British Undergraduate History Review 1(1) 2020

Volume I, Number I, 2020

British Undergraduate History Review

Editor-in-chief: Robert Jones ​University of Exeter

Â

British Undergraduate History Review

The British Undergraduate History Review Journal of the British Undergraduate Review Volume I, No. I, 2020

Chairman:

Editor-in-chief:

Arden Foster-Spink

Robert Jones

Typesetting Editor:

Commissioning Editor:

Nunticha Bowonnaowarux

Elizabeth Whittaker

Peer Reviewers: Alexandra Beste

Harry Pendlebury

Man Ching Hua

Barnabas Balint

Henry Miller

Marcus Livermore

Charlie Knight

Ieuan Chappel

Matthew Slaughter

Chloe Thomas

Isabelle Hodgson

Maximus McCabe-Abel

Elizabeth Whittaker

Jack Graveney

Nunticha Bowonnaowarux

Ellie Brosnan

Joseph Beaden

Olivia Bennison

Esme Gray

Katrina Fenton

Robert Jones

Frank Allen

Lily Chadwick

Saskia Vadsholm Sieprath

Hannah Hayward

Lucie Menaul

Zac Terry

www.britishundergraduatereview.org

British Undergraduate History Review

www.britishundergraduatereview.org/history/

All rights reserved.

©2020 British Undergraduate History Review, and the authors.

No part of the ​British Undergraduate History Review​ may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means (graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, recording, or by any other information storage and retrieval system) without written permission from the ​British Undergraduate History Review e​ ditorial team, and the authors.

Cover image, ‘The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last Berth to be broken up’ by J.M.W Turner, 1838, used with public domain license (via Wikimedia Commons).

Contents

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1.

Editorial Robert Jones

British Policy and the Pashtun Experience Before the South Asian Partition Emily Baty

15. The Art of Nation-Building: Landscape Paintings and the Formation of American Identity Emma Gosling

31. Gender: A Pillar of British Imperial Power George Burnett

38. Albert, Aristotle, and Other Animals: New Perspectives on the Animal World in High Medieval Learning Thomas Banbury

47. "Unhappily Bequeathed to This World": The Personality of Henry IV of Germany Ines Andrade

58. Understandings of Landscape and Space in Early Modern Popular Culture Abigail Henderson

68. The Complexities of British Demobilisation After the First World War Hazel Laurenson

83. The Modern Construction of Gender, Sex, and the Body Rebecca Leeland

Editorial istory is written in ‘turns’, and is itself constantly turning. Proof of this can be seen in our own ‘unprecedented’ times, a bizarre epoch that leaves us in search of that precedent, in search of historicisation. It is with history that we feel comforted, knowing that we are not facing the wholly unknown, a blueprint from which we can build the future and divert to a better path. Today’s pandemic has already been compared to 1918’s; the popular appeal of a cyclical view of history thus remains. We have turned away from the conventional political situations in which we historicise ourselves, to the less familiar – the social and spatial – two ‘turns’ in historiography that perhaps at one time felt more academicized than applicable to the everyday. We no longer situate society simply according to our place within it, but also in how it has been managed and coerced from above. Space, conceptually, has also come to the fore; lockdown measures have seen spatiality dominate current political discourse. With once-esoteric sub-disciplines of historiography now finding their relevance today, it would seem that the discipline of History finds greater vindication still.

H

Yet this also means that one must imagine the historian living in fear of obsolescence, that one day their works and theories should suddenly be eclipsed. New generations, new modes of analysis, or – if we are to consider ourselves lucky – new primary material, can all render concepts and assumptions obsolete. Having one’s perspective challenged, or even the feeling of obsolescence, is merely the beautiful dialogue we have with the past, and the price we pay for engaging in it. There remains a more enduring certitude: that history is a collation, a disciplinary collage, and that professional history writing has rarely made pretences to the contrary. Historians are little without the sciences, both the social and empirical, and yet history breathes life into all other disciplines. This paradox introduces both bleakness and purpose into professional History. The endurance of a piece matters little if it contributes new perspectives, knowledge, and insights to its contemporaries. No idea ever truly lives an ephemeral existence.

It is with this assurance that the Review finds its purpose.

Currently, undergraduates are a much-maligned generation. They are, apparently, insincere in their academic desires, or are only attending university as a prerequisite to a career path. This journal stands as a proud testament against these assumptions. The Review serves to underscore two simple truths: that all academics were once budding undergraduates and, more importantly, that there is value in looking back, sometimes at seemingly exhausted topics, with fresh eyes.

Developments in historiography shift with rapidity, and this journal seeks to make use of these developments; as such, this issue covers such variance in topics as spatial understandings of early modern popular culture, to instrumentalist uses of gender. It is with new perspective that History advances as a discipline. History is constantly changing, and so too is the way we situate ourselves within it. If history is written in turns, then the BUHR asks a perennial question: where shall we turn to next?

This journal could not have been put together without the hard work of many individuals, and as such I offer my thanks. Nunticha (Yves) and Elizabeth, our Typesetting and Commissioning Editors, have done an incredible job of producing the journal and making sure the submissions process was kept to a high standard of fairness and integrity. Thanks must also go to Arden, the BUR Chairman, without whom this journal could never have actualised. Special thanks iii

must also go to Dr Charlie Rozier, whose Latin translations proved invaluable to our piece on Henry IV of Germany. Finally, a special thanks to all the Peer Reviewers behind this journal, whose judiciousness has been critical to the quality of the pieces that the BUHR has been lucky to showcase. It has been a pleasure to put the BUHR team together, and I am excited as to where the bright future of this journal leads. I very much hope you will enjoy this issue.

RJ

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British Undergraduate History Review vol. 1, no. 1, 2020

British policy and the Pashtun experience before the South Asian partition EMILY BATY

T

he Pashtun experience of British policy in colonial India must be understood as multilayered and complex. British approaches to controlling Pashtuns in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) varied, causing their experiences to be shaped in different ways. This distinction can be more prominently noted after the imposition of the Durand Line in 1893, which divided the British sphere of influence into the Tribal Areas and the Settled Districts.1 Both prior to and following the line’s demarcation, British policy towards Pashtun ‘tribes’ was informed by colonial prejudices, resulting in an incredibly invasive and repressive policy direction. Sana Haroon underscores the central notion that the concept of a ‘tribe’ should be contested as it does not correspond with reality.2 Rather, it is a colonial construction. For the purpose of this essay, however, the term will be used to refer to Pashtuns residing typically in the Tribal Areas. This essay will take a thematic approach, focusing on the significance of the rule of law and imperial violence to how British policy shaped Pashtuns. This focus allows for an exploration of the most invasive and severe aspects of British imperialism, and lays the groundwork for afterwards elaborating why Pashtuns increasingly resisted the British through violent means, especially in the tribal highlands. The paradoxical relationship between Pashtuns and British policies will also come to the fore, with each acting as a catalyst to the other. Firstly, the ideas and prejudices which underpinned Britain’s approaches to dealing with the ‘problem’ of Pashtun tribes will be outlined to contextualise the narrative. Afterwards, the central mechanisms utilised by the British to control Pashtuns, namely in the Tribal Areas, will be explored. The immediate, short-term consequences of this control will be elaborated upon before the long-term developmental implications of Britain’s systemic violence are outlined.

Next, the character of Pashtun resistance to British policies in the Settled Districts beginning in the 1920s will be explored, embedded in the context of the violent and oppressive situation created by the British in the Frontier. This will allow for comparisons which showcase the multifaceted ways in which Pashtuns’ experiences were shaped.

British policy towards Pashtuns was extensively informed by decades of colonial knowledge collection, which impacted Pashtun society and behaviour. Zak Leonard and

E Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier “Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India’, The American Historical Review, vol. 120, no. 4, 2015, p. 1225.

2 S Haroon, Frontier of Faith: A History of Religious Mobilisation in the Pakhtun Tribal Areas c. 1890-1950, Hurst & Company, London, 2007, pp. 25-26.

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Elizabeth Kolsky have both articulated the centrality of ethnography to British colonial state power.3 British public and political perceptions of Pashtuns embodied Orientalist stereotypes of a people inherently opposed to external control, which manifested in violent tendencies. 4 The ingrained nature of this perception within the British colonial establishment cemented the idea that Pashtuns were innately predisposed to violence, laying the groundwork for severe policies to shape them into submission. These ideas were also closely linked with assumptions about religion. Policy was to a large extent informed by Pashtuns’ supposed propensity for ‘fanaticism’, a western construction which William T. Cavanagh argues has worked to serve colonial powers by marginalising Muslim groups.5 British government writings on frontier tribes are riddled with condemning language of “bigoted” mullahs, and “barbarians” who carry “fire and sword for all infidels”.6 The writings of Winston Churchill from his military service in the frontier, for instance, formed a narrative of unprovoked Pashtun violence against British soldiers by “Ghazis, mad with fanaticism”.7 The British thus perceived Pashtun violence directed towards external control as an innate characteristic stemming from religious zealotry, rather than a reaction to Britain’s own extremely violent and repressive policy direction.

Officials had different perceptions of Pashtuns depending on the severity of their policy towards them, with some regarding them as hospitable and peaceful.8 In spite of this, perceptions of violence dominated British thinking and policies. The label of fanaticism automatically cast instances of Pashtun violence or anti-British sentiment as unjustified. Thus, British violent responses became not only justified, but normalised as necessary to maintain the imperial order.9 Outlining these imperial constructions is important to fully contextualise the ways Pashtuns were shaped by the policies which were informed by these imagining. It allows for the framing of a narrative in which British assertions of power dynamics and hierarchies came to be challenged by Pashtuns in various ways.

Informed by the preconceptions outlined, a cornerstone of British policy towards Pashtuns was to control frontier tribes. Churchill’s writings from his military service in the frontier outline the intention to bring “social progress against a rising deluge of barbarism”. 10 British policy thus intended to reshape the lives of five million Pashtuns by assimilating them into India proper, entwined with the hope of eradicating any sentiment of Pashtun Z Leonard, ‘Colonial Ethnography on India’s North-West Frontier, 1850-1910’, The Historical Journal, vol.

59, no. 1, 2016 , p. 175; Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law’, p. 1228.

4 C Tripodi, ‘Negotiating with the Enemy: ‘Politicals’ and Tribes 1901-47’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 39, no. 4, 2011, p. 588.

5 Leonard, ‘Colonial Ethnography’, p. 184; W.T. Cavanagh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962, p. 12.

6 W.H. Paget, ‘Record of Expeditions undertaken against the North-West Frontier Tribes’, Office of Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta, 1871, p. 2.

7 W Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, Dover Publications, New York, 1898, pp. 45-75.

8 C Lindholm, ‘Images of the Pathan: The Usefulness of Colonial Ethnography’, European Journal of Sociology, vol. 21, no. 2, 1980, p. 357.

9 D.B. Edwards, ‘Mad Mullahs and Englishmen: Discourse in the Colonial Encounter’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 31, no. 4, 1989, p. 665; Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, p. 12; E Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, p. 13.

10 Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, pp. 69-70.

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nationalism.11 A principal method used to control Pashtuns in the Tribal Areas was the rule of law. Within this, a policy of indirect control was pursued which intended to leave tribes with a degree of independence.12 British policy was thus a confusing blend of respect for tribal autonomy and the enactment of progressively more restrictive policies. Sandria B. Freitag has underscored the centrality of the law to British colonial repression, in that it was used criminalise entire groups who would thus be subject to heightened violent repression. 13 As Mark Condos puts it, the law became a weapon.14 The significance of enforcing a rigid law and order narrative cannot be understated. British official Sir William Barton wrote extensively on the importance of law and order to tribal policy.15 However, while the law intended to control and subdue Pashtun tribes, the sentiment of bringing peace to the frontier remains prevalent.16 Contradictions in British imperial thinking are thus noted. A benevolent and paternalistic approach to frontier policy was juxtaposed with increasingly violent and militaristic policies, enacted particularly in the Tribal Areas. The lives of Pashtuns thus came to be shaped by a lawand-order approach which greatly shifted their relationship to the imperial centre, raising important questions about their rights to sovereignty and access to power.

The Murderous Outrages Act (MOA) first created in 1857 is a key example of how British power was extended to deal with ‘crimes’ committed by ‘murderous fanatics’, namely violence against British officials. Between 1895 and 1905, 23 instances of ‘fanatical outrage’ in the NWFP were recorded, though real numbers are likely higher.17 The embedding of this terminology in the law created a completely separate legal category relevant to this kind of violence, almost invariably reserved for Pashtuns.18 Consequently, they were forced into an entirely new relationship with the imperial centre, one characterised by racist stereotyping, and manifesting in violent repression embedded in the law. Nasser Hussain and Elizabeth Kolsky have both written extensively about the significance of the law to legitimising British imperial state actions in its efforts to bring civilisation to Pashtuns, through exerting English ideals of morality and politics.19 Also central to Hussain’s argument is the concept of emergency in British imperial policy, which he proposes intensified the means through which the Empire

W Barton, ‘The Problems of Law and Order under a Responsible Government in the North-West Frontier Province’, vol. 19, no. 1, 1932, p. 17.

12 H Beattie, ‘Negotiations with the Tribes of Waziristan 1849-1914–The British Experience’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 39, no. 3, 2011, p. 572.

13 S.B. Freitag, ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 1991, p. 249.

14 M Condos, ‘License to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867-1925’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 2, 2016, p. 517.

15 Barton, ‘The Problems of Law and Order’, p. 5.

16 Ibid., p. 17; Paget, Record of Expeditions, p. 8.

17 M Condos, ‘“Fanaticism” and the Politics of Resistance along the North-West Frontier of British India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 58, no. 3, 2016, p. 729.

18 M Condos, The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017, p. 144.

19 N Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2006, p. 4; Edwards, ‘Mad Mullah’s and Englishmen’, p. 666; Kolsky, Colonial Justice, pp.

2-23.

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sought to maintain its sovereignty and supremacy.20 After the so-called ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, British imperial security could no longer be guaranteed. Kim A. Wagner and Joshua T. White have both emphasised the centrality of ‘Mutiny’ memory to British thinking, in that anxiety and paranoia increasingly informed policy.21 The combination of fears of a Muslim anticolonial conspiracy and pervasive ideas about fanaticism permeated British policy towards Pashtuns.22 Britain’s own anxieties about its imperial position forced Pashtuns to endure violent repression through this kind of legislation. The rule of law allowed for constructed stereotypes to become the groundwork of repressive policies which shaped Pashtuns by reducing their power to resist the exertion of British control.

Mechanisms of the MOA enabled the British to restrict tribal Pashtuns to the confines of the imperial imagination. The possibility of legitimacy of Pashtun grievances informing ‘unanticipated’ outbursts of violent rage was entirely missing from colonial legislation.23 Wagner has emphasised that the imperial hierarchy was sustained through the characterising of this kind of resistance as unjustified.24 Similarly, Kolsky has foregrounded that the rule of law allowed for the sustenance of a racial hierarchy, in which British privilege was enacted at the expense of the colonised.25 Demonstrations of discontent were swiftly repressed by colonial legislation like the MOA, with Pashtuns being denied agency to articulate anti-British, anticolonial grievances. Condos underscores that through the MOA, the British created ‘fanaticism’ as an exceedingly powerful legal category that established new boundaries for their power, reducing grievances to being the consequence of religious delusion or mental illness.26 Pashtun resistance was thus automatically discredited, especially if it took a violent form. British policy towards Pashtuns thus shaped them by transforming their status and power with respect to the imperial centre. Kolsky underscores that laws like the MOA completely transformed the relationship between Pashtuns and the state.27 Their traditionally autonomous and egalitarian society was increasingly threatened. Deeply entrenched within this colonial law, the term ‘fanatic’ remained largely subjective to British officials, which greatly enhanced powers of discretion; consequently, executions and the burning of ‘criminal’ bodies was swift.28 This exemplifies the importance of colonial ethnography to the extension of imperial power at the expense of Pashtuns. Islam teaches that the burning of bodies makes a place in heaven impossible.29 Paradoxically, Pashtuns were shaped by British use of their own religious beliefs against them. The MOA enabled individual officials to exert unprecedented dominance

20

Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency, p. 3.

K.A. Wagner, ‘‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past & Present, vol. 218, no. 1, 2013, p. 162; J.T. White, ‘The Shape of Frontier Rule: Governance and Transition, from the Raj to the Modern Pakistani Frontier’, Asian Security, vol. 4, no. 3, 2008, p. 223.

22 Wagner, ‘‘Treading Upon Fires’’, p. 186.

23 Condos, The Insecurity State, p. 149; Wagner, ‘‘Treading Upon Fires’’, p. 193.

24 Wagner, ‘‘Treading Upon Fires’’, p. 193..

25 Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, pp. 11-12.

26 Condos, ‘License to Kill’, p. 483; Condos, ‘“Fanaticism”’, pp. 719-720.

27 Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law’, p. 1228.

28 Condos, ‘“Fanaticism”’, p. 729.

29 Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law’, p. 1238.

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over Pashtuns, forcing them into subjugation to the imperial order, lest they be sentenced to imprisonment, death, or the denial of an afterlife.

The creation of the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) firstly in 1872 is another case in point of how the rule of law and colonial racial stereotypes worked in tandem to shape Pashtuns. The FCR became a systematically violent instrument through which the British attempted to manage frontier tribes.30 Benjamin D. Hopkins’ ideas about ‘frontier governmentality’ are particularly interesting here. He proposes that the FCR enabled the British to push established boundaries of sovereignty and power in order to create an entirely new legal space for Pashtuns, affecting them in unprecedented ways.31 He elaborates that imperial violence gained newfound justifications in the Frontier, while it would have been perceived as violating sovereign rights elsewhere in the British Empire.32 This creation of legal pluralisms enabled British policy to go to new lengths to oppress Pashtuns, exposing the gulf between Britain’s right to imperial sovereignty and Pashtun tribal rights to independence and self-rule.

British policy thus shaped Pashtun lives by altering their status (within the context of imperial power) for decades to come. Moreover, this quasi-imperial relationship has had important implications for the writing of history. Condos and Kolsky alike have underscored that Pashtun ‘fanatics’ left behind few written records or testimonies as a consequence of the FCR’s unjust mechanisms, leaving this history to be predominantly written by British officials.33 Similarly, Christian Tripodi has poignantly argued that tribal actions towards the British have been denied political and economic significance, being instead defined as customary and religious.34 British policy shaped Pashtuns by erasing their historical narrative, removing the ability of both contemporary actors and historical analysis to fully comprehend the political and emotional complexity of those deemed ‘fanatical’ by the imperial centre.

Methods of control and punishment embedded in the FCR were calculated to force Pashtuns into an unjust and relatively powerless position within this law and order narrative.

Collective punishments in the form of fines, displacement and the destruction of entire villages evidence some of the draconian measures employed.35 These kinds of violent punishments were deeply embedded in British imperial laws designed to control Pashtun tribes.

Furthermore, enhanced discretionary powers were assigned to the Deputy Commissioner, who would address crimes through a modified jirga system.36 Similarly, an existing ‘Council of

B Omrani, ‘The Durand Line: History and Problems of the Afghan-Pakistan Border’, Asian Affairs, vol. 40, no. 2, 2009, p. 187.

31 B.D. Hopkins, ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation and Frontier Governmentality’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 74, no. 2, 2015, p. 370.

32 Hopkins, ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation’, p. 372.

33 Condos, ‘“Fanaticism”’, p. 738; Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law’, p. 1239.

34 Tripodi, ‘Negotiating with the Enemy’, p. 595.

35 Hopkins, ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation’, p. 375; M Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 59.

36 Barton, ‘The Problems of Law and Order’, p. 8; C.C. Davies, The Problem of the North-West Frontier 18901908, Cambridge University Press, London, 1932, p. 53; Beattie, ‘Negotiations with the Tribes’, p. 574.

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Elders’ was utilised to enact FCR legislation.37 The adoption by the British of existing tribal governing institutions was especially significant; it enabled them to work through middlemen to enhance their own dominance. Manipulating local customs was a means of control that certain northern tribes would be familiar with. Thus, British policy shaped Pashtuns by combining existing mechanisms with new laws, which fused together to create new norms of governance, dealing with Pashtun ‘crime’ in much more severe ways than before. Legislation was purposefully vague about when which punishments should be employed, while police had authority to utilise the FCR’s mechanisms if they were lacking criminal evidence. 38 Pashtuns were, therefore, subject to unjust laws that had the authority to administer punishments for unspecified crimes. The British utilised the FCR to extend imperial power to have unchallenged leverage at the expense of Pashtun legal and sovereign rights. Additionally, the FCR was purposefully multi-layered and subjective. The 1887 Second Amendment stipulated that decisions made by the District Magistrate or Additional District Magistrate to punish Pashtuns by death would not have to be overseen by a Sessions Judge.39 The FCR thus enhanced the discretionary powers of individuals which shaped Pashtuns by subjecting them to the now enhanced power of British colonial officials, where accountability was virtually non-existent.

The rule of law and violence became entwined to enhance the power of the imperial centre by reducing the power of Pashtun tribes and their capacity for resistance.

Alongside impacting individual Pashtuns on a case by case basis, the FCR had implications for wider Pashtun society. Pant states that its repressive mechanisms massively hindered development.40 Colonial officials purposefully enacted collective punishments not merely as a deterrent, but to violate the Pashtun moral code Pashtunwali, which strongly emphasised the importance of honour.41 Public floggings were also increasingly enacted to humiliate individuals.42 The British thus meticulously combined colonial knowledge with the rule of law in order to shape Pashtuns into submission to the colonial order. Shame became a central element of punishment that intentionally violated cultural norms. Mukulika Banerjee has similarly written about the implications of the FCR for development in Pashtun society.

She articulates that the FCR engendered rising poverty levels and overall social stagnation, as many Pashtuns were living beyond their means to maintain honour through Pashtunwali.43 Furthermore, she emphasises that it increased social tensions, in the worst cases manifesting in murder, kidnapping and arson.44 British policy therefore shaped Pashtuns’ lives by destroying the traditional fabric of Pashtun society, replacing it with heightened social instability and inter-

‘The Punjab Frontier Crimes Regulation: A Regulation for The Suppression of Crime on the Punjab Frontier, 1887’, in R Nichols ed., The Frontier Crimes Regulation: A History in Documents, Oxford University Press, New York, 2014, p. 30.

38 Hopkins, ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation’, p. 376; Barton, ‘The Problems of Law and Order’, p. 13.

39 ‘The Punjab Frontier Crimes Regulation’, in R Nichols ed., The Frontier Crimes Regulation, p. 32.

40 S Pant, ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation in Colonial India: Local Critiques and Persistent Effects’, Journal of South Asia Studies, vol. 41, no. 4, 2018, p. 796; Hopkins, ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation’, p. 377.

41 Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed, p. 33.

42 Condos, ‘“Fanaticism”’, p. 736.

43 Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed, p. 34.

44 Ibid., p. 34.

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tribal tensions. Violence on the part of Pashtuns must therefore by understood as a consequence of Britain’s own violent policies, rather than innate characteristics, a notion which will be elaborated upon later. Poignantly, the punitive infrastructures established by the FCR were continued by the Pakistani government after partition in 1947.45 British policy towards Pashtuns thus created a lasting geographically and politically isolated, oppressed state of existence for Pashtuns. Power structures in place in this region have their origins in the colonial period, standing as a strikingly pertinent example of the enduring nature of systemic violence and its consequences.

The punitive infrastructures outlined had important implications for Pashtuns by shaping the character of their anti-British activity. In the Pashtun Tribal Areas, British political influences greatly enhanced the status of religious leaders such as mullahs and faqirs, evidencing the increasingly hierarchical nature of Pashtun tribal society.46 Ironically, these religious leaders profoundly affected anti-British activity amongst frontier tribes, with individuals such as Mullah Powindah and the Faqir of Ipi gaining political influence from their religious ferocity in Waziristan.47 The Faqir of Ipi was instrumental in recruiting for uprisings against the British, proclaiming the imminent necessity of preserving tribal ways of life based upon Islamic beliefs.48 A new role for religious leaders and religion itself was thus carved by the British for Pashtuns in the Frontier, with Islam becoming a unifying force and the basis for nationalist sentiment against British imperialism. Religious leaders became very charismatic in their preaching of an ‘Islamic utopia’ and the expulsion of infidels.49 British policy instrumentally shaped Pashtuns by pushing them to direct violence against a specific external enemy. This is significant as unity had long been rather absent for Pashtuns. The traditionally egalitarian nature of Pashtun tribal society was thus eroded to the detriment of the British, while newfound nationalistic sentiments surrounding sovereignty, but being based predominantly on Islam, were more commonplace. Three major revolts against British imperialism led by mullahs occurred, using methods of ambush, assassination, and robbery.50 British policy thus stirred a rise in instances of religiously inspired violence by Pashtuns. It is important to underscore the ignorance of the aforementioned perception that religious violence was an innate Pashtun characteristic. Instead, it must be defined as the consequence of punitive British policy measures.

The paradoxical relationship between British policy and Pashtun behaviour must now be addressed in further detail. Instances of religiously inspired violence were responded to by Pant, ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation’, p. 797; White, ‘The Shape of Frontier Rule’, p. 220; Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law’, p. 1222.

46 P Titus, ‘Honour the Baloch, Buy the Pushtun: Stereotypes, Social Organisation and History in Western Pakistan’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 32, no. 3, 1998, pp. 672-675; B.D. Hopkins, ‘Jihad on the Frontier: A History of Religious Revolt on the North-West Frontier, 1800-1947’, History Compass, vol. 7, no. 6, 2009, p.

1462; Haroon, Frontier of Faith, p. 101.

47 A Singer, Lords of the Khyber: The Story of the North-West Frontier, Faber and Faber, London, 1984, p. 159; Tripodi, ‘Negotiating with the Enemy’, p. 596.

48 C Tripodi, Edge of Empire: The British Political Officer and Tribal Administration on the North-West Frontier, 1877-1947, Ashgate, Farnham, 2011, p. 180.

49 Singer, Lords of the Khyber, p. 169.

50 Ibid., p. 161.

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the British with an increasingly militaristic approach to policy. Viceroy Lord Curzon, especially after 1900, was instrumental in stressing the need for greater applications of military and legislative violence by the imperial centre.51 Tribal aggression characterised as the work of ‘mad mullahs’ or ‘mad faqirs’ manifested in attacks seen at British forts of Chakdara and Malakand.52 Increased military garrisons were stationed to deter dissident activity in the NWFP, an example being the Malakand Field Force which totalled 10,000 men.53 Moreover, as one of the main areas of tribal violence, Waziristan was the only place in the Frontier where a regular army was stationed by the British.54 Violently repressive methods of martial law, burning villages and air bombing were also employed.55 The British perceived these applications of military power as the only suitable method of dealing with the provocative actions of the uncivilised ‘savages’ of the Frontier.56 The linguistics surrounding military expeditions against Pashtuns draw interest, with repeated references to them being ‘punishment[s] for international offences’.57 The British perceived their right to control Pashtuns through the rigid assertion of law and order through violent means. Thus, they pursued vigorous attempts to isolate anti-colonial resistance. The impact of British policy on Pashtun activity, and vice versa, becomes clear here: Pashtun behaviour shaped British policy at the same time as British policy shaped Pashtuns. Pashtuns in the Tribal Areas responded, often violently, to British colonial injustices, namely infringements upon tribal sovereignty.

