des historiens de l’art actifs en France de la Révolution à la Première Guerre mondiale, edited by Philippe Sénéchal and Claire Barbillon [2008], Accessed 19 June 2020. https:// www.inha.fr/fr/ressources/publications/publications-numeriques/dictionnairecritique-des-historiens-de-l-art/havard-henry.html. Grever, Maria. Onontkoombaar verleden: Reflecties op een veranderende historische cultuur. Hilversum: Verloren, 2020. Grever, Maria. “Visualisering en collectieve herinneringen.” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 117, no. 2 (2004): pp. 207–29. Groeneweg, Irene, Steven Braat et al. “Oosters porselein en Delfts aardewerk in Museum Paul Tétar van Elven te Delft.” Mededelingenblad Nederlandse Vereniging van Vrienden van de Ceramiek 1, no. 129 (1988): pp. 1–24.

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Havard, Henry. Dictionnaire de l’ameublement et de la décoration, depuis le XIIIe siècle jusqu’à nos jours. 4 vols. Paris: A. Quantin, 1887–90. Havard, Henry. Histoire de la faïence de Delft. Paris: E. Plon, 1878. Havard, Henry. Histoire de la peinture hollandaise. Paris: A. Quantin, 1881. Havard, Henry. La céramique hollandaise: Histoire des faïences de Delft, Haarlem, Rotterdam, Arnhem, Utrecht etc. et des porcelaines de Weesp, Loosdrecht, Amsterdam et La Haye. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Vivat, 1909. Havard, Henry. La Hollande pittoresque: Le coeur du pays; Voyage dans la Hollande méridionale, la Zélande et le Brabant. Paris: E. Plon , 1878. Havard, Henry. La Hollande pittoresque: Les frontières menacées; Voyage dans les provinces de Frise, Groningue, Drenthe, Overyssel, Gueldre et Limbourg. Paris: E. Plon, 1876. Havard, Henry. La Hollande pittoresque: Voyage aux villes mortes du Zuiderzée. Paris: E. Plon, 1874. Havard, Henry. L’Art à travers les mœurs. Paris: G. Decaux & A. Quantin, 1882. Havard, Henry. L’Art et les artistes hollandais. 4 vols. Paris: A. Quantin, 1879–81. Havard, Henry. Les arts de l’ameublement: La céramique. 2 vols. Paris: Charles Delagrave, n.d. Havard, Henry. Les merveilles de l’art hollandais exposées à Amsterdam en 1872. Arnhem: D. A. Thieme, 1873. Havard, Henry. Objets d’art et de curiosité tirés des grandes collections hollandaises: Orfèvrerie, ivoires, faïences, émaux, &c. exposés à Amsterdam en 1873. Haarlem: J. M. Schalekamp, 1873. Heijbroek, Jan Frederik. “Adriaan Pit, directeur van het Nederlandsch Museum: Een vergeten periode uit de geschiedenis van het Rijksmuseum.” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 4, no. 33 (1985): pp. 233–65. Helbig, Jean. Faïences hollandaises XVIIe–XVIIIe–début XIXe s. 2 vols. Brussels: Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, [1971]. Hoop Scheffer, D. de. “Het Rijksmuseum en zijn begunstigers.” In “Het Rijksmuseum 1808– 1958.” Special issue, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 3–4, no. 6 (1958): pp. 83–100. Hoftijzer, Paul Gerardus. Kleinood aan een Delftse gracht: Museum Paul Tétar van Elven. Delft: W. D. Meinema, 2004. Hudig, Ferrand W. Delfter Fayence: Ein Handbuch für Sammler und Liebhaber. Bibliothek für Kunst- und Antiquitäten-Sammler 34. Berlin: Richard Carl Schmidt, 1929. Jong, A. A. M. de. De dirigenten van de herinnering: Musealisering en nationalisering van de volkscultuur in Nederland 1815–1940. Memoria. Nijmegen: SUN, 2001. Knowles, William Pitcairn. Dutch Pottery and Porcelain. Batsford’s Collector’s Library. London: B. T. Batsford, [1904].

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Part IV Historicity and Narrative

15 Travelling Westwards Finding Europe in the Irish Middle Ages Ann Dooley Abstract Medieval Irish bardic verse is a frustratingly esoteric and inward-looking genre, deeply self-referential in its own hidebound traditions exclusive to native Irish poetics and politics. This chapter attempts to pry open one example of the genre to reveal a European core, and a mediation of Irish and European understandings of “gaisgeadh/prowess.” Keywords: Irish bardic poetry; Dublin University; Connacht kings and lords; translatio studii

It is often claimed that Ireland lies quite outside the historical experience of the European Middle Ages. In this view, her marginal status has been evident since the Roman period or even before, an outlier even in the Celtic world of prehistory.1 More recent historiographical trends have re-established somewhat a Roman prof ile for Ireland in terms of trade contact and a related Roman literacy that predates the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century.2 The links with the Latin West of the early Middle Ages through the mediation of Christian literacy and its effect on law, social custom and literature is now a scholarly orthodoxy and few would have the temerity to question it. The later medieval period and the “two nations” split after the English invasion of Ireland in the late twelfth century seems to find a Gaelic Ireland at a political disadvantage: pushed to the margins as it was, with little understanding or sympathy for its divergent social and cultural 1 For the most recent discussions of the continental Celts and the European West Atlantic world, see Cunliffe and Koch, Celtic from the West. 2 See Johnston, Literacy and Identity, passim.

Brolsma et al. Networks, Narratives and Nations. Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022. doi: 10.5117/9789463720755_ch15

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underpinnings, it is harder to discern how its native structures link to a wider European world – outside of the very obvious universalizing relations maintained by the network of the Church.3 I wish to examine the faint outlines of one such link here. My focus is on a fragment of a bardic praise poem which Lambert McKenna published in his anthology Aithdioghluim Dána from the duanaire or poem-book embedded in the manuscript called the Yellow Book of Lecan. 4 McKenna cautiously suggested an identification for the named subject of the eulogy as Toirrdhealbhach Ó Conchobhair, one of the most powerful kings of his dynasty to rule Connacht and to be accorded the title of High King of Ireland in the Irish Middle Ages. He died in 1156 and so this identification would make the poem one of the earliest in the surviving medieval classical bardic tradition.5 The piece, of which nine quatrains remain, is in correct deibidhe metre, a favourite form, because marginally less taxing, of the Irish court poets of the later Middle Ages; this then would make of the piece a fairly precocious example of good classical style and valuable in itself for this reason. McKenna based his identification on quatrain 8ab, “Ó Conchobhair chláir Teamhrach/ dar ainm ar tús Toirrdhealbhach,” and translated it as “Ó Conchobhair of the plain of Tara, the first called Toirrdhealbhach.” Here “Ó Conchobhair” is taken as the Irish honorific title: he is head (ceann fine) of his line and more, a rightful ruler of Tara, and thus in the projection of the poet, paramount king of Ireland; as Toirrdhealbhach could be viewed historically as the dominant ruler of his time in Ireland, this would indeed make the twelfth-century king the only logical subject. I would strongly suggest that there are other ways to read this line which would open up the dating of the fragment to any point up to 1473, the date of the YBL duanaire. It is almost certainly an instance of the titular use of the cognomen Ó Conchobhair, as “the O’Connor.” This would offer an understanding of the lines as containing a personal name with the title, “chief of the name” or less likely, the surname Ó Conchabhair.6 McKenna’s 3 The standard reference for the history of later Gaelic medieval Ireland is Cosgrove, New History of Ireland, vol. 2, chap. 17, pp. 526–90. 4 McKenna, Aithdioghluim Dána (hereafter AD), p. 2; at col. 214 in the original MS of the Yellow Book of Lecan (hereafter YBL), for a description of which see Ó Riain, manuscript description of YBL. 5 The best brief guide to this enormous body of literary material is still Osborn Bergin’s lecture to the National Literary Society in 1912: Bergin, “Bardic Poetry.” 6 See the discussion in McManus, “Surnames and Scions,” pp. 117–43. Simms, From Kings to Warlords, pp. 32–35, discusses the use of surname as title and states that it was already in use by the 1100s.

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problem is the translation of ar tús, “first”: in modern Irish this has indeed been restricted to a temporal usage, but it also has a positional usage. The sense of the lines is moving in the direction of designating a full signature and might then be translated: “An O’Connor whose first name is Turlough is (now) an O’Connor of the plain of Tara.” So, the Toirrdealbach in question could also be the next O’Connor lord of the name who died in 1345 as well as a few other even later Toirrdhalbachs. However, the likelihood of reference to a surname is remote. Even though the O’Connors had been among the first to use surnames in Ireland and even though the process of creating them was still continuing as late as the first half of the fourteenth century, the awkward circumlocution for a first name and surname would most likely not occur for a family as long adopting the usage as the O’Connors. Simms sees a clear demarcation in the use of the surname as lord’s title and an abandonment of the ríg-terms associated with kingship at the beginning of the fifteenth century.7 That process is complicated by the special case and final history of the Ui Chonchobhair kingship, as we shall see below. The poet Tuathal Ó hUiginn provides the best context for the awkward circumlocution in our poem. In a complaint poem to a Mac Diarmata lord he says that he took from him the title of ollamh (master poet) and seriously altered his address by substituting for his former baptismal name of Tuathal his proud title of ollamh. In the hunt for the best candidate, one can take seriously three potential subjects: first is the Toirrdealbach, whose royal career is set in the first half of the fourteenth century (1317–18, 1324–29, 1343–45); second is the Toirrdealbach, lord of the name and grandson of the first figure, whose career spans the last quarter of the fourteenth century and the first quarter of the fifteenth (1384–1406). The last figure is Toirrdealbach Ruaid, co-king of Connacht from 1385 who died in 1426.8 Clearly, whichever of the O’Connor lords is recipient of our poem, he was deemed a worthy subject of a bardic eulogy of obvious elegance and refinement. The annals give us plenty of information about both figures but, for anyone who knows the later medieval fortunes of the O’Connors, their biographies make for depressing reading: a series of destructive family rivalries from which the strongest men emerge victorious but bloody-handed and with ordinary civil society much impoverished as a result. A number of factors feed into this long-term historic pattern of the later medieval West: the presence of strong neighbouring lords who switch sides from allies to foes with bewildering frequency, the Uí Ceallaigh of Uí Mhaine in the south; the two main Uí Briuin families, Uí Raighillig and Uí Ruairc, 7 Simms, From Kings to Warlords, pp. 65–66. I would rather date it some fifty years earlier. 8 All information below for the period is drawn from Freeman, Annals of Connacht (hereafter AC).

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to the northeast; and the two branches of the Burkes in Galway. Of key importance also is the mediatory role of Mac Dhiarmada of Moylurg – asserted since the beginning of the fourteenth century – in the inauguration on the mound of Carnfree of the new Connacht king. This official function still held its sway as a powerful sanction, so that any upstart candidate could ill afford to make enemies of these lords of Lough Cé. The arrival of Richard II in Ireland in 1394–95 and 1399, though it only lightly affected Connacht, marks in my opinion the real beginning of the English reconquest of Ireland; the lengthy visit made all the Irish lords apprehensive of the diminished value of the older arrangements with the crown and created an increasing tension about written documents, property rights and the law.9 This figured strongly with respect to the special status of the kingdom of Connacht, as the sole area where the title of king had been ratified by English royal decree in 1172. Internally, the most significant event was the final division in 1384, on the death of Ruaidri, son of Toirrdealbach, of the kingship of Connacht when the nomenclature, Ó Concobhair Donn and Ó Conchobair Ruaid, was first utilized to distinguish the main branches and rivals of the Connacht royal line. From that time on, except for the reign of Cathal (1407, 1426–39), the kingship of Connacht effectively ceased to exist. The first Toirrdealbach’s career emerges in the shadow of the disastrous Bruce campaign in Ireland and of the battle of Athenry in which his brother Féilim, king of Connacht, was killed (1316–17). He is quickly deposed in 1318 by Cathal, son of Domhnall, of the north Connacht Uí Choncobhair Cairbre, who is desperate to assert his claim to kingship before his branch of the family is shut out of royal contention forever.10 The subsequent power see-saw between the two kings is not helped by uneasy relations with Mac Diarmada and still less by the belligerent presence of Edmund son of William Burke, head of the Burke family in Connacht. Toirrdealbach is restored to the kingship in 1324 having defeated and killed his rival Cathal.11 By 1338, as the annals note, he had achieved ascendancy in Connacht over Burke. By 1342, hostility between Toirrdealbach and Mac Diarmada flares again and gives rise to a memorable line in sarcastic rejoinder recorded by the annalist: the conflict going against Toirrdealbach, his captor struck him on the shoulder with a switch as he was being confined in the church of Elphin and said, “At cru a cullaig!” (to your 9 See Lydon, “Richard II’s Expeditions to Ireland.” 10 His father Domhnall was tánist of Connacht before he was killed in 1309. 11 The Annals of Connacht give Cathal’s genealogy back to Toirrdealbach Mór as if to note the importance of the fact that the rights to kingship of a main branch of the royal line going back to this last great king of Ireland are now extinguished.

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sty, you hog); whereupon Toirrdealbach replied, “narab ferr dom mucaide!” (Bad luck to my swinekeeper).12 The result of this is the second deposition of Toirrdealbach and the giving of the kingship to the Clann Muirceartaigh branch of the Uí Conchobair. Restored to kingship yet again after patching up his differences with Mac Diarmada, he dies in 1345. There is an impressive but qualified rhetorical flourish to his annals obituary: he is described as a good candidate for the kingship of Ireland had God willed it, and his death is compared to that of the legendary Niall Noíngiallach. At the other end of the century are our next possible subjects: the first is a grandson of Toirrdealbach above. He succeeds his uncle Ruaidhrí who died of the plague in 1384. Equally, however, if not a more compelling candidate for the poem, is his arch-rival and second cousin, Toirrdealbeach, son of Aodh son of Féilim. By this date, as noted above, Connacht has been hopelessly split between the two septs of the main line, and these two both claimed:13 “Two kings were then made […]: Toirrdelbach Ruaid son of Aed son of ­Feidlim was installed by Mac Diarmata, the Clann Murtagh and the rest of the Connacht chieftains, that is, the Sil Murray; and Toirrdelbach Oc son Aed son of Toirrdelbach was installed by O Cellaig, [the] Clanrickard [Burkes], Domnall son of Muircertach O Concobhair and the Clann Donnchada.”

In the following few years, Toirrdealbach Ruaid and his supporters move against the allies of their rivals, the Uí Chellaig, the Clanrickard Burkes and the Clann Donnchada, but the dual-kingship arrangement holds despite the persistent aggression of Toirrdelbach Ruaid. In 1387 Toirrdelbach Ruaid moves directly against his rivals and his supporters, the Clann Donnchada of Tirerrill, Sligo, and a general civil war in Connacht ensues. In 1392 Toirrdealbach Óc (Ó Conbhobair Donn) raids the Uí Cheallaigh who are supported this time by Toirrdelbach Ruaid. In 1398 a raid, with Thomas Burke (“Lord of the Foreigners of Connacht”), was particularly destructive. Again, in 1398, a second attack, with Mac Diarmada, on Clann Donnchada results in a reversal and leads to Toirrdealbach Ruaid’s wounding. 12 AC, 1342. 13 “Da Ri do denam ina inat iar sin .i. Toirrdelbach Ruad mac Aeda meic Fedlimid do rigad do Mac Diarmata 7 do Clainn Muircertaig Muimnech 7 do taisechaib Connacht archena .i. dotaisechaib Sila Muredaig, ocus Toirrdelbach Occ mac Aeda meic Toirrdelbaig do rigad d’O Ceallaig 7 do Clann Ricairt 7 do Domnaill mac Muircertaig h. O Concobair 7 do Clann Dondchada.” AC, 1384.2. There is a still-valid sense of the old Gaelic arrangement of alternating kingship between the segments of a dynasty which can be seen operating all through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and supported by Mac Diarmada.

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The other Toirrdealbach Óc (Ó Conchobair Donn) is still active, moving against Ó Ceallaigh in 1403 and resisting Mac Diarmada’s attempts to secure his traditional dues of lordship in Airtech in 1405. He dies in 1406 at the hands of Cathal Dub, son of his rival, Toirrdealbach Ruaid. There is no note of poetic glorif ication for his death notice in the annals, merely a comparison with other noted members of the dynasty who had died in the same spot before him. Meanwhile, a struggle continues over control of the Ó Conchobair Donn castle of Roscommon; challenges come in 1411 and 1413 and the bawn of the castle is broken up by Ó Conchobhair Ruaid. This is the last raid carried out by Toirrdelbach Ruaid himself. He dies of old age in 1425 and is lauded by the annalist as “the Cú Chulainn of his time,” with the wry observation that no one thought he would die in his bed. Each of these three figures are likely candidates for a eulogy. The diff iculty of deciding which one f its is compounded by the fact that their careers span a relatively lengthy period. On the face of it, the obvious choice for composer would have to be Tuathal Ó hUiginn, from the placement of the poem in one of YBL’s constituent manuscripts, the poem-book (duanaire).14 It fills cols. 128–216 of the great composite manuscript and is essentially an Ó hUiginn family poem-book comprising collections from three contemporary brothers: the eldest, Cormac Ruadh, represented by three religious poems; Tadhg, who wrote an elegy for this brother, by fourteen; and Tuathal, by twelve. Our poem is found unattributed on col. 214 and at nine quatrains is unusually short for a bardic eulogy of the period.15 Tuathal himself succeeded Tadg Óg briefly as an ollamh dána (official poet) between 1448 and 1450; both are of the family branch settled in Kilcloney near Tuam.16 Tuathal’s poems in the collection are found on cols. 192, 194 and 195, sandwiched between Tadg Og and Cormac Ruadh’s compositions (his contributions begin on col. 209). Col. 212 resumes Tuathal’s compositions with a poem to Brian Ballach mac Aedha Ó Conchobair (d.1417), brother of Toirrdealbach Ruadh.17 All other things being equal, the poem would seem to be a natural fit for Tuathal, even if unascribed in the collection. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, sporadic surviving poems to O’Connor lords are being composed by Tadg Ó hUiginn, Tuathal Ó hUiginn 14 For a new description of the fascicule, see Ó Riain, manuscript description of YBL. 15 Ó Riain, however, considers that it is complete. 16 Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn, Bardic Poems (hereafter TD), ed. Knott, vol. 1, p. xxii, and vol. 2, p. 12, note on quatrain 6. 17 McKenna, Dioghluim Dana (hereafter DD), 82; AD, 7.

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and Maelsechnaill na n-úrscél Ó hUiginn ( fl. 1440), among others.18 The official poet (ollamh dána) of the Uí Conchobair seems, by long-established custom, to be of the family of Ó Domhnalláin since the early thirteenth century.19 To further delimit the possible author and his writing milieu, its rhyming word patterns may show who else, working in this deibidhe metre, is close to our poem’s stylistic range. The closest matches are with Tuathal Ó hUiginn and Gofraid Fionn Ó Dálaigh. Other vocabulary features help to limit the ascription within a general cultural context. For example, gaisged: in the saga literature this is normally the word for the set of weaponry and armour assumed to be the normal accoutrements of a mature warrior. Hence terms like gaibid gaisced of a youth about to take up arms reoccur as in Cú Chulainn’s taking up arms in the “Boyhood Deeds” segment of the Táin. The secondary sense is the abstract “valour, skill at arms.” Later, it also assumes the medieval meaning grádha gaisgidh, “order of chivalry,” of the code of medieval romance knighthood as in, for example, the apologue of a poem of Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn: gaiscedach means one bearing arms.20 In the c/d lines of quatrain 3 the word gasrad occurs, meaning young armed warriors, or more generally, soldiers. It too is particularly common in the medieval translation works and alliteration with grég- as the f irst element is common. I have no evidence of it compounded with gaoidhil as here. Gasrad is common enough in Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh.21 In matters of diction and style there is much to associate this poem with the southern poet Gofraidh Fionn (d.1387) and, if so, the first Toirrdealbach is appropriate as a subject, while the other two would barely fit within his 18 There is an unattributed elegy in Royal Irish Academy (RIA) 23 D 4, 125, for Toirrdelbach Óc (O’Connor Donn), DD, 86, and one to Brian Ó Conchobhair Cairbre (d.1440) from Maelsheachlainn na n-Úirsgeal Ó hUiginn, DD, 88. The Ó Clumhain family also supplied poems. 19 The Western Annals’ first mention of this poetic family is at 1227, for a Cú Mara killed in captivity by Ruaidri mac Duinn Sléibe i ndigail a athar 7 se crosda. This act was part of the civil war activities between Aedh, son of Cathal Croibhdearg, and the sons of Ruaidhri Ó Conchobhair. Presumably, the annalist is critical of the killing of either Donn Sléibhe Ó Gadhra or Cú Mara because they had taken a crusade vow. Flann Óg ollam dana h. Conchobair (d.1342); Sean (d.1368); Maelsechlainn degfer dana do ecc don filum (d.1375); Flann Oc mac Sean Ui Domhnallain, ollam dana Sil Muiredaig (d.1404); Cormac ollam Sil Muiredaig re dan (d.1436). Maelsechlainn mac Flainn of this family (d.1461). Tuathal himself claims elsewhere that he has been appointed ollamh (official poet) to Mac Diarmata, AD, 32, passim. 20 TD, 1, quatrain 33. 21 DD, pp. 85, 19, 99 and 35; from here it is excerpted in Bergin and Knott, Irish Grammatical Tracts, Declension, excerpt 534.

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career. Indeed, given the number of patrons throughout Ireland that he frequented, the omission of any poem for an O’Connor lord stands out as a curious exception. It is possible that he could have stepped briefly into a relative patronage vacuum and provided this poem.22 However, the bulk of the evidence so far, particularly the manuscript evidence and textual similarities, favour ascription to Tuathal and the congruence with Gofraidh Fionn’s tricks of style may come from actual poetic samples acquired from the master poet Gofraidh’s circle and passed on to the next generation. In particular, the fact that Tuathal wrote his only other O’Connor poem to a brother of Toirrdealbach Ruadh, first to become Ó Conchobhair Rua, and the fact that the YBL duanaire is an Ó hUiginn product, points to Tuathal Ó hUiginn as our probable author. Tuathal’s secular poems in YBL run from cols. 199, 197, 204, 202, 201, 206, 212; his only poem to an O’Connor occurs on col. 212. It is with the larger topos of translatio studii/imperii (transfer of learning/ government) that one might come closer to a frame of reference for Gofraidh and his time. The topos here follows the classic lines – superior skill in arms and/or learning moves from east to west: a somewhat foreshortened account, as only the last stages are rehearsed, from France, to London, to Ireland. The two are united by Chrétien de Troyes in the opening of his romance Cligés, written around 1176: Ce nos ont nostr livre apris Quán Grece ot de la chevalerie Le premier los et de clergie. Puis vint chevalerie a Rome Et de clergie la some, Qui or est an France venue. Dex doint quéle i soit maintenue et que li leus li abelise Tant que ja mes de france n’isse L’enors qui s’i est arestee. Dex l’avoit as altres prestee: Car des Grezois ne de Romains Ne dit an mes ne plus ne mains, D’ax est la parole remese Et estainte la vive brese.

Our books have taught us That Greece was pre-eminent in chivalry And in learning. Then chivalry passed to Rome Along with highest learning. Now the first rank has passed to France. God grant it remain there And find such a pleasant home That the honour prevailing now will never leave France. God had given it on loan to the others; No one speaks now Of Greeks or of Romans; They have been forgotten And their live coals are extinguished.23

22 Dooley, “Poetic Self-fashioning.” 23 Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, 28–42, p. 2, translation my own.

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The pre-eminence of Paris particularly in matters of learning, a topic so beloved of the masters of Paris through the Middle Ages, was not left unchallenged by their English counterparts. An English Dominican, Hugh Ripelin of Strasbourg, asserts his Germanic perspective by stating the arrival of learning to England and of imperium (government) to Germany.24 The theme of proud chauvinism continues in England even into the seventeenth century..25 At the beginning of the fourteenth century an Irish master at the Sorbonne, Thomas Hibernicus, produced his personal spin on the movement of learning and imperium. He repeats the common topos of the founding role of the martyr Dionysius bringing with him from Greece the two flowers of military skill and philosophy. According to him the School of Paris had four founders: Hrabanus Maurus, Claudius of Turin, Alcuin and John Scotus Eriugena. Thus, for the Irishman the matter of Ireland is inextricably linked with the theme of translatio studii et imperii. Not only this, but Thomas also proposes that the transfer of learning to Oxford was, in his own time, further developed to take in the transfer of learning to Ireland. According to Merlin, in his time this learning travelled to Ireland, to Vadasaxa so that the glory of military victory and philosophy could coincide: “Et, ut ait secundum uaticinium Merlini, uigebant studia ad Vadaboum in Anglia, tempore suo ad partes Hyberniae transitura ad Vadasaxa […] Miliciae enim uictoria et philosophiae gloria quasi simul concurrunt.”26 Whatever his reason for making the flourishing of learning in Britain and Ireland dependent on a prophecy of Merlin, the most intriguing aspect of this statement is the way in which Thomas continues to promote Irish connections to learning. What is this Irish location Vadasaxa and what is the tempore suo of this translatio? Jeaneau accepts a suggestion that Vadasaxum might be Stamford, based on the rough equivalent of saxa/stam for stan. So this would be a very contemporary reference to the attempt by some masters of Oxford to set up a new University at Stamford in the years 1333–35, just a few years before Thomas’s own death, which Jeaneau would place at some time before 1338. From the perspective of Thomas’s Irish affinities and his specific placing in Ireland, Stamford is not, however, entirely satisfactory as a solution. I suggest that it is Dublin which Thomas has in mind. Serious efforts to set 24 Hugh of Strasbourg, Compendium theologicae ueritatis, 2, cap. 10, in Borgnet, Sancti Alberti Magni opera, pp. 47–48, quoted in Jeauneau, Translatio Studii, pp. 37–38. All quotations from Thomas of Ireland are from Jeaneau’s edition in the work. 25 Jeaneau, Translatio Studii, passim. 26 Jeaneau, Translatio Studii, p. 38.

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up a University in Dublin began in 1312. Archbishop John Lech petitioned the pope for permission to establish a University in Dublin and this was granted in 1312. Under Alexander Bicknor, the next archbishop, the scheme advanced and regulations modelled on Oxford were set up with actual appointments made in 1320. But the scheme was still-born and did not develop much further. Still, for an Anglo-Irishman like Thomas a possible university in Dublin was probably one to which he would have wished to lend his support. Is Dublin that Vadasaxa? It is possible that there is an etymological conjecture underlying the Latin name – a misunderstanding of Cliath for Liac/cloch, “stone”? A more likely reference is to the large stones in its harbour, a prominent structural feature of its medieval port, and this may be what Thomas had in mind.27 These stones entered also into Welsh literary lore in the Welsh Mabinogion story of Branwen. 28 When the Welsh king Bran crosses to invade Ireland, he learns of the dangers attached to the port of Dublin – the lodestones in the harbour draw ships under the water. The topos of translatio imperii/studii might have become current in Ireland at this time to be picked up by Gaelic poets subsequently. Tuathal’s poems are among the first to show concern for English/Irish issues centring around the idea of the written charter as false legitimator of English land-grabbing in Ireland. His advice to his O’Reilly patron, for example, is that he should rely on his own gaisgeadh instead (quatrain 33); his weapons are his real charter.29 In that poem his take on the translatio imperii/origin myth is the old established one of Irish pseudo-historical record: the journey westwards of the children of Gaoidheal Glas from Greece to Spain to Ireland (quatrains 23–25). Gofraidh Fionn also works the traditional Irish east/west passage of the Gaoidhil. But he also seizes on fresh and current occasions to work with east/west circuits between London, France and Ireland in his great poem to the 3rd Earl of Desmond 1356, Mór ár bfearg riut a rí Saxan (We Are Very Angry with You Saxon King). In the end it is impossible and perhaps unnecessary to decide between Tuathal and Gofraidh as author. Gofraidh’s work entered the corpus of teaching materials for the schools of poetry and may have been used in the Ó hUiginn school in Kilcloney, of which Tuathal was a part. In any case, from Gofraidh’s time on, questions of identity, of who are the Éireannaigh (the Irish), and cultural connections with a wider European world have been placed into 27 See Clarke, “Dublin c.840–c.1540,” passim. 28 Thomson, Branwen uerch Lyr. 29 AD, 30, 20–23 and 31–36.

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circulation. If the western poet Tuathal chooses to reinterpret these in a more conventional Gaelic way, may we not say that a north/south culturalresources divide is already marking its place in bardic tradition? That divide will give us the extraordinary early seventeenth-century compendium, Iomarbhadh na Bhfiled (The Quarrel of the Poets), the most spectacular of poetic quarrels between north and south on their understandings of Gaelic identity, a work about which Joep Leerssen wrote so eloquently, and that marked the end of the bardic tradition in Ireland. 1 A-noir ghabhas an gaisgeadh, ní anann sé ag síoraisdear, don roghaisgeadh – ní rian gar – siar thomhaisdear an talamh. 2 Fada a-tá ó thír do thír ag imtheacht ar gach n-airdrígh; ar chuairt anas ag gach fhior fa chuairt ghabhas an gaisgiodh. 3 Do-ní a Lunnainn na learg dte cuairt ar bhágbháil na Fraingce do bhaoi i Saghsanaibh re seal do bhaoi ar gasradhaibh Gaoidheal. 4 An gaisgeadh – ní gníomh folaigh – ar mbeith seal i Sacsonaibh do ionnsuidh siar eing a heing ón fhiadh fhionnsain go hÉrinn. 5 Do-chuala ar chan Bricne, tháinigh d’éis gach imirce ar clár fhonnmhuige na n-Art do ghrádh chomhnuidhe Chonnacht. 6 Gan iarraidh nír fhágaibh sin Dob é iomthús an ghaisghidh, Port ríogh deiseall an domhain Co shíol chneisseang ĺ Chonchobhair. 7 Tug annsacht dob oircheas dó ar dtoigheacht a céin chuco seach Éireannchaibh don fhine tre éinfhearchoin d’áiridhe.

From the East comes Gallantry: he is ever wandering: the earth is traversed by him as he journeys westward – a long course! For long he has been travelling, visiting every king: Gallantry bides for a spell with each hero who welcomes him. After leaving France, he visited London of the pleasant hills, he stayed among the Saxons for a time, and then came to the heroes of the Gaoidhil. Gallantry, as we all know, after biding a time with the Saxons, came from that fair land by stages to Éire. He heard what Bricne said, and then after many journeys arrived at the Arts’ Plain, glad to settle down in Connachta. This is the story of Gallantry: journeying sunwise, he failed not to visit the palace of Ó Conchobhair’s shapely race. Coming to them from afar, he gave to that race beyond all the men of Éire the love it deserved – owing especially to a certain hero.

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8 Ó Conchobhair chláir Teamhrach dar ainm ar tús Toirrdhealbhach, an tonn brátha ráidhtir ribh is d’áitibh gnátha an ghaisgidh. 9 Comhnaidhe i gCruachain Meadhbha, sé do thógh ag tighearna, do-ní an gaisgeadh gun áith fhionn ar dtaisdeal cháigh go coitchionn.

Ann Dooley

’Twas from Gallantry’s home that came Ó Conchobhair, the first called Toirdhealbhach: ’tis a wave of destiny I tell you of. Gallantry settles in Meadhbh’s Cruacha with a fair and brave hero. Having visited all in turn, such was his choice.

References Archival Sources RIA (Royal Irish Academy). 23 D 4, 125.

Published Sources Bergin, Osborn. “Bardic Poetry.” Journal of the Ivernian Society 5 (1912): pp. 203–19. Bergin, Osborn, and Eleanor Knott. Irish Grammatical Tracts. 5 vols. Ériu. Dublin: School for Irish Learning, 1916–55. Borgnet, S. C. A., ed. Sancti Alberti Magni opera omnia. Vol. 34. Paris: Vivès, 1895. Chrétien de Troyes. Cligés. Edited by Alexandre Micha. Paris: Champion, 1970. Clarke, Howard B. “Dublin c.840–c.1540: The Medieval Town in the Modern City.” Ordinance Survey, I: 2,2500. Dublin: 1978. Cosgrove, Art, ed. The New History of Ireland. Vol. 2, Medieval Ireland 1169–1534. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Cunliffe, Barry, and John Koch, eds. Celtic from the West: Alternative Perspectives from Archaeology, Genetics, Language, and Literature. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010. Dooley, Ann, ed. “‘Namha occus cara d’ár gcéird’: A Dán Leathaoire.” Celtica 18 (1986): pp. 125–49. Dooley, Ann. “The Poetic Self-Fashioning of Gofraidh Fionn O Daláigh.” In Ogma: Essays in Celtic Studies in Honour of Proinseas Ni Chathain, edited by Michael Richter and Jean-Michel Picard, pp. 211–23. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002. Freeman, A. Martin, ed. The Annals of Connacht. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1944. Greene, David, and Fergus Kelly. Irish Bardic Poetry. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970.

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Jeauneau, Édouard. Translatio Studii: The Transmission of Learning; A Gilsonian Theme. Étienne Gilson Series 18. Toronto: Pontif ical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005. Johnston, Elva. Literacy and Identity in Early Medieval Ireland. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013. Leerssen, Joep. Mere Irish & Fíor-Gael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century. Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature 22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986. Lydon, James. “Richard II’s Expeditions to Ireland.” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 93 (1963): pp. 135–49. McKenna, Lambert, ed. Dioghluim Dana. Dublin: Oifig an tSoláthair 1938. McKenna, Lambert, ed. Aithdioghluim Dána. A miscellany of Irish bardic poetry, historical and religious, including the historical poems of the Duanaire in the Yellow book of Lecan. 2 vols. London: Irish Text Society, 1939–40. McManus, Damian. “Surnames and Scions: Adjectival Qualifications of Christian Names and Cognomina in Classical Irish Poetry.” Éiru 63 (2013): pp. 117–43. Ó Riain, Gordon. Manuscript description of YBL duanaire. Irish Script on Screen. Accessed 8 November 2021. https://www.isos.dias.ie/master.html?https://www. isos.dias.ie/libraries/TCD/TCD_MS_1318/english/index.html. Simms, Katharine. From Kings to Warlords. Studies in Celtic History 7. Woodbridge, Surrey: Boydell Press, 1987. Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn, The Bardic Poems of Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn. Edited by Eleanor Knott. 2 vols. London: Irish Texts Society, 1920. Thomson, Derick, ed. Branwen uerch Lyr. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1961. Williams, N. J. A. The Poems of Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe. London: Irish Texts Society, 1980.

16 Finding Oneself within Germania Karl Viktor Mühlenhoff’s Reading of Widsith Tom Shippey Abstract The Old English poem Widsith was felt on publication to provide a valuable Germanic correlative to Tacitus’s list of tribes in the Germania. This chapter studies a detailed if localized attempt to harmonize the two, with an evident agenda relating to the political status of Schleswig-Holstein. Keywords: Germania; Beowulf; Widsith; Karl Viktor Mühlenhoff; PanGermanism; Schleswig-Holstein

In his seminal work National Thought in Europe, Joep Leerssen points out that Tacitus’s Germania, rediscovered in 1455, was “to become the single most influential piece of Latin literature in post-medieval Europe.”1 The immediate reasons for its popularity among German scholars are obvious: it presented the ancient Germans as brave, stalwart, chaste and virtuous, praise which their descendants were very ready to claim as their own. Much more seriously influential was Tacitus’s assertion, in chapter 2 of his work, that in his opinion the Germans were not only autochthonous but racially pure.2 The bad effects of this in the twentieth century need no emphasis here, but in the nineteenth century they added force to the desire to make Germany, or Deutschland, not only an ethnic or linguistic but also a political unity. Tacitus, one may say, gave ancient authority to the Bismarckian programme. Nevertheless, the Germania suffered in scholarly German eyes from a major defect: it was ethnology from the outside. Its list of some fifty tribal 1 Leerssen, National Thought in Europe, p. 41. 2 “Ipsos Germanos indigenas crediderim minimeque aliarum gentium adventibus et hospitiis mixtos”: Tacitus, Germania.

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names (depending on how many one was prepared to accept as Germanic) was mostly unrecognizable. The Frisii were certainly Frisians, the Suiones Swedes, the Suebi arguably Swabians. But who were the descendants of the Chamavi or Usipi, to take two names at random, and what did their names mean? It was a problem, but not, many felt, an insoluble one. For in the nineteenth century, scholars had for the first time at their disposal the formidable force of comparative philology – which they often called, looking back to the seminal work of Jacob Grimm in 1830, simply Grammatik. Some works, such as Kaspar Zeuss’s Die Deutschen und die Nachbarstämme (The Germans and Neighbouring Tribes, 1837) considered the whole problem, while others attempted to trace the history of one tribe or another, the whole collective activity being eventually rolled up in Rudolf Much’s long edition and commentary on Tacitus’s Germania in 1937.3 Merely to exemplify the methods and results obtained, one may look at the way Much treated Tacitus’s chapter 40, on “Die Langobarden und die Nerthusvölker” (The Lombards and the Nerthus Peoples), as Much entitled it, the latter being the seven small tribes whom Tacitus described – woundingly for English amour propre – as indistinguishable from each other, and distinct from the other Germans only by their custom of drowning people in bogs in honour of the goddess Nerthus. 4 Tacitus listed them as the Reudigni, Aviones, Anglii, Varini, Eudoses, Suarini and Nuitones. The Anglii at least were familiar in Old English as the Engle, the vowel-change satisfactorily explained in Grammatik by the familiar phenomenon of i-mutation. This further allowed the Varini to correspond with (in Old English) the Werne, mentioned several times in later history in association with the Engle.5 But who or what were the unknown Reudigni? This was an obvious mistake, Much declared, made by someone familiar with Latin words like ignis, benignus, but not with the common Germanic ending ing, used as a patronymic or dynastic grouping. As for the stem, that must be PG (ProtoGermanic) *reudan, “to clear.” These were the *Reudinge, “the people of the clearings,” that is, in the old forests of Holstein.6 As for Aviones, it had already been noted that Pliny’s term Scatinavia was – allowing for the Latin alphabet’s lack of a letter -w and for the influence from Latin names like Dacia and Dalmatia – rather a good rendering of PG *Skadin-awjō, 3 Cited here from the third edition of 1967, with notes by Herbert Jankuhn: Much, Die Germania des Tacitus. 4 Much, Die Germania des Tacitus, pp. 441–61. 5 See Malone, Widsith, pp. 207–9. 6 Much, Die Germania des Tacitus, p. 444.

