Early Modern Notes

Until mid-November, an exhibition of nineteenth-century French political caricatures in the Long Room, Trinity College, Dublin. To mark the recent acquisition of the Glucksman Collection of 750 hand-coloured caricatures covering the period 1798 to 1830 (about 300 on Napoleon), the exhibition features aspects of the Emperor’s career. One of the collection’s most striking features is that the caricatures all bear manuscript annotations by the anonymous compiler, which give some explanation of the context and occasionally give the writer’s personal opinions. (Which is always fun, no?)

Admission includes viewing the Old Library and the Book of Kells exhibition. Opening hours: Monday to Saturday 9.30am to 5pm, Sunday 12noon to 4.30pm. Admission rates: adults 7.50 euros, students and OAPs 6.50 euros (group discounts, and school groups accompanied by teachers go free).

Yesterday I took a day off work and went to see the V & A’s current exhibition Encounters: the meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800. “It explores”, we are promised, “how East and West perceived and represented each other and how the appeal of the exotic shaped both cultures.”

And that promise is kept well. Half of what’s presented here will be quite familiar to many Europeans with even a passing interest in history: the porcelain, the textiles, carved ivory, lacquerware and all the other beautiful goods that were brought to Europe; the missionaries; the men of the eighteenth century (like William Fullerton) who went to India and embraced the sub-continent’s culture (and women…) in a way that (as we’re reminded) became in the nineteenth century impossible for imperialist governors to imagine.

It’s the other half that makes the exhibition something different, something special: where, for once, we learn what ‘they’ thought of ‘us’. In China and Japan at least, the answer is frequently: not a great deal. Europeans were barbarians; the Japanese called the Portuguese ‘nankan-jin’ (southern barbarians), and depicted them as comic figures with big noses (and even bigger trousers). There is a laugh-out loud seventeenth-century Japanese print mocking the sexual prowess (and smell) of the Dutch male, too. Some of it strangely made me think of modern European attitudes towards America and Americans, our stereotypes of brash, unsophisticated Yanks (even as the USA emerged as the world’s most important political, economic, cultural power).

Europeans are clearly depicted as marginal and inferior in several of the paintings (this, for example. But Chinese disdain was perhaps best expressed in a poem on a wall hanging depicting Lord Macartney’s (not very successful) trade embassy to Beijing in 1793, and commenting on the gifts the envoys had presented to the emperor:

… While they appear ordinary their hearts are good and true
Yet their gifts are not precious but curiosities, whose subtleties have been exaggerated…

One of the gifts was a telescope. Later in the exhibition, there is another telescope, from just a few years earlier, that was also a gift to Chinese rulers, though this time in Canton (Guangdong) province. The second one is accompanied by a label claiming that it “demonstrates how much European technical novelties were prized at the imperial court”. But the object itself cannot tell us how it was received. The words of the poem surely should warn against any simple notion that merely because powerful people accept gifts, they ‘prize’ them (except as symbols of power). The exhibition is at its best, rather, when it gives us the (translated) words (and images) created by these people, so unfamiliar to us in time and place – which it does, powerfully, again and again.

There is the beautiful scroll, from China again and dated 1781-5, showing a man and woman from each of a range of countries or ethnicities. A translation of the commentary for the picture of the British couple was provided: British men “are commonly dressed in wool and flannel and like drinking.” (The man carries a bottle.) “Women, before marriage, bind their waists to make them narrow.” And: “Some people carry a snuff bottle in a little bag made of golden threads.” (!)

Accuracy is hardly always the overriding concern of representations of the ‘Other’ on either side of these encounters. Nonetheless, that snuff bottle detail surely comes from first-hand observation (and, after all, ‘some’ is a pretty elastic quantity…). And eighteenth-century British men commonly did like drinking, though whether they were worse than any other European males is of course another matter. Yet the roll was perhaps most striking for its overall effect, all these couples beautifully pictured (but who were they meant to be? I longed for more information, not just on the British pair), and the interest in ‘other’ peoples suggested by the roll – in contrast, perhaps, to European stereotypes of Chinese ‘insularity’.

