Robert Darnton, Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature

What is censorship?  Like pornography, it seems to be a field that is hard to define, yet people feel confident that they can identify examples of it without worrying overmuch about the precision of their definition of the term.  If anything, the term "censorship" has become so broad that it could (and has been) be applied to almost any and every form of supposed information suppression, whether or not the entity or entities doing this presumed suppression are affiliated with any official government body.  Yet this increasingly diffused use of the term does little to explain the mechanics of censorship and how states, past and present, have used it to further their goals.  Beyond this, however, lurks the question of how power relationships are created and utilized in order to shape and control the dissemination of information, particularly literary works.  Are censors cogs in a monolithic machine, dispassionately stamping out works that might be a challenge to the ruling government, regardless of actual content?  Or is censorship itself but another area of socio-political discourse, in which there are frequent negotiations, implicit and explicit each, between artists and government representatives?

In his latest book, Censors at Work:  How States Shaped Literature, American cultural historian Robert Darnton tackles this tricky topic.  As he notes in his introduction, frequently in Western history there are periods in which the bounds of the permissible and the forbidden have been blurred.  All of our imagined "Wild Wests," past and present, have been "tamed" to some extent, often with at least the partial blessing of those who were once participants in less-regulated domains such as today's cyberspace, which has seen an increase of governmental regulation over the past two decades.  The main question, Darnton seems to posit, is not one of whether or not the state should be involved in the regulation of the internet, but to what degree it should have sway over the content posted there.  Furthermore, Darnton notes that the latest round of discourse on the state's role in regulating communication is not new to the 21st century, but that by analyzing past attempts by states to control communication and the means by which this was achieved, we can gain greater perspective on what is transpiring today (p. 13).

The history of censorship, therefore, is not one of aloof, monolithic governmental bodies, but instead is, as Darnton puts it, an "inside history," one that is full of back room negotiations and secret missions, where the agents of the state were as much curators of the written word as they were suppressors of seditious speech (pp. 13-14).  By delving into the available archives (which due to the spottiness of human record keeping, often limits such explorations to the past few centuries of Western states and even more recent for most non-Western states), a light can finally be shined on the players in these complex negotiations.  Just who were these censors and how did they make their decisions?  Were there times in which an individual censor's decision might purposely run counter to the implicit, if not express, desire of the state?  What differences and similarities can be found in states separated by time, space, and cultural history?  These are just some of the questions that Darnton explores in Censors at Work.

Censors at Work is divided into three main sections, each the subject of separate lectures that Darnton presented as part of the Panizzi Lectures in January 2014 at the British Library.  The first, "Bourbon France:  Privilege and Repression," concretes on peculiarities of mid-eighteenth century Bourbon policies regarding the approval of printed works.  At first glance, the ancien régime would seem to be a perfect example of the more Manichean concept of censorship/freedom of speech that many people have when they consider the effects of censorship.  As Darnton notes:

France offers the most dramatic examples:  the burning of books, the imprisonment of authors, and the outlawing of the most important works of literature – particularly those of Voltaire and Rousseau and the Encyclopédie, whose publishing history epitomizes the struggle of knowledge to free itself from the fetters imposed by the state and the church. (p. 23)

But these actions, damning as they seem to be, are perhaps only the most sensationalist examples of Bourbon censorship.  Just who were its censors and how do their activities fit into the espirit du temps?  The answers to this are far murkier and yet somehow are more illuminating than a simplistic presumption that the censors were opposed to the leading writers of the French Enlightenment.

It must be made clear that in pre-Revolutionary France, it wasn't as much the authors of works (fictional and political tracts alike) who were responsible for the contents of printed materials as it was the responsibility of the printers who agreed to publish these works and to help disseminate them.  Since 1275, these booksellers/printers had been under the authority of the University of Paris and, by extension, under that of the king. (p. 24)  Each officially-sanctioned publication bore on its title page this line:  "Avec Approbation & Privilege du Roy" ("With the approbation and privilege of the king").  Here is an interesting example of censorship in a positive fashion:  the work published has been approved and found free of questionable material, therefore it can be sold in public.  In one sense, it is literally a "seal of approval" that lets readers know that the work in question is fully legit.  In another, this approbation, or rather approbations, as many pages bear the names of those who ultimately approved the work, served as a sort of book blurb, in which the censors, often with their names printed, gave their reasons for why the work in question was approved for publication.  Instead of these censors acting as deniers of the flow of information, here in Bourbon France they often acted as curators of the arts.  Occasionally, these approbations read more like works of literary criticism (not surprising, since many of the censors were fellow writers and university professors) than something that might be expected from a government functionary.