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“the broken land in the sea,” that is, the Danish archipelago. The Aviones, then, were the islanders, which Much took to be what are now the North Frisian Islands in the North Sea.7 The Anglii came from Angeln, the angle or corner between the Flensborg Fjord and the river Schlei; the Varini were their known associates; while the Eudoses got their name from PG *euða, “people.”8As for the remaining two rather awkward cases, Much proposed that Nuitones was another scribal error like Reudigni. N- had been written for H-, and the tribal name must have been simply PG *Hwitaniz, “the Whites”: in which case the Suardones, contrastingly, might have been PG *Svartaniz, “the Blacks.”9 Such were the eventual conclusions of scholarship. But for some they were not satisfactory, and especially for those who took the matter personally, foremost among them Karl Viktor Müllenhoff, the dominant figure of Beowulf scholarship in the nineteenth century. As I have detailed elsewhere, Müllenhoff cast a long and authoritarian shadow over the interpretation of this Old English epic poem for many years.10 But as I likewise conceded, if he had an amiable quality, it was his devotion to his own narrow homeland of Holstein, or more specifically, Dithmarschen, the Ditmarsh. Born there in 1818, Müllenhoff was therefore in early life a thoroughly disaffected subject of the king of Denmark, and accordingly a passionate Großdeutschland patriot. In his heart of hearts (I believe) he would have liked to claim the Beowulf legend, and maybe the poem, as a product not of England but of the Ditmarsh itself, a belief at least assisted by the fact that the poem never mentions England, Britain or (with two arguable exceptions) anyone English. What really caught Müllenhoff’s eye in early life, however, was the Old English poem Widsith, first edited in 1826, and then more influentially by J. M. Kemble, another passionate Germanophile, in 1833. This poem seemed to some to be what had always been wanted: if not a German, at least a Germanic equivalent to Tacitus. The poem consists of three mnemonic lists, with some legendary expansions, held together by an autobiography of the singer. “Widsith” was soon recognized to be fictional, for he claims to have taken gifts both from Ermanaric, king of the Goths, who died far away in eastern Europe in the late fourth century, and from Ælfwine the Lombard king, who died in 572. His lists are moreover extremely wide-ranging in time and space, and are 7 Much, Die Germania des Tacitus, p. 445. 8 Much, Die Germania des Tacitus, pp. 445–47. 9 Much, Die Germania des Tacitus, p. 447. 10 Shippey and Haarder, Critical Heritage, pp. 38–41.

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quite easy to isolate within the poem. First comes a list of thirty-three rulers and peoples (lines 18–35), usually two to a line, for example Ætla weold Hunum, Eormanric Gotum.11 Lines 57–70, 75–87, offer a longer list of peoples Widsith claims to have been with, again starting with the Huns and the Goths, Ic waes mid Hunum & mid Hreðgotum (“I was with Huns and with Goths […]”). Lines 112–24 give another list of peoples and princes he visited, beginning, Hehcan. It was the first of these lists which was of particular interest to Müllenhoff, and which he studied in his long article of 1844, “Die deutschen Völker an Nord- und Ostsee in ältester Zeit” (The German Peoples on the North and Baltic Seas in the Earliest Times), with the revealing subtitle “Eine Kritik der neueren Forschungen mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Tacitus, Beovulf und Scopesvidhsith” (A Critique of Recent Research with Special Reference to Tacitus, Beowulf and Widsith). It was published in Nordalbingische Studien, “Nordalbingia” being at this time something of a code word for “independent Schleswig-Holstein freed from Danish rule.”12 Müllenhoff’s agenda, one may suspect, was first to correlate Tacitus’s list of North Germanic tribes with that in Widsith, thus proving the antiquity of the tribal groupings; and, second, to show that German as opposed to Scandinavian tribes were indigenous to Schleswig-Holstein, which should accordingly become once again independent of Denmark. The poem gave Müllenhoff an excellent start in lines 4–5, where the singer Widsith is identified as a Myrging, possibly “the people of the mire, the swamp-dwellers.” This thought did not occur to Müllenhoff (who would have liked it), but in any case lines 41–44 of the poem declare in one of the legendary expansions aforementioned, that Offa of the Angles defined the border “against the Myrgings” on the Fifeldor river, identified by Grimm as the Eider. Since the Eider river was also the northern border of the Ditmarsh, if the Myrgings lived south of the river, then they, like Müllenhoff, were Ditmarshers. Even if the poet’s autobiography was fiction, for Müllenhoff it was the right kind of fiction. Müllenhoff began by declaring very firmly that previous discussions suffered from a complete lack of Grammatik. A new era had dawned in linguistic science as a result of the publication of Anglo-Saxon poems. The latter corroborated Tacitus and gave him renewed authority. It was vital to realize, however, that Tacitus’s list had a geographical frame and ordering and that this was true also of the lists in Widsith, and in particular of the first list. 11 All citations from the poem are from the edition by Malone: Malone, Widsith. 12 For some account of the confused political situation at the time, and of the way Old English studies were drawn into it, see Shippey, “Kemble.”

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On the face of it, one has to say this seems unlikely, for the list begins with a very wide spread of places and rulers of non-Germanic peoples: Attila the Hun, Eormenric the Goth, Gifica of the Burgundians, Caesar of the Greeks and Caelic of the Finns, with among them the unknown Becca of the Banings. These might be excused as scene-setters, heroes of special prominence. With line 21, in Müllenhoff’s view, the poet gets down to business. The figures mentioned in this line, Hagena and Henden, are also found in the medieval romance Kudrun, whose origins Müllenhoff believed could be traced back to another work from the North Sea seaboard.13 Hagena’s Holmryge or “island realms,” he thought (for reasons perhaps apparent later) were the smaller Danish islands, not the North Frisian Islands. The Glommen were likewise Scandinavian, from Norway. Moving south through Scandinavia, Witta of the Swaefe and Wada of the Hælsings came from north Sjaelland, where one still found the place names Helsingör and Helsingborg.14 Of the next six name-pairs, Müllenhoff ruled two out as being obviously misplaced – Theodric of the Franks and Thyle of the Rondings – but was more fortunate with Meaca of the Myrgings, their locale already identified. Next were Mearchealf of the Hundings, placed nearby on the Baltic coast of North Schleswig, and then Breoca of the Brondings. The latter was clearly to be identified with Breca of the Brondings, who in Beowulf has a swimming race with Beowulf himself, being cast up among the Heaðoroemas. These latter are normally (if very uncertainly) identified with the inhabitants of Norwegian Raumariki, but Müllenhoff preferred the Danish island of Romsö, off the west coast of Schleswig; in which case the Brondings must be close by, with Billing of the Werne further south – very suitably, in view of their known association with the Angles on the east coast and south of Flensborg.15 There followed some sixteen pairs, the first group of which included Finn son of Folcwalda of the Frisians, prominent also in Beowulf, who in Widsith gets a line to himself. The Frisians at least were easy to locate, as were the Jutes of Jutland in the line preceding, while the Eowen – and here one sees why Müllenhoff may have located the Holmryge in Denmark – could be

13 He published an edition of it in 1845, or rather an anti-edition, in which he reduced the 6,800-line poem to an echt, or genuine, 1,800-line core, the production of unser Land, or our land, Dithmarschen. 14 Müllenhoff, “Die deutschen Völker,” p. 151. 15 Müllenhofff, “Die deutschen Völker,” p. 152–55.

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identified with Tacitus’s Aviones and ascribed to the North Frisian Islands.16 Of the remaining thirteen, two were again declared out of court. Sigehere of the Sea-Danes must have been a pirate king with no f ixed territory, and Ongentheow of the Swedes was just a wildly misplaced interpolation, drawn in by connection to another character from the Finn cycle, Saeferth of the Secge.17 But the rest could be fitted on to the map of Holstein, north Germany, and the North Sea coast. The Hocings – Tacitus’s Chauci, at last a name surviving, if in very reduced circumstances, from the first century! – along with the Hundings, must be East Frisians, always at odds with their northern cousins. The Woings were from modern Wangerooge, the Thuringians were on the lower Rhine, the Ymbre came from Frisian Ammerland, the Langobards from Bardengau just south of the base of the Jutland Peninsula, and the Hetware from Frankish territory between the Rhine and the Maas. The Wrosne came from Rosogawi south of the Elbe; Hringweald of the Herefare was another homeless pirate, like Sigehere above; and then, perhaps with some relief, Müllenhoff found himself back with the very securely localized Offa of the Angles and his adversary Alewih of the Danes, though Müllenhoff would have liked to cut them both out of the poem, Offa on the grounds that his victory over the Myrgings would be unlikely to be granted the prominence of an eight-line expansion by the Myrging singer which Widsith claimed to be.18 Müllenhoff turned then to the second list of the poem, though in less detail. Of line 59 he demanded, how could one have firmer confirmation of Tacitus than the appearance of the Wenle, or Vandals, next to the Werne (and showing the same vowel-change caused by i-mutation), for the Vandals must be located in Vendsyssel, north of the Limfjord in Jutland.19 In line 62 he thought that Tacitus’s Suardones reappeared as the Sweordwerum, their name deriving from sweord rather than Much’s later suggestion sweart.20 His final conclusion was that Widsith “ist eine wichtige Urkunde, und hat […] 16 Though Müllenhoff insisted they were definitely not Frisians (p. 157), the islands having been settled by North Frisian speakers in much later times. Müllenhoff often betrays a neighbourly hostility to Frisians, who in his own time added to the ethno-linguistic complexity of Holstein; though he also seems to confess that he was half-Frisian himself (see Shippey and Haarder, Critical Heritage, p. 53). This may have contributed to an underlying “identity crisis,” of which his 1844 article may be a symptom. 17 Müllenhoff, “Die deutschen Völker,” p. 159. 18 Müllenhofff, “Die deutschen Völker,” p. 158-62. 19 Müllenhoff, “Die deutschen Völker,” p. 163. 20 Müllenhoff, “Die deutschen Völker,” p. 164.

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durch die klare Anordnung fast aller deutschen Völker an Ost- und Nordsee […] alle Angaben des Tacitus vollkommen bestätigt” (“is an important document, and has […] by the clear arrangement of almost all German peoples on the Baltic and North Seas […] fully confirmed all the information from Tacitus”).21 Müllenhoff went on in the rest of his article to consider Beowulf, and to give a first airing of his theories that it was in essence a work of the Ditmarsh, and moreover essentially allegorical: the monster Grendel being an image of the destructive floods which had once threatened his low-lying homeland. Very few of Müllenhoff’s postulations have stood the test of time, much though one might admire his wide-ranging scholarship.22 It is at least a curiosity that in Beowulf the word mōr is clearly a doublet of fen, meaning “low-lying swamp” rather than (as is more normal in Old and modern English) “high-lying heathland”: the poem’s landscape is a soggy, marshy one, for all the Scandinavian analogues put forward. Müllenhoff may well also have been correct in thinking that there is more information to be drawn out of the many tribal names of Tacitus and Widsith than is generally acknowledged, and that the writers of both texts had some organizing principle in mind. In recent years, moreover, there have been strong and Grammatik-oriented restatements of the view that the poem contains genuinely old material, dating back to the seventh century,23 if not to a time when, as Müllenhoff put it, the tribes of Widsith “noch […] zum Theil in ihren alten Sitten waren” (“were still […] partly in their old customs”) that is, the fifth or sixth centuries.24 On the whole, though, one must concede that Müllenhoff’s problem was his determination to prove that all ancient texts, including Beowulf and Kudrun and The Nibelungenlied and Widsith too, were thoroughly imbued with national feeling (durchaus national).25 Neither Old English poem shows any trace of this, indeed national feeling is quite remarkably absent from both. Müllenhoff, of course, would have responded by declaring that that was because scholars had been looking at the wrong nation. Written in English though they were, the Old English poems were – in origin, in their legendary connections, in their general ambiance – part of a lost Holsteiner heritage, 21 Müllenhoff, “Die deutschen Völker,” p. 165. 22 Müllenhoff is said to have disowned his 1844 article in later life: see Shippey and Haarder, Critical Heritage, p. 39. He may have become aware of the slenderness of his evidence, though given his character and later career, he may instead have felt he had not gone far enough. 23 Neidorf, “Dating of Widsið”; Pascual, “Metrical History.” 24 Müllenhoff, “Die deutschen Völker,” p. 165. 25 Müllenhoff, “Die deutschen Völker,” p. 170.

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and to him all the more precious for that. One may conclude, somewhat sadly, that Romantic nationalism had particular appeal to those who felt their nation and their identity had been suppressed or left unrecognized.

References Leerssen, Joep. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Malone, Kemp, ed. Widsith. Revised edition. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1962. Much, Rudolf, ed. Die Germania des Tacitus. Edited by Herbert Jankuhn. Third, expanded edition. Heidelberg: Wolfgang Lange, 1967. Müllenhoff, Karl Viktor. “Die deutschen Völker an Nord- und Ostsee in ältester Zeit: Eine Kritik der neueren Forschungen mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Tacitus, Beovulf und Scopesvidhsith.” Nordalbingische Studien 1 (1844): pp. 111–74. Müllenhoff, Karl Viktor, ed. Kudrun: Die echten Teile des Gedichtes. Kiel: Schwerssche Buchhandlung, 1845. Neidorf, Leonard. “The Dating of Widsið and the Study of Germanic Antiquity.” Neophilologus 97 (2013): pp. 165–83. Pascual, Rafael J. “Old English Metrical History and the Composition of Widsið.” Neophilologus 99 (2015): pp. 289–302. Shippey, T. A. “Kemble, Beowulf, and the Schleswig-Holstein Question.” In The Kemble Lectures on Anglo-Saxon Studies, edited by Alice Jorgensen et al., pp. 64–80. Dublin: School of English, Trinity College, 2009. Shippey, T. A., and Andreas Haarder, eds. Beowulf: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1998. Tacitus. Germania. The Latin Library. Accessed 23 June 2020. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/tacitus/tac.ger.shtml. Zeuss, Kaspar. Die Deutschen und die Nachbarstämme. Munich: Ignaz Joseph Lentner, 1837.

17 The Faces of Crisis Rethinking a Key Concept in View of the Transnational Intellectual History of Europe Balázs Trencsényi Abstract The present chapter reflects on a number of key controversies that shaped modern history and politics roughly between 1890 and 1945, with a special focus on discourses of crisis. Combining a conceptual history approach with a contextualist reading of political ideas in a transnational perspective, it seeks to reassess some of the key assumptions of research on this topic, many of them going back to the work of Reinhart Koselleck. It forms part of a larger research project seeking to contribute to the rethinking of modern European intellectual history from the vantage point of crisis discourses. Keywords crisis; critique; conceptual history; transnational history; political modernity; democracy

“Crisis,” a term with a complex history, has emerged as one of the pivotal notions of political modernity.1 Thus, reconstructing the ways the discourse of crisis functioned in various contexts and historical moments gives us a unique insight not only into a series of conceptual transformations but also into the underlying logic of key political and intellectual controversies. In this respect, Reinhart Koselleck’s hypothesis – originally focusing on the long shadows of the Enlightenment, but also seeking to point to the roots of political modernity as such – can be tested on later periods and other 1 Koselleck, Critique and Crisis; Koselleck and Richter, “Crisis”; Orth, “Krise”; see also Mergel, Krisen verstehen; Grunwald and Pfister, Krisis!; Kjaer and Olsen, Critical Theories; and Gilbert, Crisis Paradigm.

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cultural contexts as well. Did the emergence of the discourse of crisis signal, and at the same time contribute to, the radical transformation of modern political thinking and action through shifting the horizons of expectation? Nevertheless, rather than thinking in the framework stipulated by the binary of critique and crisis (Kritik und Krise), and being somewhat sceptical of the underlying anti-modernist connotations of Koselleck’s seminal early work, I propose here not a “pathogenetic” reconstruction, but an inquiry into the destructive but also creative sides of describing key components and institutions of modernity as crisis-ridden. Here I propose to analyse how the perspective of crisis sheds light on key assumptions of a given historical moment, also pointing towards solutions beyond the closely knit local/national milieu to discover transnational entanglements. The discourse of crisis is thus not only a framework of temporalization, but also that of spatialization, of modernity, and can thus be turned into a vantage point for transnational analysis. By studying the ways crisis was experienced, conceptualized and negotiated it might be possible to contribute to the understanding of how various visions of time and history shape political thinking and, conversely, how political and social reconf igurations frame our assumptions about temporality and spatiality. In this sense, my work is also in dialogue with a number of recent attempts to rethink transnational political and intellectual history from the perspective of recurrent epistemological frames structuring the political and cultural debate.2

Temporalization and Spatialization Recently, the main debates on crisis discourses have been unfolding, quite predictably, with regard to the interwar period. The classic post-war narrative focused on Weimar Germany, describing it as eminently crisis-ridden and taking at face value the endemic statements of various political subcultures about disorientation, disintegration and an impending catastrophe. This picture, however, was increasingly questioned by scholars who pointed to the intended illocutionary force of the representations of crisis (i.e. rather than predictions of what was to come, they were meant to unify and mobilize their target audience to make a concerted effort to avoid the catastrophe).3 2 An important work in this vein is Case, Age of Questions. 3 “Weimar’s crises should be understood as the products of the people who diagnosed them and not as factors that can be used in explanations of Weimar’s collapse,” Graf, “Either-Or,”

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From another perspective, there has been a growing emphasis on the openended horizons of Weimar politics, arguing that radical ideological criticism could go together with a de facto acceptance of the existing institutional frameworks. While democracy was heavily contested, its fall was far from predetermined. 4 As it is evidently not true that the “objective” crisis created “subjective”crisis narratives, it is also far-fetched to argue that representations of crisis are completely disengaged from socio-economic, cultural and political processes and are only meant as discursive weapons to subvert the political order. One has to make important distinctions, both between the different ideological frameworks and between theories and ideologies of crisis, thus providing a more pluralistic take on the different ways crisis was embedded in modern political discourse.5 While it is often hard to draw the exact borderline between ideological and analytical statements, it is still important to bear in mind that the occurrence of the concept of crisis might indicate very different ideological and mental frames. Likewise, while liberal, conservative, socialist, communist and fascist diagnoses were in some ways part of the same discussion, they should not be equated as different sides of the same pathology, which might relativize their respective moral and intellectual weight. Nor can they be merged with those sociological, philosophical or historical projects which sought to describe and analyse particular phenomena in the past or the present as crisis-ridden, even if those who put forward these analyses were themselves far from being ideologically neutral. Following various intellectuals who sought to conceptualize the developments around themselves in the 1920s and 1930s in terms of a crisis (representing different national contexts as well as extremely divergent intellectual and political positions), we find competing models of reality, which obviously should not be mistaken for Reality as such; but we should nevertheless be able to say more than just to register their divergences.6 Analysing how they constructed reality and thereby engaging in a sort of dialogue with them, we hope to learn something not only about the speakers, but also about the world they inhabited and sought – often desperately – to make sense of. p. 614; see also his Die Zukunft and “Die Krise.” 4 See, for example, Müller and Tooze, Normalität und Fragilität. 5 Freeden, “Crisis?,” p. 16. 6 For example, István Bibó, Guglielmo Ferrero, Karl Jaspers, Mihail Manoilescu, Wilhelm Medinger, Ludwig von Mises, José Ortega y Gasset, Bogdan Radica, Wilhelm Röpke, Louis Rougier, Alexander Rüstow, Pitirim Sorokin, Oswald Spengler, Jenő Varga, Alfred Weber, Florian Znaniecki and Ferdynand Zweig.

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Going beyond the image of a unilinear shift from premodern to modern political languages, a starting hypothesis of this project is the existence of a “second Sattelzeit” roughly between 1890 and 1945: a new mode of temporalization and dynamization of concepts undermining the linear modernist narrative and bringing back cyclical and other “anti-modernist” visions of history.7 Key conceptual features and narrative frames of this were: (a) atemporalization (anti-historicism, ontologization of the national past); (b) serialization (the use of tropes like the “second renaissance” and generational discourses); (c) hierarchization (contrasting elites vs. masses, minorities vs. majorities); (d) biologization (using organic metaphors, the symbolism of “gardening,” eugenics); and (e) sacralization (the reappearance of the topos of “elect nationhood,” charismatic cult of the leader, etc.). This is important in the sense that we can identify not only a linear continuity but also ruptures between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. A case in point is the shift of the function of nationalist discourse from the more universalist and emancipatory implications characteristic of the early nineteenth century toward the exclusivist and anti-democratic version (envisioning a zero-sum game between the competing national projects) at the end of the nineteenth century and beyond.

Conceptual Continuity and Contextual Shifts Crisis was an important concept in various political and cultural discourses throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, it also changed its function and connotations to a certain extent over time. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was inserted into a debate on social transformation and the loss of function of traditional elites. This was linked to a sweeping image of the advent of mass society, eroding traditional hierarchies and social norms and leading to the demise of rational politics through an appeal to irrational mass emotions. An important aspect of this debate concerned the status of the intelligentsia, reflecting the rise of a new social group with specific consciousness and peculiar socio-economic characteristics (most obviously in the French context which is also the best documented). On the other hand – especially in the cases of societies outside of western Europe – it revealed the growing gap between the traditional popular culture based on a predominantly rural sociocultural milieu and the educated urbanites who 7 This is also the working hypothesis of Mishkova et al., “Regimes of Historicity” (the f irst Sattelzeit was postulated by Koselleck to act between the early modern and modern periods).

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turned to the contemporary western canon, a gap often conceptualized in terms of the emergence of “two cultures.” Especially in the wake of collective traumas such as the 1905 Russian Revolution, this discourse came to be framed as a political, intellectual and moral crisis. As Petr Struve put it: The detestable triumph of reaction has moved many of us to forget or keep silent about the mistakes of our revolution. Nothing could be more dangerous than forgetfulness, nothing more thoughtless than silence. “Political impressionism” is the only name for this attitude; it must be opposed by an analysis that transcends the impressions of the moment in order to study the moral essence of the political crisis into which the intelligentsia has led our country.8

At the European semi-peripheries, this (self-)criticism often boiled down to a castigation of the imitative and inauthentic nature of the emerging modern intellectual culture and social mores in these societies undergoing a swift westernization. For this tended to take place on the surface, while leaving the deeper structures untouched (this is the meaning of the famous metaphor launched by the Romanian Junimea (Youth) intellectual movement, “forms without substance”). In other contexts, the crisis of political modernity was described in biopolitical terms: a demographic shift led to overpopulation and the decline of the health of the nation, which needed to be treated by eugenicist measures. Importantly, the medical language was also changing toward the end of the nineteenth century, from the binary of health/sickness to normality/abnormality, opening up the space for an even more comprehensive organicist conceptual framework that could also be transferred to the analysis of societies.9 The biopolitical framing of crisis also brought another important element, namely linking the generational discourse, the trope of spiritual and biological decline, and a critique of democratic institutions. This is mainly documented in cases in France (the famous “Agathon’s Report” from 1912)10 and in Italy (in the political language of pre-First World War integral nationalists), but it appeared in other countries as well, such as Serbia where the pre-1914 integral Yugoslavist discourse had similar implications. It is important to see that in this instance the Great War is much less of a turning point than it is usually presumed to be. 8 Struve, “Intelligentsia and Revolution,” p. 125. 9 Nye, “Degeneration.” 10 Agathon, Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui.

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However, many of these ideological components got a further twist in the interwar period. As Rüdiger Graf has convincingly argued, the discourse of crisis, while activating already existing discursive patterns, gradually became more comprehensive, covering most spheres of human existence.11 Here, I can only sketch out the main lines of a working hypothesis that needs further testing and research. To analyse the different discursive frameworks, functions and connotations, my taxonomy is based on “discursive localizations” and not on ideological streams (liberal vs. socialist vs. fascist visions, etc.), as I have sought to avoid representing ideological streams as monological. Furthermore, the most interesting analysts were often hard to confine to an ideological box, and it is also tedious to employ the same taxonomy transnationally – what in one context qualifies as liberalism might well be considered socialism or conservatism in another. An obvious context where crisis discourse had a pivotal role is the economy. Economic historians point out that by the turn of the century the concept of crisis almost disappeared from more professional economic discourse, being taken over by the conceptual framework of cycles and conjuncture.12 However, the Great Depression brought the concept back, as the main debate was about whether the dramatic economic situation was just the result of a normal cyclical downturn or a more general transformation indicating the end of the hitherto known economic system and the beginning of something radically different.13 Another key locus of interwar crisis discourse was the crisis of society. It was often linked to economic developments, but many observers also argued that the social disintegration of this time was not necessarily the result but perhaps the very cause of the economic downturn. Within the societal crisis, further loci (and social groups) were identified, such as the elites, the youth, the family (and even gender roles) and that of social infrastructure (such as the “housing crisis”). Again, societal crisis was often linked to other faces of crisis: Wilhelm Röpke, for instance, argued influentially that social, economic and political crises were closely interrelated.14 There was also a strong tendency to argue that the underlying cause of socio-economic crisis phenomena was spiritual – the disorientation of western civilization. Philosophers and essayists produced many different versions of this argument, depending on their metaphysical and political preferences. 11 Graf, Die Zukunft; Graf, “Die Krise.” 12 Nützenadel, “Der Krisenbegriff”; Kövér, A növekedés terhe. 13 See, for example, Einzig, World Economic Crisis; Lederer, Wege; Boese, Deutschland. 14 Röpke, Gesellschaftskrisis.

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What was common in these discourses was the tendency to insert the crisis into a broader historical framework, describing it as the end/beginning of an era (for instance of post-Renaissance individualism), and drawing parallels between the present and previous eras of transformation.15 The philosophical diagnosis of crisis could be framed apolitically, pointing more to epistemological issues, as in Husserl’s important work, but it was more typical to insert this into a metapolitical framework, as in the work of Husserl’s eminent disciple, Martin Heidegger.16 Linked to the philosophical diagnoses but having its own dynamic was the discourse of the crisis of religion, or of particular denominations. The clash of traditionalist, modernist and anti-modernist visions was particularly visible in these debates, with many interesting border-crossings (such as in the case of personalism). Again, the political implications were often very outspoken, for instance in the debates on the nationalization of religion (with some critiques taking up a universalist position and castigating the nationalist turn of the clergy, while others were arguing for a closer interrelationship – amounting to the sacralization of the nation – as a way out of the spiritual crisis). The nation – and especially the nation-state – was also often framed in terms of a crisis discourse. Here again there could be a critique of political fragmentation and moral particularism (not only from a leftist or liberal point of view, but from an anti-modernist/conservative anti-totalitarian one as well). 17 More often, however, the crisis of the nation-state was described in terms of the cleavage between institutions and the people (Volk in the rightist, “working class” in the leftist version), projecting a way toward regeneration in terms of a possible overhaul or reintegration.18 All this was often encapsulated into an even broader framework of the crisis of the international system (the increasing ineffectiveness of the League of Nations provides ample illustration of this),19 and – linking the philosophical and the foreign policy-related discourses – the crisis of the European Idea. Last but not least, the debate on the crisis of liberal democracy (both the ideology and its institutions) was among the most heated.20 Here the inadequacy of representative democracy was often the starting point, 15 See, for example, Valéry, Crise; Ortega y Gasset, Esquema; Sorokin, Crisis; Jaspers, Die geistige Situation; Radica, Agonija Europe. 16 Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis. 17 See, for example, Bibó, Art of Peacemaking; Huizinga, In the Shadow. 18 Weber, Die Krise; Boehm, “Staat und Minderheit”; Zweig, Poland. 19 Mantoux, Potter and Rappard, World Crisis. 20 Bonn, The Crisis; Medinger, Die internationale Diskussion.

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going back to the critics of mass democracy at the turn of the century, such as Sorel, Pareto or Le Bon. Their ideas are amplified after 1918 when most of Europe saw the expansion of parliamentary regimes that soon became ravaged by permanent infighting and eventually superseded by authoritarian projects. Closely linked to the debates on economic and spiritual crises, the interwar period saw a complex debate on the crisis of liberalism. In many cases this meant the disintegration of liberal nationalism, with some of its representatives becoming increasingly nationalistic while others turned against nationalism altogether. In a broader sense, this amounted to the decomposition of the liberal camp and the appearance of incompatible liberalisms. This could mean a horizontal ideological division between rightist, centrist and progressive-leftist streams. 21 But it might also be a division between economic, cultural and political liberalisms, thus making it possible to assume positions which were for instance culturally liberal/progressive but economically anti-liberal, or economically liberal but politically authoritarian ethnonationalist. The crisis of liberalism was a central notion of the anti-liberal camps left and right; but liberals also often used this trope to propose a more updated version of their doctrine, which was meant to heal the wounds caused by the etatist/collectivist/authoritarian “deviations” becoming especially prevalent from the late 1920s onwards.22 Neoliberal projects of the early and mid-1930s centred on the concept of crisis and offered themselves as a remedy to etatism.23 In contrast, political liberals arguing for planning also positioned themselves with the help of the crisis discourse. As the Polish émigré economic thinker, Ferdynand Zweig, put it, “planning is the child of crisis.”24 Needless to say, liberalism was not the only ideological stream described in terms of a crisis. Most importantly, there was an extensive literature on the crisis of socialism, ravaged by the division between the revisionist, syndicalist and communist streams from the late 1910s onwards and challenged by the rise of National Socialism. The latter meant a threat not only in the sense of violently repressing the socialist movement, but also in the sense of attracting a significant part of its social base.25

21 Freeden, Liberalism Divided. 22 Wells, After Democracy; Rappard, The Crisis. 23 Rougier, Les mystiques; Rüstow, “Der Weg”; Audier, Le colloque; Neuman, Limitele. 24 Zweig, The Planning, p. 9. 25 Landsberg, Die politische Krise.

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Conclusions: Taking Agency Seriously One could continue with further examples, but the above-mentioned debates and localizations of crisis discourse provide enough material to draw some general conclusions. Recent discussions of crisis have often pointed out the inflation of this notion, arguably losing most of its meaning as an explanatory concept. From another perspective, crisis is actually real and quite common, but not to be overdramatized, as it is concomitant to the democratic process.26 While I agree with the recommendation to be more cautious in using crisis both as a political concept and as an analytical term, it is still undeniable (as shown also by the pandemic situation we are currently living through) that there are historical moments characterized by the compression of temporal and spatial horizons and a pervasive feeling of disorientation shared by many contemporaries. A key question of the early interpretative literature reviewed in this chapter is whether the proliferation of crisis discourses might be read as a “crisis.” My recommendation would indeed be to take agency seriously, to question the wider understanding of crisis as some sort of inherent and impersonal dynamic, but at the same time to not reject its analytical force altogether given the implications it may have for the self-perception of actors in a certain historical situation.27 Key features of this perception of crisis are the feelings of time pressure, a growing insecurity in regard to establishing causal relationships (finding that the same phenomena can be linked to different causal chains) and a monological situation where representatives of different interpretations of the world or of the given situation are unable to share their experiences as captured by their own autarchic language games. For the insiders, these language games give the perfect explanation for everything, but for the outsiders they make very little sense. While in such situations most ideological streams try to conceptualize crisis, there are also ideologies which turn it into the very core of their conceptual framework: in the interwar period we can identify, among others, populism and neoliberalism as ideologies built around such a diagnosis of acute crisis. It is not by chance that some of the authors analysed in this paper, such as Röpke, were linked to both ideological streams. The discourse of crisis is thus neither the cause nor an indicator of social and political conflicts; rather, it is a representation of reality and a narrative framework of temporalization 26 O’Donnell, “Perpetual Crises”; a more nuanced argument is Runciman, Confidence Trap. 27 Roitman, Anti-crisis, makes a similar point from a different analytical and political perspective.

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(compressing time and identifying both ruptures and continuities) and often also spatialization (for instance, when talking about the “crisis of Europe”). While overuse of this term hollows it completely, in certain situations it can help us reflect on past instances with a modest expectation of identifying some similarities to our present predicament – way too imprecise to blindly follow its analogies when trying to cope with our current challenges, but still offering much more than just accidental resemblances.28

References Agathon [Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde]. Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui. Paris: Plon, 1913. Audier, Serge, ed. Le colloque Lippmann: Aux origines du néolibéralisme. Paris: Le Bord de l’Eau, 2008. Bibó, István. The Art of Peacemaking: Political Essays by István Bibó. Translated by Péter Pásztor. Edited by Iván Zoltán Dénes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Boehm, Max Hildebert. “Staat und Minderheit.” Europäische Revue 7, no. 10 (1931): pp. 724–34. Boese, Franz. Deutschland und die Weltkrise: Verhandlungen des Vereins für Sozialpolitik. Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1932. Bonn, Moritz J. The Crisis of European Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925. Case, Holly. The Age of Questions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Einzig, Paul. The World Economic Crisis, 1929–1931. London: Macmillan, 1931. Freeden, Michael. “Crisis? How Is That a Crisis!? Reflections on an Overburdened Word.” Contributions to the History of Concepts 12, no. 2 (2017): pp. 12–28. Freeden, Michael. Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought, 1914–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Gilbert, A. S. The Crisis Paradigm: Description and Prescription in Social and Political Theory. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Graf, Rüdiger. “Die Krise im intellektuellen Zukunftsdiskurs der Weimarer Republik.” In Die “Krise” der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters, edited by Moritz Föllmer and Rüdiger Graf, pp. 77–106. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005. 28 Part of this research was conducted during the semester I spent in Berlin as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and Centre Marc Bloch in the first half of 2020. I am grateful to both institutions for their warm hospitality during these hard times.

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Graf, Rüdiger. Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisen und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland 1918–1933. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008. Graf, Rüdiger. “Either-Or: The Narrative of ‘Crisis’ in Weimar Germany and in Historiography.” Central European History 43, no. 4 (2010): pp. 592–615. Grunwald, Henning, and Manfred Pfister, eds. Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen und Diskursstrategien. Munich: Fink, 2007. Huizinga, Johan. In the Shadow of To-morrow: A Diagnosis of the Spiritual Distempers of Our Time. Translated by J. H. Huizinga. London: William Heinemann, 1936. Jaspers, Karl. Die geistige Situation der Zeit. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1932. Kjaer, Poul F., and Niklas Olsen, eds. Critical Theories of Crisis in Europe: From Weimar to the Euro. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Koselleck, Reinhart. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Koselleck, Reinhart, and Michaela W. Richter. “Crisis.” Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 2 (2006): pp. 357–400. Kövér, György. A növekedés terhe. Budapest: Osiris, 2018. Landsberg, Otto. Die politische Krise der Gegenwart. Berlin: Dietz, 1931. Lederer, Emil. Wege aus der Krise. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1931. Mantoux, Paul, Pitman B. Potter and William E. Rappard. The World Crisis. London: Longmans, Green, 1938. Medinger, Wilhelm. Die internationale Diskussion über die Krise des Parlamentarismus. Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1929. Mergel, Thomas, ed. Krisen verstehen: Historische und kulturwissenschaftliche Annäherungen. Frankfurt: Campus, 2012. Mishkova, Diana, Balázs Trencsényi and Marja Jalava, eds. “Regimes of Historicity” in Southeastern and Northern Europe: Discourses of Identity and Temporality, 1890–1945. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Müller, Tim B., and Adam Tooze, eds. Normalität und Fragilität: Demokratie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS, 2015. Neuman, Emanuel. Limitele puterii statului. Bucharest: Universitatea din Bucureşti, 1937. Nützenadel, Alexander. “Der Krisenbegriff der modernen Ökonomie.” In Krisen verstehen: Historische und kulturwissenschaftliche Annäherungen, edited by Thomas Mergel, pp. 48–58. Frankfurt: Campus, 2012. Nye, Robert A. “Degeneration and the Medical Model of Cultural Crisis in the French Belle Époque.” In Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse, edited by Seymour Drescher, David Sabean and Allan Sharlin, pp. 19–43. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1982. O’Donnell, G. A. “The Perpetual Crises of Democracy.” Journal of Democracy 18, no. 1 (2007): pp. 5–11.

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Ortega y Gasset, José. Esquema de las crisis. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1942. Orth, Ernst Wolfgang. “Krise.” In Schlüsselbegriffe der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Christian Bermes and Ulrich Dierse, pp. 149–73. Hamburg: Meiner, 2010. Radica, Bogdan. Agonija Evrope: Razgovori i susreti. Belgrade: Geca Kon, 1940. Rappard, William. The Crisis of Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938. Roitman, Janet. Anti-crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Röpke, Wilhelm. Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart. Erlenbach: Eugen Rentsch, 1942. Rougier, Louis. Les mystiques politiques contemporaines et leurs incidences internationales. Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1935. Runciman, David. The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Rüstow, Alexander. “Der Weg durch Weltkrise und deutsche Krise.” Europäische Revue 6, no. 12 (1930): pp. 873–83. Sluga, Hans. Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Sorokin, Pitirim Aleksandrovich. The Crisis of Our Age: The Social and Cultural Outlook. New York: Dutton, 1941. Struve, Petr. “The Intelligentsia and Revolution.” In Vekhi (Landmarks): A Collection of Articles about the Russian Intelligentsia, translated and edited by Marshall S. Shatz and Judith E. Zimmerman, pp. 115–29. London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. Valéry, Paul. Crise de l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard, 1924. Weber, Alfred. Die Krise des modernen Staatsgedankens in Europa. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1925. Wells, H. G. After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation. London: Watts, 1932. Zweig, Ferdynand. The Planning of Free Societies. London: Secker & Warburg, 1942. Zweig, Ferdynand. Poland Between Two Wars: A Critical Study of Social and Economic Change. London: Secker & Warburg, 1944.

18 The Extension of Traditions King Stephen I of Hungary and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism Krisztina Lajosi Abstract The case of King Stephen provides a useful basis for rethinking the relationship between political and cultural nationalism, focusing on competing ideas of nationhood promoted by communities with different traditions. These traditions are often extended by adding innovative components or expanding their range of meaning to adapt to new sociopolitical contexts. Modern national narratives can thus be understood not only in terms of the invention of traditions but also of their extension. Keywords Hungary; King Stephen I of Hungary; cultural nationalism; canon; extension of traditions

Historical Memory and Cultural Nationalism The coronation in the year 1000 AD ce of King Stephen I of Hungary, also known as King Saint Stephen (Szent István király in Hungarian), is often interpreted as the founding act of the Hungarian state. But could he unite the nation? One would expect such a founding father to have become a national symbol in the time of the nineteenth-century nation-building movement. However, although King Stephen has been an official saint since 1083, he was not a popular one in the heyday of nineteenth-century nationalism. He has remained a controversial figure, celebrated by some and rejected by others. While some see him as a great Christian monarch whose state has survived for more than a thousand years, many Hungarian far-right sympathizers regard him more as a villain than a hero, and as an astute statesman who betrayed the ancient Hungarian religion and mistreated

Brolsma et al. Networks, Narratives and Nations. Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022. doi: 10.5117/9789463720755_ch18

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Fig. 18.1 Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger, The Coronation of St Stephen (c.1870). Lithograph, Hungarian National Museum, Budapest. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

his kinfolk in order to establish a Christian state.1 He may have founded a kingdom, but his legacy continues to divide the community (Fig. 18.1). An examination of the historical memory and stage adaptations of King Stephen’s life can serve to contribute to the theoretical debate concerning the dichotomy of cultural and political nationalism. Cultural nationalism is often understood in opposition to political nationalism, but I will argue that there is no significant demarcation between these two spheres. Here I draw attention to some actual examples of their interaction, with the aim of contributing to a more dynamic and nuanced understanding of the phenomenon of nationalism in its historical context. Drawing on the theories of John Hutchinson and Joep Leerssen, I examine the ways in which cultural nationalism was entangled with competing national narratives. In particular, this paper elaborates on Leerssen’s claim that “all nationalism is cultural nationalism.”2 Leerssen argues that culture should not be located outside the nationalist agenda but at the heart of it, since a nation is defined as a people with a shared culture.3 He introduces the idea of the “cultivation of culture,” which he defines as a new interest in 1 King Stephen’s reputation has recently been tarnished by the rise of neoshamanism and the grass-roots cult of Koppány, an adversary of Stephen who is celebrated as a figure of resistance against global capitalism and the European Union. See Kürti, “Neoshamanism.” 2 Leerssen, “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture.” 3 Leerssen, “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture,” pp. 561–62.

