Europa 51

Part of the British Film Institute's Ingrid Bergman season, Europa 51 is a collaboration between the great actress and her lover, the director Roberto Rosselini. The film opens in an apartment in Rome where a wealthy bourgeoise couple- played by Bergman and Alexander Knox- are having a dinner party. Thanks to traffic, Bergman's character, Irene has arrived late home and George her husband and Michel her son both want and need her attention: George to prepare for the party and Michel because he is upset. She neglects the son to prioritise the party and quickly dresses- however during the party, Michel falls down the stairs and eventually dies. The film then becomes a story about Irene's response- she becomes a servant of all she meets particularly the poor, supporting a boy going to hospital with her money, helping a young mother to get and retain a job, aiding a prostitute in her last hours and performing countless other acts of kindness. She eschews the simple Marxist prognosis of her cousin Andrea, and instead cleaves to a religious and spiritual (yet non-denominational) renaissance which provides her with a meaning for her life. It also alienates her family: more and more they are distressed by what she has done, her husband is estranged gradually, her mother uncomprehending and various other members of her social circle criticise her as she abandons convention.

Irene's behaviour is touched off by the tragedy of her son's death- a death which is caused by the Oedipal jealousy that Michel feels for George- but its consequences are profound. Irene is faced with three options as a consequence of Michel's death: the first is to continue in the route that she has lived through in Rome, the life of a bourgeoise, a life ringed with dinner parties and triviality, that relegates the condition of the poor to being a subject for after dinner and finds more entertainment in frivolity. The second is to become a Marxist- who sees a system opressing the poor and responds in Irene's words by teaching the poor to hate the rich- the alternative does not attract Irene because it does not deal with the spiritual life of the poor and nor does it meet her real need, for a philosophy that can embrace the dead Michel as much the living suffering excluded citizens of Rome. Lastly she reaches a kind of individualistic Christianity- similar to that Rosselini discussed in Francesco Guilare di Dio- she recognises that the only route to salvation lies in becoming a holy fool.

The film is about the response of the rest of society to that decision: significantly of course what Irene finds is that being a holy fool is incompatible with modern capitalistic society. It is incompatible with modern morality- how for instance can she explain to her husband that she has deserted him to live with an ailing prostitute? The policeman suspects that when she appealed to a criminal to surrender himself and aided him to escape so that he would not be arrested with his family, she was infatuated with the criminal and not seeking his redemption. There are a thousand other examples where Irene's actions are either unbelievable or imprudent: this is a woman who is quite happy to give up an entire day so that another woman can go off to have a night with her boyfriend, a woman who never condemns, but who takes others as she finds them with all their sins. A woman who finds ultimately two truths to be central to her life: the first being that she has nothing but contempt for herself- that to quote Cromwell she is the 'worst of sinners'- and finds that as a resource to comfort others and who secondly decides that she cannot love those that are close to her unless she loves everyone, who finds that she cannot excuse the faults of those who are close to her (as her husband does with her) unless she can excuse the faults of all those who suffer and sin (including prostitutes and theives).

The Christian imagery pervades this film- Rosselini was seeking to see whether a St Francis could live in modern society and what he found was that she or he could, but only behind the gates of a mental asylum. Perhaps more impressive is what he finds as the content of the Christian message- like Bergman, Rosselini took refuge in the sense that the heart of Christianity was love- that everything else came second and should come second- and for Rosselini it is the practical and unjudging charity of Irene that is the centre of the Christian message. The priest in this drama is reduced to mumbling bourgeois banalities- and the Catholic church is at its most impressive only when it too recalls the medieval saints, it is religious in its ceremonies and yet not in its sanctimonies.

The film makes this point in lots of interesting ways. Firstly there are the spectacular performances- Ingrid Bergman was at the top of her proffession with such masterpieces as Notorious and Casablanca behind her and Autumn Sonata to come. Alexander Knox as her husband is equally impressive- his subtle and thoughtful performance is a wonder to watch and should be better known. Teresa Pellati as the prostitute, Ines, does a fine job. Some of the other performances particularly of the proletarian characters and Andrea the Marxist cousin do not work as well- Rosselini has partly romanticised the working classes here. Secondly though there is the direction- the use of shot is interesting. Rosselini indicates the shape of the story through his use of lighting and camera angles: so when Irene and George discuss her reaction to Michel's death, her face is clouded in shadow whilst his is lit fully denoting the fact that her reaction is more mysterious than his conventional grief and insistance that life must go on. Thirdly though the script occasionally particularly in the working class scenes is mawkish, at other points it is sublime- Bergman is given a wonderful speech to explain herself to a judge towards the end of the film which is one of the keys to understanding her freedom as a fool.

These three elements would mean nothing though without Rosselini's mind controlling and gathering the threads of his story: this is a film about the difficult subjects- love, religion, charity and the meaning of freedom- set in modernity. It is a film under the shadow of war and industrialisation- a film about a society where children have heard the bombs fall and where factories ressemble in their brutal mechanisation the machines of destruction. What Rosselini offers, like Bresson, is a Dosteovskyan message- a message that is difficult to homogenise with our categories of political thinking- that ethics not politics is the only way to rebuild something out of the chaos of modernity. That the ethical will be rejected and destroyed, but serene in their vanquished state. It is an argument that is suffused with a religion of a particular kind- which sees the centre of Christianity in love- the answer for Bergman to Neitsche's declaration of God's death was to declare that love did exist- and in a sense that is Rosselini's answer too. Abandoning prescription, the film is both a diagnosis of the condition of society- and the way that it is unethical and brutal- and a call to a renewed ethics. It has no politics- and Irene's religion is not prescriptive- but emancipatory and based on love.

Even if, like me, you do not accept the divine instigator that lies behind Irene's conversion, the argument that ultimately the only way to cope with modernism is to turn to ethics is an important one and an appealing one. Irene's life and personality may be utopian- like every holy fool before her and since- but it is an important thought experiment for it reminds us of how selfish and unloving our relationships with strangers often are.

The Giroux Affair

Philippe Giroux, a judge in the highest court in Burgundy in the 1630s, was in 1640 accused of murdering his own cousin Pierre Baillet and Baillet's valet, Philibert Neugot. He was furthermore accused of manufacturing evidence that a rival was a paedophile and rapist and suspicions hung over him that he had murdered his own wife in 1636, attempted to murder his mother in law and had had an adulterous affair with Baillet's wife, Marie Fyot. The trial took three years to come to a conclusion about Giroux, but the affair dragged on for several years with others like Fyot coming and going to court in Dijon and Paris. By the late 1650s, it was all over. Professor James Farr has written an excellent book about the whole process- which brings out several points I feel will be of interest.

Farr's research is extensive and relies heavily on the archival records of the trial- which are themselves profuse. In relying so, what he is able to do is to chart the process whereby Giroux was tried and imprisoned and later a verdict was found. His researches reveal the sources of power in 17th Century France. Giroux sat at the apex of Burgundian society in the 1630s, a client of the Prince de Conde, and a high official in a court that was presided over by his brother in law: his sources of official power were extensive. Thanks to his father Benoit's efforts he had also acquired substantial land holdings in Burgundy, a title and an impressive marriage into the local jurisprudential aristocracy. Giroux was able to use this power to acquire more: fees from his cases at the court for example allowed him to extend his land ownings. But also he was committed to serving his patrons, the Prince de Conde and those who stood beyond and above the Prince, the King of France and his Prime Minister, Richelieu.

The official lines of authority were one thing- but what Farr's extensive research makes clear is that here we see a combat between kin groups, client-groups which dominated the town of Dijon. These groups were based on family, patronage and employment patterns. Men like Giroux had patrons like Conde with whom they rose and fell and on whose support they depended: but Giroux too had a network of servants and friends within Burgundy who depended on his continuous success. When Giroux was imprisoned many of his servants were horrendously tortured- at least one died on the wheel (the most agonising death available to a seventeenth century man). You might fall when your patron fell- but equally you might fall if your patron lost interest in you. Giroux's fall is connected to the fact that by 1639-40 the Prince de Conde was beggining to lose interest in his protege: when Benoit went to attempt to save his son to see the Prince he was rejected and turned away. Giroux's enemies could strike as soon as the powerful shield of the Prince's influence was removed.

Politics was about the conjunction of official legal authority and that granted by patrons and client networks. The game of political intrigue though had two other characteristics. What people were battling for was money and land: a successful career meant a political career and could arouse envy, leading to the increase in numbers of enemies. For Giroux political abstention was not an option, rather for him and his family political and legal advance were dependent on each other. The converse to that is that political failure meant imprisonment or disgrace and death. The second issue that Farr highlights is the creation of a new political class: secular politics was shared now between noblemen like Conde and classically educated magistrates like Giroux. The rise of this class of individuals brought a change in morality- towards a neo-stoic idea of human behaviour which prioritised resistance to human passion and adherence to proffessional reason. Lastly this new class came to office at a time when France and Europe was reeling, from the effects of the disastrous wars of the century between 1550 and 1650 (the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War). Contemporary philosophy stressed the need for peace and the arts to maintain it: one might characterise Hobbes, Bodin and Grotius as major thinkers who dwelt on this subject and for them it meant the creation of an 'absolutist' state- the state that the likes of Giroux were to become the civil servants, lawyers and judges for.

