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Manual Work
and Mental Work
Humanist Knowledge for Professions
in the Siglo de Oro
Christoph Strosetzki
Manual Work and Mental Work
Manual Work and Mental

Work
Humanist Knowledge for Professions
in the Siglo de Oro
Romanisches Seminar
Universität Münster
Münster, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Editorial
Contact Oliver Schuetze
ISBN 978-3-662-66365-3 ISBN 978-3-662-66366-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66366-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH,
DE, part of Springer Nature 2023
This book is a translation of the original German edition „Handarbeit und Kopfarbeit“ by Strosetzki,
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This book is a translation of an original German
edition. The translation was done with the help of
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support of Miriam Cantwell) has subsequently revised
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Preface
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, numerous texts dealt with professions by
presenting necessary skills, the required knowledge, individual fields of activity,
purpose and origin, as well as prestige and dignity of the individual fields of activity.
Since they generally refer back to ancient texts, the explanations are humanistic in
character. Furthermore, the line of argumentation is humanistic, insofar as it mostly
starts from the human being and first evaluates his profession morally and socially.
The ancient idea of the priority of mental work over manual work, which is derived
from the priority of the spiritual over the material, has a formative function here, but
is also undermined by counter designs. Numerous ancient models are brought into
line with Christianity in the Middle Ages, so that they also become significant in
medieval form in the Spanish Siglo de Oro.
While in the Middle Ages it was only the prince’s mirrors that dealt with the
virtues, tasks, and activities of the ruler, in the early modern period, as a result of
both an increasingly functionally differentiated modern society and as a result of the
possibilities of printing, new tracts and dialogues appear that present further diverse
professions. Along with the invention of printing, the early modern period also
brought new interpretations of the Bible. Protestantism and Calvinism changed reli-
gious ideas in northern Europe. Spain, on the other hand, had remained Catholic
and, after the Reconquista had won back the territories occupied by the Moors with
the help of the Inquisition, had turned against Islam and Judaism as well as against
heterodox dogmas, that is, those spread by Luther or Calvin. Catholic Spain of the
Siglo de Oro appears therefore as a special case in Europe. However, non-
traditionally orthodox elements can also be found here in the course of the Counter-
Reformation. In addition, it should not be overlooked that the Spanish king was at
the same time Charles V (1520–1556) Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and
ruler of the colonies in America; so by the standards of the time, he ruled a
global empire.
Charles Taylor, on the other hand, notes a paradigm shift caused by the Protestant
Reformation that permeated the entire realm of earthly life and was also felt outside
the borders of Protestant Europe, that is, in Catholic countries as well (Taylor 2018,
391). Since monasticism and the cult of the saints were rejected as mediating
vii
viii Preface
instances by the Protestant side, and thus activities that had previously been consid-
ered “higher” were subjected to a disapproving critique; the fulfillment of human
life was now seen in work and family, that is, in ordinary life. It is the latter and the
common good that science was supposed to benefit, not theoretical speculation
(377, 378, 384, 398).1 Inventions deserve more praise than Aristotelian speculation,
and trade became preferable to aristocratic quests for military glory and was viewed
positively (424, 505). This is quite understandable, once we disregard the fact that
the art of war, while belonging to the aristocratic sphere, was assigned to the artes
mechanicae. The lowly craftsman and the skillful practitioner have, as it turns out,
contributed more to the progress of science than the philosopher with all his leisure
(378). It is necessary to pursue the affairs of the profession in a heavenly frame of
mind, that is, participating in the world with detached affects (395). For Taylor, the
paradigmatic representative of this direction is Francis Bacon as a Puritan, accord-
ing to whom science should refrain from speculation and serve the benefit of man-
kind (407).
Taylor’s thesis of a paradigm shift in the evaluation of manual professions caused
by Protestantism cannot be confirmed with the explanations of the present book,
just as Foucault’s theory of discursive ruptures cannot. It is not true that manual
occupations have enjoyed positive evaluation only since Puritanism, Calvinism, and
Protestantism, whereas before they were little appreciated. For in antiquity, as in the
Middle Ages and modern times, there have been positive as well as negative assess-
ments of manual trades. Not uncommon are voices that highly value simple trades
and “ordinary life” in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The change noted by Taylor
outside the borders of Protestant Europe, that is, also in Catholic countries, cannot
be detected, at least in Spain, where often the intellectual part was still the criterion
for the evaluation of a profession.
The following text will therefore examine the extent to which Taylor’s model for
the Siglo de Oro can be contrasted with the following categories: intellectual life,
moral perfection, and social advancement through knowledge. The significance of
these categories will be exemplified in the course of the following chapters, in order
to be addressed once again in retrospect in the outlook at the end.
In Plato’s state, the peasants and workers constituted the lowest class, since they
did not speculate about the true nature of a thing or the causes of a problem.
According to Aristotle, politics requires virtue, which cannot be trained in crafts-
manship. In ancient Greece, mechanike techne, as a kind of applied mathematics,
was the discipline of using mechanical devices such as levers and screws to make
machines that could accomplish what man could not with his own powers. At least,
this is how Aristotle describes it in his work Problemata mechanika, which was
available to the occidental Middle Ages only in fragments (Boehm 1993, 428). Even
in Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas’ concept of science, which is oriented towards
reason, still sees the mechanical arts as artes factivae, operativae, manuales,
1
In the case of repeated successive references to the same source, we limit ourselves to stating the
page number.
Preface ix
serviles, inferiores, since they are bound to matter and utility and are not oriented
towards knowledge. The hierarchy in theory does not necessarily correspond to the
social situation; considering that the mechanical art of hunting belonged to the
nobility, the architect was quite respected, and the manual physician could become
rich (432).
Agricultural activity was positively valued in antiquity. Socrates considers agri-
culture as an activity worthy of a citizen (Xen. oik. 4–6). He is opposed to the idea
that the superior man need not work (Xen. Mem. 2,7). Virgil praises agricultural
activity in his Georgica. In Cicero, agriculture seems worthy of a free man (Cic. off.
I, 42). However, the latifundia economy of slaves soon took the place of the free
farmer of the plot economy.
In the Bible, work is directed towards the mastery of the forces of nature and the
distribution of goods. Work is necessary to bring creation to its completion, when
man is to subdue the Earth and rule over the animals (Gen 1:26–28), and at the same
time atonement and purification, when he will eat his bread by the sweat of his brow
(Gen 3:19). Thus work is seen once positively and once negatively: God requires the
first man to work and tend his dwelling place in the Garden of Eden (Gen 2:15). It
goes on to say, “Despise not the tillage which God hath appointed” (Coh 7:16).
In contrast, if one looks at the attitude of German classicism, one is reminded of
Aristotle. Goethe’s and Schiller’s ideal of a harmonious human being seems incom-
patible with a realistic portrayal of the world of work. While bourgeois businessmen
pursue only their selfish interests in pedantic parochialism, for Schiller it is impor-
tant to find a harmonious totality of the individual in purposeless play, in the absence
of work. Only those who are active without working preserve the beautiful whole
that is destroyed by work, by which he means select circles of the nobility and bour-
geoisie. In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the question of a bourgeois is not
what he is, but only what insight, knowledge, ability, or fortune he has. “The noble-
man is what he represents, the citizen what he produces” (Habermas 1968, 26–27).
Wilhelm is fascinated by the unproductive aristocratic way of life, although he is
later taught by Montan that it is not a matter of general education but rather of one
being particularly good at something and achieving something that others cannot
easily imitate (Berghahn 1979, 58, 71).
In the late Middle Ages, the artes mechanicae passed from a tradition of the oral
transmission of a secret knowledge from generation to generation to writing, which
then also had consequences for the tension between theory and practice or science
and technology. However, this process was so slow that d’Alembert, in his Discours
préliminaire to the eighteenth-century French encyclopedia, complains that there
are hardly any written literary sources of support for the description of the mechani-
cal arts, and that his authors therefore had to seek out workshops to interview the
craftsmen (Boehm 1993, 421). The Abbé Pluche also presents the specifics of arti-
sanal work in various industries in eight volumes of his Spectacle de la nature (Paris
1732). Diderot’s Encyclopédie negatively judges day laborers and handymen who
carry heavy loads or perform other laborious tasks. And craftsmen, artisans, also
practice mechanical arts that require little intelligence, according to Diderot, who
wrote the article himself. In contrast, the outstanding works of the artists appear to
x Preface
be characterized by intelligence. It was Karl Marx who later dreamed of a higher

phase of society where the opposition between mental and physical labor had dimin-
ished (Marx 1973, 21). According to Marx, work is, after all, life generating action
and free production, by which the worker creates objectivity for himself in his
works. This is precisely the reason why alienation is so destructive for him.
When Bacon, for Taylor the paradigmatic representative of Puritanism, sees as
his goal the expansion of man’s power and praises inventions such as the book,
gunpowder, and the compass, he is following in the tradition of the praise of inven-
tions that began in antiquity. However, Bacon’s goal of expanding power as well as
Locke’s purpose of self-preservation and improvement are elements of teleological
thinking, which the physicist according to Bacon should actually be aware of.
As both positive and negative assessments of craft and ordinary life have occurred
simultaneously since antiquity, the question arises as to how such a contradiction
can be explained. Our hypothesis is that what the author chooses depends on his
social position. Craftsmen will see crafts in a more favorable light than nobles or
theologians. Heuristically, the thought model of ideology as defined by Karl Marx
is helpful here: “The thoughts of the ruling class are the ruling thoughts in every
epoch, i.e., the class which is the ruling material power of society is at the same time
its ruling intellectual power” (Marx 1969, 46). This explains that the upper class
emphasizes the priority of intellectual activity in order to legitimize its social
supremacy. For the jurists who put themselves at the head of the state by ousting the
nobles from their ancestral offices, the following Marx quote applies: “Every new
class, namely, which puts itself in the place of one that ruled before it, is compelled,
if only to carry out its purpose, to present its interest as the common interest of all
the members of society” (Marx 1969, 47). Since Marx is referring to the nineteenth
century, his theses have limited applicability to the early modern period. This is
evident when he writes that it is unimportant whether this or that theorem is true, but
important whether it is useful or harmful to capital, convenient or inconvenient, thus
replacing unbiased scientific inquiry with mere apologetics.
When we ask in the following to what extent socially conditioned partisanships
are responsible for the respective evaluation of manual and intellectual activity, the
model of class struggle is subtracted from its historical context of the nineteenth
century and generalized in the sense of the sociology of knowledge. In this way,
class prejudices arising from the economic structure appear surmountable. Karl
Mannheim’s “total ideology” derives from the being-connectedness of knowledge,
so that the “location-bound aspect structure of a thought” serves to conceal and
stabilize social contexts (Mannheim 1929, 52). Stammer puts it even more gener-
ally, and in a way that serves our context, with the phrase “the ideological represents
sociality in the spiritual” (Stammer 1950/1951, 282). It will thus depend on the
social location from which the intellectual is praised and the manual rejected, or the
manual is praised and the intellectual rejected.
This brings us close to Foucault, who also sees objective truth as relativized, but
in doing so leaves out social subjects and classes. If what matters to him is that
something is “in the true” rather than that it is true, then he assumes a priori epis-
temic discourses that guide cognition in certain epochs. “Mendel told the truth, but
Preface xi
he was not ‘in the true’ of the biological discourse of his epoch: biological objects
and concepts were formed according to quite different rules” (Foucault 1991, 25).
The rules that determine whether a result is valid or not establish power structures.
Thus, he argues, the sixteenth century was characterized by resemblance, the period
from the mid-seventeenth by représentation with taxonomic definitional tableaux,
and the nineteenth century by historicity. According to Foucault, the shift from one
paradigm designated as episteme to another takes place in ruptures. We will prove
that the notion of rupture-like paradigm shifts is inadequate, since historical think-
ing, the constant search for inventors, and the historical course of a science are also
pronounced in the sixteenth century. Tableaux of représentation are also found in
the hierarchies of the sciences and their representatives from antiquity through the
Middle Ages to the early modern period, and similarities have dominated the appli-
cations of mathematics and geometry in subjects such as music and astronomy since
antiquity. Last but not least, both historicity and représentation are taught through
the Aristotelian doctrine of four causes and the Aristotelian-Scholastic doctrine of
definition with genus proximum and differentia specifica in the late sixteenth-
century scholastic school of Salamanca. Représentation is evidenced by the doc-
trine of arbor porphyriana, introduced by the scholastic Petrus Hispanus in 1240
and popular in the sixteenth century, where not only are basic terms classified in
tableau fashion but also a subordination of species and generic terms is practiced.
If, for example, after the invention of gunpowder, the tracts on the craft of war-
fare are devoted less to the use of the sword and the care of horses and instead focus
on artillery, the professional image of the soldier shifts. Or if, after the discovery of
the New World, herbal remedies from America are also taken into account, the
source situation of pharmacy also changes. The professions of the lawyer are exam-
ples of how representatives of the bourgeoisie displace the nobles from key posi-
tions in the state. The progressive legitimization of the activity of the merchant is an
example of the establishment of a professional group that had previously only been
tolerated. Professionalization can be described as the process in which an activity or
a profession is transformed and justifications are formulated that ideologically jus-
tify courses of action and serve to achieve goals. In the process, ideologically occu-
pied and normative terms always emerge (Siegrist 1988, 14–15).
Following Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory (Luhmann 1992, 194, 199), we
start from the notion of “guiding differences” to characterize the basic semantic
structure of individual mental domains and spheres of action. As an illustrative
example of leading difference, Luhmann cites the theory of Darwinism, which is
organized by the opposition of variation and selection (Luhmann 1984, 19). Such
binary structuring characterizes the early modern system of social intercourse, in
which the distinctive features of aristocratic forms of life are defined by their oppo-
sition to the bourgeois or peasant. In modern functionally differentiated societies,
too, points of social affiliation and demarcation are continuously communicated
(Luhmann 1997, 606). It is characteristic of early modern society that it is in a tran-
sitional stage between stratificationally structured class society and functional
differentiation.
xii Preface
We thank Isabel Hernando Morata for her support in procuring the materials and
Maike Dietz for her assistance in standardizing the manuscript. We would also like
to thank the publisher for their interest in publishing the English version of the
book. Thanks to DeepL.com for the machine translation. Special thanks to Miriam
Cantwell for her careful review of the English text and its stylistic refinement.
The cover image shows a detail from Botticelli’s allegorical painting “Athena
and the Centaur.” Athena, as goddess of wisdom, is patroness of the sciences. The
centaurs, on the other hand, who have the abdomen of a horse, are characterized by
tremendous strength, with which they noisily and impetuously snorting like horses
break off large rocks, break through walls without restraint, and hurl uprooted trees
(Roscher 1894, 1063–1069). Thus, intellectual and physical strength are opposed to
each other, in which one could see the contrast of head- and handwork depicted.
That this is not so simple, however, becomes clear when one considers that Athena
is also patron of craftsmen and goddess of war strategy. Thus, she has a protective
and moderating effect on physical nature, which gives her a superiority in the
Neoplatonic context of Medicean Florence and places her in a controlling role. As a
tamer of centaurs, she takes the centaur by the scruff of the neck, because under-
neath, with reason, is the ruling part of the soul. With her gentleness and beauty as
the personified virtue of prudentia, she is focused on the future and aims to “pre-
serve acquired political power by correcting at an early stage developments that
endanger it” (Leuker 2007, 258). The allegorical image thus does not only show
intellect and physics as mere opposites but also points to the complex interferences
of this relationship in different areas, which is also the task of this book.
Münster, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany Christoph Strosetzki

Contents
Part I Introduction 1
1 Conceptions of Work�� 3
2 Alternatives to Work�� 9
Part II Siglo de Oro 17

3 Collections�� 19
3.1 Encyclopaedia �� 19
3.2 Tomaso Garzoni and Suárez de Figueroa �� 24
3.3 Inventions�� 26
3.4 Personalities and Hierarchies�� 32
3.5 Satires�� 41
4 Mechanical Arts �� 45
4.1 Farmer �� 45
4.1.1 Antiquity and the Middle Ages �� 46
4.1.2 Early Modern Period�� 48
4.1.3 Spanish Domestic Literature�� 50
4.1.4 Country Life as a Golden Age�� 51
4.1.5 Rural Life and Primitive State�� 53
4.1.6 Country Life and Greed�� 55
4.1.7 The Idyll of the Garden�� 57
4.2 Soldier �� 58
4.2.1 Rejection and Legitimization of the War�� 59
4.2.2 Military Ranks�� 62
4.2.3 Recruitment�� 66
4.2.4 Responsibility, Motivation and Refusal to Obey Orders�� 68
4.2.5 Cunning and Treachery �� 70
4.2.6 Rebellion �� 72
4.2.7 Sword and Horse�� 73
4.2.8 Cannon and Rifles �� 75
xiii
xiv Contents
4.3 Merchant �� 77

