Cleopatra, de nuevo

Quien camine por la calle San Pablo de Salamanca y se detenga a observar los cinco medallones que coronan los arcos de entrada al palacio plateresco de La Salina, antigua residencia de los señores de La Guardia, notará, tal vez con cierta sorpresa, que uno de esos medallones muestra la efigie de una mujer elegantemente peinada, enjoyada y vestida a la moda renacentista, pero con el seno derecho desnudo y a punto de ser mordido por una serpiente. La sorpresa pudiera aumentar al descubrir que esa efigie representa a Cleopatra VII, última reina de Egipto.

Después de la sorpresa, las dudas: ¿qué hace Cleopatra en la fachada de un palacio renacentista español?, ¿qué se cifraba exactamente en ese mensaje en piedra con el que los señores del palacio recibían a sus visitas y demás curiosos de la calle? Estamos aproximadamente a mitad del siglo XVI, en el ámbito de una nobleza castellana que se mira en el espejo de las cortes de Italia, y el exceso sentimental, erótico, político y moral típicamente asociado con la reina egipcia desde tiempos de Augusto ha cambiado de signo y lugar al pasar por la criba del neoplatonismo humanista. El desnudo, como marca explícita de ese cúmulo de excesos, es ahora marca de una simbología en la que se funden amor (carnal y espiritual) y política (heroicidad, resistencia), y en la que se materializa un distintivo gusto italianizante, y una determinada voluntad de posicionamiento social, cultural y estético. Fuera ya de la autoridad exclusiva de las antiguas fachadas románicas, en las que Cleopatra y la Lujuria habían sido las dos caras de una misma moneda, la Cleopatra de La Guardia resume y anuncia siglos de fascinación occidental con la legendaria reina de Egipto.

A estas alturas de la historia resultan ya evidentes las razones para la extraordinaria maleabilidad de Cleopatra y para su transformación, a lo largo de los siglos, de personaje histórico en icono cultural. En este sentido, afirma Mary Hamer:

In addition to the craft sector, the Mineworkers Development Agency (MDA) was also engaged in product innovation in the commercialisation of products derived from the indigenous marula fruit, harvested from the wild as a non-timber forest product (NTFP):

While marula grew prolifically in communal areas, it had not been commercialised to any significant extent. A rare opportunity therefore existed to catalyse new markets for products derived from this indigenous fruit, bringing a new source of income into poor communities from a potentially significant asset that until then had been hidden in plain view.

The marula, or Sclerocarya birrea, sub-species caffera is an ancient African tree that grows prolifically in a belt that stretches from northern KwaZulu-Natal across the lowveld into Namibia and all the way to Zambia.

Outside this belt, it is known for two main reasons: for the entirely apocryphal stories of elephants drunk on fermented marula berries stumbling around the veld, and for Amarula Cream – a liqueur sold in over one hundred countries and produced by Distell.

Within the marula belt, people have relied for centuries on the many qualities and uses of this prolific tree, including its fruit, kernels and wood, with homesteads also protected from the hot African sun by the shade cast by these massive and magnificent trees. The marula fruit has more vitamin C than oranges, its kernels are a source of protein in the local diet and the cosmetic properties of its oil have been known in these areas for centuries. Marula also has profound cultural significance within ritual systems as well as within traditional medicine.

El dibujo de Cleopatra que Michelangelo Buonarroti regaló al noble romano Tommaso de’ Cavalieri alrededor de 1533 puede citarse como uno de los mejores ejemplos de la maleabilidad del icono cleopátrico. Mientras el recto del folio nos presenta la imagen idealizada y dignificada de la reina que los poetas y artistas renacentistas pondrían en circulación a partir del siglo XVI, el verso muestra otro retrato de Cleopatra, descubierto durante una labor de restauración en 1988, cuyos rasgos desmesurados y gesto de espanto, dirigidos directamente al espectador, son un recuerdo grotesco de la Cleopatra “lussuriosa” de Dante y, al mismo tiempo, un adelanto de la Cleopatra patética de los dramas senequistas que se escribirían a lo largo de la segunda mitad del XVI por toda Europa.