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“the demotic, vernacular, non-classical culture […] which represents the very identity of the nation, its specificity amidst other nations.”4 However, cultural nationalist movements were internally diverse, and what was regarded as “authentic” demotic culture was also a matter of discussion and debate. Only by examining these controversies and by placing them in a larger historical and comparative context can a more nuanced understanding of nationalism be achieved. A transnational approach should not replace the study of a single country or region but complement it. Only by mapping, comparing and contextualizing the internal differences within a regional and linguistic context can we obtain a more accurate picture of how one idea of nationhood relates to another and what accounts for these differences. Hungarian nationalism had a double character: it was a political nationalism in opposition to the Habsburgs and emphasized the ancient rights of the estates, but it used cultural nationalism when defining itself in contrast to other neighbouring nations. King Stephen’s figure could not fit into the narrative of a cultivation of culture because of his legacy of having destroyed the ancient, ethnic traditions. Both the conservative political nationalists and the progressive cultural nationalists engaged in the cultivation of culture, but they defined culture in different ways. For the conservatives it meant the cultural canon preserved in written or printed documents since the foundation of the Hungarian state. Cultural nationalists, on the other hand, wished to include the ancient folk tales, legends and mythology that were largely lost, and for whose disappearance King Stephen bore responsibility. According to John Hutchinson, political nationalism arose from the tradition of the Enlightenment and saw the nation as a “political autonomous community of will” whose primary aim was to establish a territorial state, whereas cultural nationalist intellectuals sought to revive an “‘organic’ romantic conception of the nation as a historical community.”5 Hutchinson notes the importance of Herder, who celebrated the cultural diversity of humanity and developed a polycentric world view. Herder’s ideas about the nation as an organic entity inspired Romantic cultural nationalists who wanted to regenerate the nation by reviving its ethnocultural past. When old myths failed to serve modern nationalist aims, new myths were created by the nationalist elite, but without completely removing the old ones. Hutchinson, inspired by the ethnosymbolist theories of Anthony D. Smith, calls this phenomenon “mythic overlay.”6 The new myths invoke the 4 Leerssen, “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture,” p. 568. 5 Hutchinson, “Cultural Nationalism,” p. 76. 6 Hutchinson, “Myth against Myth,” p. 120.

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image of the “traditional enemy” and unite the nation under the banner of a collective sacrifice that could restore the continuity of the nation if the old myths failed. However, the old myths are not replaced, but merged with and overlaid by new ones. While this theory serves as a solid model to explain the mechanisms of cultural nationalism, it does not account for the competing ideas of nationhood. Modern nations were created not only by “overlaying” but also by simultaneously competing with traditions and ideas of nationhood. Which of these traditions became more powerful in shaping the national canon? It is important to examine diverse aspects of the cultural canon to gain insight into the divisions of national discourses. Cultural nationalists often extended national traditions instead of “inventing” them.7 Traditions were extended by adding to them elements that made them relevant in a new context, and by expanding their range of signification to encompass a more democratic idea of the nation. Culture played an important role in both the resilience and the extension of traditions. Countries like Hungary – which were politically and culturally divided since the seventeenth-century anti-Habsburg nationalist rebellions – were characterized by long-standing, competing national narratives and myths. Mythic overlay certainly played a role in cultural nationalism, but the various competing myths and their entanglement with politics were also strong factors in the nationalist movements of central Europe. A sense of national unity was achieved from time to time, and culture played a pivotal role in both defining the idea of nationhood and creating national communities. In what follows, I propose to examine how a canonical historical figure like King Saint Stephen has been deployed for nationalist purposes throughout the centuries, and how in the twentieth century an opera production revolving around his figure could create a sense of national belonging. Following the millennium commemorations in 2000, some excellent studies have scrutinized the symbolic meaning of the Szent korona (Holy Crown) and the Szentjobb (the Right Hand of King Stephen, regarded a national holy relic), the legacy of St Stephen’s Day as a national holiday, and St Stephen’s representations in art, literature and church culture.8 Building on this material, I propose to examine the position of King Stephen in the Hungarian cultural canon mainly through theatrical and operatic works. The opera and the theatre have always been strongly intertwined with politics, and became 7 See Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition. 8 See, for example, Péter, “Holy Crown of Hungary”; Klimó, “A nemzet Szent Jobbja”; and Bene, “Hol vagy, István király?”

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important venues of the public exchange of ideas – indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, they can be regarded as the social media of their time9 – and they serve as productive platforms for investigating the culturalization of politics and the politicization of culture. They have also served as a bridge between elite and popular culture. An examination of the dynamics of cultural canon formation reveals the diversity of internal, national narratives and how these tie in with transnational trends. Such an approach shows that cultural nationalism was not merely a nineteenth-century phenomenon, and that political and cultural nationalism are inseparable.

King Stephen I – History and Historicity When the Hungarians settled in central Europe, they found themselves caught in the middle between an expanding Byzantine Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. They chose to expand in both directions, and therefore created enemies in both the east and the west. This was the status quo until finally Grand Prince Géza decided to end the constant wars by allying himself with the German Holy Roman Emperor and thus to accept and actively promote Western Christianity. Géza’s son Vajk was christened István (Stephen, after the biblical protomartyr) and established a Christian kingdom that became one of the most significant political powers in medieval Europe until the mid-sixteenth century, when the expanding Ottoman Empire occupied Hungary. Stephen was declared a saint in 1083, and the day of his canonization, 20 August, has been an official holiday since the late eighteenth century. Although he was perceived as a remarkable statesman, King Stephen was not commemorated in secular literature, unlike his successor King Saint Ladislas (Szent László király, c.1040–1095) and the later King Matthias Corvinus (Mátyás király, 1443–1490), both of whom featured as the protagonists of many folksongs and tales. Not until the late sixteenth century, in the Counter-Reformation period, did theologians take up the example of King Stephen, highlighting his religiosity and political wisdom in embracing Christianity and the doctrines of Rome instead of Constantinople. Stephen’s figure has always been controversial and divisive. He was portrayed as a just and wise ruler in the writings of the politically motivated chroniclers of his successors King Saint Ladislas and King Coloman the Learned (Könyves Kálmán, 1074–1116), who sought to legitimate their own 9 Lajosi, Staging the Nation.

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rule by using Stephen as an example. In the Chronicon Pictum (Illuminated Chronicle, sometimes also called the Chronica Hungarorum), composed around 1360, Stephen’s German wife, Gisela of Bavaria, was blamed for the horrific treatment of Stephen’s adversaries, because allegedly she wanted to advance her own brother to the throne so that the Hungarian kingdom would lose its sovereignty to the Germans.10 Historians have dismissed this story as legendary, but the question of why the writer of the chronicle changed the image of the religiously devout and meek queen from the first half of the chronicle into an ambitious bloodthirsty schemer in the second half remains interesting. It is very likely that this Janus-faced portrait of Gisela, perpetuated in the later chronicles, was informed on the one hand by the oral traditions of Hungary during King Stephen’s time, and on the other by the written traditions from the time of the king’s canonization when a saintly depiction of the royalty was needed. From the eleventh century onwards, there were two Giselas and two King Stephens in the historiographic tradition: one saintly and the other evil. Although nationalities are mentioned in the chronicles, this was not a “national” conflict but a dynastic power struggle. One of the most famous legends was written by Hartvik, Bishop of Győr and the chronicler of King Coloman. He emphasized the role of Astrik, Archbishop of Esztergom, who was allegedly sent by Stephen to ask the Pope for his blessing and a crown. The name Stephen, Stephanos in Greek, means “crown” or “wreath,” and it was mainly used to refer to a certain rank and office. Although historians have disputed both its provenance and the identity of its original donor, the Holy Crown has a special place in Hungarian history, culture and constitutional doctrine. Its age is difficult to establish: art historians generally agree that the diadem in its present form was not King Stephen’s crown. All we know for sure is that the object is composed of two parts: the lower part, the so-called corona graeca, is of Byzantine origin. The upper part, the corona latina, has two intersecting bands that hold a cross on the top which became bent at some point in history. Nevertheless, the cult of such regalia began in the Middle Ages and functioned as an ideological pillar in the construction of a theory of state. In essence “the Holy Crown” meant that regardless of the person of the monarch, the Hungarian kingdom was independent and the crown was the symbol of its sovereignty. In the fifteenth century, a special corps was created whose only task was to guard the crown. Only high church officials and members of the aristocracy were 10 Csákó, “Kegyes királyné vagy rosszakarat mérgével teli vipera?”

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appointed as the koronaőr (guardian of the crown). The cult of the crown was revived after the regime change in 1989, and it has been used for symbolic political purposes by various conservative right-wing governments. The first Fidesz government moved the crown from the national museum to the parliament in 2000, which suggested that the crown is not simply a historical object, but is still very much “alive” as an abstract idea.11 However, the current Fidesz government, with its foreign policy of “opening up to the East,” meaning to Russia, funds and supports groups involved in the cult of Koppány and dubious reconstructions of the ancient history of the Magyars. After Stephen’s only son, Emeric, was killed by a boar while hunting, Stephen allegedly offered the country to the Virgin Mary. She is also called Patrona Hungariae in Hungarian tradition. If the country was under the protection of the Virgin Mary – and by extension of God – the German emperors could not claim their right of sovereignty. This athleta Christi trope of the first Christian Hungarian ruler was a useful propaganda tool for the Catholic church, but more was at stake: Stephen’s conversion to Christianity became a matter of patriotic pride and a symbol of Hungarian sovereignty. By emphasizing that Stephen was given the crown personally by Pope Sylvester II, and not by the Holy Roman Emperor, the German Otto, Hungarian ecclesiastical authorities expressed their desire for greater independence from their counterparts in Germany. This early form of political antagonism between the Hungarians and Germans was present even in St Peter’s Basilica, in the form of the rivalry between the German and Hungarian religious colleges, the Collegium Germanicum and the Collegium Hungaricum. These colleges were responsible for the education of Catholic priests, and the question was whether Hungarian priests would be educated under Habsburg auspices or in the Collegium Hungaricum under the protectorate of Warsaw, where Stephen Báthory – a Transylvanian prince of Hungarian origin – reigned as king of Poland. Báthory was eager to gain more independence from the Habsburgs and promoted an independent Hungarian education through Jesuit schools and colleges. Hungarian priests in Rome and Vienna began to write Hungarian church history intentionally in a way that stressed its direct relationship with Rome instead of Vienna.12 These sixteenth-century church historians downplayed the role of the German Holy Roman Emperor, Otto the Great, in introducing and spreading 11 For a thorough historical overview of the significance of the crown in Hungarian national traditions, see Péter, “Holy Crown of Hungary.” 12 Kruppa, “Szent István kultusza a Báthoryak Erdélyében,” p. 59.

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Christianity in Hungary and minimized the influence of German Catholic priests in establishing churches and abbeys all over the country.13 It was argued that by embracing the Western Christian religion instead of Eastern Christianity, Géza, Stephen’s father, decided to protect his country against the expanding Byzantine Empire by committing to a western type of political organization and friendly relations with the German emperor. According to this account, Géza’s decision was politically motivated and not driven by religious devotion. However, according to written sources from the twelfth century which were meant to prepare his canonization as a saint, Stephen was a truly religious king. There is little doubt that Stephen was more deeply acquainted with the Catholic tradition than was his father Géza; but in the early Middle Ages religion meant not only spirituality but also the foundation of political structures. King Stephen’s representation as a pious monarch includes both his personal devotion to the Catholic faith and his political wisdom as a ruler. The legends written shortly before and after Stephen’s canonization only accentuated his heroic and saintly deeds.14 The violent aspects of his rule were either omitted or blamed on his family members. King Stephen’s reign could be described as a period of bloody civil war from which he emerged victorious, but the heavy price paid by his enemies for their dissent was conveniently omitted from the later legends for the sake of his canonization.15 King Stephen was raised according to the principles of the Catholic church, and his ideas of a kingdom were informed by early medieval political theories based on these principles. The Libellus de institutione morum (Little Book of Morals, commonly known in Hungarian as Intelmek [Admonitions]) is attributed to him but probably written by an itinerant Catholic priest around 1010. A “mirror for princes” dedicated to Stephen’s son, it is commonly seen as laying down the political foundations of their kingdom. Based on the tone and style of the Intelmek, it was assumed that this document is not only public and pragmatic but also personal and subjective. Had he been driven only by sheer political interests like his father, Géza, he could have commissioned a copy of an existing Mirror for Princes, which would have been even more prestigious according to the literary conventions of the time. Instead, he chose to give his son an original document that reflected 13 Rácz, “Szent István király történelmi jelentősége.” 14 For a genealogical analysis of these legends see Kristó, “A nagyobbik és a Hartvik-féle István-legenda.” 15 Zsoldos, “Árpád’s Descendants,” pp. 46–47.

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his personal convictions and principles of government. At the same time, by accepting the general political system of early medieval Europe and by regarding the Hungarian kingdom (nostra monarchia) as a member at the “rank of royal dignity” (regalis dignitatis ordo) of the universal Christian union, he also secured the sovereign position of the Hungarian state by emphasizing its equal standing with other kingdoms in the corpus Christi, that is, the church. These principles might sound like abstract mysticism, but they were the pillars of the European political theory of King Stephen’s time.16

A Saint-King in Cultural Memory and Politics In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Stephen became a popular historical figure in plays written and performed mainly in Latin on the stages of Jesuit school theatres across the country. Of the 400 plays based on Hungarian historical topics staged in school theatres in Hungary, about 40 concerned the life of St Stephen. As an allegory of conversion to Christianity, Stephen’s life belonged to the European cultural heritage, since Jesuits were everywhere familiar with the Latin codices, among which Antonio Bonfini’s Rerum Ungaricarum decades (Basel, 1543) enjoyed the widest circulation. Versions of the story were first performed on German and Belgian stages, as well as in Latin for Habsburg coronations (where the pagans were understood as equivalent to the Ottoman Turks); it did not become a specifically Hungarian “national” story until the eighteenth century.17 In the eighteenth century, the Hungarian Jesuits supported estate nationalism, and through their institutions (schools, churches, processions, theatres, etc.) they shaped Hungarian national consciousness. They promoted the idea that Hungary, the realm of St Stephen, was the country of the Virgin Mary, the regnum Marianum, and this became a strong element of both Habsburg state politics and Hungarian estate nationalism.18 Many famous eighteenth-century Hungarian poets – József Rajnis, Ferenc Verseghy and Ferenc Faludi – celebrated Stephen in their odes and songs.19 August von Kotzebue (1761–1819), the popular German playwright, was also inspired by Stephen and wrote a hasty play entitled König Stephan oder 16 Szűcs, “István király Intelmei – István király állama,” pp. 361–79. 17 Pintér, “Szent István alakja a régi magyar drámairodalomban,” pp. 189–93. 18 Kosáry, Újjáépítés és polgárosodás, p. 137. 19 Gockler, Szent István király a magyar irodalomban, p. 37.

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Ungarns erster Wohltäter (King Stephen, or Hungary’s First Benefactor) that was set to music by Beethoven in 1811 for the opening of the German theatre in Pest, the unofficial commercial capital of Hungary. Beethoven’s piece became a cantata instead of an opera, with a moralistic text praising Stephen for his pious nature, his religious commitment and his determination to convert the pagan Hungarians, not shunning force when necessary.20 Stephen’s association with the Catholic church was so appealing to the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa that she established the Order of St Stephen and made sure that Stephen’s right hand (szentjobb), kept as a relic in a cloister in Dubrovnik, was brought home to Hungary. This gesture could be interpreted as part of a politics of toleration towards the Hungarian aristocracy, whose support was needed by the Habsburgs since the wars of succession.21 This respect for the heritage of St Stephen as the promoter of the Virgin Mary tied in with the Habsburg worship of Mary, which resulted in the creation of many places of pilgrimage.22 One school play written in Latin ended with the well-known trope of Stephen offering the country to the protection of the Virgin Mary, but the playwright identified Mary with Maria Theresa herself. The association between King Stephen, the masculine leader who needs to use force to secure the future of the kingdom, with the Virgin Mary, the feminine protective mother of God, was formed in the thirteenth century. According to some theories, Mary could function as a replacement for the pagan goddesses who were given up for the sake of Christianity. In any case, this fusion of masculine power with the feminine, motherly, caring principle served Maria Theresa’s self-representation as monarch. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Habsburgs approved of declaring St Stephen’s Day (20 August) a national holiday and supported a dynastic national conservatism to suppress the ideas of the French Revolution in the country. St Stephen’s Day, with its processions, remained however primarily a religious holiday, and never had wide popular support.23 Indeed, Stephen disappeared from the stage during the nineteenth century and failed to inspire other literary works. This neglect can be explained in terms of the increasing competition between two ideas of nationhood in Hungary: the nation in the sense of statehood versus the nation in the 20 The libretto can be found at: “Beethoven, L. van: König Stephan/Leonore Prohaska (excerpts) 8.574042,” trans. Susan Baxter, Naxos, 2019–20, https://www.naxos.com/sungtext/ pdf/8.574042_sungtext.pdf#. 21 Klimó, “A nemzet Szent Jobbja,” p. 48. 22 Sinkó, “Árpád versus Saint István,” p. 71. 23 Klimó, “A nemzet Szent Jobbja,” p. 49.

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sense of a cultural community.24 The nation as a state was the conservative definition of the nation, while the nation as a cultural community was the progressive, Romantic idea of nationhood. Since Stephen had zealously eradicated the old Hungarian pagan culture, he could not play the role of a national hero in the Romantic sense of the word, and was only fit for the athleta Christi role, which as a literary trope was less interesting during the Romantic era than it had been in the Baroque period or even during the Enlightenment, when the figure of Stephen as a symbol of Western Christianity had a much stronger ideological appeal. John Hutchinson describes the cultural nationalists as “moral innovators” who wished to “provide models of socio-political development that guide their modernizing strategies.”25 According to Hutchinson, cultural nationalists are modernizers because what they put forward was not primitivism but a “transnational secular culture” and a polycentric world view.26 This could help us to understand why a religious icon like King Stephen could not be readily embraced by the traditionalist cultural activists of the Romantic era. As Hutchinson argues, “cultural nationalism is a political movement” because it rejects the view that the ancient traditions were backwards and inferior compared with western values. King Stephen was associated with the Habsburg monarchs, who often used his figure to emphasize their respect for a Hungarian kingdom committed to a Christian world order and western values. This alienated many nineteenth-century Hungarians with revolutionary anti-Habsburg political sentiments and cultural-nationalist aspirations, who defined their national identity more and more in opposition to everything Habsburg or Germanic. The only late eighteenth-century theatre play published in “Pest-Buda” was penned in German by a writer of Czech-German origin. Franz Xavier Girzik’s play Stephan, der erste König der Hungarn (Stephen, the First King of Hungary) appeared in 1792; and József Katona (1791–1830), who came to be regarded as the national playwright, translated and adapted some fragments of this drama.27 The German writer’s choice of topic illustrates the attitude towards the Hungarian state among the German population of Hungary: a strong Hungarus identity, which meant identification with the traditions and institutions of the kingdom of Hungary and not with the abstract idea of cultural nationhood. 24 Szűcs, Nemzet és történelem, pp. 30–31. 25 Hutchinson, “Cultural Nationalism and Moral Regeneration,” p. 127. 26 Hutchinson, “Cultural Nationalism and Moral Regeneration,” p. 127. 27 Gockler, Szent István király a magyar irodalomban, p. 44.

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This politicized cultural nationalism or ethnic nationalism was not yet very strong, nor was it especially well defined as against the ethnic German population living in Hungary.28 The German literary artists in Hungary saw the Austrian German literary tradition as a rival, and not so much as kindred spirit, which explains the frequent choice of Hungarian historical topics among the Hungarian German authors.29 The Germans in Hungary identified much more readily with the country where they lived than with Germans living elsewhere on the basis of a shared language. This Hungarus identity made it possible for Germans living in Hungary to identify themselves with Hungarian literary and historical traditions rather than with Habsburg German literary traditions. The playwright Girzik combined the well-established trope of St Stephen as an exceptional statesman with another trope originating in the German literary and historiographical tradition that represented the common Hungarian people as pagan and primitive. Girzik did not express the slightest concern about the cruel ways in which the Christian state was established by St Stephen against the will of a large part of the Hungarian population. The figure of King Stephen assisted in the creation and revival of a distinctively German patriotism in Hungary, but for the same reason he could not become a national hero for the Hungarians.30 King Stephen’s rivals were more interesting and inspiring for Hungarian Romantic authors such as Ede Szigligeti in his Vazul (1838) or Álmos (1859), which served as the libretto of Mihály Mosonyi’s eponymous opera, or Dániel Berzsenyi in his A somogyi Kupán (The Kupán of Somogy County, 1816). Their choice of historical subject could be attributed both to the Romantic idea of ethnocentrism and to the increasingly influential democratic nationalist ideas. Since St Stephen was associated with both the Habsburgs and the anti-Habsburg aristocratic Hungarian resistance, the new democratic nationalists needed a another set of heroes, and found them in the oppressed pagan kinfolk of King Stephen’s rule. The nineteenth century witnessed a revival of interest in the eastern origins of the Hungarians, focused not on István but on Árpád and other tribal leaders.31 The figure of King Stephen was invoked for official celebrations like coronation ceremonies, the opening of the German theatre in Pest (1812), or the opening of the Hungarian opera house in Budapest (1884), for which 28 29 30 31

Balogh, “Szent István alakja,” p. 309. Balogh, “Szent István alakja,” p. 311. For more on theatre productions from this period, see Pintér, “Szent István alakja.” See Sinkó, “Árpád versus Saint István”; Klaniczay, “Myth of Scythian Origin.”

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the national composer, Ferenc Erkel, was commissioned to write his König Stephan (King Stephen).32 Stephen’s figure as the wise statesman was again a political choice after the Compromise of 1867 which established Hungary’s independence within the framework of the Habsburg Empire, now called Austria-Hungary. The main conflict in the opera is between Christianity and paganism, between King Stephen and his scheming nephew Peter Orseolo, whose aim is to grab power. In the opera Peter is responsible for blinding Vazul, a Byzantine Christian who rebelled against Stephen, and for killing Imre, Stephen’s son. This rendering of history was influenced by the extant traditions about the image of King Stephen, but it was also a departure from typical nineteenth-century heroic representations of Stephen’s adversaries. Nonetheless, the most dramatic and heroic musical arias were given to the pagan characters, in sharp contrast to the oratorial style of King Stephen’s circle. This meant that Stephen’s enemies were more memorable and had a greater impact on the experience of the audiences than the saintly king.33 The opera presented a pious king whose rule was paved with wars and internal rivalry, but who could keep his integrity and devout attitude despite all the difficulties and conflicts. This representation would have served the interests and self-image of the Habsburg ruler, Franz Joseph, who was crowned king of Hungary in 1867 after the Ausgleich. Later, during the millennial celebrations in 1896 commemorating the settling of the Hungarians in the Pannonia Basin (in the ninth/tenth century), Erkel’s opera was again chosen as the representative piece and marked the beginning of the festivities on 2 May. Gyula Erkel was the conductor, and he even extended the already lengthy opera with additional numbers.34 Though the subject matter was meant to unite the nation, the lengthy opera could not fulfil this role. A shortened version of the opera was revived in 1930 during the commemorations of St Imre and was performed only twenty times.35 An opera about King Stephen could be interpreted as a symbolic choice in interwar Hungary, which was marked by a Christian nationalism and an irredentist politics aimed at restoring the territorial loss caused by the Treaty of Trianon at the close of the First World War.36 Remarkably, King Stephen was a more suitable symbol at this time than the rebellious Koppány or other figures from ancient Hungarian history. In the 1930s 32 Somfai, “Az Erkel-kéziratok problémái.” 33 Németh, Erkel, p. 208. 34 Sebestyén, Magyar Operajátszás Budapesten, p. 70. 35 Sebestyén, Magyar Operajátszás Budapesten, p. 70. 36 Deák, “Admiral and Regent Miklós Horthy.”

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Hungary was a kingdom without a king; Admiral Horthy was a regent who sought to consolidate his power with the help of the church and popular support. He needed the saint-king. Ten years after the Treaty of Trianon, the main theme of the St Imre celebrations was a lament for the loss of St Stephen’s Hungary.37 Although the opera was not a great success, its message of a chaste prince and saintly ruler reflected the spirit of an age that promoted the regeneration of the state through the Christian education of its youth. Paradoxically, St Imre was accepted by the radical right-wing Turul Association, and was even associated with King Stephen’s challenger Koppány, whom they regarded as the crucified pagan savior of the Hungarians.38 How could a pagan hero and his total opposite, a devout chaste prince, be associated with each other? The death of St Imre was considered similar to that of Koppány. According to this interpretation, Imre did not die in a hunting accident, as recorded in the medieval chronicles, but – as Erkel’s opera suggested – was murdered by his power-thirsty foreign relative, Peter Orseolo. The historically opposed images of Koppány and Imre merged in this period under the peculiar umbrella of martyrdom.39

Stephen the King Unites the Nation: Mediated Historical Memory After almost half a century of silence, König Stephan was revived in 1983 as a rock opera commissioned by the Communist Party entitled Stephen the King (István, a király), which was originally meant to be a film. The very fact that the opera could be produced was a sign that the regime was seeking to reposition itself in cultural terms. The historical context and circumstances of the performance were important for its resounding success, along with a more nuanced and dramatically stronger libretto than any of its musical-theatrical predecessors. The rock opera was composed by Levente Szörény and János Bródy, two well-known figures of Hungarian pop music, and the libretto was based on a reworked version of a nineteenth-century play by Lajos Dobsa. In this opera the conflicts between the old and new, the Christian and pagan, the foreign and traditional, are embodied in the figures of Stephen and Koppány, the pagan lord who also claimed the throne after Géza’s 37 László, “Szent Imre-év, 1930.” 38 For more about the Turul Associations, see Kerepeszki, “Organisation.” 39 László, “Szent Imre-év, 1930.”

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death. Koppány supports his claim to the throne with arguments based on the ancient law and the will of the people. As an enlightened absolutist monarch, Stephen defeats Koppány in the name of the new order – the geopolitical stability of the state – and the Christian faith, which meant full acceptance among the nations of Europe. Koppány was defeated and his body was quartered, though in the rock opera it is not Stephen but his mother, Sarolt, who wants the mutilated body of the rebel to serve as a warning to other traitors. The greatest strengths of the libretto were the dramatic confrontation with Koppány, the psychological struggles of King Stephen, and the impressive choruses and crowd scenes. The pagan parts were sung by rock singers with a reputation for being rebellious, which added to the impact of the opera as an expression of protest. Just as in Erkel’s opera, Stephen is the protagonist, but his arias were musically less powerful than Koppány’s. Koppány unleashed a new interest in ancient history, and the state-controlled nationalism that the Communist Party hoped for thus started a wave of popular nationalism. This new wave was neither oppressed nor embraced but tolerated by the party. Stephen the King also bridged the gap between pop music and traditional operatic and theatrical culture. In an interview in 2008, the composer János Bródy attributed the success of the opera to its wide range of references to political ideas of contemporary resonance and to its popular genre, thanks to which the message reached a broader section of the population than just the intellectual elite. The artists were themselves surprised by the resounding success of the production. 40 Not everybody was enthusiastic about the opera, however. Some were critical of its musical eclecticism and its folksy character; others disapproved of its obvious nationalist undertones. The Soviet-appointed Kádár regime disliked it because it was far too obvious that Stephen was identified with the leader of the Hungarian Communist Party. An anonymous critic wrote a review in a samizdat publication in which the critic elaborated on how Kádár’s answer to Koppány’s question – “Shall we be free or be imprisoned?” – was that “you cannot be free, but should at least be grateful that I allow you to feel Hungarian, albeit in moderation and under the supervision of the police.”41 The circumstances of the opera were noteworthy. In a communist country where any reference to religion or rebellion against the state would have been censored, this rock opera was surprisingly given a green light from the party because General Secretary Kádár and his regime could identify 40 Bródy, interview in Balla, “Bródy.” 41 Szőnyi, “István király szupersztár.”

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with Stephen’s struggle to establish stability in a state torn apart by dissent. In allegorical terms, Stephen could be seen as representing the need for compromise by Kádár and the Hungarian Communist Party; Stephen’s pagan adversaries could be viewed as the rebellious anti-communist opposition; and the foreign threat to the nation was the Soviet bloc. Some associated Koppány with Imre Nagy (1896–1958), the Hungarian prime minister who was executed because of his involvement in the anti-Soviet revolution of 1956. 42 Like Stephen, Kádár was prepared to do whatever was necessary to unite and preserve the nation. Some party members were afraid of the potential of the opera to stir up strong nationalist feelings which might lead to a revolution, as in 1956. For the public it was a revelation to see an opera where previously banned themes were presented so openly and conveyed by such powerful songs and accomplished singers. In Stephen the King, King Stephen became not only a statesman but also a national icon. The public realized that this rock opera marked a change of direction in the Hungarian Communist Party, which became generally more open and more openly supportive of the cultivation of national traditions and culture. The rock opera features lavish crowd scenes and folk dances that resonated with a public familiar with the so-called táncház (folk-dance house) movement that became increasingly popular in the 1970s and 80s. The cultivation of folk culture was seen as a form of resistance against the official doctrines of the Communist Party. The rock opera built on the cultivation of culture and transformed it into a cultural nationalism that was at the same time also political. All the elements in this rock opera complemented each other: folk, pop and rock merged into an eclectic whole. The more than 100,000 people who attended the open-air premiere in the Városliget, a park in Budapest, experienced an unforgettable performance. The opera was recorded and brought out on a vinyl disk that became the best selling disk of Hungaroton, the Hungarian musical company. Everybody listened to István, a király and people knew the songs by heart. This rock opera brought not only the Hungarian historical consciousness to life, but also created a unique sense of national solidarity and unity. Since its original performance it has been restaged many times with great success, but none of these performances could come close to the impact of the original production of the opera. Art, the state, and the nation formed a unity and strengthened each other in this rock opera in a way unparalleled in twentieth-century opera history. Together with Ferenc Erkel’s two classical operas, Hunyadi László (Hunyadi 42 Szőnyi, “István király szupersztár.”

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László, a fifteenth-century nobleman destined to become king of Hungary) and Bánk Bán (about a thirteenth-century nobleman, Bánk Bán), this rock opera can be seen as a truly national work. The rock opera Stephen the King rewrote history, renewed the nation and regenerated the Hungarian state. Stephen the King is still staged from time to time, which has led to further polemics and upheavals. The culturalization of St Stephen’s historical memory is an ongoing process that continues to shape Hungarian national consciousness. Because Stephen the King has become so deeply engrained in public consciousness, directors find it challenging to depart from its original design. New productions, whether innovative or traditional, always carry a political message that still divides the nation. This conflict between two opposing views of the history of the nation – one that accepts and acknowledges the importance of compromise, while the other rejects it and regards it as treason – remains one of the most fundamental characteristics of the Hungarian nation. Understanding its dynamics and the way it extends traditions is crucial for understanding present-day nationalism in Hungary.

Conclusion The case of King Stephen I of Hungary justifies the claims that culture is at the heart of nationalism and that cultural nationalism is also always political. The extension and medialization of historical memories influence the sense of belonging to a cultural community. Appreciating the diversity of cultural nationalism is crucial to understanding how cultural canons were formed and how competing ideas of nationhood emerged in a larger sociopolitical context. The case of King Stephen also draws attention to the importance of what John Hutchinson calls the “overlaying” of myths and traditions instead of “invention.” Nations with medieval states or ethnic traditions built on their cultural heritage and extended the meaning of historical memory to meet the needs of the present. Nationalism could be better understood not as the “invention of tradition” but rather as the extension of tradition, both in prolonging old traditions by adding new elements and by spreading the range of their meaning to make them more inclusive or democratic. In order to understand the complexities of nationalism, the extension of traditions needs to be examined through nation-based case studies in a transnational context. The extension of traditions is a relatively underdeveloped area of nationalism studies, and the pioneering work of Joep Leerssen to map the cultivation of culture in the nineteenth century could serve as a useful model.

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Kristó, Gyula. “A nagyobbik és a Hartvik-féle István-legenda szövegkapcsolatához.” Acta Universitatis Szegediensis: Acta Historica 90 (1990): pp. 43–62. Kruppa, Tamás. “Szent István kultusza a Báthoryak Erdélyében.” In “Hol vagy, István király?”: A Szent István-hagyomány évszázadai, edited by Sándor Bene, pp. 57–62. Budapest: Gondolat, 2006. Kürti, László. “Neoshamanism, National Identity and the Holy Crown of Hungary.” Journal of Religion in Europe 8 (2015): pp. 235–60. Lajosi, Krisztina. Staging the Nation: Opera and Nationalism in 19th-Century Hungary. Leiden: Brill, 2018. László, Ferenc. “Szent Imre-év, 1930: A liliomos herceg.” Magyar Narancs 13 (September 2007). Accessed 8 November 2021. https://magyarnarancs.hu/konyv/ szent_imre-ev_1930_a_liliomos_herceg-67627. Leerssen, Joep. “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture.” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 4 (2006): pp. 559–78. Németh, Amadé. Erkel. Budapest: Gondolat, 1979. Péter, László. “The Holy Crown of Hungary: Visible and Invisible.” Slavonic and East European Review 81, no. 3 (2003): pp. 421–510. Pintér, Márta Zsuzsanna. “Szent István alakja a régi magyar drámairodalomban.” In “Hol vagy, István király?”: A Szent István-hagyomány évszázadai, edited by Sándor Bene, pp. 189–200. Budapest: Gondolat, 2006. Rácz, György. “Szent István király történelmi jelentősége.” Vigilia 78, no. 8 (2013): pp. 562–66. Sebestyén, Ede. Magyar operajátszás Budapesten 1793–1937. Budapest: Somló Béla, 1937. Sinkó, Katalin. “Árpád versus Saint István: Competing Heroes and Competing Interests in the Figurative Representation of Hungarian History.” Ethnologia Europaea 19, no. 1 (1989): pp. 67–83. Somfai, László. “Az Erkel-kéziratok problémái.” In Az opera történetéből, edited by Bence Szabolcsi and Dénes Bartha, pp. 81–158. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1961. Szőnyi, Szilárd. “István király szupersztár.” Válasz.hu, 15 August 2003. Szűcs, Jenő. “István király Intelmei – István király állama.” In Nemzet és történelem, edited by Jenő Szűcs, pp. 359–79. Budapest: Gondolat, 1984. Szűcs, Jenő. Nemzet és történelem. Budapest: Gondolat, 1984. Zsoldos, Attila. “Árpád’s Descendants.” In A Concise History of Hungary, edited by István György Tóth, pp. 43–112. Budapest: Corvina, 2005.

19 The Buried Tombstone, the Melting Iceberg, and the Random Bullet History, Memory and Antagonism in Ireland R. F. Foster

Abstract This essay follows Joep Leerssen’s inspiration in considering the operations of memory in Irish culture and history, and especially of strategic forgetting – in the form of “aphasia” rather than “amnesia,” in David Fitzpatrick’s formulation. This is related to the depth of antagonism encoded in Irish history, often producing violent confrontations, and the need to negotiate these memories in post-revolutionary civil society. Literary reflections on this syndrome in the work of Yeats and Heaney are discussed, some comparisons made with central and eastern Europe, and the operations of official commemoration of the revolutionary era considered. These complications of the national narrative are finally encapsulated in an “imagined reminiscence” from the author’s own family history. Keywords memory; history; aphasia; violence; Ireland

“This is the use of memory,” wrote T. S. Eliot in “Little Gidding,” “for liberation.” Joep Leerssen fell on the same idea a long time ago, and his two marvellous books on Irish literary history show how memory has been reworked, reprocessed and revived over and over again in Irish culture.1 The attention currently paid to cultural memory in Ireland, especially during the commemoration of the centenary of the Irish Revolution of 1912–22, owes a great deal to the scholar to whom this volume is dedicated. Leerssen has also impelled some of us to consider the way that the understanding 1 Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael; and Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination.

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of Irish history has been dictated by narrative forms. He has navigated epistemological minefields of contested assumptions and interpretations and spoken to those of us who had been reading (and in some cases teaching) Hayden White, Michel Foucault and Paul Veyne, and were quite keen on decoding the differences between “narratology” and fiction.2 Here again, he has made us think about memory and history – and particularly perhaps, forgetting. My title invokes three metaphors. The buried tombstone refers to the grave of a rebel who fought in the 1798 Rebellion in Ulster and whose comrades, in order to prevent desecration of his grave, buried the tombstone (suitably engraved) along with the coffin.3 It is an image taken from Guy Beiner’s brilliant book on the memory of 1798 in Ulster. The 1798 rebellion was violently internecine and its memory accordingly contested throughout the nineteenth century; and, as Beiner shows us, it was accompanied by a complex, convoluted, complicit and deliberately self-deluding phenomenon which he calls “social forgetting.” Following the Irish historian David Fitzpatrick’s comment on attitudes towards Ireland’s part in the First World War, the word “amnesia” is not quite right, because the memory was all around us. We are dealing with aphasia, an inability or refusal to speak.4 This raises the question of the relationship between the depth and intensity of historic hatreds, and the necessity for oblivion. This is one reason, perhaps, why civil wars are most deeply and problematically covered over. Like the tombstone buried with the rebel it commemorated, memory goes underground. But the stone heaves eventually to the surface, as stones do, with its inscription still preserved. A second metaphor to do with Ulster comes to mind, inspired by a project of the Northern Irish artist Rita Duffy: to tow an iceberg from the Arctic to Belfast, moor it by the Titanic Centre and the Harland & Wolff shipyard (where that doomed ship was built and launched) and let it slowly melt onto oblivion. Harland & Wolff is famous not only for the Titanic, but for its long tradition of sectarian employment patterns. The iceberg makes a number of points, and it will take a long time to melt. Burial of memory and melting into forgetfulness are sometimes necessary conditions for continued co-existence, where there has been a history of hatred. The great eighteenth-century lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was a good hater, famously remarked that the Irish were “a fair people – they 2 I discuss this in Foster, Irish Story, particularly in chap. 1, “The Story of Ireland,” pp. 1–23. 3 Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance, p. 150. 4 Fitzpatrick, “Ireland and the Great War,” p. 257.

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never speak well of one another.”5 Johnson also believed that the record of history showed how badly the Irish had been treated by the English – though he did not say that this was why they abused each other so much. If you take a psychoanalytical view of Irish history, you might think that this deferred reaction is indeed the reason for the depth and violence of Irish antipathies. As history-writing has shifted towards the psychological, this has led – as Peter Burke and others have shown – to history being approached and interpreted as social memory.6 “Memory” has come to refer to the way we often analyse and interrogate “History,” leading to a preoccupation with the obscure operations of “Memory” rather than a dogged attempt to establish ascertainable facts. Clio is, like the other Muses, a daughter of Memory, but nowadays mother and daughter have swapped roles, and Memory has become the daughter of History. This raises awkward questions about authenticity. At the trial of Maurice Papon for crimes committed under the Vichy regime, one scholar refused to give evidence on the grounds that the process was adding to the confusion between history and memory.7 As the search to reimagine “experience” takes over, so does the exploration of feeling and sensibility, raising awkward questions of relativism. The French may have established this fashion (as they so often do), but the Irish have taken it up with enthusiasm. So “Complicating the Narrative” has marked our centenary commemorations of the Irish Revolution of 1912–22. In particular, this has led to the study of reconciliation and an emphasis on the plurality of experience. But anyone who reads Irish history – and indeed, Irish historians – has to be struck by a countervailing syndrome: the vehemence with which animosity is invoked, declared and acted upon. Vituperation comes easily and eloquently to Irish tongues and violent actions often follow. Accordingly, forgetfulness is perhaps most essential when facing the non-reconciliatory aspects of Ireland’s history – the history of antagonism. Having successfully commemorated the anniversaries of the Third Home Rule Bill, the start of the First World War, and above all the Easter Rising of 1916, Ireland is now involved in “remembering” more disruptive events in the revolutionary decade a century ago, from 1919 to 1923 – the Anglo-Irish War, the Treaty and finally the Civil War when comrades turned against each other. It may be less easy to recognize and appreciate a plurality of views and identifications where these events are concerned. Symbolically, 5 Boswell, Life of Johnson, vol. 2, p. 307. 6 See Burke, Varieties of Cultural History. 7 Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance, pp. 620–21.

