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Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books in Intellectual History, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Alexandra Otolio Baird, and today I'll be talking to Nicholas Dittering and Isabella Vazabugla, who alongside Clementina Marzico are the editors of the New Volume Contesting Europe, Comparative Perspectives on Early Modern Discourses on Europe, 1400 to 1800 published by Brill in 2019. Nicholas and Isabella, welcome to the show. It's a delight to have you here.
Thank you very much for having us, hello. So we always like to begin by asking guests to just tell us a little bit about themselves and how the book really came about and how it leads out of your backgrounds as scholars. Yes, so if I just may start, my name is Isabella Vazabugla. I work as a Principal Investigator at the Ludic Guetman Institute for Nioletin Studies in Innsbruck.
My main fields of research include Early Modern Politics, the History of the University, and the History of Ideas and how it is represented in Nioletin literature. For those who don't know exactly what Nioletin or Nioletin literature is, Nioletin is basically the Latin used in written and oral form in the Early Modern Period. So roughly from 1400 to 1800. And during these centuries, Latin was basically a lingua franca.
It was the main means of international communication, quite similar to how we use English today or quite similar to the role that English has today. About how this whole book thing got started, well, in 2015, I started a postdoc project on Europe in Nioletin literature. Before I had been working on the Habsburg Propagation of Supernationality in the Habsburg Empire. And so to kind of expand the look meant for me to kind of go to a continental scope and look at really supernationality ideas of togetherness in Europe.
And so when I started, I was kind of looking for people to contact and to work with, people working on the same topic. And so I found Nicholas on the internet and I invited him for a guest talk at our institute in 2016. And so that's really where we just sat together. We had a coffee, we had a chat and we decided that we should collaborate on some level.
And so there you go. A year later, December 2017, we organized the conference together. And the book that we are talking about today is really the result from this conference. Okay.
Yeah. I'm originally from Germany, but my current position is in Switzerland at the University of Bern, where I'm a junior professor of literature. And I'm specializing on modern German literature, ranging from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, but my particular focus is on the 17th century. And my interest in the idea of Europe evolved while I was writing my PhD thesis at the University of Freiburg.
I originally set out to write it on the reception of French and Italian poetry in Germany in the 17th century. But in order to explain why German poets were eager to copy their models, I was going to write a very short chapter on perceptions of Europe and cultural transfer among European nations. And while I was researching for this chapter, which as I said, I originally conceived to be just a short introduction, I noticed that really very little research had been done on the topic and that sources on the idea of Europe in the 17th and 18th century abounded. And so this chapter expanded, if you will, to be my whole PhD thesis.
And it was only after I finished the book that I learned that Isabella was working on a similar topic, but that she concentrated more neo-Latin sources. I read and translated some prominent Latin texts from the 16th and 17th century, but I wasn't aware of just how much more there was, particularly in the 16th century. So it was really a fruitful encounter when we finally met in Innsbruck in 2016. And this was about the time when the Brexit had just chatted the idea that the European integration would be a continuous process.
And so the time seemed right, really, for a reflection on the history of the idea of Europe. And that led to the conference, the following year 2017. And it's fascinating to see how your different backgrounds really lead you towards this kind of very powerful description of Europe that you explore in the book. I just want to ask you a little bit about your motivations in producing the book.
I mean, you've touched on it here a little bit, but it would be great if you could maybe outline that a little bit more for listeners. Well, in the beginning, what Nicholas and I found was really that there was kind of a research gap when it came to bringing different findings on Europe together. There was hardly any collaboration at the time between the disciplines. Every discipline had their isolated research results, historians did their historical work, they would quote historians, philologists who quote philologists, neo-Latinists, neo-Latinists, and so on and so forth.
And it seemed quite awkward to us that all these findings were partly repeating each other, partly complimenting each other, but no one really seemed to, you know, attempt to bring it all together to one big hole to really understand what Europe was about in the early modern period. And so when we first talked about, you know, doing something, some sort of conference, some sort of, you know, get together, whatever it would be, for us it was quite clear from the beginning that it would have to be something interdisciplinary and, you know, bring some fresh impulses to it. But also, with my dad, I mean, of course, interest in the topic also came from some of the events that transpired during the last couple of years. The Brexit, as I said, the migration crisis, the rise of an anti-European populism.
So all these events may have contributed to why we're interested in the origins of the discourse on Europe, even though we didn't set out to publish a direct comment on politics of the day and our volume doesn't include any concrete, political commentary of any sorts. But it did contribute to why we're interested in the topic in the first case. Someone based in Brexit land currently, this is very familiar, we will certainly come back to that. I think later in the interview, I think it's very difficult, as you say, to kind of not think about it with the current circumstances in mind.
But, Isabel, you've just touched on this, but maybe you could give us a little bit of background about the types of scholars who are contributing to the volume in their fields. And perhaps then also the audience of this book, because as you say, it's incredibly interdisciplinary. It really tries to bring together these disparate fields and disparate concepts. So it would be great to hear a little bit more about that.
Yes. So as I said, we really tried to combine a variety of fields and a variety of scholars from these fields. So, for example, in this book, you'll find neo-Latinists. You'll find scholars of German literature, of French literature, Portuguese literature, Russian literature.
Then we have scholars representing different strands of history. We have like the classical straits, historians of early modern periods. We have art historians, cartographic historians. And we really believe that this is actually one of the strong sides of the book, right, to kind of bring the different insights together.
