2021 is the 700th anniversary of the poet Dante Alighieri’s death in 1321. I celebrated this anno dantesco in the fall semester by teaching my Age of Dante course, an interdisciplinary offering that combines a history of medieval Italy with reading large portions of the Comedy.1 One of the topics we study is the commercial economy of the Italian communes, or city-states. The primary source anthology we use, The Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages, edited by Trevor Dean, includes a selection of documents on wool manufacture, an important facet of the economy of medieval cities like Dante’s Florence.
The documents Dean chose come from the Datini archive, which holds the records of Francesco Datini, a wealthy international merchant from Prato, a Tuscan city about twenty miles from Florence. Datini lived from ca. 1335-1410, so he’s a bit late for the age of Dante, but his archives are particularly rich, and wool manufacture didn’t change substantially between Dante’s time and his, so I felt justified in assigning these documents. In the passages printed in their anthology from Datini’s account books, students could see how many steps the process of wool-making involved and how decentralized it was, with the account books noting the amounts paid to individual carders and combers, spinners and weavers, dyers and finishers.2
Datini kept detailed and voluminous records of his various business interests, which included, in addition to wool manufacture, shopkeeping, banking, and import-export trade in such goods as cloth, arms, wheat, spices, and gems.3 Because he was often away on business, he corresponded with his wife, Margherita. And because he spent a lot of time at his premises in Florence, while she remained at home in Prato, letters could go quickly back and forth.
19th-century statue of Francesco Datini, in Prato.
Francesco and Margherita Datini had no children. In his will, he directed that his estate should be used to establish a charitable foundation to help the poor of Prato. He hoped this would help atone for any sins he might have committed in his business activities, especially usury. The foundation still exists. TheFondazione Casa Pia dei Ceppi is headquartered in Datini’s former home in Prato, the Palazzo Datini.
The Palazzo Datini in Prato.
I first became aware of the Datini archive in graduate school, when I read The Merchant of Prato, by Iris Origo, for my comps. This fall, when reading the wool industry documents with my class, I became curious about the history of the archive itself. I learned that all of Datini’s records and correspondence sat, ignored, in the Palazzo Datini for centuries until they were discovered in 1870. They are now part of the State Archive of Prato, also housed in the Palazzo Datini.
I’d love to know the full story of the 1870 discovery. Was it accidental or intentional? Did someone just trip over a box in the Palazzo Datini and say, I wonder what’s in here? Or did someone suspect that there might be interesting documents and go looking for them? In the “Introduction” to The Merchant of Prato, Iris Origo simply says, “in 1870 some learned citizens of Prato brought them to life.”4 In the bibliography, however, she names the discoverer as “an Archdeacon of Prato, Don Martino Benelli, a man of taste and scholarship.”5
I’ve been unable to find any more information about the circumstances of Benelli’s find.6 Given the date, and the fact that Origo described Benelli as a scholar, I suspect that the discovery was intentional. Nationalism was very prominent in the nineteenth century. One expression of nationalism was an interest in historical study, and several national archives and publication projects were established in the nineteenth century. For example, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, a series of published documents relating to Germany, began in 1819; Britain’s Public Record Office (now part of the National Archives) was founded in 1838; and the Archivio di Stato di Firenze was established in 1852. Nationalist feeling would have been especially high in 1870, when the final stages of both German and Italian unification were imminent, so I can easily imagine that a historically-minded archdeacon might think to see what he could find in the local Palazzo.
Italian economic historians began to draw on the Datini archive beginning in the early twentieth century. Then in 1957, Iris Origo, an Anglo-American writer living in Tuscany with her Italian husband, published The Merchant of Prato, a combination biography of Datini and social and economic history of fourteenth-century Italy based on sources from the Datini archive.7 Whereas earlier researchers had drawn on Datini’s business records to focus on his economic activities, Origo broadened her scope to include the extensive private correspondence between Francesco and Margherita, allowing her to explore domestic activities and family life.
Iris Origo herself had a fascinating life.8 She had a privileged background on both sides. Her father’s family, the Cuttings, were members of the Old New York aristocracy; they sound like they stepped out of the pages of an Edith Wharton novel (in fact, Wharton was a family friend). Iris’ paternal grandfather, William Bayard Cutting Sr., was a co-founder of the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Public Library. The Cutting country estate on Long Island, Westbrook, is now a state park. Iris’ mother’s Anglo-Irish family could have had their own storyline in Downton Abbey. Her maternal grandfather, Lord Desart, was an Irish peer. His daughter, Lady Sybil Cuffe, met William Bayard Cutting, Jr., while he was stationed in London as private secretary to the American ambassador. They married in 1901 and Iris, their only child, was born in 1902.
Iris’ father died of tuberculosis when she was only eight, and she and her mother settled in Italy, where they were part of the large British expatriate community. The Cuttings lived in the Villa Medici in Fiesole, in the hills just outside Florence. Yes, that Medici. The Villa was originally built in the 1450s; beginning in 1469, Lorenzo the Magnificent used it as his summer residence. It belonged to the Medici family until 1671. That’s where Iris grew up. Among her mother’s friends was Bernard Berenson, the Lithuanian-born American art dealer who almost single-handedly founded the study of Italian Renaissance art. Little Iris used to play in the gardens of his home, the Villa I Tatti, while her mother, Berenson, and his other guests discussed art and poetry. I Tatti is now owned by Harvard University and used as an institute for Renaissance studies.