Las Cleopatras de Michelangelo pueden entenderse como los dos extremos de la gran variedad de representaciones culturales de la reina egipcia que, a partir de finales del XV, reemplazó la visión mucho más homogénea de las fuentes clásicas y medievales. Esta diversificación renacentista vino marcada, sin duda, por nuevas circunstancias sociales y culturales, entre las que habría que destacar la transición paulatina hacia una sociedad cortesana y los cambios de códigos de conducta y relaciones de poder y género que conllevó esa transición, pero también por la salida de la historia cleopátrica de los límites historiográficos hacia nuevos territorios genéricos como la poesía o el teatro.

El subtexto erótico que había acompañado la historia cleopátrica desde las narraciones clásicas y que, profundamente moralizado, había pasado luego a las relecturas medievales, se correspondió con una suerte de erotismo textual que, desde la página, vinculaba esa historia con otro tipo de excesos: la historia de Cleopatra se presentaba como una historia excesiva desde un punto de vista moral y político (pues giraba en torno a una conflictiva soberanía femenina localizada en el Oriente), pero potencialmente también podía serlo desde un punto de vista retórico, ya que esa narración se había fundado sobre un nudo temático heterogéneo en el que confluían lo histórico con lo fabuloso, lo épico con lo lírico, lo político con lo amoroso, lo honesto con lo deshonesto.

Throughout history, taxation has been crucially linked to the wielding of power. Taxation has never been an independent, unconnected or solely local phenomenon, but rather a top-down mechanism for controlling the economy and exercising authority. In Sweden, as late as the 17th and 18th centuries, Lapland clearly constituted a special region in which it was not possible to practise large-scale agriculture. However, the Crown sought to consolidate otherness – Sami culture – as an integral part of the realm. This unification was a reflection of intellectual values, since the government understood Lapland's special economic and livelihood-related circumstances and the taxation could not be the same in Lapland as in other parts of the Swedish Empire.

In this chapter I examine the special characteristics of Lapland's system of taxation and the significance these had from the standpoint of “otherness” and diversity. The focus is on whether in the 17th and 18th centuries the Swedish Crown – the central power – sought to pursue a colonialist agenda in Lapland by means of its regulations with regard to taxation, or whether Lapland's system of taxation was intended rather to protect the traditional rights of the population there. What did Lapland's taxation and Lappish “tax-land” – whereby earnings from hunting and fishing but not the quality and extent of the terrain were taken into account – mean from the standpoint of “otherness” and diversity?

On 25 April 1660, over eleven years since its last sitting, the House of Lords returned. Among those ten parliamentarian peers who took their seats that day were three who had refused to act upon their summons to Cromwell's Other House: Manchester, Saye and Wharton. Yet, it seems that, like those second chambers proposed in 1659, this ‘restored’ House of Lords was envisaged merely as a bulwark for a faction. The Act that brought the Long Parliament to an end and summoned the Convention Parliament to meet defended the ‘House of Peers (consisting of those Lords who did ingage in the Cause of the Parliament, against the Forces raised in the name of the lake King, and so continued untill One Thousand six hundred fourty eight)’. Writing to Hyde just days before the parliament assembled, John Mordaunt believed that only those lords who remained faithful to parliament in 1648 would be allowed to sit. He also believed that this ‘Cabal’ would insist upon the terms of the Newport Negotiations of 1648 as the basis for Charles II's restoration. If true, the parliamentarian peers who assembled on 25 April envisaged the restoration of the House of Lords along the same lines as the old Presbyterians in the third Protectorate Parliament. That is, they wanted a House of Lords grounded firmly upon the ideas and proposals of the 1640s, rendering void all peerages bestowed since May 1642 and ensuring that all future peers had the approval of both Houses before sitting and voting in the Lords. As in 1648, they intended not a return to the chamber that sat before 1642, but a chamber dominated by the old parliamentarian peers and supervised by the Commons.

