History 211, Fall 98
Lecture 1
Introduction
The Course
The course consists of four interconnected components: lectures and readings, precept discussion, writing, and exams. The lectures don't need much discussion, except to say that I am returning to this material following a four-year hiatus. I have the main themes pretty well fixed, but I may still change my mind about specific topics as I go along. Don't let that disturb you; it means I'm thinking and learning along with you.
The Readings fall into two categories. The textbook is Western Civilization by Jackson Spielvogel, which by and large fits the structure of the course, although it does not match that structure entirely. We will read most of it at the rate of a chapter a week, with a few minor changes in order. The textbook serves the purposes of the course, rather than the other way around. The lectures reflect the structure of the course, and their coverage of the material will differ at times from that of the textbook -- not contradict (in general) but differ. The book will provide you with background information and with a roughly chronological survey. It contains, if you will, the context for the source readings and the raw material for the explorations and interpretations in the lectures. It may happen on occasion that what you read one week will be pertinent to lectures and precepts in another week. I'll let you know when that is happening in a major way. In any event, it should not disturb you, since you should be looking for those connections yourself.
The source readings follow the structure of the course more closely than the chapters in Spielvogel, and they will be the focus of precept discussions. There are three collections from which we will be drawing. Wiesner et al. is a collection of case studies, in which the authors set up the problem, present the relevant sources, and offer suggestions for discussion. Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West and the selections in the Packet simply set out the raw material. ICCW contains what have been termed the "great books" or the "great ideas" of western thought. The Packet contains sources of a less exalted sort but no less revelatory in their own way of the cultures that created them. All the source readings will need careful reading beforehand, and you will need them in front of you for reference during discussions. So, as heavy as ICCW may be, bring it with you to precept.
Spielvogel, Wiesner, and ICCW are available at the U-Store; the Packet should be purchased at Print-It, 12 Witherspoon Str. We have a large enrollment this semester, as you can see by looking around you. It is larger than expected by a third. That means two things. First, it may take time for the U-Store and Print-It to get hold of the extra books, so you may have to share books for a short time. That's not as bad as it sounds; on the contrary, you may find it a useful opportunity to meet someone new. Second, I would appreciate it if the auditors, especially the senior-citizens, would hold off from buying any of the books for the moment to give the regularly enrolled participants first crack at them.
Precepts are an essential part of this course, and for that reason so are the preceptors: Scott Bruce, Marilyn Cooper, Gabriel Finkelstein, Greg Lyon, and Jacob Soll. Precepts will meet twice each week, to provide ample opportunity to work closely with the sources from which history is created, to raise questions about the readings and lectures, to identify issues of historical importance, and to discuss and debate interpretations.
The success of a precept depends for the most part on the students in it. It will work well if the participants take responsibility for their own learning and share responsibility for the learning of their fellow students. Students who come to precept unprepared or who sit through precepts without participating hurt not only themselves but all the members of the group. In essence, unprepared students are not pulling their share of the load. You owe it to your fellow students to contribute the best of your thinking to their learning; that is why you and they chose Princeton in the first place.
You owe it to yourself as well. Most of you will be attending precepts throughout your working life. They will be called "conferences", "meetings", "strategy sessions", "seminars", "task forces, "commissions", and so on, but in essence they will come down to a group of people sitting down together to decide what the problem is and how to go about solving it. Your effectiveness in contibuting to that process will be the basis for the grades that really count in life, and they will come as much from your peers as your superiors. Precepts are an opportunity to develop the skills of analysis and oral discourse that make people effective in such settings.
Precepts will be graded on the basis of attendence and participation in discussion. The precept grade will constitute 30% of the final grade.
Precept meeting times are:
Mon/Wed 2:30, 3:30
Tues/Thurs 9:00, 11:00, 1:30, 7:00
Wed/Fri 10:00, 11:00
On the schedule forms that have been passed out, please put your name, class, phone (don't forget these items, especially your name; it happens) and indicate your choices of time in order. We have gone to extra effort to provide enough staff to keep the size of precepts down to 10. We will keep to that number. If you find it necessary --not merely convenient-- to change precept, please see Marilyn Cooper, and we will try to arrange a switch. But we am going to be tough about changes; they soon lead to real imbalances and we want to avoid that. Precepts will meet this week at the second scheduled time to give us a chance to get acquainted. Please try to read over the selection from St. Augustine by then. Precept assignments will be posted on the web site and on the bulletin board outside the History Office, 129 Dickinson.
As many of you know, History 211 is one of the writing courses, which means you will be doing a lot of it through the semester -- not at great length, but at frequent intervals. In this course, we consider writing a tool for thinking as much as a means of communication. A major reason for keeping precept sizes small is to allow us to work closely with you in developing your skills as a writer and in making your writing work for you rather than against you.