Tied into this is the concept of "privilege," which is fundamentally different from today's conceptualization of matters of press and speech.  Darnton notes that privilege (which in turn is derived from a compound word for "private law") was the organizing principle of eighteenth century society (p. 29).  Laws did not apply equally to all; hierarchies determined the applicability of certain legal concepts.  Laws thus were not societal legal guidelines, but instead were special dispensations that proceeded from a monarch's inherent power and which were accorded to certain groups or individuals.  Printed literature, far from being a means of mass cultural dissemination of ideas, were instead understood to be artifacts of privilege, granted to an express few.  In one sense, the privileges of the book trade (who could produce it, print it, and sell it) epitomized the ancien régime's system of granting approval and withholding it from others.

Yet the official book trade had its own series of pitfalls.  Works sometimes appeared in official quarters that were critical of the king.  Sometimes the censors found themselves in trouble for this, while at other times, they took great pains in order to communicate to certain writers what had to be changed in order for the work to be published.  Other times, a submitted work could be fully orthodox and rejected on the grounds that its literary qualities were not on the level of those to be expected for the reception of the king's official approval. (p. 31)  Then there are cases in which patronage came into play, especially as the royal bureaucracy expanded in the eighteenth century.  Often the censors had to negotiate with the director of the book trade administration.  Darnton cites several examples from the 1750s and 1760s of the critical role that this director, C.G. de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, played in the negotiations between writers, censors, and their superiors in determining whether or not a work would receive royal approbation and be published by an officially licensed printer.  Sometimes these discussions were informal in nature, often conducted through a series of letters, some of which were of considerable length. (p. 40) 

Censors, themselves doing this mostly for future patronage and not for the nearly-non-existent pay, often acted more as editors than as agents of the government.  They accepted assignments from Malesherbes, most tailored to their specific academic specialties.  Occasionally, they would correspond with authors, usually via anonymous means, and even met with them, despite the pains many went to keep knowledge of their role as approbators secret from the writers with whom they were communicating. (p. 46).  These correspondences often influenced their perception of works, as sometimes works of questionable literary quality were approved due to the censors being aware of the writer's financial straits. (p. 46).  Sometimes these discussions with authors became contentious, but on the whole, Darnton argues that this form of censorship served to bring censors and authors closer together.  Far from being sworn enemies, in Bourbon France authors and censors could be seen as parts of a collaborative exercise, in which the censors served as a sort of quasi-editor whose commentaries served to improve the considered works.

But what about those works which were not sent to the censors for approbation?  In these cases of unlicensed works, the matter is more dire.  If otherwise non-offensive, works published outside France could be brought in, provided that another part of the state apparatus, the police, did not perceive them to be threats to state or national morality.  But for those works judged to be obscene, the punishments could be severe.  The case of Mlle. Bonafon and the scandalous Tanastès, concerned with the sex life of Louis XV, is emblematic of how the regime reacted when a work outside the official book privilege system was made available for sale.  Her imprisonment for over thirteen years indicates that the French system was not as cordial as might be expected after reading prior tales of chummy censors and writers.

Although Darnton devoted roughly a third of Censors at Work to Bourbon France, this review has spent a disproportionate amount of space on it due to the similarities found between it and the other two case studies.  While there is much of interest in the other two sections, much of the conclusions are similar to those found for Bourbon French censorship policies.  Yet there are some key differences.  For example, in the second section, "British India:  Liberalism and Imperialism," the focus is more on how the conflicts between the ruling British aristocracy and the native Indian constituencies are rooted in a complex understanding of British legal beliefs and Indian political reality.  Censorship did not exist as a standard system on the British Isles in the nineteenth century, but in the aftermath of the 1857-1858 Sepoy mutinies, the Raj had to develop a way of understanding their native subjects better.  Indian publications were scrutinized more, especially as there was an explosion of printed material available in the various Indian languages in the mid-nineteenth century.  Since there were very few British officials conversant in all of the subcontinent's languages, native speakers had to be recruited to play the role of censors. 