Iris Cutting married Antonio Origo in 1924 and they bought a run-down estate south of Siena, La Foce, which they spent the next several years renovating. They made an effort to be good padroni, implementing agricultural improvements (aided by Mussolini’s agricultural policies) and building a school, medical clinic, and homes for their tenants, the mezzadri, or sharecroppers. During World War II, the Origos took in refugee children and aided the local partigiani, or anti-Fascist fighters. Iris Origo published the diary she kept during this period as War in Val d’Orcia. After the war she and Antonio repaired the wartime damage to La Foce and raised their two daughters, Donata and Benedetta (a son, Gianni, had died of meningitis in 1933). Iris Origo died in 1988; Benedetta now runsLa Foce as a country hotel.
Iris and Antonio Origo, with their daughter Donata.
In addition to the war diary and The Merchant of Prato, Origo wrote several other books: an autobiography9 and biographies of subjects drawn from medieval and Renaissance Italy10 as well as studies of nineteenth-century literary figures, both English and Italian.11 Iris Origo was not a professional historian, however. She was mostly educated at home, by governesses and tutors; she never taught at or even attended a university. She was what we would now call an independent scholar. You might even call her a scholarly dilettante.
I’m not ashamed to admit it—I love Christmas music. I love listening to it, singing it, and playing it. One of my favorite Christmas songs is “Gesù Bambino,” composed in 1917 by Pietro A. Yon. The song combines a beautiful melody in the form of a Pastorale (a dotted rhythm in six-eight or twelve-eight time) with the tune to Adeste Fideles. There are innumerable performances on youtube. Here’s Luciano Pavarotti singing the Italian version.
I am more familiar with the English lyrics, beginning “When blossoms flowered ‘mid the snows,” written by Frederick H. Martens. Here’s a performance by the Cathedral Singers.
Nowadays Pietro Yon might be considered a one-hit wonder, with “Gesù Bambino” being his one hit, but during his lifetime he was well-known as a virtuoso organist and composer, mostly of sacred music. Here’s a newsreel clip from 1930 showing him playing the organ at St Patrick’s Cathedral (he starts playing forty seconds in; sorry about the audio quality).
I recently discovered some unexpected family connections to Pietro Yon. My maternal grandmother, Josephine Valentino (whom we called “Nonni”), spent her last years in a nursing home. She had long expressed a desire to write the story of her life, and my father (her son-in-law) offered to help her. He would visit her once a week and tape record her reminiscences, transcribe them during the week, bring them to her on his next weekly visit for her review, and then start the cycle again. Working this way, they produced two volumes of memoirs, which he had duplicated and bound at a copy shop and sent to all the relatives. Producing these books, I think, was one of my grandmother’s proudest accomplishments.
Recently my son asked me a few questions about our family history, and to answer them I got out Nonni’s books. I hadn’t read them in a long time, and I found a few surprising things (look for later blog entries!). Nonni and my father chose some supplemental materials to go along with her text. These were mostly family photos, but in the section where she talked about her 1924 wedding at Sacred Heart church in Manhattan, my father transcribed newspaper accounts of the event. One of these articles listed some of the wedding guests, including, according to my father’s transcription, “Peter and Constantino Yon.” My first reaction upon reading this was, could that be Pietro Yon, the composer of Gesù Bambino? And if so, I wonder if it was the newspaper that called him “Peter” or if that was a transcription error on my father’s part?1 Next, I wondered if Pietro’s wife was named “Constantina” and if “Constantino” was a typo (again, either my father’s or the paper’s).
Some quick googling answered at least some of my questions. Pietro Yon was born in Italy in 1886 and came to the US in 1907. From 1907-1926 he was the organist at St Francis Xavier church in New York City, and from 1926 until his death in 1943 he was the organist at St Patrick’s Cathedral. At least the chronology and geography, therefore, are consistent with his attending my grandparents’ 1924 wedding in New York City. Yon’s wife was named Francesca, not Constantina, but it turned out that Constantino was the name of Pietro’s brother, also a church musician.2 Wikipedia also helpfully informed me that Pietro Yon’s birthplace was in the Piedmont region of Italy, which is the same region my grandmother came from (she emigrated to the US as a child in 1910). The obvious next step was to check Google Maps, where I discovered that Yon’s hometown, Settimo Vittone, is only a couple of miles from Borgofranco d’Ivrea, where my grandmother’s family lived.
Next piece of evidence: the photographs. Here’s a photo of Pietro Yon from the internet:
And here’s a photo taken at my grandparents’ wedding reception at the Hotel McAlpin:
I’d say the gentleman on the far left is Pietro Yon. I’m not sure if Constantino is in the photo, as I couldn’t find a good image of him for comparison. (As an aside, check out the pageboys, dressed as Little Lord Fauntleroy. There’s a wedding custom that probably would profit from further research.)