Consequently, British officials perceived this tribal violence as a threat to British imperial sovereignty, which had to be dealt with accordingly. Within this, a great irony in the imperial project can be interpreted, raising questions about the role of religion in this violent narrative.

Violence in the name of Christianity and the civilising mission was starkly juxtaposed with violence inspired by Islam. Perpetrated by Pashtun Muslims, it was portrayed by the British as evidence of barbarism, insanity, and lawlessness. In contrast, British violence was a necessary, civilised arm of imperial power.

To fully emphasise the distinctive nature of this violent situation created in the Tribal Areas, the relationship between British policy and Pashtuns in the so-called Settled Districts must be elaborated upon. The Settled Districts of the NWFP saw a different kind of Pashtun resistance manifest as a consequence of the different British policies employed. Examining the differences between instances of anti-colonial resistance will demonstrate that Pashtuns were shaped in different ways. In the settled areas, the British tried to control Pashtuns through the dismantling and replacing of existing structures. Systems of revenue collection and concepts of ownership were introduced with the intention to establish a landlord class, resulting in rising inequalities.58 The traditional tribal wesh system was gradually replaced by British financial Tripodi, Edge of Empire, p. 87; Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law’, p. 1236; Condos, ‘License to Kill’, p.

508.

52 Tripodi, Edge of Empire, p. 87; Edwards, ‘Mad Mullahs and Englishmen’, p. 652.

53 Imperial Gazetteer of India, North-West Frontier Province, Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta, 1908, p. 24.

54 Tripodi, ‘Negotiating with the Enemy’, p. 596.

55 Ibid, p. 59; W Barton, India’s North-West Frontier, John Murray, London, 1939, p. 165.

56 Paget, Record of Expeditions, p. 5.

57 Ibid., p. 8.

58 Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed, p. 31.

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models.59 British policy justified transforming settled Pashtun society under the banner of improvement and modernity.60 However, certain Pashtuns in the Settled Districts became dissatisfied with their inequality with respect to Delhi, perceiving stagnated reforms and crucially, the absence of self-determination.61 The emergence of social and economic inequalities in a formerly egalitarian landscape shaped Pashtuns by entirely transforming their long-known structures, which manifested in a more organised form of anti-British resistance.

Abdul Ghaffar Khan, leader of the Khudai Khidmatgars (KK), is an example of a leader whose ideas and actions were shaped profoundly by British policy. Ironically, his Christian-directed, British education encouraged him to criticise the political and military injustices of British colonialism, to which he responded by stressing the importance of Pashtun schooling and education.62 Repression and underdevelopment as a consequence of British policy led the KK to foster an increased social awareness among Pashtuns, advocating the elevation of the status of Pashtun culture embedded in the necessity of justice. Thus, paradoxically, British attempts to integrate Pashtuns in the administered areas into India proper had the adverse effect of encouraging organised and politicised anti-colonial resistance.

Additionally, the nonviolent orientation of KK activism adds another angle to how British policy shaped Pashtuns. Ghaffar Khan was staunchly opposed to violence, enacting more peaceful, educational initiatives to avoid provoking British aggression.63 Banerjee and Sana Haroon have both emphasised that education was seen as a way to foster Pashtun unity and thus eradicate instances of inter-tribal violence, particularly prolific in the Tribal Areas.64 As aforementioned, the idea of the inherently and inconsolably violent Pashtun was carefully constructed by the British in order to justify more invasive and brutal means of control. The KK thus intentionally set out to counter British perceptions of Pashtuns in order to demonstrate their capacity for civility and self-governance. Thus, the nature of British policy towards Pashtuns determined the character of a different kind of Pashtun activism, which sought to escape the confines of the British imperial imagination. Despite this, the British response to Ghaffar Khan’s activism was indeed violent and repressive. So-called ‘Red Shirt’ activity was deemed to be lawless dissidence that needed to be dealt with.65 Indeed, the FCR was a primary method used to repress KK activism, which the British urgently wanted to avoid penetrating the Tribal Areas.66 The British were fearful of the kind of socially and politically motivated activism that they embodied, because of their real potential to animate enduring animosity towards British imperialism. Furthermore, the Emergency Powers Ordinance enabled the British to curtail relations between the KK and Indian nationalists.67 This repressive nature of 59

Davies, The Problem of the North-West Frontier, p. 55; Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed, p. 31.

Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency, p. 39.

61 Singer, Lords of the Khyber, pp. 193-194.

62 Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed, p. 47; S Haroon, ‘Competing Views of Pashtun Tribalism, Islam, and Society in the Indo-Afghan Borderlands’, in N Green ed., Afghanistan’s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban, University of California Press, California, 2017, p. 153.

63 Ibid., p. 49.

64 Ibid., p. 51; Haroon, ‘Competing Views of Pashtun Tribalism’, p. 153.

65 Barton, ‘The Problems of Law and Order’, p. 19.

66 Pant, ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation’, p. 795.

67 Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed, p. 58.

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British colonial policy was able to profoundly curtail the scope of Pashtun activism, massively limiting its power in the Frontier. The application of the law, coupled with violence, impacted Pashtuns by thwarting their capacity for resistance even in its peaceful forms.

This comparison between the Tribal Areas and Settled Districts warrants further attention. Haroon has emphasised that examining Pashtun resistance exposes an important difference between tribal and settled Pashtun communities.68 Pashtuns in the Tribal Areas continued to embody the violent, ‘uncivilised’ behaviour ascribed to them by the British, showcased by their lack of integration with the organised movements gaining traction in the Settled Districts.69 Although activists like Ghaffar Khan wanted total Pashtun solidarity to include the Tribal Areas, British policy dictated that he was unable to forge more than miniscule covert links with highland tribes.70 The behaviour of Pashtuns in the Tribal Areas was thus shaped to conform to British stereotypes. Imaginations of the innately violent Pashtun to an extent became reality. Britain’s strategic concerns become significant here. Indeed, the Pashtun tribal highlands functioned as a natural physical barrier to an expanding Russian Empire. Tribal policy was therefore considered central to British imperial defence. 71 British official Charles F. Andrews writing in 1937 explicitly stated that given the prospect of Russian expansion, it would be necessary “to take away a portion of their independence to keep them under some loose form of control”.72 Tribal sovereign rights were therefore subsumed by Britain’s imperial strategic considerations. Hopkins has emphasised that tribesmen were left ‘wild’ and ‘uncivilised’ in order to remain a barrier to the Russians.73 In this sense we must see Pashtuns as being shaped in different ways depending on their location. British policy was attempting to find a balance between controlling Pashtuns while leaving certain areas ‘uncontrolled’. There was clearly much to be gained from purposely stagnating development in the Tribal Areas and preventing organised resistance from taking hold. Pashtun tribal regions were thus deliberately underdeveloped and repressed to serve the Raj’s international geopolitical considerations, forced to be a cornerstone of Britain’s imperial defence.

Before concluding, it is important to briefly underscore the significance of this history to contemporary dynamics. The repression of Pashtun resistance and nationalism bears striking similarities to the repression enacted by the Pakistani government in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.74 This showcases the long-lasting implications of British policy for Pashtuns. Moreover, western Islamophobia and ideas surrounding the socalled War on Terror must be historically embedded. Both academic works and public discourse centre upon the violence-prone nature of Islam, while emphasising the supremacy of

Haroon, ‘Competing Views of Pashtun Tribalism’, p. 154.

Tripodi, Edge of Empire, p. 165.

70 Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed, p. 183.

71 Davies, The Problem of the North-West Frontier, p. 18.

72 C.F. Andrews. The Challenge of the North-West Frontier: A Contribution to World Peace, George Allen & Unwin LTD, London, 1937, p. 61.

73 Hopkins, ‘Jihad on the Frontier’, p. 1460.

74 Titus, ‘Honour the Baloch’, p. 678; Hopkins, ‘Jihad on the Frontier’, p. 1461.

68 69

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western-style liberal democratic structures.75 Concepts of the inherently primitive nature of Islam as being opposed to the modern west are grounded in this imperial narrative.76 Furthermore, analysts propose that US involvement in the region today unknowingly mirrors British imperial policy a century earlier.77 By considering this pertinent modern day context, we can more aptly comprehend the sustaining nature of British imperial policy towards Pashtuns, in that they were not only shaped in the colonial era, but continue to be shaped today.

Pashtuns’ lives were shaped by British policies in various ways. Britain’s own imperial imaginings, coupled with its strategic considerations, transformed the lives of Pashtuns residing in both the Tribal Areas and the Settled Districts. The distinction between the two, though not entirely rigid ‘on the ground’, is important to acknowledge, and helps to showcase the multifaceted relationship between Pashtuns and the British. The significance of violence and the rule of law as key elements of British policy cannot be understated. Pashtuns in the NWFP were forced to serve Britain’s imperial aims at the expense of their own sovereignty.

Resistance became illegal and was repressed violently, even in its most peaceful manifestations. Britain created a paradox in its imperial Frontier. Pashtuns became entrapped in a cycle in which their livelihoods and resistant activity were continually subjugated by Britain as an imperial power. Ultimately, this historical narrative can be understood as one of little change over time in the direction and aims of British policy. Contrastingly, marked and dynamic changes can be noted in the character of Pashtun resistance to imperialism, evidenced by the unified activism of the Settled Districts championing Pashtun rights. Importantly, the lasting implications of British policy must be acknowledged if we seek to accurately understand Britain’s imperial legacy and the contemporary dynamics that Pashtuns continue to experience presently.

Cavanagh, The Myth of Religious Violence, p. 13; Hopkins, ‘Jihad on the Frontier’, p. 1459.

A Padamsee, Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005, p. 202.

77 Omrani, ‘The Durand Line’, p. 177.

75 76

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Bibliography Primary sources Andrews, C.F., The Challenge of the North-West Frontier: A Contribution to World Peace, George Allen & Unwin LTD, London, 1937.

Barton, W., ‘The Problems of Law and Order under a Responsible Government in the NorthWest Frontier Province’, Journal of The Royal Central Asian Society, vol. 19, no. 1, 1932, pp.

5-21.

Barton, W., India’s North-West Frontier, John Murray, London, 1939.

Churchill, W., The Story of the Malakand Field Force, Dover Publications, New York, 1898.

Davies, C.C., The Problem of the North-West Frontier 1890-1908, Cambridge University Press, London, 1932.

Imperial Gazetteer of India, North-West Frontier Province, Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta, 1908.

Paget, W.H., ‘Record of Expeditions undertaken against the North-West Frontier Tribes’, Office of Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta, 1871.

‘The Punjab Frontier Crimes Regulation: A Regulation for The Suppression of Crime on the Punjab Frontier, 1887’, in R Nichols ed., The Frontier Crimes Regulation: A History in Documents, Oxford University Press, New York, 2014.

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Secondary sources Banerjee, M., The Pathan Unarmed, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000.

Beattie, H., ‘Negotiations with the Tribes of Waziristan 1849-1914–The British Experience’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 39, no. 4, 2011, pp. 571-587.

Cavanaugh, W.T., The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962.

Condos, M., ‘“Fanaticism” and the Politics of Resistance along the North-West Frontier of British India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 58, no. 3, 2016, pp. 717-745.

-

‘License to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867-1925’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 2, 2016, pp. 479-517.

-

The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017.

Edwards, D.B., ‘Mad Mullahs and Englishmen: Discourse in the Colonial Encounter’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 31, no. 4, 1989, pp. 649-670.

Freitag, S.B., ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol.

25, no. 2, 1991, pp. 227-261.

Haroon, S., ‘Competing Views of Pashtun Tribalism, Islam, and Society in the Indo-Afghan Borderlands’, in N Green ed., Afghanistan’s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban, University of California Press, California, 2017, pp. 145-162.

-

Frontier of Faith: A History of Religious Mobilisation in the Pakhtun Tribal Areas c.

1890-1950, Hurst & Company, London, 2007.

Hopkins, B.D., ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation and Frontier Governmentality’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 74, no. 2, 2015, pp. 369-389.

-

‘Jihad on the Frontier: A History of Religious Revolt on the North-West Frontier, 18001947’, History Compass, vol. 7, no. 6, 2009, pp. 1459-1469.

Hussain, N., The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2006.

Kolsky, E., Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010.

-

‘The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier “Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India’, The American Historical Review, vol. 120, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1218-1246.

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Leonard, Z., ‘Colonial Ethnography on India’s North-West Frontier, 1850-1910’, The Historical Journal, vol. 59, no. 1, 2016, pp. 175-196.

Lindholm, C., ‘Images of the Pathan: The Usefulness of Colonial Ethnography’, European Journal of Sociology, vol. 21, no. 2, 1980, pp. 350-361.

Omrani, B., ‘The Durand Line: History and Problems of the Afghan-Pakistan Border’, Asian Affairs, vol. 40, no. 2, 2009, pp. 177-195.

Padamsee, A., Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005.

Pant, S., ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation in Colonial India: Local Critiques and Persistent Effects’, Journal of South Asia Studies, vol. 41, no. 4, 2018, pp. 789-805.

Singer, A., Lords of the Khyber: The Story of the North-West Frontier, Faber and Faber, London, 1984.

Tapper, R., ‘Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan: An Update’, Etudes Rurales, vol. 184, 2009, pp. 33-46.

Titus, P., ‘Honour the Baloch, Buy the Pushtun: Stereotypes, Social Organisation and History in Western Pakistan’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 32, no. 3, 1998, pp. 657-687.

Tripodi, C., Edge of Empire: The British Political Officer and Tribal Administration on the North-West Frontier, 1877-1947, Ashgate, Farnham, 2011.

-

‘“Good for one but not the other”: The “Sandeman System” of Pacification as Applied to Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier, 1877-1947’, The Journal of Military History, vol. 73, no. 3, 2009, pp. 767-802.

-

‘Negotiating with the Enemy: ‘Politicals’ and Tribes 1901-47’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 39, no. 4, 2011, pp. 589-606.

Wagner, K.A., ‘‘Treading Upon Fires’ The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past & Present, vol. 218, no. 1, 2013, pp. 159-197.

White, J.T., ‘The Shape of Frontier Rule: Governance and Transition, from the Raj to the Modern Pakistani Frontier’, Asian Security, vol. 4, no. 3, 2008, pp. 219-243.

Wood, C., ‘The First Moplah Rebellion against British Rule in Malabar’, Modern Asian Studies, vol.10, no. 4, 1976, pp. 543-556.

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British Undergraduate History Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020

The Art of Nation-Building: landscape paintings and the formation of American identity EMMA GOSLING

T

he United States during the antebellum era can be seen as a nation in the process of establishing its own identity. Only recently independent from Britain, the American nation was ethnically diverse, and it did not have a language of its own or an ancient history in the Old World sense.1 For these reasons, American cultural products such as art and literature acquired significance in the early national period as confirmation of the nation’s unique identity. This essay will focus on eight works of art, produced between 1836 and 1861, which depicted the American landscape. Important studies by the historians Kariann Akemi Yokota, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Benjamin E. Park, as well as the art historian Angela Miller, will also be addressed. It will become clear that landscape art conveyed a sense of national identity through its emphasis on the ideas of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. Landscapes also enabled Americans to speculate about the future of their nation and, in certain instances, celebrate their revolutionary past. Although the regionally specific subjects featured in landscape paintings might be interpreted as evidence that sectionalism was prioritised over nationalism in the antebellum period, it will become apparent that regional subjects also enabled a conception of American identity which was broad and diverse. In various ways, therefore, American landscape art in the antebellum period conveyed a sense of national identity which was both complex and contradictory.

The movement for a unique cultural identity in the United States was characterised by the idea that American culture should be distinct from British culture. Kariann Akemi Yokota draws attention to this idea in her monograph Unbecoming British.2 By conceptualising the United States as a postcolonial nation, Yokota contends that as much as ‘becoming’ citizens of a new nation, Americans were engaged in a struggle of ‘unbecoming’ British subjects. 3 She contends that this struggle manifested itself in diverse areas of American life.4 Indeed, the process of establishing a cultural identity distinct from that of Britain was pervasive: for instance, in 1828 Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language

1

L. S. Kramer, Nationalism in Europe and America: politics, cultures and identities since 1775, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2011, p. 126.

2 K. A. Yokota, Unbecoming British: how revolutionary America became a postcolonial nation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010.

3 Ibid., p. 9.

4 Ibid., p. 234.

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British Undergraduate History Review as part of a cultural project to establish a distinct American language.5 Moreover, a number of literary publications came to fruition in the early republican period – such as the North American Review, established in 1815.6 This movement towards a unique American linguistic and literary identity indicates that America was engaged in a process of ‘unbecoming British’.

Similarly, in the fine arts, Americans demonstrated their commitment to the establishment of a national culture. The American Art-Union, established in 1844 in New York City, purchased and distributed works of art created by American artists.7 The Union declared itself as a truly national body which intended to cultivate a distinctly American art – a goal which was made particularly clear in an issue of the Bulletin of the American Art-Union in April 1850.8 It proclaimed that the committee of management of the Art-Union intended ‘to foster by all means in their power the development of a National school, and to cultivate those peculiarities which, while they are consistent with the true principles of Art, seem to distinguish, to a considerable extent, its manifestations in America’.9 The atmosphere of American politics at the time of the publication of this issue in 1850 must be borne in mind: the United States had recently made significant territorial gains in the West following the end of the MexicanAmerican War, and the controversy over the Wilmot Proviso had demonstrated that there was a strong sectional divide over the extension of slavery into the West. Within this context, the American Art-Union clearly considered its mission to be particularly important: the same issue of the Bulletin in 1850 declared, ‘may the Art-Union appeal to the public in this season of political agitation. It presents a field of work in which all may unite like brethren. It belongs to the whole people. It disregards sectional differences’.10 The search for an American artistic identity – exemplified by the American Art-Union – was therefore not just a process of ‘unbecoming British’, but also a process of healing the divisions in an increasingly fragmented nation during the antebellum period.

In the 1840s and 1850s, the American Art-Union prioritised the purchase and distribution of landscapes over other forms of painting.11 This indicates that landscape art was a particularly important vehicle for the expression of a national identity in these years. There are a number of explanations for this. Firstly, a feature of the American landscape which set it apart from the Old World was the existence of vast areas of wilderness untouched by human settlement.12 Landscape art depicting wilderness could therefore facilitate an expression of American exceptionalism which contributed to its unique national identity. In addition, the emergence of Romanticism in American thought during the early decades of the nineteenth century is an important element to consider. Under the influence of Romantic conceptions of nature, the American landscape – in particular its scale, variety and untouched quality – would come to

5

J. McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern nationalists and Southern nationalism, 1830-1860, London, W. W. Norton & Company, 1979, pp. 18-20.

6 Ibid., pp. 18-20.

7 D. Schuyler, Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists and the Hudson River Valley, 1820-1909, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2012, pp. 116-7 8 ‘Introductory’, Bulletin of the American Art-Union, no. 1, 1850, pp. 1-3.

9 Ibid., p. 3.

10 Ibid., p. 2.

11 Schuyler, Sanctified Landscape, pp. 116-7.

12 Ibid., p. 117.

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GOSLING – Landscape paintings and the formation of American identity symbolise the youthful promise of the nation.13 Another aspect of the American landscape which facilitated an expression of national identity is what Angela Miller refers to as its ‘multivalence of meaning’.14 The idea that American nature was shared by all Americans meant that landscape art could convey a broad understanding of national identity which appealed to citizens with diverse social and political allegiances.15 Landscapes also became more accessible as a result of advances in the circulation of printed material during the nineteenth century. This is demonstrated by the increasing popularity of ‘scenery albums’ – such as The Home Book of the Picturesque, published in 1852 – which enabled Americans to access images of their landscape without travelling great distances.16 Clearly, landscape art in particular was a useful tool in the construction of a distinct American identity.

The Hudson River School of landscape painters, which emerged in the Hudson River Valley area of New York in the 1830s, exemplified the spirit of American nationalism.17 One of the central figures of the school was Frederick Edwin Church, whose 1857 painting Niagara demonstrates how landscape art was used to present a message of American exceptionalism.18 Perhaps the most striking feature of the painting is its presentation of the enormous scale of Niagara Falls, which is facilitated by the use of a wide canvas. Furthermore, the force with which the water appears to move, and the sense of majesty created by the rainbow left of view, suggests that Church was making an implicit comment upon the superiority of American nature in relation to European nature. Indeed, the painting was exhibited in England and Scotland, which suggests that it was used in order to demonstrate the magnificence of New World landscapes to a British audience.19 Church’s Niagara is a nationalistic portrayal of the American landscape which conveys a sense of identity characterised by the notion of exceptionalism. Therefore, the painting can be seen to support Yokota’s argument that the United States in this period was ‘unbecoming British’.

Another prominent theme in American art from the antebellum era, which relates to ideas of American exceptionalism, is the westward expansion of the United States. Art was a means by which Americans could represent the nation’s Manifest Destiny – that is, the idea that the American people were destined by divine providence to expand into the West and to extend the ideals of the Revolution throughout the entire continent.20 This aspect of American ideology, which was particularly prevalent from the 1830s onward, indicates that the West played an important role in Americans’ perception of their nation’s identity and mission in the antebellum period.21 Frederick Jackson Turner expressed this idea in his 1893 essay, ‘The 13

A. Miller, The empire of the eye: landscape representation and American cultural politics, 1825-1875, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 7.

14 Ibid., p. 15.

15 Ibid., p. 15.

16 R. F. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001, p. 71.

17 E. Avila, American cultural history: a very short introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 256.

18 See Appendix A. 19 Miller, The empire of the eye, p. 218 20 R. W. Johannsen, ‘Introduction’, in S. W. Haynes and C. Morris (eds.), Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism, Arlington, Texas A&M University Press, 2008, p. 3.

21 R. C. Aikin, ‘Paintings of Manifest Destiny: Mapping the Nation’, American Art, vol. 14, no. 3, 2000, p. 79.

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British Undergraduate History Review significance of the Frontier in American History’.22 Turner described the western frontier as ‘the line of most rapid and effective Americanization’ and argued that ‘the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines’.23 Although Turner’s frontier thesis obscures some other important factors which contributed to the formation of national identity, it does provide a convincing explanation for the prevalence of western migration as a theme in American art at this time. The idea that Americans had been chosen by God to fulfil the mission of western expansion complemented notions of American exceptionalism, giving rise to the emergence of an American identity independent of European influence. Works of art depicting western migration in the antebellum period used landscape in order to express the idea of America’s Manifest Destiny. Characteristic of this approach are Emanuel Leutze’s 1861 painting, Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, and J. J. Young’s watercolour from 1859, Crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert.24 Both of these works depict the westward movement of the pioneers through American landscapes, and although they are stylistically different, there is a specific technique which they both employ. Leutze and Young, like many other artists depicting western migration in this period, present the movement of figures from the right of the frame to the left, mimicking the movement of the pioneers from east to west.25 In this way, they allegorically represent the entire North American continent within their depictions of migration, which reinforces the notion that Americans were drawn to the West by divine destiny.26 The fact that this technique was so widely used by antebellum artists implies that the West held an important influence over the American psyche during the antebellum period.27 This lends support to Frederick Jackson Turner’s notion that American identity was formed at the western frontier.

The idea of movement through the American landscape is a significant theme in J. J. Young’s watercolour, Crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert.28 In contrast to the paintings of the Hudson River School, such as Church’s Niagara, this watercolour does not use the landscape itself to inspire awe. In fact, the only discernible feature of the desert landscape is the faint outline of Granite Mountain in the distance. As Roger Cushing Aikin has pointed out, Young presents the Salt Lake Desert ‘only as something to be traversed as quickly as possible’. 29 In this way, Young presents an image of the West as a vast, empty space which would inevitably be incorporated into the United States. In other words, this watercolour is a strong assertion of the idea of Manifest Destiny. J. J. Young’s technique is different to that of Frederick Edwin Church – for Young, the American landscape is not a symbol of power or majesty but a symbol of the American destiny. However, the two artists convey a similar understanding of national identity based on American exceptionalism. Emanuel Leutze’s painting, Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, presents a dramatic view of the American landscape, bearing more 22

F. J. Turner, The significance of the Frontier in American history, London, Penguin, 2008 Ibid., p. 4 .

24 See Appendices B and C. 25 Aikin, ‘Paintings of Manifest Destiny’, pp. 85-6.

26 Ibid., p. 86.

27 Ibid., pp. 85-6.

28 See Appendix C. 29 Aikin, ‘Paintings of Manifest Destiny’, p. 86.

23

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GOSLING – Landscape paintings and the formation of American identity similarities with Church’s Niagara than with Young’s Crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert.30 Leutze highlights diverse natural features – mountains, deserts, rock formations, forests, and sea – in order to draw attention to the scale and variety of the American landscape. The presentation of the idea of Manifest Destiny in the painting is similar to that in Crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert: the viewer is invited, by the central figure pointing in a westward direction, to imagine a future in which the American nation is continental in scope. Moreover, there is a religious tone to the painting which reinforces the idea of the providential mission of the American people. For instance, the painting’s composition – which includes a predella depicting the Golden Gate of San Francisco – imitates a composition used in European representations of the holy miracles in Medieval and Renaissance art.31 The implicit suggestion that western migration was itself a holy miracle is an expression of the idea that Americans were destined by divine providence to extend their nation’s ideals to the Pacific coast. Leutze and Young, in their representations of the American landscape as the backdrop for western migration, construct a vision of national identity based on the principles of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.

