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Memory and Enlightenment
Cultural Afterlives of the Long Eighteenth Century
James Ward
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Series Editors
Andrew Hoskins
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

John Sutton
Department of Cognitive Science
Macquarie University
Macquarie, Australia
The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends
that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to
that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes
in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory;
panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination
with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of
trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to
an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years.
Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect
what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This
groundbreaking new series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’
under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for
its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theo-
retical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14682
 James Ward

Memory and
Enlightenment
Cultural Afterlives of the Long Eighteenth Century
James Ward
School of Arts and Humanities
Ulster University
Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

ISBN 978-3-319-96709-7    ISBN 978-3-319-96710-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96710-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957458

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
­institutional affiliations.

Cover Illustration: detail from A Fall of Ordinariness and Light: The Order Land by Jessie
Brennan. Graphite on paper (framed in aluminium), 57.5 × 71.5 cm. Commissioned for
Progress by the Foundling Museum, 2014. Courtesy the Victoria and Albert Museum,
2016. With thanks to Jessie Brennan.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

Chapter 3 of this book includes reproductions of works by Lubaina Himid,

Grayson Perry, Paula Rego, and Jessie Brennan. I am very grateful to each
of these artists for their generosity and I am particularly indebted to
Lubaina Himid for her help and to Jessie Brennan for allowing me to use
her work for the cover of this book.
Parts of Chaps. 3 and 7 appeared previously in Reading Historical
Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past, edited by Kate Mitchell and
Nicola Parsons (Palgrave, 2013).
At Palgrave, Heloise Harding, Lucy Batrouney, Carolyn Zhang, and
Felicity Plester have been helpful and encouraging throughout the com-
missioning and writing of this book.
Thanks also to my students at Ulster University who have taken mod-
ules and classes in eighteenth-century literature, adaptation and historical
fiction, and memory studies, where many ideas for this book were formed.
Catherine Bates, David Dwan, Adam Hansen, Moyra Haslett, and Greg
Lynall invited me to present my research at their institutions and I am very
grateful for the opportunity to try out my ideas, and for their hospitality
and good company.
Thanks above all to the Byrne and Ward families, with a special mention
to my parents Michael and Jo and my daughter Mina. This book is dedi-
cated to the number one: Kate.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction: Theatres of Memory   1

2 Restorations  33

3 ‘Ever-haunting Hogarth’: Remembering the Hogarthian

Progress  77

4 Emma Donoghue’s Enlightenment Fictions 117

5 Memory and Enlightenment in the Poetry of Eavan Boland

and Medbh McGuckian 149

6 The Recruiting Officer in the Penal Colony 181

7 Memory and Atrocity: Representing the Zong 199

8 Conclusion 223

vii
viii Contents

Bibliography 227

Index 247
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Theatres of Memory

Like other historical periods, the ‘long eighteenth century’ (1660–1800)

persists in our present through screen and performance media, writing,
and visual art. These afterlives are a form of cultural memory, whose
emerging and changing forms this book traces from the 1980s to the pres-
ent. The idea that ‘the past […] derives its meaning increasingly from the
present’1 is one of the central disciplinary tenets of memory studies, and I
begin with an encounter illustrating the currency of such representations.
On 18 November 2016, Mike Pence, then Vice President-elect of the
United States, attended a performance of Hamilton: An American Musical
at the Richard Rogers Theater in New York. When they realized who he
was, audience members began to boo Pence. They continued to do so
sporadically during the performance and again at the end as he walked
out. As Pence was leaving, he was called back from the stage by one of the
show’s lead actors, Brandon Dixon, who had played the part of vice presi-
dent Aaron Burr. Encouraging the audience to film and share the speech
on social media, he addressed the following words to Pence:

I see you walking out, but I hope you will hear us, just a few moments. […]
We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new
administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or
defend our inalienable rights. But we truly hope that this show has inspired
you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us.2

© The Author(s) 2018 1

J. Ward, Memory and Enlightenment, Palgrave Macmillan Memory
Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96710-3_1
2 J. WARD

Almost gratuitous in its potential for symbolism, the encounter between

the cast, the audience, and the politician can be interpreted in many ways:
as an affront to the new presidency to be denounced as such by Donald
Trump; as an object lesson in irony where a fictional vice president
addressed an unlikely one; and as an amusing but also sobering instance of
the combined power of social media and the traditional public sphere of
the theatre. From the point of view of this book, however, the encounter
represents a contest over and between its two central concepts: memory
and enlightenment.
Hamilton is an example of the kind of work that this book is about. A
retelling of the life of the United States’ founding father, initially inspired
by Ron Chernow’s biography Alexander Hamilton (2004), the play reme-
diates historical biography as musical drama. It works in ways typical of
those ascribed to historical fiction by Jerome de Groot in Remaking
History (2015). Like the texts discussed by de Groot, Hamilton performs
functions traditionally split between primary and secondary historical
sources, having at once ‘an almost pedagogical aspect in allowing a culture
to “understand” past moments’ but also providing through ‘reflection
upon the representational processes […] a means to critique, conceptual-
ize, engage with and reject the processes of representation’.3 Hamilton,
like the other texts I discuss, undoubtedly enables such reflective responses.
But to consider it as a memory text is to widen this reflective focus to
include not just the process of representation but also its motives and its
effects. Because it places a particular emphasis on the meaning for present
audiences of its narrated content, meaning which acquired a particularly
urgent charge during the encounter of November 2016, Hamilton is a
mnemotechnic text as well as an historiographic one. Cultural memory, as
defined by Astrid Erll, always includes ‘an expressive indication of the
needs and interests of the person or group doing the remembering’. As a
discipline, memory studies therefore directs its interest ‘not toward the
shape of the remembered past, but rather toward the particular presents of
the remembering’.4 In the case of Hamilton, these needs and interests are
explicitly political. According to Jeremy McCarter, who was closely
involved with its conception and commissioning, the play ‘doesn’t just
dramatize Hamilton’s revolution: It continues it’.5 In this reading, the
values which Pence was asked from the stage to protect and defend—
equality, diversity, and stewardship of the environment—represent mod-
ern, concrete expressions of the abstract principles underpinning the
historical foundation of the United States. In performance, Hamilton
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 3

reproduces and reframes a relationship of culture to politics instituted dur-

ing the revolutionary period and exemplified, for McCarter, in the effort
of General George Washington to raise the morale of his exhausted troops
with a performance of Joseph Addison’s Cato during the winter of
1777–78. Hamilton becomes a memory text in performance, commemo-
rating and continuing a set of previously existing historical conditions for
a new audience.
The cast and friends of Hamilton were not, however, the only ones
claiming in the winter of 2016–17 to extend and inherit the memory of
the American revolution. The Tea Party, to take one obvious example,
similarly appropriated a familiar revolutionary name to agitate for a radi-
cally different agenda. It is one broadly shared by right-wing Republicans
such as Pence, who is a climate change sceptic, opponent of LGBT civil
rights, and proponent of intelligent design. Some of these values and
beliefs can technically at least be aligned with those of the revolutionar-
ies—according to the document invoked and quoted from the stage of
Hamilton, for example, unalienable rights are endowed in humans ‘by
their Creator’. A more common response, however, has been to cite the
American political movement that includes Trump, Pence, and the Tea
Party as abandoning not just their republic’s founding values but the
broader philosophical dispensation from which they emerged. Whether
this is conceived as a reversion to ‘a pre-enlightenment form of thinking’
or a turn to a post-enlightenment worldview,6 it reflects a general anxiety
that recent political and cultural modernity has begun irreversibly to
diverge from traditions of political liberalism and scientific rationalism
associated with the period named in this book’s title. The idea that we may
be witnessing the end of enlightenment is voiced in Europe as well as the
United States. Emmanuel Macron, who is perhaps alone among world
leaders in having contributed to an important work in the field of memory
studies, saw his election to the French presidency in 2017 as a chance ‘to
defend the spirit of the Enlightenment, threatened in so many places’.7
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s vote in 2016 to leave the European
Union was regarded as the beginning of a new politics of intolerance
which ‘set at risk fundamental liberal values and the universal, progressive
principles that Britain, since the eighteenth-century Age of the
Enlightenment, has been instrumental in spreading around the globe’.8
These expressions of fear and hope reveal a number of common assump-
tions. Western political modernity is based on values inherited from a
period called the (age of the) enlightenment, broadly identifiable with the
4 J. WARD

eighteenth century, but often encompassing the latter half of the seven-
teenth. These values are currently under threat from reactionary and
aggressive forms of individualism, intolerance, and anti-rationalism.
Although political change in 2016–17 made the issue newsworthy, debate
over enlightenment’s legacy and fate has preoccupied the academic
humanities for a much longer time. It has fallen across two areas of
research. On the one hand, much recent work looks at the cultural history
of the period and generally emphasizes its positive legacy, notably in high-­
profile books by Jonathan Israel and Anthony Pagden. Enlightenment
studies is enjoying a resurgence which is producing significant works by
public intellectuals aimed at general audiences as well as specialized treat-
ments by academic writers.9
This recent return to enlightenment comes partly in response to neo-­
reactionary politics’ destructive efforts, but it also addresses a much more
sophisticated and enduring critique launched by Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), and which initially
gained widespread currency with the rise to prominence of critical theory
in the 1980s. This critique has been caricatured as a reflex which tends
automatically ‘to lay responsibility for all injustices at the feet of technol-
ogy, progress, and the Enlightenment’.10 But even in the face of an increas-
ingly confident rejection of enlightenment as a single ‘monolithic edifice
[…] responsible for modernity’,11 this critique remains pertinent and com-
pelling. Any historically sensitive discussion of the period must address its
unsettling temporal compaction of progressive discourses and oppressive
acts. It is an era marked, as Carey notes by ‘a disjunction […] between a
politics of liberation and autonomy, which coincides at the same time with
imperial expansion and the subjugation of native peoples, and a new ethics
of equality which nonetheless occurs in an era of slavery unprecedented in
its scale and brutality’.12 The exact nature of these events’ co-incidence
and interrelationship is difficult to generalize, but their association and
connection is a permanent feature of enlightenment’s memory in the pres-
ent. Its most forceful and enduring articulation has been postcolonial
theory and criticism’s account of enlightenment ‘both as an eighteenth
century phenomenon and as a concept that bears on modern political
formations’.13 One foundational text of this position, Spivak’s Critique of
Postcolonial Reason, characterizes the philosophy of the German enlight-
enment as having produced ‘new representations of self and world that
would serve as alibis for the domination, exploitation, and epistemic viola-
tion entailed by the establishment of colony and empire’.14 Alibi is a par-
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 5