The essays will be short: 2-3 pages for all but the last, which will run 5-6 pages. But unless you're already a highly skilled writer, don't count on knocking them off the night before they're due. We're going to be reading them carefully, and on occasion we're going to discuss them in class. We belong to the "lean and mean" school of writing. We want you to write in ways that make every word count. That means that you must think carefully about what you want to say and how best to say it. To do so, you will have to think about the audience for whom you're writing (we'll vary that from essay to essay). How do you connect what you want to say with what they know? How do you determine what they know? (That gets us back to precepts, and learning how to listen and to ask questions aimed at finding out what other people think.)
First Essay
Fair warning: if you use a word processor, use the spelling checker that goes with it. Misspellings and typos will not be accepted in word-processed papers. If you don't use a word processor yet, I suggest you learn quickly; they're all over the place, and they can be effective tools for writing if you use them properly.
The essays will be graded, although not all individually. We're especially interested in your progress over the semester and will figure that into an overall writing grade, which will constitute 30% of the course grade.
The midterm and final examinations will be standard in-class exams covering the material of the course, and will count for 40% of the final grade.
In the time remaining, let me talk about the course in general and then get down to specifics.
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The subject of this course is Europe, which, though we refer to it as a continent, is really a peninsula on the western edge of Asia. At the beginning of the fourth century of the common era, most of Europe north of the Italian peninsula was a heavily forested, largely undeveloped, sparsely settled region inhabited by a variety of people who were primitive even by the standards of the day. Some were semi-nomadic, some had settled into agrarian life. Those in Britain and on the Continent west of the Rhine had been under the tenuous control of the Romans since the first century B.C. and had begun to adopt Roman ways, those along the Rhine served as mercenary guardians of that border, and those east of it lay in the path of newcomers squeezed into the narrowing European peninsula by upheavals in the great Asian heartland. Only where the Romans had settled, in Spain, Gaul, and Britain, could one find urban centers and long-distance trade between them (the Northmen were an exception). None of the indigenous cultures had developed a written language, nor employed any but the most rudimentary technology. |
Though we think of Italy as part of Europe today, Rome at the peak of her power lay at the northern and western edges of its empire. The Republic became an Empire with the conquest of Greeks, Carthage, Egypt, and the Levant. North Africa and Egypt served as Rome's granary, the Levant and Asia Minor were the heart of her commercial wealth. That is where the Empire devoted the bulk of its political and military energies, and that is where it sought to regroup its forces as its fortunes waned.
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From the fifth to the ninth centuries, despite recurrent revivals of the Empire's fortune, conditions declined to an even more primitive state as waves of aggressive tribes stormed into Europe, either to escape their neighbors to the east or to take advantage of a failing empire. Some, like the Visigoths, passed through or, like the Huns, returned to whence they had come. Others stayed, in particular the Franks, adding to the mix of cultures inhabiting the peninsula. War, famine, and disease carried off a large part of the original population, while the center of Roman civilization moved eastward toward the new capital of Constantinople -- or rather, the capital moved eastward toward what had long been the center of Mediterranean culture. Europe seemed to have little future, and the inhabitants who thought at all about their situation could only perceive decline from an earlier, greater age. |
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Now, jump forward eight centuries. By
the end of the seventeenth century, Europeans had
established strong nation states administered by central
bureaucracies. They had learned the arts of building
large stone structures and sophisticated mechanical
devices. They had sailed out to probe the world at large
and were beginning to establish world-wide networks of
trade and communication through which to exploit the new
sources of wealth they found there. They had created an
understanding of the nature of the world that opened the
universe at both the telescopic and the microscopic ends
and that promised ever greater technological control over
the physical world. Over the next two centuries,
Europeans would extend their power and influence over the
entire globe, and the rest of the world in turn would
increasingly measure itself by European standards,
learning European languages, adopting European
institutions, embracing European ideologies. In some quarters in the United States and Europe today, we are having second thoughts about that power and influence. But whatever value one places on European hegemony, it is a signal fact of history. Between 400 and 1700, Europe emerged as a distinct and autonomous culture, which thereafter spread throughout the world. How that culture evolved is the subject of this course. |
The catalog description speaks of "Europe from Antiquity to 1700", but that is something of a misnomer. There was no Europe in Antiquity. The civilizations we have in mind under the heading of "Antiquity", primarily Greece and Rome (and their relations with Egypt and Mesopotamia), were centered on the Mediterranean and the Levant (whereas Europe with its North American offspring eventually centered on the North Atlantic). The northern lands that the Romans, following the Greeks, called "Europe" lay at the periphery of their world, a place to seek military fame, political refuge, or wealth in land and raw materials. The people who inhabited Europe, both the original settlers and the later immigrants, had little part in the civilizations of Antiquity and were in no real sense their "inheritors" or even "successors", even when they thought they were. Through conquest and by default, the Europeans of the first millenium appropriated the Roman remains of the great ancient civilizations, while in the mid-7th century, the eastern and southern portion of the Empire fell under the aegis of Islam. The greater part of ancient civilization before Greece and Rome had already slipped into oblivion. Not until the nineteenth century would the written history of Egypt and Babylonia again be accessible to posterity, largely through the ingenuity of European scholars.
