Category: Research post

A blog post by Laurianne Bremond.

Laurianne is a member of the LERMA, and recently successfully defended her PhD dissertation entitled “Pour ma Chère Chère Soeur” : édition critique et traduction de la correspondance entre Charles II et Henriette-Anne, duchesse d’Orléans. In this post, she analyses the materiality of letters and correspondence to show how social conventions were translated onto paper not only int he words used but also in the formal presentation of thoseintimate documents.

Social distancing has been part of our daily lives and vocabulary for the last two years. Yet, the expression can also be used when talking about the 17^th century. Nothing to do with safety measures to fight the numerous epidemics that plagued Europe at that time, though. This phenomenon can be observed… in letters.

In the Middle Ages, the epistle was a complex exercise following strict rules, which demanded high intellectual level and Latin proficiency. It was thus reserved for an elite. In the early modern era, letters were considered the best way to keep in touch and communicate with someone who was not physically present. Correspondence even thrived as literacy rate grew and postal services improved. According to Roger Duchêne, “the developing of epistolary practice, and especially the female epistolary practice, created a new state of mind, more attentive to spontaneity than to perfection, to the truth of a letter genuinely sent rather than its technical achievement[1]”. Yet did this evolution between the medieval epistle and the early modern letter imply the utter deregulation of epistolary writing?

If correspondence is said to be a “conversation between absentees”, it should be considered as a conversation between civil people, well aware of the rules that govern the relationship between men and women, members of the family or inferiors and superiors within the social hierarchy. In the 17^th century, social conventions were still paramount, especially in Court. There was no spontaneity in writing to a member of Government or to the sovereign. Quite the contrary: to be sure that their requests would be well received, courtiers could use manuals and even ask professionals to write their letters.

Despite the calls for more spontaneity and truth, writing rules were still in use. Alan Stewart even chose the word “grammar” to name “the physical features of the letter (such as handwriting, paper, seals, postscripts) – and the social practices that animate them (the customs of writing and the rites of delivery)[2]”. Indeed, epistolary and social conventions were intrinsically tied. Deference to a social superior, like a patron or the King himself, should be visible in the content of the text but also in the structure of the letter.

In a report sent to Louis XIV, French Ambassador in London Gaston Jean Baptiste de Comminges, kown as “le comte de Comminges” left a large blank (almost half a page) between the greeting “Sire” and the first line of the text. He did likewise at the end, with a reasonable blank between the last line and the parting “Sire”, his signature pushed even further, into the bottom right corner of the letter. This document is an example of the fastidious implementation of what we could call “social distancing” in epistolarity. Here, “social” is not related to “3. b. a group of people, an organization, etc.: consisting or composed of people associated together for friendly interaction or companionship” but refers to “5. d. a person’s status in society”[3]. The distance that existed between the author and the recipient, who was superior on the social ladder, was illustrated by the visible distance between the body of the text and the opening and ending of the letter. Those blanks could be seen as the epistolary equivalent of bowing and were a mark of humility.

This form of social distancing can also be associated with one of the key rules of Court life: precedence. In that case, distance came with order. It can be observed when the letter is attributed to several authors with different social status. For example, in 1665, Louis XIV sent two envoys extraordinary to his first cousin Charles II. With Comminges, they were supposed to prevent a war between England and the United Provinces. One of them was a diplomat, Honoré Courtin. The other was Henri de Bourbon-Verneuil, duc de Verneuil, legitimate son of King Henri IV of France and therefore uncle to both Louis XIV and Charles II. When this “ambassade extraordinaire” (as it was called) sent reports to the French King, not only the respectful distances were applied when possible (when the text did not cover the last page almost entirely), but the three men signed according to their status: as a Duke and member of the royal family, Henri de Bourbon-Verneuil was the first to sign (“Henry”, the title “duc de Verneuil” was visibly added by the secretary), then came Comminges (“Comenge”), and finally Honoré Courtin (“Courtin”).