I think it’s fairly certain that Pietro Yon attended my grandparents’ wedding. But the question remains, what was the connection? How did he (and his brother) get on the guest list? It’s possible, given the closeness of Settimo Vittone and Borgofranco, that the families knew each other in the Old Country. Or perhaps they just moved in similar Italian-American circles in New York City. I like to imagine my grandmother’s stepfather, Carlo Boatti, encountering Pietro Yon at an event—perhaps a dinner at some Italian-American society—and recognizing his accent. Just like in canto ten of Dante’s Inferno, where Farinata degli Uberti hears the character Dante’s speech and calls out to him, “O Tosco” (“Hey, guy speaking Tuscan!”)3 Maybe Carlo Boatti called out, “O Piemontese!” I was unaware of this family connection to Pietro Yon while either my grandmother or my mother was alive, so I can’t ask them how our family knew the Yons. I guess I’ll never know.
Mount St Vincent is affiliated with the Sisters of Charity of New York, the same order who ran Holy Cross Academy for Young Ladies, the school attended by both my mother and grandmother. My mother, who graduated first in her class, was offered a full scholarship to Mount St Vincent, but she turned it down in favor of attending Hunter College, where she majored in music (another story for another blog entry). But if she had taken the scholarship, she might have studied under Constantino Yon. And to bring the connections full circle, the Sisters of Charity of New York are a branch of the order founded by Saint Elizabeth Seton, who left New York and settled in Emmitsburg, MD, where one of her other communities, the Daughters of Charity, have their Mother House right down the road from Mount St Mary’s University, also affectionately referred to as “The Mount,” and where I teach. And now I think I’ll go play “Gesù Bambino” on my violin.
Yesterday I made a brief Facebook post regarding an insight one of my students had during a discussion of Book II of Vergil’s Aeneid (the Fall of Troy). The account of the attack on Priam’s palace reminded him of the siege of Helm’s Deep in Tolkien’s The Two Towers. A friend of mine questioned my spelling of “Vergil” in the post. I assured him that I was correct and realized that this was a perfect opportunity for a blog post on Roman onomastics (the study of naming customs).
My friend thought that the correct spelling for the
name of the poet of the Aeneid is “Virgil.”
He’s not wrong: look at the cover of my (well-thumbed) copy of the Fitzgerald
translation of the Aeneid.
So why did I write “Vergil” and not “Virgil”? The
poet, of course, didn’t spell his name either of those ways. His full name was
Publius Vergilius Maro. But that just leads us to another question: why are we referring
to him by a shortened form of his middle name? Well, it’s not a middle name in
our understanding of the term—that is, the second of two personal names chosen
by our parents, and followed by our last name, which is the family name. The
name in the middle position of a 3-part Roman male name was not a personal name
chosen by one’s parents; it was part of the family name. In other words,
Publius Vergilius Maro’s father and brothers would also be named Firstname
Vergilius Maro, and not Firstname Middlename Maro.
Here’s how it worked. The name of a male Roman
typically had three parts:
The praenomen (first name)
Marcus
The nomen (clan or gens name):
Tullius
The cognomen (branch of the gens):
Cicero
There were so few praenomines available
that the Romans developed a set of standard abbreviations for them; these
abbreviations are found, for example, in inscriptions on Roman monuments. They
are also commonly used by modern writers. So we could refer to our poet as P.
Vergilius Maro, and there would be no doubt that we are talking about a
Publius. Here are all the praenomines
and their abbreviations (I tell my students that an ancient Roman baby name
book was a single page):
A.
Aulus
App.
Appius
C.
Caius or Gaius
Cn.
Cnaeus or Gnaeus
D.
Decimus
K.
Kaeso or Caeso
L.
Lucius
M.
Marcus
M’
Manius
Mam.
Mamercus
N.
Numerius
P.
Publius
Q.
Quintus
S. or Sex.
Sextus
Ser.
Servius
Sp.
Spurius
T.
Titus
Ti.
Tiberius
Notice that not only are there merely eighteen names to choose from, but some of them are just numbers: Quintus, Sextus, and Decimus (Fifth, Sixth, and Tenth)! I don’t know if those names were reserved for actual fifth, sixth, or tenth sons (or children); I also don’t know why the other numbers are missing.
A boy born after the death of his father was given the praenomen “Postumus.” Sometimes a second cognomen was added (later called an agnomen), especially in honor of military achievements: P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus (P. Cornelius Scipio, the conqueror of Africa). If a boy was adopted by another family, he would assume the new family’s nomen and cognomen; his original nomen would have the syllable “an” inserted in it (making it an adjective) and would become his agnomen. For example, when P. Aemilius Paullus was adopted by the Scipio family, his new name became P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus (the Aemilian Cornelius Scipio). Similarly, when C. Octavius was adopted by C. Julius Caesar, his new name became C. Julius Caesar Octavianus (the Octavian Julius Caesar). We commonly refer to him as “Octavian.” (Later, he was granted the agnomen “Augustus”).
If this is how male names worked, how about female names? Was there a corresponding list of female praenomines, and was P. Vergilius Maro’s mother known as Mrs. Vergilius Maro? No and no. Female Romans had only one name: the name of their father’s gens (his nomen) with a feminine ending. If a family had more than one daughter, they would be distinguished by maior (the elder) and minor (the younger). Roman women did not change their names at marriage. Here are some examples:
C. Julius Caesar’s daughter = Julia M. Tullius Cicero’s daughter = Tullia L. Aemilius Paullus’ daughter = Aemilia T. Livius’ daughter = Livia
Back to Vergilian spelling. One good indication that a particular Roman has had a prominent place in the western tradition is if his name has been anglicized. We don’t say “Q. Horatius Flaccus”; we say “Horace.” We don’t say “T. Livius”; we say “Livy.” We don’t say “P. Vergilius Maro”; we say “Vergil.” But that still doesn’t answer the question where “Virgil” came from.
