Speech
I'm giving a presentation tomorrow. Spent the last hour and a half keyboard smashing this out. It quotes/takes from a couple different posts in here already, so. Yeah. Reallllllly hope it's long enough because I'm not going to check until the morning.
There is a tendency for people, looking back at the past, to make broad generalizations. “All of Christian Europe hated the Muslims.” To do so, however, is to ignore the differences between individuals and to interpret the past as being far less complex and complicated than our own time. One period of history that interests me is that of the Italian Renaissance. While researching this period, however, I realized there is a certain lack of information on the ways in which ethnicity shaped identity and interactions in this time. Many texts do not talk about it, even as newer ones touch on other topics such as gender and class and look at how they played out at this time. Some assert that there was a pan-European identity, or an identity that stretched across all of Christendom, that trumped other issues of region or nation. Historian Garrett Mattingly found it sufficient to state “in general, the Latin West inclined to lump Jews, heretics, schismatics, and pagans together as outsiders and natural enemies, while preserving, even in the bitterest of quarrels, a sense of solidarity in one Catholic faith”, without any explanation of why this was. Why was religion able to create a “sense of solidarity” across so many miles and so many other differences? And was religion able to do so at all? I feel that while over arching ideas such as Christianity did provide a sense of shared community they were weak in comparison to other, more local ties and connections.
Both regionalism and nationalism can be understood to shape a sense of community and self during the Renaissance, although there was no Italian nation state at this time. There were other countries, though, and records left by observers in Italy at this time show a clear understanding of differences between people from their peninsula and people from those other nations or places. France, Switzerland, and Reconquista Spain all played an active part in Italian politics.
In the Italian peninsula, however, there was no national government. The efficiency of the centralized governments in other places at this time can be debated as well, but Italy clearly had no unifying power. The different city-states such as Florence and Venice were their own governments and fought with one another for territory and control. The Church had been unable to collect money owed it from petty lords in the surrounding land for many years, even though it has been argued that all of Christendom looked to Rome as their capital. Italy itself was said to hold Rome in high esteem for it represented both the legacy of the Roman Empire and Christianity. At the same time, however, regionalism was strong and the different cities, including Rome, vied with one another for the highest position.
Towards the end of his life Machiavelli said “I love my native city more than my own soul”. Regionalism clearly had a strong pull and many people have latched onto that aspect of the Renaissance and have ascribed biological and racial characteristics to people from the different cities. Florentinians are said to be more gentle and artistic, while Venitians are more concerned with wealth. This is similar to saying that all people from New York City are rough and street-smart, while all people from San Francisco are peace-loving and sensitive. The problem is that these personality traits are not biologically determined. It may very well be that they are encouraged in one place more than the other but they are subject to change. Most texts that divide up Italy in such a manner do not take this into consideration and present a too black-and-white picture of the population. They reflect too strongly the Burckhardtian thesis about the Italian Renaissance, propagated by his tome “A History of the Civlisation of the Renaissance”-an impressive body of work to be sure, but strongly reflective of the 19th century that he lived in. Although I cannot of course blame him for his understanding of community or identity, it is dated and stale in comparison to modern work on ethnic or race studies and should not be used as the foundation for modern texts on the subject. Burckhardt was clearly influenced by the views of his time and his tome reflects this, with its emphasis on reading the Renaissance as the struggle between the superstition and backwards thinking of the Middle Ages and the progressive views of modernity that, of course, his own time embodied. His work was so all-encompassing that it led to a stagnation in Renaissance studies, where all new work would simply refer back to his text as the end-all source. Renaissance studies underwent a period of neglect; it became seen as old and without much new potential. Of course the Italian Renaissance was an important period but there was not much else to say about its break with the past and Burckhardt’s views went largely unchallenged for many decades. The thesis of progress became stale because there was nothing new to say about it; if history was a march of advancement and the Renaissance sparked this advancement, then everything that could be studied in the Renaissance was merely a prototype of some form of modern society. The conclusions were already known. Even when minor facts and points were argued against by historians, the general opinion of the Renaissance as a pivotal moment in human evolution was agreed upon. Burckhardt had successfully argued that this idealized man in the Renaissance had learned to reason objectively, saw himself as a spiritual individual, and was no longer bound by ideas of race. It was only the great social change that took place in the 1970s that history began to be written in drastically new ways and the discourse on the Renaissance in Italy was reshaped. Much of the criticism that appeared stemmed from the fact that Burckhardt was writing in the 19th century, prior to new popularity of looking at history from the bottom up and was deeply entrenched in the Whiggish notion of history as a march towards progress and enlightenment. Similarly, his idea that Renaissance man was “no longer bound by ideas of race” reflected his own belief that his own time was equally freed from inappropriate racial thinking. Few today would argue that 19th century Europe was as enlightened as he felt it was but it is understandable why he thought so. We often think of our own time as the pinnacle of human development, the point to which all past history has been leading. Regardless, the point is that the ideas of nationalism and regionalism that we are often working with when studying this period are based upon the Burckhardtian thesis and are now argued to be outdated. Nationalism did not exist then in the same sense that we understand it now and regionalism is often inflated with biological race.
If nationalism was too weak and regionalism doesn’t function the way we often say it does, where does that leave us? Professor Edward Muir writes of “community as a social interaction in an institutional guise, community as a certain kind of space, and community as a process of social exclusion”, and I think this is what we have to build upon. I want to speak about the use of ethnicity in this period as a marker of self and other independent from but closely related to nationalism and regionalism and with the potential to create communities within communities and to function as a process of both social inclusion and social exclusion.
Professor Robert Bartlett argues that ethnicity in this period is not the same as our current understanding of ethnicity. It was more mutable, changeable, because there was not yet a clear idea of biological race. He claims that the three things that make up ethnicity in this period are customs (including religion), language, and law. It was possible to change your ethnicity if you were willing and able to change these three things. The tensions over this somewhat contradictory idea of ethnicity and self were reflected in the European unease with converted Jews. Ideas about the validity of conversion to Christianity from Judaism changed throughout the centuries, generally heading towards the belief that Judaism was a racial trait, not a cultural one, therefore feeding into the fear of “crypto-Jews” in the community who masqueraded as Christians but were not true believers. This fear was intensified with the belief that members of this ethnic group share certain unsavory characteristics, furthering the notion that ethnicity was inherited instead of created. Fear of “crypto-Jews” reflected the uncertainty of what counted as an inheritable trait. Some stories about the Jewish community contained voluntary conversions, showing that the negative traits associated with practitioners of Judaism were in fact tied to religion and were not an inherent part of the people. Later stories tended to focus on “crypto-Jews” who, even after conversion, retained the undesirable characteristics associated with Judaism. Although the reasoning was that they had not truly converted to Christianity at all, it pointed to the idea that it was impossible for members of the minority community to become members of the majority community: once a Jew, always a Jew.
It was this (potentially dangerously) mutable ethnicity that created a sense of common bond, political as well as religious. It could be inherited and passed on, although not in a genetic sense as ethnicity is now understood to do-my mother is ethnically Japanese and therefore I am as well-because parents imparted the markers of Renaissance ethnicity to their children-my mother was raised in Hawaii and passed on her understanding of the local culture, language, and law to me as well. Whereas now ethnicity is usually used to explain what location someone’s family is from (as an example for how I am using these terms, my father is racially Caucasian and ethnically German-he was at one point held German nationality as well but is now an American national), at this time it was used to explain what community one belonged to. This sense of a mutable identity was reflected in the practice (as Bartlett says in a different text) of Italian merchants who created their own enclaves, where they spoke their native tongue and were compelled to follow their original laws, in trade cities outside of Italy. By their creation of these fortresses of familiarity, it appears that Bartlett is correct and that the merchants were very aware of ethnicity as changeable and something to be both protected and nourished. Some aspects of ethnic identity were easier to change than others both because they were more deeply ingrained (such as religion instead of regulatory laws) and because changing them was more strongly discouraged. It was much harder for a Jew to convert to Christianity than for a merchant to agree to participate by different laws even though in both cases the person might have been moving from a minority into a majority group. This is not to say that it either was impossible, simply that one was easier and as such more likely, making it more typical and acceptable and feeding back into the cycle.
At the same time, however, just because one claimed ethnicity in a certain community does not mean that that community would decide to validate that claim. Muir says that "There was nothing 'universal' about Italian communities. The 'public’ was a private club. ... Italy was no stranger to rejecting certain persons because of skin pigmentation or ethnicity from membership in the majority community. Renaissance communities became communities by including some, ostracizing others.” Similarly, a Hispanic immigrant might very well be rejected by the majority American community even after she learned the customs, language, and laws of the country. Many historians have remarked that the process of community formation in the Renaissance relied heavily on this idea of exclusion-on defining the “self” in opposition to the “other”. Certainly, many documents from the time show a strong sense of ethnic identity, using Bartlett’s thesis, as men from different city-states described each other as foils for the self.
One example that I have found to be a particularly interesting and useful example is that of the Borgias. The family produced two popes, the latter and better known being Alexander VI, who fathered the now infamous Cesare and Lucrezia. This painting is thought to be a portrait of Cesare, although it was made shortly after his death. While Alexander VI was born in Spain, Cesare’s mother was Italian and he was born and raised in Rome, studying in Pisa briefly before returning to the Vatican. As an adult he went to the French court and married a French noblewoman and had a child by her. Apart from short visits to Naples, still on the Italian peninsula, he never set foot in Spanish territory until he was arrested and brought to Spain against his will. He spoke Italian fluently, obtained an Italian degree, was born and lived in Rome, and even had Julius Caesar himself as his namesake, and yet many did still not consider him ethnically Italian. He knew of and participated in Italian customs and obeyed Italian laws as well as any other ambitious noble or upstart of his day. Lucrezia, too, was denigrated throughout her early life and it was only with her third marriage and move to the d’Este estate that her reputation changed. What was the difference? I believe there were two problems preventing acceptance into the majority community and the conference of Italian ethnicity. The first of which was Alexander VI himself. While it was possible to break away from your parents’ ethnicity (Lucrezia by all accounts did so after her third marriage took her away from Rome), it was difficult because your parents, presumably, would have raised you to understand their customs, speak their language, and know their rules. The family was known to speak Spanish to each other, even in public, and Alexander VI was fiercely proud of his background. The Borgia Apartments in the Vatican are decorated in a distinctly Mozarabic style and replete with images of the bull, symbol of both the Borgias and of Spain itself. Furthermore, his holdings as Cardinal (and the positions Cesare held before he gave up the red) were all in Spain, with the vast majority of them in his homeland of modern Valencia and Catalonia-even today Catalonia is known for setting itself apart from the rest of Spain and is home to a strong sense of regionalism. People complaining that Alexander VI was Spanish, however, did not point to the fact that he was born in Spain but that he perpetuated Spanish culture and et cetera. To be seen as ethnically Italian, his son would have needed to distance himself, something that was not possible considering the animosity felt towards the family for their coming in from the outside and upsetting the power balance in Italy. The second problem was that Cesare was seen as a threat to many in the peninsula. His family’s political maneuverings and his attempt to carve out a geographic territory for himself caused many in the peninsula who might have otherwise been willing to overlook his connections to Spain to reject him as a dangerous outsider. Spain also rejected him, since he was seen by their most Catholic majesties to be a threat as well. Similar to the problem faced by the previously Jewish population that converted to Christianity, people could successfully argue that Cesare had inherited undesirable Spanish characteristics from his father and that, try as he might, he would never be able to fully shake them. The argument was not that was genetically Spanish but that he was too acculturated to change. Ethnicity is a two way street. Although Cesare could have claimed to be a part of either ethnic group on account of his fluency in both sets of requirements, he was rejected by both. Cesare was not accepted as Italian because his father submerged him in Spanish ethnicity and he was not accepted as Spanish because the surrounding majority culture made him fluent in Italian ethicity as well.
As the community grew and incorporated more people into itself, it also continued to exclude others as not being the same for various reasons that boiled down to a sense of ethnicity that was both flexible and rigid. On the one hand it could be changed by modifying certain non-essential aspects such as language and law and in this way allowed for the community to grow. On the other hand it provided a means for persons to be rejected from the majority and to be refused entry. Both the individual and the surrounding community shaped perceptions of ethnicity in the Italian Renaissance.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to need to bulk up a couple of those early paragraphs. :|
edfull version up now :|b
There is a tendency for people, looking back at the past, to make broad generalizations. “All of Christian Europe hated the Muslims.” To do so, however, is to ignore the differences between individuals and to interpret the past as being far less complex and complicated than our own time. One period of history that interests me is that of the Italian Renaissance. While researching this period, however, I realized there is a certain lack of information on the ways in which ethnicity shaped identity and interactions in this time. Many texts do not talk about it, even as newer ones touch on other topics such as gender and class and look at how they played out at this time. Some assert that there was a pan-European identity, or an identity that stretched across all of Christendom, that trumped other issues of region or nation. Historian Garrett Mattingly found it sufficient to state “in general, the Latin West inclined to lump Jews, heretics, schismatics, and pagans together as outsiders and natural enemies, while preserving, even in the bitterest of quarrels, a sense of solidarity in one Catholic faith”, without any explanation of why this was. Why was religion able to create a “sense of solidarity” across so many miles and so many other differences? And was religion able to do so at all? I feel that while over arching ideas such as Christianity did provide a sense of shared community they were weak in comparison to other, more local ties and connections.
Both regionalism and nationalism can be understood to shape a sense of community and self during the Renaissance, although there was no Italian nation state at this time. There were other countries, though, and records left by observers in Italy at this time show a clear understanding of differences between people from their peninsula and people from those other nations or places. France, Switzerland, and Reconquista Spain all played an active part in Italian politics.
In the Italian peninsula, however, there was no national government. The efficiency of the centralized governments in other places at this time can be debated as well, but Italy clearly had no unifying power. The different city-states such as Florence and Venice were their own governments and fought with one another for territory and control. The Church had been unable to collect money owed it from petty lords in the surrounding land for many years, even though it has been argued that all of Christendom looked to Rome as their capital. Italy itself was said to hold Rome in high esteem for it represented both the legacy of the Roman Empire and Christianity. At the same time, however, regionalism was strong and the different cities, including Rome, vied with one another for the highest position.
Towards the end of his life Machiavelli said “I love my native city more than my own soul”. Regionalism clearly had a strong pull and many people have latched onto that aspect of the Renaissance and have ascribed biological and racial characteristics to people from the different cities. Florentinians are said to be more gentle and artistic, while Venitians are more concerned with wealth. This is similar to saying that all people from New York City are rough and street-smart, while all people from San Francisco are peace-loving and sensitive. The problem is that these personality traits are not biologically determined. It may very well be that they are encouraged in one place more than the other but they are subject to change. Most texts that divide up Italy in such a manner do not take this into consideration and present a too black-and-white picture of the population. They reflect too strongly the Burckhardtian thesis about the Italian Renaissance, propagated by his tome “A History of the Civlisation of the Renaissance”-an impressive body of work to be sure, but strongly reflective of the 19th century that he lived in. Although I cannot of course blame him for his understanding of community or identity, it is dated and stale in comparison to modern work on ethnic or race studies and should not be used as the foundation for modern texts on the subject. Burckhardt was clearly influenced by the views of his time and his tome reflects this, with its emphasis on reading the Renaissance as the struggle between the superstition and backwards thinking of the Middle Ages and the progressive views of modernity that, of course, his own time embodied. His work was so all-encompassing that it led to a stagnation in Renaissance studies, where all new work would simply refer back to his text as the end-all source. Renaissance studies underwent a period of neglect; it became seen as old and without much new potential. Of course the Italian Renaissance was an important period but there was not much else to say about its break with the past and Burckhardt’s views went largely unchallenged for many decades. The thesis of progress became stale because there was nothing new to say about it; if history was a march of advancement and the Renaissance sparked this advancement, then everything that could be studied in the Renaissance was merely a prototype of some form of modern society. The conclusions were already known. Even when minor facts and points were argued against by historians, the general opinion of the Renaissance as a pivotal moment in human evolution was agreed upon. Burckhardt had successfully argued that this idealized man in the Renaissance had learned to reason objectively, saw himself as a spiritual individual, and was no longer bound by ideas of race. It was only the great social change that took place in the 1970s that history began to be written in drastically new ways and the discourse on the Renaissance in Italy was reshaped. Much of the criticism that appeared stemmed from the fact that Burckhardt was writing in the 19th century, prior to new popularity of looking at history from the bottom up and was deeply entrenched in the Whiggish notion of history as a march towards progress and enlightenment. Similarly, his idea that Renaissance man was “no longer bound by ideas of race” reflected his own belief that his own time was equally freed from inappropriate racial thinking. Few today would argue that 19th century Europe was as enlightened as he felt it was but it is understandable why he thought so. We often think of our own time as the pinnacle of human development, the point to which all past history has been leading. Regardless, the point is that the ideas of nationalism and regionalism that we are often working with when studying this period are based upon the Burckhardtian thesis and are now argued to be outdated. Nationalism did not exist then in the same sense that we understand it now and regionalism is often inflated with biological race.
If nationalism was too weak and regionalism doesn’t function the way we often say it does, where does that leave us? Professor Edward Muir writes of “community as a social interaction in an institutional guise, community as a certain kind of space, and community as a process of social exclusion”, and I think this is what we have to build upon. I want to speak about the use of ethnicity in this period as a marker of self and other independent from but closely related to nationalism and regionalism and with the potential to create communities within communities and to function as a process of both social inclusion and social exclusion.
Professor Robert Bartlett argues that ethnicity in this period is not the same as our current understanding of ethnicity. It was more mutable, changeable, because there was not yet a clear idea of biological race. He claims that the three things that make up ethnicity in this period are customs (including religion), language, and law. It was possible to change your ethnicity if you were willing and able to change these three things. The tensions over this somewhat contradictory idea of ethnicity and self were reflected in the European unease with converted Jews. Ideas about the validity of conversion to Christianity from Judaism changed throughout the centuries, generally heading towards the belief that Judaism was a racial trait, not a cultural one, therefore feeding into the fear of “crypto-Jews” in the community who masqueraded as Christians but were not true believers. This fear was intensified with the belief that members of this ethnic group share certain unsavory characteristics, furthering the notion that ethnicity was inherited instead of created. Fear of “crypto-Jews” reflected the uncertainty of what counted as an inheritable trait. Some stories about the Jewish community contained voluntary conversions, showing that the negative traits associated with practitioners of Judaism were in fact tied to religion and were not an inherent part of the people. Later stories tended to focus on “crypto-Jews” who, even after conversion, retained the undesirable characteristics associated with Judaism. Although the reasoning was that they had not truly converted to Christianity at all, it pointed to the idea that it was impossible for members of the minority community to become members of the majority community: once a Jew, always a Jew.
It was this (potentially dangerously) mutable ethnicity that created a sense of common bond, political as well as religious. It could be inherited and passed on, although not in a genetic sense as ethnicity is now understood to do-my mother is ethnically Japanese and therefore I am as well-because parents imparted the markers of Renaissance ethnicity to their children-my mother was raised in Hawaii and passed on her understanding of the local culture, language, and law to me as well. Whereas now ethnicity is usually used to explain what location someone’s family is from (as an example for how I am using these terms, my father is racially Caucasian and ethnically German-he was at one point held German nationality as well but is now an American national), at this time it was used to explain what community one belonged to. This sense of a mutable identity was reflected in the practice (as Bartlett says in a different text) of Italian merchants who created their own enclaves, where they spoke their native tongue and were compelled to follow their original laws, in trade cities outside of Italy. By their creation of these fortresses of familiarity, it appears that Bartlett is correct and that the merchants were very aware of ethnicity as changeable and something to be both protected and nourished. Some aspects of ethnic identity were easier to change than others both because they were more deeply ingrained (such as religion instead of regulatory laws) and because changing them was more strongly discouraged. It was much harder for a Jew to convert to Christianity than for a merchant to agree to participate by different laws even though in both cases the person might have been moving from a minority into a majority group. This is not to say that it either was impossible, simply that one was easier and as such more likely, making it more typical and acceptable and feeding back into the cycle.
At the same time, however, just because one claimed ethnicity in a certain community does not mean that that community would decide to validate that claim. Muir says that "There was nothing 'universal' about Italian communities. The 'public’ was a private club. ... Italy was no stranger to rejecting certain persons because of skin pigmentation or ethnicity from membership in the majority community. Renaissance communities became communities by including some, ostracizing others.” Similarly, a Hispanic immigrant might very well be rejected by the majority American community even after she learned the customs, language, and laws of the country. Many historians have remarked that the process of community formation in the Renaissance relied heavily on this idea of exclusion-on defining the “self” in opposition to the “other”. Certainly, many documents from the time show a strong sense of ethnic identity, using Bartlett’s thesis, as men from different city-states described each other as foils for the self.
One example that I have found to be a particularly interesting and useful example is that of the Borgias. The family produced two popes, the latter and better known being Alexander VI, who fathered the now infamous Cesare and Lucrezia. This painting is thought to be a portrait of Cesare, although it was made shortly after his death. While Alexander VI was born in Spain, Cesare’s mother was Italian and he was born and raised in Rome, studying in Pisa briefly before returning to the Vatican. As an adult he went to the French court and married a French noblewoman and had a child by her. Apart from short visits to Naples, still on the Italian peninsula, he never set foot in Spanish territory until he was arrested and brought to Spain against his will. He spoke Italian fluently, obtained an Italian degree, was born and lived in Rome, and even had Julius Caesar himself as his namesake, and yet many did still not consider him ethnically Italian. He knew of and participated in Italian customs and obeyed Italian laws as well as any other ambitious noble or upstart of his day. Lucrezia, too, was denigrated throughout her early life and it was only with her third marriage and move to the d’Este estate that her reputation changed. What was the difference? I believe there were two problems preventing acceptance into the majority community and the conference of Italian ethnicity. The first of which was Alexander VI himself. While it was possible to break away from your parents’ ethnicity (Lucrezia by all accounts did so after her third marriage took her away from Rome), it was difficult because your parents, presumably, would have raised you to understand their customs, speak their language, and know their rules. The family was known to speak Spanish to each other, even in public, and Alexander VI was fiercely proud of his background. The Borgia Apartments in the Vatican are decorated in a distinctly Mozarabic style and replete with images of the bull, symbol of both the Borgias and of Spain itself. Furthermore, his holdings as Cardinal (and the positions Cesare held before he gave up the red) were all in Spain, with the vast majority of them in his homeland of modern Valencia and Catalonia-even today Catalonia is known for setting itself apart from the rest of Spain and is home to a strong sense of regionalism. People complaining that Alexander VI was Spanish, however, did not point to the fact that he was born in Spain but that he perpetuated Spanish culture and et cetera. To be seen as ethnically Italian, his son would have needed to distance himself, something that was not possible considering the animosity felt towards the family for their coming in from the outside and upsetting the power balance in Italy. The second problem was that Cesare was seen as a threat to many in the peninsula. His family’s political maneuverings and his attempt to carve out a geographic territory for himself caused many in the peninsula who might have otherwise been willing to overlook his connections to Spain to reject him as a dangerous outsider. Spain also rejected him, since he was seen by their most Catholic majesties to be a threat as well. Similar to the problem faced by the previously Jewish population that converted to Christianity, people could successfully argue that Cesare had inherited undesirable Spanish characteristics from his father and that, try as he might, he would never be able to fully shake them. The argument was not that was genetically Spanish but that he was too acculturated to change. Ethnicity is a two way street. Although Cesare could have claimed to be a part of either ethnic group on account of his fluency in both sets of requirements, he was rejected by both. Cesare was not accepted as Italian because his father submerged him in Spanish ethnicity and he was not accepted as Spanish because the surrounding majority culture made him fluent in Italian ethicity as well.
As the community grew and incorporated more people into itself, it also continued to exclude others as not being the same for various reasons that boiled down to a sense of ethnicity that was both flexible and rigid. On the one hand it could be changed by modifying certain non-essential aspects such as language and law and in this way allowed for the community to grow. On the other hand it provided a means for persons to be rejected from the majority and to be refused entry. Both the individual and the surrounding community shaped perceptions of ethnicity in the Italian Renaissance.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to need to bulk up a couple of those early paragraphs. :|
edfull version up now :|b