ticularly apt term because it evinces the importance of narration, a medium

through which individual memory becomes a forensic object to be col-
lectively interpreted and scrutinized. Alibi represents a memorial assertion
which proves in some cases true, in some cases false, and in yet others,
undecidable. If one role of intellectual and artistic history of the enlight-
enment was to establish alibis, then one function of memory texts is to
revisit the crime scene by using the period’s cultural heritage to engage its
political legacy.
Tracing some versions of these competing narratives, this book is struc-
tured around a fault line between nostalgic and post-traumatic visions of
enlightenment. The first three look at enduring legacies such as political
institutions (Chap. 2 on monarchy) and artistic forms (Chaps. 3 and 4 on
Hogarthian progress and the novel) which have traditionally been objects
of patriotic, reverential, or uncritical memory. I show how different texts
work to challenge and revise but also to affirm such traditions. Chapters 5,
6 and 7 address traumatic memory, focusing on the Atlantic slave trade,
Australia’s colonial past, and the contested history of Ireland. This dichot-
omous vision of enlightenment can also be seen to structure the encounter
between the Hamilton cast and Mike Pence. Echoing in its form the
eighteenth-­century theatrical tradition of frame-breaking epilogues,15 the
confrontation reveals a tension between the meaning in our present of
enlightenment as period and process. Enlightenment endures in contem-
porary memory both as the historic source of the liberal ideals embraced
by the cast of Hamilton, and as an historic plot to entrench the kind of
white, male Christian privilege embodied by Mike Pence. The ability of
these conflicting visions to make news in the meeting of November 2016
has been discussed at length in the media. The fundamental questions it
broached about our modernity and its relation to seventeenth- and
eighteenth-­century thought and action continue to fuel a debate across
the disciplines of history, philosophy, cultural, and literary studies. The
ability of creative works to focus and reframe this debate through the
political and emotional resonances of memory is the subject of this book.
The opening chapter looks at the presentist resonance of the concept of
restoration. This term is historically associated with the return of monarchy
to the four kingdoms of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales under
Charles II, following an experiment in republican politics under Oliver
Cromwell from 1649 to 1660. If our current moment is identified as one
in which ideals and values of the enlightenment are losing their traction,
‘restoration’ is a figure of speech which powerfully embodies some of the
6 J. WARD

reactionary countercurrents which are taking hold. Chapter 4 looks at two

novels by Emma Donoghue as instances of an alternative kind of restora-
tion—the recreation in exquisite detail of an historical artefact, in this case,
the eighteenth-century novel. This chapter investigates Donoghue’s fiction
as a product of her training as a researcher in eighteenth-­century English
fiction and argues that her work reworks the formalism of such fiction to
present a focus on temporality and memory as ways to encounter alterity
and resist narrative closure. Chapter 3 is similarly concerned with the rein-
vention of an enlightenment narrative form. It argues that modern rework-
ings of Hogarth’s graphic satires form a kind of ‘progress’ in Hogarth’s
ironic sense, from confident, and polemical appropriations to increasingly
elegiac memorial modes. Memory texts use Hogarth’s preoccupation with
markers of class, gender, and racial difference to question the assumption
that distance from a remembered past necessarily or inevitably equates to
social or political progress. The fifth chapter looks at the representation of
the eighteenth century in modern Irish poetry. Acknowledging the com-
plexity and difficulty involved in treating poetry as a medium of cultural
memory, as well as the overburdening of Irish poetry in particular by ques-
tions of history, it focuses on Medbh McGuckian and Eavan Boland’s pre-
sentation of what the latter poet calls ‘our darkest century’. Aleida
Assmann’s distinction between archival and canonical cultural memory
structures the final two chapters, which trace the cultural afterlife of two
events. A theatrical performance of George Farquhar’s play The Recruiting
Officer (1706) took place in the New South Wales Penal Colony on 4 June
1789 and has been recreated in two memory-making fictions, Thomas
Keneally’s 1987 novel The Playmaker, and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our
Country’s Good (1988), the well-known stage adaptation of Keneally’s
book. The play performed in 1789, Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, pro-
vides a powerful if disturbing illustration of the workings and creation of
memory. The second event is the murder of an estimated 132 African men,
women and children which took place on board the slave ship Zong between
29 November and 1 December 1781. The massacre has been subject
to two distinct waves of mediation in cultural memory, which came either
side of the 200th anniversary, in 2007, of the 1807 act abolishing slave
trading in the British empire, a moment identified as pivotal in the modern
memory culture of the Atlantic slave trade.16 This event has moved from a
marginal to a more central position in public memory. Cultural memory
replays not just the event but the ethical dilemmas that surround its repre-
sentation and increasing visibility as an object of memory.
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 7

Enlightenment and Memory

The remainder of this introduction works through a number of familiar
examples to argue that enlightenment shapes not just memories but mem-
ory itself. Enlightenment’s recent return to public discourse shows how
the period still informs the way we think about the present and the future.
The period is an historic source for concepts of secular duration, and other
ways individuals and communities think about themselves as subject to the
passage of time. Its emergence in memory is, however, part of a larger
preoccupation with the past. Andreas Huyssen dates its appearance:

One of the most surprising cultural and political phenomena of recent years
has been the emergence of memory as a key concern, a turning towards the
past that stands in stark contrast to the privileging of the future so character-
istic of earlier decades of twentieth-century modernity. […] Since the 1980s,
it seems, the focus has shifted from present futures to present pasts.17

This period of transformation, which Aleida Assmann regards as ‘not just

a theoretical “turn”’ but ‘a much deeper shift in the structure of Western
temporality’,18 encompasses the creation of this book’s primary materials as
well as the theoretical and methodological perspectives it applies. Whether
this shift is conceived as a change in tone and focus, or as something alto-
gether more profound, it is worth noting that its emphasis has tended to be
on pasts which postdate the period focus of this book. Although not tied to
any particular past, memory studies has with notable exceptions (e.g. the
work of Jan Assmann) tended to focus in practice on twentieth-century sites
of memory, as a look over the other titles published in this series will confirm.
When it comes to text-based studies in cultural memory, the nineteenth cen-
tury has also been an important object of interest, as the emergence of the
sub-discipline of neo-Victorian studies attests. Despite its relative lack of
prominence to date, the long eighteenth century is of particular value from a
memory studies perspective for two related reasons. First, as well as an object
of memory in itself, enlightenment represents an historic mode of modernity
which retains an ability to condition later modernities. Second, the period is
an important historic source for forms and processes which have become
fundamental to the operation of modern memory. The first of these qualities
is seen in recent conceptions of our present as a decline into either a post- or
pre-­enlightenment era, in references to the twentieth century’s paradoxical
combining of genocide with ‘enlightened modernity’, and to postmodern-
ism as a movement directed to ‘get rid of the uncompleted project of mod-
ernism, that of the Enlightenment’.19 Enlightenment retains a defining
8 J. WARD

presence in later periods. This is a memorial presence because it structures

relations between present and past. We evaluate the conditions under which
we live through their ability to live up or down to the memory of enlighten-
ment. In the three examples just quoted, enlightenment features in this pro-
cess as a part of intellectual history; my focus, however, is its encounter
through texts and performances as an object of cultural memory. Viewed
through these media, its importance lies not solely in measuring historical
change or progress but also in registering contemporary culture’s retention
and reworking of historic forms and concepts that supply the apparatus of
modern memory. I will detail the relevance of two such forms, the person
and the novel, before moving to a discussion of afterlives and, finally, of the
oppositions that structure this book.
Memory may not have been invented during the enlightenment, but it
was conceptualized in highly influential and historically enduring ways.
Svetlana Boym notes, for example, that the concept of nostalgia was
developed by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss physician, as a diagnostic category
in 1688.20 Memory came to define normative states as well as aberrant
ones, providing, in the epistemology of John Locke, a foundational
account of personal identity. Relying on a notion of identity which retains
the word’s primary sense of ‘sameness’, Locke presents memory as the
guarantor of a person’s existence over time. ‘[A]s far as any intelligent
being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness
it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present
action, so far it is the same personal self’. The extent of their personhood
depends on the ability to recall historic thoughts and actions: ‘As far as
this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or
thought’, Locke writes, ‘so far reaches the identity of that person’.21
Memory for Locke is in Udo Thiel’s words, ‘constitutive of identity’,
while, in Assman’s summary, ‘[t]he Lockean subject is, in so far as she/
he remembers’.22 And as Assmann further points out, this notion of the
memory-enabled self proved influential because it lent conceptual sup-
port to practical arrangements already taking place in the legal, political,
and financial spheres: Locke offered ‘a new concept of the individual that
fitted in neatly with the demands of middle-class society’.23 Private prop-
erty, to take one example, results from the actions of a private self able to
extend over time a record not just of sensory experience but also of rela-
tionships with the material world that include a claim to own parts of it.
Ownership of possessions,24 Locke insists, is enabled by the fact that
‘every Man has a Property in his own Person’. Locke uses two apparently
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 9

