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Founding a Scientific Academy: Gender, Patronage and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Milan

Melanie Conroy — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:40:25 -0700

In 1722 Sir Thomas Dereham (ca. 1678-1739), a member of the Royal Society since 1720, wrote a series of letters to the Royal Society secretary James Jurin about the state of Italian science. At the beginning of the year Sir Isaac Newton, in his capacity as President of the Royal Society, authorized Jurin to accept Dereham’s offer to act as a conduit of information between England and Italy, “that Learned & Inquisitive Nation, with which you reside.” Recalling the distinguished tradition of Italian science, Jurin reported Newton’s opinion:

The Royal Society has so just a regard & Veneration for y^e memory of y^e Galilei, the Borelli, Malpighi, and Bellini, y^t she can never be incurious of what is doing in a Country, y^t produced those Great & Excellent Genii.[1]

Dereham responded with great pleasure at the thought that he would be “opening a Philosophical Communication between two nations, among both which have been, & are so many generous spirits, as you say, united in the same noble design, for the common benefit, & information of mankind.”[2] In the ensuing months Dereham supplied them with news culled largely from the Italian community of physicians, natural philosophers, and mathematicians who were already foreign members of the Royal Society, particularly those residing in the university towns of Pisa, Padua, and Bologna.

A keen observer of Italian science, with numerous contacts in virtually every major city and a fluency with language that allowed him to build his reputation as a translator of English philosophical and theological texts into Italian, Dereham was an unusually amphibious creature in the eighteenth-century republic of letters. He had many reasons to be interested in Italy. Heir to his father’s cousin, an earlier Sir Thomas Dereham who had been the English Envoy to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany at the end of the seventeenth century, he arrived in Florence in 1718. But his Catholicism ultimately drew him to Rome where he installed himself as a fixture of the English resident community, acting as an intermediary between the Old Pretender James III, Clement XII, and those English who shared his desire to restore the throne to the Stuarts. Upon his death, Dereham bequeathed a considerable endowment to the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith to support the training of English missionaries.[3]

To the Protestant English, Dereham was a demi-Italian, a papist residing in Italy who nonetheless spoke their language and shared their philosophical persuasions. To the Italian scholarly community, he was an Englishman who appreciated their culture and participated in their faith but who also sought to promote greater knowledge of British intellectual life in Italy. His influential series of Italian publications in the early decades of the eighteenth century not only publicized the activities of the Royal Society but specifically advertised important elements of Newtonian science and natural theology, allowing learned Italians, few of whom read English, relatively unmediated access to these ideas.[4] It is no exaggeration to say that Dereham played a singular role in opening up new channels of communication between England and Italy in the early eighteenth century.

In 1722 Dereham was eager to display his knowledge of Italian science to the English while also promoting himself as the individual best able to facilitate communication between Italy and the Royal Society. His goal was not only to identify those Italian scholars whose intellectual merits and interests warranted more regular communication with the Royal Society but also to describe the exciting new institutional developments that had occurred in Italy during the past decade. One of those institutions—the focal point of this article—was the enigmatic Clelian Academy (Accademia Clelia de’ Vigilanti) founded by Clelia Grillo Borromeo in Milan in the year in which Dereham composed his report. He considered its appearance to be indicative of a new vitality to Italian science and found its activities sufficiently interesting to consider what sort of relationship the Royal Society might have with this academy in the making. Through such information Dereham encouraged representatives of England’s premier English scientific institution to be in greater contact with the scientific community in Italy.

In order to assess Dereham’s comments about Italian scientific academies in the early eighteenth century, we briefly need to consider the larger context in which they arose. While academies of various kinds had been in existence since the Renaissance, the scientific academy first came into its own in the seventeenth century. The inauguration of the Royal Society in London in 1660 and its receipt of a royal charter in 1662 played a fundamental role in the promotion of experimental philosophy and the creation of a new kind of scientific community in England. The subsequent foundation of the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1666, as a royal institution offering enticing stipends and the promise of research facilities to attract Europe’s best scientific minds to France, provided an alternative model to its London counterpart. Under the patronage of the French minister Colbert, the Paris Academy of Sciences made the idea of a scientific society a more overtly political project, making state sponsorship of science an integral part of the emerging image of France as a nation that rewarded talent, cultivated expertise, and considered the advancement and control of knowledge to be a measure of national prosperity.[5]

In subsequent decades the transformation of the Academy for the Curious of Nature (1652-93), from a physicians’ club which moved from one German town to another into an academy with an imperial charter in 1671 and Leibniz’s realization of the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1700 under Frederick I reflected the expanding role of academies in the promotion of scientific research and communication. Numerous provincial cities supported private and occasionally state-sponsored initiatives such as the Collegium Curiosorum (1710-11) in Uppsala, which became the Royal Society of Sciences in 1728. As far away as St. Petersburg, the idea of an academy that could play a fundamental role in the modernizing projects of Peter the Great was also in the works though it would not receive its official charter until 1724.[6]

Drawing inspiration from the writings of such figures as Bacon, Descartes, Galileo and Leibniz, early modern scientific societies advocated the reformation and progress of knowledge as a project of great benefit to society. Harnessing the best features of the republic of letters, they sought to make scholarly networks deliberately productive associations based on membership rather than voluntary association. Academies brought scholars together, concentrating talent, pooling resources, and promoting new forms of collaboration that often culminated in novel publications such as the learned journal or academy-sponsored books. They institutionalized practices that had already been under development in the preceding century while also being self-conscious about their goal of supporting further innovations that would contribute to the modernization of knowledge. The scientific academy became simultaneously a repository of information, instruments, and specimens—a space in which to conduct and present one’s research, a deliberative body whose collective expertise might potentially resolve intellectual differences through commonly agreed upon procedures, and an organ of publicity through its correspondence networks and publications. Fundamentally, the scientific academy represented the new prestige of natural knowledge and mathematics as a matter of public interest. These were the ingredients that made the learned society the institutional embodiment of the promise of the new science, and they were ideals forged in the republic of letters.[7]

The proliferation of academies by the eighteenth century led the most famous academician of this age, the Paris Academy’s perpetual secretary Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, to declare it an “age of academies.”[8] Academies were not only engines of knowledge in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—communities of scholars collecting, assessing, and creating knowledge, just as Bacon had prophesied—but they were also a subject of great discussion within of the republic of letters. Creating an academy added something tangible to a rapidly evolving institutional landscape whose participants sought to change not only what kind of knowledge mattered but how knowledge itself was produced. The growing number of learned academies by the eighteenth century made the project of reforming knowledge more than just an informal conversation among scholars. It was increasingly supported by an infrastructure which presented the learned academy as the culmination of a new understanding of the value of knowledge.

What, then, were Italy’s contributions to these exciting new developments? In the seventeenth century Italy created more scientific academies than any other part of Europe—indeed more academies of any kind—and yet virtually none of them remained active by 1700. All the scientific academies founded in the early to mid-seventeenth century—most notably the Accademia dei Lincei (1603-30) and Accademia Fisico-Matematica (1677-98) in Rome, the Accademia del Cimento (1657-67) in Florence, and the Accademia degli Investiganti (1663-70) in Naples, and the Accademia della Traccia (1666- ca.1678) in Bologna—had vanished. With the noteworthy exceptions of the Accademia degli Inquieti (1690-1714) in Bologna, the Accademia degli Argonauti (1684-1718) in Venice, and the Accademia dei Fisiocritici (1691- ) in Siena, few vestiges of Italy’s glorious tradition of creating scientific academies survived into the next century.[9] This was of course old news by the time Dereham summed up the state of Italian science in the 1720s and the Royal Society had been well-informed by travelers and correspondents about the activities of many of these fleeting initiatives. The question in 1722 was not what the Italian academies looked like in the past but what future developments might bring. Would any of the Italian states and their leading citizens ever find the means of creating a more enduring scientific institution?

On this count, Dereham had some interesting things to report. He enthusiastically described the development of the Academy of the Institute of Sciences and the Arts, founded in Bologna by Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli in 1714 and superseding the now defunct Inquieti. Dereham characterized it as “like our R[oyal] S[ociety] butt of a more vast Idea” since it was to be housed in a brand-new building, “a most magnificent Pallace with an observatory over it,” whose construction was underway during his visit to the city in June 1722.[10] Talking with Bologna’s leading scientists, he recognized that there were elements of this new Italian academy—its function as a teaching and research institution, its connection to one of Italy’s most venerable universities, and its desire to encompass both the sciences and the arts in a facility designed especially to meet the material needs of these disciplines—that surpassed even the ambitions of the Royal Society. Dereham promised to send a more complete account of this scientific institution since he knew that its activities would be of great interest to his correspondents in London. The Bologna Academy of Sciences, the most long-lived and influential of any of Italy’s scientific societies, did indeed continue to intrigue the English throughout the eighteenth century. It was described by contemporaries as both a realization of Bacon’s utopian vision of Salomon’s House and an Italian version of the Parisian model of an academy as an institution with a nucleus of paid researchers—an image that its founder Marsigli, himself a Royal Society and Paris Academy member, self-consciously cultivated.[11]

In December 1722 Dereham informed Jurin that a second Italian scientific academy was under development. As an added curiosity, he noted that this academy was the idea of a learned and aristocratic woman. Dereham was so intrigued that he wrote the founder on behalf of the Royal Society, seeking further information. “Having understood that a sort of an Accademy was setting up at Milan, & that Countess Borromeo, a Lady that is a good scholar, was a great promoter of it, I wrote to her to have some notice of these lucubrations, & she answer’d me thus.” The lady in question, Clelia Grillo Borromeo (1684-1777) demonstrated her cosmopolitan flair by responding to Dereham in French. She did not directly answer his question but referred him instead to the distinguished medical professor and naturalist Antonio Vallisneri (1661-1730):

I addressed your proposition regarding the commission that you have just received from the Royal Society to the celebrated Monsieur Vallisneri because this scholar, having some plan regarding the formation of a certain Academy, or scientific meeting (conference de Sciences) here in Milan, will be able to put you on the path that you must take to fulfill it. In addressing you to him, I am pleased to contribute to the establishment of a relationship between two people, both of whom are reciprocally worthy of mutual esteem.

Dereham concluded his report of Italy’s newest scientific academy by anticipating a letter “in obedience unto the Ladys commands” from Vallisneri.[12]

Whatever Vallisneri told him seems to have further increased Dereham’s fascination with Grillo Borromeo’s project to found a scientific academy—the Clelian Academy of the Vigilant—in Milan. During the next few years he continued to monitor its progress and his admiration for its patron grew. From Padua and during his occasional trips to Milan Vallisneri plied him with news. In the winter of 1727 Dereham at last found himself in the presence of this philosophical countess, providing his fellow Royal Society members with a first-hand account of the activities of her academicians. He was especially excited about their experiments concerning animal generation. On 25 February 1727 he forwarded a report from Milan “of a she mule that has actually in this Town gott a colt which has been reckond hitherto fabulous in history, & y^e G[rand] Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany that sett up the Accademia del cimento had above 100 she mules tried without success.” Lest Jurin remain skeptical of the veracity of this report, Dereham added: “I can answer for this Phenomena being an eye witness of having seen milk drawn out of her by a groom into my own hands, whilst the Colt stood by her, that is very pretty and mighty unlucky to answer the Italian proverb, che il figlio di una mula ammazza il Padrone.”[13] By providing a verifiable instance of a fertile mule that had given birth—an extremely rare phenomenon that is still an object of great curiosity even today[14]—the Clelian Academy had made a major discovery. The mule and her offspring became a subject of discussion up and down the Italian peninsula. Reports of this latest anomaly of nature were sent not only to the Royal Society in London but also to the imperial physicians at the court of Vienna.

The report of the Milanese physician Carlo Mazzucchelli which Dereham forwarded to the Royal Society was not simply another curious account of the unresolved mysteries of generation but a talisman of an effort to create a relationship between a nascent scientific community and a more well-established institution. The postscript to his letter from Milan specified this element of his communication:

P.S. the annex’d anatomicall observation of a learned Phisitian of this Town that has subscribed himself is directed to Countess Clelia Grillo Borromeo a very learned Lady that keepeth a sort of Accademia del Cimento in her house, & is a great Patron of all the learned of Italy.[15]

There was a reason, in other words, that the birth of a mule from a mule recalled the experiments of the Cimento. Redoing these seventeenth-century experiments was one of the many ways in which Countess Borromeo and her scientists presented themselves as heirs to the proud tradition of Galilean science that had flourished in Tuscany in the mid-seventeenth century

Reviving the Cimento

The experimental academy that Clelia Grillo Borromeo attempted to found in her apartment in Palazzo Borromeo in Milan in the 1720s was indeed a project built upon the successes and disappointments of the preceding century of Italian science. Grillo Borromeo envisioned the Accademia Clelia dei Vigilanti as serving not just Milan but all of Italy. She aspired to make her academy part of the international network of academies then in formation while also presenting it as a tangible reminder than Italy had and continued to make major contributions to the progress of science. Writing to the academy president Vallisneri about a year after Dereham’s visit, she confirmed their mutual understanding of its goals. Her plan, she reminded Vallisneri, was to create “an Academy shortly like that of the Cimento.”[16]

In order to understand what it meant to reinvent the Accademia del Cimento, an academy that eventually inspired the foundation of the Nuova Accademia del Cimento in Florence in 1801, we need to understand why it was such an important point of reference for discussions of a new academy in Milan. An experimental academy founded by Prince Leopoldo de’ Medici in 1657, the Cimento was a group of physicians, philosophers and mathematicians closely associated with the Tuscan court which met primarily in Leopoldo’s quarters in Palazzo Pitti whenever the prince was in town. Members included the mathematician Vincenzo Viviani, Galileo’s disciple and self-proclaimed heir to his intellectual legacy; the brilliant and cantankerous mathematician, astronomer and mechanical philosopher Giovanni Alfonso Borelli; the controversial advocate of southern Italian naturalism Antonio Uliva; the physicist and experimenter Paolo del Buono and his priestly brother Candido; the neoscholastic philosophers Carlo Rinaldini and Alessandro Marsili; and a number of virtuosi closely associated with the Medici court such as the academy’s first secretary Alessandro Segni, his successor Lorenzo Magalotti, and quite possibly Carlo Dati. Less officially, the court physician and naturalist Francesco Redi also seems to have guided aspects of the Cimento’s experimental work on animals and insects while also developing his own personal experimental program that famously critiqued the Aristotelian idea that insects generated spontaneously.[17]

The Cimento, in short, was a princely initiative that existed because of Leopoldo’s personal interest in science, and to a lesser degree that of his brother, Grand Duke Ferdinando II. A diary recorded its experimental activities but the academy never became a formal institution with rules, regulations, and criteria for membership. It did not even finalize its name until 1666, well beyond the most active phase of its existence.[18] Leopoldo provided the impetus for much of the research undertaken by the group. His goals were to some degree personal and intellectual—the pleasure of convening leading scientists in Florence and exploring some of the most pressing scientific questions of the day, save for the thorny issues of Copernican astronomy rendered controversial by Galileo’s trial and condemnation in 1633. Leopoldo submitted questions for their consideration, monitored discussion, underwrote the costs of the expensive and beautiful instruments that they used, and personally corresponded with scientists physically removed from Florence who took an interest in the Cimento’s activities.

Elements of the Cimento’s activities fostered its reputation as a Galilean academy exploring questions of mechanics and physics. However, its decision to avoid public controversy while also investing its energies in new kinds of experimental observation reflected the climate in which it was created. Much to the consternation of individual members, the Cimento did not explicitly support the potentially revolutionary implications of the air-pump experiments of Galileo’s disciple Evangelista Torricelli, leaving in doubt the question of the existence of a vacuum in nature. Observing the philosophical disagreements among his academicians in their private discussions, Leopoldo explored the possibilities for creating a realm of public consensus that would facilitate new directions in scientific thinking.[19]

At the same time, Leopoldo also envisioned the Cimento as a carefully crafted demonstration of the Medici’s continued investment in the new science, an academy that would cement his family’s reputation as great patrons of science. Leopoldo minimized the group’s intellectual divisions by insisting on a publication that would present the experiments themselves as the results without drawing any overt conclusions that might provoke further controversy. The goal of the Cimento, at least as it was presented in public, was never to have an opinion which could only be the product of the “private sentiment of the academicians, never that of the Academy, whose only task is to make experiments, and to tell about them.”[20] While hinting that the academicians indeed had different interpretations of their findings, the Academy nonetheless presented them not as individual interpreters of nature but as collective witnesses whose agreement on the written description of 268 experiments constituted the nucleus of their collaboration.

The Cimento’s only publication not only displayed this cautious neutrality but was also a book created by committee. Edited and reedited for five years by a group of core academicians as well as consultants invited to comment on the quality of its literary presentation, the Essays on Natural Experiences (1667) bore no marks of individual authorship. Even Lorenzo Magalotti’s florid dedication to Grand Duke Ferdinando II was signed by Il Saggiato secretario, the unnamed secretary whose penname “The Assayed” evoked the title of Galileo’s famous work of scientific methodology, The Assayer (1623), which also questioned traditional explanations of how nature was perceived by the senses. The Essays presented the Cimento as an academy committed to the importance of experimental knowledge “under the protection of the Most Serene Prince Leopoldo of Tuscany.”[21]

Personally delivered by Magalotti to King Charles II, the Royal Society, and leading natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle during the Medici embassy to London in winter 1668, the Essays became a great artifact of scientific diplomacy.[22] As the Essays began to circulate among scholars throughout Europe, albeit in a highly limited fashion since the book was not for sale, scientists attempted to write to Florence for news of further activities. But by then the academy no longer existed. With Leopoldo’s appointment as cardinal and the simultaneous departure of Borelli, Uliva, and Rinaldini from Tuscany in 1667, the ingredients to maintain the prince’s academy were no longer there.

In the end, the Accademia del Cimento was not a community like the Royal Society, a group formed by scholars who wished to conduct research together of their own volition and sought funding and sponsorship to make this possible, or a ministerial prerogative such as the Paris Academy that saw science as an investment in the best scientists money could buy. An entity that did not even have a name until it was on the verge of disbanding, the Cimento was itself an experiment in scientific conversation, observation, collaboration, and experimentation. It was a curious point of departure for an academy that hoped to succeed.

Looking more closely, however, there were ingredients in this failed academy that suggest why creating something like it was an important topic of conversation in the 1720s. Given the Royal Society’s own enthusiastic program of experimentation, the Cimento’s single official publication had appeared redundant to its members by the time it reached them. But in its own way it was nonetheless a success. Translated into English and Latin and well-discussed by the French scientific community, the Essays did indeed generate some discussion about post-Galilean science in other parts of Europe. The appearance of a second Italian edition in 1691 made its contents more commercially available.

For those who knew the history of the Cimento and its members, however, the academy’s intellectual output was far more than one book. Careful readers of the publications of Borelli and Redi, the most prolific scientists associated with the academy (save for Rinaldini, whose more scholastic natural philosophy excited far less interest by the eighteenth century or even in his own time), understood their impressive body of work to have been also facilitated by Medici support for science in the mid-seventeenth century. Even more than the Essays, their publications were enduring contributions to some of the important fields of scientific research in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

In the case of Borelli, he significantly advanced scientific discussions of the concept of force, the nature of mechanics, the idea of the animal-machine, and furthered the development of a mathematics that could capture the nuances of a new physics while also having important applications to such fields as medicine and microscopic anatomy; at the same time, Borelli also demonstrated his ability to combine his theoretical and methodological preoccupations with detailed observation analysis of phenomena such as the satellites of Jupiter and the eruption of Mount Etna.[23] His work had the additional virtue of belonging to no single discipline, indeed repeatedly crossing the boundaries between astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, and medicine in his quest to understand fully the implications of the new mechanics. While Viviani may have been the official torchbearer of Galileo’s legacy, Borelli demonstrated repeatedly what the next steps might be in developing a new approach to science inspired by a close reading of Galileo’s work.

By contrast, Redi presented successive generations with a vast empirical program of medicine and natural history. By employing naked-eye observation, the instrumental powers of the microscope, and sophisticated experimental practices, he repeatedly demolished many time-honored preconceptions about the natural world and the human body. He also did so with great style and verve that offered a different kind of homage to Galileo as a scientist committed to the idea of writing about science not only for experts but for anyone who could read. Redi’s liquid Tuscan prose, much like Galileo’s famously witty books that had gotten him in so much trouble, made him one of the most well-read scientists of his generation. He delighted readers with his accounts of his discoveries: the nature and source of venom in vipers, the generation of insects, the improbability of the miraculous powers of the snakestone, and the nauseating details of the presence of parasites of the human body.[24] More than any Italian scientist of the seventeenth century, Redi embodied the kind of style that Leopoldo and his secretary Magalotti wished to impart in constructing an account of the Cimento’s experiments. In short, discerning readers of those seventeenth-century works of science lining the shelves of eighteenth-century libraries knew that the Cimento had indeed left its imprint on Italian science and been important to European-wide discussions of science in general. It was indeed worthy of a revival.

By the eighteenth century the Cimento was as a symbolic point of departure for the idea of founding an academy that would restore Italy’s greatness through the pursuit of modern knowledge. It evoked nostalgia for an earlier age when the Italian peninsula had been more politically powerful and culturally dynamic, and its academies the envy of other European states. Instead, as the great librarian, historian, and guardian of Italy’s intellectual heritage Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750) noted with disgust in 1704, in his day virtually every Italian city had “an academy, indeed two, three or sometimes even more”—but to what end? In his famous account of the Italian republic of letters, First Sketches of the Republic of Letters of Italy, written under the pseudonym of Lamindio Pritanio, Muratori described the decline of Italy’s academies since the era of the Cimento. In a withering attack on the nature of Italian society, Muratori accused his contemporaries of having trivialized the idea of the academy. He acridly observed that most Italian academicians had no understanding of the value of knowledge. Instead they were besotted with poetry—“verses and more verses”—and invested all their energies in witty speeches about frivolous subjects which were, Muratori opined, “perhaps delightful but certainly of little utility to the public.”[25]

In this influential publication which sought to redefine the Italian republic of letters as a project transcending the political boundaries separating the many Italian states, Muratori called for a wholesale reformation of the idea of the academy that was obviously inspired by the emergence of national academies in other countries. He encouraged Italian scholars to think of the academy not as a literary club in which to pass one’s leisure hours but as an engine for productive knowledge. His vision of the academy was a worthy accompaniment to his understanding of the function of a library as a center for scholarly research. A society blessed with so many great libraries—not only the great libraries of religious institutions such as the Vatican and the Ambrosiana but the numerous princely and private libraries for which Italy was famous—should produce institutionalized conversation worthy of their contents. Praising those few academies which had already embraced this mission, he encouraged the inauguration of “a most noble competition among the Italian academies, whose end would be the growth of the sciences and the arts, and the glory of the nation.”[26]

Without explicitly invoking the Cimento, Muratori nonetheless praised everything that it stood for. The Cimento was an academy that had presented its findings in its own language, Tuscan rather than Latin. It embodied the virtues of the new natural philosophy based on “observations, experiences, and inventions” and it fulfilled Muratori’s vision of a modern science that neither blindly accepted nor completely discarded the virtues of traditional Aristotelian philosophy. Finally, it was an initiative that had attracted international attention. “Let us then entrust our greatest hopes for our glory in the philosophy that we call experimental,” wrote Muratori. Specifying the value of “experiments (cimenti) by which we mean the new experiments,” he self-consciously evoked the legacy of the Cimento in a way that would have resonated with many Italians of his generation.[27] Such sentiments reverberated across the Alps, finding their way into foreign journals that monitored news of the Italian republic of letters.[28]

Clelia Grillo Borromeo and Antonio Vallisneri were both avid consumers of crucial elements of Muratori’s program. Their personal ties to Muratori already predisposed them to be favorable to his vision of Italian intellectual life. Grillo Borromeo had married into the Milanese family which supported Muratori in the first major position of his career, as prefect of the Ambrosian Library (1695-1700). Even after he returned to his native city of Modena to become librarian and advisor the d’Este family, Muratori maintained his ties with the Borromeo.[29] Vallisneri was a close friend and intimate correspondent who shared Muratori’s goal of improving Italy’s standing in the republic of letters. He played an important role in publicizing Muratori’s First Sketches by reviewing it at length in the first volume of the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia (1710-40), the journal he helped to found in Venice to give this imagined literary republic a voice and a venue.[30] While Vallisneri harbored doubts about the moral dimensions of Muratori’s program of Catholic enlightenment, he strongly supported its intellectual underpinnings: a new edifice of learning whose core ingredients were experimental science and historical erudition, and a new conversation about knowledge reinvigorated by the creation of new kinds of academies and scholarly journals. The inauguration of the Giornale de’ letterati was but the first step in Vallisneri’s efforts to respond to Muratori’s challenge to create an Italian republic of letters.

Yet Muratori’s subtle invocation of the salutatory effect of the activities of Leopoldo’s academy was not the only reason why both the founder and president of the Accademia Clelia de’ Vigilanti saw themselves as heirs to the Cimento. In the case of Grillo Borromeo, she envisioned herself as fulfilling Muratori’s call for a new kind of patron who understood the value of scholarship as well as the necessity for bold intellectual initiatives in the age of Enlightenment. As the founder of a new academy in the final years of the Medici’s lengthy reign in Tuscany, when they had ceased to be a viable political power or to offer significant cultural leadership, she considered the creation of an academy to be a gesture of political significance. Contemporaries actively cultivated this image of Grillo Borromeo, praising her for “bringing about a rebirth of the Century of Patrons with her rare ability.”[31] Scholars dedicated many books to her, asked her advice on their projects, and generally sought to win her favor. She became famous for her philosophical correspondence.[32] Dereham’s description of her to the Royal Society, in other words, was quite accurate; she was an unusually learned and engaged patron who aspired, as she told Vallisneri in 1725, to create “a new Cimento.”[33]

At the same time, Grillo Borromeo also saw herself as filling a void created by the death of the most important female patron of the preceding century, Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-89), whose cult as a Catholic icon of learning and faith reached its climax with the installation of her funerary monument in St. Peter’s in 1702. During her lengthy stay in Rome following her conversion and abdication of her throne, Queen Christina was frequently praised for her support of Italian learning and culture. The founder of at least one Roman academy, which included among its members two of the most distinguished participants in the Cimento—Borelli and Redi—Christina’s activities also inspired the foundation of Ciampini’s Accademia Fisico-matematica in 1677. She was widely regarded as a great patron of science. Yet these activities had been eclipsed by the creation of the Accademia degli Arcadi, a literary academy founded in Rome in 1690 which claimed Queen Christina as its posthumous patron and rapidly established colonies throughout the Italian peninsula.[34]

In the decade prior to the founding of the Clelian Academy, Arcadia had almost 1400 members.[35] The success of Arcadia at the expense of other kinds of scholarly initiatives at the dawn of the eighteenth century was the focal point of Muratori’s condemnation of the current state of the Italian academies and his call for the emergence of a new kind of patron. Grillo Borromeo’s decision to create an academy in Palazzo Borromeo was an attempt to redress this imbalance while also highlighting the prominent role that learned women might play in this new vision of the republic of letters.[36] Her academy, more than any other scientific project of the 1720s, embodied the idea of the learned noblewoman as a patron of science who could intelligently direct conversations of male philosophers for the greater good of society. In this respect, she was as much a reader of Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier as Muratori’s plan for an Italian republic of letters.

As for Vallisneri, he was in every respect one of the most overtly Galilean scientists of his generation—prolific in his publications, broadminded in his interests, and free with his opinions about virtually every controversial subject in the fields of medicine and natural history including the refutation of Leeuwenhoek’s understanding of sperm and the numerous accounts of the geological and paleontological record which attributed these transforms to the Flood. A disciple of the great Bolognese anatomist Malpighi, he understood the ways in which the methodological issues which Galileo had raised about the evidence of the senses and the uses of instruments could render an entirely new account of the human body and the natural world. A talented anatomist, passionate collector of specimens, and strong advocate of the ability of the microscope to resolve thornier issues of observation, he was also an avid reader of every learned journal and foreign publication he could get his hands on.[37] For Vallisneri, science as he knew it began with Galileo and his heirs at the same time that it also played itself out on a far larger European stage which made him one of the few Italian scholars, like Marsigli in Bologna, to be invited to join leading scientific societies. Vallisneri’s self-consciousness about the relationship between Italian science and approaches to nature developed elsewhere was quite acute. Passionately critical of the French, he was begrudgingly admiring of their contributions to science and far more generous in his assessments of the English, quoting the writings of Bacon at every opportunity.

While cultivating a cosmopolitan view of learning, Vallisneri strongly believed in the value of communicating one’s ideas in the vernacular. In the end, as Michael Cunningham aptly observes, he was a small-town physician who became a professor of international reputation by patiently developing a research program that played itself out in his intense and voluminous correspondence, his participation in the new world of scholarly journals, and his perseverance in the publication of his books.[38] Vallisneri believed that the language of science, and learning in general, must be Italian. His understanding of this issue offers further insight into why the Cimento was an important point of reference for his participation in a new academy. In his 1722 manifesto entitled “That Every Italian Ought to Write in Polished Italian or Tuscan Language,” Vallisneri criticized those who insisted on the value of writing in Latin by poking fun at their obsession with communicating in an ancient language. “In what age and among what people are we?” he joked. “Among the Latins or the Italians?” In Vallisneri’s mind, Italy could not be defended and renewed without taking greater pride in its own language. Citing previous authors who shared this belief, he not only invoked Muratori’s First Sketches but repeatedly referred to “my favorite Redi” as his principal source of inspiration.[39] For him, Redi was the pinnacle of the kind of scientific writing he hoped to emulate and improve upon—a probing naturalist whose findings were so important that foreigners read and translated him but also a brilliant prose stylist and poet who understood how to use language to make science accessible and pleasurable to a broadly literate audience who knew Italian. Both the style and the substance of Vallisneri’s science sought to revive the approach of the Cimento as it was embodied in the work of Redi. But he also understood the Essays to be an equally important product of this Galilean tradition of vernacular science that he worked to keep alive, unlike his mentor Malpighi who published in Latin to reach an international audience.

For all these reasons, the Clelian Academy was indeed an attempt to capitalize upon a certain degree of nostalgia for the moment that the Cimento represented without limiting itself to the format, let alone the intellectual program of Leopoldo’s academy. If anything, Vallisneri constantly reminded readers of his popular works of medicine and natural history that he had moved beyond Redi’s conclusions, indeed improved upon his account of spontaneous generation through fresh observations that demolished the weaker parts of Redi’s own argument. The Cimento, for him and his aristocratic Milanese patron, was simply a point of departure for an even greater and, in their minds, more enduring project: an academy that would create an information network uniting the multiple scholarly communities clustered in different Italian cities, and connecting the Italian scientific community with the rest of the world. This was a project forged by the mutual ambitions of Italy’s most distinguished senior naturalist of the early eighteenth century and the peninsula’s most learned and wealthy woman. Inspired by the past and invigorated by the present, around 1722 they began to construct their academy.

An Academy on Paper

The idea of the Clelian Academy emerged as a result of Grillo Borromeo’s avid curiosity about science. Wife of Gian Benedetto Borromeo, great-nephew of Innocent XI and son of Carlo Borromeo Arese (1657-1734), one of the wealthiest and powerful men in Italy, she came from an equally noble Genoese family that paid the princely sum of 30,000 ducats for her dowry when they married in 1707.[40] Her family educated her well beyond the norm in the convent of the Misericordia; she reputedly knew five languages at a tender age and was nicknamed the “Oracle” by the time she was twenty because of her quick intelligence.[41] By every measure, Grillo Borromeo was an avid consumer of books, journals, and newspapers in all of the major European languages. Visitors to her house were struck by the depth and breadth of her library.[42] Much to her father-in-law’s consternation, she hosted conversations in Palazzo Borromeo which reflected her cosmopolitan taste and curiosity about the world beyond Milan.

