Cultural Stereotypes

ONE OF THE characteristic features distinguishing one nation from another are the stereotypes peculiar to that nation. According to American sociologist Walter Lippmann, who introduced the term “stereotype” (from Greek words stereos —hard—and typos —the imprint) into the Western scientific literature, stereotypes are formed under the influence of an individual's cultural environment. Each person is an individual by her or his own nature. And as we have long known, character has social and psychological roots and thereby depends on one's world outlook, one's knowledge and experience, the moral principles one has learned, the social groups in which one lives and functions, as well as one's active interaction with other people. One's perspective on the world may be linked to one's beliefs, moral views, and ideals; control one's behavior; be reflected in one's thoughts; be realized in one's actions; and substantially take part in the formation of one's character. One's outlook and morals inform one's character in the form of habits—an accustomed way of moral behavior.

We may also use the idea of cultural stereotypes to understand the national character of a nation, national character being nothing but the totality of the character traits attributed to the people who inhabit that nation. Since stereotypes are considered to be the core of traditions particular to each nation, they are an integral part of that nation's national character as well. Cultural stereotypes specific to each society begin to be adopted starting from the moment when a person starts to perceive herself or himself as a part of a certain ethnos and culture. While even the most prevailing stereotypes in a society may be gradually replaced by new ones when political and cultural changes happen in connection with that society's development, some cultural stereotypes associated with a national character tend to remain stable. Referring to this durability, Lippmann writes that stereotypes are so persistently passed on from generation to generation that they are often accepted as a given, as an unquestioned reality or a biological fact.

IN the past thirty years, a great deal of scholarly work has opened up new vistas on the Ancrene Wisse Group, anchorites in general, and women's devotional literacies. Along with their appearance together in a number of manuscripts, the Ancrene Wisse Group of texts has long been accepted as having linguistic and thematic connections. The implications of these connections have been studied with reference to both context and audience, in particular the audience of anchoresses addressed in Ancrene Wisse itself both in its original and revised versions. In addition, the reading practices of medieval women have been illuminated by the work of a number of scholars. The results of these studies have provided a context in which we can now take what we know about early thirteenth-century anchoresses and their reading, combine it with what we know about other medieval women's literacies and habits, and make some informed speculations about the literary communities that are reflected in the composition of the Ancrene Wisse Group. In this chapter, I would like to indulge in such speculation, taking what we know about the Wooing Group prayers and their context and then pondering the question of ‘What then?’ along with a little ‘What if?’. I will focus on the four earliest prayers, found together as a group in London, British Library, MS Nero A. xiv (hereafter Nero).

Whether written specifically for anchoresses in the first instance or not, the texts of the Katherine Group and the Wooing Group became part of the gathering together of textual support for the anchoritic life of their female readers, possibly at the request of the anchoresses themselves, who needed prayers to supplement their devotions. The Wooing Group is a microcosm of this process: as I have argued elsewhere, when one considers the Wooing Group prayers in their historical and textual context, they become witnesses of the complexity of early thirteenth-century vernacular spirituality.

Wohunge is found only in London, British Library, MS Titus D. xviii (1240s) with Ancrene Wisse and three texts of the Katherine Group: Sawles Warde, Hali Meiðhad and Seinte Katerine. The four shorter Wooing Group prayers are found together in Nero (also dating to the 1240s): On god ureisun of ure lefdi; On wel swuðe god ureisun of God almihti; Þe oreisun of seinte Marie; and On lofsong of ure louerde.

Charles Robert Cockerell was a trained architect and one of the most significant and perceptive of British travellers in Greece and Greater Greece in the two decades after 1800. His time in the Mediterranean from 1810 to 1817 was at the heart of his life, and this book is intended to shine light on what he was doing, and thinking and feeling, while he was away, in order to strengthen understanding of the major figure he was to become.

The book sets out the letters he wrote home at this time, elucidating the people and places involved as much as possible, and making use of additional material to fill out the story. The accompanying chapters unravel the detail of Cockerell's travels, and discuss his methods of working on temples and their significance, the emergence of his crucial historical perspective, and the development of his aesthetic and conceptual sense, particularly his important part in the changing vision of Greek sculpture and architecture. It will discuss his significance in the wider cultural scene of the 1820s and later, especially in the shift either side of 1800 to new ways of understanding the past.