Also the different kind of approaches, because every discipline has sort of a different approach to sources, even to kind of how things are being argued. And also we have a lot of different sources that come in. And I have to say, I'm very much focused on the neo-Latin side and Nicola, certainly on the German side. And I was certainly not aware of what was going on in Russia in the 17th century.
I was not aware of what was going on in Portugal at the time. And I think that's really the case with most people. They have like a sort of like naturally sort of restricted view on the sources, because it cannot work on everything. It's just impossible.
But here I think it's really useful to have other people come in who are experts in other fields. And so when it comes to the audience, of course, we wanted to address in the first place, people working on concepts of Europe, people working on European as, specifically people who work in all those disciplines that I've just mentioned, because we really wanted to raise an awareness among them of the connection between the different fields, between the different studies. And maybe that was our hope that we could also, you know, by giving an example of ourselves inside some more interdisciplinary collaboration in that respect. But of course, in a second stance, we also hope to address anybody that is interested in the history of Europe and interested in how the integration process kind of evolved as of, let's say, 1400, 1450, because there's always some interesting parallels and similarities, you know, between then and now.
And I think we'll probably come back to that later. And there certainly is something for everybody in this book, as you say, that the rich interdisciplinary of it is really, really striking, not only as a methodology, but also just in the content presented, which I'm sure combined with a very arresting title of contestant Europe, will make people pick it up very, very quickly and enthusiastically. So I'd like to just ask if you could outline the general structure, because there is so, so much in this book. So if you could outline the general structure and how it progresses within the book for the listeners.
Sure. So we've tried to systemize our contributions by arranging them into three sections. So the first group of articles survey the various ways in which Europe is embodied or personified in literary and pictorial representations. So starting in the 16th century, scholars began to envision Europe as a queen in distress, so a triumphant ruler over the rest of the world, and they depicted the continent accordingly.
And some articles in this section consider treatises in which the body of Europe was taken very literally as an object for medical scrutiny or sexual desire. And others consider the various tropes with which Europe was imagined in paintings for churches with a court and painters like Rubens, for example, intertwined the art with political endeavors. So their artworks served as an instrument in their strive for peace. The second section assembles studies on processes of the centralization of Europe, the construction of a core Europe, if you will, with peripheries and margins.
And this I think is a general tendency of the early modern period, namely the wish to create stability and order and norms and institutions. And the discourse is on Europe when there are exceptions to this. So for example, in article by Katarina Pichotsky, it shows how cartography in the 16th century saw the rise of border thinking, she calls it, of delineating where Europe began and where it ended. So while in antiquity borders were thought of as natural, early modern cartographers took sort of a more constructivist approach, if you will, by taking geometry as their model.
And then measured Europe with mathematical precision and determined that its center had to lie either around Prague or around New England. But in any case, France and Germany were at the core of the continent. And this had clear political implications. And other articles, such as the one by Oranakopian, inquire after the reactions to this image in Russia, for example, or in Muscoville, as it was called then.
And then the third array of articles consider the political models of plurality and power in the early modern period. So during the 30 years war, for example, the establishment of a universal monarchy, a monarchy for all of Europe, was generally seen as a threat. So the powers of Europe, it was argued, had rather to be in balance with each other. And the article was asked, for example, how book series on the history and geography of Europe propagated this idea of plurality.
So each volume of the series represented a different nation and only the totality of the series then presented Europe. It was a plurality of Europe. And other articles examined how many treatises, which on the surface, Article IV piece, had rather disemble a geopolitical agenda. So those are the three sections, if you will, which we took the various articles and then faced them into each section.
And we'll definitely come to unpick them in a moment. But before we do so, could you give listeners a brief overview of the ever, and I mean brief here, I realize that this is a gargantuan topic, but just a kind of overview of the evolution of the term and concept of Europe throughout history, because I realize that many people are probably perhaps unfamiliar with this. They think of Europe as a modern creation. So it would be great if you could just outline some of the kind of ebbs and flows of that.
Yes, sure, sure. So as you say, Europe is not quite so much a modern creation, but it's actually, well, an early modern creation, because it's really the early modern period when it all started. There is some discord in scholarship I have to say about really the, well, the origin of the term Europe and a proper concept of Europe. But if you're really looking to the sources, and me as a classic system quite familiar with the ancient sources, for me it is quite clear that really in antiquity and in the middle ages, Europe played hardly in a role as a term, and it has hardly any ideological meaning.
Of course, ancient culture shaped our modern European culture very much, if you think, for example, about political formats like democracy or the monarchy. We have a lot of, you know, Greek philosophy in our Western thinking. There is the Roman law, there is all this administration that the Roman Empire kind of brought to Europe by transmission through the middle ages, but that does not mean by inversion of the argument that an idea of Europe had really existed in antiquity. If we talk about ancient Greece, for example, Greece mostly knew Helas, you know, that was Helas, and then there was the rest of the world, all just, you know, randomly mixed together.
And even if I say Helas, even a panhellenic identity was not 100% realized because people in ancient Greece really identified with the polis. So, for example, you would have the Spartans versus the Athenians as a very prominent example. So, there isn't even a proper national, let's say, to apply this term kind of unachronistically here. There wasn't even any sort of national identity.
