Early Modern Constructions of Europe

Literature, Culture, History

Florian Kläger,Gerd Bayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317394914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Between the medieval conception of Christendom and the political visions of modernity, ideas of Europe underwent a transformative and catalytic period that saw a cultural process of renewed self-definition or self-Europeanization. The contributors to this volume address this process, analyzing how Europe was imagined between 1450 and 1750. By whom, in which contexts, and for what purposes was Europe made into a subject of discourse? Which forms did early modern 'Europes' take, and what functions did they serve? Essays examine the role of factors such as religion, history, space and geography, ethnicity and alterity, patronage and dynasty, migration and education, language, translation, and narration for the ways in which Europe turned into an 'imagined community.' The thematic range of the volume comprises early modern texts in Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, including plays, poems, and narrative fiction, as well as cartography, historiography, iconography, travelogues, periodicals, and political polemics. Literary negotiations in particular foreground the creative potential, versatility, and agency that inhere in the process of Europeanization, as well as a specifically early modern attitude towards the past and tradition emblematized in the poetics of the period. There is a clear continuity between the collection's approach to European identities and the focus of cultural and postcolonial studies on the constructed nature of collective identities at large: the chapters build on the insights produced by these fields over the past decades and apply them, from various angles, to a subject that has so far largely eluded critical attention. This volume examines what existing and well-established work on identity and alterity, hybridity and margins has to contribute to an understanding of the largely un-examined and under-theorized 'pre-formative' period of European identity.

Part I
Others

1 Europeans before Europe

Modernity and the Myth of the Other

David Blanks

Although the shelves in my office are filled with books that have titles such as Europe in the Middle Ages, The European Mind from Antiquity to the Present, and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Early Modern Europe, and while I teach courses called “Early Modern Europe (c. 1450–1700)” and “Europe in the Age of Revolution and Reform,” the introductory chapters of these books, and my introductory remarks in such classes, are always given over to explaining why using the term ‘Europe’ in the medieval or early modern period is something of a misnomer. I say ‘something of a misnomer’ and not, flat out, an error, because although ‘Europeans’ did not know they were Europeans at the time, there was, nonetheless, a certain nascent Europeanness bubbling up in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. It was in the early modern period that the cultural values and practices emerged that would later be identified as European not only by the citizens of Europe but also, and just as importantly, perhaps more importantly, by the scholars who studied them. We can put it that way.

It is difficult to know how most ‘Europeans’ identified themselves at the time. Most were poor and illiterate, and, as we shall see, this is one of the core problems when it comes to examining early modern constructions of the idea: for the most part, we simply do not have the data we require to answer the question. What we do possess are the observations of elites, and even those are few and far between—not sufficient, really, for building an informed case, but we do the best we can because there is little else to go on in this period. Trouble ensues when scholars get caught up in rushing to the finish line, 1989 and all that, and end up glossing over cultural constructions they know are more complex than they have allowed for (cf. Delanty 1995, 2013; Said 1978).

Historians and literary critics have carefully sifted through the writings of their predecessors from Herodotus to Hobbes; they have catalogued, collated, compared, and compiled; and some impressive analyses have resulted therefrom (cf. den Boer 1993). And yet, this ‘nominalist’ approach is not entirely satisfying, as the editors and some of the authors of this volume suggest, not only because meanings change over time, and from person to person, and even for one person in the course of a career, but especially because at the end of the day we are still entirely at the mercy of sources written by and for the educated classes. Most ‘Europeans’ did not see themselves that way. They were far more likely to identify themselves as part of a particular family or clan, or perhaps, in broader terms, as coming from a specific place, or maybe simply as Christians. Peter Burke notes, for example, that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries even members of the upper classes considered themselves Bretons or Catalans or what have you; that Erasmus self-identified as being from Rotterdam; Montaigne, as a Gascon; and the French poet Pierre de Ronsard, despite using the term ‘Europe’ so frequently in his writings, nonetheless thought of himself as a “gentilhomme Vandomois” (Burke 1980, 27).

And although we begin to see the word used by intellectuals rather more frequently after 1450, it was not until the late nineteenth century that it had any sort of currency among the majority of people living on the continent, and it probably did not entirely crystallize across broad spectrums of the population until after World War II. Yet we persist in using this anachronism in our writings and our lectures, not only because it is convenient, and because without it, it is hard to make sensible generalizations and comparative analyses about this period, but also because there was something there. There was something to it. The answer to Peter Burke’s question is, no, Europe did not exist before 1700—but ‘Europeans’ most certainly did (cf. Bohrer 2012).

When Burke first asked this question, it was the early 1970s,¹ and the principal work that had been done by then, the work that he was using as his stepping-off point, was the product of scholars who had witnessed not one but in some cases two world wars, who were living through the Cold War, and who joined in the general hand-wringing and soul-searching about what had happened, what it meant, and, most relevant to the concerns we are addressing here, what it meant to be European: who was in, who was out, and how ‘Europeans’ could be brought together in such a way so as to prevent this from happening again.

It was just after the war in 1946 that Winston Churchill first called for a United States of Europe; the Hague Conference, seen by many as the wellspring of the European Union, was held in 1948; both the Council of Europe and the College of Europe were established in 1949; and, on the academic side, the School of European Studies opened its offices at the University of Sussex in 1963. With but a single exception all of the work upon which Burke bases his essay was produced in these years by scholars who shared this overall sense of cultural crisis (Burke 1980, 27–28).

It was around this same time or shortly thereafter—indeed, at the very time that Burke was looking into these issues, in the late 1960s and early 1970s—that identity studies became a notable discipline. Although this was primarily a move aimed at creating cultural and intellectual space for those who had been disenfranchised by the establishment, or who had never found a voice to begin with, members of the ‘establishment’ continued to ask questions about identity themselves: hence the appearance of a raft of studies aimed at understanding the origins of Europeanness.

Given these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that those inclined to examine the roots of European identity in the medieval and early modern periods should have found some essential ‘European characteristics’ that were rooted in the ancient world and that came to the fore in reaction to that seemingly ubiquitous medieval enemy, the Muslim other. When one reads the Chanson de Roland or other chansons de geste, the enormously popular crusading poems of the High Middle Ages, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that this is where the European—or in this case more appropriately Latin Christian—sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ was born. But one wonders whether the villagers and warriors who enjoyed (not reading but) listening to the troubadours perform these epic tales came to the same conclusions that we do in thinking back about them. Certainly there was great variation depending upon where they lived. Those closer to the Mediterranean—sailors, merchants, pilgrims, and the like—and those with first-hand knowledge of real life Muslims, undoubtedly felt differently than, say, a Yorkshire farmer watching a mystery play that pitted the pharaoh, devotee of Mahomet, against Moses, follower of the true God (Tolan 2002, 130). My sense is that the farther away you were from the centre of action, the less nuanced your interpretation (Jones 1942, 213)—an observation that, as we shall see below, is perhaps equally valid for academics today.

It was also in the 1960s that Norman Daniel, a devout Catholic with long experience in the Muslim world, provided the framework for much subsequent work that was more specifically focused on the emergence of the idea of Europe. Daniel believed that Western attitudes towards Islam were ‘canonized’ in the Middle Ages. This was a view shared by Edward Said, who himself was enormously influential in shaping the scholarship of succeeding generations, especially among those of the identity studies camp who were writing a counternarrative to the received wisdom of the 1970s and 1980s. Said bought into the accepted narrative vis-à-vis the Muslim other that had initially been posited by Daniel, Richard Southern (1962), and others (Said 1980; Daniel 1960, 1975; Manselli 1965; see also Blanks 1999, 25–29). Daniel devoted his scholarship specifically to trying to understand the sources of modern attitudes towards Islam, which is precisely what we are doing here in trying to understand the early modern (and in this case late medieval) sources of attitudes toward the European self. In Daniel’s view, the way in which medieval Christians thought “has always been and still is part of the make-up of every Western mind brought to bear upon the subject” (1975, 301). “If we have to choose a date to end the western European Middle Age,” he wrote, “we might do worse than take 1939” (1975, 2).

A generation later, in another influential book, Robert Bartlett also went looking for the origins of Europeanness (1993). Bartlett was somewhat more ecumenical in his outlook as befitted the post–Cold War, post–1960s academic and political climate. As is typical of such works, he provides the appropriate caveats in his introduction, then plunges ahead and talks about Europe as if it was the way in which the people of the region normally referred to it. As suggested above, this was necessary in order to compose a study that holds together and makes sense to us today—rather in the same way, I suppose, as we discuss feudalism, the Crusades, and the Renaissance even though these terms were not in use at the time. But the important thing for our purposes here is this: Bartlett is searching for those intangible qualities that really do seem to be taking shape in this period even if they have as yet no name. This I suppose could fall under the heading of a ‘realist’ approach, and in truth it seems the only viable way of trying to grasp the essence of this emerging culture before 1700—before, that is, the Enlightenment and, more significantly still, before the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by which time people really did have a sense of what Europe was and what it meant to be European even if it remained (and still remains) a vigorously contested discourse.

The notion that there was both an intensification and an extensification of Christian identity between 950 and 1350 is central to Bartlett’s thesis, and Muslims play a leading role in his narrative. He has quite a bit to say about the cultural aftermath of the Crusades, devoting two chapters to what he calls “race relations on the frontiers of Latin Europe.” The argument is more subtle than it sounds, however, focusing on the widely used medieval notion of gens and applying it not only to Christendom’s Muslim neighbours to the south and east but also equally to the pagan peoples of the north and northeast. Here is a new turn. It is not just a matter of constructing European identity in regards to (1) people who conquered you (the Muslims) and (2) people you conquered (the Indians): in addition, Bartlett is able to demonstrate that the same approach to the other that was in operation in the Mediterranean world was equally at play in German and Slavic lands as well, as it also was in peripheral regions such as Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.

In his essay Burke had cautioned that “despite the excellent books on the idea of Europe, the social history of the consciousness of Europe remains to be written” (1980, 22). Here, too, Bartlett moves in new directions as he is able to get away from purely elite records and show, through a variety of different types of sources, that the intangible quality that we will all later recognize as quintessentially European is spreading its roots in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries:

By 1300 Europe existed as an identifiable cultur...