̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Material culture

How 9,000 lists written over 300 years are helping to test theories of economic growth

lw355 — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 10:59:23 +0000

In 1752, Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, was reprimanded by the local weavers’ guild for “weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance”.

When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members she was summoned before the guild court and fined the equivalent of one third of a maidservant’s annual wages. ̽��ֱ��entire affair was then recorded neatly in a ledger.

It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany, and elsewhere, regulated people’s access to labour markets. ̽��ֱ��dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, as in Juliana’s case, but also held back even the simplest of industrial innovations.

What makes this detail of Juliana’s life so interesting is that it is one among a vast number of observations in a huge database on the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900. Built by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge's Faculty of Economics, the database includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries.

Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s growth and development.

“It might sound as if this is a no-brainer,” explains Ogilvie. “Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, earn more, have fewer children and invest more in them – surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.”

She explains that between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late.

“Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,” she adds.

̽��ֱ��inventories Ogilvie is analysing listed the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, dung barrows to dried apple slices, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods were listed. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools revealed economic activities; ownership of books and education-related objects like pens and slates suggested how people learned.

In addition, tax lists recorded the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicated literacy and numeracy levels; and court records revealed obstacles that stifled industry, like Juliana and her wool-combing.

“Previous studies usually had just one proxy for linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names.
This database gives us multiple indicators for the same individuals,” she explains. “I began to realise that, for the first time ever, it was possible to link literacy, numeracy, wealth, industriousness, innovative behaviour and participation in the cash economy and credit markets – for individual women and men, rich and poor, over the very long term.”

Since 2009, Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two communities. “We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,” she says.

Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the man who wanted to grow a new crop – turnips – but was forbidden by the village council because it meant driving his cart to the fields at a different time, threatening others’ crops in the communal rotation system.

Or the young weaver’s wife Magdalena Schöttlin fined 11 days’ wages for wearing an “excessively large neckerchief ... above her station”. Or the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin who were chastised in 1707 for reading books instead of listening to the pastor’s sermon. “This tells us that they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,” explains Ogilvie.

It would be easy to focus on these stories – the aspirations and tragedies, the societal norms and individual rebellions, the possessions precious and prosaic – but, says Ogilvie, now that the data-gathering phase of the project is complete, “it’s time to ask the big questions”.

One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to “hold wealth constant” and follow the lives of people of a certain level, rich or poor, she explains. “Do we find education positively linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like knitting frames or sewing machines? Or to the acquisition of ‘contemporary’ goods such as cottons or coffee cups? Or to female labour force participation or involvement in the credit market?”

̽��ֱ��team will also ask whether more highly educated women had fewer children – enabling them to invest more in those they had – as well as what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next two years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward.

“German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,” she explains. “We know that literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. We also know that local guilds and merchant associations were powerful and resisted changes that threatened their monopolies. Entrenched village oligarchies opposed disruptive innovations and blocked labour migration.

“Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,” she says. “Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.”

Ogilvie also hopes to dig deeper into which aspects of education matter. “We feel intuitively that the answer to the famous question posed by Tolstoy – ‘Can there be two opinions on the advantage of education?’ – is the one that Tolstoy gives: ‘If it’s a good thing for you, it’s a good thing for everyone’.

“But while some types of schooling just benefit the providers or the authorities, other types make kids happier, increase their productivity, maximise impact on people’s wellbeing and benefit the wider society.”

Ogilvie believes the data will contain answers, and says: “I look at what we’ve amassed and I realise that I’m going to be working on these inventories for the rest of my life… I can think of much worse fates.”

Research funded by the British Academy, the Wolfson Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.

Inset image: read more about our research on the topic of work in the ̽��ֱ��'s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

̽��ֱ��handwritten inventories had lain largely untouched for centuries. Sand used to dry the ink still lay between the pages. Written neatly inside were thousands of lists that might hold the key to an enduring puzzle in economics – does education fuel economic growth?

Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, earn more, have fewer children and invest more in them – surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier

Original and Reproduction: Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. HStAS A573 Bü. 4923

Death inventory for Michael Planckh of Wildberg, 30 Oct. 1676

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Yes

A feather in your cap: inside the symbolic universe of Renaissance Europe

tdk25 — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 08:50:40 +0000

Later, an eyewitness recalled that officials thought the Duchess had fainted at the sight of blood trickling from her husband’s mouth. Only the Archduke himself seemed to realise that she, too, had been hit. “Sophie dear! Don’t die! Stay alive for our children!” Franz Ferdinand pleaded. Then, “he seemed to sag down himself,” the witness remembered. “His plumed general’s hat… fell off; many of its green feathers were found all over the car floor.”

̽��ֱ��assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, had such seismic repercussions in precipitating the First World War that it is easy to disregard the curious little detail of feathers on the floor. In such context, they seem trivial. Rewind a few moments more, to the famous final photograph of the couple leaving Sarajevo town hall, and the plumage sprouting from the Archduke’s hat looks positively absurd; as if amid all the other mortal perils of that day – the bomb that narrowly missed his car, the bullets from a semi-automatic – he somehow also sustained a direct hit from a large bird.

Today, we generally associate feathers with women’s fashion, and a peculiarly ostentatious brand at that, reserved for Royal Ascot, high-society weddings and hen parties. Among men, wearing feathers is typically seen as provocatively effete – the domain of drag queens, or ageing, eyelinered devotees of the Manic Street Preachers.

Yet a cursory glance at military history shows that Franz Ferdinand was far from alone in his penchant for plumage. ̽��ֱ��Bersaglieri of the Italian Army, for example, still wear capercaillie feathers in their hats, while British fusiliers have a clipped plume called a hackle. Cavaliers in the English Civil War adorned their hats with ostrich feathers.

“Historically, feathers were an incredibly expressive accessory for men,” observes Cambridge historian Professor Ulinka Rublack. “Nobody has really looked at why this was the case. That’s a story that I want to tell.”

Rublack is beginning to study the use of featherwork in early modern fashion as part of a project called ‘Materialized Identities’, a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge, Basel and Bern, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

To the outsider, its preoccupations (her co-researchers are studying gold, glass and veils) might seem surprising. Yet such materials are not just mute artefacts; they sustained significant economies, craft expertise and, she says, “entered into rich dialogue with the humans who processed and used them”. Critically, they elicited emotions, moods and attitudes for both the wearer and the viewer. In this sense, they belonged to the ‘symbolic universe’ of communities long since dead. If we can understand such resonances, we come closer to knowing more about how it felt to be a part of that world.

