Defining Universal History

The ambition of composing narratives that embrace the totality of humankind's past – or the entire history of the universe – can be found throughout the world and throughout history. Yet universal history as a practice seems to have fallen out of favour among European historians today. Ambitious projects like Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West and A. J. Toynbee's A Study of History – which traced the shape of history across many civilizations and many epochs – seem to belong to a distant past, and in any case neither was the work of professional historians, at the margins of the Rankean definition of historical research, which attempts solely to show the past as it really was (‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’). Nonetheless, historians are finally beginning to rediscover universal history, and moves are afoot to reintroduce universal history into academic curricula. David Christian, for example, has recently argued that teaching universal history at universities ‘will help students grasp the underlying unity of modern knowledge’. He also suggests that ‘only at the scales of universal history will it be possible to grasp the underlying unity of humanity as a whole. We have seen that the overall trajectory of human history cannot be seen within the constricted timescales of Rankean scholarship.’ A medievalist reading these statements will probably observe that these sentiments are hardly new. Medieval universal chronicles were already based on the fundamental principle of the unity of humankind, and allowed the reader to understand the fundamental unity of knowledge: narrating the history of salvation revealed the coherence of the Creation. The academic community is currently debating the possibility of narrating the geographical and chronological totality of the history of humanity. It is important, therefore, to consider how this totality was understood in the past.

Despite the fact that universal history has been so geographically and chronologically widespread across history, it is difficult to define the universal chronicle as a single genre. Several attempts have been made to do so, however. Karl Krüger, for example says in his volume on universal chronicles in the Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental that they represent the entirety of the history available to their redactor in the form of writing.

The Chronique dite de Baudouin d'Avesnes, composed between 1278 and 1281 in Northern France, is the second universal chronicle to be written in French after the Histoire ancienne jusqu'a César. Its first version covers the history of the world from the creation till the execution of Philip the Bold's favourite Pierre de la Broce in 1278. This work, however, remains little known by researchers and is still unpublished. This chapter examines the life of Alexander the Great inserted in the chronicle, as it appears in Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipal, MS 683 – which offers one of the earliest versions of the text. The author combines a large number of different sources and gives his account of Alexander's life a didactic tone by inserting a treaty on the virtues inspired by Brunetto Latini's Livre du trésor. This chapter addresses the structure of the Chronique's historical account, the choice and use of sources, the way they are referred to in the text and the role of the didactic discourse in the author's project.

La chronique et le manuscrit de base

La Chronique dite de Baudouin d'Avesnes composée entre 1278 et 1281 au Nord de la France est la deuxieme chronique universelle en langue française apres l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César de Wauchier de Denain, elle aussi rédigée dans cette région. La chronique d'un auteur anonyme fut commandée par Baudouin d'Avesnes, seigneur de Beaumont (le Hainaut), un membre de la famille impliquée dans une des plus importantes querelles d'héritage du XIIIe siecle opposant les Avesnes et les Dampierre. La premiere rédaction de la CBA couvre l'histoire du monde depuis la Création divine jusqu'a la pendaison, en 1278, de Pierre de la Broce, le favori de Philippe III le Hardi; elle raconte aussi les événements de l'histoire du Hainaut et de la Flandre, avec les généalogies des familles issues de ces comtés. Jusqu'a récemment, c'est cet aspect régional qui a surtout intéressé les chercheurs, tandis que l'histoire universelle a souvent été négligée. Malgré son statut important de deuxieme chronique universelle en français, malgré une diffusion considérable (elle nous est parvenue dans une cinquantaine de manuscrits), la CBA est aujourd'hui encore peu connue des chercheurs et reste inédite.

