Spanish History Archives

This review was originally published on the Imperial & Global Forum on May 22, 2017.

By Ben Holmes (University of Exeter)

What does it mean to belong to the human race? Does this belonging bring with it particular rights as well as responsibilities? What does it mean to act with humanity? These are some of the big questions lying at the heart of a new edited collection from Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin, Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practice From the Sixteenth Century to the Present (2016). Based on a 2015 conference at the Leibniz Institute in Mainz, the book, as the title suggests, is not a purely conceptual history of the term “humanity.”[1] Rather it looks to discover “the concrete implications of theoretical discourses on the concept of humanity.” In other words, how did ideas of “humanity” guide European practices in areas like humanism, imperialism, international law, humanitarianism, and human rights?[2] The editors argue that despite the implied timeless, universal nature of the term, humanity is both a changing, dynamic concept, and has been prone to create divisions as much as it promotes commonality. Although the volume is a study of European conceptions of humanity, the contributions are transnational, displaying how conceptions of humanity were practiced in Europe and in the continent’s interactions with the wider world over the course of five-hundred years.

Leibniz Institute of European History (via Wikimedia Commons).

The volume is divided into four sections. The two chapters in section one explore how ideas of humanity developed over the volume’s five-hundred year period. Francisco Bethencourt demonstrates how, since antiquity, ideas of the humanity or sub-humanity of different categories of people have created legal and political divisions between the rights of free man and slave, civilized and barbarian, or man and woman. Although these distinctions have gradually eroded in response to more inclusive notions of humanity, Bethencourt warns that hierarchical ranking of peoples remains “one of the persistent realities of [the] human condition,” thus disabusing “triumphalist narratives” which would portray modern notions of “humanity” as the culmination of an inevitable progress of enlightened beneficence.[3] Paul Betts looks more closely at the politicization of humanity during the twentieth century. He also shows humanity was not the sole property of progressive politics; throughout the century “humanity remained a slippery term, and could be aligned to various causes,” including fascist, communist, or racist ones which legitimated what many would consider inhuman practices like apartheid. Betts provocatively concludes by suggesting that an intellectual estrangement exists between the aspirational notions of common humanity today and those notions that characterized previous generations of internationalists.

The rest of the chapters in the book are structured according to what the editors describe as”‘three essential areas” that constitute sub-topics of humanity. Thus, Part II revolves around the development of ideas and debates surrounding morality and human dignity in the context of major transnational movements like humanism, colonialism, or missionary activity. Compared to the later sections, some of the chapters in Section II study humanity in a slightly more theoretical fashion than as a “concept in practice.” Mihai-D. Grigore’s chapter situates Desiderius Erasmus’s (1466-1536) sixteenth-century political writings as emblematic of a wider transition from theological to political understandings of humanity, and Mariano Delgado’s chapter presents the Spanish Franciscan friar Bartolmé de Las Casas’s (1484-1566) arguments for recognizing the humanity of indigenous populations of Spain’s “New World.” In doing so, they provide a study of the changing ideological conceptions of humanity rather the practical implications of these ideas. This should not detract from two very useful case studies of sixteenth-century debates about human nature; but it does raise the question of how far one pushes the idea of a “concept in practice” In contrast, Judith Becker’s contribution on nineteenth-century German Protestantism in India illustrates the practical implications of ideas of humanity by showing how the missionaries’ belief in the unity of mankind guided both the evangelistic and humanitarian aspects of their missionary work in India.

Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1523 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Section III examines themes around humanitarianism, violence, and international law, and illustrates how theories of humanity practically affected European attempts to remedy or restrain the violence of warfare or slavery. Thomas Weller provides an intriguing case study on the contributions the sixteenth-century Hispanophone world made to the arguments later famously espoused by eighteenth-century Anglo-American abolitionists in their protests against the transatlantic slave trade. While questioning any straightforward evolution between the arguments of sixteenth-century writers like Tomás de Mercado (1525–1575) or Luis de Molina (1535-1600) and eighteenth-century transatlantic abolitionists like William Wilberforce (1759-1833), Weller does highlight an under-researched topic concerning what he considers “humanitarianism before humanitarianism.” Picking up the antislavery story, Fabian Klose shows that while British abolitionist narratives about African humanity helped shape the national and international legislation that ended the transatlantic slave trade, these same appeals to protect humanity also legitimated new forms of violence, like armed intervention and colonial expansion in order to enforce the ban. Further emphasizing that the relationship between humanity and humanitarianism is far from straightforward, Esther Möller shows the tensions over the concept in the Red Cross Movement in the second half of the twentieth century. Specifically, the implementation of humanity as the first of the seven Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross precipitated debates in the movement between those who saw humanity as a politically neutral concept, and those national societies involved in anti-colonial struggles, which argued that engagement with politics was a humanitarian duty. Humanity, intended as a principle to unite national societies, actually highlighted the regional and political divisions in the movement.