Where does this leave us? What Farr's research cannot tell us is whether Giroux committed a murder- but what he does tell us is a more universal and in a sense more interesting point. He informs us about the way that Early Modern France and her legal system worked. Farr's work is an example of the way that crime can be useful for historians: a sensational case like the Giroux affair acts like a scalple, a society records its transactions and the reasons for them when prosecuting a member of the elite for a horrifying crime. It then reveals itself to the eager historian: and in a sense at the distance of several centuries what those revelations show is as interesting as the crime itself. Professor Farr's work is definitely interesting and well worth reading- he takes you through the case in a disciplined fashion and also explains what he feels are some of its trends. The case is interesting, the trends are fascinating and the research is impressive.

Henry Wallace's Chickens

Apologies for not posting much this week- a combination of illness, tiredness and being back at work led me to neglect the blog a little and tonight's article will not be a model of intellectual rigour. As I surfed the internet this evening, I found a rather interesting article on American Vice-Presidents- the job, turned down by many of the most notable citizens of the Republic, has been occupied sometimes by men whose conduct has excited disgust rather than respect. Most famously of all Aaron Burr left the Vice Presidency, fought a duel with Alexander Hamilton and was eventually prosecuted for treason. But there are ways of doing better after the Vice Presidency, succeeding more than Burr: one such success post Vice Presidency was Henry Wallace. Wallace was Roosevelt's second Vice President (1940-4) and a socialist: having failed to gain the Presidency for himself in 1948 and served a term as Secretary of Commerce, Wallace retired from politics and became an agricultural expert. He eventually bred a new type of chicken- a type that eventually became dominant in the agricultural chicken market.

Wallace's success in this new career prompts two thoughts. One is that Wallace was a uniquely American type of politician- he was the son of a former Cabinet member but before his first appointment to Roosevelt's cabinet (as Secretary of Agriculture in 1932) he was an innovative and successful farmer. Like Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Steven Chu or Alexander Haig, Wallace was a success outside as well as inside politics. As for example one would expect Rice to return to Stanford and continue her academic career, as Haig returned to command NATO and Chu will return to science, Wallace returned to agriculture. Perhaps as well though what Wallace's career demonstrates is that though Enoch Powell was right- that every political career ends in failure (and one might add that every career ends in retirement!)- that is not the end of people's productive and important lives. Wallace's subsequent career suggests to me the fallacy of assuming that anyone has one vocation or one career: that image is a falsehood. Wallace went through several transitions- he may have ended a socialist but he began a liberal Republican. We often assume consistency about people's lives by looking backwards through their lives- if we look forwards I think we see in Wallace an able man from outside politics coming into it for fifteen years and then leaving it and continuing to use his other talents, furthermore we see a person whose career was not exactly predictable- liberal Republican turns to Democrat and becomes too leftwing for Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman.

Wallace's career reminds one of how unpredictable careers are and how unpredictable history is. Henry Wallace deserves remembering in history not merely for his fairly successful political career- but for his amazing career as a chicken breeder.

Great Books

The thesis that Great Books are the source of education is one that has a long historical pedigree: one particular facet of that debate is explored in a book reviewed in the city journal recently. But regardless of that article, it is a debate which is worth having. I have a problem with a great books approach- not because I think great books should not be read (the thesis that Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Mill, Nozick and the rest are wiser than the average citizen, average student, academic or dare I say it blogger is one that I do not object to at all) but because you cannot understand great books appropriately without reading them in context.

The arguments that I will make here are more fully developed by Quentin Skinner. Essentially you can view every book or argument as existing on its own- and also as existing within a context. Every book has a long context and a short context. Take Hobbes- his Leviathan is definitely based on a reading of Thucydides (he translated the Greek historian after all) and Aristotle, mentioned in the text. But Hobbes's Leviathan is also based, as Professor Skinner has discussed, on arguments going on at the same time between theorists like Francis Rous the younger and Anthony Ascham about the nature of political promises. You cannot understand Hobbes without understanding that he was deliberately responding to both kinds of debate. Even better take a text like Locke or one of Plato's dialogues, both of these are not merely implicitly aimed at contemporary debates, but explicitly. Locke's Treatises are directed against Sir Robert Filmer. Plato's characters in his dialogues are often contemporary philosophical figures: it would be stupid not to realise that Plato was in dialogue with those philosophers.

Context is important- both for understanding what a text was written for and to understand what the words within a text actually mean (even if a text is doing something with those words which attack the contemporary definitions- Hobbes and natural law is a great example). On the other hand, there is another principle we should not forget: we should not fence in great texts behind walls of obscurity. I have no problem with the term middle brow- and indeed the more people read these texts the better. That is because the texts often do something to the people who read them: Livy for instance is a text who I only know in isolation (I have read a smattering of other Roman sources) but it is one that is enriching my mind at the moment, provoking my historical instincts and giving me food for thought. Learning is hard- but we only stop the process by suggesting that there are two alternatives absolute knowledge (for which context is indispensible) and absolute ignorance: actually learning is a process as well as a destination and the process is personally important. If we recognise that then we can see that a great books approach is a good didactic tool- go out and read Cicero and Plato and Locke and Rousseau- but as well go deeper and read around, read the historians who have studied the context and the sources which are the context ultimately of the great books you read.

Plunder and War

After repeated Volscian provocations, the Romans eventually invaded and despoiled Volscian territory: Livy describes the differences between what the Romans and Volscians did in this way,

The Roman devastation of the land was consequently quite unlie the sporadic forays made by the Volscians who, like bandits, relied on disagreements between their enemies, but feared their courage, and acted in nervous haste; it was carried out by a regular army in lawful retaliation and did more damage because it was not pressed for time. The Volscians had in fact limited their incursions to frontier regions, for fear that any minute an army might march out from Rome. The Romans on the other hand had a further reason for lingering in enemy territory; they hoped to provoke the Volscians to give battle. And so they burnt down all the farm buildings everywhere and even some of the villages, left not a single fruit tree nor an ear of corn standing to give hope of a harvest, took off as booty all the men and cattle outside the town walls, and then brought both armies back to Rome. (VI 31)

The Romans were obviously, if we believe Livy's account, more vicious than their Volscian enemies: the impact of a Roman raid was deeper than the impact of a Volscian incursion. The real issue is why. Livy offers us an answer- which is that the Volscians feared a Roman army more than the Romans feared a Volscian. He bases this argument upon the fact that Rome was a civic society whereas the Volscians were an agrarian one. This suggestion deserves our attention- however even if we accept Livy's social division I think we can go further than the Roman historian in attributing reasons behind his observed distinction.

Two things instantly come to mind. The first is that the purpose of the Volscian invasion was not neccessarily the same as the purpose of the Roman invasion. Livy may, reading his sources, be confusing Volscian invasions with Volscian cattle raids: raids across the border which sought plunder and had no political purpose. It seems to me pretty obvious that this would be the basis for much interraction between Roman and barbarian across whichever frontier that they lived upon. On the other hand, the action that Livy describes is the civic response to those raids- a punitive expedition which is designed to punish and not merely to plunder. The first kind of invasion is a quick attack for the purpose of gathering booty- as soon as you have your goods, your interest is to get back to enjoy the proceeds of your raid. The second expedition is designed to punish the raiders- and so you go as deep as you can and punish as much as you can. The second thing, tied to the first, is that the Romans may have been much more coordinated than the Volscians- they had an army as opposed to a raiding band and so their damage could have been organised, instead of a matter of whim. With a more methodical approach, more devastation could be achieved: organised violence can be more focussed and hence more damaging than disorganised violence.

The basis for Livy's point is his division between civic and barbarian societies: he may not at this point in Roman history be right- indeed I would suggest that Livy is still writing without evidence particularly without the Volscian side of the story. More often than not, I would suggest, he bases these ideas upon his own knowledge, gathered through conversations with Augustan commanders about their relations with Germans on the frontier. Be wary though of the dichotomies that Livy invokes: it may be that really what we are looking at is not so much the dichotomy of ability to commit violence between these two types of society as a dichotomy of intention. As I have suggested if you intend to gather wealth, then devastation is an incidental byproduct, if you intend to punish then devastation is your first principle and hence you are going to devastate more. There may be organisational differences as well- but this point explains the cowardice of the Volscians better than any story of Roman bravery: Volscians retreated before an army because their purpose was to get plunder, not to fight, the Romans sought to fight because they wished to destroy the raiding capacity of the Volscians.

In this sense, I think, if we unpick Livy's narrative, we can both see his assumptions (the virtues of civic society) and also the reasons that lie behind some of what he observed (of the Volscian-Germans) : it may not always be that societies differ in courage or moral intention, but it may be that their activities have different consequences because they have different purposes. The Volscians sought to gather goods, the Romans sought to punish them for gathering goods and that explains the difference in their actions when on enemy territory and also the different impact of their raiding.