For early modern people, laughter was capable of altering the world around it: it was a vigorous means of doing. It could bind or corrode. In charivari and other punitive rituals that shamed moral transgressors – cuckolds, shrewish women, adulterers – laughter policed social mores and restored cultural norms by theatrically chastising those who broke them; conversely, in taunting rhymes and mock trials it eroded ties of respect that legitimised authority. Laughter variously mocked and punished, united groups and reaffirmed boundaries, in a range of contexts. Its potency to do was ever-present. Such potency renders laughter's ethical status troubling, either because it was intended to offend, or because it has become offensive over time: consider the persistent mockery of rape victims and the disabled in jest-books; or the lack of sympathy we often feel with satirists who lash their subjects. Early modern laughter can make us deeply uncomfortable. Early modern satire also has many undesirable characteristics: a dense barrage of scorn that co-joined author and audience in an act of violence against its object, it is consequently capable of making modern readers squeamish. That squeamishness is a reaction to laughter's expression of superiority, a deliberate exaggeration of a perceived difference that objectifies or ‘others’ someone/ thing to create and sustain ‘structures of exaltation or abjection’, which empower one social group at the expense of another. The superiority theory has triggered equivalent condemnations in sociology, psychology, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. For Theodor Adorno, for example, laughter is unethical because it is illogical – he ‘who has laughter on his side’, Adorno warned, ‘has no need of proof’. Many critics doubt that laughter can ever be an ethical act.

The argument below is twofold. First, that the problematic aspects of satirical laughter – its corrosive energies of negation – were often central to its polemical appeal and effect. The agency to damage made laughter a precarious weapon, opening those who used it to charges of sedition. Both labels – satire and sedition – accorded laughter political impetus. Disagreements centred upon the morality of laughing in a specific context, not on the force of the laughter (which both labels characterised as considerable).

This chapter examines a central theme in Jane Guyer's analysis of monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa – the implications of money valuation in relation to social order and disorder in Nigeria. It revisits the case of manilla currency exchange that she has discussed extensively in relation to calculation, ranking and political legitimacy (Guyer 2004, 2009). The manilla exchange rate is often ignored as a contributory factor in the various social upheavals of the region in the period before the manilla was ‘redeemed’ in 1948. Following Guyer's lead, and drawing on the pioneering scholarship of Naanen (1993), this chapter argues that manilla currency exchange critically exposed fault lines in gender relations and crucially amplified the social and economic tensions that contributed to two of the most significant conflicts in Nigeria during the colonial period – the Women's War (1929) and the ‘man-leopard murders’ (1943–8).

The ‘oil rivers’ region of south-eastern Nigeria had been a hub of Atlantic trade from the sixteenth century onwards. Located between two of the ‘oil rivers’ flowing south to the coast, the Annang territory discussed here lay adjacent to Ogoni and Igbo communities across the Imo River to the south and west, and to the Ibibio across the Qua Iboe River to the north-east. The economic basis of these neighbouring hinterland communities shifted during the nineteenth century from slaves to palm-oil exports. The effects of the fluctuations of the global palm-oil market were intensified in this region because of a peculiar economic feature, dual currencies of shilling and manilla. The manilla currency was originally introduced to the West African coast by the Portuguese as a bracelet. With the expansion of European trade from the late seventeenth century onwards, currencies became specialized between local uses and trading at the coast (Jones 1958; Latham 1971; Northrup 1978: 157–64). The brass rod, the currency used in Calabar, had been supplanted by British currency by the turn of the twentieth century. Elsewhere on the coast (between Oron and Ikot Ubo) copper wire currency was displaced by the shilling and the penny by 1920. Yet, elsewhere in Calabar Province, particularly in the Annang-speaking Ikot Ekpene, Abak and Opobo Divisions, the local manilla currency proved to be a durable medium of exchange until the late 1940s.

Judging from the nearly complete lack of mention in the published record, ascertaining what might have been John Gower's attitudes toward Jews has never provoked much scholarly interest. The contrast with Chaucer on this as on so many points is very striking. Interpretations of the “Prioress's Tale” are thick on the ground, and rich in their disagreement over what such virulent anti-Judaism reveals about the character of Madame Eglentyne, the Canterbury Tales, and about Chaucer himself. In recent years, as the subject of real and imaginary Jews in medieval societies has attracted increased scrutiny, the focus has widened for Chaucer too, to draw in additional narratives of his, notably the “Man of Law's Tale,” where the Jewish “presence” is an absence, but, it has been argued, can be teased out theoretically. In all of this, Gower's name has come up, albeit in the usual fashion: that is, readers of Chaucer (and the more so in the study of fourteenth-century anti-Judaism, medievalists at large) habitually have reached out to hail Gower in passing, whenever a corroborative snippet seems wanting. The silence is particularly puzzling when Chaucer and Gower tell the same tale—e.g., the “Man of Law's” and the “Tale of Constance,” which latter, it has been shown, served Chaucer as a primary source.

