Abstract
The latter extract opens one of the most remarkable enterprises in the retrieval of historical marginality. Carlo Ginzburg’s exemplary story of Domenico Scandella, alias Menocchio, a sixteenth-century miller from Friuli in Northern Italy, is not only concerned with his trials for heresy and final burning by the Holy Office; more importantly, it engages in the reconstruction of a fragment of what we call ‘the popular culture’.
The unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.
J. Joyce, Finnegans Wake
In the past, historians could be accused of wanting to know only about ‘the great deeds of kings’, but today this is certainly no longer true. More and more they are turning toward what their predecessors passed over in silence, discarded or simply ignored. ‘Who built Thebes of the seven gates?’ Bertolt Brecht’s ‘literate worker’ was already asking. The sources tell us nothing about these anonymous masons, but the question retains all its significance.1
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Notes
C. Ginzburg, Il forrnaggio e i vermi. Il cosmo di un mugnaio del ‘500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), p. xi. English transl., The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-centunj Miller (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. xiii.
See also, on the necessarily tangential evidence on which scholars of popular culture are obliged to rely, P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978), especially Chapter 3.
Sir Thomas Smith, De republica anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 76. Smith borrowed the passage from Harrison’s Description of England, which introduced Holinshed’s Chronicles.
See W. Harrison, Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 118. Smith died on 12 August 1577, the year in which the first edition of Holinshed was published. De republica was not published until 1583. It should be noticed that the crowd of paupers, vagrants and masterless men is altogether expelled from Smith’s respublica.
Many voices have spoken against the polarisation of the subversion— containment alternative, suggesting a less monolithic vision of the power structure. Theodore Leinwand has convincingly argued for a model of ‘negotiated change’, where social conflicts are seen as governed by ‘Compromise, negotiation, exchange, accommodation, give and take’ and has suggested that ‘it is a thorough falsification of historical processes to argue that subversion offers the only alternative to the status quo’ (’Negotiation and New Historicism’, p. 479). The response of social historians, too, has underscored problems of method and suggested less radical ideological partitions (see D. Cressy, ‘Foucault, Stone, Shakespeare and Social History’, English Literary Renaissance XXI [1991], 121–33).
S. Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), p. 183 (reported in E. K. Chambers, op. cit., vol. 4, p. 216).
The first of these treatisés is probably The Boke of Justices of Peas, published circa 1506; the most famous is Eirenarcha by William Lambarde (there are three variants of the first edition, one bearing the imprint 1581 and the other two 1582; my reference edition is one of the last). Lambarde also held a diary of the first eight years (1580–1588) of his experience as member of the Commission of the Peace (Ephemeris); by the same we possess a number of ‘charges’. See C. Read (ed.), William Lambarde and Local Government: His ‘Ephemeris’ and ‘Twenty-nine Charges to Juries and Commissions’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962);
see also, by the same Lambarde, The Duties of Constables, Borsholders, Tythingmen, and such other lowe Ministers of the Peace (London, 1583)
and Michael Dalton, The Country Justice (London, 1626).
F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Disorder (Chelmsford: Essex County Council, 1970), p. 179.
K. Wrightson, English Society 1550–1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 150.
E. Moir, The Justice of the Peace (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 33.
Ibid., p. 158. Leinwand says that ‘Personal pressures, applied from below, included shaming, ostracism, noncooperation, and physical violence.’ (op. cit., p. 483) See also, on this point, K. Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in SeventeenthCentury England’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People. The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1980), pp. 21–46.
J. A. Sharpe, ‘“Such Disagreemént Betwyxt Neighbours”: Litigation and Human Relations in Early Modem England’, in J. Bossy (ed.) Disputes and Settlements. Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 167–87, 167. Sharpe also signals an increase in litigiousness and in legal processes, although he stresses the fact that, albeit willing to initiate litigations, people were less willing to bring suits to their conclusion and often accepted arbitration (ibid.).
A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 26.
The expression is S. T. Bindoff’s, Tudor England, The Pelican History of England, vol. 5 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977 [1950]), p. 57.
Years later we meet Ben Jonson’s Adam Overdo in Bartholomew Fair. Overdo is a worthy companion of Shallow, although he is affected by the contrary disease of overzealousness. On the social and political function of the JPs and on their literary representation, see L. Curti, A. Mineo and M. Vitale, ‘Adam Overdo (Bartholomew Fair)’, in Analisi di contenuto della struttura superficiale di alcuni personaggi del teatro comico elisabettiano, AION, XIV (1971), 437–518.