And in Roman times, Europe as a term was even less important because the Imperium Romanum actually spent the entire world, the entire known world, spent all three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa. And the Imperium Romanum was often referred to as the Orbeez Terarum, which is basically the entire world. So it wouldn't make sense to kind of have any sort of concept of Europe when really your kind of space of shared identities, the world itself, right? And given these sort of circumstances, Greeks and Romans in antiquity only had a very vague geographical notion of Europe.
And also that the famous myth of Europe and the bull didn't have any ideological meaning at all. And ancient historiographers were even unsure about how the myth could possibly be tied to the name of the continent. And yeah, but there were no further deliberations on any sort of communality, continental communality. And in the Middle Ages, it was basically quite similar.
The term Europe, if it was used at all, it was used in a very vague geographical sense. During the Carolinian time, so 800, 900, Europe was sometimes used as a term for the new empire spending the West of today's continent. It was, yeah, they were trying basically to implement a new term that would go beyond the Francia or just Gallia, but the term Europe could not really be established. And not even during the crusade, the term Europe played a particular role because of course it was European Christians who went towards the East.
And it was kind of a joint Christian undertaking. But if you're really looking to all the crusading descriptions, all these travel reports, you realize that the focus is always on the fact that these Europeans, they come from different nations. And once the fight was over, they would return to their respective nations. So also, if anything, then it is an astounding lack of Europe that you find in this crusading literature.
And so the big bang really only happened in the early modern period. Europe all of a sudden expanded. And this had to do with several reasons. There were the explorations to the rest of the world, all those overseas discoveries.
Then there was the dissolution of the feudal system and suddenly all these smaller kingdoms were merged into bigger ones. There was a reformation challenging the old ways of thinking. And there was humanism in intellectual terms also kind of challenging you or actually challenging the old ways of thinking. And all these developments forced the Europeans to revaluate their position in the world, to revaluate their position and also to renegotiate their position.
And so suddenly the usage of the term Europe exploded. Europe suddenly is everywhere as of 1430, 1450. And the work was even so popular and also not just the work, but also the category as a sort of system of reference. It's the adjective European and then the plural noun Europeans had to be invented.
So basically the language is reacted to the growing collective needs of the European community. And for the first time in history as well, Europe gained a meaning beyond just the mere geographical scope. For the first time we suddenly are confronted with political concepts of Europe, with cultural concepts, with religious concepts, intellectual concepts and so on and so forth. This is something that is truly amazing because before the 19th century, continental feelings of shared identity were not actually quite common.
Before the 19th century, it was only and exclusively the Europeans who had declared themselves as being one entity, as being one community. And so then in your collective introduction to the volume, you go on and make a very, very powerful argument for rethinking this chronology of the discourse on Europe. And so could you perhaps just explain why the existing H.T. and scholarship has really seen the idea, this concept of Europe as originating in the 18th century and why is the world of Europe touched on this.
So why are you refuting this argument? So I think it's partly a methodological difference. I think the question on the 18th century has to do with the role of the Enlightenment in the history of the idea of Europe. It's shown in the mid 20th century often argued that the idea of Europe meant the idea of a European identity shared by all nations and their feelings of belonging and unity.
And they thought that a European identity has to have certain cultural reasons that were ascribed to it, first and foremost Christianity of course, or the reference to antiquity or the rise of scientific thinking, liberalism and so forth. So they searched for the origins of an idea of identity, peace and unity, or for the origins of the idea of a European culture and clearly all of these were more prominent in the Enlightenment than say in the period of reformation, even though they exist in the Reformation too. And I think our approach is a little bit different. We stress more the prognacious constitutional for Europe, if you will, and argue that the political strife that was dominant in the 16th and 17th century was a major factor for the later Europeanization.
So we focus not on identity, but on discourses and these discourses, if in say sort of, as I said, it was sort of stried and struggles and conflict. And we stress more that the concept of Europe can also be negative towards Europe. It can be political rather than cultural and aggressive towards the rest of the world. So I don't think our contributions given up to the question of a European identity, a feeling of continental unity, but rather look at how the term Europe was used in various texts and the term used in a purely political and geographical sense.
People may not have felt that they were emphatically European in the early modern period, but they did see that Europe was a central point of reference for their lives. And also, if I may just chime in here, another reason why we kind of refused the, well, the kind of previous idea of Europe originating in the 18th century is that with Neolatin, suddenly a lot of new sources popped up. You know, Neolatin is a very, very recent field. It only got established at the end of the 20th century.
And you could say that it was only properly institutionalized in the last 10 to 15 years. So no one has really ever looked at all these Neolatin sources out there before, but these new sources, they gave new impulses and they showed that this course on Europe was actually there since the 15th century. And so you could say that one of the successes of the Neolatin studies have contributed to recently is this change of view that Europe really started earlier than just the 17th or 18th century. So the first section then of the volume is called embodying Europe, allegories of the self and the other.
And this section is very exploring the allegorical vision of Europe in both textual and visual culture. Could you give listeners an overview of the depth and breadth of this allegorical outlook, perhaps with a couple of references to some of the examples within the chapters? Yes. So, among the most popular depictions of Europe in the early modern period were allegorical personifications of Europe.
