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Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

Previous articleNext article FreeIn an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800Nir ShafirNir ShafirUniversity of California, San Diego Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis is the story of a holy land in the Middle East—but not the one you might expect. Cities like Jerusalem and Mecca might quickly come to mind, but Damascus was the key to the creation of an Ottoman holy land between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, because Damascus was the gateway to the hajj. As a recent flurry of museum exhibits reminds us, the hajj—that is, the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina—has been a well-established part of Muslim religiosity for centuries.1 The Ottoman dynasty also celebrated the hajj's importance over the six centuries of its rule, even if no sultan personally undertook the journey.2 Yet the hajj's aura of timeless sanctity also hinders scholars from understanding its historicity. How did the hajj complement and compete with other forms of Muslim religiosity, such as saint worship/Sufism? Can we speak of an "Ottoman" hajj, and what significance did this pilgrimage carry for the many non-Muslim subjects of the empire? Approaching the hajj from the shrines of Damascus, no longer so holy today, rather than Mecca and Jerusalem's hallowed sites, allows us to scratch away a bit of the gilding of enduring holiness and find a history of choices and contingencies, controversies and contestations.3I argue in this article that between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries an Ottoman holy land emerged that comprised the traditional sanctuaries of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, as well as the lands of greater Syria. Following the conquest of the Arab lands in the early sixteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty turned Damascus into both the center of an Ottoman imperial cult around the grave of the medieval theosophist Ibn ʿArabī and the empire's primary logistical hub for the hajj in response to the challenges of its religious and political competitors. As tens of thousands of Rūmī—that is, Turkish-speaking—pilgrims used the new infrastructure to stream into and through Damascus, the hajj also became an extended pilgrimage to visit the numerous tombs of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Non-Muslims too began to use the same infrastructure to partake in their own pilgrimage to Jerusalem and its environs, which they also referred to as the hajj. These overlapping claims to the hajj brought Rūmīs, Arabs, Christians, and others into competition and collaboration over the significance of the Ottoman holy land.As the logistical hub for the hajj, Damascus offers a view onto how religion was shaped by the forms of mobility available at the time, especially due to the development of material infrastructure. I take inspiration from recent scholarship, specifically that on the hajj, that has emphasized how new technologies of travel, such as steam and jet power, transformed Muslim religiosity by expanding its geographical horizons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 These works, with their focus on modern technologies, refrain from commenting on the premodern period, yet their insights can be applied to early modern forms of mobility. An unexpected complement to these studies is the recent book by James Grehan on everyday religion in greater Syria during the early modern period. He argues that an "agrarian religion" centered on saint worship flourished in rural parts of the Middle East among both Muslim and Christian communities. Although not explicitly framed as such, Grehan's argument is about mobility and materiality. According to Grehan, a shared religious practice of saint worship emerged from the timeless patterns of rural life and the inability of the "high" Islam of scholars and jurists to move into the countryside. Only the technological and infrastructural transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries delivered the shocks needed to dismantle the material conditions underpinning saint worship, bring the high tradition of legalistic Islam to all areas, and make Muslim and Christian peasants realize that they belonged to distinct religious traditions.5 Grehan deserves credit for pushing scholars to pay attention to the difference between urban and rural religious life in the early modern Middle East. However, we should not assume, as Grehan does, that increased circulation inevitably homogenizes devotional practice and obliterates saint worship.6 As Nile Green has demonstrated, modern technologies like steamships and steam-powered printing presses actually fed a florescence of religious practices centered on saintly miracles.7 Moreover, I disagree with Grehan's presumption that premodern Ottoman society, even in rural areas, was static and immobile. People (and objects) traveled on camels, horses, and on foot rather than on steamships and trains, but the empire was always on the move, and these movements redefined its religious landscape. While the mode in which people traveled remained largely the same, there were particular circuits and forms of mobility unique to the Ottoman Empire; the road from Damascus was one of these.The second part of this article's argument is that the regime of circulation built on the road from Damascus gave rise to a specifically "Ottoman" lived religion in