8

ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE:
THE READER’S SHARE

To enter the palace of learning at the great gate, requires an expense of time and forms; men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door.

Swift

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Johnson

THE last chapter concentrated on the production of knowledge for profit and its relation to the rise of the eighteenth-century ‘consumer society’. It is time to turn to the consumers themselves, the ways in which they acquired or appropriated knowledge and the uses they found for it.

In the field of knowledge, individual consumption is relatively well documented. Inventories of goods often list the contents of libraries title by title. The practice of publishing by subscription discussed in chapter 7 (above, 167) led to the publication of lists of subscribers which give historians some impression of the nature of the reading public in different places and times and for different kinds of book. It is fascinating to find, for example, that the subscribers to John Harris’s Lexicon technicum (above, 172) ranged from Isaac Newton and the classical scholar Richard Bentley to a shipwright and a watchmaker, or that the subscribers to the Encyclopédic, often perceived as an anticlerical enterprise, included substantial numbers of French clergymen.¹

Subscription lists are also a vivid reminder of the problem, of the limitations to individual access to knowledge at this time. Only a tiny proportion of the population could afford to subscribe to a folio encyclopaedia or even to a journal. Public or quasi-public libraries existed, as we have seen (chapter 4, 67), but access to them was limited, most obviously by the individual’s location, with the inhabitants of Rome and Paris enjoying considerable advantages over everyone else (above, 68). Jean Barbeyrac, a French writer on law, wished in 1716 that he were living in Berlin rather than Lausanne because access to libraries was better there. The English historian Edward Gibbon worked in the public libraries of Lausanne and Geneva in 1763 and deplored the lack of a public library in London (he was admitted a reader at the British Museum in 1770, soon after it opened).2

The sociology as well as the geography of libraries is also relevant to the history of the acquisition of knowledge. Access to early modern libraries depended on the attitudes of the librarian and his staff. For example, the correspondence of foreign scholars is full of complaints about the difficulty of gaining access to the Marciana in Venice. In his treatise on libraries, Gabriel Naudé noted that only the Bodleian in Oxford, the Ambrosiana in Milan and the Augustinian library in Rome allowed free entrance to scholars (the Bodleian is known to have been used by some 350 foreign readers between 1620 and 1640). The seventeenth-century English traveller Richard Lassels also noted with pleasure that the Ambrosiana ‘opens its doors to all comers and goers, and suffers them to read what book they please’, and that in Rome the university library and that of the Augustinians were ‘open to all men every day, with a courteous gentleman to reach you any book’.

Public libraries multiplied in the period and so did the numbers of users and the numbers of books available on their shelves. For example, in 1648, eighty to a hundred scholars regularly used the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris on the days on which it was open. The Hofbibliothek in Vienna officially opened to readers in 1726, and the Bibliothèque Royale in Paris a decade later. By the late eighteenth century there were printed forms to use for ordering books, although the journalist Sébastien Mercier complained: ‘This vast store is open only twice a week and for two and a half hours … the public is poorly served, with a disdainful air.’³

Lectures for a wider public than that of university students were becoming more frequent in London, Paris and elsewhere (above, 152). Museums, which for the most part housed private collections, were gradually becoming more open in the course of the period, at least to visitors from the upper classes, as surviving visitors’ books make clear.⁴

All the same, it is appropriate for this chapter to focus on the acquisition of knowledge via the reading of books and periodicals. Periodicals deserve a special mention because they made learning easier. As the Italian philosophe Cesare Beccaria once observed – in the pages of the journal II Caffé – periodicals spread knowledge more widely than books, just as books spread knowledge more widely than manuscripts. Some readers are in awe of books and prefer not to have them in the house. The periodical, on the other hand, is more reader-friendly. ‘It presents itself like a friend who just wants to say a word in your ear.’

READING AND RECEPTION

The acquisition of knowledge is obviously dependent not only on the possibility of access to stores of information, but also on the individual’s intelligence, assumptions and practices. The history of ways of listening and even of ways of viewing has not been studied in any depth, but the history of reading has attracted a good deal of attention in the last couple of decades, and it has led, for instance, to a new way of writing the history of science.5

The new approach has also generated a number of debates, notably the debate over the rise of what is known as ‘extensive reading’, in other words browsing, skimming or consulting. One historian has claimed that a ‘reading revolution’ took place in Germany in the later eighteenth century, in the sense of a shift from intensive to extensive reading. Another has described a more gradual and a more general shift ‘from intensive and reverent reading to a more extensive, nonchalant reading style’, the result of the proliferation and the consequent ‘desacralization’ of the book. It was in the mid-eighteenth century that Dr Johnson asked his interlocutor with his usual force, ‘Sir, do you read books through?’⁶

However, extensive reading was not a new discovery. In ancient Rome the philosopher Seneca, in his second letter to Lucilius, was already advising his pupil not to browse in books, which he compared to toying with one’s food. Francis Bacon developed the same common comparison between reading and eating in his essay ‘Of Studies’, when he distinguished three ways of using books: ‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.’ Bacon’s advice reminds us that it was perfectly possible for the same person to practise different styles of reading in the seventeenth century, just like many of us today. The preface to John Harris’s technical dictionary claimed that the book was ‘useful to be read carefully over, as well as to be consulted like other dictionaries occasionally’.