Yet if the parliamentarian peers believed they could control the terms of the Restoration they miscalculated. When, after a brief adjournment, the peers resumed their sitting on the afternoon of 25 April they found that the earls of Middlesex, Dorset and Rivers had slipped past Monck's soldiers and entered the chamber. All three had succeeded to their peerages during the 1650s and, more alarmingly for the parliamentarian peers, the latter two were the sons of Royalists.

PEACE CAME AS a relief after more than two decades of war. Instead of drawing political dividends from the victory, however, Liverpool faced a hostility that limited his options. While most governments undergo the most strain at their start or end, his administration faced its greatest challenge in its middle years when public discontent and parliamentary opposition kept ministers on their heels. Its strengths as a wartime government, as Liverpool had recognized earlier, dissipated or became liabilities in peace. Country gentlemen and others who backed ministers during the struggle now blamed them for economic distress or court profligacy. Loyalism became a rapidly depreciating asset while the charge of sympathizing with a foreign enemy no longer checked parliamentary opposition. The scale of wartime dislocation also made postwar economic adjustment more painful. While a younger generation accepted wartime patterns as the new normal, those who remembered conditions before 1793 sought a return to what they considered normalcy. Ministers thus faced competing pressures. Any decision aroused complaint which newspapers amplified. Sharp downturns in the economic cycle and political agitation catalyzed unrest. Thrown on the defensive, Liverpool struggled to respond amidst successive crises.

The war had imposed a heavy financial burden. Taxes normally between 8 and 10 percent during the eighteenth century peaked between 1793 and 1815 at 20 percent of England's national income. Revenue not only paid current expenses, but also covered interest on loans and a sinking fund to repay debt. Peace brought demands for retrenchment. Renewed concerns about taxes reinforced much older rhetoric attacking the supposedly parasitical system known as “old corruption” that enabled the elite to feed its appetite for money and power at public expense. War had expanded the size of civilian administration since the 1790s, along with the armed forces and national debt. William Cobbett, a loyalist turned radical, joined in attacking government pensions, church preferment, and contracts funded by burdensome taxation, along with financial policies that benefitted vested interests in agriculture, shipping, and finance at the expense of consumers.

This book has been written in the belief that it is possible, by carefully re-examining the manuscript versions of lyric texts that have come down to us and the historical circumstances in which they were originally composed, to tease out fresh historical information and insights into lay views of the crusades. These texts speak to us in a variety of voices. Their hundred or more composers may express their own individual concerns and opinions, but they also, and more often, speak for others, for they need to please and be meaningful to at least part of their audience: a powerful member of the high nobility, a group of local aristocracy with its aspirations and discontents, other poets, a settled court imbued with courtly and knightly ideology, a court in transit to a crusading expedition, an army camp, people under siege.

The troubadours and trouvères were composing songs for oral performance at particular times and places, in front of particular audiences. Their contemporaries and successors did not see their songs as ephemeral, occasional pieces, for they preserved them through a long process of oral and written transmission. We have seen how political songs could be passed on orally and still resonate seventy years later as the voice of lasting political dissidence. At the oral stage of performance and transmission, memorable, memorised and repeatable songs could be a powerful medium for putting pressure on leaders and others conscious of their reputation and for reinforcing socially accepted values. For us the songs survive in written form, arranged in medieval anthologies compiled from the thirteenth century onwards, sometimes a hundred years or more after their original composition. The various purposes of these anthologies are still to be fully explored. Some evidently sought to create prestigious cultural objects for their aristocratic patrons, as was the case for a number of Italian manuscripts and the French aristocratic songbooks. The latter, as we have seen, generally excluded political and other material which surfaces in marginal sources or collections. Other, all-inclusive, compilations represent a retrospective, all-encompassing, symbolic monument designed to preserve the poetic and cultural baggage of a tradition. As Marisa Galvez has observed, the collecting and ordering of lyric texts into a codex ‘was a fluid, often ad hoc process’ reflecting ‘the shifting horizons of the songbook's medieval public’.