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one of the most spectacular events of the Civil War was the destruction of the Four Courts building, and along with it much of the records of medieval Ireland – so contributing to the suppression of memory in very literal way. Perhaps the aftermath of a colonized history necessarily involves centuries of simmering antagonism that will inevitably break out, as Freud posited in his theory of “the return of the repressed,” whereby suppressed impulses fester in the unconscious, producing “symptomatic” outbursts and compounding chaos and violence. Certainly, when we look at the parts of Ireland where violent hatreds were most obviously enacted, there seems to be a relationship to a history of contestation, for land or for power, which reflected an uneasy balance between populations of different faiths. (This is not only applicable to Ulster, though this is the area where we can see this most intensely demonstrated: recent work on County Cork has followed some of the same paths.8) And what seems undeniable is that, complex as Irish ancien régime society was, it left behind a rationale by which future violent antipathies could be – and were – excused. History-writing played a vital role in this process and it has continued to do so, right down to the “revisionist” controversies of the late twentieth century. Just as interesting is the way that historic social and political resentments and antipathies were negotiated in the late nineteenth century after social and political discriminations against the Catholic majority were removed and a Catholic bourgeoisie entered its kingdom in political and economic terms (if not entirely in terms of social advancement and access to governing elites). In the more relaxed and prosperous days of Edwardian Ireland, before the revolution, there seems to have been an expectation that old resentments were being moderated, old injustices were fading into a kind of accepting forgetfulness and a new class was in the ascendant. This was a widely held expectation.9 But as so often in history, the expectation was not borne out: there was a revolution against the ancien régime instead. Here as at other eras, in considering the way that hatred operates in Irish history it is illuminating to look at literary culture. Certainly a recognition of Irish antagonisms, and suppressed memories, fuels the work of W. B. Yeats, as it would later that of Seamus Heaney. The ancient Irish, Yeats believed, did not “weigh and measure their hatred” but focused it into a pure idea: “and from this idealism […],” he deduced, “comes […] a certain power of saying and forgetting things, 8 Hart, IRA and Its Enemies and Hart; Hart, IRA at War. 9 I discuss this in Foster, “Parnell to Pearse.”

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especially a power of saying and forgetting things in politics, which others do not say or forget.”10 In a late essay he remarked, unforgettably, “No people hate as we do in whom [the] past is always alive,” but went on to say that “everything I love has come to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate.”11 During the revolution, Yeats interrogated the impulses of fanaticism and violence pulsing around him – most strikingly in the great image of the stone in the stream, in his poem “Easter 1916.” Above all, perhaps, it was the Civil War of 1922–23 which directed his mind towards the way violence and hatred affected Irish history. His sequence of poems, Meditations in Time of Civil War, reviews (in “Ancestral Houses”) history, privilege, conquest, hatred and dispossession, and suggests that the energy and vision which make civilization are inseparable from the energy of violence and conquest. But he despairingly resolves in “The Stare’s Nest by My Window” to turn from hatred and begin building again: The bees build in the crevices Of loosening masonry, and there The mother birds bring grubs and flies. My wall is loosening; honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare. We are closed in, and the key is turned On our uncertainty; somewhere A man is killed, or a house burned, Yet no clear fact to be discerned: Come build in the empty house of the stare. A barricade of stone or of wood; Some fourteen days of civil war; Last night they trundled down the road That dead young soldier in his blood: Come build in the empty house of the stare. We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare; More substance in our enmities Than in our love; O honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.12 10 Yeats, “Celtic Element,” pp. 220–21. 11 Yeats, “General Introduction,” p. 519. 12 “Stare” is an Irish name for a starling: see Foster, Yeats, A Life, vol. 2, pp. 217–23.

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The animosity of the civil war reversed the brotherhood of the war of independence. Unlike the nearly contemporary Spanish or the Greek civil wars, which saw long-simmering social and political and class antagonisms burst into flame, the Irish Civil War pitted brother against brother, destroying sacred bonds of fraternity. The young and ambitious, as in any revolution, were implicitly in contest with each other for the levers of power, though this was obscured by the rhetoric of fraternity and the easy identif ication of a common enemy. The fact that this common enemy was the moderate-nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party, who were fellow Irish (and usually fellow Catholics) just as much as the British army or the Royal Irish Constabulary, is often uncomfortably clear, striking the jarring death-knell for the polite collusions of Edwardian Ireland. The uncompromising and often explicitly violent rhetoric articulated by contemporary revolutionary activists is arresting. It sometimes invokes the thought of anti-Semitism, reminding us of similar themes in Austria and Hungary during these years. But it also goes with a recharging and rebooting of historical memory: the centenary of the 1798 Rising in 1898 was a key moment, focusing the memory of resistance and emphasizing a rather selective version of the joint Protestant-Catholic effort to overthrow the Saxon invader – past history parlayed into present purposes, yet again. The lieux de mémoire of Irish history are also lieux d’oubli. Families were divided by the catastrophe of civil war, but I have been told by one member of the old revolutionary elite that, though their parents, aunts and uncles had taken different sides in 1922–23 and often no longer spoke to each other, the children were sent on holiday with their cousins, where discussion of past politics was forbidden. Thus a generation was encouraged to forget, but the previous generation had appealed to extremism and hatred of compromise, écrasant l’infame. The revolutionary Mabel Fitzgerald told her ex-employer George Bernard Shaw in 1914 that she was educating her young son “in the sound traditional hatred of England and all her ways; you should just hear him say ‘Sasanach,’ the concentrated hate in his voice is worthy of Drury Lane.” Shaw replied sarcastically, As an Ulsterwoman you must be aware that if you bring up your son to hate anybody except a papist you will go to hell […] You must be a wicked devil to load a child’s innocent soul with a burden of old hatreds and rancours that Ireland is sick of […]. You make that boy a good International Socialist – a good Catholic in fact, in the true sense – and make him understand that the English are far more oppressed than any folk he

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has seen in Ireland, by the same forces that have oppressed Ireland in the past.13

In terms of the immediate Irish future, however, Mabel was much nearer the mark than GBS. In 1918–19, Sinn Fein swept the board in the general election and a policy of waging guerilla war on police and army took over. Those who seized the initiative were different from the opinion-formers of the pre-revolution: the radical theorists, feminists and socialists gave way to a more uncompromising and in many ways more traditionalist element of freedom fighter and an older rhetoric of faith and fatherland took over. The Catholic Bulletin endowed the rebels with martyrdom, placing them firmly into the tradition of early Irish Christianity, where self-denial, fortitude and sacrifice were embraced to redeem mankind. Faced with this, some old revolutionaries sadly remembered what fun they had had in their revolutionary youth.14 Bitterness, disillusionment and antipathy are perhaps emotions underrepresented in the rich archives of the Bureau of Military History witness statements which profile the way that activists remembered – or wanted to remember – their revolution.15 How sui generis is Ireland? As Joep Leerssen can testify, one of the striking ways in which the history of Ireland a hundred years ago has been “opened out,” and reconceived, is by seeing it as closer to the histories of central and eastern Europe than we often realize. Historians of Europe such as Robert Gerwarth, John Horne and Tim Wilson have illuminated the way in which, for central and eastern Europe, 1918 did not bring the end of war but ushered in a period of destabilization, paramilitary banding, enforced shifts of borders and peoples, and intercommunal conflict – themes familiar to contemporary Ireland.16 The difference, of course, between central and eastern Europe and Ireland in the early 1920s lies in the extent of the violence and the depths of the intercommunal warfare: for all the horrors of the killings at Ballyseedy or Co Kerry, or the drifting away of Protestant populations in parts of rural Ireland, the scale of violence, even in the northeastern counties, is of a different order to what happened in Poland, Hungary or the Ukraine. The seismic aftershock of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires was a spectacular contrast to the slow waning of 13 14 15 16

See Foster, Vivid Faces, p. 18. Bulmer Hobson to Denis McCullough, 1 September 1965, in Hay, Hobson, p. 246. See Foster, “Promise of 1916,” pp. 25–40. See Gerwarth, Vanquished; Gerwarth and Horne, War in Peace; Wilson, Frontiers of Violence.

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British imperial power. There are also infrastructural reasons why separate communities could sustain a kind of coexistence in Ulster, but not in Silesia. The demography of religious affiliation matters and so does the pedigree of the post-revolutionary state. In Ireland an unarmed police and a small but disciplined army were created and the removal of the six northeastern counties enabled a stable and homogenous southern state to evolve, with a bicameral parliamentary system and an independent civil service.17 However, the strong family resemblances to British institutions had to be strategically ignored in favour of a more Manichean version of history. Thus aphasia occurs once again. The revolutionary rhetoric of victimhood denied that in Edwardian Ireland the obvious forms of oppression by “England” had receded into the past. State-aided landownership, tax reform, local-government reform, old-age pensions and the hegemony of the Irish Parliamentary Party were creating in Ireland a materialist, Anglophone world against which the idealism of the revolutionary generation rebelled. The prevalence of large-scale emigration, especially of the young, and the restricted level of labour activism helped sustain this conservative stasis; thus a state founded on violence, and a political party system where old hatreds from the Civil War were deeply encoded, still managed to create a stable democratic polity. Strategic forgetfulness is part of this, of course, and a very careful negotiation of official memory. Commemoration was a battlefield in independent Ireland, a site where exclusions were violently contested, evading the unstated but continuing conflicts of the Civil War, as well as the central question of what the revolution had been fought for; this was potently demonstrated in the triumphalist celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising in 1966.18 And contemporary crisis enforced a much more low-key event for the seventy-fifth anniversary in 1991, given the violent confrontations actually happening in Northern Ireland. By then, too, as with Yeats in the early 1920s, an Irish poet was memorably targeting themes of historical memory and forgetting. From about 1971 Seamus Heaney began writing his series of bog poems, starting with “The Tollund Man” in his volume Wintering Out (1972) and culminating in his extraordinary volume North (1975). In “The Tollund Man” Heaney used the image of a sacrificial victim – preserved since prehistoric times in Danish bogland – as a metaphor to connect with the suppressed but returning memories of violence and antagonism in Irish history: 17 Mitchell, Revolutionary Government; Garvin, 1922; Hughes, Defying the IRA? 18 Daly and O’Callaghan, 1916 in 1966.

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Something of his sad freedom As he rode the tumbril Should come to me, driving, Saying the names Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard, Watching the pointing hands Of country people, Not knowing their tongue. Out here in Jutland In the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, Unhappy and at home.

It was controversial to suggest that violence was encoded into historical memory in this way.19 But it struck a chord, at a time when history was being rethought and “memory” allowed to complicate the national narrative. Bringing to attention what divided Irish people in the past, as well as what united them, and facing up to uncomfortable truths, involves also facing up to how strategic our mechanisms of oblivion, as well as of memory, remain in the effort to negotiate the aftermath of hatred. This brings me to the third metaphor of my title. The discipline of vernacular historiography uses the concepts of “grandfather stories” and “imagined reminiscence,” and I can add my own examples. My maternal grandfather died in 1923, aged 54, leaving a large family. He was an officer in the Royal Irish Constabulary, stationed in Wicklow town. According to family lore, he was an immensely popular and convivial figure and his death was an unfortunate accident. During the Anglo-Irish War, in 1920 he was doing his rounds in the company of a deeply unpopular senior officer of the Royal Irish Constabulary when an IRA sniper aimed at the Inspector, missed him and shot my grandfather instead. My grandfather did not die immediately, but three years later, from the after-effects of the bullet which remained lodged in his body. My resourceful grandmother converted their sizeable house into a boarding house, and became herself a much-loved Wicklow character. And she always told her children that the IRA sent someone to the house to apologize for having shot their father by mistake. I believed this story until I went to the United States and met a cousin who had done more detailed research into the family background. She laughed heartily at my version and told me that it was nonsense; our grandfather – famously convivial – died of cirrhosis of the liver. 19 As discussed in Foster, On Seamus Heaney, pp. 43–59.

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What interests me now is the version that was handed down and the reasons for it, particularly as it reflects my grandmother’s situation, a Protestant policeman’s widow with a large family, trying to make her way as a lodging-house landlady in newly independent Ireland still scarred by revolution and civil war. The story of that random bullet inexorably making its way through a popular policeman’s doomed body was a potent metaphor. Given her circumstances, elective amnesia and creative invention must indeed have been necessary to enable a viable future. And on a much larger level, they still are.

References Beiner, Guy. Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Boswell, James. Life of Johnson. Edited by G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934. Burke, Peter. Varieties of Cultural History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Daly, Mary, and Margaret O’Callaghan, eds. 1916 in 1966: Commemorating the Easter Rising. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2014. Fitzpatrick, David. “Ireland and the Great War.” In 1800 to the Present, pp. 223–57. Vol. 4 of The Cambridge History of Ireland, edited by Thomas Bartlett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Foster, R. F. The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland. London: Allen Lane, 2001. Foster, R. F. “Parnell to Pearse.” In Parnell and His Times: Ireland into the Twentieth Century, edited by Joep Leerssen, pp. 53–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Foster, R. F. “The Promise of 1916: Radicalism, Radicalization and Resettlement, 1916–2016.” In Ireland 1916–2016: The Promise and Challenge of National Sovereignty, edited by Tom Boylan, Nicholas Canny and Mary Harris, pp. 25–40. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017. Foster, R. F. On Seamus Heaney. Writers on Writers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Foster, R. F. Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923. London: Allen Lane, 2014. Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats, A Life. Vol. 2, The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Garvin, Tom. 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1996. Gerwarth, Robert. The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923. London: Allen Lane, 2016.

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Gerwarth, Robert, and John Horne, eds. War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War. The Greater War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hart, Peter. The IRA and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Hart, Peter. The IRA at War, 1916–1923. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Hay, Marnie. Bulmer Hobson and the Nationalist Movement in Twentieth-Century Ireland. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Hughes, Brian. Defying the IRA? Intimidation, Coercion and Communities during the Irish Revolution. Reappraisals in Irish History 7. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Leerssen, Joep. Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century. Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature 22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986. Leerssen, Joep. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representations of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Critical Conditions 4. Cork: Cork University Press, 1996. Mitchell, Arthur. Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dáil Éireann, 1919–1922. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1995. Wilson, Timothy. Frontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918–1922. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Yeats, W. B. “The Celtic Element in Literature.” In Ideas of Good and Evil, pp. 210–29. Vol. 6 of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose. London: Chapman & Hall, 1908. Yeats, W. B. “A General Introduction for My Work.” In Essays and Introductions, pp. 509–26. London: Macmillan, 1961.

20 Reconstituting the European Historical Novel in Latin America Mario Vargas Llosa in the Backlands of Brazil Ina Ferris

Abstract This essay considers the historical novel as inherently and not contingently a “translational” genre, from its origins in nineteenth-century Europe to its recent resurgence in the postcolonial world. It takes as exemplary its transposition into Latin America and Vargas Llosa’s recalibration of the form in War of the End of the World. Keywords historical novel; cultural translation; translational modes; Latin America; Vargas Llosa

In 1972 Ruy Guerra, Portuguese-Brazilian film director, recruited Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian novelist, to write the script for a f ilm about an uprising in the remote backlands of Brazil in the late nineteenth century which escalated into a major national conflict known as the Canudos War (1896–97). The film itself was to be based on the vivid account of the war by an eyewitness, Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões (The Backlands, 1902), firmly enshrined as a foundational text in Brazil’s national canon. Although the film project fell through, Vargas Llosa’s fascination with the story of Canudos, sparked by da Cunha’s “extraordinary book,” only intensified.1 Less than a decade later, the projected cinematic script had metamorphosed into La guerra del fin del mundo (1981, translated in 1984 as The War of the End of the World) an almost 600-page historical novel on the grand scale of 1 Vargas Llosa, Writer’s Reality, p. 123. Os sertões was translated into English in 1944 as Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands.

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nineteenth-century European realist fictions. A striking departure from his earlier experimental modernist fictions of contemporary Peruvian life, this was Vargas Llosa’s most ambitious project and the most difficult to realize: how to write about an event that took place in another time as well as in a country with whose language he was unfamiliar? In response, Vargas Llosa performed a double act of translation. He created a language he describes as “not entirely Spanish in spite of being Spanish” by incorporating words from Brazilian Portuguese (Luso-Brazilian), and he used this language not just in dialogue but in description in order to generate the entire world of the novel. He also created the sense of historical distance by writing some episodes in the manner of nineteenth-century novels and alternating these with episodes written in a modern manner, so as to position readers in the temporal space between past and present definitive of historical narrative as a whole.2 The difficulty Vargas Llosa faced reflects the specificity of his situation vis-à-vis the subject of Canudos, but at the same time it foregrounds a problem endemic to the writing of historical novels in general and throws into sharp relief the status of the historical novel as a genre constituted by acts of translation. This is the case even when the historical subject or its language belong to the writer’s own nation and language, since neither belongs to the writer’s own time. As Walter Scott argued when defining the genre he established in the early nineteenth century, even a national historical subject “should be, as it were, translated into the manners, as well as the language of the age we live in.”3 Scott’s model locates historical fiction as a mode of what we would now call cultural translation, one that chimed in his own day with the notion of “free translation” dominant in making literary translations, including acts of internal literary translation such as Scott’s own transmission of the ballad tradition in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). Importantly, however, the target based set to contemporary readers in the historical novel did not rule out a certain estrangement of these same readers, for its story of national formation possessed the potential to both sustain and unsettle a modern order. On the one hand, the basic plot of the emergence of a coherent national identity out of bitter cultural conflicts rooted in the past affirmed the trajectory and mediations of a historical process. On the other hand, the narrative dynamic of a consonance forged (usually violently) out of dissonance worked to dislodge taken-for-granted assumptions about the unity of national history. 2 Vargas Llosa, Writer’s Reality, pp. 137–38. Vargas Llosa adds a note commending Helen Lane’s English translation which follows his model (p. 137, n.). 3 Scott, Ivanhoe, p. 18.

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In this double valence lies a key to its wide dissemination across postRevolutionary Europe and beyond through translation and the rapidity with which it achieved paradigmatic status. For Franco Moretti, indeed, the historical novel gained so broad a purchase that he identifies it as a crucial vector in what he calls the “ruthless, unprecedented centralization of European literature” in the nineteenth century.4 Within Europe, he argues, it played a key role in the homogenization of European culture, while in the colonial world it reinforced Europe’s hegemonic power.5 Moretti’s atlas of the European novel thus offers a centrifugal model of cultural transfer: cultural influences emanate from the major centres of London and Paris and flow in one direction. In contrast, Joep Leerssen, addressing the same question of cultural transfer, operates out of a decentred lateral model, tracing lines of connection that flow in several directions and move along different axes of relation to present Europe as a complex “zone of traffic and exchange.”6 In Leerssen’s scenario, translation belongs not in the context of asymmetric power relations, as in Moretti, but within a matrix of communicative acts through which both national culture and translational phenomena are made. And in analysing transnational phenomena in particular, he specifies, two main variables need to be distinguished: a “translational” variable of direct transfer and a “situational” variable of parallel conditions.7 Both are generally operative but the relative weight of each varies with the circumstances. The historical novel offers an especially clear instance of a translational literary phenomenon, one with a determinate origin and identifiable template, but the two variables Leerssen identifies stand in consequentially different relation when it moves across Europe than when it is transposed to colonial and former colonial lands. Where in Europe the generic template mapped with relative ease onto the specificity of the situational circumstances into which it was transferred, in non-European regions the translational transfer repeatedly ran into recalcitrant situational contexts. And this friction, in turn, produced a recalibration of the narrative dynamic that was to alter the gravitational centre of the historical novel and reshape its plot of national history. As a “semi-detached” region in relation to western culture, Latin America presents a salient site of such transposition, its cultures at once tied to and distinct from those of Europe.8 As its name suggests, the region identifies 4 Moretti, Atlas, p. 186. 5 Moretti, Atlas, pp. 190–93. 6 Leerssen, National Thought in Europe, p. 19. 7 Leerssen, introduction, pp. 7–8. 8 Martin, “Novel of a Continent,” p. 636.

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itself as essentially constituted by a foundational imbrication of European and Amerindian elements (African elements were incorporated later, notably in Brazil), so that its postcolonial relationship to European culture resists the kind of binary reduction generated by Moretti among others. Like all novels in Latin America the historical novel was an imported form and generally experienced in translation.9 It bore a special charge, however, on a continent where most of the colonized regions had achieved political independence from European powers in the first decades of the century but were themselves highly unstable entities, constantly mired in internal and intracontinental conflicts. In such a context the integrative model and conciliatory form of the historical novel held a singular appeal. But two key dimensions of difference in historical experience tended to unbalance the dynamic of the European historical novel: geography and race. The alien landscape of South America placed European bodies and minds under new kinds of strain, while the overwhelming indigenous presence placed severe pressure on the trope of cross-cultural union (which underwrote an amalgamated national identity) when this union was not simply between European cultures but between distinct races. If the structure of early Latin American historical novels was thus generally modelled on Scott’s prototype – Xavier points to José de Alencar’s pioneering 1857 Indianist historical novel O Guarany (The Guaraní) as exemplary – the conciliatory arc of its narrative proved unsustainable. Novel endings remained open and uncertain, while the novels’ body elaborated the genre’s conflictive narrative kernel, drawing out unassimilated threads of colonial history and translating indigenous cultures for a national readership. In this sense, Xavier argues, a novel like O Guarany may be said to have “transformed” the constellation of the European historical novel tradition.10 At the same time, such nineteenth-century transformations largely continued to operate within the terms of European models of uneven development, locating their competing cultures as regressive or progressive movements on a flat, homogeneous plane in which sociohistorical time was imagined as a continuous line moving in only one direction. Vargas Llosa’s late twentieth-century intervention in War of the End of the World effects a more radical transformation by introducing a vertical axis to bisect the horizontal axis of national-historical time and press in on its parameters. Recalling the standard scenario of nineteenth-century historical fictions, the novel tells the story of an uprising that challenged an incipient 9 Vasconcelos, “Migratory Literary Forms,” p. 74. 10 Xavier, “Brazilian Novels,” p. 150.

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modern order and was defeated. In the late nineteenth century a millenarian lay preacher known as Antônio Conselheiro (the “Counsellor”) wandered about the arid interior of northern Brazil for decades, restoring churches and cemeteries and preaching the imminent end of the world. In 1893, however, he opposed modern measures introduced by the recently created Republic of Brazil and led a rag-tag band of followers to a deserted hamlet named Canudos, where they set about creating a settlement, constructing a temple and awaiting fulfillment of the prophecy. Thousands flocked to the site, a motley mixed-race collection of society’s marginalized; as their numbers swelled, spawning false rumours of a monarchist conspiracy supported by English money, state and federal authorities took alarm. In 1896, they launched the first of what would turn out to be four military campaigns, each fiercely resisted and each scaled up as shocking defeat followed shocking defeat, including that of Brazil’s finest regiment led by a venerated hero of the republic. Only a massively escalated fourth campaign finally succeeded in taking Canudos, razing it to the ground and annihilating its inhabitants.11 In telling this story, Vargas Llosa suspends macrolevel questions of historical process or progress – the explanatory frame within which such historical events were generally placed – to dilate the event itself, and he downplays the sense of its pastness by deploying present tense as much as past so as to endow Canudos with a powerful sense of presence. Governed by another kind of time, the people of Canudos orient themselves along a vertical axis of allegiance, upward toward the transcendent realm of the sacred and downward to the earthy sphere of elemental corporeal, creaturely existence. They thus stand in orthogonal relation to the horizontal axis of modern historical time, bypassing categories such as nation and politics altogether and confounding those who operate within them. The intersection of the two axes marks the point of uprising, and Vargas Llosa mobilizes the energy of uprising as literally a movement, a surging up from below: something more spontaneous, visceral and amorphous than more conceptually directed notions like rebellion or revolution (which may or may not begin as uprisings). In an important way, his story of Canudos is the story of an uprising misread as a rebellion or revolution. To some it appears a revolution, the rebirth of the revolutionary Idea defeated in Europe and heralding the advent of a just new society; to others, a reactionary rebellion threatening the creation of a united modern Brazilian nation. Explicitly shaped by political ideas imported from Europe (e.g. Proudhon, Bakunin and Comte), both readings are instances of what Bruno Schwarz has termed “misplaced ideas” in the 11 For the historical context, see Madden, “Canudos War in History.”

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Latin American context.12 Neither finds purchase in the backlands where, by contrast, the Counsellor’s own vision, equally anchored in European sources (a mixture of Catholic doctrine, chivalric tales, Christian eschatology and Portuguese myth), meets with an extraordinary uptake. The key to this success lies in genre and in medium. The Counsellor’s vision itself both comes out of and is conveyed through the deeply rooted oral culture of the region, while story is the genre of transmission. Both factors enable an integration of European influence into the experience of the backlands that eludes political ideas promulgated by outsiders from abroad or from the urban coastal areas of Brazil. To his listeners the Counsellor’s stories remind them of familiar fables and tales recited by the cantadores, singers who wandered the region while his invocation of limit events, like the end of the world, readily folds into the experience of “everyday, familiar things” for those inhabiting a terrain where time itself takes on the form of recurring calamity.13 Orchestrating multiple layers of traditional story (biblical and secular) into a millennial vision of transformation, the Counsellor not only anchors his words in a familiar world but charges the everyday world with sublimity – hence aligning the novel’s own realism with the much older form of realism Erich Auerbach found in biblical story and called the “serious realism” of everyday life.14 In short, the Counsellor operates within the informal, lived zone of culture and religion wherein the sense of a collective identity distinct from Europe took shape across Latin America well before it acquired “political and social substance” over the course of the nineteenth century.15 Importantly, this collective consciousness was intensely regional rather than national, an affiliation shaped by place rather than idea. What draws the people of Canudos together, for example, is not so much the spirituality of faith (it houses a heterogeneity of dispositions) as the shared experience of existence on a ground inimical to human order and community, subject to searing heat, severe drought, pestilence and depredation. And the ground itself becomes an active participant in the conflict, enabling the defenders to ambush and entrap their attackers while impeding, destroying and exhausting military movements, equipment and soldiers. Even as climate and topography change radically in different parts of the continent, the sense of inhabiting an extreme environment not amenable to the mediatory 12 Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas, pp. 19–32. 13 Vargas Llosa, War of the End, p. 5. 14 Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 1–23. 15 Bouchard, Making of Nations, pp. 159–60.

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forms and temporalities of human order remains a common thread. And Canudos itself has, in Johnson’s words, “jumped national borders” to become inscribed in a broader Latin American tradition.16 An event that in a sense went nowhere, it has entered into historical narrative and cultural memory as an “otherwise” – a story that eludes explanation and continues to reverberate. Heralding the surprising resurgence of historical fiction in global peripheries in recent decades, War of the End of the World testifies to the historical novel’s enduring role as what Emily Apter terms a “translation zone”: sites that do not belong to a single nation or language but neither do they dissolve into a nebulous post-nationalism; rather, they operate as “a connecting port of translational transnationalism.” In themselves, therefore, they are always “in translation,” and the primary function of such translation, she explains, is to “reposition the subject” so as to unsettle premises taken for granted and to renew perception by removal from the “comfort zone” of national space and daily ritual.17 It is no accident that, for both Vargas Llosa and Scott, historical fiction was importantly an adventure tale, a swerve out of everyday life and time. Indeed, this linkage to a devalued genre goes some way to explain the historical novel’s own typical devaluation and relegation to the lower reaches of literary culture. By mobilizing the translational potential inherent in the form, however, the revival of the practice of historical fiction in global peripheries has reconstituted the genre, restoring to it the innovative edge it possessed when it emerged from Britain’s own peripheries in the early nineteenth century to reshape the European novelistic field.

References Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Bouchard, Gérard. The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World: An Essay in Comparative Literature. Translated by Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Brown. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008. Originally published as Genèse des nations et cultures du nouveau monde: Essai d’histoire comparée (Montréal: Boréal, 2001). 16 Johnson, Sentencing Canudos, pp. 2–3. 17 Apter, Translation Zone, p. 3.

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Cunha, Euclides da. Rebellion in the Backlands. Translated by Samuel Putnam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. Johnson, Adriana M. C. Sentencing Canudos: Everydayness and Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Leerssen, Joep. Introduction to The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe, edited by Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen, pp. 1–10. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Leerssen, Joep. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Madden, Lori. “The Canudos War in History.” Luso-Brazilian Review 30, no. 2 (1993): pp. 5–22. Martin, Gerald. “The Novel of a Continent: Latin America.” In History, Geography, and Culture, pp. 632–67. Vol. 1 of The Novel, edited by Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1999. Schwarz, Bruno. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. Edited by John Gledson. London: Verso, 1992. Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe. Edited by Ian Duncan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Vargas Llosa, Mario. La guerra del fin del mundo. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981. Vargas Llosa, Mario. The War of the End of the World. Translated by Helen R. Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984. Vargas Llosa, Mario. A Writer’s Reality. Edited by Myron I. Lichtblau. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Vasconcelos, Sandra Guardini. “Migratory Literary Forms: British Novels in Nineteenth-Century Brazil.” In Books and Periodicals in Brazil 1768–1930, edited by Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos, pp. 68–85. London: Routledge, 2014. Xavier, Weibke Röben de Alencar. “The Brazilian Novels O Guarany and Innocencia Translated into German: National Production and the Bestseller in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In The Transatlantic Circulation of Novels between Europe and Brazil, 1789–1914, edited by Márcia Abreu, pp. 145–69. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Part V Imagology, Identity and Alterity

21 The Shape of Things to Come Thomas Pennant’s Tour of Ireland in 1754 Mary-Ann Constantine Abstract Thomas Pennant’s writings on Wales and Scotland profoundly influenced the development of tourism in those countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and helped shaped ideas about their respective “national characters”. His much earlier tour of Ireland, however, was never published. Though only in note form, it offers useful insights into the concerns of the period and their future directions. Keywords tourism; Celticism; Enlightenment; Wales; Ireland; Scotland

Waiting for the ferry to Ireland in the summer of 1754, Thomas Pennant combed the shoreline at Holyhead in Wales. He found “hexagonal cristallizations” and a sea anemone “displaying various beautyfull branches, always expanded,” and was shown an “odd vegetation” by his new friend, William Morris. 1 This may have been his f irst meeting with William (1705–1763), the third of the four Morris brothers of Anglesey (Morrisiad Môn), whose correspondence charts the ups and downs of a stimulating period of revival in Welsh literature and antiquarianism.2 Pennant was embarking on a three-month journey around Ireland, the first of several ambitious tours which would take him to the Continent, up to the northern and western parts of Scotland, and all over his native north Wales. He recorded that journey in a notebook of jottings – sometimes barely more than a list of places – a thin and sketchy ghost of the lived experience of the journey itself. 1 2

Pennant, “Journal,” vol. 1 [unpaginated]. See Davies, Letters.

Brolsma et al. Networks, Narratives and Nations. Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022. doi: 10.5117/9789463720755_ch21

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There would doubtless be many more of these notebooks, though remarkably few have survived. One from 1770 records an expedition into the north Welsh mountains, with an account of an ascent of Mount Snowdon: it contains a pressed flower, picked and slipped between its pages more than two and half centuries ago.3 But such intimacies are unusual, since this traveller mostly appears in print. Pennant’s first successful publication was A Tour in Scotland 1769 (1771) rapidly followed by A Tour in Scotland and A Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772 (1774–76), and a series of three journeys around north Wales resulted in the two-volume Tours in Wales published in 1784. They were books that made a difference. Looking back over his Literary Life in 1793, he wrote: I had the hardiness to venture on a journey to the remotest part of North Britain, a country almost as little known to its southern brethren as Kamschatka. I brought home a favourable account of the land. Whether it will thank me or not I cannot say, but from the report I made, and shewing that it might be visited with safety, it has ever since been inondée with southern visitors. 4

Given the context of global exploration to Siberia and the southern hemisphere, there may be a flicker of self-mockery here. But Scotland was indeed relatively “unknown” to the southern (and western) parts of a still somewhat uneasily United Kingdom. Pennant’s volumes on Scotland and later Wales acted as gateways for the scores, and then hundreds, of visitors who came after him. He played an important and somewhat underrated role – perhaps because also understated – in the ideological construction of two of the Celtic-speaking cultures of the British archipelago at a period when the “Celtic Revival” was experiencing its first burst of creative energy, and when ideas about the landscapes and people of both countries had excited national and international imaginations, thanks to Thomas Gray’s The Bard and James Macpherson’s Ossian.5 There was, however, no published Tour of Ireland 1754. Two small notebooks and a handful of letters to his aunt are all that remain of that early journey across the Irish Sea. As Pennant himself put it decades later, “such was the conviviality of the country, that my journal proved as maigre [thin] as my entertainment was gras [thick], so it never was a 3 Pennant, “Notes for a Tour in Wales,” National Library of Wales, MS 2532B. 4 Pennant, Literary Life, p. 11. 5 Leask, Stepping Westward; Constantine, Curious Travellers.

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dish fit to be offered to the public.”6 Maigre as it is, the notebook account is a valuable example of the kind of raw, immediate text which Pennant subsequently worked up into his publications. Lines across the page mark the end of each day and track the writer’s progress across the land; sparse observations of places and events unroll in close proximity to their actuality. It seems an appropriate subject for a short piece such as this; a sketch of things to come. Pennant’s tour of Ireland pref igures not only his own career as a writer of richly detailed travel narratives (themselves continually fattened through successive editions with new information from correspondents), but as a precursor of also the routes taken and sights seen by later visitors. Tourism was and is a powerful force in the creation and reinforcement of national stereotypes. The written and visual legacies of hundreds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tours of the British archipelago had the paradoxical effect of both familiarizing and exoticizing the landscapes and cultures they described. While variety was, in theory, at the heart of the picturesque, the presentation of “peripheral” landscapes – all those waterfalls, those tree-scattered rocks – tended towards a conceptual homogenization which shaped perceptions of the Celtic-speaking west.7 Against this pulled an undertow of narratives of real, often unpredictable, encounters: with weather and people, with food, costumes, music and languages, and importantly with sites of past conflict memorializing unfamiliar versions of history, or familiar pasts viewed from new perspectives. One can read Pennant’s mid-century journal as an early thread in cultural Celticism – that web of connections and comparisons between the Celtic-speaking countries which would cradle later essentialist ideas of national or racial character.8 But there are other, broader patterns at work here too.

The Journey Unlike an irascible Jonathan Swift some thirty years earlier,9 Pennant was not much delayed at the port, arriving on the evening of Tuesday 25 June and leaving the following afternoon. The crossing was not easy: “one part of the time a rolling sea and no wind. When off the Hill of Howth an hard gale from 6 Pennant, Literary Life, p. 2. 7 O’Kane, Ireland and the Picturesque. 8 Brown, Celticism. 9 Connolly, “Too Rough for Verse?”

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Fig. 21.1 Map of Thomas Pennant’s journey in Ireland, 1754. Map made by David Parsons.

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land drove us several leages N.”10 It was Friday morning before they reached Dublin. The next few days evoke a rapidly changing city and its environs, with visits to the smelting mills near Athlone, the college and the museum (“ill furnished” but with two British axe-heads that he rather liked); he heard about the project of building a square on Lord Fitzwilliam’s estate, attended a levée hosted the Lord Justice and “dined at the Rose tavern. Saw a fine shew of Toys at Smith’s a Jewellers.”11 From Dublin Pennant took the usual route north via Swords, and then, over a period of weeks, looped the island of Ireland in a circuit which took him to Sligo, Galway, Limerick, Killarney, Cork and Waterford, with many other stops and excursions on the way. He mostly travelled on horseback, observing, like Arthur Young some twenty years later, the nature of the country around him (“poor,” “rocky,” “good,” “improveable,” “beautyfully wooded”). Though antiquities and natural phenomena appear as points of interest, his main focus is on land-use and infrastructure, on mines and mills, linen manufactures and the planning and development of new towns. At Ballycastle he describes Hugh Boyd’s attempts “to form a flourishing colliery and a secure Port”: The former he has in some measure succeeded in; but the latter seems still in an uncertain state. A turbulent sea, and a destructive insect has done vast damage, a small grub scarce the 8th part of an inch in length having in five years space utterly destroyed part of the finest oake he had employed in his Pier.12

These reports on the progress of progress (and its occasional interruptions by the Toredo worm) are interspersed with eye-catching details: “in the Evening went into a druidical cave, on the side of a hill”; the “clean, gravelly” shores at Lough Neagh “abound with variety of carnations” which the people pick and sell (Fig. 21.1).13

Killarney In Killarney, Pennant visited the home of the Catholic landowner Thomas Browne, Lord Kenmare (1726–1795). The two men had much in common: 10 11 12 13

Pennant, “Journal,” WCRO, CR 2017/TP18, vol. 1. Pennant, “Journal,” WCRO, CR 2017/TP18, vol. 1. Pennant to Elizabeth Pennant, 16 July 1754, WCRO. CR2017 TP125/1. Pennant, “Journal,” WCRO, CR 2017/TP18, vol. 1.

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born in the same year, both men had a powerful influence on the shape of the tourist itineraries in their respective countries. Pennant would “Lye at Lord Kenmares” for a whole week, riding out to see castles and walks, copper mines and plantations, and visiting his host’s linen manufacture (“Not successful because Protestants will not live under Papists”). One rainy afternoon they attend “an Irish Papist funeral barbarous custom of howling before the corps bury at an old abby severe Penalty People there howl over the respective graves of their friends. Get drunk commonly.”14 This is interesting both because Irish funeral traditions become a topos of later travel literature and because this particular episode reappears utterly transformed in Pennant’s 1769 Tour of Scotland in a discussion of funeral rites in the Highlands. He had not, he writes, the “good fortune” to attend a burial in “North Britain,” but “formerly assisted at one in the south of Ireland, where it was performed in the fullness of horror.” Summoning an episode experienced fifteen years earlier in Ireland to fill the gap in his Scottish tour, he gives a two-page description of the funeral “conducted in the purest Classical form.” The “howling” is transmuted into “ululating,” and the page is thick with citations from Virgil’s account of the death of Dido, with the keeners in black, flowing robes “resembling the ancient Palla, their hair long, and dishevelled”; he nonetheless suspects them of being, like the women noted by Horace, a mercenary tribe (“I could not but observe that they overdid their parts”). The closing scene is theatrical: “the corps was carried slowly along the verge of a most beautiful lake, the ululatus [howling] was continued, and the whole procession ended among the ruins of an old abby.”15 It does not mention (as the notebook does) that such burials were prohibited. That short and rather squeamish notebook entry seems an improbable seed for this luxurious later piece, and offers a rare glimpse of how the pencil-sketches of the Irish tour might have looked as full-blown verbal paintings. It represents a typical Pennant manoeuvre when dealing with instances of “superstitious,” primitive or transgressive behaviour (in Wales, often traditions associated with saints): they are deflected with dry humour, explained away by rational science or, as here, dignified with parallels from the classical past. The highlight of Pennant’s stay at Killarney was the day spent on the lakes with his host. “His lordship,” he wrote to his aunt, “does me the honour of shewing everything remarkable in the most advantageous manner,

14 Pennant, “Journal,” WCRO, CR 2017/TP18, vol. 1. 15 Pennant, Tour in Scotland 1769, pp. 93–94.

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particularly the Beauties of the celebrated Lough Lene.” The little islands scattered on the water are especially striking for the variety of their trees: On the same rock I counted the Arbutus or Strawberry tree; the service, yew, Holly, Juniper, oake, ashe, wicken, with great numbers of others some proper to that spot others that we have in England. These entertained my Eyes; but that was not the only sense that was pleased; for my Hearing had its share from the surprizing Echo from the mountains: to enjoy this in the greatest perfection his Ld [Lordship] brought on the water two French horns, a fife, a drum and Two swivel guns: every note was returned to the former, but when the Latter were discharged the loudest claps of Thunder I ever heard were unequal to the sound returned.16

The Killarney lake experience is a kind of locus classicus in the history of Irish tourism, as recent work has shown. William Williams has charted the growth of tourist infrastructure there for the period of 1750–1850, and the inexorable journey of the “experience” itself from a thrilling encounter with wildness to a carefully stage-managed, and paid-for, simulacrum – the “surprizing Echo” becoming an echo of itself in relentlessly repeated tourist accounts.17 Virtually every element in Pennant’s letter to his aunt will become an element of the Killarney experience, right down to the strawberry trees. (In this sense Kenmare prefigures Thomas Johnes of Hafod, who, from the 1780s, transformed a bleak mid-Wales valley into a picturesque Eden of walks, waterfalls and woodland, and played an impresario role in attracting visitors who would write and sketch the place into public consciousness.18) Luke Gibbons’ work situating Killarney within the “politics of the sublime” brings a darker element into play, a note far from absent even in Pennant’s laconic account (“Not successful because Protestants will not live under Papists”).19 The Kerry mountains, whose Tory bandits and rebels had frustrated Edward Lhuyd back in 1700, were still dangerous ground and formed a disturbing backdrop to Kenmare’s unusual position as a “civilized Catholic landowner”, his family having exceptionally retained their estates during the confiscations. The response of the Echo to the sonic flurry of military bravura on the lake is nicely double-edged: is this a landscape tamed and packaged, or a landscape answering back? 16 Pennant to Elizabeth Pennant, 24 August 1754, WCRO, CR2017 TP125/2. 17 Williams, Creating Irish Tourism, pp. 129–50. 18 Constantine, Curious Travellers. 19 Gibbons, “Topographies of Terror.”