Rublack has spotted that something unusual started to happen with feathers during the 16th century. In 1500, they were barely worn at all; 100 years later they had become an indispensable accessory for the Renaissance hipster set on achieving a ‘gallant’ look.

In prosperous trading centres, the locals started sporting hats bedecked with feathers from parrots, cranes and swallows. Headgear was manufactured so that feathers could be inserted more easily. By 1573, Plantin’s Flemish–French dictionary was even obliged to offer words to describe people who chose not to wear them, recommending such verbiage as: ‘the featherless’ and ‘unfeathered’.

Featherworking became big business. From Prague and Nuremberg to Paris and Madrid, people started to make a living from decorating feathers for clothing. Impressive efforts went into dyeing them. A 1548 recipe recommends using ashes, lead monoxide and river water to create a ‘very beautiful’ black, for example.

Why this happened will become clearer as the project develops. One crucial driver, however, was exploration – the discovery of new lands, especially in South America. Compared with many of the other species that early European colonists encountered, exotic birds could be captured, transported and kept with relative ease. Europe experienced a sudden ‘bird-craze’, as birds such as parrots became a relatively common sight on the continent’s largest markets.

Given the link with new territories and conquest, ruling elites wore feathers partly to express their power and reach. But there were also more complex reasons. In 1599, for example, Duke Frederick of Württemberg held a display at his court at which he personally appeared as ‘Lady America’, wearing a costume covered in exotic feathers. This was not just a symbol of power, but of cultural connectedness, Rublack suggests: “ ̽��ֱ��message seems to be that he was embracing the global in a duchy that was quite insular and territorial.”

Nor were feathers worn by the powerful alone. In 1530, a legislative assembly at Augsburg imposed restrictions on peasants and burghers adopting what it clearly felt should be an elite fashion. ̽��ֱ��measure did not last, perhaps because health manuals of the era recommended feathers as protecting the wearer from ‘bad’ air – cold, miasma, damp or excessive heat – all of which were regarded as hazardous. During the 1550s, Eleanor of Toledo had hats made from peacock feathers to protect her from the rain.

Gradually, feathers came to indicate that the wearer was healthy, civilised and cultured. Artists and musicians took to wearing them as a mark of subtlety and style. “They have a certain tactility that was seen to signal an artistic nature,” Rublack says.

Like most fads, this enthusiasm eventually wore off. By the mid-17th century, feathers were out of style, with one striking exception. Within the armies of Europe what was now becoming a ‘feminine’ fashion choice elsewhere remained an essential part of military costume.

Rublack thinks that there may have been several reasons for this strange contradiction. “It’s associated with the notion of graceful warfaring,” she says. “This was a period when there were no standing armies and it was hard to draft soldiers. One solution was to aestheticise the military, to make it seem graceful and powerful, rather than simply about killing.” Feathers became associated with the idea of an art of warfare.

They were also already a part of military garb among both native American peoples and those living in lands ruled by the Ottomans. Rublack believes that just as some of these cultures treated birds as gods, and therefore saw feathers as having a protective quality, European soldiers saw them as imparting noble passions, bravery and valiance.

In time, her research may therefore reveal a tension about the ongoing use of feathers in this unlikely context. “It has to do with a notion of masculinity achieved both through brutal killing, and the proper conduct of war as art,” she says. But, as she also notes, she is perhaps the first historian to have spotted the curious emotional resonance of feathers in military fashion at all. All this shows a sea-change in methodologies: historians now chart the ways in which our identities are shaped through deep connections with ‘stuff’. Further work is needed to understand how far these notions persisted by 1914 when, in his final moments, Franz Ferdinand left feathers scattered across the car floor.

Inset image: Hendrick Goltzius, soldier, c. 1580; credit: ̽��ֱ��Rijsmuseum, Amsterdam.

Today, feathers are an extravagant accessory in fashion; 500 years ago, however, they were used to constitute culture, artistry, good health and even courage in battle. This unlikely material is now part of a project that promises to tell us more not only about what happened in the past, but also about how it felt to be there.

Historically, feathers were an incredibly expressive accessory for men. Nobody has really looked at why this was the case. That’s a story that I want to tell.

Ulinka Rublack

Achille Beltrame

Assassination of the feather-hatted Archduke Franz Ferdinand

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Pre-Inka elites and the social life of fragments

fpjl2 — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 08:45:01 +0000

̽��ֱ��town of Borgatta was built in the Argentinean Andes sometime in the tenth century. It grew to a community of several hundred residential compounds before being abandoned around 1450 when the Inkan Empire claimed the region. In the ruins, archaeologist Dr Elizabeth DeMarrais has been hunting for signs of pre-Inkan elites.

Her interests lie in the dynamics of social groups in the past – how did society work? Were there ‘pecking orders’ or hierarchies? When did the ‘politics’ of daily existence begin to characterise human societies, from the ancient to our own? ̽��ֱ��excavation of Borgatta, which she led, was to yield some surprising results.

“It’s a big site, with a population that would have numbered in the low thousands,” she explains. “We therefore expected to find evidence of leaders, of rich and poor – as in our own society. But we were surprised to see only limited social differentiation in the materials we uncovered.”

She studies the fragments – the archaeology of daily life – that societies left behind. “We thought we’d see socio-economic differences reflected in diet through remains of animal bones, or in dwelling locations, or in material accumulation,” she explains.

̽��ֱ��team found evidence of craft production occurring across the entire settlement. But no specialists could be identified: no equivalent of a blacksmith’s workshop, or a dedicated weaver or a kiln technician. And no wealthy elites with stockpiles of luxury goods. Yet things were being made in most houses in town – things that defied easy classification.

“Think of the feather cloaks of Hawaiian chiefs, or the swords of Bronze Age warriors,” adds DeMarrais. “These were objects of wealth and power, commissioned from specialist technicians for elites who controlled production and often also trade. This commodification is typical in hierarchical societies.