As in Bourbon France, these censors often struck up relationships with the writers they were examining.  However, there were some interesting differences, particularly in the way that texts were analyzed.  In Great Britain, copyright laws had replaced the system of royal privilege long before the conquest of India.  In addition, the censors were more concerned with matters of libel, especially as comments critical of the Raj, even obliquely, could threaten the fragile post-mutiny peace.  Frequently, the Raj utilized the legal system to prosecute questionable writers for libel for things as picayune as talking about particular planters or the suffering that many Indians experienced in their everyday lives.  While the literary censors were not as complicit here, it is worth noting that in the Raj, the courts served as the silencers of those who wrote texts that could be construed as attacks on the government.  It is here where the more traditional views of censorship come closest to actual reality.  Yet there is a curious contradiction, in that in bringing these often-ruinous libel cases to court, the Raj went to great pains to appear to be preserving British ideals of free press while in reality denying full freedom to its Indian subjects. (p. 142)  And yet even within this elaborate charade, there were negotiations between the government and writers, with more give-and-take taking place on both sides than what otherwise might be expected from a foreign-dominated government.

The third section, "Communist East Germany:  Planning and Persecution," is perhaps the most illuminating of the three cases because it is the closest to our modern conceptions of state and literature.  Darnton bases much of his essay here on interviews he did with two East German censors during that period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the re-unification of the two Germanies in October 1990.  He discusses how integrated the East German censors were within the governmental structure and how certainly literary "plans" were developed for the publication of literary works for a given year.  For the East German government, literature grounded in socialist reality was esteemed and the role of the censors was to cultivate relationships with writers, to use a carrot-and-stick approach to get them to conform to governmental expectations.  While there were certainly times that the government arrested dissident writers, on the whole, the censors' task was to persuade writers to conform their works to government expectations.  As in the case of Bourbon France, this led to cozy relationships between the censors and writers, with certain writers receiving partial protection from other elements of the East German government.

This is not to say that conditions were ideal for East German writers.  Frequently they had to negotiate with their censors just to get certain elements included.  Christa Wolf managed to negotiate for ellipses to be left in the text of her most famous work, Kassandra, to denote the excised parts the censors had removed (these sections were later filled in with samizdat typewritten fragments to be inserted within the book).  Others would beg and sometimes even cajole the censors for passages to be preserved.  Sometimes the censors faced criticism from within the government (East German leader Erich Honecker played a personal role in many cases) for allowing certain works critical of the government to be published.  Darnton does an excellent job in outlining not just the negotiations that took place, but also their implications for the East German government.

In his conclusion, Darnton justifies the ethnographical approach toward censorship that he took.  By using archival evidence and allowing the principal actors to "speak" through their recorded thoughts and writings, he argues that a larger, more composite image of censorship emerges.  In particular, authors, far from being helpless victims, could sometimes play a strong role in determining the discourse being established between writer and state (p. 233).  They could negotiate with the government's censors in order for certain passages to be preserved, but they could also appeal to powerful political patrons.  In all three cases, the works in question could be published abroad, although there were specific consequences that could have a negative impact on the writers.  It is in these interplays between complicity, collaboration, and negotiation that the literatures of these three places, France, India, and East Germany, were shaped.

Darnton does an outstanding job in developing his approach toward the topic and exploring the comparisons and contrasts between his three chosen locales.  Through extensive citing of archival evidence, he builds a strong case for censorship being not an uniformly negative, oppressive entity, but instead a complex, nuanced field in which the concerns of the government and the artistic desires of writers converged and which produced a broad discourse through which negotiations took place.  Although there were times that it felt as though too much emphasis was placed on the literary responsibilities of these censors and not enough to the various roles, implicit and explicit alike, that other governmental bodies played in controlling written communication, on the whole Censors at Work is one of the best cultural studies of government-literary interactions that I have read since I finished grad school in 1997.  Highly recommended.

Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England

I was talking about this short review I had to write back in 1996 for a grad class on early modern English social history with Dunja and she thought that due to the subject matter that I should post it here.  It was originally a 2.5 double-spaced page review, so keep that in mind when reading it.  It was a fascinating book, I recall, but also a frustrating one, as my review notes.  Too bad it costs nearly $200 for the hardcover edition.

Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls:  Suicide in Early Modern England.  Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1990.

In this book, MacDonald and Murphy attempt to explain the cultural attitudes regarding suicide.  They split the book into three parts.  The first part, 1485-1660, examines the rise in felo de se, or intentional and rational self-murder, suicide convictions.  The second section, 1660-1800, notes a drop in felo de se convictions and a sharp rise in non compos mentis, or mentally deranged, verdicts on suicide.  The last section deals with the interpretations of suicide.  The authors state in their introduction that they intend to take a longue durèe approach toward studying this period, thus explaining why the focus of this book spans over three centuries.

