“Kindred Brutes”

FOR MILLENNIA WESTERN EUROPEAN CULTURE considered the human to be superior to and categorically separate from other biological entities. For Aristotle, this was the result of the human being's “rational and sentient” soul, while for Christians the soul took on a far more transcendental and defining significance—placing humanity in a privileged and powerful position with respect to the rest of the biological world (Coleman, 96–97). However, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, questions regarding the relationship among species were becoming more complex, especially as natural philosophers (by the middle of the nineteenth century they would be called “scientists”) began to consider humans as a part of the animal world rather than superior to it (Kenyon-Jones, 1), and to see animals as “kindred brutes” (Byron, quoted in Kenyon-Jones, 11). Sometimes differences of scholarly opinion about how animals could be related to humans erupted in protracted disputes, such as the struggle between Preformationists (those who believed that in the womb the embryos of various species were preformed and then merely grew) and the Epigeneticists (who insisted that embryos developed in utero from undifferentiated tissues). The observations of Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer (1765–1844) and Johann Friedrich Meckel (1781–1833) that the embryo of each species, including that of the human being, passes through morphological stages “recapitulating” the form of less-developed species (Bowler, 121–24; Coleman, 35–56) suggested that the various species were more closely related than had previously been imagined. New ideas regarding what Alexander Pope had celebrated, already in 1751, as “the Great Chain of Being” (Lovejoy, 60; Bowler, 63) came to the fore, not merely from the Enlightenment tendency to individualize, isolate, and analyze, and thus to consider “mind” to be essentially separate from nature, but rather from Romantic impulses to foreground connections and similarities among species, imaginatively synthesizing flora and fauna across species lines and locating mind “deeply implicated in the organic structure of nature” (Richards, 515).

Micro simulation application of the CAMSIM programmes

The simulation produces birth cohorts of individuals whose demographic characteristics have been predetermined. These individuals can be considered as a sample of unrelated individuals from a particular cohort in a stable population. In order, however, to compare the attributes of a cohort with empirically-based cross-sectional data, the size of successive cohorts needs to be adjusted in accordance with the growth rate in the population indicated by the reconstitutions. The correction has been made, in this instance, by applying the appropriate stable population growth rate to each age group in each cohort. Assumptions embodied in the simulation are that the mean age at first marriage of each cohort matches that indicated by the reconstitutions with the distribution of marriage ages sampled from the Coale-McNeill marriage model for that mean age at marriage but with an age range of 15–50. It has also been assumed that the marriage ages of husband and wife were correlated (r = 0.35). The mortality rates used were those indicated by life-tables for the ever-married population in the reconstitutions. No adjustments were made for any differences in mortality dependent on marital status, and the dates of death of husband and wife were assumed to be independent, the likelihood of the survivor dying neither increasing nor decreasing as a consequence of their widowed status. Other assumptions were rates of lifetime celibacy of 10 percent for men, and 12.5 percent for women, rates which remained the same over time, and a probability of remarriage of 25 percent for women and 50 percent for men at intervals indicated by the reconstitutions and subject to a maximum age at remarriage of 45.

The simplifying assumptions that it has been necessary to make to produce the simulations can certainly be challenged. There is evidence from the 1920s and 1930s of associations between the level of mortality and marital status in a number of national populations, both within and beyond Europe. For England, there is also evidence to suggest that the frequency of remarriage did change over time, as did the incidence of lifetime celibacy.

AMONG ROMANTICISM's BASIC TENETS is radical individualism. It occurs everywhere in the arts and even across the disciplines, sometimes tending toward self-idolatry (Schenk, 125–51), at other times taking the form of a valorization of natural genius (Abrams, 187–97), and often serving as the movement's most characteristic intellectual or structural idea (Morse, 1–2). Goethe's particular theory of individualism represents a highly sophisticated and complex view of the matter. “He said, famously, ‘Individuum est ineffabile’ (individualism is ineffable).” Manfred Frank, who likes this quote, draws a distinction between individuals and particulars. In Frank's usage, a particular is always an instantiation of “ein Allgemeines”—a general. The features and actions of an individual, by contrast, cannot be inferred from the category to which it belongs. “Individuality is a particular that cannot be derived without discontinuity from a general.” “An element that can be separated from a whole by the imposition of limits (or one that is subsumed under a rule as a case) is called a particular.” A particular, which represents the “esse commune,” is a species, albeit the smallest species, whereas an individual is incommensurable and capable of surprising. Particulars are specimens of their class or genus, whereas individuals produce and express novelty. It would be a dull world that had only classes and particulars, but no individuals.