“In Borgatta, however, we found evidence of nonspecialist ‘multicrafting’ right across the community: with each household using expedient bone and stone toolkits to create a range of objects – from baskets to cooking pots, spindle whorls to wooden bowls – in their own idiosyncratic styles.”

Each residence produced its own items. Household members shared skills and mixed media – creating distinctive artistry in the process.

“Archaeologists like to classify, and the diversity of the Borgatta materials was initially frustrating. However, ideas from social theory helped us think about the significance of this variation, including contexts of production and social roles,” says DeMarrais.

̽��ֱ��approach to making things in Borgatta has led her to believe that its people depended upon “a different kind of social glue” – one based on individual relationships, rather than ordered by social rank.

“Objects were gifted on a personal basis to build connections, rather than being funnelled up to a leader who represented the group.” She describes this as a ‘heterarchy’: a society ordered along the lines of decentralised networks and shared power.

“Heterarchy was described in the 1940s as a means of understanding the structure of the human brain: ordered but not hierarchically organised. In a human society, it highlights a structure where different individuals may take precedence in key activities – religion, trade, politics – but there is a fluidity to power relations that resists top-down rule.

“One can think of it as a form of confederacy – similar in some respects to the governance of Cambridge colleges, for example,” says DeMarrais.

Artefacts tell the story of this laterally ordered society. Distinctive clay urns with painted motifs showing serpents, frogs and birds, as well as human facial features, were found to contain the skeletal remains of young infants.

̽��ֱ��urns were buried under the floors of houses. DeMarrais suggests that the funeral rites of babies involved displaying urns in the community as part of an extended process of mourning, before they were returned to the residences.

Some urns had the rim extending above the floor, to allow ongoing access to the contents. “In the Andes, mortuary practices involved extended interaction with remains that sustained a sense of connection between the living and the dead.”

̽��ֱ��decorated urns were the most striking pieces of material culture excavated at Borgatta. Adults were simply buried in groups of three or four outside the home, while other children were interred in old cooking pots called ‘ollas’.

Why were the burial vessels of certain infants so distinctive? “ ̽��ֱ��emotions around such premature loss may have been intense. But emotion is also culturally constructed. Would our grief be the same as their grief?” asks DeMarrais.

“These urns may have been intended to evoke emotions. In the absence of centralised authority, we would expect that rituals involving display of objects and the inculcation of shared emotions were an important means of social cohesion.”

There is little standardisation of the urns. Borgatta artisans exercised considerable freedom, says DeMarrais, combining design elements in novel ways. “Each urn, with its individual qualities, may have referenced the unique infant interred inside. But the diversity of motifs also reflects the localised character of social ties within a heterarchical society.”

̽��ֱ��shape of some painted urn motifs hinted at design constraints faced by weavers, supporting the ‘multi-crafters’ idea. “We think this similarity suggests that patterns first appeared on textile, and were then transferred to the urns by individuals with experience in both crafts.”

As an archaeologist you have to accept you will never have the definitive answers. We work with fragments.
Elizabeth DeMarrais

̽��ֱ��things observed in Borgatta suggest the lives of artisans in this heterarchy were more varied and creative, given the diversity of social roles objects had to play. ̽��ֱ��things of the Inka Empire, however, were made by specialist artisans whose skill level was high, but who were tightly constrained by the state in their artistic expression.

Neither society had a writing system, so material culture was vital for communication. And for the Inkas, a central aim was expressing power through an identifiable ‘brand’.

“ ̽��ֱ��Inkas had rules about who could wear and own what, according to status. Inka objects and architecture were immediately recognisable – like a Coca-Cola bottle in our world. This is, in part, how the Inkas managed to integrate roughly 12 million people across 80 ethnic groups without a writing system.”

Whereas Inkans had specialists who worked to formulae, each object made in Borgatta may well have had numerous ‘authors’ through multicrafting in household workshops. DeMarrais envisions a workshop environment similar to a tech start-up’s open-plan office: “people with different skill-sets pitch ideas and collaborate to create new products to adapt to a changing world”.

̽��ֱ��Department of Archaeology’s Material Culture Laboratory, which DeMarrais runs with her colleague Professor John Robb, takes a ‘Borgattan approach’. Researchers working on artefacts from Ancient Egypt to Anglo-Saxon England come together to conduct comparative analyses, and debate how ‘things’ mediated social relations in the past.

“We ask why humans put their energy into particular objects,” explains DeMarrais. “We look for commonalities – from religion to bureaucracies – as well as differences. We ask what happens when you look at an object through a different theoretical lens, whether economic, political, ideological or ontological.”

“What you find – as Elizabeth’s work shows beautifully – is that social life works materially,” says Robb. “Whether it is a government trying to exert its authority, villagers organising their lives to meet their own needs, or individuals remembering and feeling emotions about their own history, things are the medium of the whole process.”

“In the end,” adds DeMarrais, “it’s about squeezing as much information as we can from things people have left behind to build a picture of human lives across time. As an archaeologist you have to accept you will never have the definitive answers. We work with fragments.”

Objects unearthed in the Andes tell new stories of societies lacking hierarchical leadership in the time before the Inka Empire.

Distinctive clay urns with painted motifs showing serpents, frogs and birds, as well as human facial features, were found to contain the skeletal remains of young infants.

Museo Arqueológico de Cachi

Urns from the Museo Arqueológico de Cachi in Argentina

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

̽��ֱ��man who tried to read all the books in the world

lw355 — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 12:49:19 +0000

129,864,880. That’s the number of books in the world, according to an estimate by Google Books, which since its launch in 2005 has been trying to scan them all, convert them to searchable text using optical character recognition and then make them publicly available online. Although Google Books’ hopes have been slowed by wrangles over copyright and fair use, if it succeeds it could become the largest online body of human knowledge ever available.

Half a millennium earlier in Seville, Spain, Hernando Colón (1488–1539) had the same ambitious aim: to create a library that would be universal in a way never before imagined because it would contain everything. And Colón really did try to collect everything: from precious manuscripts to books by unknown authors, from flimsy pamphlets to tavern posters, from weighty tomes to throwaway ephemera.