In June 1718 Grillo Borromeo’s program of self-education inspired her to travel all the way to Padua to meet one of her favorite scientific authors, Antonio Vallisneri. As Vallisneri wrote with great amazement to Giuseppe Antonio Sassi, who succeeded Muratori as the prefect of the Ambrosian Library in Milan: “This great lady, entering before my servant with a candle, looked me over and said: ‘I want nothing else than to know Vallisneri by sight since I already know him from his books, all of which I’ve read.’” The next day Vallisneri visited the countess at the osteria where she was staying; he reported to Muratori that they talked well into the evening about “letters and scholars” (lettere e letterati).[43]

For the next few years, Vallisneri engaged in an intense correspondence with Grillo Borromeo about anatomical curiosities and other matters of scientific interest. The culmination of this first stage in their relationship was Vallisneri’s fulsome dedication to the “heroic and masculine ability” of his new patron in his important treatise on fossils, On Marine Bodies Found on Mountains (1721)—on Muratori’s advice he did not dedicate the far racier History of Human and Animal Generation which appeared in the same year with a dedication to the Habsburg emperor.[44] Grillo Borromeo, however, aspired to more than just a long-distance meeting of minds. Following the appearance of Vallisneri’s book, which she praised for associating her far more modest talents with his considerable reputation in “the entire learned world,” she persuaded the busy medical professor on several occasions to leave his patients and students behind in order visit her in Milan during his summer holidays. Friends such as the mathematician Jacopo Riccati joked about these pilgrimages “to bow before your patroness Madame Borromeo.”[45]

Vallisneri participated in Grillo Borromeo’s salon, and spent his days reading, conversing, and writing in her library. He conducted experiments in her well-stocked physics and natural history cabinet, and enjoyed further conversation of the kind that inspired Grillo Borromeo and her physician Carlo Mazzucchelli to send him an account of a monster to insert in his work on generation.[46] Describing his experience of Casa Borromea Vallisneri told one friend: “Here there is a continual academy of scholars, so to speak, because Signora Donna Clelia is so talented and generous. I would have never believed that I could find as much depth in all the sciences and arts as I find in this great Lady.”[47] Vallisneri accompanied the countess on several occasions to Lake Como in order to study the peculiar geology and hydrology of the region, while marveling at her “heroic curiosity.” He described the pleasure of their “philosophical observations” together and graciously accepted her defense of his theory that mountains springs were fed by rain and snow (and not by the waters of the sea reaching up into the highest points of land, as his opponents argued).[48]

Towards the end of his initial visit, Vallisneri completed his Critical Reflections on the Anglican cleric and Royal Society member William Derham’s rational proof of the existence of God “in blissful leisure in the house of his great patron” in September 1722.[49] Though this essay remained unpublished until after his death, it was nonetheless a talisman of the increasing active role Grillo Borromeo envisioned for herself as a facilitator of the work of a great scientist. The steady stream of books appeared from Vallisneri’s pen during this final decade of his long and productive life, and letters that he sent to correspondents, testify to the mutual importance of their relationship. Vallisneri would recall with some pride that he had been the first to recognize Grillo Borromeo’s importance as a great and knowledgeable patron.[50]

Being a patron and pupil of a distinguished scientist was not, however, Grillo Borromeo’s ultimate ambition. By the end of the first year of their relationship, if not before, she had begun to contemplate the possibility of transforming the conversations in her palace into a more formal academy. During the summer of 1722, just before Dereham wrote his report to the Royal Society, Vallisneri accepted Grillo Borromeo’s invitation to become president of the Clelian Academy. They envisioned the Clelian Academy not as an institution with walls but as a center coordinating the activities and information exchange of a community that was largely but not exclusively Italian, and dedicated to the preservation of Italy’s distinguished scientific heritage.

Vallisneri’s reasons for embracing this opportunity had a great deal to do with his own understanding of the importance of academies to the pursuit of science. In the early years of his relationship with his new patron, Vallisneri told one of his Bolognese correspondents how much he envied the resources that Marsigli had brought to this city by founding an academy of which he became a corresponding member.[51] Marsigli created the Bologna Academy of Sciences partly as a solution to his concerns about the stagnation of the Italian university curriculum. Valllisneri was sufficiently curious about its evolution to make multiple trips to Bologna in the 1720s to observe firsthand the miraculous emergence of this Italian version of Salomon’s House and tour its natural history collection. He personally witnessed Marsigli’s return from the Netherlands, laden with boxes groaning with fresh specimens and heretofore unseen curiosities, and wrote that he considered him “one of the first lights of Italy.”[52] In short, there was a great deal of competition between Italy’s two leading naturalists, both of whom had great ambitions for the restoration of Italian science.

Marsigli’s ability to garner papal support for his academy encouraged Vallisneri to consider how Grillo Borromeo’s admiration for his work might provide him with an opportunity to create an institution of his own making. He hoped that the Clelian Academy would compete with the Bologna Academy to claim the terrain that the failure of the Cimento had left vacant. Vallisneri had already shaped the scientific culture of early eighteenth-century Italy through a publication program which he had pursued for many decades with great success. He now dreamed of an academy that would galvanize support for science and garner international attention, proving once and for all that the Italians were indeed full-fledged participants in the scientific republic of letters.

In contrast to a number of other Italian cities, Milan was conspicuously devoid of strong initiatives to create a flourishing scientific culture. Key figures behind the Clelian Academy openly “commiserated that in this city of ours in which there is no stimulus to the arts, philosophy not only goes about naked and wounded but so does every other kind of science, since there is an absence of those who make them look good.”[53] Despite its distinguished tradition of producing noteworthy physicians, mathematicians, and engineers that predated even the arrival of Leonardo, there had been virtually no effort to create a visible scientific community in this city.

With the exception of Count Carlo Archinto’s Accademia dei Cavalieri (1702-06), an academy that brought together nobles, clerics, physicians, and scholars for a few years in the count’s palace, there seem to have been no other efforts to create and sustain scientific conversation and experimentation. Part of the problem had to do with the distance of Lombardy’s principal university which lay further east in Pavia. At the same time, the flourishing college system established by religious orders such as the Jesuits, Piarists, Somascans, and Theatines populated the city with well-educated professors of natural philosophy and mathematics; but it did not facilitate a self-conscious community of experimenters eager to debate the legacy of Galilean science and exciting new developments in the academies of London and Paris whose accomplishments were lauded by the increasing number of Grand Tourists passing through the city.[54] Grillo Borromeo participated in a community frustrated by Milan’s secondary intellectual status. In an age of great ideas, how could a city with a library to rival the Vatican’s be so marginal to enlightened conversation? She saw her academy as an opportunity to integrate her city into the networks shaping and reshaping the republic of letters.

One of the questions on Vallisneri’s mind in the summer of 1722 was where to begin. What, he asked himself, were the first steps in inaugurating an academy? His answer contained many of the standard ingredients of the Renaissance tradition of Italian academies. Taking the cricket (grillo) as its emblem, in an evident pun on the patron’s name, the academy’s motto—“by night and by day” (noctuque diuque)—suggested the virtues of continuous inquiry that confirmed the appropriateness of designating the academicians “Vigilanti.” Moving beyond the rhetorical trappings of academy life, Vallisneri began to sketch a portrait of the academy’s membership and activities. By the time he returned to Padua in fall to resume his professorial duties, he had left behind an apostolic number of laws—twelve principles which became “the rules for an Experimental Academy.”[55]

Examining this sketch of the academy, which exists on paper primarily in Giuseppe Antonio Sassi’s posthumous description of the Clelian Academy that appeared in 1729, we can see the many ways in which the Clelian Academy sought to realize the outline for a new kind of knowledge sketched by Muratori at the beginning of the century. The first law defined the criteria for admission, emphasizing that the core community of Vigilanti would be composed of virtuous scholars of uncommon ingenuity who proposed new things and who wrote in the vernacular. They would hold some public and mostly private meetings and avoid verbal excess in their presentations, aiming instead for a sober accounting of their conclusions. Conversations could range across “every Science and liberal Art,” but the founders expressed a clear preference for discussions of scientific novelties in such fields as mathematics, mechanics, physics, botany, medicine, anatomy, and chemistry. Considering the nature of academy communications, the rules permitted conversation in the classical languages of learning—Latin and to a lesser degree Greek—but expressed a strong preference for Italian as a spoken as well as written language, reflecting Vallisneri’s longstanding agenda to make it a language of scientific communication. At the same time Vallisneri and Grillo Borromeo highlighted the cosmopolitanism of their academy by referring to the ability of the Vigilanti to converse in French, English, and German as well as Arabic.[56] Not surprisingly, all the languages mentioned were ones in which Grillo Borromeo claimed some degree of competency.

Strongly inspired by Muratori’s program for reinvigorating the Italian academies, the academy founders also created an intellectual agenda for the academy that was tightly circumscribed. Describing the academy’s mission as the “advancement of the Sciences and Noble Arts”—a phrase that brought to mind the important work of Francis Bacon of the previous century—rule five prohibited the Vigilanti from discussing poetry and rhetoric. The Clelian Academy, in other words, was an anti-Arcadia that sought to define the terrain which Arcadia had vacated. It strongly supported the pursuit of the historical sciences, which it described in light of the best practices of antiquarian scholarship of the past century such as the reading of inscriptions and coins, and whose goals were closely intertwined with natural history.[57] In this passage, we see the further influence of Muratori who, to my knowledge, was never officially a member of the Clelian Academy but well informed of its activities which coincided with the period in which his monumental collection of medieval Italian sources, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (1723-51), began to appear. In some very tangible sense, he was its intellectual patron.[58]

At the same time, Vallisneri had his own agenda to pursue. Rule six proclaimed the largely secular goals of the Clelian Academy by indicating its desire to separate the pursuit of knowledge from the understanding of faith. It prohibited the Vigilanti from delving into any aspect of theology, especially the vexed arena of biblical commentary. Such sentiments not only reflected Vallisneri’s agreement with Bacon’s pronouncements on this subject but underscored Vallisneri’s often-repeated statement that Galileo had been right to envision science as a complementary rather than subordinate truth in its relationship to faith.[59]

Debating this very point with his Swiss Protestant colleague Louis Bourguet (1678-1742) the year before the outline for the academy emerged, Vallisneri strongly critiqued the English naturalist John Woodward for trying to read nature through the lens of scripture: “Holy Scripture speaks in many different ways that one can and one must interpret (or otherwise say an infinite number of things that are contrary to the evidence of the senses), but nature speaks always in the same way, without metaphor, allegory, or hyperbole, and without dubious, obscure, and mysterious meanings.”[60] Vallisneri’s academy was a modern scientific community in its goals if not in its organization. Exhibiting marked differences from Marsigli’s vision of the Bologna Academy of Sciences—created in the shadow of an ancient university with the full backing of the pope, publicly proclaiming its obedience to the papal decree against heliocentrism, and insisting on Latin as the international language of scholarship—the Clelian Academy was a more overtly political as well as an intellectual project. Its goal was to create a new kind of institution that encouraged a vision of science which could no longer be contained within the Roman Catholic Church’s formulation of the proper relationship between knowledge and faith, as it emerged in the wake of its deliberations about heliocentrism, culminating in the 1633 trial and condemnation of Galileo. In the end, Vallisneri did not hide his admiration for the Galileo who had been condemned. The institution which he sought to create with his patron reflected his own understanding of science as an autonomous pursuit of experts who should answer only to each other in the interpretation of their findings.

In the early days of its development, when anything seemed possible, the founders of the Clelian Academy ambitiously announced their desire to make their initiative into a global center of knowledge. They would initiate “literary commerce” by corresponding with scholars with a European-wide reputation as well as other academies—something that Vallisneri had already accomplished on an individual basis with his voluminous correspondence.[61] They would solicit members from every continent. The fruits of their inquiry would not remain local but would circulate in the printed acts of the academy. An avid reader and editor of scientific journals, Vallisneri particularly celebrated the process by which, as he put it, noble curiosity engendered better publications and ultimately reinforced the “true method of Philosophy.”

While proclaiming a broad interest in science, in its specificity the proposed activities of the Clelian Academy reinforced the primacy of natural history as a model of scientific inquiry. Academicians were encouraged to make detailed natural historical observations by dissecting rare animals and inspecting both exotic and familiar plants. Vallisneri underscored the importance of ordinary nature to the academy’s investigations by encouraging further research on insects, one of his own areas of specialization, as an example of the more neglected features of the natural world: “Nothing therefore, however lowly or domestic, is neglected that may be suitable in illuminating the triple kingdom of nature.”[62] In such statements, we can see the way in which the natural historical program of the Clelian Academy owed a considerable debt to the combined legacy of Redi and Malpighi channeled through the writings of Vallisneri.

To complement the observations and dissections that took place in Palazzo Borromeo, the foundational documents of the Clelian Academy envisioned an ambitious program of research and travel which drew inspiration from another dimension of Vallisneri’s own intellectual program: his considerable contributions to the history of the earth. The Vigilanti would scrutinize the mountains to pursue a wide range of hydrological, geological, and paleontological questions. They would make observations, collect specimens, and ultimately test their conclusions experimentally, demolishing earlier theories about the very subjects which Vallisneri had discussed in such publications as his Academic Lecture on the Origin of Springs (1715) and On Marine Bodies Found on Mountains (1721).[63] Their ultimate goal would be a “universal natural history of this most noble region,” the first complete natural history of Lombardy.[64] Vallisneri’s field trips with Grillo Borromeo inaugurated this otherwise unfinished project.

While actively seeking out knowledge, the Vigilanti also envisioned themselves as the recipients of an endless stream of information. In imitation of the Jesuits, they explicitly stated their desire to acquire information on a global scale and envisioned this acquisition as being “communicated to the Academy by Letters.” At the same time, they did not neglect the idea of sponsoring travel themselves well beyond the Alps. Echoing Bacon’s classic description of the Merchants of Light who trafficked in knowledge by traveling the world, rule ten of the Clelian Academy encouraged “some Academician … to go to see not only the most celebrated Cities of Europe but also those of Asia, Africa, and beyond if it pleases to bring even [reports] of America.” Every aspect of natural history, astronomy, geography, law, custom, and invention was to be studied and reported back to the Vigilanti. Such a project would not only benefit the academy but the state. In all respects, the founders of the Clelian Academy presented it as an academy devoted to the idea of “public utility.”[65]

The rules of the Clelian Academy concluded by reiterating the five most important disciplines it encompassed—history, anatomy, mechanics, geometry, and astronomy—and by emphasizing the value of collective intellectual labor which surpassed the efforts and even the mortality of any individual scholar. Finally, the twelfth rule returned to the question of publication. Undecided about whether the acts would be published “every month or year,” the Vigilanti also considered the status of individually authored books published by academicians. Lamenting the many unworthy publications in print, they encouraged members to seek counsel from their fellow Vigilanti to ensure that each publication would be novel and distinguished, earning the “worthy applause of the Republic of Letters” and adding to the “fame of the Academy.”[66] Such comments add further weight to the idea that they had discussed the criteria for publication in the Society of Jesus, which also placed great emphasis on internal censorship as a form of quality control.[67]

Writing to Vallisneri in February 1723 about the possibility of becoming a member of the Clelian Academy, the Swiss naturalist Bourguet asked to see the laws. Initially Vallisneri informed him that the academy did not yet exist except on paper. “The laws that I wrote are quite extensive, and I left them there, thinking that I had brought with me the draft, but I’m not finding it.” When Bourguet pressed the issue further, Vallisneri responded in June that the laws remained in the hands of Countess Borromeo. He offered a further detail that gave the academy some tangible reality by informing Bourguet that he had recommended Giovanni Bianchi (1693-1775), a promising young physician-naturalist from Rimini, for the position of academy secretary.[68] Vallisneri had also promised Bianchi a copy of the laws through their mutual friend Sassi, writing early in 1723 about their final revision. “Tell him that I am awaiting the rules of the experimental Academy, since Her Excellency, Signora Donna Clelia, wrote me that she had completed them.” Sassi responded warmly that he planned to visit their mutual patron to “give her a final push for the opening of this new experimental academy.” [69] In such exchanges we can see how the idea of an academy emerged as a conversation in letters which established the network of possible participants in the actual project.

At the same time, Vallisneri confessed that things were not moving forward as rapidly as he would have liked. In the very period in which he congratulated Matteo Bazzani and Francesco Maria Zanotti on assuming respectively the offices of president and secretary of the Bologna Academy of Sciences, he found it difficult to get his own idea off the ground.[70] He used his presidency of another academy, the Accademia dei Ricovrati in Padua, to flatter his patron by honoring her with an entire debate on the question of women’s education.[71] Bourguet also attempted to encourage Grillo Borromeo to realize her plans by writing directly to her about the possibility of becoming a Vigilante. The countess was sufficiently pleased by his overtures, responding warmly that his membership would enhance the “honor of the academy that is about to form.”[72] Nonetheless, a year after Dereham reported the rumor of this academy to the Royal Society it still existed only on paper.

The trappings of an academy, however, continued to emerge piecemeal. At Grillo Borromeo’s request, Vallisneri’s official academy portrait was being prepared with enormous care by artists in Milan, working from a miniature of Vallisneri in full professorial garb.[73] Bianchi never did officially become the secretary of the Clelian Academy but Vallisneri certainly was its president. By 1723 Grillo Borromeo hung his portrait in the room in her palace in which the academy would meet. Vallisneri agreed to return at least once a year to give an annual presidential lecture on natural history, inaugurating these meetings with a lecture on viper’s venom.[74] For roughly a period of five years, in other words, from the initial discussions of the academy in the summer of 1722 until his final trip to Milan in September 1727, Vallisneri seems to have been the president of this chimerical academy. Even in the final years of his life he still hoped that it would eventually become an institution rather than an idea.

Creating a Philosophical Family

What, then, was the Clelian Academy beyond its patron and president? Working together, Grillo Borromeo and Vallisneri created what she would later describe as a “philosophical family.”[75] This fundamental concept defined their understanding of the nature of an academy as a set of affective relations between patrons and scholars that were deeply personal as well as intellectual. In part, the idea of an academy gave a name to the community which already gathered in Palazzo Borromeo for regular conversations.[76] The Ambrosian librarian Sassi and her physician Mazzucchelli were loyal members of this inner circle. They were indeed full-fledged participants in the Borromeo household beyond their role in the academy.

At the same time, Vallisneri’s presence in Milan helped encourage other scholars to participate more actively in her projects. While it is hard to know which ones had participated in the Borromeo conversazione prior to 1722, the number of prominent mathematicians, philosophers, and physicians who joined her conversations seems to have grown. Core members included the Jesuit Tommaso Ceva (1648-1737), whose Philosophia novo-antiqua, a philosophical poem first published in 1704 and frequently reissued throughout the early decades of the eighteenth century, was an interesting if highly criticized attempt to modernize traditional natural philosophy by an author who had explored Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Ceva’s student Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri (1667-1733), who occupied the chair in mathematics at the University of Pavia, also seems to have been a participant. Gradually the salon—for this in essence was what a conversazione was when it brought together male scholars and aristocrats in the home of a wealthy woman[77]—became something more focused and seemingly engaged with the project of the academy.

The Somaschan Giovanni Francesco Crivelli (1691-1743)—who completed his textbook on algebra (1728) around the time of the Clelian Academy’s demise and shortly thereafter published his influential Elements of Physics (1731)—was another key member.[78] His laudatory goal of creating a vernacular physics textbook which would introduce readers to all the important developments in physics since the age of Galileo, while treading lightly on the most controversial issues, was a fitting demonstration of the principles of scientific communication and publication inscribed in the rules of the academy. When Sassi composed his history of the academy in 1729, he especially singled out the contributions of Ceva, Saccheri, and Crivelli as a supplement to the work of Vallisneri.[79]

The creation of an indigenous community of academicians who, to differing degrees, shared Grillo Borromeo’s and Vallisneri’s vision of an academy was but the first step in the realization of its larger goals. When Sassi compared the Clelian Academy to those in Paris, London, Berlin, and Bologna, he outlined its ambition to become a major scientific academy of international significance.[80] Vallisneri’s prominence, as one of the few Italians admitted to the Royal Society, among his many other honors, in conjunction with Grillo Borromeo’s growing reputation, helped them to recruit potential members outside of the city whose affiliation with the academy would give it a kind of instant visibility.

Through his voluminous correspondence, Vallisnieri identified an influential community of possible participants, or at the very least friends of this venture. He not only encouraged scholars in Lombardy to take Grillo Borromeo’s initiative more seriously but also began to envision the Clelian Academy as a mirror of his own image of the Italian republic of letters. The network he drew upon disproportionately involved Italian scholars who were, like himself, Royal Society members.[81] A noteworthy exception was Marsigli, who was in England and Holland during the early period of the academy’s formation, nursing his grievances about how ill-treated he had been in Bologna by its senators and scientists, and enjoying the pleasure of meeting luminaries such as Newton.[82] In general, the Bolognese were conspicuously absent from lists of potential participants in the academy, nor did Vallisneri involve every important scientific figure in the Venetian Republic or reach out to the communities of scientific practitioners in such cities as Florence and Rome (save for the Englishman Dereham). With one noteworthy exception that we will discuss shortly, Naples was also absent.[83] Vallisneri’s republic of letters was, on the one hand, well-connected outside of Italy to major centers of learning and publication initiatives, and on the other hand, highly local, reaching as far as Modena but not quite arriving in Bologna. The political boundaries which carved up the map of Italy like a jigsaw puzzle were indeed quite tangible and limiting in their effect on intellectual ambitions.

In addition to keeping Muratori well informed about the academy’s evolution, Vallisneri also communicated news of the academy to the most influential Italian colleagues residing abroad in the capital cities of Europe. In January 1723, for example, it was rumored that Vallisneri’s collaborator on the Giornale de’ letterati Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750), who left Venice for Vienna in 1718 for the prestigious position of imperial poet, might stay with the countess during a trip to Milan.[84] The Paduan philosopher and abbé Antonio Conti (1677-1749), a fellow Royal Society member who had famously intervened in 1715 in the debate between Leibniz and Newton on their priority in the invention of the calculus and mostly lived in Paris between 1713 and 1726, was another obvious candidate for membership. In regular contact with Vallisneri, Conti became increasingly intrigued about the possibility of meeting la donna Clelia. In the period in which the idea of the Clelian Academy emerged, Conti was composing his Philosophical Dialogues in which he reaffirmed the importance of Italian science to the origins of experimental philosophy and the role of the Accademia del Cimento as a model for subsequent academies.[85] Similarly, Vallisneri’s other collaborator on the Giornale de’ letterati, the Veronese antiquarian Scipione Maffei (1675-1755) eventually became part of Grillo Borromeo’s network of correspondents.[86] They all considered the Milanese countess a patron of great learning who deserved their praise and who might potentially be useful in the realization of various projects. Yet none of these influential figures formally became members, despite their friendship with Vallisneri.

The only person who seems to have been asked in writing to join the academy—as far as the surviving documentation permits us to know with any certainty[87]—was Vallisneri’s close friend in Geneva, Bourguet. He was certainly the first foreign member and eager to be involved in the planning of this new initiative. After inviting Bourguet to join the nascent academy, Vallisneri informed his friend that he could write to their patron “in French, English, Latin, or German” since she was perfecting all of these languages.[88] Bourguet’s relationship with Grillo Borromeo not only revolved around the promise of the academy and his own scientific projects, including an unrealized edition of Leibniz’s correspondence that he planned to dedicate to her, but eventually concerned his role as a founding editor of the Swiss journal Bibliothèque italique. The idea for this journal took shape in 1725 and its first issue appeared in 1728. In discussions with the other editors in Geneva about the content of the journal in reporting news of Italy, Bourguet invoked the “judgment of Madame Borromeo” regarding what to insert.[89] While the Geneva journal was not by any means an academy publication, it nonetheless relied heavily on information from scholars in Milan and the Veneto whose relationships shaped the nature of the Clelian Academy.

While working to create a network of potential academicians, Vallisneri also sought other forms of publicity for this new venture. One of his most assiduous southern Italian correspondents was the abbé Giacinto Gimma (1668-1735), who spent the majority of his life between Naples and his native city of Bari pursuing eclectic encyclopedic projects of history, philosophy, and natural history. He had also reinvented a Neapolitan academy—the Spensierati of Rossano, of which Vallisneri was a member as of 1705[90]—in 1695, writing a set of laws that provided some of the inspiration for the Clelian Academy’s own document. In 1722 Gimma was completing his Sketch for the History of Learned Italy (1723), a controversial work that presented the Italian peninsula as the region of Europe in which modern knowledge first emerged. He informed Vallisneri that he intended to dedicate it to Grillo Borromeo and told him, “I’ll see if I can add to my work the sketch of the Experimental Academy in Signora Borromeo’s home.”[91]

In July 1723 Gimma composed the dedication of the first volume, comparing la donna Clelia to Cesare Ripa’s sixteenth-century allegory of Italy as a beautiful woman atop a globe, scepter in one hand and a cornucopia in the other. “You are the most beautiful and noble ornament of Italy in our age.” Describing Grillo Borromeo’s accomplishments, Gimma wrote: “She is so especially learned in natural and experimental philosophy that she has founded a new Academy in her own home.”[92] He optimistically predicted that it would ultimately make her more famous that any learned woman—ancient, medieval, or modern.

Towards the end of the second volume of his history of Italian learning, Gimma allotted further space to the Clelian Academy. He described Vallisneri’s portrait over the entryway to the academy and the president’s obligation to present an annual natural history lecture. Finally, he celebrated Grillo Borromeo’s style of interaction with her academicians, “her profound and lively discussions with learned men, of whom she is the generous and liberal protector.”[93] Even before the laws had been finalized, the academy now existed in print in a book that was widely read, discussed, and critiqued throughout Italy and even reviewed in foreign journals. Grillo Borromeo was so pleased with Gimma’s book that she incessantly reminded Vallisneri—a far less appreciative reader of a publication he considered to be uneven and insufficiently critical in its content—to review it in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia.[94]

By all outward appearances, the Clelian Academy was on the verge of success, making the transition from idea to institution. The increasing publicity that the academy and its patron received only solidified the idea that Milan was truly a city ready to invest in the creation of a strong scientific community. For various reasons, this did not occur. The history of the Clelian Academy is primarily the history of an idea that excited a good deal of interest for about a decade and then vanished. Understanding why it did not succeed, after receiving so much initial publicity, suggests the real obstacles at work in transforming an idea into a community, and that community into a well-funded institution.

The primary opposition to the Clelian Academy lay close to home. Her father-in-law Count Carlo, who had served as viceroy of the Kingdom of Naples (1710-13) and subsequently became commissario imperiale plenipotenziario for Charles VI in 1715, openly detested his daughter-in-law’s fascination with the kind of modern knowledge that experimental philosophy represented. A staunch representative of first the Spanish and then Austrian rulers of Lombardy, he was one of Milan’s premier civil servants.[95] He was openly suspicious of the foreigners who frequented her conversations, of the intellectual pretensions of his daughter-in-law, and of her allegiances to the Spanish faction in the city.[96] By refusing to offer the academy his support, Carlo Borromeo played an instrumental role in ensuring that it would never be much more than a paper fantasy.

The obstacles to success were already apparent, at least to an inner circle of potential participants, at the time when Gimma publicized the emergence of this new academy. In June 1723 rumors circulated that “someone in the house” did not want the academy to thrive. By December Vallisneri knew exactly what the problem was. “The Experimental Academy has never been established in the home of the Great Donna Clelia …,” he told Bourguet:

her husband’s father still lives and is the patron of everything. From what they tell me, he loves politics and arms but not letters. Hence of necessity the most learned lady does that which she can but not always that which she wants.[97]

La donna Clelia may have been the most intellectually versatile and prominent woman in early eighteenth-century Italy, but she could not overrule the wishes of a powerful patriarch who distrusted the nature of the philosophical modernity that she and her friends championed, and whose support of the Austrian government of Milan conflicted with her own politics. The power dynamic within the Borromeo household was indeed a limiting factor in the realization of this project.

The other obstacle Vallisneri acknowledged was Grillo Borromeo’s approach to knowledge. She was not a professional scholar, as he was, but a highly intelligent patron of learning for whom learning was yet another form of pleasure. “Her beautiful mind is distracted by a thousand things,” he declared with some exasperation, repeating this criticism several times in the course of their relationship. Grillo Borromeo herself confessed to possessing “a certain natural impatience for seeing quickly the conclusion” of any discussion. “And if it takes a bit longer to get there, I quickly tire and give it up.” She observed, “I attribute the fact that I have not perfected myself in any subject to this quickness and instability no less than my small talent.”[98] Her desire to be a patron of all knowledge made it difficult for her to sustain a conversation with her academicians on any single subject, compelling her to go in many different directions. As a result, her intellectual goals did not exactly coincide with his own which were far more focused on specific outcomes. He also had begun to realize how much she enjoyed her new role as the most visible female patron in early eighteenth-century Italy. Vallisneri observed that she was a “great lady with a most wonderful mind but [she is] too liberal with everyone.”[99] Grillo Borromeo’s aristocratic munificence, in other words, was at times counterproductive for the goals of the academy.

By the beginning of 1724 the possibilities for getting the academy off the ground were quickly evaporating. Sassi and Grillo Borromeo commiserated over the lack of support for such intellectual initiatives in their city. As Sassi told Vallisneri bluntly, the ship had run aground. While Vallisneri’s arrival in the city had excited a certain interest and increased the flow of participants into the Borromeo conversazione, there was simply not a critical community in Milan to sustain this idea in his absence. “To this end, she has still brought to a standstill her noble sketch of the Clelian Academy,” wrote Sassi in January 1724, “because, however much her spirit is great, the number of those who wish to manfully second it by bringing to fruition the still languid taste for difficult studies is sparse.”[100] It was around this time that Vallisneri encouraged Bourguet to think of dedicating an edition of Leibniz’s correspondence to the countess in imitation of Gimma’s book.[101]

For a period, discussions of the academy simply vanished from the conversations of its putative members. It was a stark reminder that the presence of scientists in a conversation did not necessarily make it scientific. What mattered most to Grillo Borromeo was her ability to maintain a certain standing in the republic of letters that she had achieved through Vallisneri’s public praise of her and because of the excitement generated by the idea of the academy. She continued to facilitate “learned correspondence” between some of the so-called Vigilanti.[102]

During this period Vallisneri concentrated on his patients and lessons in Padua while also obsessing at great length about the engraving and presentation of a portrait la donna Clelia had given him that he wished to publish as part of a new dedication. He had not forgotten his patron by any means nor did she neglect her favorite naturalist. In July 1724 he was hard at work on a new edition of On Marine Bodies and worrying with friends in Venice about the poor typesetting of the revised dedication he had written to Grillo Borromeo. At the same time, he put off her requests that he return to Milan, telling her that his duties kept him at home but that he would make the trip the following year. Finally, in 1725 he told the Trevisan mathematician Jacopo Riccati that he was headed to Milan to be reunited with his “philosophical family.”[103]

For several weeks, Vallisneri found himself once again at the center of a whirlwind of activity. An endless round of social obligations among the Milanese patriciate, which often blurred into impromptu patient consultations for which he was famous throughout northern Italy, occupied his days. Grillo Borromeo assisted Vallisneri in pursuing his idea of writing the natural history of Lombardy by inviting the naturalist to accompany her to Lake Como to observe the mountains and waters north of the city with other academicians such as Ceva. She encouraged Vallisneri to revivify the experimental culture of her erstwhile academy with his lectures, dissections, and air-pump experiments on vipers in honor of his great hero Redi, and a wide range of “other experiments and observations” which he funneled into his next round of publications. The range of activity and conversation he experienced that fall led Vallisneri to describe Ca’ Borromeo as “a continuous academy.”[104] But what exactly did he mean by this phrase when it seems so hard to distinguish the salon from the academy? With little fanfare, the Clelian Academy, or rather the conversazione that had been re-baptized under this name, reemerged.

While in Milan, Vallisneri also heard about the latest publishing project on the horizon that might add further luster to their ghost of an academy: Thomas Dereham’s Italian translation of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, whose first volume did not appear until 1729. In the midst of an unexpectedly lengthy trip home due to weather, Vallisneri wrote Dereham that this project was “most useful and worthy of eternal praise” because so few Italians could read the original articles in English.[105] He also may have encouraged Dereham to dedicate this project to Grillo Borromeo in the hope that a steady stream of publications drawing attention to her merits might put further pressure on those who resisted the creation of a new scientific academy under her patronage.

Yet as the fame of la donna Clelia increased, Vallisneri found himself in the frustrating position of competing for her attention. Polishing the new dedication to his book and contemplating the best presentation of her portrait so that he might perfectly capture his patron in words and image, he fretted over the “great silence of our Donna Clelia who no longer responds to my letters.” Sassi patiently informed him:

The reason for her silence is the excessive quantity of letters, and even more of people who never leave her in peace. New obligations arise from every sector. Just a little while ago, she told me that there were about twelve scholars who want to dedicate their books to her. You have shed light on her for everyone, and for this, too, she is greatly obliged.[106]

The success of Vallisneri’s strategy placed Grillo Borromeo firmly at the center of the republic of letters. In just a few years, she had become Italy’s most important female patron since Queen Christina of Sweden. Vallisneri recognized that he bore some responsibility for being “the first to set so many pens in motion.”[107] In September 1726 he played the same role for Bourguet as Sassi had done for him, consoling his friend in Geneva when she did not write: “The abovementioned Signora is so full of things to do and has so enlarged her literary commerce that she cannot satisfy everyone often or even well, as still often happens to me, so don’t be surprised if she delays writing or responding ….”[108] La donna Clelia, as Gimma brilliantly suggested, was now the female icon of Italian learning. But it was not yet clear that her literary apotheosis would ever make the Clelian Academy into the kind of institution they had dreamed of in 1722. If anything, it seemed to make its reality even more remote.