general and a shared culture of pilgrimage in particular. The hajj became a central component of the lived religion of many of the Ottoman Empire's inhabitants, Muslim and non-Muslim. Christian subjects of the empire, for example, came to refer to their pilgrimage to Jerusalem as the hajj, even integrating the honorific hajji—that is, someone who completed the hajj—into their names and titles. Asking how the hajj became "Ottoman," in turn, opens a number of related questions for the study of religion. How did the Ottoman hajj differ from earlier iterations, given that the ritual itself did not change? What is the role of the state in the creation of common religious practices? And how does the religious practice of one community—in this case, the Muslim practice of pilgrimage—come to be a shared aspect of the lived religion of a diverse and multiconfessional early modern empire?To speak of an "Ottoman" hajj also requires probing the analytical valence of the word "Ottoman." In its most restricted sense, the word applies only to the actions of the ruling dynasty, the eponymous house of Osman. In the early modern period, the word was used largely in this limited sense, both by the dynasty itself and its observers. Modern historians, however, employ a more expansive definition of "Ottoman," in which the word is a blanket term that applies to anything and everything that occurred within the empire's boundaries. Moreover, many implicitly extend this idea conceptually and assume that every subject within the empire's boundaries also possessed a shared "Ottoman" mentality or culture, which in turn drove their political and intellectual choices.8 The mechanisms for the dissemination of a common Ottoman culture or mentality are rarely articulated, however. Most often, historians point to the actions of the state as creating an Ottoman culture. For example, the sociologist Karen Barkey argues that the Ottoman state intentionally promoted a policy of religious tolerance, one that broke from earlier and supposedly narrower iterations of Islam.9 Even if we accept Barkey's assertions of a state policy of ecumenicalism, they do not necessarily help explain how cultural practices like the hajj came to be shared by all the empire's subjects at the community or individual level. Like many premodern empires, the Ottoman government did not attempt to homogenize its diverse population under a single imagined culture. While the state actively intervened in the daily religious practices of Muslims and the institutional structure of Islamic law, it never contemplated the creation of shared "Ottoman" religious practices among its subjects.10 How then did the hajj become "Ottoman"?To understand how the hajj became a practice that left its mark on nearly all Ottoman subjects, we have to rethink our understandings of empire. Historians today, especially those focusing on the Ottomans, have often understood empire to be a set of institutions that govern by replicating or projecting the rules and culture of the imperial center onto its provinces.11 In other words, empire is regarded as a synonym for the state. Other scholars highlight the inherent social diversity of empires, using empire largely as a foil to the linguistic, ethnic, or religious homogeneity of the nation-state.12 I treat empire differently in this article. I see empire as a specific assemblage or network of heterogenous human and nonhuman actors connected in myriad relationships.13 The specific elements of the network, and their arrangement, varied in time and place. Thus, the "Ottoman" hajj was different from the "Mamluk" hajj, for example, not because the ritual radically differed but because it brought together an alternate set of material and social elements: the movement of Rūmī Muslims to the Arab provinces, the kilns of Iznik and Kütahya that produced the empire's ceramics, and especially the lines of pilgrim infrastructure centered in Damascus, among others. The shared "Ottoman" culture of the hajj was not the intentional construction by the state but an unintentional by-product of the interaction of these elements, a network that could only have existed with the empire's expansion and sustained presence.14This article traces the network that brought about the creation of an Ottoman hajj and holy land. Damascus functions not as the site of a fine-grained local study but as a gateway that illuminates the various connections streaming through it. My argument brings together a constellation of actors, both human and nonhuman, that connect to form a larger picture. Moreover, since I focus on the transformation of what Nancy Ammerman has termed "lived religion," I draw the reader's attention to the creation of an Ottoman pilgrimage culture from everyday practices rather than in theological works.15 The article jumps from Egypt to Hungary and the many places in-between, but it begins with the Ottoman Empire's conquest of Damascus in 1516, which first provided the Ottoman dynasty the possibility of administering the hajj. The centrality of the hajj in Ottoman religious life was far from assured, however, in these initial years. I situate the dynasty's first operations in Damascus in a wide array of other forms of state-sponsored Muslim religiosity available to the dynasty, such as the creation of a set of imperially sponsored saintly tombs. I then turn to the Ottoman state's eventual commitment to the hajj and its massive investment in the physical and textual infrastructure of pilgrimage. The hajj became progressively