4.3.1 Negative Evaluation�� 78
4.3.2 Positive Evaluation�� 81
4.3.3 Virtues �� 83
4.3.4 Common Good and Self-Interest�� 84
4.3.5 Money Lending�� 86
4.3.6 Contracts �� 88
4.3.7 Respectability and Illegality �� 90
4.4 Between Mechanical Arts and Artes Liberales �� 93
4.4.1 Bricklayer and Tailor�� 93
4.4.2 Visual Arts and the Church �� 95
4.4.3 Experience and Artes�� 98
4.4.4 Fine Arts and Mathematics �� 99
4.4.5 Dignity of the Visual Arts �� 101
4.4.6 Fine Arts and Artes Liberales �� 102
4.4.7 Résumé�� 107
5 Artes Liberales �� 111
5.1 Trivium�� 111
5.1.1 Grammarian�� 111
5.1.2 Rhetorician and Humanist�� 116
5.2 Quadrivium �� 131
5.2.1 Musician�� 132
5.2.2 Mathematician�� 136
5.2.3 Astronomer and Astrologer�� 141
5.2.4 Cosmographer and Navigator �� 150
6 Higher Faculties �� 155
6.1 Doctor �� 155
6.1.1 Body and Soul�� 157
6.1.2 Microcosm and Macrocosm�� 159
6.1.3 Teleology�� 160
6.1.4 Between Speculation and Empiricism�� 162
6.1.5 Mental Health�� 163
6.1.6 Dietetics�� 164
6.1.7 Remedies�� 167
6.1.8 Between University Teaching and Practice�� 170
6.1.9 Surgeon and Wound Healer�� 172
6.1.10 The Plague�� 177
6.1.11 Satire �� 180
6.1.12 Résumé�� 182
6.2 Theologian�� 183
6.2.1 Chaplain�� 184
6.2.2 Practical Helper�� 186
6.2.3 Missionary�� 187
6.2.4 Confessor�� 191
Contents xv
6.2.5 Asset Manager�� 195

6.2.6 Retreat and Monasticism�� 196
6.2.7 Jesuit �� 197
6.2.8 memoria and Don Quixote�� 201
6.2.9 Imitation in Don Quixote�� 204
6.2.10 sola scriptura and Don Quixote as Reader �� 206
6.2.11 Résumé�� 208
6.3 Lawyer�� 209
6.3.1 Training�� 211
6.3.2 School of Salamanca�� 213
6.3.3 Chief Magistrate�� 214
6.3.4 Jurisprudence: A Science?�� 216
6.3.5 Dignity of the Lawyer�� 219
6.3.6 Alderman�� 220
6.3.7 Lawyers in Fictional Literature�� 222
6.3.8 Lawyers as Advisers to Rulers�� 225
6.3.9 Advocate �� 229
6.3.10 Satire �� 231
6.3.11 Satire in Don Quixote�� 232
6.3.12 Résumé�� 238
Part III Outlook 241
7 Craft and Hierarchy�� 243
References�� 251
Part I
Introduction
Chapter 1
Conceptions of Work
Professions require skills and knowledge to practice them. Authors of the early
modern period endeavored to compile the knowledge necessary for individual pro-
fessions, repeatedly drawing on ancient texts in the humanist manner. A distinction
must be made between professions in which practice predominates, such as that of
the merchant, and those that are more theoretical, such as that of the astronomer. But
even within individual professions, theoretical variants can be distinguished from
practical ones, for example in a case of the physician, who speculates on ancient
theories as a university doctor, and a wound healer, who treats injuries. While the
former reflects on and discusses contradictions and explanations of traditional book
knowledge, the latter draws on experience.
Again and again the contrasting pair of manual work and mental work is dis-
cussed, whereby mental work is generally valued higher in the hierarchy of profes-
sions, which is why the professions of manual work strive to rise. They point out
that mental work also has a high proportion among them, in that they also demon-
strate elements of the higher-ranking disciplines among themselves. The literature
of antiquity, which provides sources for the knowledge of the present, is either
unquestioningly taken over as valid as a matter of course or, as in the case of Galen’s
theory of the humours, relativised and overtaken by more recent approaches. In the
presentation of the individual disciplines of knowledge, according to the Aristotelian
doctrine of the four causes, invention is readily given as the causal cause and pur-
pose as the final cause. It is to be asked to what extent, on the one hand, this increases
their prestige through an early invention and the resulting long tradition, and to what
extent, on the other hand, a normative component is introduced if the purposes and
goals are oriented towards norms of the ethics of antiquity or Christianity.
The structure of the following remarks begins with a discussion of some central
categories. Presented then are attempts in the early modern period of overall repre-
sentations of knowledge, professions and outstanding professional representatives.
Here, as in the following chapters, the hierarchization and its relativization through
satire is of importance. The mechanical arts and the artes liberales are then
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, 3

part of Springer Nature 2023
C. Strosetzki, Manual Work and Mental Work,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66366-0_1
4 1 Conceptions of Work
presented on the basis of individual professions selected as characteristic examples,

each with its own specific knowledge. The higher faculties of medicine, theology
and jurisprudence with their representatives form the conclusion.
The counterparts to professional activity and the knowledge to be acquired for it
are leisure and idleness. While leisure has been praised since antiquity in the topoi
of the locus amoenus and the beatus ille as a rural idyll free of professional activity,
idleness, otiositas, is in Christian tradition the enemy of the soul, especially since it
is close to acedia, the mortal sin of laziness. Therefore, when the beggar refuses to
work, it is necessary to examine whether he is incapable or unwilling. The question
also arises whether games are to be regarded as leisure or idleness. Are they recre-
ation or a waste of time? Can greed make the game of chance a job-like activity? Do
question games and chess games train intellectual and strategic skills, making them
appear as propaedeutics of professional activity? Since games and leisure have a
special relationship to professions, they are dealt with in the second part of this
introduction, which deals with the evaluation of mental and manual labour, first in
antiquity and the Middle Ages, then in the early modern period.
The fact that ancient mythology does not particularly value manual labor is evi-
dent from the fact that Hephaestus, the god of the blacksmith’s art, forms a contrast
to the beauty of the other gods. He is depicted as a cripple with a large neck and
weakening legs (Hom. Il. 18). Ancient philosophy is no less hostile. In Plato’s state,
workers and peasants form the lowest class. Aristotle also held crafts in low esteem
(Hist. 2, 167, Oik. 4, 203). In politics, for example, virtue is needed. But this,
according to Aristotle, cannot be learned from craftsmanship (Pol. 4, 9). Political
activity must remain closed to the craftsman, since he works unfree like a slave for
others. Also, his work makes him narrow-minded and insensitive to great interests
(Pol. 8, 2). In the case of indispensable activities, he who does them for a master is
called a slave, and he who does them for the general public is called a workman
(Pol. III). It is to be asked to what extent the turning away from the sensual and turn-
ing to the spiritual affects the valuation of physical labor. In the early modern period,
did Luther’s valorization of peasants and artisans in Protestantism have an impact
on Catholic Spain? Did the teleological view or the empirical emergence of indi-
vidual activities and fields of knowledge have an impact on their hierarchical posi-
tion? If needs such as food, housing, or clothing lead to technical inventions, are
these to be valued highly because they compensate for the deficiencies of the human
being through rational thought, or lowly because they require little intellectual effort?
In the early modern treatises on dignitas hominis, it is thought that distinguishes
man from the animal and thus constitutes his dignity. If he devotes himself to practi-
cal tasks, then he does nothing different from an animal. This hierarchization has a
long history. Demeter is the corn mother and goddess of fertility. Her son is Plutos,
the personification of wealth. The Eleusinian mysteries were held annually in her
honor. According to Xenophon, the best crafts are those of agriculture and warcraft
(Xen. oik. IV, 4, 15, 17, 24). The god of travelers and merchants, in Greek Hermes,
in Latin Mercury, was also the god of thieves, and thus had something disreputable
about him. There are examples of manual labor in Greek literature. Thus Homer’s
Odysseus made his own bed before the Trojan War (Hom. Od. 23, 181–201). In
1 Conceptions of Work 5
Hesiod, work is the gods’ punishment for Prometheus deceiving Zeus when he
brought fire to man. Thus Zeus, in his anger, hid from men the means of subsistence
(Hes. erg. 42–44). Hesiod, the author of Works and Days and the Theogony, made
his living by an inherited farm, and writes to his brother, “Zeal promotes labor. One
who is always pushing ahead is always struggling with harm.” (Dummer 2001, 70).
Nevertheless, he finds work tiring and sees himself in a brazen age preceded by bet-
ter times. A distinction must be made, however, between the one who masters and
exercises a technique and the one who merely labors, the banausos (the philistine)
(Plat., polit. 495e). Work is contrasted with schole, leisure, having time, which
Aristotle values more highly, since happiness presupposes leisure and work is done
in order to then have leisure. Similarly, war is waged in order to then have peace
(Aristot. NE 1177b 4–6). He distinguishes the necessary and useful actions from the
beautiful, whereby work happens for the sake of leisure and the necessary and use-
ful for the sake of beauty (Aristot. pol., 1333a). In this sense Horace praises the
“beatus ille qui procul negotiis” (Hor. Epod. 2.1) is, though his otium may be filled
with intensive agricultural labor. Since land ownership was the most important and
stable form of property in antiquity, since peasant labor was considered non-
specialized but diverse, and since peasants did not work for others but self-
sufficiently for themselves, their activity corresponded to a Greek ideal (Meier
2003, 43).
According to Plutarch, Lykurg forbade the Spartans the practice of craftsman-
ship (Plut. Lyk. 24). Archimedes wished not to apply his intellectual reasoning to
bodily things, considering mechanical works and everything that serves the neces-
sary satisfaction of needs as ignoble and low (Plut. Marc. 14, 17). Even the beauty
of the works of Phidias lend no esteem to the artist (Plut. Per. 2). Lucian of Samosata
describes in a dream how two women court favour, the one as a science, the other as
a sculpture (Lucian, Somnium 6–13).
In Plato’s state, it seemed more attractive to speculate about the true nature of a
thing or the reasons for a problem than to seek practical and technical applications.
And in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos it is said that practical work performed in a sitting
position and in the house weakens the body and thus also slackens the mind (Engels
2006, 62). More generously perceived was the rural work of the shepherd or the
peasant, for example in the Cynic Diogenes, who valorized simple work in the inter-
est of self-sufficiency, or in the Stoic Zeno, who extolled the ideal of simple living
according to nature. Among the Greeks, the aristocracy was concerned with politics
and warfare or the theoretical activity of a philosopher. Slaves were available for
manual labor (Rivero 2020, 20–25, 74–77). Thus, in antiquity, the artes liberales
appropriate to a free man are contrasted with the artes illiberales or sordidae not
appropriate to a free man. In Cicero, the activities that are meant only to satisfy
pleasure, such as those of the fishmonger, butcher, or cook, are the least prestigious.
While the Greco-Roman elite despised physical exertion and toil, the people devel-
oped a kind of skill-consciousness that ennobled work in the educational sense as
virtus. In reality, the successful activity of even simple occupations, such as that of
the woodcutter, the shoemaker, or the porter, led to modest prosperity and social
advancement. This is confirmed by Democritus in the fifth century B.C. and the
sophist Protagoras, when they considered strenuous effort as conducive to the emer-
gence of the technai, which advanced civilization.
The Roman Cicero, too, excluded from participation in politics all who practiced
a paid profession, except farmers and wholesalers (Cicero, de off. I, 151). However,
the Sophists, who charged money for their teaching, had already made intellectual
work into gainful employment. Cicero, in his writing addressed to his son Marcus,
makes a gradual assessment of crafts and types of gainful employment. He consid-
ers the collection of customs duties, the charging of interest, and the keeping of
gambling houses to be particularly dirty, as well as mechanical and physical handi-
crafts, the luxury industry, and petty trade. Only agriculture is worthy of a free man
(De officiis, I, 42).
Already the Bible had in the book of Jesus Sirach an ambivalent appreciation of
the handicraft. He who holds the plow, who drives the cattle, directs himself com-
pletely to his activity. Likewise, he who works as a craftsman and builder, black-
smith and potter. “All these have trusted in their hands, and each proves wise in his
doings. Without them no city is founded, they are not migrants and do not wander.”
(Sir 38:25–31). This is the positive part, which, however, has the consequence that
in doing crafts there is no time for further gaining knowledge, which is then to the
disadvantage of the craftsmen: “But for the counsel of the people they are not
sought, and in the assembly they do not stand out; on a judge’s seat they do not sit
down, and about the decision of a judgment they do not think.” (Sir 38:32–33).
Patristics adopts this ambivalent assessment. Augustine evaluates handicraft
positively when he emphasizes that Jesus had a craftsman as foster-father, that Paul
was a cell-cloth weaver who earned his living by working with his hands (Aug. c.
acad. 18, 3; 20, 34; 1 Cor. 6, 12; 1 Tess. 2, 9; 2 Thess. 3, 8), and, moreover, the work-
ing man stands as a model for imitation (2 Thess. 3, 9, 10). When an attitude of
rejection of manual labor took hold in the monasteries, he wrote his book “On the
Manual Labor of the Monks”, in which he presents the duty to feed oneself with
manual labor as an apostolic commandment. For manual labor would find a great
spiritual reward. Just as rowers motivate one another through song, this work also
promotes prayer (Weinand 1911, 34–35). In agriculture Augustine sees an optimal
union of physical and spiritual work, when the spirit of man speaks with nature
(Weinand 1911, 55).
Influenced by Neoplatonism, which demands the renunciation of the sensual, of
the outer worldly appearances, Augustine, on the other hand, strives for the concen-
tration on the spiritual and the inner life. Since evil necessarily reigns in this world,
but the soul wants to escape from evil, it must flee from this world. Therefore, the
Neoplatonist wants to withdraw from worldly business, overcome his own body
through asceticism, and devote himself to contemplation. In view of the approach-
ing end of the world, the world and its creatures are only a ladder to God. Against
this background, the task of the Church is not to make them free, but to make them
good. Thus earthly things become steps on which one ascends to heavenly righ-
teousness (Weinand 1911, 19). In this perspective, work and mechanical arts are
also tools for reaching God. If worldly men work for earthly motives, one should
not work for earthly love, but for the sake of the eternal rest that God promises.
1 Conceptions of Work 7
Finally, according to Augustine, when man works, he imitates God, who in turn
directs and sustains the universe (Aug. Conf. 1, 4; 13, 37). Here Plato’s ideas of
parousia and metexis take hold, reversing Plotinus’ ancient emphasis on the idea or
the divine and emphasizing the shining through of the idea in objects. According to
Augustine, man possesses securely only what he has gained after laborious work. In
his commentary on Genesis he lets the work begin right in Paradise. God had given
Paradise to man to guard and cultivate it, so that what God had created would come
to fruition through human activity. This work, however, was perceived as pleasure;
it only became a burden through the Fall after the expulsion from Paradise. But even
then physical work is to be spiritualized, in that through it the soul is directed toward
God. The Jews misunderstood the Sabbath commandment when they abstained
from physical labor. The commandment is to be understood allegorically, since it
involves direction of the spirit to God rather than a commitment to physical idle-
ness. (Weinand 1911, 22–25).
Such Augustinian approaches were taken up by Protestantism. Through Martin
Luther, the everyday manual labor of peasants and craftsmen was valorized through
the criticism of the clerical class and the abolition of monasticism. While the latter
were accused of laziness, the peasant’s manual labor appeared as the ideal way of
life. The Peasants’ War of 1525 was directed equally against the laziness of the
clergy and the nobility (Wiedemann 1979, 83–87, 99, 307). A Catholic revaluation
of practical work can be found in François de Sales 1609 in his Guide to the Pious
Life. In Italian humanism, Pico della Mirandola had already declared man to be the
designer of the world as the image of the Creator God in his treatise On the Dignity
of Man in 1487 (Reinhard 2007, 21–22).
Even medieval monasticism held on to work, which was not its raison d’être but
used as an ascetic exercise. Bernard of Clairvaux, who spread the Cistercian order
in Europe, rebuked his nephew for defecting to the Clunyazens and betraying the
Cistercian ideal, which consisted of fasting, vigilance, silence and the work of the
hands. Of the hermit and monk-father Anthony the following anecdote was handed
down in the eleventh century: When he was endeavoring to follow Christ ascetically
in the Egyptian desert, he had a vision of a simple tanner in Alexandria who was
even more devout than he was in his hermitage. When he went to see him, he found
that the latter, with his humble devotion to work as a simple craftsman, was quietly
attaining the kingdom of God (Seibt 1981, 166–167). Scotus Eriugena, around 859,
in a commentary on Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis philologiae et Mercurii (c.
400), had attested that the artes liberales were pursued for their own sake, while the
artes mechanicae were based only on imitation and invention (Boehm 1993,
427–430). Hugh of St. Victor (1097–1141) had distinguished among the mechanical
arts lanificum, armatura, navigatio, agricultura, venatio, medicina et theatrica, i.e.
woolwork with clothing manufacture, military art, navigation, agriculture, hunting,
medicine, and theater. Vincent of Beauvais sees that medicine has not only a manual
but also a theoretical part and therefore replaces it with alchemy in his thirteenth
century Speculum doctrinale when enumerating the mechanical arts (Lusignan
1982, 36). For Thomas Aquinas, the biblical parable of the lilies of the field and the
birds of the air, for which the Lord provides, does not speak against the general
provision for existence, but only against an excessive, immoderate striving for gain.
Moderate work, on the other hand, protected against the dangers of an aimless life,
demanded self-conquest, guaranteed subsistence, and made alms possible. And
where Thomas in his Summa contra gentiles (1259–1267), especially in Ch. 77,
ascribes to man a secondary creative efficacy, in that he himself, like the Creator,
becomes the effective cause for other creatures, whereby God indirectly participates
in every act of creation through secondary causes, the results of the mechanical arts
are also meant. However, the universe and not the world of work is the focus of the
argument (Seibt 1981, 170–171). Nevertheless, it can be stated that in antiquity and
in the Middle Ages there were voices that positively appreciated manual labor.
Chapter 2
Alternatives to Work
Head work, like hand work, stands in contrast to the absence of work in leisure,
idleness or play. Since these form a counterpart to the theme of work and its disci-
plines of knowledge, let us briefly introduce them with their implications and evalu-
ations. In Luque Faxardo’s Fiel desengaño contra la ociosidad y los juegos (1603),
the world of the player is confronted with that of the sage in dialogue form. In the
case of games, the commercial ones, in which skill is important, are to be distin-
guished from those in which the outcome depends on chance. Since the former,
motivated by greed and the desire for gain, pursue the purpose of monetary gain at
the expense of others, they are not only an expression of idleness, but are to be
regarded as a disease and a sin. The loss of money is joined by that of friendship and
respect. The author wants to allow the Olympic Games, in which young people can
strengthen their forces, and the chess game, in which war tactics are practiced
(Luque Faxardo 1955, 746). On the other hand, he finds it particularly inappropriate
for women to play cards (Albert 2009, 142).
In his Tratado contra los juegos públicos (1609), Juan de Mariana puts the dif-
ferent kinds of entertainment and pastimes on the same level, so that bullfighting,
theatrical games and prostitution are seen as damage to the country and religion, as
“oficina de deshonestidad” (Mariana 1950, 413), and counterpart to praiseworthy
work. It is also work that is seen as part of human dignity in Francisco Cervantes de
Salazar. He had edited Pérez de Oliva’s Diálogo de la dignidad del hombre (1546)
and supplemented it with a text of his own. Here the figure of Labricio, whose
ancestor was Hercules, represents work and Ocía with her retinue Fraude and
Hipocresía idleness. The plot ends with a banquet at which Mercury urges all the
guests to work honorably and advises against idleness and its harmful concomitants
(Cervantes de Salazar 1772; Briesemeister 2009, 254–257).
Juan de Pineda, in his Diálogos familiares de la agricultura cristiana (1589),
tightens the argument by considering idleness not as something neutral, but as
something bad (Juan de Pineda 1963, 239–241). Thus, he argues, it is wrong to
think that the idler who does nothing does neither good nor bad. He does bad and