They kind of reached their peak in the 16th century, but they were also partly present still in the 17th century. What we see is that, I mean, we are treating texts more than maps, for example, in our books, really maps were the first media to kind of implement this sort of allegorical depiction of Europe. Literature would then only kind of jump on it. And Johannes Butch, who, Nicholas Dideringen, and Dennis Boulina, treat in the contribution, played a crucial role in that, because he was the first to conceive a map of Europe as a lady, a queen.
And he was also the first to kind of write a poem with like starring basically Oiropa the lady. In general, the the figuration of Europe as a woman goes back to antiquity, kind of, where figurations of cities and people were usually female. For example, if you think about Roma as the patron goddess of the city of Rome. In the early modern period, those allegories are also female, so Europe is female because, of course, Oiropa is female by just grammar, but also because the early modern culture was really much a male culture.
And so depicting a woman for them, it had sort of implications of concussed, of security, of love, things like that. Nicholas has kind of touched on it already before, but I will just repeat it that basically there were two main strands of female Europe that evolved in the early modern period. We have on the one hand sort of Triumfent Europe, you know, where we find this allegorical personification, rejoicing and flourishing, and she's all happy about how Europe looks. And then we have on the other hand, Europe lamenting.
And especially now a book we have the contributions by Nicholas Didering and Dennis Boulina and Roni Kaiser who deal with these sort of lamenting Europe. It seems that lamenting Europe seems to have been slightly more popular in the early modern periods, but then the Triumfent one. But of course, it had to do with the political message that these texts were trying to convey, because in all these lamenting texts, you have Europe bemoaning the wars that are tearing her apart, and she bemoans the wars that are inflicted upon her by her own children, as she says, very often, of course, by her own children, she means the European princes who are fighting each other for power and predominance. And a very, very funny example is treated in Roni Kaiser's contribution.
It's called a Robert Heouten Timurumene, which is a Greek title and he basically translates to Europe, the self-tormant. And it was written by a Spanish humanist, Andres Laguna. And this is a very, very interesting example, because Laguna in fact was a doctor, and what he did with his or her was to depict her as a sick, feverish old lady. And in this text, he kind of recounts how one day he was going about his business, you know, medical staff, when suddenly he bumped into an old sick lady.
She was really ugly to look at and he's kind of revolted by her look. And then she suddenly feigned and he has to resurrect her. And once she comes back to life, he kind of starts this doctor-patient consultation. And in the course of this consultation, it becomes clear that the patient he has in front of him is Europe.
The Europe, the queen, which he had in mind as a beautiful young lady was kind of seducing every man on the continent. And he can hardly believe what he sees here. And Europe then starts to explain why she's in the state that, well, he found her in. And again, here we have the motive of her own children that are ripping her apart.
And she even applies the metaphor of a, well, a sheep, a mother sheep who has given birth and who has nurtured a baby wolf who are now trying to get her and who are not really caring about her well-being. And well, the text basically ends with a plea to the European princes to make peace and also a very, very strong appeal to Emperor Charles V to kind of take the leading role in making this peace. And with this sort of appeal to the Emperor as the leader, we can kind of deduce a very, very specific concept of Europe, which is the concept of Europe as a universal monarchy. So basically Laguna envisioned Europe under the peaceful control of Charles.
So Europe should be but one big empire. And all the other princes should be subordinated to the Emperor in a way. And this is a very, very strong, well, statement, if you will. And I think it worked particularly well to promote European integration like that because the, the cooperative moment is very much implied in the corporality of the female depiction.
And especially the 16th century, the Renaissance was a very visual age. And I think that's also a reason why just in general, these sort of allegorical personifications of Europe worked very, very well. And it's striking how these images really feel like they could be in the current British press. Yeah.
Nicholas, I think we have to turn now to your chapter. It's been mentioned so many times now. So this is with Dennis Paulina. And here you explore the rise of discourses in Europe in light of the perceived threat of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century.
And it's, as Europe is very much intertwined with Christianity in which you argue was actually scarce as a kind of concept image before 1500. And you explore this really fascinating trope through this wonderful woodcut that Isabel is already introduced by Johannes Pudge of Queen Europe. Could you just expand a little bit of on this really fascinating iconography of Queen Europe? And how it really actually came to be, how it came to be present so frequently in the discourse?
Well, the image of the Queen of Europe is of course rooted ancient myth, the definition of instance of this latter invention, the convocation of the continent as far as we know, is a woodcut. Johannes Pudge and his book, a cartographer from Minsburg, who worked as a counselor to Ferdinand I, the brother of Charles I, who was the German emperor in the first half of the 16th century. And his woodcut chose Europe as a queen adorned with a crown and a receptor in her hand. And then it chose the country's of Europe as the parts of her body from the head to her feet.
But it chose the countries without clear cat boundaries. So it only depicts various crests of the countries. And the rest of the countries are not delineated clearly. And this image, this woodcut, has become enormously influential during the early modern time and well beyond it.
While it is quite famous also in the scholarship, Pudge also authored a poem which is not so well known, it is called the Lamente of Europe. And it addresses Ferdinand and Charles V. And actually last year it was discovered in Austrian the museum, that this poem was actually attached to the map of Europe in its earliest version of 1534. And Dennis and I interpreted the woodcut with regard to this little-known poem by Pudge.
And we found again that the image presented was not one of peaceful unification of the continent, but rather of a universal monarchy under Habsburg rule, a submission of sorts. So the poem makes clear that only the Habsburgs can really protect Europe from the Ottoman threat and the various other dangers. So after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans were perceived to be the great threat to Europe and Pudge argues that only a united Europe, but united on the Habsburg rule, could really be strong enough to oppose the Ottomans. And the Habsburg rule over the continent.
