The week commencing 5th September 2022 was politically eventful in the UK, with a change between Monday and Friday not just of Prime Minister but also of monarch. In the midst of this political upheaval we held the first Experiencing Political Texts workshop, on the theme 'Genre and Form in Early Modern Political Thought'. Twelve rich and stimulating papers were delivered, disrupted only slightly by a gas leak just before our final panel which prompted an evacuation of the building.
In his paper on ceremonial writings from the civil war period, Niall Allsopp emphasised the importance of thinking about the key terms of the project and the complexity of their meanings. Inspired by this prompt, the reflections that follow are organised around the three words of our network's title, taken in reverse order.
The 1777 print edition of the Traité des trois imposteurs. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.
Collectively, the speakers adopted a broad understanding of what we mean by the term 'text'. Many spoke about written sources (both manuscript and print) but a significant number incorporated into their discussion non-textual forms such as images, artefacts, and even landscapes. Martin Dzelzainis made an explicit case for images to be understood - and read - as texts. Noting that paintings were cited as a casus belli by the English in their conflict with the Dutch in the 1670s, Dzelzainis showed how the rhetorical technique of citing inartificial proofs could encompass visual as well as written sources, and highlighted the difficulties visual propaganda materials presented for those who were charged with refuting them in print.
The title page to the 1698 edition of Sidney’s Discourses, edited by John Toland and printed by John Darby. Note the description of Sidney which highlights his aristocratic credentials and royal connections.
Other papers addressed the malleability of texts and the fact that a single 'text' might change its identity over time. In her paper on clandestine literature, Delphine Doucet explained that the text of the Traité des trois imposteurs was not stable. New chapters were added over time so that different versions of the text vary in length and content. In addition, from 1719 when the first printed version of the text was published, print and manuscript versions circulated alongside each other. The other text discussed by Delphine, Jean Bodin's Colloquium heptapolomeres, was more stable, but here too paratextual additions (such as an index) influenced the way in which particular copies were read. I made a similar observation in my own paper about how the paratextual material added to editions of English republican texts produced by John Toland and Thomas Hollis shaped how those works were interpreted. For example, Toland's emphasis on the monarchical and aristocratic connections of the original authors served to make works published under the English commonwealth applicable to the circumstances of English society following the Glorious Revolution. It was not only full texts that were 'recycled' in later editions, but also extracts, anecdotes, and even jokes. It was interesting to note that Daniel Isaac Eaton, who has come to my attention because of his tendency to republish extracts from radical political texts in his periodical Politics for the People, is also known to Tim Somers as regards his reprinting of radical jokes.
Various papers highlighted the fluidity of boundaries between texts and the interplay between different kinds of text. Gaby Mahlberg presented John Toland's Anglia Libera as a patchwork sewn from a range of radical texts, thereby emphasising the importance of intertextuality within the republican canon. She argued that readers of the German translation will have read the work differently from their English counterparts owing to the fact that they will have been unaware of the sources on which Toland was drawing. Tim Somers's paper reminded us of the fluid nature of the boundary between textual and oral culture. Jest books not only recorded jokes that had been heard - thereby reflecting a move from the oral to the textual - but might also operate as collections of jokes to be retold - thereby facilitating a shift back from textual to oral form. In his paper on Thomas Spence, Tom Whitfield noted that Spence's first move as a political actor also involved a shift from the oral to the textual, with the lecture that he delivered to the Newcastle Philosophical Society in 1775 being printed for sale and circulation (a move that sparked condemnation). But Spence took this crossing of boundaries much further. The Land Plan he had set out in his lecture made the move from prose to verse, and was abstracted in slogans which he stamped onto tokens and chalked onto walls. The relationship between Spence's pamphlets and his tokens was particularly complex. The tokens were used to advertise his Land Plan and whet the appetite of readers for his printed works, but as Tom indicated as a form of coinage they could also be handed in at Spence's shop in exchange for a pamphlet.
An example of one of Thomas Spence’s tokens. This is a halfpenny token thought to be from 1790. Reproduced from https://onlinecoin.club The observes depicts an ass carrying a heavy burden with the slogans ‘RENTS’ and ‘TAXS’. The ass was commonly used to represent labouring people as in Sermons to Asses by Spence’s friend John Murray. On the reverse are listed the names of three Thomas’s: Spence; More; and Paine - all said to be advocates for the rights of man.
