I am happy to thank all the librarians who aided me in my research, in particular the staffs of the Archiginnasio in Bologna and the Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
1. François de la Mothe Le Vayer, Discours sur l’histoire, in his Œuvres, 15 vols. (Paris: L. Billaine, 1669), 2:152: “C’est le temps qui compose ce qu’on nomme proprement le fil de l’Histoire. Car la Chronologie est un filet plus necessaire à se démeller d’une narration historique, que ne fut iamais à Thesée celuy qui le tira de tous les détours du Labyrinthe.”
2. A. Frugoni, Arnaldo da Brescia nelle fonti del secolo XII (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1954); new ed., with an introduction by Giuseppe Sergi (Turin: Einaudi, 1989).
3. Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire; ou, Métier d’historien (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949); trans. Peter Putnam as The Historian’s Craft (New York: Knopf, 1953), pp. 63–64.
4. Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1966); trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi as The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
5. Carlo Ginzburg, “Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziario” (1979), later included in Miti, emblemi, spie (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), pp. 158–209: 166–167; trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi as “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 96–125: 102–104. Cf. also idem, Nessuna isola è un’isola: Quattro sguardi sulla letteratura inglese (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002), pp. 13–14; trans. as No Island Is an Island:Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
6. The same thing is true of the three books that are intertwined with the present one: Occhiacci di legno; Nove riflessioni sulla distanza (Milan: Feltrinelli 1998) (trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper as Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance [New York: Columbia University Press, 2001]); Rapporti di forza: Storia, retorica, prova (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000); and Nessuna isola è un’isola. I should also like to mention the thought-provoking 1993 conference organized by Anthony Grafton and Sue Marchand, “Proof and Persuasion in History” (Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ).
7. The most obvious example is that of Paul Feyerabend. Cf. Ginzburg, Occhiacci di legno, pp. 155–159; Wooden Eyes, pp. 131–135.
8. Bloch, Historian’s Craft, pp. 63–64.
9. Ibid., p. 104. On this passage, see Ginzburg, “A proposito della raccolta dei saggi storici di Marc Bloch,” Studi medievali, ser. 3, vol. 6 (1965): 335–353: 338–340.
10. Ginzburg, Rapporti di forza, pp. 47, 87–108.
11. A. Jolles, “Forme semplici,” chap. “Il caso,” in his I travestimenti della letteratura: Scritti critici e teorici (1897–1932), ed. Silvia Contarini (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), pp.379–399: 393.
12. See the fine essay by Yan Thomas, “L’extrême et l’ordinaire: Remarques sur le cas médiéval de la communauté disparue,” in Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel, eds., Penser par cas (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2005), pp. 45–73. The mental experiment which Hobbes proposes in his De corpore, describing the annihilatio of the world with the exception of one individual, may have been rooted in an actual case: see G. Paganini, “Hobbes, Gassendi und die Hypothese von Weltvernichtung,” in Martin Mulsow and Marcelo Stamm, eds., Konstellationsforschung (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2005), pp. 258–339.
13. “Of history,” as the grammarian Asclepiades of Myrlea wrote, “one division is true, one false, one as if true: the factual is true, that of fictions and legends is false, and as if true are such forms as comedy and mimes”: Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos (1:252). See Sextus Empiricus, trans. R. G. Bury, vol. 4, Against the Professors (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 141–143. See also below, chap. 3.
1. On this point, cf. chap. 12 below, “Just One Witness,” esp. what is said apropos Renato Serra’s “Partenza di un gruppo di soldati per la Libia.”
2. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London and New York: Verso, 1988), p. 121; originally published as Versuche über Brecht (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1966).
3. See chap. 12 below, “Just One Witness.”
4. E. Benveniste, “Les relations de temps dans le verbe française,” in idem, Problèmes de linguistique générale, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 1:237–250; trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek as Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971).
5. R. Caillois, Ponce Pilate: Récit (Paris: Gallimard, 1961); trans. Charles Lam Markmann as Pontius Pilate (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).
6. This expression goes back to Roland Barthes’s “effect of the real,” but from an opposite perspective. For Barthes, who identifies reality and language, “a fact has nothing but a linguistic existence,” and the “truth,” between quotation marks, is assimilated to polemic against “realism.” See Roland Barthes, “Il discorso della storia,” in his Il brusio della lingua: Saggi critici (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 4:138–149: 147, 149; see also pp. 151–159; trans. Richard Howard as Critical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972). I think that facts have an extralinguistic existence and that the notion of truth is part of a very long story, which may coincide with the history of the species. But the procedures used to control and communicate the truth have changed over the course of time.
7. The Histories of Polybius, trans. from the text of F. Hultsch by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh, introd. by F. W. Walbank, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), 2:482. Cf. Attilio Roveri, Studi su Polibio (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1964), at the entry “enargeia” in the index; and, esp., G. Schepens, “Emphasis und enargeia in Polybios’ Geschichtstheorie,” Rivista Storica dell’Antichità 5 (1975): 185–200. For a different reading of Polybius 24:3 (energeia rather than enargeia), see Kenneth Sacks, Polybius on the Writing of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 154n8.
8. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 28n39; André Wartelle, Lexique de la “Rhetorique” d’Aristote (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1982), pp. 142–144; P. Pirani, Dodici capi pertinenti all’arte historica del Mascardi (Venice, 1646), pp. 56, 84; S. L. Alpers, “Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960): 194n18, led into error by Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients (London, 1638), p. 300 (Energia): but see the original text, De pictura veterum (Amsterdam, 1637), p. 185 (enargeia). I have not been able to consult Colette Nativel, “La théorie de l’enargeia dans le ‘De pictura veterum’ de Franciscus Junius: Sources antiques et développements modernes,” in René Demoris, ed., Hommage à Elizabeth Sophie Chéron: Texte et peinture à l’age classique (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1992), pp. 73–85.
9. The confusion had already been noted by Agostino Mascardi (1636); see n. 70 below.
10. The following pages, corresponding to sections 3 through 6, are basically unchanged in respect to the original 1988 version of this essay. In the notes I have added citations to studies that have since appeared on the subject of enargeia (many cited in Bernard Vouilloux, “La description des œuvres d’art dans le roman français au XIXe siècle,” in La description de l’œuvre d’art: Du modèle classique aux variations contemporaines, Acts of a colloquium organized by Olivier Bonfait, Rome, 2004 [Paris: Somogy, 2004], pp. 153–184: 179n13; but the entire volume is important). I have found especially useful Claude Calam, “Quand dire c’est faire voir: L’évidence dans la rhétorique antique,” Études de Lettres 4 (1991): 3–20; A. D. Walker, “Enargeia and the Spectator in Greek Historiography,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 123 (1993): 353–377; and Perrine Galand-Hallyn, Les yeux de l’éloquence: Poétiques humanistes de l’évidence (Orléans: Paradigme, 1995).
11. Gioia M. Rispoli, “Phantasia ed enargeia negli scoli all’Illiade,” Vichiana 13 (1984): 311–339; Graham Zanker, “Enargeia in the Ancient Criticism of Poetry,” Rheinisches Museum, n.s., vol. 124 (1981): 296–311, esp. p. 304n29 and p. 310n57.
12. P. Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 4 vols. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), 1:104. See also D. Mülder, “Götteranrufungen in Ilias und Odyssee,” Rheinisches Museum 79 (1930): 7–34: 29. Enargés is not mentioned in Charles Mugler, Dictionnaire historique de la terminologie optique des grecs (Paris: Klincksieck, 1964).
13. Histories of Polybius, 2:261.
14. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H. E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1977), 2:84–85: “Evidentia in narratione, quantum ego intelligo, est quidem magna virtus, cum quid veri non dicendum, sed quodammodo etiam ostendendum est.”
15. Ibid., 2:434–437: “. . . quae non tam dicere videtur quam ostendere; et adfectus non aliter, quam si rebus ipsis intersimus sequentur.” See also the notes to Quintilian, Institution oratoire, ed. Jean Cousin, 7 vols. (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1977), vol. 4, bks. 6 and 7, pp. 194–195, on the importance of enargeia in Greek and Roman historical thought.
16. Cicero, Partitiones Oratoriae 20: “Haec pars orationis, quae rem constituat paene ante oculos.”
17. [Cicero], Ad C. Herennium De ratione dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium), trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 404–408: “Demonstratio est cum ita verbis res exprimitur ut geri negotium et res ante oculos esse videatur. . . . Statuit enim rem totam et prope ponit ante oculos.”
18. Jacqueline de Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
19. On this notion, see G. Schepens, L’ “autopsie” dans la méthode des historiens grecs du Ve siècle avant J.-C. (Brussels: AWLSK, 1980).
20. [Demetrius], On Style, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1982), p. 429. Cf. W. Rhys Roberts, Demetrius on Style: The Greek Text of Demetrius “De elocutione” (Cambridge: The University Press, 1902; reprint Hildesheim, 1969), pp. 209ff.; Bernard Weinberg, “Translations and Commentaries of Demetrius ‘On Style’ to 1600: A Bibliography,” Philological Quarterly 30 (1951): 353–380; Dirk M. Schenkeveld, Studies in Demetrius on Style (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1964), p. 61; Paul Oskar Kristeller and F. Edward Cranz, Catalogus translationum et commentariorum (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1971), 2:27–41 (B. Weinberg); Guido Morpurgo Tagliabue, Demetrio dello stile (Rome: Ateneo, 1980).
21. Luciano Canfora, Totalità e selezione nella storiografia classica (Bari: Laterza, 1972).
22. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 3rd ed. (London: Phaidon, 1968), pp. 99ff. (1st ed., 1960); Hermann Strasburger, Die Wesenbestimmung der Geschichte durch die antike Geschichtsschreibung, Sitzungsberichte der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt a. M., vol. 5, no. 3, 1966 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978), p. 78n1, p. 79n3.
23. Strasburger, Die Wesensbestimmung. In a more limited perspective, see Erich Burck, Die Erzählungskunst des T. Livius (Berlin: Weidmann, 1934); and Gert Avenarius, Lukians Schrift zur Geschichtsschreibung (Meisenheim/Glan: Hain, 1956), pp. 130ff. Enargeia is mentioned in Josef Martin, Antike Rhetorik: Technik und Methode (Munich: Beck, 1974), pp. 252–253, 288–289. For a broader perspective, see Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik (Munich: Hueber, 1960), paragraphs 810–819; trans. as Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, ed. David E. Horton and R. Dean Anderson (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1998); and in Perrine Galand, “L’ ‘enargia’ chez Politien,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 49 (1987): 25–53. (Both are very useful even if they do not treat the relationship with historiography.) On the philosophical implications of enargeia, see A. A. Long, “Aisthesis, Prolepsis and Linguistic Theory in Epicurus,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 18 (1971): 114–133. On Duride, in addition to Strasburger, Die Wesensbestimmung, see the discussion between Schepens, “Emphasis,” and Sachs, Polybius, pp. 149ff. For additional bibliography, see J. R. Morgan, “Make-Believe and Make Believe: The Fictionality of the Greek Novels,” in Christopher Gill and T. P. Wiseman, eds., Lies and Fictions in the Ancient World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), pp. 175–229: 184n15.
24. Plato, The Statesman, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [1953]), 3:489.
25. Philostratus the Elder, Imagines; Philostratus the Younger, Imagines; Callistratus, Descriptions; trans. Arthur Fairbanks, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1969), p. 339.
26. Plutarch, On the Fame of the Athenians, in Plutarch’s Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 501.
27. Strasburger, Die Wesensbestimmung, p. 80, p. 87n3. Calame (“Quand dire,” pp. 5, 13–14) suggests that the relationship between the ekphrasis and the description was marginal: but the ekphrasis in a broad sense included the detailed descriptions.
28. The presence of these notions in the aesthetic discussions of the time is attested to in Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 67–112 (on enargeia).
29. The same juxtaposition has been suggested, independently, in T. P. Wiseman, “Lying Historians: Seven Types of Mendacity,” in Gill and Wiseman, Lies and Fiction, pp. 122–146: 145–146.
30. The Institutio oratoria of Quintilian 2:84–85: “. . . quia in quibusdam causis obscuranda veritas esset; quod est ridiculum. Nam qui obscurare vult, narrat falsa pro veris, et in iis quae narrat debet laborare ut videantur quam evidentissima.”
31. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315; idem, “The Rise of Antiquarian Research,” in his The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, foreword by Riccardo Di Donato (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 54–79. The Italian translation, Le radici classiche della storiografia moderna, ed. R. Di Donato (Florence: Sansoni, 1992), contains a new introd. by the volume’s editor (pp. 59–83).
32. Francesco Robortello, De convenientia supputationis Livianae Ann. cum marmoribus Rom. quae in Capitolio sunt. Eiusdem de arte, sive ratione corrigendi veteres authores, disputatio. Eiusdem Emendationum libri duo, Patavii [Padua], 1557. Cf. Antonio Carlini, “L’attività filologica di Francesco Robortello,” Atti dell’Accademia di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti di Udine, ser. 7, vol. 7 (1966–1969): 53–84; E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 29–36 (to whom Sebastiano Timpanaro was perhaps alluding when he observed that Robortello’s writing “deserves to be remembered without anachronistic severity”: La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (1963) (Turin: UTET, 2003), p. 13n1; trans. Glenn W. Most as The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). For Robortello’s life, see Gian Giuseppe Liruti, Notizie delle vite ed opere scritte da’ letterati del Friuli (Venice, 1762), 3:413–483 (reprinted Bologna: Forni, 1971). But Robortello’s denunciation of Celio Secondo Curione as a heretic will bear further scrutiny, especially in light of what is said in the next note.
33. F. Robortello, De historica facultate disputatio. Eiusdem Laconici, seu sudationis explicatio. Eiusdem de nominibus Romanorum. Eiusdem de rhetorica facultate. Eiusdem explicatio in Catulli Epithalamium, Florentiae, Apud L. Tolentinum, 1548. The Disputatio was edited and reprinted by the Pole Stanislaus Ilovius, a student of Curione, in two volumes: see Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Nonnulla opuscula, ex officina Roberti Stephani, Lutetiae [Paris] 1556, pp. 42–62, followed by a letter to Curione; Demetrius of Phalerum, De elocutione liber, Basileae, per Ioannem Oporinum, 1557 (pp. 226–246). This collection contains a piece by Ilovius which recalls, even by its very title, Robortello’s (De historica facultate libellus, pp. 215–226). The continuation of Robortello’s ideas on the part of Francesco Patrizi, who called him “master” (Della historia, diece dialoghi, Venetia, A. Arrivabene, 1560, fol. 6r), is a subject I hope to return to elsewhere. Robortello and Patrizi are both present in the Artis historicae penus, ed. Johann Wolff, Basileae, officina Petri Pernae, 1579. The importance of Robortello’s Disputatio (and what Speroni and Patrizi owed to it) was missed in Giorgio Spini, “I trattatisti dell’arte storica nella Controriforma italiana,” in Contributi alla storia del Concilio di Trento, “Quaderni di Belfagor” 1 (1948): 109–136; see also below at n. 47). More useful, even if partly influenced by the preceding essay, is Girolamo Cotroneo, I trattatisti dell’ “ars historica” (Naples: Giannini, 1971), pp. 121168 (on Robortello).
34. Sexti philosophi Pyrrhoniarum hypotiposeon libri III . . . latine nunc primum editi, interprete Henrico Stephano, Parisiis, 1562. On all this, see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, rev. and expanded ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 17ff. Cf. also Arno Seifert, Cognitio historica (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1976), pp. 17–18; and Luciano Floridi, Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 31.
35. Gian Francesco Pico, Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium, et veritatis Christiane disciplinae, distinctum in libros sex, impressit Mirandulae Joannes Maciochius, 1520, fol. lxxxii r (bk. 3, chap. 3): “Quid sceptici contra grammaticam soleant disputare: ubi et quaepiam ex aliis auctoribus”). Cf. Charles B. Schmitt, Gian Francesco Pico della Mirandola (1450–1533) and His Critique of Aristotle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967), p. 49.
36. H. Mutschmann, “Die Überlieferung der Schriften des Sextus Empiricus,” Rheinisches Museum, n.s., vol. 64 (1909): 244–283.
37. On this point, see chap. 5 below.
38. The first edition of Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos, dates to 1569; the Artis historicae penus followed ten years later.
39. See, for example, Eckhard Kessler, Theoretiker humanistischer Geschichtsschreibung (Munich: Fink, 1971) (superficial). Jean Jehasse, La Renaissance de la critique: L’essor de l’humanisme érudit de 1560 à 1614 (Paris: Champion, 2002), p. 101, is totally off the mark, attributing to Robortello a “radical subjectivism” which excludes the possibility of even ascertaining factual truths.
40. “Thucydides nobis exemplo sit, qui libro sexto omnem antiquitatem urbium, ac populorum Siciliae diligentissime ac verissime explicit. Et quoniam ad hanc antiquitatem cognoscendum multum nos iuvant vetustorum aedificiorum reliquiae, atque aut marmoribus, aut auro, aere, et argento incisae literae haec quoque teneat oportet. Idem Thucydides (quid enim opus est ab huius tanti praeclari historici authoritate discedere?) ex inscriptione marmoris, quod in arce fuerat positum, ut posteris esset monimentum, probat, quod multi aliter recensebant: Hippiam Atheniensium fuisse tyrannum, et liberos quinque suscepisse.”
41. Luciano [Lucian of Samosata], Come si deve scrivere la storia, ed. Franco Montanari and A. Barabino (Milan, 2002), paragraphs 19, 34.
42. F. Robortello, Emendationum libri duo, in the collective volume De convenientia, fols. 34v–37r; see also fol. 22v etc. For a minute reconstruction of the controversy, see William McCuaig, Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the Late Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 28ff., 43ff.
43. I have discussed this in my Rapporti di forza: Storia, retorica, prova (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000). Cotroneo (I trattatisti dell’ “ars historica”) emphasizes the Aristotelian and rhetorical dimension of Robortello’s Disputatio, without, however, grasping the connection between rhetoric and proof.
44. I have not been able to see G. Lloyd, “Annalen, Geschichten, Mythen,” in M. Teich and A. Müller, eds., Historia Magistra Vitae? in Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 16, n. 2 (2005): 27–47.
45. “Historiam ab annalibus quidam differre eo putant, quod, cum utrumque sit rerum gestarum narratio, earum tamen proprie rerum sit historia quibus rebus gerendis interfuerit is qui narret”; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, trans. John C. Rolfe, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 1:433.
46. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, 1:44: “Historia est eorum temporum quae vidimus, annales vero sunt eorum annorum quos aetas nostra non vidit.” I have used the Italian translation, Etimologie o origini, ed. A. Vilastro Canale (Turin: UTET, 2004), 1:183.
47. Sperone Speroni degli Alvarotti, Dialogo della Istoria, in Opere . . ., ed. Natale delle Laste and Marco Forcellini, 5 vols. (Venice, 1740), 2:210–328. The two editors called a previous edition “monstrous” (Dialoghi [Venice, Meietti, 1596], pp. 361–502). The passage is cited in Mario Pozzi, ed., Trattatisti del Cinquecento (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1978), 1:503. Actually, as was observed by Jean-Louis Fournel (“Il Dialogo della Istoria: Dall’oratore al religioso,” in Sperone Speroni, Filologia Veneta, no. 2 [1989]: 139–167: 150–151 [Padua: Editoriale Programma, 1989]), the first part of the dialogue printed by Meietti in 1596, which was based on a manuscript now lost, reproduces an earlier, quite different version. (Subsequently Fournel spoke, with unjustified caution in my opinion, of a probable, rather than a certain, priority: Les dialogues de Sperone Speroni: Libertés de parole et règles de l’écriture (Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1990), p. 235. This chronology is verified by the series of notes at the end of part 1 (Dialoghi, pp. 411–412) and developed in the subsequent edition—namely, the last (Opere, 2:250ff.). The letters which Alvise Mocenigo wrote to Speroni between 27 August 1585 and 11 October 1587 (Opere, 5:378–381) to bring him up-to-date on the copying of the Dialogo della Istoria concern the penultimate edition, as emerges from the passage (later suppressed) in which Pomponazzi’s old student, Speroni himself, born in 1500, is described as an “old man more than eighty-six years of age” (p. 373). Between October 1587 and 2 June 1588 (the date of his death) Speroni was strong enough to work on a new edition of part 1 of the Dialogo. This work, erroneously dated 1542, has been portrayed as the inspiration of the Disputatio on history written by “another of the big guns of sixteenth-century pedantry, Francesco Robortello” (G. Spini, “I trattatisti dell’arte storica,” pp. 113–114). A little pedantry would have permitted the reconstruction of the chronology of the two works, and their relationship.
48. On these personages, see the prefatory remarks by Mario Pozzi to the second part of Speroni’s Dialogo della Istoria, in Trattatisti del Cinquecento, pp. 725–727.
49. Speroni, Opere, 2:222. This piece of evidence did not attract the attention of the scholars (from Bruno Nardi to Paul Oskar Kristeller) who have studied the work of Pomponazzi. That the “booklet” appears to be irreparably lost is confirmed in A. Daniele, “Sperone Speroni, Bernardino Tomitano e l’Accademia degli Infiammati di Padova,” in Sperone Speroni, p. 16.