When addressing the emergence of an American identity in the antebellum period, an important question to consider is whether the primary goal of American nationalists was to extricate their nation from its colonial past, or to look forward to the nation’s future. Kariann Akemi Yokota argues that the early United States was more concerned with the process of ‘freeing itself from British cultural hegemony’ than with optimistically speculating about its own destiny.32 Yokota uses A. A. Phillips’s phrase ‘cultural cringe’ in order to describe feelings of inferiority which characterised American nationalism in this period.33 To a certain extent, American landscape art from the antebellum period supports Yokota’s view. Some Southern landscapes, in particular, could be interpreted as attempts to distance America from its colonial origins. The landscapes in the South which were most frequently represented in art in the antebellum period were those which were associated with the Revolution.34 The Natural Bridge in Virginia, for instance, was depicted by a number of landscape artists, including William Henry Bartlett, whose engravings were featured in Nathaniel Parker Willis’s 1840 book American Scenery.35 The Natural Bridge held historical significance because it had been made famous by Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, therefore it bore associations with America’s founding fathers.36 This emphasis on moments in America’s past which bolstered patriotism lends support to Yokota’s view that the primary mission of American nationalists was to free their nation from its associations with Britain. However, a much more prevalent theme in antebellum landscape art is the exploration of America’s future. This is evident in Leutze’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way and Young’s Crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert; and it is perhaps even more obvious in the paintings of the Hudson

30

See Appendix B. Aikin, ‘Paintings of Manifest Destiny’, p. 79.

32 Yokota, Unbecoming British, p. 234.

33 Ibid., p. 12.

34 Miller, The empire of the eye, p. 23.

35 See Appendix D; Miller, The empire of the eye, p. 234.

36 Miller, The empire of the eye, p. 234.

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British Undergraduate History Review River School. Thomas Cole’s 1836 painting, The Oxbow, is a prime example of this.37 The painting juxtaposes wilderness (presented in the left foreground) with settlement and agriculture (presented in the background). Scholars have interpreted this juxtaposition as a metaphor for America’s natural progress towards a civilised, agrarian ideal.38 Furthermore, the use of colour is significant: while the darkness in the foreground represents a primitive stage in America’s development, the light in the background connotes optimism for the future. The emphasis on the future in this important painting from the Hudson River School indicates that, to a significant extent, America’s perception of itself in the antebellum period was characterised by confidence and optimism rather than ‘cultural cringe’. Moreover, it is significant that The Oxbow uses wilderness to symbolise an early stage in America’s development, rather than to highlight the unique, untouched quality of the American landscape.

In this respect, Cole’s painting does not appear to celebrate American exceptionalism; rather, it appears to aspire to a development from wilderness to civilised society comparable to that of Europe. This demonstrates that, in some cases, artists demonstrated a vision of the American nation which was embedded in its relationship with the Old World. In this way, too, Cole’s The Oxbow indicates that Yokota’s notion of ‘unbecoming British’ is not entirely convincing in relation to the antebellum period.

The idea of emulating the development of the Old World is illustrated even more explicitly in another painting from the Hudson River School. Asher B. Durand’s 1853 painting, Progress (The Advance of Civilization), is similar in composition to Cole’s The Oxbow.39 The left foreground depicts a rugged wilderness, featuring Native American figures looking out onto a landscape that shows signs of development.40 In the middle distance there are fields and cattle, connoting an agricultural ideal comparable to that presented by Cole. Similarly to The Oxbow, the painting uses the contrast of dark and light colours to portray optimism. Some particularly significant features of Durand’s painting are the references to technological advancement: the telegraph wires moving from the right foreground into the middle distance, a train crossing the river, and what appear to be ships and factories producing steam in the background. The painting seems to fantasise about the future of technological advancement and industrialisation in the United States. Like Cole’s The Oxbow, the painting can therefore be seen to suggest a desire to imitate the course of Great Britain. Yokota’s concept of ‘unbecoming British’ is persuasive in relation to many aspects of landscape art in the antebellum period, in particular the portrayal of the majesty of American nature in paintings such as Church’s Niagara, the presentation of Manifest Destiny in art depicting westward migration, and the references to America’s revolutionary history in Southern landscapes. However, Cole’s The Oxbow and Durand’s Progress (The Advance of Civilization) indicate that it would be incorrect to assume that the entire process of constructing American identity centred around the notion of ‘unbecoming British’. Landscape art demonstrates that, in the antebellum period, there was a tension in America’s nascent identity between an inclination to follow the course of Britain and an inclination to demonstrate American exceptionalism.

37

See Appendix E. Miller, The empire of the eye, pp. 40-1.

39 See Appendix F. 40 Miller, The empire of the eye, p. 154.

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GOSLING – Landscape paintings and the formation of American identity

In many respects, the American landscape appealed to diverse understandings of national identity in the antebellum period. However, the regionally specific nature of landscape art in some cases resulted in the construction of regionally specific identities. Indeed, the images of American nature created by artists in the Hudson River School – which came to be viewed as the national ideal – were centred around the Hudson River Valley area in New York.41 Furthermore, New York City was a particularly important centre for the creation of a national art: the American Art-Union was based there, as was the National Academy of Design – an organisation which established itself as the standard-bearer of the national artistic culture.42 For this reason, landscape artists, even those from the South, were drawn to New York City in order to access training, patronage, or opportunities to exhibit their work.43 The majority of the artistic representations of the American landscape in the antebellum period were therefore influenced by the predominance of the Northeast as an artistic centre. One of the consequences of this was that collections of images of American scenery published during this period largely neglected Southern subjects. For instance, in Willis’s American Scenery (1840), which featured over one hundred engravings by William Henry Bartlett, the Natural Bridge in Virginia was the southernmost landmark to be depicted.44 Clearly, artistic representations of the American landscape in the antebellum period were not necessarily representative of the diverse aspects of American nature and, by extension, American identity.

Thomas Addison Richards was one of the landscape artists of the antebellum era who depicted Southern subjects. His painting River Plantation, from the late 1850s, demonstrates how artistic representations of the South were in many ways different from representations of the North.45 River Plantation depicts a calm scene on the banks of a river in the plantation South. Its serene atmosphere is a stark contrast to the drama of paintings of the Hudson River School such as Church’s Niagara. There are a number of features which identify River Plantation as a distinctly Southern landscape – the oak tree covered in Spanish moss, for example. Moreover, slavery – which was associated with the South in particular by the 1850s – is implicitly incorporated into Richards’s landscape: in the foreground, there is a black child sitting on a horse, suggesting the presence of slave labour on this plantation. Given that there are a number of distinctly Southern features, the message of identity conveyed in this painting could be interpreted as sectional rather than national. Some scholars, however, have suggested that regionally specific conceptions of identity are important in understanding American identity as a whole. Benjamin E. Park, for instance, contends that ‘constructions of nationalism were often tethered to personal backgrounds, regional cultures, parochial concerns, and localized political systems’.46 For this reason, Park draws attention to ‘American nationalisms’, plural, rather than ‘American nationalism’, singular.47 If this view were to be applied to the 41

Schuyler, Sanctified Landscape, pp. 174-5.

Miller, The empire of the eye, p. 217.

43 Ibid., pp. 233-4.

44 See Appendix D; Miller, The empire of the eye, p. 234.

45 See Appendix G. 46 B. E. Park, American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 6-7.

47 Ibid., pp. 6-7.

42

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British Undergraduate History Review landscape art of the antebellum period, it would suggest that Southern landscapes such as Richards’s River Plantation, as well as Northern landscapes such as those of the Hudson River School, all reflect diverse aspects of a composite American identity rather than separate sectional identities. However, this argument is not entirely convincing. Park’s monograph American Nationalisms focuses on the period from 1783 until 1833, therefore his argument that regional contexts influenced notions of national identity does not necessarily apply to the antebellum era. In the years leading to the Civil War, the tension between the North and the South became increasingly palpable and at times violent, as events such as Bleeding Kansas (1854-1861) demonstrate. For this reason, an interpretation provided by Angela Miller is perhaps more applicable to the antebellum period than that provided by Benjamin E. Park.

Miller argues that by the mid-nineteenth century, ‘this older version of nationalism rooted in the specifics of the local and regional landscape had been discredited by its new association with sectional apologetics’.48 Although American identity might have been constructed in the early national period from a range of regionally specific identities, the fragmented political atmosphere in the years leading to the Civil War must be borne in mind. Some of the artistic representations of the American landscape from the antebellum period – such as Richards’s River Plantation – can be seen to represent sectionalism rather than nationalism.

In one respect, however, Benjamin E. Park’s argument is pertinent to the landscape art of the antebellum period. The presentation of western landscapes in the paintings of George Caleb Bingham reveals that regionally specific subjects could be consciously incorporated into presentations of national identity. Bingham’s paintings of the Missouri River, such as Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), depicted the West within the context of the Union as a whole.49 Certainly, there are some distinctly western themes in Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. As in Young’s Crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert and Leutze’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, the movement of the central figures in the painting is from right to left, which can be interpreted as a reference to westward expansion and the significance of the Missouri River in this process.50 However, the presentation of the fur trade in the painting also demonstrates that the Missouri River was an asset to the national economy because it functioned as a commercial link between Missouri and the other states in the Union.51 Owing to George Caleb Bingham’s association with the Whig party in Missouri, scholars have interpreted the painting as an overt political comment upon the interconnectedness of the American states.52 Indeed, Whig political rhetoric encouraged the pursuit of regional policies which benefitted the economy of the nation as a whole – and, in Missouri, commerce on the cleared rivers was an important part of this agenda.53 The national perspective incorporated in

48

Miller, The empire of the eye, pp. 215-16.

See Appendix H; N. Rash, The painting and politics of George Caleb Bingham, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991, pp. 5-6.

50 Rash, The painting and politics of George Caleb Bingham, p. 7.

51 Ibid., p. 7.

52 Ibid., p. 1.

53 A. Miller, ‘The mechanisms of the market and the invention of western regionalism: the example of George Caleb Bingham’, in D. C. Miller (ed.), American Iconology: new approaches to nineteenth-century art and literature, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993, p. 120; Rash, The painting and politics of George Caleb Bingham p. 1, 7.

49

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GOSLING – Landscape paintings and the formation of American identity Bingham’s paintings of the Missouri River is an indication that diverse and regionally specific representations of the American landscape in some cases supported notions of national identity.

Artistic representations of the American landscape reveal the complex and contradictory aspects of America’s emergent identity in the antebellum period. In some ways, landscape art from this period demonstrates that Americans were engaged in a process of ‘unbecoming British’. Artists drew attention to the features which separated the United States from the Old World by portraying the power and majesty of American nature, by emphasising the idea of Manifest Destiny, and by celebrating landscapes associated with the Revolution. However, certain landscapes of the Hudson River School focused instead on the promises of the nation’s future and even demonstrated an inclination to emulate the development of Great Britain.

Moreover, landscape art did not only convey a sense of national identity. In the antebellum period it also represented identities which were specific to section or region. In these ways, artistic representations of the American landscape highlight the fundamental ideas, as well as the inherent tensions and inconsistencies, which characterised America’s nascent identity during the antebellum period.

23

British Undergraduate History Review Appendix A

F. E. Church, Niagara, 1857, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.166436.html, (accessed 9 January 2020).

Appendix B E. Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, 1861, https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/westward-course-empire-takes-its-way-mural-study-uscapitol-14569, (accessed 8 January 2020).

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GOSLING – Landscape paintings and the formation of American identity Appendix C J. J. Young, Crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert, from Simpson’s Spring to Short Cut Pass, Granite Mountain in the Distance, 1859, cited in R. C. Aikin, ‘Paintings of Manifest Destiny: Mapping the Nation’, American Art, vol. 14, no. 3, 2000, p. 87.

Appendix D W. H. Bartlett, Natural Bridge, Virginia, 1840, in N. P. Willis, American Scenery: Or, Land, Lake and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature. Volume 2, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015.

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Appendix E T. Cole, View form Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow, 1836, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/08.228/, (accessed 6 January 2020).

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GOSLING – Landscape paintings and the formation of American identity Appendix F A. B. Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization), 1853, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/710442, (accessed 6 January 2020).

Appendix G T. A. Richards, River Plantation, 1855-1859, https://www.themorris.org/art_piece/riverplantation/, (accessed 4 January 2020).

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British Undergraduate History Review Appendix H G. C. Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/33.61/, (accessed 9 January 2020).

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GOSLING – Landscape paintings and the formation of American identity Bibliography Primary sources Bartlett, W. H., Natural Bridge, Virginia, 1840, in N. P. Willis, American Scenery: Or, Land, Lake and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature. Volume 2, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Bingham, G. C., Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/33.61/, (accessed 9 January 2020).

Church, F. E., Niagara, 1857, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.166436.html, (accessed 9 January 2020).

Cole, T., View form Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow, 1836, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/08.228/, (accessed 6 January 2020).

Durand, A. B., Progress (The Advance of Civilization), 1853, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/710442, (accessed 6 January 2020).

‘Introductory’, Bulletin of the American Art-Union, no. 1, 1850, pp. 1-3.

Leutze, E., Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, 1861, https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/westward-course-empire-takes-its-way-mural-study-uscapitol-14569, (accessed 8 January 2020).

Richards, T. A., River Plantation, 1855-1859, https://www.themorris.org/art_piece/riverplantation/, (accessed 4 January 2020).

Young, J. J., Crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert, from Simpson’s Spring to Short Cut Pass, Granite Mountain in the Distance, 1859, cited in R. C. Aikin, ‘Paintings of Manifest Destiny: Mapping the Nation’, American Art, vol. 14, no. 3, 2000, p. 87.

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British Undergraduate History Review Secondary sources Aikin, R. C., ‘Paintings of Manifest Destiny: Mapping the Nation’, American Art, vol. 14, no.

3, 2000, pp. 78-89.

Avila, E., American cultural history: a very short introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Johannsen, R. W., ‘Introduction’, in S. W. Haynes and C. Morris (eds.), Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism, Arlington, Texas A&M University Press, 2008, pp. 3-6.

Kramer, L. S., Nationalism in Europe and America: politics, cultures and identities since 1775, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

McCardell, J., The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern nationalists and Southern nationalism, 1830-1860, London, W. W. Norton & Company, 1979.

Miller, A., The empire of the eye: landscape representation and American cultural politics, 1825-1875, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993.

Miller, A., ‘The mechanisms of the market and the invention of western regionalism: the example of George Caleb Bingham’, in D. C. Miller (ed.), American Iconology: new approaches to nineteenth-century art and literature, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993, pp. 112-134.

Nash, R. F., Wilderness and the American Mind, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001.

Park, B. E., American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Rash, N., The painting and politics of George Caleb Bingham, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991.

Schuyler, D., Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists and the Hudson River Valley, 18201909, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 2012.

Turner, F. J., The significance of the Frontier in American history, London, Penguin, 2008.

Yokota, K. A., Unbecoming British: how revolutionary America became a postcolonial nation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010.

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British Undergraduate History Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020

Gender: A pillar of British imperial power GEORGE BURNETT

G

ender, in particular gendered discourse, was used to justify and maintain British Imperial power. Gendered discourse shaped Imperial identities – of natives and of colonisers – and in doing so created a framework of identity which justified Imperial dominance. This framework manifested itself in the often stereotypical and imprecise gendering of certain groups of people, and the perceived dynamics between categories of race and sex. With this reworking of Imperial identity, gender thus provided a universal everchanging justification for Imperial power, and so helped to construct and maintain it throughout the course of Imperial history. For the purposes of this essay, ‘gender’ is best defined as ‘a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasise the social and cultural… distinction between the sexes.’1 Though dated in modern contexts, as sex and gender are no longer regarded as so intimately connected, this definition describes gender aptly when considering the British Empire. In its time, gender and sex were seen as intimately connected, and gender principally played a ‘social and cultural’ role in shaping Imperial discourse, which in turn affected identities and power dynamics across the Empire.

With this in mind, gender’s key role in the construction of Imperial power and identity was its role in justifying the ‘Natural History of Man’, a pervasive idea that the ‘civilised’ British were morally superior to the ‘savage’ native populations, and had a duty to ‘civilise’ them. This depiction of native men as ‘savages’ relied on various markers of identity – race, rank and religion, for example – but its foundation was gender. Perceived gender relations between black men and white women exemplify this, as the supposed ‘heightened sexuality’ of native men towards white women debased them to the status of lustful savages.2 The invented sexual threat of black men was common in the West Indies in the 18th century, justifying slavery by gendering slaves as lecherous barbarians in need of civilisation.3 The myth of “Black Peril” in South Rhodesia and Kenya in the 1920s mirrored this: another presumption of that stereotype.4 Consequently, this gendered image had two effects across the lifespan of the Empire: it solidified racial identity and racial power dynamics by reinforcing the notion of the ‘savage’ blacks, and it justified colonial power by dehumanising the colonised and giving a perceived morality to British dominance. Various studies have correlated political tensions with the 1

J. A. H. Murray, H. Bradley, W. A. Craigie and C. T. Onions (eds.), The Oxford English Dictionary Volume VI Follow-Haswed, 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 428.

2 A. L. Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures’, American Ethnologist, vol. 16, 1989, p. 640.

3 K. Wilson, ‘Empire, Gender and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century’, in P. Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 30.

4 Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable’, p. 641.

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BURNETT – Gender: a pillar of British imperial power prevalence of this stereotype, bolstering the idea that this perception was a way to justify Imperial power.5 The perceived dynamic between genders within the colonised population was another influential gendered formation that played to the stereotypical ‘savage’ identity. This perception is summarised in George Forster’s (d. 1792) discussions of Pacific islanders, which Wilson claims were influential in shaping British views of the colonies. In his diaries, Forster declares forcefully and repeatedly that ‘uncivilised nations… deny their women the common privileges of human beings.’6 Wilson perhaps overstates Forster’s influence on national discourse, but he is certainly illustrative of contemporary views towards ‘uncivilised nations’ and their attitudes to women. Such a perspective was not limited to the Pacific either, as the same argument was given about Indian maltreatment of women, particularly concerning the practice of suttee (widow-burning). The British saw this as a barbaric way to treat women, and framed it as symptomatic of the subcontinent’s barbarism, a view reinforced by perceptions of child marriage, polygamy and female segregation.7 Hall seems to overemphasise this interpretation when she describes the 1829 prohibition of suttee as a cynical attempt to undermine the identity of native men, as this prohibition was championed by William Carey alongside various native reformers and was a genuine act of social reform. While it may have had reformers driving it though, it was still a gendered method for justifying Empire: the perception of social reform as a British movement bolstered the gendered stereotype of natives as ‘savages’ being ‘civilised’ by Imperial presence.

Another aspect of this gendered moralisation of Empire is the perception of native masculinity; native men were seen as unmanly, thus justifying their subordination. Hall sees a transition in perceived Indian masculinity after the so-called Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 – the ‘docile and loyal sepoy’ becoming re-framed as ‘treacherous’ in response to the threat.8 However, this is an oversimplification which does not acknowledge the role of gender. Streets’ arguments appear more appropriate, as she views a transition in gendered discourse occurring because of a nascent nationalism in India which threatened Imperial power, rather than a reactive sense of betrayal following the rebellion.9 This trend is epitomised by the changing image of the feminine babu, which was originally a caricature of Bengali men but came to represent middle-class men across India more generally. As Streets argues, the ruling British were attempting to ‘discredit nationalists as fraudulent men’ with this politically gendered stereotype, as the ‘babu’ classes were the ones which contained and supported most separatist Indian politicians.10 This link between the babu stereotype and political opposition is only strengthened when considering that its popularity increased in conjunction with the rise of anti5

A. Inglis, The White Women's Protection Ordinance: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Papua, London, St Martin’s Press, 1975, pp. 8, 11; Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable’, p. 642.

6 G. Forster, Voyage Round the World During the Years 1772-1775, London, White, Robson, Elmsly and Robinson, 1775, p. 324, cited in Wilson, ‘Empire, Gender and Modernity’, p. 39.

7 C. Hall, ‘Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century’, in Levine (ed.) Gender and Empire, pp. 52-54.

8 Hall, ‘Of Gender and Empire’, p. 50 9 H. Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in the British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004, p. 162.

10 Ibid.

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British Undergraduate History Review Raj sentiments in the 1880s, conspicuous in the debate around the controversial Ilbert Bill in 1883.11 When political tensions reached their zenith, attempts to discredit Indian nationalists with feminising rhetoric increased. This illustrates that gendered discourse was a vital and effective method of justifying and maintaining Imperial power. Alongside the moral framework of the ‘Natural History of Man’, a more general justification of Imperial power is evident – the presupposition that the British were superior. This politically charged feminisation is illustrated in the gendering of Irish men as well. As Streets has acknowledged, the feminisation of Irish nationalists was clearly associated with maintaining Imperial power, as Irish men made up as much as 42.2% of the British Army (in 1830) and the feminisation intensified when the army was most needed – the 1880s in particular.12 This was a gendered method of maintaining Imperial power, in this instance using the army. Irish men may have been depicted differently to babus, being portrayed as ‘inconsistent’, child-like and belligerent rather than feeble and disloyal, but this was still a gendered subjugation.13 It aligned with racial distancing (the notion of Irishmen as ‘Scythians’, not Britons) to discredit Irish nationalism and justify Imperial power over the ‘inferior’ population throughout the nineteenth century, just as it did in India.14 The juxtaposition of feminised ‘disloyal’ and masculinised ‘loyal’ men added to this degradation of native masculinity. The juxtaposition of the babu ‘emasculated specimens of manhood’ with the ‘manly men… to be found in the ranks of our native soldiery’, in the words of a contributor to the United Services Magazine, explicitly advocated Imperial loyalty and thus upheld the status quo.15 Sikhs and Ghurkhas, perceived as loyal members of the army, were generally lauded as disciplined, stoic and above all ‘masculine’, in order to reaffirm the power of the Empire.16 The same is true of the Scottish Highlanders, initially seen as ‘savages’ after the Jacobite Uprising in 1745,17 but later praised as a ‘martial race’ in the same way as the Ghurkhas. The biography of Hector MacDonald, an infamous commander of the Highland Brigade from 1898, illustrates this gendered image perfectly: a ‘typical Highlander… [is] bold as an eagle and firm as a rock’.18 The comparison between the ‘martial’ Ndebele and the ‘effeminate’ Shona in Africa had a similar framework.19 The polarity of these two colonial masculinities clearly had a great effect upon nationalist colonial identities, as it deterred their emergence and reinforced existent Imperial power structures. Above all else, it incentivised loyalty to the Empire among colonised men.

11

Ibid, p. 163.

Streets, Martial Races, p. 167.

13 Ibid.

14 Wilson, ‘Empire, Gender and Modernity’, pp. 23-4.

15 ‘Recruiting for India: Deterioration in the Recruiting Material for the Indian Army with Suggestions as to Causes and Remedies’, United Services Magazine, vol. 26, 1898, p. 330, cited in Streets, Martial Races, p. 165.

16 Streets, Martial Races, p. 163.

17 Wilson, ‘Empire, Gender and Modernity’, p. 24.

18 Hector MacDonald or the Private Who Became a General: A Highland Laddie’s Life and Laurels, 4th edition, London, 1900, p. 15, cited in Streets, Martial Races, p. 172.

19 R. O’Hanlon, ‘Gender in the British Empire’ in J. M. Brown and R. Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire Vol. 4: The Twentieth Century Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 389.

12

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BURNETT – Gender: a pillar of British imperial power Imperial power was also justified by a similar division between coloniser and colonised, presented within a gendered and racial framework. This system of separation, termed the ‘politics of exclusion’, fostered the perception of the universal superiority of the British.20 It is a trend that is clearest in discourse surrounding the sexual relations between colonising men and colonised women. The bluntest example of this is planters’ casual rape of enslaved woman in the Caribbean, a ‘marker’ of wider relations of white men’s power, as Stoler puts it.21 It is also evident in the sexualisation of colonised women, such as Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’, who toured across Europe 1810-1816.22 As Abrahams observes, she was overtly sexualised, a female interpretation of the sexual and primitive ‘savage’ prevalent in the ‘Natural History of Man’.23 Equally, Abrahams and Levine arguably overanalyse Baartman, seeing a masculinisation of her genitalia as an illustration of Imperial notions of masculinity – an example of the ‘social metaphor’ that Stoler criticises for being focused too much on symbolism.24 Nevertheless, she exemplifies the common gendering of black women as sexual and primitive, which served to justify Imperial dominance in two ways: by playing into the ideas of the ‘Natural History of Man’, and by distinguishing black women from supposedly pure, ‘respectable’ white women – an example of the aforementioned ‘politics of exclusion’.

This perceived Imperial superiority was also illustrated in the masculinity of British and colonial men. Initially, this took the form of the daring, adventurous ‘Frontier Man’, a problematic image given the pervasiveness of ‘Frontier Women’ such as Helen Caddick that nevertheless lasted in the form of figures such as the explorer Robert Falcon Scott.25 As colonies were established, this matured into a sense of heroism and dignity, a gendering conceived in public schools especially. This gendering is summarised by a headmaster of Loretto school, who repeatedly urged ‘vigorous manhood [and] full courage’ on his pupils.26 It is debatable how influential the effect of this ‘cult’ of masculinity in public schools was, though the example of the Sudan Political Service in the late 19th century would suggest that it had a disseminating effect through the ranks of Empire.27 Regardless of origin, this masculine identity, idealised in films, comic strips and newspapers, supposedly personified by figures such as Arthur Phillip and Captain Cook, established a patriarchal sentiment across the Empire,

Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable’, p. 635.

Wilson, ‘Empire, Gender and Modernity’, p. 31; Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable’, p. 634.

22 P. Levine, ‘Sexuality and Empire’ in C. Hall and S. O. Rose (eds.), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 126.

23 Ibid, p. 127.

24 Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable’, p. 634.

25 Hall, ‘Of Gender and Empire’, p. 71; J. Wolf, ‘A Woman Passing Through: Helen Caddick and the Maturation of the Empire in British Central Africa’, Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 30, 1996, pp. 35-55.

26 H. H. Almond, ‘The Conservation of the Body’, in Christ the Protestant and Other Sermons, 1899, p. 283, cited in J. A. Mangan (ed.), The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal, Reading, Routledge, 1998, p. 27.

27 Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism, pp. 43, 71-100, drawing on statistics from J. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe, Millington, 1979, pp. 238-252.

20 21

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British Undergraduate History Review with the white British man in control, protecting the ‘savages’ around him.28 Thus, this gendered identity helped to establish Imperial dominance, and then to maintain it.

The adulation of British women also served to separate the colonisers and the colonised, reaffirming Imperial power by establishing a firm identity of white women as pure and ‘civilised’ in contrast with ‘inferior’ native populations. This gendering of white women realised itself in two interlinking aspects of identity: the expectations of motherhood and the nuclear family. The expectation of motherhood is typified in the opinions of Imperial eugenicists, such as the MP John Burns who argued that Britain should ‘glorify, dignify and purify motherhood by every means in our power.’29 Davin’s argument that eugenicists had a ‘pervasive’ influence over political and social discourse is too forceful, as they were a fringe movement in the Empire at most.30 Yet, they still represent a severe version of a ‘pervasive’ gendered identity: the white mother maintaining the Empire through her key role in the nuclear family. This is reinforced when considering Canada, as there was initially a popular acceptance of interracial families until the early 19th century, when the identity of the traditional white colonial family prevailed. Examining the transitionary conflict illustrates the dynamics of colonial motherhood perfectly. For example, Alexander Ross married the daughter of a native chief in 1815, but their children avoided her in public because of the need to be identified as white.31 This is another case of synergy between racial and gender identities, as the desire to be considered white, combined with the desire for a nuclear family to create a conservative colonial identity, justified colonial separation. The liminal role played by governesses across the Empire – ‘tabooed’ women, as Elizabeth Eastlake observed in The Times in 1848 – demonstrates this, as they did not play a role in the nuclear family, so were socially isolated.32 Therefore, the gendered identities of motherhood and the nuclear family were clearly integral within Imperial society, establishing the morality, ‘civilisation’, and thus superiority, of the British people. Not only this, but they also combined with and built on the various other aforementioned gendered identities to create a field of gendered discourse - all of which worked to justify Imperial power across the Empire. Conversely, gender could also play a significant role in the deconstruction of Imperial power. A prime example of this is the populist narrative preceding the Commonwealth of Australia’s creation in 1901, whereby the virile Australian man differed significantly from British ideas of masculinity, shaping the process of separation.33 This raises the question of gender’s significance, as it appears to be a pervasive theme in all forms of discourse, perhaps not a cause but instead a side effect of Imperial frictions. However, its ubiquity should not invalidate it, as it clearly did play a role in Imperial

S. Bassnett, ‘Lost in the Past: A Tale of Heroes and Englishness’ in C. Gittings (ed.), Imperialism and Gender: Constructions of Masculinity, New Lambton, 1996, p. 48; Wilson, ‘Empire, Gender and Modernity’, p.

22.

29 A. Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, in F. Cooper and L. A. Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, London, University of California Press, 1997, p. 99.

30 Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, p. 99.

31 Hall, ‘Of Gender and Empire’, pp. 66-75.

32 J. Trollope, Britannia`s Daughters: Women of the British Empire, St. Ives, Random House, 1983, p. 63.

33 M. Sinha, ‘Nations in an Imperial Crucible’, in Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire, p. 184.

28

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BURNETT – Gender: a pillar of British imperial power identity and power, as a major theme in identity politics. It was simply so pervasive as an aspect of identity that it played a role in justifying decolonisation, as was as in concurrently justifying colonisation and the maintenance of Imperial power.

Overall, gender shaped Imperial discourse about identity, in conjunction with race and sexuality, and served to justify and maintain Imperial power throughout the Empire’s history.

With the concept of the ‘Natural History of Man’, gender helped to moralise Imperial dominance by shaping Imperial identities. A broader sense of polarity and British superiority over colonised peoples was also steeped in gender, particularly evident in white British identities and sexual dynamics. Thus, gender played an integral role in the justification of Imperial power most of all, as it degraded perceived native identities and elevated perceived Imperial identities simultaneously.

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British Undergraduate History Review Bibliography Brown, J. M. and Louis, R. (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire Vol. 4: The Twentieth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001 Cooper, F. and Stoler, L. A. (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, London, University of California Press, 1997 Gittings, C. (ed.), Imperialism and Gender: Constructions of Masculinity, (New Lambton, 1996), pp. 47-61 Levine, P. (ed.), Gender and Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004 Hall, C. and Rose, S. O. (eds.), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006 Inglis, A., The White Women's Protection Ordinance: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Papua, London, St Martin’s Press, 1975 Mangan, J. A. (ed.), The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal, Reading, Routledge, 1998 Murray, J. A. H., Bradley, H., Craigie, W. A., and Onions, C. T. (eds.), The Oxford English Dictionary Volume VI Follow-Haswed, 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991 Stoler, A. L., ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures’, American Ethnologist, vol. 16, 1989, pp. 634-660 Streets, H., Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in the British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004 Tosh, J., ‘What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth Century Britain’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 38, 1994, pp. 179–202 Trollope, J., Britannia`s Daughters: Women of the British Empire, St. Ives, Random House, 1983 Wolf, J., ‘A Woman Passing Through: Helen Caddick and the Maturation of the Empire in British Central Africa’, Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 30, 1996, pp.

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British Undergraduate History Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020

Albert, Aristotle, and other animals: new perspectives on the animal world in high medieval learning THOMAS BANBURY

S

tudy of the animal world in the medieval period stimulated multiple branches of thought across different social and intellectual milieux. The role of the animal world in this learning was highly contingent on the intellectual tradition that accommodated for it.

Between 1050 and 1250, learning and scholarship in medieval Europe developed, incorporated, and adapted a range of new perspectives into its intellectual culture, most prominently in the areas of theology and natural philosophy from Aristotle. The influence of these texts on the epistemology of the 12th century was not limited to discussions about the animal world.

However, the incorporation of Aristotelean notions of a demonstrative approach to natural science, and the nature of the animal soul, provides us with a useful point of departure from which to analyse the role of the animal world in medieval learning. It also allows us to trace the contours of the medieval approach to animals before and after the proliferation of new Aristotelean texts. This essay will treat ‘learning’ not just as the cumulative body of knowledge which framed medieval scholarship, but also as an active process of investigation and pedagogy, which considered the animal world both as a subject in its own terms, and as a teaching tool. Through this definition it is possible to integrate the sophisticated zoological projects of Albert the Great for example, in the early 13th century, with the tradition of animal moralisations in the bestiaries and Physiologus, and issues in logic and philosophy investigated through animals at the schools of Oxford and Paris.

Medieval scholars offered a number of definitions of ‘animals’ and how they related both to humans and to the rest of the non-human world. These were often rooted in both classical natural histories and earlier Christian authorities, as well as in Scripture. In the most basic definition, gleaned from the account of the Creation in the Book of Genesis, animals were created by God on the fifth and sixth days, firstly birds and sea-creatures, and then ‘beasts of burden and crawling creatures and the wild animals of the earth’, respectively. In his second book of Sentences (c.1150), Peter Lombard characterises the creation of these three divisions of animals as the ‘adornment’ of the three habitable elements of the waters, air, and earth. 1 Peter says that having been made in the image and likeness of God, man ‘surpasses the irrational creatures; but he is made to God’s image according to memory, intelligence, and love’, although he also offers several other interpretations of this phrase in Genesis.2 Animals, therefore, were living creatures created before humans which did not share the special 1 2

P. Lombard, The Sentences, Book 2: On Creation, trans. G. Silano, Toronto, PIMS, 2007, pp. 63-4.

P. Rosemann, Peter Lombard, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 105-6.

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characteristics which inhered in men from being created in God’s own image, ambiguous though these characteristics were. Additionally, man was given dominion over the animals, both through God’s mandate to Adam to name the animals, and from having been created last of all living creatures ‘as their lord and possessor who was to be set over them’.3 The third century Christian exegete Origen of Alexandria proposed a more radical distinction between humans and animals. He argued in his Dialogue with Heracleides that Adam and Eve possessed an inner soul created in God’s image which only became inextricable from the outer body after the Fall, and were therefore distinct from the animals in Paradise who had only a corporeal form.4 The seventh-century Etymologiae, or Etymologies, of Isidore of Seville was extremely influential in the development of animal lore (though not, strictly speaking, natural science) in medieval Europe and gives two definitions of animals in its twelfth book, De animalibus. In keeping with the eponymous purpose of the work, Isidore reports that ‘they are called ‘animals’ or ‘animate beings’, because they are animated by life and moved by the spirit’.5 It is important to note that the breadth of this definition also includes humans, and so Isidore further specifies that ‘we call any animal that lacks human language and form ‘livestock’’, and notes that while ‘livestock’ strictly refers to animals that can be eaten or used for labour, it is commonly meant to encompass wild beats such as lions, and burden animals such as oxen as well. 6 Isidore’s definition, along with the account of Adam naming the animals, was frequently used as a preface for bestiary manuscripts and they make extensive use of the text of book XII of the Etymologiae for their subsequent entries for different animals.7 Another major authority on the natural world was the Naturalis Historia of the Roman stateman Pliny the Elder, published in AD 77. The significance of Pliny’s writings in medieval scholarship is attested by his influence in the texts of various bestiaries and the Latin Physiologus, an early Christian mystical text moralising on features of the natural world.8 Pliny’s text implicitly agrees with Isidore’s inclusion of humans amongst the animals, concluding his discussion of humans in book VII of his Natural History by saying that he will ‘now turn to the rest of the animals’.9 However unlike Isidore, Pliny does not consider language to be the exclusive preserve of humanity. He records elephants who have learned the Greek alphabet and birds whose language is simply inaccessible to humans without skills in augury.10 The question of how to classify animals became more prominent in the 12th and 13th centuries and was aided by the new taxonomies of organic life introduced by the libri naturales 3

Lombard, The Sentences, Book 2, pp. 63-4.

A. Lund Jacobsen, ‘Genesis 1-3 as Source for the Anthropology of Origen’, Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 62, no.

3, 2008, pp. 216-9.

5 S. Barney, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 247.

6 Ibid., pp. 247-51.

7 W. Clark, The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilloy's Avarium, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, Binghamton, NY, 1992, pp.21-4; ‘The Aberdeen Bestiary MS. 24’, Aberdeen University Library, c.1200, f5v. (Hereafter ‘Aberdeen MS. 24’) 8 Physiologus, trans. M. Curley, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009, pp.ix-xvii; Clark, The Medieval Book of Birds, p.12 9 Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, ed. K.F.T. Mayhoff, Teubner, Leipzig, 1906, 7.87.

10 Ibid., 8.1-3, 8.70.

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of Aristotle, translated by scholars such as James of Venice in the first half of the 12th century, and later Michael Scot and William of Moerbeke.11 However, before the dissemination of Aristotelean texts on biology and the soul, the principle that the animal world had something to offer medieval learning, either through their behaviour or through the divine encoding of their anatomy, was an extremely important framework for medieval interactions with the natural world.12 Returning to the work of Origen, his Commentary on the Song of Songs proposes that ‘the invisible things of God may be known through the visible, and things which are not seen may be contemplated by reason of and likeness to those things which are seen’.13 The visible and tangible aspects of this world, therefore, could lead to knowledge of spiritual matters if interpreted properly. This reasoning, which considered the whole of creation, including animals, as spiritual allegories written digito Dei (‘by the finger of God’), underscored the significance of the Greek Physiologus, most likely composed in 3rd or 4th century Alexandria, its Latin and vernacular descendants, and its wildly popular medieval offspring, the bestiary.14 The bestiary manuscripts that proliferated across medieval Europe, beginning in the later 11th century, presented an allegorical analysis of a range of different animals. The chapters describe certain behaviours or physical features to demonstrate and exhort Christian virtues and doctrine, and to warn of unvirtuous behaviour. For example, according to the Latin Physiologus, the two horns of the antelope represent the Old and New Testaments.15 In the Aberdeen Bestiary, the grazing behaviour of the goat in the valleys is an allegory of Christ being nourished by the Church, both Christ and the goat sharing a love of high mountain peaks, though for Christ these consist of the patriarchs and other high authorities.16 The examples of animal anatomy and behaviour used in the bestiaries were culled from a range of early Christian and Classical authors, including both Pliny’s Natural History and Isidore’s Etymologies discussed above. Their moralizations were often individual to the manuscripts, but frequently cited sources include the corpus of St. Augustine, Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, and Peter Riga’s versified biblical text, the Aurora.17 A question remains, however, as to why the bestiary genre and its methods of ‘natural exegesis’ proliferated as it did. The analogical treatment of nature could not replace Holy Scripture, nor did any bestiary claim it could. Willene Clarke has explained the popularity of bestiaries in the monastic setting in terms of their use as preaching aids. She points particularly to the second prologue of Hugh of Fouilloy’s De Avibus, also known as the Aviary, written between 1132 and 1152 as a bestiary-style text focussed on birds. Hugh says that ‘because I must write for the unlettered, the diligent reader should not wonder that, for the instruction of the unlettered, I say simple things about subtle matters’.18 Clark argues that the allegories in the Aviary were compiled and used for the instruction of the lay-brothers (conversi) who were 11

C. Morris, The Papal Monarchy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989, p.514.

U. Eco, From the Tree to the Labyrinth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA., 2014, p. 191.

13 Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, Paulist Press, Mahwah, NJ., 1957, pp. 218-9; Physiologus, p.xiii.

14 F. McCulloch, Medieval Latin And French Bestiaries, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC., 1962, pp.15-20; Eco, From the Tree to the Labyrinth, p. 191.

15 Curley, Physiologus, p. 5.

16 Aberdeen MS. 24, f14r.

17 Clark, The Medieval Book of Birds, p. 22.

18 Ibid., p. 119.

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attached to the community of Augustinian canons at St.-Laurent-d’Heilly, near Amiens, and its dependant priories.19 The lay-brothers would have been older than the canons when they entered religious life and were, therefore, less likely to be literate, yet have greater experience of secular life. The illustrations of the Aviary and, it is reasonable to assume, the bestiaries were intended to complement the straightforward spiritual imagery of the text to communicate doctrine and morals to the conversi in a relatable fashion.20 Such an interpretation is supported by the concentration of Aviary and bestiary manuscripts in Cistercian and canonical houses, as both groups had a large body of lay-brothers attached to their foundations, and the Augustinian order had a particular emphasis on preaching to the laity.21 The manuscripts treat not just of animals, however, but also of minerals and trees.22 Sarah Kay has pointed out that the term ‘bestiary’, with its zoological connotations, is unique to English-speaking scholarship, and historians in continental Europe usually refer to these texts as versions of the Physiologus.23 The inclusion of minerals, trees, and, in the case of the Y-version Physiologus, the prophet Amos, within a text usually described as about animals appears somewhat incongruous.24 Although the animals predominate, the Physiologus tradition sought to read spiritual meaning into all of the natural world, with the process of incorporating various recension of different texts amplifying the role of the animals, as they made for some of the more vivid and popular subjects. The bestiary treatment of the animal world was neither a replacement for textual exegesis, nor a concerted attempt at zoological categorisation. Instead, by situating the bestiaries firmly in the genre of homiletics, alongside other preaching texts with secular inflections such as Bernard of Clairvaux’s Parables and Sentences, the role of animals through allegory in medieval learning, and teaching, becomes clearer.25 As Clark points out, the popularity of the Aviary and bestiary tradition peaked in the mid-twelfth century, and then slowly declined across the thirteenth, succeeded by its secular, vernacular descendants.26 We must, therefore, turn our attention to an altogether different intellectual impulse, which treated of the animal world in light of the newly translated texts on natural philosophy by Aristotle. This included James of Venice’s translation of the Posterior Analytics and De Anima from Greek into Latin between 1125 and 1150 and Michael Scot’s work on the Arabic text of De Animalibus in the 1210s.27 These supplemented the 6th-century translations made by Boethius, which included Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, Categories, and Porphyry’s Isagoge, which had long been a staple of the logica vetus, or ‘old logic’, studied in 19

Ibid., p. 5.

W. Clark, ‘The Illustrated Medieval Aviary and The Lay-Brotherhood’, Gesta, vol. 21, no.1, 1982, pp.64-6.

21 Clark, The Medieval Book of Birds, p. 25.

22 Ibid., p. 22.

23 S. Kay, ‘'The English Bestiary', The Continental 'Physiologus', And the Intersections between Them’, Medium Ævum, vol.85, no.1, 2016, pp. 118-9.

24 Curley, Physiologus, pp. 32-3.

25 J. Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1979, pp. 9-10,88-9.

26 Clark, ‘The Illustrated Medieval Aviary and The Lay-Brotherhood’, pp. 70-1.

27 W. Laird, ‘Robert Grosseteste on the Subalternate Sciences’, Traditio, vol.43, 1987, p.155; Michael Tkacz, ‘Albert the Great and the Revival of Aristotle's Zoological Research Program’, Vivarium, vol.45, no.1, 2007, p.

51; The Cambridge History Of Late Medieval Philosophy, eds. N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 76-7.

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dialectic.28 The significance of Aristotle’s texts, particularly his demonstrative methodology outlined in the Posterior Analytics, were influential in a range of fields. Its principles were analysed by Robert Grosseteste in his Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, composed between 1220 and 1230, and were based on James of Venice’s translation as well as Gerard of Cremona’s translation of Themistius’s paraphrase.29 Grosseteste summarises that knowledge is obtained by understanding the cause of a phenomenon simpliciter, or straightforwardly. The basis of demonstrative science are principles which are ‘true, primary, immediate, prior to, better known than, and the causes of the conclusion’.30 To understand any phenomena simpliciter it is necessary to understand its ‘first principles’ which are specific to the science which studies that particular genus of phenomena, as all the terms of the syllogistic reasoning used to demonstrate it must also be of the same genus.31 That is to say, mathematical proofs cannot be used to demonstrate questions in theology, as they deal with different topics which are not interchangeable, and are, therefore, different areas of learning.

For the study of the animal world to be considered a distinct branch of learning, it was necessary to define its subject matter. To this end, the work of Aristotle on the nature of the soul in De Anima, and its applications in his biological text De Animalibus, becomes extremely important. De Anima, another product of James of Venice’s translation project, is Aristotle’s major treatises on psychology where he outlined his tripartite division of ensouled organisms.

De Animalibus, translated by Michael Scot in the 1220s, comprises five different treatises on animals, on their parts, generation, movement, locomotion, and a Historia which concerns taxonomy and the causes of certain features and behaviours.32 These texts were studied and commented on by, amongst others, the German Dominican Albert the Great (along with most of Aristotle’s corpus) and formed the basis of his project of natural sciences undertaken from 1249 up to his death in 1280.33 Bearing in mind Grosseteste’s conclusions about the division of knowledge which he set forth in his Commentary, Albert identifies the subject of his inquiry with reference to Aristotle’s taxonomies of living things. The most basic function of any living thing is nutrition, without which an organism cannot sustain itself. Albert terms this the vis augmentiva, or the force of augmentation, which also includes the mechanism for reproduction.

Plants, animals and humans all share in this ability, the product of the Aristotelean ‘vegetative soul’.34 The domain of Albert’s science was animals, distinguished from plants by the possession of a ‘sensitive’ soul, capable of sensory perception and movement, in addition to the powers of a vegetative soul. In addition to the qualities of the first two, humans possess a third kind of soul, one which is ‘rational’ and capable of thought and reflection.35

M. Asztalos, ‘Boethius as a Transmitter of Greek Logic to the Latin West: The Categories’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol.95, 1993, pp. 367-9.

29 J. McEvoy, ‘The Chronology of Robert Grosseteste's Writings on Nature and Natural Philosophy’, Speculum, vol.58, no.3, 1983, pp.636-7; D. Bloch, ‘Robert Grosseteste's ‘Conclusiones’ and the Commentary on the ‘Posterior Analytics’’, Vivarium, vol.47, no.1, 2009, p. 10.

30 Bloch, ‘Robert Grosseteste's ‘Conclusiones’ and the Commentary’, p. 6.

31 Laird, ‘Robert Grosseteste on the Subalternate Sciences’, p. 154.

32 Morris, Papal Monarchy, pp. 514-5.

33 Tkacz, ‘Albert the Great and the Revival of Aristotle's Zoological Research Program’, pp. 30-2.

34 Ibid., p. 34.

35 J. Finamore, ‘Aristotle's Criticisms of Plato's Tripartite Soul’, Bulletin of The Institute of Classical Studies, vol.117, 2013, p. 8.

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Albert was one of the first commentators on Aristotle’s biological works to supplement them with his own observations, and he compiled his study of the animal world into his De animalibus libri XXVI, begun around 1256. This consisted of his commentary on Michael Scot’s translation of Aristotle’s relevant works (I-XIX) and his own additional observations (XX-XXI). The final five books were drawn from a bestiary by his fellow Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré.36 Albert’s work is comprehensive enough to be described as ecological science; he covers physiology, habitat, feeding, breeding, and other behaviours, applying the syllogistic reasoning of the Posterior Analytics to his own observations. The animal world offered Albert and other medieval scholars an ideal subject in which to apply the syllogistic methodologies of Aristotle’s texts, and his pre-existent work in texts like the Historia Animalium provided a useful point of departure. That is not to say, however, that Albert compiled his De animalibus as a way of practicing Aristotelean methods. Rather, the desire to investigate the animal world, partly in response to Aristotle’s natural sciences, invited the integration of both Latin and Arabic perspectives on the Philosopher’s work which helped to crystallise the demonstrative science which had been first commented on in the west by Grosseteste and which would go on to influence thinkers such as Roger Bacon.

One of the most important developments in medieval learning that came out of the Aristotelean taxonomy of living organisms was reflection on what separated humans from animals. Humans and non-human animals were far more comparable to each other than they were to organism possessing only a vegetative soul. While Boethius of Dacia devised several arguments in favour of the sophisma that ‘every man is of necessity an animal’, no one argued that every animal is of necessity a plant.37 As humans were the only creatures who had a direct relationship with God, the quality of the rational soul must be a key part of this relationship, and invited comparisons between human and animal behaviour and morphology to understand the rational soul more clearly. In his De homine, Albert tackles the problem of the ‘unity of the soul’, partly in response to the Andalusian scholar Ibn Rushd’s Long Commentary on De Anima, and maintains that the vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls are not different substances in humans but the rather the realisation of different powers of a single soul through the organs of the body.38 According to Church doctrine, only humans have immortal souls and therefore this quality of immortality must be bound up with the rational soul. In solving the problem of the similarities between human and animal souls, contrasted with the immortality of the rational soul, some medieval thinkers approached a position similar to that of Origen. This developed in the 13th century into the thought of Peter Olivi and Robert Kilwardby.39 Olivi draws a line

F. Egerton, ‘A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 9. Albertus Magnus: A Scholastic Naturalist’, Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, vol.84, no.2, 2003, pp. 88-9.

37 Boethius of Dacia, ‘Boethius of Dacia: The Sophisma 'Every Man is of Necessity an Animal'’, in The Cambridge Translation of Medieval Philosophical Text, Vol.1 Logic and The Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 509.

38 D. N. Hasse, ‘The Early Albertus Magnus and his Arabic Sources on the Theory of the Soul’, Vivarium, vol.46, no.3, 2008, pp. 244-6.

39 J. Toivanen and J. F. Silva, ‘The Active Nature of The Soul in Sense Perception: Robert Kilwardby And Peter Olivi, Vivarium, vol.48, no.3, 2010, pp. 248-9.

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between humans and animals in his Questions on the Second Book of Sentences, by stating that the human soul is composed of spiritual matter which animates a corporeal body. The soul of animals is composed of corporeal matter joined to their body.40 It is this immaterial quality of the human soul that allows it to perform advanced intellective functions such as imagining.

The thirteenth-century discourse on the nature of the soul, which included Albert, his student Thomas Aquinas, John Blund, and John Peckham, as well as Ibn Gabirol and Ibn Rushd, relied on Aristotle’s De Anima.41 The animal world - and in particular animal cognition - was, therefore, an essential problem to be tackled, and one which stimulated the lively tradition of anthropological and psychological texts in medieval learning, alongside the role it played in the development of ecological sciences.

In his chapter on changes in the structure and content of medieval learning in The Papal Monarchy, Colin Morris concludes that ‘it would be too much to say that by 1250 man had come of age; but he was beginning to find his feet and explore the world around him’.42 This essay contends that the investigation of the animal world was a major part of this process of exploration and influenced areas of study beyond the direct study of animals. The study of the animal world speaks to a number of emerging currents in medieval society between 1050 and 1250; the importance of lay-brothers in monasticism, the introduction and absorption of Aristotle’s scientific methodology and works (by way of its Arabic commentators), and the nature of the human soul in tension between the spiritual and material. Arguably, it occasioned the diversification of medieval learning, and illustrates both the relations between pastoral and speculative theological study and teaching, and the methodological differences between the allegorical treatment of creation and the Aristotelean syllogisms of distinct branches of natural philosophy.

40

J. Toivanen, Animal Consciousness: Peter Olivi on Cognitive Functions of The Sensitive Soul, University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, 2009, p. 153.

41 J. Weishiepl, ‘Albertus Magnus and Universal Hylomorphism: Avicebron’, The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, vol.10, no.3, 1979, pp. 241-4.

42 Morris, Papal Monarchy, p. 511.

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Bibliography Primary sources Boethius of Dacia, ‘Boethius Of Dacia: The Sophisma 'Every Man is of Necessity an Animal'‘, in The Cambridge Translation of Medieval Philosophical Text, Vol.1 Logic and The Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 480-510.

Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia ed. Mayhoff, K.F.T., Teubner, Leipzig, 1906.

‘The Aberdeen Bestiary MS. 24’, Aberdeen University Library.

Secondary sources Asztalos, M., ‘Boethius As A Transmitter of Greek Logic to The Latin West: The Categories’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol.95, 1993, pp.367-407.

Barney, S., W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, and O. Berghof, The Etymologies of Isidore Of Seville, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006.

Bloch, D., ‘Robert Grosseteste's ‘Conclusiones’ And the Commentary on the ‘Posterior Analytics’’, Vivarium, vol.47, no.1, 2009, pp.1-23.

Clark, W., ‘The Illustrated Medieval Aviary and The Lay-Brotherhood’, Gesta, vol. 21, no. 1, 1982, pp. 63-74.

- The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilloy's Avarium, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, Binghamton, NY, 1992.

Curley, M., Physiologus, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009.

Eco, U., From the Tree to The Labyrinth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA., 2014.

Egerton, F., ‘A History of The Ecological Sciences, Part 9. Albertus Magnus: A Scholastic Naturalist’, Bulletin of The Ecological Society of America, vol.84, no.2, 2003, pp. 87-91.

Finamore, J., ‘Aristotle's Criticisms of Plato's Tripartite Soul’, Bulletin of The Institute of Classical Studies, vol.117, 2013, pp. 3-13.

Hasse, D., ‘The Early Albertus Magnus And His Arabic Sources on The Theory of The Soul’, Vivarium, vol.46, no.3, 2008, pp. 232-52.

Kay, S., ‘'The English Bestiary', The Continental 'Physiologus', and the Intersections Between Them’, Medium Ævum, vol.85, no.1, 2016, pp. 118-42.

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Kretzmann, N., A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg, The Cambridge History of Late Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982.

Laird, W., ‘Robert Grosseteste on the Subalternate Sciences’, Traditio, vol.43, 1987, pp. 14769.

Leclercq, J., Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1979.

Lombard, P., The Sentences, Book 2: On Creation, ed. G. Silano, PIMS, Toronto, 2007.

Lund Jacobsen, A., ‘Genesis 1-3 as Source for the Anthropology of Origen’, Vigiliae Christianae, vol.62, no.3, 2008, pp. 213-32.

McCulloch, F., Medieval Latin And French Bestiaries, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC., 1962.

McEvoy, J., ‘The Chronology of Robert Grosseteste's Writings on Nature and Natural Philosophy’, Speculum, vol.58, no.3, 1983, pp. 614-55.

Morris, C., The Papal Monarchy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989.

Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, Paulist Press, Mahwah, NJ., 1957.

Rosemann, Philipp, Peter Lombard, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.

Tkacz, M., ‘Albert the Great and the Revival of Aristotle's Zoological Research Program’, Vivarium, vol.45, no.1, 2007, pp. 30-68.

Toivanen, J., Animal Consciousness: Peter Olivi on Cognitive Functions of The Sensitive Soul, University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, 2009.

- Silva, J. P., ‘The Active Nature of The Soul in Sense Perception: Robert Kilwardby And Peter Olivi’, Vivarium, vol.48, no.3, 2010, pp. 245-78.

Weishiepl, J., ‘Albertus Magnus And Universal Hylomorphism: Avicebron ‘, The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, vol.10, no.3, 1979, pp. 239-60.

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'"Unhappily bequeathed to this world": The personality of Henry IV of Germany' INES ANDRADE1

T

he personality of Henry IV is a vanishing topic in medieval historiography. Indeed, as Janet Nelson questions, ‘can we possibly have any real evidence for the personality of a dark ages king?’2 To answer her question, this essay will examine the ‘evidence’ of Henry’s personality left in annals and chronicles. It will also assume a unique focus: how these sources present Henry IV’s childhood and adolescence. The debate around ‘childhood’ in the medieval period remains too grand in scope for this essay; thus, the foremost years of Henry’s reign, and how medieval authors present this as indicative of his personality, is to be examined.

If, in Horst Fuhrmann’s words, ‘these are the colours in which his youth is painted’, we must examine why medieval authors particularly stress his reckless younger years.3 Examining this shows how the available source base’s partisan nature and presentation of Henry’s role as ‘the king’ both obscure and reveal wider conceptions of his personhood. This means that if we cannot accurately ‘know’ the personality of Henry IV, we can at least start to understand how he was conceptualised as an individual and how he may have conceptualised himself. From the beginning of this essay, it must be understood that the source base which historians use to construct Henry IV’s personality is inherently incomplete. We do not possess the innermost thoughts that modern and early modern biographers unearth in diaries, personal accounts, or interviews. While some of Henry’s letters survive, as Nelson dismisses, these ‘can hardly be used for early medieval societies as indicators’ of the king’s private life. 4 The king’s letters were written from the perspective of Henry-as-ruler, and often do not contain enough contextualisation to stand alone.5 Thus, much of our information comes from the more detailed works written by clerical authors, who perceived historical writing as providing a model of virtue for the reader.6 This means that Henry’s personal traits are often mediated through clerical ideas of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ kingship. Early Salian rulers were written largely as positive models of kingship. For instance, Wipo advised Henry III that the “valorous deeds of your father” must “flower more abundantly in you”, inciting the young king to mimic the best

1

With special thanks given to Dr Charlie Rozier (University of Durham) for his generous Latin translations and contributions to this article.

2 J. Nelson, ‘Did Charlemagne Have a Private Life?’ in D. Bates, J. Crick and S. Hamilton (eds.) Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow, Suffolk, Boydell Press. 2006.

3 H. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages c.1050-1200, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. p.

161.

4 Nelson, ‘The Problematic in the Private’, Social History, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1990) p. 362.

5 T. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, London, Routledge, 1998. p. 6.

6 N. Partner, Serious entertainments: the writing of history in twelfth-century England, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997.

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decisions and traits that he ascribed to Conrad.7 By Henry III’s death however, Bruno of Merseburg would bluntly pronounce that the king “unhappily bequeathed (Henry VI) to this world”.8 In the polarised climate of the late eleventh century, this tonal shift is unsurprising. The rise of Pope Gregory VII heralded a new era of reform. His aggressive attempts to remove lay influence unsettled those who supported established imperial involvement.9 At the same time, the stirring of tensions in Saxony by Henry III would bubble over into a prolonged rebellion in by the reign of his son.10 While these issues were larger than Henry IV himself, by continuing to invest bishops and antagonising the Saxons, he stepped into their wider gravitation.

Churchmen increasingly leant their pens to the debate to supplement diplomatic and military actions, meaning their annals, chronicles and other pieces became increasingly polemical.11 In these works, Henry often serves as a symbolic encapsulation of all those against reform and supportive of imperial power, meaning his image and personality is distorted to convince the noble audience to side with the individual churchman’s faction.12 For pro-imperial writers, this meant reiterating the old language of kingship. Since the seventh century, a good king was defined as practising his power according to the word of God.13 Björn Weiler traced the tenacity of this ideal, suggesting that dark ages royal power relied on a spotless Imago Dei. The king must possess unassailable personal virtues, protect the common good, and disown corruptible personal desires.14 This can be seen in the sympathetic The Life of Henry IV (hereafter, Life).

This was written by an unidentified author at Henry’s death in 1105, speculated to be the king’s chancellor Bishop Erlung of Wurzburg.15 The account showed Henry to be imbued with inherent “goodness and mercy”.16 Frutolf of Michelsburg’s universal Chronicle (also written c. 1100) similarly attempts to establish Henry’s kingly precedent in a royal line leading back to the Romans.17 The self-conscious anonymity of Life (incentivising the reader to “reveal

7

Wipo, ‘The Deeds of Conrad II’ in T. Mommsen and K. Morrison, Imperial l lives and Letters in the Eleventh Century, New York, Columbia University Press, 1962, p. 53.

8 Bruno of Merseburg, ‘On the Saxon War’, E. Erik Niblaeus and C. Rozier(tr.) Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores (SS), 5, Chapter 1, p. 330; tr. C. Rozier 9 J. Malegam, The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200, London, Cornell, 2013 - see chapter 3.

10 T. McCarthy, ‘Introduction’ in The Chronicles of the Investiture Contest: Frutolf of Michelsberg and his continuators, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015, p. 7.

11 H. Vollrath, ‘The western empire under the Salians’ in eds. D. Luscombe & J. Riley-Smith, The New Cambridge Medieval History: Volume IV, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

12 D. and B. Bachrach, ‘Bruno of Merseburg and his Historical Method, c.1085’, Journal of Medieval History, vol 40, no. 4, 2014, p. 383.

13 S. Weinfurter, The Salian Century: Main Currents in an Age of Transition, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, p. 100; Henry IV of Germany 1056–1109.

14 B. Weiler, ‘The Rex Renitens and the Medieval Idea of Kingship, ca. 900-ca. 1250’ Viator, vol. 31, 2000; Weiler, ‘Crown-giving and King-making in the West ca. 1000-ca. 1250’, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, vol 41, no. 1, 2010, p. 67.

15 Weinfurter, p. 109; I. Robinson, Authority and Resistance in the Investiture Contest: The Polemical Literature of the Late Eleventh Century, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1978, p. 65.

16 Anonymous, ‘The Life of Emperor Henry IV’ in Mommsen and Morrison, Imperial l lives and Letters in the Eleventh Century, p. 104.

17 McCarthy, p. 29.

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these writings to no one”) speaks to the dominance of anti-Henrician narratives.18 Two authors writing closer to the formative years of Henry’s reign, Lampert of Hersfeld and Bruno of Merseburg, exemplify this. Lampert was peripherally allied to reform and, combined with Hersfeld’s proximity to Saxony, this meant that he was firmly allied against Henry.19 Likewise, himself a Saxon monk and later chancellor to the anti-king Hermann, Bruno’s allegiance is immediately identifiable.20 These accounts promote the notion (in Lampert’s words) that their “cause was just” by counterposing it to “the merciless severity of the king”.21 In particular, the polemicists use Henry’s childhood as a way to ground his inadequacy for the crown. Bruno’s Henry as ‘unhappily bequeathed to the world’ is emblematic of this argument. The image of Henry III blossoming his father’s royal virtues is starkly opposed to the infant child, already unequal to them. In anti-Henrician polemics, Henry’s youngest years indicate his passive reliance on others, opposing the ideal singular rulership what Wipo defined in Tetralogus.22 This is indicated in Lampert’s work when the “artless boy” became infatuated with Archbishop Adalbert of Bremen. “By honouring and flattering him” remarked Lampert “the king depended on him exclusively” (‘sine timore vel pudore talia faceret, velud adhortando’).23 In a similar tone, Bruno described how Adalbert “encouraged (Henry) without fear or shame” to pursue his desires.24 In both accounts, the bishop is not only a corrupting presence and also has authority over the king. Lampert symbolises this when he writes that Adalbert banished a demon during Henry’s coming of age.25 By predicating this miracle before Henry’s majority, his coming to power is implied as less important than a ‘wicked’ man’s miracle.

The reality of this dependency is shaky. Henry probably had a close relationship with Adalbert, but this did not manifest as any disproportionate power. Contemporary diplomas imply that his word held no more political weight than the other regents until 1065, much later than the polemics suggest. Even with his rise in influence, other advisors (notably, Anno of Cologne) remained in power.26 Yet, according to Lampert, Adalbert incited Henry to “pursue (Anno) with fire and sword”.27 By symbolically attributing authority to Adalbert, by conceding authority to Adalbert, Bruno and Lampert emphasise Henry’s inability to maintain the political autonomy of a good king. From his youngest years he is shown as prone to violence and vapidly dependent on others. This account of Henry’s personality is important to note. For Bruno and Lampert, this characterises not only his childhood, but his entire reign. After the Saxon War, Lampert notes that “nothing had changed (…) his cruelty, his reliance on the most wicked

18

Anonymous, ‘Life of Henry IV’, p. 102.

I. Robinson, ‘Introduction’ in The Annals of Lampert the Hersfeld, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015.

20 D. and B. Bachrach, p. 383.

21 Lampert the Hershfield, ‘The Annals of Lampert the Hershfield’ in I. Robinson (tr.) The Annals of Lampert the Hershfield, p. 1.

22 Weinfurter, p. 100.

23 Ibid., p. 81 and p. 92; tr. C. Rozier 24 Bruno, chapter 8, p. 332 25 Lampert, p. 98.

26 I. Robison, Henry IV of Germany 1056–1109, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 46-51.

27 Lampert, p. 98.

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men”.28 This hardly seems surprising, considering he had relied on ‘flattery’ since childhood.

This is mirrored in Bruno’s work when Henry flees the Saxon army, distrustful of advisors unwilling to give “him the advice that he wanted to hear” (quia non ut volebat sibi consilium dederant).29 Bruno’s Henry is reliant on others and ironically driven by his own reckless desires.

At Anno’s retirement, Lampert describes that Henry reacted as if he was “freed from a very strict schoolmaster, [throwing] himself into every kind of shameful act”.30 He is manipulated only by those who praise him, driven by corrupt personal agents and his own hedonistic aspirations.

This presents the historian with an obvious problem. The Henry we encounter in these works is an anthropomorphised template for bad kingship. Bruno and Lampert characterise Henry as a perpetual child, who from the outset of his reign could never live up to the expectations of a good ruler. In this, Henry’s personality becomes lost behind a veil of partisanship and the expectations of his crown. Equally, it may be argued this problem is easily countered. Simply compare the medieval texts for extraneous or rendered details, remove them, and infer Henry’s personality from the ‘objective’ events. A reduction in the use of ‘literary’ sources, such as royal diplomas, can be used to inform the facts. Using these sources and disposing of partisan opinions, we can extract the truthful events of Henry’s rule. For instance, we know that Henry became king aged five. This naturally caused instability as the sovereign was too young to rule by himself - certainly, his ‘dependency’ on his counsellors, while symbolically exaggerated, has some truth. He gained his majority at thirteen and immediately went on campaigns. From these objective events the historian can infer, for instance, that his eagerness to immediately embark may signal a characteristic willingness to take full control of the throne. This falls into the classical Quellenkritik treatment of medieval German texts, championed by Leopold von Ranke. He argued that removing all symbolism or rhetoric naturally creates an unbiased history, unaffected by the medieval partisan.31 According to Ranke, volumes must be compared to remove all ‘inconsistencies’: opinions or facts that are not echoed across all texts.32 While this method has some value in gaining a rough outline of Henry’s reign and individual traits, discerning an ‘objective world’, especially concerning something as subjective as personality, is not so straightforward. More than simply being ‘biased’, Wolfgang Eggert highlights that the polemics weave their argument into the very fabric of their account.33 This makes unnaturally trying to separate opinion and fact incredibly hard. For instance, in his vignette of Henry, Stefan Weinfurter noted that he was “prone to impulsive actions”, evidencing this using his attack on Anno.34 Yet, as Robinson pointed out, this depiction is likely affected by Lampert’s close relationship to the bishop. Henry’s violence is a symbolic composition of how Lampert imagined Anno’s fall from power. 35 As this essay 28

Ibid., p. 310.

Bruno, chapter 27, p. 338; tr. C. Rozier 30 Lampert, p. 164.

31 J. Lake, ‘Current Approaches to Medieval Historiography’, History Compass vol 13, no 3, 2015, p. 89.

32 Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages c. 800-1056, London, Routledge, 1998, pp. 6-16; D. Warner, ‘Rituals, Kingship and Rebellion in Medieval Germany’. History Compass, vol 8, 2010, p. 1209.

33 D. and B. Bachrach, p. 382.

34 Weinfurter, p. 109.

35 Robinson, p. 52.

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has also indicated, the attack allegorically evidences Henry’s violent immaturity. Thus, Weinfurter’s impression of Henry as ‘impulsive’ seems predisposed by Lampert’s depiction of the childishly reckless king.

Thus, polemic interpretations need to be carefully considered. If one tries to remove the opinions in these accounts, one risks trying to put forward an ‘objective’ view whilst being implicitly influenced by their partiality. To rid all textual polemic rhetoric and assume that Henry was ‘eager for kingship’ is as much of an opinion as Lampert or Bruno’s and, crucially, it is one removed from the cultural climate of his time. The historian cannot assume that the medieval subject would have thought of ‘personality’ in a similar vein to twenty-first century conceptions. Inflicting modern ideas of ‘identity’ onto the medieval individual is both reductive and anachronistic. As Aron Gurevich underlines, the modern idea of ‘personality’ is only one way of understanding self, which has had many different configurations throughout different periods.36 Therefore, trying to find an ‘objective’ portrait of Henry IV, filtered through our understandings, misses the mark. To truly understand him, we must understand how his personality would have been conceived contemporaneously. As the medieval historian is implicitly influenced by the same ideas of personhood, closely analysing their ‘distortions’ can start to reveal this. To begin this, the historian must look at how pro-Henrician narratives construct Henry and his childhood in opposition to Lampert or Bruno.

As mentioned, pro-Henrician works reiterate ideas of the engrained, noble character of the king. Nonetheless, Frutolf’s characterisation of the young Henry seems, at first glance, to align with Bruno and Lampert’s. He described that Henry “taking advantage of the freedom of youth” gave into leisure at the expense of his duties, specifically “on (Adalbert’s) advice”. 37 However, this is contrasted with his ‘humble’ submission at Canossa. For Frutolf, Henry’s apology was genuinely meant, which is a notable deviation from the norm. Even Life presents the deditio as an “astute plan” rather than a heart-felt action.38 By sincerely promising to “correct his future life”, Frutolf’s Henry has matured from his previous frivolity to rightfully befit his ordained title.39 Life similarly argued that Henry was initially “left to his own devices to boyish acts” and “lead by the suggestion” of his advisers.40 Nonetheless, upon receiving his majority, he “condemned many of the things which he had done” under their authority.

Beginning his quest to create ‘peace and justice’ in his realm, by renouncing their actions, Henry becomes the shining example of a king. Interestingly, these narratives do not entirely reject the earlier characterisations of Henry IV. However, less than dependency, they depict Henry’s youthful reliance as giving him culpability. More crucially, however, Henry’s recognition of these early flaws is presented as strengthening his kingship. This is shown when the authors relocate Henry’s initial ‘brattish’ traits onto his opponents. Whilst Henry is able to 36

Y. Zaretsky, and B. Stepanov, ‘Aron Gurevich’s medieval individual’ in Y. Mazour-Matusevič, A. and S. Korros (eds) Saluting Aron Gurevich: Essays in History, Literature and Other Related Subjects, Leiden, Brill, 2010.

37 Frutolf of Michelsberg, Chronicle, T. J. McCarthy (tr.) in Chronicles of the Investiture Contest, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2014, pp. 108-109.

38 Anonymous, Life of Henry IV, p. 109.

39 Frutolf, p. 114.

40 Anonymous, Life of Henry IV, p. 106.

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renounce his ways at Canossa, Frutolf presented the anti-king Rudolf as childishly refusing to desist from violence. Life dramatizes this more emotionally through Henry V. Like his father, Henry V is depicted as easily led into vice “as youth is always seducible”. 41 Tempted by the “lures to which youth aspires”, his hard-hearted plot for the throne is juxtaposed to the forgiving embrace of his father.42 If Lampert depicted Henry IV as “unmoved by prayers, by tears”, Life relocates this attitude to his reformist son. Even as the imprisoned Henry IV appeals to their familial bond, the anonymous author reported that he “could not move (Henry V) to pity”.43 Henry IV’s care for his son indicates his ability to change and forgive, whereas Henry V’s stubborn immaturity is painted as almost irredeemable.

This is enigmatic in the dogma of High Medieval texts. Examining German medieval impressions of childhood generally, James Schultz indicates that most authors ignore their subject’s formative years. As nature was believed to be dictated by inherent essence, and not conditioned by early experiences, authors often saw little point in discussing their subject’s childhood.44 This raises some interesting questions about how medieval individuals perceived personality. It is often thought that medieval people, as in the classic nineteenth century conception of Jacob Burckhardt, were only “conscious of (themselves) only as a race, people (…) or corporation”.45 Because all men were believed to exist in a hierarchy ordained by God, historians postulated that they would not conceive themselves as having a unique ‘personality’ outside of this God-given role. In particular, it historians believed that the divinely ordained power of the sovereign was seen as inbuilt with qualities and virtues that were inextricable from the person of the king.46 Certainly, as Ernst Kantorowicz’s The Kings’ Two Bodies archetypally defined, the king possessed a mortal, corruptible body and the immortal kingly one. The regal body overpowered the first, meaning, in his view, kingship was not so much a ‘role’ as an inherent essence.47 This has meant many recent biographies of medieval subjects have abandoned the idea of finding a ‘personality’ for their chosen subject to begin with. For instance, in his study of Otto III, Gerd Althoff refuses to engage with issues of ‘personality’.

He believed that the only thing the historian can uncover are the unspoken ‘rules’ of kingship and how medieval people tried to fit into them.48 Nonetheless, these ideas have been increasingly challenged. As Colin Morris speculates, feudal hierarchies relied on interpersonal relations between the king, his nobles and his subjects – in essence, it was a system constructed by the personalities and allegiances of individuals.49 In this way, we must return to how medieval accounts construct the ‘personality’ of their rulers.

41

Ibid, p. 122.

Ibid.

43 Lampert, p. 143; Anonymous, Life of Henry IV, p. 127.

44 S. James, The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100-1350, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, see chapter 1.

45 J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, New York, Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 225.

46 W. Ullman, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship, London, Methuen, 1969 47 E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1957.

48 G. Althoff, ‘Otto III’ reviewed in Hamilton, S. ‘Early medieval rulers and their modern biographers’ Early Medieval Europe, vol. 9, 2000, pp. 256-257.

49 C. Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200, London, Harper and Row, 1972.

42

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Certainly, if there is a recognition of Henry as able to grow or differ from ‘the king’, this begins to unravel. As I have shown, medieval authors clearly had an expectation that the king should possess God-given virtues. But the extent that they believed this was a ‘reality’ is debatable. This underpins Caroline Walker Bynum’s study, indicating that medieval personality was constructed by both the person's collective ‘role’ within society and their individual actions within it.50 This is hidden in the argument of the polemics. Rather than an infallible royal being, anti-Henrician accounts argue that loyalty was only owed, in the words of Bruno, “when he was a king and acted like a king” (Dum mihi rex erat, et ea quae sunt regis faciebat).51 Since childhood, they show that Henry had never acted like a king and had never been a king. As McLaughlin argues, in the anti-Henrician narrative, the ‘king’ and ‘Henry’ are separated.52 More than this, along Walker Bynum’s lines, his role is separated from his personality because of his discordant actions. In essence, this creates a personality for Henry outside his role, if a negatively exaggerated one. Conversely, pro-Henrician narratives dispel a static narrative all together, allowing the king to grow into his kingly virtues. Again, his initially immoral personality is removed from his role as king, and only realigned when his personal actions come to reflect his royal seat. In fact, Henry’s kingship is even more warranted because of this, meaning his crown is (in Life’s words) “snatched away prematurely” by the unworthy, unrelenting Henry V.53 Whilst ‘sacral kingship’ remains, its static configuration is disavowed.

Henry’s personal recognition of his previous sinfulness and ability to mature from it is more befitting of the royal role.

Writing to Pope Gregory, Henry IV implored that “partly through the deceitful youth (…) I have sinned against heaven”.54 This indicates that Henry was aware of the paradigm so thoroughly elaborated on by Bruno and Lampert. He separates his ‘deceitful youth’ from his current actions, recognising his young ‘personality’ as separate from the ‘heavenly’ duties expected of a king. Yet, like the pro-Henrician narratives, he establishes that his kingship will be strengthened by his ability to reform his personal traits, “I shall not fail you (…) and humbly beseech your fatherly support”.55 Thus, we may conclude that it is almost impossible to discern anything about Henry’s personality explicitly. Nonetheless, hope is not entirely lost. From this we ‘know’ that Henry’s personality was conceptualised separately from his royal title, and that this questions historians’ previous ideas about medieval ideas of character. Henry’s youthful kingship offers a unique opportunity to explore how an ‘inherent office’ is reconciled with his coming to maturity. For pro-Henrican works, this shows his ability to grow into the virtues of kingship. For anti-Henrican polemics, Henry is unable to unite his personality and his office.

If we recognise these ‘partisan depictions’ as containing a more complex image of Henry’s individuality, they can be further deconstructed to investigate how medieval people, and Henry 50

C. Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol 2 No. 1, 1980.

51 Bruno, chapter 25, p. 337; tr. C. Rozier 52 M. McLaughlin, ‘Disgusting Acts Of Shamelessness”: Sexual Misconduct And The Deconstruction Of Royal Authority In The Eleventh Century’, Early Medieval Europe, vol. 19, no.3, 2011, p. 324.

53 Anonymous, Life of Henry IV, p. 130.

54 Letter from Henry IV to Pope Gregory VII, 1073 in E. Emerton (tr.) The Correspondence of Pope Gregory VII: selected letters from the Registrum, Columbia, Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 19.

55 Ibid.

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himself, may have perceived his personality. While this must be explored in more detail than in this essay and its brevity, it nonetheless points towards a less anachronistic understanding that tells us more about how medieval people, and Henry himself, conceptualised the separate personality of their ruler. Moving forward, we should not question (in a Quellenkritik sense) ‘what we can truthfully know’, but how many ideas of Henry’s personality derive from the polemics implicit assumptions and enigmatic lines of argument.

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Bibliography Primary sources Anonymous, ‘The Life of Emperor Henry IV’ in T. Mommsen and K. Morrison (tr.), Imperial Lives and Letters in the Eleventh Century, Columbia, Columbia University Press, 1962.

Bruno of Merseburg, ‘On The Saxon Wars’, E Niblaeus and C Rozier (tr.) from Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptoria (SS) 5 Frutolf of Michelsberg, ‘Chronicle’, T. J. McCarthy (tr.) in Chronicles of the Investiture Contest, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2014.

Henry IV, ‘The Letters of Henry IV’ in T. E. Mommsen and K. F. Morrison (tr.), The Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century, New York, Columbia University Press, 1962.

Lampert the Hershfield, ‘The Annals of Lampert the Hershfield’ in I.S Robinson (tr.), The Annals of Lampert the Hershfield, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015.

Letter from Henry IV to Pope Gregory VII in E. Emerton (tr.) The Correspondence of Pope Gregory VII: Selected letters from the Registrum, Columbia, Columbia University Press, 1990.

Wipo, ‘The Deeds of Conrad II’ in T. Mommsen and K. Morrison (tr.) The Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century, New York, Columbia University Press, 1962.

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Secondary sources Althoff, G. ‘Otto III’ reviewed in Hamilton, S. ‘Early medieval rulers and their modern biographers’, Early Medieval Europe, vol. 9, no.2, 2000.

Burckhardt, J. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, New York, Oxford University Press, 1966.

Bachrach, D and Bachrach, B. ‘Bruno of Merseburg and his Historical Method, c.1085’, Journal of Medieval History, vol. 40, no. 4, 2014, pp. 381-398.

Fuhrmann, H. Germany in the High Middle Ages, c. 1050-1200, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Hamilton, S. ‘Early medieval rulers and their modern biographers’ Early Medieval Europe, vol. 9, no.2 , 2000, pp. 248-260.

Kantorowicz, E., The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1957.

Lake, J. ‘Current Approaches to Medieval Historiography’, History Compass, vol. 13, no 3, 2015, pp. 89-109.

Malegam, J. The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000– 1200, London, Cornell, 2013.

McCarthy, T. J. H. ‘Introduction’ in The Chronicles of the Investiture Contest: Frutolf of Michelsberg and his Continuators, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015 McLaughlin, M. ‘” Disgusting Acts Of Shamelessness”: Sexual Misconduct And The Deconstruction Of Royal Authority In The Eleventh Century’, Early Medieval Europe, vol. 19, no.3, 2011.

Morris, C. The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200, London, Harper and Row, 1972.

Janet, N. ‘Did Charlemagne Have a Private Life?’ in Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow, Suffolk, Boydell Press, 2006.

- ‘The Problematic in the Private’, Social History, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1990, pp. 355-64.

Partner, N. Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History In Twelfth-Century England, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Reuter, T. Germany in the Early Middle Ages c. 800-1056, London, Routledge, 1998.

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Robinson, I. S. ‘Introduction’ in The Annals of Lampert the Hershfield, Manchester, Medieval Sources, 2015.

- Henry IV of Germany 1056–1109, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Schultz, J., The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100-1350, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

Ullman, W. The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship, Methuen, London, 1969.

Vollrath, H. ‘The Western Empire Under The Salians’ in D. Luscombe & J. Riley-Smith (eds.)

The New Cambridge Medieval History: Volume IV, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Walker Bynum, C. ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, No. 1, 1980, pp. 1-17.

Warner, D. ‘Rituals, Kingship and Rebellion in Medieval Germany’. History Compass, vol 8, 2010, pp. 1210-1220.

Weiler, B. ‘Crown-giving and King-making in the West ca. 1000-ca. 1250’, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, vol 41, no. 1, 2010, pp. 57-87.

Weiler, Björn. ‘The Rex Renitens and the Medieval Idea of Kingship, ca. 900-ca. 1250’ Viator, vol. 31, 2000, pp. 1-42.

Weinfurter, Stefan. The Salian Century: Main Currents in an Age of Transition, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Zaretsky, Y and Stepanov, B. ‘Aron Gurevich’s medieval individual’ in Yelena MazourMatusevič, Alexandra and Schecket Korros (eds.), Saluting Aron Gurevich: Essays in History, Literature and Other Related Subjects, Leiden, Brill, 2010.

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Understandings of landscape and space in early modern popular culture ABIGAIL HENDERSON

he ‘spatial turn’ in social history has seen historians adopt a multi-disciplinary approach in their exploration of early modern landscape and space. Recent scholarship has moved away from presenting landscape and space as a mere passive canvas onto which ‘meaning’ was inscribed. Focusing primarily upon rural communities, this essay seeks to engage with this characterisation of spatiality as being an active agent in influencing popular culture, exploring how understandings of landscape and space influenced popular senses of memory and identity, popular and localised politics and the social hierarchies underpinning these systems. Whilst social history understandably has focused upon the influence of landscape and space on culture and society at large, this question also necessitates exploration into how contemporaries and historians alike have conceptualised and interacted with features such as ‘landscape’ and ‘space’. An area of popular contention across disciplines, these debates about what we mean when we categorise spatiality will be of central importance in understanding the complex and diverse ways in which early modern rural communities experienced the world around them. This essay will ultimately argue that the centrality of landscape and space to popular culture suggests an intrinsic, symbiotic relationship between the people and the landscape in which they lived; a relationship which arguably re-positions spatiality as being an integral part of popular culture itself, not just an influencing force.

T

The socio-economic instabilities of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries came to a head in rural communities through harvest failures throughout the 1590s and a gradual enclosure of land through engrossment and depopulation for sheep-farming.1 As Williamson has argued, however, such change in the physical landscape, whilst gradual, ultimately signalled a deeper structural shift in early modern mentalities towards landscape and space. 2 This is what gives the study of landscape and space such vital importance in these centuries: the physicality of the landscape and its popular perception alike were simultaneously in flux.

In exploring the influence of landscape and space upon popular culture, however, it is necessary to define the terms of the question; in this case, the concepts of ‘landscape’ and ‘space’. The concept of the early modern ‘landscape’ has previously been portrayed in a neutral way, as a mere background to human activity. Anthropologists, such as Tim Ingold, have been instrumental in complicating this view. Ingold emphasises that landscape is not the same as ‘land’, ‘nature’ or ‘space’. Seeing ‘land’ as the materiality of the landscape and the literal N. Blomley ‘Making Property Private: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges’, Rural History, vol. 18, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1-2; T. Williamson, ‘Understanding Enclosure’, Landscapes, vol.1, no.1, 2000, pp. 5758.

2 Williamson, ‘Understanding Enclosure’, pp. 57-58.

1

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topography of the environment, Ingold suggests that landscape is quite distinct; it should be considered as an array of related features, imbued with meaning from the people who inhabit it. He therefore argues that ‘where land is thus quantitative and homogeneous, the landscape is qualitative and heterogenous’.3 Such summations are shared in part by historians such as Wood who characterised the landscape as ‘a cultural construction, the sum of our perception of the material world’.4 Yet it is important to draw some distinction between the naturality of the landscape and its ‘cultural image’. Space is arguably the true manifestation of the cultural construction within the natural world and in a differing way to the way that landscape is constructed. Represented by surveyors and cartographers, Ingold has argued that ‘whereas with space, the meanings are attached to the world, with landscape they are gathered from it’.5 In many ways the way this essay will conceptualise space is akin to Wood’s description of ‘place’; ‘the construction of a social collectively upon the landscape: the creation of mutual, affective ties within a distinct locality’.6 This will be how the two are differentiated hence forth; whilst the landscape is a ‘cultural construction’, when we inhabit the landscape ‘it becomes part of us, as we become part of it’.7 The naturalistic connection here being of central importance; the concept of space is defined by the way a community inscribes its meaning onto the landscape.

With these differentiating factors in mind, popular conceptions of early modern local memory and identity were intimately affected by landscape and space. A key ‘flag-ship’ example of this was the period of Rogationtide; commonly known as ‘beating the bounds’.8 The process of walking the parish’s bounds in a ‘perambulation’ relied on the memory embedded in the landscape from subsequent generations, and created a spatial identity for those in the locality; both geographically and temporally. Hindle highlights how perambulations had a truly ‘Durkheimian significance’ and offered a moment of agency for rural communities; a ‘fleeting moment when society might be observed in the act of describing itself’.9 The establishment of communal memory of parish boundaries was strongly linked to the importance of having a sensory experience within the landscape. Contemporary recollections of perambulation routes often reference the drinking of ale and eating of cakes at important points on the boundary.10 An account of the perambulation route in New Buckenham recorded in 1594 highlights the importance of drinking culture and creating a sensory experience attached to the landscape. Richard Sturdinante’s deposition recalled how:

T. Ingold, ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, World Archaeology, vol. 25, no. 2, 1993, pp. 154-156.

A. Wood, Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 188-190.

5 Ingold, ‘Temporality of the Landscape’, pp. 154-156.

6 Wood, Memory of the People, pp. 188-190.

7 Wood, Memory of the People, pp. 188-190; Ingold, ‘Temporality of the Landscape’, pp. 154-156.

8 S. Hindle, ‘Beating the Bounds of the Parish: Order, Memory, and Identity in the English Local Community, c.

1500-1700’, in K E. Spierling and M. Halvorson (eds.), Defining Community in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, 2016, pp. 205-206.

9 Ibid., pp. 205-206.

10 Ibid., p. 216.

3 4

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British Undergraduate History Review ‘The inhabs of New Buckenham ‘in auncyent tyme did meet wth ould Buckenham in procession in the Boroughe of Buckenham and so from thence to the castle garden and there drinkinge went to dambridge togither and there p[ar]ted.’’11

The synesthesia involved in perambulations was inherently influenced by the centrality of the landscape to such practices. Wood has highlighted that in addition to eating and drinking amongst the landscape, young boys also found themselves subject to more unpleasant sensory experiences, but ones that instilled the landscape with a deep sense of memory. In 1635, Robert Fidler deposed that during his perambulation route as a boy, he ‘had his ears pulled and was set on his heads upon a mearestone…and had his head knocked to the same stone to the end to make him the better to remember…that was a boundary stone’.12 It is important that in many of these depositions, the natural landscape was vital in defining parish boundaries and holding the memories of such boundaries. However, whilst the landscape has been termed as a ‘memory palace’ by historians such as Rollison, Whyte’s development of the ‘mnemonic language’ of the landscape and how natural features worked within a memory network is arguably a more useful way of thinking about the influence of landscape and space upon popular culture. 13 Whilst the idea of a ‘memory palace’ suggests something static and constructed, Whyte’s research places the landscape in conversation with the memory it holds and most crucially, in conversation with those still dwelling within the landscape. With early modern boundaries being more akin to ‘nodal points in the landscape’ rather than the modern conceptions of linear boundaries, Whyte has argued that unassuming natural features such as trees and stones ‘became incorporated within mnemonic systems, with each being learnt in relation to the next’.14 The mnemonic language of the landscape ultimately influenced how communities remembered, both through memory rituals such as Rogationtide, but crucially also through repeated everyday action. The everyday maintenance of parish boundaries through these ‘casual rituals’ was innately influenced by the landscape; in 1616 for instance, Roger Hudson ‘knew the bound stone between Amble and Birling (Northumberland) as his father made him take notice of it by striking the stone with his staff as he walked past, and he often went that way.’15 Repeated ritual such as these or the continued maintenance of natural boundaries, suggests that rural communities were engaged in a ‘taskscape’; a landscape that was imbued with meaning through repeated work; ‘an array of related activities’.16 These everyday rituals and tasks not only positions the natural landscape as a central influencing force upon popular memory, they also highlight the cultural importance of the landscape in defining spatial identity. It is significant that even with maps that have been presented as static and concrete conception of the landscape, Ingold’s concept of the ‘taskscape’ and the meaning attached to it is still visible. The inclusion of people in the Plan of Great Yarmouth (c. 1570s)17 seems to

11

Norfolk Record Office, PD254/171 Wood, Memory and the People, pp. 207-208.

13 N. Whyte, ‘Landscape, Memory and Custom: Parish Identities c. 1550-1700’, Social History, vol. 32, no.2, 2007, pp. 166-168.

14 Ibid., pp. 175-176.

15 Ibid., pp. 180-182.

16 Ingold, ‘Temporality of the Landscape’, pp. 157-158.

17 See Appendix A. 12

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present the concept of ‘working landscape’, where those inhabiting the landscape are portrayed as part of the landscape itself, not just occupying the space.

Whyte has highlighted how natural features such as trees became ‘tangible, often deeply emotive’ signs of the past within the cultural landscape of the locality.18 Trees, as visible markers of antiquity, heavily influenced early modern popular culture as they acted as vessels of collective memory; they defined the communities’ sense of place both spatially and temporally. Whyte draws upon a dispute surrounding the memory of an old Elm Tree in Cawston, Norfolk. Landowner Thomas Hirne cut down the elm tree as it was narrowing the footpath and offered to replace the tree with a ‘doole stone’ to mark the boundary. 19 The loss of this ‘ould decaied elm’, which had been part of the inhabitant’s perambulation route for over twenty years, caused outrage amongst the inhabitants of Cawston; a dispute that lingered onto until 1676.20 The loss of this elm was felt sharply by inhabitants whose ‘personal experiences and memories became entwinned, indeed were inseparable from, the physical landscape’.21 It is, therefore, somewhat surprising that Whyte agrees with Richard Bradley’s suggestion that natural features could hold a similar space in people’s minds as monuments.22 Whilst Bradley concedes that natural features are not constructed by societies per se, the implication that they could carry memory in the same way is arguably misleading. Natural features seemed to act as a more intrinsic type of memory which did not demand remembrance in isolation to everyday life, but instead made memory part of the living, breathing landscape. Tim Ingold expresses this most eloquently in stating that: ‘to perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past.’23

The effect of landscape on ways of remembering and establishing the lineage of local identity is therefore of central importance to the wider debate in how spatiality influenced popular culture. Understandings of landscape and space was also a highly political area of popular culture and significantly influenced local politics and social hierarchies. The importance of the landscape in political memory is clearly observed in how the site of Kett’s rebellion in 1549 became ingrained in the collective consciousness of local and national memory. Mousehold Heath, on the eastern borders of Norwich, became the place where Robert Kett and his followers met and made camp, under what became known as the ‘Oak of Reformation’.24 With the rebellion being largely sparked by enclosure protests, it is arguable that landscape and space not only became influential in sparking popular engagement with

N. Whyte, ‘An Archaeology of Natural Places: Trees in the Early Modern Landscape’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 76, no.4, 2013, pp. 499-517.

19 Ibid., pp. 499-501.

20 Ibid., pp. 514-515.

21 Ibid., pp. 502-503.

22 R. Bradley, An Archaeology of Natural Places, Routledge, 2002, pp. 34-35., Whyte, ‘An Archaeology of Natural Places’, pp. 499-501.

23 Ingold, ‘Temporality of the Landscape’, pp. 152-153.

24 N. Whyte, ‘Remembering Mousehold Heath’, in C. Griffin and B. McDonagh (eds.), Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500: Memory, Materiality and the Landscape, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 27-28.

18

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political rebellion, but also came to hold popular memory of protest. It is interesting to observe how quickly this landscape came to influence contemporary political action. In a confession from James Fuller of Lavenham in 1571 who admitted to inciting a rebellion along with John Porter, Fuller’s ‘seditious words’ as he addressed rebels draw clearly on the memory of the 1525 rebellion in Lavenham, and Kett’s rebellion.25 Fuller directly addresses the grievances of the 1549 execution of the rebels still felt sharply by the community, in stating that with this current rebellion; ‘we will not be deceived as we were at the last rysinge, for then we were promised more than ynoughe…but the more was an hawlter.’26

The highly symbolic language of the ‘hawlter’ suggests that the inhabitants of Lavenham saw themselves as being yoked by social subordination, a subordination that they wished to invert by calling for the rebels to execute to newly rich inhabitants by hanging them from a tree by their own horses’ halters.27 It can therefore be seen how the landscape both provided a focus for political memory, and a stage upon which popular political actions could be enacted.

Popular understandings of landscape and space were also instrumental in influencing localised, smaller scale political disputes. This is perhaps where the concept of space comes increasingly to the fore, as local political clashes surrounding customary rights and access to common land were inherently based in how communities categorised and organised space.

Indeed it is important to highlight how ‘no feature of the landscape is, of itself, a boundary’; that the meaning given to natural features of the landscape by the activities of people cause it ‘to be recognised or experienced as such’.28 Wood has highlighted how early modern rural communities worked in an ‘overtly political manner’ to defend their local custom and how landscape and space can give extensive insights into popular politics.29 Customary disputes between communities or villages demonstrate the importance of defining spatial boundaries. It is important to note, however, that Parish boundaries were only systematically documented in the nineteenth century; the contested nature of many early modern boundaries meant that oral memory and the maintenance of physical, often natural structures, were vital in defining space.30 The ‘mental map’ of people’s locality was complex, and the visual impact of changes to this mental map such as enclosure fences and hedges should not be undermined.31 Hindle highlights how parish identity and the allocation of common resources became political disputes based in spatiality. At a Rogationtide in Essex in 1578, Hindle recounts how two groups from different parishes ‘came to blows’ regarding access rights to Rettendon Common.

‘The minster of the parish of Runwell alleged that two dozen parishioners of Rettendon had violently ‘hindered them from their lawful, peaceful, and ancient procession of D. MacCulloch, ‘Kett’s Rebellion in Context’, Past and Present, no. 84, 1979, pp. 44-45.

The Calendar of Patent Rolls, Elizabeth I, 1568-1572, no. 1818, ‘The Confession of James Fuller of Lavenham, 1571’ 27 A. Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 242-243.

28 Ingold, ‘Temporality of the Landscape’, pp. 154-155.

29 A. Wood, ‘The Place of Custom in Plebeian Political Culture: England 1550-1800’, Social History, vol. 22, no. 1, 1997, pp. 46-47.

30 Whyte, ‘Landscape, Memory and Custom’, pp. 169-170.

31 Blomley, ‘Making Private Property’, pp. 13-14.

25 26

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perambulation’’.32 Such an account highlights how part of parish identity was formed in opposition to neighbouring parishes. Space also influenced practical issues such as resource allocation and the costs of caring for those within a parish. Due to parishes being financially responsible for its poor after the Elizabethan Poor Laws in 1598 and 1601, spatial definition became more important. Parishes were known to reject the settlement of very poor families, prevent marriages between the poor and refuse aid to single mothers especially.33 Hindle highlights a case from Fillongley (Warwickshire) in 1653, where one Grace Fisher went into labour and ‘the inhabitants drove her ‘uncivilly and unmercifully’ across the parish boundary to Allesley’ where she gave birth the next day, in order to not have to pay poor relief to the illegitimate child.34 This account is illuminating as it demonstrates that custom varied in its inclusivity; and that women and poorer inhabitants especially were sometimes spatially restricted.35 Landscape and space can once again be seen to contribute to hierarchal social organisation. Before the Reformation, both men and women were expected to process during perambulations; yet after the Reformation and Elizabethan injunctions, it was stated that only the ‘substantialest men of the parish’ were to take part.36 Occasions such as these, based within customary rights and defining spatial boundaries, further excluded women from positions of official and institutional influence within popular political spheres. Indeed, it is highly notable that throughout local depositions in equity courts surrounding disputes over customary rights, the main carriers of memory and authority were older men; a feature that influences the way we think about the representation of custom.37 ‘The plebeian language of custom’ which represented the people of the locality, ‘in fact defined ‘the people’ as masculine’’; it is clear that it was not only the authority of the past that was an extremely powerful concept, but the voice which conferred the ancient truth.38 What is vital to emphasise about customary rights regarding landscape and space is that they were continually evolving and being reinterpreted, working alongside other forms of popular memory such as a developing literary culture.39 Therefore, whilst women may have been excluded from official expressions of custom, there is evidence of significant female involvement in protecting their local spatial rights to common land under threat from encroaching enclosure. Women and children traditionally executed key tasks such as gleaning on the common land; when enclosure threatened to prevent this activity, women were instrumental in ransacking hedges and fences in order to access what they perceived as their inalienable right to common resources.40 With the hedges used in enclosure being a key device in which ‘new forms of spatial discipline were both materialised and enforced’, women insisting on exercising their customary right had a significant symbolic importance within a

Hindle, ‘Beating the Bounds’, pp. 224-226.

Ibid., pp. 224-226.

34 Ibid., pp. 224-226.

35 Wood, ‘The Place of Custom in Plebeian Political Culture’, pp. 48-49.

36 Hindle, ‘Beating the Bounds’, pp. 210-211.

37 Wood, ‘The Place of Custom in Plebeian Culture’, pp. 53-55.

38 Ibid., pp. 50-52; 53-55.

39 Ibid., pp. 53-55.

40 Blomley, ‘Making Private Property’, pp. 10-11.

32 33

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locality.41 In Nidderdale in North Riding of Yorkshire, a long dispute over inhabitants’ rights to common land on the moor came to a head through a female-led riot. Women became the main threat for the noblemen who were trying to expand their rights onto the moor. These attempts were rebuffed by crowds led by Dorothy Dawson, ‘Captaine Dorrothie’, and at one point saw a riot of women charge down a slope and cast down the Earl of Derby’s enclosures whilst being cheered on by the local men.42 The centrality of landscape and space to community life, and local understandings of it being the bearer of custom, gave women a stage on which they could enforce their customary rights regardless of being excluded from official institutions of custom.

Contemporary understandings of landscape and space were highly influential upon early modern popular culture. The landscape can be observed as shaping popular memory in localities and creating a strong sense of communal, spatial identity. The influence of the surrounding world, and people’s lived experience within it, helped rural communities define themselves not only spatially, but also temporally as they placed themselves within a generation lineage and a history conveyed by the signs of antiquity around them. As Whyte so eloquently puts it, ‘for early modern people, the process of inhabiting the landscape was thus an engagement with time’ - it gave them the ability to place themselves within a complex palimpsest of heritage.43 With landscape and space also being so influential in underpinning social hierarchies based on gender and age, and offering a materiality to popular protest regarding the protection of customary rights and rebellions on local and national levels alike, it is perhaps a disservice to early modern landscape and space to separate it from popular culture at all. If popular culture can be seen as a force that underpins a given society, the centrality of landscape and space in the lives of rural communities establishes these as central ideas in popular culture. They are concepts that worked symbiotically with, and gave meaning to, everyday life.

41

Ibid., pp. 5-6.

Wood, ‘The Place of Custom in Plebeian Political Culture’, pp. 56-58.

43 Whyte, ‘An Archaeology of Natural Places’, pp. 516-517.

42

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Appendix A

Plan of the town and harbour of Great Yarmouth (Norfolk), c. 1570s, Held by the British Library.

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British Undergraduate History Review Bibliography Primary sources

‘Memories of the Boundaries of New Buckenham, 1594’, Norfolk Record Office, PD254/171.

‘Plan of the town and harbour of Great Yarmouth (Norfolk)’, c. 1570s, Held by the British Library.

‘The Confession of James Fuller of Lavenham, 1571’, The Calendar of Patent Rolls, Elizabeth I, 1568-1572, no. 1818.

Secondary sources

Blomley, N., ‘Making Private Property: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges’, Rural History, vol. 18, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1-21.

Bradley, R., An Archaeology of Natural Places, Routledge, 2002.

Hindle, S., ‘Beating the Bounds of the Parish: Order, Memory, and Identity in the English Local Community, c. 1500-1700’, in K. E. Spierling and M. Halvorson (eds.), Defining Community in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, 2016, pp. 205-227.

Ingold, T., ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, World Archaeology, vol. 25, no. 2, 1993, pp.

152-174.

MacCulloch, D., ‘Kett’s Rebellion in Context’, Past and Present, no. 84, 1979, pp. 36-59.

McDonagh, B., ‘Making and Breaking Property: Negotiating Enclosure and Common Rights in Sixteenth-Century England’, History Workshop Journal, no. 76, 2013, pp. 32-56.

Philips, H., ‘Old, old, very old men: Nostalgia in the Early Modern Broadside Ballad’, Parergon, vol. 33, no. 2, 2016, pp. 79-95.

Whyte, N., ‘An Archaeology of Natural Places: Trees in the Early Modern Landscape’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 4, 2013, pp. 499-517.

Whyte, N., ‘Landscape, Memory and Custom: Parish Identities c. 1550-1700’, Social History, vol. 32, no. 2, 2007, pp. 166-186.

Whyte, N., ‘Remembering Mousehold Heath’, in C. Griffin, B. McDonagh (eds.), Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500: Memory, Materiality and the Landscape, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 25-51.

Williamson, T., ‘Understanding Enclosure’, Landscapes, vol. 1, no. 1, Routledge, 2000, pp.

56-79.

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Wood, A., ‘Popular senses of time and place in Tudor and Stuart England’, Insights, 6, 3 (2014): https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/ias/insights/Wood25Feb.pdf Wood, A., ‘The Place of Custom in Plebeian Political Culture: England 1550-1800’, Social History, vol. 22, no. 1, 1997, pp. 46-60.

Wood, A., The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Wood, A., The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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British Undergraduate History Review vol. 1, no. 1, 2020

The Complexities of British Demobilisation After the First World War HAZEL LAURENSON

T

he unprecedented nature of the First World War (WW1), and the cultural mobilisation it required, meant that demobilisation was fraught with complexities.1 In Britain, cultural demobilisation was predominantly successful due to the emergent ‘culture of victory’. This unique response was the product of both Britain’s war experience and its subsequent victor status. This culture was, however, characterised by sobriety, and was fundamentally incompatible with the maintenance of cultural mobilisation. This essay is thus primarily concerned with the cultural legacy of the war, an area of debate to which Adrian Gregory has substantially contributed. He contends that cultural demobilisation was achieved as WW1’s atrocities outweighed the fear of German barbarism. 2 Crucially, however, he also highlights how this cultural response to the war was manipulated by ‘the establishment’ to counteract the potential escalation of political extremism.3 Before delving into these contentions, however, the intricacies of demobilisation must be addressed. Throughout this project, cultural demobilisation will be understood as ‘the dismantling of the wartime mentality’, in contrast to cultural mobilisation, whereby enemies are defined and demonised.4 The assumption that Britain culturally demobilised ‘so successfully’ is qualified by viewing the process in relative terms. As Bloxam contends, a comparative understanding of post-war socio-political and cultural processes is vital.5 German attempts to culturally demobilise, for instance, were scarce and ineffective. Military defeat was denied, and Dolchstoss (‘stab-in-theback’) became a counter-revolutionary myth of betrayal.6 Thus, when viewed in relation to other nations, whose wartime mentality long outdated the war itself, Britain’s successful cultural demobilisation is evident. Moreover, the criteria for inclusion within ‘Britain’ was contested.7 In this vein, this essay considers the cultural demobilisation of non-combatants and the state, as well as combatants, all of whom possessed a wartime mentality. It would be inaccurate, however, to claim that all Britons were unequivocally culturally demobilised by 1931, the endpoint of this analysis. Historical processes, by nature, lack definitive epochs. This weakens Kent’s argument that the formation of the National Government in 1931 ended the

J. Macmillan, ‘War’ in D. Bloxham and R. Gerwarth (eds.), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, 2011, p. 45.

2 A. Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, Cambridge, 2008, p. 268.

3 Ibid., p. 267.

4 Macmillan, ‘War’, p. 64; Ibid., p. 41.

5 D. Bloxam, ‘Introduction’ in Bloxam and Gerwarth, Political Violence, p. 1.

6 W. Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, New York, 2003, pp.

14-15.

7 P. Ward, Britishness since 1870, London, 2004, pp. 141-164.

1

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British Undergraduate History Review nation’s collective trauma.8 Not only is it impossible to project trauma - a uniquely individual experience – on to a nation, but by emphasising 1931 she robs the public of agency, assuming ‘recovery’ was only possible if initiated from above. Kent’s model, however, is not wholly relevant, as her focus upon trauma does not fully align with that of this essay. Nevertheless, it highlights important historical issues to consider regarding the use of a singular model to study a whole population. British cultural demobilisation was ‘successful’ due to Britain’s unique response to WW1, described as the ‘culture of victory’. Cultural demobilisation essentially constituted the adoption of a reconciliatory mentality, in place of aggression, towards former WW1 adversaries. Britain’s war experience alone, however, did not precipitate success. The experience was undeniably distinctive, as no fighting took place on British soil, and until 1916 service was voluntary, but did not translate into a distinctively overwhelming cultural force. It was the culture of victory’s catalysis of pre-war processes, in addition to its substantial independent agency, that was pivotal in the success of cultural demobilisation. This is evidenced in its entrenchment of revised perceptions of masculinity, and contribution to political conditions that offset disillusionment with the establishment. The state was able to appropriate British culture to maintain relative political stability and reduce the hostility of the wartime mindset. Winter’s idea of ‘Big Words’ - Duty, Honour and County - is thus relevant and will be referred to throughout.9 This essay will analyse the culture of victory, changes in perceptions of masculinity, and political developments in turn. The latter two elements were secondary, catalytic rather than causal in nature, complementarily promoting British cultural demobilisation. It was ultimately the fact that most British social strata possessed a shared desire to undergo the process, exhibited through the culture of victory, and distance themselves from the war’s unparalleled suffering, that made cultural demobilisation so successful. This coalition of interests crucially differentiated Britain from numerous other WW1 participants.

To provide a full analysis, the evolution of WW1 understandings must first be outlined.

This is because the culture of victory itself partially relied upon the mythologisation of the war experience. Initially, in the ‘spirit of 1914’, enthusiasm was widespread. Cultural mobilisation was evident in Allied propaganda, portraying Germans as ‘barbarian Huns’. These images proliferated through mass media, and subsequently their reach was wide and impact upon the public psyche substantial.10 The story of the ‘rape of Belgium’ was contrasted with messages implying that Britain represented honour and liberty, and had only entered WW1 to protect small nations from ‘Prussian militarism’.11 The idea of a ‘culture war’ was promoted: the enemy was not an individual, but a nation.12 As WW1 progressed, Britons’ divergent experiences provoked divergent viewpoints. References throughout this essay to the British ‘war experience’ should not, therefore, be understood to overlook this, but as alluding to the homogenised narrative that subsequently dominated the public domain. Following the

8

S. Kent, Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918 -1931, Macmillan, 2009, pp. 180-195.

J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in Cultural History, Cambridge, 1995, p. 8.