The structure of the book, in my opinion, could have been better.  It appears that the authors focus too much attention on the suicide conviction rates than they do on the actual reasons for committing suicide.  While most of this information is useful, the various reasons why England was considered by many Europeans to be the suicide capital of the world in the eighteenth century is put off until the very last section.  Although the authors do explain why la mort à l'anglaise (p. 308) became known as such, this information could have been better used if it had been dealt with in the opening chapter.

In discussing the rise of suicide convictions and the resulting popular treatment of the corpses (burial at the crossroads with a stake driven through the body), MacDonald and Murphy note that the conviction rate was over ninety-five percent between 1485 and 1660 (p. 16).  In their explanation for this rise of suicide trials and the sentence of felo de se, Murphy and MacDonald argue that the Tudor regime instituted stricter laws regarding suicide, equating it with other felonies.  This meant that the felon had to forfeit his property, which the State then controlled (p. 16).  There were individuals, mostly churchmen, who the Tudor government authorized to seize these properties and to use them as they saw fit (p. 25).  The problem with this argument is that those with the richest properties, namely the nobility, were the ones most likely to be acquitted of intentional murder (p. 129).

While MacDonald and Murphy do an excellent job of tying in political reforms with popular attitudes regarding suicide, their emphasis on the "secularization" of suicide is slightly misleading.  They argue that before the mid-seventeenth century that suicide was considered to be caused by sin (p. 19).  They theorize that around 1660, when the Restoration signaled the decline of Puritanism, that popular attitudes toward suicide became less harsh.  They also note that although the penalty for suicide was still there, conviction rates dropped drastically in the next century.  They argue that religious views had shifted to the point where suicide could be removed from its earlier association with the devil (p. 157).  The problem with this argument, as the authors themselves note, is that there was still in the eighteenth century a strong minority, especially among Methodists, who still clung to a religious interpretation regarding suicide.

While the two authors do a good job of discussing the shift in popular attitudes toward religion, their section on the interpretations regarding suicide could have been handled better.  I believe that they should have gone into greater detail in their explanation for motives behind committing suicide.  Although they do state that monetary reasons were a primary motive (p. 270), they do not explain adequately the reason for the high rate of youth suicide, even though they note that 430 out of 1001 reported suicides in England from 1485-1714 were committed by those younger than the age of twenty-four (p. 251).

MacDonald and Murphy also neglect to discuss in great detail the formulation of suicide notes.  What do these notes mean and why were they written?  The authors theorize that suicide notes ought to be viewed as essays in persuasion, thus explaining the similarities in suicide notes, but they do not really correlate this with the rise in literacy rates during this period.  This section, like the others, leaves one to wonder why these suicides occurred the ways they did.  MacDonald and Murphy do not explain why suicides occurred in the book, and this lack of explanation makes their arguments regarding the meanings behind suicide weaker.

A Blast from the Past: A historiographical essay I wrote in 1997 for a hypothetical Early Modern European Cultural History survey course

The things I find when searching through old folders.  See if this course proposal sounds interesting to you.  I wrote this back in the Spring of 1997, when I was 22, almost 23 years old.

Cultural history, more than other subdisciplines in history, involves a wide variety of topics and a corresponding number of sources.  By necessity, culture itself is a very broad and amorphous term.  What is culture?  According to Peter Burke, in his introduction to his book on European popular culture, culture is "a system of shared meanings, attitudes, and values, and the symbolic forms in which they are expressed or embodied" (Burke xi).  In this sense of the word, culture reflects the society in which it exists.

The definition of culture as being the outward expressions of human behavior, whether articulated, as in conscious dialogue like books and stories, or non-articulated, as in rituals such as rough ridings and churchings, differs from older definitions which viewed culture as being only the recorded elements of everyday interactions among people.  In this syllabus, I intend to demonstrate the differences between these two points by including samples from each school of cultural thought.

The proposed course attempts to discuss cultural developments over a large span of European history.  Traditionally, the fourteenth century arguably has marked the beginnings of cultural self-analysis, as the humanists, beginning with Dante and continuing through Boccaccio, revived the study of classical Greek and Roman societies.  Although this period underwent rapid shifts, whether in terms of religious belief or political organization, I believe that there are certain trends that developed during this time that need to be addressed.

