Anthony Molho, Diogo Ramada Curto, Niki Koniordos, eds. Finding Europe: Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. x + 408 pp. $89.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84545-208-7.
Herman Roodenburg, ed. Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, vol. 4: Forging European Identities, 1400-1700. With an introductory essay by Bernd Roeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xxv + 439 pp. $179.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-84549-6.
Reviewed by Peter Hanenberg (Faculdade de Ciências Humanas, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon )
Published on H-German (July, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Forging or Finding Europe? Studies on Discourses and Identities
The books under review here seem to offer a kind of scholarly answer to the crisis that Europe has been going through since the "no" votes--first in France and in the Netherlands, then in Ireland--delivered by populations asked to accept a constitution or in the later cases, to accept a new treaty for the future organization of the European Union. Ever since the European Commission started to look for what it has called "A Soul for Europe" (by means of a biannual conference in Berlin with the same title), more attention has been given to the cultural dimension of the process of the Europeanization of Europe. If the European Union is expected to be more than a mere market enclave or a geopolitical answer to globalization, the question of cultural identities has to be answered in a way that draws simultaneously upon both aspects of its institutional definition as "united in diversity."
Neither of the books under review directly approaches this question in any other way than via history, specifically that of the "early modern period," which extended from some point at the end of the Middle Ages to some time before the nineteenth century. Research on European culture has frequently expressed the notion that we should not look for it before we can find at least a certain use of the word "Europe" itself. As early as 1961, when he first collected essays for an anthology on the history of the idea of Europe, Denis de Rougemont made quite clear that Europe before 1400 is best understood as an absence or silence. Only after that can we can actually speak of a European consciousness. This observation has been confirmed more recently in Peter Rietbergen's excellent Europe: A Cultural History (2nd ed., 2006).
While the two books share a focus on the same period, their approach to the history of the early modern period is not only different, but in a certain sense even contradictory. The opposition consists in a more teleological view used by the authors and editors of Forging European Identities and a much more casuistic conception underlying the methodology in Finding Europe. Perhaps this difference is due to the main keywords added to each book's subtitle: "Cultural exchange" means processes of direct impact in the first case; margins, images and the construction of communities, in the second. We might actually find a more unifying perspective in the book edited by Herman Roodenburg and a more diversifying attitude in the one edited by Anthony Molho, Diogo Ramado Curto, and Niki Koniordos--a difference that corresponds to the diverging title terms of "forging" and "finding." A parallel reading of both books can provide insights about the cultural dimensions of a shared history of Europe.
Forging European Identities completes a four-volume collection (sponsored by the European Science Foundation) dedicated to cultural exchange, namely in terms of religion (volume 1), cities (volume 2), and correspondence (volume 3). This fourth volume presents chapters centered on special issues that might contribute to several different histories, as Bernd Roeck puts it in his introduction. Cultural transfer is a matter of microhistory as well as of media history; it is necessarily based both on material and on non-material culture, on war and peace, on routes and stations, on styles and habits; and it reaches horizontally (from neighbors to neighbors) and vertically (top-down or bottom-up in social hierarchy). These very useful remarks on the diversity (and complexity) of cultural transfer lead to the surprising and problematic conclusion that "it seems as if everything melts together and we will soon experience a 'world culture'" which contrasts with "the conviction of the relevance and significance of preserving cultural difference," which "is necessary if we are to retain our own identity" (Forging, p. 29).
The eleven case studies show how European identity has always been in dialogue with other identities, completing, competing, threatening, or developing particular costumes and traditions. These processes can occur as a market phenomenon, as David Gaimster shows in terms of Hanseatic cultural transfer in the Baltic region in the use and techniques of pottery. They can also be a matter of representation, as shown by Evelyn Welch in work on Italian architect Aristotele Fioravanti da Bologna in Moscow and by Barbara Marx on the migration of artists and arts from Italy to German courts. If we think of painting, we can trace the development of Netherlandish works and styles throughout Europe (Bernard Aikema ). In a more exotic sense, we find a kind of Turkish fashion all across Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one that oddly corresponds to the ongoing threat from the Ottoman Empire. In Venice, there was a remarkable demand for Turkish artifacts "promoting both commercial and cultural exchange" (Forging, p. 167), as Deborah Howard argues. And even in the case of dress, Isabelle Paresys finds a "hybrid character" of fashion (Forging, p. 248), due to permanent foreign influences, sometimes mocked, but nevertheless widely appreciated by the public. Ulinka Rublack notes the ethnographic potential of the study of clothing for understanding not only Renaissance Germany, but one's own culture as well. Through the systematic collection of similarity and difference in terms of fashion, men like Veit Konrad Schwartz, Hans Weigel, or Christoph Weiditz discovered the principle of change and history as a challenge to the status quo and an invitation to reflect on the use and danger of cultural change. Other sixteenth-century scholars in Europe (as presented by Dilwyn Knox) applied the same comparative method to "gesture and comportment" (Forging, p. 289), allowing not only a notion of difference between the European countries, but also the development of common attitudes towards non-European cultures.
In a certain sense, the chapters in Forging European Identities take an interesting journey from outside (what is at hand and in use, like pottery, architecture, artifacts, and objects) via cultural expression (like fashion) to authentic embodiment, as in the study of gesture and comportment or in the three final studies, which are dedicated to dance. A phenomenon like dance can be seen as a matter of exchange (as Marina Nordera explains by studying dance cultures in Italy, France, and abroad), as a matter of bodily memory (as Herman Roodenburg argues) or as a matter of representation (as Johan Verberckmoes illustrates in his study of the re-creation of overseas cultures in European pageants). Cultural change is thus not something to be observed, but rather something the individual experiences within herself. The movement from outside to inside is even more interesting as we find its inversion in the scope of experiences discussed in the eleven chapters: from internal European phenomena to representation of global dominance.
Verberckmoes's last chapter ends with a question: "How was it for a Rouen sailor to jump around as a stark naked Tupi in front of one's own king, or for an Antwerp schoolboy to parade as the king of Amanguci?" (Forging, p. 380). This question about performance is treated systematically in Finding Europe. The question is a multiple one: regarding the sailor's and the schoolboy's identities and their bodies (as essential margins), their membership in communities, and, finally, the significance of sailors and schoolboys in seeking an image of Europe.
Margins, communities, images: Finding Europe does not aim to give new or more examples to define the idea of the history of Europe (and how it has changed culturally). The book tries to ask the question in a different way, as Anthony Molho states: "It is a point of method. The method is to move from things to words, from institutions to discussions about them, from reified values to discourses about ways of justifying and explaining actions" (Finding, p. 10). Thus, it is not the question of how Europe was and what it meant in a certain historical moment, but rather of what people "thought and wrote about their world" (Finding, p. 10). Thus the book does not give examples, but alternatives; it does not offer pieces to complete a picture, but pieces that were held fast in pictures or, on the contrary, never allowed to become a part of a picture. It is an invitation not just to know Europe and its history but to rethink them: in the belief, as Diogo Ramda Curto writes, "that fragments of the past--in this instance comprising a set of images and discourses--may cast new and revealing light on the predicaments that we and our students--citizens and scholars that we all are--face today" (Finding, p. 34). In this sense, the book's first part presents "images and discourses of contrasts, exclusions, violence, dissimulation" (Finding, p. 38), dealing with disguised Turks, Christians, and Jews (Giovanni Ricci); Semitic Spain (André Stoll); "Gender and the Body" (Giulia Calvi); and "Magic and Witchcraft" (Stuart Clark). The second part of the book is less about conflict and more about communication, especially in the sense of the ways in which Europeans saw themselves organized in terms of communities. The chapter is not centered on political forms of communities (following Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities [1983]), but rather on social forms of belonging and communication. Thus the authors consider what might be called a "Republic of Merchants" (Francesca Trivellato); a community of scholars (Florike Egmond); the court as a space for certain common European discursive traditions (Rita Costa Gomes); the Grand Tour as a means of discovering (and inventing) Europe (Robert Wokler); the shared traditions of European law (Pietro Costa); and its application to violence and resistance (Angela De Benedictis). All these experiences can be included in a real notion of a conceptual space. This subject is explored by Janet Coleman, who studies the relationship between individuals and communities. Drawing on the category of citizenship, Coleman shows what it means when we speak of Europe as a "historical experience" (Finding, p. 246). European tradition does not mean a simple line forward that leads from past to present, but it includes the ongoing presence of such experiences that have been overcome by history. If Europe nowadays lives within a tradition of enlightenment, laicism, and unbelief, Coleman continues, this "modern unbelief and the politics that results from doubt and unbelief, is framed in absentia by what Europeans once did believe" (Finding, p. 247). The ongoing experience of history in spite of and even within its own overcoming and reluctance is the matter that widely characterizes Europe.
The last part of the book, dedicated to images, offers a kind of proof for these continuing or "resilient discursive traditions in Europe" (Finding, p. 291): the tree (Christiane Klapisch-Zuber); museums (Edouard Pommier); sainthood and heroism (Denis Crouzet); and Latin (Françoise Waquet) are the four images depicted as elements for a framework of European imagination. Trees, for example, prefigured European "models of both logical and historical origins" (Finding, p. 309) for centuries, as a kind of permanent image for organizing the relationship between elements, ideas, and arguments. In the same sense, Latin was not just a language for communication, but "a sign, and a sign that makes sense" (Finding, p. 359). Latin offered a way to see and handle the world; Latin discourses formed European practices; this interaction between civilization, Latin, and Europe lasted until the eighteenth century. Finding Europe is not about unity; there are no goals to reach, no project to fulfill. It is about experiences that have organized the way Europe has come to be. It is about those moments when Europe was not certain, but uncertain, questionable, and at risk--or perhaps even transcended.
It is this surprising presence of the no-(more-)belonging that makes both these studies so useful: we cannot invent Europe; we can only reconstruct it by experience. Both books make a considerable contribution to the study of Europe as a cultural phenomenon in its singularity. Perhaps they can help their readers to discover a "Soul for Europe" without proclaiming a political or social agenda, in trying to explain how the search for Europe came to happen.
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Citation:
Peter Hanenberg. Review of Molho, Anthony; Curto, Diogo Ramada; Koniordos, Niki, eds., Finding Europe: Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images and
Roodenburg, Herman, ed., Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, vol. 4: Forging European Identities, 1400-1700..
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15517
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