The focus of our project is primarily on early modern political texts, but some of the papers served to remind us that there is value in adopting a broad and flexible definition of the term 'political'. Two papers in particular focused on genres that we would not immediately think of in these terms: Tim's paper on jest books and Harriet Palin's paper on religious catechisms. Tim pointed out that, while we often think of political jokes as graphic or literary satire aimed at challenging authority, jest books are primarily concerned with mirth and diversion. Yet Tim made a strong case for them still having a political role to play, showing how jests were used by defeated royalists during the civil wars to identify themselves and solidify their position, and by eighteenth-century Whigs to ridicule what they saw as the immoral behaviour of their opponents. Meanwhile, Harriet showed how catechisms were aimed at persuasion and could be read as a calls to action. In this regard I was struck by the parallel between republican treatises that were designed to generate active citizens whose behaviour would strengthen the common good, and Protestant catechisms aimed at creating active believers whose actions would strengthen both their own faith and their religious communities. Moreover, in both cases there is a tension between giving agency to people and directing this towards specific ends.
Sir Richard Fanshawe by William Faithorne, 1667. National Portrait Gallery NPG D22736. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.
The question of what we mean by 'political' texts was approached from a different angle in Max Skönsberg's paper, in which he introduced the Subscription Library project that he has been working on alongside Mark Towsey and others. Max's analysis of borrowing records has revealed that theoretical works of politics like Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and John Locke's Two Treatises were not particularly popular with the members of subscription libraries. Nor were parliamentary documents and debates borrowed frequently by readers. Yet, we should not assume from this that the members of these libraries were uninterested in politics. Among the works borrowed most frequently were histories, including David Hume's History of England (borrowed from Bristol's Library 180 times between 1773 and 1784) and William Robertson's History of Charles V (borrowed 131 times in the same period). While adopting the historical form, these works were overtly political and Mark's paper on readers' manuscript adaptations of Hume's History made clear that readers read them for their own political purposes. This idea of history as an explicitly political genre was reiterated in Tiago Sousa Garcia's paper on Richard Fanshawe's translation of the Portuguese classic the Lusiad. Tiago introduced us to the seventeenth-century debate about whether works like Lucan's Civil Wars and the Lusiad should be viewed as epic poetry or history and highlighted the different connotations associated with each genre.
The title page of the French translation of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government produced by P. A. Samson. Source http://gallica.bnf.fr Bibliothèque national de France.
Finally, there is the question of what we mean by 'experiencing' political texts? By using this word we are indicating an interest not simply in passive reading, but rather in more active engagement. The question of how this is achieved was the subject of several papers, with speakers reflecting on how humour, rhetoric, the blending of fact and fiction, and other literary devices were used to engage readers. Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq's paper on eighteenth-century French translations of English republican texts highlighted a further strategy: the deployment of emotion. She described how the French translator of Algernon Sidney's Discourses concerning Government added to the translation a letter Sidney had written to a friend in which he explained why he had decided to remain in exile rather than returning to England. The letter drew an emotional connection between Sidney's experience of exile and that of the translator himself (a Huguenot refugee then living in the Dutch Republic) and via him to his Huguenot readers. By reminding his readers that they shared the emotional experience of exile with Sidney, the translator provided an incentive for them to engage with his work, and directed their approach to it. Of course, engaging emotions was not always viewed positively. Part of the objection to epic poetry, in the seventeenth-century debate described by Tiago, was precisely its tendency to do this.
The experience of reading a particular text might also vary depending on its format. As I noted in my paper, the editions of Sidney's Discourses published by John Toland, Thomas Hollis, and Daniel Eaton were very different from each other. They were directed at different audiences, had different purposes, and created distinct reading experiences. Similarly as Gaby and Myriam-Isabelle demonstrated, the experience of reading a text in translation is often different from reading the original. In the case of Toland's Anglia Libera, the title of the German version was truncated and the dedication cut. The papers by Max and Mark revealed that the reading experience might also be different when accessing a library copy of a work as opposed to reading one's own copy. Library members could not always control when they were able to access a particular book and might even have to read a multi-volume work in reverse order. While we know that readers added annotations to library copies, they might nevertheless have felt more inhibited about doing so. They were, therefore, more likely to produce their own separate notes on a work (of the kind Mark presented to us) rather than scribbling in the margins. Even the same physical text might be experienced differently by different audiences, as Tom made clear in his discussion of Spence's tokens. Tom argued that Spence adjusted the price depending on the purchaser: selling them at a high price to collectors, but throwing them into the street to be picked up by poor Londoners for free. For some, the tokens were therefore a collectible item to be catalogued, stored, and cherished, but for London's poor they were an abstract of Spence's radical programme and an invitation to discover more.
Finally, Niall raised the interesting point about the relationship between readers and spectators. The ceremonial works Niall is studying were designed to make readers feel like spectators and to create an imagined community. Drawing on Stephen Shapin's notion of virtual witnessing as applied to scientific experiments, Niall argued that ceremonial writings could therefore be used to affirm the authority of the magistrate(s) involved. This idea remains relevant today. Over the last few weeks those of us living in the UK have found ourselves drawn (willingly or unwillingly) into virtual witnessing in the ceremonials associated with a royal funeral.
We will pick up many of these issues at our next workshop in York in late February 2023. I only hope that the political situation that week will be less eventful.