Every unique thing is ineffable, for to express the essence of any being we would have to cite attributes that it has in common with other essences. But individuals, unlike particulars, alter the systems of relations in which they reside or with which they intersect, thus creating ever-shifting and novel rapport. All persons are individuals, but some express their individuality in more dramatic ways than do others. The young Goethe displayed his admiration for the rugged individualist “Kraftkerl” in his early Sturm und Drang dramas, and expressed his own personal individuality in creating original verse forms and in the mildly outrageous conduct of his early Weimar years. He takes his individualism so far as to reject exclusivity in romantic relationships and to suggest in the play Stella that a unique, untransferable love for one individual does not preclude a simultaneous, equally untransferable love for a different person.

“CLOSE YOUR EYES, cover your ears with your hands and open your soul” (82; Rasch die Augen schließen, mit den Händen die Ohren zuhalten und in sich versinken, 82). With this enigmatic observation, Ali Khan Shirvanshir, the main Muslim figure in Kurban Said's novel Ali and Nino, advises his Western readers about the art of viewing Persian opera. He continues, “The spectators tremble and weep. A Mullah passes along the rows collecting tears with cotton wool. There are strong magical powers in these tears. The deeper the beholder's faith, the greater is the effect of the play on him” (82; Die Zuschauer zittern und weinen. Ein Mullah geht durch die Reihen und sammelt mit Watte die Tränen der Zuschauer in eine kleine Flasche. Magische Kräfte aller Art sind in diesen Tränen enthalten. Je tiefer der Glaube der Zuschauer, desto gewaltiger die Wirkung des Spieles, 83). The deep connection between Persian faith and artistic or poetic performance is here emphasized, as is the implicit cultural foreignness of this experience for the European reader. Said tells us, art lives within the Persian soul. In contrast Ali describes in the same passage the Western audience's experience at the opera as sterile and distant: “Now open your eyes, drop your hands and look around” (83; Nun die Augen öffnen, die Hände sinken lassen und sich umschauen, 83). Filled with electric lights, plaster-of-Paris statuary, naked female arms and backs, bald-headed gentlemen, and a dark abyss, the Western opera house separates the viewer from the performers with a faceless orchestra playing in the darkness. Said's novel draws on many such comparative and confrontational cultural moments via poetry and poetic performance in an obvious effort to provoke the reader's introspection and to promote cultural tolerance and acceptance. Why does Said choose to use poetry and poetic performance as a programmatic metaphorical tool throughout his novel? And what is the ultimate aim of placing poetry and performance in such a central role?

Poetry and verse shimmer beneath the surface of Said's narrative, peeking through in brief flashes to enhance it and at other times fully surfacing to become the story itself.

These words, written by Novalis, declare that philosophy begins in an act of self-destruction, or more precisely formulated: all properly philosophical acts aim to destroy the self. This demand is not as mysterious as it might seem. A self, by definition, is differentiated and limited, and thus represents one of the most palpable impediments to that which romantic philosophy seeks, namely, the absolute, das Unbedingte, that which is without condition and without limit. A truly philosophical act must efface the horizon of limitations and differences that constitutes selfhood: Selbsttödtung, self-annihilation. The proper name for this act is not suicide, but transcendence.

And yet: what is suicide other than the most extreme and literal form of self-extinction? E. T. A. Hoffmann would have been able to read the fragment cited above in Schlegel and Tieck's edition of Novalis's collected works. In light of this fragment, it is worth considering whether or not Hoffmann's most celebrated Nachtstück (Night Piece), Der Sandmann—which culminates in a spectacular act of self-destruction, Selbsttödtung—is much more than a story about childhood trauma, abuse, irony, or the tragic frustrations of a mediocre poet. Rather, Der Sandmann, as an aesthetic document, indexes a distinctly philosophical problem, namely, the phenomenal movements and operations associated with a conception of the absolute that exists beyond all instances of differential signification attached to a limited self. Seen from this perspective, the central problem of Der Sandmann is less psychological than ontological: it concerns not the pathological psyche of a problematic individual, but the order of beings as a whole.