New cultural history has been heavily influenced by the writings of poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault.  Although I have not included Foucault in my syllabus, I intend to reviewing some of his more famous works, like his studies such as Order of Things, Human Sexuality, and Madness, as they have heavily influenced later discussions of early modern European cultural practice.  Earlier writers, like Jakob Burckhardt, have tended to place too much emphasis on the modernizing aspects of early modern European culture.  In doing so, they have often neglected to examine contemporary attitudes.  In include works by Dante and Bunyan not just to provide a glimpse into contemporary religious beliefs, but also to illustrate how these authors viewed their own societies in general.  Bunyan's descriptions of the City of Destruction is not intended just to give hope to the average Protestant Christian, but also to condemn the perverseness of late seventeenth century English life.

In developing this course, I believed that certain themes in early modern European cultural life needed to be addressed.  These themes, some of which are listed in the syllabus, include the importance of cultural symbols, the interrelationships between people and their societies, religious beliefs, individual and collective structures, as well as the exportation and importation of cultural elements from differing cultural regions.  Related to these topics are such questions as whether or not cultural polarization occurred during this time, how did cultural groups view themselves, and what were the differences and similarities between Western European societies.  I believe that a seminar class, with its increased focus on specialized topics, addresses these issues in a better manner than traditional lecture classes.

Peter Burke's book on early modern European culture is the best attempt that I have found to combine cultural events across Europe during this time in an attempt to provide a synthesis.  He was one of the first authors to try to analyze popular culture, or cultures, in relation to actions and inner expressions as well as outer expressions such as art and poetry.  Burke in his 1978 book championed the notion of cultural polarization, noting that throughout this period, there came to be a widening divergence between patrician and plebeian cultures.  In his article on seventeenth century London, Burke theorizes that popular culture by the end of this period was becoming more passive, as the elites managed, through their control of the printed media, to shape and alter popular attitudes and cultural symbols.  Although I disagree with many of his conclusions, especially about the increased passivity of popular culture, Burke's book provides an excellent starting place for a discussion of cultural symbols and the interrelationships between the elites and the poorer classes.

With this in mind, I selected a variety of books and articles to provide not just detailed studies of cultural symbols like childbirth, but also in order to test Burke's theories.  Although I did not include them in my course readings, Keith Thomas's book on religion and the decline of magic and Keith Wrightson's introduction regarding early modern English social life provide corroborating evidence for some of Burke's theses, especially regarding the cultural divergence into elite and popular culture.  Some, like Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson, focused on the differences between popular and elite culture to such a degree that, as in the case of hill's book on the radical ideas that developed during the English Revolution, all sense of interdependent relationships between the two were lost.  Natalie Zemon Davis in her book on the sixteenth century French pardon tales emphasizes the connection between plebeian pleas for royal intervention and the elite's justification of their own privileges through the tacit acceptance by the peasants of their cultural and social superiority.

The novels are included for a number of reasons.  As they are written records documenting the attitudes and prejudices of those individuals who wrote them during the early modern era, more so than secondary accounts they can provide clues to a variety of questions regarding culture.  Boccaccio's stories in The Decameron were drawn from a rich pool of popular folk tales.  Although Boccaccio himself belonged to the privileged classes, he was able to use a common cultural tradition of storytelling that transcended class in order to provide common cultural traditions.  In this sense, Boccaccio, as Burke notes in his revised introduction, acts as a mediator between patrician and plebeian cultures.  Chaucer, even more than Boccaccio, ties the elite and popular traditions together.  The pilgrims in his Canterbury Tales were a motley group that included the nobility (the Knight and his son), the peasants (the Miller), and the nascent bourgeoisie (the Wife of Bath).  Along with the religious orders present among them, the pilgrims told stories that ranged form the courtly to the bawdy.  Chaucer's skill in integrating these elements into a coherent narrative structure demonstrates his ability to move between the two cultures.