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66366-0_2
10 2 Alternatives to Work
can expect no reward. Gutierrez de los Ríos, in the last chapter of his Noticia general
para la estimación de las artes y la manera en que se conocen los liberales de las
que son mecánicas y serviles (1600), also praises work, attributing on the one hand
the deplorable situation of the Spain of his time to widespread idleness, and on the
other hand calling for the overcoming of this state by a return to the values of work.
This present state of affairs was caused by the glamour and fame of the idlers and
the poverty and misery of the honest workers, which made the life of idleness
worthy of imitation. Nobles, foreigners and other idlers were “ladrones legítimos y
legales” (Gutierrez de los Ríos 1600, 227) and seized the ecclesiastical and state
pension income and thus the labor earnings of each individual in the state. The idle-
ness of the nobility was opposed by Hernando de Talavera in his De cómo se ha de
ordenar el tiempo para que sea bien expendido (c. 1500), in which he stressed the
importance of time. Whoever used it properly could achieve prosperity and prop-
erty. Citing Seneca, he states that there is no greater and worse loss than that of time
(Hernando de Talavera 1911, 95). After all, he argues, the stars were arranged by the
Creator in such a way that we can read from them the passage of time. Such benefits
of the stars, however, are held in low esteem by those nobles who turn day into night
and night into day, partying at night, getting on their nerves, and sleeping late during
the day. Wealthy nobles will not immediately become poor because of their disor-
derly lifestyle. But those who are already poor will have to put up with the reproach
of having become poor through idleness. Already in the Bible we find the following
parable: “Go to the ant, you lazy one, consider her behavior, and become wise! It
has no leader, no overseer, no ruler, and yet it provides food in the summer, gathers
provisions at harvest time. How long, thou lazy one, wilt thou lie there, when wilt
thou rise from thy sleep? Still a little sleep, still a little slumber, still a little fold your
arms to rest. Then poverty comes upon thee quickly like a rascal, trouble like an
armed man.” (Prov 6:6-11; Bibel 2017:723).
In the preface to his Discursos del amparo de los legitimos pobres y reduccion de
los fingidos: y de la fundacion y principio de los albergues destos Reynos y amparo
de la milicia dellos (1598), Perez de Herrera emphasizes that the support of the truly
poor should be accompanied by a reduction in the number of malingerers. Under the
latter category fall, “los fingidos, falsos, engañosos, y vagabundos” (Perez de
Herrera 1598, al lector), who seize the alms of others and violate all the good cus-
toms and laws of the state. The poor spread contagious diseases and behave as
thieves of charity. Vagabonds, pretending to be poor, enter houses to ask for alms,
spying where it is worth while to break in at night. Thus they are very inventive in
settling down to their poor life of idleness and gluttony (5r), and living without
religious support. Poor as they pretend to be, they are avaricious. Spending nothing,
they accumulate money. Although they could work, they inflict wounds on them-
selves or eat harmful things in order to look as pale as possible and arouse pity. They
pretend to be dumb and blind without being so. They twist the feet and hands of
their children who have just been born, or they forcibly cause them to lose their
sight, only that they may help them to accumulate money. As they always wear the
same filthy clothes in cold and heat, eat rotten meat or other things that have been
thrown away, drink undrinkable water and bad wine in great quantity, especially in
2 Alternatives to Work 11
summer, when it is hot and humid, as in Seville, they emit a mouldy smell, spoil the
air, and bring typhus and plague.
Addiction to gambling can be a cause of poverty. According to Adrian de Castro,
it is closer to idleness than to leisure. As usual in other fields, his Libro de los daños
que resultan del juego first gives its origin and inventor. They are greed, idolatry,
and the god of merchants and thieves: “La madre deste vicio es la Avaricia, su ama
de leche la Idolatria, su ayo y maestro el Dios Mercurio, qual la madre tal el hijo.”
(de Castro 1599, 6v). With Aristotle, greed is explained as an infinite and boundless
desire to have, making it the root of all evils, of treachery, perjury, and violence. The
fact that Anselm of Canterbury is also cited, according to whom money and riches
are the god of the covetous, suggests that it is primarily a matter of gambling for
money. The gambler is compared to Tantalus, who stood atoning for his misdeeds in
the underworld up to his chin in water, but could not drink from it as it kept reced-
ing, nor could he grasp the fruit above him as the wind blew it away at every attempt.
Tantalus torments also the gamblers have when they thirst for money. That Mercury
is named as the educator is not surprising. He is, after all, the greatest cheat and
most treacherous gypsy among the gods. Ancient references often dominate,
although the end and climax of the argument against gambling is the raffle of the
clothes of the crucified Jesus.
While doctors cure minor illnesses with mild medicines, according to de Castro,
greed is a difficult disease to cure, which idolizes money and gold. Examples include
Caesar, who wanted to immortalize himself by having his image engraved on coins,
and the Golden Calf, which the Israelites created and worshipped as a new god
when they grew tired of waiting for Moses. If one compares possessions with free-
dom, peace of mind, or good reputation, they seem of lesser value anyway. But
possessions also have something of a chameleon quality that adapts to its surround-
ings. If they are with a good person, they appear good and can lead to charity, while
with a bad one this leads to lechery and gluttony. An example of this is the gambler,
for whom it is sacrilege to withdraw his money from the game in order to give it to
the poor.
If you look at the player at play, you notice his oaths, his blasphemies, his hatred,
his envy, his defiance, his lies and false flattery. In any case, he says, it is better to
possess little securely than to leave much to a doubtful fate. Of course, according to
de Castro, it is appealing to make great gains with small stakes. But one should
avoid the behavior of the dog in Aesop’s fable, who, with a piece of meat between
his teeth, stoops over a river in whose waters he sees the meat magnified. Hence he
snaps at the reflection in the water and loses the meat from his muzzle. Here the
proverb fits, “Mas vale pajaro en mano, que buitre volando.” (34r) (Better a sparrow
in the hand than a dove on the roof.). And in Seneca it is stated that an adverse fate
is more likely than a favorable one. Through gambling, more rich have become poor
than poor have become rich. Those who have lost their own possessions also lose
their dignity when they have to ask others for money and credit. Such distresses are
then responsible for usurious interest and for flattery. Since flattery, cunning, and
deception rule the world of gamblers, Aesop’s fable in which a hungry vixen saw a
jackdaw with a piece of bread in its beak illustrates the point. The vixen praises the
jackdaw’s beauty, speed, and lightness and asks her if she can sing as beautifully.
The jackdaw is flattered and when she begins to sing, the bread falls out of her beak,
which the vixen immediately steals from her.
According to de Castro, emergencies are often exploited for usury. If the mer-
chant knows that the borrower is in distress, he allows the price to rise to unimag-
ined heights. “No pide lo que ella vale, sino lo que el quiere.” (60v). Thus, there are
people just waiting to lend to hard-pressed players. Thus, the game creates disorder
and lost is the great good of peace, which is the condition for prosperity, tranquility
and permanence. Without peace, cities are unprotected and revenues are uncertain.
It is like the strings of a musical instrument. If one is out of tune, the proper tuning
of the others is useless (64v). The author contrasts covetousness, which is respon-
sible for trying to gain possessions and win lands through wars, with meekness,
whose kinship with peace is emphasized in the Psalms of the Bible. Indeed, he
argues, play is nothing other than a living image of war and discord (82v). Seneca
is credited with the assertion that the root of wars is that some claim for themselves
what belongs to all or to another. And the game is nothing but a war in which one
wins and the other loses, and whoever wins today will be defeated tomorrow.
Another great good is lost through the game: time. Here de Castro quotes
Aristotle, who characterizes it as the beginning of the future and the end of the past.
According to Augustine, time is something intangible, since the past is no more, the
future not yet happened, and the present an indivisible and unknowable moment.
For Thales, time is the wisest of all things, since it finds, confesses and discovers
everything. And according to Seneca, all things are foreign to man, only time is
proper to him. Therefore Theophilus advises us to use this good wisely. Since man,
unlike animals, has a mind, let him devote his time to contemplation and the sci-
ences (123v−124v) or to the salvation of his soul. But he who plays has time for
nothing else. Thus the merchant, when he plays, lacks time for his shop, the scribe
for his office, the scholar for study, the physician for visiting the sick, and the cleric
for prayer. Those who do not play, on the other hand, have time in abundance to
think, to do good deeds, or to meet with friends. Maintaining friendships stabilizes
society and supports the individual. There is also time for the practice of music,
which Aristotle said transforms negative feelings into positive ones.
Can you also learn through play? Does a quiz only require presence of mind or
is it also suitable for imparting knowledge? It is not possible to reconstruct exactly
how question and answer games were designed in detail in the Siglo de Oro. In any
case, instructions for questions and answers are available in book form. In the dedi-
catory letter of his Sylva de varias questiones naturales y morales con sus respues-
tas y solutiones, facadas de muchos autores griegos y latinos (1575), Hieronymo
Campos begins by blaming idleness for numerous evils and misdeeds, which is why
it is important to fill one’s time with sensible activities. The Roman state, which had
long flourished and dominated the world, is cited as an example of this, until sweet
idleness spread there and it finally succumbed to the attacks of the barbarians. The
author Campos himself intends to use his time, freed after participation in warlike
enterprises, to gather his materials, collected from ancient Greek and Roman
authors, in the form of questions and answers in a “silva,” so that those unpracticed
in the sciences may find answers and remove doubts, “con que pueda Vuestra
Excelencia algunos ratos (desocupado de los negocios publicos) recrear el alma.”
(Campos 1575, dedication).
The questions and answers are arranged in groups of 100 and concern first physi-
cal objects and then human concerns. The fourth question, “what is the human body
made of?” is answered by referring to the four elements: “El cuerpo del hombre, de
que esta hecho y compuesto? Solucion. De quatro elementos: Tierra, Agua, Aire, y
Fuego.”(1v). Why the blood is red is answered by referring to its place of origin, the
liver. An opaque object and light are given as the cause of the shadow. Why is the
wind from the Mediterranean countries to the east so pleasant? – Because it is tem-
perate and neither hot nor cold. Why are some right-handed and others left-
handed? – The reason is the heat emanating from the heart, which radiates more
strongly to the right or left and thus makes one or the other hand more active, which
can also be a hereditary predisposition. How is it that after a clear and cheerful day
it soon becomes cloudy with the onset of night? – This is due to the inconstancy of
the moon, which commands the night.
A few more examples from the realm of human morality follow: Why is the loss
of one’s property preferable to unjust gain? – Because this loss depresses only for a
short time, and not for so many years as the remorse of wrong done. By what
MEANS does a king perpetuate himself throughout his life and after his death? – By
liking his subjects and committing no injustice. When do cities and states perish? –
When the rulers no longer know how to distinguish between good and bad. The
question of what benefit music brings to those who actively pursue it is answered
with reference to its positive psychological and physical effects: – “Levanta el
entendimiento y el alma, a contemplar cosas grandes, y despierta el cuerpo, para
que pueda dezir lo que quiere, con mucha gravedad y eloquentia, assi en verso como
en prosa.” (132v). Why does Homer call salt a divine thing? – Because it gives fla-
vour to all food and has a preservative effect.
The approach of Alonso López de Corela in his Trezientas preguntas de cosas
naturales (1546) appears more academic. The author, who calls himself a physician
in the title page, sends his 300 questions ahead, then lets a preface follow, and in the
main part repeats the questions with solutions in the right column of each page,
while in the left column he gives and discusses the respective sources. In the preface
he addresses all those who know nothing of philosophy and other sciences. He
wants to give them the opportunity to keep difficult and important things in mind,
since it is as difficult to ask questions as it is to give answers. In doing so, he uses a
simple and low style, because “el bien tanto es mayor quanto a mas se comunica”
(Al prudente lector), making it possible to benefit a large number of readers. In
answer to the first question, why man is of great and upright stature, the purpose
given is that it enables him to see the sky better. The reason further given is that he
has more heat than other living creatures.
The answers are discussed in the left column, citing passages in Aristotle, Galen
and Boethius. Thus, as a counter-argument, it is stated that there are animals that do
not walk straight but can still see the sky, such as the cock. Why is it praiseworthy
to kindle great fires in times of pestilence? – Fire carries away the poisonous
pestilential air, as evidenced by Pliny in the left column. Why is man stricken with
sadness when he is alone at home? – Because he becomes pensive and melancholy,
sadness assails him, as is confirmed ex contrario with Avicenna, who points out that
it is a pleasure to have social interaction with others. Why is man born without
teeth? – Because, unlike some animals, he does not need them at first, bones can
form beforehand. Why does reading in the evening keep some awake while others
fall asleep while doing it? – It is because the moist cold juice of the body immobi-
lizes the phlegmatic and warms the brain in the choleric, Aristotle being quoted here
in the left column. These examples from the questions in the book without page
references may give an impression. Despite the seemingly greater scientificity, orig-
inality also seems to be more important here than scientifically validated knowl-
edge, which raises the question of whether knowledge ought really to be conveyed
primarily in an entertaining way, or whether the entertaining aspect should not
dominate over the instructive one. Perhaps the texts were taken to help in games in
society, in which the aim was to shine through brilliant answers, as is assumed in
seventeenth century France with La Rochefoucauld (Sorel 1977; Strosetzki 1990).
If the game of questions can instruct entertainingly, then this applies even more
to the game of chess. For Ruylopez de Sigura it is in any case not a game but a sci-
ence. In his Libro de la invencion liberal y arte de juego del Axedrez (1561), he
explains why it requires mastery of the liberal arts of geometry and arithmetic. It is,
in fact, square and has eight boxes on each side, which in total stand side by side like
64 houses. It is a mathematical science because it does not deal with chance but with
proofs. Moreover, as in other sciences, one needs here “ingenio, memoria, fuerca de
imaginacion, exercicio, y afficion.” (Ruylopez de Sigura 1561, 1v). What the imagi-
nation conceives is to be preserved by the memory and brought to mind by the spirit
of invention on occasion. Practice is as important in the art of chess as the mastery
of knowledge.
Not to be underestimated is the importance of inclination and enthusiasm, which
increase diligence and ease difficulties. Since all this is also true of other sciences,
it is proved that chess is a science. It is not merely a laudable pastime, but something
necessary for the maintenance of man, who, like all beings who have a body, cannot
work uninterruptedly, but needs rests. The mind, too, needs breaks in order not to
become ill and dull. Recovered, it is better, stronger and more perceptive. Chess is
especially appropriate in this context, “por ser juego de sciencia, y parecer que con
el se huye el ocio inhonesto.” (4v). Finally, scholars and great philosophers, such as
Seneca, are attested to have played chess. Also, one should not be confused by the
term “game,” since other arts of the artes liberales were also so called, such as ludus
litterarum the study of literature or ludus grammaticus the study of grammar.
When asked who invented chess, Ruylopez de Sigura gives different answers. For
some it is the Moors, for others the Greeks. On the one hand, Xerxes from Babylon
comes into question. Then the game is a reflection of the city with the king, his
nobles and the edges as city walls. On the other, the prudent army commander
Palamedes is said to have invented, among many other things in the Trojan War, the
board game as a useful occupation between warlike actions for his soldiers, on which
chess could be played, because it involved them “en las cosas de la milicia: y traxes-
sen los ingenios vivos, y exercitados en las subtilezas de poder vencer sus enemigos.”
(7v). Chess, then, is a martial activity. One reason given for the invention of the game
is that it teaches by example that a good king should not be cruel and unrestrained,
but rather should spare his subjects “mas con amor y aequidad, que no con crueldad:
para que los hallasse promptos, y obedientes al tiempo de menester: y no enemigos
y rebeldes.” (3r). The art of war, he says, is the best of all, since it preserves liberty,
strengthens the dignity of a country, and preserves dominion.
Since it depends on the fate of the king whether the game is won, he deserves
special attention. He stands in the middle with his subjects in order to administer
justice, fairness and leniency from there. Depending on their proximity to the king,
the pawns’ pieces are given more or less importance. After all, it is not so much a
city as a battlefield with two kings and their soldiers ready to fight (37v). Vegetius
emphasizes the importance of the infantry, since the arfiles are tribunos militum, i.e.
capitanes de infanteria or alferez de infanteria. The figures of the knights stand for
mounted warriors. This warrior force must be kept together. An army driven apart
and disordered is at risk and “recibe grauissimo peligro y daño de los enemigos.”
(48v). What matters less, he says, is the number of figures or soldiers. More impor-
tant, he says, is the quality of the leaders. To win, one should confuse the enemy
before the battle and, if possible, tire him out during the fight so that he makes mis-
takes. Advice goes back to Vegetius to use selected and well-armed peasants in the
midfield to break the enemy’s ranks, and not to isolate the peasants but to have them
act in groups. The leaders should always be ready to rush to the aid of all others. The
advice goes back to Cassiodorus: “aprenda el soldado en tiempo que es de ocio, lo
que pueda perfectamente hazer en la escaramuza, o pelea.” (68r). And from Vegetius
it is deduced that no one is born a good player, but that it is perseverance, practice
and experience that make one win in the long run.
In summary, it can be emphasized that many of the aforementioned opinions and
models of labor activity were widespread and thus influential in the Spanish Siglo
de Oro. Even if in antiquity workers and peasants were the lowest class and philoso-
phers such as Aristotle considered it impossible for virtue, a prerequisite for politi-
cal activity, to be learned from handicrafts, there are countervailing tendencies in
ancient mythology. Examples of this are Odysseus, who makes his own bed, or the
corn-mother Demeter as the goddess of fertility. And if in the early Middle Ages
earthly things are generally of little value compared to heavenly righteousness,
Augustine emphasizes that Jesus had a craftsman as foster father and advises monks
to do manual work.
The counterpart to work is leisure. Breaks from work are considered necessary
in order not to become dull. However, a distinction must be made here between
leisure and idleness. Whereas leisure is for recreation, in order to be able to work
better again afterwards, and is always connected with an activity, e. g. as otium cum
litteris, idleness stands for doing nothing and is not morally neutral, but bad. It
leads, in fact, to poverty, in which the really poor must be distinguished from the
malingerers who beg, although they could work. If idleness is filled with gambling,
care must be taken. For in gambling, avarice leads to addiction to gambling and to
distress, which usurers are fond of exploiting. Of course, there are useful games in
which one can learn something. These include question games, which provide
knowledge in an entertaining way, or the game of chess, which can be seen as an
intellectual preliminary exercise for war.
Part II
Siglo de Oro
Chapter 3
Collections
3.1 Encyclopaedia
Even if only a few representative professions can be singled out in this book, some
encyclopaedic representations of professions and early modern encyclopaedias
should first be presented. There is, after all, a connection between the two insofar as
the encyclopaedias of specialist knowledge also focus on the specialists who use
this knowledge professionally, and the representations of professions usually also
include the relevant necessary knowledge. Two other genres can have a comparably
encyclopedic character. First, directories of inventors also bring detailed informa-
tion about the invented subject or field, especially as it was customary to character-
ize and define the latter by indicating its origin. On the other hand, directories of the
most important personalities of a country or city also list those who excelled in their
field or science, which is supplemented with relevant information. In all directories,
the hierarchy of the different disciplines of knowledge and with it that of their
representatives is not missing.
Even in antiquity, manual labor was usually not highly valued. In the Middle
Ages, the appreciation of the fields of knowledge and their activities was linked to
the hierarchy of being, and a servant function was attributed to the mechanical arts.
In the compilations of knowledge by Martianus Capella, Isidore of Seville, and
Vincent of Beauvais, arrangement and classification were more important than com-
pleteness. While the directories of Aristotle and Pliny are oriented towards the
norm, the mirabilia literature, which presents the technical wonders of Rome, as in
Pliny, or the whimsical things of newly discovered lands, as in Marco Polo, concen-
trates on the exceptional phenomena. Thus, the miraculous becomes a poetological
postulate (Leinkauf 2015).
Does Garzoni see only frauds in merchants, stonemasons and shoemakers, who,
occupied all day with menial tasks, cannot develop virtues, because he writes as an
Augustinian monk in his library? His overall view of different professions, arts and