50. Speroni, Dialoghi (1596 ed.), p. 373. The passage does not appear in the edition of the Opere, a fact which did not prevent J. L. Fournel (“Il Dialogo della Istoria,” p. 163) from recognizing the identity of the former student.
51. Speroni, Dialoghi (1596 ed.), pp. 386, 392.
52. Speroni, Opere, 2:201. The dialogue was printed for the first time in the posthumous Dialoghi in 1596. The statement attributed to Trapolino resurrected, even more aggressively, a passage in which Julius Caesar Scaliger defined Livy as a poet for having, like Thucydides, inserted speeches which were total fabrications. (See J. C. Scaliger, Poetices libri septem [Genevae], Apud Antonium Vincentium, 1561, p. 5.)
53. On Trapolino, see Bruno Nardi, Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1965), pp. 104–121; and Eugenio Garin, Storia della filosofia italiana, 2 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), 2:564–565 (1st ed. Turin: Vallecchi, 1949); trans. Giorgio A. Pinton as History of Italian Philosophy (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008).
54. Mario Pozzi, “Sperone Speroni e il genere epidittico,” in Sperone Speroni, pp. 55–88.
55. Speroni, Opere, 2:319.
56. Ibid., pp. 319–320.
57. Reprinted in Mario Pozzi, ed., Discussioni linguistiche del Cinquecento (Turin: UTET, 1988).
58. Speroni, Dialoghi (1596 ed.), p. 387.
59. Ibid., p. 389.
60. Speroni, Opere, 5:380. For reasons explained above (n. 47), the letter should be referenced to the penultimate version of the Dialogo.
61. Beginning in 1578, Baronius resided at Santa Maria della Vallicella, where Antoniano preached weekly (a document from 1581 called him “one of our men, but who does not reside with us”): see Louis Ponnelle and Louis Bardet, Saint Philippe Néri et la société romaine de son temps, 1515–1595 (1929) (Paris: La Colombe, 1958). I have used the Italian version: San Filippo Neri e la società romana del suo tempo (1515–1595) (Florence: Ferrari, 1931), p. 352n10. Trans. Ralph Francis Kerr as St. Philip Neri and the Roman Society of His Times (1515–1595) (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932). See also the entries in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani by Alberto Pincherle (“Baronio, Cesare” [6:470–478]) and by Paolo Prodi (“Antoniano, Silvio” [3:511–515]). The “myth” of the influence of the Filippini on Baronius’s Annales transfigured a real situation (see Stefano Zen, Baronio storico: Controriforma e crisi del metodo umanistico [Naples: Vivarium, 1994], pp. 117ff.).
62. Pincherle limits himself to recording the title change (“Baronio, Cesare,” p. 472). In 1581, in the draft of a letter to Charles Borromeo, Filippo Neri mentioned “the Historia ecclesiastica” among the obligations of the Oratory (Ponnelle and Bardet, San Filippo Neri, p. 277).
63. C. Baronius, Annales Ecclesiastici (Romae: Ex typografia Vaticana, 1593), vol. 1, introd.: “Relinquemus historicis Ethnicis locutiones illas per longiorem ambitum periphrastice circumductas, orationesque summa arte concinnatas, fictas, ex sententia cuiusque compositas, ad libitum dispositas; et Annales potius quam Historiam scribemus.” Cf. also Cyriac K. Pullapilly, Caesar Baronius, Counter-Reformation Historian (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), p. 171. On the simplicity of preaching desired by the Oratory, see Ponnelle and Bardet, San Filippo Neri, pp. 328–329.
64. St. Jerome to Eustochius, Patrologia Latina 22:7, 30.
65. This echoes a letter from Cicero to Atticus: “Horridula mihi atque incompta visa sunt” (2:1).
66. Baronius, Annales Ecclesiastici, 1:4–5. Both A. Pincherle (“Baronio, Cesare,” p. 476) and Anthony Grafton (The Footnote. A Curious History [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999], p. 164) refer to this passage.
67. Anna Laura Lepschy and Giulio Lepschy, “Punto e virgola: Considerazioni sulla punteggiatura italiana e europea,” in Ilona Fried and Arianna Carta, eds., Le esperienze e le correnti culturali europee del Novecento in Italia e in Ungheria (Budapest: Eötvös Lorand University, 2003), pp. 9–22: 20–21. A. Castellani (“Le virgolette di Aldo Manuzio,” Studi Linguistici Italiani 22 [1996]: 106–109) notes that the introduction of quotation marks is an example of the dependence of the printed book on the manuscript: the marginal marks (“) are taken, in fact, from the diple used in Greek and Roman manuscripts: see P. McGurk, “Citation Marks in Early Latin Manuscripts,” Scriptorium 15 (1961): 3–13. For a precocious discussion on the diple, see Pietro Vettori, Explicationes suarum in Ciceronem castigationum, Parisiis 1538, p. 48 (apropos Cicero, Ad Atticum, 8: 2). C. J. Mitchell (“Quotation Marks, National Compositional Habits and False Imprints,” The Library, ser. 6, vol. 5 [1983]: 360–384: 362–363) will have to be corrected on the basis of Castellani’s findings.
68. An example of both (1597) is reproduced in Malcolm B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), p. 261. Much research remains to be done on the history of the note (perhaps located in the margin rather than at the foot of the page: but the difference does not affect the essential point). In Grafton’s brilliant “flashback” (The Footnote), what preceded “the Cartesian origins of the footnote”—namely, Pierre Bayle (chap. 7)—receives inadequate attention.
69. Agostino Mascardi, Dell’arte historica (Rome: Facciotti, 1636), pp. 25, 313–314.
70. Ibid., pp. 419ff, esp. pp. 426–427. Julius Caesar Scaliger, inadequately distinguishing between the two terms, had translated energeia as “efficacy” (efficacia) (Poetices, pp. 116ff.).
71. Mascardi, Dell’arte historica, pp. 122–123.
72. Ibid., pp. 125ff. Also by Mascardi, see La congiura del Conte Gio: Luigi de’ Fieschi (Venice: G. Scaglia, 1629); Oppositioni e difesa alla “Congiura del Conte Gio: Luigi de’ Fieschi” descritta da Agostino Mascardi (Venice, 1630).
73. The passage is quoted from Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 93–94. Curiously, Haskell does not mention the allusion to a figure whom he studied admirably in his Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963; many times reprinted with additions and corrections). There is much new material on Cassiano dal Pozzo and his activities in David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Several volumes of the Museo cartaceo have appeared in a beautifully illustrated series edited by Francis Haskell and Jennifer Montagu.
74. See Manuel Chrysoloras, Roma, parte del cielo: Confronto tra l’Antica e la Nuova Roma, ed. Enrico V. Maltese, trans. Guido Cortassa (Turin: UTET, 2000), p. 59n2 (for the identification of the addressee of the letter). The volume has a rich bibliography. See also Michael Baxandall, “Guarino, Pisanello and Manuel Chrysoloras,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1985): 183–204: 197–199; idem, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 80–81.
75. Chrysoloras, Roma, pp. 59–98: 65–66. In view of the mention of “Herodotus and other historians,” I do not follow Peter N. Miller, who proposes to translate historian with “description.” See his “Description Terminable and Interminable,” in Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi, eds., Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 357–358.
76. According to Maltese this statement “has no precedent in classical literature” (introd. to Chrysoloras, Roma, p. 20).
77. Ibid., p. 96.
I am grateful to Peter Brown, Sofia Boesch Gajano, Pier Cesare Bori, Augusto Campana, and Richard Landes for their valuable suggestions.
1. See Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 103–105.
2. Ibid., p. 104.
3. On “emic” and “etic,” see Kenneth L. Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of Structure of Human Behaviour, 2nd rev. ed. (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1967), pp. 37ff.; and Ernest Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 144–145. For Brown’s praise of another work by Mary Douglas (Natural Symbols), see Cult of the Saints, p. 177n102. Douglas’s seminal Purity and Danger is mentioned in Brown’s “The Saint as Exemplar in Classical Antiquity,” Representations 2 (1983): 1–25:11, in a context suggesting the author’s growing distance from “a strand of post-Durkheimian and of British functionalist anthropology.”
4. See, for example, Maurice Kriegel, “Un trait de psychologie sociale,” Annales, E.S.C. 31 (1976): 26–30.
5. Arnaldo Momigliano, in La contraddizione felice? Ernesto De Martino e gli altri, ed. Riccardo Di Donato (Pisa: ETS, 1990), p. 198. (This final sentence was Momigliano’s last-minute addition: see editor’s note, p. 11.) For a similar rejection of “history of historiography as history of political thought (pensiero storico),” see Delio Cantimori, “Storia e storiografia in Benedetto Croce” (1966), reprinted in Cantimori’s Storici e storia (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), pp. 397–409: 407–409. Momigliano was alluding implicitly to Hayden White and his followers, whereas Cantimori was directing himself to some unnamed followers of Croce, as well as, to a certain extent, to Croce himself. I have tried to explore the reasons behind this convergence in “Just One Witness” (see chap. 12).
6. See B. Croce, La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell’ arte (1895), now in Croce’s Primi saggi, 2nd ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1927), pp. 38ff. The importance of this early essay has been underlined in Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 381ff.
7. See, in this connection, my “Just One Witness” (chap. 12).
8. See G. Seguí Vidal, La carta-encíclica del obispo Severo . . . (Palma de Majorca: Seminario de los Misioneros de los Sagrados Corazones de Jesús y María, 1937), pp. 1ff. Translations in Castillian: Juan Bautista Dameto, La historia general del reyno balearico (Majorca: en casa de Gabriel Guasp, 1632), pp. 150ff.; J. de la Puerta Vizcaino, La sinagoga Balear, ó Historia de los Judíos de Mallorca (Palma de Majorca: Editorial Clumba, 1951 [reprint of 1857 ed.]). For the Latin text, followed by Castilian and Catalan translations, see Epistola Severi episcopi—Carta del Obispo Severo—Carta del Bisbe Sever, ed. E. Lafuente Hernandez (Minorca, 1981). But see now Severus of Minorca, Letter on the Conversion of the Jews, ed. and trans. Scott Bradbury (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), with an excellent introduction.
9. Bernhard Blumenkranz, “Altercatio Ecclesiae contra Synagogam. Texte inédit du Xe siècle,” Revue du Moyen Age Latin 10 (1954): 5–159: 46; idem, Juifs et Chrétiens dans le monde occidental (430–1096) (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1960), pp. 282–284; idem, Les auteurs chrétiens latins du Moyen Age (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1963), pp. 106–110; idem, “Juden und Jüdische in christliche Wundererzählung,” in idem, Juifs et Chrétiens: Patristique et Moyen Age (London: Variorum, 1977), pp. 419–420.
10. To the best of my knowledge, the question of the letter’s authenticity was not raised by any of the numerous reviewers of The Cult of the Saints.
11. See Seguí Vidal, La carta-encíclica, pp. 130ff.
12. See G. Seguí-Vidal and J. N. Hillgarth, La “Altercatio” y la basilica paleocristiana de Son Bou de Menorca (Palma de Majorca: Sociedad Arqueológica Lulliana, 1955).
13. José Vives, review of Seguí Vidal and Hillgarth, La “Altercatio,” in Hispania Sacra 9 (1956): 227–229.
14. See Blumenkranz, “Altercatio.”
15. Idem, Les auteurs, p. 108n14. On the letter of Severus studied from a linguistic point of view, see C. Paucker, “De latinitate scriptorum quorundam saeculi quarti et ineuntis quinti p. C. minorum observationes,” Zeitschrift für die Oesterreichischen Gymnasien 32 (1881): 481–499 (not cited by Blumenkranz). Strangely, no scholar has discussed the word argistinum, which, according to Severus, in the dialect of Minorca meant “small hail” (Severus, Letter on the Conversion, ed. Bradbury, p. 112: “grando minutissima, quam incolae insulae huius gentili sermone ‘argistinum vocant’ ”). To the best of my knowledge, argistinum is a hapax legomenon.
16. See L. Cracco Ruggini, “Note sugli ebrei in Italia dal IV al XVI secolo (a proposito di un libro e di altri contributi recenti),” Rivista Storica Italiana 76 (1964): 926–956: 936–938.
17. See M. C. Díaz y Díaz, “De patristica española,” Revista española de teologia 17 (1956): 3–12.
18. Patrologia Latina 41:833–854.
19. See Díaz y Díaz, “De patristica,” p. 12n30.
20. Some unconvincing doubts about this identification have been raised in Raymond Van Dam, “ ‘Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing’: The Letters of Consentius to Augustine,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37 (1986): 515–535.
21. St. Augustine, Œuvres, Bibliothèque Augustinienne (Paris: Desclée, De Brouwer, 1936-), vol. 46B, Lettres 1*–29* (ed. J. Divjak, 1987), pp. 184ff. For the relevant passage, see pp. 248–250: “Eodem tempore accidit, ut quaedam apud nos ex praecepto domini mirabilia gererentur. Quae cum mihi beatus antistes, frater paternitatis tuae Severus episcopus cum ceteris qui affuerant rettulisset, irrupit propositum meum summis viribus caritatis et, ut epistolam quae rei gestae ordinem contineret ipse conscriberet, sola a me verba mutuatus est.” Consentius mentions also that he wrote an anti-Jewish treatise (one that apparently has not survived), which he asks his correspondent not to reveal. Peter Brown has kindly brought to my attention the importance of Consentius’s letter, as well as articles about him.
22. J. Wankenne, in St. Augustine, Œuvres, 46B:492.
23. Madeleine Moreau, “Lecture de la lettre II* de Consentius à Augustin,” in Les lettres de Saint Augustin decouvertes par Johannes Divjak, communications présentées au colloque des 20 et 21 septembre 1981 (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1983), pp. 215–223.
24. E. D. Hunt, “St. Stephen in Minorca: An Episode in Jewish-Christian Relations in the Early 5th Century A.D,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., vol. 33, pt. 1 (1982): 106–123; L.-J. Wankenne and B. Hambenne, “La lettre-encyclique de Severus évêque de Minorque au début du Ve siècle,” Revue Bénédictine 103 (1987): 13–27. Both articles take for granted the early date as well as the authenticity of Severus’s letter; only the second of the two, more limited in scope, takes into account the letter by Consentius (12*). For an early discussion of it, see J. Amengual i Batle, “Noves Fonts par a la histôria de les Balears dins el Baix Imperi,” Bolletí de la Societat Arqueològica Lulliana, ser. 2, vol. 37 (1980): 99–111.
25. Not in order to “acquire relics of St. Stephen” (they had not been discovered yet), as stated in W. H. G. Frend, “The North-African Cult of Martyrs,” in idem, Archeology and History in the Study of Christianity (London: Variorum, 1988), chap.11, p. 164.
26. Patrologia Latina 41:805–816.
27. On this date, corresponding to 2 February 418, see Victor Saxer, Mort, martyrs, reliques en Afrique chrétienne aux premiers siècles (Paris: Beauchesne, 1980), p. 246.
28. I am very grateful to Richard Landes for having pointed this out to me. See, in general, his essay “Let the Millennium Be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western Chronography, 100–800 CE,” in W. Verbek, D. Verhelst, and A. Welkenhuysen, eds., The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages (Louvain: Louvain University Press, 1988), pp. 137–211, esp. pp. 156–160, on the epistolary discussion, which took place in either 418 or 419 (i.e., at approximately the time of Severus’s letter), between Augustine and Hesychius, a Dalmatian bishop, concerning the end of the world. On the date of Orosius’s work, see Adolf Lippold’s introduction to Orosius, Le storie contro i pagani, trans. A. Bartalucci, 2 vols. (Milan: Fondazione L. Valla, 1976), 1:xxii.
29. P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, a Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), passim; Paul Monceaux, Histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne depuis les origines jusqu’à l’invasion arabe (Paris: E. Leroux, 1923), 7:42–45.
30. L. Cracco Ruggini, “Ambrogio e le opposizioni anticattoliche fra il 383 e il 390,” Augustinianum 14 (1974): 409–449; Manlio Simonetti, “La politica antiariana di Ambrogio,” in Giuseppe Lazzati, ed., Ambrosius episcopus . . . Atti (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1976), 1:266–285; A. Lenox-Conyngham, “The Topography of the Basilica Conflict of A.D. 385/6 in Milan,” Historia 31 (1982): 353–363; Gérard Nauroy, “Le fouet et le miel: Le combat d’Ambroise en 386 contre l’Arianisme milanais,” Recherches Augustiniennes 23 (1986): 3–86.
31. De vera religione 25:47: “Cum enim Ecclesia catholica per totum orbem diffusa atque fundata sit, nec miracula illa in nostra tempora durare permissa sunt, ne animus semper visibilia quaereret, ut eorum consuetudine frigesceret genus humanum” (quoted by G. Bardy in a note on miracles included in his edition of The City of God [Augustine, Œuvres, Bibliothèque Augustinienne 37, pp. 825–831]); Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les “Confessions” de Saint Augustin, enlarged ed. (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1968), pp. 139ff.
32. Carlo Cecchelli, “Note sopra il culto delle reliquie nell’Africa romana,” Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia 15 (1939): 125–134: 131–132.
33. Saxer, Mort, martyrs, reliques, pp. 245ff. See also Cyrille Lambot, “Collection antique de sermons de S. Augustin,” Revue Bénédictine 57 (1947): 89–108: 105–106; idem, “Le sermons de saint Augustin pour les fêtes des martyrs,” ibid. 79 (1969): 82–97: 94; Pierre Patrick Verbraken, Études critiques sur les sermons authentiques de Saint Augustin (The Hague and Steenbergen: In Abbatia S. Petri, 1976), sermons 314–320.
34. Saxer, Mort, martyrs, reliques, pp. 293–294.
35. Michel van Esbroeck, “Jean II de Jérusalem et les cultes de S. Etienne, de la Sainte-Sion et de la Croix,” Analecta Bollandiana 102 (1984): 99–134.
36. Patrologia Latina 41:813, 815–816.
37. On the two versions, see P. Peeters, “Le sanctuaire de la lapidation de S. Etienne,” Analecta Bollandiana 27 (1908): 359–368: 364–367; J. Martin, “Die revelatio S. Stephani und Verwandtes,” Historisches Jahrbuch 77 (1958): 419–433. On the entire event, see E. D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, A.D. 312–460 (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 212–220.
38. Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: Étude sur les relations entre Chrétiens et Juifs dans l’empire romain (135–425), 2nd ed. (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1964).
39. Theodor Mommsen and Paul M. Meyer, eds., Codex Theodosianus, 2 vols. in 3, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1962), pp. 892–893.
40. Jean Juster, Les Juifs dans l’Empire romain: Leur condition juridique, économique et sociale (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1914), 1:391ff.; Alfredo M. Rabello, “The Legal Condition of the Jews in the Roman Empire,” in H. Temporini, ed., Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1980), pp. 713–716 (but in A.D. 415 patriarch Gamaliel was not “deposed,” as we read at p. 714n212); Bernard S. Bachrach, “The Jewish Community of the Later Roman Empire,” in Jacob Neusner and Ernest S. Frerichs, eds., “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), pp. 399–421: 412–415; Günther Stemberger, Juden und Christen im Heiligen Land (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987), pp. 208–213.
41. St. John Chrysostom, Discourses against Judaizing Christians, trans. P. W. Harkins (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1979). See also Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and Wayne A. Meeks and Robert L. Wilken, Jews and Christians in Antioch in the First Four Centuries of the Common Era (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979).
42. Marcel Simon, “La polémique antijuive de Saint Jean Chrysostome et le mouvement judaïsant d’Antioche,” in idem, Recherches d’histoire Judéo-Chrétienne (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1962), pp. 140–153.
43. Cardinal M. Rampolla [del Tindaro], “Martyre et sépulture des Macchabées,” Revue de l’Art Chrétien, ser. 4, vol. 10 (1899): 290–305; 377–392; 457–465: 388ff.
44. Elias J. Bikerman (“Les Macchabées de Malalas,” Byzantion 21 [1951]: 63–83: 74–75) remarks that synagogues were regarded as holy places in Roman law, not in Jewish ritual; but the attitude of the Christians (including those who seized the Antioch synagogue) was presumably closer to the Roman model.
45. St. Ambrose, Ep. 40, 16, quoted in Lellia Cracco Ruggini, “Ebrei e Orientali nell’Italia settentrionale fra il IV e il VI sec. d.C.,” Studia et Monumenta Historiae et Iuris 25 (1959): 198–199.
46. William H. C. Frend, “Blandina et Perpetua: Two Early Christian Heroines,” in Jean Rouge and Robert Turran, eds., Les martyrs de Lyon (177) (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1978), pp. 167–177: 173.
47. W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1967). I cite from the Oxford (1965) ed., pp, 21, 87.
48. Marcel Simon, “Les Saints d’Israël dans la dévotion de l’Église ancienne,” in Recherches d’histoire, pp. 154–180:157 (Gregory of Nazianzus, Hom. 3 in Mach., in Patrologia Graeca 35:627).
49. “Judaei igitur exemplis se Machabaei temporis cohortantes, mortem quoque pro defendendis legitimis suis desiderabant” (Severus, Letter on the Conversion, ed. Bradbury, p. 86).
50. Marcel Simon made a stimulating attempt in this direction: St. Stephen and the Hellenists in the Primitive Church (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1958).