Elements of popular culture that this proposed course will examine include social interactions, like gender relations, as well as some intellectual developments, primarily in the field of political theory.  I have included these topics because during this period there was a shift away from an emphasis on the collective to a focus on the individual.  The concept of a nuclear family emerged during this time and although the village still exerted a strong pull on familial relations, it steadily declined as a social force.  This emphasis on individuality is reflected in someo f the writings of the time, namely The Pilgrim's Progress, where the valiant Christian, with the help of only a couple of like-minded souls, struggles against the iniquities of his social world.  In the intellectual writings of the time, individuals like Machiavelli and Galileo implicitly challenged earlier conceived notions of authority, whether it was a belief in the divine approval of royal authority or in a geocentric universe.  This increased focus on the centrality of the individual played a major role in the Reformation, which was unfolding during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Many authors like Hill would argue that the Reformation marked a major break with the past.  They would argue that the Reformation, especially in its Calvinist guise, placed stress upon the individual, who was to be the cultivator of his own religiosity.  Although this is in a sense true,  the continuities with the past are often overlooked in these authors' works.  Some, like Martin Brecht, are so immersed in their studies of the major Protestant figures like Luther that they sometimes neglect to analyze the sources of his religious ideas.  I include selections from the multi-volume collection of Luther's works because I believe that by examining Luther's own writings in the context of previous religious movements like the German Mystics, one can see a continuation of certain religious trends such as an inward focus on the individual, marked by Luther's call for a "priesthood of all believers" where one would be saved by faith, as opposed to the earlier emphasis on outward forms of piety, such as the veneration of the saints.

In discussing the impact of the Reformation, I have taken a nation by nation approach, since each nation, whether Protestant like England, Catholic like France, or mixed like Germany, reacted to the Reformation in different ways.  In the case of France, the course readings do not directly discuss the rise of religious turmoil, but in Davis's Return of Martin Guerre, there is a sense from the readings that many of the individuals present in her story seem to be Protestants, like the presiding judge and Martin's wife.  Combined with Davis's other book on the pardon tales, the case of Martin Guerre illustrates some of the aspects of French cultural life during the early modern era.

In the case of England, I use a number of different documents, like Bunyan's novel, Burke's article on seventeenth century London, David Underdown's case study of Dorchester, and Hill's account of the religious radicals during the English Revolution.  Each of these is designed to discuss different aspects of English religious life.  Bunyan's book, as mentioned earlier, deals with the struggles of a pious Calvinist in a harsh world.  His use of allegories to explain theology resembles in many manners Langland's book, who also used allegories to tell his story of redemption.  Although Bunyan's emphasis on inner piety stands in marked contrast to Langland's concentration on sacramental observation, the two have enough in common that they combined can present the changes that occurred in English religious life.

David Underdown in his book on Dorchester took a case study approach toward discussing the impact that Calvinism had on English society.  Although he at times appears to be too enthusiastic about the benefits of Calvinism, his book provides a detailed account of the adjustments, albeit temporary, that Calvinism made on venial actions like drinking and premarital sex.

Christopher Hill's book is included in part that it is written from an older perspective.  Unlike most of the previous authors, who in passing discuss the internal mechanics of cultural interaction, Hill focuses on the relationship between the radical ideas of reformers like Gerald Winstanley and the development of later modern political and social thought.  His book, with its attempt to demonstrate a strong connection between the past and present, is the only Marxist literature included in my reading list.  Although there are many problems with it, Hill's book gives one perspective of how to view the past.

Germany is tougher to analyze than either France or England due to the fragmentary nature of the German Reich during this time.  Germany was divided not only politically, but also culturally and religiously.  The doctrine of cuius regio, eius religio established as imperial law the division of Germany into armed camps, a situation which destabilized during the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648.  In discussing German cultural life, I have included Thomas Brady's article because it provides a background for the other two books included in the section.  David Sabean's book on popular culture in Württemberg covers a long range of time and his emphasis on the interrelationships between person, community, and Herrschaft, or authority, fits well with one of my themes, that of the relationships between individuals and their societies.  H.J.C. von Grimmelhausen lived through the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War and his novel Simplicius Simplicissimus gives in his chapter on the Order of the Marauder Brothers a tongue-in-cheek account of his experiences in the last stages of the fighting in the 1640s.  As in the case of the other novels, I believe that the adventures of Simplicissimus gives a graphic account unfettered by historical analysis of the experiences that many Germans went through during this destructive conflict.

The last segment of the course, on heretics, is devoted primarily to discussing the works of Carlo Ginzburg.  His book The Cheese and the Worms, which provides an account of the heretical opinions of an Italian miller, has proved to be a very influential work.  His emphasis on detail over analysis is reflected in other accounts like that of Martin Guerre.  The relevance of Menocchio's religious theories is overshadowed by Ginzburg's storyteller approach to presenting the Inquisition's two trials of the miller.  Ginzburg, more so than Davis, takes a microhistorical approach to analyzing ideas and beliefs.  This approach reflects a trend present in many recent historical works toward de-emphasizing the role of the author in presenting the story.  Although one may question whether or not Ginzburg provides counterfactual evidence to critique or bolster his own implicit selection of the archival material, Ginzburg's book signals a shift away from direct historical analysis toward a more personalized approach, where the reader takes the evidence present and draws his or her own conclusions.

