1148
Reviews of Books
Lancre, his fellow judges considered him a naif; when
most of his Basque prisoners got to them in 1610, they
put his witnesses on trial instead. Now there is real
refutation of one's thesis-and de Lancre himself tells
us this juicy detail, thereby suggesting that his colleagues judged him correctly. Even the Germans wisely
ignored him. But today, some literary scholars take
him very seriously indeed.
WILLIAM MONTER
Northwestern University
PETER BURKE. The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione's Cortegiano. (The Penn
State Series in the History of the Book.) University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1996. Pp. x,
210. Cloth $40.00, paper $16.95.
these operations and for some aspects of reception
theory, Burke's study is exceptionally useful. Not to be
missed are his pages on translation, touching on the
question of how a book is received and adapted, as
disclosed by what translators do with key words and
phrases. Here, however, problems arise. When reading
a humanist like Castiglione, if we focus on his pivotal
word "grace" (grazia), do we turn to Ovid and other
classical writers for its freight, or to Renaissance
literary and vernacular usage? The two are not easily
reconcilable. My sense is that we should opt for usage.
Yet to do so requires a tidal wave of labor, for grazia
appears variously in almost every love poem and love
tale of the period. This means that we shall have
trouble taking hold of Castiglione'S text, let alone
trying to take hold of all those readers who came later.
LAURO MARTINES
Peter Burke is brave to try, in 157 pages, to measure
the effects on European civilization of its most celebrated courtly primer. The results, accordingly, can
only be suggestive.
First published in 1528, Castiglione's Cortegiano was
soon translated into five languages and, by 1600, had
been through 115 editions. Why the book was so
successful obviously belongs to the history of its reception. Burke contends that its open, dialogic form
enticed readers; that part three, dedicated to the court
lady, appealed greatly to women; that the work's
numerous gleanings from the classics attracted the
educated; and that its remarkable charm, anecdotes,
and conversational ploys won over sociable men and
women. An effort is made to look at text and readers
in their milieux, but these contexts are too thinly
drawn.
The Courtier was at once seen as a book for the
surpassingly ambitious, for all who desired place at
court, from great barons and little noblemen to clever
lawyers, commoners, and worldly clerics. He nourished
that gross enterprise verging on art, "Renaissance
self-fashioning": artful upward mobility in accord with
dynamic social structures, where the animating ghost
was in the seductions of power, place, money, and all
their symbolic appurtenances. No wonder the Cortegiano, an early do-it-yourself book, was long a bestseller. But it also had critics: the Tridentine Church,
scandalized by Castiglione's cynical view of friars, and
Protestants of the sort who resented the power, posturings, and privileges of the influential.
Although Burke considers the book's reception, his
work is more an excursion in theory than the application thereof. How do we establish a book's readers,
their attitudes, and modes of reading? By checking
appropriate inventories and signs of ownership on
early copies of the book itself, by examining marginalia, combing through the relevant correspondence,
locating references to the book in later writings,
identifying imitations and influences, and by studying
"paratexts" (i.e., the editorial frameworks of later
editions of the book, including preface, index, notes,
chapter headings, and glosses where available). For all
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
University of California,
Los Angeles
MARVIN B. BECKER. The Emergence of Civil Society in
the Eighteenth Century: A Privileged Moment in the
History of England, Scotland, and France. Bloomington: Indiana University Pres. 1994. Pp. xxiii, 164.
$24.95.
. This is a sequel to Marvin B. Becker's Civility and
Society in Western Europe, 1300-1600 (1988). Originally an Italian Renaissance historian, Becker has for
some years been pursuing one of the great themes in
western historiography: the way in which a society
based ultimately on aristocratic values, in which heroic
virtu was the essential underpinning of both monarchical and republican polities, changed into one dominated by commercialism, division of labor, and a
minimalist ethic.
He begins with a discussion of civil society, starting
with a quotation from Adam Ferguson's Essay on the
History of Civil Society (1767). Ferguson is not only the
writer from whom modern sociology is ultimately
derived but also an interesting case in his own right.
He was a professor and leading light of the Edinburgh
Enlightenment, but he was also a Gaelic speaker from
Logierait in Perthshire, a member of a clannish society
that cherished the heroic virtues in song and verse. He
is buried in the cathedral kirkyard of St. Andrews,
to which he retired, not far from a contemporary
Macleod of Macleod. The overlappings of eighteenthcentury reality often made nonsense of the sharp
Highland-Lowland antithesis so useful to romantic
novelists. Becker is intrigued by the eighteenth-century
Scottish origins of our unheroic but durable commercial and industrial society operating under what the
Scots philosopher David Hume called the "artificial
virtue of justice." Adam Smith called it "a society of
strangers."