Colón’s bibliomania took him back and forth across Europe for three decades. According to Dr Edward Wilson-Lee, from Cambridge's Sidney Sussex College and the Faculty of English, he bought 700 books in Nuremburg over Christmas in 1521, before passing on to Mainz where he bought a thousand more in the course of a month. In a single year in 1530, he visited Rome, Bologna, Modena, Parma, Turin, Milan, Venice, Padua, Innsbruck, Augsburg, Constance, Basle, Fribourg, Cologne, Maastricht, Antwerp, Paris, Poitiers and Burgos, voraciously buying all he could lay his hands on.

Wilson-Lee has been working with Dr José María Pérez Fernández from the Universidad de Granada to research the life of Colón, the natural son of the great Italian navigator Christopher Columbus. In addition to creating his library, Colón accompanied his father on explorations of the new world and wrote the first biography of Columbus; he was also a ground-breaking mapmaker and gathered unparalleled collections of music, images and plants.

“Colón had an extraordinary memory and an obsession with lists,” says Wilson-Lee, whose research on Colón was funded by the British Academy. “Each time he bought a book, he would meticulously record where and when he bought it, how much it cost and the rate of currency exchange that day. Sometimes he noted where he was when he read it, what he thought of the book and if he’d met the author. As pieces of material culture, each is a fascinating account of how one man related to, used and was changed by books.”

This almost obsessive activity makes what now remains of his library – the Biblioteca Colombina, housed in a wing of Seville Cathedral – an incredibly important material resource to explore book history, travel and intellectual networks. “When pieced together,” he adds, “they give an account of one of the most extraordinary lives in a period filled with entrancing characters.”

Wilson-Lee describes Colón as having lived at the time of an “event horizon” of exponential change, in the same way that the advent of the internet has been for us today; only in Colón’s case it was the move from written manuscript to printed book.

“It simply became impossible for one man to read everything,” says Wilson-Lee. “Maybe in his youth, it would have been possible – there would have been few enough printed books. But as his library grew, he realised he needed to employ readers to work through each book and provide him with a summary – in effect the forerunner of the Reader’s Digest.”

As Colón’s vision of amassing all knowledge grew, so did something else: the need to add structure to the information he gathered. “It was one of the first ‘big data’ challenges,” says Wilson-Lee. “You might have the information but how do you make sense of it all?

“One of the fascinating aspects about the library is that it shows that sometimes the way in which knowledge becomes divided up is not in response to some kind of grand abstract reasoning, some kind of Eureka moment, it’s sometimes in response to a practical problem. In this case, ‘I’ve got 15,000 books, where do I put them?’” On a shelf seems reasonable, but even in this respect Colón was pioneering, says Wilson-Lee.

“In essence, he invents the modern bookshelf: row upon row of books standing upright on their spines, stacked in specially designed wooden cases.”

And a material problem of how to store things very quickly turns into an intellectual problem of which things belong together. It forces certain decisions. “As anyone who has walked through a library will know, order is everything,” explains Wilson-Lee. “ ̽��ֱ��ways in which books can be ordered multiplies rapidly as the collection grows, and each of these orders shows the universe in a slightly different light – do you order alphabetically, by size or by subject?

“Hernando was acutely aware of this. He referred to unordered, or ‘unmapped’, collections as ‘dead’.”

He wanted his library not only to have everything but also to “provide a set of propositions about how the universe fits together,” he adds. “He viewed the Universal Library as the intellectual counterpart – the brain – to the world empire that Spain was aiming for in the 16th century. It was a fitting extension to his father’s grand ambitions to explore the globe.”

One of Colón’s innovations to make sense of his library was a vast compendium of book summaries, called the Libro de Epitomes. To create this, he set a team of sumistas – digesters of the thousands of books in the library – to work distilling each volume, leading towards his ultimate vision that all the knowledge in the world could be boiled down into just a few volumes: one for medicine, one for grammar, and so on.

Another was a blueprint for the Library using ten thousand scraps of paper bearing hieroglyphic symbols. “Each of the myriad ways they could be put together suggested a different path through the library, just as a different set of search terms on the internet will bring up different information. In some respects, the Biblioteca Hernandina, as it was then called, was the world’s first search engine.”

How these systems worked will be uncovered in books that Wilson-Lee and Pérez Fernández are writing about the man and his library, and also about how his accomplishments resonate with our own fast-changing networked world.

“For all that he died nearly five centuries ago, Hernando’s discovery of the world around him bears striking, sometimes uncanny, resemblance to the world that we are discovering today,” says Wilson-Lee. “ ̽��ֱ��digital revolution has increased the amount of information available but how do you discern what’s useful from what’s useless? We are wholly reliant on search algorithms to order the internet for us. Hernando was just as aware that how you choose to categorise and rank information has immense consequences. It’s easy for us to forget this sometimes – to sleepwalk our way into knowledge collection and distribution.”

Today, just over 3,000 books of Colón’s library remain. Until now, the life of this extraordinary man has largely escaped notice; it’s taken another revolution to grasp how visionary he was in recognising the power of tools to order the world of information.

Edward Wilson-Lee’s biography of Hernando Colón, ‘ ̽��ֱ��Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books’ will be published by HarperCollins in 2018, and the study of the library, co-authored with José María Pérez Fernández, will be published later by Yale ̽��ֱ�� Press.

Inset image: Hernando Colón. Credit: Wikipedia.

One man’s quest to create a library of everything, 500 years before Google Books was conceived, foreshadowed the challenges of ‘big data’ and our reliance on search algorithms to make sense of it all.

In some respects, the Biblioteca Hernandina, as it was then called, was the world’s first search engine.

Edward Wilson-Lee

Montilal Books

Old book wall

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Public Domain

Animating objects: what material culture can tell us about domestic devotions

amb206 — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 06:21:48 +0000

It’s an enduring irony of history that the most commonplace objects from the past are those least represented in today’s museum collections. ̽��ֱ��more precious and expensive an object, the more likely it is to have survived. As a result, our perceptions are skewed towards items that belonged to the rich and powerful – objects that were perhaps rarely handled.

During Madonnas and Miracles, a recent exhibition of religious material culture at the Fitzwilliam Museum, one of the most ‘stopped at’ items of the objects on show was an exquisite rock crystal rosary. It was clearly crafted for an individual of outstanding wealth and status. Each bead features a scene from the New Testament; the drawings are incised into a layer of gold. Not surprisingly, the rosary is today one of the treasures held by the Palazzo Madama Museum in Turin.