Marcus Manlius Rex

Tyranny and Kingship in Livy's view are not so distinct from democracy. Rome's constitution included a democratic element though it was a republic- and as we have seen the people within Rome were incredibly important to the proper functioning of that republic. This though establishes a problem within Livy's thought. If tyranny and democracy are related, then how can the Roman Republic which is partly a democracy hope to survive. Livy in my view was aware of this issue- obviously as a historian he does not need to provide a complete answer- indeed he could have argued that the events of his father's generation (Clodius, Catilina and Caesar) demonstrated the real danger of the demos overthrowing the constitution- but what he did need to show was how the Republic might survive a democratic and tyrannical challenge. The tale of the rise and fall of Marcus Manlius- whose importance within the history of money we have dealt with already- gives us an interesting indication of what Livy thought: both because the tale contains the most explicit appeal yet to the democratic power of the tyrant and just as importantly because it contains the most important answer- from the Roman tribunes- to the arguments of the tyrant.

Marcus Manlius makes his appeal to the citizens of Rome based upon their own circumstances- they have been enslaved by debt collectors and usurers. The substance of his allegations need not concern us for the minute- it is his solution to the problems that I think is more interesting. Livy gives him a speech (as it was delivered within the house of a secret conspiracy, I think we can be pretty sure that Livy had no way of knowing what this speech contained) and that speech gives us Manlius's political doctrine. Manlius calls on the people to create for him a 'more striking title of authority and honour' than dictatorship or the consulship, he can only be thinking in the context of the royal title. (VI 19) He calls for them to do this because he suggests that 'it is easier to establish rule over the patricians than it was to establish resistance to their rule' (VI 19). His argument is that the patricians will always win, despite the parchment barriers they have erected to abuses, in any contest between the classes because they control the instruments of state. Manlius, with Livy as his temporary ventriloquist, is suggesting that the democratic cause can only be protected by dictatorship- because only then can class differences be levelled- only through tyranny can the plebeians attain liberty.

The argument against him is most powerfully stated by Quinctius Publilius. Speaking to the Senate, again with ventriloquist Livy at his service, Publilius says,

Why are we turning into a conflict between the senate and the people what should be no more than the action of the state against a single obnoxious individual? Why involve the people in our attack on him, when it is safer to attack him by means of the people, so that he will collapse under the weight of his own strength?

The point that Publilius is making is important because ultimately it is the argument which carries force with Livy. It is that the actions of Manlius are in reality about himself- they are the actions of a proud man who uses the people, who gives them a temporary respite in order to create a party and a tyranny and then will like Tarquin before him desert them. Of course on this occasion, the Roman people see through Manlius's disguise- Livy judges that the charges must have been 'convincing' and that the people judged Manlius to have been a traitor (VI 19). The real sorrow over Manlius's death, Livy tells us, was not because anyone was not converted by the senate's arguments but because of the military courage of the accused, his courage in aiding the defeat of the Gauls made the Commons blanche before they passed the sentence of death, but after a pause, they did pass that sentence. What he shows in this episode is that Manlius's arguments, his blandishments are defeated because it is proven that he seeks for tyranny and not the popular good: he voices the popular good but the people were in the end convinced that he only does that for his own aggrandisment.

We see here Livy develop two themes of his history. The story of Manlius with his rise, and eventual and quite literal fall (he was pushed off the Tarpeian rock to his doom) serves as a means to explain something that Livy wants us to understand. He wants us to appreciate three points: firstly that tyranny has an appeal, particularly to the democratic elements in Rome. Secondly he wants us to appreciate that despite that, on this occasion, the constitutional establishment were able to trump that appeal with the revelation that the tyrant sought only his own good and not that of Rome. Lastly Livy wants us to see the value of this myth of Rome within Roman society: it promoted stability and constitutionalism against threats from those who would seek civil war. The issue that Livy was never able to answer- though I reckon he pondered through the form of his history- was why the argument that he thought had succeeded against Manlius failed later.

William Marshall: Knighthood, War and Chivalry 1147-1219

William Marshall, knight, Earl of Pembroke and Regent of England (1216-19) was a formidable figure within his own times: he was also a unique figure, being the only lay non-royal Englishman to have had a biography written about him in the early Middle Ages. Professor David Crouch has written a biography about Marshall which has several points of interest. Professor Crouch obviously knows the sources surrounding Marshall- he edited the most important of those sources- Marshall's biography for its publication in 2002, but he also is the first biographer to make extensive use of Marshall's charters which give us a reliable idea of who were his followers and knights. Marshall deserves a biography and deserves a biographer like this, one whose knowledge of Marshall's milieu is uncontestable.

Marshall was the son of a West Country nobleman who held an office at court (that of Marshall)- John Marshall was involved in the wars between Stephen and Matilda (the young William was held as hostage and at one point, King Stephen threatened to fire the live boy from a catapult over the walls of his father's castle, John Marshall replied that he had a hammer and anvil to make more sons!) When John Marshall died however it was his oldest son, John Marshall (II) who gained his lands. William was left to fend for himself. Crouch demonstrates here the way that Marshall did eventually gain lands- he followed a path that others too in different ways followed across the Middle Ages. Firstly he became a knight in the following of an important lord- Henry the Young King and later other members of the royal family. Then thanks to his connections at court he acquired the right to manage an estate of a dead lord for the King- in his case the Earldom of Pembroke where he was awarded the right and where Pembroke had left only a daughter- Marshall married the daughter to himself and hence acquired the lands and later the title.

Marshall's succession to his title and estates demonstrates how important political favour was in medieval England- primogeniture had not yet become a stable method of inheritance and Kings had power over the lands of those who died with minors as their heirs. Marshall exploited the second situation- not merely to acquire the hand of Isabelle and her lands- but also in forging political alliances. Crouch offers evidence that John of Earley, one of Marshall's wards, was married to a member of Marshall's family. This though brings us to a second key point which is that the power of an early medieval English magnate depended upon his access to and success with the King. In general Marshall was a plantagenet loyalist- only twice in his life (once with Henry II when the young King and his brothers fell out with their father) and secondly with John in 1206-7 did Marshall fall out with the reigning King. The consequences were dramatic- in 1206-7 notable knights in Marshall's retinue deserted him and the Earl lost royal offices and castles across the West Country and Welsh Marches.

Marshall's power depended upon his courtliness. Crouch is aware of this and towards the end of his study presents us with three thematic chapters- dwelling on Marshall's retinue of knights, courtliness and chivalry. The first chapter shows us the way that Marshall created and sustained a group of knights. Crouch argues that this represents one of the first intrusions into British history of that complicated concept, bastard feudalism. William's following depended not so much upon complicated tenurial structures within the Marches and the south west- indeed very few of his tenants were found amidst his following- but upon his own abilities to patronise. Hence he appointed his men as sensachels or sherrifs in his country and fitted them with weapons and horses- they were bound to him for the receipt of offices not of lands. There are many learned descriptions of the evolution of English feudalism- from the conqueror's men who dominated through tenurial relationships to the more complicated situations in the wars of the Roses- but Crouch definitely shows that Marshall's lordship represents a milestone along that route.

Lordship in the Middle Ages was bound up with ideas about ethics. One might represent those ideas in two parts- chivalry and courtliness. To succeed as a secular nobleman one had to have both attributes- one had to be judged as a preudehomme and also seen as a courtly and sensible counciller. The first attribute was not that of some Arthurian knight: rather a preudehomme was a man who could stand up for himself, was manly, able on the battlefield and in the tournament and would not take a slight without complaining. A courtier though was a different kind of human being- a man who could survive in the hostile, backbiting atmosphere of the court, who was suave and thoughtful. Those two attributes seem in some sense to conflict- and a medieval lord like Marshall had to observe the thin line between losing his status as an admirable knight and losing his head if he responded too eagerly to his lord the King. Marshall did manage it- but it is worth noting the dilemma and Crouch illustrates it well for us in his last chapters.

Crouch's book therefore is an interesting and thoughtful medieval biography. It lacks somewhat in that it is limited by the evidence for Marshall's life- particularly his early life is not covered well and Crouch presumes that is because the biographer had no access to men who had lived during that period. Lots therefore has to be assumed. Marshall's interior world again is something we can infer things about, but we cannot know like we can with a modern subject whose letters are available to us. Crouch though tells his story with verve and skill- his writing makes a great deal of use of modern analogy (perhaps for my liking too much!) but it is readable. The points he makes are interesting- and Marshall's life is intrinsically fascinating and well worth finding out about.

Violence

Rumbold rightly argues on Pickled Politics that it is difficult to estimate violence in the early modern period- he points to and explains a fascinating debate between Lawrence Stone and James Sharpe in the pages of Past and Present about the question of how much violence there really was. I would suggest you read his piece as I have nothing much to add to its description of the debate. What is worth adding though are two additional reasons why murder rates in particular might not denote levels of violence and secondly why levels of violence might not correlate to psychological feelings of insecurity.