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66366-0_3
20 3 Collections
occupations opens up insights into the world of the court, hunters and shepherds as
well as that of rag merchants. The Spaniard Figueroa not only translates Garzoni’s
original, but edits and adds to it to delight his readers with things of general interest.
To what extent is he guided by the principle of composition of Pedro Mexía’s
encyclopaedic Silva de varia lección and Antonio de Torquemada’s Jardin de flores
curiosas?
The books of the Italian humanist Polydor Vergil De inventoribus rerum, dis-
seminated throughout Europe, present the fields of knowledge by tracing them to
their origins and inventors. Polydor Vergil’s system begins with God and creation,
and is also devoted to jurisprudence, agriculture, and seafaring. His approach is
adopted in Spain by Juan de la Cueva with his directory Los inventores de las cosas,
which focuses on the stories of inventors.
Although the apprenticeship with a master in the mechanical arts usually lasted
4 years, its value is disputed. Miranda Villafant has the soul advise the body in an
allegorical dialogue that, now that it has acquired what is necessary with the
mechanical arts, it can devote itself to contemplation. In doing so, the ancient texts
may be available in Spanish, so that the grammar of Latin is no longer an obstacle.
Before the glory and honor of the persons listed in the viri illustres – tracts are pre-
sented, the ideas of prowess and honor that lead to excellence are discussed in more
detail. Guardiola makes prowess and honor criteria for the varones claros y grandes
de España. Is this prowess expressed in words and in heroic deeds? In the case of
nobility, he distinguishes three types: the theological, which is linked to the grace of
God; the natural, which is held by those who do not follow a trade; and the nobleza
civil, which is conferred by the king with the title of nobility. Numerous examples
can be cited from antiquity of a craftsman or peasant rising to the highest offices of
state because of his own prowess. Does this explain why the privileged nobles were
not necessarily to be preferred in the granting of higher offices? Should those who
excel in study and knowledge be considered, even if they come from humble
beginnings? Military exploits seem impossible without knowledge of the art of war.
This is not changed by the many titles of nobility, which were initially rewards for
martial deeds before being passed on to later generations. Guardiola obviously has
no intention of upgrading the manual professions, since fame and glory only beckon
when manual labor is replaced by intellectual activity.
In ancient times, people liked to combine the narrative of the emergence of a
field of culture and science with the praise of those responsible for it, be they
humans or native gods. Thus Athens, which had a monopoly on state olive cultiva-
tion, credited the goddess Athena with having planted the first olive tree. In early
modern Spain, inventors also serve to praise Spain when, for example, the biblical
Tubal, as the country’s founder, also brought culture and science. What is the sig-
nificance of works that, following Petrarch’s De viris illustribus, name Spain’s
authoritative officeholders, such as king, bishops, dukes, and counts, and highlight
the strengths of Spaniards in various fields? Are there other lists of greater conse-
quence, giving the principal writers or personages by name, title, and occupational
title, with an indication of special attainments in the intellectual field? Where inven-
tions are cited as evidence of dignitas hominis, a debate arises between optimists
3.1 Encyclopaedia 21
and pessimists of progress, the latter, like the ancient cynics, seeing the ideal in the
state of nature. Smaller cities and towns such as Calatayud also boast their most
important representatives in history and the present, including the heroes of the
expulsion of the Almogavars in 1383 as well as the Roman poet Martial.
First, let us note some authorities and encyclopedias that present different kinds
of knowledge and their representatives. Evidence that late antiquity held manual
labor in low esteem is found in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis philologiae et
Mercurii and in Cassiodor’s De septem disciplinis. In Isidore de Seville’s
Etymologiae, the artes liberales are placed above the manual arts. In encyclopedias
of the early modern period, up to the eighteenth century, it is not so much the com-
plete representation of the sciences that is important, but rather their connection and
coordination, their outline and classification. For classification, antiquity provides
three models: the system of artes liberales with trivium and quadrivium, the
Aristotelian division into theoretical (physics, mathematics, and metaphysics),
practical (ethics, politics, and economics), and poetic philosophy and, thirdly, the
Stoic-Neoplatonic scheme of logic, ethics, and physics (Dierse 1971, 3, 10). In the
Middle Ages, Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141) refers to the manual arts as mechani-
cal, citing as examples weaving, weaponry, seafaring, agriculture, hunting, healing,
and acting (Villa Prieto 2015, 421). In Thomas Aquinas, the hierarchization of
knowledge is oriented towards the order of being, which consists of the supernatural
(God), the natural (creation), and the physical (the world). Knowledge thus has a
theological level, a logical level, a moral level, and a level produced by free and
mechanical arts. In this context, he also refers to the mechanical arts as serving,
since they modify nature for better use by means of special techniques (423). It is
the usefulness of the mechanical arts that Raimundus Lullus emphasizes in Libre de
contemplació en Déu (1276) and Doctrina pueril (1275), since without them the
world would be in disorder and citizens and princes alike would be deprived of their
livelihood. Among the professions that produce and sell food, Lullus distinguishes
agricultural workers, gardeners, hunters and shepherds. Food processing and distri-
bution are served by the miller or businessmen such as butchers and innkeepers
(427). Clothing and care of the body are provided by shoemakers, tailors, weavers,
furriers, and barbers. Lullus also introduces the professions that serve to build
houses, make weapons or tools, or those who buy and sell or transport goods, and
the bankers who support commerce. As late as Juan Manuel’s Libro de los estados
(1327–1332), the representatives of all these professions are contrasted as the class
of laboratores with the classes of oratores and bellatores (434).
The Speculum of Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo was printed in Latin in Rome in
1467, followed by a Spanish translation in 1491 by Pablo Hurus in Zaragoza.
Sánchez de Arévalo had studied law and theology at Salamanca, held various
bishoprics in Spain, and in 1464 was appointed castellan of Castel Sant’Angelo in
Rome, where he resided when he wrote his Speculum. He begins in the first book
with the secular estates, presenting them from the king down to the ox-driver, and in
the second book presents the ecclesiastical estates in an equally hierarchical manner,
distinguishing the clergy and the monastic as separate groups. The text is framed as
an argument between the mother and relatives about the pros and cons of individual
22 3 Collections
professions, intended to help a young man choose a career and decide between
ecclesiastical and secular offices. In considering both sides of the coin, he has
borrowed from Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae (Kurze 1999, 120).
Specifically, the secular professions are presented in a largely hierarchical order
with one article pro and one contra each: Kings and princes, courtiers, nobility,
military, magistrates and judges, consuls and provincial leaders, advocates, notaries
and scribes, as a separate group the peasantry, finally the artes liberales and the
artes mechanicae. No hierarchy is made among the mechanical arts, but the
usefulness and necessity of the mechanical arts is emphasized, since without
agriculture and hunting there would be no food, without wool production no
clothing, without blacksmiths and carpenters no houses for protection against cold
and enemies. But important as craftsmen are, they are not suitable for public office.
Here Sánchez de Arévalo draws on Aristotle and sees them at the bottom of the
social hierarchy. A disparaging attitude towards the craftsmen is expressed when it
is said that wool workers mix linen with wool, blacksmiths spend brass for gold and
stretch silver with lead, and finally, merchants give false claims when purchasing
and conceal damage when selling (Kurze 1999, 130). Thus, although Sánchez de
Arévalo presents in detail the professional alternatives parallelled in reality, he is not
impartialbecause of his noble origin, his spiritual status and his ancient sources.
A division of the fields of knowledge can start from the respective fields or from
the human abilities that are prerequisites for the activity in the respective field.
Thus, Juan Huarte starts from the faculties of comprehension, imagination and
memory. Temperaments are what determine human nature, when Juan Huarte, in his
Examen de ingenios (1575), distinguishes in each individual different intellectual
aptitudes, attitudes and deficiencies in relation to the exercise of professions (Martín
Araguz 2004). The mechanical arts offer a wide range that includes artisans, stock-
breeders, farmers, merchants, and bankers. These groups find support from eco-
nomic reformers such as the official in the Málaga treasury, Luis Ortiz, who
presented his Memorial to King Philip II in 1558, in which he advocated teaching
every Spaniard a trade so that raw materials would become products. Alejo Venegas’s
Agonía del tránsito de la muerte (1537), in which he complains that in Spain it is
considered dishonorable to practice a craft, which is why there are so many idlers,
shows that the actual situation is far from this (Herrero 2004, 296–297).
A particular kind of encyclopedia emerges in early modern Spain and makes no
claim to completeness or comprehensive systematics. When Pedro Mexía titles his
encyclopedic presentation of phenomena Silva de varia lección, he programmati-
cally uses the word “silva”, which means forest, thus referring to an area where the
trees and plants stand without order. Offering knowledge that can be directly
accessed, extracted from texts, and used piecemeal, so to speak, is the model Mexía
follows (Schneiderl 2013, 23). What was known and how it was represented dif-
fered in the early modern period from the culture of knowledge today, as not only
was ancient mythology and the Old Testament taken into account, but symbolic
worlds and anomalies such as monsters were also included when considering stones,
plants and animals. Thus, in the four-volume dictionary of the French Academy of
1685, the bee appears in two separate alphabets: one of literature and language as a
3.1 Encyclopaedia 23
symbol of diligence, and the other of arts and sciences as an insect (Schneider 2006,
10 f.). The alphabetical principle had not yet become established.
New inventions are seen in eighteenth-century France by d’Alembert, e.g., in
agriculture and medicine, by research undertaken out of pure curiosity, and by the
application of geometry and mechanics to the properties of bodies, i.e., by combin-
ing observation and calculation, e.g., in astronomy (d’Alembert 1997, 16, 20). His
and Diderot’s Encyclopedia aims to highlight causes of origin and uses in the com-
prehension of sciences and arts. It deals with their invention and the historical con-
text of the inventions. Earlier works of an encyclopedic character, which we will not
discuss further below, are: Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De incertitudine et vanitate
scientiarum declamatio invectiva (1568), Correas Gonzalo’s Vocabulario de
refranes y frases proverbiales (1627), Gómez Pereira’s Antoniana Margarita
(1554), Sebastián Izquierdo’s Pharus scientiarum (1659), Gregor Reisch’s
Margarita philosophica (1503), and Paulus Scalichius’s Encyclopaedia, seu Orbis
disciplinarum, tam sacrarum quam prophanarum, Epistemon (1559).
Encyclopedias usually present the normal. But there are also compilations of the
extraordinary, especially in travelogues. Marco Polo had travelled east from Venice
along the Silk Road to China in 1271, where he had stayed for 17 years and had seen
numerous wondrous things, such as paper money or long-burning coal extracted
from the earth, of which he tells. The great age of discovery, however, began at the
end of the fifteenth century with the circumnavigation of the southern tip of Africa
in 1487/1488 by the Portuguese Bartolomeu Diaz, the discovery of America in 1492
by Columbus, the discovery of the sea route to India in 1498 by Vasco da Gama, and
the circumnavigation of the world in 1519 and 1522 by Fernando Magellan. It was
Marco Polo who, although he himself had lived in China, furnished his account with
numerous stories of miracles and magicians. Another example of such compilations
is Alvar Gutiérrez de Torres’ El sumario de las maravillosas y espantables cosas
que en el mundo han acontescido (1524).
Mirabilia are omnipresent in the aforementioned natural history of Pliny from
50 AD. They show up in natural phenomena as well as in human inventions, the
latter appearing as heroic as they are miraculous (Céard 1996, 60). Here one has to
distinguish between what the adjective thaumasios denotes in Greek and what para-
doxos denotes. The former refers to that which arouses wonder or admiration, the
latter to that which contradicts the common norm. The outline of the work moves
from cosmology to geography to anthropology, and then to zoology, botany, medi-
cine, and mineralogy. In doing so, Pliny takes his cue from Aristotle’s concern to
encompass all knowledge, but unlike him, he devotes himself not only to the norm,
but also to the exceptions, i.e. the mirabilia. Where Pliny depicts the technical and
architectural wonders of Rome, he makes use of the topos of the praise of the city.
Where he praises the technical achievements of Rome’s aqueducts and water tanks,
the element of the miraculous is as important to him as that of general usefulness.
That the miraculous should not be improbable either is obvious.
24 3 Collections
3.2 Tomaso Garzoni and Suárez de Figueroa
Of interest in this context are encyclopedias in which professions and fields of activ-
ity are presented with the associated areas of knowledge. Garzoni became particu-
larly famous with his La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (1587)
and Fioravanti with Dello Specchio Di Scientia Universale (1564). Garzoni views
the post-Tridentine world as an Augustinian monk from his monastic library, while
Fioravanti, as a physician much traveled in the Mediterranean, prefers his own expe-
riences to scholastic scholarship. Garzoni’s work had 15 editions in Italy between
1585 and 1665, was translated into German and Latin, and adapted in Spanish.
Fioravanti’s book appeared in 1564, was reprinted for the tenth time in 1660, and
had been translated into French, English, and German. Garzoni’s intention in listing
no less than 540 trades and professions is not so much to valorize manual labor as
to instruct the prince about social groups and their interconnections in the state
(Mocarelli 2011, 92). When Garzoni places merchants near usurers and swindlers,
he seems to be writing from the traditional perspective of the natal nobility, who
claim honors and privileges for themselves precisely because it is what those who
spend all day in menial tasks and mechanical arts cannot have. He also sees the
stonemasons and the shoemakers as primarily flawed and fraudulent. In contrast,
Fioravanti praises the art of the stonemason, since the art of building comes in rank
and necessity right after food and clothing.
As precursors, Barthélemy de Chasseneuz with Catalogus gloriae mundi (1529)
and André Tiraqueau with De nobilitate (1549) could influence Garzoni, the former
primarily concerned with the position of professions in the social hierarchy. In addi-
tion to these works, another possible source of inspiration for Garzoni is Leonardo
Fioravanti’s Dello Specchio Di Scientia Universale (1564) (McClure 2004, 72).
Fioravanti deals with practical arts such as agriculture and animal husbandry in the
first book, theology and ethics in the second, and medicine in the third. When he
introduces tailors, goldsmiths, printers, makers of Murano glass, or shopkeepers, an
appreciation of active and useful manual labor can be discerned, though overcoming
the challenges seems greater to him in the shopkeeper than in the jurist. This is
explained as he distinguishes between good and bad fields of knowledge, counting
magic and astrology among the latter, as well as jurisprudence (McClure 2004, 74).
Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (1526) and its
translation by Ludovico Domenichi, published in Venice in 1547, present in polemi-
cal tradition the presumption and corruption of over a 100 disciplines of knowledge.
In doing so, he rejects a divine origin of knowledge, condemns it as an evil conse-
quence of original sin, and recommends God as a place of retreat. If Garzoni adopts
Agrippa of Nettesheim’s polemic, he differs in his basic attitude. For him, knowl-
edge contributes to the perfection of man and makes man more like his Creator, who
stands for infinite wisdom and prudence.
In Tomaso Garzoni’s German translation from 1619, the Italian word “profes-
sioni” is translated and paraphrased as “Professionen, Künsten, Geschafften,
Händlen vnd Handiwercken”, while the Spanish adaptation by Christoval Suarez de
3.2 Tomaso Garzoni and Suárez de Figueroa 25
Figueroa from 1615 speaks only of “plaza universal de todas ciencias y artes”. On
more than 700 pages in 153 chapters, not only professions with their occupational
knowledge disciplines are presented, but also the most diverse areas of everyday
practice. For example, the courtly world with its forms of behavior in conversation,
at meals and at play, courtly leisure and idleness are presented. In contrast, activities
that are closer to nature than to the court are also depicted, such as those of the
hunter, the shepherd or the gardener. For the astrologer, the alchemist, the dream-
interpreter or the nigromancer, reading nature is a rule-governed art that makes it
possible to find the propitious moments for a marriage, a medicine or a contract of
sale. Another world is that of the great merchants who have risen to high honors in
such cities as Venice, London, and Barcelona. They must not be confused with petty
changers, salt merchants or rag merchants.
Suárez de Figueroa’s adaptation of Garzoni’s model can be understood as a
humanistic aemulatio, that is, as a competitive imitation and adaptation to circum-
stances that are different in Madrid than in Italy. While Garzoni aims to list all
professions and forms of activity in an encyclopedic manner, Suárez de Figueroa
describes his work as a “jardín deleitoso de admirables frutos y flores” (Bradbury
2011, 103), evoking titles such as Pedro Mexía’s Silva de varia lección (1540) or
Antonio de Torquemada’s Jardín de flores curiosas, en que se tratan algunas mate-
rias de humanidad, philosophia, theologia y geographia, con otras curiosas y
apacibles (1570), where encyclopedic completeness is less important than interest
and attention. In keeping with this intention, Suárez de Figueroa deletes the negative
aspects from Garzoni’s descriptions. Figueroa’s Plaza universal (1615) is more than
a mere translation of Garzoni’s original, given numerous additions and cuts, espe-
cially the paratexts at the beginning. The fact that the latter’s Piazza universale had
become a bestseller after its first edition in 1585 was experienced by Figueroa dur-
ing his stay in northern Italy. Probably with censorship in mind, he later omitted the
articles on the censor, the follower of the Kabbalah, the soothsayer, the chiromancer,
the necromancer, the thief, the robber, and the court jester, and added a section on
skill at arms (Arce Menéndez 2008).
Suárez de Figueroa presents the profession of jurist as noble and respectable,
especially since it is associated with notions of justice. However, the excellent law-
yers are contrasted by a large number of incompetent and ignorant ones (Suárez de
Figueroa 1629, 44). Lawyers are especially respected because they not infrequently
represent the interests of rulers. Yet many of them, who appear polite and elegant,
are insidious and mendacious. Caution should therefore be exercised. For if one
wants to risk the loss of one’s body, one can entrust oneself to an incompetent physi-
cian. With a bad theologian one risks body and soul, but with a bad advocate one
risks body, soul, and property (64). The profession of physician seems to have been
created by God, since it is of the greatest usefulness for the preservation of health.
It requires broad knowledge, not only in the artes liberales, but also in the numerous
medical fields of work. It is all the more regrettable that there are numerous physi-
cians who feign competence, but do not possess it.
Nor do the representatives of the artes liberales find Suárez de Figueroa’s undi-
vided approval. On the one hand, the grammarian of the Latin language opens the
26 3 Collections
door to all the sciences that are available in this language, but he dwells too much
on linguistic trifles, such as the question of whether “Ulysses” should be written
with two “s”. The rhetorician deceives by using cunning to soften his opponent
emotionally. The musician of the quadrivium on the other hand, is dedicated to
harmony, which is everywhere observable in nature and which supports man in
music, balances him emotionally, and frees him from disease (34–36, 134–135, 208).
In the case of the mechanical arts, the activity of those working in a forge is
described. It is so exhausting, he says, that it does not allow the workers to rest and
recuperate, “sino que llegada la noche en que de la trabajosa y larga jornada quedan
tan cansados, que sin acordarse de cenar se adormecen, dando algun breve descanso
a su grave fatiga.” (218). Alongside these are knowledge of different materials and
tools, which the locksmith needs just as much as the boilermaker, armourer or cut-
ler. If one were to continue the hierarchy even lower, one would have to distinguish
between the oficios manuales or mecánicos and the oficios viles, which would
include those of the innkeeper, the miller, the fishmonger, or the butcher. There are
also gradations upwards. Thus, the silversmith belongs to the oficios mecánicos, as
does the simple blacksmith, but is distinguished by the geometric knowledge
required for his field (Alvar Ezquerra and Ortiz 2005, 174–176). Moreover, the sil-
versmith’s social rank is higher, since not only his material but also his clientele, the
nobility, is nobler. Just in passing, Nicolás Monardes, in his Diálogo del hierro y de
sus grandezas y excelencias (1536), deliberately inverts traditional hierarchies by
proving the superiority of iron over gold. Iron is used to make weapons, tools for
agriculture and house building. With iron and steel, kings defend their lands, guar-
antee justice, and punish wrongdoers (Ferreras 2003, 496).
In his work El passagero, Suárez de Figueroa is able to illuminate individual
professions from different perspectives in dialogue form. The four interlocutors are
on the journey: The experienced Maestro en Artes a Professor de Teología has the
role of the master who instructs his students, the young and curiously questioning
soldier Don Luis, the goldsmith Isidro who speaks little and – although proud of his
profession – is a craftsman at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and the knowledge-
able Doctor of Law who dominates the conversation. Clearly, this dialogue also
shows the intellectual superiority of the representatives of the higher faculties over
the mechanical arts of the blacksmith and the soldier (Hakenes 2020, 57).
3.3 Inventions
What is the relationship between disciplines of knowledge and their inventors? As