The answer is that it comes from the Middle Ages. The poet of the Aeneid was especially revered during the Middle Ages, when his work was used for divination: a questioner would open the Aeneid at random and point to a line, whose significance would then be used to answer the question. This practice is known as the sortes Vergilianae (or Virgilianae). As a result, the poet got a reputation as having been a magician. The Latin word for “magic wand” was virga; hence, his name came to be spelled “Virgilius.” This was later anglicized as Virgil.
Today, both spellings are used and both are acceptable. I prefer “Vergil” because it’s closer to his original name. But if I were writing about medieval uses of the Aeneid (for example, in Dante’s Divine Comedy), I would probably spell it “Virgil.”
The only image I could find of Kate Turabian. It’s from the Univ. of Chicago Press website, so it’s presumably the best one they have.
One of the courses I teach regularly is an introductory course for History majors, entitled “Making History.” One of my responsibilities as instructor is to teach the students how to do documentation in historical writing, or, in a word, FOOTNOTES.
Wait, don’t stop reading. Footnotes are fun! The form of documentation conventionally used by professional historians is called “Chicago style,” after the Chicago Manual of Style, first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1906 and now in its 17th edition. One question I have not yet been able to answer is how it came about that the conventions created for the output of one particular university press came to be adopted by the historical profession as a whole. Other academic disciplines use documentation models sponsored by their respective professional organizations: Psychologists use APA style, as specified by the American Psychological Association; literary scholars use MLA style, regulated by the Modern Language Association. But although there is an AHA, the American Historical Association, there is nothing called “AHA style.”
Undergraduate history majors rarely purchase the Chicago Manual, however. Not only is it expensive—the current edition lists for $70—but it includes much more detail than they need for the kind of writing they’re doing. (I didn’t buy one until I was a PhD student.)
Instead, students typically use specially-written
handbooks that package the essential information into a more user-friendly
format. In Making History, for example, we use Mary Lynne Rampolla’s Pocket Guide to Writing in History. But
when our history majors get to the Senior Seminar, we have them purchase a more
serious, detailed, in-depth handbook. At that point, as they prepare to write
their Senior Research Thesis, they’re ready for . . . TURABIAN.
What’s a Turabian, you ask? It’s short for Kate L. Turabian’s Manual for Writers of Theses, Research Papers, and Dissertations. Like Cher or Madonna, Turabian requires only a single name to be immediately identifiable to the cognoscenti. I recall going to see a professor during office hours in the first history major course I took as an undergraduate, to ask for help in beginning the assigned research paper, and receiving the answer, in its entirety, “Turabian.”1
I was reminded of this conversation recently when I
was introducing Chicago-style footnotes to my Making History students. Although
we don’t buy Turabian in Making History, I thought it was important that they
at least know the term. Even undergraduate research journals, conferences, or
essay competitions might well specify “Turabian” without further elaboration.
Wanting to show my students the person behind the name, I did a little research. Fortunately, the Chicago Manual Online has a page devoted to the history of Turabian, both the person and the book. There I learned that she was born in Chicago in 1893, never attended college, but went to work as a department secretary at the University in 1925, becoming the thesis secretary in 1930.
The thesis secretary at a graduate institution is in some ways the most powerful person on campus. She (and it often was a she) inspects all master’s theses and doctoral dissertations to ensure that they conform to the university’s formatting guidelines, including margins, front matter (title page, acknowledgments, etc.) and documentation. Your professor might have already approved your work; your methodology might be groundbreaking, your conclusions insightful, your prose sparkling. But if the thesis secretary sees that your margins are too narrow or too wide, no degree for you until it’s fixed.2
To help students navigate this stressful process, in
1937 Kate Turabian produced a booklet summarizing the formatting guidelines for
Chicago style, so that Depression-era students didn’t have to buy the big
manual. Her pamphlet was first published in book form in 1955; it is now in its
9th edition.
Next I looked for some images to show the class, and was delighted to come across the cover of the 3rd edition, published in 1967. This is the one I remember using in college.3 Notice what’s on the cover—mostly pencils and pens of various types, most of the pens having nibs, and one curious-looking round object. Boomers like myself may be able to identify that as a typewriter eraser. This cover image says to me that “writers of term papers, theses, and dissertations” will literally be writing them by hand, and only as a final step producing a typescript (perhaps even hiring a typist).
Notice how the cover of the 4th edition, from 1973, has changed. It is still an assemblage of writers’ tools, still mostly writing implements, but now none of the pens have nibs, there’s a new-fangled marker, and instead of a typewriter eraser there are two spherical objects. These are type balls (known familiarly as “golf balls”) from an IBM Selectric typewriter, first introduced in 1973—which means that the cover is displaying what was then state-of-the-art technology.
The 5th edition, released in 1987, got rid of not only the pens but also the typewriter accessories. That round red object with the spokes is a daisy wheel from a daisy wheel printer. We’re in the computer age! Daisy wheel printers were used before the widespread introduction of laser printers to produce what was called “letter quality” output, that is, as good as what a typewriter could do. I printed my first cover letters for job applications using a daisy wheel printer.