We are surrounded by and sometimes still use structures dating from the middle ages. Scholarship has recreated its political, economic, social and military history. Specialists debate the finer details of medieval science, education and technology. The architecture of cathedrals, monasteries, churches and castles is painstakingly examined and re-examined and their functions are explored in both academic conferences and the popular media. But there are fewer studies of the people responsible for these works. And even fewer of military engineers – who may well have been involved in both the construction and the destruction of military fortifications.

I began to ponder this even while completing my History of the Early and Late Medieval Siege. The names of engineers at war kept appearing in contemporary accounts, increasingly as more records survived. Evidently, by the time of the renaissance in Europe, a body of expertise existed that rulers called upon to fulfil their engineering needs, and some of those experts’ names are well known today (if the number of exhibitions devoted to Leonardo da Vinci is any guide). It is also clear that engineering continued to be undertaken across the world even when there is no surviving record of it. But what had happened before?

I was at first anxious that it would not be possible to attempt this history because of a lack of evidence. Closer study suggested that, especially for the early centuries, it was necessary to offer rather more in the way of hypothesis than a historian ought to be happy with, and to read back from later reports into earlier times, something that also involved making unprovable assumptions. Nonetheless, there was sufficient to show that this king or that prince had successfully bridged a great river, or had built engines against a hostile fortress, or had laid out and defended a camp, or had diverted a river, and thus to identify that to have done so required having access to a degree of engineering skill that it was highly unlikely the rulers themselves possessed. That the necessary technical skills also existed can be confirmed from evidence in other fields: planning, layout and construction of buildings, hydraulic engineering (canals, dams, irrigation) or shipbuilding, all areas where archaeology has added immensely to knowledge of the past. Craftsmen built ships, houses or watermills with evident skill.

This is the first full-length study in English of the work of José Enrique Rodó, one of the great intellectual figures in Spanish and the most important essayist of modernismo, the movement that aimed to attain aesthetic excellence by revitalizing Spanish literature. He was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1871, and the present book was completed in the year of the centenary of his death: he died in the Sicilian capital, Palermo, on 1 May 1917. Rodó is best known for an essay, Ariel, which came out at the beginning of 1900, a significant date for two reasons. The first is that it marked the beginning of a century associated in the Latin American subcontinent with the consolidation of modernity through great waves of immigration, mostly from Europe; the rise of industrialization and its concomitant labour organizations; and, at least for a time, the establishment of democratic institutions. The second reason, which in part inspired the essay, was that Spain had recently lost its last colonies on the American continent (Cuba and Puerto Rico) following its crushing defeat against a United States that had already displayed unequivocal signs of its might to its southern neighbours. The circumstances were therefore most propitious for reflection on what being Latin American meant; Ariel did precisely that, as it pondered “roots” and proposed future “routes”.

Ariel takes the form of a final lesson by an old teacher, nicknamed Próspero, to a class who stand for the youth of the subcontinent. He exhorts them to live according to high ethical and aesthetic ideals and not to surrender themselves to utilitarian values; instead, they should explore their full potential as individuals and allow room in their daily lives for introspection aimed at self-improvement. Próspero also warns the students not to forget their Greco-Latin cultural roots and to be wary of the imposing and materialistic model of the Colossus of the North. Moreover, and resoundingly, he stresses that as they are the ones to lead the progress of their subcontinent, their lofty ideas must be an inspiration for action: “Sed, pues, conscientes poseedores de la fuerza bendita que lleváis dentro de vosotros mismos.

From the late 1990s, the policy discourse started to place increasing store on the scope for small enterprise to provide a solution to South Africa’s stubbornly high levels of unemployment. In particular, there was an assumption that – enabled by access to micro-loans at commercial interest rates and a bit of grit and determination – the poor would be able to self-employ their way out of poverty. The attraction of this solution was clear: poverty could be solved through the market-driven efforts of the poor themselves, while leaving the core economy and its patterns of accumulation untouched, with no wider change in economic structures or patterns of distribution required. The banks could even profit from it.

Yet against the backdrop of this growing hubris, the Mineworkers Development Agency (MDA) was confronted in practice with the limits of such an approach. Despite the alacrity with which poor and unemployed people were using the services of the MDA centres and initiating enterprise activity, returns were, for the most part, low. Time and again, the explanation given to MDA by entrepreneurs was that there was ‘no market’ for their products. Closer inspection, however, found that all too often, there was no lack of such markets: they were just already taken.