late as the eighteenth century, d’Alembert, in his introduction to the French
Encyclopaedia, stresses the importance of origins for the classification of a phenom-
enon: “Our first step in this inquiry, then, is to examine – allow us the expression –
the pedigree and interrelation of our knowledge, the presumed causes of its
emergence, and the characteristics of its distinction; in a word, we must go back to
the origin and genesis of our ideas. Apart from the benefit we derive from this
3.3 Inventions 27
inquiry for the encyclopaedic survey of the sciences and arts, such an inquiry should
probably not be out of place at the beginning of a methodical non-fiction diction-
ary.” (d’Alembert 1997, 8). Usefulness, satisfaction of needs and solution of prob-
lems are the repeatedly mentioned merits of inventions. They are also the arguments
used to legitimize inventions. The question arises to what extent the legitimation of
an invention is not at the same time paradigmatically intended to justify the entire
field of knowledge or activity belonging to it. Here, too, a few examples may be
cited to illustrate the problem. In antiquity, the postulate of utility assigned to inven-
tion was generalized into the notion of universal expediency. In the Memorabilia of
Xenophon, the argumentation assumes that works that are useful are not the results
of chance but of rational considerations. This, he argues, can be seen in the very
physique of man, in which the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and hands have definite
functions. With his hands and with his intellect man surpasses the animals. The
world is arranged for him; for his sake everything has been ordered by the gods to
the best. The design principle of all things is usefulness to man. Plato, who in the
dialogue of the same name lets Protagoras tell of a time when men were formed by
the gods from earth and clay, also assumes usefulness and satisfaction of needs.
Epimetheus equipped them, and when he showed Prometheus his work, all other
advantages and abilities had already been distributed to the animals, so that man
was left destitute. Now Prometheus would not tolerate this and saved him when he
stole the arts of Hephaestus and Athena and gave them to him. The three most
important needs are food, shelter, and clothing. The satisfaction of these needs
becomes the reason for the invention of fields of knowledge and culture.
The increasing refinement of needs requires an increasing differentiation of areas
of knowledge. A comparable orientation towards purpose is still evident in the early
modern period in the presentation and explanation of technical inventions in Pedro
Juan de Lastanosa’s Los veintiun libros de los ingenios y máquinas de Juanelo
(1564?). For the author, who also presents his own inventions, technical inventions
alleviate natural scarcity. “De modo que vemos que esto ha sido causa de ir inven-
tanto varios modos de máquinas y nuevas invenciones de instrumentos para la sus-
tentación de la vida.” (García Tapia 1997, 117; Strosetzki 2016a). The different
types of mills, bridges, building materials, and water channels used to supply water
as well as to irrigate gardens are demonstrated in detail. The weakness of human
muscular strength makes necessary inventions for lifting heavy loads. When indi-
vidual disciplines of knowledge are presented, it is always a question of their inven-
tion, their usefulness and their contextualisation. This is already shown by the full
title of Bartolome Scarion de Pauia’s work: Doctrina militar, en la qual se trata de
los principios y causas porque fue hallada en el mundo la Milicia, y como con razon
y justa causa fue hallada de los hombres, y fue aprobada de Dios. Y despues se va
de grado en grado descurriendo de las obligaciones y advertencias, que han de
saber y tener todos los que siguen la soldadesca, començando del Capitan general
hasta el menor soldado por muy visoño que sea (1598). Inventions, then, are men-
tioned above all where mechanical arts are concerned, which in turn are thus
honored.
28 3 Collections
Polydor Vergil’s work De inventoribus rerum was read throughout Europe in the
sixteenth century. Its intention is to trace every discipline of knowledge to its inven-
tors and origins. Three volumes were published in 1499, followed by five more in
1521. What the effect was in detail is difficult to ascertain in the case of an encyclo-
paedic work, since it is open to question when the work itself or its sources were
used. In ancient literature the latter are authors such as Aristotle, Cicero, Hesiod,
Macrobius, Pliny the Elder as well as the Younger, and Tacitus; in patristics
Augustine and Isidore of Seville, and later Thomas Aquinas, as well as Reuchlin
and Zabarella. If Polydor Vergil claims for himself to be the first to write about
inventions, this is not quite true. A forerunner is the fourteenth-century Italian
Guglielmo da Pastrengo of Verona, with a thin work that was entitled De viris illus-
tribus in the 1547 edition, but De originibus rerum in the original version (Hay
1952, 53–54; Copenhaver 1978). Other precursors were the Cornucopiae (1489) by
the humanist Niccolo Perotti and Giovanni Tortelli’s De orthographia dictionum e
Graecis tractarum (1471), where explanations of the origin of objects are found
alongside orthographic explanations. Polydor Vergil, however, was the most widely
received.
Polydor Vergil structures his work according to an idiosyncratic system and dis-
cusses, among other things, God, creation, language and the sciences in the first
volume, jurisprudence, administration, precious metals, images and sculptures in
the second, and agriculture, architecture and seafaring in the third. The other vol-
umes contain reflections on the early church, the pope and the clergy, church holi-
days and rites, the monarchy, heresy and the martyrs (Catherine Atkinson 2007).
Between 1498 and 1726, 59 editions appeared, including translations into German
(1537), French (1521), and Spanish (1555). Because Polydor Vergil pursued not
only the inventions of agriculture, navigation, and theater, but also those of ecclesi-
astical institutions, the veneration of saints, and religious orders, he came to the
attention of the censorship authorities, who ordered versions shortened to remove
objectionable passages to be published (Bernsmeier 1986, 26). He gives special
praise to Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of printing, while criticizing the
gunpowder-powered cannon as a terrible invention, suitable for the destruction of
mankind. Among the new inventions repeatedly mentioned by him, as by Bacon and
Bodin, are the compass, printing, and gunpowder. The former, according to Polydor
Virgil, enabled to discover new continents such as America. Printing provided a new
medium for the dissemination of knowledge, while gunpowder gave rise to artillery
and made knighthood disappear.
Unlike Polydor Vergil, Juan de la Cueva (1550–1610), the author of the Spanish
inventors’ directory Los inventores de las cosas, writes not as a historian and theo-
logian but as a man of letters. While in Polydor the inventions structure the material,
in Cueva it is the inventors with their personal experiences. Thus he tells stories as
in “el Autor de la primer Estatua,” whose invention he attributes to the fact that a
young woman, while her husband was away, persuaded her father to make a statue
resembling her husband (Weiss and Pérez 1980, 21). The fame of Polydor Vergil’s
De inventoribus rerum in Europe is shown by texts that make him the subject of
satire. François Rabelais gives his 62nd chapter of the Quart Livre the title
3.3 Inventions 29
“Comment Gaster inventoit art et moyen de non estre blessé ne touché par coups de
canon” (Rabelais 1994, 684). Finally, in Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote is satiri-
cally shown a supplementary volume to Polydor in Montesino’s Cave, which
includes who was the first in the world to have the sniffles or anointings for syphilis:
“Otro libro tengo, que le llamó Suplemento de Virgilio Polidoro, que trata de la
invención de las cosas, que es de grande erudición y estudio, a causa que las cosas
que se dejó de decir Polidoro de gran sustancia las averiguo yo y las declaro por
gentil estilo. Olvidósele a Virgilio de declararnos quién fue el primero que tuvo
catarro en el mundo, y el primero que tomó las unciones para curarse del morbo
gálico.” (de Cervantes 2015, 887). We should also mention Maurice Scève, who in
his poem Microcosme (1562) depicts the early history of humanity and its progress
up to the birth of Christ. It is Adam here who praises human creativity in the face of
technological progress and the invention of arts and sciences, starting from Polydor
Vergil (Hay 1952, 75).
In antiquity, too, inventors are celebrated as heroes of progress. Thus, in the
playwright Aeschylus, the aforementioned Prometheus, in an interchange with the
chorus, shows himself as the saviour of a humanity that had no golden age, but
vegetated until fire and culture were brought to it. Prometheus shows the building of
houses, the division of the year, astronomy, numbers and writing, explains naviga-
tion, medicine and mining and becomes the originator of an ascent of mankind by
means of cultural goods. In this, time becomes the essential element of development
as shown by a fragment of Xenophanes from the sixth century B.C.: “Not from the
beginning did the gods show everything to mortals, but by living for a time they
found what was better.” (Uxkull-Gyllenband 1924, 3, hereafter 16, 20, 42).
Inventions become evidence of dignitas hominis. This progress-optimistic evalua-
tion of inventions is contrasted with a culturally pessimistic discourse of progress.
It has its ancient precursor in Cynicism, which sees its ideal in the state of nature,
which is free of any cultural imprint. The animal in its natural habitat is its model.
Animals get along without houses and are healthy and happy without doctors and
medicines. The lack of fur is not a defect, for even frogs have no fur and can live in
cold water. The praise of inventors is contrasted with the criticism of inventors,
expressed, for example, in the rejection of navigation, which distanced man from
natural life. The most important critics of inventions are Cynics such as Epicurus,
who prefers Diogenes to Daedalus, since mankind only gained moral depravity
through the invention of arts and techniques, i.e. took a step backwards (Thraede
1962a). A comparably pessimistic assessment is held by the Spaniard Juan Luis
Vives in his consideration of contemporary sciences, although he does not reject
their justification and emergence.
Can inventions be hierarchized? Antonio Camos, in his work Microcosmia, y
govierno universal del hombre christiano, para todos los estados, y qualquiera de
ellos (1595), takes the tracts on dignitas hominis of Pico della Mirandola and Pérez
de Oliva as a starting point when he sees the same hierarchical structure in the
microcosm of man as in the macrocosm of the universe. He recognizes perfection
wherever the spirit reigns. The least perfect are elements like water, earth or air.
Higher already are plants and trees, which ripen, grow and pass away. Then come
30 3 Collections
the animals, which also have sensations. Finally, man is not only characterized by
life and sensation, but he also has a rational soul: “diole mas el uso de razón, y lib-
ertad del albedrío: por razón del cual entiende, discurre, quiere, o aborrece libre-
mente, según que la voluntad en él ordena.” (Camos 1595, 13). Since the world is at
his service, he can use his mind to have experiences, invent sciences, give himself
laws, and order coexistence with justice. Iosepe Luquian formulates the priority of
the mind over the body more pointedly in his Tratado del hombre en el qval se
descvbren algunas cosas buenas del, a algunas imperficiones 1594. On the one
hand, he says, man is an angel; on the other, he is an animal. “Parece el hombre de
los pechos arriba, hombre, de ahí abajo caballo, la mitad, noble criatura racional, la
otra mitad, vil y bestial.” (Luquian 1594, 7). Thus, those who do not use their rea-
son, but allow their bodies to guide them in passions, fall back to the level of wild
animals. Miguel Sánchez de Ortega, in his Libro llamado el hombre nuevo (1582),
adds the theological aspect that the body is earthly and the soul divine and rational.
When Juan Sánchez reviews the advances in human history in his Corónica y histo-
ria general del hombre (1598), he emphasizes above all the inventions of sciences
and tools such as writing, medicine, rhetoric, or music that were due to human rea-
son. But the useful inventions of reason also include quite material things such as
the house for protection against cold, heat, and storms, the clock for the useful divi-
sion of time, or the plow and seed, clothing, metals, money, bells, jewelry, and wine,
all of which serve to compensate for deficiencies (Sánchez 1598, 217). Gaspar
Gutiérrez de los Ríos makes a more precise distinction between the spiritual and the
material when he opines in his Noticia general para la estimación de las artes
(1600) that the mechanical arts owe their designation to the fact that they are prac-
ticed with the body (Gutierrez de los Ríos 1600, 45). And it was to satisfy bodily
needs that they were first invented, since without them man would have to live like
an animal. Again, perception and experience only provided the material with which
reason made advances in shipbuilding or medicine: “que primero vio las cosas el
sentido exterior: luego las probó la experiencia, y al cabo las compuso la razón.”
(Gutierrez de los Ríos 1600, 4).
The question now arises as to how the invention is described. When should one
becontent with naming a mythical authority, and when should the context and a
story presented? A mixture of resignation in the face of the impossibility of explor-
ing first inventors, recourse to ancient mythology and awareness of the gradual per-
fection of an invention is evident in the sixteenth century in Antonio de Guevara. In
his view, the art of seafaring was invented not by Greek philosophers but by the
experiences of seafarers. Thus, in his Arte de marear (1539), he aims to present
what the origins of the galley are, what language is spoken there, and what prepara-
tions must be made for a voyage (de Guevara 1984, 303–304). He situates the time
of the invention of seafaring before the Flood and before the destruction of Troy.
Since people could not yet read and write, the power of invention is not handed