important in the daily lives of Rūmī Muslims from the empire's heartland, and it even expanded to incorporate visitation to tombs and shrines. Christians too used the same infrastructure to turn their pilgrimage to Jerusalem into what they themselves referred to as the hajj. The last section examines how this network led to a shared Ottoman culture of the hajj and also to competing claims by Arabs, Rūmīs, and Christians as to who could define the Ottoman holy land.Holy Lands, Old and NewUpon his return to Damascus, fresh from the victories against the Mamluks in 1517, Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20) set out immediately to thank a saint.16 The sultan seems to have attributed his victory to the omens and intercession of Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240)—an Andalusia-born Sufi theorist whom the Ottomans believed had prophesized the rise of the dynasty in a pseudepigraphic work, Al-Shajara al-nuʿmāniyya—and thus decided to build an imperial tomb at the site. Sultan Selim ordered that the residences, bathhouses, and an already standing mosque in the Ṣāliḥiyya neighborhood be bought from their owners and quickly demolished. Within three months, a congregational mosque had been erected around the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī.Even today, Ibn ʿArabī is a notorious figure. Thanks to his pantheistic theories of the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd), he is regarded as either the greatest Sufi master or the master of the infidels.17 The residents of Damascus, however, knew little of Ibn ʿArabī before the Ottomans' entry. Despite the fact that it had been well known that he had died in the city, travelers who sought out his grave state that it was being used as a rubbish dump in the fourteenth century. In 1499, one apparently had to scale the wall of a bathhouse in order to access the neglected graveyard housing Ibn ʿArabī's unvisited tomb.18 Other observers, such as Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 1546), the future imam of the mosque built at Ibn ʿArabī's tomb, tell us that the site was already the tomb of a certain Ibn al-Zakī.19While they knew little of Ibn ʿArabī, the residents were at the center of their own holy land, populated by the graves of local saints and holy men, many of them being ṣaḥāba, the companions of the Prophet. This Syrian holy land had been built up over centuries; the oldest surviving collection of the faḍā'il (virtues) of the area comes from the mid-eleventh century and reflects the traditions and stories that had been collected up to that moment about Syria's sacrality.20 The arrival of the Crusaders—who built at least four hundred chapels and churches in the Levant over the course of their two-hundred-year presence—prompted the resacralization of greater Syria.21 As the Ayyubids (under Salāh al-Dīn, r. 1174–93) and the Mamluks (under Baybars, r. 1260–77) reclaimed this land, they quickly began a campaign of creating a new Muslim holy land in southern Syria. Rulers, military men, and common townsfolk took part in rediscovering, often in an inspired dream, the locations of the tombs of early Islamic figures and heroes from the wars against the Crusaders and then contributing to their construction and upkeep. Older, smaller pilgrimage sites, such as the tomb of the patriarchs in Hebron, were greatly expanded, and non-Muslims were banned from entering them. Churches and monasteries were converted into Sufi lodges; revenues from villages that previously supported monasteries and churches were seized and reendowed to support the new shrines.22 Whereas earlier holy sites had predominantly stressed biblical events and urban locales, this new wave of shrine building saw the establishment of the graves of a wide variety of early Islamic figures, learned scholars, and military heroes throughout both the urban and rural landscape. Geographies and pilgrimage guides (pilgrimage to shrines, that is) of the period, like those of al-Idrīsī (d. 1165) and al-Harawī (d. 1215), included these shrines and sites. While the Crusader incursion might have spurred the renewed sacralization of the lands of Syria, the spread and establishment of shrines by themselves was part of the growing shift in the middle to late medieval period toward an Islam centered on saints and holy men—that is, Sufism.23The Ottoman government's warmhearted embrace of Ibn ʿArabī and its intervention in the sacred landscape of Damascus were not acts intended for the locals but rather for its competitors in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Iran. In the post-Mongol Turco-Iranian world, especially on the frontiers of Anatolia and the Balkans, there was a constant potential for holy men and saints' descendants to raise the flag of rebellion in their fortress-like lodges and become contenders for political power.24 Only a few years before his conquest of the Mamluk lands, Sultan Selim had quelled a serious rebellion in central and eastern Anatolia by the Kızılbaş followers of the Safavid Shah Ismail, a man who had used his holy ancestry to found a state in the late fifteenth century. Even cities like Cairo were not exempt from this particularly Turco-Iranian idiom of political sainthood. In the chaotic aftermath of the Ottoman conquest, a new holy man from Anatolia, Ibrāhīm al-Gulshanī (d. 1534), started gathering a following and consolidating power in Cairo.25 In these uncertain times, the Ottoman government took a distrustful stance against many Sufi orders and instead