2
PROFESSING KNOWLEDGE:
THE EUROPEAN CLERISY
Learning … a calling … endowing us with light to see farther than other men.
Barrow
First come I; my name is Jowett.
There’s no knowledge but I know it.
I am Master of this college.
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.
H. C. Beeching
THIS chapter is concerned with the main discoverers, producers and disseminators of knowledge in early modern Europe. These discoverers, producers and disseminators are often known as ‘intellectuals’. Karl Mannheim described them as the social groups in every society ‘whose special task it is to provide an interpretation of the world for that society’. In a famous phrase, already quoted (5), he called them the ‘free-floating intelligentsia’, an ‘unanchored, relatively classless stratum’.1
CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES
It is often claimed that the intellectual emerged only in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, when the word ‘intelligentsia’ was coined to refer to the men of letters who were unwilling or unable to find posts in the bureaucracy. Alternatively, the emergence of the group is dated to the end of the nineteenth century, in the course of the French debate over the guilt or innocence of Captain Dreyfus, with the Manifeste des intellectuels in the captain’s favour.2 Other historians, notably Jacques Le Goff, speak about intellectuals in the Middle Ages, at least in the context of universities.3 These disagreements are partly over definitions but they also reveal a major difference of opinion over the relative importance of change and continuity in European cultural history.
A common view of modern intellectuals is that they are the descendants of the radical intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, who are the descendants of the philosophes of the Enlightenment, who are either a secular version of the Protestant clergy, or the descendants of the humanists of the Renaissance. Such a view is too ‘present-minded’, in the sense of scanning the past only for people more or less like ourselves. Michel Foucault was not the first person to see present-mindedness and continuity as problematic, but he remains the most radical critic of these common assumptions.
A Foucauldian history of intellectuals might discuss the discontinuity between the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, who wanted to overthrow their old regime, and the eighteenth-century philosophes, who wanted to reform theirs. Again, it might note the gap between the anticlerical philosophes and the English puritan clergy of the seventeenth century, who have been described as the first example in history of ‘radical intellectuals’ in a traditional society, ‘freed from feudal connections’.4 However, in the eyes of these puritans, their true or general vocation or ‘calling’ was neither learning nor political activity, which were simply different means to a higher end, religion. Their ideal was that of the ‘saint’, and this aim led some of them to express anti-intellectual attitudes.5 Another discontinuity separates the Protestant clergy from their predecessors the Renaissance humanists, and yet another divides the humanists from the scholastic philosophers they so often denounced, Le Goff’s medieval intellectuals.
To avoid confusion, it might be a good idea to follow the lead of Samuel Coleridge and Ernest Gellner and to describe the specialists in knowledge as a ‘clerisy’.6 The term will be employed below from time to time to describe social groups whose members variously thought of themselves as ‘men of learning’ (docti, eruditi, savants, Gelehrten), or ‘men of letters’ (literati, hommes de lettres). In this context lettres meant learning rather than literature (hence the need for the adjective in belles-lettres).
From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, scholars regularly referred to themselves as citizens of the ‘Republic of Letters’ (Respublica litteraria), a phrase which expressed their sense of belonging to a community which transcended national frontiers. It was essentially an imagined community, but one which developed customs of its own such as the exchange of letters, books and visits, not to mention the ritualized ways in which younger scholars paid their respects to senior colleagues who might help launch their careers.7
The aim of this chapter is to discuss what a famous sociological essay of 1940 described as ‘the social role of the man of knowledge’.8 Today, that phrase irresistibly prompts a question about the women of knowledge at this time. They were more or less ‘excluded’ from the pursuit of learning, as the seventeenth-century French philosopher Poulain de la Barre pointed out in his treatise The Equality of the Two Sexes (1673).
It is true that women of letters or learned ‘ladies’ existed throughout the period, although the term ‘bluestocking’ was not coined until the late eighteenth century. Among the most famous of these were Christine de Pisan, the fifteenth-century author of The City of Women; Marie Le Jars de Gournay, who edited Montaigne’s Essays, studied alchemy and wrote a treatise on the equality of men and women; the universal scholar Anne-Marie Schuurman, who lived in the Dutch Republic, attended lectures at the University of Utrecht and wrote a treatise on the aptitude of women for study; and Queen Kristina of Sweden, who summoned René Descartes, Hugo Grotius and other scholars to her court in Stockholm, and after her abdication founded the Academia Fisico-Matematica in Rome.
All the same, women were unable to participate in the republic of letters on the same terms as men. It was extremely rare for them to study at a university. They might learn Latin from relatives or from a private tutor, but if they attempted to enter the circle of the humanists, for example, they might be rebuffed, as in the case of the fifteenth-century Italian learned ladies Isotta Nogarola and Cassandra Fedele. Isotta entered a convent following the public ridicule of what men saw as her intellectual pretensions.9
Women were also involved in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, attended meetings of the Royal Society and published her philosophical opinions. Voltaire wrote his Essay on Manners for the marquise du Châtelet in order to persuade her that history was as worthy of study as the natural philosophy she favoured. In these areas too the position of women was a marginal one. Bernard de Fontenelle wrote his dialogues on the plurality of worlds for a female audience, and Francesco Algarotti published a treatise called Newtonianism for Ladies, on the somewhat patronizing assumption that intelligent women could understand the new science if it was explained to them in simple terms.10
THE MIDDLE AGES
The example of Héloïse, who was Abelard’s pupil before she became his lover, reminds us that women of knowledge could already be found in the twelfth century. It was at that time that a European clerisy became visible in the world outside the monasteries for the first time since late antiquity. This development, like that of the universities, was a result of the increasing division of labour associated with the rise of towns.
The clerisy included a group of learned laymen, usually either physicians or lawyers. Law and medicine were the two secular learned professions, with their place within the medieval university as well as status in the world outside it.11 They were corporate groups, sometimes organized in colleges (like the London College of Physicians, founded in 1518), concerned to maintain a monopoly of knowledge and practice against unofficial competitors.
However, in the Middle Ages the majority of university teachers and students were members of the clergy, often members of religious orders, above all the Dominicans, who included the most famous medieval teacher of all, Thomas Aquinas. Even academic investigators of nature such as Albert the Great and Roger Bacon were friars. The students often wandered from university to university, so they were an international group, conscious – as their Latin songs show – of their difference from the normal inhabitants of the city in which they happened to live. As for the teachers, they were mainly what we describe as ‘scholastic’ philosophers and theologians, although they did not use this term but referred to themselves as ‘men of letters’ (piri litterati), ‘clerks’ (clerici), ‘masters’ (magistri) or ‘philosophers’ (philosophi). Some of these men of letters, like the twelfth-century Englishman John of Salisbury, could also be found at courts.12
As for the word ‘schoolmen’ (scholastici), it was a term of contempt invented by the supporters of a new-style university curriculum, the ‘humanities’ (below, chapter 5). Teachers of this new curriculum were nicknamed the ‘humanists’ (humanistae) and the term spread, first in Italy and then through other parts of Europe. These humanists were a new form of clerisy. Some were in holy orders but many were laymen, teaching in schools or universities or as private tutors or depending on the largesse of patrons. For some of them at least, teaching was a fate rather than a vocation, and one Italian humanist wrote sadly to another in the later fifteenth century that ‘I, who have until recently enjoyed the friendship of princes, have now, because of my evil star, opened a school’ The generally low rate of remuneration for teachers in schools and universities, apart from some stars, mainly in law faculties, makes his reaction all too easy to understand. Teaching offered a way of making a living from knowledge, but not a very good living.13
The emergence of the word ‘humanist’ suggests that in universities at least, teaching the humanities encouraged a sense of a common identity among the teachers. The societies or academies founded by these humanists (institutions which will be discussed in chapter 3 below), also suggest the emergence of a collective identity.14
THE CONSEQUENCES OF PRINTING
One major consequence of the invention of printing was to widen the career opportunities open to the clerisy. Some of them became scholar-printers, like Aldus Manutius in Venice.15 Others worked for the press, correcting proofs for example, making indexes, translating or even writing new books on commission from printer-publishers. It became easier, although it was still difficult, to follow the career of a ‘man of letters’. Erasmus, at least, was successful enough with his books to free himself from dependence on patrons. Indeed, Norbert Elias portrayed the humanists in general and Erasmus in particular in the manner of Mannheim as examples of the free-floating intellectual, their detachment linked to their opportunity of ‘distancing themselves’ from all the social groups in their world.16
In Venice in particular a group of writers with a humanist education managed to make a living from their pens in mid-sixteenth-century Venice, writing so much and on such a variety of topics that they were known as poligrafi (below, chapter 7). Similar figures can be found in Paris, London and other cities in the later sixteenth century, producing among other publications chronologies, cosmographies, dictionaries and other guides to knowledge.
OPPORTUNITIES IN CHURCHES AND STATES
The groups mentioned so far did not exhaust the opportunities open to the learned in the sixteenth century. The Reformation added another. Martin Luther’s idea of the priesthood of all believers had originally seemed to make the clergy superfluous. His even more radical colleague at the university of Wittenberg, Andreas Karlstadt, went so far as to suggest the abolition of academic degrees. However, Luther came in time to support the idea of a learned clergy who would preach the Gospel to the people, and Jean Calvin and other Protestant reformers followed him in this respect. On the Catholic side the foundation of seminaries from the mid-sixteenth century onwards showed a similar concern for the education of parish priests.17 Some of the clergy educated in these institutions appear to have taken scholarship as their vocation, while continuing to serve their parishes, as in the case of the Lutheran pastor Paul Bolduan, a pioneer compiler of subject bibliographies. In this way the churches may be described as having funded scholarship unintentionally.
The rise in the number of students in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was in part the result of the new function of the university as a training institution for the parish clergy, as well as of the increasing demand by governments for officials with degrees in law. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the supply of students was coming to exceed the demand for their services, and a substantial proportion of graduates were becoming frustrated in their aspirations. In Naples, students took part in the famous revolt against Spain in 1647–8. On one occasion, 300 armed students marched through the streets in protest against a rise in the expense of doctorates. In the case of England, it has even been suggested that these ‘alienated intellectuals’ were in part responsible for the English Revolution.18
Some university-trained men of letters found employment as secretaries to rulers, aristocrats or men of learning. A succession of leading Italian humanists, including Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla, were secretaries to the popes. The occupation was not a new one, but the number of treatises, especially Italian treatises explaining how to do the job, suggests that it increased in importance in this period, as paper-work increased for rulers and nobles alike (below, chapter 6).19 In Sweden, the later sixteenth century has gone down in history as the age of the ‘rule of the secretaries’, men of low birth such as the clergyman’s son Jöran Persson. Persson, who was more of an adviser than a clerk, was the right-hand man of King Erik XIV until his enemies the aristocrats had him put to death. In Spain, where the rule of secretaries was even more obvious at this time, the age of Philip II, the term letrado (derived from litteratus) came into use to describe the lawyers in royal service, men of letters as opposed to the men of arms who had traditionally surrounded the king. Their role was to give good counsel, a major political function of the clerisy in many cultures.20
Scholars too might take a secretary or amanuensis into their service. Erasmus, for example, employed Gilbert Cousin, himself a scholar, while the secretaries of Francis Bacon included the young Thomas Hobbes. Ambassadors too had their assistants, sometimes men of letters like Amelot de la Houssaie, secretary to the French ambassador to Venice, who used his position to acquire a knowledge of the hidden workings of the Venetian state, knowledge which he subsequently published (below, 147). By the seventeenth century, the function of secretary to a learned society had come into existence. Bernard de Fontenelle was secretary to the French Académie des Sciences, Henry Oldenburg to the Royal Society, Formey to the Berlin Academy and Per Wilhelm Warentin to the Swedish Academy. The post sometimes carried a salary, as it did in Oldenburg’s case.
By the mid-seventeenth century, it was becoming increasingly possible, though still risky, for writers and scholars to support themselves from a mixture of patronage and publishing. An analysis of 559 French writers active between 1643 and 1665 suggests that, given the right strategies, it had become possible to make a career from literature – in a wide sense of that term, including dictionaries and works of history as well as the plays of Racine and the poems of Boileau.21
The break with tradition must not be exaggerated. Royal pensions remained an important source of income. For example, Louis XIV granted generous pensions not only to Boileau, Racine and other poets but to the astronomer Gian-Domenico Cassini and the philologist Charles Du Cange. Lawyers such as Nicholas de Peiresc and John Selden and physicians such as Theodor Zwinger and Ole Worm continued to make important contributions to scholarship in their spare time. The number of writers who were clerics or at least existed on the margin of the clergy remained significant. Indeed, they may still have been in a majority in the age of Louis XIV.22 Until the end of our period, and even beyond, a substantial proportion of the learned works published were still being written by members of the clergy.
STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIATION
By 1600 or thereabouts a process of social differentiation within the European clerisy had become apparent. Writers were one semiindependent group, their increasing self-consciousness marked, as in seventeenth-century France, by the increasing use of terms such as auteur and écrivain.23 A small but influential group might be described in the language of our own day as ‘information brokers’, because they put scholars in different places in touch with one another, or as ‘knowledge managers’, because they tried to organize as well as to collect material. Some of their names will recur in these pages, anong them Francis Bacon, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Denis Diderot, Samuel Hartlib, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Marin Mersenne, Gabriel Naudé, Henry Oldenburg, Théophraste Renaudot.24
University professors were also becoming a distinct group, especially in the German-speaking world – in which there were more than forty universities by the later eighteenth century, not counting other institutions of higher education. They were often laymen, not infrequently the sons or sons-in-law of other professors. Their sense of a separate identity is revealed by an increasing concern with academic dress and titles as well as by the rise of galleries displaying portraits of professors at the University of Uppsala and elsewhere. Like Benjamin Jowett in nineteenth-century Oxford, Master of Balliol College from 1870 to 1893 (and the target of the verses printed in the epigraph to this chapter), the early modern professorate embodied intellectual authority.
Early modern scholars were coming to view their work as a vocation. In late seventeenth-century England, more than two centuries before Max Weber’s famous reflections on the topic, Isaac Barrow, Master of Trinity College Cambridge, discussed scholarship as a vocation or ‘calling’ in his treatise Of Industry, arguing that the ‘business’ of academics was ‘to find truth’ and to ‘attain knowledge’. By ‘know-ledge’, Barrow meant not information about ‘obvious and vulgar matters’ but ‘sublime, abstruse, intricate and knotty subjects, remote from common observation and sense’. Members of specific learned professions sometimes regarded their work as a calling, including the German historian Johann Sleidan and the French historian Henri de La Popelinière.25
With this social differentiation in the world of learning came conflicts between the different groups. For example, there were increasingly forceful attacks, from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, on what the English called ‘priestcraft’, in other words an attack on the authority of one group of men of knowledge on the grounds that they were deceiving ordinary people.26 Such attacks would have been unnecessary if the clergy had not remained a powerful force in the world of learning, but they would have been impossible without the existence of a substantial body of lay scholars, committed to a new ideal, that of detachment, or as they said at the time ‘impartiality’, in the sense of a critical distance from parties in Church and state alike (only at the end of the eighteenth century did people begin to speak about knowledge as ‘objective’). Lawyers and physicians also came under attack as secular versions of the clergy, defending their monopolies with the help of languages which were unintelligible to their clients.27
Again, the French emphasis on lettres and the vernacular, from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards, contrasted with the German interest in Latin culture and Gelehrtheit. The Germans thought the French superficial, the French thought the Germans pedantic. Noble amateurs, or virtuosi as they were called in Italy (and in England too in the later seventeenth century, whether they studied art, antiquities or the works of nature), sometimes looked down on professional teachers and writers. In a phrase reminiscent of Mannheim’s (but written nearly 300 years earlier), the historian of the newly founded Royal Society, Thomas Sprat, argued the importance of the role of gentlemen in research in natural philosophy precisely because they were ‘free and unconfined’. The descriptions of some French scholars as curieux gave the impression, and were doubtless designed to give the impression, that what drove them was disinterested intellectual curiosity.28