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Tourism and National Character Kenmare’s project at Killarney demonstrates the meshed complexities of the discourses of the “political” and the “picturesque” which Leerssen explores at length in his work on representations of Ireland and Irish history in the nineteenth century.20 The role of tourism in constructing such representations, and the role of texts specifically written by or for visitors to such places, remains a subject with rich comparative possibilities. The lake and mountain landscapes of Snowdonia, Switzerland and the Scottish Highlands produce their own scenarios of violence from the distant or recent past, set in suitably stunning locations. This flirtation with historical conflict sometimes presumes a legacy of antipathy to the (usually English) traveller. His kind clerical host notwithstanding, the anonymous author of the Letters from Snowdon (1770) identifies natives of the region as direct descendants of “the Ordovices of the Romans,” still steadfast in their dislike of incomers: “whenever they speak of an Englishman, whom they still call Saes or Saxon, they always join some opprobious epithet.”21 Other visitors have enough historical sensitivity to feel uncomfortable when admiring the ruined beauties of Edwardian castles along the north Welsh coast.22 Postcolonial theory has helped to lay bare the ideologies, the imbalances in power and agency, which structured much travel writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this paradigm, tours of the Celtic-speaking countries can be read as contributing towards the neutralization, appropriation or occlusion of a native, non-English past. Productive as these broad readings can be, they occasionally result in the glib binaries of precisely the kind of retroactive nationalism which Leerssen’s work as a whole so carefully dissects. Within that bigger picture, one can easily miss the fine cross-hatchings that give it depth. Pennant is a case in point: his relationship to what we might consider “national” thought is extraordinarily difficult to pin down – until one realizes that this might simply be the result of asking the wrong questions. In 1754, as later in Scotland, Pennant moved easily enough from one gentry house to the next, speaking English and sharing the ideals and assumptions of British polite society. “Hidden Ireland” flickers off-stage, in the “howling” at Kerry or in the hints of dark stories about “Papists” or “Irish” in the north; in the reference to a Murder Hole (“from the slaughter of Protestants there”). The maigre journal precludes reflection or opinion; but in a letter to his 20 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, p. 10. 21 Letters from Snowdon, p. 6. 22 Hucks, Pedestrian Tour, pp. 42–43.

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aunt, Pennant contrasts the “Healthy rosy cheeked Damsels” of fairs at home with the “emaciated half-starved scarecrows” of Ireland, adding, “for tho’ the gentry live in the greatest affluence, the Peasants fare more hardly than any People I ever met with yet.”23 This is not a comment about Welshness or Irishness, any more than the shocking discovery of starving families on Canna and Jura in 1772 is a reflection on Gaelic culture. Pennant’s Tours certainly contributed to the later development of nationalist thought; not least, in a Welsh context, in resuscitating the largely neglected figure of Owain Glyndŵr. His account of the latter is strikingly non-partisan, however, and much of his writing expresses the ideals of Enlightenment Patriotism, which Leerssen sees as “the forerunner of liberalism rather than nationalism”: middle-class, enlightened, complacent in its economic security, joining the notion of individual liberty with that of social consensus and government accountability, aiming to ensure stability and to prevent or alleviate disaffection by reconciling the interests of the state and of the body of its citizens.24

To read Pennant’s interest in and concern for the cultures of the archipelago in a Patriot rather than a ‘patriotic’ framework is liberating. It explains how the writer who wished to draw a veil over the “incidents” at Culloden could be excoriating in his condemnation of a British government which left Hebridean citizens to starve; or why the man who ordered extra grain for depressed rural communities in 1790s Flintshire also supported the viciously anti-radical Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property. And it also contextualizes, although without quite exhausting its mischievous possibilities, his famously latent description in the Tours in Wales of Caernarfon castle as “that most magnificent badge of our subjection.”

References Archival Sources National Library of Wales. Pennant, Thomas. “Notes for a Tour in Wales.” MS 2532B. WCRO (Warwickshire County Record Office). Pennant, Thomas. “Journal of my Tour in Ireland 1754.” 2 vols. Unpaginated. CR 2017/TP18/1–2. WCRO. Thomas Pennant letters. CR2017 TP125/1–2. 23 Pennant to Elizabeth Pennant, 16 July 1754, WCRO, CR2017 TP125/1. 24 Leerssen, “Anglo-Irish Patriotism,” p. 15.

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Published Sources Brown, Terence, ed. Celticism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Connolly, Claire. “Too Rough for Verse? Sea Crossings in Irish Culture.” In Parnell and His Times, edited by Joep Leerssen, pp. 235–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Constantine, Mary-Ann. Curious Travellers: Writing the Welsh Tour 1700–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Constantine, Mary-Ann, and Nigel Leask, eds. Enlightenment Travel and British Identities: Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Scotland and Wales. London: Anthem Press, 2017. Davies, J. H. The Letters of Lewis, Richard, William and John Morris of Anglesey. 2 vols. Aberystwyth: privately printed, 1907–9. Gibbons, Luke. “Topographies of Terror: Killarney and the Politics of the Sublime.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95, no. 1 (1996): pp. 23–45. Hucks, Joseph. A Pedestrian Tour through North Wales in a Series of Letters (1795). Edited by Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1979. Leask, Nigel. Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour 1700–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Leerssen, Joep. “Anglo-Irish Patriotism and its European Context: Notes Towards a Reassessment.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 3 (1988): pp. 7–24. Leerssen, Joep. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Cork: Cork University Press, 1996. Letters from Snowdon. London, 1770. O’Kane, Finola. Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting and Tourism in Ireland, 1700–1840. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Pennant, Thomas. The Literary Life of the Late Thomas Pennant Esq., by Himself. London: Benjamin White, 1793. Pennant, Thomas. A Tour in Scotland 1769. Warrington, 1771. Williams, William. Creating Irish Tourism: The First Century 1750–1850. London: Anthem Press, 2011.

22 Auto-exoticism and the Irish Colonial Landscape George Petrie’s Paintings of Clonmacnoise (1828) and Dún Aengus (1827) Tom Dunne

Abstract This chapter shows how auto-exoticism, seen by Leerssen as a feature of the post-Union Irish novel, also shaped Irish landscape art in this period. The focus is on two key watercolours by George Petrie (1790–1866), together with engravings he produced for tourist guides. Keywords auto-exoticism; George Petrie; Clonmacnoise; Inismore; Dún Aengus

In Remembrance and Imagination, his seminal study of “Historical and Literary Representations of Ireland,” Joep Leerssen identified “auto-exoticism” as a key feature of the Irish novel in the decades after the Act of Union (1800). Beginning with Lady Morgan, a succession of Irish writers, published in London, and with an English readership primarily in mind, developed this “mode of seeing, presenting and representing oneself in one’s otherness,” that is, “non-Englishness.” They used the device of a cosmopolitan outsider, often on a journey westward from Dublin, to present a sympathetic image of the Irish poor. Designed, primarily, to counter the negative stereotypes held by English readers, this image exaggerated and romanticized Irish difference. In this way, “Ireland is made exotic by the self-same descriptions that purport to represent or explain Ireland.” Furthermore, in a paradoxical trope still present in contemporary tourism promotion, “the most peripheral

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areas of Ireland are canonized as the most representative and characteristic ones.”1 My contribution attempts to demonstrate how auto-exoticism also shaped Irish landscape art in this period, noting, in addition, the colonial context of this mindset – something that was also true of the novels. Despite the constitutional fiction that after 1800, Ireland was a free and equal “Kingdom” in the expanded “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,” in real terms, whether of power relations, of ideologies or the shorthand of national stereotypes, Ireland remained a colony, though now, uniquely, an internal one. One reflection of this is that the exotic stereotype developed by Ireland’s defenders in print or paint had many elements in common with the colonialist stereotype they sought to challenge. The focus here is on two key watercolours by George Petrie (1790–1866), together with the engravings he produced for the elaborate tourist guides that, like the novels, catered for a new English interest in Ireland post-Union. From the middle of the eighteenth century, the relatively new vogue for landscape art in England gained acceptance, in part, by consciously reflecting popular views of English national character. Gainsborough, Stubbs, Constable and Turner, for example, promoted a patriotic image of the English landscape as marked by advanced agriculture (particularly corn production), featuring paternalistic landlords and an industrious, deferential peasantry – George Stubbs’s Reapers (1785) is one well-known example.2 Despite the ubiquity of corn production in large areas of the Irish landscape, there are no surviving Irish paintings that foreground this: it did not meet the expectations of the Irish colonial stereotype. Instead, copying, or even anticipating, the auto-exoticism of the novels surveyed by Leerssen, Ireland was often portrayed as primitive, exotic and picturesque – as dramatically “other.”3 Thomas Roberts’, A Landscape with travellers and cattle crossing a bridge (c.1771), with colourful peasants still lazily herding cattle in a Romantic, wild setting, as their distant ancestors did (a proof of their primitive state for Edmund Spenser), has claims to be regarded as characteristic of the Irish picturesque. 4 Son of a Dublin-based miniatures painter of Scottish descent, George Petrie was a complex figure, who made a precarious living primarily as an artist, particularly of detailed topographical and antiquarian subjects, 1 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, pp. 35–38. 2 Payne, Images, pp. 46–66. 3 Dunne, “Dark Side,” pp. 50–57. 4 Laffan and Rooney, Thomas Roberts, pp. 336–39.

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many of them engraved for tourist guides. However, he was ultimately better known as an antiquarian and proto-archaeologist, famous for rigorous scholarship and a penchant for controversy; he was an important collector and publisher of Irish music, and the founder of a popular newspaper making the fruits of antiquarian research widely available. He was a formidable cultural leader and facilitator across a range of activities, prominent in the Ordnance Survey, the Royal Irish Academy, and long-time president of the Royal Hibernian Academy, Ireland’s version of the Royal Academy.5 Little wonder that Joep Leerssen has argued that “Petrie, more than any other single individual in the nineteenth century, traced the cultural profile by which Ireland is still identified today,” comparing his influence to that of Sir Walter Scott on Scotland.6 Informing all of this remarkable range of cultural activity was a practical sense of patriotism, focused on countering the negative colonial stereotype of Ireland as primitive or barbarous, mainly by promoting the idea of a sophisticated, cultured, precolonial Ireland. This built on the work of eighteenth-century Catholic antiquarians, notably Charles O’Conor, and was articulated also in different ways by Lady Morgan and Thomas Moore in literature, by James Barry in art and by Daniel O’Connell and “Young Ireland” in politics. Petrie, indeed, sought to make the tradition more scholarly, seeing himself as an example of what he called “the philosophical historian.” Thomas Davis’s appeal for a patriotic “National art” came closest to realization in the key paintings by Petrie that are the focus of this chapter.7 Petrie wanted, in his own words, “to lend even a feeble hand towards the ultimate removal of hostile prejudices against the Celtic race amongst whom it was my chance to be cast.”8 However, as we will see, he could also project Romantic notions of Celtic primitivism onto the contemporary inhabitants of Aran. Petrie was also very influenced by the vogue for the picturesque in art. This related to seeing landscapes not as they were, but as they might best be represented in a picture, stressing pleasing versions of the natural and the rough, rather than the sophisticated or the sublime. Awareness of the importance of the burgeoning tourist market reinforced the picturesque nature of his art, and sometimes complicated its patriotic focus. Tourism, as Finola O’Kane points out, was “also a stage in the appropriation and colonisation of 5 Murray, George Petrie, pp. 39–124. 6 Murray, George Petrie, pp. 7–11. 7 Dunne, “Towards a National Art,” pp. 126–36. 8 Stokes, Life and Labours, pp. 404–5.

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territory,” and what can be termed “tourist landscapes” in Petrie’s work are particular instances of what was distinctively colonial in Irish landscape art.9 Petrie was under constant pressure to put more figures in his landscapes, in order, as one publisher told him, “to have given [the scene] life and bustle.”10 His figures mainly consisted of conventional “staffage” (incidental distant figures of bystanders, travellers or labourers, long a feature of European landscape art), but on occasion they were designed to reflect contemporary social and cultural reality. How such figures generally reinforced, but sometimes subverted, the patriotic intent of the image is a particular focus here. The inclusion of ruins in picturesque landscapes was more common and had a different meaning in Ireland than in England. In the imperial centre, the history that ruins evoked was settled, distant and nostalgic, so that they were increasingly used to represent private emotion rather than historical trauma, as in Constable’s famous Hadleigh Castle (1829).11 Centuries of endemic colonial wars were still vividly remembered in Ireland; their major elements of contention – land, religion and power – were still unresolved. In his patriotic 1828 painting of Clonmacnoise Petrie was clear about the wider meaning of the ecclesiastical ruins; they “call forth national associations and ideas.”12 Petrie produced over a hundred illustrations for Thomas Kitson Cromwell’s three-volume Excursions through Ireland (1820–21). While most included no significant figures, his McCarthy’s Church and Tower, Clonmacnoise, King’s County featured a group of devout women, one with a pilgrim staff, kneeling beside the ruin.13 This low-key political intervention was one of a number of positive portrayals of Catholic devotion by this liberal Protestant antiquarian, in a time when Catholic Emancipation dominated public discourse. The most important, and most adventurous, of Petrie’s sketching tours was in 1820 when he first visited remote and virtually unknown Inismore, the largest of the Aran Islands, off Ireland’s west coast. En route, he did extensive antiquarian research, including detailed sketching, at the almost equally unexplored monastic site of Clonmacnoise on the river Shannon. But he also did some general sketches, two of which were engraved for tourist guides. The first, for Cromwell’s Excursions, as noted above included devout female pilgrims. The second, engraved for Brewer’s Beauties of Ireland (1825–26), had a very different focus, featuring a tourist on horseback, getting directions 9 O’Kane, Ireland and the Picturesque, p. 2. 10 Murray, George Petrie, p. 36. 11 Hawes, Presences, p. 48. 12 Dunne, “Towards a National Art,” p. 129. 13 Murray, George Petrie, pp. 158–97 and 223.

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Fig. 22.1 Ruins of Clonmacnoise, King’s County. Engraving after George Petrie, from J. N. Brewer, Beauties of Ireland (London: Sherwood, Gilbert & Piper, 1826), vol. 2, no pag.

from a Gainsborough-style local family, on their way to or from market, in the foreground, while a funeral procession moves across the middle ground to the ancient graveyard among the monastic ruins (Fig. 22.1).14 A non-engraved, hand-drawn sketch of Clonmacnoise was used to produce a small, intensely dramatic watercolour the same year. In contrast to the cool, commercial “picturesque” of the engraving produced for Brewer, and its foregrounding of tourists rather than locals, this Romantic-style painting foregrounded a pious peasantry and connected them to a renowned precolonial religious settlement. These figures are colourfully “picturesque,” and as such are in the tradition of depictions of the rural poor in British landscape art since Gainsborough. But here, instead of rural pursuits, these peasants are depicted as symbolic carriers of an ancient religion. The title of the painting, The Last Circuit of Pilgrims at Clonmacnoise, exhibited in 1828, refers to the pilgrimage each June on the feast day of the monastery’s sixth-century founder, St Ciarán (Fig. 22.2). But Clonmacnoise was more than a great religious site, being the burial place also of native kings including the High King at the time of the Norman invasion, after which it was repeatedly sacked and looted and thus a symbol 14 Murray, George Petrie, p. 212.

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Fig. 22.2 George Petrie, The Last Circuit of Pilgrims at Clonmacnoise (1826). Richard Wood Collection, University of Limerick.

of colonial aggression as well as a major example of complex, sophisticated precolonial architecture. A close connection is made between the ruins and the devout pilgrims, who, he commented in his journal, “are so identified in character with the ruins, that they may truly be said to belong to each other.” These peasants were also connected, in his mind, to the great aristocratic past of the site and had “come for the purposes that brought others here for more than a thousand years.”15 This connection between people and place, between present and past – like the positive portrayal of peasant behaviour – projects a positive image of Irish national character and identity very different from the colonial stereotype. Perhaps the most remarkable example of this stereotype (and very likely a goad to Petrie) was Joseph Peacock’s The Pattern or Festival of St. Kevin at Glendalough (1817), featuring drunken, violent pilgrims fighting among the famous ecclesiastical ruins in a wild landscape – an extreme example of negative “auto-exoticism.”16 Petrie reversed the stereotype, showing devout pilgrims in a calm river landscape, at home in the ecclesiastical centre of their culture – a positive example of the same. 15 Stokes, Life and Labours, pp. 28–34. 16 Dunne, “Dark Side,” pp. 55–57.

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The romance of Ireland’s west coast had been established in fiction shortly after the Union, by the success of Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), on one level a “tourist novel,” with its returned Anglo-Irish hero, Mortimer, son of an absentee landlord, learning to have a sympathetic understanding of the country and its picturesque poor. He was impressed by Dublin but was advised to head west, as “the north-west coast of Connaught […] is the classic ground of Ireland. The native Irish […] made it the asylum of their sufferings […] so I shall have a fair opportunity of beholding the Irish character in all its primeval ferocity.”17 But the romance of the west was not then, or for many decades afterwards, celebrated in Irish landscape art to anything like the same degree as in fiction. In part, perhaps, this was because it appeared to lack enough “history”, that is, the ruins that featured so strongly in the Irish picturesque. Even more significant was the fact that the west was underdeveloped economically, and difficult of access. When in 1821 Petrie proposed a book on the Aran Islands to James Norris Brewer, who was preparing a new series of guides, to be called The Beauties of Ireland, the idea was rejected on the basis of Aran’s “obscurity” and insignificance.18 Petrie described his journey westward as being “in search of the ancient and the picturesque.” When he finally got to Inismore, the largest of the Aran Islands, he wrote, “I discovered a class of monuments which, like the inscriptions at Clonmacnoise, had not been at all previously noticed; curious stone forts, beehive shaped stone houses, all built without cement.”19 In a talk in 1834 on “Military Architecture in Ireland previous to the English invasion,” he again stressed his intention to refute the views of colonial writers that Ireland lacked stone castles and forts before the Normans. Aran gave him many examples, with the spectacular cliff-top fort of Dún Aengus the crowning glory, despite its much-diminished outer walls. A prehistoric fort, built on an elevated site and at the edge of a towering sheer cliff, it was, Petrie pronounced, “probably the most magnificent barbaric monument in Europe,” dating it to around the birth of Christ and ascribing it to the mythical Firbolg. In fact, it was constructed around 1100 bce, and we still have no idea who built it.20 Petrie was also fascinated by the monoglot Irish-speaking inhabitants of the island. Displaying conventional auto-exoticism, he commented on their “primitive simplicity” and “pristine purity.” “Brave and hardy,” “simple and innocent,” the islanders “exhibit the virtues of the Irish character at its 17 Morgan, Wild Irish Girl, vol. 1, pp. 46–48. 18 Murray, George Petrie, pp. 72–73. 19 Petrie, “Minutes of Evidence,” p. 36. 20 Petrie, “Essay,” p. 247.

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best.” They were “a fair specimen of the ancient and present wild Irish” – and of what the Irish generally might be if allowed to live a simple life, remote from the modern world.21 Remarkably, however, he did not include any of them in his dramatic painting of Dún Aengus. Petrie was opposed to opening up the remote west by new roads, telling Thomas Larcom, Supervisor of the Ordnance Survey, that they would cause the destruction of its antiquities, and of the primitive simplicity of the natives. For example, “the costume of the women, so exquisitely beautiful and simple – exactly as if they had stepped out of the pictures of Raphael or Murillo,” would be replaced by “cheap cotton gowns so odious to lovers of the picturesque.”22 This awareness of the picturesque potential of the Inismore natives and their distinctive clothing – later exploited in the paintings of his friend Frederic Richard Burton – made their absence from Petrie’s Aran sketches and painting all the more striking. Dun Aengus Fort, Inismore, Aran Islands (c.1827), unlike the painting of Clonmacnoise, is both an antiquarian landscape, celebrating the dramatic proof of an ancient advanced Irish past, and a “tourist” landscape, which he clearly planned as the basis for a future engraving (Fig. 22.3). As in his illustration for Brewer, The Ruins of Clonmacnoise, he again foregrounded tourists, on this occasion a couple with a picnic basket. But there are no locals to guide or observe them. This may be because Petrie did not associate the colourful locals positively with the ruins, as is clear in the account of his return to Inismore in 1856. Now a distinguished public figure, he travelled there with the Ethnographical Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the group included some of his friends, notably the Gaelic scholars John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry. The provost of Trinity College Dublin presided at a splendid lunch inside the fort, watched by “numbers of the peasantry in their picturesque costumes.” Petrie was upset at the “utter ruin” of “these singularly interesting remains” in the thirty-four years since his first visit, and this was echoed by O’Donovan and Curry in addresses to the locals in Irish (Petrie couldn’t speak the language), “exhorting them to preserve the old monuments,” rather than neglecting them or using their stones.23 Their culture seemed to Petrie inimical to the survival of the site, rather than identified with it, like that of the pilgrims at Clonmacnoise. Yet, Dun Aengus Fort, Inismore, Aran Islands is as much a patriotic and antiquarian painting as a tourist one. It made the same point as the Clonmacnoise 21 Stokes, Life and Labours, pp. 49–50. 22 Murray, George Petrie, p. 96. 23 Stokes, Life and Labours, pp. 374–82.

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Fig. 22.3 George Petrie, Dun Aengus Fort, Inismore, Aran Islands (c.1827). National Gallery of Ireland.

paintings, that Ireland had an advanced indigenous civilization, long before the twelfth-century conquest. Its focus is the ancient fort rather than the people; and its elevated style, exaggerating the dramatic outline of the fort, has elements of the sublime as well as the picturesque. In the Clonmacnoise paintings, the people are as important as the architectural remains and are presented in a way that challenges the colonial stereotype of the Irish. However, Petrie’s written views of the Aran islanders reflected a patriotic version of the same stereotype, an idealized and exoticized primitivism, which was a key trope of Irish Romanticism from Lady Morgan to Synge and beyond. Unable to associate the islanders meaningfully with the ruin, he simply left them out.

References Dunne, Tom. “The Dark Side of the Irish Landscape: Depictions of the Rural Poor, 1760–1850.” In Whipping the Herring: Survival and Celebration in Nineteenth Century Irish Art, edited by Peter Murray, pp. 46–59. Cork: Crawford Art Gallery, 2006. Dunne, Tom. “Towards a National Art? Petrie’s Two Versions of The Last Circuit of Pilgrims at Clonmacnoise.” In George Petrie (1790–1866): The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past, edited by Peter Murray, pp. 126–36. Cork: Crawford Art Gallery, 2004. Hawes, Louis. Presences of Nature: British Landscapes, 1780–1830. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

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Laffan, William, and Brendan Rooney. Thomas Roberts: Landscape and Patronage in Eighteenth Century Ireland. Tralee: Churchill House Press for the National Gallery of Ireland, 2009. Leerssen, Joep. “Petrie: Polymath and Innovator.” In George Petrie (1790–1866): The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past, edited by Peter Murray, pp. 7–11. Cork: Crawford Art Gallery, 2004. Leerssen, Joep. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Cork: Cork University Press, 1996. Morgan, Lady. The Wild Irish Girl. 3 vols. London: Richard Philips, 1806. Murray, Peter. George Petrie (1790–1866): The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past. Cork: Crawford Art Gallery, 2004. O’Kane, Finola. Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting and Tourism, 1700–1840. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Payne, Christiana. Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England 1780–1890. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Petrie, George. “An essay on Military Architecture in Ireland previous to the English Invasion.” Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Ireland 72, C, no. 10 (1834): pp. 219–69. Petrie, George. “Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commissioners of Inquiry into the Ordnance Survey Memoir of Ireland.” In Parliamentary Reports 1844, pp. 35–41. Stokes, William. The Life and Labours in Art and Archeology of George Petrie. London: Longmans, Green, 1868.

23 Ordinary Eyesight? Cultural Comparisons between Ireland and Wales Claire Connolly Abstract Is it possible to see Ireland from Wales? And can Wales be glimpsed from the east coast of Ireland? The question resonates through the two cultures and enables a fresh perspective on the question of Irish-Welsh cultural connections along with a topographically grounded approach to the imaginative work of comparison itself: what it means to see one country from the perspective of another. Keywords eyesight; travel; literature; Celticism; Ireland; Wales

Comparisons between Ireland and Wales are foundational to Celtic studies as it is practised in universities, a methodological assumption that should sit well with Joep Leerssen’s insistence on the necessity of a “cross-national comparative approach” to the study of national cultures.1 And yet comparative research between Ireland and Wales has tended to be confined to prehistoric and medieval contexts, largely concerned with legend, literature and philology.2 Perhaps the proximate nature of the Ireland-Wales case deprives it of a degree of interest: two smallish countries separated by a narrow sea and joined by centuries of shared political experience within the same archipelago. Those very likenesses further make it difficult to grasp the asymmetries born of modernity: the traumas of famine in Ireland, Welsh hostility toward immigrant Irish labourers who in turn were ignorant of the growth of organized labour in Wales, the cultural differences between 1 2

Leerssen, “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture,” p. 564. See Connolly and Gramich, “Introduction,” pp. 1–4.

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Non-Conformity and Catholicism. But then again, even as we consider the cleavages wrought by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments, from the Industrial Revolution to famine and revolution, we encounter the near contemporaneous role of the first and second Celtic revivals in covering over these splits and fractures. Perhaps the best-known example of this process is the publication of Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature, an essay that hymned eternal Celtic affinities even as the Fenian cause of independence gained support in Ireland, Britain and the United States.3 These patterns of connection and disconnection are threaded through the modern history of Ireland’s relationships with Wales. When the Irish scholar Cecile O’Rahilly won a prize at the 1920 Barry National Eisteddfod for her essay Ireland and Wales: Their Historical and Literary Relations, she remarked that there was “scant sympathy between the Irish and Welsh people.”4 It’s easy to see how, in 1920, difference rather than similarity might have sounded the dominant note. In Ireland, the year saw the establishment of a provisional republican legal system, the death of the Lord Mayor of Cork on hunger strike in Brixton prison and the burning of Cork by the Black and Tans. In Wales, the country enjoyed a short-lived economic boom, a royal charter was granted to a new college of the University of Wales in Swansea, and the Church in Wales was formally created. No wonder that Cecile O’Rahilly thought that the views of Giraldus Cambrensis on Ireland – “they hold to their bond with no one […] This race is a race of savages” – might well be “from a speech made in the British House of Commons” of her own day.5 A distinguished Irish medievalist who lived in Wales and retained lifelong friendships there, O’Rahilly must have understood how such prejudices were born.6 But her scholarly study confines itself to proper Celtic studies ground: kinship and parallels between the medieval languages and literatures of Ireland and Wales. Even where she ventures into “Nineteenth-Century Political Relations,” the emphasis is on connection and the optimistic idea of David Lloyd George as unifying figure: “It was a Welsh Prime Minister of England who conducted the negotiations between Ireland and England which led to the signing of the Treaty in December 1921.”7 O’Rahilly’s faith 3 Howes, Yeats’s Nations, p. 20. 4 O’Rahilly, Ireland and Wales, p. 90. 5 O’Rahilly, “Antipathy of Irish and Welsh,” p. 226. 6 O’Rahilly (1894–1980) undertook doctoral research at the University of Wales in Bangor before going on to teach in Beaumaris Grammar and Cardiff High School. She returned to an assistant professorship in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1946 and was appointed to a full professorship in 1956, the first time a woman held such a post. 7 O’Rahilly, Ireland and Wales, p. 91.

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in the resilience of Welsh-Irish relationships in the context of the sundering of the United Kingdom gives testament to the remarkable cultural work done by the nineteenth-century discourse of Celticism in connecting “highly disparate” phenomena.8 Yet it is also worth noting how often O’Rahilly locates the search for parallels and likenesses within the context of actual geographies of connection between two islands separated by a narrow sea. Speculating on contacts between Ireland and Wales in the third century, for instance, O’Rahilly suggests that it is improbable that Ireland did not traffic with its neighbours, “a land the shores of which were actually visible.”9 She quotes Kuno Myer’s speculations on the lines of war and trade that crossed the sea just “where the coast of Britain projects towards Ireland, and where, in clear weather, the land is plainly visible from the sister isle.”10 In what follows I take up this question of geographical proximity and trace connections between Ireland and Wales in terms of patterns of sight, vision and perspective, expressed in a range of registers. Enduring topographical realities run beneath the “hue of meditative otherworldliness” associated with the first and second Celtic revivals; geography, in turn, feeds new imaginative possibilities.11 Perhaps the best place to begin to join these ideas is with a discussion of a tale fundamental to the conception of Ireland within Welsh culture. The story of Branwen from the second branch of the Mabinogion opens with Bendigeidgfran, king of Britain, sitting with his brother on the rock of Harlech, looking across the sea to Ireland. “As they were sitting there, they could see thirteen ships coming from the south of Ireland, heading towards them easily and swiftly, the wind behind them, and they were approaching with speed.” The ships have been sent by Matholwch, king of Ireland, who wishes to marry Branwen, the sister of the giant, Bendigeidgfran, in order to unite the kingdoms. They marry but, because of an earlier insult offered to Matholwch, the Irish punish Branwen, forcing her “to cook for the court; and they had the butcher come to her every day, after he had chopped up meat, and give her a box on the ear.” Over the three years of her punishment, Branwen “reared a starling at the end of her kneading-trough, and taught it to speak, and told the bird what kind of man her brother was.” Hearing from the starling of his sister’s mistreatment by the Irish, Bendigeidgfran vows revenge. This time, the view from the sea shore yields hostility and 8 Quotation from Leerssen, “Celticism,” p. 1. 9 O’Rahilly, Ireland and Wales, p. 36. 10 O’Rahilly, Ireland and Wales, p. 47. 11 Quotation from Leerssen, “Cúchulain in the General Post Office,” p. 144.

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not unity. Swineherds on the strand witness “a forest on the sea” and their vision of “a huge mountain” moving towards Ireland that turns out to be the enraged giant Bendigeidgfran wading across the water to save his sister. After the battle, Branwen is borne home to Wales. Arriving at the mouth of the river Alaw in Anglesey with the seven survivors of the war against the Irish, she takes one final look back across the sea to Ireland, heaves a heartbroken sigh and dies on the spot, declaring: “Two good islands have been laid waste because of me.”12 Such glances over and back across the Irish sea resonate through the two cultures. A rich archive presents itself of writers who see (or fail to see) one country from the other: Anglesey glimpsed from the Wicklow hills; the Dublin mountains seen from Holyhead. These questions of looking are intimately shaped by weather, topography and sightlines but more broadly address the imaginative work of comparison itself: what it means to see one country from the perspective of another. The earliest natural history of Ireland, compiled by the Dutch physician Gerard Boate in 1652, asserts that “a man whose sight is but of an ordinary goodness, may at any time in clear weather with ease discern the high and mountainous coast of Wales from the top of the Dublin mountains.” The observation is adduced in order to prove the proximity of two islands tied together by nature, only “forty leagues, or sixscore English miles” apart.13 Published in the context of the Cromwellian plantation of Ireland, Boate’s history has an explicitly political and improving agenda that is echoed throughout later eighteenth-century accounts. An anonymous eighteenthcentury tour of Ireland, for example, opens in Wales and the view “From an Eminence to the Left of the Town [Holyhead].” From there, “with the Help of a Glass, we can see the Mountains of Wicklow, distant, S. W. (as a Sailor told us) about sixteen Miles from Dublin.”14 The idea that Ireland and Wales are within easy visual reach of one another and thus naturally connected retains a role throughout eighteenthcentury travel narratives. Visiting Pembrokeshire in the southwest of Wales, Daniel Defoe sought out a view of Ireland. He remarked that “[h]ere the Weather being very Clear, we had a full view of Ireland, tho’ at a very great Distance: The Land here is call’d St. Davids Head, and from hence, there has some time ago, gone a Passage Boat constantly between England and Ireland, but that Voiture is at present discontinued.” From Pembrokeshire, 12 Davies, Mabinogion, pp. 22–33. 13 Boate, Gerard Boate’s Natural History of Ireland, p. 2. 14 Tour through Ireland, p. 47; emphasis in the original, here and below.

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Defoe travelled north past the Menai straits to the island Angelsea and on to Holyhead, “where we went for no purpose, but to have another view of Ireland, tho’ we were disappointed, the Weather being Bad and Stormy.”15 The ideological implications of being able to take in such views are spelled out by the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726–1798) in a striking passage where he describes an ascent of Snowdon. Pennant recalls the view as “unbounded” and he imagines the landscape forming itself before his eyes in a ready map of the four nations of the British Isles: In a former tour, I saw from it the county of Chester, the high hills of Yorkshire, part of the north of England, Scotland, and Ireland: a plain view of the Isle of Man; and that of Anglesea lay extended like a map beneath us, with every rill visible. I took much pains to see this prospect to advantage; sat up at a farm on the west till about twelve, and walked up the whole way. The night was remarkably fine and starry: towards morn, the stars faded away, and left a short interval of darkness, which was soon dispersed by the dawn of day. The body of the sun appeared most distinct, with the rotundity of the moon, before it rose high enough to render its beams too brilliant for our sight. The sea which bounded the western part was gilt by its beams, first in slender streaks, at length glowed with redness. The prospect was disclosed to us like the gradual drawing up of a curtain in a theatre.16

Pennant’s account of a geopolitical drama visible as the curtain goes up derives from a long tradition of loco-descriptive poems that afford panoramic perspectives, originating in the New Arcadia (1590) when Philip Sidney describes a position that, from “pretty height,” “gives the eye lordship over a good large circuit.”17 This lordship of the eye is associated with the type of prospect that tends towards an extensive moral vision, in this case connected with the right and necessary interdependence of component parts of what was soon to be the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Perspectives may have shifted with the advent of the Union, but we can continue to locate William Wordsworth in a line of prospect poems that naturalize the relationship between Ireland and Britain. His “View from the Top of Black Comb,” published in 1815, sees the poet atop a mountain in 15 Defoe, Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, pp. 87 and 93. 16 Pennant, Journey to Snowdon, pp. 163–64; on Pennant, see further Mary-Ann Constantine’s contribution to this volume. 17 Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, p. 62.

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Cumbria, looking across the landscape from a “height a ministering Angel might select”: For from the summit of Black Comb (dread name Derived from clouds and storms!) the amplest range Of unobstructed prospect may be seen That British ground commands […].

In Wordsworth’s poem, “a line of eye-sight” links English, Scottish and Welsh hills and rivers, as well as “Mona’s Isle” – the Isle of Man or Anglesea. Ireland is a sea-blue line just beyond the sea: Yon azure Ridge, Is it a perishable cloud? Or there Do we behold the frame of Erin’s Coast? Land sometimes by the roving shepherd swain, Like the bright confines of another world Not doubtfully perceived. – Look homeward now! In depth, in height, in circuit, how serene The spectacle, how pure! – Of Nature’s works, In earth, and air, and earth-embracing sea, A Revelation infinite it seems; Display august of man’s inheritance, Of Britain’s calm felicity and power.18

As Brandon Yen has shown, Ireland’s place in this vision of “British ground” is “ambiguous,” characterized by an uncertain question rather than a commanding vision. Picking up on Wordsworth’s allusion to Milton in his description of “Erin’s coast” as “the bright confines of another world,” Yen further suggests that reference to Paradise Lost “implies a wish to incorporate ‘Erin’ into a unitary sense of nationhood,” “mixed, perhaps unconsciously, with the ambivalences of an outsider.”19 Such “ambivalences” sound a characteristically Romantic note, but they also express actual uncertainties of vision, the uncertainties made by sky, sea and weather. Does Wordsworth see a cloud or might it be possible to discern the east coast of Ireland along with parts of England and Wales from Cumbria? Dublin is separated from the Holyhead by about 67 miles while 18 Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, pp. 99–100. 19 Yen, “Wordsworth in Ireland,” p. 18.

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the distance between the Llŷn Peninsula and the Wicklow Mountains is as little as 71 miles. To this day, tourists in clear weather take photographs of Snowdonia from the Wicklow Mountains or tweet images for the Wicklow Mountains glimpsed from the Llŷn Peninsula. Online message boards are full of tourists who want to know “Can you see Ireland from Wales?” while a Google search reveals many versions of the same question asked from the other side. Throughout the nineteenth century, such sightlines were called up in the imagination or recorded from elevated routes. At the end of his 1902 history of the Holyhead Road, tracing its magnificent passage from London through to Anglesey, Charles Harper poses a resonant question, which he answers with a further query: “Whether Ireland […] can be seen, lying afar off, like cloudbanks upon the horizon, is a matter for the most favourable weather, the keenest eyesight, and the most robust faith to decide in the affirmative, or for scepticism to deny.”20 No less a sceptic than Samuel Beckett recalled “wonderful memories” of seeing north Wales from the Wicklow Mountains while walking with his father as a child. A 1948 letter to the French writer Georges Duthuit explains Beckett’s plan to “have lunch, then go for a walk on the long green slopes from where, on a clear day, when I was a child, I used to see the mountains of Wales.” He will drink a “few pints,” Beckett tells his friend, and watch the evening draw in “and the sea light up – the harbour, the town, the headlands. Romantic landscape but dry old stick of a traveller.”21 The scene is recognizable both in particular and in abstract ways: a detailed evocation of the Wicklow hills that contains the impress of a narrative shape familiar from Beckett’s prose: “the focal character alone in the hills of South Dublin, near the sea, contending with memories of his father or mother.”22 The hastily sketched-in tension between Romantic and “dry” perspectives not only addresses different points of view but also the possibilities of sight, memory and connection, as if to figure what Joep Leerssen calls the “doubts and uncertainties” of Celticism itself.23 A final example showing how wider “doubts and uncertainties” inhere in the very texture of views over and back the Irish sea comes from a recent short story by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, “Little Red.” The story concerns a publisher named Fiona whose adventures in online dating take a dark turn when a 20 Harper, Holyhead Road, p. 326. 21 Beckett, Letters, p. 87. 22 Pearson, Irish Cosmopolitanism, p. 111. 23 Leerssen, “Celticism,” p. 2.