As mentioned earlier, this course presumes to discuss certain themes like the importance of cultural symbols, change, and cultural polarization.  These questions are very difficult to answer, and I believe that these questions should be addressed by the students themselves.  That is why I have purposely included the novels in the reading requirements.  I believe that the novels give not only contemporary attitudes, but by examining the material without the benefits of historical analysis, students can draw their own conclusions as to the connections between the readings that the questions posed at the beginning of this paper.  Likewise Ginzburg and Davis, although they are separated by centuries and cultural differences from their subjects, attempt to describe the cultures that they have studied without coloring their accounts with too much analysis.  However, I do believe that some historical analysis is necessary in order to understand adequately some of the problems facing historians studying this era of European history.  Therefore I have included works by authors like Christopher Hill and Martin Brecht, who despite their flaws, try to place their writings in a certain school of thought.  Although I realize that this course structure can be very challenging to most undergraduate students, I believe that those who are dedicated to attempting to discuss the changes in early modern European culture will leave the class better able to critique their own culture and their roles in it.



Although I cringed a few times as I typed this out, I thought perhaps a few might be interested to see what I had written for a course 15 years ago.  There were other elements to that paper that I didn't photocopy and save that, if available, would have provided the syllabus itself and the full list of readings and recommended other literature.

What led to the rise of the fairy tale?

Interesting article posted the other day by The Guardian, where a folklorist, Ruth B Bottigheimer, disputes the notion that fairy tales rose whole cloth from oral culture. While at first I was tempted to disagree vociferously with her claims, after a bit of thought there is something to it. Robert Darnton in his classic 1984 cultural history, The Great Cat Massacre, explores the complex relationships between popular and elite cultures in 18th century France, including a chapter on the rise of folklore and how stories such as Little Red Riding Hood changed over time. In that book (which I wholeheartedly recommend that others read, along with Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre and Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a 16th Century Miller, in order to grasp some of the arguments for microhistories and new cultural history methodologies), Darnton touches upon the various ways that print and oral culture of the 18th century influenced one another. While he doesn't spend much time on it, one could argue that he was leaning toward the stance that "oral culture" was quite influenced by the dissemination of ideas and storytelling motifs (poverty, social relations between rigid classes, etc.) that was brought about by the printing revolution and by the revival of long-distance trade that started after 1200 CE.

So while I probably wouldn't go as far as Bottigheimer apparently does with her arguments, I would have to say that there is something to the notion that it wasn't until print culture and widespread international exchanges of stories emerged that the folk tales and fairy tales began to develop their familiar forms. After all, consider the international influence of a Fafnir or a Reynard and I suspect trade patterns and print distribution might play a role in those legendary characters crossing cultural bounds that had begun to be established after the 12th century.

Grounding the Fantastic

This is a natural outgrowth from my reactions to two recent books I've reviewed, Paul Kincaid's What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction and Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy. While I enjoyed each of them and came away from the readings believing that I had learned something, there were a few niggling points in each that bothered me. However, these points I felt needed to be addressed outside of the reviews rather than inside them, since they concern matters that neither author aimed to address.

Epistemological discussions of science fiction and fantasy that I have read online or in the few critical studies that I have encountered rarely ground the discussion in a historical context. Too often, claims that X belongs in SF and/or fantasy is based on superficial similarities between the "fuzzy sets" (to nick Mendlesohn's term for it in her book) of stories as diverse as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Hal Duncan's The Book of All Hours duology. While examining key components such as narrative focus and elements of the "unreal" is important, too often claims that ancient or medieval works are "fantasy" or "SF" distort matters.

While each Text is going to be read anew by Readers who bring to the table their own analytical tool sets, I would argue that one must place the Story within its Zeitgeist before any such claims can be made. Easy, agreeable point, no? Not exactly.

Grounding the fantastic (or any story) in its own time is an arduous task fraught with all sorts of risks. Later in this short essay, I am going to note an otherwise excellent study that falls into the trap of interpreting events using a too-modern technique, but for now, I want to present the beginnings of a possible alternative for examining the evidence for SF urtexts. It is my belief that too often, critics fail to include material culture concerns into their interpretations of important literary developments. However, despite my background in cultural history, this is not meant to be a full scholarly article, but rather to simulate what a précis of such a hypothetical monograph would take. Hopefully, this will provoke questions and responses here and elsewhere and perhaps someone else who has more invested in this might explore matters further.