Now interestingly, a French humanist, Ubersusanne, wrote a reply to this poem in the 1530s, in which he counted this very partisan vision of Europe with a French countervision in which only France is the first, the King of France and the enemy of Charles can save Europe from the dangers of the Reformation. So it's not the Ottoman threat, or not only the Ottoman threat, but also the Reformation, which of course had only broken out 20 years earlier in the Holy Roman Emperor. And Sussanne now says the greatest threat to Europe is also the Reformation, and only France is the first to really save Europe and can rule over it. So in a way, we argue that the very image of a European body politic evolves not from the idea of peaceful unity or plurality, but from an argument between Putin, Sussanne and many others, from a conflict between rivals, Charles and Francis, and from the literary fights between the learned humanists of the time.
And I believe this is a good example, this struggle between parties of what I call the the Pagnatius roots or the Pagnatius Constitution of Europe in early modern times and maybe even in the present day. A Saper Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars. And it means there's no need to worry when I play at the park.
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So the second section of the book is called Centralising Europe, Constructions of Peripheries and Boundaries. And it explores how Europe became increasingly perceived and constructed as North Western Europe, as you've already mentioned, namely Germany and France. In order to, as you state, immunise Europe against an alien other. Could you explain how this evolution was linked to wider processes of globalisation in the early modern period?
And perhaps give some examples of the centralisation as was experienced both in the centre, so there's a new centre of Europe and in those peripheries and boundary states? You mentioned a very, very interesting point here, which is the othering in order to define Europe as a whole. And Europe in the early modern period got constructed very, very much by demarcating the continent and its people from everything decidedly non-European. And we found there are three main ways how this was basically done.
First, there was the anti-Ottoman argument, which is mainly a religious and cultural argument. So, you know, the Ottomans are the big threat in the early modern period. They of course cherish the Muslim faith. And so the Europeans who cherished the Catholic faith, they would make religion as the main argument basically.
They would say everything that is not Christian can never be European. And in an interesting way also, when it was about going against the Ottomans, suddenly also the Catholics were able to overcome the split of confession between the protestants, Catholics, the Orthodox churches. So religion was a very, very strong argument in that respect. The second way of distinguishing themselves from non-Europeans are tied to the Jesuit missions, but I should say not only the Jesuit missions, but also Benedictine, Franciscan, other orders, missions into the world.
But of course, the Jesuits were like the biggest order to kind of pursue these missionary goals. And of course, this is also a very strong religious and cultural argument, because when the Jesuits, for example, set out to China in the 17th century, they brought with them prisms, astrolabs and all sorts of other technical devices to kind of prove to the Chinese people that if Europeans have been able to kind of create these things, then the Christian really must be the only true God, because he's the one who kind of endows people with their abilities and with their scientific and intellectual skills. And then on a third, I respect we have, of course, a topic of colonialism and overseas trips. So Europeans basically set out to conquer the world.
And there is a lot of travel reports and descriptions of the barbarian other that Europeans encountered. And of course, they set this barbarian other in opposition to civilised Europe. And that respect was really made the center of the world, who is dominating the rest. There is a very famous metaphor that the Bohemian humanist, Juan Amos, continues, applied because he compared Europe to a big, big ship and gathered around this ship.
It's basically the rest of the world, which is just small barbarians in small little boats. And of course, already the designation of the European ship and just the barbarian boats says a lot about the perception of Europe at the time. And also, Camino's kind of argues that with Europeans in our ship, we need to make friends with these barbarians in their boats, because otherwise, there is a danger that they might one day get together and attack us. So we bring to them the Christian faith, we bring to them all the intellectual, scientific achievements that we have in order to kind of, you know, civilise them, but also make them dependent on the Europeans.
And in the contributions in this section of the book, we can see very well how the different nations, both in the centre and the periphery, try to Europeanise themselves, let's say, in the face of the rest of the world. For example, you have Lucy Stochovar talking about the, you know, Bohemian stories of origins by professors at the university in Prague in the 16th century, and they would kind of try very hard to argue that the Bohemians are not of Scythian or Asian descent, but that they are properly born Europeans in order to render them credible and authoritative as intellectuals. Then we have, for example, in the contribution of Aacopian, the Russian sort of perspective, where he shows that there were many Russians, even before Peter the Great, as the first Russian Tsar who visited the continent in the 17th century, there were Russians already before, were trying to prove that they had cultural assets that made them European, that were similar to that of the people on the continent, no matter whether they lived in the northern or in the southern or in the western part of the continent. And then you have even definitions of centre and periphery, some of these national perspectives.
For example, Portugal, the contribution by Bittahannenberg, you see that Portuguese people in the 16th, 17th century, they admit they say, yes, we are part of the European periphery, we know very, very well that the continent is mostly directed by France and Germany, but look, here is what we can contribute to Europe, and here is what we can do to help you defend Europe against the advancing Ottomans and so on and so forth. So it's only really in a European context that the single nations often set themselves apart from each other when it really came to kind of, you know, looking on a bigger scheme, looking out to the world, then Europe all of a sudden by just magic seems to be, well, united in a way, or at least connected by certain cultural or political values. I think that's very, very interesting what we can see very well in this section of the book. And once again, those parallels are just so tangible, you know, there's this, there's vacillation as to what it means to be European, these European values, where we draw the boundaries of who and who is not in the European Union, it really hits home in that section, I think, I mean, it does throughout the entire volume, but I think here it was particularly striking.