Official correspondence was not the only type concerned with respecting the rules. Such proof of humility and discretion can be observed in exchanges between a man and a woman who were not related (in that case, the female writer had to be careful to maintain the distance on paper to preserve her reputation) or between members of the family (children showing their respect to their parents and expecting their own children to do likewise).

The apparent failure to respect such rules can either be due to ignorance, which could have unfortunate consequences, or to a will to bridge the gap between the correspondents, sometimes despite their differences. The correspondence between King Charles II and his youngest sister Henriette-Anne, known as “Madame”, is remarkable. Conventionally, Madame should address her brother with reverence, as a King and the head of the Stuart family. That is why, at the very beginning of their correspondence (the first letter of the corpus dates from 1659) the 15-year-old princess repeatedly called him “your Majesty”. But Charles II clearly asked her not to be so formal (“I beg of you not to treat me with such ceremony”). From that moment, the letters were written with a complete lack of structural formality. When we observe the surviving documents, we can see that the text is very compact and often cover whole pages. Moreover, there are no greetings and their respective parting sentences (“I am yours” and “I am your humble servant”) are directly included in the last lines of the text. Madame does not even use a signature while the King uses a mark that could be a stylized “C”, coming just after the end of the text and, sometimes, on the same line as the last words.

Social distancing can be observed in letters because they are the literal reflection of the social relationships which were, in the early modern era, extremely hierarchical, especially at Court. The spontaneity promoted was actually ruled by social conventions, which became epistolary conventions. However, those conventions were not limited to the text per se. For scholars, its structure and even the materiality of the letter are highly informative on the relationship between the correspondents. A carefully built text with significant blanks can be proof of formality and social distance. On the contrary, a text that does seem spontaneous in its content and structure can convey a sense of familiarity.

Such observations should encourage us not to limit letters to their literary content but to zoom out and have a broader view on the epistolary process, which could give precious information on the author’s social self-awareness.

[1] Roger Duchêne, Comme une lettre à la poste. Les progrès de l’écriture personnelle sous Louis XIV (Paris : Fayard, 2006), p. 128.

[2] James Daybell et Andrew Gordon, « Introduction: The Early Modern Letter Opener » dans James Daybell et Andrew Gordon (eds), Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphie : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 1-26 (p. 12).

[3] OED online.

SWIFT, Jonathan.. Ed. Valérie Maffre and Dominique Triaire. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2021. ISBN 978-2-36781-336-3, 15€.

Less than a year after Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift had been published in London, Voltaire was already extolling the virtues of this book which he deemed thoroughly entertaining thanks to its ‘many imaginative aspects’ and to the ‘lightness of its style.’ He thus begged Thieriot to quickly translate the work, rightfully fearing that ‘a more hurried person might have already done so.’ Indeed, a French version of the work had already been issued in the Hague a few weeks before the philosopher had written his letter to Thieriot in January 1727.

However, this anonymous translation, published by Pierre Gosse and Jean Neaulme, had not been advertised in the better-known French reviews of the time. It thus hardly comes as a surprise that Voltaire should not have been familiar with this text. In March of 1727, Pierre-François Guyot Desfontaines, who would later become one of Voltaire’s many literary nemeses, authored his own translation of Gulliver’s Travels, a work which would be met with widespread success. The Dutch publishers attempted to fight back, although to no avail. They indeed presented a new version of their text, insisting on the presence of illustrations and maps which could not be found in Desfontaines’s edition. The public nevertheless remained more inclined to read Desfontaines’s version than the anonymous one from the 18^th century to the present time. While The Hague’s Gulliver was only reprinted six times, Desfontaines’s translation was printed in 96 books, either in full text or in adapted and shortened versions.

