Transcultural Conversations

Having just returned from a fascinating conference at the European University Institute (EUI) near Florence I feel I must interrupt my series of posts on Republicanism to offer some reflections on that event.

Villa Salviati. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Villa Salviati. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

The conference was expertly organised by four PhD students based at the EUI: Thomas Ashby, Ela Bozok, Muireann McCann and Elisavet Papalexopoulou. It was held in the beautiful Villa Salviati. Medici imagery appears throughout the villa in reference to the family link via Lucrezia, the wife of Jacoo di Giovanni Salviati who owned the villa in the sixteenth century and whose renovations determined the current layout. Contributors to the conference were lucky enough to be shown the private chapel that Jacopo constructed, probably for his daughter's wedding, with its beautifully decorated ceiling bearing heraldic devices alluding to the alliance between the Medici and Salviati families.

The ceiling of the private chapel at Villa Salviati. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

The ceiling of the private chapel at Villa Salviati. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

The conference theme, 'transcultural conversations', is not only academically popular at present (as evidenced by the excellent papers), but also has potential contemporary relevance. My own work in this area has tended to focus on the crossing of linguistic boundaries particularly through translations. In my paper I reflected on this work arguing that to fully understand the impact of translations we need to go beyond the conventional texts to look not only at  explicit and acknowledged translations, but also at works that perform similar functions; to consider the form and materiality as well as the content of the text; and to look at the uses to which translations and associated texts were put. The conference organisers and participants very deliberately chose the term 'transcultural' rather than 'transnational' and took a broad approach.

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Some papers did consider conversations that took place across national and linguistic boundaries - for example Arnab Dutta's paper on discussions between Bengali and German scholars and intellectuals in the 1920s and 30s over the meaning of the term 'kultur' and Simone Muraca's paper on cultural diplomacy between Italy and Portugal in the same period. Others considered conversations that occurred across confessional divides. Thomas Pritchard's paper on pan-European Anti-Spanish polemic highlighted the distinction between Anti-Catholic and specifically Anti-Spanish arguments. Concerns about the establishment of a Spanish universal monarchy were articulated not just by Protestant authors but also by Catholics such as Trajano Boccalini and Paolo Sarpi, whose works were then translated into English and used to further English campaigns. Such conversations could even cross the religious/secular divide as Agathe de Margerie's paper on the Austrian Paulus Gesellschaft made clear. She showed how in the late 1960s attempts were made by the group to open up a dialogue between Catholic and Marxist thinkers and the ideologies they embraced. Other papers explored conversations across philosophical boundaries, as in Nicholas Devlin's paper on 'The continental Marxist origins of American totalitarian theory' and Luke Illott's paper exploring Michel Foucault's crossing of the boundary between the English and Continental philosophical traditions. Moreover, Benjamin Thomas, in his paper 'Intra-Party Contestation: Ideological Transformations and Neoliberalism', emphasised the importance of considering conversations within, as well as between, ideological groups. In a number of these cases, conversations took place across multiple cultural boundaries simultaneously.

The means by or through which these conversations occurred were equally complex. While some participants focused on the reading, translation, and writing of published texts, others engaged with conversations that took place in private correspondence or even face-to-face. Thus, the kind of 'conversation' that Hugo Bonin explored in his paper on  Henry Reeve's English translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and the British reception of the work that resulted from it, was very different from the face-to-face encounters discussed by Dutta's Indian and German intellectuals or de Margerie's Marxists and Catholics. In both types of conversation, however, it was noted that the engagement could be either monolingual or multilingual (the conversations Dutta described took place in English, French, and German as well as in various Indian languages).

Alex Collins's paper looked more theoretically at methods of communication. He argued that the pioneering seventeenth-century scientist Henry Oldenburg expressed an explicit preference for knowledge gained via acquaintance (for example news that came directly from his contacts) as compared with knowledge by description (such as the information he might gain from newspapers). For Oldenburg the advantage lay primarily in the importance of trust in knowledge formation. In our discussion, however, we also considered the fact that direct engagement between people tends to encourage cultural conversations that are multi-directional rather than ones in which ideas flow in only one direction.