interchangeable terms, man and person, to denote the wielder and the
property they hold. Jonathan Kramnick asserts a distinction between
them, noting that in Locke’s terminology man ‘is a kind of object sup-
ported by life, whereas person is a kind of self, supported by conscious-
ness’.25 Private property is therefore an effect not just of physical
possession but also of conscious reflection underpinned by memory.
Locke’s vision of the possessive and self-possessive individual had an
obvious application in legal and commercial spheres but it also helped
populate imaginary ones. Eighteenth-century fiction is said to have
imported the concept wholesale to the point where the early history of the
English novel is routinely identified with the programmatic elaboration
and transmission of Locke’s idea of personhood. The form of the novel as
it emerged in eighteenth-century English literature, as Sandra Macpherson
notes, has been ‘persistently associated with the historical and cultural pro-
duction of self-conscious personhood’, to the point where it is habitually
regarded as ‘a technology for producing […] the “Person” or the “sub-
ject” [or] the “individual”’.26 Since their initial emergence in the 1950s,
narratives of a symbiotic ‘rise’ of the novel with the individual have been
enormously influential not just in literary studies but in philosophical
accounts of the enlightenment, notably the work of Jurgen Habermas.
They have also been subject to challenge and modification by successive
waves of criticism, including the recent reassessment which includes the
work of Macpherson and Kramnick. My fourth chapter uses the novels of
Emma Donoghue to show how works of fiction can add to this critique.
This introduction revisits an earlier wave of criticism and fiction which
zoned in on the animating forms and constructs of the novel and the self.
An implicit point of this earlier critique, which my analysis makes central,
is that the raw material of these constructs is memory.
Reading novels, today as much as in the eighteenth century, often
involves accessing the memories of another person readers know to be
imaginary, but whose experiences they accept as a plausible fiction which
can add to the store of their own experience and knowledge. This access is
granted either with the illusion that it is unmediated, or, as is much more
common in eighteenth-century fiction, presented to the reader as a prod-
uct of introspection and the physical production and assembly of written
materials—a work, in other words, of memory. Novels therefore provide a
version of prosthetic memory, defined by Alison Landsberg as the experi-
ence whereby someone takes on a personal, ‘deeply felt memory of a past
through which he or she did not live’, and which is able to ‘shape that
10 J. WARD

person’s subjectivity’.27 In this context, Locke’s theory of ‘consciousness

extended backwards to any past action’ is a theory of narration as much as
personal identity. Although open, as in the work of Samuel Richardson, to
sensational innovations such as narrowing the gap between an act and its
narration so as to produce an almost ‘live’ effect, prose fiction was and
remains a temporal medium whose events always take place in memory
even if they unfold in a future which postdates the time of writing or pub-
lication. As Erll states, ‘the distinction between an “experiencing I”’ and a
“narrating I” already rests on a (largely implicit) concept of “memory”,
arising from a split between ‘pre-narrative experience on the one hand,
and, on the other, narrative memory which creates meaning retrospec-
tively’.28 The memory work done by novels also extends beyond the pri-
vate history of individuals. The current resurgence of popular and critical
interest in historical fiction, another aspect of the ‘turning towards the
past’ previously identified, has lent considerable weight to the argument
that fiction can add to, and even create, public knowledge of a past era. On
this note, it is worth remembering that many early novels are also histori-
cal novels. Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, is set between 1651 and
1694, while A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), by reconstructing the
epidemic of 1665–66 in forensic but also emotionally resonant detail,
‘dramatises the operation of memory’ through affective registers as well as
empirical ones.29 Like many other historical narratives, Defoe’s novel of
the plague serves, to use Erll’s term, as a ‘memory-making fiction’: it
numbers among texts that ‘possess the potential to generate and mould
images of the past which will be retained by whole generations’.30 In addi-
tion to shaping specific memories of individual events, however, early nov-
els can be associated with the production of memory in a more foundational
sense. They are fictions that, by refining and retooling the textual appara-
tus and cultural production of memory, can reasonably claim not just to
have made memories but also to have made memory, shaping the forms of
memory that we apply and discuss today. Novels are one of those ‘forms
which draw attention to processes and problems of remembering’ and
thereby enable reflexive modes of memory.31 Centring on processes rather
than problems, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe calls attention to this reflexive
status. It dramatizes, almost to the point of absurdity, the centrality of the
remembering self to novelistic fiction.
Confining its focus to a single character for much of its duration,
Robinson Crusoe focuses in meticulous and sometimes tedious detail on his
day-to-day activities. Crusoe’s narrative is therefore a virtuoso performance
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 11

of memory. Because Crusoe’s interaction with his environment and things

in it provides the dramatic focus that is usually supplied by interaction with
other people, the acquisition of things and the accurate recording of these
acquisitions while marking the duration of time becomes in effect the nov-
el’s plot. Crusoe ‘entangles identity in possession’ as Barbara Benedict
notes,32 and therefore embodies not just the reflective, introspective self of
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding but also the active,
acquisitive self of Two Treatises of Government. The latter text’s account of
property hinges on the assertion that the processing and extraction of raw
materials vests ownership of the resulting commodities in whoever per-
forms these tasks. Every person, Locke writes, owns the ‘labour of his body,
and the work of his hands’; it follows that when a person takes something
‘out of the state that nature hath provided’, the finished p ­ roduct is an
object ‘he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his
own, and thereby makes it his property’.33 Individuals acquire property by
imparting something of themselves to stuff; this act of self-­expression is in
turn enabled by a sense of distinct personhood measured through the abil-
ity to form memories which are ‘imprinted by external things’.34 As Wolfram
Schmidgen notes, ‘Crusoe’s property is exclusive only by virtue of the fact
that it bears the imprint of his extended self’.35 This notion of imprinting
suggests that Locke’s theory of selfhood and property have common roots
in a process of memory-making. Categorized through written lists and
inventories, Crusoe’s things are part of the store of his memory. Robinson
Crusoe is therefore an iconic text of enlightenment subjecthood not just
because its hero embodies the specific relationships between identity and
possession theorized by Locke, but also because the ground of these rela-
tionships is memory. Crusoe represents a self in which memory and reflec-
tion are paired with, rather than opposed to, activity and acquisition. This
second set of attributes is particularly pertinent to the global and colonial
contexts emphasized in the seond half of this book.
For all his individuality, Crusoe is, as Edward Said points out, ‘virtually
unthinkable without the colonizing mission that permits him to create a
new world of his own in the distant reaches of the African, Pacific, and
Atlantic wilderness’.36 Such colonial ventures, as much as the project of
the self, he adds, ‘have always been associated with the realistic novel’.
This dual pattern of association shows that however Crusoe may be caught
up in recounting his own remembered experience, his story is equally
bound up with the memory of empire. Novels like Robinson Crusoe can be
12 J. WARD

classed among what Erll calls ‘media of storage, which allow cultural
memories to travel across centuries and even become themselves objects of
remembrance’.37 Crusoe is one of those texts that has become an object as
much as an agent of memory, functioning, according to Michel de Certeau,
as ‘one of the rare myths that modern Occidental society has been able to
create’.38 Cultural memory operates critically and reflexively upon such
myths. Afterlives, defined by Anna Holland and Richard Scholar through
their ‘capacity to probe the (often seductive) myths of origin attached to a
particular cultural object and unpick the status of its beginning’,39 are a
particularly important critical tool. The multifarious afterlife of Robinson
Crusoe has become a genre in itself, focused on the central character to
embody both individualism and empire. Robinsonades, as Erik Martiny
notes, highlight ‘the possibilities of the genre to explore the ravages of
solitude or colonisation’.40 One such text, J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986)
shows how memory texts challenge the tradition, whereby novelistic fic-
tion became a manufactory of the remembering self. The novel also exem-
plifies Holland and Scholar’s notion of afterlife as a critical return to myths
of origin.
Even though it subverts the canonicity of Defoe’s original, Foe has
become a canonical text of its kind, a reworking of literary history which
energized important responses in postmodern and postcolonial criticism
to the problem of the past. Spivak calls the novel an ‘historically implau-
sible but politically provocative revision’, and singles out its rewriting of
Friday, presented in Defoe’s original as a ‘prototype of the successful colo-
nial subject’.41 Linda Hutcheon emphasizes the strategic nature of the
historical implausibility remarked on by Spivak, arguing that Foe typifies
the approach of historiographic metafiction, where ‘known historical
details are deliberately falsified in order to foreground the possible mne-
monic failures of recorded history and the constant potential for both
deliberate and inadvertent error’.42 Hutcheon also touches on oppositions
between history and memory, and the ability of novelistic fiction both to
bridge and trouble the distinction between them, as seen in the reference
to ‘mnemonic failures’. This suggestive phrase can be expanded in light of
the considerable emphasis placed in Coetzee’s novel on failures and abdi-
cations of memory. The novel’s uptake by postmodern and postcolonial
theorists reflects its critique of enlightenment broadly conceived as a proj-
ect which interlinks modes of self, empire, and narration. From a memory
studies perspective, however, Foe is a critique of the production and dis-
semination of memory.
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 13

Foe both parodies and flatly contradicts Robinson Crusoe’s faith in

modes of inscription and textual apparatus to record and transmit memo-
ries with absolute fidelity. In contrast with the obsessive recorder and
inscriber of Defoe’s novel, Cruso (as Coetzee renames him) has no inter-
est in the material creation of memory. Susan Barton, the writer who joins
Cruso and Friday on their island, finds that Cruso ‘kept no journal, per-
haps because he lacked paper and ink, but more likely, I now believe,
because he lacked the inclination to keep one’. On inspecting the wooden
fittings of his hut, she finds ‘no carvings, not even notches to indicate that
he counted the years of his banishment’.43 She later implores Cruso before
his death to make ‘some record of your years of shipwreck, so that what
you have passed through shall not die from memory’, asking him whether
it is not possible ‘to manufacture paper and ink and set down what traces
remain of these memories, to burn the story upon wood, or engrave it
upon rock?’ (17). Cruso does in fact make use of these technologies but
only in wilful ignorance of their capacity to encode and store information.
His possessions include drinking vessels made from ‘crude blocks of wood
hollowed out by scraping and burning’ because there was ‘no clay on the
island to mould’ (16). Along with Cruso’s lack of a journal, this last detail
contradicts the source-text’s painstaking account of arriving through
‘experiment’ at a successful process to shape, fire, and glaze earthenware.
Discrediting the claim to truth of the ‘memories’ preserved in Robinson
Crusoe, the avowed lack of mouldable clay metaphorically denies the shap-
ing agency of fiction (given that the word derives from the verb fingere, to
mould), revoking analogies between the novel as the founding myth of
Western secular individuality and religious myths of the creation of man
from clay. Much as the political society built by Cruso on the island reverts
to an ‘anti-Enlightenment and feudal’44 decadence, its culture remains
minimal and functional, incapable of memorial elaboration or
preservation.
Later in the novel, after leaving the island and Cruso’s death, Susan
Barton joins company with the novel’s title character, who is a version of
Daniel Defoe known by his given name Foe, and turns her attention to
Friday. Her efforts to access Friday’s past experience by having him write
and draw throw up ambiguous images and asemic script; a final effort to
teach Friday to write is cut short when he snatches his writing slate and
wipes it until ‘rubbed […] clean’ (146). This return to the blank slate of
prememorial consciousness echoes the earlier failure of Cruso’s individual
memory to access collective frameworks of memory through inscription or
14 J. WARD