But also attracting attention was a much less eye-catching slip of paper printed on both sides with prayers in Latin. This breve would have been sold cheaply on the streets of Italian cities. Its frayed edges suggest that it was folded and worn close to the skin in the belief that the prayers would protect the wearer from a host of disasters – from earthquake to plague. Thousands of brevi were produced, and carried as talismans against misfortune, but few have survived.

In 2013, three Cambridge academics from different fields of scholarship came together to throw fresh light on the ways in which Renaissance Italians worshipped within the privacy of the home. Historian Professor Mary Laven, literary specialist Dr Abigail Brundin and art historian Professor Deborah Howard were determined to explore material culture from modest as well as wealthy households through their ambitious research project, Domestic Devotions: the Place of Piety in the Italian Domestic Home 1400–1600, funded by the European Research Council.

During the research, which informed Madonnas and Miracles and a forthcoming book, the three stepped out of the ‘golden triangle’ of Florence, Rome and Venice, the major hubs of cultural activity in the Renaissance, to look at material culture from further afield – in Naples, the Marche and the Venetian mainland. In doing so, their study makes an important contribution to our understanding of domestic religious practice across the Italian peninsula.

̽��ֱ��Renaissance is often seen as a secular, less religious age in which interest in antiquity encouraged a more rational way of seeing the world. But the evidence from material culture paints a different picture. “ ̽��ֱ��wealth of devotional images and artefacts that we have discovered in Renaissance homes encourages us to view the period 1400–1600 as a time of spiritual revitalisation,” says Laven.

Household inventories show how even a relatively modest family could create a special place for prayer and meditation by setting objects such as a crucifix, candlesticks, holy books and rosaries on a table or kneeling stool. As a reminder of divine protection, religious pictures or statues might be found almost anywhere in or around the house.

“Acts of devotion, from routine prayers to extraordinary religious experiences, such as miracles and visions, frequently took place in the home and were shaped to meet the demands of domestic life with all its ups and downs – from birth to death,” adds Laven. “ ̽��ֱ��tight bond between the domestic and the devotional can be seen in the material culture of the period – in paintings, ceramics and more. These objects tell us how closely daily life intersected with religious belief.”

Young women often asked the Virgin Mary for intercession during childbirth. Representations of the Madonna embracing her healthy son were a feature of many bedchambers – and not just those of the wealthy. ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum holds an example of a rustic terracotta figure of a solemn-looking Madonna and Christ child who is portrayed holding his mother’s naked breast. This rare object exemplifies the type of lower-end production available to less well-off consumers.

Household objects acted as reminders to Renaissance parents of their duties, and the Holy Family was a powerful model of how a devout family should live. An early 16th-century maiolica inkstand in the Fitzwilliam collection, for instance, takes the form of a nativity scene: the infant Christ lies before an adoring Mary and Joseph while a cow and ass look over a stable door, their placidity testament to the wonder of the moment.

In Renaissance paintings, the Madonna appears as an ideal mother and educator – a compelling role model. “A painting of Virgin and child with John the Baptist by Pinturicchio, held by the Fitzwilliam, is a wonderful example,” says Howard. “It shows the Madonna teaching the young Jesus to read. Seated on her lap and encircled by her arms, he is perfectly absorbed in a book. Meanwhile, a boyish and pious John the Baptist provides a model for devotion by young children.”

Everyday objects could literally incorporate the sacred. An earthenware bowl in the Fitzwilliam Museum decorated with an image of the Madonna of Loreto bears around its rim the inscription: CON POL. DI S. CASA. This abbreviated Italian text tells us that the clay from which it was made contains dust (polvere) from the ‘holy house’ of the Virgin Mary, supposedly carried from Nazareth to Italy in the 13th century. Behind the Madonna is an outline of the Santa Casa with its tiled roof and bell tower.

At a time when much of the population was illiterate, owning devotional texts was important for surprisingly large swathes of the population. Even when closed, or unread, they exuded beauty and spiritual value within the domestic sphere. Brundin explains: “Sacred words, by their very presence, could provide protection. Some authors even advised writing the words of certain psalms on the walls to keep the family safe and as a reminder to pray regularly.”

Texts can offer clues to their owners. Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library holds a stunning hand-illustrated printed copy of the Meditation on the Life of Christ. Hand-written notes in its margins show that in 1528 it was given to a nun, Sister Alexia, by her uncle. Alexia’s annotations indicate that she read the work closely. She even added manicules (pointing fingers) next to passages of particular importance. ̽��ֱ��book was later owned by another nun, Teofila, whose own reading would have been guided by Alexia’s marks.

Objects accrue deeply personal meanings that are impossible to unravel fully. Careful investigation across disciplines can, however, offer a glimpse of the very human and very fragile hopes and fears embodied by objects, as Brundin explains: “A humble scrap of paper marked with a cross or a brief prayer, of no obvious artistic or literary merit, comes alive when we’re able to marry it with an archival record in which a devotee explains what it means to them.”

‘ ̽��ֱ��Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy’ by Abigail Brundin, Deborah Howard and Professor Mary Laven will be published by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press in 2018.

Inset image: This breve was probably folded and worn close to the skin around 500 years ago in the belief that the prayers would protect the wearer; Breve di S. Vincenzo Ferrerio contro la fibre, Civica Raccolta Stampe A. Bertarelli.

Rustic figurines of a resigned-looking Virgin clutching her child may have no obvious literary or artistic merit to us today. But understanding what they meant to the spiritual lives of their owners can offer a glimpse of the human hopes and fears that people have, for centuries, invested in inanimate objects.

̽��ֱ��tight bond between the domestic and the devotional can be seen in the material culture of the period – in paintings, ceramics and more. These objects tell us how closely daily life intersected with religious belief.

Mary Laven

Fitzwilliam Museum

This down-to-earth, glazed terracotta figurine of the Virgin could act as the focus of family prayers in a modest home

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Living in a material world: why 'things' matter

lw355 — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 08:00:59 +0000

From the tools we work with to the eyeglasses and dental implants that improve us, our bodies are shaped by the things we use. We express and understand our identities through clothing, cars and hobbies. We create daily routines and relate to each other through houses and workplaces. We imagine place, history and political regimens through sculptures and paintings.