Conversely we learn how Chinese maps not only placed China at the centre of the world but contained little information about anywhere beyond China’s borders. We’re starting to see the complexity and diversity of possible attitudes. And there was one picture that was for me startling and intriguing. It’s an eighteenth-century Japanese portrayal of three scholars, Japanese, Chinese and European, at a table. The Japanese scholar is at the centre; he is sitting close to the European on his right; the Chinese scholar is set apart from them. In this view, then, Japanese intellectuals (at least) considered themselves to have more in common with westerners than with their own neighbours.

Mutual fascination and ambivalence was really the key theme of the exhibition. Regional variety, too, was emphasised; for example, the way in which Japan and China regulated and restricted the movements of Europeans, kept them at arms-length, compared to the much freer interactions permitted in India. Like Guardian’s reviewer, though, I wondered just how far any of these interactions went:

as with present-day globalisation, it is hard to marvel at the free flow and consumption of diverse commodities and artefacts without wondering whether they advanced understanding and sympathy across nations and cultures at the same time.

(By coincidence, Another Damned Medievalist asked the same question at Blogenspiel very recently.) Interest, fascination even, does not necessarily entail either sympathy or understanding. As I suggested already, there can be some dissonance between the positive, optimistic story – of ‘fluidity’, of mutual exchange and enrichment – that the V & A wants to tell us through the cultural artefacts, and what those artefacts themselves frequently say or portray.

The exhibition largely steers clear of issues of imperialism, racism, exploitation; the message is that these are features of the nineteenth century. Well, yes, it’s not hard to see that there were enormous differences between the situation in (say) 1650 and that of 1850. But there is little sense of how relations or attitudes developed over the centuries, especially during the eighteenth century (in part, perhaps, because a chronological framework was deliberately eschewed in favour of a thematic one). The final section of the exhibition, ‘Exchanges’, presents ‘Europe in Asia’ and ‘Asia in Europe’; it’s packed with artefacts, mostly eighteenth century. The contrast was perfectly clear: the Europeans imported from Asia all those luxury goods, beautiful and often purely decorative things – unless and until they could manage to copy them more cheaply at home (such as cotton fabrics); from Europe, Asians imported technology. Maps and guns. That disparity – given the eighteenth-century emphasis – seemed to signify, disturbingly, just how things were, indeed, changing and how soon Asian political autonomy would be under threat (even in those countries that were not formally colonised).

Perhaps the exhibition shouldn’t be criticised for not dwelling on the development of European imperialism, when it spends so much time looking through the eyes of those who were later on the receiving end. For, if that splendidly condescending verse of 1793 and other exhibits are anything to go by – though I’m happy to be corrected by the experts if this hardly well-informed judgment is mistaken – Asia did not see European dominance coming either. Perhaps the final message is a melancholy one, despite the up-beat tone of the exhibition. ‘Encounters’ between Europeans and Asians during those three hundred years created many things of astonishing beauty, and for some generated wealth and new opportunities, cultural and economic. But in the end, they did not bring Asia’s political elites understanding of the aggression that the Europeans were increasingly prepared to bring to bear to protect and further their interests in Asia – any more than those encounters taught westerners respect for Asian civilisations and cultures. Each continued to see the other as ‘barbarians’ – and, disastrously, terrifyingly, that barely seems to have changed in the two centuries that have since passed.

Enough for today. I have one or two thoughts raised by particular exhibits, but they can wait for their own posts. If you can get there, this is well worth £8 of your money (I think there are student concessions) and a few hours of your life…

Further notes and resources:
A 2-day conference is to be held on 12-13 November 2004.
Telegraph review (registration required; excerpt at Renaissance weblog)
Exhibition links
East and South-east Asia links here at EMN (sorry, I haven’t got to the Indian sub-continent yet in this series)

Also this exhibition web page: Luxury textiles east and west

American Jews today commemorate the arrival of the first Jewish settlers in New Amsterdam on 7 September 1654, and this anniversary is being celebrated around the Web and the blogosphere.