Intensive reading was encouraged in schools and universities, where close familiarity with certain texts such as Aristotle, Cicero, the Bible and the Corpus of Roman law was often required from students. To acquire this familiarity the students might practise the classical art of ‘artificial memory’, making an effort to associate whatever they wanted to remember with vivid and dramatic images which were located in imagined ‘places’ such as a church or a theatre.7

Centuries before Marcel Proust and ‘his contemporary the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the power of associations and the importance of location for the act of remembering was clearly recognized. It was perhaps for this reason that Sir Robert Cotton described the major sections of his library by the names of Roman emperors whose busts were placed on the book-cases. Joseph Williamson, a secretary of state in the reign of Charles II, organized his papers in a similar way.⁸

Alternatively, the students might take notes on texts. The fact that this practice still persists does not mean that we can take it for granted or assume that it is unchanging. A history of note-taking, if it ever comes to be written, would make a valuable contribution to intellectual history. This history might include notes on lectures, a number of which have survived from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and notes on travels, often made for educational reasons by young noblemen on the Grand Tour.⁹

Notes might be taken in the texts themselves, with the reader underlining passages or writing in the margin a heading or the words ‘note well’ (nota bene), sometimes symbolized by the image of a pointing finger. Marginalia of this kind were sometimes inserted by printers in order to make the student’s task easier. Alternatively, notes might be taken in special notebooks. Well-organized scholars might keep different notebooks for different subjects, as Montesquieu did with his notes on history, geography, law, politics, mythology and so on. By the eighteenth century, if not before – how else could bibliographers like Conrad Gesner have operated? – notes were being taken on slips of paper or fiches, which had the advantage that they could be rearranged in different combinations whenever necessary. Since slips of paper were liable to damage, some scholars preferred to take their notes on the back of playing-cards, the ancestor of the card-index system so important in intellectual life until the recent arrival of the personal computer.10

The practice of note-taking was taught in schools by the sixteenth century, if not before: it may be significant that the word ‘notes’ in this sense, like the term ‘digest’ in the sense of a summary, is recorded in English only in the sixteenth century. Frequently advised was the keeping of what were known at this time as ‘commonplace books’, notebooks which were organized in systematic form, often in alphabetical order of ‘topics’ or ‘commonplaces’ (loci communes, lieux communs, etc.). As we have seen (above, 95), this was a common way of ordering knowledge. Associated with the ‘places’ of artificial memory, commonplaces helped writers to produce new texts and readers to assimilate them with a minimum of effort, whether these readers were students, lawyers composing speeches or preachers with sermons to deliver.

The last group, for example, might turn to the collection of sermon outlines already circulating in print in the fifteenth century and nicknamed ‘Sleep Well’ (Dormi secure) because it alleviated anxiety over next Sunday’s sermon; or to Francisco Labata’s Instrument for Preachers (1614), discussed in chapter 5 (above, 171); or to Vincent Houdry’s eight-volume Preachers’ Library (1712). Houdry’s book, which had expanded to twenty-three volumes by its fourth edition, was an alphabetical list of topics for sermons, mainly moral topics such as ‘affliction’ or ‘ambition’, complete with appropriate references to the Bible, the fathers of the Church, theologians and preachers. Its derivation from the tradition of commonplaces is revealed by the author’s habit of considering pairs of opposed qualities together, humility alongside pride and so on.

The ‘places’ included abstract concepts such as comparisons and opposites, which helped readers organize information and so retrieve it when they needed it. As recommended by writers on education such as Erasmus and Vives, the topics also included moral qualities such as prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance, sometimes paired with the opposite vice. Under these headings, the students were supposed to note striking examples from Homer, Virgil and other classics in order to use them in arguments for or against a particular line of conduct. Since the same examples frequently recurred, the idea of the ‘commonplace’ gradually shifted from active to passive, from a scheme for organizing information to what we call a verbal cliché.¹¹

The moral-rhetorical approach embodied in the commonplace books and taught in schools and universities influenced modes of reading in early modern Europe and may therefore be used by scholars to reconstruct these modes. Take history, for example. A number of treatises were devoted to the art of reading books on history. Jean Bodin’s Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1566), with its chapter ‘On the order of reading historical treatises’, is the most famous example of the genre. In his third chapter, ‘On the proper arrangement of historical material’, Bodin advises his readers to keep a commonplace book of the examples they come across when reading about the past, dividing them into four types, ‘base, honourable, useful and useless’.

The study of history was generally justified on moral grounds. Readers of Livy, Tacitus or Guicciardini were supposed to look out for moral examples, good examples to follow and bad examples to avoid. The frequent moral reflections offered by historians ancient and modern helped readers in their task. Printed marginalia drew attention to these reflections, which were sometimes listed in a separate index of maxims or gnomologia. It would therefore appear that the sixteenth-century public read its history in a very different way from many readers today, concerned as it was with morals rather than facts, and attending to the general features of a situation at the expense of the specific.

History was also read with the precepts of rhetoric very much in mind. Sixteenth-century historians, like those of ancient Greece and Rome, offered a good deal of their explanations in the form of speeches placed in the mouths of counsellors, generals or ambassadors, and arguing for or against a particular course of action or exhorting the troops to fight. The professional writer François de Belleforest, a French equivalent of the Venetian poligrafi, once published a book called Harangues (1573), an anthology of speeches taken from leading ancient and modern historians, each speech preceded by a summary of the argument and followed by an account of its effect. An elaborate index which included maxims and commonplaces increased what might be called the reference value of the work.