It must be emphasised that in no sense is this a book about Cockerell's career after his return to London in 1817, or the history of Greek Revival architecture, or the archaeology of the temples and other buildings that Cockerell studied, or the detailed history of the sculptures, especially those of Aegina and Bassae, after their resurrection. Its focus is Cockerell's experiences while he was abroad.

We have worked on this book together. Pearce has prepared the transcripts of the letters and edited them for publication, and written the chapters; Ormrod has translated the relevant letters in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities (British Museum) from the French, prepared and written the footnotes, and prepared the biographies and the bibliography.

Cockerell's drawings showing the entasis of columns on the back of his letter to Smirke of December 23, 1814, published by Frank Salmon in 2008, have not been illustrated here, nor have any of his drawings in the British Museum, because of their poor reproduction quality. Brief biographies of the principal characters have been gathered in a separate section.

THE FIELD OF GERMAN STUDIES in the twenty-first century has been shaped in no small measure by the spatial or topographical turn in the social sciences and humanities. Two important scholarly anthologies edited on either side of the Atlantic indicate the breadth of this critical idiom: Topographien der Literatur: Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext, edited by Hartmut Böhme; and Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel. Fittingly, in organizing these collections, the respective editors have chosen to apply models associated with the critical turn in question. Thus, the four sections of Böhme's anthology are headed “Representations of Discursive Spaces,” “Spaces of Literature,” “Literary Spaces,” and “Borders and the Foreign,” while the four sections of Fisher and Mennel's collection bear the headings “Mapping Spaces,” “Spaces of the Urban,” “Spaces of Encounter,” and “Visualized Space.” In their overall organization, these two milestone anthologies thus studiously avoid what Böhme terms “classical systems of order, for instance according to periods” (IX). In this special section of the Goethe Yearbook devoted to the poetics of space in the Goethezeit, we hope to build on the work of these ground-breaking anthologies, while questioning an approach that foregrounds the category of space at the expense of that of period—whether understood in the more traditional sense of the Age of Goethe, or Reinhart Koselleck's notion of the Sattelzeit, or the temporal marker “around 1800.”

Within the framework of the spatial turn, the relegation of period to “a secondary role” (Böhme IX) is understandable. Indeed, the turn to an analysis of space as a fundamental social category arose precisely as a reaction to, and critique of, historicism, in particular the Marxian historical dialectic. As Edward Soja writes in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, “The critical hermeneutic is still enveloped in a temporal master-narrative, in a historical but not yet comparably geographical imagination.” Building on twentieth-century social thinkers (particularly Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre), Soja and other contemporary theoretical geographers (such as Derek Gregory and David Harvey) have challenged “the hoary traditions of a space-blinkered historicism” and have helped effect “a far-reaching spatialization of the critical imagination” (Soja 11).

Upon its publication, Goethe's Faust II met with perplexing reception as to its generic classification and complex narrative. Writers who boldly proposed an allegorical interpretation also reflected on its resistance to traditional stage presentation. Robert Schumann, who set to music scenes from both Parts I and II of Faust, made Faust the protagonist of his oratorio Szenen aus Goethes Faust (1844–53). Franz Liszt's setting of the ‘Chorus mysticus’ at the end of his Faust- Symphonie (1854) represented an unconventional response to Goethe's text. But it was not until Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony (1906) that the Schlußszene from Faust II received an admittedly monumental treatment. By setting to music the parts of Faust II that were rarely set to music, Mahler made redemption – with all its interpretative baggage – the epicentre and eventual apogee of his work.

Mahler set the First Part of the Eighth Symphony to the Latin Pentecost hymn Veni creator spiritus (‘Come Holy Ghost, Creator’), while the Second Part comprises an exalted melopoiesis of the final scene of Part II of Goethe's Faust. The setting of the sacred hymn Veni creator spiritus abounds in secular musical references (band music and marches, with subtle allusions to sacred music), whereas Goethe's secular text is clothed in music of unmistakably religious character. The protagonist's struggle and the drama's mystical message of redemption seem to have resonated with the composer, as revealed in the genesis of the work and subsequent interpretations gleaned from his correspondence. Like Goethe's Faust, the Eighth traverses the genre's boundaries, and its musical ethos defies generic expectations. By sculpting the text in the mould of a symphony, Mahler upholds – and simultaneously critiques – the prevailing tradition of the venerable symphonic genre. At the same time, the Eighth reinforces perceptions of universality and authority appropriate to a setting of Faust, while it also offers a musical analogue to its ambivalent and multivalent status as a genre.

WIDOWS have often been seen as the victims of male structures – poor, deprived and sidelined. Bridget Hair could be seen as a typical example. She supported her family of four children (four had died) by selling ribbons in 1820s Newcastle. She had been ill for three years with ‘inside disease’, and did not make enough to pay her rent of 6d a week. After pawning her bedding – ‘bed clothes and body clothes we have none’ – she turned to the poor relief authorities.

It has been assumed that when a woman was freed from the control of her husband, she lost the necessary economic protection. In her book about gender and poverty, Rachel Fuchs puts forward the view that widowhood and old age for nineteenth-century European women was beset by poverty, neglect by family and kin, and dependence on assistance from welfare institutions. The image of the lonely old widow reliant on poor relief still lives on, despite studies demonstrating the presence of family support for widows in Britain in the past, and evidence suggesting that assumptions about loneliness are wrong. There seems to be an unwillingness to accept that the key to understanding the causes of loneliness is to be found in demography and migration, not in the refusal of children to help their mothers.

Richard Wall has refuted the idea that the poor in the past survived mainly or only on outside support from parish and charities. Widows and abandoned women should not be seen as parasites on the welfare system. Undeniably, the process of industrialisation – in combination with restricted access, in rural areas, to commons – eroded opportunities for women to contribute to the family economy. However, in spite of the fact that the life of widows was hard and their economic status weak, they created survival strategies of which poor relief only constituted one part. In their efforts to survive, they also provided vital services like lodging, washing and cleaning, easing the transformation of society, an input that is difficult to measure and has therefore often been overlooked.

It was to be Max Reinhardt's last theatre production in Europe: his production of Faust I at the Salzburg Festival was staged in 1937 for the fifth and last time, and its director found himself forced by the annexation of Austria to turn his back on Europe. Up to the present day this production is one of the milestones in the history of the Salzburg Festival. At its premiere in 1933 the accompanying music was given its own separate appraisal – something very unusual in the history of incidental music. The reviewer spoke of music ‘that came into the world in shackles’, by which he meant the tight and direct amalgamation of the acoustic dimension with the special Salzburg situation. What was seen and evaluated here first and foremost from marketing strategy angles (the impossibility of using the music again for productions elsewhere) can be applied also to the level of aesthetics concerning the work and its production: the linking of specially composed music to a specific performance context is indeed probably the most important characteristic of incidental music which distinguishes it fundamentally from opera.

Reinhardt's Salzburg Faust production with music by Bernhard Paumgartner is a significant example of a type of productive musical engagement with Faust which, until a few years ago, was completely ignored by both musicologists and Germanists and only recently emerged in the consciousness of at least those scholars who focus on theatre music: they see the history of Faust as a play for the stage, including the music for each production – and often exclusively for that production – as a primary and original strand of reception, which began in Goethe's lifetime, continued after his death and still has currency in the modern period and in the current theatre landscape. Early in the history of theatrical practice this kind of productive updating of the work by way of a new musical interpretation of Faust was often overlooked. On the one hand, in Goethe's lifetime there were no – or hardly any – performances of the work, so that it was received first of all as a reading drama.

The Author of the Rule

IN the opening lines of his prologue, Grimlaicus, author of the Regula solitariorum, says that he is writing a rule for coenobitic solitaries [‘regulam solitariorum, videlicet coenobitarum’] at the suggestion of one who has that same name, ‘my dear father in Christ … Grimlaicus the venerable priest’ [‘dilectissimo patri in Christo … Grimlaico venerabili sacerdoti’]. Grimlaicus's remarks in the prologue, as well as his complete familiarity with the physical and spiritual circumstances of the life of an inclusus, make it clear that he had lived such a life himself for a good while. Just as clear is Grimlaicus's thorough familiarity with the Rule of St Benedict, surely the fruit of years lived in a community that observed it. Grimlaicus ingeniously modifies this most communitarian of rules to fit the situation of enclosed solitaries, always drawing on its good sense and time-tested moderation.

Who was Grimlaicus? Although Karl Suso Frank acknowledges that the rule's author cannot be positively identified, he conjectures that Grimlaicus may have written his rule after the time of Robert, bishop of Metz and abbot of Gorze, who died in 917. Réginald Grégoire also associates Grimlaicus with the monastery of Gorze in the diocese of Metz. Metz does seem a likely location, since in chapters 1 and 63, Grimlaicus praises Arnulf, bishop of Metz (d. 640) and twice cites the Rule for Canons of Amalarius of Metz (d. 850) in chapter 41. We can make an informed guess that Grimlaicus was a monk of a monastery in or near Metz who composed his rule for solitaries in the first quarter of the tenth century.

Grimlaicus is careful to say what sort of solitaries he is legislating for: not anchorites, that is to say hermits who dwell all by themselves, but rather solitaries who dwell in the midst of a coenobium and follow the common horarium, but who live in quarters sealed off from almost all physical and visual contact with others. The cell's situation within the monastic enclosure is simply stated, but the relationship between the solitary's observance and that of the community is more difficult to determine, as we shall see.

THE role of technology and the communications network in the prosecution of a war effort is crucial. The growing complexity of warfare has, if only implicitly, given those with access to finer technology a feeling of superiority over their enemies. The major facilitator of the communications network in Britain in war and peace was the Post Office. Arguably one of the Post Office's most important functions during the Second World War was the provision of telephones and telegrams as a communication method for the public and also for the government. Yet a systematic analysis of its importance to the nation has not yet been undertaken. Indeed, the historiography of the American Post Office remains more fruitful, with Richard John's numerous works highlighting the telegraph's importance to and development in American society. As a government department, the Post Office occupied a central part of the British public service. Yet the responsibility bestowed on the Post Office for maintaining the nation's communications put massive strains on the department during wartime. The latest analysis by Duncan Campbell Smith contains some description of its work in wartime, although it is largely contextualized within the post-war debates concerning the impact of war on modernization.

This study builds on David Edgerton's earlier argument that the Second World War was a war of technology. In challenging previous assertions that Germany was technologically superior to its wartime counterparts, Edgerton deftly argues that it was British confidence, and their academic prowess, that helped the nation build a successful defence against Nazi aggression. This was seen with the work of numerous communication workers, including the Bletchley Park code-breakers. Nevertheless, without the academic and practical skills of Post Office engineers (perhaps most famously Tommy Flowers and the development of the code-breaking machine Colossus), much of these and later communication developments would not have been possible. Furthermore, little attention has been afforded to the instrumental role of women in sustaining the nation's communications during the war.

THERE IS PLENTY TO SEE in Ali and Nino. Let us therefore have a close look at how this love story of Ali Khan Shirvanshir, a Shi'ite Azerbaijani raised in a traditional Muslim family, and Nino Kipiani, a Christian Georgian raised in a European way, deals with the oppositions between Asia and Europe, Islam and Christianity, and antiquity and modernity. Each of these paired terms depends on its counterpart and thus defines itself at the same time as it gives contour to the other. While pressures from their own cultural backgrounds compel them to embody these opposites, Ali and Nino try to overcome these differences through their love, and seek to create a lasting bond by living together despite all odds. It is their rejection of each of these single spheres that enables them to realize this aim. To be precise, Ali and Nino strive to situate themselves on the “and,” the word that conjoins these binary concepts. Yet, this delicate state of being between clearly defined states and conditions defies definition, making the space hard to grasp, pin down, see, and explain. Already in the first chapter, Ali remarks on “Baku's undecided geographical situation” (6; Die geographische Fragwürdigkeit der Stadt Baku, 8) as located somewhere between Asia and Europe. Throughout the novel, various scenes play with this juxtaposition.

To begin, the scene depicting what leads to Ali's subsequent exile in Daghestan may serve as an example. Ali chases Melik Nachararyan who has abducted Nino and plans to escape with her and several gold ingots to Moscow and later to Sweden. This scene unmistakably presents the division between Asia and Europe that the novel deals with over and over again. On the one hand, there is Nachararyan, who seeks to leave everything Asian behind, driving a European car and claiming to save Nino from being stuck in what he regards as Azerbaijani barbarity. On the other hand, there is Ali, who is tied to the Asian part of Azerbaijan and pursues Nino's abductor, riding a golden horse bred from an ancient stock referred to as the marvel of Karabagh (146/144), a symbol of honor and nobility that further serves as the archaic equivalent of Nachararyan's modern car.

Cockerell was a significant man in the Hellenistic tradition and some important tensions within it, as the previous chapter has shown. But he also participated in the broader cultural climate of his own generation, the ‘Spirit of the Time’. This, der Zeitgeist, was a notion conceived around 1790 at the University of Göttingen to express the idea that classical Greece in particular, and each age and place generally, had a special mentality derived from its context of history and culture. It was part of the developing Alternumwissenshaft, the ‘knowledge of Antiquity’, with its new historiographical rigour of exhaustive scholarship, which became the foundation of German education, and Cockerell must have been familiar with Göttingen's ideas, with their significant turn to historical understanding. This turn was itself a critical element in the Zeitgeist of Cockerell's own time. The period either side of 1800 experienced a crucial cultural shift, which changed how the past was understood, how material from the past was perceived, and how the various pasts could be integrated into an appropriate nostalgia for both individuals and communities. Cockerell was a part of this change.

It is important, first of all, to clarify Cockerell's own motives and intentions, when he went out to Greece in 1810. He meant to record ancient Greek buildings by making exact drawings of them, following the example of Stuart and Revett who were his personal heroes. He wanted to have the satisfaction of demonstrating how Greek architecture and art worked in the actual stone, and of harvesting information which could be used in an architectural practice in England. Although the Aegina and Bassae marbles were ‘collections’ in one sense, they are better seen as site material. Cockerell did not collect, if this activity is defined as the bringing together by conscious acquisition of selected objects which seem by their owner to be meaningfully related in a range of possible ways; he simply gathered up what appeared. He did not (usually) bring objects back from his travels for his personal use, nor did he buy them at home, and in fact most of his generation of travellers left collecting to men on the spot, like Fauvel.

IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE, when the monarchy fell, so too did the Académie royale des beaux-arts and the security of official patronage from the church and aristocracy, nearly crippling the production of traditional Judeo-Christian and historical subjects. To reform this newly orphaned institution, the government appointed as its new leader the foremost French Neoclassicist, Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), whose work had come to epitomize Enlightenment and revolutionary ideology, and who had already proved himself as an artistic and political leader. His protégés were encouraged to become paragons of Republican virtue and were called on to generate artworks that honored secular values. Artists in this circle were under tremendous pressure to bolster the people's will and to derail the perception of art as a parasitic luxury of the elite. Such artists were even a bit ahead of the curve by unwittingly anticipating succession from monarchical control. David, for instance, was a member of the Commune des arts (Commune of the Arts), which by 1790 had petitioned the National Assembly for the dissolution of the Royal Academy altogether because it had been founded by the king in 1648. Later David was famously a member of the Jacobin Party (largely responsible for the “Terror” of 1793), and went on record to vote to execute Louis XVI (McClellan, 306).