Perhaps because daisy wheel printers were already headed towards obsolescence in 1987, beginning with the 6th edition the Manual for Writers dispensed with images altogether. But collectively, the 3rd through 5th edition covers are a fascinating look at the rapid revolutionary changes in writing technology over a period of just 20 years. I should point out, however, that while the fountain pen has disappeared from the cover of Turabian, I used one to draft this entry (and, in fact, my doctoral dissertation as well). Like vinyl records, the fountain pen is making a comeback!
Kate Turabian retired as thesis secretary at the University of Chicago in 1958, but she continued to work on updates of the manual; she died in 1987. The book is still published in her name, along with the names of the writers who have taken over the updates.4 According to a 2016 study of American college syllabi, Kate Turabian is the most assigned female author in college classes.
Kate Turabian’s New York Times obituary, October 26, 1987.
Now I want to know more about the history of the footnote itself.5 As the American Historical Association says, #everythinghasahistory. Research never ends!
Happy Beethoven Day! Have you made your plans yet for #Beethoven250? This will be a year-long celebration in 2020 to mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.
I got an early start on the festivities on Saturday, when I performed Beethoven’s Sonatina in F major at this semester’s recital for adult music students at Frederick Community College (FCC), where I study piano. Or did I? That is, I really performed it (from memory, I might add), but is it really by Beethoven?
Linda Benoit (left) and me, two adult piano students of John Wickelgren at the December 2019 recital at FCC. Linda has a private piano studio and plays advanced repertoire; I’m, well, a dilettante.
Soon after I started learning it, my teacher at FCC, Dr. John Wickelgren, casually mentioned one day, “This probably isn’t by Beethoven.”
I said, “What are you talking about? It says ‘Beethoven’
right there on the music.”
He explained, “It’s got an Anhang number. That’s the appendix to the Kinsky-Halm Beethoven
catalog. It means that the attribution is probably spurious.”
I asked, “On what grounds? What’s the evidence?”
He replied, “I don’t know. You’ll have to look in
Kinsky-Halm. I’m not even sure if that’s a hyphenated name or if it’s two different
people.”
RESEARCH PROJECT!!!
The Mount Saint Mary’s library didn’t have the Kinsky-Halm catalog, so while I was waiting for the Interlibrary Loan to arrive I tried to see what I could find out online. First of all, Kinsky and Halm were two people, Georg L. Kinsky and Hans Halm. Georg Kinsky (1882-1951), according to Grove Music Online, was a lecturer in musicology at the University of Cologne from 1921-1932, after which, his biography states ominously, “he worked privately.” The bio doesn’t say, but I assume he was Jewish, especially since it notes that he was sentenced to hard labor in 1944 (no further details). Kinsky survived the war and worked on the Beethoven catalog until his death in 1951. The catalog was completed by Hans Halm (1898-1965), the music librarian at the Munich State Library, and published in 1955 as Das Werk Beethovens / Thematisch-Bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner sämtlichen vollendeten Kompositions (Beethoven’s Works / Thematic-Bibliographic List of His Completed Compositions).
Once the catalog arrived, I eagerly looked to see what it said about my Sonatina. It’s one of a group of two, along with a Sonatina in G major. Both of them are staples of the intermediate piano repertoire. Neither has an opus number, which means they were not published by Beethoven during his lifetime.
Nor are the two Sonatinas listed among the Werke ohne Opuszahl(“WoO”), or “Works without opus number,” pieces that Kinsky determined were definitely by Beethoven but that remained unpublished during his lifetime. There are over 200 works in this category, some of them never or rarely performed but others quite well-known. The most famous of these is probably WoO 59, more commonly known as “Für Elise.”1 The two Sonatinas are in another category, the Anhang, or appendix. These are works that have been attributed to Beethoven, but the attribution is doubtful. The Sonatinas are Anhang 5, numbers 1 and 2.
Two questions need to be answered. First, how did the Sonatinas come to be attributed to Beethoven? Second, why is that attribution now considered to be spurious? In other words, why are they in the Anhang and not the WoO? The entry in Kinsky-Halm provides information to help answer both questions.2
In answer to the first, the Sonatinas were published under Beethoven’s name, during his lifetime, as early as 1807 (Beethoven died in 1827). The 1807 publication was by a publisher named Louis-Rudolphus, located in Altona (near Hamburg, in northern Germany). The title-page reads, “II SONATINES / pour le Piano-Forte / Composées par / L. van Beethoven. / Altona chéz Louis Rudolphus.”
In answer to the second, Beethoven had no known relationship with the publisher in Altona. Furthermore, no manuscripts of the Sonatinas survive, nor did Beethoven ever mention them in any of his writings. It appears that the publisher thought that the Beethoven name would sell sheet music, so he attached it to someone else’s composition, and the attribution stuck.3 If this is true, then two people were cheated: Beethoven, who never received a pfennig for the use of his name, and the unknown actual composer, whose two charming works have been performed for over 100 years without his receiving credit.
So it looks like the two Sonatinas that are typically the first Beethoven works a beginning pianist learns—even before “Für Elise Therese”—are not by Beethoven at all. And I’ve got to admit, they don’t actually sound very much like Beethoven. They’re lovely, but they have no particularly Beethovenian characteristics (like sforzandi, sudden strong accents in unexpected places). They sound like the works of a run-of-the-mill classical-era composer.