Malleus maleficarum was written at the requést of Pope Innocent VIII by two Dominican German inquisitors, Heinrich Institor and Jacob Spränger and published in Strasbourg in 1486. On the continent, it was the most influential treatise on witchcraft, going through 34 editions up to 1669 in Germany, France and Italy. Although it was known by the English intellectuals who wrote on the same subject, its influence in England was limited (the first English translation, in fact, appeared in 1928). Although Reginald Scot does not deny the existence of good and bad spirits and of demons, his treatise was meant to expose witchcraft and other magic practices as trickery. Surprising as it was for its demystifying analysis of the phenomenon, The Discouerie of Witchcraft was not very influential, for ‘by sheer scope and size and weight of critical apparatus, the book took itself out of the popular market and lost the pamphlet audience’, B. Rosen, Witchcraft in England, 1558–1618 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991 [1969], p. 171). One of the main targets of Scot’s impassioned critique is the great Jean Bodin, who in his Démonomanie des Sorciers (Paris, 1580) showed a completé belief in witchcraft which the sceptical Scot deeply despised.
The association of mental illness and political radicalism in the seventeenth century is discussed by Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down (London: Temple Smith, 1972), Chapter 13.
Harry Rusche, ‘Prophecies and Propaganda, 1641–1651’, The English Historical Review LXXXIV (1969), 752–70, pp. 754.
On the use of prophecies as political propaganda, see also R. Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), especially pp. 83–107.
L. B. Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 11. 78–9.
M. Foucault, L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 13.
M. Garber, ‘“What’s Past is Prologue”: Temporality and Prophecy in Shakespeare’s History Plays’, in B. Levalsky (ed.), Renaissance Genres (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 301–31, 321.
A. L. Beier, Masterless Men (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 48.
W. Harrison, Description, pp. 184–5. Paul Slack reports the case of a woman vagrant in the Shropshire village of Myddle in the 1660s. Sina Davies was a ‘crafty, idle, dissembling woman’ who ‘did counterfeit herself to be lame, and went hopping with a staff when men saw her, but at other times could go with it under her arm’. Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988), p. 63. Slack also quotes cases of ‘counterfeit Bedlams’, counterfeit cripples and a ‘dummerer’ in Salisbury, pretending he had no tongue (ibid., p. 96). All these types of counterfeiters are described in numerous tracts and pamphlets on vagrancy. The most famous is the one by Thomas Harman, A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors (1566?); see also John Awdeley, The Fraternitye of Vacabondes (1560–61). Harman treats all vagabonds as impostors; see, in particular, the story of Nicholas Gennyns, a ‘counterfeit cranke’, who is also shown in two of the illustrations: first in stocks and then on his way to the gallows. Greenblatt connects Harman’s pamphlet to Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays holding that as Harman, by betraying his confidential sources with the publication of his pamphlet, served the purpose of maintaining order in the community, so the small acts of betrayal and subversion performed by Hal, Falstaff and Shallow are functional to securing order and supporting authority (’Invisible Bullets’).
J. A. Sharpe, Early ÏVlodern England. A S’ocial History, 1550–1760 (London: Edward Arnold, 1987), p. 217.
Sharpe, Early Modern England, p. 218. ‘Masterless men’, Manning says, ‘inspired a fear of ungovernable multitudes which was out of all proportion to their numbers and actual potential for mischief.’ B. Manning, Village Revolts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 158.
The order was given because the French army had camped hardly a mile away. Silence, however, was one of the ‘principall points belonging to the souldiers’, as is stated by Thomas Styward: ‘In all places of seruice such silence must be used, that soldiers maie heare friends, and not be heard as well in watch, ward, ambush, camisado, or else where: in which pointe consisteth oftentimes the safetie or perdition of the whole Campe.’ Thomas Styward, The Pathwaie to Martiall Discipline (London, 1581), p. 46. Contemporary historians say that such was the silence in the English camp that night that the French thought the English might have run away.
W. B. Kerr, ‘The English Soldier in the Campaign of Agincourt’, Journal of the American Military Institute, IV (1940), 8–29 and 209–24, pp. 220, 221–2.
The contemporary accounts of the battle are, in the first place, an anonymous chronicle probably written by a priest who said to have accompanied the expedition. The text (in Latin) is in the British Library, Cottonian Ms. Julius E.iv. and Sloane Ms. No. 1776. (The part relating the expedition is found in translation in H. Nicolas, History of the Battle of Agincourt (London, Johnson & Co., 1832), Appendix.
The second manuscript source is the anonymous Chronicles of London, also held in the British Library (Harleian Ms. 565, ‘Cleopatra C iv’; the manuscript has been edited by C. L. Kingsford in Chronicles of London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905). Of the printed sources, mention should be made of the History of Charles VI by Jean Le Fèvre, who affirms that he was with the English army (Chronique de Jean Le Fèvre, Seigneur de Saint Rémy, ed. F. Morand (Paris: Société de l’histoire de France, 1876); also Titus Livius, Vita Henrici Quinti, Regis Angliae, is a valuable source.
Recruitment in Elizabeth’s time was made among all able-bodied men between the ages of 16 and 60. However, there were some who thought that the age between 20 and 45 better suited a soldier. See Matthew Sutcliffe, The Practice, Proceedings and Lawes of Armes (London, 1593), p. 63.
From 19 to 45 is the age indicated by Leonard and Thomas Digges, An Arithmeticall Militare Treatise, named Stratioticos (London, 1579), p. 81.
A useful, although not extensive, introduction to Elizabethan war treatises is the book by H. J. Webb, Elizabethan Military Science. The Books and the Practice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965).
Hibbert, op. cit., p. 32. In Elizabeth’s time, the recruitment was made by the Lord Lieutenant and the JPs acting as commissioners of muster, from whom the Council required a certain number of soldiers ready by a certain date; see C. G. Cruikshank, Elizabeth’s Army (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 23. In 2 Henry IV (III.ii) the recruiting is made by a commission of JPs (Shallow and Silence) and supervised by a knight (Sir John Falstaff ).
Ibid., p. On the tendency ‘to place the ideological power of “Shakespeare” at the service of the national war effort’ during the Second World War, see G. Holderness,‘Agincourt 1944: Readings in the Shakespeare Myth’, Literature and History X (1984), 24–45. Holderness discusses three texts produced in 1944: G. Wilson Knight’s The Olive and the Sword, Olivier’s film Henry V and Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays.
See Niccolb Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra (1519–20), transl. Peter Whitehorne in 1560 as The Art of Warre; see also, Raimond Beccarie de Pavie, Baron de Fourquevaux, Instructions sur le faict de la guerre (Paris, 1548), where the author insists on the fact that ‘il faut recompenser les hommes après avoir bien servi’ (p. 107). The English translation of the treatise, Instructions for the Warres (London, 1589), wrongly attributes its authorship to Guillaume du Bellay.
Thomas Styward lists sobriety among the six principal virtues of a soldier, together with silence, obedience, secretness, hardiness and truth (op. cit., pp. 46–7); the same quality is indicated by William Garrard, The Arte of Warre (London, 1591), pp. 30–1. Sutcliffe says that ‘lesse pay doth content our souldiers, then any forreine nation’ (op. cit., p. 71).
The poverty of the English soldier is discussed as a point of fact by Barnabe Rich, Allarme to England (London, 1578), passim.
C. W. C. Oman, The Art of War In the Middle Ages, revised and edited by John H. Beeler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1953), p. 126; my emphasis.
Cruikshank; op. cit., p. 25. G. J. Millar says that the voluntary character of conscription, especially in the case of waging war in foreign countries, was easily overcome by the crown by invoking national emergency. Tudor Mercenaries and Auxiliaries (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980), p. 15. That the voluntary character of military service was a fiction is also hinted at in a passage by Norden quoted earlier: ‘whether they bee prest by authoritie, or of their own forwardnes’ (op. cit., p. 43). Machiavelli’s idea on this point is that soldiers should be neither wholly pressed nor wholly volunteers — ‘né al tutto forzati né al tutto volontarii’ — but rather led by the respect they feel for their prince — ‘tirati da uno rispetto ch’egli abbiano al principe’. Dell’arte della guerra, in Opere, ed. Antonio Panella (Milan: Rizzoli, 1939), vol. II, p. 495.
P. A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956), pp. 209–10.
Jorgensen reports a letter written by the Council to the Justice of Monmouth about one William James, ‘a poore maimed souldier’ to whom the local authorities should have granted a pension for a year and who had protested with the government because the pension was ‘wrongfully and without cause with the certificate of his mayms and hurtes (his maims being apparent) deteyned from him.’ (op. cit., p. 211; from the Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, ed. J. R. Dasent (London, 1890—), XXV, 249.
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Pugliatti, P. (1996). ‘Bastards and else’: Less than History. In: Shakespeare the Historian. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373747_11
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