Even when we think we are dealing with abstract information, the form it takes makes a huge difference. When printing liberated the written word from the limited circulation of handwritten manuscripts, the book and the newspaper became fundamental to religious and political changes, and helped create the modern world.

Studies of material culture focus upon things not just as material objects, but also on how they reflect our meanings and uses. Throughout the humanities and social sciences, there is a long tradition of thinking principally about meaning and human intention, but scholars are now realising the immense importance of material things in social life.

At the core of material culture studies is the question of how people and things interact. This is a simple, sweeping question, but one long overlooked, thanks to historically dominant philosophical traditions that focus narrowly on human intention. In fact, it’s only in the past decade that scholars have posed the question of material agency – how things structure human lives and action.

Material culture studies have emerged as central in many disciplines across the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. In archaeology and history, scholars see material objects as fundamental sources for the human past, counterbalancing the discourse-oriented view that written texts give us. Should we use historical sources to see what people think they ate, or count their rubbish to find out what they really consumed? Combining the two gives us answers of unprecedented scope.

Geographers ask why it makes a difference whether workplaces are organised into separate offices or open-plan cubicles. Literary scholars draw attention to how experience and meaning are built around things, like Marcel Proust’s remembering of things long past as a madeleine cake is dipped in tea; even books themselves are artefacts of a singular and powerful kind. Likewise, studying anatomical models and astronomical instruments empowers an understanding of the history of science as a practical activity. And anthropologists explore the capacity of art to cross cultures and express the claims of indigenous peoples.

Material things are also at the heart of new fields such as heritage studies. Memory itself is material, as we’ve seen recently in the USA, where whether to keep or tear down statues of historic figures such as Confederate generals can polarise people.

Unlike most newly emerging fields in the sciences, material culture studies are grounded in a sprawling panoply of related approaches rather than in a tightly focused paradigm. They come from a convergence of archaeology, anthropology, history, geography, literary studies, economics and many other disciplines, each with its own methods for approaching human–thing interactions.

̽��ֱ��reasons for this interest are not hard to find. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� offers a rare combination of three essential foundations for the field. One is world-class strength in the humanities and social sciences, sustained by institutions like the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), an essential venue for interdisciplinary collaboration as shown by its 'Things' seminar series (see panel).

Most human dilemmas are material dilemmas in some way

̽��ֱ��second is the capacity for a huge range of scientific analyses of materials. ̽��ֱ��third is our immensely varied museum collections: the Fitzwilliam Museum’s treasures; the Museum of Classical Archaeology’s 19th-century cast gallery; the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s worldwide prehistoric, historic and ethnographic collections; and many others. Where else can scholars interested in the material aspect of Victorian collecting study Darwin’s original finches or Sedgwick’s and Scilla’s original fossils, boxes, labels, archives and all?

Whether it’s work on historic costume, craft production, religion or books, the study of material culture offers unparalleled insights into how humans form their identities, use their skills and create a sense of place and history.

But it is not only a descriptive and historical field. Most human dilemmas are material dilemmas in some way. Where did our desire for things come from and how did the economics of consumerism develop? How can we organise our daily lives to reduce our dependence on cars? Should we care where the objects we buy come from before they reach the supermarket shelves? How do repatriation claims grow out of the entangled histories of museum objects?

̽��ֱ��shape of this new field is still emerging, but Cambridge research will be at the heart of it.

Professor John Robb is at the Department of Archaeology, Professor Simon Goldhill is at the Faculty of Classics, Professor Ulinka Rublack is at the Faculty of History and Professor Nicholas Thomas is at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Things structure our lives. They enrich us, embellish us and express our hopes and fears. Here, to introduce a month-long focus on research on material culture, four academics from different disciplines explain why understanding how we interact with our material world can reveal unparalleled insights into what it is to be human.

Studies of material culture focus upon things not just as material objects, but also on how they reflect our meanings and uses.

John Robb, Simon Goldhill, Ulinka Rublack, Nicholas Thomas

Harlow Heslop

All the things

Curious objects and CRASSH courses

You’ve had a difficult time lately. You’re thinking that all this bad luck might be more than coincidence. You trim your nails, snip some hair and bend a couple of pins. You put them in a bottle with a dash of urine, heat it up and put it in a wall. That’ll cure the bewitchment, you say to yourself.

Making a ‘witch bottle’ like this would be an entirely reasonable thing to do 400 years ago. It would also be reasonable to swallow a stone from a goat’s stomach to counteract poisoning and hide an old shoe in a chimney breast to increase the chance of conceiving.

“All of these objects took on layers of meaning for their owners, and the fact these strong connections existed at all gives us glimpses of people’s beliefs, hopes and lives,” says Annie Thwaite, a PhD student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. She is also one of the convenors of a seminar series on ‘Things’ at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

“Material culture was a crucial part of medicine in the 17th century. Objects like witch bottles are often dismissed as ‘folkish’. But by investigating the bottles’ architectural and geographical situation, their material properties and processes, you start to look through the eyes of their owners. Fearful of supernatural intrusion into their homes and bodies, people would go to great efforts to use something they regarded as a legitimate element of early modern medical practice.”

Charms and amulets, votives and potions, myths and magic will be discussed as this year’s ‘Things’ seminars begins a new focus on imaginative objects.

“Like material culture studies, the seminar series is broad and varied,” she explains. “We might just as easily examine the skills required to craft objects as the power of objects to become politicised.

“Things matter greatly to humans. We have short lives and our stuff outlives us. While we can’t tell our own story, maybe they can.”

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Two million years of human stories

sjr81 — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 07:00:57 +0000

One of the overarching mottos and principles of the Museum is “Look. Look again.” Spread over three floors, with ground-breaking exhibitions and one million objects in its stores, the Museum presents endless opportunities for visitors and researchers to look, then look again.

Among its collections are objects that speak to us of love and loss, conflict and war, and life and death. These objects of material culture communicate to us in many different ways – if we learn how to observe and listen to the myriad stories they have to tell.

But what is the place and purpose of ethnographic museums in the UK in the 21st century? As time marches us further and further away from Britain’s own contentious history of exploration and the Empire, can and should we be comfortable with such repositories – born from an imperial legacy that painted a quarter of the globe red?