In classical and medieval studies, we have a way of referring to exactly the scenario I’ve described regarding the two Beethoven Sonatinas. If a work was at one time ascribed to a particular author (perhaps because of the subject matter, or because it was included in a manuscript with other works by that author), but further research has shown that it couldn’t have been by that person (typically on chronological or linguistic grounds), and there’s no evidence to determine who really wrote it, then the work is identified as being by “Pseudo-[name].” For example, one of the sources I used in my dissertation was an early-medieval theologian referred to as “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.” In my recently-concluded Ancient Greece class, we read a description of Athenian democracy originally attributed to Xenophon but now identified as “Pseudo-Xenophon.”4
I’ve never seen this usage applied in a musicological context, but I propose that it should be. Henceforth, the Sonatinas in F and G, Anhang 5 nos. 1 and 2, shall be identified as having been composed by “Pseudo-Beethoven.” You heard it here first.
BONUS: Here’san unusual performance of the F major Sonatina, by Tobias Koch, who added his own improvisatory flourishes.
Brian Tierney’s portrait as president of the American Catholic Historical Association, 1965.
I wrote this essay originally for a summer faculty seminar at Mount St Mary’s University held in 2007 on the American founding, directed by Dr Peter Dorsey of the English department. I learned most of the medieval material from the graduate seminars I took from Brian Tierney at Cornell: Francis of Assisi and the Franciscans, Church and State in the Middle Ages, Medieval Conciliarism, and Medieval Canon Law, as well as from his published works as specified in the notes. I publish it here as a tribute to him.
A Brian Tierney bookshelf.
In the preface to his 1927 book The Twelfth-Century Renaissance, Charles Homer Haskins wrote,
“The title of this book will appear to many to contain a flagrant contradiction. A renaissance in the twelfth century! Do not the Middle Ages, that epoch of ignorance, stagnation, and gloom, stand in the sharpest contrast to the light and progress and freedom of the Italian Renaissance which followed? How could there be a renaissance in the Middle Ages, when men had no eye for the joy and beauty and knowledge of this passing world, their gaze ever fixed on the terrors of the world to come?”
Haskins’ rhetorical questions apply equally to my subtitle. Medieval
Origins of the Declaration of Independence! Do not the Middle Ages, that epoch
of ignorance, stagnation, and gloom, stand in the sharpest contrast to the
light and progress and freedom of the Enlightenment? How could the Middle Ages
have anything to do with the Declaration of Independence, when medieval people
knew nothing of natural rights, government by consent, or a right of rebellion,
their gaze ever fixed on the terrors of the world to come?
Haskins justified his title this way: “The answer is that the continuity of history rejects such sharp and violent contrasts between successive periods, and that modern research shows us the Middle Ages less dark and less static, the Renaissance less bright and less sudden, than was once supposed.” 1 The historiographical movement Haskins represented has been termed “The Revolt of the Medievalists”; this is the historiographical tradition in which Brian Tierney worked. I would like to extend this revolt to tracing the medieval roots of the Declaration.
In an episode of the 1980’s sitcom Family Ties, Alex Keaton, played by Michael J. Fox, dreams that he is watching Thomas Jefferson (played by Alex’s father in the dream) draft the Declaration of Independence. In addition to proposing a few changes in wording (“try ‘self-evident,’ Mr. Jefferson”), Alex also suggests that he use “brown crinkly paper” to write it on. 2 The scene works because not only do we know what the Declaration is supposed to sound like—we know that it says “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” not “really obvious”—we know what it’s supposed to look like. And what it looks like is medieval.
Michael J. Fox as Alex Keaton encouraging Thomas Jefferson (his father Steven Keaton, played by Michael Gross) as he writes the Declaration of Independence.
Thomas Jefferson didn’t produce the famous version on the brown crinkly paper (actually parchment, which is also what medieval documents were written on); his handwritten draft survives, written in a surprisingly legible hand and with no special formatting. After the final text of the Declaration was approved on July 4, the Continental Congress directed that the text be “engrossed on parchment.”3 This task was undertaken by Timothy Matlack, assistant to Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Congress. 4 The layout of Matlack’s version follows point by point the layout of medieval papal documents.
Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence.
Here we see the familiar image of the official copy of the Declaration below a privilege issued by Pope Gregory IX in 1234. The languages and the scripts are different, of course, but otherwise the two documents look strikingly similar. Both highlight their opening words in larger letters that use a different script from the main body of the text. Both occasionally vary the script used in the body. Both have witnesses’ signatures, each of which is accompanied by a distinguishing flourish, arranged in vertical columns at the bottom of the page, with the main signatures (John Hancock and Pope Gregory IX) larger and in the center.
Above: a papal charter from 1234. Below: the Declaration of Independence.
Details of the signatures on the papal charter (above) and the Declaration (below).
I’m not suggesting, of course, that Timothy Matlack had a papal charter next to him when he dipped his quill into the ink to begin writing “In Congress.” My hypothesis is that the visual format of ecclesiastical documents influenced the look of royal documents, probably by means of clergymen working in royal chanceries—it’s no accident that “cleric” and “clerk” are the same word in Latin (clericus). Then I suspect that colonial charters followed the format of other royal documents, and the colonial charters influenced the look of the Declaration. Someday I’ll take the time to document this hypothesis (yet another retirement project!).