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man appears at her patio door. The man, Declan, has chatted to Fiona online and – with some creepy “detective work” – found her address, entered her home and asked for food, which she provides. Ní Dhuibhne’s mysterious and open-ended narrative plays with the plot of Little Red Riding Hood while gathering about itself the Gothic shades of Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover.” Bowen’s story is set in 1941 during the Blitz and ends with a terrified woman beating against the glass partition of a taxi that “accelerat[ed] without mercy” through deserted streets.24 Fairy tales and wartime London may seem very far from the location of the story – “a bungalow by the sea, south of Wicklow town” – but Fiona’s relationship with her house is intimately connected with its sightlines across to Wales and the role of literature itself in shaping horizons. Some lines of remembered verse from a Welsh poem once widely taught in Irish primary schools (“Leisure” by W. H. Davies: “What is this life if, full of care,/ We have no time to stand and stare”) prompt a reverie: But she’s beginning to get it. What is life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs and stare as long as sheep or cows. The poet is saying that the capacity to stand and stare like a cow is a virtue. But is it? Really? She is staring at something. The apple trees. The long grass – knapweed, montbretia, thistles, grass – that wild stuff. The roof of a house below. The sea. The horizon […] beyond, the coast of Wales, which you never see from here although it’s not far away.25

Wales is never visible and not far away: with this curious negative formulation, Ní Dhuibhne’s narrative draws a delicate line of connection between the capacities of ordinary eyesight and the continuing power of Celtic sightlines.

References Beckett, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Vol. 2, 1941–1956, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Boate, Gerard. Gerard Boate’s Natural History of Ireland. Edited by Thomas E. Jordan. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. Accessed at 8 November 2021. https://celt. ucc.ie/published/E650002-001. 24 Bowen, Demon Lover, p. 87. 25 Ní Dhuibhne, Little Red and Other Stories, pp. 9–10.

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Bowen, Elizabeth. The Demon Lover and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape, 1945. Connolly, Claire, and Katie Gramich. “Introduction.” Irish Studies Review 17, no. 1 (2009): pp. 1–4. Davies, Sioned, trans. The Mabinogion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Defoe, Daniel. A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. Vol. 2. London, 1725. Harper, Charles. The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Vol. 2, Birmingham to Holyhead. London: Chapman & Hall, 1902. Howes, Marjorie. Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Leerssen, Joep. “Celticism.” In Celticism, edited by Terence Brown, pp. 1–20. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Leerssen, Joep. “Cúchulain in the General Post Office: Gaelic Revival, Irish Rising.” Journal of the British Academy 4 (2016): pp. 137–68. Leerssen, Joep. “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture.” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 4 (2006): pp. 559–78. Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís. Little Red and Other Stories. Newtownards: Blackstaff Press, 2020. O’Rahilly, Cecile. “The Antipathy of Irish and Welsh.” Welsh Outlook 7 (September 1920): p. 226. O’Rahilly, Cecile. Ireland and Wales: Their Historical and Literary Relations. London: Longman, 1924. Pearson, Nels. Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett. Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2015. Pennant, Thomas. The Journey to Snowdon. London: Henry Hughes, 1781. Sidney, Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Edited by H. Oskar Sommer. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891. A Tour through Ireland: In Several Entertaining Letters. London, 1748. Wordsworth, William. Shorter Poems, 1807–1820. Edited by Carl H. Ketcham. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Yen, Brandon. “Wordsworth in Ireland.” History Ireland 28, no. 1 (2020): pp. 18–21.

24 European Constructions of the Asian East in the Novels of John Buchan Michael Wintle

Abstract This chapter is concerned with European notions of “the East,” and in particular Asia, around the time of the First World War. “The East” is one of a number of spatial conceptualizations, like the continents or the “Third World,” which are often the product of hegemonic and Eurocentric cultural imaginings. These European perceptions of Asia are examined here through the lens of popular f iction, and especially the novels of John Buchan, famous for his swashbuckling “shockers” about heroic British adventurers such as The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle. His musings arguably both guided and represented the complex and contradictory views held by “Westerners” around the time of the First World War. Keywords John Buchan; Asia; imperialism; Islam; popular culture

“The peoples of Asia did not perceive of themselves as ‘Asians’ until the Europeans classified them in that way,” as the cartographical scholar A. J. Klinghoffer once remarked.1 Geographical orderings like the continents, the “Middle East,” or the “Third World,” are concepts usually invented by Europeans.2 Europeans have viewed the world in relation to themselves: one only needs to think of the Prime Meridian, where the longitudinal divisions of the world radiate out from the Greenwich Observatory in London. This chapter is concerned with “East” and “West,” and more specifically, with “Asia” and “Europe”: what do those terms imply? “The West”: that ubiquitous 1 Klinghoffer, Power of Projections, p. 49. 2 Lewis and Wigen, Myth of Continents, chap. 2.

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term in our daily media, but West of what? The East means “East of Europe,” but it has not always remained static. From about 700 ce in Western usage, “East” began increasingly to be associated with the Muslim religion and the areas it came to dominate. Later this East expanded to include the Indian subcontinent, as the Europeans discovered a new colonial Orient. Other variations would later include the Ottoman Empire (as in the “Orient Express”) and the Far Eastern “Yellow Peril.”3 East and West are thus terms culturally constructed by Europeans rather than being scientifically or geographically defined: “the East” is designated according to the changing dictates of the West. One way of unpicking this “East” is to explore popular adventure fiction as a source. Especially in the period of New or High Imperialism after 1880, the genre was international, represented by G. A. Henty and H. Rider Haggard in Britain, but also by Jules Verne, Joseph Conrad, Karl May and many others. The British variant warmed up towards the First World War, with Erskine Childers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and William Le Queux, among others. 4 These adventure stories can best be placed in the context of cultural imperialism, where they and other media functioned to “manufacture cultural images and racial stereotypes” in support of imperialism.5 They were of the utmost importance for the formation and development of the identity of imperial nations themselves: the popular Othering process was here in full swing.6 Attention here will concentrate on one British imperialist novelist: John Buchan. He was allegedly racist, imperialist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, upper-class and sexist; so why him? Many of the post-war generation will have come across him in their youth. Buchan spins a rattling good yarn, and is still read today (also by me), but now also as a source for cultural history: what made men (and women?) tick in those days? What was the popular sentiment, the mass mood? Buchan’s work provides a way of getting inside certain European attitudes a century ago. There is a veritable Buchan industry in existence, not one practised only by diehard imperialists and dilettante devotees of Victorian virtues and values but a serious community of scholars who take Buchan very seriously as a source and expression of popular sentiment around the time of the 3 Wintle, Eurocentrism, chap. 6. 4 Hambly, “Muslims in English-Language Fiction.” 5 MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, p. 254. See also the work of Edward Said, especially Culture and Imperialism. 6 Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire, pp. 39, 114–15 and 139; and McEvoy, “Construction of Ottoman Asia,” p. 35.

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First World War.7 Born in Scotland, Buchan lived from 1875 to 1940, and enjoyed a varied career as a barrister, civil servant, colonial administrator in South Africa, historian and member of parliament. Finally, ennobled as Lord Tweedsmuir, in 1935 he was made Governor-General of Canada until his death in 1940. It is important to know that he was intimately involved with official British propaganda during the First World War, as a contributor to and then de facto head of the Department of Information in the Foreign Office, specializing in propaganda about Asia, particularly the Ottoman Empire.8 It was, however, as a novelist that he made his name. His first success came in 1910 with a yarn about South Africa in Prester John, and then definitively with his novels featuring Richard Hannay, a mining engineer and soldier deployed by the British government to undertake perilous secret missions to scupper the machinations of plotters against civilization in general, and especially against the British Empire.9 Buchan’s heroes in these juvenile fantasies were anti-intellectual, anti-city, anti-finance;10 Hannay was in many ways “the last Victorian.”11 But Buchan was also a practical achiever; as one of Milner’s staff in South Africa, he opposed Boer racism and earned a reputation as an administrator.12 He was clearly an effective propagandist for his government in wartime. His work has never been out of print, and he is still a leading library author. For his time, Buchan’s fantasies signified, in the words of historian Bill Schwarz, “all that was good about England and its civilization”; through his novels he “sought to universalize the values he believed to be the especial preserve of the white man.” Buchan’s work can be said to represent significant elements of the larger culture of his time.13 All this makes him more than just an empty stereotype. It was of course Rudyard Kipling who popularized the expression “the White Man’s Burden” in his famous poem of 1899, but the qualities of “the white man” were essential ingredients in Buchan’s novels. A recurring phrase is “he was a white man,” meaning he was a good fellow you could trust and work with. The “white man” was certainly masculine, physically capable and 7 See, for example, Schwarz, White Man’s World; Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, chap. 3; and Cannadine, History in Our Time, pp. 233–42. 8 See McEvoy, “Construction of Ottoman Asia,” esp. chap. 5. 9 I quote here from three of these novels featuring Hannay (39 Steps [1915], Greenmantle [1916], and The Three Hostages [1924]) reprinted together in 2010: Buchan, Complete Richard Hannay Stories. 10 Cannadine, History in Our Time, pp. 240–42. 11 Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, pp. 79 and 92. 12 Macdonald, Reassessing John Buchan, pp. 3–4. 13 Schwarz, White Man’s World, pp. 213, 253 and 265.

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Fig. 24.1 Cover of the first edition of John Buchan, Greenmantle (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916).

fit, direct and unafraid of danger; he took trouble to understand colonial peoples; he was usually British, probably not Jewish; and he was used to wielding a degree of power.14 And he was European, not Asian (or African). Much of this applied to the only part of the empire Buchan personally knew well: Southern Africa. In Prester John, he put these much quoted and vilified words into the mouth of his hero David Crawfurd: I knew then the meaning of the white man’s duty. He has to take all risks, […] well content to find his reward in the fulfilment of his task. That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king; and so long as we know this and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies.15

These dark men who would be ruled by Buchan’s caste of white men: did that apply to Asia as well as Africa (Fig. 24.1)? Buchan does not state explicitly and definitively what he means by “the East,” but he gives us some clues in the speeches of some of his protagonists. 14 Schwarz, White Man’s World, pp. 257–59. 15 Buchan, Prester John, p. 238.

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In Greenmantle, the mainspring of the plot is a scheme by some “devilish” Germans during the First World War to harness “the dry wind blowing through the East”16 in order to ignite a widespread Islamic revolt against the British Empire. But there is a degree of respect and even fascination involved, as well as fear and danger. The heroic character of Sandy Arbuthnot, a Scots aristocrat based on Buchan’s friend Aubrey Herbert,17 who specializes in outlandish disguises and in penetrating behind enemy lines and who knows “the soul of the East […] better than any man,” puts it in these terms: It is the austerity of the East that is its beauty and its terror. […] The Turk and the Arab came out of big spaces, and they have the desire of them in their bones. […] They want to prune life of its foolish fringes and get back to the noble bareness of the desert. […] It isn’t inhuman. It’s the humanity of one part of the human race. It isn’t ours, it isn’t as good as ours, but it’s jolly good all the same.18

In more conventional Orientalist mode, Buchan also thought of “Asia” as made up of “a medieval and suspicious people, while also being mysterious and exotic.”19 In later life, he worried that “[t]he European tradition has been confronted with an Asiatic revolt, with its historic accompaniment of janissaries and assassins.”20 Most importantly perhaps, there is that cavernous perceived difference between East and West shown in Buchan’s work; much of it concerned religion. Hinduism is the object of apprehension in The Three Hostages, where the power of Eastern mysticism is manipulated by the arch-fiend Medina into a force which will bring the West to its knees.21 In Greenmantle, it is Islam which is the threat to the free, decent, white man’s world.22 Early in the book, the Whitehall spymaster Sir Walter Bullivant explains that the essence of the Ottoman fighting force is Islam, for “Islam is a fighting creed,” and “the mullah stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.” “There is a jehad preparing,” he warns.23 The danger from “the East” was not entirely imaginary. During the First World 16 Buchan, Greenmantle, p. 105. 17 Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door, p. 195. 18 Buchan, Greenmantle, p. 234. 19 Al-Rawi, “Islam and the East,” p. 118. 20 Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door, p. 286. 21 Al-Rawi, “Islam and the East,” pp. 122–24; and Etherington, Imperialism in Literature, p. 10, on the “Oriental tyrant.” 22 See Al-Rawi, “Manipulating Muslims”; and Al-Rawi, “Islam and the East.” 23 Buchan, Greenmantle, p. 105.

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War, when Greenmantle was written and published, memories were still alive of the Mahdi in the Sudan; and on 14 November 1914 Sultan Mehmed V had indeed called for all Muslims in the territories of Britain, France and Russia to rise up against the infidel in a jihad or “holy war.”24 Islam was perceived to be a dangerous militant religion, to be taken very seriously indeed. Alongside the fear, there was also that underlying fascination with the East: in The Three Hostages, the hero, Hannay, is introduced to the Eastern mystic Kharáma, in whom the secret power of “the East” resides, which the villain Medina wants to manipulate for the destruction of all civilization. Hannay describes the mystic in the following terms: I have rarely seen a human being at once so handsome and so repulsive, but both beauty and horror were merged in the impression of ruthless power. I had been sceptical enough about this Eastern image […]. But as I looked on that dark countenance I had a vision of a world of terrible knowledge, a hideousness like an evil smell, but a power like a blasting wind or a pestilence […].25

The East was also framed in terms of decadence: Buchan frequently referred to a civilization and values which were simply inadequate.26 Hannay talks in Greenmantle of “the real supineness of the East,” while the Sandy character in The Three Hostages claims he is going to organize mass Islamic pilgrimages by aeroplane to Mecca – the Hadj – because the Muslims are too incompetent to do it themselves.27 Another Buchan mouthpiece in that novel, Dr. Greenslade, concludes that “Europe is confused enough, but Asia is ancient Chaos.”28 So: backward, decadent, corrupt and childish, but potentially dangerous and sometimes enticing. That was the view of the East proselytized in Buchan’s novels, at least partly driven by his propaganda work for the government. Once again, the main issue was its difference from the West. Mysterious Hindus, unpredictable Muslims – all were essentially different from the civilized, modern, Christian West. The arch-villain Medina says admiringly of the East in The Three Hostages, “There has never […] been a true marriage between East and West, but when there is its seed will rule the world.”29 Buchan found it the essential task of the white man to keep 24 McEvoy, “Construction of Ottoman Asia,” p. 18. 25 Buchan, Three Hostages, p. 667. 26 Al-Rawi, “Islam and the East,” p. 118. 27 Buchan, Greenmantle, p. 189; and Buchan, Three Hostages, p. 614. 28 Buchan, Three Hostages, p. 576. 29 Buchan, Three Hostages, p. 663.

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the two apart. That fundamental difference was essential, and the border had to be maintained between East and West at all costs, for otherwise the chaos of the East would overwhelm the West.30 And here lies the crux of these Western attitudes towards the East around the time of the First World War, so well interpreted and then reinforced by Buchan, in his “shockers.” There is a certain amount of amateur psychology put about in these novels; Buchan probably knew of Freud’s work,31 and the notion of split personality seems essential to the mainspring of the psychological side of his plots, both at the individual and the societal or civilizational level. The arch-villains in his novels – Laputa in Prester John, the leader of the Black Stone in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Hilda von Einem in Greenmantle, Medina in The Three Hostages, and many others – all share the characteristic of being highly sophisticated, admired key members of the Western elites, but harbouring secret power-mad dreams of upending all decent order in civilized society by using abominable and usually Eastern chaotic elements to undermine and destroy all that was worthy in human society. Of Medina in The Three Hostages Hannay says, “He wanted to win everything that civilisation would give him, and then wreck it.”32 Even in his heroes there was this cloven identity, this potential Jekyll and Hyde: they were all fine upstanding fellows, full of no-nonsense Christian virtues, but they all came perilously close at times to falling under the spell of the fascinating, mystical, evil but almost irresistible charm of the East, the Other. That was why it was so essential to stress that difference between East and West, to keep the two parts of the personality firmly apart, for fear of contamination. This operated at the level of society too, and was shared by other British adventure novelists at the turn of the century. Conrad, Rider Haggard and Kipling all point in the direction of the frailty of civilized society, vulnerable to “foreign” evil and destruction: this was the constant threat at the underbelly of Empire.33 The East/West dichotomy had a strong ideological and even civilizational content. The focus here on John Buchan’s imaginings of the East, Asia and Islam has been a way of probing the complex, intricate, contentious and contradictory views held by “Westerners” around the time of the First World War. They were Eurocentric, certainly, and sometimes racist, but seldom simply reductionist or straightforward. 30 This is the conclusion of Al-Rawi, “Islam and the East,” p. 127. 31 Etherington, Imperialism in Literature, p. 8. 32 Buchan, Three Hostages, pp. 753–54. 33 Etherington, Imperialism in Literature, pp. 3 and 12; McEvoy, “Construction of Ottoman Asia,” p. 268; and Schwarz, White Man’s World, p. 251.

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References Al-Rawi, Ahmed. “Islam and the East in John Buchan’s Novels.” In Reassessing John Buchan: Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, edited by Kate Macdonald, pp. 117–28. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009. Al-Rawi, Ahmed. “Manipulating Muslims in John Buchan’s Greenmantle and A. J. Quinnell’s The Mahdi: A Pattern of Consistency.” John Buchan Journal, no. 36 (2007): pp. 18–32. Buchan, John. The Complete Richard Hannay Stories: The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr Standfast, The Three Hostages & The Island of Sheep. Ware: Wordsworth, 2010. Buchan, John. Greenmantle. In The Complete Richard Hannay Stories: The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr Standfast, The Three Hostages & The Island of Sheep. Ware: Wordsworth, 2010. Buchan, John. Memory Hold-the-Door. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940. Buchan, John. Prester John. 1910. London: Nelson, 1938. Reprinted in 1945. Buchan, John. The Three Hostages. In The Complete Richard Hannay Stories: The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast, The Three Hostages & The Island of Sheep. Ware: Wordsworth, 2010. Cannadine, David. History in Our Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Etherington, Norman. Imperialism in Literature, the Case of John Buchan. London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1981. Accessed 25 January 2017. http:// sas-space.sas.ac.uk/id/eprint/4096. Gorman, Daniel. Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Hambly, Gavin R. G. “Muslims in English-Language Fiction.” In Asia in Western Fiction, edited by Robin W. Winks and James R. Rush, pp. 35–52. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Klinghoffer, Arthur Jay. The Power of Projections: How Maps Reflect Global Politics and History. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Lewis, Martin W., and Kären E. Wigen. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Macdonald, Kate, ed. Reassessing John Buchan: Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009. MacKenzie, John M. Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. McEvoy, Sadia. “The Construction of Ottoman Asia and Its Muslim Peoples in Wellington House’s Propaganda and Associated Literature, 1914–1918.” PhD diss., King’s College London, 2016.

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Phillips, Richard. Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure. London: Routledge, 1997. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. Schwarz, Bill. The White Man’s World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Wintle, Michael. Eurocentrism: History, Identity, White Man’s Burden. London: Routledge, 2020.

25 Prerequisites to the Study of “Social Perception” Empathy and Immunity to Nationalism Hercules Millas

Abstract There is a popular conviction that the presence of an academic or scientific methodology guarantees a relatively satisfactory, impartial approach. However, recent studies show that “impartiality,” especially in regard to identities and social perceptions, is heavily influenced by the psychological and ideological inclinations of the researcher. Lack of empathy or the presence of nationalist predispositions in particular produce one-sided, prejudiced results. In our era of nation-states, almost all people carry a national identity which influences their judgment, especially with regard to ethnic issues. The more notable researchers rely on some non-academic aptitudes such as personal life experience or intrinsic inclinations. This article discusses some of the author’s personal experiences of interethnic relations, those between Greeks and Turks. Keywords empathy; nationalism; perceptions; methodology; objectivity; identity

Apart from the related methods and knowledge of disciplines and scientific fields, some qualifications are needed when the issues to be studied have to do with human understanding and behaviour. Based mostly on my own experience and not being very confident of my judgment, I believe that what is also needed is a kind of aptitude.1 Aptitude may be seen as something one 1 Instead of “aptitude” I could as well have used talent, gift, competence, ability, frame of mind, inclination, emotional condition, mindset, personality, emotional quotient, etc. The meaning that I attribute to these words is more important.

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has to have in order to be, for example, an opera singer; that I would never be one was clear when I was ten! Empathy may be one of these required abilities. Many have a clear knowledge of the feelings of others, especially the psychologists, but empathy is something different. It means to “feel” the Other. “Today there are many definitions of empathy. Most clinical and counseling psychologists, however, agree that true empathy requires three distinct skills: the ability to share the other persons’ feelings, the cognitive ability to intuit what another person is feeling, and a ‘socially beneficial’ intention to respond compassionately to that person’s distress.”2 Actually, empathy has two components/sources: one is the experience (and education) one gets during a lifetime, and the other, say, the mysteries of the brain. About the first, I have some observations; but I am reluctant to reach general conclusions based on my limited personal observations. On the other hand, I see no reason not to share my experience with others. Almost all the researchers I have met who were interested and able to study cases directly or indirectly related to issues of “social perception” (beliefs, images, prejudices, stereotypes, and the like, directed to persons) were sentimentally attached to and empathetic towards their subjects. These researchers had been somehow familiar with comparable situations themselves. It was as if they had had experiences where “perceptions” played a role in their own lives. For example, they were brought up in ethnically or religiously mixed families or in a multicultural turbulent environment, or they belonged to ideologically persecuted groups or to discriminated minority groups, or they were ethnically or gender-wise marginalized persons. When I conversed with them they expressed themselves as if at some time in their past they had felt uncomfortable under the gaze of others. I often suspected that they chose this academic field due to the questions that preoccupied them in their personal lives at some time. They were not detached, apathetic, impartial or objective researchers. They were involved. The people I met and worked with in the field of “perceptions” in Turkey and in Greece have been active in human and gender rights movements; some were themselves marginalized for their ethnicity, religious or political beliefs, or gender; others were leftists, atheists, Jews, southern Russians, Georgians or persons who had married an “Other.” Some were “normal,” that is, they belonged to the dominant majority, but their family history did not: they had an often secret family history of social marginalization, 2

Decety and Ickes, Social Neuroscience of Empathy, p. 19.

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that is, they had refugee or immigrant grandparents who did not speak the language of the host country or who had been converted to the “proper” religion of the majority. Lately I was positively surprised to read that a professor of clinical psychiatry specializing in empathy related her interest to her life experience. On the very first page of her book on empathy she explained how she had been drawn to this field. Her family – migrants to the United States after the Second World War – had faced all kinds of discrimination during their lifetime: both ethnic and religious. They were “judged” because of their accents. “As a child, I got very upset when my classmates ridiculed others because of things they could not control, such as color of their skins, where they lived, or their family situations.”3 The case of Claude Lévi-Strauss seems to fall into the same category. Lévi-Strauss was born to French Jewish parents. During the Second World War, he was assigned to the Maginot Line as a liaison officer. After the French defeat in 1940, he taught at a lycée in Montpellier, but as a Jew he lost his job due to the Vichy racial laws, and was stripped of French citizenship. Years later, he narrated in his book Tristes tropiques how he became an anthropologist and fervently tried to show how close people of different cultures really are; and – I suspect, reconstructing his past – he wrote: Anthropology affords me an intellectual satisfaction: it rejoins at one extreme the history of the world, and at the other the history of myself, and it unveils the shared motivation of one and the other at the same moment. In suggesting Man as the object of my studies, anthropology dispelled all my doubts: for the differences and changes which we ethnographers deal in are those which matter to all mankind, as opposed to those which are exclusive to one particular civilization and would not exist if we choose to live outside. 4

These people must have felt what “othering” is. They were sensitive vis-àvis situations that had to do with social perception; they were especially receptive to the related findings. For my part, I feel reasonably confident in this judgment regarding other researchers, but nonetheless hesitate. I may be projecting my own history and feelings onto others, being myself a minority member of my society with a history of exclusions. And I have a family secret: my grandmother on my mother’s side was a Catholic who 3 Riess, Empathy Effect, pp. 1–2. 4 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, p. 62.

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converted to Greek Orthodoxy! Or maybe there are actually very few people who are entirely “pure,” religiously, ethnically, ideologically or gender-wise, and almost all of us are somewhat mixed, marginalized or “different.” And, therefore, all my observations might have been a coincidental, statistical unavoidability. Whatever the case, empathy is a complex phenomenon and plays an important role in the study of “perceptions”. To understand human beings means mostly to know how they think, feel and imagine. Sociobiology – and now we enter into the mysteries of the mind – shows that other animals, too, exhibit actions that resemble some types of human social behaviour, such as altruism.5 Frans de Waal showed that monkeys and especially chimpanzees exhibit empathy.6 Neuroscience understands empathy to be an innate capability of the human brain that works unconsciously, yet it can be trained to come into play in certain circumstances. Neuroscientists have discovered that people who score well on empathy tests have highly active mirror-neuron systems. This means that in cases of a “physical/ biological anomaly,” empathy is hampered. In point of fact, autistic people exhibit fewer empathic traits.7 Daniel Kahneman, too, associates absence of empathy with autism.8 Yet objectivity, which is sometimes confidently presented and defended as scientific, also reveals a certain lack of self-knowledge. Human beings are not only rational; they are emotional beings, too. Indeed, for Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, we are all – humans and other mammals – emotionally driven, due to our evolutionary history.9 Thus, empathy does not operate according to our conscious will but it acts automatically; and when it is expressed “rationally” it, in fact, works unconsciously. Some practices of our great-grandparents, such as sacrificing prisoners of war to secure their own survival, the slave trade, female genital mutilation, can rarely be studied today “objectively”; we are not neutral in these cases, and have feelings of empathy as we study them. As modern actors we judge, accordingly, to a great extent emotionally. It is as if neuroscientists and philosophers reach the same understanding with respect to reality even though they have different starting points. Some neuroscientists have reminded us of the close relationship between their 5 Wilson, Sociobiology. 6 Waal, Good Natured. 7 Sacks, Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; and Schuster, Συνειδητά ή ασυνείδητα. 8 Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, p. 76. 9 Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, pp. 408–18.

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discoveries of neurons, especially the mirror neurons, and the philosophical school of phenomenology. For these scientists, philosophers like Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger “criticized the classical philosophical approach as being seduced by the holy grail of discovering the very essence of phenomena and thus getting bogged down in musing about abstractions […] The phenomenologists proposed to pay close attention to the objects and phenomena of the world and to our own inner experience of these objects and phenomena.”10 “For Husserl, phenomenology is a study of the subjective perspective. In science one aims for objectivity and endeavours to arrange observations and experiments in such a way as to minimize differences between different observers. Phenomenology focuses on the subjective, on the manner in which each subject structures or ‘constitutes’ the world differently, on the basis of different experiences and cultural background, but also on the basis of adaptation to other subjects through interaction and communication […]. A main aim of phenomenology is to make us reflect on this world and make us see how it is constituted by us” (emphasis mine).11 And in Husserl’s words: “Phenomenological idealism does not deny the factual existence or the real world (and in the first instance nature) […]. Its only task and accomplishment is to clarify the sense of this world, just that sense in which we all regard it as really existing and as really valid. That the world exists […] is quite indubitable. Another matter is to understand this indubitability which is the basis or life and science and clarify the basis for its claim.”12 This scientific explanation of empathy is pessimistic. Especially the absence of empathy is seen as a function of a brain defect or of a special type of brain. From the point of view of any study of social perception, where empathy is considered indispensable to the researcher’s approach the feelings of other people, the issue transcends academic disciplines. It becomes one of a human capacity – an aptitude – which in everyday language may be called being good natured, considerate, etc. But at the same time, it seems as if one needs to accept that some people cannot display empathy due to their nature.13 10 Iacoboni, Mirroring People, p. 16. 11 Føllesdal, “Husserl, Edmund,” secs. 6 and 12. 12 Føllesdal, “Husserl, Edmund,” sec. 2. 13 This kind of an understanding – to have or not to have empathy or similar feelings – is seen in some wordings of ancient texts. For example, the sayings “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3) or “Allah has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing, and over their vision is a veil” (Koran, Bakara 2/7) are as if they mean that some people are doomed due to remain the way they were created!

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Immunity to Nationalism There is an additional non-academic requirement that may be critical to any scientific study of social perception, humanistic or social: immunity to nationalism. Our era is one of nation-states and ethnic groupings. Almost all people carry a national identity or at least a citizenship associated to with a nation-state. How efficient could a nationalist researcher ever be in a study of social perception, especially in regard to ethnicity, even if they were only subject to the appeal of national sentiment? I think the presence of empathy and the absence of national attachment are prerequisites for a successful approach to “perceptions.” The good quality of a study dealing with “national perception” is directly proportional to empathy and inversely proportional to national feelings. I once experienced a surprise that made it clear to me that “seeing” is not as simple as looking! Seeing has to do with our inner self. When I f inished my dissertation on images I handed the text to a Turkish political scientist and a good friend of mine for a review. In a chapter titled “Contradictions and Silencing,” I had listed various categories of inconsistency that I had found researchers in my f ield to be prone to. For example, some writers in their introductions stated that they would be impartial since they approached the issues “scientif ically,” but then they portrayed the Other almost in a racist way; others “missed” or “forgot” important but unf lattering historical incidents caused by their own group – etc. One category was of contradictions within a single sentence. In one case my friend wrote in the margin, “I do not see any contradiction.” The sentence was this: “[You Greeks] show the basest inf idelity to the masters of this noble nation, to the Turks and Muslims who for centuries have shown excess of respect to you and fed you in this country, and whom you served for centuries as slaves […].”14 One needs to have empathy and absence of “national sensitivities” to understand how a member of an ethnic group feels when he is portrayed as a centuries-long respected slave. An example of how national feelings influence academic works is the case of Vamık D. Volkan, a Turkish Cypriot psychiatrist, internationally known for his forty years work bringing together groups in conflict for dialogue and mutual understanding. It is ironic that nationalist bias is apparent even in the study of conflict resolution when the issue is one of Greek-Turkish relations. The 1994 study by Volkan and Dr. Norman Itzkowitz – Turks and 14 Millas, Türk ve Yunan Romanlarında Öteki, p. 292.

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Greeks: Neighbours in Conflict – is a “Turkish” one, as Volkan states in the introduction that he is the senior author.15 Indeed, it is Turkish! I tried to show that Volkan produced a pro-Turkish text and that this was done, on one hand, by “forgetting” some negative deeds of “his side,” and on the other, by exaggerating some negative deeds of the Greeks. Selective memory, wishful thinking, defense mechanisms and bias are obstacles that prevent researchers from seeing and facing facts, once they are under the spell of a national identity. Here I will present only his use of words. For he used different words for the same actions and practice, apparently unconsciously. Here are some examples: The Turks “conquer” (p. 64), the Greeks “invade” (102); the Greeks purify their language to “reject” Turkish words because they are obsessed with the Turks (88), the Turks simply initiate “language reforms” when they “purify” Turkish (114); the Greeks make advances “against” Turkish territories (77), the Turks simply expand their influence “against Anatolia” (28); the identity discussions among Greeks show their “confusion” (87), but Turkey’s recent “identity crisis” is simply a process of “searching [for] a newer identity” (186, 188). Crete is “absorbed” by Greece (203), Turkey “triumphs” in Cyprus in the sixteenth century and “intervenes” in 1974 (131); the Turks were “humiliated” by “the other” in Cyprus (142), but the Greeks “thought” that they were insulted by “the other” (204). The word self-determination is used only once, as a right of the Turks (101). When innocent people are killed, they are “massacred” if the dead are “ours,” that is, if they are Turks (78), and they “lose their lives” if they belong to “the other,” that is, if they are Greeks (67).16 The whole book is written in this spirit. It is as if when the writers look at similar historical incidents, they see different things due to a “filter” in the (ethnic) mind that selects or discards and finally classifies events on an ethnic/nationalistic basis. With great probability, a Greek historian would have seen different happenings had he ventured to write on the same topics. I think that a study of perceptions, especially if it is related to ethnic/ national issues, should not be limited to questions of academic principle and discipline. It has to incorporate, from the start and as a prerequisite, the awareness of the identity of the researcher and her way of thinking and feeling. A “scientific approach” does not guarantee impartiality.17 This can 15 Volkan and Itzkowitz, Turks and Greeks. 16 Millas, “Greek-Turkish Conflict.” 17 By “impartiality” I mean a relative objectivity. No human being can be as impartial as a computer.

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be demonstrated with hundreds of examples: one may think of the huge number of scientists and academics who disagree and contradict each other when they write – of course unconsciously – as members of different and rival ethnic, national, religious or ideological groups. This is a well-known phenomenon. In these cases “science” may even turn into pretext, fallacy or self-deception.

References Decety, Jean, and William Ickes, eds. The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Føllesdal, Dagfinn. “Husserl, Edmund (1859–1839).” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Graig, no pag. doi:10.4324/9780415249126-DD029-1. Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others. New York: Picador, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Penguin, 2011. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes tropiques. Translated by John Russell. New York: Criterion Books, 1961. Millas, Hercules. “Greek-Turkish Conflict and Arsonist Firemen.” In Nations and Identities: The Case of the Greeks and the Turks, pp. 43–53. Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2016. First published in New Perspectives on Turkey 22 (2000): pp. 173–84. Millas, Hercules. Türk ve Yunan Romanlarında Öteki ve Kimlik. Istanbul: İletişim, 2005. Riess, Helen. The Empathy Effect. Louisville, CO: Sounds True, 2018. Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Picador, 1986. Schuster, Heinz Georg. Συνειδητά ή ασυνείδητα. Translated by M. Kolokotsa. Athens: Politropon, 2009. Volkan, Vamık D., and Norman Itzkowitz. Turks and Greeks: Neighbours in Conflict. Huntington, UK: Eothen Press, 1994. Waal, Frans de. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1980.

26 Considerations of an Imagined Land Manfred Beller Abstract The image of the land of Albania results from the history of an occupied country and its subjugated people. The legendary hero of liberation, Skanderbeg, and his counterpart, the ferocious tyrant Ali Pasha, were immortalized in Lord Byron’s poetry. That fictitious mental image, dominating western European travel writing, is deconstructed by imagological analysis. Keywords imagology; national hero; Orientalism; travel writing; Albania

Imagology is the art of deconstructing a fictitious reality. This method has been applied in a recently published book by Olimpia Gargano, Au pays des Skipetares: L’Albanie dans l’imaginaire européen des XVIe–XIXe siècles (In the land of the Skipetars: Albania in the European imagination of the 16th–19th centuries), a study of the origin and the development of the image of the Albanians and their country. Nearly all European peoples followed the same steps in the process of nation-building, as documented in Monika Flake’s collection of analytical articles in Mythen der Nationen (Myths of nations, 1998). But this collection has no article on Albania, the land of the “Skipetars” (as the Abanians call themselves). The survey Imagology (2007), edited by Beller and Leerssen, is also missing a chapter on Albania, mentioning it only in the comprehensive article on the “Balkans.” In the first part of her book, entitled “Mots” (Words), Gargano presents Skanderbeg, the heroic leader of the Skipetars in their struggle against the Ottoman occupation in the fifteenth century and the late discovery of Albania by English and French voyagers in the nineteenth century. The second part, “Espaces”, describes the ill-famed despot Ali Pasha and the literary characterization of the Albanians. The third part, “Images”, treats the pictorial representation of the Albanian landscape and the people’s

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appearance, customs and nuptial rites. So Gargano treats the historical, linguistic, literary, geographic and pictorial elements of Albanian life from several perspectives. Of the aspects treated by Gargano, I will focus on the fictional construction of the image of the country and its inhabitants. The case of Albania shows that the imagined land of the Skipetars needed four ingredients: a legendary hero, an Oriental despot, Romantic poetry and travellers in search of paradise.

The Legendary Hero Skanderbeg, the national hero of the Skipetars, was born Gjergj Kastrioti in 1405, son of Gjon Kastrioti, a noble landowner and local official of the Ottoman government in the northern part of Albania. Young Gjergj Kastrioti was surrendered by his father as a hostage to the court of the Sultan Mehmed I where he received a high level of military training. Gjergj distinguished himself in numerous battles which gave rise to the Turks calling him “Iskander Beg,” that is, “Lord Alexander.” The epithet invoking Alexander the Great was the first step towards Gjergj Kastrioti becoming a legendary hero. Now called Skanderbeg, he became the governor of his father’s estate. In 1443 he abandoned the Ottoman military and was elected commanderin-chief of the Albanian army of liberation. He won several battles against the sultans Murad II and Mehmed II. His fame increased so widely that in 1464 Pope Pius II, who was preparing a crusade against the Turks, conferred upon him the title athleta Christi. After Skanderbeg’s death from malaria in 1468, the Albanian lands remained under Ottoman rule for the next four and a half centuries. The subjugated, proud, but dispirited Skipetars made Skanderbeg a figure of myth. In 1508 Marinus Barletius of Skutari (Shkodër) published the Historia de vita et gestis Scanderbegi, Epirotarum principis (History of the life and deeds of Scanderbegi, Prince of the Epirotes), which was translated into ten European languages over the course of several centuries. Barletius’s biography included fantastic illustrations of dreams and heroic feats and was the source material for novels and plays and comedies in court theatres during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Elsewhere, Michel de Montaigne began the first of his Essais (1580) with an anecdote of Skanderbeg’s extraordinary “force and courage,” and Voltaire devoted the ninetieth chapter of his 1756 Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations to Scanderbeg, referring to the “Turquish annals” in Demetrius Cantemir’s Histoire de l’empire ottoman (1743). Skanderbeg would become a literary

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figure in western Europe. He represented the heroic character of an Albanian prince, though Albania remained for the most part inaccessible under Ottoman dominion and the people almost completely unknown. A resurgence of Skanderbeg as a national hero occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was not brought about in Albania, but among the so-called Arbëreshë, descendants of thousands of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Skipetar refugees in southern Italy. Skanderbeg assumed his place among distinguished legendary heroes such as Arminius for the Germans, Vercingetorix and Jeanne d’Arc for the French, El Cid for the Spaniards, the Piast Dynasty for the Poles and William Tell for the Swiss in a wide range of publications. These national heroes have been noted in several reference works of literary themes and motifs, for example in those of Frenzel (1962 and 1976), or of Laffont and Bompiani (1970, 1994), or of Hartman and Sapp (1994); but not a single one includes an article on Skanderbeg. On the other hand, all the great German, French and English national encyclopedias make mention of the Albanian hero Skanderbeg in a few biographical lines, except for the Enciclopedia Italiana of Treccani, which in 1936 dedicated two long columns and a portrait to the eroico difensore dell’indipendenza albanese. Only in the last decades have historians of southeastern Europe like Bartl (1981 and 2000), Schmitt (2009) and Pink (2020) discussed the myth of Skanderbeg and its political function for the renewed state of Albania – not to forget the most recent encyclopaedic article “Scanderbeg” in Wikipedia.