For Professor Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), the answers are clear. He believes that at a time when questions of cultural and religious differences are highly contentious, the renewal of displays that stimulate cross-cultural curiosity are more important than ever.

“ ̽��ֱ��objects in MAA are not ‘dead’ objects,” he says. “ ̽��ֱ��Museum is a place that brings its collections to life through its interactions with the public as well as the indigenous communities from which these artefacts originate, not to mention the world-class research that scholars and academics from Cambridge and around the globe undertake here every day.

“Museum collections are not just a mass gathering of objects, but a complex set of relationships, things, documents, images and people. Each collection is a tangled formation of material culture and human intention. We’re dealing not with lifeless data, but with people’s interests in making, using, collecting, interpreting, classifying and reclaiming things.

“That’s what makes our collections in particular so rich; it’s the web of information that might lie behind a single object of encounter that ensures such objects resonate to this day.”

MAA’s collections are extraordinary for a museum of its size. Fewer than 1% of its objects can be on display at any given time, but the stores are actively researched by a bewildering range of global scholars.

̽��ֱ��Museum contains significant material from all over the world, with some of its best-documented collections hailing from the Pacific, including the world’s most important collection from the first voyage of Captain James Cook.

Cook’s three voyages of 1768–1780 were formative for the histories of exploration, anthropology, natural history and the Empire, and marked a new epoch in contacts between Europeans and indigenous peoples across the Pacific Islands and around the Pacific Rim.

Bequeathed by Cook’s patron Lord Sandwich to Trinity College in Cambridge and transferred to MAA during the early 20th century, the collection is probably the first extensive, systematically made ethnographic collection from any part of the world.

Recent projects have included research published in the leading archaeological journal Antiquity on the origins and history of a unique and enigmatic sculpture from the Cook collection. ̽��ֱ��carving, which features two double humanoid figures and a quadruped, is one of the Museum’s best-known objects and was long attributed to the Austral Islands in French Polynesia.

However, wood isotope analysis reveals that it is in fact from Tahiti, and carbon dating suggests that the work was 50–80 years old by the time Cook acquired it, changing our understanding of Oceania’s art history. Probably an element of a gateway into a sacred precinct, the carving was most likely preserved as a relic before being presented to the explorer. Its gifting implies the wish to build relationships with visitors who were perceived as powerful partners at that time.

It is often assumed that artefacts in ethnographic collections were appropriated from the communities that created them. Although some objects were indeed looted, many collections were created more collaboratively through trade and deliberate gift-giving.

MAA also holds important material from Uganda, brought to Cambridge primarily by the prominent missionary and ethnographer John Roscoe. Roscoe’s donations were supplemented by artefacts such as the necklet shown here. Worn by a royal bodyguard, it was gifted in 1902 by Apolo Kagwa, Katikiro (Prime Minister) of Uganda and the author of important anthropological studies, who travelled to England for the coronation of Edward VII.

Sixty years later, Abu Mayanja, a Cambridge law graduate and Minister for Education in the newly independent nation, asked the ̽��ֱ�� to return certain sacred objects, which were repatriated, and remain on display in the Uganda Museum today.

“I think we see the repatriation question as an opportunity to open up a dialogue – rather than a threat,” adds Thomas. “MAA has a distinguished record in engaging with indigenous people in a sustained way. We have had many extended engagements and collaborations around research that have been very rewarding for all the parties involved. It’s also been an extremely positive experience to share our collections through lending to major exhibitions in the countries of origin.

“Another more meaningful way of working with indigenous communities has been projects such as ‘Pacific Presences’, funded currently for five years through a European Research Council advanced grant. Work on material culture almost inevitably involves international collaboration, and we have done so with many small, experimental exhibitions, sharing photographs with communities in the Pacific, as well as through work with partner museums across Europe.

“Benin bronzes notoriously exemplify colonial confrontation and conflict in Africa in the 1890s. We try at once to be upfront about difficult histories, and to communicate the complications of the histories. Like most museums, we receive very few outright repatriation requests. Many indigenous peoples prioritise working together. They see these objects as ambassadors for their cultures.”

Inset image: Sculpture of two double humanoid figures and a quadruped, one of a hundred artefacts brought back by Captain James Cook from his first voyage on the Endeavour, and presented by him to his Admiralty patron Lord Sandwich, who donated the collection to Trinity College, which in turn transferred the artefacts to the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in the early 20th century. Credit: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Every object in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology tells not just one but many stories. ̽��ֱ��Museum’s collections chronicle two million years of human history, revealing the diversity of human life over millennia and the ongoing dynamism of world cultures in the present. Many individual artefacts reflect histories and cultures that are contested.

Each collection is a tangled formation of material culture and human intention. We’re dealing not with lifeless data, but with people’s interests in making, using, collecting, interpreting, classifying and reclaiming things.

Nicholas Thomas

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Necklet worn by a royal bodyguard, gifted in 1902 by Apolo Kagwa, Katikiro of Uganda

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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‘France’s Samuel Pepys’ is elevated from the footnotes of history

amb206 — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 13:00:00 +0000

Pierre de L’Estoile has been described as France’s Samuel Pepys. Like Pepys, he lived in singularly interesting times. Like Pepys, he documented in his journals both the inner world of his household and the wider world of politics and gossip. He also compiled scrapbooks of the partisan and often scurrilous broadsheets that circulated in his Paris neighbourhood as rival factions in a religious upheaval sought to discredit each other as heretics, unbelievers or opportunists.

Born in 1546, L’Estoile lived through the eight civil wars that became known as France’s Wars of Religion, a succession of violent struggles between Catholics and Protestants that drew in all of the great powers of Reformation Europe. ̽��ֱ��troubles began with the massacre of Protestants worshipping at the village of Vassy on 1 March 1562 and the advance of the Protestant armies that followed. Ten years later, thousands of Protestants lay dead on the streets of Paris, slaughtered by Catholic militia in the infamous St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Only with the Edict of Nantes in 1598 did rival parties unite behind the Catholic convert, King Henri IV, and establish a fragile peace.