Murder rates might not relate that well to levels of violence because of improved medicine. It is a commonplace of modern discussion of the battlefield in the early modern or medieval period that you were as likely to die from your wounds as you were from a blow which killed you. The same must be true of murder: I would imagine that many died a couple of days after or even more they were murdered. In some cases- where there was internal organ damage for example- I would imagine that the death might not even be described as murder. This both exaggerates the early modern figure- the numbers who died say from a beating would be higher if there was no doctor around with a knowledge of how to deal with head wounds- and it might also diminish that rate: the figure for modern murders includes things that in medieval and early modern times would not have been connected to the original act which led to them.

The psychological point is just as interesting. Imagine you got involved in a fight. If you are a modern city denizen that's probably one of the very few physical encounters that you get involved in: if you were an early modern citizen you would be involved in physical encounters every day- an overwhelmingly rural population would have to for a start cope physically with livestock. Violence in that sense must have been more common- in that violence, physical hardship is more common on a farm or in a field than in a modern office block. Psychologically the way that violence hit people would have been different just because of the different nature of their lives. Pain would have been more common as another example because of the absense of any pain killers- if pain instead of being unpleasant and irregular was a constant unpleasant echo to life itself then you might have a different reaction to the somebody causing you pain. That is not to say that violence would have felt any less terrible: just that it would have felt different and that may effect the perception of the level of it within society.

I can't add to Rumbold's arguments here- I think they are right. What I would argue though is that we can add reasons to suggest that comparison between the early modern and modern periods is difficult. Both because we may be comparing unlike things- incidents that would have been murders in the past may not be now thanks to medicine, incidents that might be now would not be in the past thanks to more sophisticated understandings of what causes death. Also even if levels of violence were higher or lower than now, the impact of that level of violence on people would have been different because of the radically different lives that they lived. As Rumbold argues such doubts are not an indication that we should stop thinking about the historical issues- merely that we should examine and re-examine our assumptions about them. Doing so may well teach us about the way that we understand violence and murder, their place in our society and the trajectory that such crimes are on.

The Body of a Greek God

Greek Gods were not like the 'gods' of the West. Zeus was unlike the Jewish, Christian or Muslim God- he was unlike them both in having colleagues, or either sex, in having a geneaology and a succession, powers limited to a region of the world and his own set of special tools (the thunderbolts). When we turn to look at the Gods of Greece we look at entities which are not the same as our own deities- and thinking about them according to the categorisation that we have developed for whatever God we believe in or oppose may not be useful. Ancient and particularly archaiac Greek polytheism- which is really what we are talking about here- is a very different beast to modern religion.

It is a different beast in part, as Jean Pierre Vernant argues, because we have two related attitudes to the body which the Greeks did not have. The Archaic Greeks did not believe that the body and soul were distinct entities and they did not believe that the body was something separate that one could study. For them the body was the person: this breeds that remarkable Greek attitude (remarkable to anyone brought up in a culture based on the separation of body and soul) that the external beauty of the body reflects moral virtue, that ugliness is in some sense a moral hazard. If the Greeks did not accept a fundamental division between body and soul, neither did they accept a fundamental division between nature and supernature. Zeus and Aphrodite slept with mortals, Ares battled with them on the planes of Troy and a mortal (Paris) was even appointed to arbiter between Aphrodite, Athena and Hera when they were in discord. We should not be surprised to find both these ideas- that the human being was indivisible and that the Gods and humans lay on a continuum influencing what the Greeks understood by a divine body.

The Greek conception of a human body was that it was perishable- every Menelaus turning eventually into Nestor, every Helen into Aethra. Throughout life the body needed revitalising by sleep (Hupnos) and eventually of course the term of the body ran out and the being became subject to the twin brother of Hupnos, Thanatos or Death. The Gods though were not mortal but immortal- in that sense they had 'super' bodies. Aphrodite's beauty was distinct from Helen in that it would not fade. The predicate of immortality was fastened to these 'super' bodies- but also they were exalted because of the nature of their beauty- as the Homeric Hymn comments on the Ionians at the island of Delos 'an unexpected guest would think them immortal and free from old age for he would see grace in all of them'. Notice that immortality comes with extraordinary grace or beauty or indeed strength (hence Apollo can kick away the fortifications of the Argives at Troy like sandcastles on a beech despite their great efforts to construct them). Beauty, strength and grace are all opposites to decay, to old age and ultimately to death- hence they are predicates or permanence: Keats was right in the Ode to the Grecian Urn that one of the great issues in Greece was of the immortality of beauty and that if beauty was immortal it was divine and hence true.

A last thing that Vernant notes that I found very interesting is the way that Greek Gods intervene in the world. Whether it is Odysseus meeting Nausicaa or similarly meeting Telemachus in Ithaca, Athena gives him added lustre. Interestingly that is accompanied by Odysseus getting dressed- and that moves us on to another interesting aspect of the Greek attitude to the body. They saw the aspects of the body whether it be the armour of Achilles or the thunderbolt of Zeus as parts of that body. When Pandora was created, she was created with all the implements of seduction, jewelry, dress and necklace. This adds another metaphor about divine intervention in the world of the human- the Gods putting on (like Prometheus did to Ajax) the hero courage and other attitudes. In a sense, as the outward persona and the inward persona are the same and the body shapes (in our language) the mind, dress becomes a signifier of a change within a person: a God can achieve this but so could a person by dressing themselves.

What Vernant gets here, and I think it is interesting, is a different mentality and way of seeing the world based on a series of very simple assumptions about the world- in which the Greeks and we differ. I want to finish on a caution though- I have relied on his research- and yet there is a reason to be sceptical. It is incredibly difficult to get to a different mentality and there is the potential for evidence to be used and chosen selectively: Vernant seems to use enough evidence to suggest he is not doing this- and even if he has constructed a whole out of a series of shards which denote something else, I think what he has constructed is interesting. It is a different way of viewing the world which leads to several basic assumptions that we all make being discarded, part of the reason to think about history is to realise how strange the past was (History as C.S. Lewis suggested is a traveller wondering through distinct, strange and wonderful territory)- in that sense Vernant succeeds in providing us with a strange and novel vision of the world. The Greek view of the divine body and the human body and its relationship was a fascinating one- and deserves to be understood partly because it is so counter intuitive and strange to those reared in a world that assumes a mind body, nature supernature duality.

Computers and Books

Stacy's post on Huntingdon's Clash of Civilisations is well written and thought out. But Stacy's post exemplifies something more than that- something that I often try to do on this blog. It is to take something that does not exist on the net- a book, a film, whatever- and to record your impressions on the net. That kind of article seems to me to distill something for the reader- gives the reader something that they could not find themselves unless they devoted time to reading an hundred pages of Livy or a passage of Huntingdon. I do not underrate the things that you can find on the internet- the Old Bailey website as I have commented before is a key resource for this blog- but I do think that the best blogs are about something more than a dialogue within the internet. Like Ashok for example, they take texts and arguments from outside the net and explain, refine and consider them within the internet. The net here becomes a mere extension of the Republic of Letters- an extension which allows everyone to write a common place book.

I was provoked to this by reading an article from the Scientific American about how we process text. It is an interesting article which argues that reading on the net involves more distractions and makes cognition and comprehension harder- as I read a page on the internet, I have to adapt to colours and adverts- often moving adverts. I find the argument that that changes the experience of reading and perhaps makes it a less intense and 'thick' experience quite convincing. The means of communication may make concentration harder: and in a sense blogging itself is a medium which does not require as much concentration as reading a book. I would expect you to take a couple of minutes to read this article- and then you might pass over to read something else either on this blog or another. Personally this form helpful to distill my arguments about longer passages- like a book or film- but I would find it hard to read for much further than the 10,000th word of an article (trust me on this having written a PhD I have had to read 80,000 words on a screen, it was painful!) Blogging works online because it allows us not to develop major ideas or scholarly rigour- we have neither space nor time- but it allows a common place book, recording impressions and ideas and hopefully developing a community around each blog which discusses and thinks about similar things.

Fortress Netherlands

This scene is not unfamiliar in Dutch art. It shows soldiers gathering and playing cards, presumably in a garrison town. I found this aspect of Israel's history of the Dutch state one of the most interesting and thought I'd note down some of his arguments. Essentially the Dutch state from the 16th Century onwards was threatened over both its southern and eastern land borders by Spain: their response was to create vast fortresses across the country which protected those borders. Such garrison towns saw large numbers of soldiers gather together with ordinary civilians. As Israel notes this had an important effect on the Dutch army: leading to a focus on discipline. It also stimulated an economy within garrison towns that was dependent on the disposition of the troops- whether prostitution or gambling or legal activities- many townsmen and women relied on the troops for their own sustenance. This is interesting- and it emphasizes something which I think is always worth considering- the influence of large armies on the economies and cultures of the societies that they dominate and protect. I don't want to go beyond Israel's arguments because I am tired and incapable of critical thought- but I do think that his points are interesting enough for us to note- and apply in other situations.