This book surveys a series of European thinkers,
from Thomas Hobbes to Blaise Pascal and a host of
others. Jansenists like Pascal, Pierre Nicole (who had
read Hobbes), and Antoine Arnauld are very impor-
OCTOBER
1997
Modern Europe
tant for the argument that there was a gradual recognition that society could cohere on the basis of enlightened self-interest. The debate on the nature of social
obligation is then pursued through Samuel von Pufendorf, Hugo Grotius, Gershom Carmichael, and John
Locke. With that widely read popularizer, the Earl of
Shaftesbury, Becker reaches his main sections, for
Shaftesbury depicted a natural law rooted in innate
moral sense as the bedrock of a civilized, discursive
society. This is pure intellectual history. How can a
slim book also cover fundamental shifts in Western
social history?
Becker's answer is that civil society was the creation
of a particular moment in time in eighteenth-century
England and Scotland, a privileged time, an oasis of
consciously crafted calm between the storms of the
seventeenth century and the hurricane of the French
Revolution. We march through the canon, with Joseph
Addison and The Spectator prominent in the unfolding
pattern of ciVility. From there, we progress to the
Scotland of Francis Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith,
with its emerging free-market economics, stadial theory of societal progression, and, above all, its Walter
Scott. In Scott's great novels, Becker rightly finds an
obsessive discussion of the progression from heroic to
polite, civil society and of the price paid by those
caught between the two. An epilogue glances at views
on civil society held by German thinkers such as
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, and
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
This book is misnamed. It is not about social reality
so much as about conceptualization by writers. There
is some solid social history in the Scottish section, but
the problems facing Becker are much more complex
than he imagines. Scott was obsessed with clash of
values, but he is useless as a guide to Jacobite Scotland. He wanted to manipulate early nineteenth-century perceptions of the Jacobite era, to assuage Scottish national pride and thereby strengthen the Union
of 1707. Stadial progression was an ideological formula. It no more corresponded to concrete reality than
Hobbes's state of nature. The France of Louis XV
embodied enlightened civility. In the heyday of that
urbane, salon-based discursive society, the Abbe Ferdinando Galiani argued in his Dialogues sur Ie commerce des bles (1770) that it was free-trade fanatics, the
Physiocrats, who were reintroducing the worst kinds of
dogma and anathematization of opponents. The fathers of the American Republic adhered to heroic
antique virtue as an ideal. Changes in ideologies and
changes in social realities are connected, but never
simply.
BRUCE P. LEN MAN
University of St. Andrews,
Scotland
JOHN B. RONEY. The Inside of History: Jean Henri Merle
d'Aubigne and Romantic Historiography. (Studies in
Historiography, number 3.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. 1996. Pp. vi, 214. $59.95.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1149
Long ago, Kenneth Latourette recognized the nineteenth century as a "great age" of Christianity. It is the
great value of John B. Roney's study of Jean Henri
Merle d'Aubigne that it further reminds us how fully
nineteenth-century audience remained attuned to the
history of Christianity and responsive to the Protestant
Reformation as the central event in world history.
Roney, avoiding the chief pitfall of those who attempt to resurrect long-forgotten nineteenth-century
historians, makes no claims for a modern revival.
Keenly aware of his subject's limitations, he urges a
reconsideration of Merle, not for his sixteenth-century
erudition but because Merle has much to teach us
about the nineteenth century and its preoccupations.
Roney begins by firmly establishing Merle within his
nineteenth-century settings: Geneva, French culture,
the German university, and a pastorate at Hamburg.
He places him in the historiographic mainstream;
Merle's masters were Fran<;:ois Guizot, Jules Michelet,
and Leopold von Ranke. We are asked to consider the
great popularity of Merle's Reformation histories,
which were published in half a dozen European languages. Merle gave his audience what it was seeking:
an understanding of the French Revolution through a
study of its Christian roots. The secret of Merle's success was precisely his ability to treat the Reformation
as an important link in the chain of modern revolution.
Roney's achievement is to present us with a Merle
engaged in that great nineteenth-century liberal enterprise, the creation of a revolutionary tradition that was
Protestant in the sixteenth century, English in the
seventeenth, and French in the eighteenth.
The nineteenth century was rich in efforts to reconcile Christianity and the French Revolution. HughesFelicite-Robert de Lamennais had proposed such an
alliance on the grounds that Christianity itself was
radically revolutionary. For Merle, reconciliation did
not require such extremes; the Protestant Reformation
demonstrated Christianity'S inherent ability to regenerate society. Merle believed that God intervened in
history through great individuals such as Luther and
Calvin: "God gives to every people and every epoch
the men necessary to it" (p. 150).
Merle was aware of the dangers of placing the
Protestant Reformation within a revolutionary tradition, for it exposed the Reformation to the charge of
conservatives-like Joseph de Maistre-that as an
ancestor of modern revolution, it was a source of all
modern troubles.
The purpose of Merle's history was not to introduce
a new age of religious warfare or to foment modern
revolution. Rather, Merle believed that a history of the
Protestant Reformation properly rendered by a Christian writer could be reconciling and healing. In this,
too, he emerges as a worthy exponent of nineteenthcentury history.
STANLEY MELLON
EMERITUS
University of Illinois,
Chicago
OCTOBER
1997