51. The importance of this theme had been underlined by Bernhard Blumenkranz (Les auteurs, p. 108n14).
52. Brown, “The Saint as Exemplar,” p. 12.
53. On the subject of the foregoing pages, see now the comprehensive critical survey in I. Amengual i Batle, “Consentius/Severus de Minorca: Vint-i-cinc anys d’estudis, 1975–2000,” Arxin de Textos Catalans Antics 20 (2001): 599–700.
1. M. de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Albert Thibaudet (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 24; The Essays, trans. E.J. Trechmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, n. d.), p. 1. [Translators’ note: In some instances below, the Penguin edition of the Essays, in the translation by J. M. Cohen, is followed.] In the first volume of his Recherches de la France (Orléans, 1567), Étienne Pasquier emphasized that he was addressing himself neither to patrons nor to friends, but simply to “his reader.” Montaigne’s address “au lecteur,” coming from a nobleman, is understandable, but this takes nothing away from the provocative character of his subject.
2. Montaigne, Essais, pp. 262–263; The Essays, p. 224. See also Essais, “Apologie de Raimond Sebond,” pp. 502–503.
3. For another allusion to the parallel between the Golden Age and the American natives, see “De l’experience” (Essais, p. 1196).
4. Gerard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987).
5. Montaigne, Essais, p. 545; The Essays, “Apology for Raimond Sebond,” p. 487.
6. Torquato Tasso, Aminta, vv. 656ff. The parallel between Montaigne and Tasso has been noted in Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 57. See also Ronsard, Discours contre fortune, in which he addresses the explorer Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon in the following terms: “Comme ton Amérique, où le peuple incognu / Erre innocentement tout farouche et tout nu, / D’habit tout aussi nu qu’il est nu de malice, / Qui ne cognoist les noms de vertu ny de vice, / De Senat ny de Roy, qui vit à son plaisir / Porté de l’appetit de son premier desir, / Et qui n’a dedans l’ame ainsi que nous emprainte / La frayeur de la loy qui nous fait vivre en crainte: / Mais suivant sa nature est seul maistre de soy / Soy-mesme est sa loy, son Senat et son Roy: / Qui de coutres trenchans la terre n’importune, / Laquelle comme l’air à chascun est commune, / Et comme l’eau d’un fleuve, est commun tout leur bien, / Sans procez engendrer de ce mot Tien et Mien” (“Le second livre des poèmes,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Gustave Cohen [Paris: Gallimard, 1994], p. 778). Cf. Elizabeth Armstrong, Ronsard and the Age of Gold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), and, more generally, Nicole Pellegrin, “Vêtements de peau(x) et de plumes: La nudité des Indiens et la diversité du monde au XVIe siècle,” in Voyager à la Renaissance, Actes du Colloque de Tours 1983, sous la direction de Jean Céard et Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris: Éditions Maisonneuve & Larose, 1987), pp. 509–530.
7. L. F. Benedetto, “Il Montaigne a Sant’Anna,” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana 73 (1919): 213–234: 218–219n2; Isida Cremona, L’influence de l’Aminta sur la pastorale dramatique française (Paris: Vrin, 1977), pp. 33ff. (who ignores the previously cited article).
8. Richard A. Sayce and David Maskell, A Descriptive Bibliography of Montaigne’s “essais,” 1580–1700 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1983). Tasso received the first copies of the first edition of the Aminta, published in Cremona, on 3 December 1580 (cf. La raccolta tassiana della Biblioteca Civica “A. Mai” di Bergamo [n.p., n.d.], p. 261).
9. Montaigne, Essais, p. 546; The Essays, “Apology for Raimond Sebond,” p. 487; Benedetto, “Il Montaigne a Sant’Anna.”
10. La métamorphose d’Ovide figurée (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1557; facsimile reprint 1933, Collection d’unica et de livres rares, no. 3, with R. Brun’s descriptive leaflet on the illustrations). Cf. Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), first page, and the appendix, pp. 197–198. On the author of the etchings, see Natalis Rondot, Bernard Salomon, peintre et tailleur d’histoire à Lyon, au XVIe siècle (Lyon: Imprimerie de Mougin-Rusand, 1897), who remarks (p. 53) that the grotesques accompanying the French translation of Ovid are similar to the illustrations of La plaisante et joyeuse histoire de Gargantua et Pantagruel (see Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel [La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1989], with a brilliant introduction by M. Jeanneret, “Rire à la face du monstre”). Salomon, who frequently used a five-pointed star as a signature (ibid., p. 27), might have been a converted Jew. See also M. D. Henkel, “Illustrierte Ausgaben von Ovids Metamorphosen im XV., XVI., und XVII. Jahrhundert,” Bibliothek Warburg Vorträge 1926–1927 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1930), pp. 58–144: 77ff. Some of Salomon’s grotesques, despite their occasional obscenity, were also used in Clement Marot and Théodore de Bèze, Les Pseaumes mis en rime françoise, à Lyon, par Jean de Tournes, 1563, ff. Q i v (ps. LICX), R 5v (ps. LXVIII), etc.
11. Levin (Myth of the Golden Age, pp. 197–198) notices that “the second of the two summarizing quatrains, departing from Ovid and foreshadowing Tasso, sounds the praise of free love.”
12. Nicole Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques à la Renaissance, Studies of the Warburg Institute 31 (London and Leiden, 1969); idem, in N. Dacos-Caterina Furlan, Giovanni da Udine, vol. 1 (Udine: Casamassima, 1987). See also H. de Geymüller, Les du Cerceau, leur vie et leur œuvre (Paris and London: J. Rouam & G. Wood, 1887). More evidence can be found in Carlo Ossola, Autunno del Rinascimento (Florence: Olschki, 1971), pp. 184–207.
13. Montaigne, Essais, “De l’amité,” p. 218 (The Essays, pp. 182–183). André Chastel chose this passage as a starting point for his essay La grottesque (Paris: Le Promeneur, 1988).
14. François Enaud, “Peintures murales de la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle decouvertes au château de Villeneuve-Lembrun (Puy-de Dôme),” in André Chastel, ed., Actes du colloque international sur l’art de Fontainebleau (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975), pp. 185–197: 194. See also Jean Adhémar, “L’estampe et la transmission des formes maniéristes,” in Le triomphe du Maniérisme Européen (Amsterdam: Rijks-Museum, 1955), pp. 34–36.
15. J. Céard, La Nature et les prodiges: L’insolite, au XVIe siècle en France (Geneva: Droz, 1977), pp. 387ff. (chap. 16: “L’idée de variété dans les Essais”); Imbrie Buffum, L’influence du voyage de Montaigne sur les “Essais” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), pp. 121–133 (chap. 5, “Unité et diversité”). For a remarkable parallel, see Cristina Del Lungo, “La Zucca del Doni e la struttura della ‘grottesca,’ ” Paradigma 2 (1978): 71–91.
16. M. de Montaigne, Journal de voyage. . . en Italie . . ., ed. Alessandro D’Ancona (Città di Castello: Lapi, 1895), pp. 163–164, 177–178, 527–530 (still important even after the recent edition of François Rigolot [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992]). See also Lino Pertile, “Montaigne in Italia: Arte, tecnica e scienza dal Journal agli Essais,” Saggi e Ricerche di Letteratura Francese, n.s., vol. 12 (1973): 49–82; Richard A. Sayce, “The Visual Arts in Montaigne’s Journal de Voyage,” in Raymond C. La Charité, ed., O un amy! Essays on Montaigne in Honor of Donald M. Frame (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1977), pp. 219–241.
17. Montaigne, Essais, p. 344.
18. See André Chastel, The Palace of Apollidon (The Zaharoff Lecture for 1984–1985) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 3.
19. Vitruvius, De architectura, ed. Carol Herselle Krinsky (photostatic reprint of the 1521 edition) (Munich: Fink Verlag 1969), introduction pp. 5–6; text, fol. 31v. See also Architecture ou art de bien bastir, de Marc Vitruve Pollion, Autheur Romain Antique, mis de latin en François par Ian Martin . . . à Paris 1547, fols. C ii v ff.
20. Montaigne, Journal de voyage, pp. 163–164 (The Works of Michel de Montaigne, ed. W. Hazlitt, 2nd ed. [London 1845], p. 565).
21. Detlef Heikamp, “La grotta grande del giardino di Boboli,” Antichità Viva 4, no. 4 (1965): 27–43; Emil Maurer, “Zwischen Gestein und Gestalt: Zur grossen Grotte im Boboli-Garten in Florenz” (1977), in Manierismus: Figura serpentinata und andere Figurenideale (Zürich: Fink, 2001), pp. 131–137; Ida Maria Botto, “Buontalenti, Bernardo,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 15:280–284. See also W. Smyth, “Pratolino,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 20 (1961): 155–168; Boboli ’90: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, 2 vols. (Florence: Edifir, [1991]). On Castello, see also L. Châtelet-Lange, “The Grotto of the Unicorn and the Garden of the Villa of Castello,” Art Bulletin 50 (1968): 51–58.
22. Quoted from Heikamp, “La grotta grande,” p. 43.
23. One of Montaigne’s recurrent appreciations of Plutarch reads: “Il me semble avoir veu en Plutarque (qui est de tous les autheurs que je cognoisse celuy qui a mieux meslé l’art à la nature et le jugement à la science) . . .” (Essais, p. 1006); Essays (Penguin ed.), p. 264: “I think that it was in Plutarch—who of all the authors I know is the best at combining art with nature, and judgement with knowledge—that I read.. . .”
24. E. Kris, “Der Stil ‘rustique’: Die Verwendung des Naturabgusses bei Wenzel Jamnitzer und Bernard Palissy,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, n.s. 1 (1926): 137–208.
25. Ibid., p. 196: “. . . der grosse Man zeigt sich hier im kleinen als echtes Kind seiner Zeit.” See also the perceptive pages in Michel Butor, Essai sur les Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), pp. 66–71, 114–119. Cf. Naomi Miller, “Domain of Illusion: The Grotto in France,” in Fons Sapientiae: Renaissance Garden Fountains (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1978), pp. 175–205; J. Céard, “Relire Bernard Palissy,” Revue de l’Art 78 (1987): 77–83.
26. S. Serlio, Regole generali di architettura, 3rd ed. (Venice, 1551), book 4, fols. xiv-xiir. See James S. Ackerman, “The Tuscan/Rustic Order: A Study in the Metaphoric Language of Architecture,” in Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 495–545. Cf. Natura e artificio: L’ordine rustico, le fontane e gli automi nella cultura del Manierismo europeo, ed. Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1981).
27. This point was emphasized in E. H. Gombrich, “Zum Werke Giulio Romanos,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, n.s., vol. 8 (1934): 79–104; vol. 9 (1935): 121–150: 86–87 (an essay to which I am greatly indebted). See also idem, “Architecture and Rhetoric in Giulio Romano’s Palazzo del Te,” in New Light on Old Masters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 161–170.
28. The importance of Serlio’s Libro estraordinario has been underlined in John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 263–286. For a useful overview of the literature on Serlio (and a less useful attempt to present him as a postmodernist), see idem, “Serlio and the History of Architecture,” in Giovanna Perini, ed., Il luogo e il ruolo della città di Bologna tra Europa continentale e mediterraneo (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1992), pp. 181–199. See also Christof Thoenens, ed., Sebastiano Serlio: Sesto seminario internazionale di storia dell’architettura (Milan: Electa, 1989).
29. I have used the Venice 1566 edition. Ackerman’s quotation (Distance Points, p. 543, with a reference to the forest at Fontainebleau) seems to have been taken from the first edition, which I have not seen. On the presence at Fontainebleau of Rosso, Primaticcio, and other Italian painters, see Sylvie Béguin, L’École de Fontainebleau: Le Maniérisme à la cour de France (Paris: Éditions Gonthier-Seghers, 1960).
30. See Bernard Palissy, Architecture et Ordonnance de la grotte rustique de Monseigneur le duc de Montmorency connestable de France, réimprimé d’après l’édition de La Rochelle 1563 (Paris, 1919).
31. Antoine Compagnon, La seconde main, ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979), pp. 299ff.
32. “Nos vero, ut captus noster est, incuriose et inmeditate ac prope etiam subrustice ex ipso loco ac tempore hibernarum vigiliarum Atticas noctes inscripsimus” (Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, preface).
33. Here I am developing some of the implications in “Les après midi périgourdins,” the title chosen by Compagnon for his chapter on Montaigne (La seconde main, pp. 299ff.).
34. S. Serlio, Libro estraordinario, nel quale si dimostrano trenta porte di opera rustica mista con diversi ordini, in Venetia 1566, fols. 29v–30r.
35. S. Serlio, Libro primo (-quinto) d’architettura, in Venetia 1566, bk. IV, chap. 11, fol. 192r.
36. S. Serlio, Regole generali, fol. XI v.
37. Montaigne, Essais, p. 242; Essays (Penguin ed.), p. 108.
38. M. Eyquem de Montaigne, Essais, réproduction photographique de l’édition originale de 1580, ed. D. Martin (Geneva and Paris: Droz, 1976), p. 303v.
39. Montaigne, Essais, p. 1078. See A. Chastel, “Le fragmentaire, l’hybride, l’inachévé,” in Fables, formes, figures (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 2:33–45; Jean Lafond, “Achèvement, inachèvement dans les Essais,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, ser. 7, nos. 13–16 (July–December 1988/January–June 1989): 175–188; Arnaud Tripet, “Projet, développement, achèvement dans les Essais,” ibid., pp. 189–201.
40. Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954), pp. 17–18. Galileo’s Considerazioni have been dated between 1595 and 1609 (ibid., pp. 19–20n2). See also G. Galilei, Scritti letterari, ed. Alberto Chiari (Florence: Le Monnier, 1970), pp. 493–494. For other pertinent references, see Ossola, Autunno del Rinascimento, pp. 86–94.
41. Arnold Hauser, Der Manierismus (Munich: Beck, 1964), pp. 325–327; R. A. Sayce, “Renaissance et Maniérisme dans l’œuvre de Montaigne,” in Renaissance, Maniérisme, Baroque (Paris: Vrin, 1972), pp. 137–151.
42. G. Galilei, Scritti letterari, pp. 502–503.
43. Panofsky, Galileo, pp. 60–61.
44. Montaigne, Essais, p. 46; The Essays, p. 208. Cf. also Kris, Der Stil “rustique,” p. 143. See also Julius von Schlosser, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (Leipzig, 1908) (I have consulted the Italian translation, accompanied by useful notes: Raccolte d’arte e di meraviglie del tardo Rinascimento, ed. Paola di Paolo [Florence: Sansoni, 1974]).
45. For the moral implications of the style, see E. H. Gombrich, “Visual Metaphors of Value in Art,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (London: Phaidon, 1963), pp. 12–29, 163–165. Cf. also my “Stile,” in Occhiacci di legno: Nove riflessioni sulla distanza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998), pp. 136–170.
46. On this point, see R. A. Sayce, “Renaissance Mannerism and Baroque,” in The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), pp. 319–320.
47. Montaigne, Essais, p. 242. See Frank Lestringant, André Thevet, cosmographe des derniers Valois (Geneva: Droz, 1991) (with abundant bibliography).
48. A. Thevet, Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (Paris, 1584), fol. b iv r. The editions and translations of the work are recorded in Lestringant, André Thevet, pp. 376–381. Cf. Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 51–52.
49. Thevet, Les vrais pourtraits, fol. 650r (reproduced in Frank Lestringant, ed., Le Brésil de Montaigne: Le Nouveau Monde des “Essais” (1580–1592) [Paris: Chandeigne, 2005], p. 204).
50. Cited in Jean Baudry, introduction to André Thevet, Les singularitez de la France Antarctique, autrement nommée Amérique (Paris: Le Temps, 1981), p. 40.
51. Lestringant, André Thevet, p. 380.
52. Eugene Müntz, “Le musée des portraits de Paul Jove: Contribution pour servir à l’iconographie du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance,” Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 36, pt. 2 (1900).
53. This was stressed in Federico Chabod, “Paolo Giovio,” in idem, Scritti sul Rinascimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), pp. 243–267: 262ff.
54. Müntz, “Le musée,” pp. 13–14. On a general level, see Christian F. Feest, “Mexico and South America in the European Wunderkammer,” in Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 237–244.
55. Lestringant, André Thevet, pp. 38–39. See also Jean Adhémar, Frère André Thevet. Profils Franciscains 28 (Paris: Éditions Franciscaines, 1947), p. 28.
56. Lestringant, André Thevet, p. 378.
57. Montaigne, Essais, pp. 251–252.
58. This is the kind of terminology used, in general, in Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). But see the perceptive comments in Antoine Compagnon, Chat-en-poche: Montaigne et l’allégorie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), pp. 41ff. (on Todorov and R. Romano).
59. R. A. Sayce, “Imitation and Originality: Montaigne and Books,” in Sayce, The Essays of Montaigne, pp. 31–32, where he has perceived an antiquarian element in the essay “Des coustumes anciennes.”
60. Montaigne, Journal de voyage, pp. 274–275: “J’y vis aussi un Virgile ecrit à mein, d’une lettre infiniement grosse, & de ce caractere long & etroit que nous voïons ici aus inscriptions du tamps des ampereurs, come environ le siecle de Constantin, qui ont quelque façon//gothique, & ont perdu cete proportion carré, qui est aus vielles escritures latines.”
61. Sebastiano Timpanaro considers it as an “enormity” that in the past these verses could have been considered authentic (Per la storia della filologia virgiliana antica, Quaderni di Filologia e Critica 6 [Rome: Salerno, 1986], pp. 16–17). In fact, this attitude is still shared, for example, by Jacques Perret (Enéide [Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981], p. xlvi). See also the detailed discussion in Walter Schmid, Vergil-Probleme, Göppinger Akademische Beiträge 120 (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1983), who attributes to Vergil the authorship of the four verses. Cf. also Remigio Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci nei secoli XIV e XV (1905), edizione anastatica con nuove aggiunte e correzioni dell’autore a cura di Eugenio Garin, 2 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1967), 1:154.
62. Montaigne, Journal de voyage, p. 275n1.
63. Poliziano had dated the codex to approximately the sixth century: see Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici, 1:154, 169. A comparison between the illuminations of the Vat. lat. 3867 and sculptures of the age of Constantine was first proposed in C. Nordenfolk, Der Kalender vom Jahre 354 und die lateinische Buchmalerei des IV. Jahrhunderts (Göteborg, 1936), pp. 31–36. Cf. Earl Rosenthal, The Illuminations of the Vergilius Romanus (Cod. Vat. Lat. 3867): A Stylistic and Iconographic Analysis (Zürich: Urs Graf-Verlag, 1972), p. 9; and David H. Wright, The Roman Vergil and the Origins of Medieval Book Design (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Wright leans toward a date about 480. Unless I am mistaken, none of the above mention Montaigne.
64. Claude de Bellièvre, Souvenirs de voyage en Italie et en Orient: Notes historiques, pièces de vers, ed. Charles Perrat (Geneva: Droz, 1956), pp. 4–5. (In his notebook Bellièvre reproduced the manuscript’s peculiar lettering.) See also Anthony Grafton, “The Scholarship of Poliziano and Its Context,” in idem, Defenders of the Text (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 47–48.
65. Montaigne, Essais, p. 189; Essays, “On the Education of Children” (Penguin ed.), p. 61 (slightly modified).
66. On this point, see Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315.
67. I have dealt with this theme fleetingly in Rapporti di forza: Storia, retorica, prova (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000), pp. 100–105.
68. Lucien Febvre, Civilisation: Le mot et l’idée, Publications du Centre International de Synthèse (Paris, 1930), pp. 1–55; E. Benveniste, “Civilisation: Contribution à l’histoire du mot,” in Éventail de l’histoire vivante: Hommage à Lucien Febvre (Paris: A. Colin, 1953), 1: 47–54.
69. Montaigne, Essais, pp. 251–252. These observations had been prepared by the quotation from Plutarch that appears at the beginning of the essay: “. . . King Pyrrhus remarked ‘I do not know what barbarians these are—for so the Greeks called all foreign nations—but the ordering of the army before me has nothing barbarous about it’ ” (Montaigne, Essays [Penguin ed.], p. 105). On this, see Edwin M. Duval, “Lessons of the New World: Design and Meaning in Montaigne’s ‘Des cannibales’ (1:31) and ‘Des coches’ (3:6),” Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 95ff.
70. Montaigne, Essais, pp. 242–243; Essays (Penguin ed.), p. 108.
71. Montaigne, Essais, p. 248; Essays (Penguin ed.), pp. 113–114.
72. Montaigne, Essais, pp. 243–244; Essays (Penguin ed.), p. 109.
73. Montaigne, Essais, p. 251; Essays (Penguin ed.), p. 117.
74. Montaigne, Essais, p. 253; Essays (Penguin ed.), p. 119.
1. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Albert Thibaudet (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 1156. See Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 119, in which Davis uses the famous Renaissance translation of Montaigne by John Florio (1603): “I remember . . . that me thought he proved his imposture, whom he condemned as guiltie, so wondrous-strange and sofar exceeding both our knowledge and his owne, who was judge, that I found much boldness in the sentence, which had condemned him to be hanged” (facsimile reprint of the original edition [Menston: Scholar Press, 1969], p. 615).