American Red Cross Society Building, 1922 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The final section focuses on how humanity has influenced social and benevolent practices like charity, philanthropy, and solidarity movements. Picking up the themes of Möller’s chapter, Joachim Berger shows the difficulties of using humanity as a rhetorical device to unite a transnational movement like international Freemasonry. In international forums for European Freemasons, humanity acted as an “empty signifier” which papered over national differences, but these regional differences were re-exposed whenever practical action to support “universal brotherhood,” like transnational charity, was proposed. Studying nineteenth century Catholic philanthropic groups’ promotional campaigns for child-relief in Africa and Asia, Katharina Stornig highlights the at-times dissonant nature of European conceptions of humanity. These philanthropic campaigns used universalist rhetoric of a common humanity to present a moral imperative to save distant children, while simultaneously emphasizing the “barbarity” and “inhumanity” of these children’s parents, who they deemed responsible for this suffering. Gerhard Kruip’s chapter, using church documents to explore the Catholic Church’s attitudes towards solidarity and justice, is part history and part call-to-arms. Kruip exhorts the current Catholic hierarchy to do more to promote global justice by becoming less western-centric, less centralized, “and more open to all the different cultures of the human family,” while also calling for greater state regulation and collective action to ensure a fairer distribution of “common goods for humanity as a whole.”

Cardinals leaving St. Peters (via Wikimedia Commons).

Johannes Paulmann concludes the volume by tying the big themes together with his four main perceptions on humanity. Firstly, humanity has often been defined by its antonyms, most obviously by behaviors of inhumanity. Secondly, the abstract nature of humanity allowed the concept to fulfill a diverse array of functions for a multiplicity of causes. Paulmann’s third and fourth perceptions question the static nature and universality of humanity. Not only was humanity dynamic, which its proponents often understood as a process and goal rather than a fixed reality, but many of these ideas of ‘progress’ implied notions of hierarchies in terms of civilization or development. Paulmann’s conclusion provides a welcome theoretical summary, bringing together the volume’s diverse collection of topics.

The volume’s scale and scope will make this book attractive to scholars of humanitarianism, international law, and human rights. The structure of the volume, while generally clear, could have been explained in more depth for the benefit of non-specialists. For instance, dividing humanitarianism and charity into two separate sections may require clarification to anyone unfamiliar with the theoretical difference between the two. Moreover, some chapters occasionally skirted between themes of humanitarianism, charity, and missionary, which created a bit of confusion. Nevertheless, this is a very important collection of case studies exploring the European concept of humanity and its spread, and leaves the door open to future works focusing on non-European conceptions of the term and how non-Europeans may have actively re-shaped and reinterpreted European ideas.

[1] For such histories, see Hans Erich Bödeker, ‘Menscheit, Humanitӓt, Humanismus’, in Otto Brunnter et. al. (eds.) Geschtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen in Deutschland vol.3 (Stuttgart, 1982).

[2] A vast corpus of works exist on each of these areas, which are too many to list here. For humanitarianism see Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, 2011). For humanitarianism’s relationship with imperialism see Rob Skinner and Alan Lester, ‘Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40:2 (2012), 729-747. On human rights see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2011).

[3] For more criticism on ‘triumphalist narratives’ of human rights see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (London, 2012).

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By Christopher Heaney

There are few characters more English than William Shakespeare’s Falstaff, yet there he is, alone onstage in part two of Henry IV, praising his favorite drink: Spanish wine, the “good sherris sack” that “ascends [him] into the brain” and gives him bibulous valor. It’s one of Falstaff’s funnier monologues, but still touching, infused with his realization that his young friend Prince Hal no longer seems to love him. If so, Falstaff muses, then at least their time drinking sherry from Jerez together was well spent.

Eduard von Grützner: Falstaff mit großer Weinkanne und Becher {Falstaff with big wine jar and cup} (1896).

Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for

the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his

father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land,

manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent

endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile

sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If

I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I

would teach them should be, to forswear thin

potations and to addict themselves to sack. [Henry IV, Part Two, Act 4, Scene 3]

To addict one’s self to sack. An appropriate pun, perhaps intentional. “Sack” as both noun and verb: “sack,” another name for sherry, popular in Shakespeare’s England after the privateer Sir Francis Drake “sacked” 2,900 butts of the drink from the shipyards of Cádiz in 1587 (or so the story goes). Falstaff never labels the wine explicitly as from Spain, but it remains the “fertile” drink that redeemed the “cold blood” and “lean, sterile and bare” lands—England, perhaps—that Harry inherited from his father. Now “hot and valiant,” Harry is ready for Henry V. (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”) Stolen, drunk, and stripped of its Spanish origins, wine from Jerez is sent back in time to become sherry, a medieval fount of Elizabethan identity and someday staple of English fruitcakes, funerals, and vicars’ sideboards.