For that reason, we will avoid when feasible the common practice of referring to the first half of this course as the "Middle Ages". To do so buys into the Renaissance conceit that Europeans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were picking up the torch of civilization dropped by the Greeks and Romans and freeing it from the barbarian shade that had covered it in the interim, as if a line ran from Athens and Rome to Florence and Venice, interrupted by a barbarian hiatus. We embrace that notion whenever we refer to the "Dark Ages" (as if the sun never shone in Europe from 400 to 1400) and summon up Monty Python's image of monks chanting while smacking themselves in the forehead with 2x4s. What we lose thereby is an appreciation of the ingenuity and inventiveness with which the Europeans created institutions of government, law, society, and religion suited to the conditions of the time and subsequently modified those institutions as conditions changed. That is we fail to see how Europeans came to be Europeans. In matters that count, Europeans were not the successors of Rome; they may have borrowed from Rome, but they did it their way -- and in many essentials we today follow that way, e.g. in our legal and educational institutions, neither of which are classical in origin.
As we shall see, Renaissance thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries no sooner recovered classical learning than they discovered their distance from it. That is, understanding the classical past eventually meant appreciating that it was the past, and that the present was different, not only by being in another place at a later time but also by having accumulated more experience of the world. The real revolution in European thinking, namely the Scientific Revolution, occurred when writers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes (if you don't know who these people are now, don't worry; you will) relegated the Greek philosophers to the past and proclaimed the independent validity of their own experience in a world wider and more varied than anything the ancients had known.
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The World System in the 13th (Abu-Lughod) and 17th Centuries (Braudel)
What made that world wider and more varied were not only the vast empires to the far east, which Europeans knew about, both directly and indirectly, but of course an entirely New World to the west, unsuspected by all ancient writers and declared impossible by some. We will speak of the Europeans having "discovered" these lands, not because the lands and the people who lived there were somehow lost, but because they thus became part of the European consciousness, never to be separated from it. When the voyages started, Europe both wanted to exploit the world and had laid the foundations of the intrastructure needed to do it. Hence, when the Europeans came, they usually stayed in one way or the other, and neither side was quite the same again. Put another way, when you got "found" by the Europeans, you knew it.
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What distinguished Europeans from the
rest of the world by 1700 was another New World they had
discovered: the New World of the Heavens, which in turn
changed their world on earth. By 1700, they had created
the enterprise we know as modern science and had begun to
order their social, political, and economic practices by
its precepts. We cannot understand Europe without
exploring how and why this new view of the world came
about. Much of it is captured in this frontispiece from
Francis Bacon's Great Instauration, published in
1620, and you will be seeing the image again and again. I've been speaking of the Europeans as if they were one people with one culture. That may sound strange to anyone who looks at the map of Europe at any time in its history and finds the peninsula divided up into regions inhabited by people speaking different languages, following different customs, worshipping different gods. You don't have to travel far or long today to cross a linguistic or cultural border. Yet, beneath that variety lie commonalties born of having for a time shared one religion and spoken one common language of learning. And while customs may differ, the idea of basing law on custom has generated many common practices. |
As a result, many of the continuing differences among Europeans, especially their intellectual and doctrinal differences, are themselves peculiarly European. Again and again, other cultures did not know what the fuss was about. Jesuits and Dominicans, Protestant and Catholics, Copernicans and Ptolemaeans looked just about the same to people elsewhere in the world. To Peter the Great of Russia at the turn of the 18th century, Europe represented the modern West, a model for his nation. He built St. Petersburg in the European style as a window to the West, and there he established an Academy of Sciences as a symbol of his nation's aspiration to modernity. Yet, there was much that he failed to see, and it undermined his efforts.
To the rest of the world, Europeans looked the same, and they looked strange. That is how we would like them to look to you, whatever your own heritage. They should look strange for two reasons. First, as a writer named Leslie Hartley once put it, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." Second, European institutions represent one way of organizing experience. There are others. The question is not why others don't do it the European way, but why Europeans do it their way. We're going to be looking at their history as one approach toward answering the question.
The way to start is to remind ourselves of how strange they seemed to the Romans. They lived along and beyond the Roman frontier; they lived beyond the borders of the civilized world. Our main story begins when they came crashing through those borders at the beginning of the fifth century. But there is a crucial prologue, namely the spread of a new religion that would come to form a common bond between invaders and invaded and among the invaders themselves: Christianity. We'll take a look at it on Wednesday.
Terms Worth Knowing
Asia Minor
Francis Bacon
Carthage
Constantinople
Copernicans
René Descartes
Dominicans
Gaul
Huns
Jesuits
Leslie Hartley
Levant
Mediterranean
Mesopotamia
Peter the Great
Ptolemaeans
Renaissance
Rhine
Scientific Revolution
St. Petersburg
Visigoths