The following consideration of a few autobiographical texts by Goethe in terms of the “spatial turn” argues for the importance of the loss of self and personal identity in spatialized aesthetic experiences and the reconstitution of that identity not in individual becoming—the self-referential processing of the spatial environment—but by analogy to the constitution of external space, especially, but not only, urban public spaces. The representation of observed and lived space in the texts I shall read joins anachronisms and contradictions, present and past, high and low, self and other, in a form of symbolization made expressly for the condensation of spatial experience. This symbolic form, an aspect of what Goethe calls Mystifikation, turns from the self to its environment in order to create a sense of worldliness that makes society, history, and political life into objects of spatial experience. It also translates this worldliness back into the subject-self, creating parallels between the coming-to-self of the person and the self-constitution of the community and polity, particularly in Goethe's Italian journeys but also back home in Frankfurt, in a way that challenges the intact and sovereign subject of Bildung.

As the prevalent narrative on Goethe's Italienische Reise runs, the work is a sort of Bildungsroman grounded in a “Schule des Sehens,” a “school of seeing” that educates the protagonist-narrator-author himself, as the note of 14 March, 1788, affirms: “In Rom hab’ ich mich selbst zuerst gefunden, ich bin zuerst übereinstimmend mit mir selbst glücklich und vernünftig geworden” (“In Rome I first found myself, for the first time I achieved inner harmony and became happy and rational”). If “the journey's true purpose” is indeed “the subject's fundamental self-fashioning” in the encounter with an unchanging landscape, two things about this experience are remarkable because they challenge the autonomy of self-making. First of all, in Rome, Goethe finds himself in an urban space otherwise marked by constant interaction with others and by chaos even at the times of greatest presence. His own incarnate selfhood seems mimicked by the urban environment, the firecrackers, cannonades, and bells celebrating Easter that immediately follow his reflection on self-discovery: “So eben steht der Herr Christus mit entsetzlichem Lärm auf” (FA 1.15:570; “The Lord Christ is rising with a fearful noise,” CW 6:428.).

An understanding of the social dynamics of the village world from 936 to 1031, the subject of this chapter, is founded upon a rich corpus of peasant sales. Typical of these sales was that which took place on 7 February 962, when Ermegoto and his sons sold their share of a vineyard in the village of Rabal to Rosendo and the monks of Celanova, receiving in turn four modios in grain and unspecified goods. On this occasion Ermegoto and his sons dealt with one of the most important political fixers of the region, as well as what was effectively the house monastery of one of the kingdom's most powerful families. Their decision to sell, all the same, likely reflected careful deliberation – a weighing up of the benefits and drawbacks occasioned by the deal in land, food and social capital. A range of considerations must have informed all such transactions, and peasants had to be strategic insofar as circumstances allowed: after all, such benefits and drawbacks could have variable short-, medium- and long-term consequences, many of which were hard to foresee and difficult to predict. Yet these were the conditions of quotidian human interaction in tenthcentury Galicia: every transaction brought with it an element of risk and none would have been undertaken lightly, for there was simply too much at stake. Remarkable, then, that buying and selling continued to pervade all corners of society before, throughout, and beyond the tenth century, a conclusion rendered unassailable by the surviving documentation.

Be that as it may, once Celanova's agents began in the 960s to take a more proactive and persistent approach towards the acquisition of land in Rabal, the tectonic plates on which this particular ‘small world’ rested underwent realignment. Every sale thereafter further altered the balance of risk for the transacting parties: the more Rabal's peasants sold to the monastery, the more difficult it became for their neighbours to resist the offers of Celanova's agents. This was not simply the result of the coercive or bargaining power that Celanova enjoyed thanks to its superior resources, which dwarfed those of all members of village society. Geographical and (increasing) psychological proximity to the village also worked to the monastery's advantage, its agents establishing a frequent presence in the vicinity by dint of their regular and welldocumented visits to the community.

The Age of the Graduate Clergyman Arrives?