From 1700 or thereabouts it became possible to pursue an intellectual career not only as a teacher or writer but also as a salaried member of certain organizations dedicated to the accumulation of knowledge, notably the Academies of Science founded and funded in Paris, Berlin, Stockholm and St Petersburg, even if the limited funds available generally compelled the recipients to supplement their salaries with other forms of employment. Whether or not we call such men ‘scientists’ (a term which was only coined in the nineteenth century), the emergence of this group was surely a significant moment in the history of the European clerisy. Some members of the group chose their occupation in conscious preference to a traditional university career.29
Individuals of the stature of Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton headed learned societies, combining these posts with other occupations. Leibniz, for example was active as a librarian, another career which was growing in importance in the early modern period. Scholar-librarians included Bartolommeo Platina at the Vatican in the fifteenth century, Hugo Blotius in sixteenth-century Vienna, Gabriel Naudé in seventeenth-century Rome and Paris, Daniel Morhof in seventeenth-century Kiel, Burkhard Struve in eighteenth-century Jena and the historian Ludovico Muratori in eighteenth-century Modena. Librarians of this period have been described as crucial ‘mediators’ in the Republic of Letters. Often scholars themselves, they brought information to the notice of their colleagues and were slower than most of these colleagues to abandon the ideal of universal knowledge,30
Another alternative to work in universities was to serve a ruler as a counsellor or as an official historian. Appointments of this kind were already made in the Middle Ages, but their numbers rose in time with the rise of more centralized states in the early modern period, and included such well-known scholars and writers as Jean Racine (historian to Louis XIV), John Dryden (to Charles II), Samuel Pufendorf (to the rulers of Prussia and Sweden), and even Voltaire (to Louis XV). To this group one might add a smaller number of men of letters who made a career out of advising governments on what we might call ‘cultural affairs’ or ‘propaganda’. In Louis XIV’s France, for example, the poet and critic Jean Chapelain, Charles Perrault (better know today as a writer of fairy tales) and others formed a ‘little academy’ which considered how best to present the public image of the monarch.31 Some German scholars, such as Herman Conring (below, 91) and Burkhard Struve doubled as university professors and as counsellors to the local prince. Like Chinese officials, they were given power on the basis of intellectual distinction. The rise of the German mandarins had already begun.32
GROUP IDENTITIES
That the group identity of the clerisy was becoming stronger, despite differentiation and conflicts, is suggested by the publication of books on the man of letters, like the Italian Jesuit Daniele Bartoli’s The Man of Letters (1645, much reprinted and translated), or the marquis d’Alembert’s ‘essay’ on the same subject (1752). The Encyclopédie carried an entry on ‘Gens de lettres’ which stressed the point that they were not narrow specialists but ‘capable of entering these different fields even if they could not cultivate them all’ (en état de porter leurs pas dans ces différentes terrains, s’ils ne peuvent les cultiver tons). The eighteenth-century Swiss physician Simon Tissot even wrote a book about the health hazards specific to the profession of letters (1766).
For their part, the German mandarins preferred the title of ‘man of learning’ (Gelehrte), or ‘polymath’ (Polyhistor). In seventeenth-century Germany, these people were sometimes described as a social class or order (der Gelehrten Stand). One sign of their collective self-consciousness was the publication of Daniel Morhof’s Polyhistor (1688), a guide to the scholarship of the time, which went through many editions, like its rival Burkhard Struve’s Introduction to the Knowledge of Learning (1704). Another was the appearance of collections of biographies such as the ‘Dictionary of the Learned’ (Gelehrten-Lexicon, 1715), edited by Professor Johann Burchard Mencke, and the ‘Temple of Honour of German Scholarship’ (Ehrentempel der Deutsche Gelehrsamkeit, 1747) edited by the philosopher Jakob Brucker. Yet another sign of self-consciousness was the claim of the critic Johann Christoph Gottsched that scholars in action were as free as rulers, ‘recognizing no one as their superior but reason and a more powerful pen’ (die Vernunft und eine mächtigere Feder)’.33 At the end of our period, the young Goethe, a student at the university of Leipzig, was impressed by the high status of the professors there.
The European clerisy also defined themselves as citizens of the Republic of Letters, a phrase which goes back to the fifteenth century but was employed with increasing frequency from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Nouvelles de la République des Lettres was the title of of a journal founded in 1684, one of an increasing number of learned or cultural reviews which were published from the 1660s onwards and helped create a new identity for their readers: the Journal des Savants (1665), The Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions (1665), the Giornale de’ letterati of Rome (1668), the Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig (1682) and many others.34
The Nouvelles was edited by Pierre Bayle, who has been described as an archetypical intellectual of the period. Bayle was a French Calvinist professor who emigrated to the Dutch Republic to escape the persecution of the Protestants by the regime of Louis XIV. He taught at Rotterdam for a time but then turned to writing for a living. Thanks to his place in the history of dictionaries and the history of the footnote as well as in the history of scepticism, Bayle’s name will recur in the course of this study.35
Like Bayle, a number of Calvinist pastors also emigrated from France at this point, following the revocation in 1685 of the royal edict which had allowed Protestants freedom of worship. Discovering that the supply of Calvinist clergy exceeded the demand for pastors and preachers, some of them turned to the profession of letters and in particular to the periodical press (below, chapter 7). These ex-pastors were among the first ‘journalists’, a term which was just coming into use in French, English and Italian around 1700 to refer to writers in the learned or literary journals, as opposed to the lower-status gazetiers who reported the news on a daily or weekly basis. Printing was thus continuing to generate new professions.36
In the eighteenth century, journalists became increasingly influential as periodicals proliferated. The rewards to leading men of letters, including historians, were rising (below, chapter 8). In England, Alexander Pope has been described as the first independent man of letters, soon followed by Samuel Johnson.37 In France, philosophes such as Diderot and other contributors to the Encylopédie followed the example of Bayle and Johnson in producing a reference book in order to make a living from their pens, although the use of an encyclopaedia to support a political project was a major novelty.
The well-known examples of literary success should not allow us to forget the literary underground’, or ‘Grub Street’, as it was called in eighteenth-century England, in other words the world of the unsuccessful and impoverished writers, described by Voltaire as la canaille de la littérature.38 All the same, from a comparative point of view, what is striking is the emergence in most parts of Europe by the middle of the eighteenth century of a group of more or less independent men of letters with political views of their own, concentrated in a few major cities, notably Paris, London, Amsterdam and Berlin, and in regular contact with one another. The reference to ‘most parts’ of Europe is intended as a reminder of the fact that in the world of Orthodox or Eastern Christendom, the clerisy was still almost entirely clerical, with the exception of a tiny group of ‘westernized’ men of learning such as Dimitri Cantemir (prince of Moldavia and a member of the Berlin Academy), or Mikhail Lomonosov, the great Russian polymath, who began his education in a seminary but was transferred to the college of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg in 1736.
ISLAM AND CHINA
The western clerisy was not of course unique. In Islam, for example, the ‘ulama (in other words the specialists in ‘ilm, ‘knowledge’) had long had an honourable position in society, whether as teachers in the schools attached to mosques (the madrasas), as judges or as the counsellors of rulers. As in the medieval West, this clerisy was associated with religion (including the sacred law). They were not clergy in the Christian sense because Muslims deny the possibility of mediation between the individual and God.39 Some scholars acquired an international reputation, as in the case of Ibn Sina (‘Avicenna’) and Ibn Rushd (‘Averroes’), both of whom were known in the West in the Middle Ages.
In the early modern Ottoman Empire, as in western Europe, students were coming to expect employment in the ‘ulama or ‘learned hierarchy’ after their studies were finished, and the frustration of these expectations in the middle of the seventeenth century led to discontent in Istanbul as it did in Oxford or Naples.40 The great contrast between Muslim scholars and their counterparts in early modern Europe was a contrast between media of communication. As we have seen, the printing press offered a variety of opportunities to European men of letters. The world of Islam, on the other hand, rejected the printing press and remained until 1800 or thereabouts a world of oral and manuscript communication.41
In China the position of the shen-shih or ‘scholar-gentry’ was even more honourable, since it was this group which (with some competition from eunuchs and others) managed the state for the emperor for some 2,000 years. For much of this time the political elite, magistrates or mandarins, were chosen on the basis of the results of competitive examinations at different levels (the district, the prefecture, the province and finally the metropolis). The candidates were isolated from one another in individual cubicles in the examination compound. Their answers, usually commentaries on the Confucian classics, were marked by examiners who did not know the identity of the candidates. The system was closer to a ‘meritocracy’ than any other in the early modern world.42
The increasing western interest in China (to be discussed below, 193), included a lively curiosity about its clerisy (known in Europe as literati), not to mention some envy. In his famous Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton, an Oxford don, offered what he called ‘an Utopia of mine own’. In this ideal commonwealth, magistrates would be chosen by examination, ‘as the literati in China’. A writer in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions (July 1666) raised the same fundamental issues in the course of reviewing a new description of China, when he noted that ‘their Nobility is raised from Learning and Knowledge, without regard to blood or parentage.’ It was for this reason that the eighteenth-century French reformer François Quesnay wanted to imitate the Chinese examination system, while Voltaire was among those who admired the mandarins, fonctionnaires lettrés as he called them. The Chinese system may well have inspired the introduction of examinations for candidates for the civil service in France, Prussia and Britain in the nineteenth century.43
This brief discussion of the clerisy in early modern Europe – a topic which surely deserves a book-length study – may at least be sufficient to indicate the difficulty of defining their identity without taking into account the different kinds of institution in which they pursued their careers. To examine these institutions and their contributions to knowledge is the purpose of the following chapter.
1 Mannheim (1936), 137–8.
2 Pipes (1960); Charle (1990).
3 Le Goff (1957).
4 Walzer (1965).
5 Solt (1956).
6 Gellner (1988), 70–1, 79.
7 Goldgar (1995); Bots and Waquet (1997); Burke (1999a).
8 Znaniecki (1940).
9 King (1976); Jardine (1983, 1985).
10 Schiebinger (1989); Goodman (1994); Shteir (1996).
11 Bouwsma (1973).
12 Le Goff (1957); cf. Murray (1978), 227—33, 263—5, Brocchieri (1987), Verger (1997).
13 Kristeller (1955); Dionisotti (1967); Romano and Tenenti (1967); Burke (1986).
14 Benzoni (1978), 159ff.
15 Schottenloher (1935).
16 Elias (1939), 1, 73.
17 Burke (1988); Prosperi (1981).
18 Curtis (1962); cf. Chartier (1982), Roche (1982).
19 Nigro (1991).
20 Stehr (1992).
21 Viala (1985).
22 Viala (1985), 247.
23 Viala (1985), 270–80; Vandermeersch (1996), 223–4, 246–8.
24 Hall (1965); Rochot (1966); Solomon (1972); Webster (1975); Revel (1996).
25 Kelley (1971, 1980).
26 Goldie (1987).
27 Hill (1972); Webster (1975), 250–64.
28 Houghton (1942); Kenny (1998).
29 Hahn (1971, 1975); McClellan (1985), xxiv–xxv, 233–51.
30 Clarke (1966); Rosa (1994).
31 Burke (1992).
32 Ringer (1969).
33 Quoted in Dülmen (1978), 257.
34 Morgan (1929); Gardair (1984); Laeven (1986).
35 Labrousse (1963–4, 1983); Bost (1994).
36 Haase (1959), 404–17; Labrousse (1963–4); Yardeni (1973, 1985); Martens (1974); Gibbs (1975); Bost (1994), 232–9.
37 Beljame (1881).
38 Darnton (1982); Masseau (1994).
39 Repp (1972; 1986); Fleischer (1986); Zilfi (1988).
40 Itzkowitz (1972).
41 Messick (1993); Robinson (1993).
42 Marsh (1961); Miyazaki (1963); Chaffee (1985).
43 Teng (1942–3).