Anthony Grafton Andann Blair

The Transmission of Culture in Early Modem Europe Published under the auspices of the ShelbyCullomDavis Centerfor HistoricalStudies PrincetonUniversity The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe Editedby Anthony Grafton andAnn Blair PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia Copyright © 1990University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19I 04-40II Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Transmission of culture in early modern Europe / Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair, editors. p. cm. "Published under the auspices of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University?' Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8122-8191-8 (cloth) ISBN 13: 978-0-8122-1667-7 I. Europe - Civilization. 2. Europe - Intelleetuallife. 3. Culture diffusion - Europe - History. 4. Grafton, Anthony. 5. Blair,Ann. 6. Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. CB203.T3 1990 940.2-dc20 89-70750 CIP Contents Acknowledgments Vll Introduction: Notes from Underground on Cultural Transmission Anthony Grafton 1 I. Invention of Traditions and Traditions of Invention in Renaissance Europe: The Strange Case of Annius of Viterbo Anthony Grafton 8 2. Inventing Rudolph Agricola: Cultural Transmission, Renaissance Dialectic, and the Emerging Humanities LisaJardine 39 3. Cortes, Signs, and the Conquest of Mexico Inga Clendinnen 87 4. "Second Nature": The Idea of Custom in European Law, Society, and Culture DonaldR. Kelley 131 5. The Making of a Political Paradigm: The Ottoman State and Oriental Despotism Lucette Valensi 173 6. Civic Chivalry and the English Civil War William Hunt 204 7. Theology and Atheism in Early Modern France Alan CharlesKors 238 8. Honor, Morals, Religion, and the Law: The Action for Criminal Conversation in England, 1670-1857 LawrenceStone 276 Contributors 317 Index 319 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments We would like to thank Lawrence Stone and Joan Daviduk for help of many kinds; also the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts of Princeton University Library, whose staff provided most of the illustra tions with miraculous speed and efficiency. This page intentionally left blank Anthony Grafton Introduction: Notes from Underground on Cultural Transmission I was in a Printing house in Hell, & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation. In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the rubbish from a cave'smouth; within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the cave. In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the cave, and others adorning it with gold, silver and precious stones. In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of air: he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite; around were numbers of Eagle like men who built palaces in the immense cliffs. In the fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire, raging around & melting the metals into living fluids. In the fifth chamber were Unman'd forms, which cast the metals into the expanse. There they were reciev'd by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries.1 William Blake, TheMarriageofHeavenand Hell Unlike Blake, most nineteenth-century scholars saw the creation of cul ture as distinct from and more interesting than its transmission.' Jacob Burckhardt, for example, treated the culture of the Renaissance as an es sentially new creation rather than a mere revival of an ancient one, and deliberately relegated the study of the classicsto a late and subordinate po sition in his work. "The essence of the phenomena," he remarked, "might have been the same without the classicalrevival."3 This attitude, rooted in Romantic beliefs about originality and intensity, died hard; but between 1870 and 1914 it gave up the ghost. In its place arose a new scholarship centrally concerned with the transmission of texts, images, and ideas. Aby Warburg and the scholars associatedwith the institute he founded traced with the zest and intuition of detectives the shifting paths taken by classicalideas and forms in the worlds of Islam and the Western Middle Ages. Literary scholars tracked classicaltopoi from text to text. Iconogra- 2 Anthony Grafton phers mapped the visual and literary deformation of myths and fables.And historians of the Renaissance and Reformation took the individuals they studied at their word and ceased to dismiss the central importance of the retrieval of texts and other ancient models to early modern culture. The medieval and early modern scholarship that resulted from this reorienta tion of interests and assumptions was both rich in specificresults and pro lific in further applications. It inspired many of the German humanists whose transplantation to England and North America in the 1930S trans formed historical scholarship in the English-speaking world; its results have shaped undergraduate teaching on the history of Western culture from the 1930S to the present. This new scholarship, however, accepted and transmitted its own problematic and largely unexamined assumptions. It treated transmission as a simple, one-directional process rather like high-fidelity broadcasting of classicalmusic. The original message was assumed to be pure and per fect. The changes and revisions introduced into it in the course of time were defined as interference-something to be studied with meticulous care, but also to be treated with regret, as a corruption, not an enhance ment, of the original. In general, only a limited set of adaptations of inher ited forms and ideas seemed to be organic expressionsof genuine thoughts and feelings; others were dismissed, for no evident reason, as banal and sterile. And the humanists of the Renaissance emerged as heroes not for the originality of mind and spirit that had attracted Burckhardt but for their painstaking efforts to restore the signal to its initial, correct form. The transmission of culture, in other words, turned out to be rather like the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: a protracted and fascinating process, but one only gloomily illuminated by the glow of decay. If trans mission equaled corruption of a primal light, however, retrieval equaled restoration. The new historical insight of early modern intellectuals was assumed-rather than proved-to be a triumph of culture over barbarism and reason over superstition." The high-cultural scholarship which the Davis Center has sampled in 1986-88 still draws inspiration and information from the rich traditions of Burckhardt and Warburg, but it rests on its own new foundations. It as sumes that changes in an original form, text, or idea were charged with meaning unless the contrary can be proved-that they normally represent conscious artistic and intellectual decisions rather than failures to repro duce a primal truth. More specifically,medieval and Renaissance changes in classical and biblical originals are themselves not simply innovations, Introduction 3 but moves in a game some of whose rules were established in antiquity itself. All literary or artistic creations-classical as well as postclassical result from choices among preexisting genres and elements and take effect only by the grace of scribes and printers and the conscious activity of read ers. The history of cultural transmission has been extended backward into the ancient world itself; even Homer has come to seem an Alexandrian poet, playing nostalgically with tradition. And the assumption that any given stage in the history of culture deserves intellectual priority over others has largely been abandoned. Changed scripts, artistic forms, meth ods of commentary, and modes of appropriation are the outward and visiblesigns of life in a tradition that would have the marmoreal perfection of death if it froze in a stable form instead of continuing to undergo crea tive adaptation. Transmission thus becomes central to the story of high culture in the West; and severalof the essaysthat follow take off from the assumption that alteration in a powerful message is just alteration, not degradation. Burckhardt denigrated the study of transmission because he envi sioned cultures as organically unified-as coherent beings that could be studied in any socialor individual manifestation. And he found much grist for his analytical mill entirely outside the high world of literature and ideas. He scrutinized a vast range of social and cultural institutions and activities-from waging war to holding festivals, from raising taxes to making jokes-in his CivilizationoftheRenaissance,treating all of them as expressions of a common cultural spirit inhabiting an entire society. His catholic interests and generous learning still inspire us; but here, too, his assumptions and methods need scrutiny and revision. Burckhardt assumed that nonliterary forms within a culture-ways of eating or fighting or as sembling in public-are simply shared, not elaborately learned. He was more interested in calling them back to life than in investigating whether they had been dominated or shaped by single powerful groups in a larger society-for example, by members of a profession or social order bent on making forms of behavior or public institutions serve their own interest. And he was not fully attentive to the fact-well known to the classicistsof his time-that such forms of conduct have their own long-term history, which also

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