REFERENCE BOOKS

If commonplace books encouraged intensive reading, its complementary opposite, extensive reading, was stimulated by the rise of reference books. This literary genre or cluster of genres has already been discussed from the point of view of the producer (above, 169). It is time to approach reference books from the demand side and to ask what they provided for whom and how they were used.

A reference book might be defined as a book designed not to be read ‘from cover to cover’ but rather to be ‘consulted’ by someone who looks up’ or ‘refers to’ the book in search of a specific item of information, a short cut to knowledge. The essential point was neatly made by Jonathan Swift in a passage quoted as epigraph to this chapter as ‘the back-door’ to ‘the palace of learning’.

It might reasonably be argued that from the reader’s point of view, there is no such thing as a reference book, since any book, even a novel, can be consulted, and any book, even the encyclopaedia, can be read. The larger the book, the less likely that it will be read from cover to cover. Rather than thinking of a fixed corpus of objects, we should define reference books through the practices of readers.

Take the case of Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, for example. It is likely that the author of this dialogue, first published in 1528, intended to explore a range of questions about education and life at court rather than to offer clear and definite answers. At all events, the original folio edition, lacking even a division into chapters, is one in which it was and is difficult to find anything quickly. However, the book became a best-seller which went through about 125 editions in various languages in the century which followed its publication. Surviving copies show that some readers used the book as a source of information about good behaviour or even of anecdotes to tell in company. Some of the printers exploited the possibility and facilitated information retrieval by dividing the book into chapters and providing it with a full apparatus of marginalia, index and detailed table of contents, thus transforming it into a kind of reference book.12

Changes in the physical format of books in the early modern period make it increasingly clear that many of them were designed for some uses other than close or intensive reading. Indexes and lists of contents became increasingly frequent. The term ‘table of contents’ was often to be taken literally, since the list of chapters might be replaced or supplemented by a synopsis in the form of bracketed tables of the kind discussed in chapter 5 (above, 97), tables which made it possible for a reader to take in the structure of the treatise virtually at a glance. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, uses this technique to display the definition, species, causes and symptoms of melancholy. The symptoms were divided into mental and physical, the causes into general or particular, natural or supernatural and so on.

Again, the use of parallel columns in chronological tables assisted the reader in the task of ‘synchronizing’ different systems of time reckoning (Jewish, Christian, Muslim and so on), and thus revealing ‘anachronisms’. Parallel with the rise of statistics (above, 135) the increasing importance of tables of figures may be noted, whether the subject of the book is astronomy, history or political economy. Tables facilitated comparisons and contrasts. Diagrams and other illustrations, frequent in many kinds of treatise from the herbal to the drill manual, allowed readers to use books without paying very much attention to the text. New reading skills or modes of literacy were increasingly required to make sense of maps, tables of figures and so on.

The proliferation of books raised the problem of how to compare different accounts of the same phenomenon without wasting time. A book-wheel, designed to hold a series of open volumes, made the task of collation somewhat easier. A wheel of this kind, dating from the late sixteenth century, is still preserved in the Herzog-August library at Wolfenbüttel.

Certain kinds of book were organized in such a way as effectively to resist attempts to read them from cover to cover. Dictionaries, for example, or atlases and gazetteers, or catalogues (of stars, plants or books), or anthologies of maxims or proverbs such as the book through which Erasmus made his reputation, the Adagia, or indeed encyclopaedias, especially if they were arranged in alphabetical order.

ALPHABETICAL ORDER

As d’Alembert pointed out in his introduction to the Encyclopédia (above, 115), there are essentially two ways of arranging information in encyclopaedias (in the West at least). In the first place, what he called the ‘encyclopaedic principle’, in other words thematic organization, the traditional tree of knowledge. In the second place, what he called the ‘dictionary principle’, in other words alphabetical order of topics.

Alphabetical order had been introduced in the eleventh-century Byzantine encyclopaedia known as ‘Suidas’. Indexes of this kind were used by Cistercians and others in the thirteenth century.13 The famous library of the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris was catalogued alphabetically in the early sixteenth century, while Erasmus arranged his famous collection of proverbs, the Adagia (1500) in the same way. Gesner’s Library (1545) listed books in alphabetical order, while his History of Animals (1551–) listed animals alphabetically. The Catholic Index of Prohibited Books followed the same principle.14 It was even applied to some museums: the collection assembled by the Farnese family at their great house at Caprarola, for instance, was arranged in drawers labelled A to N.