Yet viewed from above, such glancing references to Gower's ideas about Jews are perhaps understandable. Gower has much to say about many topics, but very little about Jews qua Jews to draw scholars’ notice. Of the tens of thousands of French, Latin, and Middle English lines Gower wrote, fewer than 300 do so, of which 122 make up the “Tale of the Jew and the Pagan,” in Book VII of the Confessio Amantis. Primarily here I want to look closely at that tale, but it may be efficacious to begin an approach from some distance. To start with, we need to recognize that Gower subscribed to the distinction widely held by most Christians in the Middle Ages between those living prior to the birth of Christ and all who came after. Thus the Judaism of a righteous follower of the Old Law—Abraham, Moses, Daniel, etc.

On 4 March 1607, Sir Henry Ludlow, sitting in the English House of Commons representing the constituency of Wiltshire, farted. Since there is no formal record of parliamentary proceedings in early Stuart England, we are dependent for our knowledge of this interjection upon a poem. This poem, ‘The Censure of the Parliament Fart’, or, more simply, ‘The Parliament Fart’, consists of rhyming tetrameter couplets, most of which centre upon the imagined reactions of particular members of the House to Ludlow's fart. While extant manuscript versions vary considerably in length, and it seems that some collectors were adding couplets many years after the event, some of the more reliable copies run to just over two hundred lines. Despite this length, which is unusual in the culture of manuscript circulation of the seventeenth century, it was very widely circulated, both at its time of composition and in subsequent decades. Michelle O'Callaghan, who has edited the most authoritative version, has identified forty extant manuscripts, as well as two Restoration printed versions. ‘The Parliament Fart’ demands recognition, on the basis of these remarkable statistics, as one of the best-known and best-loved poems of the seventeenth century.

‘The Parliament Fart’ is an urbane exercise in wit, yet it is also keenly aware of its invocation of popular traditions. While most existing commentary on this poem has focused on its subtle characterisations and political reflections, I lean more heavily here on the function of the popular. Given that the poem generates much of its comic energy from a demotic breach of decorum, I consider how a study of popular humour might help us to appreciate not only this poem but also the political culture within which it was situated. While popular and elite strains of humour are notoriously difficult to distinguish at any time, there was perhaps no period of early modern history when their relation was more fraught than in the decades from the 1590s to the 1620s. These years encompassed an extraordinary outpouring of prose and verse satire, and subsequently the great era of early Stuart libelling. In a political arena, they were years in which the authority of the House of Commons, with its claims to represent the people, was subject to intense scrutiny. Several early Stuart parliaments collapsed acrimoniously; after 1629, Charles I resolved to rule without recourse to this troublesome body.

A royalist martyrology is not necessarily the first place you might turn to in search of a laugh. The book known as the Sufferings of the Clergy, published by Devonshire clergyman John Walker in 1714, is consequently better known to historians than to specialists in eighteenth-century satire. What is less known is that the voluminous correspondence on which it was based, along with recording memories of loyalist sufferings during the Civil Wars, also contains a rich seam of ridicule directed against the interregnum church and its clergy. During Queen Anne's reign, what Andrew Marvell had styled ‘jocular divinity’ was at its height. Even Jonathan Swift, in his A Tale of a Tub, published in 1704 – the same year Walker began researching – complained of the ‘so very numerous’ ‘wits of the present age’, before calculating the number at a figure remarkably close to the number of beneficed Church of England clergy. Visual and verbal satire had become the dominant mode of addressing religious anxieties over the perceived threat to the established church from dissent. While the satirical efforts of Swift (and of Daniel Defoe on the other side) have been much studied, non-canonical efforts from contemporary discourse have attracted less attention.