transmission and reflects that of Susan Barton, whose novel of her experi-
ences, ‘The Female Castaway’ is never published. In contrast with Robinson
Crusoe’s mythical return to the creation of the remembering self, Foe con-
stitutes an endpoint into which memory disappears. Coetzee’s novel not
only disrupts the narrative of emergent selfhood associated with Defoe
and Locke, it also suggests that this narrative was preserved at the expense
of others which have been wiped from cultural memory or which were
never stored there. Its technique of critical return to these other narratives
is a strategy taken up by later memory texts concerned with the status in
cultural memory of myths of selfhood and artistic creation. Comparable
examples discussed in the main body of this book include David Dabydeen’s
representation of the artists J.M.W. Turner and William Hogarth in
Turner (2002) and A Harlot’s Progress (1999), and Eavan Boland’s por-
trayal of Oliver Goldsmith in her 2011 reworking of The Deserted Village.
In such texts, individuals associated with definitive visual and verbal images
of a particular period or event are shown not to channel memory so much
as occlude and distort it. These texts produce countermemories by turn-
ing an objectifying gaze back on to the originating author or artist. They
also amplify this distortion so that it registers as a literary effect and a
political symptom, a figurative rendering of exclusion from the discourse
of personhood. They present cultural analogues for enlightenment and
post-enlightenment philosophical efforts to unravel the connection
between memory and identity.

Memory, Identity, and Personhood

In Reasons and Persons, the philosopher Derek Parfit argues that ‘most of
us have a false view about ourselves and about our actual lives’. The false
view is that individuals can claim personal identity as a unique, defining
essence which makes them different from other persons. Classifying the
experience as a ‘Liberation from the Self’, Parfit describes his personal
emotional response to this conclusion as a relief from the time-limited
sense of his own existence he had previously felt. ‘My life seemed like a
glass tunnel’, he writes, ‘through which I was moving faster every year,
and at the end of which there was darkness’. Parfit’s revised view of self-
hood makes him ‘less concerned about the rest of my own life and more
concerned about the lives of others’; although, he writes, ‘my death will
break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future
experiences, […] it will not break various other relations’. This second
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 15

class of relation would continue after Parfit’s death through other people’s
‘memories about my life’ and in ‘thoughts that are influenced by mine’.45
Because Parfit has proved to his own satisfaction that these relations are
not constitutive of personhood, the cessation of direct relations between
experiences to which he is uniquely subject becomes less important than
the continuance and extension of these relations through other people’s
thoughts and memories. This is an afterlife of sorts, seen in the fact that
this paragraph employs the present tense to talk about Parfit, who died six
months before it was first drafted. Although far from a sociological theory,
Reasons and Persons shares a significant feature with one of memory stud-
ies’ founding texts. Maurice Halbwachs’ The Social Frameworks of Memory
registers astonishment that in existing psychological literature on memory,
‘people are treated […] as isolated beings’. To illustrate his counterpropo-
sition that ‘memory depends on the social environment’, he evinces a
1731 incident where a young girl, later given the name Marie-Angélique
Leblanc, was found living wild in the forests of the Champagne region of
France. Although unable to articulate memories, her earlier life was even-
tually reconstructed:

She was born in the north of Europe, probably among the Eskimos, and
that she had been transported first to the Antilles and then to France. She
said that she had twice crossed large distances by sea, and she appeared
moved when shown pictures of huts or boats from Eskimo country, seals, or
sugar cane and other products of the Americas. She thought that she could
recall rather clearly that she had belonged as a slave to a mistress who had
liked her very much, but that the master, who could not stand her, had her
sent away.46

Children like this became an object of enlightenment cultural fascina-

tion, a focus for explorations of memory, identity, and the importance of
early experience in their formation.47 For Halbwachs, the story of the
young girl is evidence that individual memory depends on social frame-
works: ‘it is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these
frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of
recollection’. The girl is unable to recall her past because she was repeat-
edly uprooted from these necessary contexts. Although Halbwachs regards
this example as an ‘extreme case’ which serves dramatically to illustrate a
more widespread phenomenon, it could be argued that it also highlights
the role of expanded social frameworks formed by global trade and com-
modity culture as producers of cultural memory. Forcible transfer across
16 J. WARD

these networks may have effectively wiped Leblanc’s personal memory,

but her case helped construct the enlightenment topos of the wild found-
ling, which has persisted in cultural memory initially through scientific and
philosophical writing and latterly in film and fiction. Through their pres-
ervation in narrative and scientific discourse, exceptional cases such as that
of Leblanc become fetish objects which by drawing attention to a disrup-
tive moment, mask the daily operation of an economy, as Joseph Roach
notes, whose ‘most revolutionary commodity […] was human flesh’.48
Particularly striking in the context of this discussion is how the girl’s
reconstructed journey mirrors the paths from Northern Europe to the
Americas and back taken in Robinson Crusoe, whose author was prompted
by the case of an earlier feral child, ‘wild Peter’, to contribute to the litera-
ture on this topic.49 The attempts to retrieve her lost memory are also
echoed by the efforts of Susan Barton with Friday in Foe. Like Coetzee’s
Friday (if not Defoe’s), Leblanc can be seen to figure and embody the
psychic damage experienced as a result of passing through this economy.
Although it results in the loss of a coherent, socially encoded personal
memory, and therefore of self, her experience looks very different from the
liberation described by Derek Parfit. An example which combines ele-
ments of the previous two cases is that of David Hume.
For Hume, the idea of self is a memory-enabled fiction, a subjective
feeling rather than a property of any existing thing. Beliefs about the oper-
ation of the external world are also feelings so habitually entertained that
they are mistaken for objective fact. These feelings compel the imagina-
tion, ‘whenever any object is presented to the memory’ to conceive by the
force of custom ‘that object which is usually conjoined to it’. Remembered
experience alone joins cause to effect. ‘If I see a billiard-ball moving
towards another, on a smooth table, I can easily conceive it to stop upon
contact’, Hume argues.50 Memory, however, compels us to feel that the
first ball will instead cause the second one to move. In a famous passage,
Hume surveys the implications of his arguments through what seems like
an unusually confessional persona, admitting that their ‘intense view of
manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason’ have ‘so
wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all
beliefs and reasoning’. Hume’s solution is to re-enter the sociable world:
‘I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my
friends; and when after three or four hour’s amusement, I wou’d return to
these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I
cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther’.51
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 17

Though linked by a common unravelling of the threads that connect

memory and identity, Hume’s experience is different from that of Parfit,
who cites it in Reasons and Persons. It is different again from that of the
young girl discovered in the forest. Although Hume is unable to establish
any objective relation between his self and the world, he is able reaffirm its
subjective validity through social frameworks of dining, conversation, and
merry-making. These frameworks depend for their continuance on mate-
rial things—not just food and drink but also gaming tables and pieces
made from tropical hardwoods such as ebony and mahogany, backgam-
mon men, and billiard balls made from ivory. Hume’s unpicking and sub-
sequent reassertion of personal identity is therefore enabled by material
objects produced through the networks of commodity circulation previ-
ously identified, and similarly masks the violence and exploitation involved
in their extraction and production. Parfit’s account, consulted for current
purposes as a pdf on equipment manufactured using silicon and rare earth
metals, can be similarly located within modern versions of such networks.
Memory is a product of these networks as much as of social frameworks.
Without them and outside them, it is as inarticulable as it would be out-
side Halbwachs’ cadres sociaux. Subjectivities which enable such frame-
works, like those discussed by Halbwachs, or which perform the
deconstruction of memory and personal identity, like those of Parfit and
Hume, are built of things as well as persons. Because they embody a total-
ity of subject-object relations, things carry coded inscriptions of stories
and memories other than the one being told at a given moment. Memory
texts discussed in this book can revisit such moments and reconfigure
these relationships. A central concept to these processes of recovery and
return is the idea of afterlife.

Afterlives
My subtitle uses the label ‘afterlives’ to describe this book’s primary mate-
rials. As a metaphorical designation for individual texts, seen in Holland
and Scholar’s previously quoted identification of a ‘capacity to probe […]
myths of origin’, ‘afterlife’ identifies the tendency of modern works to
revisit, relive, and reconfigure earlier ones and invokes both critical and
retentive memorial functions. Afterlife also operates within texts as a rep-
resentational mode, where it serves to render the existence of real and
fictional persons who have historically been denied a defining attribute of
personhood—to remember and be remembered. In Foe, for example,
18 J. WARD

Susan Barton calls herself ‘a ghost beside the true body of Cruso’ (Foe,
51). When she puts her sense of unreality to Foe, she receives an unhelpful
reply: ‘as to who among us is a ghost and who not I have nothing to say’
(134).
Here, as in works discussed in succeeding chapters, ghostliness is a
mode of representation associated with individuals who register as pres-
ences but not persons in history. An example discussed in Chap. 4 is Mary
Saunders. Prior to being reimagined as the protagonist of Emma
Donoghue’s Slammerkin (2000), her execution for murder in 1764 made
her a brief and sensational object of interest in the press which, as Maria
Mulvany argues, served to ‘ghost the lived reality of this young girl’ by
making her an object of fear and repulsion.52 A different form of ghosting,
discussed in Chap. 7, applies to victims of the Zong massacre and of the
Atlantic slave trade, who appear in Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts and
David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress. A similar, if more controversial,
ethic of representation is at work in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Our
Country’s Good and Debra Adelaide’s novel Serpent Dust, where Indigenous
Australians perceive First Fleet colonists as ‘spirits, ghosts’.53 Unlike Mary
Saunders in Slammerkin, these figures are ghosted in that they inhabit a
different order of reality from other characters. Their haunting, partial vis-
ibility to audiences and to other characters enacts a refusal to pass out of
memory and into history, disrupting, as Stef Craps argues, ‘popular under-
standing of history as a linear progression […] to a liberated “postcolo-
nial” present’. As a parahistorical presence they inhabit spaces ‘of
remembrance in which historical losses are neither properly mourned nor
melancholically entombed within the self but, constantly re-examined and
reinterpreted’.54 Memory texts like those of D’Aguiar, Dabydeen, and
Donoghue additionally engage in ‘ghost writing’ in that they give some
kind of voice, often in the first person, to individuals historically denied an
opportunity and means to articulate their experience. Through such
‘ghostliness’, as Kate Mitchell writes, fiction rejects ‘the objectives, and
assumed objectivity of history, and aligns it with the functions of mem-
ory’.55 One of the specific memorial functions of enlightenment memory
texts is to highlight their period as a point of origin for legal and philo-
sophical discourses of personhood which have historically proved
exclusionary.
If, as previous sections of this introduction observed, memory makes
persons, then personhood makes ghosts of those excluded from its remit.
In Two Treatises of Government, Locke writes that where executive power
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 19