John Cawse: Falstaff and the recruits from Henry IV, Part II, (1818)

Barbara Fuchs doesn’t land on the Falstaff example in her excellent The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, but it is part of the process she so attentively explores. During the English Renaissance, she argues, early modern Spain’s extraordinarily rich literary production—“chivalric, sentimental, and maurophile romance, as well as picaresque, pastoral and novella”—was appropriated, de-nationalized, and then hidden by England’s emerging national canon of literature. Coming off the world-changing century that began with the conquest of Granada and accelerated through Columbus’s exploration of the New World, imperial Spain remained the puissant—nay, poderoso—geo-political power to beat, which the English attempted through literary emulation, Fuchs argues. For Shakespeare and contemporaries on page and stage like Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Thomas Middleton, “the Spanish vein” ran rich and deep, “even as the political situation between the two nations deteriorated in the wake of the Reformation and imperial rivalries.”

Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613)

Fuchs makes her case by juxtaposing texts on Spain and translated Spanish sources to argue that in the period under study—from the late sixteenth century to the 1620s and beyond—English writers celebrated the act of piracy, literary and literal, as a means to steal from the Spanish Golden Age and transform it into something new. By looking at translators in the late sixteenth century, she suggests that England was self-conscious of its “relative poverty of English letters,” and sought to enrich its own imperial ambitions through the translation of Spanish geographies, manuals for navigation, military treatises, and, epics and romances. The Chilean epic La Araucana was translated as a “how-to” guide for conquering Indians and Irishman, but still more influential was Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote, which Fuchs shows was freely available and popular in England from the year of its publication in 1605. She explores how Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle turned Quijote’s romance into a parody of London’s merchant class, piracy, and syphilis. During the failed negotiations of the Spanish Match between Prince Charles and the infanta Maria Anna, Fuchs proves just how often English writers continued to plunder Cervantes and Spain’s vibrant theater, turning “Spanish plots” into racist stereotypes of suspicious “plotting Spaniards.”

Why has it taken so long for scholars to recognize Spain’s obvious influence on English literature—and, one might add, the arc of its empire, in general? Why is it so revolutionary to suggest, as Fuchs argues, that “English literature was deeply transnational” at its founding moment? Fuchs suggests that the disavowal of Spain was itself the move England used to distinguish its literature from that of “the world,” and complicit in that erasure are critics and scholars of literary history who fetishize “‘English’ genius.” To make the point, she takes on the holy grail of Spanish-English literary relations— Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s lost play, Cardenio, inspired by one of Don Quijote’s stories-within-a-story. Just as Don Quijote is the oft-dropped asterisk to England’s claim to have invented the novel, Cardenio, when it is periodically reconstructed, is celebrated as a lost work of Shakespeare, minimizing the Cervantes connection, or taking it as an opportunity to fetishize folkloric, tarantella-dancing Spain, source of English sunburns. All this despite the fact that those reproductions have no Shakespeare-penned script to work from, only a possible eighteenth-century rewrite whose gaps are filled in with Cervantes instead.

Honoré Daumier, Don Quichotte und Sancho Pansa {Don Quijote and Sancho Panza} (Circa 1868)

Fuchs works the Cardenio–Quijote question to yield a final twist worthy of Jorge Luis Borges. Fellow literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt recently received a Mellon Foundation grant to fund re-productions of Cardenio as “a lost play of Shakespeare’s” throughout the world. Fuchs draws from Greenblatt’s correspondence with Jesús Eguía Armenteros, the beleagured writer who took on the project in Spain, in which the Harvard scholar suggested that the Spanish writer “take the basic source material, the story in Cervantes, and our version of Cardenio and transform it to fit the concerns and the theatrical conventions of Spanish culture and society.” Eguía Armenteros instead began his play with a conversation between ‘The Author” and a character named “Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt.” “But I don’t know what the ‘theatrical conventions of Spanish culture and society’ are,” the Author complains.

Who does? But as The Poetics of Piracy shows, they are alive, well, and still intoxicate Falstaff’s heirs.

Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practice From the Sixteenth Century to the Present, edited by Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin (2016)

The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, by Barbara Fuchs (2013)

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