Alphabetical ordering became an increasingly common practice in the seventeenth century.¹⁵ Thomas James, librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, wanted the library catalogue, published in 1605, to be arranged in alphabetical order, although the founder, Sir Thomas Bodley, insisted on the traditional organization by disciplines, and James had to be content with making an alphabetical index (the 1620 version of the catalogue was arranged alphaetically).¹⁶ Gazetteers bore titles such as ABC de tout le monde (1651). The library of the statesman Jean-Baptiste Colbert included ‘alphabetical tables’ listing important kinds of manuscript, such as maps and treaties.¹⁷ Famous examples of reference books organized in this way include Laurentius Beyerlinck’s Theatre of Human Life (1631), a rearrangement of Zwinger’s thematic encyclopaedia; Louis Moréri’s Great Historical Dictionary (1674), which went through many editions; and Pierre Bayle’s riposte to Moréri, the Critical and Historical Dictionary (1697). Apparently Bayle even wrote the articles in his dictionary in alphabetical order.¹⁸ In the mid-eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson provided his readers with the earliest known index to a work of fiction. By the end of the century, libraries were beginning to catalogue their holdings on cards (originally the backs of playing cards) so as to permit the insertion of new items in alphabetical order.¹⁹

However, obvious as the principle may seem today, it was only very slowly that alphabetical organization (as opposed to topical organization accompanied by an alphabetical index) replaced older systems. The collection of proverbs which Erasmus had published in alphabetical order in 1500 was republished, organized by topic, in 1596. Alphabetical order was still unusual enough at the end of the seventeenth century for the editor of a reference book about the Muslim world, Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Oriental Library (1697), to find it necessary to apologize for it in his preface, declaring that the method ‘does not produce as much confusion as one might imagine’ – Gibbon complained all the same in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (chapter 51) that he could not ‘digest’ the alphabetical order of Herbelot’s book. The preface to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771) criticized both Chambers and the Encyclopédie for what it describes as ‘the folly of attempts to communicate science under the various technical terms arranged in an alphabetical order’.20

The conflict between the two systems makes a good illustration of the problems raised by presenting the history of knowledge as a story of progress. The change from the thematic system to the alphabetical system is no simple shift from less to more efficiency. It may reflect a change in world-views (above, 115), a loss of faith in the correspondence between the world and the word. It also corresponds to a change in modes of reading.

It is clear enough that the traditional encyclopaedias described in chapter 5 were unsuitable for rapid consultation by readers who were in search of particular items. Alphabetical order saves time. However, this solution to the problem of information retrieval, the ‘Suidas solution’ as we might call it, also had its price. The Canadian communications theorist Harold Innis once complained how ‘encyclopaedias may tear knowledge apart and pigeonhole it in alphabetical boxes’.²¹ They both express and encourage the modern fragmentation of knowledge. The ‘confusion’ which Herbelot mentioned was more than a simple failure by readers to adapt to the requirements of a new system.

After all, the traditional thematic, organic or holistic arrangement of knowledge has great and obvious advantages. It encourages ‘intensive’ readers to notice what d’Alembert called ‘l’enchaînement des connaissances’, in other words the links between the different disciplines or specialities, the system underlying them. Medieval and Renaissance encyclopaedias were designed to be read rather than consulted (though they might, like Reisch’s volume, include an alphabetical index).

The arbitrariness of alphabetical order could be and was counteracted by means of cross-references to other entries on related topics. As Leibniz pointed out, the system had the advantage of presenting the same material from different points of view. The work involved in following up such references, with or without mechanical aids such as the Wolfenbüttel book-wheel, is a useful reminder that ‘reference reading’ is not, or not necessarily, a soft option. As one English writer, Myles Davies, complained in 1716 in his Athenae Britannicae, ‘not one reader in a hundred takes the pains to turn backwards and forwards, as such appendicular References require.’ However, some of the cross-references in the Encyclopédie surely achieved their subversive aims without being followed up; it was sufficient for an article on the Eucharist to end with the recommendation, ‘see cannibals’.

AIDS TO HISTORICAL RESEARCH

To offer a more vivid picture of the way in which more resources were available in each successive century to someone seeking knowledge on a particular topic, we might take the example of history itself. Imagine a scholar concerned to discover the date of a particular event, for example, or some information about an individual who lived centuries before, or the text of a document.

In 1450, such a scholar would have had to depend entirely on manuscript sources. A hundred years later, he would have been able to consult a few works of reference. For geography, for instance, he could go to Sebastian Münister’s Cosmography (1540). For bibliography, he could refer to Gesner (above, 93) or the list of ecclesiastical writers compiled by the German abbot Johannes Trithemius and published in 1494. On the histories of individual countries, he could turn to the work of the expatriate Italian humanists Paolo Emili on France (published 1516–20), Luca Marineo on Spain (1533), Polydore Vergil on England (1534), and Antonio Bonfini on Hungary (1543). After 1550 it was possible to consult Giorgio Vasari’s biographies of Italian artists; after 1553, the historical dictionary compiled by the French scholar-printer Charles Estienne; and after 1566, Bodin’s Method, which was among other things a bibliographical essay covering the whole field of history.

By 1650, the situation had changed dramatically, as private letters between scholars were increasingly supplemented as sources of information by periodicals and specialized reference books.22 Bodin was supplemented by the Oxford don Degory Wheare’s Method of Reading Histories (1623) and by the more detailed historical bibliography of the German pastor Paul Bolduan (1620). The atlases of Abraham Ortelius (1570), Gerard Mercator (1585–95) and the Blaeu family (1635 onwards) simplified the problem of finding the cities and regions discussed in historical texts. Chronological tables of world history could be found in a number of books, including the famous studies by Joseph Scaliger (1583) and the French Jesuit Denis Petavius (1627).