2. Montaigne, Essais, p. 1159. “When all is done, it is an over-valuing of one’s conjectures, by them to cause a man to be burned alive” (Florio translation, p. 1159). Leonardo Sciascia dwells on this passage in his Sentenza memorabile (Palermo: Sellerio, 1982), p. 11, where he reviews the various accounts produced by the case of Martin Guerre.
3. Montaigne, Essais, p. 1155. “I am drawne to hate likely things, when men goe about to set them downe as infallible. I love these words or phrases, which mollifie and moderate the temeritie of our propositions: ‘It may be,’ ‘Peradventure,’ ‘In some sort,’ ‘Some,’ ‘It is saide,’ ‘I think,’ and such like. . . .” (Florio translation, p. 614).
4. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, p. viii.
5. See now my preface to the Italian translation of Marc Bloch, I re taumaturghi (Turin: Einaudi, 1973).
6. See “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 96–125: 117.
7. Georges Duby, Le dimanche de Bouvines (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).
8. I have found stimulating the article by Luigi Ferrajoli on the so-called “Case of 7 April,” Il Manifesto, 23 and 24 February 1983; see especially the first part. But the question of “judicial historiography” alluded to there will have to be studied further.
9. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, p. 5.
10. J. de Coras, Arrest memorable, du Parlement de Tolose, Contenant une histoire prodigieuse, de nostre temps. . . (Lyon: Antoine Vincent, 1561), dedication.
11. In addition to the copy cited by Davis, another exemplar from this printing run with a misprint in the title (Histoite rather than Histoire) is housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale (call no. Rés. Z. Fontanieu 171, 12). The sonnet does not appear in a late printing, not mentioned by Davis (Recit veritable d’un faux et supposé mary, arrivé à une Femme notable, au pays de Languedoc, en ce derniers troubles, à Paris chez Jean Brunet, ruë neufve sainct Louys, à la Crosse d’Or, MDCXXXVI: BN 8o. LN 27. 27815).
12. J. de Coras, Arrest memorable (Paris, 1572), Arrest CIIII. In the introduction to this expanded edition, the printer, Gaillot du Pré, in addition to defining the small work as a “tragicomédie,” as Davis notes, also declares that he has not “changé un iota du langaige de l’autheur, à fin que plus facilement on puisse discerner cette presente coppie, avec plusieurs autres imprimées parcidevant: l’autheur desquelles s’estoit tellement pleu à Amadizer, qu’il avoit assez maigrement récité la verité du fait.” It is not clear what is meant by this statement: the term “coppie” makes one think of previous defective editions of Coras’s text. “Amadizer,” instead, suggests actual fictional revisions of the Martin Guerre story on the model of the Amadis of Gaul. Favoring this second hypothesis is the fact that the first twelve books of the French translation of the Amadis had been reprinted between 1555 and 1560 by Vincent Sertenas and Estienne Groulleau, and that Sertenas himself had published Le Sueur’s Histoire admirable. Thus, the person who had “maigrement récité la verité du fait” could be identified with Sertenas.
13. Coras, Arrest memorable (1572 ed.), pp. 146, 149.
14. [Guillaume Le Sueur], Histoite [sic] admirable, fol. Aiir.
15. Coras, Arrest memorable (1572 ed.), p. 39.
16. Tzvetan Todorov has embarked on this type of research with his excellent book The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
17. For two recent examples, see Jürgen Kocka and Thomas Nipperday, eds., Theorie und Erzählung in der Geschichte. Theorie und Geschichte 3 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979); Hayden White, “La questione della narrazione nella teoria contemporanea della storiografia,” in Paolo Rossi, ed., La teoria della storiografia oggi (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1983), pp. 33–78. See also the ambitious work by Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit (Paris: Seuil, 1983), vol. 1; trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer as Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
18. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jorn Rüsen, in Rossi, La teoria della storiografia oggi, pp. 109, 200. However, they do not go as far as to reformulate the terms in which the question is generally posed.
19. Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past and Present 85 (1979): 3–24; E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Revival of Narrative: Some Comments,” ibid. 86 (1980): 3–8.
20. Ed. J. Donald Crowley (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. [1].
21. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, an Authoritative Text, Contemporary Reactions, Criticism, ed. Sheridan Baker (New York and London: Norton, 1973), p. 58.
22. See Fielding, Tom Jones, chap. 1 of bk. 8 (p. 304). On the antithesis between the age of the chronicle and of the epic and the age of the novel, see the enlightening essay by Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations (extracts of Angelus novus), ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, 1968), pp. 83–110. Karl-Heinz Stierle takes it as his point of departure in “Erfahrung und Narrative Form,” in Kocka and Nipperday, Theorie und Erzählung, pp. 85ff.
23. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 292.
24. Fielding, Tom Jones, 1:516.
25. Ibid., pp. 417–418.
26. The quotation is from Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 13.
27. Honoré de Balzac in Twenty-Five Volumes (New York: Collier, 1900), 1:15. For the original text, cf. Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 7: “La Société française allait être l’historien, je ne devais être que le secrétaire.. . . Peut-être pouvais-je arriver à écrire l’histoire oubliée par tant d’historiens, celle des mœurs. Avec beaucoup de patience et de courage, je réaliserais, sur la France au XIXe siècle, ce livre que nous regrettons tous, que Rome, Athènes, Tyr, Memphis, la Perse, l’Inde ne nous ont malheureusement pas laissé sur leurs civilisations.. . .”
28. Balzac in Twenty-Five Volumes, 21:12–13 (slightly modified); La Comédie humaine, pp. 12–13: “J’accorde aux faits constants, quotidiens, secrets ou patents, aux actes de la vie individuelle, à leurs causes et à leurs principes, autant d’importance que jusqu’alors les historiens ont attaché aux événements de la vie publique des nations.”
29. Renato Bertacchini, ed., Documenti e prefazioni del romanzo italiano dell’Ottocento (Rome: Editrice Studium, 1969), pp. 32ff., which reprints the introduction to the 3rd ed. of the Falco della rupe (Milan, 1831).
30. Alessandro Manzoni, Opere, ed. Riccardo Bacchelli (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1953), pp. 1056, 1068–1069. This passage is taken from Sandra Berman’s translation of Manzoni’s On the Historical Novel (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 63–64, 76–77.
31. Balzac in Twenty-Five Volumes, vol. 21. Cf. Balzac, La Comédie humaine, 1:13: “La bataille inconnue qui se livre dans une vallée de l’Indre entre madame de Mortsauf et la passion est peut-être aussi grande que la plus illustre des batailles connues.”
32. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
33. François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). I have used the original text, Le miroir d’Hérodote: Essai sur la représentation de l’autre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), pp. 23ff., 141–142.
34. White, Metahistory, p. 3n.
35. Ibid., pp. 432–433. The reference to Gombrich and to the notion of “realism” is repeated at the beginning of the essay “La questione della narrazione” (p. 33n1) but then diverges.
36. Arnaldo Momigliano, “L’histoire dans l’âge des idéologies,” Le Débat 23 (1983): 129–146; idem, “Biblical Studies and Classical Studies: Simple Reflections upon Historical Method,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, ser. 3, vol. 11 (1981): 25–32.
37. Idem, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315.
38. Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, quoted by L. Braudy (Narrative Form, p. 216), who notes the importance of this passage, but in a different context.
39. Manzoni, On the Historical Novel, pp. 74–75; Manzoni, Opere, pp. 1066–1067.
40. Benedetto Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione (Bari: Laterza, 1938), pp. 122–128 (there already is a hint of it in idem, “La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell’arte,” in Primi saggi [Bari: Laterza, 1927], pp. 39–40).
41. Piero Zerbi, “A proposito di tre libri recenti di storia: Riflessioni sopra alcuni problemi di metodo,” Aevum 31 (1957): 524n17, where Frugoni’s indebtedness to Croce is suggested cautiously as a question. I am indebted to Giovanni Kral, who brought this to my attention in a seminar at the University of Bologna.
42. Arsenio Frugoni, Arnaldo da Brescia nelle fonti del secolo XII (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo, 1954), p. ix.
43. Zerbi, “A proposito,” p. 504.
44. On this problem as applied to the history of art, see the discussion between Antonio Pinelli and the present writer in Quaderni Storici 50 (1982): 682–727.
45. A. Manzoni, La “Lettre à M. Chauvet,” ed. Natalino Sapegno (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1947), pp. 59–60: “This invention is that which is most facile and coarse in the work of the spirit, that which calls for the least reflection, and even less imagination”; idem, I promessi sposi, chap. 13.
46. These words from Austen’s Northanger Abbey (London: Richard Bentley; Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1848), p. 87, were adopted by Edward H. Carr as the half title of his What Is History? (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. [iii].
47. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory since Plato (New York: Harcourt, 1971), p. 662.
48. Fielding, Tom Jones, 1:418.
I should like to thank R. Howard Bloch, who read a preliminary version of this essay and who corrected a number of errors; and Peter Burke, who noticed the absence of La Mothe Le Vayer in a slightly later redaction of the paper which I presented at Cambridge and subsequently published.
1. Marcel Detienne, The Creation of Mythology, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 23–26; p. 141n19; p. 142n32. According to Detienne, Vidal-Naquet’s introduction to the Iliad “distances itself from [Moses] Finley’s historical interpretation” (p. 56n29). Actually, Vidal Naquet’s position is much more nuanced: see “L’Iliade sans travesti,” in La démocratie grecque vue d’ailleurs (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), pp. 38–39; and, in the same volume, “Économie et société dans la Grèce ancienne: L’œuvre de Moses Finley,” pp. 55–94: 59ff. Cf. also the review by Arnaldo Momigliano of the original French edition of Detienne’s work Invention de la mythologie (1981) in Rivista Storica Italiana 94 (1982): 784–787.
2. Detienne, Creation of Mythology, p. 150n75.
3. On its dating, I now follow Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, “Galanterie et histoire de l’antiquité moderne: Jean Chapelain, de la lecture des vieux romans, 1647,” XVIIe Siècle 50 (1998): 387–415, reprinted as the introduction to Cavaillé’s edition of De la lecture des vieux romans (Paris: Zanzibar, 1999).
4. Voltaire’s parody La Pucelle d’Orléans delivered the coup de grâce to Chapelain’s poem.
5. See Lettres de Jean Chapelain, ed. Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1880–1883); J. Chapelain, Soixante-dix-sept lettres inédites à Nicolas Heinsius (1649–1658), ed. Bernard Bray (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966). On his literary career, see Christian Jouhaud, Les pouvoirs de la litterature: Histoire d’un paradoxe (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), pp. 97–150.
6. Except for one small correction, I have used the following text: J. Chapelain, Opuscules critiques, ed. Alfred C. Hunter (Paris: Droz, 1936), pp. 205–241. Other editions: [Pierre Nicolas Desmolets], Continuation des mémoires de littérature et d’histoire (Paris: Simart, 1728); another, ed. A. Feillet, who reprinted the dialogue, assuming it to be unpublished (Paris, 1870; reprinted Geneva: Slatkine, 1968); Fabienne Gegou, Lettre-traité de Pierre-Daniel Huet sur l’origine des romans . . . suivie de la Lecture des vieux romans par Jean Chapelain (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1971) (with useful commentary); and especially the Paris 1999 edition by Jean-Pierre Cavaillé. See also J. de Beer, “Literary Circles in Paris, 1619–1660,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 53 (1938): 730–780: 757–758; Jean Frappier, “Voltaire amateur de vieux romans,” in Amour courtois et Table Ronde (Geneva: Droz, 1973), pp. 283ff.; C. Delhez-Sarlet, “Le Lancelot ‘fabuleux et historique’: Vraisemblance et crédibilité d’un récit au XVIIe siècle,” in Mélanges offerts à Rita Lejeune (Gembloux, Belgium: Editions Duculot, 1969), 2:1535ff.
7. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, poets, critics, and antiquarians gathered around the cardinal de Retz: see J. de Beer, “Literary Circles.” On the libertines, see René Pintard, Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du dix-septième siècle (Paris: Boivin, 1943; reprinted with a new introduction, Geneva and Paris: Droz, 1983). See also Tullio Gregory et al., eds., Ricerche su letteratura libertina e letteratura clandestina nel Seicento (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1981).
8. Paul de Gondi was Ménage’s patron at the time, but their relationship ended in 1652. Ménage rejected the invitation, offered immediately after by Sarasin, to enter the service of Monseigneur de Conti. See G. G., “Ménage et le Cardinal de Retz,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 38 (1931): 283–285; and B. Bray’s introduction to Chapelain, Soixante-dix-sept-lettres, pp. 168–169n2. Ménage and Sarasin remained friends, but Chapelain broke with both (ibid., pp. 112, 285). Among Sarasin’s works published by Ménage, we find a dialogue entitled S’il faut qu’un jeune homme soit amoureux, clearly modeled on the De la lecture des vieux romans, written a few months earlier but never published (J.-F. Sarasin, Œuvres [Paris, 1694], pp. 139–235, esp. p. 208). Except for M. de Pille and Louis Aubry, sieur de Trilleport, the personages in the two dialogues are the same. In Sarasin’s text the starting point of the discussion is the Roman de Perceforest instead of the Lancelot.
9. See Catalogue de tous les livres de feu M. Chapelain, ed. Colbert Searles (Stanford University, CA: The University, 1912), p. 70nn2328–2329. Chapelain possessed the Histoire de Lancelot (Paris, 1520, 1591) and Le premier volume de Lancelot du Lac nouvellement imprimé (Paris, 1633).
10. An echo of the conversations is caught in Ménage’s letter dedicating to Jacques Dupuy the Origines de la langue françoise (Paris, 1650): “Et pour remonter jusques à la source . . . il faudroit avoir leu tous nos vieux Poëtes, tous nos vieux Romans, tous nos vieux Coustumiers, et tous nos autres vieux Escrivains, pour suivre comme à la piste et découvrir les altérations que nos mots ont souffertes de temps en temps. Et je n’ay qu’une légère connoissance de la moindre partie de toutes ces choses.” We read this passage at the conclusion of an astounding list which includes “l’Hebreu et le Chaldée,” “la langue qui se parle en Basse-Bretagne, et l’Alleman avec tous ses differens dialectes,” “les diverses idiomes de nos provinces, et le langage des paysans, parmi lesquels les langues se conservent plus longuement.”
11. “Fable,” we read in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, means “an invented narrative intended to teach or entertain. . .. Fable also means the subject of an epic or dramatic poem, or the subject of a romance . . .” (Charles Sorel, De la connoissance des bons livres, ed. Lucia Moretti [Rome: Bulzoni, 1974], p. 84n23).
12. Chapelain, Opuscules, p. 219. On this and similar expressions, see the stillfundamental treatment by Nathan Edelman, Attitudes of Seventeenth-Century France toward the Middle Ages (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1946), pp. 1–23.
13. The dialogue is not mentioned in the collection La querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, ed. and with an introd. by Marc Fumaroli, and with a postscript by Jean-Robert Armogathe (Paris: Gallimard, 2001).
14. See Chapelain, Opuscules, p. 209. On the ambiguity of the word histoire, resembling the Italian storia, see Furetière’s Dictionnaire: “Histoire can also refer to romances, and narratives based on invented events but not intrinsically impossible, as imagined by a writer or presented in a form not immediately recognizable” (Sorel, De la connoissance des bons livres, p. 84n23).
15. Chapelain, Opuscules, p. 217.
16. This point was misunderstood by Maurice Magendie in Le roman française au XVIIe siècle (1932) (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1978), p. 131. Much more pertinent is Detienne’s polemical reaction to Finley’s statement that verisimilitude was one of the conditions imposed by the audiences of Homeric poems: “But what can it mean for an auditor to demand verisimilitude, probability? What does verisimilitude mean? Surely something other than what Aristotle meant” (Creation of Mythology, p. 142n33).
17. On this passage, see [Desmolets], Continuation des mémoires de littérature et d’histoire, pp. 6, 304, which permitted me to correct an error in the Hunter edition. For a reaction to the original publication of Chapelain’s dialogue, cf. La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie (1759), ed. Charles Nodier, 3rd ed. (Paris: Girard, 1826), 1:431–432. See, esp., “Mémoire concernant la lecture des anciens romans de chevalerie,” ibid., pp. 436–437: “Je ne dissimulerai point qu’après avoir achevé ce mémoire, j’appris que j’avais été prévenu il y a long-temps par M. Chapelain.. . .” Cf. Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 153.
18. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Storia antica e antiquaria,” in idem, Sui fondamenti della storia antica (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), pp. 3–45.
19. Claude Fauchet, Les œuvres. . . revues et corrigées (Paris: Le Clerc & de Heuqueville, 1610), pp. 482ff. On this writer, see J. G. Espiner-Scott, Claude Fauchet (Paris: Droz, 1938) (where he notes at p. 372 that Fauchet’s name does not appear in Chapelain’s dialogue). See also Gossman, Medievalism, p. 153.
20. Fauchet, Les œuvres, p. 591.
21. L. Chantereau Le Fèvre, Traité des fiefs et de leur origine avec les preuves tirées de divers autheurs anciens et modernes, de capitulaires de Charlemagne, de Louis le Débonnaire, de Charles le Chauve, et des ordonnances de S. Louis, et de quantité d’autres actes mss. extraicts de plusieurs cartulaires authentiques (Paris: Billaine, 1662), pp. 87–89, apropos meffaire (although in the corresponding passage in Lancelot we find a synonym, mesprendre). The ample study by G. Baer Fundenburg, Feudal France in French Epic: A Study of Feudal French Institutions in History and Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1918), omits the seventeenth-century antiquarian tradition. For a fuller perspective, one that takes into consideration the narrative dimension, see Donald Maddox, “Lancelot et le sens de la coutume,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 29 (1986): 339–353, and idem, “Yvain et le sens de la coutume,” Romania 109 (1988): 1–17.
22. Chapelain, Opuscules, p. 219. Almost a century later, moving in a similar direction, see Bernard de Montfaucon’s observation “Ce différent goût de sculpture, et de peinture en divers siècles peut même être compté parmi les faits historiques” (Les monuments de la monarchie françoise, 5 vols. [Paris, 1729–1733], 1:11; quoted in Giovanni Previtali, La fortuna dei primitivi dal Vasari ai neoclassici [Turin: Einaudi, 1964], p. 70).
23. Chapelain, Opuscules, p. 221.
24. According to M. Magendie, they testify “un sens du relatif rare au XVIIe siècle” (Le roman, p. 121).
25. Chapelain, Opuscules, p. 217.
26. Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, rev. and expanded ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 36–37. For a description of the 1621 edition, see Luciano Floridi, Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism (New York: Oxford, 2002), pp. 53–54.
27. Even a valuable book, Carlo Borghero’s La certezza e la storia: Cartesianesimo, pirronismo e conoscenza storica (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1983), begins by saying that the category “historical Pyrrhonism” has generated a “historiographical mirage” (p. 9). But then he does not discuss the writings of Sextus.
28. Sexti Philosophi Opera quae extant (Parisiis, in officina Abrahami Pacardi, 1621), in two separately paginated parts (see part 2: 49–53, and also chap. 1 in this book).
29. On Dionysius Thrax, see Peter Matthews, “La linguistica greco-1atina,” in Giulio C. Lepschy, ed., Storia della linguistica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 1:246–248. And on the presumed techné of Dionysius, see Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 266–272; Pfeiffer has sustained the thesis of authenticity against the compelling arguments of Vincenzo Di Benedetto in “Dionisio Trace e la techné a lui attribuita,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere, ser. 2, vol. 27 (1958): 169–210; vol. 28 (1959): 87–118.
30. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Schoolmasters (Against the Mathematicians), 1:252. (I have consulted the Italian translation, Contro i matematici, by Antonio Russo [Bari: Laterza, 1972], p. 82). Gentian Hervet’s Latin translation reads: “Ex historia enim aliam quidem dicit esse veram, aliam vero falsam, aliam autem tanquam veram. Et veram quidem, eam, quae versatur in rebus quae geruntur. Falsam autem, quae versatur in figmentis et fabulis. Tanquam veram autem, cuiusmodi est comedia et mimi.”
31. Ibid., 1:265 (Russo ed., p. 86); Hervet translation: “Non est ars aliqua in iis quae sunt falsa et esse non possunt: falsa autem sunt et esse non possunt que sunt in fabulis et figmentis, in quibus maxime historicae partis versatur grammatica: non est ars aliqua in historica parte grammaticae.”
32. F. La Mothe Le Vayer, “Du peu de certitude qu’il y a dans l’histoire,” in Œuvres, 15 vols. (Paris: Billaine, 1669), 13:409–448. Cf. Momigliano, “Storia antica e antiquaria,” pp. 17–18. On La Mothe Le Vayer, see A. Momigliano, Le radici classiche della storiografia moderna, trans. Riccardo Di Donato (Florence: Sansoni, 1992), pp. 60–61 (original ed., The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography). There is an extended discussion in Borghero, La certezza e la storia, pp. 57ff., esp. p. 71, where the “Du peu de certitude” is called “fundamental.”
33. Vittor Ivo Comparato, “La Mothe Le Vayer dalla critica storica al pirronismo,” in T. Gregory et al., eds., Ricerche su letteratura libertina, pp. 259–279: 271–273.
34. Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 4:408ff.: 413nK: “[Le livre] des historiens est bon: mais comme Mr. Baillet le remarque finement, il ne lui a pas coûté beaucoup de peine” (referring to Adrien Baillet, Jugemens des savans sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs, 7 vols. [Paris: Charles Moette et al., 1722], 2:121). Borghero (La certezza e la storia, p. 71n100) alludes to it implicitly: “A sort of critical catalogue.”
35. F. La Mothe Le Vayer, Jugement sur les anciens et principaux historiens grecs et latins, dont il nous reste quelques ouvrages (Paris: Augustin Courbé, 1646), unpaginated.
36. There is a gap for the years 1641–1658 in the Chapelain correspondence published in Tamizey de Larroque, Lettres inédites à Chapelain, 1:xiv (cited in full below at n. 48). La Mothe Le Vayer is among the missing correspondents, although he is frequently mentioned in the letters to Guez de Balzac (1638–1640), often accompanied by critical judgments. We perceive a competitive relationship, especially at the moment in which Chapelain is offered the post of tutor to the dauphin, later filled by La Mothe Le Vayer. A reconciliation must have occurred about 1660, brought about also by their common friendship with François Bernier, to whom La Mothe Le Vayer was very attached (see Tamizey de Larroque, Lettres inédites à Chapelain, 2:186–187 and passim).
37. A. Momigliano, “Il posto di Erodoto nella storia della storiografia,” in idem, La storiografia greca (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), pp. 138–155.
38. La Mothe Le Vayer, Jugement, p. 11.
39. Herodotus, trans. A. D. Godley, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 2:463.
40. La Mothe Le Vayer attributes this opinion to Francesco Patrizi, perhaps confusing it with a passage in Jean Bodin which asserts that Polybius “donned the mask of both the philosopher and the historian.” See “Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem,” in Bodin’s Artis historicae penus, ed. Johannes Wolf (Basel: Perna, 1579), pp. 52–53. The volume contains both Patrizi’s dialogues on history and Bodin’s Methodus; the passage from this second work is indicated in the table with a cross-reference to Polybius as “nimis Philosophus.”
41. La Mothe Le Vayer, Jugement, p. 50.
42. Ibid., pp. 48–49.
43. C. Ginzburg, “Mito,” in idem, Occhiacci di legno: Nove riflessioni sulla distanza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998), pp. 40–81: 56.
44. See Casaubon’s dedication to Henri IV of his Polybius edition (Frankfurt, 1609).
45. See also La Mothe Le Vayer’s Jugement, p. 339, on the passages where Herodotus distances himself from the myths concerning the Abari and from the beliefs of the Scythians tied to werewolves (regarding a preface which the editor states he found among the author’s papers).
46. Ibid., p. 58.
47. Ibid., pp. 64–65.
48. Guez de Balzac, in a letter to Chapelain, ironically described La Mothe Le Vayer as “the successor of Montaigne and Charron, and even, if it should please him, of Cardano and Vanini, whose memory is blessed in Toulouse” (Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Lettres inédites à Chapelain, ed. Tamizey de Larroque [Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1873], pp. 410, 418, cited in Pintard, Le libertinage érudit, pp. 145–146).
49. See the passage in G. C. Vanini, De admirandis Naturae arcanis (Lutetiae [Paris]: Apud A. Perier, 1616), cited in Marco Ferrari and Carlo Ginzburg, “La colombara ha aperto gli occhi,” Quaderni storici 38 (1978): 631–639: 639n27.
50. La Mothe Le Vayer, Jugement, p. 68.
51. See Comparato, “La Mothe Le Vayer,” p. 269: “. . . the ‘fables’ declined in standing from causes to ethnographic material. . ..”
52. C. Ginzburg, “Distanza e prospettiva: Due metafore,” in idem, Occhiacci di legno, pp. 171–193.
53. Pintard, Le libertinage érudit, pp. 531–533; and see at pp. xxxv–xxxvi Pintard’s critique of the concept of La Mothe Le Vayer as Christian skeptic, proposed by Richard Popkin. The latter’s response (History of Scepticism, pp. 82–87) is unconvincing.
54. Anna Maria Battista, Alle origini del pensiero politico libertino: Montaigne e Charron (Milan: Giuffré, 1966); idem, “Come giudicano la ‘politica’ libertini e moralisti nella Francia del Seicento,” in Sergio Bertelli, ed., Il libertinismo in Europa (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1960), pp. 25–80 (new ed. 1980).
55. “De la diversité des religions,” in Cinq dialogues faits à l’imitation des anciens (Mons: Paul de la Flèche, 1671): cf. Ginzburg, Occhiacci di legno, pp. 57–58.
56. The two positions are not mutually exclusive, as demonstrated by Marc Bloch in Les rois thaumaturges (1924). Cf. also C. Ginzburg, “A proposito della raccolta dei saggi storici di Marc Bloch,” Studi Medievali, ser. 3, vol. 6 (1965): 335–353: 352–353.
57. See F. de Grenaille, Sieur de Chatounieres, La Mode ou Charactère de la Religion. De la Vie. De la Conversation. De la Solitude. Des Compliments. Des Habits. Et du Style du temps (Paris, 1642) (to which I hope to return in the near future).
58. J.-L. Guez de Balzac, Œuvres, publiées par Valentin Conrart (Paris: Billaine, 1665; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), 1: fols. *iir (but the entire introduction is important).
59. Fauchet, Les œuvres, p. 591.
60. Chapelain, Opuscules, p. 221.
61. Samuel Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: Dent; New York: Dutton [1906]), chap. 14, II, p. 6. The passage pertains to the Lyrical Ballads of Coleridge and Wordsworth.
62. Hamlet, act 2, sc. 2. I am expanding, in a slightly different direction, an expression by Giacomo Magrini which Cesare Garboli used in Pianura proibita (Milan: Adelphi, 2002).
63. Markus Volkel, “Pyrrhonismus historicus” und fides Historica”: Die Entwicklung der deutschen historischen Methodologie unter dem Gesichtspunkt der historischen Skepsis (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1987).
64. “Fede è sustanza di cose sperate / ed argomento delle non parventi” (Dante, Paradiso, 24:64–65, which translated Hebrews 11:1: “Est fides sperandarum substantia rerum, argumentum non apparentium” [“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”]).
1. Venetia: P. & F. Tini, gli heredi di G. M. Bonelli, 1572 (1st ed., 1565), fols. 54v-55r (anastatic reprint, Graz: F. Anders, 1972; see at pp. xxv-xxxi for a listing of reprintings and translations). See also A. Martinengo in Paolo Collo and Pier Luigi Crovetto, eds., Nuovo Mondo: Gli italiani (1492–1565) (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), pp. 549–552; and the entry for “Benzoni, Girolamo” by Angela Codazzi, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 8:732–733, in which Codazzi quotes part of the passage reproduced here from the first edition of La historia (see also below at n. 16).
2. C. Ginzburg, “Straniamento: Preistoria di un procedimento letterario,” in idem, Occhiacci di legno: Nove riflessioni sulla distanza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998), pp. 15–39.
3. Benzoni, La historia del mondo nuovo, fols. 55r–56r.
4. N. Monardes, Primera y segunda y tercera partes de la historia medicinal, de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias occidentales, que sirven en Medicina (Seville, 1580; 1st ed., 1571), fols. 32ff., especially fols. 36v-39r. See also Nardo Antonio Recco, Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1648), pp. 173–177 (Bk. V, chap. L 1, “De Pycielt, seu Tabaco”).
5. Pietro Andrea Mattioli, I discorsi . . . nelli sei libri di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo della materia medicinale (Venice, 1568), p. 1476, on the “solatro maniaco over furioso,” distinguished from the “doricnian” (p. 1132: Mattioli asserts that he did not succeed in identifying it), it, too, mentioned by Dioscorides.
6. Garcia da Orta, Coloquio dos simples e drogas da India (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1891), pp. 95–101 (annotated by Count de Ficalho). The first edition appeared in Goa in 1563 (not seen). The form used today is bhang.
7. Christovam da Costa, Tractado de las drogas, y medicinas de las Indias Orientales, con sus plantas debuxadas al bivo (Burgos: M. de Victoria, 1578), pp. 360–361. In the dedication to the reader Costa discretely alludes to the imperfections in the work of his predecessor, Garcia de Orta.
8. Monardes, Primera y segunda, fol. 38r.
9. Benzoni, La historia del mondo nuovo, fol. 169r.
10. E. Le Roy Ladurie, “Un concept: l’unification microbienne du monde (XIVe–XVIIe siècles),” in idem, Le territoire de l’historien, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973–1978), 2:37–97.
11. Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle France en l’année 1636, envoyée au R. Père Provincial de la Compagnie de Jésus en la province de France par le P. Paul Lejeune de la mesme Compagnie, supérieur de la Résidence de Kébec (Paris, 1637), 1:199–200: “. . . monsieur Gand parlant aux Sauvages, comme i’ay dit cy-dessus, leur remonstroit, que s’ils mouroient si souvent, ils s’en falloit prendre à ces boissons, dont ils ne sçauroient user par mesure. Que n’écris tu a ton grand roy, firent-ils, qu’il defende d’apporter de ces boissons qui nous tuent. Et sur ce qu’on leur repartit, que nos François en avoient besoin sur la mer, et dans les grandes froidures de leur païs, Fais donc en sorte qu’ils les boivent tous seuls. On s’efforcera, comme j’espère, d’y tenir la main; mai ces Barbares sont importuns au dernier point. Un autre prenant la parole, prit la defense du vin et de l’eau de vie. Non, dit-il, ce ne sont pas ces boissons qui nous ostent la vie, mais vos écritures: car depuis que vous avez décry nostre païs, nos fleuves, nos terres, et nos bois nous mourons tous, ce qui n’arrivoit pas devant que vous vinssiez icy. Nous-nous mismes à rire entendans ces causes nouvelles de leur maladies. Ie leur dy que nous décrivions tout le monde, que nous décrivions nostre païs, celuy des Hurons, des Hiroquois, bref toute la terre, et cependant qu’on ne mouroit point ailleurs, comme on fait en leurs païs, qu’il falloit donc que leur mort provint d’ailleurs; ils s’y accordèrent.” Father de Brebeuf was killed by the Iroquois (Dictionnaire de biographie française, s.v. “Brebeuf”).
12. François de Dainville, La Géographie des humanistes (Paris: Beauchesne, 1940; Slatkine Reprints, 1969).
13. On the hostility of the Catholic hierarchy toward tobacco consumption, an attitude which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century, see John Tedeschi, “Literary Piracy in Seventeenth-Century Florence: Giovanni Battista Neri’s De iudice S. Inquisitionis Opusculum,” Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987): 107–118 (reprinted in idem, The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), pp. 259–272.
14. Jerome E. Brooks, Tobacco: Its History Illustrated by the Books, Manuscripts and Engravings in the Library of George Arents, Jr. 5 vols. (New York: Rosenbach, 1937–1952).
15. G. Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela Bueso (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1959), 1:116–118.
16. Benzoni’s words, “smoke which in the Mexican language is called tobacco”—changed in the second edition to “this herb which” etc.—could have been suggested by something Oviedo had said: the Indios call tobacco the smoke or the tubes to inhale it, not (as some have believed) the herb or the sleep into which they fall after smoking it (Historia, p. 116). Successive authors—Monardes, for example—instead call the plant “tobacco,” in line with a usage that was later in fashion. According to Adolfo Ernst, “On the Etymology of the Word Tobacco,” American Anthropologist 2 (1889): 133–141, the instrument described and reproduced by Oviedo—in the guaraní language, taboca—was and still is used on the American continent to inhale not the smoke of tobacco but of plants of the leguminous family containing alkaloids. The hypothesis that Benzoni never took the voyages he described is discussed (and rejected) by A. Codazzi and A. Martinengo (in the works cited at note 3).
17. “Aquí me paresce que cuadra una costumbre viciosa e mala que la gente de Tracia usaba entre otros criminosos vicios suyos, segund el Abulensis escribe sobre Eusebio De los tiempos Bk. 3, chap. 168), donde dice que tienen por costumbre todos, varones e mujeres, de comer alrededor del fuego, y que huelgan mucho de ser embriagos, o lo parescer; e que como no tienen vino, toman simientes de algunas hierbas que entre ellos hay, las cuales, echadas en las brasas, dan de sí un tal olor, que embriagan a todos los presentes, sin algo beber. A mi parescer, esto es lo mismo que los tabacos que estos indios toman” (G. F. de Oviedo, Historia, 1:117).
18. Tostado sobre el Eusebio (Salamanca: Hans Gysser, 1506), vol. 3, fol. lix v (chap. 168); C. Julius Solinus, Polyhistor rerum toto orbe memorabilium thesaurus locupletissimus (Basel: M. Isingrinus & H. Petrus, 1538), p. 36: “Uterque sexus epulantes, focos ambiunt, herbarum quas habent semine ignibus superiecto, cuius nidore perculsi, pro laetitia habent, imitari ebrietatem sensibus sauciatis.”
19. Pomponius Mela, De orbis situ libri tres, accuratissime emendati, una cum commentariis Joachimi Vadiani . . . (Paris: Claude Garamond, 1540), p. 90: “Vini usus quibusdam ignotus est: epulantibus tamen ubi super ignes, quos circumsident, quaedam semina ingesta sunt, similis ebrietati hilaritas ex nidore contingit.”
20. François du Creux, Historiae Canadensis, seu Novae Franciae libri decem, ad annum usque Christi MDCLVI (Paris: Cramoisy, 1664), p. 76: “. . . ebrietatemque enim inducunt, vini instar” (on a facing page an illustration shows a pipe-smoking native).
21. Ibid., p. 56.
22. P. Biard, Grenoblois, de la Compagnie de Jésus, Relation de la nouvelle France, de ses terres, naturel du Païs, et de ses Habitans . . ., à Lyon 1616, p. 78.
23. Ibid., pp. 78–79.
24. On the use of bhang in ritual contexts, see Robert G. Wasson, Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality (New York, n.d.), pp. 128ff., in which he discusses and rejects the suggestion of identifying bhang with the soma mentioned in Vedic poems (apropos B. L. Mukherjee, “The Soma Plant,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society [1921]: 241–244). A pamphlet by this author, with identical title, appeared in Calcutta in 1922 (not seen).
25. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Knopf, 1987), pp. 193ff. (2nd ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1997). But the counterattack against tobacco, its producers, and its consumers, is now in full force.
26. I. Vossius, Observationes ad Pomponium Melam de situ orbis (Hagae Comitis, apud Adrianum Ulacq, 1658), pp. 124–125.
27. The oldest representation of tobacco by a European botanist (the Dutchman Rembert Dodoens, 1554) identifies the plant with the Hyosciamus luteus described by Dioscorides: cf. Jerry Stannard, “Dioscorides and Renaissance Materia Medica,” in Marcel Florkin, ed., Materia Medica in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1966), p. 113, and n. 93; F. Edelmann, “Nicotiniana,” Flammes et Fumées 9 (1977): 75–128.
28. See Joseph-François Lafitau, Mœurs des sauvages amériquains, comparées aux mœurs des premieres temps (Paris, 1724), 2:126ff. Cf. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), s.v. “Lafitau”; Alessandro Saggioro, “Lafitau e lo spettacolo dell’ ‘altro’: Considerazioni iniziali in margine a un comparatista ante literam,” Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 63 (1997): 191–208.
29. Maximus of Tyre, Sermones sive disputationes XLI (Paris, 1557), p. 90 (sermon 11).
30. J.-F. Lafitau, Mémoire présenté à son Altesse Royale monseigneur le Duc d’Orléans concernant la précieuse plante de Gin Seng de Tartarie découverte au Canada (Paris, 1718).
31. J.-F. Lafitau, Mœurs, 2:133: “Il est certain que le Tabac est en Amérique une herbe consacrée à plusieurs exercices, et à plusieurs usages de Religion, Outre ce que j’ai déjà dit de la vertu qu’ils lui attribuent pour amortir le feu de la concupiscence et les révoltes de la chair; pour éclairer l’âme, la purifier, et la rendre propre aux songes et aux visions extatiques; pour évoquer les esprits, et les forcer de communiquer avec les hommes; pour rendre ces esprits favorables aux besoins des nations qui les servent, et pour guérir toutes les infirmités de l’âme et du corps. . . .”
32. G. Henning, “Die Reiseberichte über Sibirien von Heberstein bis Ides,” Mitteilungen des Vereins fur Erdkunde zu Leipzig (1905): 241–394. Cf. Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
33. Jan N. Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 26–27; Bremmer has perfected my reconstruction on this point.
34. E. I. Ides, “Voyage de Moscou à la Chine,” in Recueil de voiages au Nord, contenant divers mémoires très utiles au commerce et à la navigation (Amsterdam: Jean Frédéric Bernard, 1727), 8:54 (in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, the work is entered under the name of the publisher, Bernard): “A’ quelques journées de chemin d’Ilinskoi il y a une grande cascade, ou pente d’eau, qu’on appelle Chute du Schaman, ou Chute du Magicien, à cause que le fameux Schaman, ou magicien des Funguses, a sa cabane auprès de cet endroit.” The original Dutch version of Ides’s report appeared in Amsterdam in 1704. On the term shaman, see S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Fungus (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1935), pp. 268–269, which cites B. Laufer, “Origin of the Word Shaman,” American Anthropologist 19 (1917): 361–371.
35. J. B. Müller, “Les mœurs et usages des Ostiackes et la manière dont ils furent convertis en 1712 à la religion chrétienne du rit grec,” in Recueil de voiages au Nord, 10 vols. (Amsterdam: J. F. Bernard, 1715–1738), 8:382ff., 412 (the translation of a German version, which I have not seen).
36. J. G. Gmelin, Reise durch Sibirien, vor dem Jahr 1733 bis 1743, 3 vols. (Göttingen: Abram Bandenhoect, 1751–1752), esp. 1:283ff., 351, 397; 2:45–46, 82ff., 351; 3: preface, 69ff., 330ff., 347ff. For a very abridged French translation of this work, see Voyage en Sibérie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1767).
37. Idem, Reise durch Sibirien, 3:370ff., 522ff.
38. Idem, Flora sibirica sive historia plantarum Sibiriae, 4 vols. (Petropoli [St. Petersburg]: Typis Academiae Scientiarum, 1747), 1:184; 3:31. A biography of Gmelin by the rector of the University of Tübingen serves as preface to Gmelin’s Sermo academicus de novorum vegetabilium post creationem divinam exortu (Tubingae: Litteris Erhardtianis, 1749).
39. Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959).
40. Ibid., pp. 137–145.
41. Ibid., pp. 73–74. Cf. J. G. Georgi, Bemerkungen einer Reise im russischen Reich im Jahre 1772, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1775).
42. C. Meiners, “Über die Mysterien der Alten, besonders über die Eleusinischen Geheimnisse,” in Vermischte Philosophische Schriften (Leipzig: Weygand, 1776), 3:164–342. On Meiners (barely mentioned by Manuel), see Sergio Landucci, I filosofi e i selvaggi, 1580–1780 (Bari: Laterza, 1972), pp. 463–465, passim. On the Eurocentric and racist tone of his writings, see Luigi Marino, I maestri della Germania: Göttingen, 1770–1820 (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), pp. 103–112.
43. Meiners, “Über die Mysterien,” pp. 169–171.
44. C. Peucer, Commentarius de praecipuis generibus divinationum (Francofurti: apud A. Wecheli haeredes, 1560); J. Scheffer, Lapponia (Frankfurt a. M. and Leipzig, 1674).
45. C. Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1991).
46. Vossius, Observationes, p. 124.
47. Herodotus, trans. A. D. Godley, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 273–274.
48. Karl Meier-Lemgo, Engelbert Kämpfer, der erste deutsche Forschungsreisende, 1651–1716 (Hamburg: Cram, De Gruyter, 1960). Cf. also idem, “Die Briefe Engelbert Kaempfers,” Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz. Abhandlungen der Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Klasse 6 (1965): 267–314, and Die Reisetagebücher Engelbert Kaempfers (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1968).
49. E. Kaempfer, Amoenitatum Exoticarum politico-physico-medicarum fasciculi V (Lemgoviae [Lemgo]: Typis et impensis Henrici Wilhelmi Meyeri, 1712), pp. 333–334, 528–529. See also Detlev Haberland, Engelbert Kaempfer, 1651–1716: A Biography, trans. Peter Hog (London: British Library, 1996), with abundant reference to the bibliography, which has grown exponentially in recent years.
50. Kaempfer, Amoenitatum, pp. 638ff., esp. p. 647. Kaempfer’s source is Alessandro d’Alessandro, Genialium dierum libri sex (Paris: J. Petrus, 1561), fols. 137v–138r (l.iii.xi).
51. For a new, complete edition, see René Radrizzani, Manuscript trouvé à Saragosse (Paris: José Corti, 1989).
52. J. Potocki, Histoire primitive des peuples de la Russie (St. Petersburg: Imprimé à l’Académie Impériale des Sciences, 1802), p. 128. We read “chaman” in the new edition, containing an introduction and highly useful critical notes by the Orientalist Julius Klaproth, a student of Potocki: see J. Potocki, Voyage dans les steps [!] d’Astrakhan et du Caucase: Histoire primitive des peuples qui ont habité anciennement ces contrées. Nouveau périple du Pont-Euxin, 2 vols. (Paris: Merlin, 1829), 2:171.