Law Enforcement

Johann Van Banchem was one of the people involved in the lynching of the prominent Dutch statesmen Cornelius and Jan de Witt in 1672, Van Banchem was awarded for his part in the murder with an appointment as Bailiff in the Hague. Eventually though he fell foul of the authorities there for the way that he exerted his authority in the Hague and was himself imprisoned in 1576, eventually dying in prison, after numerous appeals (which had not finished at his death) twenty years later. The story is simple and you might say is a morality tale of a kind- but it is more interesting than that, because the later bit of it, the charges against Van Banchem as a magistrate, illustrate the way that bailiffs had to operate in 17th Century Holland and the way that they had to get close to the criminals that they were supposed to control.

Pieter Wagenaar and Otto Van Meij wrote a fascinating paper on Van Banchem than analyses his methods in exerting his authority in the Hague and the way that he used it. Part of his job involved the supression of what we might loosely term 'sexual morality': he was supposed to stop prostitution, adultery and fornication amongst the population of the Hague. The Republic (in common with other seventeenth century regimes- England in the 1650s is a good example) had made such activities illegal and expected their magistrates to make an effort to suppress them- we should understand that in the context of the Dutch effort to create a civic sober society. Van Banchem was later accused of consorting with prostitutes, allowing brothels (including within his own house) and letting men off with payments of large fines.

For a moment it is worth considering how he got into this situation- and what Wagenaar and Van Meij show is that he got into this position in the course of his normal legal duties. The problem in the seventeenth century was that adultery left no incriminating traces- a man might always deny his offence unless you caught him in the actual act. Without a large investigatory police force or modern forensic techniques, in order to prosecute, Van Banchem and his fellow magistrates had to rely on informers- normally amongst the city population of prostitutes. Van Banchem often sought to put up these prostitutes in houses that he knew- where he could conceal himself and his officers. Sometimes this meant concealing them in his own house and trapping the offenders there. Setting up brothels and consorting with prostitutes was a consequence of lacking the power to investigate crimes. Likewise when Van Banchem took bribes to stop a case proceeding to court- what he was doing was not uncommon in Holland- he was protecting the social structure at the price of the moral law, two sets of values came into conflict and Van Banchem like most magistrates knew that over zealotry was not what was required in cases involving significant gentlemen.

There are aspects of the Van Banchem case which to a Dutch 17th Century eye would look suspicious- he did for instance (after his wife's death) invite a former prostitute into his house as his maid and let her sleep in the room next to his. Other 'offences' we can clearly see were related to the internal politics of the Hague: Van Banchem was accused of imprisoning offenders in his own house- he did that because of a jurisdictional conflict between the Supreme Court of the Hague and the aldermen of the town about where prisoners should be kept. Van Banchem's prosecution also has to be related to his political situation- eventually he upset important factions within the town. The issue is that most of what he did, he had to do in the normal course of his duties- it was impossible to attack the problems that he was expected to attack without using informers, possibly framing suspects, in the context of the Hague using his own house as a prison and a brothel: furthermore his position exposed him to the danger of intimacy with prostitutes and therefore to the temptation to his maid-mistress. What I think is interesting about this is how easy it was to prosecute a magistrate for performing what many others were doing- if Wagenaar and Van Meij are right, what we have here is a fascinating situation which reveals a lot about early modern law enforcement- particularly in the area of sexual morality.

What it reveals is that in order to enforce sexual laws, the magistrate had to find informers from inside the class of those who broke the sexual law. To stop adultery he had to locate and use the women with which men most usually committed adultery- prostitutes. To maintain the social structure, he had to bend the law occasionally. To play the political game aright, he had to be sensitive to competing claims and avoid offense- sometimes this would involve ignoring potential problems and dealing with issues sine jure. We can see all this in the Van Banchem case because we have the records of the court: but I (like Wagenaar and Van Meijj) would suggest this happened a great deal more than it might appear.

When Lear says 'Hark in thy ear, change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief', he may have meant more than our modern glosses might have it. To be a judge in the early modern period meant getting very close to the criminal as you sought to find him, prove his offence and punish him.

Old Bailey Wiki

I have often, as probably you have noticed, used the Old Bailey website as a repositary of interesting information to supply material for posts: I hope that historians are using it in the same way for more proffessional work. Its incredibly heartening therefore to see via Early Modern Notes that a wiki has been started about the proceedings: it will add information on the trials, on who was there, what they were doing at the same time and at other points in their lives and other interesting material. If it succeeds, it could become an indispensible resource. If you ever find someone that you have some information upon in the Old Bailey online records, I suggest you go across and add that information to the Wiki, so that everyone can profit from it and use it in order to further their own research- this seems to me to be a really good idea.

Its also an interesting idea because it illustrates how the web can be used by academics. Beyond devising things that other academics can use- an important branch of the use of the web by academics- I'd personally like to see academics using the web more often. In history for example I think it can provide a useful way of academics engaging with a wider public- historians who wrote blogs could contribute to helping others to understand the subject. A blog like this in a way tries to do a little of that- but there are far better historians out there than me and quite often all I do is rely on the research of others and supply my own thoughts. There are some really good historical blogs of course- but it should be more mainstream within the historical community and other academic disciplines- there are some great blogs out there, but there is space for increase as well. As a new generation, we are told, makes the transition to the web- its important that this medium is used as a way of publically educating people to understand the world around them. Furthermore in the world of the long tail, the web performs a useful function where people who might be interested in a subject, but unable for geographical, employment or other reasons from accessing that subject normally, can access it through the click of a mouse and the movement of a cursor.

The world of academia should not be confined to a discussion within the ivory towers- but should look outwards.

Welfare, Religion and Immigration

One of the major problems of modernity is the difficulties related to concentrations of wealth, immigration and the demands of the poor for welfare. Poor immigrants migrate to richer regions in pursuit of higher wages and thus face universal welfare states with the challenge of how to treat them until they too grow richer. That problem is visible in the United States, Western Europe and even Eastern China: it will probably become a problem in India soon and underlies some of the issues in Israel and Palestine. It is a very interesting and difficult issue for policy makers- and yet it is assumed that it is a new problem, it is not- and I think it is interesting to look at an older treatment of the same issues in the 17th Century Netherlands- not because the alternative is neccessarily better but because it is an alternative way of thinking about the issues that we all face today.

The Netherlands in the 17th Century was an incredibly rich economy- it retained its dominance of the poor trades I noted below- and extended that dominance into luxury goods, like imports from the Americas and Indies. The effect on wages within the Netherlands was dramatic- whereas after 1590 in Western Europe the general trend was for living standards to fall- in the Netherlands wages continued to rise. In 1585 wages in the north were similar to those in the south, by 1609 Willem Usselincx warned that wages were making Dutch industry uncompetitive. Wages in Leiden for example were more than 50% higher than those in Ghent or Bruges for the same jobs. At Antwerp, a high wage city in the south, a bricklayer might earn between 12 to 14 stuivers a day, in Leiden, Delft or Alkmaar such a labourer earned 22 to 24 stuivers a day. The Southern Netherlands had higher wages than Germany, France or England at this point- and despite higher taxes and rentals, it is true to argue that the Northern Netherlands was in general wealthier than the south or any other area within Europe.

What this caused was massive immigration to the north across the century. Recalling that most cities in the early modern period saw no natural increases and increased generally due to immigration, the figures for increases in Dutch cities are incredible across the period we are discussing. Amsterdam's population went from 30,000 in 1570 to 140,000 in 1647- the space of a lifetime. Leiden's population quadrupled in the same period. The Hague's population went from 5,000 to 18,000 people. Haarlem, Rotterdam and Middleburg's population tripled. Enkhuizen, Doordrecht and Hoorn doubled in size. It is quite incredible to think in that case of the repeated plagues that destroyed the Dutch urban population in this time- in 1602 it is estimated that 15% of the population of Amsterdam died whilst epidemics afflicted Leiden about once every ten years. Main sources of immigrants included of course the rural Netherlands, but also the southern Netherlands, Lutheran Germany and England. Within the Republic you ended up with two economies though- one based on the maritime West which thrived and the other on the rural East which declined relatively in the early 17th Century.

We have therefore wage disparity and we have massive immigration- the problem that the Dutch government faced from this was a pretty interesting one and its a familiar one, how do you create out of the immigrants that come in a citizen body. The Dutch had at least one answer that ressembles thinking at the moment: they generally based their distribution on historical lists- stopping payments from going to new immigrants. New Immigrants could not expect any money- they were expected to find jobs as they arrived. One thing that the Dutch had which modern societies do not neccessarily have was that the pull to the Netherlands was in part an ideological pull- towards a republican Calvinism that attracted migrants from the southern Netherlands and the rest of the Protestant Northern European landmass. But what they also used was welfare. Welfare in the Netherlands was, as Sir William Temple argued, far in advance of anything else seen in Europe. One English observer compared the Dutch mental hospitals to the houses of noblemen in England, Cosimo de Medici, son of the Duke of Tuscany, was astounded, reporting on the cleanliness and good order in which inmates were kept, Sir Dudley Carleton compared the Dutch system to that of a well run house. In a sense there was a simple economic rationale behind this- in a system that had an excess of employment and sucked up immigrants like a hoover, orphans could be put to use spinning twine, the poor could be turned into prosperous workers. Definitely that was part of the ideology of these programs- the deserving poor received money to return to work.

There is something else going on here though of interest and that is that welfare was tied within the Netherlands to identity. Firstly it was a privilege granted to religious establishments to cater for their own people- Jews, Lutherans, Calvinists and others had extensive facilities and lists of the deserving poor: significantly those like the Catholics perceived as dangers to the state were not included within this social compact. Secondly these programs were seen as a way to strengthen civic identity, in Middleberg in 1602 orphans were clothed in uniforms with the emblem of the city on their right sleeve. In Haarlem likewise uniforms denoted the status of being poor- but also the pride of the city in caring for its own. Regents, leading town officials, took an important interest in all the functionings of the Dutch welfare system- at Goes for example three regents presided over the town hospital. Civic identity here maintained something as important- an ideal of the Netherlands as a godly society- as Israel says welfare measures were tied as well to laws penalising drunkenness, licentiousness and rowdiness. These laws were the other side of the coin of sustaining a virtuous citizendry.

We should understand the aspirations of the governors of the Netherlands as being to create a citizen- as well as a state. The godly citizen, soberly going about his business, was a political creation- a political creation to both inculcate reason within the general population and to stimulate economic growth but also to fortify the polity. It is not advisable to draw lines between centuries- but in a sense I think we can see the Netherlands facing a real modern problem- that of immigration and republicanism, of geographical wage inequality. Whether the mixture of religion and welfare that they crafted to meet the problem was right is another matter- but it is interesting to see that it was in the Netherlands, possibly the most dynamic, cosmopolitan and tolerant society of 17th Century Europe, that you see the development of this type of welfare state- flowing out of civic and religious pride and ultimately towards the ends of the Republic itself. In a sense, the institutions of welfare in the Netherlands demonstrated that the country was, in Machiavelli's words, a republic designed for increase.

Intolerable Cruelty

The intolerable cruelty of the Coen Brother's film is on the surface easy to believe in: it is the intolerable cruelty of hypocrisy. The film is about what we might call the business of divorce: George Clooney sits on one side of that business as a lawyer who is the cleverest practitioner of the hostile break up, Catherine Zeta Jones sits on the other side as a woman committed to getting ahead in the world through her sex appeal and her callous willingness to leave husbands as soon as she can reap a reward from them. The two of them fence deliciously through the film- but over the film hovers this reality, that no-one believes what they say and furthermore no-one's actions conform to their statements. The assumption is that if you say I love you- you mean I'm going to divorce you in three months and take you for all the money I can get. In some sense Zeta Jones and her coterie define marriage as a very expensive form of prostitution- where divorce is the payoff for three months of a young woman having sex with an older man. In a sense the film is about whether that understanding of marriage is true or not- or whether it is true in every case as it is evidently (in the world of the film and perhaps outside) true in some cases. The problem is whether the film ever convincingly addresses or answers that question- I, as this review will show, am not sure that it does.

The counter argument to the cynical case against marriage is made by Clooney and Zeta Jones's relationship. They fall in love and ultimately, with some moments of tension, they marry and genuinely seem to disavow the option of divorce. That means something but the problem is that the meaning of that statement does not come with as much zest as does the cynical attack on marriage. The latter is made wittily through humour- a point impressed by the Coen brothers' contempt for their characters and its a point that everyone can enjoy. Clooney and Zeta Jones are at their most conventional when they make the conventional argument- that marriage is a commitment which requires you to stop identifying your selfish interests and start identifying your interests as a couple, as a unit- and thus they are at their most uninteresting. They look into each other's eyes, they embrace, they even profess earnestness. The problem with the couple is that they lose their sense of humour when they fall in love- contrast that to the great age of Hollywood comedies that the Coens wish us to remember and the problem is that whereas Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell could do love with humour, the Coens can't.

Ultimately the failure of the film is the fact that the bad guys are so much more charismatic than the good guys. Catherine Zeta Jones establishes her image as the sleek sexy charmer of the first two thirds of the film, George Clooney as the smooth manipulator of men and morals, both can't quite convey the enjoyment of being in love. Both of them feel existential doubts- but they relish their evil behaviour so much that their existential doubts don't really make sense. I think in part the failure here is that the Coens make love too prim or proper- too filled with vows of eternal sanctity- too legal ultimately- and less filled with the laughter and silliness that the emotion is actually about. Clooney and Zeta Jones aren't allowed to enjoy their romance- just like most couples on film are not allowed to enjoy their romances- swooning is in and smiles are out. That failure is an interesting one because it points in some sense to a wider failure in the world of cinema- a failure that I don't think the Coens alone are guilty of- which is that it is incredibly difficult to portray the happy ending where the girl and the guy (or whatever other combination of sexes you fancy) end up walking off into the sunset hand in hand. Making that interesting is not easy- and when your film rides on the contrast between that and biting, sarcastic, cynical, witty opposition to love you have a problem if you are making the romantic case.

This might seem a harsh criticism. The majority of the film does not concern the case for love- but concerns an ironic depreciation of that case. In a sense you could even argue that the ending is itself ironic- but I see no particular reason from what I saw on screen to make that point. Rather what I think we have here is a film that could make one point- that the marriage market in Los Angeles is amusingly cynical and yet profoundly stupid- and then tries to make another point about love vs commercialised and prostituted marriage and fails to make either because of a clumsy ending. I enjoyed the jokes, I found Clooney convincing and amusing and the same goes for Zeta Jones but the whole film failed. The whole film failed because the ending failed- because in the end the Coens couldn't make the film dark enough so that the ending would match the beggining, and couldn't get to the heart of romantic comedy where love is amusing. Instead what we have got is a bit of a mess- with the repartee and wit of the first three quarters and then the instant end cute. This is a four paragraph way of me saying that this film- despite its good performances and nice contrivances- doesn't make sense and for a film made by such film makers, with such intelligence, that for me is a problem.

The Role of the Bulk Trades in the History of the Netherlands

By 1477, 45% of the population of Holland lived in towns- that population was largely within the maritime towns. The Hague, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and other towns expanded greatly in this era. Their expansion derived mainly from the bulk trades. Amsterdam largely for example traded with Danzig, Konigsberg and Riga. The Herring fisheries similarly expanded throughout the 16th Century- in 1470 there were around 250 herring busses manned by 3000 men, by 1560 there were 500 busses manned by 7000 men. By 1560 there were 1800 ships in Holland with 500 based in Amsterdam- that figure is far larger than any other European fleet- in Venice there were for example only 300 ships at the height of her mercentile power in 1450. It is estimated that 1000 Dutch vessels- some sailing twice- going into the Baltic every year whereas only about 300 German ships went the same way.

These trades influenced the structure of Dutch urban society. Obviously it led to the large populations of the Dutch cities and their survival but its consequences went far further and shaped Dutch history in the 16th Century. Firsty there were important innovations in shipping- leading up to the design of the Hoorn fluit, a large trading ship, in 1590. Dutch shipbuilders designed ships which could take huge amounts of goods, carrying them with small crews over long distances. More importantly though the type of trade influenced the type of society that developed in its wake. There were almost no important Dutch merchants before 1585 and ownership of the ships was diversified over a huge number of men. Consequenctly affluent brewers, millers, grain and timber buyers and farmers might own a section of each ship. Ships were owned sometimes by over 64 people and the profits of voyages were spread over that large amount of owners. This diversification included a diversification across the maritime regions- it was not true that one town or two as in the south dominated trade- rather many towns developed at about the same rate. Hence though the urban population in the northern Netherlands was high, very few of its cities had large populations- only Amsterdam and Utrecht had a population above 20000 in 1560 and no city had a population above 30000 at that date. Compare that to the south which specialised in luxury trades and where Antwerp, Ghent, Brussels, Bruges, Mechelen and Lille all had populations over 30,000.

This diversification is important because it led to the success of the Northern Netherlands in resisting Spanish conquest. Partly this was because there were so many sailers about- to refresh the resources of the sea beggars for example in the 1570s who opposed Spanish rule. Partly also such a large diversification of wealth meant that the ruin of one or two cities could not devastate the entire economy of Holland. Likewise such a development argued against the dominance of the Netherlands or of Holland by one city- rather it led to the development of a regionalised politics in which Holland as the largest maritime province dominated. But as opposed to Parisian France or London dominated England, the Netherlands was a much more regionalised economy and therefore its politics too were much more regional. That had vast consequences for the type of regime that emerged after the revolt and also for the type of revolt that took place: the Spanish found the revolt hard to crush because of the difficulty of subduing its centre.

William the Silent

William the Silent's leadership of the Dutch Revolution was crucial to that revolution and thus to the course of European and World history. What is more interesting though than a simple paean to the role of William is that we obtain some understanding of what his function as a leader was within that revolution. My argument, based on Professor Israel's work, is that the William of the Dutch revolution was less of a leader as we might conventionally understand it, than as a symbol and financier. He was driven by as well as driving the revolution that he created- and in certain significant ways that revolution was not what the Prince of Orange intended it to be. This is true right from the beggining- when William himself joined the revolution, to preserve his own position as the representative of the anti-Habsburg forces in the low countries through to the end when he sponsored the involvement of the Duke of Anjou in 1583 despite the Duke's unpopularity within the low countries. Strategically William's interests and the interests of his followers were different- and the interesting thing about Israel's account of the revolution is that because of the unique circumstances of the Dutch revolt, that led to William actually losing out on his interests and being forced to accept those of his followers.

This is perhaps most evident with respect to the direction of the revolution. The Revolution essentially faced two alternative paths: one was to rely on its popular centre in the north of the country and become a revolution dominated from Holland by Calvinist city elites and mobs, the other was to attempt to span the whole of the low countries and rely on the nobility. William's own interest inclined him to the latter: he had important estates in the southern Netherlands and seems not to have been too inclined to adopting a reformation policy. Toleration for Catholics was essential if you were to have a rebellion spanning the Netherlands. William's policy failed though on two important grounds- the first was that it was difficult to maintain a revolution in the south which had a different character to the revolution in the north: the mobs in northern cities that degraded Catholic churches and clergymen were not happy to see those same churches and clergyment protected in the south- even where as in Ghent there were Protestant populations. Likewise whilst to a radical Protestant, the Habsburg crown was associated with the barbaric atrocities of anti-Protestant persecution, to a nobleman the crown was associated with the pyramid of status that protected both property and ultimately society. William ultimately forced to choose- was always going to choose the successful northern rebellion over the weaker southern rebellion- but we should never forget that he wished for a compromise that would retain the vigour of the Protestant radical military strength, whilst maintaining a traditional form of society.

What is interesting about this is that we might think that this was down to William's failings as a leader- could he not have found a formula to unite these factions and led them to victory- but the evidence of the history of Holland suggests otherwise. For William was not alone in attempting to lead the Dutch rebellion and finding that he was led as much as the leader. In 1585, after the Prince of Orange was assacinated, the States concluded a treaty (the Treaty of Nonsuch) with Elizabeth of England wherein Elizabeth nominated a commander, the Earl of Leicester, to come to Holland as Governor General and command both the English forces sent in aid to the Netherlands and the Dutch forces that resisted the Spanish. Leicester found himself in a similar quandary to William- in that he too found himself up against the overmighty province of Holland and was forced, despite his efforts, to temporise with the provincial authorities and adopt in part their strategy. Leicester also attempted to ally with forces in Dutch society that were anti-Holland (in his case the smaller northern provinces) yet thanks to a variety of circumstances he failed and departed in 1587 (and died in 1588).

Leicester and William's cases might seem pretty mundane- here essentially were two leaders who learnt that in a revolution you have to pay political attention to your followers. But I think that the point is greater than that- it reminds us that the reason that early modern noblemen often rebelled against Kings was to have an effect on the rebellion that they were then leading. The point about a rebellion is that its aims are negotiated by the participants and depend on their political strength- and particularly the strength they bring to it- and sometimes not so much on their title or position within it. It is worth remembering this when thinking about rebellion in general because it is not always true that those who lead a rebellion actually control it: the case of the Dutch revolt proves that the future of a revolution can turn out to be very different from that which the leaders envisaged.

The Role of the Inquisition in the Low Countries

A couple of years ago, on the Radio 4 Program, In our Time, Alexander Murray (Emeritus Fellow in History at University College, Oxford) suggested that the Spanish inquisition was part of an agenda of state formation in Spain in the early modern period. Spain a country created in the late 15th Century imposed ideological conformity and administrative unity through the instrument of the inquisition. Murray's theory is interesting and provoking- reading Jonathan Israel's account of the Early Modern Netherlands it becomes even more interesting- because whether that is what we think that the Spanish Inquisition was doing, I think we can argue based on Israel's book that that is precisely what the Low Countries inquisition was doing, and that the response to that inquisition in the Netherlands was a response both to the clerical and to the centralising agenda of the inquisition.

The transition from a medieval to a modern state might be described as the transition from a state wherein there were multiple focii of power- around several notable families- to a unitary state. One thinks for example of the Percies or the Nevilles in the North of England who were capable in the 15th Century of functioning pretty independently. This is a broadbrush approach- and there are exceptions- but stick with it for a moment. Because wherever it was not true, it was definitely true in the Netherlands that the crown governed through notable landed families in the 15th and early 16th Centuries. Phillip II for example relied upon William the Silent as Stadtholder of numerous provinces in the north. Accross the 16th Century inside the Netherlands we see the crown (at this point the Hapsburg crown) taking an interest in the development of a professional administrative class- Antoine Perrerot de Granvelle and Viglius van Aytta are notable examples of these men- who were educated by the humanists and formed an alternative cadre for appointment.

The crown though had to see inside each nobleman's provinces. We know that in the 1550s and 1560s one of the focii for conflict between the centre and the periphery in the Netherlands was religion. Several noblemen permitted religious heresy to take place on their own lands. Phillippe de Montmorency, Count of Horn, for example within the county of Horn allowed Protestants to proslytise- as did the noble leaders in communities in Gederland such as Culemborg, Broculo-Lichtenvoorde and Batenberg. Developing the powers of the inquisition would not merely enforce religious conformity but undermine the power of the nobility to interfere in their own regions and make their own choices about religion. Consequently when a more efficient structure of bishoprics was imposed- with Granvelle himself going to one bishopric- and when the inquisition was strengthened, the nobility protested. At 's-Hertogenbosch for example the local clergy (the Abbots of Meierij) and the local nobility (the States of Brabant) objected to the installation of Bishop Sonnius. But more was to follow: in 1565 Hendrik van Brederode and Floris of Culemborg set up the league of compromise which was a movement of crypto-Protestant and Protestant noblemen. In April 1566 they were able to present a petition to the regent of the Netherlands- Margerate of Parma- with a petition signed by 200 noblemen advocating the dismantlement of the inquisition.

On the one hand we should see that petition and the events I have discussed here as religious events- a Protestant faction responding to a Catholic crackdown. But also there is another part of the story- whether in the Holy Roman Empire (with Frederick the Wise), in England, Scotland, France or Spain, the reformation and counter reformation represented efforts by rulers to centralise their realms. The crown through these movements was claiming great powers, powers to inspect and verify the faith of its servants at great distances. The reaction to those claims wherever it came from was religious- but it also concerned the extent of those powers. Many within the nobility did not see that centralisation as a particularly 'good' thing- for them it represented a diminishing of their sphere of power and could be a Trojan horse for other royal claims. It is worth remembering that when the Dutch nobility objected to Phillip's inquisition what they were doing was objecting to a counter-reformation attack on Protestantism- but they were also seeking to defend their own privileges and powers against royal aggrandisment.

The dual face of the reformation cannot be ignored: we have to pay attention both to the fact that the reformation was a religious movement and that it turned confessionalisation into royal policy- the first had consequences but so did the latter and out of the fires of the reformation, the modern conception of the state evolved. Whereas where as with Phillip in the Netherlands or the Elizabeth in England, that process of state formation based on the creation of religious uniformity worked- in the sense that resistance was dealt with with ease- in the Low Countries, the process failed and consequently the Northern Netherlands split away forming the United Provinces. State formation- along with religious enthusiasm- is at the heart of the story of the Low Countries in the 16th Century.

Money and Civic Instability

There are certain types of crises that you can only have with money. One of the interesting things about Roman history is that soon after the Gallic invasion we have one of these crises. Livy attributes the crisis to the ambition of the centurion Marcus Manlius. The crisis concerned a centurion who was prosecuted for debt, 'as he was led off to prison Manlius saw him, hurried up in mid forum with a party of his supporters and held forth about the arrogance of the senators, the cruelty of the moneylenders, the miseries of the people, the merits and misfortune of the man.' (VI 14) Manlius does something here which I consider interesting- he contrasts the visible misfortunes of the people and bravery of the man against the invisible power of money. The injustice of the way that money operates- seemingly without any relation to the merit or demerit of the person involved- is for Manlius a political driver.

It is that operation that Manlius is focussed upon- how can someone who was a brave soldier end up in debt. In a sense the invisibility and incomprehensibility of the situation is something that creates a political opportunity. Money also creates inequality- further inequality because it allows people to store resources in a way that is not possible in a barter economy in perishable goods. You have a medium for the storage of wealth- but also a medium for the storage of debt because it is easier to create a concept of interest as well as to ennumerate a universal concept of what someone owes. What Manlius does is to create a political opportunity out of the latter issue. He uses the first development though to imply that the whole situation is the responsibility of a senatorial conspiracy: 'he declared amongst other things that the patricians were concealing treasure hoards of gallic gold and were no longer content with possessing State lands unless they could also appropriate State money; if the facts were made public the people could be freed from debt'.

Manlius's explanation for Rome's situation is clever but inaccurate- there are many reasons why debt would grow after a war, and increasing monetisation would definitely create increased inequality- but this is an interesting episode in Roman history. It is interesting because it reflects something about the way that money affects politics: it allows for further developments in the quantification of debt, allows for increased inequality and also it moves the value society puts on something from the intrinsic value of an item. Instead of a rabbit being worth seven candlesticks, both rabbits and candlesticks are translated into a conventional measure of value. Money ultimately is a civic abstraction. These developments- debt, inequality and abstraction all create a new type of politics- something I think we see in Livy's account of Manlius's debtor's revolt. Simply put, the Manlian moment could not have occured without a monetary moment preceding it.

The Death of Christopher Marlowe: Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning

Christopher Marlowe's death in 1593 is one of the most famous literary whodunnits in English history. Marlowe, Shakespeare's peer, had arguably acheived as much as Shakespeare until that date- his plays, Edward II, Tamberlaine, the Jew of Malta and Dr Faustus are examples taught in English classes and seminars today of classic verse and his poetry too lives on. Marlowe however was killed at the age of 29, in a room in Deptford, by a man called Ingram Frizier. The Coroner's court which met soon afterwards decided that what had happened was that four men, Marlowe, Frizier, Robert Pooley and Nicholas Skiers had met in Deptford, in the house of a Mrs Bull (herself affiliated to the court, and related to William Cecil), and spent around eight hours talking. Later in the evening they had had an argument over the bill for the drink and food that they had consumed, Marlowe had stolen Frizier's knife and attacked Frizier with it, Frizier responded and their was a fight, during which Marlowe was stabbed through the eye and killed. Frizier the assailant was set free on the grounds that he had committed self defence- and that Pooley and Skiers backed up his story.

The coroner's inquest record was discovered in the 1920s- and ever since there have been arguments about whether the record tells the truth or not. I have to confess here to being ignorant of many of the arguments- but one recent attempt to reconstruct the truth of what might have happened comes from Charles Nicholl, in a study published by the University of Chicago Press. Nicholl argues that you can only understand the death of Marlowe if you understand the background of the participants. He establishes that the three men in the room apart from Marlowe all had shady pasts. Frizier was an extortioner. Skiers worked both for the Earl of Essex as an agent and for Frizier as muscle. Pooley was a station chief for William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and had worked for Sir Francis Walsingham in intelligence for years. Marlowe himself was almost certainly an agent too- he was allowed to take a degree in Cambridge despite the worries of the dons about his orthodoxy because of a special warrant from the Privy Council and had been involved in various nefarious activities in the Netherlands as well as being rumoured to have been interested in the succession to Elizabeth.

Nicholl's argument is that what happened in 1593 was that Frizier and Skiers and Pooley were trying to negotiate with Marlowe. Marlowe himself was being questioned by the Privy Council at the time about accusations of atheism- that Nicholl ties to factional struggles at court between the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh. What may well have happened is that when the negotiation to get Marlowe to confess to atheism and implicate Raleigh failed, these lowly agents panicked and killed the poet spy. Based on what Nicholl writes it is a plausible reconstruction- the idea that this was a panicked killing which the participants then agreed to keep quiet makes sense. Panic is always a good historical explanation- better than any conspiracy at least. Whether Nicholl's precise constellation of facts is right I cannot be sure- there are too many 'musts' and 'shoulds' in his account, too many suppositions for us to express confidence in it as the total and unvarnished truth. Nicholl is addicted to supposing what happened in the gaps between the evidence- and whilst his explanation has the ring of truth to it, it depends on a chain of supposition and presumption. Marlowe's death ultimately may be an unresolved mystery.

Having said all of that, Nicholl's work is still worthwhile and what he has accumulated is interesting. It is interesting less because it reveals what actually happened on that dark day in Deptford, than because it reveals the world in which Marlowe passed. The world that Nicholl reveals is a world where criminality, spying and treachery are phases of a life- rather than divisions between different occupations. A character like Nicholas Skiers was a criminal (who manipulated people into contracts that they could not fulfill and who stuck closely to the letter of the law if not its spirit), a traitor (who consorted with Catholics and may well have had Catholic sympathies) and a spy. Robert Pooley, one of the men in the room, worked for Sir Francis Walsingham's secret service for years- and yet Walsingham never quite worked out which side Pooley was on and which side he worked for. Pooley was arrested for holding seditious literature for example, as well as procuring the arrests of others.

Marlowe himself fits into this world neatly. He was arrested for affray, for counterfeiting coins, was on the outside of circles around noblemen suspected of treachery and may have been stoking the flames there. Many of his friends were involved in the same kinds of activities- Thomas Watson for example another poet and playwright (though all his plays are now unfortunately lost) was a confidence trickster with a mean streak. Nicholl brings to life this world in fascinating detail- in a sense therefore it does not matter what happened in Deptford- because by analysing it we discover a lot more about Elizabethan life, politics and poetry.

Happy New Year

Apologies for the silence- I have a very irritating cold at the moment and am not feeling quite myself. But Happy New Year to all and sundry who visit this blog or who just have come through today through chance- I hope you all have a good 2009, despite the current economic gloom, and had a good New Year.

The Dutch Reformation 1520-50

Dutch Protestantism had massive consequences for European history: it fuelled the eventual Dutch revolt, had an important effect in the English seventeenth century particularly the civil war and the Revolution of 1688, and provided a check on French and Spanish ambitions in Germany and the wider world. Understanding its peculiar nature therefore is a vital part of understanding the events that formed the modern world- the English Civil War, the Thirty Years War and the culture of Early Modern Europe. Dutch Protestantism provided an intellectual environment for the philosophy of Spinoza, the jurisprudence of Grotius and the talents of painters like Van Eyck all took their form within a world shaped by Dutch Protestantism.

So what shaped Dutch Protestantism? According to Professor Israel there are two basic phenomena that we need to take account of if we are to understand what was unique about Dutch Protestantism. The first was that the Dutch Church was weak and that Dutch humanism was strong. The Dutch church was large but its presence within society was declining and it was unpopular. Furthermore it did not have appropriate leadership- the Netherlands was ecclesiastically divided between different bishoprics, some in France and in Germany. Into this clerical vacuum came the new techniques of humanism. The subject of humanism and what it meant in the early modern period is incredibly complex but lets assume for the sake of this discussion, that what it meant was a new attitude to texts. A humanist such as Erasmus taught that texts were open to those who might use them with the appropriate scholarly apparatus- consequently what he did for example was produce a Dutch translation of the Bible. Theologically they were committed to reform within the Church- often reform that might look like the reforms that Protestants too favoured, rationalisation we might call it- reforms which swept away clerical privileges and abuses and attempted to focus the Church around its mission- the gospel of Christ.

Such bald summaries will have to suffice to explain the nature of the landscape in the Netherlands- but I hope that gives you the impression that the Netherlands was ripe for the Lutheran movement after 1520 to spread. The last factor which governed how that movement spread was the persecution adopted as policy by the Hapsburg rulers of the Netherlands. Charles V made repeated efforts to bring in to the region the inquisition- fortifying it even after he had brought it in. The effect of this was to force the reformation under ground. Significantly it created a large group of people who temporised- who remained within the Catholic Church but held Protestant opinions. The martyrs who died for the faith were more often Anabaptists than Lutherans- another fact which influenced the progress of the reformation.

What this did was create in the Netherlands, according to Professor Israel, a very different reformation to the reformations that happened elsewhere in Europe. Whereas in Britain for example the reformation received its initial impetus from the crown and a reformed Church, in the Netherlands there was no institutional support for the reformation. Consequently Israel argues that the Dutch Reformation developed in an unstructured way- its heroes were people who in most of Europe were derided. It should also be noted that it developed into a movement of internal reformation- influential theorists like David Joris argued for a reformation proceeding through the spirit. Anabaptism remained stronger in the Netherlands than elsewhere in Europe- in some provinces up to 25% of congregations did not believe in child baptism. It should also be noted that whereas in the UK- London formed the centre of the reformation, in Holland it was marginal regions like East Frisia where Hapsburg persecution did not reach or amongst exiles in Germany that influential developments like the arrival of Calvinism took place.

The Dutch Reformation was much more fluid and anarchic precisely because it was an underground reformation- it was much less institutional and much more internal for the same reason. It came up from below- partly because of the triumph of humanism and weakness of the Church and partly because of the persecuting zeal of the Hapsburg Emperor. The story of Dutch Protestantism was different to that of English Protestantism because in England the new religion was chained to Parliament and the King, in the Netherlands the new religion was the leading antagonist of the Hapsburgs and only became fettered to the state after seizing a position amongst the people. In that sense, according to Professor Israel, Holland saw a different rhythm either from England or Scotland or Germany.