down, unlike later. “Después que la industria humana poco a poco comenzó a hallar
las letras y a juntar las partes, y a ordenar escrituras, sabemos cada cosa notable
adónde se inventó, cómo se inventó, quién la inventó y por qué se inventó.” (305).
Antonio de Guevara can therefore report on the invention of later technical advances
3.3 Inventions 31
after all. Thus the way of rowing in pairs was an invention of Demosthenes. In his
book he wants to let only the most credible sources speak about the inventions, “las
cuales a nuestro parescer son más creíbles” (312). He attributes technical advance-
ments of rowing and sailing to Alcibíades and Cimón, who were respectively the
first to invent the innovation.
On the other hand, the philosopher Juan Luis Vives takes a purely empirical view
of the origins of the sciences and the arts: “At first, people noted such and such
experiences as they had and which, because of their novelty, attracted their attention
in order to make use of them for their lives. From a series of individual phenomena
one separated out the general; if its general validity was further confirmed by a
series of experiments, it was regarded as a certain and inviolable truth. It was then
handed down as such to posterity. Others, in their turn, also contributed many things
which served the same purpose. These observations, collected by eminent and dis-
tinguished minds, laid the first foundation of the sciences and arts.” (Vives 1912,
110–111). Sensory impressions must therefore first be examined and interpreted by
the intellect in order to arrive at knowledge, the latter being based on probability. In
the art of healing, the procedure for inventing a remedy was to ask former patients
how they had been cured. The fiction of an inventor authority elevated to mythical
status is thus contrasted with the fiction of an anonymous community of inventors
who proceed from experience to experience.
Are contemporary inventions seen differently from those of the past? Do they
prove the superiority of the present over the past? Francis Bacon (1561–1626), as
mentioned at the outset, singles out three inventions of modern times: the printing
press, gunpowder, and the compass. These three had changed the shape of things
and the human condition on earth; one in the sciences, the other in warfare, and the
third in navigation. Innumerable changes, he says, have followed them, and no
dominion, no sect, no heavenly body, seems ever to have exerted a greater influence
on human conditions than these mechanical things. When it comes to experience,
Bacon distinguishes the new empiricism from the old, which had been merely vague
and oriented to whatever perception happens to encounter. “To this Bacon contrasts
the experience controlled, directed, purposive by the intellect, precisely the experi-
mental experience.” (Schmitt 2002, 17). Unlike him, Charles Perrault in his Parallèle
des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (1690) empha-
sizes the rank of the first inventors: “J’avoue que c’est une grande louange et un
grand merite aux Anciens d’avoir esté les Inventeurs des Arts, et qu’en cette qualité
ils ne peuvent estre regardez avec trop de respect.” (Perrault 1964, 119). However,
when comparing the old inventions with the new ones, the latter seem more formi-
dable to Perrault, as in the case of knitting, where the machine is superior to the
most skilful hand, since it does in an instant what would take hands a quarter of an
hour (120).
32 3 Collections
3.4 Personalities and Hierarchies
Inventors can bring glory to their cities and countries of origin. Then they are among
the attributes to be mentioned in a eulogy. In antiquity, teachings on the origin of
culture led to the laus maiorum, the praise of the ancestors. Since Athens had a
monopoly of state olive cultivation, Athena was not only credited with planting the
first olive tree, she became its inventor. In the interest of city praise, the Athenians
simultaneously credited her with inventing the ship and agriculture (Thraede 1962a,
1195). A city thus becomes attractive when it is the site of many inventions though
the attributions vary. While Pindar attributed the invention of the Dithyrambus to
three different cities, Pheidon is the inventor of the coinage system in Herodotus and
of all economic innovations in Ephorus. Gods, too, can become inventors. Dionysus
was considered the god of wine, then becomes the inventor of viticulture and the
vine. Osiris, as god of fertility, has become the inventor of the plough (Thraede
1962b, 176). If Hermes teaches the Egyptians legislation and writing or Asclepius
healing and dentistry, then euhemeristically religion can be derived from gratitude
towards inventions of the gods and heroes (Thraede 1962a, 1220).
In the Spanish Siglo de Oro, inventors serve to praise Spain, as is evident in
Pedro de Medina. In his 1548 Libro de grandezas y cosas memorables de España,
the founding of Spain is attributed to Tubal, who was the fifth son of Japheth, who
survived the Flood in the Ark with his father Noé. Tubal not only populated Spain
with his retinue, but he also taught the Spaniards essentials, explaining to them the
mysteries of nature, the movements in the heavens, the harmonies of music, the
virtues of geometry, and much of moral philosophy (Pedro de Medina 1944, 10).
This made the Spaniards “de los primeros hombres que supieron ciencia y de los
primeros que tuvieron conocimientos de bien vivir.” (10). Thus, the founder of
Spain not only discovered and populated the land, but he also brought culture and
science. While here the beginnings are borrowed from the Old Testament, that is,
the Judeo-Christian tradition, the founding of the cities of Seville and Salamanca is
associated with Hercules, that is, with ancient Greece. Córdoba, on the other hand,
was said to have been founded first by Roman patricians, and can thus boast of
famous figures such as Seneca (76, 13, 84). In Pedro de Medina, the most important
individuals after the king are 9 archbishops, 49 bishops, 22 dukes, 98 counts, and 41
marquises. Strengths of the Spaniards lie in their achievements as warriors, naviga-
tors, conquerors, and Christianizers of the New World.
Here Pedro de Medinas moves within the framework of epideictic rhetoric,
according to which a city is to be praised by emphasizing its noble origin, its vener-
able age, and its outstanding citizens (Lausberg 1993, 135). He goes beyond rheto-
ric where he deals with the reckoning of time. A new era began among the Romans
initially whenever a new consul took over the government, whereby in the fourth
century B.C. one also assumed the dedication of the temple of Jupiter in 507 B.C.,
only to reckon later with the founding of the city of Rome (“ab urbe condita”) in
753 B.C.. Pedro de Medina credits the Spanish king Don Juan I with replacing the
Roman calendar with the Christian calendar in 1383: “mandó que en las escrituras
3.4 Personalities and Hierarchies 33
se dejase la era de César y se pusiese el año del nacimiento de Jesu Cristo.” (Pedro
de Medina 1944, 84). Only in retrospect, then, does Christ’s birth reveal itself as the
new thing with which the Christian era began and that of the Roman emperors ended.
Descriptions of countries and directories of persons like to emphasize the merits
and make use of the rhetoric of praise. When the outstanding representatives of
individual professions or classes are praised, the praise of the persons becomes the
praise of the fields of knowledge they represent and of the cities and countries from
which they come. It was Isidore of Seville who began his Chronicle with a praise of
Spain. When Petrarch presents men who distinguished themselves in war and poli-
tics in his work De viris illustribus, he is in the tradition of the ancient biographical
historiography of Plutarch, Nepos, Suetonius, or Tacitus. Medieval viri illustres
catalogues, on the other hand, present the lives and works of saints, princes of the
church, or ecclesiastical authors. Vincent von Beauvais pursues a moral philosophi-
cal intention with his Speculum historiale when he adds aphorisms to the lives and
works of the personalities presented (Kessler 1978, 102–103, 106, 166–167,
176–178, 184–186).
Alfonso García Matamoros, canon of Seville and rector of the University of
Alcalá de Henares, complained that Spain was too much associated with military
exploits and victories and was therefore considered barbaric. His work De adser-
enda Hispanorum eruditione, sive de viris Hispaniae doctis narratio apologetica
(1553) aims to demonstrate the origin, growth, and present flourishing of culture
and knowledge in Spain. An early biblical example is the aforementioned Tubal, the
fifth grandson of Noah, who settled in Spain with his family after a long sea voyage
and introduced the resident population to the arts and sciences, which is why Spain
had great poets even before Homer (García Matamoros 1943, 174). And in Roman
antiquity, it was Spaniards such as Seneca, Quintilian, Lucan, and Pomponius Mela
who gave instructions to Roman rulers. For his time he mentions the philosopher
Vives and the praeclarus orator Nebrija, but also from the University of Alcalá Juan
Pérez, famous for his poetry, and Lope Herrera, famous for his speech “de studiis
humanitatis”, and from the University of Salamanca Alonso López Pinciano, versed
in ancient culture, and Francisco de Vitoria for his theological knowledge (210). It
is to Spain’s credit that, in addition to Hippocrates and Galen, physicians have
recently begun to draw on astrological knowledge for their work. By emphasizing
numerous other Spaniards for their works and their knowledge, his praise of Spain
ends up in a praise of the Spanish.
Lists of famous and outstanding personalities can, as in the case of García
Matamoros, stand in the context of a more extensive work or, as in the case of
Hernando Pulgar’s Claros varones de Castilla (1486), form independent publica-
tions. With his brief biographies, he sees himself in the tradition established with
Plutarch’s Heroic Lives of those who, out of love for their country and its people
and to prove their rhetorical skills, “quisieron adornar sus hechos, exaltándolos con
palabras.” (del Pulgar 1923, 5). However, if the catalogue is limited to naming and
acknowledging the most important writers, then it is a literary canon of the kind that
grammarians traditionally formed. The Catalogus clarorum hispaniae scriptorum
(1607) by Valerius Andrea Taxandrus can be cited as an example of this.
34 3 Collections
That literary education brings glory to all classes is evident from the alphabetical
list of personalities of the city of Madrid published by Juan Pérez de Montalbán,
who had studied philosophy and literature in Alcalá, as an appendix in his book
Para todos. Exemplos morales, humanos y divinos, en que se tratan diversas cien-
cias, materias y facultades (1635). He himself refers to this appendix as a directory
“de todos los pontífices, cardenales, arcobispos, obispos, escritores de libros, predi-
catores, poetas, y varones ilustres en todo genero de letras” (Pérez de Montalbán
1635, 274r), who lived and live in Madrid. The list contains 297 names, supple-
mented by academic or noble title and occupational title, and the reference to the
field of each particular achievement. One intention was probably to familiarize the
reader with the most important representatives of the intellectual and political upper
class of his city. The naming in the list honors the city of Madrid and it honors the
one who is included in it. It is noticeable that the preoccupation with the letras is not
confined to specialists such as grammarians, but does honour to the representative
of any profession. Thus a nobleman like Antonio de Aguar, “cauallero del Abito de
Santiago,” distinguishes himself as well-read in the field of Latin authors and as a
poet, or the Conde de Humanes, by education in all branches of the buenas letras.
And the archdeacon and canon of Valencia, Francisco de Madrid, translated
Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae from Latin. Representatives of the
mechanical professions also increase their prestige by occupying themselves with
spiritual matters. Thus Iuan Bautista de Toledo is not only architect of the Escorial,
but also “famoso Escultor, Filosofo, Matematico, Latino y Griego” or Iuan de
Vanderhamen y León is not only considered one of the most important painters of
the century, but is also famous for his verses, with which he proves the kinship
between painting and poetry (285v, 286v).
How do fame and honor distribute themselves between headwork and hand-
work? The author of the Dialogos de la phantastica philosophia, de los tres en un
Compuesto, y de la Letras, y Armas, y del Honor, donde se contienen varios y apazi-
bles subjectos, Francisco Miranda Villafant, describes himself in the title page as
“Chantre de la Cathedral de Plascencia” and probably emphasizes this to increase
the credibility of his protagonist named Bernaldo, who is skilled in mechanical arts,
but without education, but at least has good judgment due to his age and experience
(Miranda Villafant 1582, 3). The latter assumes the role of the body, which engages
in a dialogue with its soul. The reader is prepared to deal with a “hombre nascido
humilmente, exercitado en officios viles” (3), who only had the opportunity to talk
to his peers and drew his knowledge from books in the vernacular and from sermons
in church. Soul expresses understanding to Bernaldo that when he was young, poor
as he was, he first procured with his mechanical arts what was most necessary for
the body. But now that he was old and had everything he needed, he could devote
himself to contemplation. After all, as a noble creature, the soul had suffered greatly
from the “cosas viles deste tu mecanico officio” (21r). Bernaldo replies that without
the practice of his mechanical art he would have suffered hardship and thus harmed
the soul, and asks why common people stay away from the artes liberales. This is
not necessarily so, says the soul, since, as happens in Bologna, Naples, and Florence,
one can devote one’s leisure to the sciences instead of gambling, chatting, or
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[354] L'inscription en vers, par Étienne de Tournai, ne se trouvait plus sur le
tombeau au temps de Lejuge, p. 175, qui en a lu une autre en prose. Celle que fit
faire le cardinal est donc la troisième.
[355] Le P. Modeste de Saint-Aimable la Monarchie sainte, t. I, p. 23.
«O Dieu et Seigneur des miséricordes, accordez à votre serviteur, le