Many literary critics, such as Sybil Goulding or Pierre-Gabriel Boucé had however tried to plead for this unjustly overlooked translation. This version remains far more accurate and better renders Swift’s scathing tone than Desfontaines’s text which can be considered as a ‘belle infidèle.’ Desfontaines indeed liberally removed supposedly inappropriate passages while adding entirely new paragraphs for instance dealing with the beauty of women or the best way to rear children. Although The Hague’s translation also quite heavily modified the original text, it seems better to portray Swift’s contradictory and sharp voice. This text, which could hardly be purchased nowadays, has now been made available by Valérie Maffre and Dominique Triaire, along with valuable critical elements. This book hence fills a gap in the francophone publishing field.

The work’s preface precisely highlights this translation’s specificities. The authors outline a scrupulous typology of the anonymous translator’s omissions. They show how he has erased several British references (currency, measuring units, toponyms), deleted, for elegance’s sake, Swift’s typical enumerations and repetitions, diminished the presence of the narrator by cutting several interferences, alleviated obscene references to the body or finally removed technical details. Valérie Maffre and Dominique Triaire also remind us that the translator has chosen not to include one the original’s paratextual elements – the letter from the publisher to the reader – which triggers a play on the blurring of the borders of fiction and reality. These elements thus allow readers better to navigate the translation while giving them the opportunity of comparing it to both the original and Desfontaines’ version. One could perhaps further add that the anonymous translator has heavily edited the text where the moral values of the character were seen as unworthy, as can be exemplified by the disappearance of many passages concerning his cowardice.

The footnotes seem particularly well-balanced. They showcase the major differences between Swift’s original and the anonymous version, indicating suppressions, additions and mistakes. The comparisons, although not entirely comprehensive, entirely suffice to grasp a clear notion of the nature of the translation while dodging the risk of weighing on the reading process. They decipher, in a more than welcome fashion, several satirical allusions which the translation alleviated, or which would have remained unintelligible to non-specialists. The coloured silk threads upon which Lilliputian dignitaries have to perform stunts in order to impress the Emperor for instance refer to the Order of the Garter in a parallel which the authors highlight. Finally, the notes offer interesting explanations of French 18^th century vocabulary when definitions have shifted throughout the years, as shows the case of “machine”, which used to refer to “heavy and hard to move objects” rather than only devices.

One should note that the text’s spelling has been modernised according to contemporary norms and that ampersands have been replaced by the coordinating conjunction “and” – a choice which seems to pertain to the author’s decision of sharing their translation with a widespread audience rather with than mere specialists. While the 1727 anonymous translation tended to favour colons instead of Swift’s semi-colons, Valérie Maffre and Dominique Triaire alternate between full stops and semi-colons, a phenomenon which strengthens the closeness to the original.

Finally, the volume comprises the four maps of fictive lands and the two diagrams of the original which Gosse and Neaulme had already printed and partially translated in 1727. This appears as a crucial editorial decision as the only contemporary French edition which offered them was that published by Garnier-Flammarion, translated by Guillaume Villeneuve and commented by Alexis Tadié. One can also find the four original illustrations which were engraved for this text in the Dutch Republic in the 18^th century.

This book hence seems a welcome addition to translation and 18^th century British literature studies in France, reprinting a poorly-known text and shedding a new light on the unsung translators of the Dutch Republic who however played a major role in print circulation. It will naturally find its spot in academic libraries while remaining relevant for a wider readership.

Amélie Derome

A blog post by Louise Deschryver.

Louise is a research fellow of the FWO Flanders and is writing a doctoral thesis at the Research Group of Early Modern History at KU Leuven.

In November 1566, the daughter of Marcos Perez lay dying in Antwerp.[1] Chaos reigned around her deathbed: only three months before, the Iconoclastic Fury had swept across the Low Countries. In its wake, Lutheran and Reformed believers in Antwerp had for the first time ever gained limited (and heavily contested) rights of public worship. Marcos Perez himself, as a deputy of the Dutch Reformed consistory, had played a key role in negotiating those rights with the margrave William of Orange. His wife, Ursula Lopez, was a prominent member of the city’s Reformed community, too, and taught young Antwerp girls in the Reformed faith in the family home. Several other members of Marcos’ and Ursula’s respective families were influential Calvinists, too. And yet, their daughter wanted to die a Catholic death.