is vested in a single person, that person has ‘no will, no power, but that of
the law’ and should not be seen as an autonomous individual but rather
the ‘image, phantom, or representative of the commonwealth’.56 Although
it makes phantoms by subsuming individual will to political authority,
Locke’s contractarian theory focuses only on those who embody power.
Memory texts, by contrast, can be aligned with critical accounts which
focus on those who are excluded from and by power, the ‘missing persons’
of enlightenment modernity. Monique Wittig describes queer sexualities
as appearing ‘like a ghost only dimly’ in a social matrix which continues to
‘reverberate here and now far from its initial momentum in the
Enlightenment’.57 Helen Thompson notes how the term ‘individual’
depends on ‘paradoxically inclusive and exclusive pretenses of contractar-
ian modernity’,58 and discusses female subjection in eighteenth-century
fiction as a similarly paradoxical site of both exclusion and resistance. Like
marriage, slavery represents a ghostly survival of feudalism in the machine
of enlightenment modernity: slaves, as Victoria Kahn notes, therefore
emerge alongside other excluded persons as ‘shadows of the contracting
subject’.59
Among such shadows, the Atlantic slave trade of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries looks itself like an afterlife, a survival of primitive
and barbarous practice in a self-proclaimed age of reason. In Specters of
the Atlantic, however, Ian Baucom argues that the trade in general and
the Zong massacre in particular ‘not only belong to but in fact typicalize
their historical moment’, and additionally ‘function as types of our own
long, nonsynchronous contemporaneity’.60 Martyn Hudson develops
similar insights from a memory studies perspective, conceptualizing the
slave ship as ‘a manufactory of memory’ which has come to ‘define not
just African-­American identity but the cultures of a global humanity’ in
our present.61 Joseph Roach’s book Cities of the Dead makes a compara-
ble point in respect of the wider span of social practices and rituals that
crossed the Atlantic during the eighteenth century. Even though their
origins in ‘collaborative interdependence across imaginary borders of
race, nation, and origin’ have been forgotten, they persist in modernity
as ‘memories […] embodied through performances’.62 Viewed from
these perspectives, our modernity is itself a kind of afterlife, comparable
to Pierre Nora’s notion of an unreflecting memory which inheres in
‘gestures and habits […] unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories’.63
Nora’s confinement of such memory to ‘traditional’ societies can be
challenged. Adorno and Horkheimer observe that post-enlightenment
20 J. WARD

modernity preserves relationships of domination and deindividuation

which are essentially premodern through ‘mediation of the total society
which embraces all relations and emotions’. They find a ‘persistent alle-
gory of the dialectic of enlightenment’ in Book XII of the Odyssey, where
Odysseus stops the ears of his crew with wax. Post-enlightenment sub-
jects are indistinguishable from these ‘oarsmen who cannot speak to one
another […] each of them yoked in the same rhythm’.64 While figures of
repetition and embodiment are important to these kinds of memory,
Roach and Baucom’s titles also imply such repetition habitually takes the
form of a kind of haunting or possession. To the concept of afterlife as
self-conscious critical return, these examples add an alternative vision of
ghostly persistence.
This version of afterlife was first expounded in the work of the art his-
torian Aby Warburg (1866–1929). His term Nachleben, as Tamm notes,
does not translate precisely as ‘afterlife’ because it ‘does not refer to another
life beyond this one, but should be understood as a continued life, the past
that becomes actual in the present, or the past that haunts the present […]
a more appropriate translation might be ‘survival’ or even ‘revival’.65 In
spite of the question of accuracy, ‘afterlife’ remains a useful term because,
as shown in the reference to a ‘past that haunts the present’, it connotes
qualitative and affective features often ascribed to memories and haunt-
ings alike: their lack of material substance and their power to disturb.
Warburg explicitly adopted hauntological registers, describing his most
ambitious and unfinished project ‘Mnemosyne Atlas’ as ‘a ghost story for
truly adult people’. Giorgio Agamben explains this remark with reference
to the project’s gathering ‘together all the energetic currents that had
animated and continued to animate Europe’s memory, taking form in its
“ghosts”’, and Warburg’s comparison of artists and scholars to ‘“necro-
mancers” who consciously evoke the specters threatening them’.66 This
last figure connects the project of memory to the discourse of spectrality.
Itself the object of a theoretical ‘turn’,67 spectrality also colours the
‘turn to history’ so crucial to the development of modern memory stud-
ies. Encompassing a range of media from traditional ghost stories to the
workings of finance capital, spectrality studies overlaps closely with mem-
ory studies through its focus on immaterial forms as objects of belief (in
financial terms, ‘credit’) and indirect agents of material change. The popu-
larity of the spectre with a large body of writers and thinkers who, it may
be assumed, do not otherwise entertain supernatural beliefs, can be
explained with reference both to its potency as a literary effect and its ver-
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 21

satility as a concept. Presenting a powerful metaphor for the persistence of

the past in the present, spectres provide a way to apprehend historical
phenomena through their affective power and subjective meanings in the
present. In terms set out by Jacques Derrida, the spectre possesses ‘neither
substance, nor essence, nor existence’; ‘never present as such’, the spectre
is whatever ‘is not’. It therefore figures memory’s ability to call up what
has been omitted from history and from historic personhood. This
encounter confers ethical obligations in the form of ‘respect for those
­others who are no longer there’ and ‘responsibility, beyond all living pres-
ent […] before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are
already dead’.68 Spectrality therefore offers a way of looking at the past
through presences which are not well delineated and about which empiri-
cal data often do not exist. They provide an introspective and retrospective
counterpoint to narratives of history as progress.
This corrective function was first deployed in Derrida’s Specters of Marx.
Published at a time when an ‘orgy of self-congratulations’69 was accompa-
nying the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent triumph of
Western liberal values, Derrida countered that such values could be them-
selves counted among ‘messianic eschatologies’ (72). He invokes the
opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto to suggest that the spectre
relates both to the prospect of revolution in 1848 and the apparent van-
ishing in 1989 of political alternatives to global capitalism. In addition to
the many forms it has since taken, the spectre was, in this first iteration, a
figure both of loss and of political possibility. In the present moment,
enlightenment is a comparably spectral presence. The events of 2016–17
discussed in my opening pages represented for some not just a dissolution
of the settlement of 1989, but also a final emptying-out of the enlighten-
ment promise: if the ‘triumph’ of the West in 1989 was an expression of
boundless energy across space, then the apparent failure of enlightenment
in our present is one of temporal exhaustion. Emmanuel Macron’s call to
defend the ‘spirit of enlightenment’ can be read in this context as an invo-
cation to a vanishing spectre. More than just a dead metaphor, this appar-
ent lapse into spiritualism is part of an animist strain seen in narratives of
enlightenment’s birth as well as in fears of its demise.
The original spectre of enlightenment can be found in Isaac Newton’s
‘New Theory about Light and Colour’ (1672). It appears in the form of
the ‘coloured Spectrum’,70 which Newton produced by directing sunlight
through a glass prism. Although the latinate term now refers in English to
an imperceptibly gradated scale such as the one produced by prismatic
Another random document with
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 As early as the reign of Edward III. (1327-1377), there is record of
a number of stationarii as carrying on business in Oxford. In an
Oxford manuscript dating from this reign, there is an inscription of a
certain Mr. William Reed, of Merton College, who tells us that he
purchased this book from a stationarius.[410]
In London, there is record of an active trade in manuscripts being
in existence as early as the middle of the fourteenth century. The
trade in writing materials, such as parchment, paper, and ink,
appears not to have been organised as in Paris, but to have been
carried on in large part by the grocers and mercers. In the
housekeeping accounts of King John of France, covering the period
of his imprisonment in England, in the years 1359 and 1360, occur
entries such as the following:
“To Peter, a grocer of Lincoln, for four quaires of paper,
two shillings and four pence.”
“To John Huistasse, grocer, for a main of paper and a
skin of parchment, 10 pence.”
“To Bartholomew Mine, grocer, for three quaires of
paper, 27 pennies.”[411]
The manuscript-trade in London concentrated itself in Paternoster
Row, the street which became afterwards the centre of the trade in
printed books.
The earliest English manuscript-dealer whose name is on record is
Richard Lynn, who, in the year 1358, was stationarius in Oxford.[412]
The name of John Browne occurs in several Oxford manuscripts on
about the date of 1400. Nicholas de Frisia, an Oxford librarius of
about 1425, was originally an undergraduate. He did energetic work
as a book scribe and, later, appears to have carried on an important
business in manuscripts. His inscription is found first on a manuscript
entitled Petri Thomæ Quæstiones, etc., which manuscript has been
preserved in the library of Merton.
There is record, as early as 1359, of a manuscript-dealer in the
town of Lincoln who called himself Johannes Librarius, and who
sold, in 1360, several books to the French King John. It is a little
difficult to understand how in a quiet country town like Lincoln with
no university connections, there should have been enough business
in the fourteenth century to support a librarius.
The earliest name on record in London is that of Thomas Vycey,
who was a stationarius in 1433. A few years later we find on a
parchment manuscript containing the wise sayings of a certain
Lombardus, the inscription of Thomas Masoun, “librarius of gilde
hall.”
Between the years 1461 and 1475, a certain Piers Bauduyn,
dealer in manuscripts, and also a bookbinder, purchased a number
of books for Edward IV. In the household accounts of Edward
appears the following entry: “Paid to Piers Bauduyn, bookseller, for
binding, gilding and dressing a copy of Titus Livius, 20 shillings; for
binding, gilding and dressing a copy of the Holy Trinity, 16 shillings;
for binding, gilding and dressing a work entitled ‘The Bible’ 16
shillings.”
William Praat, who was a mercer of London, between the years
1470 and 1480 busied himself also with the trade in manuscripts,
and purchased, for William Caxton, various manuscripts from France
and from Belgium.
Kirchhoff finds record of manuscript-dealers in Spain as early as
the first decade of the fifteenth century. He prints the name, however,
of but one, a certain Antonius Raymundi, a librarius of Barcelona,
whose inscription, dated 1413, appears in a manuscript of
Cassiodorus.
 PART II.
THE EARLIER PRINTED BOOKS.
 PART II.
THE EARLIER PRINTED BOOKS.
 CHAPTER I.
THE RENAISSANCE AS THE FORERUNNER OF THE
PRINTING-PRESS.