roi Clovis, un séjour de rafraîchissement, avec la béatitude du repos
et la clarté de la lumière éternelle[356].»
[356] Voir le texte de cette oraison et de deux autres presque semblables dans
Dubos, III, p. 403.
Cette grande voix de la prière catholique s'élevait depuis près de

treize siècles autour de la tombe la plus française qu'il y eût en
France, lorsque la révolution éclata. Les restes de sainte Geneviève
furent brûlés en place publique, les sarcophages royaux profanés, la
congrégation dissoute et l'église vouée à la destruction. La honte de
cette œuvre impie, qui était un outrage au patriotisme plus encore
qu'à la religion, ne retombe cependant pas sur les seuls
révolutionnaires. C'est en 1807, en plein empire, sous le règne de
l'homme qu'on a justement appelé la Révolution couronnée, que
l'entreprise sacrilège fut consommée par un acte à jamais
irréparable: la destruction de l'édifice sacré! La crypte fut visitée à
cette occasion; on y trouva une quinzaine de sarcophages jetés
pêle-mêle et qui ne contenaient plus d'ossements; quelques-uns de
ces sarcophages, pris pour ceux de Clovis et des siens, furent
transportés au Musée des monuments français, d'où ils ont disparu
quelques années après, vers 1817, sans laisser de traces[357].
Seule, la statue couchée qui datait du temps du cardinal de la
Rochefoucauld put être sauvée; elle repose aujourd'hui dans la
crypte de Saint-Denis. Pas une voix ne s'éleva en France pour
protester contre un vandalisme qui n'avait plus même à cette date
l'excuse des fureurs politiques, et des barbares d'une espèce
nouvelle purent tranquillement abattre, sous les yeux d'un peuple
muet et indifférent, le plus antique et le plus vénérable monument de
son histoire. Aujourd'hui, une rue à laquelle on a donné comme par
dérision le nom de Clovis occupe l'emplacement du vieux sanctuaire
patriotique, et rien ne rappelle au passant qui la traverse qu'il foule
aux pieds une poussière sacrée. Les nations qui détruisent leurs
autels et leurs tombeaux ignorent-elles donc qu'elles arrachent leurs
propres racines, et qu'espèrent-elles gagner à extirper tous les
souvenirs qui rendent la patrie chère à ses enfants?
[357] A. Lenoir, Rapport sur la démolition de l'église Sainte-Geneviève de Paris
(Mémoires de l'Académie celtique, t. I).
IX
CONCLUSION
Clovis est, en un sens, le créateur de la société politique moderne. Il
en a fondé l'état le plus ancien, celui qui a eu la direction des
destinées du monde pendant des siècles, et duquel sont sorties les
principales nationalités de l'Occident. Son nom est indissolublement
lié au souvenir des origines de cette société, dont il ouvre les
annales. Tant qu'il y aura une histoire, sa place y sera marquée, non
seulement parmi les conquérants fameux, mais surtout parmi les
créateurs de nationalités et les fondateurs de civilisation. Voilà sa
gloire, qu'on ne peut ni contester ni diminuer.
Sa grandeur, il est vrai, est tout entière dans son œuvre. L'ouvrier
nous échappe en bonne partie; nous ne sommes pas en état, on l'a
vu, de juger de ce qu'il peut avoir mis de talent et de vertu dans
l'accomplissement de sa tâche providentielle. Mais l'œuvre est sous
nos yeux, telle qu'elle est arrivée jusqu'à nous à travers quatorze
siècles, avec ses gigantesques proportions, avec sa vivante et forte
unité, avec sa durée à toute épreuve. Au cours de cette longue
époque, elle a été agrandie et embellie sans relâche par le travail
des générations; mais toute cette riche floraison se développe sur
les fondements jetés par la main conquérante de Clovis. Cachés
dans le sous-sol de l'histoire, ils se révèlent dans toute leur solidité
par l'ampleur majestueuse du monument qu'ils supportent.
A cette indéfectible pérennité de la monarchie créée par le fils de
Childéric, il faut opposer, pour en bien saisir la signification, la
caducité de tous les autres royaumes barbares qui sont nés vers le
même temps que le sien. Le seuil de l'histoire moderne est jonché
de leurs débris, et on les voit s'écrouler aussitôt que disparaît leur
fondateur. Les Ostrogoths d'Italie, les Vandales d'Afrique, les
Visigoths d'Espagne, les Burgondes, les Gépides, les Rugiens, ont
eu, eux aussi, des royautés qui croyaient hériter de l'Empire, et l'on
nous dit que parmi ces peuples il s'en trouvait qui étaient les mieux
doués de tous les Germains. On se plaît aussi à nous vanter le
génie de plus d'un de leurs fondateurs; on exalte l'esprit supérieur et
le talent exceptionnel d'un Théodoric le Grand, et on le place très
haut, comme homme d'Etat, au-dessus de Clovis. Mais cette
supériorité réelle ou prétendue ne sert qu'à mettre dans un jour plus
éclatant le contraste que nous signalons ici.
A quoi donc tient-il en définitive? Ce n'est ni l'aveugle hasard, ni un
concours de circonstances purement extérieures qui en fournit une
explication suffisante. Nous devons en demander le secret aux
différences que présente la constitution interne de chacune de ces
nationalités. Rien de saisissant, rien d'instructif comme la leçon qui
se dégage d'une étude de ce genre. Dans tous les autres royaumes
barbares, c'est une soudure maladroite d'éléments hétérogènes et
incompatibles, qui ne tiennent ensemble que par l'inquiète sollicitude
d'un seul homme, et dont la dislocation commence d'ordinaire sous
ses propres yeux. Dans le royaume franc, c'est une fusion si
harmonieuse et si profonde que toute distinction entre les matériaux
qui entrent dans l'œuvre disparaît dans son unité absolue. Là, ce
sont des Romains d'un côté, et des barbares de l'autre; ceux-ci
opprimant ceux-là, ceux-là répondant à la tyrannie par une haine
sourde et implacable. Ici il n'y a ni Romains ni barbares; tous portent
le nom de Francs, tous possèdent les mêmes droits, tous se
groupent avec une fierté patriotique autour du trône royal. Là, l'état
de guerre intérieure est en permanence, et le moindre conflit devient
une catastrophe irrémédiable; ici, la paix entre les races est
tellement grande, et leur compénétration tellement intime, que dès
les premières générations elles ne forment plus qu'une seule et
même nation.
Ce n'était pas une politique ordinaire, celle qui a d'emblée élevé le
royaume franc si haut au-dessus de tous ceux de son temps, lui
permettant de soutenir seul l'effort des siècles, pendant qu'autour de
lui les nationalités nouvelles croulaient avant d'être édifiées. Elle a
reposé sur deux principes qui étaient méconnus partout en dehors
de lui, et dont la dynastie mérovingienne a fait la loi fondamentale
des rapports entre les deux races sur lesquelles elle régnait: le
principe de l'unité religieuse et celui de l'égalité politique.
Ce double et rare bienfait n'était pas l'œuvre de la force. Fondé sur
la violence, le bienfait aurait été un fléau. L'unité religieuse avait été
obtenue par la conversion spontanée du vainqueur; l'égalité politique
était le résultat d'un pacte que la conversion avait facilité. Les
barbares, jusqu'alors, pénétraient dans les populations romaines à la
manière d'un glaive qui déchire et meurtrit tout; les Francs y
entrèrent en quelque sorte comme un ferment qui soulève et active
tout. Les Francs devinrent des Romains par le baptême, et les
Romains devinrent des Francs par la participation à tous les droits
des vainqueurs. Ils se prêtèrent mutuellement leurs grandes
qualités. Les populations romaines retrouvèrent au contact des
barbares le nerf et la vigueur d'une nation jeune; les barbares
acquirent dans le commerce des civilisés la forte discipline qui fait
les grands hommes et les saints. L'une des deux races fut
régénérée et l'autre civilisée, et c'est cette parenté ainsi créée entre
elles qui a amené, avec une promptitude incroyable, la fusion
merveilleuse. Avant la fin du sixième siècle, l'on ne pouvait plus
reconnaître en Gaule à quelle race appartenait un homme, à moins
qu'il ne le sût par des traditions de famille! La dynastie
mérovingienne était acceptée par tous comme l'expression de la
nouvelle nationalité, comme l'image de la patrie. Il naissait un vrai
loyalisme, qui se traduit parfois d'une manière touchante dans les
écrits des contemporains[358]. Et les plus vieux sacramentaires de
l'Église franque nous font entendre la voix des évêques de la Gaule,
demandant à Dieu, avec les paroles consacrées de la liturgie
catholique, de bénir le roi chrétien des Francs et son royaume[359].
[358] Grégoire de Tours, iv, 50; v, init.; vii, 27: ne quis extraneorum Francorum
regnum audeat violare.
[359] Ut regni Francorum nomenis secura libertas in tua devotione semper exultet.
—Et Francorum regni adesto principibus. Et Francorum regum tibi subditum
protege principatum.—Protege regnum Francorum nomenis ubique rectores, ut
eorum votiva prosperitas pax tuorum possit esse populorum.—Et Francorum regni
nomenis virtute tuae compremas majestatem.—Hanc igitur oblationem servitutis
nostræ quam tibi offerimus pro salute et incolomitate vel statu regni Francorum,
etc. V. L. Delisle, Mémoire sur d'anciens sacramentaires français (Mém. de
l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1886, pp. 71 et 72.)
A vrai dire, l'initiative d'une politique aussi généreuse et aussi hardie
n'appartient pas à Clovis. L'honneur en revient tout d'abord à
l'épiscopat des Gaules, et en particulier, à ce qu'il semble, à l'illustre
métropolitain de la deuxième Belgique. Ce sont les évêques, selon
le mot célèbre d'un écrivain protestant, qui ont fait la France[360];
telle qu'elle a traversé les siècles, elle est l'œuvre de leurs mains. Ils
ont fondé son unité politique sur la base d'une parfaite égalité des
races; ils ont assis son unité morale et religieuse sur l'adhésion sans
réserve à la loi de Jésus-Christ. Devant cette nation jeune et
ardente, ils ont placé un grand idéal, celui que les meilleurs de ses
enfants poursuivront pendant des siècles, et pour la réalisation
duquel ils verseront joyeusement les flots de leur sang.
[360] C'est le mot de Gibbon, Hist. de la décadence de l'Empire romain, t. VII, ch.
38, p. 24, Paris 1812. Il ne faut pas cependant, comme l'ont fait depuis un siècle
une multitude d'écrivains (en dernier lieu Lecoy de la Marche, La fondation de la
France, 1893, pp. 64 et 100, qui fait sur l'origine du mot des raisonnements hors
de saison) lui faire dire que «les évêques ont fait la France comme les abeilles font
leur ruche.» Sous cette forme, le mot est le produit de la collaboration très
involontaire de Gibbon et de Joseph de Maistre, ou plutôt de la légèreté avec
laquelle on a lu ce dernier. Voici comment s'exprime Gibbon en parlant des
évêques: «Les progrès de la superstition augmentèrent leur influence, et l'on peut
attribuer en quelque façon l'établissement de la monarchie franque à l'alliance de
cent prélats qui commandaient dans les villes révoltées ou indépendantes de la
Gaule.» Et voici ce qu'écrit J. de Maistre dans le livre Du Pape (éd. Pélagaud,
1870, p. 7): «Les évêques, c'est Gibbon qui l'observe, ont fait le royaume de
France; rien n'est plus vrai. Les évêques ont construit cette monarchie, comme les
abeilles construisent une ruche.»
Quel vain travail, par conséquent, que celui qui consiste à faire
l'analyse chimique du génie de la France, en cherchant, avec
certains historiens, à y démêler l'apport de Rome et l'apport des
barbares, combinés avec l'apport chrétien! On peut décomposer
ainsi les organismes matériels, mais l'âme d'une nation n'est pas
faite à la manière d'une mosaïque; elle est le souffle immatériel
envoyé d'en haut, qui vient animer le limon terrestre et qui y fait
retentir à travers toutes les parcelles son commandement de vie.
Cela ne veut pas dire, cependant, qu'il faille renoncer à décrire le
comment de cette incarnation créatrice. Si le principe de vie est un
et indivisible, les éléments matériels qu'il a mis en œuvre, fécondés
et organisés en corps vivant, sollicitent au contraire l'analyse de
l'historien. Et nulle part, mieux qu'à la fin d'un livre consacré à
l'origine de la nation franque, un travail de ce genre ne semble
réclamé par le sujet.
Le nouveau royaume n'est ni romain ni germanique, et on aura
caractérisé sa vraie nature en se bornant à dire qu'il est moderne.
Étranger ou, pour mieux dire, indifférent aux anciennes oppositions
entre le monde romain et le monde barbare, il emprunte à l'un et à
l'autre les éléments constitutifs, les choisissant avec une souveraine
liberté selon les besoins. Semblable à un architecte bâtissant son
édifice au milieu des ruines antiques, il prend de toutes parts les
pierres qui conviennent le mieux à sa construction, tantôt les
encastrant purement et simplement dans ses murs sans leur enlever
leur marque de provenance, tantôt les retaillant pour les faire servir à
leur destination nouvelle. Nul parti pris de faire prévaloir un monde
sur l'autre, non plus que d'établir l'équilibre entre eux. L'œuvre sera
la fille des besoins du jour, et l'expression des aspirations d'un
monde qui commence à vivre.
La royauté franque ne se considère pas comme l'héritière des
Césars, et elle ne cherche pas davantage à continuer la tradition des
monarchies barbares de la Germanie. Elle a renoncé à la fiction du
césarisme, qui n'est plus comprise et qui ne répond plus à l'état des
esprits. Le roi n'est ni l'incarnation de l'État, ni le mandataire de la
nation. Il est roi de par sa naissance et de par la conquête à la fois,
et son royaume est son patrimoine comme l'alleu est celui de
l'homme libre. Ses enfants sont les héritiers naturels de sa qualité
royale, qui fait partie de leur rang, et de son royaume, qu'ils se
partagent à sa mort comme on ferait de tout autre héritage.
Est-il un roi absolu? Cette question ne se posait pas. Aucune théorie
n'affirmait ni ne contestait son absolutisme. En fait, l'Église, placée
en face de lui avec sa puissante organisation et avec son immense
prestige, créait à son arbitraire des bornes qu'il devait respecter.
L'aristocratie, qui devait entrer en scène bientôt après, offrait un
autre obstacle à l'extension de son autorité. Le roi, malgré qu'il en
eût, devait compter avec ces deux forces. Il ne se résignait pas
toujours à observer les limites dans lesquelles elles le renfermaient,
parce que l'orgueil, l'ambition, le tempérament le poussaient à n'en
respecter aucune. Mais chaque fois qu'il les avait franchies, il y était
ramené bientôt. Ses abus étaient des accès temporaires de
violence, et nullement un exercice légitime de son pouvoir.
La dynastie n'était ni germanique ni romaine; c'était la dynastie
nationale du peuple franc. Sans doute, elle gardait avec fierté ses
traditions de famille, et comme elle était d'origine barbare, ces
traditions étaient barbares aussi. Les armes, le costume, la
chevelure royale, l'entourage, tout rappelait l'époque de Clodion. Les
rois petits-fils de Clovis, parlaient encore la vieille langue d'Outre-
Rhin, et leur cour aussi[361]. Mais dans tout cela il n'y avait pas
l'ombre d'une réaction contre la romanité des milieux où ils vivaient.
S'ils restaient fidèles à tous les vieux usages, c'est parce que
c'étaient ceux de leur famille, et non parce qu'ils étaient germains.
Jamais on ne remarque ni chez eux, ni chez leurs familiers, le
moindre esprit de race. Le titre de Francs qu'ils portent ne désigne
pas un groupe particulier de leurs sujets, il leur appartient à tous
sans exception. Eux-mêmes, d'ailleurs, ils n'avaient pas craint, plus
hardis et plus heureux qu'Antée, de quitter le sol paternel, les
plaines de la Flandre et de la Campine, pour venir s'établir au milieu
des Romains. Ils ne reparaîtront plus sur la terre salienne, ils
n'auront plus un regard pour leur berceau. Dispargum, la ville des
souvenirs épiques, est abandonnée pour toujours, ainsi que Tongres
et même Tournai. Leurs résidences seront désormais les villes
romaines: Soissons, Paris, Reims, Orléans. Et ces Francs de la
première heure qui les ont aidés à conquérir la Gaule, ces barbares
des bords de l'Escaut rentreront dans la pénombre pour longtemps.
Sans culte et même sans culture, ils attendent les civilisateurs qui
leur apporteront du fond de l'Aquitaine, au septième siècle, les
lumières de l'Évangile et les biens de la civilisation. Le centre de
gravité du peuple franc sera pendant toute la durée de la dynastie
mérovingienne en terre française.
[361] On se rappelle les vers de Fortunat, Carm., vi, 2, 7, 97 sur Charibert:
Hinc cui barbaries, illinc Romania plaudit,
Diversis linguis laus sonat una viri.
Cum sis progenitus clara de gente Sicamber.
Floret in eloquio lingua latina tuo.
Qualis es in propria docto sermone loquella.
Qui nos Romanos vincis in eloquio.
Sur Chilpéric, Carm., ix, I, 91:
Quid quodcumque etiam regni dicione gubernas
Doctior ingenio vincis et ore loquax
Discernens varias sub nullo interprete voces.
Et generum linguas unica lingua refert.
Sur le duc Lupus, Carm., vii, 8, 63, 69:
Romanusque lyra, plaudat tibi barbarus harpa...
Nos tibi versiculos, dent barbara carmina leudos.
Le gouvernement du nouveau royaume aura le même cachet
d'originalité. Cette originalité sera plus réelle qu'apparente, et ceux
qui le disent germanique ou romain trouveront sans peine, dans ses
institutions et surtout dans le nom de celles-ci des arguments pour
défendre les systèmes les plus opposés. Mais, à y regarder de près,
on voit sur les débris de l'organisation impériale apparaître un
système d'institutions simple et rudimentaire, qui se développera
tout seul au cours des circonstances.
Maître du pays, le roi l'administre au moyen de gens qui ont sa
confiance, et qu'il choisit comme il lui plaît, tantôt parmi ses familiers
et même parmi ses esclaves, tantôt parmi les grandes familles
locales. Il ne pense pas un instant à ressusciter les anciennes
divisions administratives, et les dix-sept provinces de la Gaule ne
seront plus même un souvenir dans le royaume franc. Si le roi prend
pour unité administrative la cité, ce n'est pas pour se conformer aux
traditions romaines, c'est parce que la cité est un cadre existant qui
a survécu à la ruine universelle. Pendant les destructions du
cinquième siècle, grâce à l'Église, la cité est devenue le diocèse et
n'est plus que cela. Son individualité collective trouve son
expression dans son évêque, le gouverneur des âmes. La société
politique, se modelant sur la société religieuse dont elle calque
l'organisation, place un gouverneur laïque à côté de chaque pasteur
spirituel, un représentant du roi auprès du dignitaire de l'Église. Sous
le nom romain de comte, ce personnage sera tout autre chose qu'un
fonctionnaire selon le type antique. Ce sera un agent du roi et non
pas un fonctionnaire de l'État. Son mandat cessera avec le règne du
maître qui l'a nommé. A la différence du gouverneur romain, il
réunira de nouveau dans ses mains les pouvoirs civil et militaire: il
sera gouverneur, général, juge et administrateur tout à la fois. Le
divorce du civil et du militaire, expression atténuée mais toujours
redoutable du divorce du Romain et du barbare, tel que l'avait connu
l'Empire agonisant, sera chose ignorée dans le royaume franc. Il faut
le remarquer, dans l'Empire, comme dans les royaumes ariens
fondés sur ses ruines, le barbare seul servait, et seul aussi
commandait. Ici, tout le monde participe aux charges et aux
honneurs. Romains et barbares sont égaux devant le roi, devant
l'impôt, à l'armée, à l'autel. Si le droit reste personnel, c'est encore
un résultat de l'égalité: pour que personne ne soit lésé, il faut que
personne ne soit arraché à son atmosphère juridique.
Sans doute, dans la vie quotidienne de la nation, les grandes lignes
de cette organisation à la fois simple et féconde semblent souvent
rompues, brouillées ou effacées. Dans ce monde en formation, la
violence est partout à côté du droit. Le trône, les fonctions publiques,
la haute société, le clergé même, jusque dans les rangs supérieurs
de sa hiérarchie, nous donnent plus d'une fois l'impression d'une
barbarie indomptée. Les abus sont nombreux et graves; ils
apparaissent plus graves et plus nombreux encore qu'ils ne sont,
parce qu'ils ont trouvé un observateur qui, avec une merveilleuse
puissance de reproduction, les a fait vivre à jamais dans ses naïfs et
dramatiques tableaux. Tout cela n'empêche pas que la nation
prospère et grandisse sous les giboulées printanières. Elle a
conscience de son avenir; elle est fière d'être le premier des peuples
catholiques, et nous avons entendu l'expression juvénile et ardente
de ce sentiment, se traduisant pour la première fois dans l'histoire
sur la première page d'un vieux code barbare.
Tel est, tel sera au cours des siècles le royaume fondé par les
évêques et par Clovis. La gloire de celui-ci, c'est de s'être fait sans
hésitation l'agent de la politique épiscopale. Que cette attitude soit
due, chez lui, à un sûr instinct de l'avenir ou à une souveraine
intuition du génie, il n'importe. La grandeur des hommes d'État
consiste moins dans leurs aptitudes individuelles que dans la
décision avec laquelle ils correspondent aux circonstances, ces
mystérieux interprètes des volontés supérieures. Qu'on ne diminue
donc pas le rôle de Clovis en ne voyant en lui qu'un barbare plus
heureux que d'autres. En politique, c'est un mérite encore que le
bonheur. Les pilotes à qui la Providence confie les destinées des
peuples ont pour devoir de les faire arriver au port, et l'histoire a
celui de constater comment ils ont rempli leur itinéraire. La fortune
du peuple franc n'a point périclité aux mains de Clovis: il avait reçu
une peuplade barbare, il a laissé une grande nation chrétienne.
APPENDICES
I
LES SOURCES DE L'HISTOIRE DE
CLOVIS
Dans les pages qui vont suivre, je me propose de donner au lecteur
un aperçu complet des sources de l'histoire de Clovis. Il n'y sera pas
question de tous les écrivains dans lesquels on peut trouver des
renseignements généraux sur l'histoire du cinquième et du sixième
siècle; mais je signalerai tous les écrits où il est question de Clovis,
j'en ferai connaître la valeur, et je dirai ce que la critique moderne a
fait pour en élucider la connaissance. Celui qui voudra contrôler ou
refaire mon livre trouvera ici tous les moyens d'information triés et
classés selon leur valeur respective.
§ I.—CHRONIQUES
GRÉGOIRE DE TOURS
(Éd. Dom Ruinart, Paris, 1699; Arndt et Krusch, M. G. H.,

Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, t. I, Hanovre, 1884;
Omont et Collon, Paris, 1886-1893.)
L'Histoire des Francs de Grégoire de Tours est de loin le plus
important de tous les documents historiques relatifs à Clovis. A elle
seule, elle dépasse en importance et en intérêt tous les autres
réunis. Si nous ne la possédions pas, c'est à peine si nous saurions
de ce roi autre chose que son existence, et çà et là un trait curieux.
Sans elle, ce livre n'aurait pu être écrit. Il est donc indispensable de
connaître la valeur d'un témoignage si précieux.
Grégoire de Tours, né à Clermont en Auvergne, vers 538, d'une
famille patricienne apparentée aux plus illustres maisons de la
Gaule, grandit dans un milieu foncièrement romain; mais l'éducation
qu'il reçut dans sa ville natale, chez les évêques Gallus et Avitus,
était plus ecclésiastique que mondaine, et le tourna beaucoup plus
vers les lettres sacrées que vers les poètes profanes. Sans ignorer
l'antiquité classique, il n'en fut pas nourri comme les écrivains
l'avaient été avant lui, et, sous ce rapport, l'on peut dire qu'il
représente dans la littérature en langue latine le premier des
écrivains modernes. Devenu évêque de Tours en 573, il a été mêlé
activement aux principaux événements de son temps; il a parcouru
une bonne partie de la Gaule, il s'est fait raconter l'histoire par ceux
qui étaient à même de la connaître, il a vu de près les rois et a vécu
dans la familiarité de plusieurs, il a dû à ses relations, à son esprit de
recherche, une connaissance approfondie de la Gaule du sixième
siècle, et son Histoire des Francs a profité de tout cela.
Mais l'histoire de Clovis échappait à son regard. Clovis était mort
deux générations avant le moment où Grégoire prit la plume, et
c'était un laps de temps considérable à une pareille époque, où les
légendes défiguraient si rapidement la physionomie des
événements. Grégoire ne trouva nulle part une biographie de Clovis
conservée par écrit: il lui fallut rassembler péniblement les rares
notices qu'il lui fut donné de trouver dans les chroniqueurs du
cinquième et du sixième siècle, dans les vies de saints, et dans un
petit nombre de documents officiels. Avec ces débris incohérents,
venus de toutes parts, il fit ce qu'il put, et le récit qu'il a élaboré n'a
cessé de dominer l'historiographie.
Grégoire est d'ailleurs bien loin de connaître toute l'histoire de
Clovis. Il ne sait rien de la guerre de Provence, il ignore le siège de
Verdun, ainsi que le concile d'Orléans. Les événements qu'il raconte
ne sont généralement pour lui qu'un point dans l'histoire. De la
guerre de la Gaule, il ne mentionne que la bataille de Soissons et la
mort de Syagrius, plus une anecdote, celle du vase de Soissons. De
la guerre de Thuringe il ne sait que le nom, de la guerre contre les
Alamans il ne connaît qu'un épisode. Il est d'autres événements sur
lesquels il ne possède que des légendes fabuleuses, comme la mort
des rois de Tongres, de Cambrai et de Cologne.
Voici les sources dont Grégoire de Tours s'est servi pour écrire sa
vie de Clovis:
I. Annales d'Angers, continuées à Tours.—Grégoire paraît avoir eu
à sa disposition un recueil d'annales fort sèches et gardant surtout le
souvenir de faits locaux; c'est manifestement à ce recueil qu'il a
emprunté ce qu'il dit, aux chapitres 18 et 19 de son livre II, des
combats de Childéric. C'est là aussi qu'il doit avoir trouvé la rapide
mention de la bataille de Soissons (486), de la guerre contre les
Thuringiens (491), de la bataille contre les Alamans (496), de la
guerre d'Aquitaine (506) et de la mort de Clovis (511). Ces mentions
ont dû être sommaires, et telles qu'on les trouve dans les recueils de
ce genre. Les détails que Grégoire y ajoute paraissent puisés
ailleurs.
La grande raison qui me fait regarder Angers comme la patrie de ces
annales, c'est que l'existence d'annales d'Angers est rendue
presque manifeste par Hist. Franc., ii, 18 et 19; c'est aussi parce que
plusieurs faits qui ont dû se passer simultanément un peu partout
sont signalés seulement pour Angers. Ainsi vi, 21 et vii, 11, il est
parlé de tremblements de terre à Angers, alors qu'il est bien certain
que la terre a encore tremblé ailleurs que là, et que même la chute
des murs de Soissons, mentionnée dans le premier de ces deux
passages, paraît due au même accident. Si je suppose que les
annales d'Angers auront été continuées à Tours, c'est à cause du
grand nombre de dates relatives à l'histoire de Tours; on ne s'en
expliquerait pas l'existence si l'on n'admettait des annotations
chronologiques. Ces annotations peuvent avoir constitué un recueil
indépendant; mais en général, au moyen âge, on aimait à continuer
ceux qu'on possédait, et l'hypothèse que nous avons admise avec
Junghans rend compte, nous semble-t-il, d'une manière assez
naturelle de la familiarité de Grégoire avec les Annales d'Angers.
Elle ne plaît pas à M. Lair, qui m'appelle de ce chef «l'Œdipe du
sphinx mérovingien», (Annuaire-bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire de
France, t. xxxv, 1898, p. 4 du tiré à part), et qui, pour son compte,
s'est vainement attaqué à l'énigme.
II. Annales burgondes.—Grégoire de Tours et son contemporain
Marius d'Avenches offrent un récit parallèle des événements qui ont
eu la Burgondie pour théâtre, et les nombreuses ressemblances de
ces récits ne peuvent s'expliquer que par des rapports entre les
deux auteurs. Après avoir tour à tour supposé que Marius avait
copié Grégoire, et que Grégoire avait copié Marius, on a finalement
conclu, avec raison, que l'un et l'autre avaient consulté une source
commune, à savoir, un recueil d'Annales burgondes contenant des
notices sèches et sommaires. Tout ce que Grégoire nous dit de la
guerre de Clovis en Burgondie semble emprunté à cette source, à
l'exception toutefois du récit du siège d'Avignon, qu'on ne retrouve
pas dans Marius d'Avenches, et qui est, selon toute probabilité,
puisé dans la tradition populaire. V. Monod, Études critiques sur les
sources de l'histoire mérovingienne, 1e partie p. 161, rectifié par
Arndt, Historische Zeitschrift de Sybel, t. xxviii, p. 421.
III. Vie de saint Remi.—Il existait, du temps de Grégoire de Tours,
une précieuse vie de saint Remi, écrite, à ce qu'il paraît, par un clerc
de l'église de Reims peu de temps après la mort du saint, et qui,
ayant disparu d'assez bonne heure, a été remplacée par une
biographie sans valeur historique, mise, on ne sait pourquoi, sous le
nom de l'évêque Fortunat. Grégoire de Tours a connu la vieille vie,
au sujet de laquelle il écrit: Est enim nunc liber vitæ ejus, qui eum
narrat mortuum suscitasse. (Hist. Franc., ii, 31.) Il n'est pas douteux
qu'il ait lu ce document, et qu'il lui ait emprunté l'histoire de la
conversion et du baptême de Clovis. Peut-être même y a-t-il trouvé
aussi l'épisode du vase de Soissons. La supposition de M. Monod,
o. c. p. 99, qui, pour des raisons d'ailleurs fallacieuses, suppose que
sa source aurait pu être un poème latin sur la conversion de Clovis,
et celle de Schubert, Die Unterwerfung der Alamannen unter die
Franken, pp. 134-140, qui serait disposé à admettre aussi une vie en
vers de sainte Clotilde, n'ont guère de vraisemblance.
IV. Vie de saint Maixent.—Grégoire de Tours a connu aussi la
biographie de saint Maixent, abbé d'un monastère dans le Poitou. Il
dit au sujet de ce saint: Multasque et alias virtutes operatus est,
quas si quis diligenter inquiret, librum vitæ illius legens cuncta
repperiet. (Hist. Franc., ii, 37.) Le texte primitif de cette vie a disparu,
mais il en reste deux recensions, dont la première, qui paraît la plus
ancienne, a été publiée par Mabillon (Acta Sanctorum O. S. B., t. I),
et la seconde par les Bollandistes (Acta Sanctorum 26 juin, t. V).
Toutes les deux ont amplifié dans un sens légendaire l'épisode
emprunté à cette vie par Grégoire de Tours lui-même, et mettent en
scène Clovis d'une manière moins vraisemblable que dramatique.
V. Traditions orales.—Les souvenirs conservés par la bouche des
contemporains ont été transmis de différentes manières à Grégoire
de Tours. Quelques-uns ont été trouvés par lui dans sa famille ou
dans son entourage clermontois; de ce nombre est, sans contredit,
la mention de la part prise par les Clermontois à la bataille de
Vouillé, et du nom de leur chef Apollinaire (Maximus ibi tunc
Arvernorum populus, qui cum Apollinare venerat, et primi qui erant
ex senatoribus corruerunt (Hist. Franc., ii, 37). Il en a emprunté
d'autres aux souvenirs du clergé de Tours, comme les preuves de
respect données par Clovis à saint Martin dans la guerre d'Aquitaine
(Hist. Franc., ii, 37), ou les détails de l'inauguration consulaire de
Clovis à Tours (Ibid., ii, 38); à ceux du clergé de Poitiers, comme
l'épisode du signe de feu donné par saint Hilaire à Clovis, raconté
aussi par son ami Fortunat, évêque de cette ville (Liber de Virtutibus
sancti Hilarii, vii, 20, dans M. G. H. Auct. antiquiss., iv); à ceux du
clergé d'Angoulême (Hist. Franc., ii, 37: chute des murs de cette
ville).
Parmi ces traditions orales, il en est plusieurs qui portent les traces
de l'élaboration considérable que leur a fait subir l'imagination
populaire. L'histoire du siège d'Avignon est de ce nombre: c'est de la
légende et non de l'histoire. Plus d'une fois, la légende a été l'objet
de chants populaires, et est devenue l'occasion d'un petit poème
épique: de ce nombre semble avoir été l'histoire du mariage de
Clovis (Hist. Franc., ii, 28), y compris celle des malheurs de Clotilde
et de la vengeance qu'elle en tira par la suite (Ibid., iii, 6), et celle de
la manière dont Clovis se débarrassa des autres rois francs (Ibid., ii,
40-42.)
Pour les preuves de ce travail de dépouillement des sources de
Grégoire de Tours, je renvoie à mon étude intitulée: les Sources de
l'histoire de Clovis dans Grégoire de Tours, parue à la fois dans la
Revue des questions historiques, t. XLIV (1888), et dans le tome II
du Congrès scientifique international des catholiques, tenu à Paris
du 8 au 13 avril 1888 (Paris, 1889), ainsi qu'à mon Histoire poétique
des Mérovingiens (Paris-Bruxelles, 1893).
Pour la connaissance plus approfondie de Grégoire de Tours, lire: G.
Monod, Études critiques sur les sources de l'histoire mérovingienne,
1re partie. Paris 1872 (8e fascicule de la Bibliothèque de l'école des
hautes études), et Arndt-Krusch, M. G. H., Scriptores Rerum
Merovingicarum, t. I; Hanovre, 1884, (préface de la 1re et de la 2e
partie de ce tome).
CHRONIQUE DITE DE FRÉDÉGAIRE
(Éd. Ruinart, à la suite de son Grégoire de Tours, Paris,

1699; Monod, dans la Bibliothèque de l'école des hautes
études, fascicule 63, Paris, 1885; Krusch, M. G. H.,
Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, t. II, Hanovre, 1888)
La compilation historique que depuis Scaliger (1598) il est convenu,
on ne sait pourquoi, de mettre sous le nom de Frédégaire, est
l'œuvre de trois auteurs différents. La magistrale démonstration de
cette vérité est due à Krusch, dans Die Chronicæ des sogenannten
Fredegar (Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für aeltere deutsche
Geschichtskunde, t. VII, 1882), dont la substance a passé dans la
préface de l'édition de Frédégaire par le même savant. Selon
Krusch, le premier de ces trois auteurs est un Burgonde qui, vers
613, a fait un résumé du Liber generationis de saint Hippolyte, de la
chronique de saint Jérôme et de celle d'Idacius; il y a ajouté la
légende sur l'origine troyenne des Francs, et quelques menus faits
empruntés à des Annales burgondes.
Le deuxième est un Burgonde d'outre-Jura qui, vers 642, a ajouté à
cette compilation un résumé des six premiers livres de l'Historia
Francorum de Grégoire de Tours, sous le nom d'Epitome, et l'a fait
suivre d'une continuation originale allant jusqu'à 642. C'est lui qui
nous intéresse, tant à cause du résumé en question que des
additions qu'il y a faites.
Le troisième enfin est un Austrasien dévoué à la famille
carolingienne, qui, vers 658, a ajouté quelques chapitres, en
particulier 84-88, destinés à glorifier ses héros.

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