In April 1824, the Reverend Thomas Tattershall presented a paper to the Elland Clerical Society on the subject of the advantages of a university education with a view to the Christian ministry. The issue was of immediate practical concern; the raison d’être of the society was to support the ministerial preparation of as many evangelical aspirant ordinands as it could. It was important that funds were spent prudently, and university education was more expensive than preparing men for orders as non-graduates. The meeting minutes summarised Tattershall's presentation as follows:

It is an interesting sign of the times that, by the following year, the society had decided to send all those it adopted to university, except in special circumstances, having resolved, presumably, that the extra expense was compensated for by the broader educational experience, opportunities for networking, and the enhanced status apparently preferred by ‘people’.

Over the six decades from 1780 the graduate-clergyman ideal did, indeed, put down strong roots. After the mid 1820s, nearly all English bishops adopted public policies of accepting only graduates – or in default of these, men who had completed a professional course at the colleges of St Bees or St David's, Lampeter, or at Durham University. Such aspirations were, it transpired, somewhat over-ambitious, and men who had prepared for orders in other ways continued to be received in the dioceses of York and Carlisle until the end of the period. In Wales, efforts to secure a ‘better’ educated clergy took a slightly different form. St David's College, Lampeter, was devised as a Welsh college of higher education: a poor man's substitute for Oxford or Cambridge, which – despite quality issues in its early years – was in due course to provide Wales with graduate clergy.

The brief life histories of some widows, part of a cohort (of 310 widows) married between 1740 and 1810 in western Finland, were studied longitudinally. Of the cohort, fourteen percent ended their days as inmates on temporary or permanent relief. While the question of social origin was of vital importance for their destiny, even in this group family members played an important part in later life. Residence with daughter:

Residence with son:

THE GEOGRAPHY TEACHER of the Imperial Russian Humanistic High School of Baku, Transcaucasia, poses a challenge that resonates throughout Ali and Nino : “It can therefore be said, my children, that it is partly your responsibility as to whether our town should belong to progressive Europe or to reactionary Asia” (3–4; Es hängt also gewissermaßen von Ihrem Verhalten ab, meine Kinder, ob unsere Stadt zum fortschrittlichen Europa oder zum rückständigen Asien gehören soll, 5). While the teacher's European leanings are clear, his Muslim students, Ali Khan Shirvanshir [Schirwanschir] among them, explicitly state that they see themselves as Asians. Throughout the novel, Ali Khan will not waver in his conviction. The space around him, however, is constantly changing. Whether Ali Khan likes it or not, Baku is indeed becoming Europeanized, be it through the construction of European-style villas or the arrival of European troops. Indeed, this change will also invade his private sphere, as he and his wife Nino will redecorate their house in a European manner in order for it to be suitable for diplomatic entertaining. Ultimately, Ali will die fighting the invading Russian soldiers; he cannot prevent his beloved city from being overrun. Ali's death is an inevitable result of the Europeanization of Baku. Ali's Asian space has been taken away from him.

Of course, the entire process is not linear and the space of the city is more complex than a simple Asian/European duality. Over the course of the novel, multiple spaces are opened up, spaces both European and Asian. The various settings outside Baku—Daghestan, Georgia, Persia— are clearly marked as either Asian or European. These spaces function as contrasts to Baku. Only the space of the latter is contested and appears malleable. Ali attempts to preserve this mutable space, but in the end cannot. Crucial to my argument is the modern philosophical contention that space is, indeed, transformable and produced rather than continuously existing from time immemorial. As Henri Lefebvre in his ground-breaking work The Production of Space states, “every society […] produces a space, its own space.” This cultural construction of space makes possible the multivalent spatiality of Baku in Ali and Nino.