This same path was followed by several of the important
ideas in the Declaration. Concepts
developed in the church, especially by canon lawyers, were applied to secular
governments, including the kingdom of England, and then some of them crossed the Atlantic. These ideas include the existence of natural
rights, government by consent, and the right of rebellion.
Among the truths that the Declaration of Independence holds to be self-evident is that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson, clearly, is drawing on the early modern philosophical tradition of natural rights, especially as developed by John Locke (whose formulation was “life, liberty, and property”). But the early modern rights theorists were themselves drawing on a medieval tradition that began with the twelfth-century Decretists and really got going in the fourteenth-century disputes between the Franciscans and the papacy, a tradition that has been documented in the works of Brian Tierney and which I studied in his courses.
Gratian’s Decretum is a collection of canon law texts
compiled around 1140; it includes papal decrees, conciliar pronouncements, and
excerpts from the Church Fathers, all arranged topically. Many of the texts
contradict each other (the collection’s official title is Concordia Discordantium Canonum, or “Concordance of Discordant
Canons”), so canon lawyers immediately began to write commentaries that
explored the issued raised by these opposing texts. These commentators on the Decretum are called
Decretists.
One of the issues the twelfth-century Decretists debated in their commentaries was the origins of private property. The Decretum includes a text that states, “by natural law all things are common.” Human institutions are supposed to reflect natural law, so the Decretists needed somehow to account for the existence of private property. The Decretist Huguccio, for example, concluded that “common” (commune in Latin) meant “to be shared [communicanda] in time of necessity.” But otherwise, individuals had a right to their own property. 5
All the definitions, distinctions, and speculations of the Decretists regarding property were put to good use in the fourteenth-century Franciscan poverty disputes. For centuries Benedictine monks had given up all personal possessions when they joined the monastery, but the monastery as a whole owned plenty of property which the monks were able to share (their model was the early Christian community described in Acts 4:32-35, which “held everything in common”). In his attempt to follow the commandments of the Gospel literally, Francis of Assisi had embraced absolute poverty, enjoining his friars, as the formula had it, to own nothing “either individually or in common.” The problem is that it’s difficult to live that way, especially as the order grew larger and expanded its ministry. The working solution, established in the bull Ordinem vestrem issued in 1245 by Pope Innocent IV, was that buildings, furniture, books, clothing and so forth donated to the Franciscans would be owned by the church as a whole and just “used” by the Franciscans.
This compromise distinguishing between ownership and use was not acceptable to all the Franciscans, however. A splinter group, known as the Spirituals, saw this compromise as a corruption of Franciscan ideals (and therefore of the Gospel). They insisted on what they called “poor use”—it wasn’t enough simply to renounce legal ownership; one should actually live in poverty. The papacy saw the Spirituals as dangerous, because they could easily go from claiming to be holier than churchmen who lived in luxury to claiming that all property held by the church was illegitimate, because it was contrary to the absolute poverty of Christ and the Apostles.
The Spirituals’ position played into the hands of supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor against the temporal claims of the papacy. Faced with this threat, in 1323 Pope John XXII, in the bull Cum inter nonnullos, declared the belief that Christ and the Apostles were absolutely poor to be heretical. To justify the papal position, opponents of the Spirituals asserted a natural right to property. They argued that it is impossible to renounce this right (in other words, it is inalienable) because, while one might give up one’s possessions, one can never renounce the right to one’s own body or to items consumable in use (like food—how can you say you don’t own the food that you swallow and digest?). The rich tradition of medieval discussion of rights was passed on to the seventeenth-century theorists. 6
Another self-evident truth found in the Declaration of Independence is that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The idea that this consent could best be expressed by means of a representative assembly such as a Parliament developed in the Middle Ages. Eighteenth-century American Whigs frequently referred to the Magna Carta as one of the sources of their rights as Englishmen. Item twelve of Magna Carta states that the King agrees that “No scutage or aid [types of monetary contributions to the crown] may be levied in our kingdom without its general consent.” (This, of course, is the urtext for “No taxation without representation”).
But an additional source for the idea of consent comes not from common law but from canon law. Beginning around 1200, canonists began to cite a formula they found in Roman law (although in a completely different context 7), Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbetur, or “What touches all ought to be approved by all,” when referring first to the operation of ecclesiastical corporations (such as monasteries, religious orders or cathedral chapters) and then as a justification for church councils. 8
Soon the phrase began to appear in secular contexts as well. For example, in 1293, the government of the Florentine popolo issued a law code called the Ordinances of Justice whose first rubric echoes Quod omnes tangit: “that is agreed to be most perfect which . . . is approved by the judgment of all.” 9 Two years later, King Edward I of England issued a summons to Parliament that included these words: “a most just law, established by the careful providence of sacred princes, exhorts and decrees that what affects all, by all should be approved.” 10
When a government based on consent begins to act tyrannically, wrote Jefferson, the people have a right to rebel against it: “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.” This passage is another part of the Declaration that is usually considered to be Lockean. But again, medieval canonists also wrote about circumstances in which a people might remove their ruler. In the twelfth century, Decretists became concerned about what would happen if the pope were to be a heretic. This would be very dangerous, because a heretical pope could infect the faithful with his incorrect teachings and thereby jeopardize their eternal salvation. The Decretists concluded that the Church, as represented in a General Council, could depose a heretical pope. But some Decretists took their logic a bit further—what if the pope committed not heresy but some other serious sin? Given his position, wouldn’t that be just as bad? What if, for example, he were a fornicator? Huguccio imagines the situation:
“But I believe that it is the same in any notorious crime, that the pope can be accused and condemned if, being admonished, he is not willing to desist. What then? Behold, he steals publicly, he fornicates publicly, he keeps a concubine publicly, he has intercourse with her publicly in the church, near the altar or on it, and being admonished will not desist. Shall he not be accused? Shall he not be condemned? Is it not like heresy to scandalize the church in such a fashion?”11
Huguccio’s list of imaginary papal sins reminds me of the
crimes Jefferson attributed to George III. Huguccio
denied that a General Council could actually sit in judgment on a sinful pope,
because a pope can be judged by no one. Rather, because of his sins he was
incapable of being pope and therefore automatically deposed himself. The
Council simply “declared” that he had done so. Is that possibly what Jefferson
thought he was doing when he listed the king’s crimes as part of declaring
independence?