The Romantic Poetry The most important ingredient for the formation of the Albanian image and the Skipetars, Romantic poetry, is provided in thirty-five stanzas of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (II 38–72). Tired and contemptuous of English society, the young lord left England in June 1809 with his friend John Cam Hobhouse for a journey to various Mediterranean countries. On 28 September 1809 they landed at Prevesa on the Gulf of Ambrakia in the southern part of Epirus, today referred to as northwestern Greece. The opening line in his Albanian verses, “Land of Albania! where Iskander rose,” joined the literary fame of the land with the name of its hero.1 In the same verse (line 6), Byron added the second image that would come to identify Albania, “rugged nurse of savage men!,” associating the rough nature of the 1 Gargano, Au pays des Skipetares, pp. 41, 44.

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land with its inhabitants. The Albanians or Skipetars are repeatedly characterized as a savage, wild and fierce people. Byron’s companion Hobhouse, in his description of the same journey, also included images of wilderness and barbarian cruelty.2 Byron identified their warlike qualities, courage, endurance, “native fastnesses […] deadly wrath,” but also “friendship […] Gratitude or Valour” (II 65). This well-known image of Albanian warriors, engaged as elite troops by the Turks, culminated in Byron’s reproduction of songs of the Palikars in eleven quatrains (II 72). Apart from the characterization of the Albanians, Byron created another very influential image of the attractiveness and pictorial tradition of the country: the poetic portrayal of its Romantic landscape. He depicted the “favour’d spot of Monastic Zitza” surrounded by the amphitheatre of high mountains and looking on forests and pastures and the valley of the mythical river Acheron (II 48–54). Byron was a guest of the feared ruler of Janina, Ali Pasha (c.1744–1822), and described in detail the courtyard full of warriors and servants from various nations (II 57–58). He confessed in letters to his mother and to a Walter Scott, the Scottish poet, that his description was influenced by the castle of Branksome celebrated in a song by Scott.3 Byron presents Ali Pasha in his luxurious residence and characterizes the Pasha as an aged lecher and “a man of war and woes” (II 62–63). In two verses, Byron cemented the poetic damnation of Ali Pasha for all Western posterity. However in a letter to his mother, he reported that the Pasha had received him well, that he had regarded him his son and wished to see him every day. Byron visited his host four times and writes that during his departure he was protected by “a trusty band” (II 69). Katherine Elizabeth Fleming has analysed the ambiguous image of Ali Pasha as a strong though provincial ruler respected by French and English diplomats at the time and his playing the part of an idiosyncratic and cruel Oriental despot. 4 Gargano’s meticulous analysis exposes the difference between the poetic picture of the terrifying Pasha and Byron’s personal experience during his stay at Janina. The juxtaposition of poetry, letters of the time, and subsequent paintings and drawings illustrates the fascination with the exotic and European-made orientalized images, and reveals the method of identifying the construction process of imagological clichés.5 Byron personally wanted 2 Gargano, Au pays des Skipetares, p. 48. 3 Gargano, Au pays des Skipetares, p. 119. 4 See chap. 10, “Ali’s Manipulation of the Orientalist Image,” in Fleming, Muslim Bonaparte, pp. 156–80. 5 Gargano, Au pays des Skipetares, p. 47.

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to appear a part of the Albanian vision; and, at Janina, he bought expensive costumes which he put on for a portrait painted by Thomas Philips in 1813. Conscious of his public image, Byron presented himself as an incarnation of an exotic type and adventurer of the Near East, thus constructing his own legend.

The Travellers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries The most frequent ingredient of national image-making are the travelogues. The first, striking description of the Skipetars occurs in the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In 1716–17, she visited several Turkish provinces, together with her husband, the British ambassador in Istanbul. They were accompanied by a detachment of guards recruited from Albania, whom she described as being the strongest militia of the Turkish empire. Lady Montagu observed that, living among Christians and Muslims, the Albanians did not try to decide which religion would be the best. They were cleverly practising both rites, frequenting the mosque on Friday and the church on Sunday, and thus appeared to be always on the right side. The religious indifference of the Albanian soldiers under changing regimes reappears as a fixed image more than a hundred years later in 1854, when Prosper Mérimée refers to the Albanian proverb Là où est le sabre, là est la foi – “where the sword is, there is faith.” Albania is about 80 kilometres from southern Italy, but it was almost inaccessible and farther away from Europe than Turkey or the shores of the Near East. Only at the beginning of the nineteenth century did a few curious adventurers or scientific explorers risk a journey to the inland and mountainous regions. Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was the predominant source of general knowledge of the land, partly real, partly imagined. In 1864, Viscountess Strangford found her way to “Monastic Zitza,” but the place seemed to her “uninteresting and ordinary apart from the fact that it had been consecrated by Byron.”6 Particularly germane to Albania is the fact that most important explorers were foreign ambassadors or consuls with their various interests. François Pouqueville, a physician and hostage in Istanbul, published Voyage en Morée, à Constantinople, en Albanie, et dans plusieurs autres parties de l’Empire Ottoman pendant les années 1798, 1799, 1800 et 1801 (Travels through the Morea, to Constantinople, through Albania, and Other Parts of the Ottoman Empire, during the Years 1798, 1799, 1800, and 1801), in 1805, based on his studies in Istanbul and on information from other 6 Gargano, Au pays des Skipetares, p. 72.

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French hostages at Janina. In the third volume, he created a very influential image of Albania and its inhabitants, which served also as a guide for Byron’s journey. Pouqueville described the tall stature and the temperament of the Skipetars in accordance with the humoral theories of Hippocrates still in use in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.7 In 1805, Pouqueville was the French consul at Janina and in 1816 at Patras. His Voyage de la Grèce also described the geographical and geological nature of Albania. Over the course of the nineteenth century, dozens of French, English and German researchers travelled all over the Albanian regions collecting popular stories and folksongs and studying the language, grammar and dialects within the population. The most important of them was Auguste Dozon who coined the term “albanistique,” indicating the study of Albanian language and culture. Apart from serious linguistic studies, many observations and amateur comments were made about the people’s language and pronunciation. The circulation of linguistic knowledge through scientific studies and travel books contributed many details to the image of the Skipetars and their cultural background. A particular contribution to the understanding of the various Albanian tribes was Ami Boué’s fundamental work La Turquie d’Europe, which brought together the natural sciences, economics, politics, history, linguistics and the geographical exploration of Albania.

The Counterpart of the Hero and the Pictorial Characterization of the Skipetars The second and third parts of Gargano’s book resume the presentation of historical f igures and common traits of the people. In the f irst part Gargano had already presented Byron’s poetic regeneration of Skanderbeg in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, but few stanzas later he also immortalized Ali Pasha of Tepelen. As Skanderbeg had found his place in the epic poetry of Scanderbeide in 1606, so too had Ali Pasha in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. He was also celebrated while still alive in an epic 4,500-verse poem, Alipaschiad, written by an Albanian Muslim over several years (1805–12). In contrast to Skanderbeg, the glorious hero of the Skipetars, Ali Pasha became the personification of the cruel, criminal, opulent oriental tyrant in western European fiction and art. In the 1820s, Ali Pasha was made the principal character of two dramatic performances in Paris and Milan. Victor 7 Zacharasiewicz, Die Klimatheorie in der englischen Literatur; Fink, “De Bouhours à Herder.”

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Hugo condemned him to the seventh circle of the Muslim underworld in the poem “Le derviche” in Les Orientales. Popular novels such as Deleytar (1839) by Eugène Sue and Crimes Celèbres (1840) by Alexandre Dumas père presented Ali Pasha as the prototype of a bloodthirsty figure. But before those publications, during the dark, rainy summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, arose the image of the frightening Albanian breed among the poetic circle of Byron, his secretary John Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. The Gothic novels of Polidori’s Vampire (1819) and later Mary Shelley’s The Evil Eye (1830) located their stories of ghosts and murderers in a fanciful Albania or with an Albanian protagonist. This image was echoed by Prosper Mérimée in the introduction of a poem, “Le mauvais œil”, in his collection of Illyrian ballads, La guzla (The Guzla, 1827). However, these fantastic literary images of Skipetars are contrasted with serious historical, ethnological and linguistic studies in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Souvenirs de la Haute-Albanie (1901), Alexandre Degrand presented a high standard of ethnographic observation with detailed descriptions of clothes and customs, including the tendency of the mountain tribes to blood revenge (justified under the customary laws of Dukagjini), religious fanaticism and robbery incited by poverty. Several travelling painters also demonstrated their view of Albania and the Albanians. The oil paintings, watercolours, sketches and photographs are not merely the simple accessories of the literature of elsewhere, but the visual representation and an integral part of the image of the Other. In 1707–8, the French ambassador Charles Ferriol commissioned a collection of a hundred engravings representing all the nations of the Ottoman empire. It contained two portraits of Albanians with short explanatory texts. In the 1730s, two other paintings by Joan Baptiste van Mour show the execution of Patrona Halil who led a revolt of mostly Albanian janissaries against the sultans Ahmed III and Mahmud I. His story became the plot of the so-called “Turkish” novels in the nineteenth century. Albanian soldiers always armed with long rifles and sabres and daggers in the belt became the most frequent image of the Albanians. That image of the Skipetars became a fixed cliché in illustrations that accompanied accounts of travellers and journal articles up to the first decades of the twentieth century. The exotic nature of their clothes, their features and gestures conveyed an image of their boldness and savageness. More sympathetic representations also appeared, including detailed descriptions and pictorial scenes of weddings which continued for three days and brought together families.8 In the second half of the 8 Gargano, Au pays des Skipetares, pp. 164–69 and 217–19.

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nineteenth century, Edward Lear and Mary Adelaide Walker presented the best-known images of Albania through their descriptions and paintings of landscapes and towns.

Conclusion Travel writing is the common denominator of nearly all poetry, novels and professional and personal accounts of western European travellers in Albania. Those texts originate in three steps, reflecting the gap between imagination and reality: the travel writers bring with the ballast of their formation, studies and preconceptions; then they encounter and observe the unfamiliar country and people with selective attention; finally they write down their perceptions and opinions according to the conventions of the literary genre.9 “Travel writing, qua writing, always contains a poetic fiction and is therefore never restricted to convey hard facts. It necessarily contradicts material reality and retains, at least partially, its autonomy as textual construct.”10 That is exactly the case of the traditional image of Albania analysed in Gargano’s book. “Travel writing from the sixteenth to the eighteenth (and also nineteenth) centuries show previously unknown societies through the prism of the author’s prejudices about barbarians, wild hordes, heathens and exotic marvels.”11 Over time, travel accounts changed into serious geographical, linguistic and cultural research; meanwhile poetry and novels continued reproducing fictitious mental pictures and stereotypes. Albania’s path to becoming a modern state was impeded by the roughness of the mountainous country and the poverty and inaccessibility of a withdrawn population, but the main reason was the prolonged periods of heteronomy. After the first few years of Skanderbeg’s liberation struggles, the Skipetars lived under Ottoman rule for more than four centuries. The faithful Christians paid their tribute in the form of taxes and their sons for the janissaries, the elite infantry units of the Ottoman sultans. From the First to the Second World War, the Albanians experienced short periods of independence and longer phases of submission to an Italian protectorate. In 1948, the newly established People’s Republic of Albania became a political 9 Stanzel, “Der literarische Aspekt,” pp. 74–80; Beller, “Per una poetica,” p. 23; Beller. “Das Bild des Anderen,” p. 42. 10 Mayer, “Travel Writing,” p. 446. 11 Beller, “Prejudice,” p. 404.

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satellite of the Soviet Union and from 1964 to 1985 it was under the influence of the Chinese communist ideology of Mao Zedong. As a result, during the late twentieth century, Albania remained temporarily excluded as before from the European context. This historical isolation created the Skipetars as a people without an image of themselves. We know them only from the French, English or German poetry and travel accounts, as well as from pictures that created hetero-images or images that characterize Others and stereotypes of the Skipetars as seen by the “spectants” – to use Joep Leerssen’s terminology.12 They show an astonishing divergence from any self-image created by the “spected” people that would provide an opposite image or their own image and national story. As a result, the Albanians appear as taciturn victims of the real, as well as of the fantastic, object of various foreign perspectives. The contrast of fiction with reality runs through Au pays des Skipetares beginning with the dialectical difference between the Albanian verses in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the corresponding letters of Byron. Travellers did not find the imaginary paradise, and travel accounts over time described more and more the actual character of the people and the true conditions of life. The imagological analysis demonstrates the “true” character of Albania and the Albanians, but at the same time deconstructs the earlier fictitious representations of an imagined land.

References Bartl, Peter. “Skanderbeg.” In Biographisches Lexikon zur Geschichte Südosteuropas, vol 4, pp. 134–37. München: Oldenburg, 1981. Bartl, Peter. “Zum Geschichtsmythos der Albaner.” In Mythen, Symbole und Rituale: Die Geschichtsmächtigkeit der Zeichen in Südosteuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Dittmar Dahlmann and Wilfried Potthoff, pp. 119–39. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000. Beller, Manfred. “Das Bild des Anderen und die nationalen Charakteristiken in der Literaturwissenschaft.” In Eingebildete Nationalcharaktere: Vorträge und Aufsätze zur literarischen Imagologie, edited by Elena Agazzi and Raul Calzoni, pp. 21–46. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2006. Beller, Manfred. “Per una poetica della nostalgia.” In Le Metamorfosi di Mignon: L’immigrazione poetica dei tedeschi in Italia da Goethe ad oggi, pp. 11–30. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987. 12 Leerssen, “Imagology,” p. 27, point 3.

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Beller, Manfred. “Prejudice.” In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters; A Critical Survey, edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, pp. 404–6. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Beller, Manfred, and Joep Leerssen, eds. Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters; A Critical Survey. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (1973): s.v. “Skanderbeg.” Byron, George Gordon. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. London: John Murray, 1812. Enciclopedia Italiana (1936), s.v. “Scanderbeg.” Fink, Gonthier-Louis. “De Bouhours à Herder: La théorie française des climats et sa reception Outre-Rhin.” Recherches Germaniques 15 (1985): pp. 3–62. Flacke, Monika, ed. Mythen der Nationen: Ein europäisches Panorama. München: Koehler & Amelang, 1998. Fleming, Katherine Elizabeth. The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha’s Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. First published 1999. Frenzel, Elisabeth. Motive der Weltliteratur: Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher Längsschnitte. Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag, 1976. Frenzel, Elisabeth. Stoffe der Weltliteratur: Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher Längsschnitte. Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag, 1962. Gargano, Olimpia. Au pays des Skipetares: L’Albanie dans l’imaginaire européen des XVIe–XIXe siècles. Paris: Spinelle, 2019. Grand Larousse (1964), s.v. “Scanderbeg.” Halsband, Robert, ed. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Hartman, Donald K., and Gregg Sapp. Historical Figures in Fiction. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1994. Laffont, Robert, and Valentino Bompiani. Dictionnaire des personnages littéraires et dramatiques de tous les temps et de tous les pays: Poésie, théâtre, roman, musique. Paris: Société d’édition de dictionnaires et encyclopédies, 1970. Le Grand Robert des noms propres (1986), s.v. “Skanderbeg ou Scanderbeg.” Leerssen, Joep. “Imagology: History and Method.” In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters; A Critical Survey, edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, pp. 17–32. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Mayer, Albert. “Travel Writing.” In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters; A Critical Survey, edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, pp. 446–50. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Pink, Johanna. “Nationalheld.” In Compendium heroicum. Online Lexikon des Sonderforschungsbereichs 948 “Helden–Heroisierungen–Heroismen.” Universität Freiburg. Changed 18 February 2020. doi:10.6094/heroicum/nd1.1.20200218.

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Schmitt, Oliver Jens. Skanderbeg: Der neue Alexander auf dem Balkan. Regensburg: Pustet, 2009. Stanzel, Franz Karl. “Der literarische Aspekt unserer Vorstellungen vom Charakter fremder Völker.” Anzeiger der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophisch-historische Klasse 111 (1974): pp. 63–82. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. “Skanderbeg.” Last edited 31 August 2020. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skanderbeg. Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar. Die Klimatheorie in der englischen Literatur und Literaturkritik von der Mitte des 16. bis zum frühen 18. Jahrhundert. Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1977.

Acknowledgments The editorial team thanks the following bodies for generous support that went towards the publication of this volume: the Department of History, European Studies and Religious Studies and the Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies, both in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam; the Society for Dutch Literature (Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde); the Amsterdam University Fund (Amsterdams Universiteitsfonds); and the Alumni Circle for European Studies (Kring Europese Studies). Special thanks are also due to Nienke Rentenaar for her assistance in preparing the manuscript.



List of Contributors

Manfred Beller has been a Lecturer and Professor of Comparative and German Literature at the universities of Bonn, Pavia, Messina and Bergamo. He studied mythological themes, travel literature, and methods of research in imagology. He edited, together with Joep Leerssen, Imagology (2007), and recently published Rheinblicke: Historische und literarische Perspektiven (Rhineviews: historical and literary perspectives, 2019). John Breuilly is Emeritus Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics. Books include Austria, Prussia and the Making of Modern Germany, 1806–1871 (2011). He is one of the editors of the journal Nations and Nationalism, and edited The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (2013) and Nineteenth-Century Germany (2001/20). Marjet Brolsma is Assistant Professor in European Cultural History at the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. She has been a research assistant at the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms (SPIN) and has published on intellectuals and the Great War and national identity discourses and ideas of Europe. Peter Burke is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Emmanuel College. His most recent books – including The Polymath (2020) – have been concerned with the social history of knowledge, and he is now writing a social history of ignorance. Mary-Ann Constantine is Reader at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. She studies the literature and history of Romantic-period Wales and Brittany and has a particular interest in travel writing. She recently led the project “Curious Travellers,” funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Claire Connolly is Professor of Modern English at University College Cork. Her core research interests are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. She is the author of A Cultural History of the Irish Novel (2011), and co-general editor of Irish Literature in Transition (2020). Ann Dooley is Professor Emerita of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Co-founder of the Celtic Studies Program at that

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university, she was its director for many years. She publishes in the fields of medieval Irish saga and early and classical Irish poetry. Alex Drace-Francis is Associate Professor of Modern European Literary and Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanian and Balkan social, cultural and literary history; on travel writing and circulation of ideas and images; and on European identity as a whole. Tom Dunne is Emeritus Professor of History, National University of Ireland Cork. His Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798 won the Ewart Biggs Memorial Prize. He is working on an overview of Irish art from 1750 to 1850. Ina Ferris is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Ottawa. She has published widely on the historical novel, national tales and the culture of the book in Britain during the Romantic period. Her most recent book is Book-Men, Book Clubs, and the Romantic Literary Sphere (2015). R. F. Foster is Emeritus Professor of Irish History at Oxford and Emeritus Professor of Irish History and Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of many prize-winning books, including The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (2001) and the authorized biography of W. B. Yeats (1997–2003). Terry Gunnell is Professor of Folkloristics at the University of Iceland. He is author of The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia (1995), and joint editor of Málarinn og menningarsköpun: Sigurður Guðmundsson og Kvöldfélagið (The Painter and Cultural Creation: Sigurður Guðmundsson and Kvöldfélagið, with Karl Aspelund). David Hopkin is Professor of European Social History at the University of Oxford where he specializes in oral culture. He is author of Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (2012) and co-editor of Rhythms of Revolt: European Traditions and Memories of Social Conflict in Oral Culture (2018). John Hutchinson is Visiting Senior Fellow in Nationalism at the London School of Economics. He established a cultural approach to nationalism in The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism (1987) and Modern Nationalism (1994). More recently, in Nationalism and War (2017), he has integrated the experience of war and historical division into the study of nationalism.

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329

Lotte Jensen is Professor of Dutch Cultural and Literary History at Radboud University. She has published widely on the emergence of Dutch national thought and cultural nationalism from a literary-historical perspective. Together with Joep Leerssen and Marita Mathijsen, she co-edited Free Access to the Past: Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation (2010). Michael Kemper is Professor of East European History at the University of Amsterdam. Trained in Arabic, Islamic and Slavic Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum, he focuses on Islam in the Volga-Ural and North Caucasus regions, on the history of Soviet Oriental Studies and on the interaction between the languages of Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy. Krisztina Lajosi is Senior Lecturer in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She studies nationalism in a historical perspective. Her publications include Staging the Nation: Opera and Nationalism in 19th-Century Hungary, Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe and The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe. Enno Maessen is Lecturer in Political History at the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University. He works on cultural representations, urban history and the history of contemporary Turkey. He is co-founder of the Turkey Studies Network in the Low Countries. Marita Mathijsen is Professor Emeritus of Dutch Literature at Amsterdam University. She specializes in nineteenth-century culture and in editing science. Together with Joep Leerssen she has organized congresses on “primal texts” (Oerteksten) and on Free Access to the Past. In 1998 she received the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prize for the Humanities. Hercules (Iraklis) Millas (b.1940) is a political scientist (PhD) and a civil engineer. He taught Turkish political thought and Greek literature in various Greek and Turkish universities. His publications cover fields such as literature, language, historiography, textbooks and interethnic perceptions, mostly related to Turkey and Greek-Turkish relations. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin is Professor in the Department of Irish Language and Literature, Concurrent Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

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Murray Pittock is Bradley Professor and Pro Vice-Principal at the University of Glasgow. He is a member of the Board of the National Trust for Scotland and an adviser to the National Galleries, National Museums and Museums Galleries Scotland, and is currently working on a global history of Scotland for Yale University Press. Marleen Rensen is Senior Lecturer in Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam. She specializes in literary engagement and life writing and has a particular interest in the lives of French and German artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ann Rigney is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She has published widely in the field of memory studies and was co-editor (with Joep Leerssen) of Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2014). She currently directs the European Research Council-funded project “Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe.” Jan Rock is Assistant Professor of Modern Dutch Literature at the University of Amsterdam. He teaches and publishes on cultural nationalism in the Low Countries, the history of Dutch philology, and cultures of reading. He is assistant editor of the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, edited by Joep Leerssen. Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez is Associate Professor of European Literature and Culture in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She specializes in Spanish-Dutch-Anglo cultural exchanges in the early modern period and beyond. Her last edited volume is Literary Hispanophobia and Hispanophilia in Britain and the Low Countries (1550–1850) (2020). Tom Shippey is Professor Emeritus of St Louis University and has published widely on Old English, on the history of philology and on modern receptions of medieval literature. Guido Snel is a writer and Senior Lecturer in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He specializes in contemporary European literatures, with a specific focus on central and eastern Europe and the Balkans. Eric Storm is Senior Lecturer in European History at Leiden University. He published the Culture of Regionalism (2010) and The Discovery of El Greco

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(2016). He is co-editor along with Xosé Núñez Seixas of Regionalism in Modern Europe (2019) and with Stefan Berger of Writing the History of Nationalism (2019). Anne-Marie Thiesse is Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France. A specialist in cultural history, she is the author of La création des identités nationales, Europe, XVIIIe–XXe siècle (1999) and La fabrique de l’écrivain national (2019). She is a member of the research team “Transferts culturels” (“Cultural Transfers”) at the CNRS-École Normale Supérieure, Paris. Jo Tollebeek is Professor of Cultural History since 1750 at KU Leuven. Since 2015 he has also been Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the same university. He has published on the history of historiography and historical culture, and on the history of science, universities and collections from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Balázs Trencsényi is Professor of History at the Central European University, and co-director of Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies. His main field of interest is the history of modern political thought in east-central Europe. His most recent book is Brave New Hungary: Mapping the “System of National Cooperation” (2019). Michael Wintle is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at the University of Amsterdam, where until 2019 he was head of the European Studies Department. His most recent book is Eurocentrism: History, Identity, White Man’s Burden (2020).

Index Aachen 14 ‘Abdannasir, Muhammad-Fatih b 92 Abramtsevo 102 accent see language Acheron 316 adaptation see mediation Addison, Joseph 36, 109 Afghan Historical Society 70 Afghan people 70 Afghanistan 18, 63–64, 70–71 Africa 66, 258, 298 agriculture 44, 104, 276 Ahmed III, Sultan 319 Ahrenshoop 101 Albania, Albanians 23, 25, 313–21 Alcuin 197 Alencar Xavier, Weibke Röben de 258 Alencar, José de 258 Alexander the Great 314 Alexander I, Tsar 56 Algeria 67 Ali Pasha of Tepelen 313, 318 al-Marjani, Shihabaddin 86, 88–89 Alphen, Hieronymus van 11, 117, 119–21 Alsace-Lorraine 59 Amden 101 Americans, First Nation peoples 76, 127, 129, 258; Latin Americans 255–61; from the United States 46–47, 76, 78, 81, 97–99, 103, 177; see also Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Peru, United States Amirkhanov, Husayn 85 Ammerland 208 amnesia see forgetting Amsterdam 15, 99, 106, 111, 141, 168–69, 171–72, 175–76, 178 anarchism 75, 78–81, 103 Anatolia 311 Anderson, Benedict 35, 43, 67 Andrews, J. A. 80 Angkor Wat 68 Anglesey 265, 288, 291 Anglo-Dutch War, First 34 Anglo-Saxon, Anglic 43, 198, 199, 204, 206–08, 248, 272; see also Saxon Anne of Austria 35 “Annie Laurie” (song) 75–79, 81 anthems 76, 79, 80 n.17, 123 anthropology 22, 97, 132, 307 anticolonialism 63–64; see also nationalism, postcolonialism antipathy 249, 272; see also empathy antiquities, antiquarianism 150, 171, 174–75, 177–79, 265–66, 269, 276–78, 282–83 antisemitism 59

Antwerp 103 aphasia 244, 250 applied arts see decorative arts appropriation, cultural 18, 69, 79–81, 176, 272; of territory, 277–78 Apter, Emily 261 Arabic language 88; script 91 Arabs 299 Aran Islands 11, 277–78, 281–83 Arbëreshë 315 archaeology 63–71, 150, 153 architecture 34, 47, 101–03, 139–43, 280–81, 283; see also decorative arts, ruins Arminius 315 Arndt, Ernst Moritz 51–52, 54–58, 60 Arnhem 178 Arnold, Matthew 286 Arp, Jean 103 Árpád 234 art installations 22, 24, 244 artefacts 14, 18, 25, 42, 66–67, 69, 71, 80, 118, 131–32, 150, 153 artisanry 20, 101–02, 137–44; see also lace, ceramics, costume, decorative arts artists’ colonies 97–104 Aryan 64–65, 67, 70 Asian 20, 23, 25, 34, 65, 295–301 Assyrian gates 64 Astrik, Archbishop of Esztergom 228 Athenry 192 Athleta Christi 229, 314 Athlone 269 Attila the Hun 207 Auerbach, Erich 260 Aunay 160 Australians, aboriginal 128 Austria-Hungary see Habsburg Empire Austrian-German literary tradition 234 Austrians 33, 35 autobiographies 24, 57 auto-exoticism 275–83 Azeris 90 Babel 64 Baia Mare see Nagybánya Bakhuizen van den Brink, Reinier Cornelis 111 Bakkenes, L. van 172 Bakunin, Mikhail 259 Balfour, Sir James 46 Balkanization 25 Balkans 89, 313 Ballycastle 269 Ballyseedy 249 Baltic Sea 206–07, 209 Baltic Germans 60

334  Bamiyan 64, 70–71 Bánk Ban 239 Bar Kokhba Revolt 45 Barbizon 97–99 Barbour, John 45 Barcelona 142 Bardengau 208 bardic poetry see poetry, bardic Barentsz, Willem 123 Baretti, Giuseppe (Joseph) 37 Barkenhoff 104 Barletius, Marinus (Marin Barleti) 314 Barros, João de 34 Barrow, Geoffrey 45 Barry 286 Barry, James 277 Barry, Mme du 172 Bartl, Peter 315 Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic 91 Bashkirs 87, 90 Báthory, Stephen 229 Bayeux 158 Becca of the Banings 207 Becker, Nikolaus 51–52, 58 Becker, Paula 99 Beckett, Samuel 29 Beethoven, Ludwig van 232 Beiner, Guy 244 Belfast 22, 244 Belgians 98–99 Belgium 168, 171–72, 175, 231; see also Netherlands, Low Countries Beller, Manfred 16, 23, 321 Belmonte, Leo 102 Bengal 65 Bennett, Lance W. 77 Beowulf 203, 205–07, 209 Bergöö, Karine 97 Berlin 55, 103, 220 n.28 Berzsenyi, Dániel 234 Bicknor, Alexander 198 Biedermeier 57 Biéler, Ernest 101 Bilderdijk, Willem 109 Billig, Michael 52, 57, 118 biographies, biographical compendia 18, 85–94, 109, 172–73, 178, 314 biologization, biopolitics, eugenics 214, 215; see also race Birdclyffe, NY (artists’ colony) 103 Bismarck, Otto, Prince 59–60, 203 Black and Tans 286 Black Comb (Black Combe Fell, Cumbria) 289–90 Black History 42 Blum, León 144 Boas Berg, J. I. 171 Boate, Gerard 23, 288 Boece, Hector 45–46

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Bohemia 142; see also Czechs Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas 109 Bolsheviks 90–94 Bompiani, Valentino 315 Bonfini, Antonio 231 Bopp, Franz 65 Borealism 36 Borobudur temple 68, 70 Borromini, Francesco 34 Boswell, James 46 Boué, Ami 318 Bouhours, Dominique 34 Bowen, Elizabeth 292 Bower, Walter 45 Boyd, Hugh 269 Bran, Welsh king 198 Brandenburg 54, 56 Branksome (Branxholme) Castle 316 Branwen (character in Welsh legend) 287–88 Brazil, Brazilians, Brazilian Portuguese 103, 255–61 Bremen 99 Bremmer, H. P. 176, 178 Brentano, Franz 309 Breton language, people 53 Brewer, James Norris 11, 278–79, 281–82 Brian Ballach mac Aedha Ó Conchobair (d. 1417) 194 Britain (ancient kingdom) 205, 287 Britannia (personification) 33 British archipelago, British Isles 23 n.14, 78, 266, 289; see also England, Ireland, Isle of Man, Scotland, Wales, Great Britain British Association for the Advancement of Science 282 Brittany 99, 101 Brixton 286 Bródy, János 236–37 Brongniart, Alexandre 170 Bronowice (artists’ colony) 101 Browne, Thomas, Lord Kenmare 269 Brussels 169, 179 Buchan, John 11, 23, 295–303 Bucharest 142 Budapest 142, 232–34, 238 Buddhism 64, 66, 68, 70–71 Buijnsters, P. J. 119–120 Bukhara 87–88 Bulgaria 88 Bulghār Khanate, Bulghārīs 88–89 Burgh, A. H. H. van der 175–76 Burgundy 168; Burgundians 207 burial, burial places, funerary practices 44, 244, 269–70, 279; see also monuments Burke, Edmund 44 Burke, Edmund, son of William 192 Burke, family 192 Burke, Peter 245, 327 Burke, Thomas 193 Burmann, Gottlob Wilhelm 119

Index

Burnet, Gilbert 36 Burns, Robert 109 Burr, Aaron 46 Burton, Frederic Richard 282 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 108–10, 313, 315–19, 321 Caelic of the Finns 207 Caen 158 Caernarfon 273 Caesar 207 Cairo 69, 71, 92, 141 Calcutta 64 Cambó, Francesc 142 Cambodia, Cambodians, Cambodian motifs and symbols 68 Cambon-van der Werken, Margaretha von 123 Canada 129–31, 297 Canna, Isle of 273 canon, canonicity, canonization 58, 117–85, 215, 225–27 Cantemir, Demetrius 314 Canudos 22, 255–56, 259–261 capital, capitalism 44–45, 98, 102, 224 n.1; symbolic capital 80 Carnfree, mound of 192 cartoon strips 16 Catalonia 99, 142–43 Cathal Dub 194 Cathal mac Domhnall Ó Conchobhair 192 Cathal mac Rualdri Ó Conchobhair 192 Catherine the Great, Tsarina 88 Celtic 22, 23, 65, 189, 265–67, 272, 277, 285–87, 291, 292 ceramics 14, 20, 24, 102, 167–80 Champfleury, Jules 170, 173 Charolles 168 Chaucer, Geoffrey 36 Cheshire 289 Chester 289 Chesterton, G. K. 35 Chicago 75, 78–79, 141 Childers, Erskine 296 China 66, 70, 128, 321 Chinese people 34 Chinese style in porcelain 167, 175 chorals see songs Christianity 32, 64, 66, 68–70, 129, 189, 223–24, 227–37, 249, 260, 300–01; Greek Orthodox 308; Maronite 69; Protestant 33, 36, 57, 129, 248–49, 252, 278; Roman 32, 128 227, 229, 231, 248; Russian Orthodox 90 chronicles 22, 85, 227–28, 236 Chronicon Pictum or Chronica Hungarorum 228 cinema, films 16, 236, 255 citizens, citizenship 53, 273, 287, 310 city states 53, 88 Civil Rights movements 76

335 civilization 52–53, 64–71, 129–32, 216, 247, 271, 283, 297, 300–01, 307 Clanrickard Burke, family 193 classical antiquity, Greco-Roman 64–65, 67; Irish, 190 classical music see music Claudius of Turin 197 Claudius, Matthias 124 climate, weather 139, 260, 267, 288–91 Clonmacnoise 275, 278–83 clothing see costume Coleridge, Samuel 109 Coloman the Learned (Könves Kálman), King of Hungary 227–28 colonialism 25, 42, 66–69, 87–88, 127–32, 141, 171, 257–58, 275–83, 296–99; ‘enlightened’ 68; see also empires, anticolonialism, postcolonialism colonies 276; internal 64 colonies, artists’ 97–104 commemorations, celebrations, festivals 42, 44, 46–47, 75, 153, 226, 232, 234–36, 243, 245, 250 Commonweal (newspaper) 75–76 communism, communists 104, 213, 218, 236–38, 321 Communist Party of Hungary 236–38 communities, artistic 97–104, 138; embodied 75–81; imagined 35, 224, 233, 239; inherited 43, 45; linguistic 14, 16, 19, 60; political 69, 71, 225–26; rural 138, 273; religious 86, 88–92, 250; scholarly 170, 177–79, 296 comparative literature, comparativism 14–16 Comte, Auguste 259 Conan Doyle, Arthur 296 Concarneau 101 conceptual history see history Confederate States of America (Confederacy) 78 Confederation of the Rhine 60 Connacht 21, 129–30, 189–93, 199, 281 Conrad, Joseph 296, 301 Conrad, Sebastian 41 Conselheiro, Antônio 259 conservatives, conservatism 55–59, 159, 180, 213, 216–17, 225, 229, 232–33, 250 Constable, John 276 Constant Rebecque, Jan Willem baron de 168–69, 177 Constant Rebecque-Hora Siccama, H. S. de ​ 168 n.4 Constantinople 227 Copenhagen 148–51 Cork City 269, 286 Cork County 246 Cornwall 99, 101 Corot, Jean-Baptiste 98 Corsican independence 46; ‘Corsican tyrant’ (Napoleon) 57

336  cosmopolitan 20, 53, 54, 97–104, 139, 275; see also global cosmopolitanism 53–54, 99, 103, 159 costume, dress 33–35, 55, 100, 102, 141–42, 147–48, 167, 267, 282, 317, 319 counterculture 102 Covid-19 42, 55 n.7 craftmanship see artisanry Cretans 163 Crete 311 crisis 51–58, 211–20, 250; economic 138; identity 208 n.19, 311 Cromwell, Thomas Kitson 278 crowns see regalia Cruachan 200 Cú Chulainn 194 Culloden 273 culture passim; exotic 127; indigenous, peasant, vernacular 127, 138, 158, 162, 214, 227, 238, 258, 260, 266; literary 107, 246, 261; material 24, 162; pagan 233; see also agriculture, counterculture, subculture Cumbria 290 Cunningham, Allan 109 Curtiz, Michael 79 Cyprus 311 Czech people, language 53, 142, 233; see also Bohemia Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition 142 da Cunha, Euclides 22, 255 dance 103, 161, 238 Dance, E. H. 42 Danes, Danish language 60, 98, 99, 117–18, 205–08; see also Denmark Darmstadt 102 Darwin, Charles 47 Dausmesnil, Marie 160 David, Marie 98 Davies, W. H. 292 Davillier, Jean-Charles 172 Davis, Thomas 277 Davy, Humphry 108 De Muzen (journal) 19, 105–12 decadence 64, 173, 300 Declaration of Arbroath 41, 45–47 Declaration of Independence, United States 46 decorative, applied arts 101–02, 137–44, 169–70, 176 Defoe, Daniel 288–89 Degrand, Alexandre 319 Deken, Agatha 117, 119–22, 125 Delft 20, 167, 169–79 Delftware see ceramics Demmin, Auguste 170, 179 Denmark 58, 60, 147–48, 205–08, 250; see also Danes Desmond, Earl of 198 Diefenbach, Karl Wilhelm 102–03

Ne t work s, Narr atives and Nations

Digenes Akrites 157–58 Dionysius 197 Ditmarsh (Dithmarschen) 21, 205–06, 209 Diya’addin, Adbalhaqq Afandi b. 92 Dobsa, Lajos 236 Domnall son of Muircertach Ó Conchobhair 193 Donnchada, family 193 Donne, John 34, 36 Dozon, Auguste 318 Dresden 140 dress see costume Dreyfus Affair 59 Drost, Aarnout 105–06, 108–09, 111 Dublin 22, 197–98, 269, 275–76, 281–02, 288, 290–01 Dubrovnik 232 Duffy, Rita 22, 244 Dukagjini 319 Dumas père, Alexandre 319 Dún Aengus 11, 275, 281–83 Duncan, Isadora 103 Duns Scotus see John of Duns Duo Karst 124 Düsseldorf 137, 144 Dutch East Indies see Indonesia Dutch language, people 19–20, 23–24, 33–35, 38, 54, 56, 66, 68–69, 98, 105–12, 117–25, 141, 167–79, 288; see also Netherlands Duthuit, Georges 291 dynasties, dynasticism 44, 51, 53, 58, 60, 68, 70, 190, 193–94, 204, 228, 315; see also empires, monarchy earthenware see ceramics East Prussia 54, 56 East 229, 296–301; see also Orientalism echo 271 education 59, 66, 68, 88, 103, 118, 124, 125, 129, 140, 160, 163, 229–32, 236, 292 Egypt, Egyptians 36, 44–45, 64, 67, 69–70 egyptology 69–70 Eider 206 El Cid 315 Elbe River 208 Eliot, T. S. 243 elites, intelligentsia 43, 54–55, 59–60, 66, 68–69, 88, 94, 129, 153, 177, 214, 216, 225, 227, 237, 246, 248, 301 Elizabeth of France 35 Elphin 193 Emeric, Saint, King of Hungary 229 Emma, Queen of the Netherlands 174 empathy 306–12; see also antipathy empires 63–68, 87–89, 101, 140–41, 248–49; see also imperialism, colonialism, Byzantine Empire, France, Germany, Great Britain, Habsburg Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Italy, Netherlands, Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, Tatar Empire