At The Head Heeb, a Blogburst of writing about the American Jewish experience, focusing on possible futures. Head Heeb tells us that “Arrival Day is a holiday of the American Jewish people rather than the Jewish religion - a celebration of the Jewish community and its contributions to the United States. As such, non-Jews as well as Jews are welcome to join in the celebration.”

Jonathan Dresner at Cliopatria has a personal take on being a Liberal American Jew.

Addition: Naomi at Baraita also thinks about the Jewish future… by way of medieval apocalyptic literature.

I’m sure there’s much more, but these are just the ones I’ve seen today.

Celebrate this special 350th anniversary. A little more information: The small group of Jews who arrived that day were refugees from Recife, Brazil. “Fleeing persecution and seeking refuge, this first boatload was the vanguard of millions of Jews to follow.” They were not, in fact, the first Jews in north America (there had been earlier traders), but they were the first to settle and form a permanent community. The Dutch governors of New Amsterdam (and the British after them), “forced to choose between their economic interests and their religious sensibilities, voted with their pocketbooks in allowing Jews to remain".

That seems to contrast, incidentally, with economic opposition to Oliver Cromwell’s plans to re-admit Jews to Britain at about the same time (they had been expelled officially by Edward I in 1290). But Cromwell got his way in the end. (Chronology)

The Folger Institute has announced a 2004/5 program that almost makes me wish I lived somewhere near Washington DC.

Religion and toleration in the early modern world (seminar)
Culinary Cartographies: Food, Gender, and Race in the Early Modern Black Atlantic (seminar)
Emerging Ethnographies in Shakespeare’s England (seminar)
Renaissance Paleography in England (skills course)
Rethinking Word and Image: History/Literary History/Art History (colloquium)
British Political Thought in History, Literature, and Theory (conference)
In the Maelstrom of the Market: Women and the Birth of the European Market Economy (seminar)
Early Modern Books and Readers (seminar)
Ballads, Broadsides, and Eighteenth-Century Culture (seminar)
Technologies of Writing (seminar)
Reformation Transformations of Visual Culture (seminar)
Garrick and Theatrical Death (lecture)

OK, I hate this woman

Indian dancing

Hip hop, meet the bards

Well, there has to be at least one row about the language every year (and now this) (and this)

Keeping up the links with Patagonia

Lord Rhys lives on

For the fashion conscious

How about a trip to Edinburgh to see the Titians?

Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru, or The National Eisteddfod, is in full swing down at Newport, with lots of online coverage from the BBC. Big news of the day: they’re selling alcohol on site for the first time ever. Not all the bards are happy. (One day, I shall go. But it’s intimidating for a novice Welsh learner. This is probably the most intense experience of ‘Cymru’ you’ll ever get. It doesn’t help that I decided, what with needing to get on with the research in London, that I just didn’t have the time to attend Wlpan Awst this year. And you don’t get too many opportunities to see and hear everyday Welsh in Richmond.)

So, what’s an eisteddfod, some of you might be asking? Why is it such an important part of the Welsh cultural scene? In one way, it could be seen as a kind of ‘invented tradition’; at the same time, in one form or another, the eisteddfod (literally, ’sitting’) goes back a long way. The potted histories all quote the date 1176, when one of the pre-eminent Welsh magnates of the day, the Lord Rhys, called a tournament of poets and musicians who competed for the prize of a chair of honour at the lord’s table. Hence the name, which is recorded from the fifteenth century; and today’s winners (’chaired bards’) receive hand-carved chairs.