The twelfth-century canonists were thinking hypothetically, but in the late fourteenth-century a situation actually arose in which the pope appeared to be endangering the whole body of the church. During the Great Schism, which began in 1378, first two, then (after 1409) three men all claimed to be the legitimately elected pope and all of them refused any concession or compromise. Drawing on the ideas of Decretists like Huguccio, writers known as Conciliarists argued that in such a dire situation the whole church, as represented in a General Council, had a right to depose the schismatic popes. The first attempt to do so, the Council of Pisa, failed (that’s where the third pope came from), but the 1415 Council of Constance successfully asserted the powers of a General Council, deposed all three popes, and elected a new one.
The Conciliarists, however, went beyond the emergency situation; they believed that the church would be better off if General Councils met regularly, instead of only in a crisis, in hopes that crises would not develop. In other words, they believed in parliamentary government for the church. In 1417 the Council of Constance issued the decree Frequens, which stipulated that from then on General Councils should meet at regular intervals. 12
The Conciliarists, as you may have noticed, ultimately were not successful; the Catholic Church did not become a constitutional monarchy. But their writings were eagerly adapted by seventeenth-century English Parliamentarians during the English Civil War—wherever they read “Pope” they substituted “King,” and for “General Council” they substituted “Parliament.” The 1689 English Bill of Rights includes a provision “that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the laws, Parliaments ought to be held frequently.” This was clearly inspired partly by Charles I’s failure to summon Parliament between 1629 and 1640, but it is also a definite echo of Frequens.
Alan Gibson, in Interpreting
the Founding, characterizes J.G.A. Pocock’s republican approach to the
American founding as
“a sweeping narrative that traces the transmissions and transformations of the civic humanist tradition of political thought through three reconstructions: the first in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Florence (“The Machiavellian Moment”), the second in early modern England (“The Harringtonian Moment”), and a third in revolutionary America.” 13
I would like to suggest that Pocock’s “sweeping narrative” didn’t begin far enough back, and further that it is itself trapped in a sweeping narrative invented in the Renaissance and strengthened in the Enlightenment—the threefold periodization of the western tradition into ancient, medieval and modern. American history is modern history; it therefore by definition can’t be medieval. Brian Tierney, the historian who has done the most to uncover the medieval, and especially the canonical, roots of modern political ideas, has written that the history of constitutional thought can’t be understood “unless we consider the whole period from 1150 to 1650 as a single era of essentially continuous development.” 14
Or, to put it another way, perhaps we should consider the ideological origins of the American Revolution to begin, not with a Machiavellian, but a Huguccian Moment.
Brian Tierney with several of his former students in 2005, at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Foundations of Conciliar Theory.
One gorgeous summer afternoon a few years ago, while in Gettysburg, PA for a chamber music camp, I used our afternoon break from playing string quartets to visit the Gettysburg National Military Park and take some photos. I stopped the car at the most prominent monument I could see, which turned out to be the Pennsylvania Monument.
As I was walking around it looking for good photographic angles, I noticed how the summer sky was framed by the monument’s arch. “That’s beautiful,” I thought. “It looks just like a painting.” Then I realized, “Hold on—it looks like THE painting.” A quick search on my phone confirmed my suspicion. The Pennsylvania Monument is indeed very similar to the architectural setting of Raphael’s 1509 fresco The School of Athens, right down to the sky framed by the arch. (The other tourists visiting the Battlefield that day probably wondered why I was jumping up and down in excitement).
So, was The School of Athens the inspiration for
the design of the Pennsylvania Monument? The monument was commissioned in 1907
by the Pennsylvania state legislature; architect W. Liance Cottrell was awarded
the job. (Sculptor Samuel Murray, who studied with Thomas Eakins, got the
sculpture commission.) The monument was still incomplete when dedicated in 1910;
more money was appropriated and the finished memorial was rededicated on July
1, 1913, as part of the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Battle
of Gettysburg.
I have so far been unable
to find any evidence that Cottrell had Raphael’s fresco specifically in mind
when he designed the memorial to Pennsylvanians who fought at Gettysburg.
Cottrell was trained in the Beaux-Arts school of architecture, which made
extensive use of classical style. Raphael and Cottrell may simply have chosen the
same classical elements for their creations. But I like to imagine that
Cottrell tried to bring Raphael’s imaginary building to life on the field of
Gettysburg.