Edited extracts of L’Estoile’s journals were published following his death. Ever since, historians have scoured his records for unparalleled first-hand accounts of events that range from political scandals to everyday criminality and wondrous portents in the sky. Meanwhile, the diarist himself has appeared solely in the footnotes of histories devoted to the period. In Pierre de L’Estoille and his World in the Wars of Religion, historian Tom Hamilton places this remarkable Parisian centre stage of a narrative that sheds new light on a fascinating and turbulent period of French history.

̽��ֱ��Wars of Religion are conventionally framed as a conflict sharply divided between Catholics and Protestants, and driven by the political ambition of powerful noble families. Hamilton’s meticulous archival research into L’Estoile’s life as head of a large household (his two marriages produced 18 children, nine of whom survived to maturity), and holder of important positions in the royal bureaucracy, looks instead at the impact of the civil wars on everyday life. He reveals a society marked by ambiguous religious allegiances and conflicting political solidarities that could split families apart.

Hamilton’s book, the first in any language to concentrate on L’Estoile, examines a life that is both ordinary and extraordinary. He uses the diarist’s writing and collecting to rethink the complex flavours and textures of a world disrupted by religious and political conflict.

L’Estoile came from a wealthy Catholic family of royal office-holders. Yet his father chose a Protestant scholar as tutor and protector for his young son. ̽��ֱ��diarist recalled that his father’s instructions, given on his deathbed, were that his son (“one of the most precious gifts that God has given me”) was to be raised a pious and god-fearing Catholic. Tellingly, however, the boy was not to be nourished in “the abuses and superstitions of the Church”.

Years later, L’Estoile was to pass on his father’s moderate religious legacy to his own children, only to see his eldest son rebel and join the armies of the zealous Catholic League, dying tragically less than a year after reconciling with his family.

̽��ֱ��religious choice of the L’Estoile family, argues Hamilton, offers a new perspective on the history of Catholicism. It reveals how French (Gallican) Catholics could be familiar with Protestants, who were critical of Rome and what L’Estoile called “the rotten trunk of the papacy”, and at the same time give their allegiance to the “most Christian king” of France as the head of a national church, a distinctively French branch of Catholicism.

Social status gave L’Estoile privileged access to information and a means to sustain his family during the day-to-day struggle of life through the civil wars. Not only was L’Estoile a landowner (although he seldom visited his estates and mishandled his financial affairs), he also held positions as a royal secretary and officer in the Paris Chancery. During the final civil war, L’Estoile was privy to seditious correspondence between factions, and to add to his collection he “copied it at that very moment on one of the desks in the Chancery”. He also had a role in print licensing and got to know the printers of the rue Saint Jacques. Many became friends for life and one, at least, “printed nothing, however secret, about which he did not inform me”.

L’Estoile’s house in the neighbourhood of Saint-André-des-Arts, on the Left Bank of the River Seine, was just a few minutes’ walk from his workplace on the Île de la Cité. He lived surrounded by family and colleagues, a courtyard away from his mother. His house had been the scene of the murder of a previous occupant: he purchased it for a knockdown sum and never mentioned its grim history in his diaries. An inventory of L’Estoile’s worldly goods made on his death offers clues about the man he was. He owned few clothes, and those he did possess were shabby. Neither was there anything exceptional about the family’s accoutrements, although he differed from his neighbours in not displaying devotional paintings of the Virgin Mary or saints.

Located at the top of the house, L’Estoile’s study and cabinet of curiosities tell another story. In a space out of bounds to the rest of his family, L’Estoile amassed one of the largest libraries and painting collections in Paris. Here he wrote and edited his journals, organised his collections, and met with scholarly friends. In this respect he engaged with men of his class across Europe caught up in the growing mania for collecting. Some – including English and German diplomats – went out of their way to visit him.

While other collectors gathered learned manuscripts or items of natural history to prove their erudition, L’Estoile collected printed ephemera which he had made into volumes he called his ‘drolleries’ (trifles), mocking their risible exaggerations. ̽��ֱ��scale of these drolleries was far from trifling. By 1589, L’Estoile had collected more than 500 different publications that documented the twists and turns of the civil wars. At his death in 1611, his collection had swelled to contain thousands of volumes.

Meanwhile, L’Estoile’s journals offer a glimpse of some of the terrible privations suffered by poor Parisians as food supplies were disrupted and prices escalated. During the Siege of Paris in 1590, when the French royal army surrounded a city taken over by the Catholic League, he describes taking a walk with two relatives and spotting a desperate woman eating the skin of a dog. So shocked are the men by this sight that L’Estoile’s brother-in-law undertakes to record it himself, lest L’Estoile’s account later be dismissed as fabricated.

Remaining in Paris during a period when many moderate Catholics sought safety elsewhere, L’Estoile put his own life on the line. In 1591 the Catholic League drew up lists of people known to oppose its views, marking their names with the letters P for pendu (hanged), D for dagué (knifed) or C for chassé (exiled). L’Estoile was shown this list and saw his name marked D and those of several of his relatives marked P. Fortunately for L’Estoile and family, the League’s soldiers refused to carry out its orders.

L’Estoile’s political affiliations were avowedly royalist. He believed that only a strong king could bring peace. In his collecting, however, he amassed literature of every political hue, confessing that his collecting impulse overrode any sense of prudence. At a time of intermittent print censorship, people caught possessing or disseminating defamatory material were in danger of execution. L’Estoile himself wrote of anti-royalist prints in his collection that he “should have thrown them into the fire, as they deserved”.

Fortuitously for future historians, L’Estoile was stubbornly fixated on collecting. As a Chancery official charged with book licensing, and a cousin of the Parisian criminal lieutenant in charge of the book burnings, he claimed he was keeping exemplary copies for posterity, to preserve memories of the wickedness and confusion of his times.

Tom Hamilton is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Pierre de L’Estoile and his World in the Wars of Religion is published by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press.

̽��ֱ��journals and scrapbooks of Pierre de L’Estoile have for generations provided a vivid picture of France in a time of religious upheaval. Now Cambridge historian Tom Hamilton has written the first book devoted to the life of L’Estoile as a diarist, collector and man about town.

Hamilton’s book examines a life both ordinary and extraordinary. He uses the diarist’s writing and collecting to rethink the complex flavours and textures of a world disrupted by religious and political conflict.

Francois Dubois

Painting of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes