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Avarice in the late French Renaissance

Greed (avarice, avaritia) has never gone out of fashion. In every age, we find no shortage of candidates for the unenviable epithet, “avaricious.” Nowadays, investment bankers and tax-dodging multinationals head the list. In the past, money-lenders, tax collectors, and lawyers were routinely denounced, although there was a strong feeling that any person, male or female, could succumb to avarice if they did not take the appropriate moral precautions.

The late French Renaissance (c.1540–1615) provides telling evidence of such fears. This period has long been recognised by historians as an era of religious, political, and social turbulence in France. What is less well known is that amid these upheavals, France underwent its first major inflationary crisis. Financial hardship was a biting reality for many – but by no means all. Those who managed to get rich and better themselves without benefitting others were readily condemned as unjust profiteers. In an unruly age, avarice was believed to be everywhere. It was often alleged as the root cause of – or at least partially responsible for – rising prices, the relaxing of usury laws, pillaging during the Wars of Religion, nepotism at the royal court, and venality within the judiciary, Church, and financial institutions. Avarice was the bane of landowners seeking to run their estates fairly and profitably. And whilst it was regularly discussed in daily affairs, it was also recognised and even savoured as a timeless theme of literature and culture. As in the past, the miserly old man and the greedy courtesan made notable appearances in comic theatre and in the gender wars of the querelle des femmes. Yet this was merely the tip of the iceberg: literary engagement with avarice flourished in the late Renaissance across fictional prose narratives, dialogues, poetry, paradoxical encomia, and essays.

To understand the remarkable cultural breadth of avarice in early modern France, one might draw attention to the instrumental significance of the words avarice, avare, and avaricieux in shaping wider debates on gender, enrichment, and status. In recent years, language-based approaches to conceptual history have come into their own – witness the ground-breaking scholarship of Richard Newhauser (on avarice), Neil Kenny (on curiosity), and Richard Scholar (on the je-ne-sais-quoi), whose work has taken forward methodological innovations in the history of ideas stemming from Germanic Begriffsgeschichte as practised by the likes of Reinhart Koselleck. By approaching the subject of avarice through its period vocabulary and concepts, it is possible to engage simultaneously with different intellectual-historical perspectives. The relevance of the Christian tradition condemning idolatrous worship of riches may be ascertained alongside Greco-Roman moral teachings against excessive gain and deficient giving. But what also comes to light – particularly in writings by late Renaissance French jurists – is the odd departure from these traditions, in favour of downplaying the heinousness of avarice within a limited range of circumstances. Rhetorical re-description (as studied by Quentin Skinner) plays an important role here, as does personal experience. The likes of Michel de Montaigne and Antoine Hotman tentatively explored ways in which an avaricious disposition might be downgraded from mortal sin to something less corrosive: legitimate enrichment or prudent withholding of wealth, as exhibited by a bon mesnager (one who is good at “husbanding” or managing his personal resources).

Nevertheless, it is important not to overstate the extent of these daring departures from normative morality in late Renaissance France. In the medium term, stereotypical representations of avarice largely prevailed, as may be judged from Molière’s famous play, L’Avare (1668). If carefully scrutinized, Molière’s depiction of Harpagon in his miserly interactions with others reveals residual traces of late Renaissance discourses on gender, enrichment, and status. Collectively, these traces might be read as a ‘pre-history’ (to adopt Terence Cave’s term) of L’Avare. Yet, critically, one must also recognise that Molière largely bypasses an important mode of Renaissance thinking about avarice: an ability to distinguish extreme, caricatural avares from more ambivalent cases of allegedly greedy behaviour. Such thinking foreshadows – but only faintly – patterns identified by Albert Hirschman in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, whereby avaricious conduct lost its openly sinful edge. No French writer a hundred years earlier would go quite this far.

A final note to those interested in greed from a theological perspective. The position of avarice in intellectual history has frequently been deduced from scholarship on the Seven Deadly Sins (in the medieval period) or on the ‘Protestant Ethic’ (in the early modern period). Intriguingly, neither phenomenon greatly manifests itself in the humanistic texts of the late French Renaissance. Confessional differences in late Renaissance French writing on avarice are only marked in sermons and moral treatises. Yet much theological common ground may be identified here, whereas traces of the medieval heptad are scant (even in Catholic sources). If Catholics and Protestants saw greed in the other – and they certainly did – they also spoke through the same biblical commonplaces to denounce the wider social damage and moral corruption attributed to l’avarice, the common enemy of peace and godly prosperity. In the twentieth century it became academic orthodoxy to restate Max Weber’s views that the Protestant tradition eventually legitimated material prosperity to the point of moral leniency towards an overtly money-making disposition formerly denounced as avarice. Yet in the French Renaissance, at least, there are few indicators to uphold such a theory rigorously. Regarding the French context, one should note, therefore, that those who went furthest from traditional views on avarice – namely Antoine Hotman and Michel de Montaigne – were Catholics, not Protestants. In light of these findings, it is worth reiterating the need for caution when reflecting on the history of avarice vis-à-vis theological identity and social practice.

Image Credit: “Avaritia (Mosaic, Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourviere).” Photo by Rartat. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Why are missionaries in America?

“Why are there missionaries in America? This is a Christian country!”


“We send missionaries out. We don’t bring them in.”


“Missionaries in America… I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

These were some of the comments I encountered as I conducted research on the phenomena of missionaries in America. Despite these protests, missionaries from outside of the West do come to the United States, seeking to revitalize and evangelize Americans. Listed below, I provide seven reasons for why missionaries—particularly those from countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—are sharing the gospel in “God’s country.”

(1)   “We did not come to just enjoy eating beef and butter.”

However they may have entered the United States, there are many theologically conservative and devoted immigrant evangelicals in America that view themselves as a “chosen” people with a divine mission. They believe that they should not just enjoy their lives in America eating “beef and butter” and socializing only with other immigrants in ethnic enclaves. Instead, they should strike out and be the “salt and light” of America and evangelize both locally and internationally.

(2)   The United States is the “Great Nation”.

The United States is a top destination for emigrants. It is also a prime destination for self-supporting “lay” missionaries. The factors that draw immigrants to the United States also draw missionaries to America. When asked why missionaries are in America, one of the directors of a large “reverse” mission church explained: “If you are looking for an answer other than spiritual reasons . . . there are various reasons like children’s education, the desire to see the world’s best country, the wealthiest country . . . Almost everyone wants to come to America.” Everyone wants to be in the “great nation,” including missionaries.

(3)   The United States is the “Modern Rome”.

Missionaries do not come to America just because it is a “great nation” for immigrants, but also because it is the “modern Rome,” the most powerful nation in the world. Centering one’s mission work in the most powerful nation in the world is simply strategic. The United States is the superpower and therefore a logical base for launching a world mission movement. Once you make it in America as a mission movement, you can also make it elsewhere. You have more power, prestige, and legitimacy if you base your mission movement in the “modern Rome” of our world.

(4)   Evangelize America, evangelize the world.

Living in the global nation of nations, missionaries in America don’t have to go far to participate in world missions. The world is at their doorstep. If they evangelize in America, they can reach people from all four corners of the world, including China and Muslim nations. The United States is therefore a most important mission field.

(5)   The United States is a “Christian” nation in trouble.

Missionaries in America view the United States as a “Christian” nation in trouble. America has lost its spiritual fire with growing materialism, secularism, humanism, and sexual immorality. It is no longer a “city on a hill” or a “beacon of light,” and may even become like the now secular and “dark continent” of Europe. Although the United States is a predominately Christian and a dominant missionary-sending nation, it is framed as a nation that has lost its foothold as a leading Christian influence. Its churches are great in number, but they are weak in “Spirit.” Missionaries are therefore needed to bring spiritual revival in America.

(6)   Create a positive “spiritual trickle-down” effect for world Christianity.

In the world of spiritual warfare, all of Christianity would be in jeopardy if the United States fell as a dominant Christian nation. If, however, the United States is resuscitated and exerts its power as a leading “beacon of light,” there will be a positive “spiritual trickle-down” effect for all Christians of the world. The United States is a most important spiritual territory that missionaries must safeguard for Christianity to be the dominant world religion.

(7)   How can you be a history maker? Save the history makers.

What happens if people from the formerly colonized and less powerful nations send missionaries back to the western nations that have been the dominant imperial and missionary-sending nations of the last few centuries? What happens if you save the people of the United States, the superpower nation that has been the modern history-making country? You and your country can be history makers as well. If you save the history maker, you can be a history maker and thereby become a spiritual conqueror on the world stage.

Headline image credit: Cross. CC0 via Pixabay.

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On the dark side of devoutness

The unbelievable story of the Roman convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome is about crime and murder, feigned holiness, forbidden sexuality, and the abuse of power over others. Does this controversial story, which casts high dignitaries of the 19th century Catholic Church in a less than flattering light, need to be retold for the 21st century?

The answer is: absolutely. It is a mere stroke of luck for Church historical research that the well-hidden files from the Inquisition trial have been unearthed in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

What happened to the German Princess Katharina von Hohenlohe at the place of her yearning, a contemplative convent in Rome, is most probably an isolated case: the young novice mistress Maria Luisa feigned to have visions and to work miracles in order to manipulate her surroundings and to satisfy her needs. Supported by various accomplices and protected by mighty men she swept her opponents out of her way – literally under the pope’s eyes.

The files provide evidence of how dangerous exaggerated piety and blind obedience can be, producing a disastrous combination of power, sex, and false holiness within the Roman convent of Sant’Ambrogio.

The nuns were deemed to be “buried alive”; shielded from the outer world that was perceived as threatening by superiors who demanded strict obedience. However, the nuns of the convent weren’t dumb and the supposed saint, Maria Luisa, was always confronted with antagonists. Ultimately, however, she managed to cover up even her worst crimes with outrageous lies about the devil in human form, letters written by the Virgin Mary, and divine punishments. She established a perfidious system that brought unpopular young nuns to the point of praying for their own death. The confessors were no critical authority at all – on the contrary, they themselves were Maria Luisa’s greatest admirers. However the history of Sant’Ambrogio is full of surprises: in the end, Maria Luisa, for instance, appears as the distressed victim of a system that she herself had perfected, and the Roman Inquisition proves to be comparably mild despite its ill fame.

The Sistine Hall, commissioned by pope Sixtus V in the end of the 16th century. Originally part of the Vatican Library, now used by the Vatican Museums. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But how did a false saint manage to turn the heads of half of the curia? In order to understand how Maria Luisa achieved this, it must be considered in its context in 19th century Rome. Maria Luisa would have never got away with her lies if she was not part of an environment that wanted to believe her at all costs. The atmosphere in the Vatican was heavy with anxiety, as Pope Pius IX had long lost the support of broad circles of the population and rightly feared he might lose power in the Church state. In 1848, he was forced to flee the Revolution and go into exile. The pope himself increasingly sought refuge in a naïve childish faith. He was convinced that the Mother of God had saved him from drowning when he was a child and that one day she would descend from heaven in order to defend the Church state with the angelic hosts. Simply put, he and those around him wistfully longed for miracles.

The Sant’Ambrogio scandal reveals the dark side of this superficially pious environment, and it put an indelible stain on the history of the Catholic Church that can still be seen today. This is because Pope Pius IX and his predecessors were involved in the scandal of Sant’Ambrogio. Maria Luisa was very close to some figures connected to Neo-scholasticism, the predominant theological orientation at the time, and to the most eminent fathers of the First Vatican Council, which proclaimed the controversial dogmas of the infallibility of the pope and of his primacy of jurisdiction. The story of the convent in scandal tells a lot about the dialectics of enlightened modernity: it is about canting zealots put on the defensive and their longing for a newly enchanted world, in which saints proclaim simple truths, good and evil are easily discernible, the end justifies the means, and in which there always is hope for a miracle. Furthermore, Maria Luisa’s power strategies tell much about the role of women in the Catholic Church of the time, which was clearly dominated by the clergy.

Not even in the 19th century was the Catholic Church as monolithic as it appears from anticlerical clichés. The adherents of mysticism as well as the supporters of rationalism contended for influence in the Vatican. On a church-political level they pursued different strategies; the ultramontane adherents of anti-modernism were confronted with the moderate liberals. The Inquisition trial became a struggle for power between the two most important parties in the Curia; the basic conflict in the background is recognizable if put under a microscope.

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Listening on the edge

This week, we’re excited to bring you another podcast, featuring Mark Cave, Stephen M. Sloan, and Managing Editor Troy Reeves. Cave and Sloan are the editors of a recently published book, Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis, which includes stories of practicing oral history in traumatic situations from around the world. Here, they discuss the process of putting the book together, the healing potential of oral history, and the ways oral historians can take care of themselves when recording difficult interviews. Enjoy the interview, and send us your proposals if you’d like to share your work with the OHR blog.

Image Credit: Refugees from DR Congo board a UNHCR truck in Rwanda. Photo by Graham Holliday. CC by NC 2.0 via Flickr. 

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Ethical issues in developing scales for biomedical research

When we think of ethical issues in biomedical research (if we think of them at all), what usually comes to mind are either egregious breaches, such as the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, in which treatment was kept from rural black men in order to investigate the natural history of this treatable disease, or questions such as whether it is proper to use prisoners as subjects in early drug testing trials. It’s usually assumed that studies done for the purposes of developing and validating paper-and-pencil scales are immune from ethical concerns; after all, what problems could possibly arise in giving people a scale to complete? While it’s true that life and death issues are rarely present, there are in fact situations that can lead to ethical challenges. Let’s look at a few of them.

1. As part of the development of a scale of marital satisfaction, you administer the questionnaires to couples. Some of the items ask whether the person has ever had an extramarital affair. Needless to say, you assured participants that their responses would remain confidential. However, a few years later, one of the couples is going through a nasty divorce, and the lawyer for the husband has subpoenaed the wife’s questionnaire to use as evidence. Does the legal order trump your pledge of confidentiality?

2. You are trying to develop a new scale of suicidal ideation. The score for one adolescent is much higher than those of others in the sample. However, the scale has not yet been fully validated. Should you act on your concerns? If so, whom should you notify — the child, the parents, the family physician, someone else?

3. You are designing a test to measure motor coordination in children, which involves a number of tasks related to balance, ball-handling skills, and fine motor coordination, such as tracing with a pen and threading beads onto a string. The test is difficult for children with poor motor coordination and can cause anxiety, anger, and frustration. What should you do — not include such children in the development phase (which would jeopardize the norms), warn them ahead of time (which may affect their performance), counsel them afterwards, or switch to a different profession?

Researchers review documents. National Cancer Institute. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

4. Your aim is to develop a measure of self-esteem. In order to validate it, you design a study that involves assessing two groups of students before and after they make an oral presentation. Participants in the first group are told that they did very well, while those in the other group are told that they had done very badly and had made fools of themselves; this “feedback” was determined ahead of time and wasn’t dependent on their actual performance. Moreover, the students were enrolled in an Introductory Psychology class, and had to participate in three studies as part of the course requirements. Should this study be done? If so, what safeguards need to be in place? Are there concerns about requiring students to be participants in studies?

5. You have developed a new scale of parenting ability. It appears to show that those from a specific minority group have much poorer skills. Should you continue with the development of the questionnaire?

6. In order to develop a test of abstract reasoning ability, it is necessary to administer it to people ranging in age from five to 75 years, and to patients who may exhibit problems in this area, such as schizophrenics and those with brain injuries. What does it mean to get “informed consent” from people whose judgement may be compromised by age or psychiatric condition?

These situations raise a number of ethical issues — confidentiality, the duty to warn, the effects of the testing on the psychological well-being of the participants, the use of deception, the social consequences of the test results, and what “free and informed consent” means in actual practice. The perceptive reader will also note that we have been very good at raising questions about ethical concerns, but haven’t resolved any of them. In large measure, this is because there aren’t black-and-white answers, but only competing demands that must be balanced against one another and, in some areas, broad and evolving guidelines. For example, the first draft of Canada’s Tri-Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans specifically forbade the use of deception in research. However, social scientists protested, stating that some valuable research would become impossible to conduct. As a consequence, the latest version does allow it, but mandates various procedures to protect the wellbeing of the participants. Also, there are guidelines that are usually followed when enrolling people who, because of intellectual or developmental problems, are unable to give consent for themselves (e.g., having a substitute decision maker). However, these often vary from one jurisdiction to another, and even among research ethics boards within the same state or province (not the most desirable of situations for multi-site projects).

The bottom line is that ethical issues do exist in the course of developing scales, and researchers need to be aware of the areas where problems may arise. When in doubt, talk to the ethics board of your institution before the study begins, so that they can be identified and hopefully prevented.

Header image: Filling out a survey for Rainbow Health Initiative by twodolla. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Using religious repression to preserve nondemocratic rule

Religious repression—the nonviolent suppression of civil and political rights associated with religion—is a growing and global phenomenon. Though it is most often practiced in authoritarian countries, it nevertheless varies greatly across nondemocratic regimes. In my work, I’ve collected data from more than 100 nondemocratic states to explore the varieties of repression that they impose on religious expression, association, and political activities, describing the obstacles these actions present for democratization, pluralism, and the development of an independent civil society.

The nondemocratic countries of the world can be divided into four categories based on the number of religious groups they target with religious repression (All, All But One, Some, and None). Knowing how many and which groups states target helps us to understand how rulers in countries with different levels of political competition and religious divisions use regulations on religion to repress, co-opt, and prevent potential political opposition from challenging their rule.

The color-coded map below shows the degree to which nondemocratic countries repress religions. Click on the larger markers with a symbol for more detail on that particular country.

Featured image credit: Photo by Saint-Petersburg Orthodox Theological Academy. CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

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Conscience in the contemporary world

Debates about conscience arise constantly in national and international news. Appropriately so, because these debates provide a vital continuing forum about issues of ethical conduct in our time.

A recent and heated debate in the United States concerns the killing of an unarmed African American youth named Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Questioned by a reporter after learning that he would not be indicted by a grand jury after the shooting, Wilson declared himself untroubled by matters of conscience, explaining that “The reason I have a clean conscience is because I know I did my job right.” In reply, Brown family lawyer Benjamin Crump stated that “It was very hurtful to the parents when he said he had a clear conscience. They were taken aback…. I expected him to say my heart is heavy, my conscience is troubled. He didn’t say that.” Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden added of the shooting, in which officer Wilson fired six bullets into Brown’s body, “His conscience is clear? How could your conscience be clear after killing somebody even if it was an accidental death?”

At large in this disagreement are two different and contending understandings of conscience. In the police officer’s view, conscience is an external matter, involving adherence to the code and norms of one’s peers and profession; in this case, a matter of doing one’s job correctly, performing one’s duty as dictated by training and the values of fellow officers. In the family’s view, conscience is an internal matter, involving personal and subjective decisions about right and wrong.

This is a recurring debate, as old as conscience itself. Is conscience a private matter of individual ethics or is it a public trust defined by civil codes and collective agreements about duty and responsibility? Sometimes the answer seems rather evident. Arguments about “duty” and “following orders” were brushed aside at the Nuremberg Trials, and few disagree with the verdict. At other times, though, the issue is more closely contested. When Martin Luther pled the anti-institutional promptings of his personal conscience (“This I believe . . .”) before the Diet at Worms, and prosecutor Johann Eck countered with the contrary conclusions of Catholic theology, opinion divided according to the beliefs and loyalties of the beholders.

The very etymology of “conscience” registers its division. The Latin conscientia consists of two elements: scientia (knowledge or awareness, which may be personal in nature) modified by con (meaning “together” or “together with” suggesting that this knowledge should be shared or collective in nature). Conscience thus operates both internally and externally, as knowledge at once personal and shared, sitting at the very boundaries of the self.

This ambiguity was evident in conscience’s first full-dress appearance on the Western European stage. Augustine, in his Confessions, describes a chiding visit from his own conscience (conscientia mea), speaking to him in a voice which is and is not his own, critiquing his irresolute state of mind about the matter of Christian conversion, but also citing the public example of others who have already converted. Augustine’s conscience achieves a balance, between the highly personal on the one hand and more collective decision-making on the other. But we’re not all as subtle as Augustine.

Memorial to Michael Brown. Photo by Jamelle Bouie. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The location of conscience has shifted from inner to outer and back again, throughout its long history. In the Middle Ages, conscience was normally treated as a collective matter, a set of norms or beliefs held in common by all persons.With the Reformation and the fragmentation of religious belief, the idea of a personal conscience–of “my conscience” and “your conscience”–surged to the fore, especially in vigorously Protestant circles. Then, with a general moderation of Christian belief in the Enlightenment, came a revival of collective conscience, a view that certain norms were shared by all reasonable persons. Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant located conscience in the person of an impartial and objective observer, standing outside the self and speaking from the standpoint of a broader social platform.

These disagreements will never be resolved. Some parties will always situate conscience in community values or professional codes of practice, even as others treat it as an inner capacity or inviolable personal resource. The question is, are these disagreements to be taken as signs of conscience’s weakness or the source of its strength? After wrestling with these questions in the course of writing my Very Short Introduction, I’ve come to the conclusion that, yes, conscience is inherently ambiguous and may be viewed in this respect as imperfect. But that its ambiguity is also the key to its unprecedented survival, its continuing relevance to seemingly incompatible belief systems. A robust view of conscience must embrace both aspects: conscience as general consensus and conscience as personal code: conscience as public duty but also conscience as personal responsibility.

My purpose here isn’t to retry the Michael Brown case, but to think about what the standpoint of conscience brings to the discussion. A robust definition of conscience must embrace its long and rich history; it must, that is, include a sense of its internal as well as its external claims. Just “doing one’s duty” isn’t enough; Michael Brown’s family is correct in its belief that the taking of a life under any circumstances should involve some perturbations of personal conscience.

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The Oxford Comment – Episode 19 – Sugar and Sweets

Hey everyone! After a long hiatus, we’re excited to announce the re-launch of The Oxford Comment, a podcast originally created by OUP’s very own Lauren Appelwick and Michelle Rafferty in September 2010. From the drinking habits of the Founding Fathers to Cab Calloway, we’ve talked to people about every hot-button issue under the sun.

In this month’s episode, Max Sinsheimer, a Trade & Reference Editor at the New York office, chats with a few contributors to The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets discuss their work on the historical, chemical, technical, social, cultural, and linguistic aspects of sweetness.

Headline image credit: Cream puffs. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Salamone Rossi and the pressure to convert

Grove Music Online presents this multi-part series by Don Harrán, Artur Rubinstein Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the life of Jewish musician Salamone Rossi on the anniversary of his birth in 1570. Professor Harrán considers three major questions: Salamone Rossi as a Jew among Jews; Rossi as a Jew among Christians; and the conclusions to be drawn from both. Previous installments include “Salamone Rossi, Jewish musician in Renaissance Mantua”; “Salamone Rossi as a Jew among Jews”; and “Salamone Rossi as a Jew among Gentiles”.

Near to Salamone Rossi’s time, and working at the Mantuan court, is the harpist Abramino dall’Arpa. His story illustrates the unrelenting pressure brought on Jews to convert and, at the same time, Abramino’s refusal to do so. One reads, for example, that in 1582 Abramino and his son were convened to meet with a “master of theology,” but they didn’t show up, escaping to Ferrara. The authorities intensified their efforts. In June 1587 the singer Giovanni Andrea Robbiato, on the way back to Mantua with Abramino as his travel companion, is said to have explained to him that the “Christian religion … was the best and the only one to be practiced, superseding what Jews profess,” but Abramino “did not agree, even though he appeared to listen.” After arriving in Mantua, Robbiato took Abramino to the church of Santa Barbara to see the baptism of the duke’s grandson, and “Abramino appeared to be pleased with the ceremonies.” A monk clarified to him “the substance of the said sacrament of the Holy Baptism, explaining it by comparison with circumcision,” yet Abramino remained silent. Rumors of the incident immediately spread to the Jewish community, and in the evening Abramino’s uncle together with the rabbi Judah Moscato came to talk sense into him (Robbiato “approached to hear what they were saying, but they spoke Hebrew to keep him from understanding them”).

The Christians kept up their coercive endeavor, while at the same time the Jews urged Abramino to “continue in the Hebrew faith and not give ear to words spoken to him about becoming a Christian.” Infuriated, Duke Guglielmo ordered Abramino and the interfering Jews to be arrested and separately examined to determine once and for all what the musician’s intentions were. Did Abramino yield to the pressure? Apparently not, for five years later (1593, the last date we have for him) he is addressed as ebreo.

Similar pressure was probably brought on Rossi. He too resisted. But he didn’t resist the secularization of his music; his Italian vocal and his instrumental works follow the conventions of late Renaissance composition as practiced by Christians. Or do they? Is there anything about his works that, despite their otherwise Renaissance appearance, might be described as “Jewish”? Indeed, what is musically “Jewish”?

If anything “Jewish” can be detected in his vocal music, it is in the way Rossi fits his music to the words. For Rossi, music was subservient to the structural and affective demands of the text. But Rossi’s way of having the text dominate the music is by highlighting words through a plain, unobtrusive setting, as familiar perhaps from music in the synagogue, in particular the cantillation of Scriptures in which melodies don’t compete with the text. So what is Italian? What is Jewish? Only once, toward the end of his career, did Rossi allow the music to “compete” with the text in importance, in his Madrigaletti for two voices and basso continuo from 1628.

As a parallel question, one might ask: is there anything particularly Jewish about his instrumental works? Instrumental music didn’t win the approval of the rabbis, for it escaped the control of words and was often used in banqueting. The rabbis maintained that with the destruction of the Temple it was wrong to play instruments until the Messiah reinstated them by returning the Jews to Zion. Even so, instrumental music was recognized by the Jews as an expedient for spiritual elevation. Elisha, the prophet, is said to have requested a minstrel to come and awaken his powers of prophecy (in 2 Kings 3:15 one reads that when the minstrel played the power of the Lord came upon him).

For Rossi instrumental music was a natural vehicle of expression. In his instrumental works he wasn’t hampered by the semantic restrictions of words, rather he could forge his works as he desired. Not only that, but through his instrumental music he established his reputation at the court. Rossi was the only composer of instrumental music in Mantua, publishing four collections of instrumental works.

It was in his third collection of instrumental music, from 1613, that Rossi developed a more demanding, indeed virtuoso mode of expression. Rossi opened his third book of instrumental works with a sonata in a “modern” style (“Sonata prima detta la moderna”) and continues in this style with the remaining items in the collection, as in “Sonata terza sopra l’Aria della Romanesca”.

Rossi’s new approach to instrumental writing in this book directed him to try a new approach to vocal writing, as is clear from his last collection, the madrigaletti, which, in their style of writing, are truly “modern”. Whether these novel instrumental and vocal works improved Rossi’s situation in the court cannot be said. Perhaps they did, though as evidence to the contrary it might be recalled that in the years after 1613 Rossi turned his attention to composing Hebrew works. There he was under no pressure to be “modern”. The very notion of writing music to Hebrew according to the conventions of art music was, for a Jewish audience, itself “modern”. Here is another work from the “Songs by Solomon,” no. 29, “Adon ‘olam” (for eight voices).

Figure 7. “Adon ‘olam,” a hymn sung at the close of the Evening Service on the Sabbath and Rosh Ha-Shanah and often at the beginning of the Morning Service on weekdays and the Sabbath. From השירים אשר לשלמה (The Songs by Solomon, 1623), no. 29 for eight voices; after Salamone Rossi, Complete Works, ed. Don Harrán (Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 100), vols. 1–12 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart: Hänssler-Verlag for the American Institute of Musicology), vols. 13a and 13b (Madison WI: American Institute of Musicology, 1995), 13b: 178–84.

 

Headline image credit: Opening of Salomone de Rossi’s Madrigaletti, Venice, 1628. Photo of Exhibit at the Diaspora Museum, Tel Aviv. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Pussy Riot’s real crime was feminism

In February 2012 a group of young women wearing balaclavas went into Moscow’s most grandiose Russian Orthodox cathedral and sang about 40 seconds of an anti-Putin song they’d written, before being bodily removed from the premises. Pussy Riot quickly became a household name. The chorus of their “Punk Prayer” prevailed upon the Virgin Mary to kick Putin out of power, and included the line: “Shit, shit, holy shit.” That night, they mixed the footage into a longer version of the song and put it up on the web, where it went viral. Three of the group were caught and jailed a few weeks later. Ekaterina Samutsevich appealed her sentence successfully and was released on probation in October of that year, while Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina remained imprisoned. Having become an international cause celebre for freedom of speech, the two were released two months ahead of schedule in December 2013, in advance of the Sochi Olympics.

The Russian judge in Pussy Riot’s trial had condemned them to jail for two years for committing the crime of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred“. In short, they were sentenced for an ostensible hate crime against Russian Orthodoxy. What is not well known, however, is that in her sentence Judge Marina Syrova claimed that Pussy Riot’s belief in “feminism” was at the heart of their anti-religious beliefs, and thus was the motivator for their crime. As Syrova elaborated:

Pussy Riot by Denis Bochkarev. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Facebook.

“Affiliation with feminism in the Russian Federation is not a violation of the law or a crime. A series of religions, such as [Russian] orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Islam, have a religious-dogmatic basis that is incompatible with the ideas of feminism. And while feminism is not a religious teaching, its representatives are invading such spheres of social relations as ethics, norms of decorum, relations in the family, [and] sexual relations, including nontraditional [sexual relations], that were historically built on the basis of a religious worldview. In the modern world, relations between nations and peoples, between various [religious] confessions, should be built on principles of mutual respect and equality. The idea of the superiority of one [belief], and, accordingly, the inferiority and unacceptability (nepriemlemosti) of another ideology, social group, [or] religion, gives grounds for mutual animosity and hatred, for interpersonal conflictual relations.”

In essence, the women of Pussy Riot were sentenced to prison for being feminists.

After their release, Tolokonnikova and Alekhina, now the “faces” of Pussy Riot, became the most sought-after female duo on the liberal speaker circuit. While in the United States, they gave a talk at Harvard University’s Kennedy School Forum in September 2014. I attended the event and asked a question: What had they thought of that particular part of the sentence, so little reported in the Western press? Tolokonnikova responded, “That was the most interesting part of the judge’s sentence for me, too.” She then told a story about how, during the trial — during which the prosecution complained that Pussy Riot had used swear words while inside the Church — she had asked Liubov Sokologorskaia, one of the witnesses for the prosecution (whose job was to mind the candleholders, icons, and blessed relics in the cathedral), whether “feminism” was a “dirty word” (brannoe slovo). “In the cathedral — yes,” was the response.

The Harvard Forum attendees laughed loudly at this story, but it captured an insidious theme at the trial. A week in, Larisa Pavlova, lawyer for the prosecution, had informed the court that feminism was a “mortal sin, like all unnatural manifestations associated with human life,” while outside the courthouse young people associated with the pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, chanted slogans including, “The women’s revolt won’t be allowed,” and “Pussy should sit in a cell.” Apparently, Pussy Riot’s “crime” was not only to have spoken publicly against Putin, but to have embraced feminism and its dangerous defiance of traditional gender relations — a threat to the Russian church and state alike, as both depend on patriarchy for their legitimacy.

Heading image: Pussy Riot by Denis Bochkarev. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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