53. J. Potocki, Histoire primitive, p. 134; idem, Voyages en Turquie et en Egypte, en Hollande, au Maroc, ed. Daniel Beauvois (Paris: Fayard, 1980) (with a useful introduction). I wonder whether the secret relationship, especially of a structural order, that I have always thought existed between the Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse and La civetta cieca of Sadègh Hedayàt should not be looked for in the reworking, on a very different plane, of a similar hallucinatory experience. (On Hedayàt, see now Youssef Ishaghpour, Le tombeau de Sadègh Hedayàt [Paris: Diffusion Distique,1991]).
54. Barthold Georg Niebuhr, “Untersuchungen über die Geschichte der Skythen, Geten, und Sarmaten (Nach einem 1811 vorgelesenen Aufsatz neu gearbeitet 1828),” in Kleine historische und philologische Schriften (Bonn: Eduard Weber, 1828), 1:352–398: 361–362.
55. A. Mickiewicz, L’Église officielle et le messianisme. I. Cours de littérature slave au Collège de France (1842–1843), 2 vols. (Paris: Au Comptoir des imprimeurs-unis, 1845), pp. 123–125: “. . . le premier de tous les historiens de l’Europe moderne, il reconnut l’importance de la tradition orale. Niebuhr demandait aux paysans et aux vieilles femmes, sur les marchés de Rome, des explications sur l’histoire de Romulus et de Rémus. Longtemps avant lui, Potocki, dans les huttes des Tartares, méditait sur l’histoire des Scythes . . . Potocki le premier a tiré la science du cabinet. Il a voyagé, observé le pays, parlé avec les peuples, ce qu’aucun antiquaire n’avait fait avant lui. . . .” The passage is noted in E. Krakowski, Le Comte Jean Potocki, un témoin de l’Europe des Lumières (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 149. On the importance ascribed to oral tradition by Niebuhr, see Arnaldo Momigliano, “Perizonio, Niebuhr e il carattere della tradizione romana primitiva,” in idem, Sui fondamenti della storia antica (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), pp. 271–293.
56. Thanks to Bremmer (Rise and Fall of the Afterlife, p. 146n16), I am able to correct an error which had crept into an earlier version of this chapter.
57. K. Meuli, “Scythica,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Thomas Gelzer (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe Press, 1975), pp. 817–879 (with additions with respect to the first 1935 edition). See also my Ecstasies, p. 218n4. For a critique of Meuli’s thesis, see now Bremmer, Rise and Fall of the Afterlife, pp. 27–40.
58. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, p. 208.
I discussed earlier drafts of this paper in 1999 at UCLA with my students and with participants at a colloquium on European history and culture, with Pier Cesare Bori, Alberto Gajano, Francesco Orlando, and Adriano Sofri. The current version has profited from their observations and from the criticism of David Feldman. I am grateful to all.
1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 402 (slightly modified); Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, in Mélanges, ed. J. Van den Heuvel (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 17–18: “Entrez dans la bourse de Londres, cette place plus respectable que bien des cours; vous y voyez rassemblés les députés de toutes les nations pour l’utilité des hommes. Là le juif, le mahométan et le chrétien traitent l’un avec l’autre comme s’ils étaient de la même religion, et ne donnent le nom d’infidèles qu’à ceux qui font banqueroute; là le presbytérien se fie à l’anabaptiste, et l’anglican reçoit la promesse du quaker. Au sortir de ces pacifiques et libres assemblées, les uns vont à la synagogue, les autres vont boire; celui-ci va se faire baptiser dans une grande cuve au nom du Père par le Fils au saint-Esprit; celui-là fait couper le prépuce de son fils et fait marmotter sur l’enfant des paroles hébraïques qu’il n’entend point; ces autres vont dans leur église attendre l’inspiration de Dieu, leur chapeau sur la tête, et tous sont contents.”
2. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 402; Antoine Compagnon (Le démon de la théorie [Paris: Seuil, 1998], p. 103) states that in Mimesis “la notion de réalisme allait encore de soi.” But in the epilogue of the book Auerbach wrote: “Not even the term ‘realistic’ is unambiguous” (p. 556). On a strictly factual plane Voltaire’s description may have been fairly accurate. A ground plan of the London Stock Exchange dated “Août et septembre 1784” (École des Ponts et Chaussée, Ms. 8, Le Sage, 1784) indicates that specific sections were assigned to the various religious minorities (“Place des Quakers,” “Place des Juifs”). This classification apparently intersected with another based on the professions or commercial activity (“Place des Drapiers,” “Place de la Jamaïque,” etc.). I am grateful to Margaret Jacob for a reproduction of the plan.
3. Auerbach, Mimesis, chap. 18, “In the Hôtel de la Mole” (on Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert). Auerbach never explicitly clarified the connections between the various types of realism. This reticence has been interpreted incorrectly from an antitheoretical perspective: see René Wellek, “Auerbach’s Special Realism,” Kenyon Review 16 (1954): 299–307.
4. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 404.
5. Ibid., p. 404; “Epilegomena zu Mimesis,” quoted by Aurelio Roncaglia in his introduction to the Italian edition of Mimesis (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), 1:xx; I have corrected a small inaccuracy in the translation. (Translators’ note: The English edition reads simply: “I may also mention that the book was written during the war and at Istanbul” [p. 557].) On the copyright page of the book one reads “written in Istanbul between May 1942 and April 1945.” See the introduction by J. M. Ziolkowski to Auerbach’s Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. xxii.
6. See my Occhiacci di legno: Nove riflessioni sulla distanza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998), pp. 171–193.
7. B. de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, chap. 20: “Urbs Amstelodamum exemplo sit, quae tanto cum suo incremento, et omnium nationum admiratione hujus libertatis fructus experitur; in hac enim florentissima Republica, et urbe praestantissima omnes cujuscunque nationis et sectae homines summa cum concordia vivunt, et ut alicui bona sua credant, id tantum scire curant, num dives, an pauper sit, et num bona fide, an dolo solitus sit agere” (Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt [Heidelberg: Winter, 1925], 3:245–246).
8. [B. de Spinoza], Traitté des ceremonies superstitieuses des Juifs tant Anciens que Modernes, à Amsterdam 1678, p. 527. I have also used a copy with a different title page: La clef du sanctuaire par un sçavant homme de notre siècle (Leiden, 1678).
9. B. de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, preface: “Fides jam nihil aliud sit quam credulitas et praejudicia”; chap. 14: “Superest jam, ut tandem ostendam, inter fidem, sive theologiam, et philosophiam, nullum esse commercium”; chap. 20: “Fides ejusque fundamentalia determinanda sunt; quod quidem in hoc capite facere constitui, simulque fidem philosophia separare, quod totius operis praecipuum intentum fuit” (Opera, 3:8, 179, 275–276). On all this, see Emilia Giancotti Boscherini, Lexicon Spinozanum (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970), pp. 423–427.
10. Spinoza, Opera, 3:243.
11. Giuliano Procacci, Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età moderna (Bari: Laterza, 1995), pp. 275–276.
12. Luigi Lombardi, Dalla “fides” alla “bona fides” (Milan: Giuffré, 1961); Gérard Freyburger, Fides: Étude sémantique et religieuse depuis les origines jusquà l’époque augustéenne (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986). In 1584 Johannes Molanus, on the faculty at the University of Louvain, published a work entitled Libri quinque de fide haereticis servanda, tres de fide rebellibus servanda: see Adriano Prosperi, “Fede, giuramento, inquisizione,” in Paolo Prodi and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner, eds., Glaube und Eid (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993), pp. 157–171.
13. I am grateful to Pier Cesare Bori, who brought this to my attention. The thesis convincingly proposed by Albert O. Hirschman in The Passion and the Interests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977) can be extended to religion. About 1833 Stendhal made a scornful allusion to “the young America in which all passions, or almost all, can be reduced to the cult of the dollar” (draft of the introduction to “Chroniques italiennes” in Romans et nouvelles, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Champion & Slatkine, 1947), p. 544.
14. Paul Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), 2:498–499. René Pomeau, La religion de Voltaire, new ed. (Paris: Nizet, 1969), p. 54n82, claims instead that at the time Voltaire knew Spinoza’s work only indirectly. See also Charles Porset, “Notes sur Voltaire et Spinoza,” in Olivier Bloch, ed., Spinoza au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), pp. 225–240.
15. “ ‘Osent penser,’ expression remarquable,” observed R. Pomeau apropos the passage in Voltaire (“Les ‘Lettres philosophiques’: Le projet de Voltaire,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 179 [1979]: 11–24: 12). The importance of Horace for Voltaire has been underlined in Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 15–18. On “sapere aude,” see the excellent account in Franco Venturi, “Contributi a un dizionario storico, I: Was ist Aufklärung? Sapere aude!” Rivista Storica Italiana 71 (1959): 119–128; idem, Utopia e riforma nell’Illuminismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), pp. 12–18. See also by the present writer, “The High and the Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in idem, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 60–76. Voltaire owned a copy of the Horace edition translated by André Dacier (Amsterdam, 1727), in which the passage is correctly interpreted in a moral rather than intellectual sense: “Ayez le courage d’être vertueux”; cf. Venturi, “Contributi a un dizionario storico,” p. 120. The discovery that the distortion of Horace’s words was traceable to Voltaire certainly would have pleased Venturi.
16. “Il y avait plus de politesse dans l’air ouvert et humain de son visage qu’il n’y en a dans l’usage de tirer une jambe derrière l’autre et de porter à la main ce qui est fait pour couvrir la tête” (Voltaire, “Lettres philosophiques,” in Mélanges, p. 1).
17. “Nous sommes chrétiennes, et tachons d’être bons chrétiens; mais nous ne pensons pas que le christianisme consiste à jeter de l’eau froide sur la tête, avec un peu de sel” (ibid., p. 2).
18. “Notre Dieu, qui nous a ordonné d’aimer nos ennemis et de souffrir sans murmure, ne veut pas sans doute que nous passions la mer pour aller égorger nos frères, parce que des meurtriers vêtus de rouge, avec un bonnet haut de deux pieds, enrôlent des citoyens en faisant du bruit avec deux petits bâtons sur une peau d’âne bien tendue” (ibid., p. 4).
19. Ginzburg, Occhiacci di legno, pp. 18–20.
20. Voltaire’s Notebooks, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva: Droz, 1968), 1:51, 65 (Les œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 81).
21. Ibid., p. 43n2.
22. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. N. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1920), p. 139.
23. Ibid., pp. 345–346. See also J. Swift, Journal to Stella. I. April 14, 1711, ed. H. Williams (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), pp. 254–255. R. Pomeau, La religion de Voltaire, new ed. (Paris: Nizet, 1969), pp. 131–132, affirms erroneously that until 1756 Voltaire knew Swift only as the author of Gulliver’s Travels. Pomeau cites Wolff, Elementa matheseos universae, as the possible source for Micromégas, without mentioning Gulliver’s Travels (Voltaire, Romans et contes [Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1966], p. 125). But see Ira O. Wade, Voltaire’s “Micromégas”: A Study in the Fusion of Science, Myth, and Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 28.
24. J. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Peter Dixon and John Chalker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 70. See also Gianni Celati, “Introduzione” to J. Swift, I viaggi di Gulliver (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997), p. xix.
25. The italics are mine.
26. “Ainsi presque tout est imitation. L’idée des Lettres persanes est prise de celle de l’Espion turc. Le Boiardo a imité le Pulci, l’Arioste a imité le Boiardo. Les esprits les plus originaux empruntent les uns des autres.. . . Il en est des livres comme du feu dans nos foyers; on va prendre ce feu chez son voisin, on l’allume chez soi, on le communique à d’autres, et il appartient à tous” (Voltaire, Mélanges, p. 1394).
27. R. Lachmann, “Die ‘Verfremdung’ und das ‘Neue Sehen’ bei Viktor Sklovskij,” Poetica 3 (1969): 226–249.
28. Francesco Orlando, Illuminismo e retorica freudiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), p. 163.
29. Voltaire, Mélanges, pp. 157ff. For the date of the Traité, see Ira O. Wade, Studies on Voltaire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), pp. 87–129. See also W. H. Barber’s edition in Voltaire, Les œuvres complètes (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1989), vol. 14.
30. “Peu de gens s’avisent d’avoir une notion bien étendue de ce que c’est que l’homme. Les paysans d’une partie de l’Europe n’ont guère d’autre idée de notre espèce que celle d’un animal à deux pieds, ayant une peau bise, articulant quelques paroles, cultivant la terre, payant, sans savoir pourquoi, certains tributs à un’ autre animal qu’ils appellent roi, vendant leur denrées le plus cher qu’ils peuvent, et s’assemblant certains jours de l’année pour chanter des prières dans une langue qu’ils n’entendent point” (Voltaire, Mélanges, p. 157).
31. Voltaire, La philosophie de l’histoire (Les œuvres complètes de Voltaire 59), ed. J. H. Brumfitt, 2nd enlarged ed. (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1969), p. 109. For later versions of this passage, see Ginzburg, Occhiacci di legno, p. 28.
32. Wade, Voltaire’s “Micromégas,” p. 28, proposes that the published text preserves traces of an older, lost version entitled Voyage du baron de Gangan (1739). W. H. Barber, “The Genesis of Voltaire’s ‘Micromégas,’ ” French Studies 11 (1957): 1–15, rejects most of Wade’s arguments but agrees that the original idea for Micromégas stemmed from Voltaire’s scientific interests in the decade 1730–1740.
33. “Des singes, des éléphants, des nègres, qui semblent tous avoir quelque lueur d’une raison imparfaite. . .. L’homme est un animal noir qui a de la laine sur la tête, marchant sur deux pattes, presque aussi adroit qu’un singe, moins fort que les autres animaux de sa taille, ayant un peu plus d’idées qu’eux, et plus de facilité pour les exprimer; sujet d’ailleurs à toutes les mêmes nécessités, naissant, vivant et mourant tout comme eux” (Voltaire, Mélanges, pp. 159–160).
34. Ibid., p. 180. Cf. Sergio Landucci, I filosofi e i selvaggi, 1580–1780 (Bari: Laterza, 1972), pp. 80ff.
35. “La membrane muqueuse des nègres, reconnue noire, et qui est la cause de leur couleur, est une preuve manifeste qu’il y a dans chaque espèce d’hommes, comme dans les plantes, un principe qui les différencie. La nature a subordonné à ce principe ces différents degrés de génie et ces caractères des nations qu’on voit si rarement changer. C’est par là que les nègres sont les esclaves des autres hommes. On les achète sur les côtes d’Afrique comme des bêtes, et les multitudes de ces noirs, transplantés dans nos colonies d’Amérique, servent un très petit nombre d’Européens” (Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs, ed. René Pomeau [Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1963], 2:335).
36. Michele Duchet, Anthropologie et Histoire au siècle des lumières (Paris: A. Michel, 1995); Claudine Hunting, “The Philosophes and Black Slavery: 1748–1765,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 405–418. See also Giuliano Gliozzi, “Poligenismo e razzismo agli albori del secolo dei Lumi,” Rivista di Filosofia 70 (1979): 1–31.
37. “La plupart des nègres, tous les Cafres sont plongés dans la même stupidité” (La philosophie de l’histoire, p. 96); “Et y croupiront longtemps” (ibid.). See also the racist quip in Les lettres d’Amabed (Voltaire, Romans et contes, ed., Fréderic Deloffre and Jacques Van den Heuvel [Paris: Gallimard, 1979], pp. 507–508). Hunting, “The Philosophes,” p. 417n16, argues, not too convincingly, that the passage was attempting to ridicule current attitudes toward blacks. Deloffre disagrees (Les lettres d’Amabed, p. 1136n).
38. Hunting, “The Philosophes,” denies this. But see Alberto Burgio, “Razzismo e lumi: Su un ‘paradosso’ storico,” Studi Settecenteschi 13 (1992–1993): 293–329.
39. See the somewhat apologetic article by Emeka Abanime, “Voltaire antiesclavagiste,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 182 (1979): 237–252.
40. Voltaire, Mélanges, p. 203: “The superfluous, which is a very necessary thing, has reunited one hemisphere with the other. Do you not see perhaps those slender ships that from the Texel, from London, from Bordeaux, go forth to seek, by a happy exchange, new products from the banks of the Ganges, while far from us, conquerors of the Muslims, our wines of France inebriate the sultans?”
41. André Morize, L’apologie du luxe au XVIIIème siècle et “Le mondain” de Voltaire (1909) (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970); Wade, Studies on Voltaire, pp. 22–49; A. Owen Aldridge, “Mandeville and Voltaire,” in Irwin Primer, ed., Mandeville Studies (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 142–156. Wade argues that Voltaire came to know The Fable of the Bees only in 1735 at the time he wrote La défense du mondain. It should be noted, however, that Wade himself showed that Le mondain had been influenced by Jean François Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce (1736), which, in turn, was indebted to Mandeville.
42. Although we still lack a biography of Auerbach, much useful information can be gleaned from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Pathos of the Earthly Progress,” in Seth Lerer, ed., Literary History and the Challenge of Philology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 13–35.
43. The verses are contained in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and the German Models,” The Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 26 (1992): 21–22.
44. K. Barck, “5 Briefe Erich Auerbachs an Walter Benjamin in Paris,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 9 (1988): 688–694: 692. I am grateful to Stephen Greenblatt, who brought these letters to my attention.
45. Benedetto Croce, La filosofa di Giambattista Vico, 2nd rev. ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1922), p. 254. Auerbach translated into German the Scienza Nuova (1925), as well as Croce’s monograph on Vico (1927), both in collaboration with Theodor Lücke.
46. E. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” Centennial Review 13 (1969): 1–17 (which appeared originally as “Philologie der Weltliteratur” in Walter Henzen, Walter Muschg, and Emil Staiger, eds., Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz Strich [Bern: Francke, 1952], pp. 39–50). See also J. M. Ziolkowski’s remark in the introduction (p. xxv).
47. M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. xviii.
48. Ibid., pp. 180–181.
49. H. Mason, “Voltaire’s Sermon Against Optimism: The Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne,” in Giles Barber and C. P. Courtney, eds., Enlightenment Essays in Memory of Robert Shackleton (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988), pp. 189–203.
50. “Il est toujours malheureusement nécessaire d’avertir qu’il faut distinguer les objections que se fait un auteur de ses réponses aux objections” (Voltaire, Œuvres, ed. Louis Moland [Paris: Garnier, 1877], 9:469, henceforth cited as “Moland”).
51. “A l’égard des reproches d’injustice et de cruauté qu’on fait à Dieu, je réponds d’abord que supposé qu’il y ait un mal moral (ce qui me paraît une chimère), ce mal moral est tout aussi impossible à expliquer dans le système de la matière que dans celui d’un Dieu . . . nous n’avons d’autres idées de la justice que celles que nous nous sommes formées de toute action utile à la société, et conformes aux lois établies par nous, pour le bien commun; or, cette idée n’étant qu’une idée de relation d’homme à homme, elle ne peut avoir aucune analogie avec Dieu. Il est tout aussi absurde de dire de Dieu, en ce sens, que Dieu est juste ou injuste, que de dire que Dieu est bleu ou carré.“Il est donc insensé de reprocher à Dieu que les mouches soient mangées par les araignées” (Voltaire, Mélanges, pp. 169–170).
52. Moland, 9:478n12.
53. Voltaire, Mélanges, p. 208.
54. “Des nègres qu’on achetait en Afrique, et qu’on transportait au Perou comme des animaux destinés au service des hommes” (Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs, p. 360).
55. See, for example, Voltaire, Correspondance, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva: Droz, 1971), vol. 17: D 6709, 6738, 6758, 6776.
56. A similar argument appears to have been proposed by R. Arruda in his unpublished dissertation, “La réaction littéraire de Voltaire et ses contemporains au tremblement de terre de Lisbonne de 1755” (Middlebury College, 1977). See Frederick A. Spear, in collaboration with Elizabeth Kreager, Bibliographie analytique des écrits relatifs à Voltaire 1966–1990 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1992), p. 294. I have used the Pomeau edition for the additions to the Essai sur les mœurs. In general, see Henri Duranton, “Les manuscrits et les éditions corrigées de l’Essai sur les mœurs,” in Louis Hay and Winfried Woesler, eds., Die Nachlassedition—La publication des manuscrits inédits (Bern: Lang, 1979), pp. 54–62.
57. “On comptait, en 1757, dans la Saint-Domingue française, environ trente mille personnes, et cent mille esclaves nègres ou mulâtres, qui travaillaient aux sucreries, aux plantations d’indigo, de cacao, et qui abrègent leur vie pour flatter nos appétits nouveaux, en remplissant nos nouveaux besoins, que nos pères ne connaissaient pas. Nous allons acheter ces nègres à la côte de Guinée, à la côte d’Or, à celle d’Ivoire. Il y a trente ans qu’on avait un beau nègre pour cinquante livres; c’est à peu près cinq fois moins qu’un bœuf gras.. . . Nous leurs disons qu’ils sont hommes comme nous, qu’ils sont rachetés du sang d’un Dieu mort pour eux, et ensuite on les fait travailler comme des bêtes de somme: on les nourrit plus mal; s’ils veulent s’enfuir, on leur coupe une jambe, et on leur fait tourner à bras l’arbre des moulins à sucre, lorsqu’on leur a donné une jambe de bois. Après cela nous osons parler du droit des gens! . . . Ce commerce n’enrichit point un pays; bien au contraire, il fait périr des hommes, il cause des naufrages; il n’est pas sans doute un vrai bien; mai les hommes s’étant fait des nécessités nouvelles, il empêche que la France n’achète chèrement de l’étranger un superflu devenu nécessaire” (Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs, 2:379–380).