If information about individuals was needed, it was by now possible to turn, for instance, to the Swiss Heinrich Pantaleon’s lives of famous Germans (1565), entitled ‘Prosopography’; the Frenchman Gabriel du Preau’s dictionary of heretics (1569), in alphabetical order from the ‘Adamites’ to Zwingli; the painter Karel van Mander’s biographies of Dutch artists (1603); and Melchior Adam’s lives of German theologians, lawyers and physicians, published in the 1620s. For genealogical problems, reference could be made to Henninger’s Theatre of Genealogies (1598). For facts and figures about particular countries, one could turn to the description of the world by Giovanni Botero, available from the 1590s, or from the 1620s onwards, to the Elsevier series discussed in chapter 7 (above, 164). Collections of documents included volumes devoted to the decrees of German emperors and to the texts of German and Bohemian chroniclers. Works in foreign languages could be decoded with the help of dictionaries. Rare before 1550, a hundred years later these now indispensable reference books included Spanish–English, Italian–English, French–English, French–Spanish, German–Latin, German–Polish, Latin–Swedish, and a number of dictionaries of four, seven or even eleven languages, including Croat, Czech and Hungarian.

By 1750, given access to a reasonably large library, the scholar might consult a whole shelf of competing chronologies, including that of the Englishman John Marsham and the critical study published by a group of French Benedictines, The Art of Verifying Dates (1750). Atlases now included the six-volume edition of Blaeu (1655), the specialized Historical Atlas of Châtelain (1705), and Bruzen de la Martinière’s ten-volume Great Geographical and Critical Dictionary (1726–39). The rival historical dictionaries of Moréri (1674) and Bayle (1697) were available in a number of editions. Anonymous and pseudonymous writers could be tracked down with the help of a number of dictionaries beginning with that of Placcius in 1674. Biographical dictionaries included one devoted to the lives of scholars, Mencke’s Lexicon of the Learned (1715), as well as Jean-Pierre Nicéron’s voluminous Memoirs of Illustrious Men (forty-three volumes, 1727–45).

Many more texts of documents such as treaties, medieval chronicles or the decrees of Church councils were now available in sets of folio volumes edited by such scholars as the Englishman Thomas Rymer (twenty volumes), or the Italians Ludovico Muratori (twenty-eight volumes) and Archbishop Giovanni Domenico Mansi (thirty-one volumes). Archaic forms of Latin were less of an obstacle after the publication of a glossary by the French scholar Charles Du Cange (1678). Bibliographies of books on history now included Cornelis de Beughem’s four-volume Historical Bibliography (1685–) and Burkhard Struve’s Select Historical Bibliography (1705), both compiled by German scholars; and two French productions, Louis-Ellies Du Pin’s Universal Library of Historians (1707) and Nicolas Lenglet’s Method of Studying History (1713), an essay in the tradition of Bodin. New books on history – and many other subjects – could be found by browsing in the pages of learned journals such as the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres or the Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig.

INDIVIDUAL APPROPRIATIONS

It is clear that many reference books were intended for a particular section of the market, for clergy, lawyers, doctors, women and so on. For example, in the German-speaking world in particular, there was a rise of encyclopaedias intended in the first instance for female readers.23

To reconstruct the manner in which early modern readers acquired knowledge and put it to use, case-studies of individuals are also necessary. It is illuminating to learn which reference books were acquired by owners of small libraries. The inventories of books left by sixteenth-century students and teachers of the university of Cambridge, for example, include a number of references to dictionaries (notably that of Aatonius Calepinus) and encyclopaedias (especially that of Gregor Reisch).²⁴ There remains the more important but more elusive problem of the way in which reference books were used. Philip II of Spain has been caught in the act of using Ortelius’s atlas to identify villages in France in preparation for the sailing of the Spanish Armada in 1588.²⁵ Again, discussing the decline of the population in his Political Restoration of Spain (1619), the theologian Sancho de Moncada made recurrent references to Botero’s work. The reading practices of a few well-known scholars, including Jean Bodin, John Dee, Gabriel Harvey and Johann Kepler have also been studied in some detail, and a careful analysis has been made of the different channels through which the Boston patrician Samuel Sewall acquired information in the early eighteenth century.²⁶

A particularly well-documented case of an avid reader is that of the polymath Peiresc. Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc was a magistrate of extremely broad intellectual interests. Living in Provence a generation before the rise of the learned journal, Peiresc was dependent on an international network of friends for news of the Republic of Letters, of ‘people of curiosity like us’ (gens curieux comme nous) as he called them. His voluminous correspondence, much of which has been published, is stuffed with references to new books, editions of the fathers of the Church, a history of the Arabs, the latest treatise by Galileo, the Elsevier series of descriptions of Poland and other states, the anthologies of travelogues edited by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, and, not least, newsletters or gazettes in manuscript or print, from Venice, Amsterdam, Rome and elsewhere.

Peiresc did not learn from books alone. He was also an enthusiastic collector of objects such as Roman coins and Egyptian mummies, which reminds us that knowledge could be acquired by a number of means and warns us not to place too much stress on reading alone. Collections of curiosities illustrate the appropriation of knowledge with particular clarity. It may therefore be useful to cast an eye over the contents of a famous private museum of the seventeenth century, mentioned in an earlier chapter (106), and housing the collection belonging to Manfredo Settala, a noble clergyman of Milan. A catalogue of the collection was published in the seventeenth century. The catalogue is obviously no substitute for the objects themselves, but it was, after all, the means by which most people learned of the collections even at the time.