T HE fragments of classic literature which had survived the

destruction of the Western Empire, had, as we have seen, owed
their preservation chiefly to the Benedictine monasteries. Upon the
monasteries also rested, for some centuries after the overthrow of
the Gothic Kingdom of Italy, the chief responsibility for maintaining
such slender thread of continuity of intellectual activity, and of
interest in literature as remained. By the beginning of the twelfth
century, this responsibility was shared with, if not entirely transferred
to, the older of the great universities of Europe, such as Bologna and
Paris, which from that time took upon themselves, as has been
indicated, the task of directing and of furthering, in connection with
their educational work, the increasing literary activities of the
scholarly world.
With the increase throughout Europe of schools and universities,
there had come a corresponding development in literary interests
and in literary productiveness or reproductiveness. The universities
became publishing centres, and through the multiplication and
exchange of manuscripts, the scholars of Europe began to come into
closer relations with each other, and to constitute a kind of
international scholarly community. The development of such world-
wide relations between scholars was, of course, very much furthered
by the fact that Latin was universally accepted as the language not
only of scholarship but practically of all literature.
In Italy, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, intellectual
interests and literary activities had expanded beyond the scholastic
circles of the universities, and were beginning to influence larger
divisions of society. The year 1300 witnessed the production in
Florence of the Divine Comedy of Dante, and marked an epoch in
the history of Italy and in the literature of the world. During the two
centuries which followed, Florence remained the centre of a keener,
richer, and more varied intellectual life than was known in any other
city in Europe.
With the great intellectual movement known as the Renaissance, I
am concerned, for the purposes of this study, only to indicate the
influence it exerted in preparing Italy and Europe for the utilisation of
the printing-press. The work of the Renaissance included, partly as a
cause, and partly as an effect, the rediscovery for the Europe of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the literature of classic Greece,
as well as the reinterpretation of the literature of classic Rome.
The influence of the literary awakening and of the newly
discovered masterpieces would of necessity have been restricted to
a comparatively limited scholarly circle, if it had not been for the
invention of Gutenberg and for the scholarly enterprise and devotion
of such followers of Gutenberg as Aldus, Estienne, and Froben. It is,
of course, equally true that if the intellectual world had not been
quickened and inspired by the teachers of the Renaissance, the
presses of Aldus would have worked to little purpose, and their
productions would have found few buyers. Aldus may, in fact, himself
be considered as one of the most characteristic and valuable of the
products of the movement.
The Renaissance has been described by various historians, and
analysed by many commentators. The work which has, however,
been accepted as the most comprehensive account of the
movement and the best critical analysis of its nature and influence,
and which presents also a vivid and artistic series of pictures of Italy
and the Italians during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth
centuries, is Symonds’ Renaissance in Italy. These volumes are so
thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the period, and the author’s
characterisations are so full and so sympathetic, that it is difficult not
to think of Symonds as having been himself a Florentine, rather than
a native of the “barbarian realm of Britain.”
I take the liberty of quoting the description given by Symonds of
the peculiar conditions under which Italy of the fifteenth century, in
abandoning the hope of securing a place among the nations of the
world, absorbed itself in philosophic, literary, and artistic ideals.
Freshly imbued with Greek thought and Greek inspiration, Italy took
upon itself the rôle played centuries earlier by classic Greece, and,
without political power or national influence, it assumed the
leadership of the intellect and of the imagination of Europe.
“In proportion as Italy lost year by year the hope of becoming a
united nation, in proportion as the military instincts died in her, and
the political instincts were extinguished by despotism, in precisely
the same ratio did she evermore acquire a deeper sense of her
intellectual vocation. What was world-embracing in the spirit of the
mediæval Church passed by transmutation into the humanism of the
fifteenth century. As though aware of the hopelessness of being
Italians in the same sense as the natives of Spain were Spaniards,
or the natives of France were Frenchmen, the giants of the
Renaissance did their utmost to efface their nationality, in order that
they might the more effectually restore the cosmopolitan ideal of the
human family. To this end both artists and scholars, the depositories
of the real Italian greatness at this epoch, laboured; the artists by
creating an ideal of beauty with a message and a meaning for all
Europe; the scholars by recovering for Europe the burghership of
Greek and Roman civilisation. In spite of the invasions and
convulsions that ruined Italy between the years 1494 and 1527, the
painters and the humanists proceeded with their task as though the
fate of Italy concerned them not, as though the destinies of the
modern world depended on their activity. After Venice had been
desolated by the armies of the League of Cambray, Aldus Manutius
presented the peace-gift of Plato to the foes of his adopted city, and
when the Lutherans broke into Parmegiano’s workshop at Rome,
even they were awed by the tranquil majesty of the Virgin on his
easel. Stories like these remind us that Renaissance Italy met her
doom of servitude and degradation in the spirit of ancient Hellas,
repeating as they do the tales told of Archimedes in his study, and of
Paulus Emilius face to face with the Zeus of Phidias.[413]...
It is impossible to exaggerate the benefit conferred upon Europe
by the Italians at this epoch. The culture of the classics had to be
reappropriated before the movement of the modern mind could
begin, before the nations could start upon a new career of progress;
the chasm between the old and the new world had to be bridged
over. This task of reappropriation the Italians undertook alone, and
achieved at the sacrifice of their literary independence and their
political freedom. The history of the Renaissance literature in Italy is
the history of self-development into the channels of scholarship and
antiquarian research. The language created by Dante as a thing of
power, polished by Petrarch as a thing of beauty, trained by
Boccaccio as the instrument of melodious prose, was abandoned
even by the Tuscans in the fifteenth century for revived Latin and
newly discovered Greek. Patient acquisition took the place of proud
inventiveness; laborious imitation of classical authors suppressed
originality of style. The force of mind which in the fourteenth century
had produced a Divine Comedy and a Decameron, in the fifteenth
century was expended upon the interpretation of codices, the
settlement of texts, the translation of Greek books into Latin, the
study of antiquities, the composition of commentaries,
encyclopædias, dictionaries, ephemerides. While we regret this
change from creative to acquisitive literature, we must bear in mind
that these scholars, who ought to have been poets, accomplished
nothing less than the civilisation, or, to use their own phrase, the
humanisation, of the modern world. At the critical moment when the
Eastern Empire was being shattered by the Turks, and when the
other European nations were as yet unfit for culture, Italy saved the
Arts and Sciences of Greece and Rome, and interpreted the spirit of
the classics. Devoting herself to what appears the slavish work of
compilation and collection, she transmitted an inestimable treasure
to the human race; and though for a time the beautiful Italian tongue
was superseded by a jargon of dead languages, yet the literature of
the Renaissance yielded in the end the poetry of Ariosto, the political
philosophy of Machiavelli, the histories of Guicciardini and Varchi.
Meanwhile the whole of Europe had received the staple of its
intellectual education.”[414]
Symonds finds in the age of the Renaissance, or in what he calls
the Humanistic movement, four principal periods: first, the age of
inspiration and discovery, which is initiated by Petrarch; second, the
period of arrangement and translation. During this period, the first
great libraries came into existence, the study of Greek began in the
principal universities, and the courts of Cosimo de’ Medici in
Florence, Alfonso in Naples, and Nicholas in Rome, became centres
of literary activity; third, the age of academies. This period
succeeded the introduction of printing into Italy. Scholars and men of
letters are now crystallising or organising themselves into cliques or
schools, under the influence of which a more critical and exact
standard of scholarship is arrived at, while there is a marked
development in literary form and taste. Of the academies which
came into existence, the most important were the Platonic in
Florence, that of Pontanus in Naples, that of Pomponius Lætus in
Rome, and that of Aldus Manutius in Venice. This period covered, it
is to be noted, the introduction of printing into Italy (1464) and its
rapid development. In the fourth period it may be said that
scholasticism to some extent took the place of scholarship. It was
the age of the purists, of whom Bembo was both the type and the
dictator. There is a tendency to replace learning with an exaggerated
attention to æsthetics and style. It was about the Court of Leo X.
(1513-1522) that these æsthetic literati were chiefly gathered.
“Erudition, properly so-called,” says Symonds, “was now upon the
point of being transplanted beyond the Alps.”
The names of the scholars and writers who, following Dante, gave
fame to Florence and to Italy, are part of the history of the world’s
literature. It is necessary to refer here only to those whose influence
was most important in widening the range of scholarly interests and
in preparing Italy and Europe for the diffusion of literature, a
preparation which, while emphasising the requirement for some
means of multiplying books cheaply, secured for the printing-press,
as soon as its work began, an assured and sufficient support. The
fact that a period of exceptional intellectual activity and literary
productiveness immediately preceded the invention, or at least the
introduction of printing, must have had an enormous influence in
furthering the speedy development and diffusion of the new art. The
press of Aldus Manutius seems, as before said, like a natural and
necessary outgrowth of the Renaissance.
 The typical feature of the revival of learning in Italy was, of course,
the rediscovery of the literature of Greece. In the poetic simile of
Symonds, “Florence borrowed her light from Athens, as the moon
shines with rays reflected from the sun. The revival was the silver
age of that old golden age of Greece.”[415] The comparison of
Florence with Athens has repeatedly been made. The golden ages
of the two cities were separated by nearly two thousand years; but
history and human nature repeat themselves, and historians have
found in the Tuscan capital of the fifteenth century a population
which, with its keen intellectual nature, subtle and delicate wit, and
restless political spirit, recalls closely the Athens of Pericles. The
leadership which belonged to Italy in literature, art, scholarship, and
philosophy, was, within Italy, conceded to Florence.
The first name in the list of Florentine scholars whose influence
was important in this revival is that of Petrarch. He never himself
mastered the Greek language, but he arrived at a realisation of the