Nicholas, did you want to add something? If I may, just on the perception of the extra European other, it's, of course, it's clear that early modern contemporaries, that's actually true that they had little doubt that Europe is vastly superior really to all other continents. And it's often shown Europe actually as bi-unfing over Asia and the Americas. On the other hand, though, there were some tendencies, especially in France in the 16th century, to bring forth a sort of early relativism, to compare seemingly sort of wild and primitive Native Americans favorably to Europeans.
And this is true in earlier traveling accounts of the Americas. For example, by John de Vere, a contemporary of Montagnu, who in his report on his travels to Brazil narrates a number of dialogues he apparently held with the natives, and where he says that they cannot understand why Europeans are so vain, why they make so much effort for the provision of the future, it's unnecessary, why they travel so much and so forth. And Montagnu took these accounts and criticized the Europeans for their, for their cruelty, for example. And the famous essay says that the two being the natives of what is now Brazil, they may be cannibals.
But the horrors of the Befolomie, Daze, Massek and France were in fact much greater than cannibalism. So there were signs of an early relativism, and this was later then extended to China and Persia, if you think of Montesquier's letter, in the early 18th century, for example. So the Europeans like to imagine how Europe would look through the eyes of the other, and how strange they themselves must seem. But all of these attempted relativism are, of course, you're a centric.
I'm not saying that they're not your centric. One could say that they simply adapt certain modes of reflection which were established, antiquity, it's interical writing, for example, and that they weren't really interested in the reality of other cultures, that they simply used the noble savage as known in the 18th century as a stooge for a kind of satirical self-reflection. If I could just add something here, I think that what we see here very well is that I think the vernacular sources in that respect are a bit different to what the neo-latin sources portray. And the examples that I took were mainly taken from neo-latin, and of course, Latin as a lingua-fanka sort of transcended national boundaries by nature.
If you would say, and of course it makes a difference if you choose to write about Europe in Latin, or if you choose to write about Europe in French, for example, if you're talking about Montesquier. And I think that if you were writing the vernacular, you made a commitment to the national course more than you would naturally do when you use Latin, for example. I think that's kind of an interesting insight to have already from this sort of interdisciplinary approach that different sources also tell a different story depending on really, well, the international or their national usage in a way. I'm going to push us on to the final section, which is called balancing Europe discourses of plurality and power.
And so this section of the volume is exploring the various ways in which the balance of powers in Europe was conceptualised. So this ranges from the harmony of parts to the European context of nations, all this kind of cognaceous Europe, as Nicholas has mentioned. Could you give listeners just an overview of the different ways in which the concept of Europe was woven into these political discourses and discussions, and perhaps mentioning a couple of examples from the chapters? So I'll just start.
Maybe Nicholas also has some interesting things to add here. Just generally on the concept of Europe as a balance of powers, I should say that this was basically a concept that was generated in reaction to the concept of the universal monarchy. And so it also had its heyday in the 17th century, whereas the universal monarchy was really, well, had its heyday in the 16th century, basically. And the reason why the 17th century was so strong on that concept of the balance of power is that during and after the 30 years war, it became quite clear to most Europeans that territorialism was simply too strong to turn Europe into one empire.
So sort of a new promotion of sovereign states started. And I think the article of Stefan Erempies and Niels Grüner showed very well how this idea of a sovereign state, a Europe of sovereign states, served as sort of a distinction to all the big empires in Asia, because those empires, if you talk about the Ottoman Empire, for example, about the Persian Empire, for example, these were empires that were known as being very, very despotic. And of course, Europe didn't want to be perceived as a despotic sort of continent full of tyrants ruling over kind of, you know, subjects devoid of any liberty. And in a way, you could say that this balance of power idea is still reflected in our current motto of the EU, which is diversity in unity.
Because the plurality is basically a plea for tolerance and harmony. And there are a lot of Latin texts in particular promoting the plurality of Europe. Unfortunately, we don't have any of these texts in this section, but I'll just mention one here. It is the econ animor, the mirror of the mines by the Scottish French humanist John Barkley, who lived around the turn of the 17th century.
And here we have basically a mirror of all European nations, or the nations that he thought to be European. And at the end, he tells an anecdote where, you know, he has taken a walk and climbed the hill in Greenwich. And at the top, he had like a wonderful overview of everything beneath in the weather, the red roofs of the houses in London. There is the blue Thames.
There are the colorful boats on the Thames. There is like the green fields in the distance with whites and gray and black sheep and everything. And he's just like taken away by the look. And he tries to find out what is the most beautiful about this look.
And in the end, he comes to the realization that it's not one particular thing that kind of makes the look beautiful, but it's really the overview. Everything that kind of, you know, makes his view beautiful. This is a very, very strong statement for, you know, tolerance and plurality in Europe in a text that basically explores the nations and people and their customs of Europe. And apart from the Latin literature, we also have vernacular literature that is very, very strong on this concept of balance of power.