By the time Valllisneri completed the second edition of On Marine Bodies, after endless delays awaiting Grillo Borromeo’s portrait from the Milanese engraver, he was deeply pessimistic about the prospects for the academy. In June 1726 he expressed his utter exasperation at the problems of dealing with such a patron in conversation with Antonio Conti:

Here is another letter regarding the foundation of my heroine’s academy. You have touched the tooth that aches, hence she hasn’t mentioned it any more, perhaps not knowing what may be the pastimes of Venice and of a true philosopher like yourself. If you were embarrassed, do your best not to be with a woman who justly has glory in mind. [109]

As Vallisneri had come to realize, for the countess the academy primarily was a conversation piece to be reactivated in some fashion every time he or any other interesting mind came to Milan. His own image of an academy—shaped by his participation in many of Europe’s leading scientific societies and academies—existed in tension with her far more fluid understanding of the enterprise that they had undertaken together.

Vallisneri continued to praise his patron, crafting her image as the female glory of Italy. Yet by the time he wrote the dedication of On Marine Bodies in October 1726, he openly spoke of the academy in the past tense. This new version of the publication in which he had first brought Grillo Borromeo to the attention of the republic of letters became an opportunity to memorialize their much lamented project. Vallisneri fondly recalled her enthusiasm for the idea during the summer of 1722 when he delayed his departure from Milan to writing the laws for her palace academy. “If certain just reasons didn’t prohibit it, you would have set a rare example by establishing an experimental Academy, of which the laws were already brought into existence by me at your gentle and revered command,” Vallisneri wrote. He recalled how she had posted Vallisneri’s sketch of the academy in her palace and added “so many other rules full of the greatest wisdom” that only a blind man would have been unable to see “how useful to the Sciences, and how glorious to Italy all of it would be if it had been accomplished.” Vallisneri enumerated all the ingredients that should have made it a success including the plan to reform natural history, Grillo Borromeo’s vast “literary commerce,” and her boundless generosity. “But fortune, that adverse enemy within and without … robbed us of our sweet hopes and cut short such vast and generous plans.”[110]

Continuing a project he had initiated with Gimma’s Sketch for a History of Learned Italy, Vallisneri filled out the printed history of the academy in greater detail. If the Clelian Academy could not exist in actuality, it needed to survive on paper. Nonetheless, Vallisneri continue to harbor some hope that he might revive his patron’s interest in the project by discussing its uneven progress in print. He reserved his most important praise for Grillo Borromeo when he wrote: “in the absence of an Academy of many, for now you alone are an entire illustrious Academy, your home an Asylum for Scholars ….” He asked her to accept “this new attestation by the Republic of Letters of your merit, your zeal, your ability, and your love for the progress of the Arts and Sciences.”[111] Through such praise of Grillo Borromeo’s singular merits, Vallisneri encouraged her to rethink her flagging commitment to the realization of a very timely and innovative idea.

The Fragility of Institutions

It took almost a year and a half before Vallisneri’s carefully crafted image of the end of the Clelian Academy was in the hands of his readers—due in no small part to the considerable expense of her portrait and the endless conversations surrounding its presentation.[112] The countess agreed with Vallisneri that Milan so far had proven to be most unfertile terrain for the creation of a scientific institution. Washing her hands of the entire matter, she confessed that she was “surrounded by fools.”[113] Such comments serve to remind us that an academy, as even Marsigli discovered in his difficult negotiations with Bologna’s citizens and professors, could never exist at the whim of an individual but only survived to the degree to which it inspired regular acts of patronage and created an intellectual community. The ink had hardly dried on the page before an occasion arose to revisit the beleaguered idea of an academy.

In 1727 Grillo Borromeo made one last effort to get the academy off the ground. With the first volumes of Bourguet’s Bibliothèque italique and the Italian translation of the Philosophical Transactions about to appear, she could indeed claim to be an important participant in scientific communications between Italy, England, and Northern Europe. Renewed attention to her status as a great patron of learning seems to have reinvigorated her desire to put her stamp on an institution. Around this time the librarian Sassi described their efforts to make a “final push for the opening of this new experimental academy.”[114]

The latest opportunity came not from Milan or Padua but directly from the imperial court of Charles VI. By the mid-1720s discussions were underway about the idea of creating some sort of imperial academy in Austrian Italy. “I see the letter from Vienna,” Grillo Borromeo wrote eagerly to Vallisneri on 30 November 1726:

If we knew how to seize the opportunity, how many benefits would we derive from it for our scholarly and glorious desires! Why can’t that Academy of literature and diverse sciences that they want to establish be converted into an Academy of physical and mechanical experiments? This would satisfy the desire for knowledge. Then wouldn’t the ambition for glory be sufficiently satisfied if the Emperor, in the act of wanting to establish and allocate funding for this project, made me the arbiter and director of it?

The countess provided Vallisneri with a number of reasons to encourage the emperor to consider Milan as an ideal location for his academy. Among them, she cited the advantages of her station. She had no need of a subsidy to perform this role, “hence any assistance I might offer in this business would be a dignity and a position of disinterest with me.”[115] She urged him to convey these sentiments to influential friends at court such as the imperial historian and poet Apostolo Zeno and the imperial physician and librarian Pio Nicolò Garelli (1670-1739), promising them her favor if they succeeded in having her appointed the academy president and assigned an annuity. Apologizing to Vallisneri for her audacity, she nonetheless presented her credentials for the job to which she had long aspired.

In all likelihood, earlier discussions between Vallisneri and Zeno regarding “the business of Signora Donna Clelia” prompted the letter from Vienna.[116] Appointed to the position of imperial physician as of 1722, Vallisneri had close friends and relatives who were well situated in Vienna. He decided to explore the possibilities discreetly within the imperial court, recognizing how delicate this negotiation would have to be, given Carlo Borromeo Arese’s staunch opposition to his daughter-in-law’s intellectual activities and political inclinations. In an undated letter, Grillo Borromeo cautiously encouraged Vallisneri to continue his conversation with “that mediator”—in all likelihood Zeno. But she hypothesized that if they maintained and even expanded the current academy, “others will involve themselves in our idea and they will prevent it from happening here.” She encouraged Vallisneri to write vaguely of their plans “because the reliability of the mail gets worse ever day if it has perhaps not been destroyed.” [117] Such exchanges suggest the degree to which Grillo Borromeo feared for the future of her academy not only from her critics in Milan but from others in Vienna who might appropriate their proposal for other purposes. Despite the erratic nature of her commitment to the Clelian Academy up until this point, when enticed by the prospect of winning imperial recognition for her unique position in Milan as a patron of science Grillo Borromeo felt that her role in this academy was central to any argument she might make for support from Vienna.

In December 1726 Zeno wrote that he was still trying to resolve the business of donna Clelia. He had indeed made some progress. Summing up the passing of another year on New Year’s Day 1727, Grillo Borromeo wrote of her pleasure at this news. But she wondered to what degree such plans would involve her at all. She cautioned Vallisneri that they might eventually arrive at the point at which “we will find bread without having any teeth.” Increasingly, skeptical of Zeno’s commitment to making their case before the emperor, Grillo Borromeo informed Vallisneri that, if it seemed prudent, she approved of his plan to “remove Apostolo as our preacher and enlist another”[118] They were taking no chances.

At the same time, Vallisneri’s increasing skepticism regarding her ability to be the kind of patron he had imagined manifested itself quite clearly in his conversations with Dereham. There is no question that he was disillusioned and frustrated at every turn—not just by Grillo Borromeo but by every would-be supporter of science in Italy. Vallisneri openly lamented the fact that Italian scientists had been virtually abandoned by patrons, mentioning only the Violante Beatrice of Bavaria, widow of Prince Ferdinando III de’ Medici and now governor of Siena, by name.[119] Throughout January, Grillo Borromeo continued to encourage Vallisneri to find more direct channels than Zeno for a conversation with the emperor. The significance of this new opportunity is apparent in the frequency and tone of her letters inquiring about further news from Vienna. She suggested that under the guise of reporting on “some physical novelty, which would be the mule and the woman who doesn’t eat” Vallisneri could simply mention “my desire for this academy.”[120] Should the emperor still be concerned about the impropriety of her role, she provided him with examples of exceptional women who had performed similar public functions in other Italian cities. Ultimately, she wanted to know whether Charles VI was personally interested in their proposal, boldly forwarding a letter for Vallisneri to send to the emperor in Vienna.[121]

An undated letter written at the time provides us with further insight into Grillo Borromeo’s understanding of the possibilities for her project. She outlined the benefits and risks of a Milanese academy of sciences under her direction while also providing Vallisneri with ready-made answers to the emperor’s objections:

My idea would be that the emperor, persuaded of the utility that comes to states from the propagation of the sciences and arts, moved by his desire for his own applause, and firmly convinced that I have enough ability, superior to anyone else in this city, would bring this enterprise to a conclusion. That he would make up his mind to found an Academy shortly like that of the Cimento. To help him make such a determination, it needs to find shelter from the obstacles that can impede it. I only see two of them. One is paying for it in such mean times, the other is giving the task to a woman. Regarding the first, there is no lack of responses.

One can tell him that Princes find money when they want, that the amount will not be very considerable, and that as the occasion for publications, arts, and instruments arises from this institution, money will return with this success. In the end, the project will be able to support itself and grow on its own.

Throughout their prolonged negotiations with Vienna, Grillo Borromeo encouraged the idea that the Clelian Academy would cost the Austrian government very little in relation to the benefit it would return.

Responding to the second objection, Grillo Borromeo sought to minimize any concerns about the unusual nature of her position as a patron of science. She did not want the emperor to see the Clelian Academy as a strictly female endeavor, recognizing that this indeed was an obstacle to its realization. Instead, she encouraged their friends at the imperial court to present the proposal more broadly, as a Milanese or perhaps even Italian project rather than a personal initiative. She did her best to anticipate and counter any hesitation about the role she would play, making it a matter of personal ability and virtue—princely recognition of a distinguished and learned subject—rather than an artifact of her unusual standing as a woman learned in the sciences:

He need not be informed of the second difficulty and certainly my mediators won’t put it into his head. But if he were to hear of it, there is no lack of reasons to negate it. This is not a military command, nor that of provincial governor, over which the custom of conferral is already established. It is an appointment freely made by the Prince with which he gratifies one of his distinguished subjects, reaffirming the person’s scholarly ability in order to encourage others here.[122]

In such statements, we finally see Grillo Borromeo’s full recognition of the nature of her predicament. She was quite certain—probably rightfully—that she was the most qualified person in the city to head the new imperial academy. At the same time, she was well aware that the more formal the endeavor, the more problematic her role in it would be come. How to overcome this obstacle? Her own argument not only underscored her intellectual credentials but reaffirmed her role in inspiring others—certainly male, possibly female—to pursue science. Grillo Borromeo urged Vallisneri to find the best avenue for securing her role “because not only do we risk that nothing happens but also that in doing it the command is given to others. We will have done the work while others grab the prize.”[123]

In the midst of these intense negotiations, the Englishman Dereham arrived in Milan at the beginning of winter 1727. He witnessed the surprising birth of a mule from a mule and reported back to the Royal Society about the Clelian Academy. It is little wonder that he was excited about what he heard in the Borromeo conversazione about the possibility of an imperial academy under her direction. On this occasion, he must have finalized his plans to dedicate the Italian translation of the Philosophical Transactions to her. Vallisneri apologized to Dereham for being unable to join him and the countess. They both agreed that they would publicize the strange reproductive powers of a seemingly sterile animal.[124] Reports of this mule traveled from Milan to such cities as Padua, Rome, Neuchâtel, Vienna, and London, further demonstrating the function of novelties in activating correspondence while also providing the Clelian Academy with fleeting visibility.

Ever conscious of the importance of maintaining her network of correspondents, Grillo Borromeo continued to cultivate her relationship with Bourguet in Geneva. In March 1727, for example, she informed Bourguet that she had been sharing his treatise on “organic mechanism” with many scholars besides their mutual friend Vallisneri.[125] Towards the end of winter Conti arrived for a lengthy stay with the countess, offering sage advice about the obstacles which his two friends faced in gaining imperial patronage and inspiring them with his ambitious project of writing the history of knowledge since 1665. He advertised this project as yet another opportunity to celebrate the glory of Italian science after Galileo.[126]

Things were not going well in Vienna. By spring Grillo Borromeo grimly compared their situation to the military predicament of the Spanish in attempting to recapture Gibraltar from the British. Unable to find any breach in the walls, they simply could not enter.[127] There was nothing much to do or say except to lament the demise of a good idea. “I don’t want us to lose sight of that chimerical academy, and who knows?,” the countess had written quixotically to her naturalist at an earlier stage in their discussions.[128] She continued to mull over the possibilities before them with her houseguest Conti and longed for the return of the academy’s president.

Vallisneri’s final trip to Milan in September 1727, at the repeated urging of his patron, allowed the Clelian Academy to exist for one last time. He stayed with the countess, presumably read his natural history lecture in the room which held his portrait and the academy rules, and participated in her conversazione. He retrieved his friend Bourguet’s papers that had disappeared for months in the confusion of her study. Yet Vallisneri increasingly felt that he was participating in a ritual without a point. Grillo Borromeo’s reckless behavior further compounded his concerns. Shortly after his arrival, Vallisneri earned her undying gratitude when he used all of his medical skills to save her from an almost fatal bout of food poisoning brought on by her habit of eating mushrooms every night while drinking copious quantities of chocolate during the day and ingesting a steady supply of opium to calm her nerves.[129] The following year she lost considerable sums of money playing cards and was unable to provide the academy with much of a subsidy. Once again, the Clelian Academy seemed on the verge of slipping away.

Vallisneri aptly described his patron as “full of noble fantasies” in a letter to Conti in June 1728. “She wants others to pay for it,” he wrote, “but I fear that she will not find it in Italy.” The following month he offered the same assessment in a letter to Bourguet, writing that Grillo Borromeo’s desire to found an academy “is very difficult if not impossible in these times in Italy.”[130] Earlier that year he caustically remarked that he hoped his good friend Father Crivelli had received a proper reward for his own efforts with la donna Clelia but feared that his friend’s investment had been similarly ill advised.[131] Nonetheless, Grillo Borromeo continued to seek out opportunities to increase her contacts with the Italian scientific community. In 1728 she began to correspond with another distinguished Italian scientist, the Camaldolese priest Guido Grandi (1671-1742) who was professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa. Taking his cue from Vallisneri, Grandi prepared a major publication dedicated to Grillo Borromeo: his whimsical treatise on curves entitled Geometric Flowers (1728). Noting that few men cultivated the “sublime sciences … but in the female sex it is even rarer,” Grandi named a curve—la cloelia—in her honor.[132]

Vallisneri wrote to congratulate Grandi on his ingenious method of honoring la donna Clelia with her own mathematical form, including a copy of the second edition of On Marine Bodies. From Lucca, Tommaso Narducci became so enamored with Grandi’s new curve that he translated the book into Italian and sent it to the woman after which it was named.[133] Grillo Borromeo was pleased to have played such a singular role in a work by one of Italy’s leading mathematicians whom she praised “for the honor that he gives our Italy.” She delighted in discussing and distributing Grandi’s work to the English visitors who passed through Milan, some of whom may have seen an earlier article dealing with his “geometric flowers” published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1722-23. In light of Grandi’s membership in the Royal Society, Grillo Borromeo openly lamented the lowly status of scientists in Italy, contrasting their fate to the situation of the English. [134] As she knew well from English travelers to Milan and printed journals to which she subscribed, the recently deceased Newton had been buried with great pomp and ceremony in Westminister Abbey. It pleased her immensely to see Grandi as a corresponding member of the Clelian Academy.

In the fall of 1728 Montesquieu finally made his own pilgrimage to Italy. He was well fêted by Conti in Venice and, while disappointed to find Vallisneri still on holiday from the university, saw his cabinet of curiosities in Padua. On September 24, he arrived in Milan bearing “letters from abbé Conti for countess Borromeo, who is very learned and who knows French, English, German, and Latin besides her natural language, and who even has Arabic, mathematics, natural philosophy, and algebra. She has made a very great number of natural observations and experiments.”[135] During his three week stay Montesquieu enjoyed a guided tour of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana by Sassi and made time for a visit to the Borromean islands, undoubtedly at the urging of la donna Clelia, before arriving Florence. Traversing the route between Venice and Milan, Montesquieu did indeed visit an academy that never quite existed, bearing letters between its members which no longer survive. He subsequently described her as “the most admirable woman in the universe.”[136]

The following year one of the German members of the Royal Society, Johann Georg Keyssler, visited Milan. In the midst of his description of the portraits of learned women hanging in the Ambrosiana, he found himself wondering why Clelia Grillo Borromeo and her learned sisters Teresa and Ginevra were not yet among those depicted. Describing Grillo Borromeo’s vast erudition, he wrote of the Clelian Academy:

Her liberality is so great that she has set up, in her palace at Milan, an academy for natural philosophy and the mathematics, of which, though it not be fully completed, the celebrated Antonio Valisnieri, professor at Padua, is to be president, who has long since drawn up a system of its institutes and regulations. It is to be stiled Academia Clelia Vigilantium, and the members, in their exercises and disputations, are not to touch upon divinity, poetry, or eloquence.[137]

By the time Keyssler published his 1729 observations of the academy, he noted regretfully that Vallisneri was no longer alive. He did not excise this passage, however, which was surely based on his reading of Sassi’s recent description of the academy and its rules as well as his own observations.

Vallisneri tried valiantly to save the project for one more year. But in June 1729 he politely informed his patron of the utter impossibility of their academy. With the return of Zeno to Vienna, he invoked the words of his 1726 dedication, but this time with much greater finality. Vallisneri gallantly observed that the academy “is reduced to you and me, but Your Excellency is enough for me who by herself alone forms an entire Academy.”[138] The truthfulness of this statement seems to be born out by the cessation of her correspondence with other key members. Grillo Borromeo wrote her last letter to Bourguet in October 1728; she never did persuade him either to visit her academy in person or to move to Milan.[139] She tirelessly encouraged Vallisneri to explore possible avenues of negotiation with his friends at the imperial court. And she corresponded with Grandi until February 1731, entreating him to “return to Lombardy” as Vallisneri had done. When he did not, she consoled herself with the receipt of his portrait.[140]

Vallisneri died on 18 January 1730, effectively ending any hope that remained for a new opportunity to reconsider the idea of the Clelian Academy. At the height of discussions about the Clelian Academy, Grillo Borromeo vividly described the problem of pursuing a project with “many hidden enemies,” comparing them to “fleas which lie hidden between flesh and skin and invisibly kill.”[141] Ultimately, Grillo Borromeo recognized that she had neither the political capital nor the personal resources to make her academy a lasting institution. Vallisneri eloquently summed up the gravity of this problem and his dissatisfaction at the results of his own efforts to improve the situation when he told Dereham: “in Italy we are unhappy due to the lack of patrons and protectors.”[142]

Grillo Borromeo continued to have some interest in science, though not with the same intensity that she manifested in the 1720s. Her academy floundered but the salon from which it had emerged continued. Friends later recalled observing her in the room in which she held her conversazione, “sketching mathematical figures or writing letters.”[143] Despite her learning, wealth and nobility, there was no permanent place for la donna Clelia within this sector of the republic of letters because they did not continue to seek her with any regularity out after Vallisneri’s death, nor she them.[144] Instead, they memorialized her failed academy. Sassi published his description of the academy and its laws in his history of scholarship in Milan, first published in 1729 and dedicated to Grillo Borromeo; by fleshing out the details in his lengthy description of the academy as the culmination of Milan’s institutions of learning, he gave its paper existence a concreteness that it had lacked in the earlier accounts by Gimma and Vallisneri. Sassi very much wanted it to exist, so that Milan might indeed takes its place among the Italian cities that had experimented with the idea of the scientific academy across the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Briefly, the Clelian Academy was news, and then it ceased to be much of anything at all. Unlike the Cimento, which left behind glorious traces of intellectual activity and a singularly interesting collective publication of the group’s experiments, the Clelian Academy primarily left behind a record of its remarkable founder and a sketch of what a scientific academy ought to be. In the review of Sassi’s book in the Journal des Sçavans, the Clelian Academy was still presented as a work in progress. The French reviewer not only found Grillo Borromeo’s learning noteworthy but also summarized the academy rules. “History, natural philosophy, and mathematics should be the object of study by the academicians and the subject of their meetings. Anything regarding poetry, eloquence or purely theological matters is banished from it. “This Academy should be called Clelian, from the name of its founder, and the academicians will be called Vigilans.”[145] When Filippo Argelati (1685-1755) republished Sassi’s treatise in his ambitious library of Milanese writers in 1745, he further solidified Sassi’s presentation of the academy as its official history, though by this point it was a chapter in Milan’s intellectual life that had definitely closed.

The chimerical academy enjoyed several afterlives in a dispersed series of publications across several decades. Dereham’s 1729 dedication of the Italian translation of the Philosophical Transactions under the name of “Giovanni Panserpichi” further publicized the fame of Grillo Borromeo’s conversazione in its description of the lively cosmopolitan atmosphere of her home: “how many learned men from different parts of Europe have had the chance to listen to the philosophical debates of Your Excellency, expressed in the various languages that you happily possess?”[146] In many respects, his comments echoed a letter in that same year from Ruggero Arese who, recently arrived in Rome to take religious orders, lamented the fact that he found no woman or man in the Eternal City with the insatiable curiosity and intellectual talent displayed by the countess in Milan.[147] While effusively praising Grillo Borromeo’s learning and reproducing in the fifth volume of 1734 much of his correspondence with Vallisneri including the discussion of the curious birth of the mule, Dereham conspicuously chose to omit any reference to the academy. Perhaps he understood all too well that it was never going to be like the Royal Society. Instead he chose to memorialize the figure of Clelia Grillo Borromeo—and his friend Vallisneri who had inaugurated the tradition of dedicating books to her.

The posthumous publication of Vallisneri’s collected works by his son, Antonio Vallisneri, Jr. (1708-77), in 1734 further aggrandized the image of la donna Clelia as a great patron at the expense of the equally interesting history of her academy. In the biography written by Count Giovanni Artico di Porcia, the existence of the academy was reduced to a single line. Artico reminded his readers that at the end of Vallisneri’s first trip to Milan “Clelia became so infatuated with experimental philosophy that she did not want him to leave until he had dictated the laws for an academy to be founded to this end in her palace.”[148] Antonio Jr., who had accompanied his father to Milan during one of his summer trips, of course knew that there was much more to be said but he remained silent. When the president of the Dijon parlement Charles de Brosses visited the countess in the summer of 1739, he described her as a walking encyclopedia—“she not only knows all the sciences and languages of Europe but speaks Arabic like the Qu’ran”[149]—but did not associate this vast erudition with any academy.

The idea of an eighteenth-century institution which restored the glory of Italy’s influential role in shaping the very idea of a scientific academy in the preceding century did not completely vanish with the demise of the Clelian Academy. In 1732 a group of Neapolitan scholars under the leadership of Celestino Galiani, Bartolomeo Intieri and Nicola Cirillo founded a Neapolitan Academy of Sciences while the Kingdom was still under Habsburg rule. They considered their short-lived academy, which ended in 1740 under the rule of the Bourbons, to be a revival of the Neapolitan experimental academy of the previous century, the Accademia degli Investiganti.[150] In 1745 the physician-naturalist Giovanni Bianchi, whom Vallisneri had proposed as secretary of the Clelian Academy, revived the Accademia dei Lincei in Rimini, based on his experience as a core member of Cardinal Giovanni Antonio Davia’s (1660-1740) scientific academy, which flourished in Rimini during the most active period of Davia’s archbishopric in the 1710s and 20s.[151] How did Bianchi envision his own recapitulation of Italy’s scientific past? The early seventeenth-century Roman scientific academy that famously included Galileo among its members had left behind a series of important natural history publications. Bianchi inaugurated his academy with a new critical edition of the Neapolitan Lincean Fabio Colonna’s landmark botanical publication, Phytobasanos sive plantarum aliquot historia (1592) to which he appended a biography of Colonna and history of the Lincean Academy.[152] He shared Vallisneri’s and Grillo Borromeo’s perception that Italian scholars needed to publicize Italy’s intellectual and institutional contributions to the foundations of modern science so that they would not be forgotten. Much like the Clelian Academy, the new Lincean Academy of Rimini lasted only a few years and its activities were received with far less fanfare. Its failure served as an additional reminder that reinventing the past was not sufficient grounds for the creation of new institutions.

In the next decade another protégé of Grillo Borromeo, the ex-Jesuit Francesco Saverio Quadrio (1695-1756), presented a definitive encomium of the Clelian Academy. After scandalously leaving the Society of Jesus in 1748, Saverio spent several years completing his vast and unruly history of Italian literature. In the seventh volume, which appeared in 1752, he devoted a page to his patron’s long defunct academy. Saverio Quadrio not only praised her critical view of frivolous Arcadian poetry, citing the fifth law quite favorably, but also celebrated his friendship with Vallisneri and the recent death of Sassi whose description of the academy formed the basis of his own account. He specifically praised Grillo Borromeo for being “the only Lady who was the author of a similar institution, for which Italy envied neither Paris, nor London, nor Petersburg their more solemn academies ….”[153] This obscure note in the midst of a vast literary encyclopedia—in many respects the replacement for Gimma’s earlier history of Italian learning—fleetingly revived the memory of the Clelian Academy for the younger generation of Milanese who created the Accademia dei Trasformati, a literary academy founded in 1743 which carried forward a number of the ideals of the Clelian Academy and with which la donna Clelia seems to have been affiliated, the far more contentious Accademia dei Pugni (1761-66), and its journal Il Caffé (1764-66), arguably Milan’s greatest contribution to the Enlightenment.[154]

By the time Saverio Quadrio published his belated tribute to his friends, they had dispersed for political reasons as well as the inevitable passing of the generations. In 1746, two years after her husband’s death, Grillo Borromeo finally gave her family the scandal that they had feared would result from her flirtation with science. She fled Milan, accused of openly harboring pro-Spanish sympathies during the period in which Spain briefly reoccupied Lombardy. The Empress Maria Theresa confiscated all of her property and attempted to prosecute her for the next few years. During her period of exile Grillo Borromeo returned to Padua in 1747 to revisit the town of Vallisneri. By the time the Empress finally pardoned her in 1749, she was impoverished but still defiant.[155] She returned to Milan, created a theater in her palace, and retreated into a world populated by her pets and physicians. Ferdinando Galiani fondly recalled her penchant for inhaling copious quantities of snuff and musk to calm her nerves for the last fifty of her remarkable ninety-three years.[156]

Killing Time

Grillo Borromeo’s idea of creating a scientific academy that might directly challenge the goals of Arcadia while also competing with Europe’s leading scientific societies was a bold venture designed to support a vibrant community of scholars who believed that Italy’s scientific traditions needed to be revivified at home and better publicized abroad. She and Vallisneri felt that this could be accomplished through careful study of the works of the leading natural philosophers of the past century, learned correspondence, conversation with northern European scholars, and translation projects. Their attempt to secure support for the Clelian Academy, and reinvent it as an imperial academy of sciences—a project that succeeded in Florence as a result of the reorganization of scientific and cultural institutions following the end of Medici rule and the arrival of the Habsburg-Lorraine in Tuscany in 1737[157]—allows us to see with greater clarity than most projects how ambition might fail in the wrong political climate. It also sheds light on the constraints of patronage, the very real problems of creating and maintaining an intellectual community, and ongoing concerns about appropriate roles for women in the creation of a new scientific culture. No single factor impeded the development of the Clelian Academy but, taken together, they virtually ensured its failure.

Despite Marsigli’s deteriorating relationship with the scientists and citizens of Bologna, his idea of an academy succeeded, eventually taking on a life of its own to become Italy’s premier scientific institution. In 1732 the Bologna Academy of Sciences proudly advertised its first woman academician—the professor, physicist, and experimenter Laura Bassi (1711-78)—and in 1748 it would admit a renowned woman mathematician from Milan, Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-99) whose first publication appeared in a volume on women’s education created by Vallisneri with Grillo Borromeo’s encouragement.[158] Virtually all of the women natural philosophers of the next generation would commence their education in modern physics by using the textbooks which the Venetian Giovanni Crivelli had composed while he was a member of the Clelian Academy.[159] Clelia Grillo Borromeo lived long enough to observe these developments, even as her own academy faded from memory.

By the mid-eighteenth century, to the extent that anyone in Milan remembered the Clelian Academy it was in the spirit of Voltaire: an object of humor that recalled the follies of a former age. Grillo Borromeo’s conversazione continued to exist in some fashion since, as late as 1758, visitors described her home “as the meeting place of all the important people of Milan.”[160] But science was no longer the primary object of conversation, even if the countess continued to display some tincture of her scientific learning. What remained instead was a kind of curious memory of Grillo Borromeo as a founder of academies—a subject that led to a silly printed joke that turned the entire idea of the Clelian Academy upon its head. In 1762 an anonymous pamphlet entitled Love Conquered by Reason appeared in the city. Written by “Abbé N. N,” it is the penultimate work that I have found with a dedication to la donna Clelia.[161] It contained a satirical description of a “New Academy erected under a French banner.” The academy had fifteen rules and allowed only poets and “versifiers” to be members. It made “no distinction of sex,” though it somewhat preferred women in order to promote their society. The subjects of academy conversation were determined by hairdressers and cooks, by the leisure of the casino and the obsession with family genealogies. Members would sleep until an hour before midday. They were then encouraged to spend the remainder of the day at their dressing tables, looking obsessively at themselves in the mirror. They promised to recite an endless enumeration of clothes, servants, and pets.[162] Every rule concluded with the triumphant proclamation that the goal of the academy was to kill time (pour tuer les temps).

One Bolognese reader of this silly pamphlet was so outraged at its frivolity that he wrote on the flyleaf: “This book is utterly stupid and ridiculous. It seems impossible that it was considered worth printing. Whoever acquired it, rightfully stole its binding. To the fire, to the fire, is the best end for it.”[163] What such a reader did not appreciate, however, was the way in which it brilliantly captured the futility of the Clelian Academy which, in its own way, was an exercise in killing time for an earlier generation. When Clelia Grillo Borromeo died on 23 August 1777, one eulogist praised her demonstration of her learning “in the Academy of Experimental Philosophy open at the beginning of this century in her own house.”[164] Others recalled her vast correspondence and “adventurous spirit.”[165] But mostly the learned world remained silent since she had long ceased to be an active participant in the republic of letters.

Even in the city of Milan, few people recalled the role she had played at the beginning of the century. The great arbiter of the Milanese Enlightenment Pietro Verri (1728-97) wrote his brother that almost no one of their generation knew her. He charitably added, “However, she was generous, charitable, and bore a love of study in a time in which it was truly unusual for a lady to have a book in hand. She knew various languages and they say that she wrote very gracefully.”[166] This co-founder of Milan’s most exciting academy and its most contentious journal, the Accademia dei Pugni and Il Caffé, knew nothing of la donna Clelia, her letters, and her far earlier attempt to place Milan upon the map of the republic of letters. He would surely have laughed long and hard at Giuseppe Baretti’s eulogy of Clelia Grillo Borromeo for his English readers in 1757 in which he described her as “the most learned lady that ever Italy produced, and looked upon with little less reverence there, than Newton was in England.”[167] La donna Clelia, however, surely enjoyed this comparison and we can only hope that Baretti’s book found its way into her library.

Appendix I: The Rules of the Accademia Clelia de’ Vigilanti *

I. Admittendi conspicui erunt aut scriptis jam vulgatis aut novis inventis ingeniique raritate, cureturque praestantia non numerus sociorum.

II. Congressus litterarii bifariam dividentur, in publicos et privatos. Hi postremi frequentiores, rarius primi.

III. Argumenta pertractanda ex omni scientia et arte liberali peti poterunt, dummodo quod proponitur alieno labore exhaustum non sit et luci publicae non donatum.

IV. Liberum erit uti Latina vel italica lingua et, si placebit, etiam araba, graeca, aliisque ceterarum nationum, quarum stadium Academicis prorsus ignotus non fuerit. In votis tamen foret ut italica praeferretur.

V. Cum scopus Academiae sit augmentum scientiarum, artiumque nobilium, exilio arcebitur Poesis omnis italica seu Latina, admisso unico studio Inscriptionum, Lapidum, Nummorum, Iconum, etc.