58. François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, ed. Jacques Truchet (Paris: Garnier, 1967), p. 11.
59. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 252–253, 365n15. See also Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), ed. Christiane Mervaud (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1994), 1:513–521, article “Chaine des êtres crées.”
60. “Il ya probablement une distance immense entre l’homme et la brute, entre l’homme et les substances supérieures” (Moland 9:47).
61. D 9289, D 9329 (Voltaire, Correspondance, ed. T. Besterman, vol. 22). D’Alembert’s reply contains a sarcastic allusion to Rousseau, suggested by a print entitled Repas de nos philosophes, and by the comedy Les philosophes, by Charles Palissot, both dated 1760.
62. At any rate the dialogue appears in the frequently cited Pléiade anthology (Voltaire, Mélanges). See also Christiane Mervaud, Voltaire à table: Plaisir du corps, plaisir de l’esprit (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 1998), pp. 154–156. Hester Hastings, Man and Beast in French Thought of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936), pp. 257–258, rather off handedly defines it as “humorous.”
63. Voltaire, Mélanges, pp. 323–335.
64. E. Auerbach, “Remarques sur le mot ‘passion,’ ” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 38 (1937): 218–224; idem, “Passio als Leidenschaft,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1967), pp. 161–175.
65. “Une maudite servante m’a prise sur ses genoux, m’a plongé une longue aiguille dans le cul, a saisi ma matrice, l’a roulée autour de l’aiguille, l’a arrachée et l’a donnée à manger à son chat” (Voltaire, Mélanges, p. 679).
66. Renato Galliani, “Voltaire, Porphyre, et les animaux,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 199 (1981): 125–138.
67. Moland 10:140–148.
68. B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), 1:180–181. This passage should be added to the detailed examination by Wade (Studies on Voltaire, pp. 12–56) of traces of Mandeville in the work of Voltaire. On Descartes and the animals, see Hastings, Man and Beast; and Leonora Cohen Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940). I do not have a direct acquaintance with Mandeville’s De brutorum operationibus.
69. Voltaire, Mélanges, p. 682.
70. Mervaud, Voltaire à table, pp. 153–168.
71. “Il est juste qu’une espèce si perverse se dévore elle-même, et que la terre soit purgée de cette race” (Voltaire, Mélanges, p. 681).
72. Nicholas Hudson, “From Nation to Race: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996): 247–264 (kindly brought to my attention by Daniel Stolzenberg). On the alleged cannibalism of the Jews, see Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, vol. 1, Anthropophages, pp. 347–349; vol. 2: Jephté, pp. 240–242; as well as B. E. Schwarzbach, “Voltaire et les Juifs: Bilan et plaidoyer,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 358 (1998): 27–91: 82–83.
73. “Aïe! On me prend par le cou. Pardonnons à nos ennemis” (Voltaire, Mélanges, p. 684).
74. Ginzburg, Occhiacci di legno, pp. 100–117.
75. “Tous les animaux s’égorgent les uns les autres; ils y sont portés par un attrait invincible . . . il n’est point d’animal qui n’ait sa proie, et qui, pour la saisir, n’emploie l’équivalent de la ruse et de la rage avec laquelle l’exécrable araignée attire et dévore la mouche innocente. Un troupeau de moutons dévore en une heure plus d’insectes, en broutant l’herbe, qu’il n’ya d’hommes sur la terre.. . . Ces victimes n’expirent qu’après que la nature a soigneusement pourvu à en fournir de nouvelles. Tout renaît pour le meurtre” (Moland 28:534).
76. Sade, La philosophie dans le boudoir, in Œuvres, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 3:145–153. I will return to this elsewhere.
77. Moland 28:549.
78. “Les Cafres, les Hottentots, les nègres de Guinée, sont des êtres beaucoup plus raisonnables et plus honnêtes que les Juifs.. . . Vous [Juifs] l’avez emporté sur toutes les nations en fables impertinentes, en mauvaise conduite, et en barbarie; vous en portez la peine, tel est votre destin.. . . Continuez surtout à être tolérants: c’est le vrai moyen de plaire à l’Etre des êtres, qui est également le père des Turcs et des Russes, des Chinois et des Japonais, des nègres, des tannés et des jaunes, et de la nature entière” (ibid., p. 551).
79. Ibid.
80. Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 223. But see also the observations by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Le regard éloigné [Paris: Plon, 1983], pp. 11–17, 21–48) on the relationships among cultures.
I would like to thank François Hartog, to whom I owe my first encounter with the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, and Cheryl Goldman, who called my attention to the passage in Flaubert.
1. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Mildred Marmur, with a foreword by Mary McCarthy (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 32; Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province, ed. Edouard Maynial (Paris: Garnier, 1947), p. 9: “Le soir de chaque jeudi, il écrivait une longue lettre à sa mère, avec de l’encre rouge et trois pains à cacheter; puis il repassait ses cahiers d’histoire ou bien lisait un vieux volume d’Anacharsis qui traînait dans l’étude.”
2. On the connection between these elements, see Francesco Orlando, Gli oggetti desueti nelle immagini della letteratura (Turin: Einaudi, 1993).
3. This is how the entry “J.J. Barthélemy” ends in the Dictionnaire de la biographie française.
4. See the biographical sketch by C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, 3rd ed. (Paris, n.d.), 7:186–223. For other data, see Maurice Badolle, L’abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1716–1795) et l’hellénisme en France dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Thèse, 1927).
5. “Explication de la mosaïque de Palestrine,” Mémoires de littérature tirés des registres de l’Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 30 (1764): 503–538.
6. A listing without any pretense to completeness gives an idea of the variety of themes treated by Barthélemy in this period: “Remarques sur une inscription grecque, trouvée par M. l’Abbé Fourmont dans le temple d’Apollon Amycléen, et contenant une liste des prêtresses de ce Dieu,” Histoire de l’Académie des Inscriptions avec les Mémoires de Littérature (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1756), 23:394–421; “Essai d’une paléographie numismatique,” Mémoires de littérature tirés des registres de l’Académie Royale des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres 24:30–48; “Dissertations sur deux médailles samaritaines d’Antigonus roi de Judée,” ibid., pp. 49–66; “Mémoires sur les anciens monumens de Rome,” ibid., 26: 532–556; “Dissertations sur les médailles arabes,” ibid., pp. 557–576; “Réflexions sur l’alphabet et sur la langue dont on se servoit autrefois à Palmyre,” ibid., pp. 577–597; “Réflexions sur quelques monuments phéniciens et sur les alphabets qui en résultent,” ibid., 30:405–427; “Remarques sur quelques médailles publiées par differens autheurs,” ibid. 22:671–684; “Explication d’un bas-relief égyptien et de l’inscription phénicienne qui l’accompagne,” ibid., pp. 725–738.
7. J.-J. Barthélemy, Voyage en Italie, à Paris l’an X (1802); reprint (Geneva: Minkoff Reprints, 1972), pp 397ff.
8. Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Garnier 1963), vol. 2, chap. 21, p. 168.
9. Barthélemy, Voyage en Italie, p. 402. See also Werner Kaegi, Jacob Burckhardt, eine Biographie (Basel and Stuttgart: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1956), 3:678–679.
10. Barthélemy, Voyage en Italie, p. 408. For similar use of the term revolution applied to the period 1453–1648, see Johann Koch, Tableau des revolutions de l’Europe (Lausanne and Strasbourg, 1771), quoted in Delio Cantimori, Studi di storia (Turin: Einaudi, 1959), pp. 355–356.
11. On 23 October 1771, Barthélemy’s friend Madame du Deffand wrote to the duchess de Choiseul that she had read Télémaque and that she had found it “deathly boring.. . . The style is wordy, lacking in vigor; it seeks to attain a certain unction without ardor.. . .” Barthélemy, replying in the name of the duchess, acknowledged: “Granted, it is digressive, somewhat monotonous, too full of descriptions, but richly endowed with high morality . . .” (Correspondance complète de Mme du Deffand avec la duchesse de Choiseul, l’abbé Barthélemy et M. Craufurt, with an introd. by M. le M[arqu]is de Sainte-Aulaire [Paris, 1877], 2:75, 77).
12. Barthélemy, Voyage en Italie, pp. 403–404.
13. Idem, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1791), 1:i–iii. (I have also used the Italian translation, Viaggio d’Anacarsi il giovine nella Grecia verso la metà del quarto secolo avanti l’era volgare [Venice, 1791], 1:vii).
14. Keith Stewart, “History, Poetry and the Terms of Fiction in the Eighteenth Century,” Modern Philology 66 (1968): 110–120.
15. J.-J. Barthélemy, Œuvres diverses, 2 vols., à Paris l’an VI, 1:lxxii.
16. J. Spon, Voyage d’Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant, fait és années 1675 et 1676 (Lyons, 1678–1680).
17. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, 7:208: “Il est le Tillemont de la Grèce.”
18. A. Momigliano, “Storia antica e antiquaria” (1950), in Sui fondamenti della storia antica (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), pp. 3–45.
19. J. Gronovius, Thesaurus Antiquitatum Graecarum, 13 vols. (Lugduni Batavorum [Leyden]: Pieter van der Aa et al., 1697–1702).
20. Barthélemy to Madame du Deffand, Chanteloup, 18 February 1771 (Correspondance complète de Mme du Deffand, 1:345–347 [letter CCX]). On the liaison between Barthélemy and the duchess de Choiseul, see the introduction, p. xlvii. When Barthélemy was arrested during the Terror, the duchess managed to have him freed (p. cxxix).
21. Correspondance complète de Mme du Deffand, 1:cxv-xxvi; Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, Madame du Deffand and Mlle Sanadon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939), vol. 5, tome 3, p. 155 (12 December 1771).
22. Barthélemy, Œuvres diverses, 1:163–195.
23. Idem, Voyage, 2:368.
24. For a careful biography based on a wide assortment of letters, see Benedetta Craveri, Madame du Deffand e il suo mondo (Milan: Adelphi, 1982).
25. Madame du Deffand to Walpole, 4 April 1767 (Correspondance complète de Mme du Deffand, 1:95).
26. Madame du Deffand to the duchess de Choiseul, 20 April 1775 (ibid., 3:167).
27. Madame du Deffand to the duchess de Choiseul, 2 September 1778 (ibid., 3:338).
28. Madame du Deffand to the duchess de Choiseul, 9 December 1773 (ibid.,3:48–49).
29. Ibid.
30. “On nous parle de Catherine, et le marquis Ginori nous est inconnu!” (ibid., 1:119).
31. “Les entreprises de ces peuples [Romans and Carthaginians] sont paisibles, mais présentent de grands mouvements, et c’est le mouvement qui fixe ‘attention et qui intéresse. Il est vrai que cet intéret est tranquille, et tant mieux, car M. De Bucq prétend que le bonheur n’est autre chose que l’intérêt dans la calme. J’aime mieux voir les romains et les carthaginois, les espagnols et les portugais traverser les mers pour découvrir de nouveaux pays, que de voir les factions des Guelfes et Ghibellines et celles des Roses rouge et blanche mettre tout à feu et à sang pour gouverner des peuples qui se seraient bien passés d’elles” (ibid., 3:336).
32. This is the thesis of a splendid book by Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).
33. Madame du Deffand to the duchess de Choiseul (Correspondance complète de Mme du Deffand, 1:422).
34. G. H. Gaillard, Histoire de la rivalité de la France et de l’Angleterre (Paris: J. J. Blaise [impr. de P. Didot ainé], 1771), 1:2 (preface): “L’Europe est polie, l’Europe se croit éclairée, et l’Europe fait la guerre! Nous nous sommes trop pressés d’applaudir à nos lumières, l’Europe est encore barbare!”
35. Among the exceptions, see Pierre-Daniel Huet, Histoire du commerce et de la navigation des anciens, à Lyon, chez Benoit Duplain, 1763 (reprinting of the 1715 edition; the book had been written at the request of Colbert).
36. Monthly Review 81 (1789): 577–593 (app.), quoted also in J.-J. Barthélemy, Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, during the Middle of the Fourth Century before the Christian Aera, 4th ed., 4 vols. (London, 1806), 1:iii (translator’s preface).
37. See the entry “Yorke, Philip,” in Dictionary of National Biography. Cf. Monthly Review 81 (1789): 592 (app.).
38. I have consulted one of the twelve copies of the first edition housed in the Special Collections department of the Young Research Library, UCLA: Athenian letters, or the Epistolary Correspondence of an Agent of the King of Persia, residing at Athens during the Peloponnesian War, Containing the History of the Times, in Dispatches to the Ministers of State at the Persian Court. Besides Letters on Various Subjects between Him and His Friends, 4 vols. (London, 1741–1743). A manuscript note on the title pages of the third and fourth volumes cautions: “Supposed to be wrote [!] by Ld Ch [arles] N [Yorke] 12 copies printed not more.” The copy contains manuscript notes and additions, presumably written by one of the authors, and then in part inserted in the subsequent editions. This emerges from a comparison between the first and third editions, in two volumes, published in Dublin in 1792. I have not been able to see the second edition, 1781, apparently identical to the third. See, for example, the 1741 edition (1:148); the 1792 edition (1:133); the 1741 edition (1:166); and the 1792 edition (1:149).
39. Athenian Letters, 3:91–92, where there is a reference to a dissertation on Marmor Sandvicense, which had but recently been published by John Taylor (Cantabrigiae, 1743).
40. Athenian Letters, 4:227ff.
41. I have seen neither the successive editions (1800, 1810) nor the French translation (Lettres Athéniennes, 1803).
42. Athenian Letters (Dublin, 1792), vol. 1, “Introduction,” which mentions a work by Crebillon fils (Lettres Athèniennes, extraites du porte-feuille d’Alcybiade: see Collection complète des œuvres, vols. 12–14 [London (actually Paris), 1777]), a work of imagination. Another book, which I have not seen, seems to have a similar character (which in its title recalls Marana’s mentioned earlier): The Athenian Spy, Discovering the Secret Letters which were sent to the Athenian Society by the Most Ingenious Ladies of the Three Kingdoms, relating to Management of their Affections. Being a Curious System of Love Cases, Platonic and Natural (London: R. Halsey, 1704; expanded ed., 1709).
43. See the following entries in the Dictionary of National Biography: Birch, Thomas; Coventry, Henry; Green, John; Heberden, William; Salter, Samuel; Talbot, Catherine; Wray, Daniel; Yorke, Charles; Yorke, Philip (which names among those who participated in the initiative Dr. Rooke, later Master of Christ’s College; John Heaton [recte Eaton] of Christ’s College; John Lawry). See also E. Heberden, William Heberden, Physician of the Age of Reason (London: Royal Society of Medicine, 1989).
44. On this subject, see Natalie Z. Davis, “History’s Two Bodies,” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 1–30.
45. Monthly Review, n.s., vol. 1 (1790): 477–478 (app.).
46. Walpole expressed a scornful opinion about one of them, Thomas Birch: see the apposite entry in Dictionary of National Biography.
47. J.-J. Barthélemy, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, 5 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1824), 4:117ff.
48. Athenian Letters, 1:viii.
49. Athenian Letters (1792 edition), p. xviii: “The general character of Cleander is taken from Mahmut, the Turkish Spy.. . .” See Gian Carlo Roscioni, Sulle tracce dell’ “Esploratore turco” (Milan: Roth, 1933; new ed., 1992). We know of only one copy of the first Italian edition.
50. [G. P. Marana], L’espion dans les cours des princes chrétiens, ou lettres et mémoires d’un envoyé secret de la Porte dans les cours d’Europe; ou l’on voit les découvertes qu’il a faites dans toutes les Cours où il s’est trouvé, avec une dissertation curieuse de leurs Forces, Politique, et Religion, à Cologne, Erasmus Kinkius, 1739, 1:41: “C’est alors [during Lent] qu’ils s’appliquent d’avantage aux exercices de piété; et qu’après avoir purgé leur conscience par des pénitences, et par des confessions secrettes qu’ils se font les uns aux autres, ils mangent d’un certain pain qu’ils appellent le Sacrement de l’Eucharistie, où ils imaginent que leur Messie est réelement present, aussitôt que leur Prêtres ont prononcé certaines paroles. As-tu jamais rien vu de si fou?” The original Italian version of this passage was much more cautious, as noted in Guido Almansi, “L’ ‘Esploratore turco’ e la genesi del romanzo epistolare pseudo-orientale,” Studi Secenteschi 7 (1966): 35–65: 60n104. See also Roscioni, Sulle tracce, p. 171.
51. C. Ginzburg, “Straniamento,” in Occhiacci di legno: Nove riflessioni sulla distanza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998), pp. 15–39.
52. A. Momigliano, “Il contributo di Gibbon al metodo storico,” in Sui fondamenti della storia antica, pp. 294–311.
53. C. Ginzburg, Rapporti di forza: Storia, retorica, prova (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000), pp. 55–56. Cf. G. C. Roscioni, Sulle tracce (1992 ed.), p. 164.
54. Madame du Deffand, who had been delighted by Gibbon’s spirit, reacted tepidly to his book: “Je souscris à vos éloges sur la Décadence de l’Empire,” she wrote to Horace Walpole, “je n’en ai lu que la moitié, il ne m’amuse ni m’intéresse; toutes les histoires universelles et les recherches des causes m’ennuient; j’ai épuisé tous les romans, les contes, les théâtres; il n’ya plus que les lettres, les vies particulières et les mémoires écrits par ceux qui font leur propre histoire qui m’amusent et m’inspirent quelque curiosité. La morale, la métaphysique me causent un ennui mortel. Que vous dirais-je? J’ai trop vécu,” Horace Walpole’s Correspondence: Madame du Deffand and Wiart, vol. 6, tome 4, pp. 469–470 (Madame du Deffand to Walpole, 23 August 1777).
55. Momigliano, “Il contributo di Gibbon.”
56. Silvia Bordini, Storia del panorama: La visione totale nella pittura del XIX sec-olo (Rome: Officina, 1984). See also the section “panorama” in W. Benjamin, Parigi capitale del XIX secolo, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), pp. 679–689 (in English: “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century,” New Left Review 1 [March–April 1968]).
57. See C. Ginzburg, “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” in idem, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 156–164, 220–221.
Different versions of this paper were presented at various times during 2005: to the Archivio di Stato, Venice (January); to the Department of History at the University of Siena (April); and to the Department of History at the University of Pisa (November).
1. E. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002), p. 288.
2. Ibid., p. 293.
3. Ibid., p. 294. The juxtaposition of analysis and description is taken from Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past and Present 85 (1979): 3–24.
4. Interesting Times, p. 428n12. The review, unsigned (as was then the practice in the Times Literary Supplement), was reprinted as a “Foreword” to the English translation of I benandanti: The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. ix–x.
5. See chap. 15 below, “Witches and Shamans.”
6. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 296.
7. See, for example, chap. 12, “Just One Witness,” below in this book; C. Ginzburg, Occhiacci di legno: Nove riflessioni sulla distanza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998); idem, History, Rhetoric and Proof (London and Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999).
8. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 294.
9. C. Ginzburg, “L’historien et l’avocat du diable,” second installment in a conversation with L. Vidal and C. Illouz, Genèses 54 (March 2004), esp. pp. 117–121. Cf. also C. Ginzburg, “Germanic Mythology and Nazism: Thoughts on an Old Book by Georges Dumézil,” in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 126–145, 214–218.
10. E. Hobsbawm, “Manifeste pour l’histoire,” Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2004, p. 20. I should like to thank Eric Hobsbawm for permitting me to read the text of his talk to the British Academy and for responding to my queries about the differences between the two versions.
11. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, trans. Horace B. Samuel (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), p. 313. I discuss this technique below in chap. 10, “The Bitter Truth.” See also Simona Crippa, “Au bal avec Stendhal,” L’Année Stendhalienne 1 (2002): 190–206.
12. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, p. 313; Le Rouge et le Noir, in Yves Ansel and Philippe Berthier, eds., Œuvres romanesques complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 1:616: “Il se trouvait que, justement l’avant-veille, Julien avait vu Marino Faliero, tragédie de M. Casimir Delavigne. Israël Bertuccio n’a-t-il-pas plus de caractère que tous ces nobles vénitiens, se disait notre plébéien révolté.” See also at p. 623: “son triste rôle de plébéien révolté.”
13. C. Delavigne, Marino Faliero, in Œuvres, 4 vols. (Brussels: A. Wahlen, 1832), vol. 3.
14. Antoine-François Varner and Jean-François-Alfred Bayard, Marino Faliero à Paris, folie-à-propos, vaudeville en un acte (Paris: Théâtre du Vaudeville, 1829), p. 15.
15. Delavigne, Marino Faliero, p. 87: “Les travaux, eux seuls, donneront la richesse; / le talent le pouvoir; les vertus, la noblesse.”
16. Ibid., p. 27.
17. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, p. 313; “Une conspiration anéantit tous les titres donnés par les caprices sociaux” (Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, pp. 616–617).
