Man and the Exchange of Material Goods
Team leaders :
Professor Bernd Roeck (Germany)
Dr. Herman Roodenburg (Netherlands)
Employing both symbolic and material objects, this team will explore in greater depth the processes through which early modern Europeans developed and expressed new self-concepts. Using written and visual sources, we will decipher objects, both everyday and luxury goods, as a means of communication and assess how they changed - through exchange - between 1400 and 1700. The team will begin to inventory these material and symbolic objects, a task essential to understanding the formation of a common European culture, through descriptive approaches to symbolic practices of self-presentation. It is necessary to see how these practices affected men and women of different social groups, as well as to chart patterns of regional differentiation within a European manner of expression.
4.1. Renaissance concepts of Man
Reopening the venerable but still fundamental issue of the cultural significance of the Italian Renaissance, this part of the project will attempt an anthropological and historical explanation of how a new concept of Man spread across early modern Europe as a result of a process of cultural exchange. Although scholars have traced elements of this new concept of Man to 14th-century Italy and also non-European influences, the Renaissance first took firm shape in 15th-century Italy. This group will study these developments through the history of literary genres (e.g., the quantitative dissemination of ego documents), in the critical appreciation of such key texts as Pico della Mirandolas De dignitate hominis, and in the spread of newly-fashionable forms of painting (e.g., realistic painting and self-portraits) ; another significant area of research will be the development of central perspective. This section will focus on clarifying the plastic and literary forms of expressing subjectivity and individualism, which were connected to long-term trends of secularization, as the Renaissance became a European phenomenon. It will also try to identify the social and economic conditions required for the diffusion of such new cultural models both within and beyond Italy.
4.2. The eloquent body
Ever since Burkhardt, the Renaissance concept of Man has been linked to the courtly notion of civility, which found its most forceful expression in Castigliones Courtier of 1528. A non-courtly parallel text, Eramus De Civilitate (1530), adapted monastic and clerical styles of disciplina corporis for a secular audience. Both were widely popularized by educators throughout Protestant and Catholic Europe as offering rational and universal codes of behavior : civility became an integral part of a specifically European identity. This section will emphasize how the corporeal aspects of civility were adapted and appropriated across Europe through cultural exchange between clergy and laity ; courts and cities ; Catholic and Protestants ; men and women ; between Mediterranean and northern Europe and will draw upon recent research on gesture (e.g., Bremmer and Roodenburg 1991; Bertelli and Centanni 1995). This section will address such issues as exactly when and how this bodily concept of civility was adopted throughout Europe, trying to suggest which obstacles created cultural frontiers (e.g., Bogucka on Polish rules of comportment). Emphasis will lie with daily, symbolic practices of self-presentation, drawn from letters, diaries, portraits, etc., and secondarily from such prescriptive sources as books of manners or the rules of Latin schools. Particular attention will be paid to aspects of rhetoric concerned with gestus (the general carriage of the body) ; compartments embodied in the arts, for example in acting, or in painting, drawing and sculpture. Examples range from the handling of contrapposto in Renaissance and Mannerist art to the immoral depictions of courtiers and peasants in 17th-century Dutch painting. Re-defined as a primarily moral, urban, and religious rather than courtly ideal, civility will be examined for its immoral or irrational images of the uncivilized, both within and beyond Europe. A most important topic concerns everyday and symbolic practices of fashioning the body for self-presentation, including the role of womens and mens clothing and its adaptation to such physical activities as dancing or riding horses.
4.3. The diffusion of material goods
We still know very little about the ways in which material culture, involving both everyday goods and luxury products, evolved in early modern Europe. The process must be explored in three dimensions : spatially, vertically by social groups, and longitudinally across time. At present these aspects have been satisfactorily investigated only for a few small regions (e.g., Burgundy) or towns (e.g., Prague or Brunswick).
- Because most physical objects in everyday use between 1400 and 1700 were highly utilitarian and belonged to ordinary people, the geographical and chronological axes are most important. Our investigation will focus on material goods used in houses (furniture and household utensils, particularly those employed in cooking, heating, eating, sleeping, and storage). During this period, individualism and the desire for intimacy developed throughout Europe. The poly-functional, one-hall house was replaced by houses with mono-functional rooms and relatively private chambers. People began to sleep in individual beds ; they began to eat from individual dishes ; they sat on chairs instead of benches, and even stored surpluses of money in individual chests. Even in the apparently trivial spheres of everyday life, one finds extraordinary differences among various regions, different rhythms of change, and different material markers separating social classes. Innovation affected the poor as well as the rich. We need to investigate how these dynamic exchange developed, paying attention to the role of natural barriers (e.g., mountains or marshes) and cultural barriers (e.g., age, gender, language, confessions or professions), and elements of porosity, whether natural (e.g., rivers) or cultural. Because the objects themselves have rarely been preserved for this period (its archaeology remains underdeveloped), our sources must also include their pictorial representations (sometimes investigated in art history) as well as written records (e.g., travelers reports, probate inventories, account books, or ego documents).
- However, luxury goods (including objects made from expensive metals, clothes of rare materials or unusual colors, artwork, and objects not designed for practical use) deserve separate attention. Complementing the workshop on everyday objects, they represent an elite perspective which usually exchanged fashionable goods far more rapidly than ordinary Europeans adopted utilitarian products. As Pierre Bourdieu has shown, the idea of exchange plays a central role in forming the habitus of leading European groups ; for example, Corinthian columns had an aristocratic connotation and were frequently employed, while Flemish painting often had an air which made it a status symbol for the Medici in 15th-century Florence. Because this topic has traditionally focused on key exchange markets (e.g., Venice, Paris, or Amsterdam) where fashion values were established, it will obviously work in close connection with the Cities team ; and because fashion depended on systems of information, its tasks intersects with the Communication team. The central problem, which must be explored through an interdisciplinary approach, is to describe the transformations of European artistic forms, and the conditions required for the diffusion of its most significant changes.
Four workshops are therefore envisaged by this team.
- Will reexamine the perennial issue of the Italian Renaissance concept of Man and its European diffusion, relating it to notions of self-presentation (Goffman) or fashioning the self (Greenblatt) and of course to cultural exchange
- Entitled Embodying the Civilizing Process, will employ both prescriptive and descriptive sources (including non-verbal evidence) to explore developments in bodily comportment (gesture, posture, and dress) as well as the rhetorical, theatrical, recreational, and even military methods (i.e., fencing) exchanged by European men and women as they sought status and distinction.
- Will investigate the exchange of luxury goods among European elites between 1400 and 1700, will examine the unabashedly materialistic dimension of self-presentation, exploring the relations between Bourdieus habitus and Baxandalls notion of trocs. In addition to the better-known urban contexts of southern and western Europe, it will also attempt to explore this process in early modern central Europe.
- Will begin to sketch the diffusion of everyday goods during the same epoch in various regions of Europe, primarily as manifestations of individualism.