VI. Quae ad Religionem spectant, vetitum sit in periculosae criticae examen producere, sed intacta Theologis relinquantur.

VII. A secretis curam gerit litterarii commercii cum exteris Academiis, comparabit Ephemerides litteratorum.

VIII. Animalium rariorum diligentissima educatio instituatur, et cum obierint eorum anatome fiat. Plantarum etiam exoticarum experimenta non desint, ut triplex regnum naturae illustretur.

IX. Plurimum conferet alicuius sodalis per nostros montes peregrinatio, ad perscrutandum eorum naturam, terrarum colores, fontium erumpentium origines, metallorum fodinas, thermales aquas, herbas, pisces inter strata.

X. Praestantius foret si Academicus aliquis celeberrimas Europae urbes non solum, sed Asiae, Africae et Americae inviserit.

XI. Cuique sodali peculiaris provincia designabitur.

XII. Quae singula prodibunt ex calamo cuiusque sodalis, Academiae typis vulgentur.

* This short version of the twelve rules appears in Michele Maylender, Storia delle Accademie d’Italia (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni Editore, 1926-30), 2:22. It is based on the complete original in Giuseppe Antonio Sassi, De studiis litterariis Mediolanensium antiquis & novis Prodromus ad Historiam Litterario-Typographicam Mediolanensem (Milan, 1729), reprinted in Filippo Argelati, Bibliotheca scriptorum Mediolanensium (Milan, 1745), 1, col. LXIX-LXXI.

** Special thanks to Dario Generali, Ivano Dal Prete, Michael Cunningham, and Marta Cavazza for assistance at various stages with this research; to Daniel Stolzenberg and Jessica Riskin for their careful reading of an earlier version; to Dan Edelstein and Jake Soll for their comments (and good humor about a very long article!); and to the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences for offering me the time to write it up. The full scope of this project could not have been completed without the excellent editorial and archival work of the Edizionale Nazionale delle opere di Antonio Vallisneri, directed by Dario Generali. Many of the letters cited in this article are found in transcription in the online edition of his correspondence: http://www.vallisneri.it/inventario.shtml. A number of them are also transcribed in the recent studies of Clelia Grillo Borromeo, especially by Anna M. Serralunga Bardazza. I have chosen to cite either the manuscript or print original in the notes below.

[1] James Jurin to Thomas Dereham, London, 19 March 1722, in The Correspondence of James Jurin (1684-1750), ed. Andrea Rusnock (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 91.

[2] Thomas Dereham to James Jurin, Bologna, 22 June 1722, in Early Letters, Royal Society in London, D.2.12.

[3] The fact that Dereham has not even merited an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography suggests the dearth of information on him, though the website of the Archive of the Royal Society provides many of the basic details, s.v. “Dereham, Thomas.” See also Father Goldie, S. J., “The Last of the Norfolk Derehams of West Dereham,” Norfolk Archeology 18 (1914): 1-22; and Vernon Hyde Minor, Passive Tranquility: The Sculpture of Filippo Della Valle (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997), 13:53-56, 171-76.

[4] On Dereham’s scientific contributions, see Vincenzo Ferrone, The Intellectual Origins of the Italian Enlightenment, trans. Sue Brotherton (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 40, 79-81; Andrea Rusnock, “Correspondence Networks and the Royal Society, 1700-1750,” British Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999): 159-65; Marta Cavazza, “The Institute of Science of Bologna and the Royal Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 56 (2002): 10-11; and Alan Cook, “Rome and the Royal Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 58 (2004): 4.

[5] Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1989); Hunter, The Royal Society and Its Fellows, 1660-1700: The Morphology of an Early Scientific Institution, 2nd ed. (Oxford: British Society for the History of Science, 1994); Marie Boas Hall, Promoting Experimental Learning: Experiment and the Royal Society, 1660-1727 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666-1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); and Alice Stroup, A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at the Seventeenth-Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

[6] Frances Mason Barnett, Medical Authority and Princely Patronage: The Academia Naturae Curiosorum, 1652-1693 (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1995); Hans-Stephan Brather, ed., Leibniz und seine Akademie: ausgewählte Quellen zur Geschichte der Berliner Sozietät der Wissenschaften, 1697-1716 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993); and Michael Gordin, “The Importance of Being Earnest: The Early St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences,” Isis 91 (2000): 1-21. The most general study of seventeenth-century academies is Martha Ornstein, The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1913; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928); for the eighteenth century, see James E. McClellan III, Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); see also Roger L. Emerson, “The Organisation of Science and Its Pursuit in Early Modern Europe,” in Companion to the History of Science, ed. R. C. Olby et al. (London: Routledge, 1990), 960-79.

[7] A good starting point on this subject is Maarten Ultee, “The Republic of Letters: Learned Correspondence, 1680-1720,” The Seventeenth Century 2 (1987): 95-112; and Lorraine Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment,” Science in Context 4 (1991): 367-86. More comprehensive discussions of the republic of letters include Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Hans Bot and Françoise Waquet, eds., Commercium litterarium, 1600-1750: la communication dans la République des lettres (Amsterdam: APA - Holland University Press, 1994); and Bot and Waquet, La République des lettres (Paris: Belin, 1997), to cite only some of the classic literature.

[8] Roger Hahn, “The Age of Academies,” in Solomon’s House Revisited, ed. Töre Frangsmyr (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1990), 3-12; and McClellan, Science Reorganized.

[9] The standard overview of Italian academies remains Michele Maylender, Storia delle accademie in Italia (Bologna: Forni, 1926-30), 5 vols.. On Italian scientific academies, see the special issue on “Accademie scientifiche del `600,” Quaderni storici 16 (1981); also Max H. Fisch, “The Academy of the Investigators,” in Science, Medicine and History, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1953), 1:521-63; W. E. K. Middleton, “Science in Rome, 1675-1700, and the Accademia Fisicomatematica of Giovanni Giustino Ciampini,” British Journal for the History of Science 8 (1975): 138-54; Mario Biagioli, “Knowledge, Freedom, and Brotherly Love: Homosociality and the Accademia dei Lincei,” Configurations 3 (1995): 139-66; and David Freedberg, The Eye of a Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); for the Argonauti, Maria Gioia Tavoni, ed., Un intellettuale e il suo universo: Vincenzo Coronelli (1650-1718) (Bologna: Costa Editore, 1999); and Mario Lisi et al., I Fisiocritici di Siena: storia di una accademia scientifica (Siena: Accademia delle scienze di Siena detta dei Fisiocritici, 2004). The literature on the Cimento is discussed in note 17.

[10] Thomas Dereham to James Jurin, Bologna, 22 June 1722, in Early Letters, D.2.12.

[11] On the Bologna Academy of Sciences, see especially I materiali dell’Istituto delle Scienze (Bologna: CLUEB, 1979); Walter Tega, ed., Anatomie accademiche (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987), 2 vols.; Marta Cavazza, Settecento inquieto. Alle origini dell'Istituto delle Scienze di Bologna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990); and A. Angelini, ed., Anatomie accademiche, vol. 3 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993). Less satisfactory but nonetheless informative to English readers is Richard Rosen, The Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna, 1690-1804 (PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1971).

[12] Dereham to Jurin, Florence, 18 December 1722, in Early Letters, D.2.14.

[13] Early Letters, D.2.27 (Milan, 25 February 1727). Translated, the proverb tells us “that the son of a mule will kill its owner.” While most mules are sterile, in rare instances they have given birth, so this was indeed an extraordinary event of great interest to researchers trying to understand animal reproduction. This episode was much discussed by Vallisneri in his correspondence with Dereham; see Antonio Vallisneri, Epistolario 1714-1729, ed. Dario Generali (Florence: Olschki, 2005), 1363 (Padua, 2 August 1726), 1406 (Padua, 17 November 1726), 1421 (Padua, 26 December 1726), 1439 (Padua, 16 January 1727), 1459 (Padua, 1 March 1727).

[14] Horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys have 62, while the offspring of their interbreeding—a mule—has 63. The odd number of chromosomes makes all males and most females sterile, but the rare occurrence of a fertile mule led to the Roman saying, cum mula peperit (when a mule foals) as a way of indicating a very rare occurrence. See Ann Chandler and Cyril A. Clarke, “Cum mula peperit,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 78 (1985): 800-801.

[15] Clelia Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 25 February 1727, in Early Letters.

[16] Clelia Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, n.d. [1727], BACR, Conc. 338/50, no. 29. For the broader intellectual context in which it developed, see Gabriel Maugain, Étude sur l’évolution intellectuel de l’Italie de 1657 à 1750 environ (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1909). The Accademia Clelia dei Vigilanti is mentioned on 75.

[17] The most comprehensive studies of this academy are W. E. K. Middleton, The Experimenters: A Study of the Accademia del Cimento (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); Paolo Galluzzi, ed., Scienziati a Corte. L’arte della sperimentazione nell’Accademia Galileiana del Cimento (1657-1667) (Livorno: Sillabe, 2001); and Luciano Boschiero, Experimental and Natural Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany: The History of the Accademia del Cimento (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007).

[18] Paolo Galluzzi, “L’Accademia del Cimento: ‘gusti’ del Principe, filosofia e ideologia dell’esperimento,” Quaderni storici 48 (1987): 788-844, esp. 790-91, 793.

[19] On this issue, see especially Boschiero, Experimental and Natural Philosophy.

[20] Middleton, The Experimenters, 92.

[21] Saggi di natvrali esperienze fatte nell'Accademia del cimento sotto la protezione del serenissimo principe Leopoldo di Toscana e descritte dal segretario di essa academia (Florence, 1667). Middleton’s translation of Magalotti’s penname seems to miss the obvious allusion to Galileo’s Saggiatore; Middleton, The Experimenters, 88.

[22] W. E. K. Middleton, “Some Italian Visitors to the Early Royal Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 33 (1979): 157, 159-65.

[23] On Borelli, a good starting point is Ugo Baldini, “Gli studi su Giovanni Alfonso Borelli,” in La scuola galileiana. Prospettive di ricerca, G. Arrighi et al. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979), 111-35; Paolo Galluzzi, “G. A. Borelli dal Cimento agli Investiganti,” in Galileo e Napoli, ed. Fabrizio Lomonaco and Maurizio Torrini (Naples: Guida, 1987), 339-55; Domenico Bertoloni Meli, “The Neoterics and Political Power in Spanish Italy: Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and His Circle,” History of Science 34 (1996): 57-89; and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Storia e meteorologia dell'eruzione dell'Etna del 1669, ed. Nicoletta Morello (Florence: Giunti, 2001).

[24] The most comprehensive introduction to the work of Redi is Walter Bernardi and Luigi Guerrini, eds., Francesco Redi: un protagonista della scienza moderna: documenti, esperimenti, immagini (Florence: Olschki, 1999).

[25] Lamindo Pritanio [Ludovico Antonio Muratori], Primi disegni della Repubblica letteraria d’Italia esposti al pubblico (Naples, 1703 [actually Venice, 1704]), in Opere, by Muratori, ed. Giorgio Falco and Fiorenzo Forti (Milan: Ricciardi, 1964), 178, 179. For the broader context of Muratori’s project to create an Italian republic of letters, see Dario Generali, “Repubblica delle lettere fra censura e libero pensiero. La communicazione epistolare filosofica-scientifica nell’Italia fra Sei e Settecento,” Intersezioni 6 (1983): 73-94.

[26] Muratori, Primi disegni, 180.

[27] Ibid.,191, 188.

[28] Walter Kurmann, Presenze italiane nei giornali elvetici del primo Settecento (Berne: Herbert Lang, 1976), 83.

[29] Clelia Grillo Borromeo has been virtually unstudied until quite recently. Fortunately, a good biography now exists that also reproduces many key letters in her correspondence: Anna M. Serralunga Bardazza, Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese. Vicende private e pubbliche virtù di una celebre nobildonna nell’Italia del Settecento (Biella: Eventi & Progetti Editore, 2005). See also Alessandro Giulini, “Contributi alla biografia della contessa Clelia Borromeo del Grillo,” Archivio storico Lombardo 5, no. 46 (1919): 583-92; Bruno Brunelli, Figurine e costume nella corrispondenza di un medico del `700 (Antonio Vallisneri) (Milan: Mondadori, 1938), 37-44; and Giuliana Parabiago, “Clelia Borromeo del Grillo,” Correnti 1 (1998): 36-60; and Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960-) (hereafter DBI), s.v. “Grillo Borromeo, Clelia,” 59:450-54. The forthcoming proceedings of a 2007 conference on Grillo Borromeo, edited by Dario Generali, will significantly augment our understanding of her activities.

[30] Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia 1 (1710): 267-83; Aldo Andreoli, Nel mondo di Lodovico Antonio Muratori (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972), 159-64; and Brendan Dooley, Science, Politics, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Giornale de’ Lettarati and Its World (New York: Garland, 1991).

[31] Giuseppe Antonio Sassi to Vallisneri, Milan, 12 January 1724, Biblioteca dell’Accademia dei Concordi, Rovigo (hereafter BACR), Conc. 355/U. While I have not yet been able to confirm this by looking in the Florentine archives, there is some indication in her correspondence with Vallisneri that she considered herself a rival to Violante Beatrice of Bavaria (1673-1731), the widow of Prince Ferdinando III de’ Medici and sister-in-law of Gian Gastone, who became the last Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1723 and appointed her governor of Siena.

[32] Angelo Durini, Angeli Cardinalis Durini in obitum Cloeliae Grillo Borromeae matronae clarissimae ac doctissimae Obsequium funebre (Milan, 1778), viii-ix.

[33] Grillo Borromeo to Valllisneri, Milan, 8 August 1725, Archivio di Stato, Reggio Emilia (hereafter ASRE), Archivio Vallisneri, 4/I, fasc. 2, c. 1502.

[34] For an introduction to Queen Christina’s activities in Rome, see Wilma DiPalma et al., Cristina di Svezia. Scienze ed alchemia nella Roma barocca (Bari: Dedalo, 1990); Susanna Åkerman, Queen Christina of Sweden and Her Circle: The Transformation of a Seventeenth-Century Philosophical Libertine (Leiden: Brill, 1991); and Börje Magnusson, Cristina di Svezia a Roma (Stockholm: Swedish Institute in Rome, 1999).

[35] Dooley, Science, Politics, and Society, 16. On the place of Arcadia in Roman academy life, see Isidore Carini, L’Arcadia dal 1690 al 1890 (Rome: Tipographia della Pace, 1891); and Maria Pia Donato, Accademia romane. Una storia sociale (1671-1824) (Napoli: ESI, 2000), 58-76. For the role of women in Arcadia, see Elisabetta Graziosi, “Arcadia femminile: presenze e modelli,” Filologia e critica 17 (1992): 321-58.

[36] Like most learned women of her generation, Grillo Borromeo was herself an Arcadian under the name Aspasia Tentidia; see DBI, s.v. “Grillo Borromeo, Clelia,” 59:451.

[37] For an introduction to Vallisneri’s life and work, see especially Rhoda Rappaport, “Italy and Europe: The Case of Antonio Valllisneri (1661-1730),” History of Science 29 (1991): 73-98; Dario Generali, Antonio Vallisneri: gli anni della formazione e le prime ricerche (Florence: Olschki, 1997); Ivano Lombardi, Un nume del Settecento: Antonio Vallisneri (Lucca: Titania, 1998); Sandra Casellato and Luciana Sitran Rea, eds., Professori e scienziati a Padova nel Settecento (Treviso: Edizioni Antilia, 2002), 533-40; and Michael Doucette Cunningham, Seashells on the Mountains: Antonio Vallisneri, Fossils, and the Republic of Letters (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2005). On Malpighi’s Galileanism, see Domenico Bertoloni Meli, “Mechanistic Pathology and Therapy in the Medical Assayer of Marcello Malpighi,” Medical History 51 (2007): 165-80.

[38] I am paraphrasing Cunningham, Seashells on the Mountains, 16.

[39] [Antonio Vallisneri], “Che ogni italiano debba scrivere in Lingua purgata Italiana, o Toscana, per debito, per giustizia, e per decoro della nostra Italia,” Supplemento al Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia 1 (1722): 270, 288-89. While published anonymously as a “Lettera del Sig. N.N.***” Vallisneri made his authorship of this article widely known. For further discussion of his relationship with Redi, see Antonio Vallisneri, Miglioramenti e correzioni d’alcune sperienze ed osservazioni del Signor Redi, ed. Ivano dal Prete with Andrea Castellani (Florene: Olschki, 2005), esp. 5-14.

[40] Parabiago, “Clelia Borromeo del Grillo,” 37-39.

[41] Giuseppe de’ Necchi Aquila, Orazione funebre nella morte di sua eccellenza la signora Contessa Donna Clelia Borromeo (Milan, 1777), 8; Giulini, “Contributi,” 584. On the Genoese context in which she was raised, see Calogero Farinella, “La ‘nobile servitù.’ Donne e cicisbei nel salotto Genovese del Settecento,” in Salotti e ruolo femminile in Italia tra fine Seicento e primo Novecento, ed. Maria Luisa Betri and Elena Brambilla (Venice: Marsilio Editore, 2004), esp. 97-98, 113-14, 122.

[42] Serralunga Bardazza, Clelia Grillo Borromeo, 78.

[43] Vallisneri to Sassi, Padua, 2 January 1719, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan (hereafter Ambr.), MS Z sup. 208. See also Vallisneri to Muratori, Padua, 25 June 1718, in Edizione nazionale del Carteggio di Ludovico Antonio Muratori, by Ludovico Antonio Muratori (Florence: Olschki, 1975-), 44:213; and Muratori to Vallisneri, San Felice, 19 August 1718, in Epistolario di Lodovico Antonio Muratori, by Ludovico Antonio Muratori, ed. Matteo Càmpori (Modena: Società Tipografica Modenese, 1903), 5:1949.

[44] An earlier letter outlining many elements of the printed dedication and proposing the idea to her exists in the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna (hereafter BCAB), Coll. Autogr. CXIII 24740, no.3, Vallisneri to Grillo Borromeo, Camposanpiero, 8 June 1719, attached to the printed version (Padua, 18 April 1721); Coll. Autogr. CXIII 24740, n. 15a. See Vallisneri, De’ corpi marini che su' monti si trovano; della loro origine e dello stato del mondo avanti il Diluvio, nel Diluvio e dopo il Diluvio (Venice, 1721). For his discussion with Muratori, see Muratori, Edizione Nazionale del Carteggio, 44:231-32, 240. See also Vallisneri to Bourguet, Padua, 29 January 1721, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Neuchâtel (hereafter BPUN), Fonds Bourguet MS 1282, c. 243.

[45] Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 3 May 1721, Archivio di Stato, Reggio Emilia, Archivio Vallisneri, 4/I, 1, c. 204; see Serralunga Bardazza, Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese, 157; Jacopo Riccati and Antonio Vallisneri, Carteggio (1719-1729), ed. Maria Laura Soppelsa (Florence: Olschki, 1985), 151 (Castelfranco, 14 August 1725).

[46] Antonio Vallisneri to Clelia del Grillo Borromeo, 9 July 1719, BCAB, Coll. Autogr. CXIII 24750, no. 396615. Thanks to Dario Generali and Michael Cunningham for providing me with a copy of this manuscript. See Vallisneri, Istoria della generazione dell’uomo, e degli animali (Venice, 1721), 439-46, for the published version.

[47] Vallisneri to Girolamo Lioni, Milan, 28 August 1722, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 841.

[48] Antonio Vallisneri, Opere fisico-mediche (Venice, 1734), 1:307; Antonio Vallisneri, 28 August 1727, in Scritti filosofici, by Antonio Conti, ed. Nicola Badaloni (Naples: Casa Editrice Fulvio Rossi, 1972), 42. In 1725 Niccolò Gualtieri debated the origins of mountain streams point by publishing a critical response to Vallisneri’s Lezione Accademica intorno all’origine delle Fontane (Padua, 1715), leading Vallisneri to issue a new edition in 1726. This episode is discussed briefly in Parabiago, “Clelia,” 45-46.

[49] Vallisneri, “Riflessioni Critiche sopra alcuni Capitoli, e Annotazioni del Libro ottavo dell’Opera dottissima di Mr. Derham Inglese, intitolata dimostrazione della Essenza, ed Attributi d’Iddio ec. tradotta dall’Inglese, e stampata in Firenze l’an. 1719 fatta dal Sig. N. N. e cavate dalle Osservazioni del nostro Autore,” in Opere fisico-mediche, 3:326-30. This treatise responded to William Derham’s Physico-Theology (1713) and Astro-Theology (1714), the latter of which was translated into Italian by the (unrelated) Thomas Dereham in 1728.

[50] Vallisneri to Sassi, Padua, 13 April 1726, Ambr., cod. Z 210 sup., lett. 82.

[51] Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, MS 2086 (Carteggio Vogli); Vallisneri to Giovanni Giacinto Vogli, Padua, 19 May 1720, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 528-29.

[52] Vallisneri to unknown, Padua, 16 March 1726, Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, MS 2013, cartone 5, no.14; Vallisneri to Muratori, Padua, 20 June 1727, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 1486. On Vallisneri’s rivalry with Marsigli and their repeated visits to each other’s natural history museums, see Generali, Antonio Vallisneri, 351, 356-61

[53] Sassi to Vallisneri, Milan, 12 January 1724, ASRE, Fondo Brunelli V B 168, no. 10.

[54] Ugo Baldini, “L’attivita scientifica nelle accademie lombarde del Settecento,” in Economia, istituzioni, cultura in Lombardia nell’età di Maria Teresa (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982), 2:505-12; and Domenico Sella and Carlo Capra, Il Ducato di Milano dal 1535 al 1796 (Turin: UTET, 1984), 197. The scientific culture of Milan has been most recently discussed in Massimo Mazzotti, The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), including a few pages on Grillo Borromeo, 79-81.

[55] Filippo Argelati, Bibliotheca scriptorum Mediolanensium, vol. 1 (Milan, 1745), col. LXXII; and Antonio Vallisneri, Piove di Sacco, 10 November 1722, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet, MS 1282, c. 257. See also Vallisneri, Epistolario 1714-1729, 860-61. The academy rules are also discussed in Serralunga Bardazza, Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese, 57-59.

[56] Argelati, Bibliotheca scriptorum Mediolanensium, vol. 1, col. LXIX. See also Maylender, Storia delle accademie d’Italia, 2:21-23; and the posthumous description of the academy in Francesco Saverio Quadrio, Storia e ragione d’ogni poesia (Milan, 1752), 7:15. On Italian as the preferred scientific language, see Vallisneri, Opere fisico-mediche,3:254-68.

[57] Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians, 1665-1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

[58] Argelati, Bibliotheca scriptorum Mediolanensium, vol. 1, col. LXIX. On Muratori’s knowledge of the Accademia Clelia, see Muratori, Epistolario, 5:1949; 6:2287-88, 2364-66; 7:2770. For a general understanding of Italian historical scholarship in this era, see Eric Cochrane, “The Settecento Medievalists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958): 35-61; and Cochrane, “Muratori: The Vocation of a Historian,” Catholic Historical Review 51 (1965): 158-72.

[59] Francesco Saverio Tucci, “‘Il parlare della S. Scrittura e l’operare della natura’: gli interrogative della geologia storica nella riflessione di Antonio Vallisnieri,” Contributi 7 (1983): 5-37; Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians, 167-68, 188-89, 195, 219-20.

[60] Vallisneri to Bourguet, Padua, 30 August 1721, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet MS 1282, c. 249. Also see Vallisneri, Epistolario 1714-1729, 667.

[61] Vallisneri’s correspondence (ca. 1600 letters by him and ca. 12,000 letters to him) has become a serious object of study thanks to the work of Dario Generali and his collaborators on the Edizione Nazionale.

[62] Argelati, Bibliotheca scriptorum Mediolanensium, vol. 1, col. LXX.

[63] Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians, 11, 166-68, 188-89, 195, 219-20. See also Rossi, Dark Abyss of Time.

[64] Argelati, Bibliotheca scriptorum Mediolanensium, vol.1, col. LXX.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Ibid., col. LXXI.

[67] Thanks to Daniel Stolzenberg for reminding me of this parallel. See his “Utility, Edification, and Superstition: Jesuit Censorship and Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus,” in The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, ed. John O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Johann Bernhard Staudt, and Steven J. Harris (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 336-54.

[68] Vallisneri to Bourguet, 28 June 1723, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet, MS1282, c. 258 (20 February 1723), fol. 262. See also Vallisneri, Epistolario 1714-1729, 905, 935; and Sassi to Vallisneri, Milan, 23 December 1722, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan, Aut. B XXXI/58/8.

[69] Vallisneri to Sassi, Padua, 29 January 1723, Ambr. cod. Z 209 sup., lett. 136; see also Vallisneri, Epistolario 1714-1729, 899; Sassi to Vallisneri, Milan, 3 February 1723, Archivio di Stato, Reggio Emilia, Fondo Brunelli V B 167, no. 9.

[70] Regarding Vallisneri’s awareness of the latest developments in Bologna, see Vallisneri to Matteo Bazzani, Padua, 17 March 1723, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 915; Vallisneri to Francesco Maria Zanotti, Padua, 4 July 1723, ibid., 940.

[71] Vallisneri to Father Lazzarelli, Padua, 22 June 1723, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 930: “io portai in trionfo il gran nome della mia eroina, la sudetta S.^ra Donna Clelia, ec.” For an account of the Ricovrati debate, see especially Rebecca Messbarger, The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 20-48.

[72] Grillo Borromeo to Bourguet, Milan, 23 June 1723, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet, MS 1272; see also Parabiago, “Clelia Borromeo del Grillo,” 49.

[73] Vallisneri to Father Lazzarelli, Padua, 3 July 1723, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 938.

[74] Vallisneri’s lecture on vipers may not have occurred until fall 1725, when he mentioned re-doing Francesco Redi’s experiments in Milan. Vallisneri to Bourguet, October 1725, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet, MS 1282, c. 275.

[75] Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 5 March 1727, BACR, Conc. 338/50, no. 9.

[76] For an illumination discussion of the phenomenon of conversazione in Milan, see Mazzotti, The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, 20, 3, 56-57, 60-61, 79, 125-26, 136, 141.

[77] On this subject, see especially Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultura History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Antoine Lilti, Le monde des salons: sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIème siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005).

[78] DBI, s.v. “Ceva, Tommaso,” 24:325-28; s.v. “Crivelli, Giovanni Francesco,” 31:138-39. See also John Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 213-14.

[79] Argelati, Bibliotheca scriptorum Mediolanensium, vol. 1, col. LXVIII. This text reprints Giuseppe Antonio Sassi, De studiis litterariis Mediolanensium antiquis & novis Prodromus ad Historiam Litterario-Typographicam Mediolanensem (Milan, 1729). Historians have suggested other possible members including the Pliny scholar Count Anton Gioseffo Della Torre di Rezzonico; the Jesuit philosopher Giulio Cesare Brusati, who would eventually succeed Saccheri at Pavia; the Carmelite poet and philosopher Teobaldo Ceva; the physician Confalonieri; and Francesco Sommarugo. See DBI, 59:451; Brunelli, Figurine e costume nella corrspondenza di un medico del ’700 (Antonio Vallisneri) (Milan: Mondadori, 1938), 38, 40-42; Parabiago, “Clelia Borromeo,” 45, 49, 51; Pietro Nurra, “Una Milanese del secolo scorso,” Natura ed arte 8, no.4 (1899): 284; Giulini, “Contributi,” 6. Another possibility might also be the physician Pietro Giuseppe Alberizzi who dedicated his Critologia medica, in cui si stabiliscono, esclusi i Vermicciuoli, altre cagioni della Peste (Milan, 1721), to Grillo Borromeo. Grillo Borromeo’s aristocratic associates such as Marchese Diego de Araciel also merit closer study to understand their involvement in her academy and conversazione.

[80] Argelati, Bibliotheca scriptorum Mediolanensium, vol. 1, col. LXVIII.

[81] Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1692, Vallisneri in 1703, Guido Grandi in 1709, Antonio Conti in 1715, Ludovico Antonio Muratori in 1717, and Scipione Maffei in 1737. Boas, “The Royal Society and Italy.”

[82] Stowe, Marsigli’s Europe, xii, 289-94, 303-4.

[83] Vallisneri remarked on his minimal contact with Naples and his reservations about Rome in his correspondence with Antonio Conti; see Vallisneri to Conti, Padua, 18 March 1728, in Scritti filosofici, 432. We should note the absence of the distinguished physicist and fellow professor at the University of Padua, Giovanni Poleni, as well as the great Veronese astronomer Francesco Bianchini, who played a critical role in the Roman scientific community, both of them Royal Society members.

[84] Vallisneri to Father Mauro Alessandro Lazzarelli, Padua, 3 January 1723, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 892.

[85] Conti, Scritti filosofici, 314. See also Nicola Badaloni, Antonio Conti. Un abate libero pensatore tra Newton e Voltaire (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968).

[86] Maffei to Vallisneri, Verona, 29 March and 27 August 1726, in Epistolario (1700-1755), by Scipione Maffei, ed. Celestino Garibotto (Milan: A. Giuffrè, 1955), 1:514, 526.

[87] As a result of Grillo Borromeo’s flight from Milan in 1746 after Empress Maria Theresa condemned her for her pro-Spanish sympathies, which emerged during the failed efforts to restore Lombardy to Spain, a great number of her papers were lost or destroyed, including the letters in her possession that would allow us to know with greater precision her range of contacts in the republic of letters and their relationship to this initiative. The events of the Second World War added to the loss of materials, since very little archival materials relating to her life remain in the Archivio Borromeo, Isola Bella today.

[88] Vallisneri to Bourguet, Venice, 20 February 1723, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet, MS 1282, c. 259.

[89] Bourguet to Jacques Du Lignon, n.d. [ca. 1729], BPUN, Fonds Bourguet MS 1260, in La “Bibliothèque italique”. Cultura “italianisante” e giornalismo letterario, by Francesca Bianca Crucitti Ulrich (Milan: Ricciardi, 1974), 107. See also Parabiago, “Clelia Borromeo del Grillo,” 58-59.

[90] Cunningham, Seashells on the Mountains, 73. On the academy, see Raffaele Girardi, “Letteratura e scienza fra Sei e Settecento. Giacinto Gimma e il progetto degli Spensierati,” Lavoro critico 11-12 (1988): 1-40.

[91] Gimma to Vallisneri, Bari, 24 October 1722, BACR, Conc. 337/6. On their correspondence, see Antonio Iurilli, “Lettere di Giacinto Gimma ad Antonio Vallisnieri (1705-1722),” in L’enigma, la confessione, il volo. “Lettere” sommerse fra Sei e Novecento, ed. Giorgio Baroni (Azzate, Varese: Edizioni Otto-Novecento, 1992), 109-13.

[92] Giacinto Gimma, Idea della storia dell’Italia letterata, vol. 1 (Naples, 1723), sig. a3r, b2v. On Gimma’s project, see D. Giorgio, “L’abate Gimma e l’Idea della storia dell’Italia letterata,” Critica letteraria 14 (1986): 371-84; and Franco Arato, La storiografia letteraria nel Settecento italiano (Pisa: Edizione ETS, 2002), 143, 148-50.

[93] Gimma, Idea della storia dell’Italia letterata, 2:486. The term ragionamenti Gimma used to characterize these encounters captures both the idea of dialogue and spirited debate.

[94] Kurmann, Presenze italiane, 158 (review in Neue Zeitungen aus der Gelenhrten Welt 51 (1724-1725): XVII, 259-61); Crucitti Ulrich, La ‘Bibliothèque italique’, 85, 147; and Dario Generali, ed., Bibliografia delle opera di Antonio Vallisneri (Florence: Olschki, 2004), 28-29 (notice in Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia 34 (1723): art. XII, §2, 423-25). On Vallisneri’s criticisms of this book, see Vallisneri to Muratori, Padua, 24 March 1724, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 1037.

[95] Cinzia Cremonini, “Carlo Borromeo Arese, un aristocratico lombardo nel ‘nuovo ordine’ di Carlo VI,” Cheiron 11, no.21 (1994): 85-160. Lombardi, Un nume del Settecento, 63-64, suggests that Carlo Borromeo may have actively impeded the publication of Vallisneri’s response to William Derham’s rational theology, though I have found no clear evidence in his papers to support this point. For the large political landscape of this era, see Guido Quazza, Il problema italiano e l’equilibrio europeo 1720-1738 (Turin: Deputazione Subalpina di Storia Patria, 1965), including a discussion of Carlo Borromeo Arese’s role in Charles VI’s occupation of Parma and Piacenza in 1731, at 159.

[96] An undated document in the Archivio Borromeo, Isola Bella, has Carlo Borromeo condemning the “conversazione nel suo quarto, alla quale admette forestieri non conosciuti, ministri sospetti, e altri difidenti dell’Augustissima Casa d’Austria.” DBI, 59:450.

[97] Vallisneri to Bourguet, Padua, 28 June 1723, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet, MS 1282, c.262; fol. 264 (Padua, 3 December 1723).

[98] Vallisneri to Bourguet, Padua, 3 December 1723, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet, MS 1282, c. 264; and Grillo Borromeo to Bourguet, Milan, 9 October 1723, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet, MS 1272, c. 5v.

[99] Vallisneri to Bourguet, Venice, 17 January 1729, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet, MS 1282, c. 306r.

[100] Sassi to Vallisneri, Milan, 12 January 1724, BACR, Conc. 355/U, no. 2.

[101] Vallisneri to Bourguet, Padua, 20 January 1724, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet, MS 1282, cc. 266-67; Vallisneri, Epistolario 1714-1729, 1027.

[102] Grillo Borromeo to Bourguet, Milan, 29 July 1724, BPUN, Fond Bourguet MS 1272, c. 21r. In this letter she wrote of Sassi’s desire for a “corrispondenza letteraria” with Bourguet and the likelihood that others with whom she was in communication would make this request once she informed them of his scientific work. On the complementary function of correspondence and conversation, see Goodman, Republic of Letters, 139-40, 143. I have also benefited from Lilti’s remarks about the role of scientists in salons in Le Monde des salons, 260-72.

[103] Vallisneri to Marches Umberto Landi, Padua, 24 June 172, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 1056; Vallisneri to Pier Caterino Zeno, Padua, 1 July 1724, ibid., 1062; Vallisneri to Riccati, Padua, 30 July 1725, ibid., 1213.

[104] Vallisneri to Gaston Giuseppe Giorgi, Milan, n.d. [but between 1 and 9 October 1725] and 9 October 1725, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 1238, 1241; Vallisneri to Bourguet, Padua, 1 January 1726, ibid., 1264.

[105] Early Letters, vol. 55. See also Vallisneri to Dereham, Verona, 8 November 1725, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 1247. John Lawthrop’s Saggio delle transazioni filosofiche della Società Regia, trans. Thomas Dereham (Naples, 1729-34), 5 vols., included not only translations of articles but letters between Dereham and Italian scientific figures, including his correspondence with Vallisneri.

[106] Vallisneri to Sassi, Padua, 23 March 1726, Ambr., cod. Z 210 sup., lett. 80; see also Vallisneri, Epistolario 1714-1729, 1306; Sassi to Vallisneri, Milan, 3 April 1726, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan, Aut. B. XXXI/58/14.

[107] Vallisneri to Sassi, Padua, 13 April 1726, Ambr., cod. Z 210 sup., lett. 82; see also Vallisneri, Epistolario 1714-1729, 1319.

[108] Vallisneri to Bourguet, Padua, 1 September 1726, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet, MS 1282, c. 281; see also Vallisneri, Epistolario 1714-1729, 1374.

[109] Vallisneri to Conti, 5 June 1726, in Scritti filosofici, 407.

[110] Vallisneri, Opere fisico-mediche, 1:308 (Padua, 12 October 1726).

[111] Ibid., 308-9. The term Vostra Casa combines the idea of location with lineage, so it is also praise of the Borromeo family. Serralunga Bardazza rightfully considers Vallisneri’s 1726 history of the academy as marking an end point in the most intense period of their friendship. At the same time, surviving documentation suggests that Vallisneri did not exactly abandon either his patron or the academy in the next three years but continued to explore the possibilities for a successful outcome of this project; Serralunga Bardazza, Clelia Grillo Borromeo, 39, 58-59.

[112] In March 1728 Vallisneri had copies of De’ corpi marini to send to Milan; Vallisneri to Sassi, Padua, 19 March 1728, Ambr., cod. Z 210 sup., lett. 295. He sent copies to the Royal Society via Dereham in May. Vallisneri to Dereham, Padua, 25 January 1728, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 1542; Vallisneri to William Rutty, Padua, 20 May 1728, ibid., 1570.

[113] Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 5 November 1727, BACR, Conc. 338/50, no. 13.

[114] Giuseppe Antonio Sassi, Milan, n.d., BACR, Conc. 355/U, no. 9.

[115] Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 30 November 1726, BACR, Conc. 338/50, no. 2.

[116] Zeno to Vallisneri, Vienna, 24 March and 5 May 1725, in Lettere di Apostolo Zeno cittadino veneziano istorico e poeta cesareo, 2nd ed., by Apostolo Zeno (Venice, 1785), 4:26, 35.

[117] Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 14 December [1726?], ASRE, Archivio Vallisneri, 4/III, 3, no. 115.

[118] Zeno to Vallisneri, Vienna, 28 December 1726, in Lettere di Apostolo Zeno, 4:163; Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 1 January 1727, BACR, Conc. 338/50, no. 3. The other party may have been the librarian Garelli, but it could equally have been Vallisneri’s relative Ippolito Bertolani. Grillo Borromeo also alluded to her reservations about Zeno in earlier correspondence; Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 31 [January] 1725, BACR, Conc. 338/50, no. 22.

[119] Vallisneri to Dereham, Padua, 30 December 1726, in Early Letters, vol. 57; also Vallisneri, Epistolario 1714-1729, 1425.

[120] Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 8 [January] 1727, BACR, Conc. 338/50, no. 4. On her dealings with Vienna, see also Serralunga Bardazza, Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese, 56-57.

[121] Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 22 January 1727, BACR, Conc. 338/50, no. 6.

[122] Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, n.d. [1727], BACR, Conc. 338/50, no. 29.

[123] Ibid.

[124] Vallisneri to Dereham, Padua, 16 January and 1 March 1727, in Early Letters, vol. 57a; see also Vallisneri, Epistolario 1714-1729, 1439, 1459.

[125] Grillo Borromeo to Bourguet, Milan, 29 March 1727, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet MS 1272, c. 41v.

[126] On Conti’s project, see Vallisneri to Landi, Reggio, 12 July 1727, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 1490.

[127] Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 8 April 1727, BACR, Conc. 338/50, no. 10. Gibraltar was captured by the British in 1704 and officially ceded to them in 1713, which did not prevent the Spanish from repeatedly trying to recapture it throughout the eighteenth century. With close family members in the Spanish military, Grillo Borromeo understood these events well.

[128] Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, n.p., 14 December [n.d.], ASRE, Archivio Vallisneri, 4/III, 3, no. 115. While the year is omitted, it seems likely that this letter was written in 1726 or possibly 1727.

[129] Vallisneri to Conti, [Milan], 10 September 1727, in Scritti filosofici, 421; Vallisneri to Landi, 23 September 1727, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 1510; see also Lombardi, Un nume del Settecento, 69. Not coincidentally, Vallisneri’s bestselling Dell’uso e dell’abuso delle bevande e bagnature calde, o fredde (Naples, 1727), appeared that year. It was in its fourth edition by 1734.

[130] Vallisneri to Conti, Padua, 15 June 1728, in Scritti filosofici, 437; Vallisneri to Bourguet, Padua, 7 July 1728, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet MS 1282, c. 298. See also Vallisneri, Epistolario 1714-1729, 1581, 1597.

[131] Vallisneri to unknown recipient, Padua, 6 January 1728, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 1535.

[132] Guido Grandi, Flores Geometrici ex Rhodonearum, et Cloeliarum curvarum (Florence, 1728), 225.

[133] Narducci to Grandi, Lucca, 20 October 1728, 22 June, 6 January, 6 December 1729, Biblioteca Universitaria, Pisa, Mss. Guido Grandi, MS 98, cc. 309r, 312v, 321r, 323; Narducci to Grandi, Lucca, 30 December 1729, ibid., c. 324r; Grillo Borromeo to Narducci, Milan, 9 November 1729, ibid., c. 325r.

[134] Luigi Tenca, “Cinque lettere di Clelia Borromeo del Grillo al matematico Grandi,” Archivio storico Lombardo 8, no. 3 (1951): 223-30, esp. 226, Vallisneri to Grandi, Padua, 10 March 1729, and 226-27, Grillo Borromeo to Grandi, Milan, 30 March 1728. See Grandi, “Florum Geometricum Manipulus Regiae Societati Exhibitus a D. Guidone Grandi Abbate Camalduluensi, Pisani Lycaei Mathematicus, R. S. S.,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 32 (1722-23): 355-71.

[135] Baron de Montesquieu, Voyage de Montesquieu, ed. Albert de Montesquieu (Paris: Alphonse Picard & Fils, 1894), 1:64, 79-81, 92 (quote on Grillo Borromeo), 102. The phrase très grand nombre d’expériences de physique ambiguously includes both natural historical observations and physical experiments just as physique (translated above for simplicity as natural philosophy) can include both natural history and natural philosophy.

[136] As quoted in Serralunga Bardazza, Clelia Grillo Borromeo, 42 (14 October 1728).

[137] Johann Georg Keyssler [also John George Keysler], Travels through Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Swtizerland, Italy, and Lorrain, English trans. (London, 1760), vol.1, 399. First published in German in 1740 and in English in 1756-57, this frequently reprinted guidebook was well read in both languages, keeping alive the memory of this academy for several decades.

[138] Vallisneri to Grillo Borromeo, Guastella, 8 June 1729, BCAR, Conc. 360/32. Compare the language with Vallisneri, Opere fisico-mediche, 1:308.

[139] Grillo Borromeo to Bourguet, Milan, 12 October 1728, BPUN, Fonds Bourguet MS 1272, c. 42r.

[140] For her final correspondence with Vallisneri, see Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 10 and 24 August 1729, and Sedriano, 30 October 1729, BACR, Conc. 338/50, nos. 26, 32, 19. On her correspondence with Grandi, see Grillo Borromeo to Grandi, n.d., in Tenca, “Cinque lettere,” 228. She acknowledged receipt of Grandi’s portrait on June 1, 1729 (Bibilioteca Universitaria, Pisa, Mss. Guido Grandi, MS 85, c. 160); see also Tenca, “Cinque lettere,” 228.

[141] Grillo Borromeo to Vallisneri, Milan, 31 [January] 1725, BACR, Conc. 338/50, no. 22.

[142] Vallisneri to Dereham, Padua, 22 December 1728, in Epistolario 1714-1729, 1643.

[143] The 1746 testimony of the Marchese Diego de Araciel is quoted in Serralunga Bardazza, Clelia Grillo Borromeo, 78.

[144] So far I have found only two works dedicated to Grillo Borromeo after the early 1730s: Giovanni Crivelli, Elementi di aritmetica numerale, e letterale, as republished in his Elementi di fisica, 2nd ed. (Venice, 1744); and Tommaso Guerrino, Euclide in Campagna, o sia Geometria ridotta all’atto pratico (Milan, 1763).

[145] Sassi, De studiis litterariis Mediolanensium antiquis & novis. See his discussion of this project with Vallisneri, Biblioteca Comunale “A. Saffi,” Forlì, Autografi Piancastelli, Autografi sec. XII-XVIII (Sassi to Vallisneri, Milan, 16 November 1729); and the review in Journal des Sçavans (September 1731): 543.

[146] John Lawthrop, Saggio delle transazioni filosofiche della Società Regia, vol. 2, trans. [Thomas Dereham] (Naples, 1729-34), sig. a2v.

[147] Arese to Vallisneri, Rome, 15 October 1729, Biblioteca Labronica, Livorno, Autografoteca Bastogli, Cass. 5 ins. 796, no.7.

[148] Giovanni Artico di Porcia, “Notizie della vita, e degli studi del Kavalier Antonio Vallisneri,” in Vallisneri, Opere fisico-mediche, 1:67. See the modern edition of Porcia, edited by Dario Generali (Bologna: Pàtron Editore, 1986), 154. Readers should compare this biography of Vallisneri with the éloge Bourguet inserted in the Bibliothèque italique, vol. 5 (Geneva, 1728-34), art. 3.

[149] Charles de Brosses, Lettres familières sur l’Italie (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1931), 1:117-19.

[150] The Academy of Sciences in Naples (1732-40), created toward the end of Habsburg rule of the Kingdom of Naples and continuing briefly under the Bourbons, was explicitly modeled on the Royal Society of London and Paris Academy of Sciences; see Riccardo De Sanctis, La nuova scienza a Napoli tra ’700 e ’800 (Rome: Laterza, 1986), 12.

[151] Cardinal Davia’s academy is discussed in Carlo Tonnini, La coltura letteraria e scientifica in Rimini dal secolo XIV ai primordi del XIX, ed. Paola Delbianco (1884; Rimini: Luisé, 1988), 214-16, 233-34; and in Paula Findlen, “Women on the Verge of Science: Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy,” in Women, Equality and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (London: Palgrave Press, 2005), 265-87.

[152] Fabio Colonna, Phytobasanos cui accessit vita Fabi et lynceorum notitia adnoationeque in phytobasanon Iano Planco Ariminensi auctore et in Senensi academia anatomes publico professore (Florence, 1744). On Bianchi’s activities, see DBI, s.v. “Bianchi, Giovanni,” 10:104-12; and Stefano De Carolis and Angelo Turchini, Giovanni Bianchi: medici primario di Rimini ed archiatra pontificio (Verucchio: Pazzini, 1999).

[153] Francesco Saverio Quadrio, Della storia e della ragione d’ogni poesia (Milan, 1752), 7:15.

[154] Arato, La storiografia letteraria, 153, 156, 166. On Grillo Borromeo’s relationship to the Trasformati, see Mazzotti, The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, 81-86

[155] This period of Grillo Borromeo’s life has been dealt with most extensively in Serralunga Bardazza, Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese, 77-99. See also Sella and Capra, Il Ducato di Milano, 276-79, regarding the Spanish occupation on 16 December 1744 and the return of the Austrian Habsburgs in August 1746.

[156] Galiani to d’Épinay, Naples, 22 November 1777, in Epistolario 1769-1772, by Louise d’Épinay and Ferdinando Galiani, ed. Stefano Rapisarda and Giuseppe Giarrizzo (Palermo: Sellerio, 1996), 2:987.

[157] On Tuscan scientific societies under the Habsburg-Lorraine, see Eric Cochrane, Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies 1690-1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Giulio Barsanti, Vieri Becagli, and Renato Pasta, eds., La politica della scienza. Toscana e stati italiani nel tardo Settecento (Florence: Olschki, 1996); and Simone Contardi, La casa di Salomone a Firenze: l'Imperiale e Reale Museo di Fisico e Storia Naturale (1755-1801) (Florence: Olschki, 2002).

[158] On the role of women in the Bologna Academy of Sciences, see Cavazza, “Les femmes à l’académie: le cas de Bologne,” in Académies et sociétés savantes en Europe (1650-1800), ed. Daniel-Odon Hurel and Gérard Laudin (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 161-76. While the literature on Bassi has become quite large, a good starting point is Paula Findlen, “Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy. The Strategies of Laura Bassi,” Isis 84 (1993): 441-69; Gabriella Berti Logan, “The Desire to Contribute: An Eighteenth Century Italian Woman of Science,” American Historical Review 99 (1994): 785-812; Beate Ceranski, “Und sie fürchtet sich vor niemanden.” Über die Physikerin Laura Bassi (1711-1778) (Frankfurt-New York: Campus, 1996); and Cavazza, “Between Modesty and Spectacle: Women and Science in Eighteenth-Century Italy,” in Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, ed. Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Roworth, and Catherine Sama (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 275-302. On Agnesi, see especially Mazzotti, Maria Gaetana Agnesi. For the Accademia dei Ricovrati’s 1723 debate and the subsequent publication of Agnesi’s oration on women’s education in 1729, see Luciano Guerci, La discussione sulla donna nell'Italia del Settecento: aspetti e problemi (Turin: Tirrenia, 1987); Messbarger, The Century of Women, 12-13, 21-48; and Messbarger and Findlen, eds. and trans., The Contest for Knowledge: Debates over Women’s Learning in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 67-140.

[159] For an interesting discussion of the case of Agnesi, see Mazzotti, The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, 63-64. I am referring to Crivelli’s Elementi d’aritmetica numerale e letterale (Venice, 1728) and especially his Elementi di fisica, 2 vols. (Venice, 1731-32). The first book was dedicated to Grillo Borromeo and both were reprinted in 1744. Laura Bassi knew Crivelli’s work well and discussed it in her correspondence.

[160] The Englishman J. Grosley’s account of his visit in July 1758 is quoted in Serralunga Bardazza, Clelia Grillo Borromeo, 105: “La maison de la Comtesse Borromée est le rendez-vous de tout le grand monde de Milan.”

[161] The final work is Guerrino, Euclide in Campagna, a year later.

[162] [Abate N. N.], L’Amore vinto dalla ragione col’aggiunta di alcuni fogli galanti (Milan, 1762), CXXI-CXXXIII (quotes on CXXX).

[163] See the copy in Bologna; BCAB 10. V. IV. 15

[164] Nuove di diverse Corti e Paesi no. 25 (1 September 1777), 280 (Milan, 30 August 1777), in Giulini, “Contributi alla biografia…,” 11.

[165] Giuseppe d’ Necchi Aquila, Orazione funebre nella morte di sua eccellenza la signora Contessa Donna Clelia Borromeo (Milan, 1777), 16-17.

[166] Pietro Verri to Alessandro Verri, Milan, 27 August 1777, in Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri, ed. Giovanni Seregni (Milan: F. Cogliati; [then] A. Milesi; [then] A. Giuffre, 1910-42), 9:116. We should not take literally Verri’s claim to know nothing of Grillo Borromeo since she was a well-known if increasingly reclusive figure in mid-eighteenth-century Milan and someone with whom he intersected briefly in the era of the Accademia dei Trasformati. Still, the fact remains that he did not consider the Clelian Academy an interesting part of her biography when she died.

[167] Giuseppe Baretti, The Italian Library: Containing an Account of the Lives and Works of the Most Valuable Authors of Italy (London, 1757), 9.

The Nature of Early Eighteenth-Century Religious Radicalism

Melanie Conroy — Tue, 19 May 2009 01:18:47 -0700

In 1981 I argued that the period of the early Enlightenment, bound roughly from the 1680s to the 1720s, had produced within the Republic of Letters a set of ideas and attitudes, as well as texts, that were by any standard as radical as those we associate with the High Enlightenment. In my 1981 account three quite diverse national settings (England, France, and the Dutch Republic) mixed to create, as it were, a perfect storm. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 thousands of exiled French Protestants fled to the Dutch Republic and England—to name only the countries with the highest concentrations—and they carried with them experiences of persecution vivid and shocking to the modern imagination. Children deemed convertible were detained by the French authorities; the laity was actually forbidden to emigrate thus forcing families to separate as escape routes were found for some and not others. Elderly Protestants were thrown in prison; the clergy was expelled sometimes with two days notice or that was how long it took a leading and endangered Protestant clergyman, Jean Claude, to leave France. In his words the French authorities

strung up their victims, men and women, by their hair or by their feet, to the rafters in the roof, or the hooks in the chimney, and then set fire to bundles of moldy hay heaped up beneath them...They flung them into huge fires which they lit for the purpose, and left them there till they were half-roasted. They fastened ropes underneath their arms and lowered them into wells, pulling them up and down till they promised to change their religion.[1]

True in every detail or not, accounts like Claude’s were widely believed by Protestants on both sides of the Channel. When Claude (d.1687) arrived in the Dutch Republic he was awarded a pension by the stadholder, William of Orange.

The emotional logic of these events, combined with a newfound freedom, made for an experience inherently radicalizing. It could take the form of the extreme orthodoxy and millenarianism found among older exiles like Pierre Jurieu, or the radical skepticism of his enemy Bayle, or among the younger generation, a few highly literate seekers took another look at religion in general and concluded that something was inherently wrong with the existing exemplars. Still others turned toward politics, embraced the Dutch Republic that gave them refuge, but not uncritically as can be seen by the militant role played by Jean Rousset de Missy in the Dutch revolution of 1747-48. In the imaginary Republic of Letters, if conditions were right, an intellectually radical posture toward both religion and politics was entirely possible. Combine French persecution with exile in the urban book capital of Europe, the Dutch Republic, add an armed international alliance between the Republic and England against France, and refugees or Anglo-Dutch sympathizers could be expected to hold strong opinions. What is less obvious, given their religious backgrounds, is that some would turn to freethinking.[2]

The Dutch Republic offered an unprecedented set of advantages to immigrants and refugees. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries more than 1.5 million people flocked to its Western seaboard towns, and only a third of them came from the Dutch countryside. More than a million emigrated from foreign lands. The influx produced social, cultural, linguistic, and especially religious diversity of a sort never before seen in Europe. Although many immigrants arrived from Calvinist territories, the majority were Lutherans and Catholics, and many Jews and members of other persecuted sects also made their way. Religious diversity combined with the urban division of labor in complex ways. Men dependent upon one another in commerce might have vastly different religious identities or nationalities. Such divided loyalties made the imposition of uniform standards of behavior nearly impossible. Dutch cities consequently fostered an atmosphere conducive to change, innovation, and flexibility. They suggested a standing invitation to question conventional social mores, just the kind of orientation that would appeal to some men (such as those found in the circle of young Protestant refugees I identified in 1981) who in turn became responsible for some of the most outrageous texts new to the age. Then, as now, I would identify their heretical stance toward clerical authority and orthodox Christianity as radical, born out of profound anger at being persecuted and forced out of their homeland, but also now freed from constraints in the setting offered by the Dutch cities.

The emotional setting of exile found Bernard Picart, Prosper Marchand, and their circle relocated into cities where by 1700 about half the books published in Europe were printed.[3] They were accompanied by well over 100,000 French Protestants who altered the linguistic and cultural landscapes of numerous cities, but especially Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Within two years after 1685 and the arrival of the first wave of immigrants, a secret Anglo-Dutch plot, conceived against the attempt to reimpose Catholicism in England, led in 1688-89 to a successful revolution. It invented new freedoms and a new system of governance that were seen distinctively as Protestant and English. It also exposed a political radicalism visible among London Whigs in the 1680s and 1690s.[4] In 1981 my concept of the storm that unleashed a new, transnational intellectual movement possessed a strong contextual and political element that I believed, and still believe, to be critically important.

Men like the engraver Picart, and the journalist and book factor Marchand, had been led out of Catholicism toward Protestantism precisely by the writings of Jean Claude, among other Protestant polemicists. Their intellectual and religious journey only started there. In 1710 when they arrived in The Hague they may have self-identified as Protestants, but within two years Picart’s prospective father-in-law, Ysbrand Vincent, angrily reported to close family friends that Picart was a man of no religion (“geen religie”), and the following year Marchand wrote angrily in a private letter that he espoused no particular form of Protestant faith.[5]

While Picart leaves none of his private thoughts about religion, in 1713, early in the years of their exile, Marchand explained his position in the draft of a letter to an unnamed Catholic correspondent. In the letter, he angrily refuses to return in a “blind” or “absurd” fashion to the fold of a church that arrogates its authority “so haughtily and unjustly.” He explains that a book by Jean Claude (published in 1683) in defense of Protestantism against Jansenist attacks was one of those that “contributed the most to disabusing me of the opinions of Rome.” Marchand does not rest there. He insists that everything required for sound doctrine can be found in the New Testament and among the primitive Christians. In the same year Marchand wrote a preface to a new collection of the chief Protestant works refuting transubstantiation that was published by Fritsch and Böhm in Rotterdam. Taking pride of place among them were works by Claude. Did this concern with refuting the central doctrines of Catholicism lead Marchand—and Picart and Bernard—gradually toward what the age came to call “natural religion” and which some viewed as tantamount to deism, even atheism?[6] I will argue that their odyssey took them in the end to natural religion, pure and simple.

We can glimpse at stages along the way in that journey. Near the end of that angry letter to someone clearly trying to return him to the one, true Church, Marchand drops a bombshell: “since I am not Lutheran, Calvinist, Arminian, Socinian, Anabaptist, or Quaker,” anything charged against these Reformers and their various sects fails to concern him in the least. Writing privately from the relative safety of the Dutch Republic, Marchand can say that he belongs to no particular religion. Since anyone reasonable, he insists, will conclude that the Roman Church has fallen into “the most gross and contemptible idolatry,” it is time to return to the New Testament and circumvent “all the superstitions and criminal innovations” introduced in the last 1700 years. It was views such as these that no doubt horrified Picart’s future father-in-law in 1712. What kind of religion was it that required no organized church and no official doctrine? Yet Marchand appears to believe in Jesus, whom he calls “the Son of God.” It is not clear that he believes in the Trinity. He wants to return to a “pure and simple doctrine” based on Scripture and avoid the “infinity of bizarre cults and ceremonies” introduced by Roman Catholicism. What lies at the root of the natural religion infusing this text, and I would suggest the circle that produced it, can be most clearly documented in the private writings on religion left by Marchand.[7] He saw vast corruption of the religion of Christ as the handiwork of the theologians and their jargon, and he further believed that elaborate ceremonies were an accretion, a move away from the true natural religion which Jesus had understood and which belonged as the centerpiece of belief.

In addressing the issue raised by my title, let me first describe where the scholarship on this period has now gone—and my own thinking somewhat altered—since 1981. In 2001 my thesis—even my title—was expanded upon and applied to many other national arenas, to German and Spanish developments to name but one welcome addition to the scholarly discussion. In 1981 I had focused on the Dutch-French-English nexus, and saw a select cast of major seventeenth-century thinkers as influencing the arguments put forward by French refugees and English Whigs for religious freedom, republican government, freedom of the press, habeas corpus, and against monarchical absolutism as practiced by the French king and clergy. These arguments appeared in the journals, books, and clandestine manuscripts originating in both London and Amsterdam. The origin of these new polemics owed much to a particular reading of Hobbes, to Locke, to a heretical reading of Newtonian science (Toland’s distinctive contribution), and of course to Bruno, Spinoza, as well as the English republican thinkers of the 1650s. In 2001 all of those influences were collapsed by Jonathan Israel into an ideengeschichte that fixated on the intellectual legacy of Spinoza to the exclusion of any significant English or French component.

But if I think that Israel’s simplification of the way intellectual influence and human agency work—an idealist rendering that also effaces the political—will not stand up under scrutiny, so too I think aspects of my own youthful thinking are in need of a reformulation. In 1981, heady from the discovery of new evidence about the origin of the most radical text of the first half of the century—if not of the age—Le Traité des trois imposteurs, I dwelt upon the negative rebuff it offered to the three great monotheistic religions, the assault upon their veracity and the character of their founders, now labeled as Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, the three great impostors. The text gleefully proclaimed Nature as God and also relied upon Hobbesian arguments about fear as the origin of the religious impulse. Its political edge took the form of labeling the impostors as the subverters of true republics. It was yet another nail in the coffin of what Mark Lilla calls Christian political theology.[8] Since 1981 a specific coterie of French Protestant refugees and their friends in The Hague and Amsterdam—comprising Prosper Marchand, the political agent Jean Rousset de Missy, the publisher Charles Levier, the engraver Bernard Picart, the English freethinkers John Toland and Anthony Collins, the minor Dutch diplomat, Jan Vroesen, the German born publishers Fritsch and Böhm—has been identified as the locus for the transcribing, altering and disseminating of the Traité. They initially called the text La vie et l’esprit de Spinoza, and in 1719 Levier put out a now very rare edition of it which the Dutch authorities promptly suppressed. Only two or three copies of that 1719 publication now exist; one at UCLA’s Young Research Library. Yet the thinking of this group on the nature of religion was in fact, as I now see, far more subtle and profound than the dismissal of it offered in La vie et l’esprit. In their hands religion moved from being a doctrinal and devotional matter to becoming an object to be studied scientifically.[9]

The move to examine dispassionately all the religions of the world made by Picart and Bernard possessed a rich prior history, born for the most part from intentions different from their own. By the late seventeenth century Biblical polemics between Protestants and Catholics had called into question any fundamentalist reading of the Bible. We need only think of the Biblical criticism of Richard Simon, intended to bolster the authority of the Church and found deeply suspicious by it. Thus In 2006-07 at the Getty Research Institute, Lynn Hunt, myself, and Wijnand Mijnhardt devoted the year to addressing Bernard Picart’s and Jean Frederic Bernard’s massive seven folio volume, The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of all the Peoples of the World which first appeared in 1723 and concluded only in 1743. As a result my thinking (and the book we have finished together, now in press), sees this coterie as capable of offering a far richer account of religion than what can be found in the Traité, and one uniquely situated to address the religious tensions of its time.

In the period around the arrival of Marchand and Picart, in 1710 in The Hague, virtually no one in Europe believed in full religious toleration. Preparing people to accept such a posture toward others required that the nature of religion be entirely rethought. Religious Ceremonies and Customs fundamentally challenged the religious assumptions of its readers by giving them first-hand accounts, comparative essays, and ethnographic perspectives on the various religions found around the world. In fact, the book helped invent the discipline of anthropology. Divorced from the religious zeal of polemicists, the book asked readers to draw their own conclusions from the material, with some guidance along the way, especially from the explosive introductory essay. Implicitly readers were also being invited to distance themselves from their own beliefs and customs and to think about religious practices more generally. This distance, I would argue, marked a crucial first step toward complete toleration.

The French first edition was immediately translated (although edited and moderated) into Dutch, then English and German, and reprinted, plagiarized, and pirated in multiple editions and languages as recently as the 1980s. The compensation received by Bernard Picart, the engraver and Jean F. Bernard, the publisher and main author, came only from sales of about 3000 copies, nevertheless a remarkably good press run for the period. Shortly after the first two volumes appeared, Bernard Picart deposited 1500 pounds in the Bank of England.[10] His name adhered to the title page of the largest and most influential project we can associate with his circle. Ceremonies and Customs made its way onto the Index of Forbidden Books in 1738.

When the Catholic Church put the work on the Index it cited in particular: “This Preface breathes the spirit of heresy, not only because of its dogma concerning spiritual religion...but also concerning the Vicar of Christ [the pope], holy intercession, sacrifice, and many other things.” Rome was not alone in finding the general preface problematic; the English translation published between 1733 and 1739 simply dropped it without mention. What had Bernard said? “If all men could agree to only regard God as a very simple Being, sovereign and perfect in his Essence, his virtues, and his immense capacity,” then they could suppress all intercessors and “go directly to God.” They would then be able to eliminate sacrifices, incense, festivals, confraternities, penances, and monasteries, and the people who did these things would be seen as either deliberately trying to mislead others or as mentally unstable [malades d’esprit]. Everyone would then look only to themselves for ways of satisfying the Divinity and they would believe that love of virtue and pure morals were the only things truly agreeable to God. The private proceedings of the Holy Office accused it of attempting to spread a “spiritual religion.”[11]

The preface to volume 1 does not name specific religions, but it makes two crucial points about what will follow: first, that lying beneath the extraordinary variety of religious practices to be found in the world are certain common principles built upon widely shared mental and spiritual foundations; and second, that the “strangely bizarre” quality that can be seen in many religious ceremonies results from false ideas about the Divinity. “If all men could agree to regard God only as a very simple Being, supremely perfect in his Essence, his virtues, and his immense capacity,” then the elaborate hierarchies of intercessors with God (in other words, the Pope, bishops, priests, and saints of Roman Catholicism) soon would be suppressed and sacrifices, incense, festivals, confraternities, and the austerities practiced in monasteries and convents would be seen for what they are: ways of misleading the less sophisticated. Believers would look only inside themselves for ways of “satisfying the Divinity.” At points the preface sounds simply Protestant, refusing to grant the need for intercession between the believer and God. Volume six published by Bernard (after Picart’s death in 1733, but with some of his engravings) lays out the claim that this divinity may be seen as co-eternal with nature—or not—as the believer might wish.

When addressing the category of monotheism, Ceremonies and Customs is quite slippery on the subject of the one, true God. It never fails to capitalize the “Gods” when discussing those peoples who have a belief in more than one of them. At times the text slips effortlessly between God and Gods, implying their inter-changeability, and then at others the text asserts that many of the peoples who appear to believe in multiple deities in fact have one, a single being, in mind. Suffice it here to say, God and the Gods remain remote throughout. They are feared, prayed to, offered sacrifices—even human ones—but never does the book suggest that any of these invocations have been proven to work effectively. But God or the Gods do appear to have a long history, and central to the book’s argument, they are universal to humanity.

The idea of comparing the religions of the world is hardly surprising today, much less shocking, even if we do it too little or with too little willingness to suspend our own beliefs. In the early eighteenth century, however, most Western writings about religion either laid out the true doctrine (that of the author) or focused on debunking the competitors: Catholics and Protestants wrote against each other, the various Protestant sects justified their separate understandings of religious truth, and Christians wrote against Islam and Judaism, the other monotheistic religions. The customs of the rest of the world’s religions were usually lumped together as pagan idolatry and often brutally depicted. Interest in them was pursued, when it was at all, mainly as a way of facilitating Christian missionary efforts. The hefty five volume Atlas geographus, for example, printed in London between 1711 and 1717, repeated the common European view of the origins of Buddhism in China: “A 2d Sect sprung up about 32 Years after Christ’s Death, and introduced the Worship of an Idol called Foe [Buddha]. This filled the Empire with Idolatry, Atheism, Superstition and Fables.” Non-Western religions were generally depicted in just this way as idolatrous, atheistic, superstitious, and composed of legends and myths.