A contemporary engraving of Settala’s museum gives the impression of apparently inexhaustible variety. Alligators and fish hang from the ceiling, urns and busts are ranged along the floor, and the centre of the room is filled with drawers. The catalogue reinforces this impression of a museum as microcosm (above, 107), containing specimens of everything in the world. One might also describe a museum of this kind as a kind of school, teaching the viewer about the uses of materials such as wood, metal, earthenware and so on as well as about the products of different parts of the world; silver from Potosì, porcelain from China, bows and arrows from the Ottoman Empire and Brazil, mummies from Egypt, Chinese and Japanese texts written in ideograms and so on. The references in the catalogue to books, such as Gonzàlez de Mendoza on China, or to donors, such as the archbishop of Milan (who gave Settala a Japanese vase), suggest that the owner at least viewed the objects in their historical and geographical contexts as well as as examples of different materials (as discussed in chapter 5, 107).²⁷

FROM MONTAIGNE TO MONTESQUIEU

Since an earlier chapter of this book emphasized the importance of major cities such as Rome and Paris, it may be illuminating to consider individuals who lived in the countryside. By the later sixteenth century, there is evidence of English country gentlemen acquiring and exchanging historical information.28 The case of Peiresc has just been discussed. To perceive change within the period, one might compare and contrast two well-travelled French gentlemen with good libraries and wide interests, both of whom lived in the country near Bordeaux but a century and a half apart: Montaigne and Montesquieu.

When Montaigne retired to his estate, he made sure that the tower in which he meditated and wrote was well furnished with books. He is known to have used 271 books: only three on law, six on medicine and sixteen on theology, but nearly 100 on history, ancient and modern.²⁹ Like a good Renaissance man, Montaigne knew the Greek and Latin classics well, and was particularly fond of the moral works of Seneca and Plutarch. He was interested in the history of his own region, and made considerable use of the humanist Jean Bouchet’s Annates d’Aquitaine. On the history of France, he read the chronicles of Jean Froissart and the memoirs of the diplomat Philippe de Commynes; on Italy, the famous history by Francesco Guicciardini. Montaigne made use of the Method of his contemporary Jean Bodin, as well as the same author’s comparative study of political systems, Six Livres de la république. His interest in the world beyond Europe was nourished by the history of China by the Spanish missionary Juan González de Mendoza and by a handful of books on the Americas – the Spaniard Francisco Lopez de Gómara and the Italian Girolamo Benzoni on the Spanish conquests, the cosmographer Andre The vet and the missionary Jean de Léry on Brazil.

As for Montaigne’s mode of reading, it was – despite the originality of so many of his observations – typical of his period, at least in the sense that he looked at books with an eye for moral exempla. Although he expressed contempt for what he called ‘pâtés of commonplaces’ (pastissages de lieux communs), it is likely that he kept a commonplace book as well as annotating volumes in his possession. His copy of the life of Alexander by Quintus Curtius, for instance, contains notes in the margin on topics such as ‘armed chariots’, ‘Amazons’ and ‘words of Darius’. Montaigne’s early essays read like an expansion of extracts taken from his favourite authors and arranged under moral categories, and the practice of ‘commonplacing’ affected both the title and the content of his later essays as well.30

Montesquieu’s more systematic studies drew on the much wider range of books which had become available by his time. The library of his country house at La Brède contained some 3,000 volumes. His notebooks, most of them known only by their titles, were mentioned earlier in this chapter. One which has survived, the so-called Spicilège, reveals something about Montesquieu’s modes of acquiring information. It includes notes to himself about books to buy, including the collections of travelogues edited by John Harris and the Churchills. It also refers to knowledge obtained through conversation, for example with a French Jesuit missionary who had returned from China.

The notebook shows Montesquieu reading famous works of history such as Niccolò Machiavelli on Florence, Pietro Giannone on Naples and Gilbert Burnet on England, as well as cutting out passages from newspapers such as the Gazette d’Amsterdam, especially when they gave commercial information such as the arrival in Lisbon of ships from Rio de Janeiro with a cargo of diamonds. In one case the notes are detailed, that of Kaempfer’s famous description of Japan (above, 60), and they reveal something of Montesquieu’s principles of selection, notably his interest in the Japanese mode of subsistence, rice agriculture, as an explanation of their relatively dense population. The notebook, supplemented by Montesquieu’s letters, shows his familiarity with a shelf of works of reference such as the historical dictionaries of Moréri and Bayle, Chambers’s Cyclopaedia and the law dictionaries compiled by the French jurist Pierre-Jacques Brillon.³¹

Without ignoring or ironing out either the idiosyncrasies or the originality of Montaigne and Montesquieu, it may be argued that the contrast between these neighbours is, among other things, a contrast between a sixteenth-century and an eighteenth-century manner of reading. Montaigne’s manner was intensive, allowing him to quote passages from memory (as the minor inaccuracies show), and it focused on moral exempla. Montesquieu by contrast often looked books up rather than reading them through, and he read with an eye for facts, including statistics.

ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER CULTURES

What Montaigne and Montesquieu had in common was a lively interest in other cultures, even if they relied on different sources. Many leading European thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shared this curiosity. In France, one thinks of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau; in Britain, of John Locke and Adam Smith; and in Germany, of Leibniz, who wrote to the Electress Sophie Charlotte in 1697 that he meant to put a notice on his door, ‘bureau d’adresse pour la Chine’, so that people would know that they could apply to him for the latest news on this topic.