importance of Greek thought for the world, and he preached to
others the value of the studies which were beyond his own grasp. It
was at Petrarch’s instance that Boccaccio undertook the translation
into Latin of the Iliad. Among Latin authors, Petrarch’s devotion was
given particularly to Cicero and Virgil. The fact that during the first
century of printing more editions of Cicero were produced than of
any other classic author must have been largely due to the emphasis
given by the followers of Petrarch to the beauty of Cicero’s latinity
and the permanent value of his writings.
Petrarch was a devoted collector of manuscripts, and spared
neither labour nor expense to secure for his library codices of texts
recommended as authoritative. Notwithstanding his lack of
knowledge of Greek, he purchased for his collection all the Greek
manuscripts which came within his reach and within his means.
Fortunately for these expensive literary tastes, he appears to have
possessed what we should call a satisfactory independence. Some
of his manuscripts went to Boccaccio, while the rest were, at his
death, given to the city of Florence and found place later in the
Medicean Library.
 Petrarch laid great stress on the importance, for the higher
education of the people, of efficient public libraries, and his influence
with wealthy nobles served largely to increase the resources of
several of the existing libraries. In his scholarly appreciation of the
value of such collections, he was helping to educate the community
to support the booksellers, while in the collecting of manuscripts he
was unwittingly doing valuable service for the coming printer. He
died in 1374, ninety years before the first printing-press began its
work in Italy. A century later his beautiful script served as a model for
the italic or cursive type which was first made by Aldus.
Symonds thinks it very doubtful whether the Italians would have
undertaken the labour of recovering the Greek classics if no Petrarch
had preached the attractiveness of liberal studies, and if no school of
disciples had been formed by him in Florence. Of these disciples, by
far the most distinguished was Boccaccio. His actual work in
furthering the study of Greek was more important than that of the
friend to whom (although there was a difference of but nine years in
their ages) he gave the title of “master.” Boccaccio, taking up the
study of Greek (at Petrarch’s instance) in middle life, secured a
sufficient mastery of the language to be able to render into Latin the
Iliad and the Odyssey. This work, completed in 1362, was the first
translation of Homer for modern readers. He had for his instructor
and assistant an Italian named Leontius Pilatus, who had sojourned
some years at Byzantium, but whose knowledge of classic Greek
was said to have been very limited. Boccaccio secured for Pilatus an
appointment as Greek professor in the University of Florence, the
first professorship of Greek instituted in Europe.
The work by which Boccaccio is best known, the Decameron or
the Ten Nights’ Entertainment, was published in 1353, a few years
before the completion by Chaucer of the Canterbury Tales. It is
described as one of the purest specimens of Italian prose and as an
inexhaustible repository of wit, beauty, and eloquence; and
notwithstanding the fact that the stories are representative of the low
standard of moral tone which characterised Italian society of the
fourteenth century, the book is one which the world will not willingly
let die. It is probably to-day in more continued demand than any
book of its century, with the possible exception of the Divine
Comedy. The earliest printed edition was that of Valdarfer, issued in
Florence in 1471. This was three years before the beginning of
Caxton’s work as a printer in Bruges. The Decameron has since
been published in innumerable editions and in every language of
Europe.
A far larger contribution to Hellenic studies was given some years
later by Manuel Chrysoloras, a Greek scholar of Byzantium, who,
after visiting Italy as an ambassador from the Court of the Emperor
Palæologus, was, in 1396, induced to accept the Chair of Greek in
the University of Florence. “This engagement,” says Symonds,
“secured the future of Greek erudition in Europe.” Symonds
continues: “The scholars who assembled in the lecture-rooms of
Chrysoloras felt that the Greek texts, whereof he alone supplied the
key, contained those elements of spiritual freedom and intellectual
culture without which the civilisation of the modern world would be
impossible. Nor were they mistaken in what was then a guess rather
than a certainty. The study of Greek implied the birth of criticism,
comparison, research. Systems based on ignorance and superstition
were destined to give way before it. The study of Greek opened
philosophical horizons far beyond the dream world of the churchmen
and monks; it stimulated the germs of science, suggested new
astronomical hypotheses, and indirectly led to the discovery of
America. The study of Greek resuscitated a sense of the beautiful in
art and literature. It subjected the creeds of Christianity, the language
of the Gospels, the doctrines of St. Paul, to analysis, and
commenced a new era of Biblical inquiry. If it be true, as a writer no
less sober in his philosophy than eloquent in his language has lately
asserted, that except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this
world which is not Greek in its origin, we are justified in regarding the
point of contact between the Greek teacher Chrysoloras and his
Florentine pupils as one of the most momentous crises in the history
of civilisation. Indirectly the Italian intellect had hitherto felt Hellenic
influence through Latin literature. It was now about to receive that
influence immediately from actual study of the masterpieces of the
Attic writers. The world was no longer to be kept in ignorance of
those ‘eternal consolations’ of the human race. No longer could the
scribe omit Greek quotations from his Latin text with the dogged
snarl of obtuse self-satisfaction, Græca sunt, ergo non legenda. The
motto had rather to be changed into a cry of warning for
ecclesiastical authority upon the verge of dissolution, Græca sunt,
ergo periculosa; since the reawakening faith in human reason, the
reawakening belief in the dignity of man, the desire for beauty, the
liberty, audacity, and passion of the Renaissance, received from
Greek studies their strongest and most vital impulse.”
Symonds might have added that the literary revival, which was so
largely due to these Greek studies, made possible, a century later,
the utilisation of the printing-press, the invention of which would
otherwise have fallen upon comparatively barren ground; while the
printing-press alone made possible the diffusion of the new
knowledge, outside of the small circles of aristocratic scholars, to
whole communities of impecunious students.
Florence had, as we have seen, done more than any other city of
Italy, more than any city of Europe, to prepare Italy and Europe for
the appreciation and utilisation of the art of printing, but the direct
part taken by Florence in the earlier printing undertakings was,
curiously enough, much less important than that of Venice, Rome, or
Milan. By the year 1500, that is, thirty-six years after the beginning of
printing in Italy, there had been printed in Florence 300 works, in
Bologna 298, in Milan 629, in Rome 925, and in Venice 2835.
The list of the scholars and men of letters who, during the century
following the work of Petrarch and Boccaccio, associated
themselves with the brilliant society of Florence, and retained for the
city its distinctive pre-eminence in the intellectual life of Europe, is a
long one, and includes such names as those of Tommaso da
Sarzana, Palla degli Strozzi, Giovanni da Ravenna, Niccolo de’
Niccoli, Filelfo, Marsuppini, Rossi, Bruni, Guicciardini, Poggio,
Galileo, Cellini, Plethon, and Machiavelli. It was to Strozzi that was
due the beginning of Greek teaching in Florence under Manuel
Chrysoloras, while he also devoted large sums of money to the
purchase in Greece and in Constantinople of valuable manuscripts.
He kept in his house skilled copyists, and was employing these in
the work of preparing transcripts for a great public library, when,
unfortunately for Florence, he incurred the enmity of Cosimo de’
Medici, who procured his banishment. Strozzi went to Padua, where
he continued his Greek studies.
Cosimo, having vanquished his rival in politics, himself continued
the work of collecting manuscripts and of furthering the instruction
given by the Greek scholars. The chief service rendered by Cosimo
to learning and literature was in the organisation of great public
libraries. During his exile (1433-1434), he built in Venice the Library
of S. Giorgio Maggiore, and after his return to Florence, he
completed the hall for the Library of S. Marco. He also formed
several large collections of manuscripts. To the Library of S. Marco
and to the Medicean Library were bequeathed later by Niccolo de’
Niccoli 800 manuscripts, valued at 600 gold florins. Cosimo also
provided a valuable collection of manuscripts for the convent of
Fiesole. The oldest portion of the present Laurentian Library is
composed of the collections from these two convents, together with
a portion of the manuscripts preserved from the Medicean Library.
In 1438, Cosimo instituted the famous Platonic Academy of
Florence, the special purpose of which was the interpretation of
Greek philosophy. The gathering in Florence, in 1438, of the Greeks
who came to the great Council, had a large influence in stimulating
the interest of Florentines in Greek culture. Symonds (possibly
somewhat biassed in favour of his beloved Florentines of the
Renaissance) contends that the Byzantine ecclesiastics who came
to the Council, and the long series of Greek travellers or refugees
who found their way from Constantinople to Italy during the years
that followed, included comparatively few real scholars whose
classical learning could be trusted. These men supplied, says
Symonds, “the beggarly elements of grammar, caligraphy, and
bibliographical knowledge,” but it was Ficino and Aldus, Strozzi and
Cosimo de’ Medici who opened the literature of Athens to the
comprehension of the modern world.
The elevation to the papacy, in 1447, of Tommaso Parentucelli,
who took the name of Nicholas V., had the effect of carrying to Rome
some of the Florentine interest in literature and learning. Tommaso,
who was a native of Pisa, had won repute in Bologna for his wide
and thorough scholarship. He became, later, a protégé of Cosimo de’
Medici, who employed him as a librarian of the Marcian Library. To
Nicholas V. was due the foundation of the Vatican Library, for which
he secured a collection of some five thousand works. Symonds says
that during his pontificate, “Rome became a vast workshop of
erudition, a factory of translations from Greek and Latin.” The
compensation paid to these translators from the funds provided by
the Pope, was in many cases very liberal. In fact, as compared with
the returns secured at this period for original work, the rewards paid
to these translators of the Vatican seem decidedly disproportionate,
especially when we remember that a large portion of their work was
of poor quality, deficient both in exact scholarship and in literary
form. To Lorenzo Valla was paid for his translation of Thucydides,
500 scudi, to Guarino for a version of Strabo, 1500 scudi, to Perotti
for Polybius, 500 ducats. Manetti had a pension of 600 scudi a
month to enable him to pursue his sacred studies. Poggio’s version
of the Cyropædia of Xenophon and Filelfo’s rendering of the poems
of Homer, were, from a literary point of view, more important
productions. Some of the work in his series of translations was
confided by the Pope to the resident Greek scholars. Trapezuntios
undertook the Metaphysics of Aristotle and the Republic of Plato,
and Tifernas the Ethics of Aristotle. Translations were also prepared
of Theophrastus and of Ptolemy.
In addition to these paid translators, the Pope attracted to his
Court from all parts of Italy, and particularly from his old home,