None of the manuscript satire in John Walker's archive was judged fit for publication at the time. Loyalists were extremely sensitive to the widespread characterisation of their own Civil War clergy as ‘scandalous ministers’, a notoriety lasting well into the eighteenth century. This left them reluctant to adopt their adversaries’ ad hominem approach, in print at least. The dean of Norwich, Humphrey Prideaux, discouraged Walker from examining nonconformists’ characters; although ‘much practised’ by ‘the other side’, it was ‘the Devill's office’, ill-befitting a ‘good Christian or a Divine’. Edward Chamberlain, rector of Letton in Herefordshire, advised Walker to say nothing on the ‘intruders’ who had displaced loyalists, out of respect for their more conformist descendants. Thomas Rennell, fellow of Exeter College, appealed to Walker for ‘moderation’, although this would ‘make your book less entertaining’.

John Gay wrote the above lines in a letter to Alexander Pope, and it appears on his monument as an epitaph. Whereas his friend Jonathan Swift claimed saeva indignatio in death, the cheerful Gay's last message seems to express contemptus mundi. It coincides in spirit with a letter he wrote to Swift just after the first publication of his Fables. ‘I expect nothing, & am like to get nothing’, Gay writes, then, further down the page, ‘[t]he contempt of the world grows upon me, and I now begin to be richer and richer, for I find I could every morning I wake be content with less than I aim'd at the day before’. My aim in this chapter is to explore whether there is anything more than a conventional ironic gesture in Gay's epitaph, or defensive false modesty in a letter to a more famous friend. In particular, I will explore whether contempt is a dominant passion in his notorious ballad operas of the late 1720s, The Beggar's Opera and Polly. The two plays were separated at birth for very different stage histories, the former being an unprecedented hit that ran for an entire winter season and the latter being banned on stage to circulate only in print until performed in 1777. Since then Beggar's Opera has been a staple of the English stage and Polly largely neglected. In 1728–29, however, the two plays were an almost continuous political event central to a broad programme of satirical dissent against the regime of Sir Robert Walpole. Rather than treating them as qualitatively different – a great work focused on London low life and a minor work set among pirates and plantations in the West Indies – this chapter will read them as they might have been understood, at least by supporters of the Viscount Bolingbroke's Patriot Opposition, as a single political and dramatic arc. That is, to put it bluntly, a spectacular arc of mocking contempt for the first and longest-serving prime minister.

Introduction

As the terrifying experience of Professor Adelola Adeloye in Ikole-Ekiti in 1945 indicates, Sopona or Baba – as the deity associated with the disease, smallpox, was known – was lethal for some of its victims while others survived. Yet, Adeloye had been vaccinated in school. The unpredictable consequences of contracting smallpox reinforced local beliefs about the deity, Sopona, whose arbitrary power was often immune to the blandishments of Western medicine. Not surprisingly, Sopona was widely feared throughout Ekiti, which affected people's actions when it appeared. People were forbidden to ‘cry and mourn over a victim of smallpox’ for fear of provoking the deity's anger over the possibility that humans might question its actions in the selection of those whom it had affected. It was believed that if Sopona were to see someone crying for a family member, that the remaining members of the household would be stricken as well. This conceptualization of Sopona – as a dangerous orisa (deity) that possessed a person but which could be placated and treated by devotee priests and priestesses (awuro Sopona), contrasted with British colonial officials’ conceptualization of smallpox – as a virus with particular symptoms and aetiology that could be prevented through inoculation.

First Battle

The Greeks had planned for a long time and frequently prepared to go and lay siege to Troy by night, but they could not find the opportunity they wanted or the means to do so. They greatly feared how they would land there, for they could not avoid the need to go on board their ships in order to draw nearer to the city, nor was it easy for them to dock or to get on land in the face of men bent on defending it. They were uncertain as to how they would disembark, as they greatly feared misfortune. They had been perplexed about this for a long time, having taken and given much advice on the matter. One day the barons assembled for this purpose and discussed it. I cannot say or report in full what course of action each one recommended, but you can hear what Palamedes said about it in what follows. His words were well received, for everyone placed great trust in his intelligence. ‘My lords’, he said, ‘you can suffer great dishonour by this delay. A year, I believe, has passed since you arrived here, but you have not yet laid eyes on Troy. During this time a large number of troops have arrived there who will defend it against you with all their might and main. They have succeeded in constructing numerous palisades, barriers and ditches and have had ample time to reinforce them and to seek help. They think, apparently, that we do not dare advance. Do you presume to surprise them? It is no use thinking of doing that, for you will never besiege them until you have engaged them in combat. This is unavoidable, whatever may be the result. The longer you delay, the greater the harm you will incur. They feared you more before now than they will for a long time to come. Who advised you to allow them to feel confident, get reinforcements and seek aid? If the fleet had gone straight to the city, I am sure that there would have been no great opposition when we arrived. For that missed opportunity I know of no advice that I can offer. But on the morrow, without further delay, let us make our ships ready.

Prefatory Note

Encounters between different regimes of value – regimes divided by cultural space and time – presume mediation, translation, communication and, therefore, currencies, at once verbal and material, that objectify them. This, in turn, depends on one thing above all else: on mechanisms of commensuration, mechanisms that render negotiable otherwise inimical, apparently intransitive, orders of signs and practices. Without such mechanisms, which have often been the object of conflict and contestation, large-scale historical projects, like colonialism, would have made no sense, neither as a world -undertaking on the part of colonizers nor as a lived reality to those upon whose worlds it was wrought. Jane Guyer (2004: 13), in an acute reading of the West African archive, warns against the assumption that commensuration, especially that attributed to the alchemy of money, necessarily dissolves all distinctions between disparate scales and measures of worth. In Africa, she insists, non-equivalent exchange has been pervasive. If anything, it has been facilitated by the spread of quantifiable currencies: as people became adept at deploying monetary scales, they frequently used them for negotiating intervals, ‘exchanging goods and services that were explicitly not the match of each other’ (47). In similar spirit, the following essay interrogates the role of commensuration in the colonial encounter: how might the management of value conversion – efforts, that is, both to facilitate and to impede it – play into larger processes of political contestation and incorporation at the edges of empire?

Introduction

This essay explores a very specific obsession with very general historical implications: the effort of British Nonconformist evangelists – evangelists, that is, from Protestant denominations other than the established Church of England – to introduce coinage, to replace beads and cattle with banknotes, among Tswana peoples in South Africa. At its broadest, it posits a post-Marxist argument, rooted in the concerns of both Marxist and liberal theory, about the salience of commensuration in the modernist construction of society and history; above all, in the forging of empires. For, we shall claim, at the heart of all ‘modern’ colonialisms, a condition of their possibility perhaps, were mundane mechanisms that made inimical kinds of value, with different cultural roots, at once objectifiable, comparable and negotiable – mechanisms, that is, which permitted the up- and downloading of unlike forms of wealth, both human and inanimate.

Africa is often encountered as a continent in which all manners of extremities converge. Abundant natural resources coexist with extreme poverty; excessive wealth and conspicuous consumption are exhibited in the context of widespread immiseration. In the global imagination, life in Africa is characterized by excess and abjection: the excess of natural wealth and the abjection of pervasive poverty. In recent decades, due to a myriad of economic crises, political instability and social paralysis, the extremities of wealth and poverty have produced a progressive eradication of the middle ground between human happiness and human misery. Thus, much of the scholarship on Africa tends ‘toward a deterministically pessimistic view of development [in the continent] with the logic of neopatrimonialism unavoidably pushing the analysis towards ontological despair, hence its association with Afro-pessimism’ (Mkandawire 2015a: 602). Against this backdrop, Africa is often presented in ‘urgent and troubled tones’ (Ferguson 2006: 2).

Jane I. Guyer (2014: 13–14) recently summarized the implication of the conclusion reached by global neoliberal institutions regarding the current metrics of economic growth thus: ‘All the worst values of every indicator meet in Africa.’ Africa is, therefore, a very good template for examining the political-economic dynamics, structures, agencies and processes that define and determine human wellbeing, that is, how or whether people are able to live and live well – including the questions of ‘the vulnerability of human life and … what makes for a livable life’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: viii). Even though what we describe in this volume as the political economy of everyday life is not a culturally or regionally specific model, in practice, it is experienced in culturally or regionally specific ways.