Generally speaking, educated Europeans acquired their knowledge of the world outside Europe from a relatively narrow range of books, a corpus which gradually changed over the course of the period. Around 1600, for example, one might, like Montaigne, read González de Mendoza on China, Lopez de Gómara on Mexico and Jean de Léry on Brazil, supplemented by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci’s account of the China mission and that of his colleague Luis Frois on a similar mission to Japan. On Africa, there were descriptions of the north by Leo the African (Hassan al-Wazzân), a Muslim who was kidnapped by pirates and taken to Rome, and of the Congo by Duarte Lopes (available in Italian, Latin, Dutch and English). On the Ottoman Empire, which was widely feared, there was a whole shelf of books, including a first-hand account of the mission by the Flemish diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, available in Latin, German, Czech, Spanish, French and English.

By the early eighteenth century, far more information was available and the most frequently cited books had changed. There was less interest in the Ottoman Empire since the threat of invasion had subsided. China, on the other hand, had become a fashion, and Montesquieu was not alone in turning to the four volumes of the French Jesuit Jean-Baptiste du Halde’s Description de la Chine (1735) to learn about it. Interest in Japan was also increasing, encouraged by the detailed account by Engelbert Kaempfer which was in English in 1727 and in French in 1729. Kaempfer was read with attention not only by Montesquieu but also by the German historian of philosophy Johann Jacob Brucker, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and by Diderot and other contributors to the Encyclopédie.32

On Africa, the account by the Portuguese traveller, Duarte Lopes was now joined by that of the Jesuit missionary Jerónimo Lobo on Abyssinia, printed in summary form in 1673 (and inspiring Samuel Johnson’s novel Rasselas a century later). From 1704 onwards, these descriptions could be supplemented by the Dutch merchant Willem Bosnian’s description of Guinea, divided into the gold coast, the slave coast and the ivory coast. It was only in the middle of the eighteenth century that detailed information about the interior of Africa began to be available.33

South America was also the object of increasing interest. Voltaire had thirteen books on the region in his library, including Charles-Marie de La Condamine’s account of his official mission to Peru and his subsequent journey down the Amazon. La Condamine’s work was cited with respect by the naturalist Buffon, the philosophe Holbach and William Robertson, principal of Edinburgh University and author of a successful History of America (1777).³⁴

Readers without the time or inclination to read monographs such as these could always consult an encyclopaedia such as Moréri, Bayle or the Encyclopédie, although these works of reference were not at their most reliable where Asia, Africa and America were concerned.³⁵

Given what was said earlier about systems of note-taking, it may be appropriate to sum up the early modern general reader’s knowledge of the world beyond Europe in a series of commonplaces about slaves, despots, barbarians and cannibals. For example, the Ottoman Empire evoked the idea of new sultans killing their brothers on their accession as well as that of the harem or seraglio.³⁶ India meant naked philosophers (‘gymnosophists’) and juggernauts. A lecture at the university of Caen in 1663 described Calicut as follows: ‘The inhabitants do not know the use of bread, they reject chastity and sometimes exchange their wives.’³⁷

A number of readers appear to have paid particular attention to exotic methods of writing. Texts written in Arabic, Ethiopian, Chinese and Japanese were displayed in the museums of Settala and Worm. Mexico was associated with the use of pictograms or ‘hieroglyphics’, Peru with the use of the quipu, a mnemonic system based on knots. Mexican pictograms appeared in print for the first time in 1625 in a collection of travels edited by Samuel Purchas. The Dutch scholar Johannes de Laet used the Purchas edition for the account of Mexican culture given in his New World (1633). The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher also used Purchas in the chapter on Mexico in his ambitious comparative study of hieroglyphics, The Egyptian Oedipus (1652–4).

To examine the western reader’s knowledge of the world beyond Europe in a little more detail, we may take the cases of Japan and China. In 1500, few Europeans would have known that Japan existed at all, although Marco Polo’s travels had recently been printed for the first time, in Latin translation. Marco Polo mentioned a large island that is called ‘Cipangu’, with well-mannered inhabitants and ‘gold in great abundance’, but gave little more information. The letters of the Spanish missionary Francisco Xavier emphasized the Japanese sense of honour, an idea which rapidly became commonplace. The orientalist Guillaume Postel, for instance, in his Merveilles (1553) presented ‘Giapan’ as a country which was effectively Christian before the missionaries arrived. Postel made use of information from ‘Schiabier’, as he called him, and also from other Jesuit sources, presenting ‘Xaca’ (in other words, Buddha) as Christ and the emperor as ‘sovereign pontiff’.38

Botero also followed Jesuit sources in stressing the Japanese sense of honour and gravity, which he compared to that of Spaniards; the frequency of earthquakes in that country; and the Japanese taste for water mixed with ‘a precious powder which they call cha’, in other words tea. Over the years the commonplaces gradually multiplied. In 1669, for instance, the Royal Society published in its Philosophical Transactions ‘Some Observations concerning Japan made by an ingenious person that hath many years resided in that country’, reduced to twenty points including the assertions that ‘They write downward. Their government is despotic … Their left hand is the more honourable.’ Serious gaps in knowledge remained, however, and at the end of the seventeenth century a leading French cartographer, Delisle, was still discussing whether or not Japan was an island.