And especially in a public genre that is closely tied to politics, that is newspapers, journals and lexica and cyclopedia. And we have the contributions of Zuki and Bower in this section who can show that very well. And Riko Tsuki, he really shows how newspapers in the 17th and particularly then in the 18th century were used for creating international networks. And what played a very, very important role in that whole process of international networks was also the simultaneity that the newspaper editions kind of well insinuated to the European publics and the knowledge of what was currently going on in other nations.
At the same time that, you know, you are living your own life here, this kind of sharpened awareness of Europe and European community in general. And it also kind of contributed at least slightly to a more tolerant view of thinking and of course this ties in very much with 18th century enlightenment and please for tolerance and acceptance. And also the newspapers, they contained a lot of reviews of books. So via this scientific and scholarly route, Europeans can also assure themselves that there is still high standing position in the world, so to say.
And for Kebawa on the other hand, he has a very, very interesting example to present at least the so-called Renga series. So this was a series of in some 80 volumes in Germany in the early 18th century and each of the volumes, sometimes also more volumes at one, represented one state of Europe at the time. And this Renga series turned out to be immensely popular and of course it didn't just, you know, appear all at once, it wasn't published at 80 volumes all at once but it was volume one, volume two and apparently the European re-orship found it very, very interesting to get to know about, you know, the other nations in Europe and what they're up to. And so they kind of bodes up this entire series and they had to reproduce and reproduce constantly to kind of keep up with the European demand.
And both these examples of Zucchi and Renga, they also show that there was some sort of commercial and economic activities in which journalism is usually involved too that contributed to the development of Europe, not only in affirmative but also in sort of a refuting sense. There were a lot of quarrels also in the newspaper where, you know, one newspaper reacted to the article of another newspaper, one review reacting to the other and of course there were also lots of representations of feelings of national superiority and pride. So while these journalistic sources contributed on the one hand to, let's say, the development of a united Europe, it also contributed to sort of a fragmentation of Europe that would later than in the 19th century lead to the nationalism. But at any rate what we see here is a Europe in the process of making whatever it would then be.
And your own contribution to that section is about it is really fascinating. So you explore how early modern geographical descriptions are determined by political mechanisms and it's kind of fascinating to see how this early modern geopolitics is really becoming embedded into this discourse on Europe. I don't know if you maybe just want to quickly just frame that for listeners. Yeah, I think something that we have not quite covered too strongly in the book is really the sort of geographical, cartographic side of well European integration.
But I think the geopolitical approach kind of brings it together because geography, geographical and political understanding of Europe are of course closely tied to one another and they are partly influencing each other. And of course, the most geographical description of Europe is never value free. They represent just by as constructions of Europe, they represent interpretations of fact as Michael Vintler famously stated it once, who is also part of our volume. And geopolitics itself is quite a problematic term.
It's charged since it's appearance in the 19th century when Germans call us the organic theory of the state where states could expand with just along their political ambitions and devour other states and this sort of thinking then fed perfectly into the Nazi ideology. So we always have to be careful when talking about geopolitics. But I used it very much in the sense of the 20th century French school where geopolitics is basically just a tool for policy consultation to predict international behaviour. And so constructing Europe through geopolitical thoughts worked very, very well in the neo-Latin sources at least.
And just to mention one crucial example, there is a didactic poem of well, very, very large size by a German guy called Kiriakus Lentulus from 1650. And this text seems to be very much sort of geopolitical introduction of what Europe is. He dedicates this poem to Emperor Ferdinand III who had played a crucial role in organising the Westphalian piece. And so it seems that he's really consigning Europe to the emperor when he basically presents 18 nations of Europe, which Germany is at the heart naturally as it is the home of the imperial crown.
He basically goes so much into detail that he's at times boring to read. He depicts the borders of each country. He depicts the sort of inner organisation. He depicts the swarms and the fields and the forests of Poland.
And this is all very interesting of course if you think about military things which is crucial for any geopolitical vision. He goes into the history of each nation very much to show the emperor how certain claims could be justified or not. And from all this we can actually deduce the concept of Europe. That is that of a kind of a balance of power but also kind of a universal monarchy.
Sort of in between, hence also Ferdinand is often called the arbiter and the mediator of Europe. But I think it would be interesting to look more into text from this sort of geopolitical point of view to kind of really see how policies also came about in connection with geographical visions of Europe. And this section, I mean very much like the previous two, but I found it surprising in the plurality of ways in which Europe was being perceived in this period. But more in the sheer diversity of forms that were employed to kind of explore and rationalise and communicate these interpretations.
So I mean you've mentioned some of the sources within these chapters but they range from Ruben's paintings to maps to vernacular geographical publications. You've mentioned newspapers and these published books. What does this diversity of forms and mediums really tell us about how and which the types almost of people who were partaking in discourses on Europe in the early modern period? If I may, that's a big question.
The first aspect that comes to mind is simply the ubiquity of references to Europe. It seems to have been central to many different, if not all different discourses and many different media. And it seems to have been dependent on certain media. So journalism for example, had an affinity to depict Europe in its plurality simply because it was published continuously and sincerely or seriously.
And one might add that it was not only important for the elites, for the court and the ruejites, but it may have been interesting to other social classes. Some classes that were unable to read, so Marion Romba for example, examines the depiction of the four continents in church parishes and in folk culture. The depiction also had the function to educate people about stereotypical characteristics of the continents, for example, the triumph of Christianity in Europe, for example. I can actually point to another interesting example from the 16th century, which unfortunately we didn't cover in the book.