Florence, a number of scholars, of whom Poggio Bracciolini (or
Fiorentino) and Cardinal Bessarion were the most important.
Bessarion took an active part in encouraging Greek scholars to
make their homes and to do their work in Italy. The great
development of literary productiveness and literary interests in Rome
during the pontificate of Nicholas, is one of the noteworthy examples
of large results accruing to literature and to literary workers through
intelligently administered patronage. It seems safe to say that before
the introduction of printing, it was only through the liberality of
patrons that any satisfactory compensation could be secured for
literary productions.
 During the reign of Alfonso of Aragon, who in 1435 added Sicily to
his dominions, and under the direct incentive of the royal patronage,
a good deal of literary activity was developed in Naples. Alfonso was
described by Vespasiano as being, next to Nicholas V., the most
munificent patron of learning in Italy, and he attracted to his Court
scholars like Manetti, Beccadelli, Valla, and others. The King paid to
Bartolommeo Fazio a stipend of 500 ducats a year while he was
engaged in writing his Chronicles, and when the work was
completed, he added a further payment of 1500 florins. In 1459, the
year of his death, Alfonso distributed 20,000 ducats among the men
of letters gathered in Naples. It is certain that in no other city of
Europe during that year were the earnings or rewards of literature so
great. It does not appear, however, that this lavish expenditure had
the effect of securing the production by Neapolitans of any works of
continued importance, or even of bringing into existence in the city
any lasting literary interests. The temperament of the people and the
general environment were doubtless unfavourable as compared with
the influences affecting Florence or Rome. It is probable also that the
selection of the recipients of the royal bounty was made without any
trustworthy principle and very much at haphazard.
A production of Beccadelli’s, perhaps the most brilliant of Alfonso’s
literary protégés, is to be noted as having been proscribed by the
Pope, being one of the earliest Italian publications to be so
distinguished. Eugenius IV. forbade, under penalty of
excommunication, the reading of Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus, which
was declared to be contra bonos mores. The book was denounced
from many pulpits, and copies were burned, together with portraits of
the poet, on the public squares of Bologna, Milan, and Ferrara.[416]
This opposition of the Church was the more noteworthy, as the book
contained nothing heretical or subversive of ecclesiastical authority,
but was simply ribald and obscene.
Lorenzo Valla, another of the writers who received special favours
and emoluments at the hands of Alfonso, likewise came under the
ecclesiastical ban. But his writings contained more serious offences
than obscenity or ribaldry. He boldly questioned the authenticity of
Constantine’s Donation (a document which was later shown to be a
forgery), and of other documents and literature held by the Church to
be sacred, and the accuracy of his scholarship and the brilliancy of
his polemical style, gave weight and force to his attacks.
Denunciations came upon Valla’s head from many pulpits, and the
matter was taken up by the Inquisition. But Alfonso told the monks
that they must leave his secretary alone, and the proceedings were
abandoned.
When Nicholas V. came to the papacy, undeterred by the charge
of heresies, he appointed Valla to the post of Apostolic writer, and
gave him very liberal emoluments for work on the series of Greek
translations before referred to. Valla never retracted any of his
utterances against the Church, but he appears, after accepting the
Pope’s appointment, to have turned his polemical ardour in other
directions. He engaged in some bitter controversies with Poggio,
Fazio, and other contemporaries, controversies which seem to have
aroused and excited the literary circles of the time, but which turned
upon matters of no lasting importance. It is a cause of surprise to
later literary historians that men like Valla, possessed of real learning
and of unquestioned literary skill, should have been willing to devote
their time and their capacity to the futilities which formed the pretexts
for the greater part of the personal controversies of the time.
Professor Adams says of Valla: “He had all the pride and insolence
and hardly disguised pagan feeling and morals of the typical
humanist; but in spirit and methods of work he was a genuine
scholar, and his editions lie at the foundation of all later editorial work
in the case of more than one classic author, and of the critical study
of the New Testament as well.”[417]
During the two centuries preceding the invention of printing, it was
the case that more books (in the form of manuscripts) were available
for the use of students and readers in Italy than in any other country,
but even in Italy manuscripts were scarce and costly. Even the
collections in the so-called “libraries” of the cathedrals and colleges
were very meagre. These manuscripts were nearly entirely the
production of the cloisters, and as parchment continued to be very
dear, many of the works sent out by the monks were in the form of
palimpsests, that is, were transcribed upon scrolls which contained
earlier writing. The fact that the original writing was in many cases
but imperfectly erased, has caused to be preserved fragments of a
number of classics which might otherwise have disappeared entirely.
The service rendered by the monks in this way may be considered
as at least a partial offset to the injury done by them to the cause of
literature in the destruction of so many ancient writings. This matter
has been referred to more fully in the chapter on Monasteries and
Manuscripts.
One of the Italian scholars of the fifteenth century who interested
himself particularly in the collection of manuscripts of the classics
was Poggio Bracciolini. In 1414, while he was, in his official capacity
as Apostolic Secretary, in attendance at the Council of Constance,
he ransacked the libraries of St. Gall and of other monasteries of
Switzerland and Suabia, and secured a complete Quintilian, copies
of Lucretius, Frontinus, Probus, Vitruvius, nine of Cicero’s Orations,
and manuscripts of a number of other valuable texts. Many of the
libraries had been sadly neglected, and the greater part of the
manuscripts were in dirty and tattered condition, but literature owes
much to the monks through whom these literary treasures had been
kept in existence at all.
Poggio is to be noted as a free-thinker who managed to keep in
good relations with the Church. So long as free-thinkers confined
their audacity to such matters as form the topic of Poggio’s Facetiæ,
Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus, or La Casa’s Capitolo del Forno, the
Roman Curia looked on and smiled approvingly. The most obscene
books to be found in any literature escaped the Papal censure, and a
man like Aretino, notorious for his ribaldry, could aspire with fair
prospects of success to the scarlet of a Cardinal.[418]
While there could be no popular distribution, in the modern sense
of the term, for necessarily costly books in manuscript, in a
community of which only a small proportion had any knowledge of
reading and writing, it is evident from the chronicles of the time that
there was an active and prompt exchange of literary novelties
between the court circles and the literary groups of the different
cities, and also between the Faculties of the universities. A
controversy between two scholars or men of letters (and there were,
as said, many such controversies, some of them exceedingly bitter)
appears to have excited a larger measure of interest and attention in
cultivated circles throughout the country than could probably be
secured to-day for any purely literary or scholastic issues. There
must, therefore, have been in existence and in circulation a very
considerable mass of literature in manuscript form, and we know
from various sources that Florence particularly was the centre of an
important trade in manuscripts. I have not thus far, however, been
able to find any instances of the writers of this period receiving any
compensation from the publishers, booksellers, or copyists, or any
share in such profits as might be derived from the sale of the
manuscript copies of their writings. It seems probable that the
authors gave to the copyists the privilege (which it was in any case
really impracticable to withhold) of manifolding and distributing such
copies of the books as might be called for by the general public,
while the cost of the complimentary copies (often a considerable
number) given to the large circle of friends, seems as a rule to have
been borne by the author.
As the author had to take his compensation in the shape of fame
(except in the cases of receipts from patrons), the wider the
circulation secured for copies of his productions (provided only they
were not plagiarised), the larger his fund of—satisfaction. For
substantial compensation he could look only to the patron.
Fortunately for the impecunious writers of the day, it became
fashionable for not a few of the princes and nobles of Italy to play the
rôle of Mæcenas, and by many of these the support and
encouragement given to literature was magnificent, if not always
judicious.
During the reigns of the last Visconti and of the first Sforza, or from
about 1440 to 1474, literature became fashionable at the Court of
Milan. Filippo Maria Visconti is described as a superstitious and
repulsive tyrant, and he could hardly by his own personality have
attracted to Lombardy men of intellectual tastes. Visconti appears,
however, to have considered that his Court would be incomplete
without scholars, and to have been willing to pay liberally for their
attendance. Piero Candido Decembrio was one of the most
industrious of the writers who were supported by Visconti. According
to his epitaph, he was responsible for no less than 127 books.
Symonds speaks of his memoir of Visconti as a vivid and vigorous
study of a tyrant. Gasparino da Barzizza was the Court letter-writer
and rhetorician, and, as the official orator, filled an important place in
what was considered the intellectual life of the city.
By far the most noteworthy, however, of the scholars who were
attracted to Milan by the Ducal bounty was Francesco Filelfo. He
could hardly be said to belong to Lombardy, as he was born in
Ancona and educated at Padua, and had passed a number of years
in Venice, Constantinople, Florence, Siena, and Bologna. The
longest sojourn of his life, however, was made in Milan, where he
arrived in 1440, and where he enjoyed for some years liberal
emoluments from the Court.
Filelfo was evidently a man with great powers of acquisition and
with exceptional versatility. He brought back with him from
Constantinople (where he had remained for some years) a Greek
bride from a noble family, an extensive collection of Greek
manuscripts, and a working knowledge of the Greek language; and
at a time when Greek ideas and Greek literature were attracting the
enthusiastic attention not merely of the scholars but of the courtiers
and men of fashion, these possessions of Filelfo were exceptionally
serviceable, and enabled him to push his fortunes effectively. He
seems to have possessed a self-confidence at least equal to his
learning. He speaks of himself as having surpassed Virgil because
he was an orator, and Cicero because he was a poet. Symonds
says, however, that, notwithstanding his arrogance, he is entitled to
the rank of the most universal scholar of his age, and his self-
assertion doubtless aided not a little in securing prompt recognition
for his learning. Venice paid him, in 1427, a stipend of 500 sequins
for a series of lectures on Eloquence. A year later he accepted the
post of lecturer in Bologna on Moral Philosophy and Eloquence, with
a stipend of 450 sequins. Shortly afterwards, flattering offers tempted
him to Florence, where he lectured on the Greek and Latin classics
and on Dante, with a stipend first of 250 sequins, and later of 450