It is vicar-general Maximilien Morillon who wrote his absentee archbishop, the cardinal de Granvelle, with this peculiar piece of news in his letter of 16 November 1566. He himself claimed to have heard it from none other than Antwerp’s dean de Taxis.[2]  Though of course we need to be wary of taking Morillon for his gleeful word, we know the Perez family throughout the sixteenth century was torn apart by confessional differences. Marcus’ own Portuguese parents, for example, remained loyal members of Antwerp’s Catholic laity, as did his brother Luis. Ursula in the 1580s got entangled in a severe juridical conflict with the latter.

Luis did not want to terminate his guardianship over Ursula’s youngest daughter Luisa, who she had been forced to leave in his care as a baby, and refused to return his niece to her mother because of Ursula’s Reformed faith.[3] In this regard, it would have been no coincidence that it was at the deathbed of one of Marcus’ and Ursula’s children that the family’s confessional conflicts came into sharp focus for the first time.

Indeed, in pre-modern times, dying well required multiple sensory rituals and sacred objects upon which the fate of the soul depended. With the arrival of the Reformation, however, confessions argued between themselves about which sensory ars moriendi rituals constituted ‘a good death’ and which were superstitious. Should there be burning candles at the deathbed and in the funeral procession? Should the parish priest administer extreme unction? Should the church bells be rung or not? Should the grave be sprinkled with holy water and scented with incense – or would all of this be sinful idolatry?

Answering these questions became of defining importance for the salvation of the soul of the deceased. The deathbed confronted both the dying and his/her loved ones with the eternal consequences of sensory choices made in one’s final moments on earth. These choices by the middle of the sixteenth century had come to signify one’s confessional identity, a final opportunity to tie one’s confessional colours to the mast.[4]

We know from the Lutheran painter and chronicler Godevaert van Haecht this caused strife in more than one Antwerp family. On December 5, 1566, he wrote the unprecedented religious freedoms had resulted in ‘extraordinary arguments’ in families during important rites de passage. When marriages were arranged, he wrote, bride and groom were asked about their religion. When a child was being baptised godparents of the same beliefs were sought. ‘Most of all’, however, ‘[it happened that] a husband wanted to be buried here, his wife there. Or when parents had died, one wanted to bury them in this way, the other in that way’.[5]

In the case of the Perez family, it was the parents who had to agree on how to bury their daughter, instead. According to Morillon, Marcos and Ursula had not been able to ‘steer her away from the ancient faith, the girl saying her parents had taught and nourished her in it’. Nevertheless, Morillon claimed Perez did bury his daughter ‘à la huguenote’. In Antwerp at this time, this meant she did not have a wake or funeral mass in one of Antwerp’s churches, or memorial masses held for the salvation of her soul. Instead, her body was taken from her parents’ house straight to the graveyard, where a Reformed preacher held a funeral sermon near the grave. We do not know if Marcos’ Catholic parents and brother attended her funeral. In their eyes, he must have put the salvation of his child’s soul at grave risk.

Six months after their daughter’s death, Marcos and Ursula fled the city. The arrival of the troops of governor-general Margaret of Parma in May 1567 ended Antwerp’s short period of multi-confessionalism. During this period, Marcus Perez had not just shaped the political frameworks for Protestant worship in Antwerp (against Parma’s wishes), but also heavily funded the militant wing of Dutch Calvinism. As such, Perez and his wife thought it best to flee to Basel, where Marcos died in 1572. Ursula would return to Antwerp after the Pacification of Ghent in 1576, and be – as mentioned above – consumed by the battle for the guardianship over her youngest daughter. The latter had been just a baby when Ursula was forced to leave her with her brother-in-law in 1567. Thus, the girl had been re-baptised a Catholic in the Our Lady Cathedral and raised in that faith as well.[6] Her mother seemed to have been determined to not let her die in that faith, too.