In the case of China, commonplaces were particularly numerous. They include the idea that the Chinese emperor was a mere figurehead; that (as Vico’s friend the philosopher Paolo Mattia Doria put it in his treatise on Civil Life of 1709) the Chinese were an unwarlike people who defended themselves against barbarians by allowing them to conquer them and then taming them; that the Chinese made use of writing before the West, with ideograms instead of the alphabet; that they had invented gunpowder, and perhaps printing as well. Montaigne had noted that printing and gunpowder were a thousand years older in China than in Europe, and the history of printing by the scholar-bookseller Prosper Marchand (1740) discussed its possible diffusion from East to West.

The Oxford don Robert Burton, a well-read man but no specialist in oriental studies, referred to China on a number of occasions in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1620). Burton was especially impressed by the position of the mandarins, the literati as he called them (above, 31). He also commented on the lack of beggars in China; the practice of suicide out of shame for failing examinations; and the contrast between Chinese and western medicine. In China, according to Burton (on the basis of Matteo Ricci), ‘the physicians give precepts quite opposite to ours … they use altogether roots, herbs and simples in their medicines and all their physic is in a manner comprehended in an herbal: no science, no school, no art, no degree, but, like a trade, every man in private is instructed of his master’ (Book 2, part 4, section 1, 5).

If they were not commonplace already. Burton’s remarks soon became commonplaces and further points were added to the list. Reviewing a recent book on China in 1666, the Philosophical Transactions noted that the Chinese ‘prize highly the root ginseng’ and prescribe the use of tea as a medicine. In the course of the seventeenth century Chinese philosophy as well as Chinese medicine attracted western attention, and Confucius was placed by the side of Socrates as an exemplar of pagan virtue.39

The appropriation of exotic knowledge naturally included a process of domesticating or stereotyping. Even western observers in the ‘field’ perceived unfamiliar cultures in terms of stereotypes. Some, like those of American cannibals and oriental despots, exaggerated the cultural distance between the foreign culture and that of the observer. Others did the exact opposite. In Calicut, for example, the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama entered an Indian temple and viewed it as a church, the combination of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva appearing to him as an image of the Holy Trinity. Xavier saw ‘hidalgos’ and ‘universities’ in Japan, while the Japanese emperor looked to him very much like a pope. The Jesuits took their Aristotelian categories with them to China and so interpreted the principles of Yin and Yang as ‘matter’ and ‘form’. Readers at home were in no position to criticize these stereotypes. Their books of commonplaces often turned into anthologies of prejudices.

All the same, we cannot assume that early modern readers believed all they read about the world outside Europe or about anything else for that matter. The reliability of knowledge was the subject of debate – or more precisely, of a number of debates – to be discussed in the following chapter.

 

¹ Trenard (1965–6); Shackleton (1970).

² Keynes (1940), 18–19; Goldgar (1995), 13.

³ Clarke (1970), 83.

⁴ Findlen (1994), 129–46.

⁵ Sherman (1995); Blair (1997); Johns (1998).

⁶ Engelsing (1969, 1974); Chartier (1987).

⁷ Rossi (1960); Yates (1966).

⁸ Marshall (1994), 42–3.

⁹ Kearney (1970), 60–3, 137, 151; Grafton and Jardine (1986), 15, 18–20, 85n, 164–6, 170–3; Stagl (1980).

¹⁰ Shackleton (1961), 229–38.

¹¹ Schmidt-Biggemann (1983); Blair (1992, 1996); Moss (1996).

¹² Burke (1995c).

¹³ Witty (1965); Daly (1967); Brincken (1972); Rouse and Rouse (1982, 1983).

¹⁴ Taylor (1945), 89–198; Hopkins (1992).

¹⁵ Serrai (1988–92).

¹⁶ Clement (1991), 274.

¹⁷ Saunders (1991).

¹⁸ Lieshout (1993), 292.

¹⁹ Wellisch (1991), 319.

²⁰ Yeo (1991, 1996).

²¹ Innis (1980).

²² Pomian (1973).

²³ Woods (1987).

²⁴ Leedham-Green (1987), nos. 71, 82, 92.

²⁵ Parker (1992), 137; Parker (1998), 24.

²⁶ Brown (1989), 16–41; Grafton and Jardine (1986); Grafton (1992); Sherman (1995); Blair (1997).

²⁷ Findlen (1994), 42–4.

²⁸ Levy (1982).

²⁹ Villey (1908), vol. 1, 244–70.

³⁰ Villey (1908), vol. 2, 10, 52; Goyet (1986–7); Moss (1996), 212–13.

³¹ Dodds (1929), 81, 94–5, 99–100; Shackleton (1961), 229–38.

³² Nakagawa (1992), 247–67.

³³ Santos Lopes (1992).

³⁴ Duchet (1971), 69, 72, 93, 109–110.

³⁵ Switzer (1967); Miller (1981).

³⁶ Grosrichard (1979).

³⁷ Brockliss (1987), 155.

³⁸ Bernard-Maître (1953); Lach (1965), 657, 660n; Lach (1977), 267–8.

³⁹ Pinot (1932); Lach and Kley (1993).