10 Macmillan, ‘War’, p. 52.

11 J. Hayward, Myths and Legends of the First World War, Sutton, 2002, p. 86.; M. Jones, ‘War and national identity since 1914’ in F. Carnevali and J. Strange (eds.), 20th Century Britain: Economic Cultural and Social Change, Harlaw, 2007, p. 84.

12 Macmillan, ‘War’, pp. 50-52.

9

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LAURENSON – The complexities of British demobilisation after the First World War Armistice, narratives became retrospective.13 The counter-conservative view was defined in the Myth of the War, which has been outlined by Hynes, and used as a historical lens by many historians.14 Key elements include notions of Old Men, Big Words and Disenchantment.15 It rejected WW1, defining it as a wasteful tragedy. This disillusionment was reflected in the works of the ‘war generation’, including Ford Madox Ford, Richard Aldington and Siegfried Sassoon.16 The tragic narrative was embraced to simplify confused memories, silencing oppositional accounts for supposedly insulting the memory of the deceased. A Subaltern’s War (1930), Charles Carrington’s first memoir, for instance, received criticism for contradicting the popularised Myth.17 A result of the proliferation of the Myth was public exposure to combatants’ perception of the German enemy as humanised, rather than a monolithic, barbarian bloc. This proved significant as it proceeded to diffuse wartime antagonisms and replace wider hostility for opponents with hostility for armed conflict itself.18 Explaining the above developments has been necessary if this essay is to provide a robust evaluation of cultural demobilisation’s success in Britain. The war’s cultural legacy derives depth from this complex evolution of understandings, and thus to exclude this explanation would oversimplify the subject matter at hand. It was within this context that Britain’s culture of victory emerged, to which this project will now turn.

Britain’s distinctive culture of victory was the primary force behind cultural demobilisation’s relative success. It was directly informed by the Myth, which nullified the previously accepted rationale behind Britain’s WW1 participation, subsequently provoking desperation to attach meaning to the years of unparalleled and unexplained tragedy. As Bloxam rightly contends, Britain’s historic claim to represent the ‘cradle of civilisation’ was severely undermined by engagement in, what was essentially, mass murder.19 To facilitate analysis of the culture, it will be broadly split into two elements: firstly, the above stated desire to rationalise the war, and secondly, the acts of ritual and commemoration through which conflicting interpretations of WW1 were expressed. It is important, however, that victor-loser statuses are not dismissed as wholly unimportant. Gerwarth and Edele apply the ‘mobilising power of defeat’ thesis to Germany to demonstrate the agency of defeat. They maintain, the emergent ‘culture of defeat’ located Germany’s national purpose in the Dolchstoss myth.20 The denial of military defeat, and refutation of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), supported the preservation of cultural mobilisation through the glorification of soldiers at politicians’

13

J. S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain, Cambridge, 2004, p. 2.

14 S. Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, London, 1992, pp. ix-x.

15 Ibid., p. 439.

16 Ibid., p. 424.

17 Watson, Fighting Different Wars, pp. 295-296.

18 J. Horne, ‘Beyond Cultures of Victory and Cultures of Defeat? Inter-War Veterans’ Internationalism’ in J. Eichenberg and J. P. Newman (eds.), The Great War and Veterans’ Internationalism, New York, 2013, pp. 216217.

19 Bloxam, ‘Introduction’, p. 5.

20 M. Edele and R. Gerwarth, ‘The Limits of Demobilisation: Global Perspectives on the Aftermath of the Great War’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 50, no. 1, 2015, pp. 9-10.

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British Undergraduate History Review expense.21 This contrasts the British and French contexts, where victory was pivotal in warranting the rise of international liberalism. Unlike Kaiser Wilhelm, the pre-war governments in these nations were not popularly perceived to have irreparably failed. Victory thus had the potential to create ideal conditions for cultural demobilisation. In relation to the first element of this culture, the lack of ideological purpose in WW1 was confirmed in the Treaty of Versailles, and the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921). The former was vindictive, focussing upon economic and imperial interests, as opposed to liberty.22 The Irish War, situated in the broader context of colonial violence and the Amritsar Massacre, similarly provoked debates about national purpose. Its climax, in mid-1920, involved violence that Mann describes as indicative that Ireland was viewed by the British establishment as an ‘internal colony’, due to the sheer magnitude of state-sanctioned violence deployed.23 The sack of Balbriggan by the British RIC forces in September, 1920, for instance, involved the execution of two suspected Sinn Fein members and aggressive behaviour unparalleled in mainland Britain.24 Schumann’s argument relates to this point. He contends that cultural mobilisation was maintained externally by the British state, suggesting that post-war colonial violence undermines the assumption that British cultural demobilisation was successful.25 This is an important caveat to consider, especially as it implies that the post-war confiscation of Germany’s colonies bolstered domestic cultural mobilisation. This essay, however, is primarily concerned with the British mentality towards European foes within the metropole, and thus analysis of behaviours in colonies warrants further study.

The adoption of ‘Prussianism’ in Ireland compromised the British government’s selfproclaimed status as defender of small nations.26 For the wider polity, state militancy endorsed the Myth’s disillusionment with Old Men. Mosse’s ‘brutalisation’ thesis clarifies the significance of Britain’s perceived lack of purpose in relation to cultural demobilisation.

Essentially, public fears that events in Ireland signified the government’s normalisation of wartime militancy contributed to the popular delegitimisation of political violence.27 Lawrence has explicitly engaged with Mosse in the British context, rightly arguing that the extent to which brutalisation actually took place is irrelevant. It was the profound impact that brutalisation fears inflicted upon the polity that was significant.28 The threat brutalisation posed to Britons’ self-perceived reputation thus partially explains the popular desire to culturally demobilise. Therefore, the delegitimisation of political violence is largely traceable to Britain’s post-war identity crisis and collective search for purpose. This directly precipitated cultural K. Passmore, ‘Introduction: Political Violence and Democracy in Western Europe, 1918-1940’ in C. Millington and K. Passmore (eds.), Political Violence and Democracy in Western Europe, 1918-1940, Macmillan, 2015, p. 4.

22 Hynes, A War Imagined, p. 291.

23 M. Mann, ‘The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing’, New Left Review, vol. 235, 1999, p. 25.

24 Kent, Aftershocks, p. 118.

25 D. Schumann, as cited in D. Bloxham, M. Conway, R. Gerwarth, A. D. Moses and K. Weinhauer, ‘Europe in the world: systems and cultures of violence’ in Bloxam and Gerwarth, Political Violence, pp. 21-22.

26 Kent, Aftershocks, p. 118.

27 G. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping of the Memory of the World Wars, New York, 1990, pp. 3-14.

28 J. Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence and the Fear of Brutalisation in Post-First World War Britain’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 75, vol. 3., 2003, p. 589.

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LAURENSON – The complexities of British demobilisation after the First World War demobilisation through the understanding that national progression beyond WW1 necessitated forgiveness towards wartime enemies. In this sense, there was widespread popular support for cultural demobilisation, contradicting Kent’s argument that the public experienced a prolonged state of traumatised paralysis after WW1.29 The inclusion of a self-imposed public duty to maintain peace within Britain’s culture of victory is of paramount significance. The League of Nation’s Union (LNU) demonstrates the ‘bottom-up’ character of this movement. Founded in 1918, the LNU was an independent, grassroots civic association. It was affiliated with the League of Nations, and peaked in 1931 with 406,868 members.30 The LNU was committed to international liberalism and pacifism, serving as a buffer against extremism.31 Its importance in relation to cultural demobilisation is evident in its literature, which harnessed the emotive power of the Armistice and Lost Generation to safeguard against the repetition of atrocities. To promote cultural demobilisation, a 1926 LNU leaflet included the caption ‘A glorious page in British history. But do you want it [the war] to happen again?’32 This example, however, also highlights how beneath the movement’s advocation of cultural reconciliation lay commitment to Big Words.33 Overall, the LNU constituted a physical manifestation of the popular desire to dissolve wartime mentalities and replace them with a détente. The example of the LNU thus epitomises the integral role of the culture of victory in Britain’s successful cultural demobilisation.

Further aspects of the culture of victory that complemented the scrutinisation of national purpose include ritual and commemoration. The LNU’s outward-looking nature supported the introverted nature of commemoration. The latter contributed to cultural demobilisation through its appropriation by state actors to impose the idea of a ‘fictive community’, united in collective loss, emphasising reflection as opposed to aggression. These conscious projections of Britain as wholly traumatised represented top-down attempts to conceal social cleavages.34 This supports the argument that commemoration precipitated cultural demobilisation as concern for domestic social tensions replaced previous focus upon international enemies. Hynes’ idea of ‘monuments’ is particularly relevant here. Monuments, he contends, were state tools used to dictate the trajectory of the culture of victory and overcome conflict by promoting ideas of unity, manifest in buildings, statues and graves.35 The British War Graves Commission was a ‘monument-maker’, appointed by the government in 1917 to oversee military commemorations.36 The Commission made notable attempts to ‘democratise’ commemoration, stressing uniform grave designs to signify universal bereavement. This suggests that political elites believed that projecting the image of a ‘nation

29

Kent, Aftershocks, p. 193.

H. McCarthy, The British people and the League of Nations: Democracy, citizenship and internationalism, c.

1918-45, Manchester, 2011, p. 3.

31 H. McCarthy, ‘Parties, Voluntary Associations, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Britain’, Historical Journal, vol. 50, no. 4, 2007, p. 893.

32 McCarthy, Democracy, citizenship and internationalism, p. 24.

33 Winters, Sites of Memory, p. 8.

34 Gregory, The Last Great War, p. 257.

35 Hynes, A War Imagined, p. 283.

36 Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, pp. 82-83.

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British Undergraduate History Review in mourning’ would diffuse the impact of individual loss by suggesting that the nation participated in the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ together.37 The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Cenotaph, unveiled in London on Armistice day, 1920, are evidence of this. The bereaved were seldom consulted, and thus inter-war commemoration represents the government’s perception of their needs.38 Monuments, however, as Kershaw alludes to, can still be seen to have supported cultural demobilisation. They reflect the state’s preparedness to channel energy into peaceable and solemn rituals. The undertones remained military, but the emphasis was upon remembrance and emotional healing. Crucially, state monopolisation of ritual meant that grief was not predominantly expressed through the glorification of bloodshed and a desire to avenge.

This links to Kershaw’s main argument that strong state power was a prerequisite for cultural demobilisation.39 The top-down evidence provided by monuments ultimately complements the bottom-up agency of the LNU; this reiterates the importance of a coalition of interests supportive of cultural demobilisation.

The most prominent tension exposed, however, lay between ex-servicemen and the state. The ambiguous moral nature of WW1 problematised the reintegration of ex-servicemen.

They were contradictorily perceived as heroes, victims, and threats to the social order, which partially explains the wider ostracism they experienced. Soldiery-state tensions were bolstered as veteran identity became entrenched. Initially, serviceman status was one amongst several identities combatants possessed. Post-Armistice, however, veteran status became definitive, as rituals increasingly honoured the dead and excluded the surviving soldiery.40 Throughout the 1920s, ex-servicemen perceived themselves as burdens, especially as they comprised two thirds of the unemployed.41 This was evidenced in the growth of The Royal British Legion, who supported the protection of ex-servicemen and their families.42 The Legion’s slogan (‘Honour the Dead, Serve the Living’) was a direct response to the state’s ill-defined approach to the nation’s debt to living servicemen.43 They lobbied the government regarding war pensions and unemployment, and their presence in the House of Commons, through a crossparty branch, kept the memory of the ‘front experience’ alive.44 The Legion’s entrenchment of the ex-soldiery and as social group meant that elements of the wartime mentality persisted. It may, therefore, appear unclear as to how the Legion contributed to cultural demobilisation.

This can be clarified by looking at its strategy. It aimed to work with the government to reintegrate combatants into society, through non-aggressive and non-extremist means. Their methods were characterised by appeals to public charity and amity: for example, the Haig Poppy Appeal. This national fundraising campaign raised £312,000 in 1922 to support the Legion’s rehabilitative and charitable work.45 The ex-soldiery thus contributed to their own 37

Gregory, The Last Great War, p. 250.

Ibid., p. 252.

39 I. Kershaw, ‘War and Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe’, Contemporary European History, vol. 14, no. 1, 2005, p. 114-6.

40 Horne, ‘Beyond Cultures of Victory’, p. 210.

41 Kent, Aftershocks, pp. 30-31.

42 McCarthy, ‘Parties, Voluntary Associations, and Democratic Politics’, p. 893.

43 Gregory, The Last Great War, pp. 263-264.

44 Horne, ‘Beyond Cultures of Victory’, p. 211.

45 D. Thackeray, Conservatism for the Democratic Age: Conservative cultures and the challenge of mass politics in early twentieth century England, Manchester, 2013, p. 137.

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LAURENSON – The complexities of British demobilisation after the First World War cultural demobilisation through the League, in a similar way to the wider populace and the LNU. Crucially, it was Britain’s victory that permitted ex-servicemen to express their needs in this law-abiding fashion. The British ex-soldiery recognised the state’s maintained authority, contrasting the continental power vacuums which precipitated paramilitary presence. 46 The evidence presented reflects the integral role of Britain’s culture of victory regarding cultural demobilisation. This culture, based around the Myth, promoted domestic popular mobilisation towards self-improvement and reconciliation, as opposed to sustained cultural mobilisation. The populace, state and ex-soldiery founded different methods and bodies, all traceable to this overarching culture, to dissolve cultural mobilisation: the LNU, monumentmaking, and The British Legion respectively. The culture of victory was the essential constituent in the process of cultural demobilisation, but was complemented by simultaneous developments and agendas which also deserve due evaluation.

One such additional development that contributed to the relative success of cultural demobilisation was changing understandings of masculinity. Masculinity debates and cultural demobilisation had a somewhat symbiotic relationship: as new understandings became more entrenched, cultural demobilisation progressed, and vice versa. Therefore, it cannot be asserted that such debates were a primary cause of cultural demobilisation, as this culture provided the ideal context for revised gendered understandings to ensconce. Moreover, evaluating gendered perceptions themselves are problematic due to the difficulty of identifying sincere attitudes.

Due to their undeniable agency, however, the marginalisation of masculinity debates would significantly undermine this essay’s analytical value. Changes in perceptions of masculinity particularly impacted combatants’ cultural demobilisation, as individual experiences of suffering exposed pre-war conceptions to scrutiny. Roper thus rightly identifies WW1 as epochal in catalysing the re-evaluation of manliness as a single standard.47 Many middle-class troops were indoctrinated with unattainable standards of masculinity through public schooling.

These promoted ideals of national service, sacrifice, and imperial glory.48 In WW1’s aftermath, however, emphasis upon the forbearance of pain was replaced with scope for emotional sensibility and subjectivity within masculinity.49 Individual experiences of trench warfare, which prevented combatants from identifying with the Big Words they had been instructed to embody, defined contemporary masculinity. This is reflected in Colonel Charles à Court Repington’s memoir title, The First World War (1920). He recognised that the word ‘Great’ was not applicable to his experience.50 It became widely understood that no extent of preparation could quell the fears that arose in the trenches. This was reflected in the fact that a large proportion of the 80,000 men diagnosed with a ‘nervous disorder’ during WW1 had medals for bravery.51 A. Gregory, ‘Peculiarities of the English? War, Violence and Politics’, Journal of Modern European History, vol. 1, no 1., 2003, p. 44.

47 M. Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity: the ‘War Generation’ and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1919-1950’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2005, 343-62.

48 Watson, Fighting Different Wars, pp. 298-300.

49 Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity’, pp. 345-346.

50 Hynes, A War Imagined, pp. 260-261.

51 Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity’, p. 349.

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Combatants’ disillusionment with the society that projected the standards implied in the Big Words was critical to cultural demobilisation. Veterans produced satire targeting Old Man rhetoric, and Sassoon alluded to a lingering hostility towards the home front in his memoirs.52 This links to Horne’s argument that cultural demobilisation was achieved amongst combatants through their development of empathy with German enemies, rooted in the assumed similarity of their suffering. Subsequently, animosity was redirected towards the British social strata who endorsed the unrealistic Edwardian standards of men.53 This broader despair with the establishment and gendered ideas of purpose link to the culture of victory, which provided a fertile context for the realisations of the trenches to take root in post-war society. The proliferation of the Myth of the War catalysed these changes in understanding by demonstrating that disaffection was widespread, strengthening the argument that the culture was the primary cause of cultural demobilisation. Without the culture of victory, and the preparedness for social change it fostered, it is unlikely that non-combatants would have been mobilised as quickly to revise social standards of masculinity.

Contrasting the relative glorification of violence in Britain and Germany further explains cultural demobilisation and its relationship with paramilitarism. For the Freikorps, street violence revived the camaraderie and intensity of wartime.54 The groups represented ‘explosive subcultures of ultramilitant masculinity’ that attempted to resist social and national defeat, necessitating the idealisation of ‘toughness’ as a male virtue. 55 Paramilitaries thus constitute evidence of sustained German cultural mobilisation. The British Legion provides a direct comparison. They did not, in contrast, glorify killers, but focused upon peaceful rehabilitation and reintegration.56 It could be argued that this difference is explained by Britain’s victor, and Germany’s loser, status. This is strengthened by the parallels between the French and British post-war narratives. Examination of Italy, however, disproves this proposition, as the victorious Liberal state was unable to derive a credible culture of victory.

Nationalists felt victory was somewhat ‘mutilated’, as their territorial ambitions remained unfulfilled.57 The state’s weaknesses heightened ideological conflicts, precipitating the legitimisation of political violence. This offset the possibility of cultural demobilisation and paved the way for Mussolini’s fascist takeover in 1922.58 Therefore, the Italian narrative demonstrates that victor-loser status did not dictate the post-war national trajectory. This relates to the overarching argument that it was Britain’s unique response to victory that made cultural demobilisation ‘so successful’. This response differentiated Britain from Germany and Italy, where the cultural reaction to WW1 provided the conditions for the maintenance of cultural 52

Hynes, A War Imagined, p. 248.

Horne, ‘Beyond Cultures of Victory’, pp. 216-217.

54 S. Carroll (ed.), Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective, Macmillan, 2007, p.

37.

55 R. Gerwarth and J. Horne, ‘Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917-1923’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2011, p. 498.; J. Horne, ‘Defending Victory: Paramilitary Politics in France, 1918-1926. A Counter-example’, in R. Gerwarth and J. Horne (eds.), War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, Oxford, 2012, pp. 216-217.

56 Gregory, ‘Peculiarities of the English?’, p. 53.

57 Horne, ‘Beyond Cultures of Victory’, p. 219.

58 Kershaw, ‘War and Political Violence’, p. 115.

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LAURENSON – The complexities of British demobilisation after the First World War mobilisation and aggression as a facet of masculinity. Essentially, this demonstrates that victory’s prestige should not be assumed to explain Britain’s successful demobilisation.

Overall, the cultural forces released by WW1 included a notable alteration in understandings of men’s social roles. This had particular agency in the cultural demobilisation of combatants.

In contrast to the Edwardian emphasis upon external attributes, the notion that men could be defined by internal, and multiple, qualities proliferated.59 It was the universality of the culture of victory, however, that gave permanence to the changes. Therefore, the primary importance of the culture is confirmed in its bestowment of historical agency upon masculinity developments.

The final element this essay will discuss is the contribution of explicit political developments to cultural demobilisation. This mainly includes state efforts to reduce wartime aggression through reintegration of combatants into the polity. This focus, however, should not be misunderstood to totally align with Kent’s assumption that recovery from WW1 necessitated top-down initiatives.60 The fusion of top-down and bottom-up forces was integral to successfully ‘forging a peaceable kingdom’, as Lawrence describes.61 Here, Lawrence correctly suggests that images of intrinsic British calmness and self-control were conscious constructions and not entirely organic, as the state intended the resultant perception to be. It is significant that British political institutions historically derive legitimacy by claiming to represent the ‘nation’. Subsequently, the state had to react to the contested nature of the postwar British ‘nation’, prompting legislative, behavioural, and rhetorical changes. In attempt to offset extremism and restore faith in democracy, for instance, Stanley Baldwin sought to ‘invent tradition’. In this vein, Gregory has argued that Britain’s victor status underpinned the state’s ability to invent the traditions that dissipated the ideal circumstances for right-wing extremism.62 He cites disillusionment with political machinery as a key social characteristic that made 1918 Britain ripe for extremism. A British defeat, he contends, would have precipitated a Dolchstoss myth, disenabling the state from claiming that The Sacrifice was not in vain.63 Such speculation is not wholly useful, but does highlight the necessity of invented tradition in the achievement of cultural demobilisation. It should be noted that using Hobsbawm’s ‘invention of tradition’ model does not imply that state-promoted traditions were entirely artificial. Alternatively, elements of British political culture and national identity were magnified. Hobsbawm outlines three aims of inventing tradition: to demonstrate social cohesion, to legitimise institutions, and to instil beliefs and behaviours.64 In the post-war setting, these goals are certainly transferrable to the British government. The overarching ‘invented tradition’ was that the British people were innately peaceable and embodied the antithesis of violent sentiment. This built upon pre-war processes in electoral politics that involved a dissociation from Edwardian customs and encouragement of elector restraint.65 Roper ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity’, p. 347.

Kent, Aftershocks, p. 9.

61 Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom’, pp. 577-589.

62 Gregory, The Last Great War, p. 267.

63 Ibid.

64 E. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 2014, p. 9.

65 Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom’, p. 589.

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In tandem with the invention of tradition was the process of defining the British nation.

Cultural demobilisation itself necessitates clarification of the nature of both ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Forces of inclusion and exclusion were thus drawn upon to resolve Ireland’s contested status.

The Black and Tan violence during the War of Independence, as previously discussed, is evidence of Irish ostracism from the metropole.66 Irish self-exclusion was demonstrated in Sinn Féin’s domination of the 1918 election.67 By 1922, Southern Ireland was officially excluded from the British polity. This codification confirmed the geographical barriers of the peaceable kingdom, allowing rhetoric of Britishness to be effectively deployed as a means to achieve cultural mobilisation. The explicit relevance of invented tradition to cultural demobilisation lies in the exploitation of such traditions as political tools. Following the Representation of the People Act (1918) (RPA), politicians drew rhetorical contrasts between the ‘silent majority’ and the ‘active minority’, projecting the latter as an unrepresentative aggressive mob.68 This attempt to control the numerically and socially expanded electorate also represented a monopolisation of troops’ sobriety, rooted in their service experience. The RPA demonstrated WW1’s catalysis of the pre-war process by which electoral politics was becoming more peaceable, as the abolition of the male non-elector undermined rowdiness as a legitimate form of political expression.69 Similarly, the RPA is evidence of the government’s desire to peacefully integrate servicemen into the polity. Significantly, politicians across the political spectrum recognised that the divergent horrors of war annulled the appeal of heckling, and consciously partook in this refashioning of popular political involvement. 70 Outspoken assertions of political opinion were condemned, and self-discipline praised as the epitome of Britishness.71 The social aggression and militancy of wartime was thus partially dismantled through legislative reform that complemented pre-war shifts in attitudes regarding the exercising of one’s political voice. Social actors who possessed potentially destabilising dissent were bestowed explicit political agency by the state, meaning political antagonisms and bellicosity could be conveyed through voting, rather than insolent vocal exhibition. The RPA thus testified to the flexibility and sustained relevance of British parliamentary democracy, representing a legislative attempt to support the claim to serve the post-war nation.

Moreover, the invention of political tradition in Britain meant that the attribution of disruptions within political meetings to the opposition was advantageous. This was evident in the tightly fought 1924 election. During the campaign period, heckling was presented by all as an affront to the ‘true public’.72 Such political projections catalysed the path of cultural demobilisation set upon by Britain’s culture of victory. The invention of the electorate’s political role represented a cross-party effort to politically delegitimise aggression and safeguard British democracy. These projections especially appealed to the recently militarily Mann, ‘The Dark Side of Democracy’, p. 25.

Ward, Britishness since 1870, p. 163.

68 Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom’, p. 571.

69 J. Lawrence, ‘The Transformation of British Public Politics after the First World War’, Past & Present, no.

190, 2006, pp. 205-208.

70 Ibid., pp. 188-192.

71 J. Lawrence, ‘The Decline of Popular Politics?’, Parliamentary History, vol. 13, no. 3, 1994, pp. 333-337.

72 Lawrence, ‘Transformation of British Public Politics’, p. 198.

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LAURENSON – The complexities of British demobilisation after the First World War demobilised, for whom the lived war experience provoked a disinclination towards forcefulness. This delegitimisation and newfound emphasis upon characterisations of the electorate as calm and rational were ultimately significant to cultural demobilisation due to their broad popular reach and subsequent embracement.

Baldwin’s iconic rhetoric of ‘Britishness’ similarly contributed to the relative success of cultural demobilisation. He strove to personify the ideal Briton and moderate conservative, and reform his party’s image. Williamson has argued that his ‘peculiarity of style’ permitted him to oversee cultural demobilisation.73 This is valid, as Baldwin’s transcendence of partisan divides, and inclusion of the working classes and ex-soldiery in his imagined society, underpinned his influence upon public opinion. His rhetoric proliferated through political and non-political addresses. Baldwin’s May 1924 speech was amongst the orations deemed valuable enough to be published, and later sold in cheap printed editions.74 This broadened his reach, partially explaining his profound cultural impact. In an explicit attempt to reintegrate servicemen, Baldwin claimed that the Conservatives represented their interests. He presented servicemen as models of restraint and order, in contrast to Labour’s rowdiness and sectionalism. Labour, Baldwin argued, was an insult to combatants’ discipline and patriotism.75 The Conservatives’ inter-war hegemony provides evidence that these ideas influenced Baldwin’s target audience. Even in Labour’s 1923 and 1929 victories, the Conservatives gained the most votes.76 This demonstrates the popular appeal of Baldwin’s culturally demobilising oratory. In addition, the narrative of the General Strike (May, 1926) that emerged in its aftermath demonstrates the significance of social projections upon the process of cultural demobilisation. The strike’s initial characterisation, as a Soviet-inspired attack on parliamentary democracy that necessitated wartime measures, shifted immediately after 12th May.77 The mythologised narrative, promptly adopted by the Daily Mail, and slightly later by The Times, was essentially that the strike was undertaken by misguided workers, on behalf of the less fortunate miners.78 It involved a sense of reconciliation and incorporated the strikers into the British nation by presenting them as exemplars of Britishness.79 A Times editorial state, in relation to the workers’ supposed defence of their mining comrades, that the strike demonstrated that ‘the interests of the nation are not divided, but are indivisible’.80 This revision overlooked the scathing criticism of workers and Labour during the strike, and implied that barbarism and militarism are always rejected by the state and public, in line with invented Britishness.81 This characterisation of the General Strike is therefore evidence of the widespread readiness to embrace invented ideals of peaceable Britishness, and thus indicates the conscious popular desire to undertake cultural demobilisation which was essential in its

P. Williamson, ‘The Doctrinal Politics of Stanley Baldwin’, in M. Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine, Cambridge, 1993, p. 182.