Index

Ende, Hans am 99 England, English people, Englishness 33–38, 42–43, 45, 122, 128–30, 150, 162, 189, 192, 197–98, 204, 245, 248, 271–72, 275–78, 281, 286–90, 296–97, 315–18; see also Great Britain English language 33–38, 53–54, 76, 80, 98, 103, 110, 119, 122–25, 130, 178, 209, 247, 272, 313; see also Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment 54, 64, 122, 211, 225, 233, 237, 273 environment see landscape Eormenric the Goth 207 epic 20, 24, 44, 45, 123, 157, 205, 318 Epirus 315 Eritrea 132 Erkel, Ferenc 235–38 Erkel, Gyula 235 Ernst Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse 102 Erzgebirge 160 Essen, Siri von 97 etatism see statism ethnicity 53, 59–60, 306; see also race, nationalism ethnography 127–32, 139, 141–42, 157–63, 282, 307, 319 ethnosymbolism 225; see also nationalism eugenics see biologization eurocentrism 24, 295–301 Europa (journal) 106 Europe passim; central 33, 36, 60, 128, 160, 226–27, 249; confused 300; eastern 33, 85, 205, 249; northwestern 24; Ottoman 33; Russian 86; southeastern 315; western 24–25, 33, 45, 63–64, 214; idea of 64–71, 189–90, 257–60, 295–96, 313 European Federation of Artists’ Colonies (EuroArt) 104 European Studies 15 European Union 60 Evenepoel, Albert 171, 175, 179 exhibitions 102, 131, 137–44, 169–71; see also museums exoticism, exoticization 127, 132, 141, 162–63, 169, 175, 267, 299, 316–20; auto-exoticism 275–83 experience, personal-psychological 77, 159, 235, 238, 271, 305–10, 219; historical 42, 53, 59, 68, 189, 212, 245, 258, 260, 285, 320; of travel 132, 265, 270, 316; no cure for stereotypes 35; see also horizon of expectation faience see ceramics fairytales see literature Fakhreddinov, Riazeddin 18–19, 85–94 Falu, River 99 Faludi, Ferenc 231 family histories 22, 243, 251–52, 267; see also memory

337 Farsi see Persian fascism 213, 216 Fauriel, Claude 163 federalism 60 Féilim Ó Conchobhair 192–93 Ferriol, Charles 319 festivals see commemorations Fétis, Frédéric 171, 175 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 54–55 fiction 23, 57, 120–23, 159, 173, 255–61, 275–76, 281, 295–301, 314, 318–20; “Turkish novels” 319 Fidesz 229 Fidus, ps. Hugo Höppener 103 films see cinema Finland, Finnish style 101 Finns 207 First Nation peoples see Americans, First Nation Fitzgerald, Mabel 248 Fitzpatrick, David 243–44 Flake, Monika 313 Flameng, Léopold 172 Flanders 160 Flatey 148–49, 151 Fleming, Katherine 316 Flensborg 205, 207 Flintshire 273 foldan 43 folk see people folklore studies 20, 32, 65, 75, 78, 127–32, 147, 158 folktales see literature Fontainebleau 98, 100 Fontenay-le-Marmion 157–60, 162 food 35, 101, 144, 267; see also restaurants forgetting 25, 159 n.15, 244–50, 311; nothing more dangerous than 215; see also aphasia, memory Foucault, Michel 244 France, French language, people 31–38, 51–60, 67–68, 76, 79–80, 97–101, 110–11, 119, 122–25, 129, 139–44, 157–63, 167–80, 196–99, 214–15, 245, 291, 300, 307, 313, 315–16; see also French Revolution Francis II, Emperor 55 Franken Dzn., Daniël 171 Franks 207–08 Franz Joseph I, Emperor 235 Frederick II the Great, King of Prussia 53 Fredericton, New Brunswick 129–30 French Revolution 47, 76, 79–80, 138, 232 Frenzel, Elisabeth 315 Freud, Sigmund 246, 301 Friedrich Wilhelm, King 56 Frisian language, people 124, 204–05, 207–08 furniture see decorative arts Gaelic (Irish) 15, 189, 193 n.13, 198–99, 273, 282 Gainsborough 276, 279

338  Gaius Manlius 45 Gallipoli 42 Gallo-Roman origins 67 Galway 131 n.22, 192, 269 Gaoidhil, Gaels 195, 198–99 García, Carlos 35 Gargano, Olimpia 313–14, 316, 318, 320 Garnier, Edouard 170 Gasnault, Paul 170 Gauguin, Paul 99, 101 Gellner, Ernest 43–44 gender 23, 216, 306, 308 Geneva 11, 142–43 Geneva, Lake 319 Genlis, Mme de 122 genre 16, 18–20, 22–26, 37, 85, 110, 237, 256–61, 296, 320 Georgians 306 German language, people 33–35, 37–38, 53–60, 64–65, 76, 98, 101–02, 110–11, 119, 122–25, 128–29, 137–44, 227–34, 315, 318, 321 German-Danish War (1863) 58 Germania, Germany (idea of) 51–60, 203–10; Confederation (Deutsche Bund) 57; Empire 140, 169; Democratic Republic 60; Federal Republic 60; see also Habsburg Empire, Holy Roman Empire Gerwarth, Robert 249 Géza, Grand Prince of the Hungarians 227, 230, 236 Gibbons, Luke 271 Gifica of the Burgundians 207 GIF-ification see meme-ification Gijsberti Hodenpijl, F. M. T. 171 Giraldus Cambrensis 286 Girzik, Franz Xavier 233–34 Gisela of Bavaria 228 Glendalough 280 Gödöllő, Hungary (artists’ colony) 102 Goebbels, Joseph 103 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 110 Goldoni, Carlo 37 Gothic (Germanic) 205–07 Gothic (literary genre) 292, 319 Goutzwiller, Charles 172 Graf, Rüdiger 216 Grauballe, Jutland 251 Gray, Thomas 266 Great Britain 14, 25, 36, 80–81, 98, 109, 197, 205, 248, 250, 266, 273, 276, 286–89; as empire 64–70, 91–92, 129, 197, 248, 250, 259, 296–301; solipsistic narratives of 42; see also England, Ireland, Scotland, Ulster, Wales Greece, Ancient 64, 66–67, 196–98, 207 Greece (Hellenic Republic) 306, 310, 314 Greek Civil War 248 Greek Orthodox Church 308 Greek people, culture 33, 64, 66, 79, 157–59, 163, 228, 310–11

Ne t work s, Narr atives and Nations

Green, Nile 71 Greenwich 295 Greifswald 54 Grez-sur-Loing 97–99 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 127–28, 138, 204, 206 Grosby, Steven 45 Gross, Otto 103 Guðbrandur Vigfússon 148–50, 153 n.30 Guerra, Ruy 255 Guillot, Pierre 160 Guptas 70 Haarlem 178 Habsburg Empire, Habsburg Monarchy, Austria-Hungary 53–60, 141, 235, 248 Hafod, Thomas Johnes of 271 Hague, The 167–68, 170–71, 175–77, 178–79 Halbwachs, Maurice 81 Halil, Patrona 319 Harper, Charles 291 Hartvik, Bishop of Győr 228 Hauptmann, Carl 99 Hauptmann, Gerhart 99 Havard, Henry 20, 167–81 Heaney, Seamus 243, 246, 250 Heemskerck, Jacob Eduard van 169 Heidegger, Martin 217, 309 Heije, Jan Pieter 106, 108 n.10, 111–12 Hellerau 140 Helsingborg 207 Helsingör 207 Hemsterhuis, Frans 111 Henty, G. A. 296 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 18, 54, 64, 110–11, 127–28, 225 heritage, patrimony 43, 47, 66–71, 93, 100, 141–42, 232, 239 Herodotus 36 Hesse, Hermann 103 hierarches, hierarchization 100, 169, 214; see also mass culture and society, intelligentsia, urbanites Hill of Howth 267 Hinduism 64, 66, 68–69, 299–300 Hippocrates 318 history 14–18, 21–24, 41–44, 65–66, 70, 189–200, 203–10, 228–30, 244, 246, 255–61, 313, 318, 319; conceptual 211; cultural 15–17, 42, 296; economic 138, 216; see also culture, fiction, temporality Hobhouse, John Cam 315–16 Hobsbawm, Eric 43 Hofmann, Ida 103 Hohenzollern, dynasty 53 Holstein see Schleswig-Holstein Holthuysen, Louisa 171 Hölty, Ludwig 110 Holyhead 265, 288–91 Hooft, Pieter Cornelisz. 109

339

Index

Horace 270 horizon of expectation 212 Horne, John 249 Horthy, Miklós 236 Høyen, Niels Laurits 150 Hrabanus Maurus 197 Hugh Ripelin of Strasbourg 197 Hugo, Victor 110, 125, 318–19 Hundings 207–08 Hungary, Hungarian 33, 58, 99, 102–03, 223–39, 248–49 Husserl, Edmund 309 Hutcheson, Francis 46 Hutchinson, John 18, 25, 63–72, 224–40, 328 Hyde, Douglas 129–32 Iceland, Icelandic culture 147–54 iconoclasm 71 Iggers, George 41 illustrations 22, 172, 278, 282, 314, 319; see also print images, imaginaries, imagology 13, 15–17, 19, 22–25, 31–36, 57, 67, 101, 118, 142, 144, 209, 235–36, 244–45, 247, 250–51, 275–80, 289–91, 296, 300–01, 306, 310 immunity, impartiality 306–11; see also empathy, objectivity imperialism 18–19, 54–55, 64–71, 86, 88, 90, 144, 197, 295–301; see also colonialism, empires Imre, Saint see Emeric India, Indians, Indian mythology 64, 67, 68, 70, 128, 296 Indianism (literary movement in Brazil) 258 Indonesia, Indonesians 66, 68–69, 70, 141 Inismore 11, 275, 278, 281–83 intelligentsia see elites Intelmek 230 “Internationale” (song) 79–80 internationalism 18, 75–81, 105–12, 140, 168, 248–49; see also cosmopolitanism, socialism, transnationalism invention 24, 100, 117–25, 226, 239, 252 Iran see Persia Ireland, Irish people, language 14–15, 20–22, 33, 129–32, 189–200, 243–22, 265–73, 275–83, 285–92; see also Gaelic (Irish), Great Britain Irish Parliamentary Party 248 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 251 Iroquois 128 Islam, Muslims 67–71, 85–94, 299–301, 310, 317–19 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) 64, 71 Isle of Man 289–90 Israel 45; see also Jews, Yiddish Israëls, Josef 99 Italy, Italian people, language 33–37, 53–54, 58, 131–32, 141, 170, 315, 320 Itzkowitz, Norman 310

Jacquemart, Albert 170 Janina 316–18 Japan 66 Japanese people, styles 98, 175 Jeaneau, Edouard 197 Jeanne d’Arc 315 Jena 54 Jesuits 32, 128, 229, 231; see also Christianity, Roman Jews 32, 33, 298, 306–07; see also antisemitism, Israel, Yiddish John Bull 122 John of Duns 45 John Scottus Eriugena 197 Johnson, Adriana M. C. 261 Johnson, Samuel 237, 244–45 Jón Árnason 20, 147–53 Jón Sigurðsson 147, 148 n.7, 149, 153 Jones, Sir William 18, 64–65 journals, newspapers 18, 19, 37, 75, 86, 98, 105–12, 131, 277, 319 Jura 273 Jutes 205, 207 Jutland 99, 207–08, 251 Kabul 70–71 Kádár 237–38 Kahneman, Daniel 308 Kálman, King see Coloman Kandinsky, Wassily 101 Kastrioti, Gjergj see Skanderbeg Katona, József 233 Katwijk-aan-Zee 101 Kazakh 87–90, 104 Kazan 85–86, 89, 93 Keats, John 109 Kedourie, Elie 43 Kemble, J. M. 205 Kerry Mountains 271–72 Kilcloney 194, 198 Killarney 269–72 Kipling, Rudyard 296–97, 301 Klene, A. 176–77 Klinghoffer, A. J. 295 Knowles, William Pitcairn 175 Köngäs-Maranda, Elli 132 Koppány 224 n.1, 229, 235–38 Körösfői-Kriesch, Aladár 102 Koselleck, Reinhart 211, 214 n.7 Kotzebue, August von 231 Kraków 101 Krøyer, Peder Severin 99 Kudrun 207, 209 Kuhzad, Ahmad’ Ali 70 Kúld, Eiríkur 148–49 Kúld, Ólafur Sívertsen 148 La Roche, Sophie von 122 la Villestreux, Charles Antoine Edouard baron de 171

340  Laban, Rudolf von 103 lace 24, 157–63 Lacroix, Delphine 160 Ladislas I, Saint, King of Hungary 227 Laffont, Robert 315 Lafitau, Joseph-François 128 Lamartine, Alphonse de 58 Lamb, Charles 109 landscape, environment, nature 42, 100–01, 258, 260, 266–67, 269, 271, 275–83, 288–90, 313–14, 316, 318, 320 Langenau, Ferdinand Freiherr Baron von 171 language, languages 34, 43, 53–54, 58, 60, 64–66, 81, 88, 110, 118, 128–31, 158, 234, 256, 261, 267, 311, 318 Lapland 132, 141 Laren 99–100 Lares (journal) 131 Larsson, Carl 97, 99 Latin 15, 54, 189, 198, 203–04, 228, 231–32 Laurie, Annie 75–79, 81 Lavrov, Pyotr 80 n.17 Le Bon, Gustave 218 Le Paulmier, Adelaïde 160–61 Le Queux, William 296 Lear, Edward 320 Lebanese nationalism 69 Lecarpentier, Blanche 160 Lech, John 198 Leerssen, Joep 14–19, 31, 38, 44, 51–54, 58–59, 63, 75–76, 79–80, 105, 117–18, 122, 127, 158, 199, 203, 224, 239, 243, 249, 257, 271–77, 285, 291, 313, 321 legends see literature Legrand, Célina 160 Legrand, Emile 20, 157–61, 163 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 128 Leiden 179 Lenin, Vladimir Ilych 90 Lessing, Gottlob Ephraim 109 Levantines 44 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 307 Lhuyd, Edward 271 Libellus de institutione morum (Intelmek) 230 liberals, liberalism 57–59, 169, 174, 213, 216–18, 273; see also neoliberalism Libyans 44 lieux de mémoire see memory Limerick 269, 280 Limfjord 208 Limoges 170 Lind, Jenny 78 linguistics, philology 63–71, 158–59, 204, 206, 285, 318, 319–20; see also language Lisieux 158 literary history see history, literary literature 15, 16, 20, 22–23, 24, 31–38, 55, 97–104, 117–125, 243–44, 248, 266, 277, 285, 313–14, 320–21; see also epic, history, fiction, manuscripts, poetry, travel writing

Ne t work s, Narr atives and Nations

Lithuanians 56 Liverpool 76 Llosa, Mario Vargas 255–61 Lloyd George, David 286 Llŷn Peninsula 291 Lombards, Langobards 204–05, 208 London 37, 75–76, 79, 81, 123, 139, 141, 196, 198–99, 257, 275, 291–92, 295 Loria, Lamberto 131–32 Loudon, John F. 171–72, 174–75, 179–80 Lough Cé 192 Lough Lene 271 Lough Neagh 269 Louis XIII, King of France 35 love 78–79, 97, 124, 152, 247; deserved 199; free 103; illicit 161; not a crime 160; of liberty 173; of ceramics 170–71 Low Countries see Netherlands, Belgium Maas, River 208 Mabinogion 198, 287, 288 n.12, 293 Mac Dhiarmada of Moylurg, family 192 Mac Diarmata, a lord 191 Macaulay, Florence 80 n.17 Mackensen, Fritz 99, 103 Macpherson, James 266 Madagascar 128 Madison, James 46 Maghreb 67 Magnús Grímsson 149 Mahdi 300 Mahmud I, Sultan 319 Mair, John 46 Makkum 174 Maliseet 129–31 Mamontov, Savva 102 manuscripts 21, 91 n.14, 150, 153, 157–58, 189–200; see also marginalia, pagination Manzoni, Alessandro 110–11 Mao Zedong 321 “Marching to Liberty” (song) 78 marginalia 310 marginality, marginalization, marginalized people(s) 69, 71, 189, 259, 306, 308 Maria of Austria (Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma) 55 Maria Theresa, Empress 232 “Marseillaise” (song) 51–52, 75–81 Martin, Wilhelm 179–80 Mary II of England 174 Maskens, Fernand 175 material culture see artefacts Mathijsen, Marita 19, 105–13, 125, 329 Mathildenhöhe 102 Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary 227 Matthías Jochumsson 148 Mattson, H. 177 n.49 Maurer, Konrad 149–51 May, Karl 296 McKenna, Lambert 190

Index

Meadhbh, Queen of Connacht 200 Mecca 91–92, 103, 300 Mecklenburg 101 media 118; news 42, 47; social/digital 57, 77, 227 mediation, remediation, transmission, adaptation 15–16, 18, 20, 24–25, 128, 189, 192, 224, 256, 260–61 Mehmed I, Sultan 314 Mehmed II, Sultan 314 Mehmed V, Sultan 300 meme-ification, GIF-ification 25 memory, personal 42, 77, 149, 162, 246, 249, 291–92; collective-historical 15, 18, 22, 25, 42–45, 71, 75–81, 88, 223–51, 261, 278, 311; sites of (lieux de mémoire) 42, 104, 123, 248; see also canon, commemorations, forgetting, heritage, mediation, narrative, trauma, tradition Menai Straits 289 Meridionalism 36 Mérimée, Prosper 317, 319 Merlin 197 Metternich, Prince Clemens 55–56 Mexican ancestry 76 Michelet, Jules 79, 110 Middle East 67, 70, 295 Milan 318 Milner, Alfred, 1st Viscount 297 Milton, John 290 minorities 42–43, 64, 68–71, 90, 214, 306; see also nationalism mobilization 51, 56, 71, 76–81, 144, 212 modernism (art) 101, 256 modernism (nationalism theory) see nationalism modernism (philosophy of history) 21, 212, 214, 217; see also temporality modernity 43–45, 55 n.7, 67–68, 98–103, 142, 163, 211–12, 215, 285; see also periodization Modersohn, Otto 99 monarchy 44, 53, 59, 233–39; see also dynasty Mondrian, Piet 100 Montaigne, Michel de 314 Monte Verità, artist’s colony 103 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de 127 Montpellier 307 monuments, statues, tombstones 22, 25, 70–71, 100, 243–44, 267, 281–82; see also ruins Moore, Thomas 109–10, 277 Moravia 142 Moretti, Franco 257–58 Morgan, Sydney, Lady 275, 277, 281, 283 Moricet, Marthe 163 Morocco 67 Morris, William 75, 101, 139, 265 Moscow 92, 102 Mosonyi, Mihály 234

341 Mosul 64 motifs, tropes 52, 103, 159, 214–15, 229, 232–34, 259, 275–76, 283, 315 Mount Snowdon 266, 289 Mour, Joan Baptiste van 319 Much, Rudolf 204–05, 208 Muḥammad-Najīb Tūntārī’ 93 Muḥammad-Ṣādiq bin Shāh-Aḥmad 92 Mühsam, Erich 103 Muirceartaigh clan 193 Müllenhoff, Karl Viktor 21, 205–09 Muller Fz., Samuel 187 Muller, Frederik 171, 175 Müller, Gerhard Friedrich 128 multilingualism see language Münter, Gabriele 101 Murad II, Sultan 314 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban 282 Murnau 101 Murtagh clan see Muirceartaigh museums 32, 66, 69, 71, 131–32, 139, 142, 147, 150, 153, 167, 170, 172, 174–77, 179–80, 229, 269; see also exhibitions music, musicians 16, 24, 75–81, 97–104, 101–02, 159–60, 232, 235–38, 267, 277; see also songs, opera Muslim Brotherhood 70–71 Muslims see Islam Myer, Kuno 287 Myrgings 206–08 myths, mythology 56–59, 65, 70, 79, 124, 198, 225–26, 234, 239, 260, 281, 313–16; mythic overlay 225–26 Nagy, Imre 238 Nagy, Sándor 102 Nagybánya, artists’ colony (today Baia Mare, Romania) 99 Naipaul, V. S. 37 Nantes 162 Naples 36–37 Napoleon I Bonaparte, Emperor 54–58 Napoleon III Bonaparte, Emperor 58, 100 narration, narrative 25, 42–47, 60, 86, 130, 150–52, 160–63, 180, 212–13, 219–20, 224–27, 244–45, 256–58, 261, 267, 288, 291–92 national character 16–17, 22–23, 32–35, 105, 110, 121–25, 132, 174, 239, 267, 271–72, 276, 280–81, 299–301, 313–21 nationalism passim; banal 52, 118; methodological 15, 23, 79; modernist theory of 24, 44, 45; political 52, 224–25; primordial theory of 41–47; romantic 43, 52, 57, 79, 118, 128, 154, 158, 163, 210, 225, 233–34; see also anticolonialism, ethnosymbolism, populism, racism national-socialism 103–04, 218 natural histories 23, 288–89, 318 nature see climate, landscape Nebelgard 251

342  neoliberalism 218–19 neopaganism 70 neoshamanism 224 Nerthus 204 Nerval, Gérard de 157, 159 Netherlands, Kingdom of 16, 20, 54, 99, 101, 106, 120–21, 168–78; Dutch Republic 33, 167; see also Dutch language, people networks 13–25, 65, 68–70, 75–80, 85–94, 97–104, 118, 170–72, 178, 190; see also media, narrative, nationalism, transnationalism New Guinea 132 Newlyn, artists’ colony 99 newspapers see journals Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís 291–92 Nibelungenlied 209 Nicholson, Ranald 45 nicknames 34 Nijstad, family 171 Nizhnii Novgorod 89 Noah 64 Noíngiallach, Niall 193 non-European, extra-European 18, 20, 25, 63, 127, 132, 257 Nora, Pierre 42 Normandy, Norman style 140, 157–63 North Sea 205–09 Norway, Norwegians 118, 207 Norwich 79 novels see fiction Nubians 44 Ó Ceallaigh 194 O Cellaig, family 193 Ó Conchabhair, titular cognomen, explained 190 Ó Conchobhair Donn, family 192–94 Ó Conchobhair Ruaid, family 192, 194 Ó Dálaigh, Gofraid Fionn 195–96, 198 Ó Domhnalláin, family 195 Ó hUiginn, Cormac Ruadh 194 Ó hUiginn, Maelsheachlainn na n-Úirsgeal 195 Ó hUiginn, Tadg Dall 195 Ó hUiginn, Tadg 194 Ó hUiginn, Tuathal 191, 194–96 objectivity 108–09, 308–09; see also empathy, immunity oblivion see forgetting Obreen, F. D. O. 178 Occidentalism 36 O’Connell, Daniel 277 O’Conor, Charles 277 O’Curry, Eugene 282 O’Donovan, John 282 Oedenkoven, Henri 103 O’Kane, Finola 277 Olot (artist’s colony, Catalonia) 99 Oosterbeek (artists’ colony, Netherlands) 99 opera 22, 226, 232, 234–39

Ne t work s, Narr atives and Nations

O’Rahilly, Cecile 286–87 orality 127, 130–31, 138, 147–63, 225, 227–28, 260, 285, 318 Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge) 160 O’Reilly 198 Orenburg 86–88, 90 Orientalism, orientalists 36, 64–65, 67; see also exoticism, occidentalism Orseolo, Peter 235–36 Osbourne, Fanny 97 Otto the Great, Emperor 229 Ottoman Empire 23, 33, 66–67, 227, 249, 296–99, 313–20 Owain Glyndŵr 273 Oxford 197–98 paganism 69–71, 231–38 pagination, “European” 91 paintings 20, 22–24, 31–33, 97–104, 147, 169, 275–83, 313, 316, 319–21 pan-Germanism 203–10 Pāṇini (Sanskrit philologist) 66 Panofsky, Erwin 31 Papon, Maurice 245 Paranga, village 93 Pareto, Vilfredo 218 Paris 35, 80, 98, 122, 140–44, 158–59, 161–63, 168, 170, 172, 175–76, 197, 257, 318 Paris, Gaston 159–60 Parsons, Albert 75, 78, 81 Parsons, Lucy 75–76, 79, 81 Pashtuns 70–71 Patras 318 patrimony see heritage patriotism 44, 46, 101, 109, 122–23, 176, 205, 229, 234, 273, 276–78, 282–83 Peacock, Joseph 280 Peelen, Ida 176 Pellico, Silvio 110 Pembrokeshire 288 Pennant, Thomas 22, 265–67, 269–73, 289 people, peoples (as a concept) 43, 55, 63–65, 89, 118, 128, 131–32, 163, 204–09, 217 perception 219, 305–11 performance, performing arts 52, 76–78, 104, 124, 160, 162, 231, 235–38; see also dance, music, song, opera, periodicals see journals peripheries 261, 267, 275–76; see also marginality Péronne, Clélie 160 Persia, Persian language, people 64–65, 70, 88 Peru, Peruvians 255–56 Pest see Budapest Petrie, George 11, 22, 275–83 phenomenology 309 Philadelphia 177 Philip IV, King of Spain 35 Philips, Thomas 317 philology see linguistics

Index

Phnom Penh 68 Piast, dynasty 315 picturesque 100–01, 141, 267, 271, 276–83 pilgrims, pilgrimage 91, 174, 232, 278–80, 300 Pink, Johanna 315 Pit, Adriaan 176 Pitrè, Giuseppe 131 Pius II, Pope 314 Pliny the Elder 204 Plon, E. (publisher) 172 plays 22, 24, 55, 147, 153, 226, 231–34, 314 poetry 14, 21, 24, 55, 189–200, 203–10, 246–47, 250–51, 289–90, 315–17, 320–21 Poland, Poles 33, 54, 58, 101, 218, 229, 249, 315 Polidori, John 319 political writing 14, 21, 45–47, 55 Pomerania, Pomeranians 54, 56 Pont-Aven 99, 101 Pope, Alexander 109 popular culture 16, 57–59, 78, 101, 124, 127, 131, 139, 147–54, 157–63, 214, 227, 237–38, 295–97 Popular Front (French political party) 144 populism 219 porcelain see ceramics Porter, Gerald 162 Portuguese people, language 34, 56; Luso-Brazilian 255–60 postcolonialism, postcolonial theory 258, 272; see also anticolonialism, precolonialism Potgieter, Everhardus 105–08, 111–12 Pottier, Eugène 80 Pouqueville, François 317–18 practices 43, 118, 170, 308; editorial 24 funerary 44; political 45; profane 68 Prague 142 Prevesa 315 primitivism 130–31, 233–34, 270, 276–77, 281–83 primordialism see nationalism Princeton 46 print, reprints 35, 43, 52, 76–77, 119–20, 170, 176, 266, 276, 297; see also criticism, illustrations, journals, literature, manuscripts, political writing, text editions Prisher 93 processions see commemorations propaganda 68, 76 n.3, 104, 229, 297, 300 Protestants see Christianity Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 259 Prussia, Prussians 53–60 psychiatry 310–11 Punic civilization 67 Qizilbash 70 race, racism 59–60, 67–68, 76, 173, 203, 258–59, 267, 277, 286, 296–301, 307, 310; see also ethnicity, nationalism Racine, Jean 109 Rajnis, József 231 Ramaix, Maurice de 175

343 Rand, John Goffe 98 rap see songs Raphael 282 Raumariki 207 Ravelet, Marguerite and Julien de 161 regalia, crowns 67, 228–29 regional identities, regionalism 33, 69, 100, 139–44, 225, 260 Regionalist League of Catalonia (Lliga Regionalista de Catalunya) 142 relics see commemorations religion 57, 108, 217, 223, 230, 237, 260, 278–79, 296, 299–300, 307, 317; see also Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, paganism, burial, canonization, pilgrimage, sacralization Rembrandt van Rijn 179 remediation see mediation remembrance see memory, commemorations Renan, Ernest 43 Repin, Ilya 102 restaurants 120, 143 Reykjavík 147–50, 153 Reynolds, Joshua 37 Reynolds, Susan 42–43 Rhine, River 18, 51–59, 208 Rhinelands 54–55, 57–58 Richard II, King of England 192 Richardson, Samuel 122–23 Rider Haggard, H. 296, 301 Rilke, Rainer Maria 99, 102 Roberts, Thomas 276 Roger, Marie 160 Roman Catholicism see Christianity, Roman; Jesuits Roman Empire 56, 65, 67, 189 Romanian 99, 142, 215 romantic love see love Romanticism, Romantic era 44, 52, 57, 110–12, 127–28, 138, 159, 233–34, 276–77, 279, 283, 290–91, 314–16; see also nationalism, Romantic Rome 131, 142, 196, 227, 229 Romondt, W. G. F. van 171 Romsö 207 Röpke, Wilhelm 213 n.6, 216, 219 Roscommon 194 Rosogawi 208 Ross, Danielle 87 Rotterdam 178 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 127 Royal Irish Constabulary 248 Ruaidri mac Toirrdealbach Ó Conchobhair 192 ruins 54, 69, 270, 272, 278–83 Ruisdael, Jacob van 179 Ruskin, John 139 Russia, Russian Empire 43, 55, 58, 60, 70, 85–90, 102, 128, 132, 141, 229, 249, 300; see also Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

344  Russian people, language 33–34, 43, 57, 60, 70, 80 n.17, 88, 101, 306 Russian Revolution 215 sacralization 214 Said, Edward 36 St David’s Head 288 St Emeric (Imre) see Emeric St Ives 101 St Ladislaus (László) see Ladislaus St Petersburg 90 St Stephen (István) see Stephen I St Stephen’s Day Sallust 45–46 Salomé, Lou-Andreas 102 Samarkand 87 San Francisco 142 sanitariums 101, 103 Sanskrit 64–65, 66 Sardinian language 53 Ṣaṣnā, village 92 Sattelzeit 214 Savièse (artists’ colony), Switzerland 101 Saxon 54; see also Anglo-Saxon Scandinavia, Scandinavians 19, 25, 36, 65, 97, 99, 142, 206–07, 209 Scheffer, Johannes Hendrikus 178 Schelling, Friedrich 65 Schlegel, August Wilhelm and Friedrich 65 Schlei, River 205 Schleswig-Holstein 21, 203–09 Schlözer, August Ludwig 128 Schmidt, Karl 140 Schmitt, Oliver Jens 315 Schwarz, Bill 297 Schwarz, Bruno 259 Scotland, Scots people, language, culture 36, 45–47, 76, 78, 81, 175, 256, 265–66, 270, 272, 276–77, 289–90, 297, 299, 316 Scott, Sir Walter 22, 109, 124, 256, 258, 261, 277, 316 Scottish Highlands 270, 272; see also Inismore, Dún Aengus sculpture 102; see also monuments Segal, Aron 103 Segerberg, Alexandra 77 Serbia 128, 215 serialization 214 Servaas van Rooijen, A. J. 178 Seti I, Pharaoh 44 Sèvres 170, 172 Sézille, Louis 139–40 Shakespeare, William 110, 125 Shannon, River 278 Sharp, Samuel 37 Sharpe, Charles 78 Shaw, George Bernard 248 Shelley, Mary 319 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 109, 319 Shūrā (journal) 86

Ne t work s, Narr atives and Nations

Sibelius, Jean 101 Siberia 87, 89, 128, 266 Sidney, Philip 289 Sigurður Guðmundsson 20, 147–53 Sil Murray (Síol Muireadaigh), Irish lineage 193 Silesia 56, 142, 250 Simms, Katharine 191 Simonides of Kos 45 Singer, William Henry 99 singing see songs Sinn Fein 249 Six van Hillegom, Jan Pieter 171 Sjaelland 207 Skagen 99 Skanderbeg, ps. Gjergj Kastrioti 313–15, 318 sketches 120 slaves, slave trade, slavery 76, 308; as metaphor 35, 310 Slavs 65 Sligo 193, 269 Smirnov, Vasilii D. 90 Smit, Gorinne 179–80 Smith, Anthony D. 23, 225 Smollett, Tobias 37 Snowdon, Snowdonia 266, 272, 289–91 social media see media socialism, socialists 75–81, 213, 216, 218, 248–49 Socialist League 75 soil see territory songs, singing 14, 18, 20, 24, 33, 51–59, 75–81, 119, 120, 124, 129, 157–63, 227, 238, 260, 316, 318; see also opera Sorel, George 218 South Africa 297–98 Southey, Robert 109 Souvestre, Emile 160 space, spatialization 81, 101, 212–20, 261 Spain, Spaniards 33–35, 38, 55, 56–57, 103, 143, 162, 169, 198, 248, 256, 315 Sparta, Spartans 45 Spenser, Edmund 276 sports 101 Spottiswoode, Alicia 78 Staël, Mme de 111 Stamford 197 statues see monuments, sculpture Steen, Jan 170 Stein, Baron vom 56 Steiner, Rudolf 102 Steingrímur Thorsteinsson 150 Stephen I, Saint King of Hungary 11, 21, 223–39 stereotypes 31–38, 167, 267, 275–77, 280, 283, 296–97, 306, 320–21; see also images, motifs Stevenson, Robert Louis 97 Stockholm 139, 142 Strangford, Emily Anne, Viscountess 317 street names 25

345

Index

Strindberg, August 97 Struve, Petr 215 Stubbs, George 276 Stuers, Victor de 175 Styria (Steiermark) 32 subculture 212 Sudan 300 Sue, Eugène 319 Sundborn 99 Swabians 204 Swansea 287 Swedish 33, 36, 54, 55, 78, 97, 99, 101, 102, 118, 123, 139, 142, 204, 208 Swift, Jonathan 267 swimming 207 Swiss 56, 101, 103, 142–43, 272, 315 Swords 269 Sylvester II, Pope 229 Synge, J. M. 283 Sypesteyn, C. H. C. A. 175 Syrians 44 Szigligeti, Ede 234 Szörény, Levente 236 Tacitus 203–06, 208–09 Taine, Hippolyte 172 Taliban 64, 71 tapestry see decorative arts Tara 190–91 Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic 91 Tatar Empire 87 Tatar people, language 85–94 Tell, William 315 temporality, temporalization 212–14, 219–20, 256–61; see also history, historicism territory, ground, soil 54–60, 103, 129, 139, 158, 204–10, 225, 235, 260, 271, 277–78, 281, 285, 290, 311; see also landscape Tétar van Elven, Paul 171 Tetmajer, Włodzimierz 101 text editions 24, 158 theatre, theatres 147, 153, 163, 226, 231–34, 314; landscape as 289, 316; Völkertafel as 32; see also opera, performance, plays Thermopylae 45 Theroux, Paul 37 Theseus 36 Thomas Hibernicus 197 Thoms, William 128 Thoré-Bürger, Théophile 169 Þuríður Sveinbjarnardóttir 148 Tichelaar, brothers 174 Tirerrill, County Sligo 193 Titanic 22, 244 Tobolsk 89 Toirrdealbach Mór Ua Conchobhair, King of Connacht (1088–1156) 192 n.11 Toirrdealbach Ó Conchobhair, co-King of Connacht (1384–1406) 191, 193

Toirrdealbach Ó Conchobhair, King of Connacht (1317–1318, 1324–1350) 190–93, 200 Toirrdealbach Óc (O’Connor Donn) 193–94, 195 n.18 Toirrdealbach Ruaid, co-King of Connacht (1385–1426) 191 Toirrdelbach Ruaid son of Aed son of Feidlim 193 Tollens, Hendrik 108, 117, 119, 123–25 Tollund 250–51 Tolstoy, Leo 102 topography 23 n.14, 24, 66, 129, 260, 276, 285, 287–88, 314 tourism 22, 98, 141, 265–67, 270–72, 275–79, 281–83, 291 tradition 18, 33–35, 47, 68–71, 80–81, 88, 98, 100–01, 127–31, 137–44, 168–69, 173–74, 190, 194, 223–39, 269–70, 277; European 299; extension of 24, 239; invention of 24, 239; of invention 24; see also heritage, history, memory, narrative, religion translatio studii 196–98 translation 80, 108–11, 118–19, 123–24, 176, 178, 190–91, 195, 223, 255–61, 314 transmission see mediation transnationalism 63–65, 71, 75, 79, 118, 123, 168, 212, 216, 223, 227, 233, 239, 257, 261; see also internationalism, networks trauma 42, 215, 278, 285 travel, travel writing 22–24, 35–37, 86, 98–102, 108, 131, 148–49, 153, 158–59, 163, 168–70, 173, 197, 199, 265–73, 285, 288–91, 317–21; see also narrative, networks, pilgrimage Treccani, Giovanni 315 tropes see motifs Troyes, Chrétien de 196 Tuam, County Galway 194 Tunisia, Tunisian nationalists 67 Turberville, George 34 Turkestan 132 Turkey, Republic of 306, 311; see also Ottoman Empire Turkish people, language 33, 231, 299, 306, 311, 314, 316 Turkology 90 Turner, J. M. W. 276 Turul Association 236 Tuscans 54 Tutankhamun 69 Tuusula 101 Ufa 87, 89 Uí Briuin, royal dynasty 192 Uí Ceallaigh of Uí Mhaine, family 192 Uí Cheallaigh 192 Uí Chellaig 193 Uí Raighillig, family 192 Uí Ruairc, family 192 Ukraine 249

346  Ulster 22, 244, 246, 248, 250 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 90–94; see also Russia, Ukraine United States of America 46–47, 78, 81, 103, 142, 251, 286, 307; see also Americans, US universalism 68–69, 190, 214, 217 Ural see Volga-Ural region urbanites, urban life, urbanization 70, 98, 260 Utrecht 171, 178 Vadasaxa 197–98 Varberg 101 Varini 204–05 vegetarianism 103 Velde, J. van de 172 n.25 Velestinlis, Rhigas 79 Vendsyssel, Denmark 208 Vercingetorix 315 Vermeer, Jan 170, 179 Vermeersch, Gustave 175 Verne, Jules 296 Verseghy, Ferenc 231 Veschuer, W. F. K. baron van 175 Vevey 101 Veyne, Paul 244 Vico, Giambattista 127 Vienna 32, 55, 141, 229 Villemain, Abel-François 110 Virgil 270 Vivat 176, 178 Vogeler, Heinrich 99, 104 Volga-Ural region 85, 87, 89, 91 Volk see people Volkan, Vamık D. 310–11 Völkertafel 11, 31–33, 36, 38, 44 Voltaire 314 Vondel, Joost van den 109, 125 Vosmaer, Carel 171 Waal, Frans de 308 Wales, Welsh language, literature, ­landscape &c. ​53, 198, 265–92 Walker, Mary Adelaide 320 Wang, Edward 41 Wangerooge (island) 208 Waterford 269 “We Shall Overcome” (song) 76 weather see climate Weber, Max 103 Weisse, Christian Felix 119–20 Wəlastəkwewiyik see Maliseet

Ne t work s, Narr atives and Nations

Werefkin, Marianne von 103 West, the 68–69, 299–301; see also Occidentalism; Europe, western Westerman, M. 106, 111 westernization 64, 215 Westhoff, Clara 99 White, Hayden 244 Whitehall 299 Wicklow mountains 288, 291–92 Wicklow town 251 Widsith (poem) 203–09 Wigman, Mary 103 Wikipedia 315 Willet, Abraham 171 William III of England 11, 180 William III of the Netherlands 174 Williams, William 271 Wilson, James 46 Wilson, Tim 249 Witherspoon, John 46 Withuys, C. 108–09 Witkiewicz, Stanisław 101 Wolff-Bekker, Elisabeth (Betje Wolff) 117, 119–22, 125 “Women’s Marseillaise” (song) 80 n.17 Woodstock, NY 103 Wordsworth, William 289–90 world fairs see exhibitions Worpswede 99, 102, 104 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary 317 Wright, Thomas 161 Wundt, Wilhelm 131 Württemberg 101 xenophilia, xenophobia 31, 33–34 Yeats, W. B. 243, 246–47, 250 Yellow Book of Lecan 21, 190, 194, 196 Yen, Brandon 290 Yiddish 76 Yorkshire 289 Young Finnish Party 101 Young Ireland 277 Young Poland 101 Young, Arthur 269 Yugoslavism 215 Zakopane (artists’ colony) 101 Zangeres Zonder Naam 124 Zelter, Carl Friedrich 110 Zeuss, Kaspar 204 Zitza (Zitsa), Greece 316–17