Given the fact that ‘the “market principle” could never be understood shorn of its larger social and political history’ (Guyer 1997a: 5), this volume examines how African economies and economic institutions, processes and practices – in relation to the political and the social in the longue durée – enhance or weaken the possibilities of human viability and expand or limit the ‘vistas of human possibility’ (Guyer 2002a), that is, the capacity to live a good life. The capacity for a liveable life implies that such capacity can be enhanced and expanded or weakened and destroyed.

No matter their station in life, all Ripon's parishioners and clergy knew that death was inevitable. This was a theme graphically represented in medieval paintings of the dance of death, showing men, women, knights, ladies, kings and bishops clasping hands with leering skeletons. Ripon's parishioners knew also that it was unlikely that they would pass straight from earth to heaven. Instead, they were bound to spend a period of time in purgatory. Fortunately, the sufferings of the dead in purgatory could be reduced by the living. Masses, prayers and alms all helped the dead, and people could arrange during their own lifetimes for these works to be performed for them once they had died. Heraldry, merchants’ marks and inscriptions could be used to identify objects like chalices, plate, vestments, windows and tombs in order to remind the living of particular dead people who needed their prayers. Monuments in particular, if they were installed near altars and saints’ images, had the potential to generate huge numbers of prayers by becoming inescapable parts of the liturgical round of a church. While there were many ways to be remembered, there were also a number of limiting factors. One problem was that all these arrangements cost money. Another major difficulty was that with the passage of time any given deceased person was ever more likely to be forgotten. The most effective methods of being remembered for the longest time were naturally the most expensive. Only the elite could aspire to be remembered forever, though whether or not these aspirations could truly be realised was another matter. The most durable and visible type of object was a tomb, and the most enduring institution was the chantry. Yet as the number of the dead endlessly increased, old tombs might be replaced by new ones and the rents and properties donated to pay for chantry masses might eventually fail due to reductions in their value.

The memory of the dead could also benefit the living, especially when it affirmed the status of their descendants. Ripon's gentry families were very concerned with the commemoration of their ancestors. Some of them transformed chapels in the minster into their own mausolea, making the altars and surrounding spaces into family monuments. During much of the year the tombs of the gentry represented them in the minster while living family members heard mass in their own domestic chapels.

Two complementary types of evidence – a liturgical calendar from the fifteenth century and the financial accounts of the minster's officers – together conjure up the image of the ritual year in medieval Ripon. The calendar alone is its mere skeleton, unable to indicate much beyond the prescribed dates and rankings of the feasts. The financial accounts are like flesh stretched over the dry bones, giving more tangible form to the various customs of different holidays. The ritual year is the third mode of time, a natural complement to, first, the ordinary, constant repetition of the mass and, second, the life cycles of individual people whose changing place in the world was signalled by sacraments and rituals. It had two significant types of feast day. On the one hand, the guilds and chapels had their own special feast days that distinguished them from each other and from the parish as a whole. On the other hand, feast days interrupted the more mundane pattern of religious observances with special obligations to attend the minster rather than the nearest chapel. The latter were an integral part of parish society because nothing else drew the whole parish together at once. The major feast days at Ripon formed a cyclical and recursive annual routine in which people venerated the saints, elevated the great and good, and commemorated the dead with processions, banners, bells, chanting, flames, incense and smoke.

The Ripon Psalter is the only surviving manuscript witness to Ripon's medieval liturgy and thus contains its only liturgical calendar, a ranked chronological list of saints’ feast days. With leaves measuring 310 x 223 mm it is a very large manuscript, which would have been suitable for use by a priest in the choir or at one of the subsidiary altars in the minster. In addition to the Psalms, which would have been necessary for performing the daily office, it contains sets of readings and other material proper to the performance of the office on Wilfrid's feast days. It is clear from the rubrics that accompany these texts that the manuscript was always intended for use in Ripon. The feast of St Wilfrid's nativity, celebrated nowhere else in Christendom, was a principal double feast ‘within the church and parish of Ripon’. Such feasts, with nine lessons, were the highest grade in a secular collegiate church.