In the 50s and 50s, a common soldier from Riedling and southwest of Germany wrote a very strange treatise in which he imagines that Portuguese soldiers would find an enormous giant who was exactly the size of Europe, and that would then be married to the Virgin of Europe by Antreut chance the fifth in order then to vanquish the Turks. And little is known about the author, the soldier, he was obviously able to read, but there are many indications that he was not an academic and that he didn't partake in the humanist correspondences. And this could be an indication that the discourse of Europe in the early modern period was much faster than we originally thought, not only with regard to different media, but also socially. And texts, I have to say texts by the soldier, Laot-Sleria are very rare however, but there is some indication that the audiences and the authors were socially diverse.
And that certainly is kind of the feeling that comes across in the volume that this perhaps was a much broader and much more percolating discourse than perhaps people have assumed. I feel like we have to finally come to the elephant in the room, which is, which regards Europe in 2020. And you've mentioned, Nicola, the volume consciously stays away from reflections on the current discourse on Europe, but it's parallels as you and asabella have mentioned with the early modern context and the ways in which the history of Europe has been politicised are just abundant. And I was wondering if you would like to offer perhaps some reflections on these points, especially just considering in terms of Brexit, in terms of the migration crisis, how fragile the concept of Europe is in 2020 and perhaps how we should be thinking about the history of Europe and the history of the discourse of Europe.
Well, I think if I just may start, Nicolaus, I think parallels, even though in place it, are always included in historical looks at Europe, hence also to a certain degree in our volume. And what we have come to see is that Europe shows an interesting continuity when it comes to crisis and conflicts. You know, certain problems that Europe faces today were actually problems that had already been there in the early modern period. The only difference really is the political, the social and the economic circumstances.
For example, questions like, does Britain or Turkey belong to Europe was very, well, fervently discussed in the early modern period. Some authors are in favour of it, some of them are not. Reminds us very much of the Brexit discussion, or also of the, you know, Turkish, EU negotiations that have been going on for decades, you could say. Then also this question of whether Christianity is an essential part of Europeanness.
We find this very much today in basically any populist argument. If you think about the German AFD, the Austrian F.B.U. If you think about thinkers like Tito Saanatine, who have been announcing the decline of the West in the face of the Muslim threat since the 1970s, 80s, these are also questions that have already been raised in the early modern period. Some of the humanists outlook on how to go about the Ottomans often reminded me of really the populist perils of our own times.
And also the question of where does Europe start and end geographically? These are all questions discussed before. This all goes to show that the discourse of Europe in a way is timeless. And of course, we should be aware of looking at Europe in a sort of a teleological way, thinking that this is a linear process, early modern Europe started thinking about Europe and here we are.
I think we should rather think of this research into early modern Europe as a means to help us understand where we come from and what characterizes Europe at its heart, namely the constant search of what it really is and what it means to be European. I think that we can also learn that crises, even disastrous ones, have the potential to reveal the inevitability of Europe and of European politics, if you will. You take the example of the 30 years war, it's destroyed much of central Europe, tens of millions of people died. I'm not saying there was anything productive or good about it to be sure.
But it also accelerated the discourse on Europe and made it clear that the nations of Europe intertwined in such a way that events in one place by necessity affect processes in other places. And every political move then had to take into account its consequences for the continent. And I think that is true today, even though the pandemic, for example, to the shutdown of borders, there is clear evidence that the virus will move beyond them. And in a way that the COVID-19 crisis will show yet again that the Europeans are interconnected and that they are bound to each other.
And so much so that a medical or political or economic crisis will affect them all. So you could say that I think every crisis visualizes the fact of Europe, for better or worse. Which I think leads me to send out a copy of your book to all of our UK politicians and perhaps the EU Commission as well. I think they have a great deal that they could glean from these pages.
Before I let you both go, could you quickly just give us a glimpse into what exciting projects you're currently working on and that we can potentially discuss on the network in the future? Well, I have just finished a concise monograph on Europe and Europe in the early modern period in the new Latin literature. It is basically an interim report of the main concepts and the main sources in new Latin literature because there has not been that much done since, as I said, new Latin is a very young field. And I also give some perspectives on the future of this research within the field.
Other than that, I have been working on inaugural orations at German universities from 1650 to 1750 at the moment. So these inaugural orations are basically orations given by professors when they receive a professorship. And they only got their salary and were allowed to the privileges of the faculty once they gave these inaugural orations. And I found that these orations they serve to main purposes.
Firstly, they serve this think tanks for political, scientific and cultural developments. And secondly, they were a means of professorial self-fessioning, of careerism and professionalization. And I think these orations are a very good instrument for me to bring together my political interest in all the sort of educational history of ideas aspect. I'm currently interested in saints literature, and the depiction of saints and martyrs in the 19th century.
And that might seem like an obscure subject. But I think that that choreography and saints literature of the early modern period and the medieval period still shaped the way people perceive exceptional and exemplary people in the 19th century. And certain genres and motives actually continue and continue beyond the enlightenment and the secularization. So it's a reflection on sainthood and modernity really.
Nicholas Ditting and Isabela Vazabugla, thank you so very much for being on the podcast. This has been a sensational discussion I feel like. This has probably gleaned a huge amount from the discussion. The book is contesting Europe's comparative perspectives on early modern discourses on Europe, 1400 to 1800 published by Brill in 2019.
Thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.