Religious Ceremonies and Customs aimed at something very different. It still used the terms idolatry, superstition, and atheism in describing Chinese religions, for instance, but these now functioned as smokescreens to hide their true intent. Readers familiar with the previous literature would expect to see those terms. In the section on China, Bernard cleverly set up parallels with the more familiar paganism of Greece and Rome and even with Christianity itself. “Who would not believe, when reading the account of such a beautiful moral system and such an excellent practice of its duties, that Confucius was Christian and that he had been instructed in the teaching of J.[esus] C.[hrist]?” Although Bernard claimed only to provide descriptions mixed in with an occasional reflection, “without taking sides either for or against those who have analyzed Chinese Ceremonies,” he had one main purpose, present in the Chinese section as in all others: to get at the “natural religion” that lay hidden beneath the corruptions introduced by organized religions of all sorts. So, in the next sentence on Confucius, he urged the reader,

Take notice in particular of this integrity, a gift from Heaven, and from which mankind has been deprived [the emphasis is his].... No prophet of the Jews spoke more clearly [than Confucius] about the corruption of the natural religion and about the necessity of re-establishing it. Do we not have good reason to be surprised that China had the privilege of a kind of revelation, when according to vulgar opinion idolatry covered all the face of the earth, except for the little state of the Jews?[12]

The “vulgar” view of idolatry kept people from seeing the universal truths of natural religion.

Between them, Picart and Bernard, who both lived on the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam, owned over 4000 books. The extremely rare posthumous catalogues of their books have now been located and they display vast quantities of travel literature, the works of every major seventeenth-century thinker, significantly for our purposes Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Spinoza, Descartes and even Bruno (d.1600), extensive texts by liberal Protestants, many Bibles, etc. In short they were immensely and widely read and no single intellectual influence (not even Spinoza) works to pigeon hole their thinking. Picart’s library was especially strong in works by, about and against Hobbes, six rare works by Bruno; Bernard had Toland and, of course, Spinoza. Both had Descartes and Newton.[13]

Although any of the world’s religions might serve to show how natural religion had been corrupted by priests, Catholicism would be Bernard and Picart’s primary target. Their reasons for this hostility were profoundly personal. Bernard was the son of a French Calvinist pastor who had been forced to flee to Amsterdam after 1685. Picart, the son of a famous Parisian engraver, had embraced Calvinism a decade or more after it became illegal in France. In the company of his life-long friend, Prosper Marchand, Picart too made his way northward, first to The Hague, and then to Amsterdam, where he met Bernard some time after late 1709. As French Protestant refugees, the two men could draw on support from a vibrant community of like-minded exiles who shared their fury against the repressive policies of Louis XIV and their growing interest in “freethinking,” that is, a critical open-mindedness about religion that began with criticism of Catholicism and could then progress in more radical directions.

Without saying it explicitly, the frontispiece and opening paragraphs of the very first volume of Religious Ceremonies and Customs draw attention to the defects of Catholicism. The frontispiece, engraved in 1727 but clearly intended to be placed at the head of the first volume, carried an innocent title, “Vignette of the Principal Religions of the World.” At first glance, the religions are represented with remarkable even-handedness. Although the pagan religions are overshadowed by those of monotheism, Islam appears in the very front and in a surprisingly favorable light. The viewer has to read the caption to get the full import of what is intended. The female figure in white holding the Bible stands for Christianity, but next to her a Catholic monk is trying to shut the book. The female figure representing Roman Catholicism looms over all the others in the frame, and she holds an olive branch which “she seems to present to all other religions that wish to return to the bosom of the church.” But she tramples on both the Rabbi representing Judaism and the figure symbolizing the Roman Empire. The Roman is holding up the globe with the insignia of imperial authority, which the dark figure of Superstition is taking from his hand and transferring to the Pope. The modest female on the left who points to the Bible embraces the tree (of the true religion) whose useless branches she has cut away. She is surrounded by all the leading figures of the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers are the ones who initiated the process so important to Bernard and Picart; they took it further, aiming at a universal and natural religion that looks forward to the credo of the Savoyard Vicar.[14]

When Picart and Marchand arrived in the Dutch Republic they were clearly committed to a Protestant identity of some sort, but their intellectual and religious journey was just beginning. By the end, as Ceremonies and Religious Customs reveals, they had read widely and could reference a vast travel literature, as well as works by Toland, Hobbes, and Spinoza—all readily available in the Republic. Having been detached from the mystique of Catholicism, they began an odyssey that would be repeated by many others. Forging an enlightened religiosity required far more thought and reading than the rote repetition of materialist arguments. In the final analysis Bernard argues for the impossibility of Atheism. It, like Deism, is always capitalized. Everyone he claims—including Spinoza—has come to see that there is a universal self-sufficient substance, a supreme being with authority and dominion over humankind. “All the philosophers Libertins, Deistes, Esprit forts [freethinkers] … recognize a supreme authority.” It may be co-existing, or not, with matter. The supreme authority may or may not “exist before Matter; [be] Matter itself or [be] only soul of this Matter; coexisting and co-eternal, space that contains bodies; substance infinite and universal.” Let the reader decide.

The power of the Enlightenment—from this early coterie to latter thinkers like Rousseau and Jefferson—lay in understanding the force of organized religion, and then searching for a set of beliefs which deists, and perhaps even atheists of the age, could live with and accept. As I have now come to see, the pantheism I identified in 1981 would lead in many directions, among them the search to understand all human religiosity and to articulate a universal natural religion.

Fig. 1: Frontispiece

[1] Jean Claude, An Account of the Persecutions and Oppressions of the Protestants in France (London: J. Norris, 1686), 19-21, quoted in John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 63-64. The 1981 argument appears in my The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981).

[2] For a description of the Huguenot community as occupied with maintaining their unity as a group of scholars, see Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). On the integration of the Huguenots in Dutch society, see also Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck, “De Hugenoten,” in La France aux Pays-Bas. Invloeden in het verleden (Vianen: Kwadraat, 1985), 13-49; Hans Bots, Guillaume-Henri-Marie Posthumus Meyjes, Frouke Wieringa, Vlucht naar de vrijheid. De Hugenoten in de Nederlanden (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1985). See also Jens Häseler and Antony McKenna, eds., La vie intellectuelle aux refuges protestants. Actes de la Table ronde de Münster du 25 juillet 1995 (Paris: Champion, 1999).

[3] For the Dutch book trade, see Roger Chartier, “Magasin de l’univers ou magasin de la République,” in Le Magasin de l’univers: The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Book Trade, ed. Christiane Berckvens-Stevelinck (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). See also P. G. Hoftijzer and Otto Lankhorst, Drukkers, Boekverkopers en Lezers in de Republiek: Een historiografische en bibliografische handleiding (The Hague: Sdu Uitgevers, 2000), 120. For the depth and breadth of the Dutch book trade, see Geschiedenis van het gedrukte boek in Nederland, http://www.bibliopolis.nl (accessed May 13, 2009); and Hannie van Goinga, “Boeken in beweging. Publieke boekenveilingen in de Republiek, 1711-1805,” Jaerboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis 11 (2004): 99-126.

[4] Gary De Krey, “Revolution Redivivius: 1688-89 and the Radical Tradition in Seventeenth-Century London Politics,” in The Revolution of 1688-89: Changing Perspectives, ed. Lois Schwoerer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 198-217.

[5] Most of the information about the Vincent family is derived from Vincent’s correspondence with the Antwerp publishing house Plantin-Moretus (Antwerp, Archives, Officina Plantiniana, 639-42). For a description of these letters, see Maurits Sabbe, Ysbrand Vincent en zijn Antwerpsche vrienden (Gent: Volksdrukkerij, 1924). As on many occasions before, it was the publisher, Balthasar Moretus, who helped the Vincents to flee France, with support from his publisher friend F. Leonard and the Antwerp engraver Cornelis Martinus Vermeulen, who worked in Paris and with whom Vincent traded in prints. Inger Leemans located this important collection of letters in Antwerp, Archive, Officina Plantiniana, 641, 817. The Dutch text of the letter speaks of Picart as having “geen religie.” Picart could have gotten in contact with Vincent through engraver Cornelis Martinus Vermeulen, with whom Picart worked in 1697 on a portrait of Willem III for L’Histoire de l’Angleterre by De Larrey, “dont il a fait aussi la moitié du Titre achevé depuis par le même C. Vermeulen.” Bernard Picart, Impostures innocentes, ou Recueil d'estampes d'après divers peintres illustres, tels que Rafael, le Guide, Carlo Maratti, le Poussin, Rembrandt, [...] gravées à leur imitation [...] et accompagnées d'un Discours sur les préjuges de certains curieux touchant la Gravure par B.P. avec son éloge historique et le catalogue de ses ouvrages (Amsterdam: la Veuve de Bernard Picart, 1734). See also Häseler and McKenna, La vie intellectuelle aux refuges protestants.

[6] Leiden, Marchand MSS 28, fol. 144-46, and in the same collection of papers, “manuscrites de la main de Marchand concernant la religion” (n.d., underlining in the original). “C’est neant-moins là toutte la Religion de Jesus-Christ, quoi qu’en puissent dire tous les Theologiens du Monde, de quelque Société qu’ils puissent être; et cette seule Regle, toutte simple quelle est, peut suffire pour se debarasser tout d’un coup de touttes les Imaginations creuses, et de touttes les Speculations chimeriques, dont ils ont accablé la Religion chretiennes: Speculations beaucoup plus embarassantes, que bien fondées, et beaucoup moins difficiles à imaginer, que faciles à resoudre.

“On sait de science certaine qu’ils crieroient extraordinairement contre ce Raisonnement, s’il venoient à leur connoissance; que, quelques desunis qu’il soient entre eux, ils se reuniroient tous contre lui, pour le traiter d’heretique, d’Impie, de Blasphematoire, de digne du feu, &c. Mais, sans s’arreter aux Injures, et aux Persecutions, dont une funeste et déplorable experience n’a que trop appris à tout le monde qu’il sçavent incomparablement mieux se servir que de bonnes Raisons; on se contenteroit de leur faire cette petite Question?

“Lorsque Jesus-Christ vint au Monde pur nous enseigner le chemin du salut, les Instructions qu’il donna, tant à ses Disciples, qu’a ceux qui suivirent son parti, et embrasserent sa Doctrine, suffisoient-elles pour les sauver; En un mot, la Nouvelle Religion, qu’il venoit instituer, avoiet-elle ce Degré de Perfection necessaire pour les conduire surement, et infailliblement, au Salut, pourvu qu’ils l’obsrvassent exactement et religieusement?

“Je ne pense pas qu’on puisse le nier; car, Jesus Christ, en qualité de Messie, d’Envoié, de Fils de Dieu, afin de ne chicanner point sur les Termes, estoit rempli de l’Esprit de Dieu en une telle abondance, que St. Paul n’a point fait de Difficulté de dire de lui, que Dieu habitoit corporellement en lui. Avec une Prérogative si éclatante et si rélévée, et aiant pourvoir d’enseigner, d’expliquer, de retrancher, d’ajouter; en un mot, de former un nouveau plan de Religion, capable de remedier aux desordres qu’il venoit reformer; il ne l’a certainement point fait à demi, et ne l’a point laissé imparfait. Car, il n’auroit pas été de la sagesse et de la Dignité de l’Esprit de Dieu, dont il etoit extraordinairement rempli, de donner une Regle imparfaite à ceux qu’il venoit instruire et corriger.

“Or, si cette Regle estoit parfaite dès son commencement, comme sortant des mains de Dieu même, qui ne sçauroit rient faire d’imparfait et de defectueux; et si dès lors celle a pû certainement et indubitablement conduire au Salut ceux à qui Jesus-Christ lui-même l’a donnée; pourquoi seroit-elle imparfaite aujourdhi[sic] pour moi, et pourquoi ne me conduiroit-elle pas présentement au Salut, aussi certainement, et aussi indubitablement, qu’elle y a conduit autrefois les premiers Disciples du Jesus-Christ? Si elle étoit parfaite dès son commencement, pourquoi veut-on m’obliger à recevoir aujourdhui touttes les Additions, et touttes les Innovations, qu’on y a faites? Les premiers Chretiens, je dis les premiers du tems des Apotres, et du tems de Jesus-Christ lui-même, avoient-ils besoin, pour se sauver, de tout ce Fatras de Jargon Théologique, dans lequel la Religion se trouve ensevelie? Estoient-ils obliger, pour opérer efficacement leur Salut, de s’embarrasser la Fête d’une quantité prodigieuse de Termes facheux, et accablans : Termes si obscurs, et si inintelligibles, que ceux même qui y sont le plus attachés, ne les entendent pas eux-mêmes, et disputant sur leur signification depuis si longtems, et d’une manière si dure et si scandaleuse? Estoient-ils obliger, pour gagner le Ciel, de sçavoir ce que c’est que Prédestination et Réprobation Eternelles, Prédestination Gratuite, Décrets absolus et eternels, Prédetermination Physique, Grace efficace, Grace suffisante, Grace universelle, Prévision de Mérite, science moienne, Libre-Arbitre; et quantité d’autres semblables, dont on en a embarassé la Question qui roule sur la mattiere dont se peut opérer le Salut? Estoient-ils obliger, pour mériter la Gloire éternelle, d’approfondir les Mysteres de l’Essence Divine, et de l’obscurcir par les Termes barbares de Personne, d’Hypostase, de Génération éternelle, de consubstantialité, d’Amousios, de Trinité, et de mille et mille autres enfin, que sunt verba et voces, praetereaque nihil? Tous ces Termes, & touttes les Doctrines, que vous renfermer dessous, étoient-elles nécessaires du tems des Apotres? Je ne pense pas qu’on ose l’avancer. Et cela estant, qu’en ai-je à faire aujourd’hui? Ne faut-il pas s’aveugler soi même à plaisir, pour ne pas voir que ce ne sont que des fruits de l’Ecole des philosophes platoniciens, qui, étant entréz les prémiers dans l’Eglise chrétienne, y ont apporté le Jargon de leur Académie, et y ont en même tems préparé l’entrée à la n Messe, à l’Invocation des saints, au culte des images, des statues, & des reliques, à la Présence reele, à la Transubstantiation, et en fin à cette Fourmiliere de Dogmes monstrueux et abominables, qui font aujourdhui regarder avec tant de justice & de fondement, l’Eglise romaine comme le centre de l’Idolatrie, et comme la plus impure et la plus corrompuë de touttes les Sociétez religieuses….

“Au commencement, il n’en etoit point ainsi. Jesus-Christ qui supposoit la connoissance d’un Dieu dans l’Esprit de ceux qu’il etoit venu instruire, ne leur demandoit autre chose que de la reconnoitre pour la Messie, c’est-à-dire pour l’Envoié, le Fils de Dieu; et cette confession faite, sans s’informer autrement de ce qu’ils entendoient par là, il leur donnoit le Bateme, comme à des gens qu’il trouvoit suffisament instruits pour etre introduits dans le Roiaume de Dieu, et pour etre faits membres de son Eglise. Les Apôtres n’ont rien fait de plus. Ils s’en sont tenus-là tout simplement. Dès que les Juifs ou les Gentils, avoient reconnu Jesus pour le Messie, le Fils de Dieu, et promis d’embrasser sa Doctrine; sans éxiger d’eux aucune Explication particuliere de leur Foi, ils les admettoient, sur le champ, dans la compagnie des vrais Fideles, et ils etoient regardés comme tels par tous ceux qui composoient l’Eglise Chrétienne....

“Un tel homme venant à mourir, et aïant d’ailleurs rempli les Devoirs du Christianisme tels qu’ils nous sont prescrits par Jesus Christ lui-même, ne mouroit-il pas en etat de Grace et de salut? On ne le niera pas, je pense. Et, si cela lui a suffi pour lors, pourquoir ne me suffira-t-il point aujourd’hui, à moi, qui m’en tiens à la Regle certaine, donnée par Jésus-Christ lui-même, de l’aveu de tous les Théologiens du Monde et du mien, à moi, qui ne veux absolument en admettre aucune autre, puisque, de leur propre confession, elle étoit parfaite dès le tems que Jesus-Christ nous l’a donnée? Je m’y tiens donc uniquement attaché; & tous les Raisonnemens Théologiques, ou Philosophiques, qu’on pouraoit me faire, ne m’en détacheroient certainement point.”

[7] Leiden, Marchand MSS 28, “manuscrites de la main de Marchand concernant la religion” (n.d.).

[8] Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007).

[9] For an account of the text, see Jacob, Radical Enlightenment; Silvia Berti, ed., Tratatto dei tre impostori, La Vita et lo spirito del Signor Benedetto de Spinoza (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), with the original French text and a substantial critical presentation; Françoise Charles-Daubert, ed., Le “Traité des trois imposteurs” et “L’Esprit de Spinoza”: Philosophie clandestine entre 1678 et 1768 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999); Silvia Berti, Françoise Charles-Daubert, and Richard Popkin, eds., Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe. Studies in the Traité des Trois imposteurs (Dordrecht: Springer, 1996). For a portion of the text, see Margaret Jacob, The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), 94-113.

[10] Bank of England Archives, London, AC 27/444 Bank Stock # 21 I-Q Anno 1725-32, fol. 1194, September 29, 1732. Picart Bernard 1500 pounds carried over to ledger: fol. 1173, Sept 29 1725; 500 pounds by balance brought from ledger: fol. 7266r, January 24, 1726; 500 pounds transferred by William Pym Esq, February 21, 1726; 500 pounds transferred by Thomas Murray.

[11] I thank Dr. William Michael Short of Loyola College in Maryland for the Latin translation. Dr. Gene Ogle obtained copies of these records for us from Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, Vatican City, Rome, MS ACDF, Index, Diari 16 (1734-46) fols. 36v-39r; Index, Protocolli Ridolfius, NNNNN (1737-1740), fols. 69r, 70r, 100r-103v, 533r. The quote is from 100v. The book was placed on the Index again in 1757. Cérémonies et coutumes, I: unnumbered second page of “Préface générale.” Bernard’s syncretism can be seen in this passage from the same page cited in note 3: “Après cela on pourroit se flater bientôt d’une reunion dans le Culte: il reprendroit sa simplicité primitive; on verroit tomber mille & mille Ceremonies que les hommes ont inventées pour se donner du crédit, & qu’ils remettent à leur posterité comme des Actes souverainement Religieux.”

[12] Bernard Picart, Religious Ceremonies and Customs of all the Peoples of the World (Amsterdam, 1723-43), 4:198, 212, 199. The debate on Confucianism was intense in this period. Most original in Bernard’s account is his emphasis on Confucius’s contribution to developing a natural religion. See the discussion of conflicting views in Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 640-62.

[13] Catalogue du fonds de libraire de feu Jean Fréderic Bernard (Amsterdam: Humbert, Schouten en Rey, 1747); and Catalogus Librorum tam Latinorum quam Gallicorum/Catalogue de livres rassemblez par feu M.Bernard Picart celebre dessinateur (Amsterdam: Bernard en Schouten, 1733). Our forthcoming book will discuss the contents of these two remarkable libraries.

[14] The vignette is bound as the frontispiece to volume 1 in the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, set. It appears in the same place in the set owned by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. See http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b23005558/f1.item.

Was the Eighteenth-Century Republican Essentially Anticapitalist?

Andres Moreno — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:55:48 -0700

In 1975, writing within the intellectual ambiance created by the Cold War and the fashionable Marxism of scholars such as C. B. Macpherson, John Pocock brilliantly and successfully interrogated the Atlantic republican tradition in his now classic The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Among many of its interventions into the history of political and economic thought in the early modern period, the book proclaimed that after 1688–89 country Whig theorists such as Charles Davenant, John Toland, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon display a noticeable “ambivalence [in] . . . their attitudes toward the Machiavellian problem of war and the Augustan problem of commerce.”[1]

Eschewing the Marxist attitude “that the conflict between real and mobile property is a sole and sufficient explanation of the philosophers’ concern with reason and passion,” Pocock portrays what he engagingly calls the left of the Whig party as denouncing “credit . . . as corruption.”[2] Far from being creatures of capitalism, that is, liberal defenders of a new bourgeois order, these early eighteenth-century republicans “were looking to a past, and seeking to defend virtue against innovative forces, symbolized as trading empire, standing armies, and credit.”[3]

From Lukács through to Horkheimer and Adorno, the Marxist approach to the progenitors of the early Enlightenment had consistently portrayed enlightened reformers as apologists for bourgeois interests. While Marxists were largely interested in Continental thinkers, Macpherson easily transferred the model to Hobbes and Locke, as well as by implication to a host of political thinkers who came after them. Pocock’s intervention challenged the new Marxist orthodoxy in unprecedented ways.[4]

With Macpherson’s intervention the thesis (first articulated in the historiography by Christopher Hill) that the English Revolution had served bourgeois interests now swept up the most seminal political thinkers in the Anglo-American universe. Hobbes’s science became “a science of bourgeois society,” while Locke and the early eighteenth-century heirs of the revolutionary tradition solidified in 1688–89 further consolidated bourgeois rule. Thus while Marxists saw Whigs and Commonwealthmen as looking forward to the triumph of capitalism, Pocock read them as looking backwards, as deeply ambivalent toward the increasingly dominant commercial order. When Pocock sought to apply the same language of ambivalence about virtue and commerce to the American intellectual landscape of the late eighteenth century, he met first with considerable approval, and only gradually with disagreement, symbolized most readily by the writings of Joyce Appleby. And, as we are about to see, the ambivalence about the possibility of virtuous commerce also does not work for the Dutch republic.

American intellectual life of the eighteenth century seemed strangely unresponsive to the European models developed by the Frankfurt school or Macpherson. Likewise their critics, in particular Pocock, met resistance from American historians who saw liberalism “with its cultivation of expectations of sustained improvement” as a force offsetting the resistance to commerce associated by Pocock with republicanism. In Appleby’s words, “an exploration of eighteenth-century Anglo-American thought limited to the classical paradigm” misses the more optimistic liberal paradigm, so “subversive to traditional authority.”[5] In her writings she has consistently laid emphasis on the “secular enthusiasm for economic development.”[6]

On the whole Pocock’s analysis of the English neo-Harringtonians of the early eighteenth century, unlike his treatment of the American response to commerce, has received far fewer challenges. Steven Pincus has accepted Pocock’s characterization of Harrington and Milton as anticommercial, although Pincus rightly points out that even in the mid-seventeenth century there were republicans who valued money and wealth, if for no other reason than it paid for armies. By contrast, Alan Cromartie has disputed Pocock’s account of Harrington and argues that “Harrington actually favoured the growth of a commercial civilization.”[7]

I will leave that mid-seventeenth-century dispute to others. Here my sights are set on the early eighteenth century and on both English and Dutch republican discourse. When speaking about country Whigs in the period after 1688–89, I will confine myself to those capable of using largely secular terms and exclude the many country voices associated with the Societies for the Reformation of Manners.[8] Their definitions of corruption, vice, and decay—their general ambivalence toward worldly matters—had essentially religious roots that display little affinity with what Pocock defines as the classical republican tradition. Yet the country Whigs of secular orientation were quite capable of discussing virtue, and those nuanced discussions can withstand a new and different reading, one that privileges their more immediate setting without effacing their classical and Renaissance sources.

In the case of Trenchard and Gordon, when discussing virtue—simply stated, good and evil—the influence of one indigenous thinker, Thomas Hobbes, seems overwhelmingly dominant. Their Cato tells readers that “in order to persuade and govern men you must know what will please or frighten them. The good they do to one another, they do not because it is just or commanded; nor do they forbear mutual evil, because it is unjust or forbid: But these things they do out of choice or fear, and both these center in themselves; for choice is pleasure, and fear is the apprehension of pain. . . . Self-love is the parent of moral good and evil.”[9] Goodness or virtue spring from a dark, self-interested place in the human psyche, but this does not make them any less real. Pocock is surely right that because of their unrelenting secularism, their mechanical and naturalist understanding of human motives, the country Whigs deserve the label of being “the first intellectuals of the Left.”[10]

Their Hobbesian vision of human nature accepted self-love as the source of virtue. Men will pursue commerce, credit, and capital when interest propels them; that is simply the way of the world. But to imagine Cato as blindly enamored of the past ignores the consistent appeal to the moderns over the ancients in matters of learning and science, and hardly qualifies Trenchard and Gordon as “enemies of modernity,” as Pocock would have it.[11] To characterize them as disenchanted dreamers, as “closer to the romantics than to the philosophes who read them” misses their feet-on-the-ground approach to commercial life. Whig theorists from oppositional Trenchard and Gordon, later to the complacent Josiah Tucker, were eager to embrace worldliness. They could not detach their emotional life from the quotidian; Hobbesian psychology required them to be observers and participants. For Trenchard and Gordon, men govern the world, but men are governed by their passions.[12] Only magistrates must check their passions and be jealous for their people, unlike princes who in their self-interest seek to destroy the liberty of their subjects. In this assessment of princely intentions, Renaissance antecedents are plainly visible. Indeed Cato admits at one point that “many of these observations are taken from Amelot de la Houssaye,” Machiavelli’s great translator and critic, as Jacob Soll has recently described him.[13]

My first task is to examine Augustan texts in an effort to modify Pocock’s highly nuanced account of the language employed by Whig and country commentators. Then I will cross the Channel and venture where the English detractors of commerce and money saw, with envy, a charnel house of exchange and greed, the Dutch republic. Because we are intent upon examining republicanism in a variety of European settings, I want to see if there is any comparable language of ambivalence, a tension between virtue and commerce, to be found among Dutch republicans of reformist persuasion.

The moment I have chosen finds both English and Dutch commentators facing the crisis of 1720 when markets in Paris, London, and then Amsterdam crashed under the weight of speculation, preyed upon by those whom Trenchard and Gordon identify as “stockjobbers.” They assure us that the restoration of “honesty and industry can never be hoped for, while this sort of vermin is suffered to crawl about, tainting our air, and putting every thing out of course. . . .”[14] Although the crashes of 1720 were worse in Paris and London than they were in Amsterdam, in the Dutch and English cases anger manifested itself in print and image. As Pocock rightly notes, Cato’s Letters and the London Journal arose in direct response to the financial crisis. When re-issued in 1724 by Gordon (writing after the death of Trenchard), the preface labored to dispel any taint of republicanism: “his majesty never had a better subject than Cato.” Perhaps the disclaimer was less than genuine since in other places the text claims that the Hanoverian state possesses “the stile and spirit” of a republic.[15]

To read Cato’s Letters as classically republican requires that other discourses woven throughout the text go unnoticed. Recall that the letters begin with a defense of empire and rail against the possible loss of Gibraltar, something George I had contemplated and Parliament opposed. Having established their imperialist credentials, the journalists then quickly turn to the security of public good and private property, “the law is the great rule in every country at least in every free country, by which private property is ascertained, and the public good . . . is secured.”[16] Every man is entitled to his share of property, and the villains are identified as “that class of ravens, whose wealth has cost the nation its all . . . they are a conspiracy of stock jobbers.” They, in the opinion of Cato, should be hung. All the eloquence and passion of the text resides in its depiction of their rapacity: “I have before my eyes a wise beneficent Prince, a generous and public spirited Parliament, an able disinterested ministry; all contending with each other for the wealth, the glory, the liberty of their country: And I have before my eyes a brave and honest people, lovers of trade and industry, free of their money, and well-deserving of the legislature, passionate for liberty, and haters of chains; but deluded, drained of their money, and abused beyond patience, beyond expression, by mean sharpers that swagger in the plunder of their country.”[17] As in the Dutch case, as we shall see, Cato displays an unwillingness to grapple with the possibility that in the right set of circumstances, good merchants might become rapacious stockjobbers.

By comparison to the passion against stockjobbers, the text spends little emotion on issues of economic equality, and as the quotations here offered affirm, Trenchard and Gordon have no animus against money per se, or even the moneyed interest. Rather they are against “the cannibals of credit.”[18] When they reference “an Agrarian Law, or something like it” they do so explicitly in a discussion of what can happen to a society where some “men’s riches” become so engorged that they are “a danger to the Publick.”[19] There is no hint in the text that such riches will be or must be in the land; rather the enemy is big money acting against the public interest. (Recall the response early in 2009 to the bonus takers at American International Group or, in the aftermath of that crash, the animus against all Wall Street bankers.)

To address this miserable state of public affairs Cato proceeds to define the public credit of the nation and places it in commodities that may be readily sold and creditors promptly paid, lands and houses readily purchased, “money borrowed at low interest” so that trade and manufacture may be readily pursued, and stocks in large quantities can be bought and sold so that people “do not lock up their money in chests, or hide it underground.” Excessive taxation placed on labor, manufacturing, trade, and navigation are further debilitating. Cato has nothing bad to say about trade; it is monopolies and wild speculation that vex.[20]

No one knew the dangers of the South Sea bubble better than John Toland. With the assistance of Molesworth, Toland had invested and lost.[21] He had solely desired to be made “easy and independent . . . without ever stock jobbing more.” As befit his Irish roots, he had hoped to purchase land, and he readily admitted that he was “not acquainted enough with mercantile companies.” When things took a downturn, we find Toland writing to a director in the attempt to find out what had gone wrong. As his last letter to Molesworth makes clear, Toland met his end in such penury that he could not pay his doctor.[22] The papers left among his possessions indicate that he followed the bubble’s unfolding closely and appears, like Trenchard, to have favored using the Bank of England as the means of retiring the debt.[23] Toland, like Trenchard and Gordon, had nothing against wealth; indeed, they just wanted to get some of it and thought no less of themselves for trying to do so.

What better moment than our own era of global capitalist upheaval to assess how elsewhere scribbling citizens with republican aspirations might respond to greed then (and now) blamed for the public’s misfortune. We have seen Cato’s diagnosis about the cannibals of credit; now let us cross the North Sea and venture to the republic that arguably gave northern and western Europe its most intense experience of early modern capitalism. The bursting of the bubble in the fall of 1720 sent Dutch scribblers into high gear, and many of these mostly anonymous voices took to prose, verse, and stage, and even engraved images, to express their outrage, or to investigate the causes of the crash and the appropriate remedies for the future.

In the Dutch setting outrage took many forms, but a few themes tend to predominate. The good Batavian merchant had been hoodwinked by a cunning crowd of actionists, many of whom were in some sense foreigners. They could be English or French, or closer to home but still strangely foreign, Jews living in the republic and sometimes described by the derogatory slang term smousen. From every direction the naïve Dutchman is conned out of his capital.[24] The self-pity displayed in 1720 rested on the perception that the paper being peddled by the actionists (or stockjobbers) took the hard-earned money of the merchant and rendered it useless, in the process threatening to wreck the kingdom.[25] Never are Dutch entrepreneurs attacked for their lack of virtue per se or commerce viewed with suspicion. Indeed, so elevated was the status of the Dutch merchant that serious efforts were made to scapegoat the non-Dutch speculators. Once again no one was quite ready to speculate about speculation, about its actual relationship to capitalist impulses.

Popular plays performed in the winter of 1720–21 proclaimed that the country lay in the grip of insanity (gekheit) and foolishness (dwaasheit), but depicted the art of commerce (koopmanschap) trying to rally its compatriots by assuring them that the god Mercury would come to their rescue.[26] Another anonymous poet (of sorts) assured his readers that the insane guilt for all of these misfortunes lay with the Jew.[27] Other hints of social scorn that appear in this literature tell us that merchants—hence commerce, legitimate buying and selling of goods—are not on the whole the problem, rather the patrician gentlemen aping French mores are the ones who have a role to play in the folly. The plays on the Amsterdam stage of 1720 began less harshly by blaming the reckless traders for dishonesty, for spreading misinformation, and evolved into denouncing the speculators as leading the nation into hell or the mad-house, and as fomenting plaque and disease.[28]

In Amsterdam, and to a far lesser extent, in London, Jews got a goodly share of the blame for the collapse. Even though Jews constituted only a small minority of those trading shares in the new companies (probably less than 10 percent in the Dutch market), their presence, so much more visible in Amsterdam than in London, aroused malicious commentary. “Actionist” and “stockjobber” became associated with them, although in no sense exclusively. In English slang of the period, “stockjobbing” described “a sharp, cunning, cheating trade of buying and selling shares of stock in East-India, Guinea and other companies, also in the Bank, Exchequer, etc.”[29] In a large folio-size Dutch volume on the crash that included seventy prints (one by Bernard Picart), poems, satirical plays, pamphlets, and even copies of the stock subscription agreements, The Great Picture of Folly left indelible images of the impact of bankruptcy and its causes. The engravings in this collection circulated, often crudely copied, throughout England, France, Holland, and the German states.

Some engravings (like the one by Picart) made no connection between the collapse and the trading activities of Jews. Yet included in the collection, among other items, were previously published anonymous letters violently attacking the role of “Jews and smousen” and attributing the entire bubble to their sharp practices. One of the many engravings in the collection that includes Jewish figures shows a smous using his staff to pry money from his victim’s pockets before the unfortunate fellow can escape to Vianen, one of the so-called free towns where the Dutch authorities could not prosecute debtors. Yet another adaptation of the hunch-backed Jew has him taking pliers to a man’s testicles or prying worthless stones out of his anus.[30]

Contemporaries seemed obsessed with a new, negative stereotypical figure, Bombario (sometimes Bambario), a sinister hunchback sometimes depicted in prints carrying a spectacle case. Bombario might seem to be a fool or harlequin, straight out of the popular Italian and French farces, but he was always shown lurking wherever stocks were being traded, sometimes manipulating the outcome. In one of the prints of The Great Picture of Folly, “Actie Roth” has his harlequin bring him money, which he stores in his money box, “Bambario’s Gold chest.” The name Bambario or Bombario might have come from the Dutch word bombarie, which meant noise, tumult, or fuss, or it might have been a play on a well-known Jewish name, that of the poet Miguel de Barrios (alias Daniel Levi).[31]

Although Bombario is not specifically labeled as Jewish in the prints in The Great Picture of Folly, contemporaries would not have missed the meaning. In one engraving the central figure holds a banner inscribed with the name “Bambario” and wears a cap frequently seen in anti-Jewish imagery from the period. He is accompanied by the devil. An especially explicit engraving, a reworking of an older one satirizing women, converts the shrew of the original into a hunchbacked usurer. Labeled “Bambario,” the figure twists at the private parts of his victim. Legends on some engravings made the target even clearer:

There see the Walloon, the English, Hebrews, a Hans from Bremen: Hear what noise! Lean Dutch snooks make on the great European Market.

Another engraving offered an even more focused legend:

Smous Levi calls, come to me with your life. I will choose to take it or leave it.[32]

These characterizations fell short of the relentless malignity of the anti-Semitic literature coming out of the German states and eastern Europe and often reflected a general xenophobia about the ways foreign traders might take advantage of the naive Dutch, yet there can be no doubt that they often specifically targeted Jews. Originally used to belittle Ashkenazi Jews (when provincial Dutch cities tried to restrict the entry of German Jews they specifically referred to them as smousen), by 1720 smous could refer as well to Sephardic Jews (“Levi” being a Sephardic name), even though the two groups rarely intermarried or even had much contact with each other. Sephardic Jews were much more likely to trade on the emergent stock markets.[33]

In the year of the market crash, Amsterdam’s licensed theater presented to packed audiences Pieter Langendyk’s Quincampoix, a satire on the crisis named after the street in Paris where stocks were traditionally traded (also the nickname of the coffeehouse in the Kalverstraat where much of the speculative frenzy in 1720 took place). The main character, a naive Dutchman, exclaimed that if he wanted to know what was happening to particular acties or stocks he would ask “a swarm of Smousen.” “A following of Jews and others” accompanies “Monsieur Windbuil,” the deceiving speculator. When seen on their own, the Jews keep outbidding one another, chanting “the Bubble, the Bubble.” They are followed by their Bambario, now harlequin of the Jews. Frequently the Dutch they speak is heavily accented and ungrammatical. In the end, money is made and lost, and Windbuil must flee to Vianen. The play, and others like it, depicts the Jews as trading on, blithely unconcerned with the mayhem around them.[34]

The denigration of Jews as smousen and money-grubbers lived on for years afterward. In the 1720s the label even appeared in a learned journal in the course of a discussion of the supposed ethical difference between a Jewish trader, who is interested only in money, and a Christian one, who has a real conscience. An article published in the 1730s claimed that Jews were natural “actionists,” an assertion that continued to appear into the 1760s and 1770s. “‘Actie’ [stock trading] and ‘Windhandel’ [wind-trade or speculation] should be shut down; too many people have been ruined. The Jews should also find a new kind of commerce.”[35] Some stereotypes die hard. Their continuing relevance to the issue of virtue and credit suggests that the Dutch knew in their hearts that commercial men could violate the rules of civility, the ethics of trade; they just did not want to believe that the everyday merchant, however rich, could be inherently unscrupulous.

By 1780 one myth in particular, of the innocent, now patriotic Dutchman, being hoodwinked by foreigners, grew in stature. Frenchified gentlemen have also risen in stature and importance, even sometimes peddling foreign stocks on the unsuspecting burger who finally has the presence of mind to see through his game and come to the defense of the republic.[36] In a few years’ time, the defense will include the exiling of the stadholder and a Prussian invasion intended to quell republican revolution. At its height the Patriotten argued that they too were restoring an ancient liberty, the birth-right of Batavians. Dutch republicans were perfectly capable of speaking as classical republicans. Devoted to their civilian militias or opposed to foreign war, which they reckoned was bad for business and trade, they imagined themselves as possessed of a republican birthright. And from the seventeenth century onward, the wealthiest merchants (who were invariably unregulated wholesalers) had come to see themselves as the personification of virtue. As Clé Leger puts it, “Amsterdam merchants had created a city in which commerce was paramount and where merchants reigned like kings.”[37]

In both the Dutch and English cases, the evidence suggests that in the republican imagination economic turmoil requires the apportioning of blame. Blind economic forces so beloved by economists, Marxist or not, cannot be allowed to stand in the stead of human agency. By the mid-seventeenth century, as Catherine Secretan’s study of Caspar Barlaeus has shown— and ironically as Macpherson’s analysis of how and why Hobbes was able to imagine his state of nature— the market, commerce, capital, and money had become so naturalized as to be inescapable. All were by definition mysterious and uncertain, fraught with dangers as well as rewards, and when they failed, the loss of wealth or simply prosperity could be devastating.

With considerable insight in chapter thirteen of The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock interrogated the many Augustan responses to the reality of markets and credit. Where we have parted ways concerns the assertion that “civic humanist values . . . virtually defined rentier and entrepreneur as corrupt.”[38] The rage against stockjobbers or actionists was so intense on both sides of the Channel, I would suggest, precisely because the republican imagination had come to accept the mercantile entrepreneur as a model citizen characterized by caution and probity, by cooperation in social relations, an exemplar of stability.[39] In the Dutch mind that republican identification had become so strong that it admitted xenophobia and anti-Semitism as part of the explanation for how and when evil had been practiced in the market. Whether English or Dutch the socialized citizen and merchant, to be emulated by cultivating the virtue associated with wealth, would in turn ensure stability in the polity, a political goal in any year, including 1720.

[1] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 437.

[2] Ibid., 454.

[3] Ibid., 458.

[4] Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 257–67. For Macpherson, see his The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), and not least his introduction to the paperback Penguin edition of Leviathan (1968), 12, and still in classroom use. For where this discussion stood at the time when the debate was most intense, see Daniel Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (1992): 11–38. Debate continues in D. N. DeLuna, ed., with assistance from Perry Anderson and Glenn Burgess, The Political Imagination in History: Essays Concerning J. G. A. Pocock (Baltimore: Owlworks, 2006).

[5] Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 29, 139.

[6] Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 104.

[7] Alan Cromartie, “Harringtonian Virtue: Harrington, Machiavelli, and the Method of the Moment,” Historical Journal 41, no. 4 (1998): 999.

[8] See David Hayton, “Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons,” Past and Present 128 (1990): 48–91.

[9] Cato’s Letters (London: W. Wilkins, 1724), 2:267; see also 4:5.

[10] Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 477.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Cato’s Letters, 1:266.

[13] Ibid., 1:272, cf. Jacob Soll, Publishing ‘The Prince’: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

[14] Cato’s Letters, 1:8–9.

[15] Ibid., 1:296.

[16] Ibid., 1:10.

[17] Ibid., 1:14.

[18] Ibid., 1:20.

[19] Ibid., 1:283–84.

[20] Ibid., 1:46–47.

[21] [Desmaiseaux, ed.,] A Collection of Several Pieces of John Toland, Now Published from His Original Manuscripts (London: J. Peele, 1726), 2:464–65.

[22] Ibid., 2:494–95.

[23] Ibid., 1:404–74.

[24] [Anon.,] Quinquenpeaux Bombario, of Roskam voor de Dolle Actionisten. Landgezang door Philadelphus, {Knuttel #16509 (n.p., n.d., but listed as 1720 and found at the Koninkijke Bibliotheek, The Hague): “Bataafze Damon, van zijn haave en goed ontstooken;/ Zat, voor de zuider Zon gedooken….Bataafze Damon, schoon beneepen,/ Van harte, wyl’t hem allezins de nek….Na de Amsterdamsche zwier, en stelde my staag schrap,/ om yvrig, en met vlyt, de brave Koopmanschap,/ Te diene ryn van hart, het Amsterdamsche leeven….Waar wil ‘t helaas noch heen, de DAM word vol en voller:/ de meenigte groeyt aan, men word'er dol en doller:/ De Smousjes vliegen met geraas, getier, gebaar/ Ou, Jong en wie ‘t mag zyn, schuymbeckend als in ‘t haar./ He rappig Frans gebroed zoo luchtig in ‘er lappen/Is dapper in de weer met koch'ren, snappen, klappen/ En vraagd eenvoudigheyd, van ‘t schreeuw en doof en blind/Wat dat’er werd gedaan men maakt en breekt ‘erwind….Brengt als expresse brief en quas[?]tyding mee:/ Straks roezemoest en Smous/ en Jood, en Mof, en Fransje…. En ‘t Capitaal nogtans te houden in zyn stand?”
All the pamphlets discussed in this section can be looked up on Picarta and seen online by those who have membership in the Royal Library.

[25] [Anon.,] De Rasende actionisten in de blinde wareld van Quinquampoix (n.p., n.d): “zo zyn de Acties Heers, daar van heel weg gewaait;/ Vervloeken Quinquampoix [the street in Paris where the crash began], en doenen niet als zugten,/ O! Zuid Zee, ag! Helaas! Waar zal ik heene vlugten?/ Myn Gout veranderts is in Papier al zonder mund,/ En werd as Razeloos, en grypt de stalle pund,/ En wil zyn arme Ziel na ‘t Ryk van Stix toe stieren.”
For recent work on Dutch republicanism, a good place to start is Arjan van Dixhoorn, “‘Voorstanden van de vrije wetten,’ Burgerbewegingen in Arnhem en de Republiek tussen 1702 en 1707,” Tijdschrift voor Social Geschiedenis 1 (1999): 25–54, and Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism. A Shared European Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

[26] Jacob Clyburg, Nederland in Gekheit, staat en zinnespel op de Wind Negotie (printed by the author, n.d.), 19: “Merkuur zal u wel haast ondoen van al uw zorgen,/ Ligt brengt hy u geluck voor deez aanstaande morgen.”

[27] [Anon.,] Merkurius onder de actionisten. Of Quinquenpoix in alarm, over t’daalen van die Zuidzee Acties (n.p., n.d.), 6: “Fluks roept enn Jood: dien Vent zyn harszens staan verkeerd,/Het is zyn Gekehid schuld da thy ons dus durft hoonen.”

[28] [Anon.,] Klagt En Raadsvergadering der Goden, Over ‘t Wiszelvallig Actie Jaar 1720. Of Jupiters besluit en vonnis Over 't werk van Quinquenpoix (n.p., n.d.), 5: “Uit Vrankryk is die dolligheid,/ Op laauwe en zoele Zuide winden,/ Heel tot en Engeland verspreid;/ Straks was hy daar by al de vrinden,/ Die heet op winst en voordeel zyn,/ Heel welkom, zonder eens te denken/ Dat schyn bedriegt, en smart en pyn/ Voor winst en schatten weet te schenken;/ Neen, daad’lyk moest de Gentielman../ Na fransse mode naar gaan aapen,/ De wysheid moest daar in den ban.”
I owe this point about nuancing to Inger Leemans’s careful reading of my text and to her own essay, “Verse Weavers and Paper Traders: Speculation in the Theater,” in The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720, ed. William N. Goetzmann, Catherine Labio, K. Geert Rouwenhorst, and Timothy Young (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, forthcoming).

[29] See “stockjobber” in the Oxford English Dictionary; for background see Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), epilogue. On reaction in England, see Dianne Dugaw, “High Change in ‘Change Alley’: Popular Ballads and Emergent Capitalism in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 43–58, esp. 50–51.

[30] Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid : vertoonende de opkomst, voortgang en ondergang der actie, bubbel en windnegotie, in Vrankryk, Engeland, en de Nederlanden, gepleegt in den jaare MDCCXX : zynde een verzameling van alle de conditien en projecten van de opgeregte compagnien van assurantie, navigatie, commercie, &c. in Nederland, zo wel die in gebruik zyn gebragt, als die door de h. staten van eenige provintien zyn verworpen : als meede konst-plaaten, comedien en gedigten ... : gedrukt tot waarshouwinge voor de nakomelingen, in ‘t noodlottige jaar, voor veel zotte en wyze (n.p., 1720). Frans De Bruyn, “Reading Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid: An Emblem Book of the Folly of Speculation in the Bubble Year 1720,” Eighteenth-Century Life 24 (2000): 1–42; Frans De Bruyn, “Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid and the Speculative Bubble of 1720: A Bibliographical Enigma and an Economic Force,” Eighteenth-Century Life 24 (2000): 62–88. The anonymous engraving referring to Vianen is “De Stervende Bubbel-Heer in den Schoot van Madame Compagnie.” We found two different versions of this print in the Getty Research Institute holdings, one without the legend referring to smous and one with the legend that appears as well in The Great Picture of Folly vol. 1D. P850001* Box 2, VI-35 has the legend; P85001* Box 1, VI-36 does not (they are both boxed with engravings by Romeyn de Hooghe). Inger Leemans brought many of these sources to our attention.

[31] On Bombario, see De Bruyn, “Reading Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid,” 23–24. De Bruyn does not make the connection to the Jews or to de Barrios. See also H. den Boer and Jonathan Israel, “William III and the Glorious Revolution in the Eyes of Amsterdam Sephardi Writers: The Reactions of Miguel de Barrios, Joseph Penso de la Vega, and Manuel de Leao,” in The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact, ed. Jonathan I. Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 439–61. The 1780 fourth edition of Het groote tafereel does not provide any more information about the figure Bombario. Plate 19 in the first edition has become its title page. In April 2008, a colloquium on the book was held at Yale University, School of Management; its participants provided helpful background information. See also [Anon.,] De Windhandel, of Bubbles Compagnien. Blyspel [Gedrukt in Quinquenpoix by Bombario] [Amsterdam, 1720–21].

[32]

Ey ziet de Waal, de Staart, Hebreeuw
En Breemer Hans: Hoor welk geschreeuw!
Dat hier reel nederlandsche Snaaken
Op’t groot Europisch koophof maaken….
Smous Levi roept kom my je leeven, Ik stel te nemen of te geeven

[33] For the cap, see Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History (New York: Continuum, 1996). See also Thomas Wright, A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 418. A similar cap can be seen in Image and Impression: Rare Prints from the Collection of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (New York: The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America), 43 (the engraving of Jonathan Eybeschuetz [ca. 1690–1764]), 107 (the engraving dating from 1680). For the original source engraving of the shrew by Hugo Allardt, see Cornelis Veth, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche caricatuur en van de scherts in de nederlandsche beeldende kunst (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1921), 95. In reference to another engraving, Veth (154–55) claims that Bombario is the Scottish financier John Law; in fact Bombario is his accomplice. See also Yosef Kaplan, “De joden in de Republiek tot omstreeks 1750,” in Geschiedenis van de Joden in Nederland, ed. J. C. H. Blom et al. (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 1995), 172–73; and Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History (New York: Continuum), 1996. A “Hamburger Judas” appears as well in The Great Picture of Folly in an engraving entitled “De Malle Actionisten naar Vianen of t’Peperland.” Another example of anti-Jewish caricature can be found in Roeland van Leuve's Waerelds koopslot of de Amsteldamse beurs, bestaande in drie boeken met zeer veele verbeeldingen...(Amsterdam: Jacobus Verheyden, 1723), 56–58. For the usurer as a hunchback, see Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the ‘Bible moralisée’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 35. The first legend is found at the bottom of the engraving (unnumbered) “De Wind Koopers met Wind Betaald, of de lasste zal blyven hangen.” “Smous Levi” comes from the bottom caption for the engraving, “De Windverkopers of Windvangers, die door wind, verliezen Geld en Goed: bederven Vrouw en Kind.” For the viciousness of German anti-Semitic prints, see Johann Jacob Schudt, Judischer Merckwurdigkeiten vorstellende was sich curieuses und denckwürdiges in den neuern Zeiten bey einigen Jahrhunderten mit denen in alle IV. Theile der Welt, sonderlich durch Teutschland, zerstreuten Juden zugetragen : sammt einer vollständigen Franckfurter Juden-Chronick, darinnen der zu Franckfurt am Mayn wohnenden Juden, von einigen Jahr-hunderten, biss auff unsere Zeiten, merckwürdigste Begebenheiten enthalten : benebst einigen, zur Erläuterung beygefügten Kupffern und Figuren (Frankfurt, 1714), pt. 2, print opposite 256. For a useful comparison, see Richard H. Popkin, “The Jews of the Netherlands in the Early Modern Period,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 311–16; on Schudt as a Jew-baiter, see 141. On the relations of the two Jewish communities, see Kenneth R. Scholberg, “Miguel de Barrios and the Amsterdam Sephardic Community,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 53 (Oct. 1962): 120–59, and Yosef Kaplan, “The Jews in the Republic until about 1750: Religious, Cultural, and Social Life,” in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, ed. J. C. H. Blom et al., trans. Arnold J. and Erica Pomerans (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 116–31. See also Dorothée Sturkenboom, “Staging the Merchant: Commercial Vices and the Politics of Stereotyping in Early Modern Dutch Theatre,” Dutch Crossing: A Journal of Low Countries Studies 30 (2006): 216–28. For the decree by officials in Utrecht, see Publicatie tegens het inkomen en vernachten van Hoogduytsche Joden of smousen, derselver wyven or kinderen, binnen de stadt Utrecht: By provisie in de vroidschap gearresteert den 8 october, 1736 (Utrecht: Jac. Van Poolsum, 1736).

[34] A copy of the play is available at http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/Dutch/Ceneton/Quincampoix1720.html. For a useful discussion of Dutch toleration, see John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 4.

[35] William Swannenburg, De vervrolykende Momus, Amsterdam, 7 July 1727, no. 30, 234–38; De Hollandsche Spectator, 18 January 1734, no. 233, 322–23; De koopman, of bijdragen ten opbouw van Neêrlands koophandel en zeevaard, Amsterdam, vol. 2, 1769, 438.

[36] Dorothée Sturkenboom, “Merchants on the Defensive: National Self-Images in the Dutch Republic of the Late Eighteenth Century,” in The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists, ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 99–124.

[37] Clé Leger, “Merchants in Charge: The Self-Perception of Amsterdam Merchants, ca. 1550–1700,” in Jacob and Secretan, Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists, 75–97.

[38] Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 461.

[39] For recent research that suggests a similar socialization, see Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, eds., Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). The image is further reinforced by many of the essays found in Jacob and Secretan, Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists.

Jean Bodin on Sovereignty

olliek1 — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 14:02:39 -0700

Political theory is an amphibious beast with one foot in the changing stream of history and another on the enduring ground of human nature and the human condition. Jean Bodin’s theory of absolute and undivided sovereignty was a product of time and place. His Six livres de la République (1576) was written four years after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, during which thousands of prominent Huguenots were killed by the Catholic League a few days after the marriage of Margaret of Valois to Henri of Navarre, a Protestant who later converted to Catholicism when he ascended the French throne as Henri IV in 1589. Protestant thinkers, such as François Hotman, who published Franco-Gallia in 1573, argued that French kings were initially chosen by the people and could be deposed by the people.[1] Bodin’s doctrine of absolute sovereignty was, as Julian Franklin has argued, a product of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Huguenot Monarchomach theories, to which Bodin was opposed.[2] Sovereign power, Bodin hoped, could police and moderate the religious conflict between the Huguenots and the Catholic League that cost so many lives in his day. Bodin was a “politique,” a partisan of neither the Huguenots nor the Catholic League, who had the reputation of caring more for civil peace than doctrinal truth. However, Bodin’s Six livres de la République was not merely a livre de circonstance[3] but a major work of political theory concerned with enduring questions of the relations between religion and politics, of the conflict between patrician and plebeian orders, of the forms of government, and of the distinction between sovereignty and government.

I argue that Bodin, the theorist of absolute sovereignty, was not as hostile to liberal or democratic theories as is often assumed. John Locke recommended Bodin to his students at Christ Church, Oxford.[4] Bodin, as we shall see, insisted that monarchs cannot tax their subjects without their consent, a doctrine central to Locke and later to Rousseau and to the American and French revolutionaries. Bodin’s distinction between sovereignty and government, which I shall shortly analyze, anticipated liberal doctrines of the separation of powers and the subordination of the executive to the legislative branch of government, as well as Rousseau’s doctrine of the distinction between a sovereign legislative and an aristocratic executive subordinate to the sovereign people. Further, I shall show that Bodin’s subordination of church to state served the goal of religious toleration and that the subordination of church to state was espoused by champions of religious toleration, such as Hobbes, Mandeville, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, and John Stuart Mill, and thus was a genuine liberal alternative to Locke’s and Jefferson’s doctrine of the separation of church and state. I also wish to show that although Bodin was a monarchist, he wrote positively about republics and indeed could be said to have inspired some of the neo-Roman republicanism that flourished around the time of the American and French revolutions.

Monarchic Republics

John Adams, who wrote widely and more intelligently about republicanism than any other author but who was reputed by his opponents to be a monarchist, declared to Mercy Otis Warren in 1807: “There is not a more unintelligible word in the English language than republicanism.”[5] There is similar ambiguity in the French word république. Jean Bodin’s Les Six livres de la République (1576) is usually translated as The Six Books of the Commonwealth.[6] Since Bodin was a monarchist, his term république refers to states generally rather than democracies or aristocracies specifically—or, more accurately, states other than despotisms and tyrannies, where the private interest of the ruler or ruling class takes precedence over the common interest. In this respect, Bodin followed the practice of Roman emperors, from Augustus to Hadrian and Valens, who referred to common concerns of the Roman Empire as rei publicae.[7] In the century after Bodin, Hobbes used the term “commonwealth” to refer to the body politic, not specifically to refer to the republican regimes of the Rump Parliament, the Barebone’s Parliament, and the Protectorate of the English Civil War. Bodin, like Hobbes, is usually understood as a theorist of absolute monarchy. However, he thought a royal (as opposed to a despotic) monarchy consults the Paris and provincial parlements and the Estates General with respect to legislation and taxation; “the most divine, most excellent, and the state form most proper to royalty is governed partly aristocratically and partly democratically.”[8]

As Rousseau was later to do, Bodin distinguished between sovereignty and government (the institutions through which the sovereign rules). This distinction was partly a result of his insistence that sovereign authority must be undivided: ultimate authority either rests in the people in a democracy, a minority of the people in an aristocracy, or one man in a monarchy. Bodin’s central idea is that sovereignty must be absolute, perpetual, and undivided. He recognized that his rejection of mixed sovereignty ran counter to the political theory of Aristotle and Polybius and apparently contrary to Greek and Roman political practice. Because of the different functions of the councils, senates, popular assemblies, magistracies, and popular courts, the Greeks and Romans understood “the characteristic feature of a republic to be composed of both aristocratic lordship and a popular state. I reply that there is indeed some semblance of reality in this attribution but nevertheless in effect it was a true popular state.”[9] In the same way as his theory limits the Paris Parlement and the English Parliament to merely an advisory role in relation to royal law or the king’s command, the Roman Senate, according to Bodin, had a purely consultative role, although he knew that the historical record did not fully accord with his theory. The comitia centuriata and then the comitia tribunata gave the law to Rome, or had the right of command, which is the mark of sovereignty. Julian Franklin wrote: “In the classical period of the Roman Republic the people, in comitia centuriata, could not act upon a legislative proposal without the Senate’s approval. Bodin is aware of this, and even approves of it as a check on the license of the people, while yet maintaining that the Roman Republic was a pure democracy.”[10] Bodin’s central principle of undivided sovereignty was not consistently sustained throughout Six livres; sovereignty in Rome was divided between the patrician Senate and the popular assemblies. Moreover, Bodin was quite aware that the weighted voting of the comitia centuriata actually left the power of legislation in the hands of the patricians and knights and excluded the vast majority of citizens. Indeed, Bodin admired the Roman Republic precisely because it was aristocratically governed by its Senate, which had the power to dispose over finances, authorize religious practices, appoint provincial governors, and award honors, which are “the great points of sovereignty [majesté].”[11] Whereas the Roman Republic had an aristocratic government (until the time of the Gracchi) to balance popular sovereignty, Athens, after Pericles’s abolition of its aristocratic Areopagus, had both democratic sovereignty and democratic government.[12] The later Roman Republic, like Periclean Athens, represented a shift from the sovereignty of the populus to that of the plebs, “that is, the lowest throngs,” and thus passed from “democracy through ochlocracy and to the dregs of the population.”[13] Although Bodin was horrified by the prospect of dethroning a sovereign, as his contemporaries, the Huguenot Monarchomachs, such as François Hotman, Hubert Languet, and Philippe de Mornay, advocated for tyrannies, he applauded the dethroning of Nero because the sovereignty rested with the people and Senate.[14] Thus, his doctrine of absolute and undivided sovereignty did not preclude recognizing that sovereignty in Rome was divided between an aristocratic Senate and popular assemblies.

Bodin’s theory of sovereignty responded to a number of pressing problems of his time and place besides the moderation of religious conflict between the Huguenots and the Catholic League. Bodin was also concerned to establish the independence of sovereign states from claims of overlordship by the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. Kenneth McRae has suggested that Bodin was “more a precursor than a protagonist of nationalism and of the nation-state.”[15] Chapter 9 of book 1 of Six livres examines in detail the claim of the papal jurists that many European kingdoms are fiefs of the Vatican and the claim of Pope Gelasius that the spiritual authority of the church is superior to the secular authority of the state. Bodin’s theory of sovereignty broke with the medieval view that kings ruled under law—that is, were subject to divine and natural law (the latter being the immemorial law that existed time out of mind, the law of the land or custom).[16] According to the medieval view, monarchs subject to law were kings; those not subject to law were tyrants. Bodin deferred to the tradition in that he wrote that kings were subject to divine and natural law, but according to Bodin, it was a matter for God and the king’s conscience—not for the king’s subjects—to interpret and enforce divine and natural law. Law, for Bodin as later for Hobbes, was sovereign command, and new regulations were essential in an expanding commercial economy when France was extending its jurisdiction over Brittany, Burgundy, Provence, Navarre, Franche-Comté, Artois, various independent territories, and those claimed by the Holy Roman Emperor. There was a need for common currency, weights, and measures, although local customs, independent towns, provincial governors, and parlements contested the right of the French Crown to make uniform laws. Bodin insisted that kings do not discover law but make the law and give it to their subjects. Local customs are only binding subject to the will of the sovereign. Bodin presented the relation of law to custom as follows:

Custom takes its force little by little, and by long years and the common consent of all or of most people: but law comes suddenly and takes its vigor from those who have the power to command everyone. Custom enters softly, quietly, and without force; law is commanded and proclaimed by power, often against the will of subjects: for this reason Dio Chrysostom compares custom to a king and law to a tyrant. Moreover, law can break customs, and if custom should derogate the law, the magistrate and those charged with upholding the laws always can have the laws enforced when it seems good to do so. Custom carries neither rewards [loyer] nor penalties; law always involves rewards or penalties . . . and, to cut the matter short, custom only has force by the sufferance and pleasure of the sovereign prince, who can convert a custom into law by his validation [qui peut faire un loy, y adjoustant son emologation].[17]

Bodin elaborated his theory of sovereignty in the context of an expanding commercial economy and a centralizing state wracked by religious conflict. With large parts of what is now France either independent or subject to pope or emperor, the plethora of local customs and jurisdictions were inconsistent with the uniformity of law or royal command.

State sovereignty and religious toleration

Those of us schooled in the rectitude of the doctrine of the separation of church and state, elaborated by Locke and Jefferson, might think it odd that Bodin’s recipe for religious toleration and peace, the tranquility born of order,[18] was for the Crown to be supreme over religious matters. Yet Bodin’s solution of the subordination of churches to the state was espoused by many Enlightenment thinkers who were strong advocates of religious toleration. Bernard Mandeville wrote: “A good Government in all Countries pays a deference to the national Church, and no Liberty of Conscience ought to interfere with her just Rights.” Mandeville added that “the greatest argument for Tolleration is, that differences in Opinion can do no hurt, if all Clergy-men are kept in awe, and no more independent of the State than the Laity; whereas the calamities that attend Persecution are endless.”[19] Voltaire, the archetypical champion of religious toleration, wrote: “Reason informs us that the prince must be absolute master over all ecclesiastical policy [Police], without any restrictions whatsoever.”[20] Denis Diderot asserted that “it is good that in churches submission to God and to society are preached in equal measure.”[21] Anthony Strugnell wrote that “Diderot strongly advocates state intervention and control . . . in ecclesiastical affairs. The Church he sees as the greatest danger to the sovereignty of the nation, a view common to all the philosophes. . . . The state, in Diderot’s opinion, must exercise its right of control over every aspect of the Church’s doctrinal teaching and activities.”[22] David Hume and John Stuart Mill, two British votaries of religious toleration, advocated the state establishment of religion to transform religious zealots into leisured civil servants and thus abate religious enthusiasm.[23] Although Hobbes, like Bodin, thought religious strife would best be mitigated by the sovereign’s control of religious observance,[24] he particularly praised Cromwell’s imposition of the independence of religious congregations from the state: “And so we are reduced to the Independency of the Primitive Christians to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he likest best: Which, if it be without contention . . . is perhaps the best: First, because there ought to be no Power over the Consciences of men, but of the Word it selfe . . . : and secondly, because it is unreasonable in them, who teach there is such danger in every little Errour, to require a man endued with Reason of his own, to follow the Reason of any other man, or of the most voices of many other men.”[25]

I mention these later thinkers not to suggest that Bodin shared their views on religion but simply to indicate that religious toleration and state sovereignty over religious observance are not incompatible. Bodin thought all religions useful to buttress social stability, to limit tyranny, and to shape moeurs and favored extending toleration to all beliefs except atheism and witchcraft. Bodin’s Colloquium heptaplomeres (1593), published three years before his death, is a civil discussion among a Catholic, some Protestants, a Jew, a Muslim, a deist, and a philosophical skeptic in which the non-Christians are not decisively refuted by the Christian thinkers, or the Protestants by the Catholic. In Six livres, Bodin asserted that there is only one true religion but using force to bring people to it is counterproductive, and he praised the king of Turkey for guarding his religion zealously but allowing adherents of Judaism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy to practice freely.[26] He also praised the Roman Republic, “the most flourishing and best-ordered state of any,” which was attributable in part to the fact that “no god was ever received in Rome without the Senate’s warrant.”[27] If Rousseau followed Bodin in distinguishing sovereignty from government, he might also be said to have followed him (in The Social Contract, 4:8) with respect to support for a civil religion that preaches the merits of God and an afterlife and that excludes the intolerant, those who hold that only one church provides salvation and whose adherents believe it right to compel unbelievers into the “true church.”[28] Bodin thought a civil religion essential to prevent immorality, which breeds tyranny, and also to delegitimize justifications of rebellion against tyrannical and impious kings by Huguenots and the Catholic League.

State sovereignty, private property, and taxation

In his Methodus ad facilem historiarium cognitiones (1565) and Six livres (1576), Bodin cited Seneca to the effect that sovereign power is limited by the private property of subjects: “Ad reges potestas omnium pertinet, ad singulos proprietas” (To the kings power over all things belongs; to individual citizens, property) and “Omnia Rex imperio possidet, singuli dominio” (A king possesses all within his power; an individual has dominion over his property).[29] Whereas despots and tyrants take the goods of others, a king “cannot take or give the goods of another without the consent of the owner [seigneur].”[30] Thus, unlike Hobbes, who thought the right to private property excluded fellow subjects but not the sovereign from the property, Bodin precluded confiscation or taxation without the consent of the proprietor. Montesquieu praised Bodin for this view in L’esprit des lois (5:16). Bodin thought the French Crown could subsist on its royal domains, with supplementary income from colonies, customs, tolls, gifts, and, last of all and least desirable, its levying of imposts on subjects, but the last only when clearly necessary to the state’s welfare and preferably with the consent of the parlements and estats.[31]

Bodin’s insistence that sovereigns should not tax subjects without their consent may be a medieval residue to his theory[32] and is inconsistent with his theory of absolute sovereignty. Julian Franklin holds that Bodin’s insistence on popular consent to new taxation is not inconsistent with his theory of absolute monarchy but is “purely fiscal” and raised no constitutional challenges to royal absolutism, and that Bodin’s action, as deputy in the Estates General at Blois, in blocking royal proposals for raising taxes “was devoid of constitutional intentions.”[33] However, Franklin’s interpretation is difficult to square with Bodin’s claim that he risked his life at Blois by his opposition to the Crown and, replying to a Genevan critic, that he could not be more public-spirited “than what I have dared to write—that even kings are not allowed to levy taxes without the fullest consent of the citizens.”[34] Moreover, as J. H. M. Salmon stated: “it is a very strange conception of sovereignty which is not financed.”[35] In Bodin’s theory, the parlements and estats are purely advisory bodies, but he never explained how the power to withhold taxes is not a component of sovereign power.

Like Locke, Bodin did not distinguish between an individual’s own consent to taxation and the consent of a majority of elected representatives. Rousseau cited Bodin, not Locke, when he insisted in his Discourse on Political Economy that “the consent of the people or its representatives [représentans]” is essential to raise taxes and denounced the imposteurs who levy new taxes on the poor.[36] As distinct from Bodin, Locke, and Rousseau, Hobbes thought an absolute right to private property was incompatible with sovereignty; without the sovereign power to tax subjects, revolution will be the consequence. While Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty has greater internal consistency than Bodin’s, at least with respect to the issue of sovereignty, property, and taxation, the latter’s theory was espoused by constitutional monarchists and republicans from his day to ours. Taxation without the consent of the taxpayer, or the representatives of taxpayers, is theft and may justify violent resistance to the sovereign,[37] which for Bodin is the very thing he sought to avoid.

Bodin on ancient Republics

Although Bodin thought the historical record established the superiority of monarchical sovereigns to aristocratic or popular sovereignty,[38] he spoke warmly of the Roman Republic and referred to Julius Caesar as a “tyrant” and a “dictator.”[39] Bodin favored monarchy over aristocracy and democracy because he believed that monarchs could best limit class conflict between rich and poor, as well as religious conflicts, such as that between the Huguenots and the Catholic League. The ancient republics were less shattered by religious strife than states of the sixteenth century, but they were more wracked by class conflict. Following Aristotle, Bodin thought that the conflict between the many and the few, or between democrats and aristocrats, was fundamentally a struggle between rich and poor. A mixed constitution was the rule of the rich over the poor and the rule of the poor over the rich—that is, inherently unstable and apt to tilt to oppressive oligarchies or, more likely, mob rule followed by tyranny. Bodin thought “a licentious anarchy is worse than the most powerful tyranny in the world.”[40] The Aristotelian mixed constitution is to be distinguished from Lockean, Montesquieuan, or Madisonian division of powers, which was intended, not to mix rich and poor in government, but to place separate functions of government in different members of the propertied class and exclude the poor from government. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, a deafening silence prevailed with respect to Aristotle’s view of the collective prudence and integrity of the many poor—the basis of Aristotle’s commendation of a mixed constitution in which the rich serve in individual magistracies and the poor dominate popular assemblies and courts—and a version of mob psychology put in its place. Bodin would have approved Madison’s dictum, in Federalist 55: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” Bodin wrote that “wisdom for ruling is the natural capacity of very few. What stupider than the plebs? What more immoderate? When they have been stirred up against good people, what more hysterical? Rightly Livy said, ‘The nature of the multitude is such that it either serves meekly or rules insolently.’”[41]

Although a monarchist, Bodin anticipated the enthusiasm for the Roman Republic that flowered in the eighteenth century and came to wormy fruition with Robespierre and then rotted when the First Consul became the French emperor. Six livres begins with a statement of the importance of raising children with good moeurs. The ancients excelled at this practice: the Spartans raised their children to be courageous; the Romans, to be just. Bodin wrote that “the Roman Republic flourished in justice, and surpassed that of Sparta, because not only did the Romans have magnanimity, but also true justice was like a subject to which they addressed all their action.”[42] The Roman Republic, “which was the most illustrious of any state,” as manifested in the extent of its empire,[43] was fostered by the father’s power of life and death over his children. “Now paternal power having been little by little weakened with the decline of the Roman Empire, soon afterward ancient virtue and all the splendor of their Republic also vanished, and in place of piety and good morals [moeurs], a million vices and misfortunes followed from it.”[44]

Although Bodin wrote that the Roman Senate had less authority than the privy councils of European monarchies, he was clear that the Roman Republic was great because of its Senate, and its decline began at the time of the Gracchi, when “the dregs of the population,” “the plebs, that is, the lowest throngs, were enabled to order what should be law.”[45] After Pericles abolished the aristocratic Areopagus, the Athenians were even more democratic: the plebs held legislative power, magistracies were chosen by lot, payment for public office was instituted, and “what was even worse,” there was voting by a show of hands.[46] Although Bodin usually referred to Rome as a popular or democratic state, even under its kings, he sometimes referred to the Roman Republic, prior to its licentious descent into “the anarchy of its turbulent plebs,” as an oligarchy.[47] Bodin’s view was that Rome was exemplary because it combined popular sovereignty with aristocratic government,[48] which was Rousseau’s ideal, whereas Athens had democratic sovereignty and democratic government, which Rousseau thought fit only for gods. Sometimes Bodin attributed Rome’s flowering and good order to the sovereign powers of the Roman Senate[49] and sometimes to its aristocratic censors.[50] Bodin thought large aristocratic republics more stable than small democratic republics,[51] a view Hume and the Federalists were later to espouse.

Bodin thought that there was much greater opportunity to develop virtue in republics than in monarchies, where the opportunities for acquiring honor and glory are curtailed by kings: “It is why the Republic of Rome had more great generals, wise senators, eloquent orators, and knowledgeable jurisconsults than other barbarian, Greek, or Latin states (Républiques).[52] Republican Romans were model imperialists; they “filled the earth with their colonies, with an immortal glory for their justice, wisdom, and power.”[53] The imperial republic was a model for monarchists as well as republicans, for expanding nation-states and for the prospect of overseas colonies. Bodin also provided sage counsel to would-be imperialists: fear kept the Romans virtuous, but the defeat of its enemy Carthage spelled the end of Roman virtue.[54]

Bodin’s sovereignty then and now

Bodin’s theory of sovereignty was more prescriptive than descriptive, more an ideal that an independent Crown could rein in the religious wars and impose a centralized order on feudal magnates and provincial jurisdictions and customs than an actual depiction of the fragmented powers and authorities in sixteenth-century France. Henri IV, the former Huguenot who thought Paris well worth a mass at the end of the century, and Louis XIII, with his able minister Cardinal Richelieu’s policy of state centralism, brought France closer to a state of undivided sovereignty in the following century. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648), following the Thirty Years’ War within the Holy Roman Empire, instituted the principle of state sovereignty, establishing the religion of the ruler as the national religion of the sovereign state. If Bodin’s sovereignty was a defense against feudal anarchy and religious strife, might we say that if the Westphalian doctrine of state sovereignty creates anarchy in a globalized economy, it might be preferable to internationalize Bodin’s doctrine of sovereignty? If no national bank or regulatory agency can set fiscal, monetary, trade, and investment policy, and environmental hazards are not merely national in scope, bankers’ investments in perhaps incomprehensible derivatives and capitalists’ outsourcing of jobs and pollutants can put the world at great risk. The United Nations has not even the policing power to regulate conflict that sixteenth-century French kings had, nor can it make effective the decisions of the World Court, World Bank, or World Trade Organization. Perhaps the members of the G20, the successor to the G7 (the leading trading nations), can cobble together some banking, trade, and investment regulations that can be enforced by mandatory sanctions imposed on violating nations. That is, the Westphalian doctrine of state sovereignty may be as much a barrier to international security as were the Huguenot nobility and the Catholic League to the security of sixteenth-century France, enabling the capitalist corporations to be as lawless as les Grands of the sixteenth century. Or conversely, perhaps our knowledge of Bourbon despotism makes the prospect of a world state unattractive, and sixteenth-century feudal anarchy and twenty-first-century capitalist anarchy bearable by contrast.

[1] François Hotman, Francogallia, Latin text by Ralph Giesey, trans. J. H. M. Salmon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 173, 179, 205, 221, 235, 307, 401–3.

[2] Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), vii, 41. The French word Monarchomaque derives from the Greek monarchos, “monarch,” and makhomai, “to fight,” hence an opponent of monarchy. The Huguenots presented themselves as opponents of absolute monarchy, but royalists maintained that the term connoted tyrannicide.

[3] I do not mean to suggest that Franklin’s historical approach to the understanding of Bodin’s theory of sovereignty attempts to reduce the theory to the historical circumstances from which it arose but rather to question his view (Jean Bodin, 107) that Bodin’s legacy appealed solely to royal absolutists and “the history of Bodin’s theory of absolutism is a rather dreary tale.” I shall indicate that Locke and Montesquieu found Bodin’s views on the sanctity of private property congenial, and Locke and Rousseau subscribed to Bodin’s view that taxation requires popular consent, a view that Franklin found consistent with Bodin’s theory of absolute sovereignty and which I think to be an interesting tension or inconsistency in his theory of sovereignty.

[4] W. H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism and Politics: Two Traditions of English Political Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 125.

[5] Adams cited in David Wooton, Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 1.

[6] Richard Knolles 1606 translation was entitled The six bookes of a common-weale. The translations by M. J. Tooley, Six Books of the Commonwealth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), and by Julian H. Franklin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from “The Six Books of the Commonwealth” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), are abridged versions of Bodin’s text. I shall be quoting from Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République (Paris: Fayard, 1986) but will provide, after the volume and page numbers of the Fayard edition of Bodin, the book and chapter numbers (in roman numerals) for those with access to the Knolles, Tooley, or Franklin translations.

[7] P. A. Brunt and J. M. Moore, eds., Res Gestae Divi Augusti: The Achievements of the Divine Augustus (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); Mary T. Boatwright, Hadrian and the Cities of the Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 74–75; Arnold Hugh Martin Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 815–16.

[8] Bodin, Six livres, 6:254 (VI:vi).

[9] Ibid., 2:27 (II:i). Franklin noted that Bodin could have derived his view that Rome was a purely popular state from a close reading of Polybius (Jean Bodin, 33).

[10] Julian Franklin, “Jean Bodin and the End of Medieval Constitutionalism,” in Jean Bodin: Verhandlungen der internationalen Bodin Tagung in München, ed. Horst Denzer (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1973), 164. However, Franklin pointed out that in Bodin’s time the status of the Roman Senate’s authority to initiate legislation before the third century BC was uncertain, and thus Bodin had grounds for thinking that popular sovereignty existed in republican Rome as well as in Athens (Jean Bodin, 33). Nevertheless, Bodin sometimes asserted that the Roman Senate shared sovereignty with the popular assemblies and sometimes asserted that only the popular assemblies had sovereign legislative power.

[11] Bodin, Six livres, 3:36–37 (III:i).

[12] Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (1565; New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 185, 193.

[13] Ibid., 179, 184.

[14] Bodin, Six livres, 2:73 (II:v).

[15] M. K. McRae, “Bodin’s Sense of Nationality,” in Actes du Colloque interdisciplinaire d’Angers, 24 au 27 mai 1984 (Angers: Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 1985), 155.

[16] Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, trans. S. B. Chrimes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968); Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Franklin, “Jean Bodin and the End of Medieval Constitutionalism”; and Ralph E. Giesey, “Medieval Jurisprudence in Bodin’s Concept of Sovereignty,” in Denzer, Jean Bodin: Verhandlungen der internationalen Bodin Tagung in München, 151–86.

[17] Bodin, Six livres, 1:307–8 (I:x).

[18] See W. H. Greenleaf, “Bodin and the Idea of Order,” in Denzer, Jean Bodin: Verhandlungen der internationalen Bodin Tagung in München, 23–38; and Greenleaf, Order, Experience and Politics, 126–27.

[19] Bernard Mandeville, Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church and National Happiness (London: J. Brotherton, 1723), 241, 244.

[20] Voltaire, La voix du sage et du peuple (Amsterdam, 1750), 8.

[21] Denis Diderot, Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 115.

[22] Anthony Strugnell, Diderot’s Politics: A Study of the Evolution of Diderot’s Thought after the Encyclopedia (The Hague: Martin Nijhoff, 1973), 224.

[23] David Hume, The History of England (London: William Pickering, 1826), 4:27; John Stuart Mill, Collected Works, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 6:85–86.

[24] Germano Bellusi, “L’absolutisme politique et la tolerance religieuse dans l’oeuvre de Jean Bodin et de Thomas Hobbes,” in Actes du Colloque interdisciplinaire d’Angers, 43–47. Bellusi asserted that Hobbes wished to impose doctrinal and ritual uniformity on the nation, whereas the following quotation indicates that Hobbes thought that independency of religious congregations was the best solution to the problem of church and state.

[25] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin, 1984), chap. 47, 711.

[26] Bodin, Six livres, 4:206–7 (IV:vii).

[27] Ibid., 3:37 (III:i).

[28] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1964), 3:468–69.

[29] Bodin, Method, 205; Bodin, Six livres, 1:223 (I:viii).

[30] Bodin, Six livres, 1:223 (I:viii); see also 1:221, 2:35, 43 (II.ii); Bodin, Method, 205, 213.

[31] Bodin, Six livres, 6:36–37, 67 (VI:ii).

[32] Giesey, “Medieval Jurisprudence in Bodin’s Concept of Sovereignty,” 171; Franklin, introduction to On Sovereignty, xxi. On the other hand, Locke’s doctrine of consent to taxation is not usually considered a medieval holdover; contemporary cynics might consider Locke’s doctrine of individual consent to taxation to constitute a justification for tax evasion. See Charles Adams, For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1999), 285.

[33] Franklin, Jean Bodin, 88–91.

[34] Ibid., 102. Bodin’s actions as deputy in the Estates General are discussed in Franklin, introduction to On Sovereignty, x–xi; and Tooley, introduction to Six Books, xii–xiii.

[35] J. H. M. Salmon, “Bodin and the Monarchomachs,” in Denzer, Jean Bodin: Verhandlungen der internationalen Bodin Tagung in München, 363, 365, and discussion on 476.

[36] Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:270, 278.

[37] In Hobbes’s time, the reluctance of inland counties to pay “ship money” to outfit the Royal Navy was a major cause of the English Civil War. The American colonies, the richest and least taxed part of the British Empire, were reluctant to be taxed after (not before) the British had defeated their Spanish and French imperial rivals for hegemony of North America. The slogan “no taxation without representation” probably would not have been acceptable to the colonies if American representatives were a minority in a British parliament. Taxation, consent, and representation were also major factors in the French Revolution. Article 14 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen states: “All citizens have the right, by themselves or through their representatives, to have demonstrated to them the necessity of public taxes, to consent to them freely,” and to assess the use made of them and the means of collection. Whereas individual consent, for Bodin and Locke, probably referred to the seigneurs in the Estates General and the lords in the House of Lords, individual consent in the French Revolution may have been intended to include the direct participation of the Montagnards in deliberating about the justice of taxation. In my view, the conjunction of taxation and consent should be abandoned, since most people are reluctant to pay taxes and find reasons to avoid paying taxes if they can. Or, since consent to taxation is a fixed feature of our political culture, we should understand consent, as Adam Smith did, to be “but a very figurative metaphoricall consent which is given here.” See Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 324.

[38] Bodin, Six livres, 4:18 (IV:i), 6:180–81 (VI:iv); Bodin, Method, 252–53, 270–71.

[39] Bodin, Six livres, 2:82–83 (II:v).

[40] Ibid., preface, 1:14.

[41] Bodin, Method, 269.

[42] Bodin, Six livres, 1:37 (I:i).

[43] Ibid., 1:43 (I:ii).

[44] Ibid., 1:70 (I:iv).

[45] Bodin, Method, 179, 184.

[46] Ibid., 193.

[47] Ibid., 237; for his view that the people had sovereign power under the early kings, see 191.

[48] Bodin, Six livres, 2:121 (II:v).

[49] Ibid., 3:36–37 (III:i), 4:136 (IV:iv), 178 (IV:vi).

[50] Ibid., 4:142 (IV:v).

[51] Ibid., 4:39, 49–51 (IV:i).

[52] Ibid., 5:101 (V:iv).

[53] Ibid., 6:49 (VI:ii).

[54] Ibid., 5:140–41 (V:v). From Bodin’s view of the disastrous victory of the Romans over their imperial rival Carthage, we might take the lesson that all imperialist victories are defeats: the British victory over the Spanish and French in America led to the American Revolution; the American victory over the British owed much to the French army and navy, the expenditures of which were a major cause of the French Revolution; and in our day, the victory of the American-backed Afghans over the Russians in Afghanistan has been seen by Chalmers Johnson, in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), and Sheldon Wolin, in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), to mark the beginning of the end of the American empire.

Spanish Antislavery and Africa, 1808–1898

Marissa Gemma — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 15:32:18 -0700

Spain had a long history with the slave trade from Africa, predating the conquest of the Americas. But Spain’s connections to Africa and the slave trade set it apart from other European Atlantic empires, especially from its Iberian neighbor, Portugal, in that until the end of the eighteenth century its participation in the traffic was indirect. Through a changing system of licenses and privileges, the Spanish Crown farmed out slaving to foreign merchants and placed quotas on the number of slaves that could be carried to the American colonies. This equivocal distance from direct participation in the transatlantic slave trade, slavery without slaving, also received support from theologians and jurists troubled by Portuguese machinations in Africa. Unlike Portugal or, later on, other European empires, Spain had no trading forts on the coast of Africa until the attempt to make the island of Fernando Po into one in the 1770s and 1780s. When Bourbon officials, under intense lobbying from Caribbean planters and military pressure from Britain, unleashed the trade in 1789 they abolished the old system based on monopolistic privileges.[1] Cuban and Spanish slavers rushed to the coast of Africa and other Caribbean islands to trade with foreign merchants, though some, like Pedro Blanco, would later set up their own fugitive forts in the Gulf of Guinea.[2] The liberties granted in 1789 initiated a boom of slave trading to Cuba that would last, with some reverses, until 1867.

When Spanish abolitionists attacked the slave trade and Cuban slavery, they signaled Spain’s altered relationship to Africa in their arguments. I will examine these arguments about Spain and Africa (and Cuba) by looking at antislavery in two key periods of imperial crisis: the first opened in 1808 by the French overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy, the second beginning in 1868 with the outbreak of rebellion in Cuba and the first sustained assaults on slavery and Spanish rule in the island, a crisis unresolved until the invasion of Cuba by the United States in 1898. What I hope to show is that abolitionists believed that Spain’s short but intense involvement in the slave trade from Africa was a historical anomaly. Some believed that Spain must continue to absent itself from Africa; others, that it should finally undertake the robust colonization pursued by other European empires.

Joseph Blanco White and Isidoro de Antillón: Spain out of Africa

The Bourbon monarchy deregulated the slave trade to its Caribbean colonies in 1789, but public debate over the trade came into the open several years later in 1808 with the war against the French, the uprisings in Spanish America, and the uneasy alliance formed with Britain. The Cortes de Cádiz, the provisional government that carried out the resistance to the French occupation in the absence of the monarch Ferdinand VII, briefly debated banning the trade, a measure supported by both Spanish and American deputies. However, an immediate challenge from Havana, penned by the impresario of the Cuban plantation complex, Francisco Arango y Parreño, silenced the opposition. Arango argued that the Cuban plantations, fed by the slave trade from Africa, were essential to the well-being of Spain’s imperial economy. Many Spaniards concurred, and no action was taken against the slave trade.

There were, however, dissenters and they sounded their criticisms from outside the Cortes. Two passionately written pamphlets by learned and prominent intellectual figures sought to sway political opinion during the resistance to the French. One was written from abroad and likely had little circulation in Spain because it appeared at the time of Ferdinand VII’s restoration, when open political debate was shutting down. The author was the expatriate and former priest Joseph Blanco White, who at the behest of British abolitionists translated, and effectively rewrote, one of William Wilberforce’s denunciations of the slave trade in 1814. The thrust of his arguments to potential Spanish readers (the pamphlet was circulated among Spanish officials by the British minister in Madrid) drew upon a familiar theme in Spanish criticisms of the slave trade: that Spain had never been a slave-trading power, differing significantly from its European rivals. “One must keep in mind that no other European nation has had fewer slaves, considering the extension of its colonies, nor has any other based less of its prosperity on the labor of those unhappy beings than the Spanish nation.”[3] Thus, the massive upsurge in slaving to Cuba and the development of the plantations were historical aberrations. He also turned to more immediate and intimate matters to provoke outrage by comparing Spanish and Cuban slaving in Africa to the French invasion and subjection of Spain. Spanish captivity was an experience that Blanco could easily invoke, as his own brother Fernando was a prisoner of war held in France between 1808 and 1814, one of tens of thousands of Spaniards who suffered a similar fate.[4] By drawing this parallel, Blanco was making a strong argument against the slave trade: just as France must exit Spain, so Spain must exit Africa.

Do not forget that you too have seen foreigners set foot in your homeland. Leave in peace that of others. Leave those unhappy Africans the scarce portion of goods that Heaven has bestowed on their land. Leave them in peace so that they can advance little by little along the road of civilization. Just because they are poor and ignorant, can you treat them worse than you would the beasts in the wilderness? They are poor and ignorant. But the same blood runs in their veins that runs in yours. The tears that their eyes shed are just like yours. Like you, they are parents, children, and siblings. Martyrs of Spanish patriotism! . . . From this day forward stop the Spaniards from going to the coast of Africa, where they surpass in cruelty and injustice those invaders that destroyed your soul. You, who know what it is to have [your families] ripped from your homes by foreign soldiers, leave to the father his children, and to the husband his wife.[5]

Blanco’s demand that Spain exit Africa was an echo of Isidoro de Antillón’s writings on the slave trade from the same period. Antillón was a geographer active in Madrid’s learned societies before the French invasion. After 1808, he and Blanco worked together as editors of the Spanish government’s official newspaper, the Seminario patriótico, before Blanco went into exile in 1810. Among his works was an anti-slave-trade tract that sought to demonstrate that the deregulated slave traffic was not only anomalous but also unnecessary when understood within the structure of the Spanish colonial empire. Antillón insisted in his work, originally written and publicly delivered in 1803 but printed for the first time in 1811, that Spain must ban the traffic and instead rely on the indigenous population of the colonies, which had grown considerably in the eighteenth century, as the backbone of the labor force.[6] Antillón knew of course that this policy would have little appeal in Havana, because the indigenous population had virtually disappeared there, but to such objections he had a ready answer inspired by Toussaint Louverture during the Haitian Revolution: “There can be no doubt. The blacks will one day find a valiant leader who will avenge them and ensure their independence through force. And we must fear that finding the Crassus to this new Spartacus will not be easy.”[7]

But security against a possible slave revolt was not the main thrust of Antillón’s antislavery message. Rather, he viewed the turn toward the slave trade as a miscalculation that ignored the real strengths of Spanish colonial society. Antillón believed that Spain enjoyed considerable advantages over its French and British rivals because they relied too heavily on dangerous and unreliable enslaved African labor. The Saint-Domingue rebellion and the frequency of uprisings and maroonage in the British and French islands showed that the only way to stabilize tropical production in the rival empires would be by moving the plantations from the Antilles to Africa itself, where free laborers could be recruited. In contrast, Spain’s American empire benefited from a large indigenous workforce. If Spain would effectively apply its own colonial legislation, the Laws of the Indies, then Indian workers would not only be more productive but also receive more just treatment from their employers and royal officials. Spain would thus take advantage of its superior human and institutional resources in its efforts to catch up to its rivals by effectively inverting their formulas, substituting Indian labor for African: “It is uncontestable that in our Americas the Indians can take over the labor of the blacks, especially if they are treated with less harshness and arbitrariness than heretofore.”[8] The message was clear: the prosperity and security of the Spanish Empire lay not in Africa but in the Americas.

Rafael María de Labra: abolitionism and imperialism

In 1817, the restored Spanish monarch Ferdinand VII agreed to a treaty with the British government to ban the slave trade to the Spanish colonies. However, the Spanish government did little to enforce it and, on the ground in Cuba and Puerto Rico, actually encouraged the illegal trade, which spiked to new highs in the 1820s and 1830s. Though British initiatives and shifts in market conditions for sugar squeezed the trade in the 1840s and 1850s, by the time the US Civil War broke out the traffic to Cuba was surging anew. But new cooperation between Britain and the United States against slave trading spelled doom for the traffic. In 1867, the Spanish government finally abolished it effectively.[9] Though Spanish abolitionists had spoken out against the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, proslavery interests, both in the metropole and in the colonies, had carried the day for several decades more.

The Civil War in the United States and the disruptions that it caused in the Spanish colonial system created the opportunities for new antislavery movements that exercised greater influence than the isolated criticisms of the early nineteenth century. In Cuba, the separatist uprising of 1868 adopted antislavery positions and freed many slaves in the zones of the island where the uprising was effective. In Spain, the Spanish Abolitionist Society, founded by Spanish and Puerto Rican reformers in Madrid in 1865, pushed for abolition in Cuba and Puerto Rico and after 1868 demanded increasingly radical action. Many believed that only immediate abolition would preserve Spanish rule in Cuba by undercutting the rebellion’s legitimacy and enhancing Spain’s image among the enslaved population. One of the most forceful advocates of this strategy was Rafael María de Labra, a young lawyer and abolitionist who was widely involved in Madrid’s reformist circles and connected to the nascent political parties in the colonies (he would represent Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Spanish Senate later in the century).

Labra wrote widely about the Spanish colonies, not only those in the Caribbean. Indeed, after the crisis of the slave system in Cuba, where a protracted abolition process finally came to a close in 1886, he was among those Spanish commentators who believed that the metropole needed to invest more seriously in its Pacific and African outposts. In part, Labra was consciously reflecting the imperialist politics of the era, noting that Spain lagged far behind its European neighbors in an era of aggressive expansion. Yet he was also reflecting interests in the peninsula that were shifting their investments away from the Caribbean colonies in search of safer returns. Capital from Cuba sought safe havens in Spain, the United States, and Britain, but there were also interest groups that demanded more effective exploitation of the other colonies. For example, Barcelona investors, some of whom with fortunes that originated in Cuba, were quite interested in promoting the development of the Philippines.[10]

Though Labra was not a businessman, he was certainly sensitive to the changes taking place in the Spanish colonial system because of the abolition of Cuban slavery. He fully endorsed greater involvement in the Pacific and African colonies. Unlike Blanco and Antillón, then, Labra favored colonization in the Spanish islands and the creation of a small Spanish enclave in Africa. He saw colonization in Africa as a way of boosting Spain’s international presence and its prosperity in an era of intense rivalries and competition, an era in which Spain would not fare well.

However, like Blanco and Antillón, Labra called attention to Spain’s weak presence in Africa and the futility of its colonizing efforts in the nineteenth century. During a renewed period of crisis in Cuba—the War of Independence that broke out in 1895—Labra spoke before the Spanish Cortes and then published a pamphlet about Spain’s African settlements. He sketched the abandonment and neglect of the territories, making unfavorable comparisons to the Portuguese settlements in São Tome and Principe. He urged the conquest and the forced settlement of the people of Fernando Po, the Bubi, and efforts to incorporate them into Spanish civilization. Doing so required immigration from the peninsula and a strong administrative and military presence to take over from the missionaries, who were practically the sole Spanish presence. But there was a whiff of despair about the projected undertaking, and one of the factors that provoked this sensation in Labra was indeed ignorance. Unlike Britain, France, and the Netherlands with their ample publications of colonial data, Spain’s small quota of knowledge about Africa gathered dust in archives so that Spaniards knew nothing about their colonial possessions: “there in the Archive of the Ministry of Overseas Provinces, covered in dust and unknown by his countrymen and foreigners alike, keeping company with the unpublished Diccionario del idioma de los bubis written by the missionary Father Martínez Sanz in 1850, are the 12 thick volumes about Fernando Po edited by Sr. Pellón y Rodríguez some 25 years ago, a work truly worthy of esteem.”[11] Shortly thereafter, with the loss of Cuba, Spain’s ignorance of its African colony would appear all the more dire to Labra and other Spaniards.

Conclusions: Spain, Africa, and Cuba

Considering the questions raised by Lisa Surwillo about “the historiography of ignorance”[12] from the evidence gleaned from abolitionism, I would make the following points.

First, whether advocating distance from Africa like Blanco and Antillón or demanding more aggressive colonization like Labra, abolitionists called attention to the historic weakness of Spain’s presence in Africa, especially when compared with other European empires.

Second, abolitionists did consistently raise the question of Spanish ignorance: Blanco and Antillón wanted to bring to light the violence of Spanish slaving in Africa in the early nineteenth century, and at the end of the century Labra drew a picture of useful knowledge moldering in the colonial ministry’s archive to illustrate how little Spaniards knew, or could know, about the colonies in the Gulf of Guinea.

Third, if Africa was unknown (for better or worse), Africans were clearly not absent from abolitionist concerns. But the abolitionists’ focus was largely on Cuba. As one colonial minister, the Catalan Víctor Balaguer, whose pet project was the development of Spain’s presence in the Philippines, lamented: “but then there is Cuba, Cuba, which since 1870 has monopolized all of the hours of the minister, taking control of him body and soul.”[13] The same could be said of the abolitionists throughout the nineteenth century: what preoccupied them was how to end the slave trade, how to abolish slavery, how to enfranchise freed slaves, and how to maintain control of the colony in the midst of slave emancipation and anticolonial warfare. This preoccupation with Cuba, the greatest slave society in Spanish colonial history, qualifies “the historiography of ignorance.” Spain’s way toward knowledge of Africa and Africans would lead not through the continent but through the island of Cuba.

A paper presented at “Treating The Trata: A Conference on the Historiography of Ignorance and the Spanish Slave Trade,” Stanford University, April 9–10, 2010.

[1] Josep M. Delgado, “The Slave Trade in the Spanish Empire (1501–1808): The Shift from Periphery to Center,” in Slavery, Empire, and Abolitionism: Spain from Overseas Expansion to Cuban Abolition, ed. Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (forthcoming).

[2] See Michael Zeuske’s article in this issue.

[3] Joseph Blanco White, Bosquejo del comercio de esclavos y reflexiónes sobre este tráfico considerado moral, política y cristianamente, ed. Manuel Moreno Alonso (1814; repr., Seville: Ediciones Alfar, 1999), 152.

[4] Jean-René Aymes, Los españoles en Francia, 1808–1814: La deportación bajo el Primer Imperio (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1987).

[5] Blanco White, Bosquejo del comercio, 195–96 (emphasis in original).

[6] Isidoro de Antillón, Disertación sobre el origen de la esclavitud de los negros, motivos que la han perpetuado, ventajas que se le atribuyen y medios que podrían adoptarse para hacer prosperar nuestras colonias sin la esclavitud de los negros (Mallorca: Imprenta de Miguel Domingo, 1811), 67.

[7] Ibid., 75.

[8] Ibid., 67, and see also 53–67. On Spanish debates over policy toward the indigenous population in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see David Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). See also Josep M. Fradera, “Moments in a Postponed Abolition,” in Fradera and Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery, Empire, and Abolitionism. That Antillón first made these arguments in 1803 indicates that some Spaniards opposed the free traffic in slaves from the first moment, a history of opposition worth retrieving and reconsidering.

[9] Arthur Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817–1886 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967); and David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

[10] See Martin Rodrigo y Alharilla, Los marqueses de Comillas (1817–1925): Antonio y Claudio López (Madrid: LID, 2000). This is a study of one of the most famous nineteenth-century indianos, Antonio López, and his complex business interests.

[11] Rafael María de Labra, “Las colonias españolas del Golfo de Guinea,” in Cuestiones palpitantes de política, derecho y administración (Madrid: Tipografía de A. Alonso, 1897), 424.

[12] At the conference “Treating the Trata after 1808: The Historiography of Ignorance and the Spanish Slave Trade,” organized by Lisa Surwillo and held at Stanford University on April 9–10, 2010.

[13] Quoted in Javier Morillo-Alicea, “Uncharted Landscapes of ‘Latin America’: The Philippines in the Spanish Imperial Archipelago,” in Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends, ed. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara and John Nieto-Phillips (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 32.