One important development in cultural historical study has been the rise of the microhistory. Instead following the old Rankeian model of wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, microhistories don't aim to utilize overarching narratives to explore truth-claims about the past. Historians such as Carlo Ginzburg, whose seminal The Cheese and the Worms (1980, English translation) is credited with popularizing the microhistory approach, and Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983), focused on individuals, not "Great Man," but rather the common, rather insignificant working class men and women. In tales such as that of Menocchio the eccentric miller, much more is revealed about the attitudes and cosmological understandings of the "everyman" than were ever published in the dozens of scholarly tomes from the likes of Macaulay or Gibbon. Ginzburg and Davis's case studies (themselves adaptations of sociological and anthropological models that had developed from Émile Durkheim) probe deep into the heart of belief and how popular culture and its traditions (charivari, or "rough music," or the public nature of the wedding night defloration) have developed and altered over time. It becomes quite clear after reading these works that the mindset of late medieval/early modern popular culture (I dare not say "mass culture," since that is a 19th century phenomenon) is quite alien to ours. Purpose is a capital-letter belief, and the "fairy tales" of those times have a quite different intent and rationale than the sanitized ones we so callously presume they have as we dump these rather vicious, cynical tales onto our preschool set.

Robert Darnton's excellent The Great Cat Massacre... and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984) provides an invaluable resource for those who want to analyze the emergence of the fairy tale motif and the possible real-world applications of such tales during a time of actual feast or famine. Darnton in his first chapter, "Peasants Tell Tales," examines the mentalité, or group outlook to be imprecise, of 18th century French peasants who use images such as a fantastical feast or a fairy godmother as a sort of coping mechanism during a time in which the capriciousness of harvests or human wars could spell trouble at any moment. While these peasants undoubtedly saw these stories as being "unreal" on the surface, the core "truths" embedded in these tales spoke in coded form of their hopes, dreams, and desires. In a world of periodic death by starvation, a feast was truly a magical object worthy of hopes and dreams.

Darnton in the eponymous story focuses on the fun that a group of printer's apprentices have with capturing, torturing, and executing a number of cats whom the printer and his wife had treated better than the boys themselves. This account of their plotting and the mechanics behind the "trials" that the cats were put to before they were brained, flayed, or mutilated will shock many "modern" readers; the apprentices and their friends thought it was both just and hilarious. Darnton's account accentuates this division of Weltanschauungen of the 18th and late 20th (and now early 21st) centuries. So if in stories such as these, the storytellers and principal actors have such alien motivations, how can we ascribe our own value sets to these texts?

Sometimes, we try to do so, with some distortions occurring. Davis's account of Martin Guerre's disappearance and dramatic reappearance after an impostor had claimed his hearth and wife for 12 years in mid-16th century southwestern France reads quite well, but her interpretation of Martin's wife and her actions and possible complicity rang a bit hollow to other historians, who noted that Davis had to make her text do verbal contortions in able to make her interpretations fit with the historical evidence.

Despite these occasional missteps and the extremely difficult task of trying to interpret stories based on the known mindsets of the storytellers instead basing it upon modern understandings, I believe using the microhistory approach will yield a much more fruitful study of the origins of what we now call "fantasy" and "science fiction" than if the critic were to base his or her explorations solely upon the texts. While it is not a perfect system, trying to see things through "the locals' eyes" helps not just with understanding how this current genre system developed, but also why certain cultures resist others applying such labels to their story forms.

In my review of Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy, I mentioned in passing how discussing William Faulkner and his impact on the Latin American "Boom Generation" could have strengthened her points regarding magic realism. What I did not say there was that for a great many magic realists, Gabriel García Márquez being most prominent, they do not see their works as being "fantasies" because the stories themselves are very "political" and depend heavily upon an understanding of Latin American political dynamics of the late 19th through the mid-20th centuries. To call García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude strictly a "fantasy" when it riffs on the banana strike of 1928 and the resulting massacre of the workers (and the subsequent government coverup, in order to protect its relations with the US in general and the United Fruit Company specifically) could be viewed as being overly dismissive.

Yet the forms and ideas behind it represent for many others a truly remarkable, immersive fantasy. How does one form a composite analysis that takes such diametrical approaches into account? That is the million dollar question. I suspect the answer(s) lie within close questioning of the various world cultures and exploring how their value systems may or may not have had a role in their creation of "fantasy" and "science fiction" forms.