Whether she succeeded to do so, we do not know. The judiciary sources informing us on the litigation between Luis Perez and Ursula Lopez in the 1580s do not include the eventual judgment of the case. Nevertheless, the stories of Luisa Perez and her unnamed elder sister offer us a glimpse of the deep-cutting confessional divisions that could occur in families during the Reformation. In a time where one’s choice of death ritual was of defining importance for the salvation of the soul, these divisions could turn both the death chamber and the churchyard into powerful sites of confessional strife and identity formation.

[1] I have not been able to retrace her name in any of the studies on Marcos Perez and his large family. The girl’s surviving sisters, whose names we know through their marriages, were called Luisa, Isabella, Barbara and Anna. Hanquet, Pierre. ‘Les Perez et leur groupe familial aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles’, Recueil de l’Office Généalogique et Héraldique de Belgique 7 (1958), 43–63, here p. 52 footnote 25. See also Hauben, Paul, ‘MARCUS PÉREZ AND MARRANO CALVINISM IN THE DUTCH REVOLT AND THE REFORMATION’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 29/1 (1967), 121–132; Prims, Floris, ‘Het dochtertje van Ursula Lopez’, Antwerpiensia 16 (1943), p. 367-376; Prims, Floris, ‘Het doopsel van Lodowica Perez – 1567’, Antwerpiensia 18 (1947), p. 66-69; Vermaseren, Bernard Antoon, ‘De Antwerpse koopman Martin Lopez en zijn familie in de zestiende en het begin van de zeventiende eeuw’, Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis, bijzonderlijk van het aloude hertogdom Brabant, 56 (1973), 3–79.

[2] Letter from Maximilien Morillon to cardinal Granvelle, 15 november 1566. Published in Gachard, Correspondance du cardinal de Granvelle, II, p. 89-90.

[3] It is very likely this name was derived from her uncle’s own name, who had the baby girl re-baptised in the Catholic faith after her parents fled Antwerp (see below).

[4] Deschryver, ‘You Only Die Once’, 35-57.

[5] ‘Maer daer waeren wonderlyckearguatien onder ‘t volck: […] den man wou hier, de vrou daer; oft daer ouders gestorven waeren, d’een wou se na die manire begraven hebben, en d’ander na dese en so voorts’. Van Haecht, De Kroniek van Godevaert van Haecht, I, p. 128.

[6] Prims, ‘Het doopsel van Lodowica Perez – 1567’, p. 69.

A blog post by Francesco Quatrini (Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale, Dipartimento di Scienze Umane e Sociali)

The last two decades have witnessed a growing interest in Enlightenment studies. Prompted by Jonathan Israel’s ground-breaking studies on the “radical Enlightenment” in the Dutch Republic, scholars have focused on intellectuals promoting new democratic concepts in the early Enlightenment period, especially within the circle around the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Such studies, however excellent, mostly focus on philosophers and freethinkers promoting secular ideas, regarded as the main driving force leading into the Enlightenment, largely disregarding religious people who fostered enlightened social practices and similar ideas in the same period and though less known now, were influential in their time. By contrast, and alongside other scholars in the fields of intellectual history, social history, and church history, my research has been focusing on the role of seventeenth-century Protestant dissenters in the promotion of political concepts that would become foundational for the Enlightenment discourse, such as, egalitarianism, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and democracy.

These concepts were indeed an integral part of the religious beliefs and practices of a Dutch dissenting movement known today as the Collegiants or Collegiant movement.