Portrait of Henry Oldenburg, attributed to Jan van Cleve. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait of Henry Oldenburg, attributed to Jan van Cleve. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

All of this complexity inevitably generates obstacles to communication. These might include problems of vocabulary and language. Dutta noted that initially there was no Bengali word for kultur, it simply had to be transliterated from the German. But there was another word from the west of India, 'Sanskrita', the etymology of which derived from the notion of krishe/krishti or cultivated ground, which brought fresh connotations to the Indian version of the kultur/civilisation debate. Similarly, Bonin noted that 'democracy' had different connotations in English from how the word was used in French. For British readers it still tended to be understood to refer to a type of regime, whereas in Tocqueville's French account it had a broader meaning, referring to a relatively egalitarian form of society.

One way around obstacles to communication is to use different formats for the transmission of ideas.  This was a particular focus of Panel 2 'Transfer through print, visual arts and music'. As Lia Brazil demonstrated, English pamphlets engaging with the South African War took very different forms, with the strong graphics and poetry of the Stop the War Committee publications contrasting starkly with the much more plain, cautious approach of those produced by the South African Conciliation Committee. Here, form was probably designed to mirror content, with the Conciliation Committee publications engaging in much deeper legal and philosophical debate, which Brazil expertly analysed. Arthur Duhé focused to an even greater degree on form in his paper 'Affective transfer in revolutionary times'. He noted how engravings and songs were used to convey the emotional aspect of the 1848 revolutions - and particularly the impact of the deaths of revolutionary martyrs - to foreign audiences. Duhé argued persuasively that historians of revolutions need to pay more attention to visual and musical sources, their production and material transfers. In a later panel Jessica Sequeira picked up this theme. Her protagonists - Pedro Prado and Antonio Castro Leal - did not merely translate poetry, but actually went so far as to invent an Afghan poet Karez-i-Roshan. As Sequeira argued, this playfulness was not simply a prank or joke, but had a deeper meaning and resonance as a deliberate method of enacting a transcultural conversation.

Il Duomo. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Il Duomo. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Other contributors explored other means by which different communities could dialogue with each other when holding conflicting views and opinions. Luke Illot made a strong case for the fact that it was Foucault's reading of the Oxford Analytic philosophers - and the conception of language that he derived from that reading - that provided a basis on which he could open a dialogue between the English and Continental philosophical traditions, one which had seemed impossible at the time of the Royaumont Conference in 1958. Highlighting the contingency that often facilitates or frustrates these conversations, Illot noted that it was in Tunisia, and via the library of Daniel Defert, that Foucault gained access to these ideas. Similarly, Anna Adorjána referred in her paper 'Conceptualising and experiencing (inter) nationalism. The Case of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary in 1903' to Martin Fuchs's concept of the 'third idiom'. This is an overarching or higher level discourse that provides space for communication in a conflicted situation. In the case of the Hungarian Social Democrats, international class struggle performed this role, but in cases discussed by other participants human rights or religion enacted a similar function.

Yesterday's 'Brexit Day' reflects the huge political and ideological divisions that not only affect Britain's relations with the rest of Europe but also run right through the UK itself. Now, more than ever, it would seem we need to find ways to engage in positive and constructive transcultural conversations. The diverse and myriad ways in which such conversations have taken place across more than five centuries is perhaps grounds for some small hope and optimism.

Manuscripts and Reception: The Manuscript Versions of Oceana

‘A Discourse of the Ballance or Foundation of Government’. Reprinted with permission @British Library Board, Harleian MS 5063 f.17.

‘A Discourse of the Ballance or Foundation of Government’. Reprinted with permission @British Library Board, Harleian MS 5063 f.17.

Manuscripts not only have the potential to reveal hidden facts about their authors and the purpose behind, or gestation of, their works - as explored in my previous blogposts - but they can also sometimes reveal crucial information regarding the reception of ideas. In the 1960s a manuscript text entitled 'A Discourse of the Ballance or Foundation of Government' was discovered, which was at first believed to have been an early draft by James Harrington of part of The Commonwealth of Oceana. In initial analyses, the fact that the phrase 'the late monarchy' was rendered 'this monarchy' was taken as evidence that the draft dated from before the regicide, so that Harrington was, therefore, already voicing republican ideas during the 1640s.

These assumptions were convincingly disproved by Andrew Sharp in 1973. (A. Sharp, 'The Manuscript Versions of Harrington's Oceana', The Historical Journal, 16:2 (1973), pp. 227-39). He provided compelling evidence that 'A Discourse' actually postdated Oceana, and constituted a handwritten copy of passages from the printed text rather than an early draft of it. Yet he rightly insisted that this did not diminish the significance of the document, since it shed light on the domestication of Harrington's ideas, revealing how 'Harrington, a supporter of revolution, was made a conservative'. (Sharp, p. 227). 'A Discourse' used Harrington's theory of the balance of property - and his account of changes in that balance in England over the previous century - not, as Harrington himself had done, to advocate the replacement of traditional monarchy with popular government, but rather to call for a redressing of the balance among the institutions of England's mixed monarchy and in particular to defend the place of the nobility within that system.

‘A Discourse of the Ballance or Foundation of Government’. Reprinted with permission @British Library Board, Sloane MS 3828 f.75.

‘A Discourse of the Ballance or Foundation of Government’. Reprinted with permission @British Library Board, Sloane MS 3828 f.75.

Since the initial discovery, two further versions of 'A Discourse' have been found. All three appear in manuscript volumes comprised of slightly different compilations of extracts from various seventeenth-century texts (Bodleian MS Eng. Misc. C. 144, ff. 110-23; British Library Sloane MS. 3828, ff. 75-80v and Harleian MS 5063, ff. 17v-11 pagination reversed). While the texts included in the volumes are quite diverse, Harrington's theory of property does appear to have been a common theme since also included in the Bodleian and Sloane volumes is A Letter to Monsieur Van B de M at Amsterdam, by the Presbyterian MP Denzil Holles, which includes the statement: 'the Ballance of Lands is the Ballance of the Government' and draws similar conclusions to 'A Discourse' from this theory for English society.

Sir Robert Southwell by John Smith, after Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt, mezzotint, 1704. Reproduced under a creative commons license from the National Portrait Gallery, NPG D31190.

Sir Robert Southwell by John Smith, after Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt, mezzotint, 1704. Reproduced under a creative commons license from the National Portrait Gallery, NPG D31190.

What, then, were the contexts in which these volumes were produced? We can start with their owners. The Bodleian volume was owned by Robert Southwell (1635-1702), an Irish-born MP, statesman and diplomat in the Restoration regime. One of the British Library volumes was owned by Sir Hans Sloane, an Irish physician, naturalist and collector who was important in the establishment of the British Museum. The other British Library version is part of the Harleian collection, bequeathed by Robert Harley (1661-1724). 

Henry Oldenburg’s notes on Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana. Royal Society MS 1 f.90. I am grateful to Katherine Marshall for copying this manuscript and for permission to reproduce the image here.

Henry Oldenburg’s notes on Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana. Royal Society MS 1 f.90. I am grateful to Katherine Marshall for copying this manuscript and for permission to reproduce the image here.

What appears to unite two, if not all three, of these figures is the Royal Society. Southwell was admitted as a fellow in 1662, and was an active participant for the rest of the century, even serving as president between 1690 and 1695. Sloane, who was much younger than Southwell, was not admitted until 1685, but he too was active and was secretary from 1693-1700. Robert Harley was proposed, though not elected as a member of the Royal Society, but relations of his, including his father Edward Harley (1624-1700), were fellows, though they appear to have been much less active than Southwell and Sloane (Michael Hunter, The Royal Society and its Fellows 1660-1700, The British Society for the History of Science, 1982). Another fellow Abraham Hill - who was treasurer between 1679 and 1699 - was also closely associated with the volumes. He was identified as the person who had extracted and copied 'Mr Hooker's Opinion of Government' in the Bodleian volume, and a letter written to him by another Royal Society fellow William Petty, was also included in that volume. Petty died in 1687, so he was no longer active in the Royal Society in the early 1690s when Southwell was president, Sloane secretary and Hill treasurer, but he had been a good friend of both Hill and Southwell, and the three of them had collaborated closely within the Society in the early 1670s, when they had all been council members. Yet another council member at that time also displayed an interest in Harrington. The natural philosopher Henry Oldenburg was a salaried secretary of the Society for a time. Among his papers is his transcript of part of the preliminaries of Oceana. 

Sir William Petty by Isaac Fuller, oil on canvas, c.1651. Reproduced under a creative commons license from the National Portrait Gallery, NPG 2924.

Sir William Petty by Isaac Fuller, oil on canvas, c.1651. Reproduced under a creative commons license from the National Portrait Gallery, NPG 2924.

It was Petty, though, who provided a direct connection back to Harrington having been a regular attendee at the Rota Club and, according to Aubrey, 'trouble[d] Mr Harrington with his arithmetical proportions and ability to reduce politics to numbers'. (John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Kate Bennett, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, I, p. 232). Petty also picked up on the term 'political anatomy' which Harrington had coined, calling one of his works The Political Anatomy of Ireland. Further evidence of Petty's interest in key aspects of Harrington's theories is suggested by a manuscript, again in the British Library, in which Petty challenged Hobbes's defence of monarchy, and advocated a democratic system which adopted a similar division of the population to that proposed by Harrington in Oceana (Frank Amati and Tony Aspromourgos, 'Petty Contra Hobbes: A Previously Untranslated Manuscript', Journal of the History of Ideas, 46:1, 1985, pp. 127-32). Harrington and Petty evidently remained in contact with each other for the rest of Harrington's life, since there is a letter from Harrington to Petty dated 1676, again in the British Library. The letter follows up a request Harrington claimed to have made previously that the Royal Society provide a suitable place and instruments for the performance of an experiment which Harrington rather pompously claimed was 'more intimately concerning the good of man kind than any other hitherto contained in the writings or known experience of any of the Philosophers' (British Library: Petty Papers h.f.33).

In his 1973 article, Sharp suggested that an original version of 'A Discourse' was probably produced in the 1670s, and that the manuscript volumes were probably gathered together in the 1690s. The Royal Society link offers some explanation for this history. It seems likely that Petty inspired interest in Harrington among members of the Royal Society in the 1670s. This was a time when Petty and others were seeking to expand the appeal of the Society and reverse the decline in membership (Hunter, The Royal Society). Perhaps extending the Society's interests into economic and political matters, a field in which Petty was himself interested, formed part of that campaign. Moreover, the conclusions drawn from Harrington's theory were also timely, given the political situation - especially the worry among Whigs that the English constitution was being threatened by the encroaching absolutism of Charles II, and the fear of even greater future encroachment under his brother James. In the 1690s, when the question of the encroachment of royal power was again an issue, due to the controversy about William III's attempt to maintain a standing army in the aftermath of the Treaty of Ryswick, Harrington's theory would again have appeared relevant to present politics. It was perhaps this that prompted Southwell, Hill and Sloane to include 'A Discourse' in the manuscript volumes they were involved in putting together. There is a twist, however, since - with Petty now dead - the link back to Harrington appears to have been lost. Harrington's authorship of 'A Discourse' is not mentioned in the volumes, indeed in Southwell's copy a handwritten note attributes it to the English antiquary Sir Henry Spelman.