In the eyes of the Established Church, a graduate clergyman was almost certainly a man who had taken a degree at either Oxford or Cambridge university. Whilst degrees were theoretically acceptable from Trinity College, Dublin, few Irish graduates presented themselves for deacons’ orders in the English and Welsh dioceses between 1780 and 1839. And although two new universities, at Durham and London, were founded at the end of this period, they were an insignificant source of ordinands. The other universities that were broadly accessible – those of Scotland and continental Europe – were outside the Anglican world and largely beyond the pale. The relationship between Oxbridge and the Scottish universities was soured by a series of vitriolic exchanges in periodicals and pamphlets which variously impugned the teaching methods and scholarship of the two very different educational systems. Continental universities, especially those in Germany, were tainted with a reputation for radicalism – both political and, increasingly, theological. Graduates of Scottish and continental universities thus found their degrees discounted and were usually classified by bishops as literates, even if their courses of study had included knowledge and skills essential for clerical function. Such men were occasionally admitted to orders, but they were few. The issue of two different university systems operating under different established churches cut both ways. Not only were Scottish graduates at a disadvantage if they wished to minister in the Church of England, but English degrees were depreciated in the Church of Scotland, both as a result of confessional inconsistencies (English graduates subscribed to the thirty-nine articles, whereas Scottish probationer clergy subscribed to the Presbyterian Westminster Confession) and on the grounds of curriculum and length: English degrees were seen to be slighter. Certainly no well-advised aspirant ordinand for the Church of England, able to meet the expense, would have considered enrolling at any university other than Oxford or Cambridge.

Having said this, and despite the fact that the majority of those who took degrees went on to take orders, neither university offered an education which was well aligned with the majority vocational destination of graduates.

Here begins a certain revelation. A Revelation recently shown to a holy woman

May the praise for all manner of things begun, that may turn to the profit of man's soul, be given to God alone and to our Lady, Saint Mary, and to no other earthly man nor woman.

Dear brothers and sisters and all other true Christian friends who read this treatise, listen and hear how a woman was afflicted in her sleep with a spirit from purgatory and how she made her complaint to her spiritual father, speaking in this way:

Father, I wish you to know how I had great tribulation in my sleep upon the night of St Lawrence's Day, the year of our Lord 1422. I went to my bed at eight o’clock and thus I fell asleep. And then between nine and ten it seemed I was ravished into purgatory, and suddenly I saw all the pains which were shown to me many times before – as you, father, know well by my confession and telling.

But, dear sir, I was not shown the sight of them by a spirit on this night of Saint Lawrence. But suddenly, dear father, it seemed I saw them; and in truth, dear father, I was never as deeply afraid as I was then when I woke from the showing of the pains, and the reason was that I was not guided by a spirit whom I knew previously who might have comforted me.

And in this vision of purgatory it seemed I saw three great fires, and it seemed that each fire was at a different end. But sir, there was no separation between them, but each one was enhancing the other. And these three fires were wonderful and horrible, especially the greatest of all in the middle. For that fire was so horrible and so stinking that all the creatures in the world might never tell the

wicked smell of it, for there was pitch and tar, lead and brimstone and oil and all manner of things that might burn, and all manner of pains that man could imagine, and all manner of Christian men and women who had lived here in this world, whatever rank they were [when alive].

A Revelation of Purgatory is a fifteenth-century prose text, internally dated to 1422. It claims to have been authored by a woman who was also an anchoress, although she never gives us her name. Originating in the form of a letter, the text documents a series of dream-visions received by the writer over the course of three nights, in which she is visited from purgatory by the soul of a dead friend, formerly a nun named Margaret. During these visions, the revenant presents the author with an uncompromising view of purgatorial suffering, both her own and those who suffer with her, and pleads with her former friend to help alleviate her misery.

This highly visual and dynamic text is placed neatly between the work of those two other late medieval women writers who are, perhaps, better known to us: Julian of Norwich (d. after 1416) and Margery Kempe (d. after 1438), the work of whom has now virtually attained canonical status. In contrast, A Revelation has been largely overlooked as a text able to tell us a great deal not only about late medieval English purgatorial piety but also about the central role played by female religiosity within that complex arena. The reasons for this lack of attention are multiple and complex, no doubt hinging on the text's anonymity and deceptive simplicity when viewed through a post- Enlightenment lens, where the ‘cult of the author’ (more explicitly, the cult of the male author) has long dominated the reception of the literary text. Implicated here too are A Revelation's generic characteristics, in which theological ‘truths’ are articulated via a narrative of the suffering body-in-pain, vivid corporeal dismemberment, invasion and an unmitigated torment in the afterlife that likely proved distasteful to later scholarly sensibilities. Such distaste was driven, in part, by a post-Enlightenment, Protestant-led resistance to the concept of universal pain and bodily spectacle after death as vehicles for ultimate human transcension. As Richard Fenn has argued, the concept of purgatory became subject to an inexorable ‘secularization’ in which