74 Ibid., pp. 184-191.

75 Thackeray, Conservatism for the Democratic Age, p. 135.

76 Williamson, ‘Politics of Stanley Baldwin’, p. 181.

77 Kent, Aftershocks, p. 123.

78 Ibid., pp. 133-134.

79 Ibid., pp. 143-147.

80 The Times, 1926, p. 3 81 Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom’, p. 588.

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British Undergraduate History Review success. Overall, the role of post-war political developments in relation to cultural demobilisation was substantial. Legislative developments derive historical agency through their demonstration that the state wanted to culturally demobilise. Electoral reform broadened the political nation, whilst the impact of Baldwin’s invented tradition of innate British peaceableness was reflected in the Conservatives’ inter-war domination. These developments supported cultural demobilisation as they revived popular faith in the establishment, reducing wartime disillusionment to the extent that extremist conditions were offset. Britain’s culture of victory, however, remains the primary factor in stimulating cultural demobilisation, as political developments demonstrated the state’s recognition, and monopolisation, of the culture. This was primarily done to obtain political advantage, but popular rejection of militarism and bellicosity were also clear results.

In conclusion, this essay has endeavoured to explain the success of British cultural demobilisation. It should be reasserted here that the broader European context of the period validates the claim that British cultural demobilisation was ‘so successful’. German and Italian society especially continued to demonise enemies, thereby retaining cultural mobilisation.

Moreover, it would be a severe shortcoming to assume, as Kent does, that the process was wholly complete by 1931. Historical processes are rarely finite, and to reiterate, terms such as ‘success’ should not be misinterpreted to suggest this. This essay has aimed to draw general conclusions regarding the state, combatants, and non-combatants. Subsequently, further study is required to evaluate cultural demobilisation in relation to varying class and regional contexts, as well as the disparities within the described social groups. It is also important to clarify that such social categorisation has been used for ease of analysis, as opposed to the presumption that they represent monoliths. Additionally, this project has not explicitly discussed events such as the race riots and the Conservatives’ use of ‘Red Scare’ techniques, due to alternative examples better serving the purposes of assessing the complexities of demobilisation.

Ultimately, Britain’s unique war experience does not sufficiently explain its post-war trajectory. The success of cultural demobilisation is instead attributable to the attitudes and behaviours that accompanied victory. This ‘culture of victory’ demonstrates how it was not the unprecedented nature of WW1, nor Britain’s victor status, that alone instigated cultural demobilisation. The culture was bolstered by the formalisation of the Myth of the War, which proved more powerful than the experience itself.82 It contributed to both the reintegration of servicemen and the acceptance of subjectivity as a facet of masculinity.83 It was also exploited by political elites to project notions of innate British peaceableness, delegitimising wartime aggression. Lawrence’s argument that cultural demobilisation was partially a product of the conscious invention of traditions is thus valid.84 Crucially, it was the coalition of top-down and bottom-up interest in cultural demobilisation that underpinned its success in Britain. Overall, there is no singular explanation of why cultural demobilisation was ‘so successful’ in Britain.

The British culture of victory was the primary force behind the processes at work, but,

82

Gregory, The Last Great War, p. 268.

Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity’, p. 346.

84 Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom’, p. 589.

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LAURENSON – The complexities of British demobilisation after the First World War critically, it gained strength from accompanying changes in standards of masculinity, as well as in legislation and rhetoric.

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Bloxham, D,, and Gerwarth, R. (eds.), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, 2011.

Carnevali, F., and Strange, J. (eds.), 20th Century Britain: Economic Cultural and Social Change, Harlaw, 2007 Carroll, S. (ed.), Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective, Macmillan, 2007.

Edele, M., and Gerwarth, R., ‘The Limits of Demobilisation: Global Perspectives on the Aftermath of the Great War’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 50, no. 1, 2015, pp. 3-14.

Eichenberg, J., and Newman, J. P. (eds.), The Great War and Veterans’ Internationalism, New York, 2013 Gerwarth, R., and Horne, J. (eds.), War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, Oxford, 2012.

Gerwarth, R., and Horne, J., ‘Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917-1923’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2011, pp. 489-512.

Gregory, A,, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, Cambridge, 2008.

Gregory, A., ‘Peculiarities of the English? War, Violence and Politics’, Journal of Modern European History, vol. 1, no. 1, 2003, pp. 44-59.

Hayward, J., Myths and Legends of the First World War, Sutton, 2002.

Hobsbawm, E., and Ranger, T., The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 2014.

Hynes, S., A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, London, 1992.

Kent, S., Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918 -1931, Macmillan, 2009.

Kershaw, I., ‘War and Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe’, Contemporary European History, vol. 14, no. 1, 2005, pp. 107-123.

Lawrence, J., ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence and the Fear of Brutalisation in Post-First World War Britain’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 75, no. 3, 2003, pp. 557-589.

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Lawrence, J., ‘The Transformation of British Public Politics after the First World War’, Past & Present, no. 190, 2006, pp. 185-216.

Mann, M., ‘The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing’, New Left Review, vol. 235, 1999, pp. 18-45.

McCarthy, H., ‘Parties, Voluntary Associations, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Britain’, Historical Journal, vol. 50, no. 4, 2007, pp. 891-912.

McCarthy, H., The British people and the League of Nations: Democracy, citizenship and internationalism, c. 1918-45, Manchester, 2011.

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Mosse, G., Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping of the Memory of the World Wars, New York, 1990.

Roper, M., ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity: the ‘War Generation’ and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1919-1950’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2005, 343-362.

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British Undergraduate History Review vol. 1, no. 1, 2020

The Modern Construction of Gender, Sex, and the Body REBECCA LEELAND

hat ideas of gender, sexuality, and the body are socially constructed is ‘axiomatic’ among historians.1 Led largely by Michel Foucault, the constructionist approach has taken academic dominance over the essentialist argument. These theories hold that such identities are malleable and are, therefore, adjusted and reshaped according to social and historical contingencies, as opposed to being based on biological certainties. ‘Modernity’ is also a frustratingly vague term, whose chronological boundaries are often debated, but in the traditional tripartite division of history between ancient, medieval and modern, has its start in the 15th Century; the later subdivision between ‘modern’ and ‘early modern’ creates another boundary at 1789 and the French Revolution.2 The period in its entirety oversaw an increasingly systematic and institutionalised reconstruction of social identities in the wake of ‘modern’ events, namely technological advancements, education, and global crises. These developments caused notions of gender, sexuality, and the body to enter the political agenda and public discourse, precipitating an unprecedented growth in state interest in bodily norms and behaviour. However, the historiographical dominance of high politics overlooks the individual agency of citizens, both in the assumption that such government-mandated identities were followed, and in the apolitical personal joy of self-exploration. Comparing notions of identity at either end of modernity reveals the far from linear fluctuations of gender, sexuality, and the body. Due to its consistency across this period, social constructionism is a largely undisputed argument; its intricacies and precise causes are not. The hydraulic - and dominant - view of sexuality is arguably a combination of essentialist and constructionist arguments; that sex as an act is constant and unchanging, but its expression is not. Typically, the First World War is seen as a watershed for greater personal freedoms, due to the mass social upheaval it caused and the acceleration of equality that came in its wake. The definitive female step into the workforce in order to support industry and economy, coupled with the mentally fragile men returning from the war reflected the collapse of social certainties and unstable identities, allowing for greater experimentation.3 This link between uncertainty and experimentation can above all be seen in the sexual behaviour of soldiers abroad; unsure of their own survival and spending much of their time in ‘overwhelmingly male company,’ soldiers developed a sexual

T

1

V. Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003, p.3.

2 M. Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789, 2nd edition, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p.7.

3 D. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth Century History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp.45-47; J. Peakman, ‘Continuities and Change in Sexual Behaviour and Attitudes since 1750’, in J. McNeill and K. Pomeranz (eds) The Cambridge World History, Volume 7: Production, Destruction and Connection, 1750-Present, Part 2: Shared Transformations?, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p.103.

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LEELAND – The modern construction of sex, gender, and the body frustration which found its remedy in the constantly renewed pool of local women as they travelled. Not only did this open up the possibility of interracial relationships and the experience of new sexual customs, but the complete freedom of ‘what goes on tour stays on tour’ supplied ‘countless opportunities for consensual delight.’4 Sex and the body were increasingly seen as a way of reaffirming life, during a previously unseen global period of death and destruction, as facilitated by modern warfare.5 For Hera Cook, the influence of modernity in constructing notions of identity can also be found in technological developments, but above all that of contraception. The universal accessibility of the contraceptive pill in the United Kingdom in 1968 allowed for unprecedented levels of sexual freedom; between 1965 and 1975 the percentage of people who lost their virginity at marriage dropped from 38% to 15%.6 The pill released men and women from the fears and consequences of pregnancy, and ultimately the experimentation and casual, low-risk sexual activity it allowed represented a rejection of control, and a mandate for female bodily autonomy. There are arguments that the pill in fact limited female sexual freedom as it removed their ability to say no, yet that rests on the assumption that refused consent had until then been sufficient protection against unwanted pregnancies. Callum Brown argues for a more cultural shift, rather than technological, and whilst respecting Cook, finds ‘tension in her narrative.’ Her work is titled The Long Sexual Revolution and yet pinpoints the exact moment of change at 1968, and there are also statistical contests to Cook’s arguments. Rates of illegitimacy surged from 1960-1968, and therefore the rise in pre- or extra-marital sex pre-dated the introduction of the pill and its effects. He instead argues that increasing secularisation and a reduced behavioural policing by the Church encouraged a permissive society with ‘striking changes in public and private morals.’7 Geoffrey Gorer’s Exploring English Character found that ‘it can be said quite unambiguously’ that religion held the most influence in dictating sexual attitudes, with 67% of subjects who never attended church believing that men should have sexual experience before marriage, in stark contrast to the 30% of those regularly attended.8 Julie Peakman states the shift in authority over sexual activity from the Church to medicine ‘is one of the most radical changes in history regarding sexuality;’9 Cook and Brown agree on this, but with different directions of influence.

The loss of former morals and certainties, combined with greater bodily autonomy caused a loosening of sexual restrictions across the 20th Century, and thus a restructured idea of sexuality.

However, the hydraulic view, despite its historiographical dominance, limits itself through the argument that sex as an act does not change; this idea invokes Leda Cosmides and

4

Ibid, p.99; D. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth Century History, p.47.

J. Peakman, ‘Continuities and Change in Sexual Behaviour and Attitudes since 1750’, in J. McNeill and K. Pomeranz (eds) The Cambridge World History, Volume 7: Production, Destruction and Connection, 1750Present, Part 2: Shared Transformations?, p.103.

6 H. Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, Oxford, 2005, p.326.

7 C. Brown, ‘Sex, Religion, and the Single Woman c.1950-1975: The Importance of a ‘Short’ Sexual Revolution to the English Religious Crisis of the Sixties’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 22, no. 2, 2011, p.190192.

8 G. Gorer, Exploring English Character, New York, Criterion Books, 1955, p.117.

9 J. Peakman, ‘Continuities and Change in Sexual Behaviour and Attitudes since 1750’, in J. McNeill and K. Pomeranz (eds) The Cambridge World History, Volume 7: Production, Destruction and Connection, 1750Present, Part 2: Shared Transformations?, p.86.

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John Tooby’s famous statement that ‘our modern skulls house a stone-age mind,’ that despite changes in expression, we remain fundamentally primal. Yet, that notions of sexuality shifted throughout the modern period meant precisely that the nature of sex itself had changed; contraception necessarily means that sex is no longer a reproductive act, either in intent or result. This shift revealed a significant lack of knowledge surrounding sex beyond procreation, indicating how sexual restraint wasn’t ended with a ‘remarkable release of the libido’ as Lawrence Stone argued, but rather it was hidden by ignorance.10 Whilst its physical ends were unknown, desire was felt and entertained by many, they just ‘did not recognise that attraction for what it was,’ as was the case with Margaret Cole upon meeting her husband before the First World War.11 In some cases sexual ignorance could result in awkwardly embarrassing situations, as one of Gorer’s subjects said, ‘I had no sexual experience before my marriage and I’d never want to experience my wedding night again,’ but the unknowns of sexual activity often resulted in deeper emotional damage.12 Gorer’s study reveals that fear, rather than a weak libido, contributed to the culture of abstinence. Many young women, unable to recognise or express their needs were traumatised by early sexual experiences; a 17-year-old subject to Gorer’s study recorded that after being sexually assaulted she ‘thought sex was a shameful thing,’ and Naomi Mitchison upon marrying her husband ‘couldn’t explain that there were words and touches I didn’t want.’13 As such Dagmar Herzog argues sex becoming a public discussion fundamentally changed its nature, as sexual ideas that had previously been suppressed, but nevertheless felt, could now be articulated. Sigmund Freud’s declaration of the centrality of sex to all human behaviour was a revelation, and the controversy of sex entering public discourse reflects the previous silence on this matter; The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928) explored homosexuality as a biological inversion rather than a personal moral failing.14 The idea that there was a sudden eruption of sex drive implies that such feelings can only exist with a label; the rise in sexual knowledge in the 19th and 20th Centuries precipitated an ability to recognise sexual urges, rather than to have them, and this knowledge in turn changes the nature of the act itself, revealing sex to be constructed, not just sexuality.

Furthermore, the socially constructed nature of modern gender, sexuality, and the body must be analysed within the political structures of the day. Interest in sexuality and the body was initially medical; the term ‘sexuality’ itself was only coined around 1800, and preceding this, there had been minimal precise terminology for many female anatomical parts; the sex and midwifery manual Aristotle’s Masterpiece, originally published in 1684, repeatedly refers to the ovaries as testicles.15 Critically, Merry Wiesner-Hanks argues that the ‘personal is political,’ reflecting how ideas of the body became a political battleground as society became more and more centred around a liberated individual, the control of whom, as Foucauldian thought argues, is central to state authority. Harry G. Cocks summarises Foucault’s beliefs, as

10

L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, New York, Harper & Row, 1977, p.543.

M. Cole, The Life of G.D.H. Cole, London, Macmillan, 1971, p.90.

12 G. Gorer, Exploring English Character, p.104.

13 Ibid, p.110; N. Mitchison, All Change Here: Girlhood and Marriage, London, Bodley Head, 1975, p.106.

14 D. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth Century History, p.57.

15 The Works of Aristotle, the Famous Philosopher, London, L. René, 1800.

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LEELAND – The modern construction of sex, gender, and the body ‘only armed with information could the business of life be directly managed.’ 16 This ‘biopower’ entailed the ability to ‘normalise’ certain bodily behaviour and thus shape sexuality, most easily seen in the criminalisation of homosexuality and pro-natalist campaigns. Uli Linke supports this idea, that boundaries of identities are sustained by state intervention, which aligns itself with the conservative backlash that coincided with increasing discussion over social identities.17 If the growth of the nation state is characteristic of modernity, then increased influence in the lives and bodies of its people is symptomatic of this, typified for example by the European trend of pro-natalism and increased policing of women’s bodies. France criminalised contraception in 1920, with Francoist Spain doing the same in 1941; not only was abortion illegal, but a crime against the state and the primary function of womanhood. This increased control necessarily created sexual and bodily norms, above all seen in the rise of eugenics, reaching its climax in mass sterilisation under the Nazis. Government attempts to socially enshrine an ideal citizen were enacted through a neopatriarchal restoration, which saw ‘relentlessly repetitive’ propaganda promoting a bellicose masculinity, and submissive femininity in turn. Under Benito Mussolini, the inclusion, and later redaction of laws on homosexuality from the penal Rocco Code, are revealing of the Italian prioritisation of manhood; mentioning homosexuality alluded to its social presence, and thus ‘silence was preferable.’18 The strict reorganisation of bodily politics did not repress sexuality but reinvent it in a patriarchal way, idealising heterosexual sex and reproduction as a civic duty. The ‘body beautiful’19 was not specific to fascism, however, with widespread sterilisation in Scandinavia in the 1950s, and engaged couples in Switzerland had to prove their soundness of body and mind before marriage.20 Post-war Britain viewed the fit male body as, according to George VI, ‘a duty to ourselves and our generation,’ and the pursuit of ‘supermanity’ oversaw an increasing number of men’s health magazines applying pressure to achieve a hypermasculinity.21 Therefore as Foucault argues, modern constructionism finds its roots in state efforts to protect authority in the face of increased individual liberty, leading to a conservative reconstruction of sexuality, gender, and the body marked by repressive politics ‘sought by those who miss the power that is no longer theirs.’22 However, in this view the state of sexual and gendered freedom is decided by political decisions, not popular or individual sentiment. Many historians rest their explanations on this, yet the frequency of bodily policing across Europe despite differing political systems and climate suggests alternative influences. Denmark had no major involvement in the First World War, and so did not experience the same social upheavals as the rest of Europe, yet still H.G. Cocks, ‘Approaches to the History of Sexuality Since 1750’, in S. Toulalan and K. Fisher (eds) The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, 1500 to the Present, Oxford, Routledge, 2016, p.42.

17 U. Linke, ‘Gendering Europe, Europeanizing Gender: The Politics of Difference in a Global Era’, in D. Stone (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p.241.

18 D. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth Century History, pp.61-66.

19 I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in interwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 41, no. 4, 2006, p.595.

20 V. Harris, ‘Sex on the Margins: New Directions in the Historiography of Sexuality and Gender,’ The Historical Journal, vol. 53, no.4, 2010, p.1089; D. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth Century History, p.55.

21 I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in interwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, pp.608-610.

22 P. Brückner and A. Finkielkraut, Le Nouveau Désordre Amoureux, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1977, p.293.

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witnessed the same gender instability. 23 This underscores C.A. Bayly’s idea that increased interconnectivity in the modern period led to ‘global uniformities,’ despite different experiences.24 Therefore, the popular desire for modernity amongst individuals was critical to the reconstruction of gendered identity, and Danish women sought to ‘take advantage of the social and sexual upheavals’ that characterised the inter-war years.25 This was above all marked by a rejection of Victorian domesticity, which became critical to the defence of the ‘new woman.’ The simplicity of modern fashion entailed an increased display of the female body, with shorter hemlines, exposed shoulders, and reduced underwear, which according to Danish newspaper Århus Stifstidende meant ‘you can no longer tell who is the daughter of a common labourer and who belongs to the better circles.’26 These trends were believed to foreshadow social chaos; in response, women defended these styles not as feminist statements but as a rejection of the old-fashioned in favour of practicality, themselves perpetuating the stereotype of frumpy, self-righteous, ugly feminists who cared little for their appearance. This succeeded in relaxing gender anxieties as it assured conservatives that these new styles were no threat to gender hierarchies. Critically, this defence of modern fashion allowed women to reshape the female body themselves through their own desires. Gendered and sexual activity can be seen to run parallel to political activity, and Matthew Russell, medical doctor and British counterculturist stated that ‘there was a lot of this belief that if you took your knickers off you’d smash the state;’27 however Søland’s research reveals that aspirations of modernity were not necessarily political statements, and despite the political and social importance often attached to it, many women simply enjoyed experimenting different ways of aligning their own femininity with modernity. The historical focus on high politics risks a Foucauldian tendency to depend upon the passivity of everyday people, and ignore their individual agency in pioneering, rather than accepting change.

It is critical to state that, as Scott Gunther argues, the history of constructionism is not a ‘simple teleological progression toward ever greater freedom.’28 If one looks at early modern Europe, examples of sexual and gendered fluidity are frequent, and this culture was arguably more progressive than the society immediately preceding the First World War. Italian medical discourse, for example that of Michele Savonarola, asserted that the female orgasm aided conception, promoting and giving advice on foreplay in order to have the woman ‘spermatise.’29 This not only sits uncomfortably with ideas of feminine virginal purity, but critically reveals a strikingly progressive understanding and respect for female sexual pleasure, contrasting starkly with the sexual ignorance found by Gorer 250 years later. Aristotle’s

23

B. Søland, Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000, p.10.

24 C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Oxford, Blackwell, 2004, p.1.

25 B. Søland, Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s, p.3.

26 ‘Tidens Tegn’, Aarhaus Stiftstidende, May 16th, 1918, p.4. cited in B. Søland, Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s, p.25.

27 M. Russell quoted in J. Green, It: Sex Since the Sixties, London, 1993, p.11.

28 S. Gunther, The Elastic Closet: A History of Homosexuality in France, 1942-Present¸ Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p.3.

29 M. Savonarola, Il trattato ginecologico cited in V. Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance, p.19.

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LEELAND – The modern construction of sex, gender, and the body Masterpiece not only promotes sexual equality, explaining how ‘pleasure is all the more ecstatic when there are two to partake of it,’ but also more general equality in marriage itself, and that women are not ‘the plaything of an hour, but a partner and a confidante.’30 This negates a Whiggish idea of any linear progression to sexual freedom, showing instead how ideas of sex and sexuality fluctuate with the dominant discourse. It also highlights a fundamental flaw in Whig approaches, as its belief in the modern human’s superior ability to control their emotions does not tally with a similarly linear development of greater sexual activity. Moreover, studies on Florentine pederasty and sodomy further undermine the relationship between act and identity; such sexual activity was widespread in Renaissance Florence, and ‘homoeroticism and masculinity were in harmony.’31 Reflecting queer theory post-structuralism, this idea separates sex and sexuality, and that acts of one do not determine the other; as a result sexological categories are ‘uselessly narrow,’ and depend upon the hydraulic notion that sexual activity is fixed.32 Instead, as Cook argues ‘bodies and their activities are not an unchanging template upon which society writes its message,’ and this idea can be traced forward to the 20th Century.33 Constructionists largely see the end of the 19th Century as the point when permanent sexual orientations emerged, and were determined by the gender of one’s sexual partner.34 However, Herzog’s research reveals the high frequency of homosexual activity in British boarding schools in the 19th and 20th Centuries, without these boys later going on to identify as gay, and one of Gorer’s subjects argued that ‘passionate love-making and possible homosexuality are not harmful.’35 Comparing early and late modern Europe not only reveals the inherent fragility of our understandings of gender and sexuality, but also the consistency of constructionism as a salient element of social order across the entire modern period.

In conclusion, modernity entails a repeatedly recalibrated relationship between society and its constructed identities. Such constructions of gender, sexuality, and the body are not exclusive to modernity, and to say otherwise is to suggest some sort of lost egalitarian past.36 What is clear however, is the modern trend of an increasing categorisation of social identities, as a result of intellectual trends; an increased visibility produced by public discussion empowers the individual to explore their own identity, seen for example in the effects of increased sexual knowledge. In turn, however, this also provides a template for legally enforced ideas of gender, sexuality, and bodily authority by governments that feared the social repercussions of increased individual freedom. The juxtaposition between the early and later modern periods reflect the Foucauldian idea that identity restricts freedoms once ideas of gender, sexuality, and the body are firmly delineated. The Renaissance ability to permeate the

30

The Works of Aristotle, the Famous Philosopher, pp.17-23.

M. Gallucci, Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p.113.

32 I. Crozier, ‘(De-) Constructing Sexual Kinds Since 1750,’ in S. Toulalan and K. Fisher (eds) The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, 1500 to the Present, Oxford, Routledge, 2016, p.156.

33 H. Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, p.6.

34 J. Peakman, ‘Continuities and Change in Sexual Behaviour and Attitudes since 1750’, in J. McNeill and K. Pomeranz (eds) The Cambridge World History, Volume 7: Production, Destruction and Connection, 1750Present, Part 2: Shared Transformations?, p.99.

35 D. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth Century History, p.56; G. Gorer, Exploring English Character, p.109.

36 O. Hufton, ‘Women in History: Early Modern Europe’, Past & Present, vol. 51, 1983, p.126.

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binary essentialism of our modern understandings of sexuality reflect the fluidity of identity, and how acts will exist regardless of their ability to be categorised. This stark contrast to the firmly defined boundaries of sexual and gender identities of the 20th Century reveal the artificiality of these constructs, but critically the increased use of constructed ideas of gender, sexuality, and the body as a tool of authority and power of the state.

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LEELAND – The modern construction of sex, gender, and the body Bibliography Primary sources Cole, M, The Life of G.D.H. Cole, London, Macmillan, 1971, p.90.

Gorer, G, Exploring English Character, New York, Criterion Books, 1955.

Mitchison, N, All Change Here: Girlhood and Marriage, London, Bodley Head, 1975.

The Works of Aristotle, the Famous Philosopher, London, L. René, 1800.

Secondary sources Bayly, C.A, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Oxford, Blackwell, 2004.

Brown, C, ‘Sex, Religion, and the Single Woman c.1950-1975: The Importance of a ‘Short’ Sexual Revolution to the English Religious Crisis of the Sixties’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 22, no. 2, 2011, pp. 189-215.

Brückner, P and Finkielkraut, A, Le Nouveau Désordre Amoureux, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1977.

Cocks, H.G, ‘Approaches to the History of Sexuality Since 1750’, in S. Toulalan and K. Fisher (eds) The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, 1500 to the Present, Oxford, Routledge, 2016, pp. 38-56.

Cook, H, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Finucci, V, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003.

Gallucci, M, Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Gunther, S, The Elastic Closet: A History of Homosexuality in France, 1942-Present¸ Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Harris, V, ‘Sex on the Margins: New Directions in the Historiography of Sexuality and Gender,’ The Historical Journal, vol. 53, no.4, 2010, 1085-1104.

Herzog, D, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth Century History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Hufton, O, ‘Women in History: Early Modern Europe’, Past & Present, vol. 51, 1983, pp. 125141.

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Linke, U, ‘Gendering Europe, Europeanizing Gender: The Politics of Difference in a Global Era’, in D. Stone (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 220-242.

Peakman, J, ‘Continuities and Change in Sexual Behaviour and Attitudes since 1750’, in J. McNeill and K. Pomeranz (eds) The Cambridge World History, Volume 7: Production, Destruction and Connection, 1750-Present, Part 2: Shared Transformations?, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 84-111.

Søland, B, Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000.

Wiesner-Hanks, M, Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789, 2nd edition, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Zweiniger-Bargielowska, I, ‘Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in interwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 41, no. 4, 2006, pp. 595-610.

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