The Collegiants were a religious minority in seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and an avant-garde group in many ways. They were a multi-confessional movement founded around 1619 without clerical or governmental oversight, most of whose members belonged to several confessional and nonconformist churches (e.g., Remonstrants, Mennonites, and Socinians). In their meetings – or Colleges – the Collegiants welcomed learned and uneducated people regardless of differences in cultural, social, and religious background, in order to practice freedom of prophesying – prophecy being a mode of utterance that was not necessarily bound to religious discourse. Not only did women belong to their ranks, but they also enjoyed the same right to freely express their opinions as men did (as it can be seen from the picture above). The Collegiants thus practiced egalitarianism, freedom of speech, and toleration in real terms, just as they defended these concepts in their pamphlets. Renowned seventeenth-century intellectuals, including Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, and Pierre Bayle, had connections with Collegiant circles.

Among those who came into contact and eventually joined Collegiants circles during the 1650s and 1660s, the Polish Brethren must certainly be mentioned. The Polish Brethren – better knowns as Socinians – were an anti-Trinitarian group born around 1568 in Poland-Lithuania from a schism of the Polish Reformed Church, when some of their members embraced anti-Trinitarian views and the kind of anti-state attitude exhibited, for instance, by the Moravian Anabaptists. The Brethren were certainly different from the Collegiants: first of all, they were not a movement, but a true church, with a confession of faith, ministers, and elders; secondly, there is no evidence that they practiced egalitarian beliefs within their ranks, but, on the contrary, theirs was a hierarchical community. Despite this, the Brethren were strong defenders of freedom of religion, which we can assume they practiced on a regular basis. The social and cultural history of the several Brethren communities existing in Poland-Lithuania, Germany, and Transylvania is still quite unknown, but a fact appears to be quite certain: despite being harassed by all the other Christian denominations for their anti-Trinitarianism, there is no account of Brethren attacking or harassing other Christians for their beliefs.

And I suggest that if they did so, Catholics, Lutherans and Reformed would certainly report this in their fierce anti-Socinian campaigns throughout Europe. The Brethren thus appears to have practiced pacifism and freedom of religion on a daily basis, making use of arms and violence only when they had to defend themselves and their families from others (and even then, some of them chose to be harassed, rather than use violence to repel violence).

The meeting between the Collegiants and Polish Brethren represents also a clear proof that social practices led to the formation of new ideas. When they were expelled from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1658, some Brethren families moved to Amsterdam and joined Collegiant circles. In their past, the Brethren had never showed any particular interest in freedom of speech or egalitarianism, but once in Amsterdam, they began promoting such concepts and opposing the kind of hierarchical church authority as practiced by their fellows in Germany and Transylvania. In the foreword to the revised second edition of the Racovian Catechism – the Brethren’s confession of faith – the Brethren living and working in Amsterdam even included references to anticlerical views and to the freedom of prophesying as advocated by the Collegiants. There is no doubt that the egalitarian practices in the Colleges prompted the Brethren to develop such ideas and arguments in favor of egalitarianism. And it is at this crossroads of ideas and practices that we can see the significance of protestant dissenters for the developing of seventeenth-century political discourse. The religious practices of these dissenters and the participation in free-discussion groups co-created the development of Enlightenment values: the theory did not cause the practice, both were mutually implicated in development. Indeed, while Colleges were at first meant as meeting for free scriptural interpretations, soon Collegiants (and Brethren) in Amsterdam began discussing more practical and “secular” matters, such as ways to help Jews in difficult situation in eastern Europe and whether a Mennonite family should send their children to Calvinist schools. Therefore, if one were to extend this approach to other more famous political thinkers, such as Spinoza, Locke, and Bayle, who were in contact with Collegiants, Brethren, and other religious dissenters, they might find new aspects about how the political thinking of such prominent Enlightenment authors developed in practice. In other words, considering how their social relations with religious dissenters might have impacted on the development of their views and how these vews might have further developed such social relations could offer a different and perhaps more rich account of the Early Enligthenment period.