Medieval Welsh poetry was a rigorous and complex art, particularly perhaps the rules of cynghanedd (“the repetition of sounds within a line of verse, following fixed patterns” – much more than simple alliteration). In the hands of a master such as Dafydd ap Gwilym, the great lyrical fourteenth-century poet, or the fifteenth-century Guto’r Glyn, the results could be sublime (though virtually impossible to translate into English…). (The best book to read if you want to learn more is A guide to Welsh literature, vol. 2, ed. by AOH Jarman and GR Hughes. Dafydd’s poems can be found in English translation, however inadequate that might be.)

Medieval eisteddfodau were serious affairs. The bardic orders were upheld by the traditions of princely and noble patronage of bards; the eisteddfodau decided who was good enough to sing the lords’ praises – and thus to earn a living. And with the end of that aristocratic medieval society came the end of the medieval bards. (‘Anglicisation’ is a perhaps rather simplistic way of describing a long-term process of social and cultural change that meant that these traditions simply ceased to be relevant to Welsh society.) The last professional household bard died in the late seventeenth century; the eisteddfodau were in serious decline long before that – certainly from the sixteenth century. They still existed in the eighteenth century, but were by now usually very small-scale, local (and low-quality) affairs. They had, it can be argued, been supplanted by more plebeian cultural institutions such as the anterliwt (interlude), with its famous masters such as Twm o’r Nant, bawdy, satirical plays that were loved by the Welsh people in the eighteenth century (but often regarded with suspicion by authorities, and much disliked by religious reformers).

The modern Eisteddfod, with its ‘druidic’ Gorsedd of Bards, is in many ways a late eighteenth-century Romantic nationalist creation. For much of that, you can blame Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams), Glamorgan stone mason, self-taught polymath, ethnographer, poet, opium addict and master literary forger. He’s been called a ‘rattleskull genius’, and there’s currently a major research project devoted to him and his writings underway in Aberystwyth. His forgeries were indeed amazing; his Triads are a wonderful read, quite apart from being virtually indistinguishable from the medieval real thing, and his ‘Dafydd ap Gwilym’ poems were good enough to fool scholars until the mid-twentieth century. Yet at the same time, his observational writings on his native Glamorgan are accurate, vivid ethnographical sources for historians today.

In a sense, he was following the lead of eisteddfod revivals in north-east Wales from 1789 (Iolo, a true Glamorgan man, was always jealous of north Walian achievements, always had to go one better; many of his inventions were aimed at showing that Glamorgan was the real heart of Welsh culture, not the north). But in doing so, he created enduring, key elements of the modern Eisteddfod. In 1792, he held the first Gorsedd (‘Throne’) of Bards, at Primrose Hill in London, with claims that he could trace the ceremony back thousands of years to the original druids; in 1819, the Gorsedd arrived in Wales.

In truth, the Gorsedd existed only in his imagination. But even if it came directly out of Iolo’s fertile brain, it caught on rapidly in the context of an emerging Welsh nationalist consciousness in search of ‘usable’ pasts, and a Romantic one shying away from the ugly realities of industrialisation (see Prys Morgan’s The Welsh eighteenth-century renaissance, or his chapter in The invention of tradition, ed. by Hobsbawm and Ranger). By the time his invention had been exposed, the ceremonies had become inextricably part of the Eisteddfod.

Indeed, they’re probably even more central today than in the nineteenth century, when eisteddfodau flourished across Wales (at least 500 competitions of some importance were held during the century, and there would have been many more small events that have left few or no records). The first National Eisteddfod was held in 1861; it was established as an annual event, alternating between north and south Wales each year, in the 1880s. Today, there’s a wide range of competitions: not just poetry, but also prose writing, singing, dance, recitation; not to mention a wide range of entertainments (and now, of course, alcohol). And there are also the multitudes of local eisteddfodau; and, at the other end of the scale, the Llangollen International Eisteddfod, a music competition. The eisteddfod continues to evolve (despite annual worries that insufficient funds will be raised to keep it going). Iolo Morganwg’s ambition was for the eisteddfod to become a true national Welsh institution, and even though Welsh may now be the minority language (which was not the case in his day), there can be few doubts that that is what it’s become.

One day, I will go.