The strategy of supporting local production for local consumption embraced by MDA’s centres overlooked a crucial reality: that, distant as the commanding heights of the South African economy might appear from the vantage of its most remote and poorly developed rural margins, ‘the local’ was inextricably tied to the national and even global economy. In fact, we had made the same mistake that President Thabo Mbeki was to make some years later, during an address to the National Council of Provinces, in his description of South Africa as having ‘two economies’:

Certainly, apartheid’s migrant-labour policies and the bantustan policies that followed left stark legacies of economic marginalisation, reflected in the extreme spatial inequality that still today provides a proxy map for where the bantustans used to be, in relation to any poverty indicator one cares to choose.

STUDYING EARLY MODERN MARRIAGES IN THE BORDERLANDS

Marriage practices among the common people, or peasantry, are a classic topic in cultural studies but have attracted much less attention from historians, especially when it comes to the pre-modern era. Since marriage was a legal institution, the approach adopted by historians has most often been a legal one. This brief study focuses on marriages between people confessing different faiths in the eastern borderlands of 17th-century Sweden. The aim of the study is to throw light on the everyday lives of those early modern people who decided to marry a spouse of another religion. Despite laws, stipulations and common prejudices which did not favour mixed marriages, these people were ready to cross the borders between religions.

The territory concerned here is the province of Kexholm, which at that time covered an area west and north-west of Lake Ladoga that today lies on both sides of the Finnish– Russian border (Fig. 6.1). The provinces of Kexholm and Ingria were annexed to the Kingdom of Sweden under the peace treaty of 1617, but were greatly affected by the Great Northern War, which began in 1700, so that under the peace treaty of 1721 Kexholm was divided in half and its southern parts together with the whole province of Ingria were ceded to the Russian Empire while only the sparsely settled northern part of Kexholm was left in the possession of Sweden. The material available from the province of Kexholm in the Swedish period, 1617–1700, is nevertheless ideally suited to the study of the early modern borderlands.

The first chapters of this book focus on material transformations in early modern Sweden. Ideological and cultural currents, such as Lutheranism, Classicism and the Enlightenment; the political and economic currents of European colonial expansion, in which Sweden played an active part; the growth of intercontinental trade and Sweden's ambition to shed the image of a backwater: all these factors had implications for consumption and the engagement with material culture. Between the beginning of the 16th and the end of the 18th century, the material world, practices and habits of Swedish citizens underwent considerable shifts, though the dynamics and effects of these changes were not even. The court and aristocratic circles were quick to embrace and adopt diverse European fashions and ideas. One of these was the passion for furnishing private museums, collecting and displaying souvenirs, specimens of flora, fauna and curiosa from the near and far corners of the world. Colonial expansion and growing participation in trans-oceanic travel provided eager collectors with ever-growing supplies of marvellous objects for their collections. As argued by Jonas M. Nordin, these cabinets of curiosities were not innocent sites. Displaying one's own interests, knowledge and erudition through the coveted material culture of the world signalled, in symbolic and literal terms, one's own power and supremacy. The fashion for collecting exotic objects reflected and expressed in visible form the hegemonic European aristocratic worldview, which distinguished between the “self ” and the “other”.

It was not only collectables that the colonies supplied, however. An array of colonial and exotic commodities, such as tobacco, sugar and porcelain, made their way into Swedish households. These and other novelties established a visible presence in large towns located at the intersections of international trade, while their reception was often slower and more selective at locations further from commercial and cultural centres.

The material transformations experienced in early modern Sweden were reflections of the increasing connections with the culture and markets of continental Europe stimulated by the kingdom's rise on the political stage. This, in turn, required a certain level of cultural openness and a promotion of foreign influences. However, the adoption of novel materials and ideas depended on a willingness and desire among different groups in society to embrace the new. One can call this process a negotiated response to newness, which included acceptance, manipulation and reworking of new objects to fit established practices.