18. C. Delavigne, Marino Faliero (Paris: Ladvocat, 1829), pp. 11–12 (the preface does not appear in the Œuvres complètes (cited above at n. 13). I have not been able to consult K. Kiesel, Byron’s und Delavigne’s “Marino Faliero” (Düsseldorf, 1870), or Tauba Schorr, Über Casimir Delavigne, Gießener Beiträge zur Romanischen Philologie 20 (Gießen, 1926).
19. Stendhal, Courrier Anglais. New Monthly Magazine, ed. Henri Martineau, 5 vols. (Paris: Le Divan, 1935–1936), 3:480ff. (translated back from the English text; the original French version is no longer extant). See also the derisive allusion to Delavigne in Correspondance générale, ed. Victor Del Litto, 6 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1999), 3:619.
20. Ibid., 3:455–459 (letter to Louise Swanton-Belloc, who included it in her book on Byron [1824]); Souvenirs sur Lord Byron (August 1829), published by Romain Colomb (Journal Littéraire [Paris 1870], 3:167–173, ed. du Divan, vol. 35); “Lord Byron en Italie: Récit d’un témoin oculaire (1816),” Revue de Paris (March 1830) (Mélanges: II, Journalisme [Paris 1972], ed. du Divan, vol. 46).
21. Stendhal, Correspondance générale, 3:106 (to Adolphe de Mareste, 14 April 1818). In 1830 the list of names differs a bit: Rossini, Napoleon, Byron (p. 754, in a letter to Sophie Duvancel). Another of Stendhal’s triads: Correggio, Mozart, Napoleon.
22. Ibid., 3:323.
23. George Gordon Noel Byron, Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice. An Historical Tragedy in Five Acts with Notes. The Prophecy of Dante, a Poem (London: Murray, 1821), p. xx (the citations, unless so noted, are to this edition).
24. See Alan Richardson, “Byron and the Theater,” in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 133–150: 139–141.
25. Lord Byron, “Marino Faliero,” in The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980–1993), 4:525–526.
26. Ibid., p. xx: “I forgot to mention that the desire of preserving, though still too remote, a nearer approach to unity than the irregularity, which is the reproach of the English theatrical compositions, permits, has induced me to represent the conspiracy as already formed, and the Doge acceding to it, whereas in fact it was of his own preparation and that of Israel Bertuccio.”
27. Richard Landsdown, Byron’s Historical Dramas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 102ff. See also the app., “Shakespearian Allusions in Marino Faliero” (pp. 237ff.).
28. Macbeth, act 2, sc. 2.
29. Lord Byron, Marino Faliero, act 3, sc. 2, p. 95.
30. Ibid., act 3, sc. 2, p. 93. See also Michael Simpson, Closet Performances: Political Exhibition and Prohibition in the Dramas of Byron and Shelley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 172ff.
31. If I am not mistaken, in Delavigne’s play the term plébéien occurs only once, in a soliloquy by Faliero: “Mais prince ou plébéien, que je règne ou conspire /Je ne puis échapper aux soupçons que j’inspire” (act 3, sc. 3).
32. On this point as well, see chap. 10, “The Bitter Truth.”
33. [Philo-Milton], A Vindication of the Paradise Lost from the Charge of Exculpating “Cain”: A Mystery (London: J. F. Dove, 1822).
34. Thomas L. Ashton, “The Censorship of Byron’s Marino Faliero,” Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (1972): 27–44. Cf. also Simpson, Closet Performances, pp. 172ff.
35. Lord Byron, Marino Faliero, pp. xx–xxi.
36. Ibid., pp. 175–184.
37. Ibid., p. 179.
38. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, ed. L. A. Muratori, 25 vols. in 28 tomes (Mediolani: ex typographia Societatis Palatinae, 1723–1751), 22: coll. 628–635: 632.
39. M. Sanudo il Giovane, Le vite dei dogi 1423–1474, vol. 1, 1423–1457, ed. Angela Caracciolo Arico (Venice: La Malcontenta, 1999), introd.
40. See Venice, Biblioteca Correr, Marin Sanudo, “Vite dei dogi,” MS. Cicogna 1105–1106 (3768–3767). The section on the Falier conspiracy is in MS. Cicogna 1105 (3768), fols. 178v–181v.
41. Laurentii de Monacis Veneti Cretae Cancellarii Chronicon de rebus Venetis ab U. C. ad annum MCCCLIV sive ad conjurationem ducis Faledro . . . omnia ex mss. editisque codicibus eruit, recensuit, praefationibus illustravit Flaminius Cornelius senator Venetus (Venetiis: ex typographa Remondiniana, 1758), p. 316.
42. Add. MSS. 8574. Cf. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Iter Italicum (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 4:69, which cites (with a typographical error on the date of the MS.) C. Foligno, “Codici di materia veneta nelle biblioteche inglesi,” Nuovo Archivio Veneto, n.s. 10 (1905): 104n10. Filippo de Vivo (to whom I am most grateful) informs me that at fol. 158r the same personage appears as “Bertasium Isardo,” “Bertucius,” “Bertucius ergo Isardo.” This last version is changed to “Isarelo” by a hand other than the copyist’s.
43. Giovanni Pillinini, “Marino Falier e la crisi economica e politica della metà del ’300 a Venezia,” Archivio Veneto, ser. 5, vol. 84 (1968): 45–71. Frederic C. Lane (Venice, a Maritime Republic [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973], pp. 181–183) is much more cautious.
44. Laurentii de Monacis Veneti Cretae Cancellarii Chronicon de rebus Venetis, p. 317.
45. Vittorio Lazzarini,Marino Faliero(Florence: Sansoni, 1963), p. 155.
46. Ibid., pp. 156–157.
47. Archivio di Stato, Venice (hereafter cited as ASV), Grazie, vol. 3, fol. 56 (cf. V. Lazzarini, Marino Faliero, p. 158; I have corrected “navelero,” presumably a typographical slip).
48. Ibid., vol. 10, fol. 81 (cf. V. Lazzarini, Marino Faliero, p. 158).
49. Vittorio Lazzarini, “Filippo Calendario l’architetto della tradizione del palazzo ducale,” in Marino Faliero, pp. 299–314. And see also Lionello Puppi, “Calendario, Filippo,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 16:658–660.
50. Venice, Biblioteca Correr, Marin Sanudo, “Vite dei dogi,” MS. Cicogna 1105 (3768), fol. 179v.
51. V. Lazzarini, Marino Faliero, p. 300. The exchange had already occurred in a passage of the chronicle of Nicolò Trevisan, appropriated by Sanudo: “The plot had these chiefs: Bertuzi Isarello stonecutter of San Trovaso, Filippo Calandario, his son-in-law” (Cod. Marc. cl. VII it., 800, fol. 199v).
52. I have used the fifteenth-century copy housed in ASV, Miscellanea Codici I. Storia veneta 142 (originally Miscell. Codd. 728), fol. 1v. On the chronicle, see Lazzarini, Marino Faliero, p. 98.
53. This is what emerges from the research of Lazzarini, Marino Faliero, pp. 159ff.
54. ASV, Miscellanea Codici I. Storia veneta 142 (originally Miscell. Codd. 728), fol. 5r.
55. Cronaca pseudo-Zancaruola, Biblioteca Marciana, VII it., 50 (9275), fol. cccxi r.
56. ASV, Miscellanea Codici I, Storia veneta 142 (originally Miscell. Codd. 728), fol. 2v.
57. C. Ginzburg, “Somiglianza di famiglia e alberi genealogici: Due metafore cognitive,” in Clemens-Carl Härle, ed., Ai limiti dell’immagine (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2005), pp. 227–250.
58. R. Needham, “Polythetic Classification,” in Against the Tranquillity of Axioms (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 36–65.
59. See Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths (London: Norton, 2003), pp. 254–255: A youth from the countryside (specifically from the county of Yancheng, in the province of Jiangsu) mentioned in his diary Julien Sorel as a model for anyone who aspired to have a career in a bureaucratic and oppressive society. The editor observes that the allusion probably refers not to Stendhal’s novel but to the film by Chabrol (which circulated in China in the ’80s), in which the part of Julien was played by Gérard Philipe.
Different versions of this paper have been presented at Harvard University, at the Siemens Stiftung in Munich, and to the Department of History at the University of Siena. I am grateful to the Siemens Stiftung and to its director, Heinrich Meier, for making it possible for me to spend a fruitful research leave there in 2000.
1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), chap. 18.
2. Hayden White, “Auerbach’s Literary History: Figural Causation and Modernist Historicism,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 87–100. (I discuss this study in a forthcoming essay on Auerbach and Dante.)
3. We should note that in the epilogue Auerbach speaks of the realism of the Middle Ages, thereby underlining both the differences and the continuity with respect to modern realism (Mimesis, pp. 554–557).
4. C. Ginzburg, Occhiacci di legno: Nove riflessioni sulla distanza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998), pp. 171–193.
5. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 52.
6. Ibid., pp. 462, 463.
7. Ibid., p. 463.
8. Ibid., pp. 473, 477.
9. Auerbach repeatedly mentions Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936); see Mimesis, index.
10. Ibid., pp. 546–547.
11. Ibid., pp. 548ff.
12. Ibid., pp. 454ff. On the general theme, see Lucien Dällenbach, Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abîme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977).
13. “Rome, 24 mai 1834. J’ai écrit dans ma jeunesse des biographies (Mozart, Michelangelo) qui sont une espèce d’histoire. Je m’en repens. Le vrai sur les plus grandes, comme sur les plus petites choses, me semble presque impossible à atteindre, au moins un vrai un peu détaillé. M. de Tracy me disait [cancelled: il n’ya plus de vérité que dans] on ne peut plus atteindre au Vrai, que dans le Roman. Je vois tous les jours davantage que partout ailleurs c’est une prétention” (an almost identical transcription can be read in Stendhal, Œuvres romanesques complètes, ed. Yves Ansel [Paris: Gallimard, 2005], p. 997, from which I have taken all the following quotations).
14. The Pléiade edition prepared by Henri Martineau contained only the second subtitle; and only the first appears in Stendhal, The Red and the Black, trans. Horace B. Samuel, with an introd. and notes by Bruce Robbins (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005), p. xxix. Auerbach’s Mimesis cites both subtitles, but without comment. According to Robert Alter (A Lion for Love [New York: Basic Books, 1979], p. 201n), the original subtitle was changed to “Chronique de 1830” because it seemed to allude to the barricades of July 1830.
15. Charles Baudelaire, Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs (1846), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 2:17.
16. Stendhal, Œuvres romanesques complètes, p. 578; The Red and the Black, p. 270 (slightly modified). Cf. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 455.
17. Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 455–456.
18. Stendhal, “Projet d’article sur Le Rouge et le Noir” (1832), in Œuvres romanesques, pp. 822–838; V. Salvagnoli, Dei romanzi in Francia e del romanzo in particolare di M. Stendhal Le Rouge et le Noir (1832), inedito con integrazioni autografe e postille di Stendhal, ed. Annalisa Bottacin (Florence: Polistampa, 1999). See also A. Jefferson, “Stendhal and the Uses of Reading: Le Rouge et le Noir,” French Studies 37 (1983): 168–183:175.
19. Œuvres romanesques, p. 824: “Rien de semblable aujourd’hui, tout est triste et guindé dans les villes de six à huit mille âmes. L’étranger y est aussi embarrassé de sa soirée qu’en Angleterre.”
20. Pierre Victor, baron de Besenval, Spleen, trans. H. B. V., with an Introduction by Havelock Ellis (London: Chapman & Hall, 1928).
21. Stendhal, “Projet d’article,” in Œuvres romanesques, p. 827: “La France morale est ignorée à l’étranger, voilà pourquoi avant d’en venir au roman de M. de S[tendhal] il a fallu dire que rien ne ressemble moins à la France gaie, amusante, un peu libertine, qui de 1715 à 1789 fut le modèle de l’Europe, que la France grave, morale, morose que nous ont léguée les jésuites, les congrégations et le gouvernement des Bourbons de 1814 à 1830. Comme rien n’est plus difficile en fait des romans que de peindre d’après nature, de ne pas copier des livres, personne encore avant M. de S[tendhal] ne s’était hasardé à faire le portrait de ces mœurs si peu aimables, mais qui malgré cela, vu l’esprit mouton de l’Europe, finiront par régner de Naples à Saint-Pétersbourg.”
22. Ibid., p. 827: “En faisant le portrait de la société de 1829 (époque où le roman a été écrit).. . .”
23. The Red and the Black, p. [5]; Œuvres romanesques, p. 349: “Nous avons lieu de croire que les feuilles suivantes furent écrites en 1827.”
24. Idem, Œuvres intimes, ed. Victor Del Litto (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 2:129: “Je dicte la scène de la cathédrale de Bisontium [i.e., Besançon].” Cf. Del Litto’s comment, p. 1079.
25. Michel Crouzet, Le Rouge et le Noir: Essai sur le romanesque stendhalien (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), pp. 10–11. See the entry “Lablache, Louis,” in Nouvelle biographie française. Cf. Y. Ansel in Œuvres romanesques, pp. 960–962.
26. Henri Martineau, introduction to Stendhal, Romans et nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 1:198.
27. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, p. 532; Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 807: “L’inconvénient du règne de l’opinion, qui d’ailleurs procure la liberté, c’est qu’elle se mêle de ce dont elle n’a que faire; par exemple: la vie privée. De là la tristesse de l’Amérique et de l’Angleterre.” See Correspondance, ed. Victor Del Litto and Henri Martineau, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1962–1968), 2:193–194 (letter to Daniello Berlinghieri).
28. For an enlightening discussion on this theme, see Franco Moretti, Il romanzo di formazione (1986) (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), chap. 2, “Waterloo Story,” pp. 82–141.
29. See, for example, Stendhal, Œuvres romanesques, p. 1104 (in the chapter “Un siècle moral” of Le Rouge et le Noir).
30. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 480.
31. Excellent observations in J. T. Booker, “Style direct libre: The Case of Stendhal,” Stanford French Review (1985): 137–151.
32. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, p. 270 (slightly modified); Cf. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 455.
33. V. Mylne, “The Punctuation of Dialogue in Eighteenth-Century French and English Fiction,” The Library 1 (1979): 43–61. Against the so-called ponctuation forte, or abundant, see two writings which appeared the same year: A. Frey, “ancien prote [foreman] et correcteur d’imprimerie,” Principes de ponctuation fondés sur la nature du langage écrit (Paris: De l’imprimerie de Plasson, 1824); and the Traité raisonné de ponctuation published in app. to F. Raymond, Dictionnaire des termes appropriés aux arts et aux sciences, et des mots nouveaux que l’usage a consacrés . . . (Paris, 1824). In the app., see esp. chap. 10, p. xxviii, apropos parentheses, quotation marks, and so forth: “Leur apposition dans le langage est presque abandonnée dans ce moment. Les auteurs en général évitent les parenthèses, le tiret et les guillemets, le plus possible.”
34. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, pp. 569, 612.
35. Stendhal, Scarlet and Black, trans. Margaret R. B. Shaw (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), pp. 257, 303.
36. Moretti, Il romanzo di formazione, p. 107: “Certain pages of Stendhal, broken and almost fractured by sudden passages from one point of view to another.”
37. The Red and the Black, pp. 270, 298.
38. The Red and the Black, p. 309; Le Rouge et le Noire, p. 613: “Mathilde ne perdait pas une syllabe de leur conversation. L’ennui avait disparu.” On what may have inspired Stendhal, see C. Liprandi, “Sur un épisode du Rouge et Noire: Le bal du duc de Retz,” Revue des Sciences Humaines 76 (1954): 403–417.
39. The Red and the Black, p. 310; Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 614: “Il n’ya plus des passions véritables au XIXe siècle; c’est pour cela que l’on s’ennuie tant en France.”
40. M. Crouzet, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 11: “Les propos du bal de Retz et les pensées d’Altamira sont en parfaite consonance avec la Révolution, ils l’appellent et l’annoncent. Stendhal indique au lecteur qu’il l’avait bien dit, que son roman conduit aux barricades et les contient, même s’il n’en parle pas.”
41. The Red and the Black, p. 303; Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 607: “Je ne vois que la condamnation à mort qui distingue un homme, pensa Mathilde, c’est la seule chose qui ne s’achète pas.”
42. Le Rouge et le Noire, p. 644. A strikingly similar observation is made in A. Sonnenfeld, “Romantisme (ou ironie): Les épigraphes du Rouge et Noire” Stendhal Club 78 (January 1978): 143–154: 153.
43. The Red and the Black, p. 309; Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 613: “Mlle de la Mole, penchant la tête avec le plus vif intérêt, était si près de lui, que ses beaux cheveux touchaient presque son épaule.”
44. Stendhal, Romans, ed. H. Martineau, 1:1432: “Dimanche ennuyeux, promenade au Corso with Mister Sten[dhal], et pour toute sa vie ainsi till the death. 15 mars 35” (only partially legible note scribbled on the Bucci copy of Armance: see Œuvres romanesques, p. 896).
45. J. Starobinski, L’œil vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), chap. “Stendhal pseudonyme” (pp. 191–240); idem, “Leo Spitzer et la lecture stylistique,” introd. to L. Spitzer, Études de Style (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 27–28.
46. See the remarks in Y. Ansel, Œuvres romanesques, pp. 1131–1133.
47. I owe this suggestion to Vyacheslav Ivanov.
48. Stendhal, Romans, ed. H. Martineau, 1:1401: “5 mai 1834.. . . A Marseille, en 1828, je crois, je fis trop court le manuscrit du Rouge. Quand j’ai voulu le faire imprimer à Lutèce, il m’a fallu faire de la substance au lieu d’effacer quelques pages et de corriger le style. De là, entre autres défauts, des phrases heurtées et l’absence de ces petits mots qui aident l’imagination du lecteur bénévole à se figurer les choses.”
49. Ibid., 1:1458, 1483. The first annotation is no longer available. See Stendhal, Œuvres romanesques, p. 992.
50. Alter, A Lion, p. 165.
51. Stendhal, Œuvres intimes. I. Journal, pp. 301–302: “C’est un peintre qui voudrait s’illustrer dans le genre de l’Albane, qui aurait judicieusement commencé par l’étude de l’anatomie, et pour qui, come objet utile, elle serait devenue tellement agréable, qu’au lieu de peindre un joli sein, voulant enchanter les hommes, il peindrait à découvert et sanglants tous les muscles qui forment la poitrine d’une jolie femme, d’autant plus horrible, en leur sotte manie, qu’on s’attendait à une chose plus agréable. Ils procurent un nouveau dégoût par la vérité des objets qu’ils présentent. On ne ferait que les mépriser s’ils étaient faux, mais il sont vrais, ils poursuivent l’imagination.” See also the Journal entry for 13 December 1829, “Il faut avoir le courage des Carrache” (p. 108).
52. Stendhal, Correspondance, 2:858–859: Mérimée observed that Stendhal, given his relationship with Madame Azur, could not, unlike Swift, claim impotence as an alibi. Both Mérimée and Stendhal had been lovers of Madame Azur (Alberthe de Rubempré), who a little earlier in a Parisian drawing room had waxed eloquent about Stendhal’s amorous prowess: see Alter, A Lion, pp. 183–184. Stendhal had mentioned Swift’s impotence speaking of the plot of Armance in a letter to Mérimée dated 23 December 1826 (see Romans et nouvelles, 1:190–192).
53. Quoted in Muriel Augry-Merlino, Le cosmopolitisme dans les textes courts de Stendhal et Mérimée (Geneva and Paris: Slatkine, 1990), p. 102.
54. P. Mérimée, “H. B. (1850), in Portraits historiques et littéraires, ed. Pierre Jourda (Paris: Champion, 1928), p. 155: “Toute sa vie il fut dominé par son imagination, et ne fit rien que brusquement et d’enthousiasme. Cependant, il se piquait de n’agir jamais que conformément à la raison. ‘Il faut en tout se guider par la LO-GIQUE,’ disait-il en mettant un intervalle entre la première syllabe et le reste du mot. Mais il souffrait impatiemment que la logique des autres ne fût pas la sienne.”
55. Stendhal, Vie d’Henry Brulard, in Œuvres intimes, 2:858–859.
56. Ibid., 1:208; idem, Journal littéraire, in Œuvres complètes, 34:172. Cf. also pp. 166, 168.
57. P. Mérimée, “[Stendhal] Notes et souvenirs,” in Portraits, p. 179.
58. Stendhal, Correspondance, 1:352 (to Pauline Beyle, 3 June 1807): “Je relis la Logique de Tracy avec un vif plaisir; je cherche à raisonner juste pour trouver une réponse exacte à cette question: ‘Que désiré-je?’ ”
59. Idem, Souvenirs d’égotisme, ed. Beatrice Didier (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), p. 114: “On peut tout connaître, excepté soi-même.”
60. Nicola Chiaromonte, “Fabrizio a Waterloo,” in Credere e non credere (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), pp. 23–48: 30: “Stendhal not only does not believe in History with a capital H, but not even in the one he himself narrates.” Actually, he believed in both, from which came the combination of scorn (in the final years, disgust) and joy which is his alone.
61. C. Ginzburg, Rapporti di forza: Storia, retorica, prova (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000), p. 48.