As an illustration of Enlightenment thought, David's methods implied fundamental truths and unwaveringly legible morality (Diderot, 196). Under the Republic's agenda, the arts were recruited to portray revolutionaries as civilized, such that the Salon and the nation's collection at the Musée du Louvre, mostly featuring confiscated artworks from aristocrats, the monarchy, and the church, became a microcosm of public sentiment, revolutionary politics, and national identity. Quickly the superimposition of secular religiosity on the arts was evident, such as when the Festival of Unity was paired with the reopening of the Louvre on August 10, 1793, and participants drank from a “fountain of regeneration” to symbolize being absolved of their monarchical past before proceeding to the museum (McClellan, 304–5).

Gathering data

Names of ordinands

Names of ordinands to the diaconate, recorded in the Clergy of the Church of England database (CCEd), form the backbone of this study. This data has been confirmed, supplemented and extended using records that were not harvested by CCEd, the most significant being diocesan ordination papers (papers sent in by candidates as part of the application process for ordination) and lists of candidates expected for examination or ordination, drawn up by bishops’ secretaries and chaplains. Whilst such collections do not survive for every diocese, and for some survival is patchy, these records reveal the identity of ordinands omitted from CCEd, allow extension of the data up until 1839, and indicate ordinands who were ordained on letters dimissory (a matter about which the records drawn upon by CCEd are often uninformed). Since the existence of application papers does not necessarily indicate a successful ordination, no extra entries have been added without the evidence of future clerical function. Every effort has also been made to de-duplicate multiple applications for the diaconate, so that only the final, successful, ordination is counted. Certificates of ordination (issued to candidates) are sometimes found amongst parish, family and estate records; these have not been searched for exhaustively, but all those revealed by the online search portal Access-to-Archives, and by searches of online catalogues of county archives, have been incorporated.

Newspapers and periodicals, both regional and national, commonly printed lists of those ordained. A broad search of periodicals and newspapers has been made, and such lists have been used to check and supplement the other data. Comparing newspaper lists of the early 1830s to the data gathered by CCEd for the corresponding period, and comparing the newspaper lists against ordination papers for the post-1836 period, strongly suggests that collated periodical data is fairly comprehensive for the 1830s.

Educational status of ordinands

Having compiled a list of men ordained to the diaconate, details were added of university membership and educational qualifications held on ordination. Qualifications are often noted by CCEd, but for every man whose educational status was unrecorded or unclear, and for all those described as students or literates, educational status has been verified using the following sources: biographical registers of alumni, university and college calendars, clerical guides, obituaries and biographies.

Soon after his homecoming, Cockerell set up an architectural business of his own in Old Burlington Street, having come to terms with the need to earn his living by the only profession for which he was equipped, and in 1819, he was appointed Surveyor to St Paul's Cathedral. He wrote a detailed account of his expenditure during the last four years of his absence, the years which he had added to the original plan for three years of travel, and this he sent to his father, but Samuel responded by describing how he was treating all of his children. Cockerell seems to have offered to re-pay his father nearly a thousand pounds, the sum which he had spent during the years he had stayed abroad beyond the originally agreed three, but his father refused, and probably continued to give him support. While it would be an exaggeration to say his health had been ruined while he was away, he was to suffer from difficult stomach upsets, which may have stemmed partly from the illnesses he went through, and the medicines he took for them.

Cockerell spent some time working up his drawings of antiquities for exhibition at the Royal Academy, and sorting out his site records. The promised casts of the Aegina marbles were working their way through the Bavarian bureaucracy, delayed by questions of whether they should take the figures before or after Thorvaldsen's restoration, and by Wagner's general desire to cut corners. His reputation had preceded him, and his homecoming was greeted publically, both the Edinburgh Magazine and the Quarterly Journal of Sciences and the Arts reporting his successes in Greece. At the forefront of his mind were plans to publish all that he had accomplished abroad, and he was aware that this needed to be done as soon as possible.

All the time Cockerell was away, he, and Haller also, had been anxious that other people and their publications should not steal their thunder. In 1815, he learnt from the Germans that the Prince of Bavaria had allowed Wagner to publish some sketches of the Bassae sculptures, which he had been given on the understanding that they were strictly for his own use only. Their names were not mentioned, as if, they felt, they were merely the accidental finders of things they did not understand.