decided to turn Ibn ʿArabī into a "nondenominational grand master of spirituality from whose esoterism all Sufi orders could get inspired, and ideologized, in defense of the Sunni faith and its political patrons."26This type of experimentation was found in other early modern Islamicate empires throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) developed a sort of Sufi order in which he was the holy shaykh and his courtiers and subjects were disciples.27 Later, when the Mughals conquered the Deccan, they the shrines of the Muslim The built massive tomb in around their in creating a cult of the around the other Sufi The Ottomans too with this throughout the sixteenth century, for example, a tomb shrine for Sultan on the Arab observers, however, saw the Ottoman government's of Ibn ʿArabī's tomb as an attempt by Muslims from the to and even the hajj and the holy sanctuaries of Mecca and The residents of Damascus referred to the many Ottoman as In its most sense, Rūmī a and someone who and came from the lands of the central lands of the Ottoman between the in the and the in the have of the medieval from however, is actually a of his or from the lands of This early modern at with its in both the medieval and modern In the medieval period, the both the and in the and fourteenth centuries, it began to refer to Muslims in the This and was by the development of Ottoman in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries into an and of competing with a that the Rūmī from that of the more or In the nineteenth century, however, the it applied to subjects of the empire, which is its In local Arab residents of Damascus saw the as with only a of Islam and its to build a tomb over the grave of Ibn ʿArabī being the of their of the of the events by the Ibn a number of omens for the future of Ibn ʿArabī's new the the bought the and to the general and that the had The as they the a and the the the man who the sultan to build the mosque and tomb in the first Only a had also were at the foot of Ibn ʿArabī's grave as the their to it into a holy site. they erected a a traditional of over the tomb and more but only under the of being of what the people might and that no one find out about While the sultan to the and a for a Ibn ʿArabī, the people of Damascus of high due to the and the of in their an of the Safavid one when an of the and the was into the by his to its As the shrine they from a building that a had that these had been from the tomb of saint the of the an to the of Ibn Selim and the Rūmī the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī on the of The of is the central of the hajj, when the stream onto the of and for the this a hajj Ibn Ṭūlūn that the Ottomans were to the hajj with pilgrimage to the new tomb of Ibn ʿArabī, as they had the pilgrimage to the and to against the significance or the might have with their of was however, because the of the Rūmīs, was so that he could not the and the of even with a In other words, he the a were to the and were throughout the sites of the the of the and were given out in the by the As he the it for a moment that he had built the shrine of a of holy on the eastern of the it was an it was at the employ of the of it spread among the the and the men of state. it was that it was the of one of the bathhouses, which became with and when the they believed it to be holy only did the to the locals but also few of the and of the to the were that as residents decided to because of the high brought on by the Ottoman Ṭūlūn a the when he was the and of the mosque at Ibn ʿArabī's While he with the that what is for few of his came to visit in his new The of the land to visit the tomb when he came to the more traditional tombs at the He was left with the Rūmīs, who had it their to visit the tomb during their and like a certain who came with his to the tomb to to be by one should us that it was not a that the Ottoman government both and into the hajj and the the Islamic world, there were a wide variety of that and saintly power, and the same the construction of Ibn ʿArabī's a cult centered on Ibn ʿArabī was not so Ibn take on Ibn ʿArabī's tomb the that the religious of the Ottomans immediately following the Other Arab scholars of the period a of the religious and the cult of Ibn the tomb and the cult among Rūmī scholars in as Rūmī scholars a of Ibn ʿArabī, for the saint needed to be among all the scholars in the imperial Although the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī remained a for Rūmī Damascus and the Arab lands become the center of a different holy Ottoman Ottoman government for a different of a state that did not on the creation of imperially tombs of holy men and The tomb of Ibn ʿArabī remained but the dynasty instead to become a of and a of Islam centered on following Islamic the course of the sixteenth century, it and in congregational in every and and that Muslims them as it to a particular of religiosity on practices such as and the The dynasty undertook these actions to itself from its imperial competitors like the and as had their own of shrines and but also with an toward the it had at greatest in a Sunni for the empire in its of the the of Mecca and that it had from the Even with these sites at their Ottoman in the hajj were a of for of the sixteenth For example, only toward the of the sixteenth century did the dynasty support for the tomb of Sultan in Hungary and order its shaykh to move to Mecca and focus his and on the grave of the to the the of Arab the government's shift toward the hajj was a In of over a hundred years the conquest of the Arab lands, the (d. a book in of The of the of the Ottomans were to other dynasty, or to set a number of and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, known by their of of the or the of the house of The had their of Rūmī which them the site of an about the of imperial and in the Arab the Ottoman dynasty as a of both religious and a view to the the Ottoman and a century Whereas they had been as they were of especially to their massive investment in the religious sites of the hajj and the people who lived how they of thousands of on the of Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and Hebron, so so that they were never This was in to the on the military to the of the from The was by no an the from the seventeenth century that the and became and These imperial were by from the of the the which lands, and from both Muslims around the empire and of the dynasty The government also the around and Jerusalem, renewed of the area around the built and and all the in and hajj was a every which if not of thousands of through and massive infrastructure needed to be developed to bring to Mecca and Moreover, the pilgrimage had to be so that at the time in Mecca to the of the the left Damascus or there was not a to traveled on or horses, and a few were in However, the which included the many and that came traveled by The most was the between Damascus and Medina, the pilgrim were to the Syrian had been used during the Mamluk period, it no or infrastructure to to other than the few Thus, in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty began a of in the Syrian hajj The first was a

New Books across the Disciplines

Catholic Christianity and its imagery broke in on Mesoamerica suddenly in the 1520s and has been a pivot point of living and dying there ever since. But there is no simple story of an early formative stage and late decline in the history of Christian image shrines in New Spain. They began in the sixteenth century, haltingly; and with many shrines eventually scattered over a vast, broken terrain, local histories of Christian practice were bound to depart from models and prescriptions in Rome, Madrid, Mexico City, or less remote capitals and style centers. The weight of the European past and present in the development of Christianity and religious practices in New Spain was great, and diffusion from Catholic Europe lends some coherence to the history of image shrines, whether following European trends or working against them. But Europe, too, is a moving target, neither uniform nor fixed and finished in its religious culture. What, then, can be said with some confidence about the impact of European beliefs and practices on the development of those shrines? What changed where and when?

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Until very recently, scholarly examinations of almanacs within the contexts of early modern print culture and medicine had been largely absent from the existing historiography. Fortunately, this has now begun to change. Louise Hill Curth’s 2007 work is one such contribution. It examines English almanacs as a distinct genre of print literature, situating it within the wider contexts of astrology and medicine from the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth century. Curth’s story is one that is characterized much more by continuity than change for the 150-year period under investigation. Challenging previous assumptions regarding the ephemeral nature of early modern almanacs, Curth underscores the fact that they have been a vastly under-utilized source, professing that they represent “the first form of English mass media” (p. 52). She convincingly argues that almanacs have several intrinsic advantages over other types of more widely referenced materials, such as printed books and handbills. These include: sizeable print-runs and wide distribution; regularly featured advertisements; greater longevity (arising from the fact that almanacs were designed to be used for one year). Curth demonstrates that the content of almanacs often targeted specific audiences on the basis of factors such as geographical location, educational background, and economic status. Regardless, astrological content was consistently present within all these works, while three-quarters contained material of a medical character. This encompassed preventative and “remedial” (that is, therapeutic) medicines of both a non-commercial and a commercial nature for humans and animals alike. Curth asserts that the inclusion of such information within the pages of almanacs suggests that it was perceived as important to readers. Although the medical and scientific “advances” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been well referenced within the existing scholarship, Curth finds little evidence of these changes within her study. Indeed, one of her main tenets is that almanacs “remained firmly based on Galenic-astrological beliefs and practices” throughout the period, thereby contributing to “the continuing popularity and longevity of traditional, orthodox medical practices and beliefs” (p. 28). For example, she argues that the popularity of astrological physick persisted throughout the period, demonstrating “no sign of becoming obsolete” (p. 131). In terms of non-commercial medical advice, almanacs primarily relied upon readily available and “organic ingredients, with very little evidence of Paracelsian or ‘chymical’ ingredients” (p. 178). Although Curth’s arguments relating to the medical information within early modern almanacs tend to emphasize continuity, she readily acknowledges that changes did indeed transpire during this period. Curth argues that the most evident transformation occurred during the second half of the seventeenth century with the “growth of advertisements for medical services and proprietary medicines” (p. 233). This trend accompanied the rising demand for various types of consumer goods that was well under way by this point and “foreshadowed the consumer ‘revolution’ and medical materialism” in the following century (p. 233). The final chapter pertaining to the care and medical treatment of animals is a particularly useful addition, especially as this topic has not yet received due attention from scholars. Curth argues that while human and animal medicine shared the same Galenic underpinnings—and thus similar types of diagnoses and treatments—they differed in terms of the specific ingredients and how these were used in remedies. For instance, medicine for animals often consisted of less expensive and more easily accessible ingredients in comparison to human remedies. Curth’s study is a timely and welcome addition to the historiography of early modern English medicine. It presents readers with a richer and more complex picture of the various purposes and usages of almanacs—not least of which were astrological and medical—than has been available until now. Curth’s careful consideration of questions involving continuity and change (as well as similarity and difference) reminds us that such avenues of investigation are often not simply useful but necessary in order to achieve a better understanding of the practice and dissemination of popular medicine during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Wes Williams Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty MagicMonsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty Magic. Wes Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xv+344.

The article examines Lithuanian texts published in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the point of view of political awareness. It elucidates the kind of relationship between the Lithuanian-speaking and reading community and the Lithuanian state of that time. In order to do so, the political vocabulary of works in Lithuanian and the political ideas expressed in them are also examined. At the same time, it considers the political role given to the Lithuanian language by Lithuanian intellectuals writing in other languages and the image of the Lithuanian language and the Lithuanian-speaking community created by political journalism and historiography written in Latin, Russian and Polish. Written by Lithuanian intellectuals and published in Königsberg in 1547, the first Lithuanian book is symbolically dedicated to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and its addressee is the Lithuanian and Samogitian people and all the estates of this nation. Mikalojus Daukša, the translator of Postil, published in 1599 at the Vilnius University press, and his patron, Bishop of Samogitia Duke Merkelis Giedraitis urged the citizens of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to build their Republic on the Lithuanian language. In their view, it was the Lithuanian language that had to unite the different estates in the Grand Duchy and ensure the solidarity of the political nation. In the seventeenth century, the professors of Vilnius University working on Lithuanian books stressed the connection between the Lithuanian language and the Lithuanian state. Konstantinas Sirvydas created not only a cultural, philosophical, theological, but also a political Lithuanian vocabulary: his trilingual dictionary of Polish, Latin, and Lithuanian, first published by the Vilnius University press around 1620, was reprinted four more times during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was the foundation for the Lithuanian texts of the time. Sirvydas personally wrote and published a collection of sermons for intellectuals in Lithuanian in which he deliberated not only over religious but also political issues. The seventeenth-century Lithuanian hymnbooks and prayer books, which were regularly reprinted in large numbers throughout the eighteenth century and into the first half of the nineteenth century, pleaded Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and St Casimir, the patron saint of Lithuania, to help ‘our State’, ‘our Kingdom’, ‘the land of Lithuania’, and ‘the Duchy of Samogitia’. There was thus a positive relationship between the community worshipping God in Lithuanian and the state: the society that spoke and sang hymns in Lithuanian felt responsible for their country before God. The Lithuanian texts under scrutiny support the assumption of Professor Jurgis Lebedys that the link between the political programme of Daukša and Giedraitis of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the Lithuanian national movement (Simonas Daukantas, Simonas Stanevičius, and others) of the early nineteenth century was not interrupted and that the tradition of nurturing the Lithuanian language and the connection between the Lithuanian language and the state remained alive all throughout these years. Latin, Russian, and Polish journalistic and historical literature also played a significant symbolic role for the Lithuanian language in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The sixteenth-century chronicles, the texts by Venclovas Mikalojaitis, or Michalo Lituanus, Augustinus Rotundus, Maciej Stryjkowski, and Albertas Kojalavičius (Wojciech Kojałowicz) depicted the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the ‘Republic of Lithuania’ as a state created by the Romans, the ancestors of the Lithuanians, and their descendants, the Lithuanian nobility who then expanded it into the lands of Russia. In these texts, the grand dukes and nobles of Lithuania appear as Lithuanian-speaking people who follow Lithuanian customs. Hence, the historical narrative of Lithuania and the myth of Lithuanian descent from the Romans, which was embedded in the culture of the region, placed emphasis on the Lithuanian character of the Grand Duchy. In the historical narrative, we find not only a political but also a linguistic and cultural notion of the nation. Thus, even after Polish prevailed in the life of the state, the Lithuanian language remained an important factor in Lithuania’s historical and political awareness and the political identity of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Reviewed by: The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime Joanna Stalnaker Geoffrey Turnovsky , The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Pp. vi + 286. $59.95. Geoffrey Turnovsky presents his ambitious first book as a counter-narrative to the usual story of the birth of the modern author. The standard account assumes that nothing could be more natural than for authors to assert their intellectual and economic autonomy as soon as the objective conditions of the book trade made it possible for them to do so. Yet Turnovsky contends that "accounting for these conditions is not sufficient for explaining the modernization of intellectual identities" (4). Without denying the economic realities of the book trade, he focuses instead on the symbolic field of the literary market, and on how and why images of the literary market became central to authors' quest for legitimacy during the period that spanned Corneille's Le Cid and Rousseau's Confessions. As this chronological span suggests, the account is revisionist in emphasizing continuities between early modern values and behaviors and modern authorship. Although he acknowledges his debts to Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Viala, Turnovsky has no interest in locating the first literary field. Rather, his "goal is to understand authorial modernity not in terms of a decisive break with an old culture of honnête cultural activity, but as 'modernity' took root and developed within early modern culture" (11). Part I articulates Turnovsky's polemical reframing of the history of authorship by emphasizing the durability of the culture of honnêteté and reversing the typical causal explanation for the birth of the modern author. It is not contacts with the commercial book trade that somehow make writers modern, but rather "writers who transform their contacts with the book trade into powerful signifiers of their modernity" (18-19). Yet, in an original move, Turnovsky locates nascent images of authorial autonomy, and thus modernity, not within the literary market, but within the elite socialization of writing that was part and parcel of the culture of honnêteté. He begins with the seventeenth-century playwright Pierre Corneille, not because of the latter's "modern" interest in maintaining control over the publication and performance of his plays, but because the 1637 quarrel that erupted in response to the success of Le Cid highlighted the dilemma facing seventeenth-century writers: they could attain social prestige through writing and publishing, but only to the extent that they conformed to aristocratic social codes by rejecting or belittling those very activities. Turnovsky thus identifies an emerging field in which the book trade became integral to the quest for social legitimacy, but, significantly, this was a negatively viewed field from which writers sought to emphasize their absence. The anticommercial posturing of Corneille's detractors persisted into the Enlightenment, but in a new guise which Turnovsky terms "philosophical" publishing. The philosophes asserted their autonomy by addressing themselves to a broad, enlightened public; at the same time, their authority in the public sphere depended on their proximity to elite patrons. Philosophical publishing was thus a complex negotiation "between an abstract, idealized public and a more concrete readership of elites, in the course of which the philosophes had to adopt contradictory and equivocal postures, or at least postures that necessarily seem as such to us" (22). One of the virtues of this nuanced account is that it resolves the apparent paradox of the philosophes' "modern" attitude towards political and religious authorities alongside their "archaic" involvement in Old Regime systems of patronage. [End Page 318] In Part II, Turnovsky questions the view that the book trade emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a distinct and recognizable alternative to traditional systems of patronage. Instead, what Turnovsky calls the "literary market" took shape through the growing frustration of mid-level authors who found themselves unable to attain legitimacy through traditional means, and who thus constructed an alternative field in which to increase their social prestige. Focusing on the trope of "living by the pen," Turnovsky demonstrates that eighteenth-century authors tended not to make positive claims to authorial autonomy, but instead emphasized the impossibility of living by the...

David McKitterick. <i>The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840</i>.

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the heraldry of the nobility of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was influenced by local, Polish, and other European heraldic traditions. The coat of arms became one of the most important elements representing the culture and identity of the nobles. It reflected their family and marital ties, titles, positions, and other important aspects in the life of the nobility. The coats of arms that have survived to this day act as a reminder of the past lives of their holders. The article explores the heraldry of the noble Gruževskis (Grużewski) family from Samogitia between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and its actualisation in the twenty-first century in the manor estate in Kelmė that was formerly owned by this family. The analysis revealed that the Gruževskis, a Polish noble family, who moved to Samogitia in the sixteenth century, enriched the heraldic tradition of the region’s nobility with the Lubicz coat of arms originating in Poland. The Lubicz coat of arms depicts a white horseshoe on an azure field with two crosses, one cross inside the horseshoe and the other outside with a crest of three ostrich feathers. The article looks at the heraldic seals held by the members of the Gruževskis family be­tween the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the seventeenth-century coat of arms of Jurgis Gruževskis in the joint coat of arms in Kelmė Evangelical Reformed Church, and the eighteenth-century coat of arms of the Gruževskis family above the entrance to the manor house they used to own. It has been observed that the members of the Gruževskis family preserved their coat of arms from the sixteenth century up to the second half of the eighteenth century and that it was passed down from generation to generation. The analysis of the records shows that the family’s heraldic tradition featured both single-field and combined coats of arms. The emergence of the former in the seventeenth century is traced back to Jurgis Gruževskis. Today, the Kelmė Regional Museum is one of the main memory institutions that preserve and actualise the legacy of the noble Gruževskis family. While the coat of arms of this family is not forgotten by the museum and receives relatively comprehensive attention, there are few attempts to provide more detailed information or more critical insights about it. The heraldry of the former owners of the manor estate is usually presented using easy-to-understand visual resources such as illustrations, stands, interactive materials, and souvenirs. It is believed that visitors could be offered a more detailed picture of the heraldic traditions of the Gruževskis family and a more critical approach to these traditions could be developed by drawing upon a relatively extensive range of heraldic sources and scholarly materials. The possibility of showcasing the copies of the sources featuring the family’s heraldic traditions or developing thematic educational activities is to be considered.

The entire literature concerned with the philosophy and methodology of history during the three centuries preceding 1800 can be schematically divided into two groups, although in individual works the two aspects were often fused and difficult to differentiate, especially in the eighteenth century when these two branches met. The first tendency was educational or pedagogical, the second and ancillary. One branch stemmed from the antique tradition of didactic history, clearly the product of classical influences such as rhetoric and Stoicism. and emphasized the utilitarian role of history in the private and public sphere. This so-called exemplar history' stressed the efficacy of historical examples as opposed to philosophical principles. In the various artes historicae of the sixteenth century, those essays describing the ways or means of studying or writing history, this was the emphasis which we meet almost exclusively. We can also say pedagogical in the strict sense of the word, insofar as these considerations about the role of history were to be found in larger educational treatises from Vives until the end of the eighteenth century Rollin, La Chalotais, or Condillac, to mention only a few later writers.2 The second branch was a younger one, beginning in the seventeenth century. This variety was a product of such influences as Cartesianism and the monastic tradition of erudite research; it dealt with questions of historical epistemology and logic, and contained, for example, debates on historical pyrrhonism. Seen from this viewpoint, critical may be broadly interpreted to include, beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, historical dictionaries and catalogues, and, in the eighteenth century, historical journals. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as we shall see, maintained an intense interest in the question of historical pyrrhonism. Yet all but a minority of the historical treaties produced at this time were essentially in nature, and logic came in second place. Any speculations about historical doubt derived generally from didactic motivations, rather than from philosophical or pyrrhonistic detachment. We may say that in the eighteenth century there developed a diversification of concerns. Questions of method, problems, or criticism became more defined and multiplied. Old elements of historical theory underwent adaptation in order to meet new social and political needs. This is clearly noticeable in the role of history in the programs or in the introductions and contents of the historical catechisms. At the same time, there was a fusion of research and his-

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster