Pietro Aretino Collection Acquired
Massimo Ciavolella, Department of Italian, UCLA
Bruce Whiteman, Head Librarian
(No. 41, Spring 2003)

In December of 2002, the Clark Library was fortunate in acquiring a major private collection of books by and relating to the Italian writer Pietro Aretino (1492–1556). The collection was formed over many years by a Sri Lanka-born French collector and is rich in early editions of Aretino’s works, translations (especially into French), later illustrated and authoritative editions, and books by Aretino’s supporters and detractors, particularly in Italy and France. There are almost 200 books in the collection: about seventy editions of various works by Aretino, fifty-some by writers in his circle and other contemporaries, thirty-four books about Aretino or inspired by him, and a few others from the sixteenth century and later that are marginally related to him or could be construed as Aretiniana.

Pietro Aretino was undoubtedly one of the most versatile, innovative, and original writers of the Italian Renaissance. Because he was condemned, just after his death, to an actual damnatio memoriae, posterity long labeled him a pornographer, an obscene writer devoid of true artistic qualities. It has only been in the last twenty years that we have witnessed a reversal of this tendency, and instead of focusing only on those texts considered immoral (Le sei giornate or I modi, also known as Sonetti lussuriosi—the Lascivious Sonnets), critics have reconsidered his entire vast production. What has emerged is what Ariosto had understood and expressed in canto 46 of his Orlando furioso: Pietro Aretino was not only the “scourge of princes” but a “divine” writer who excelled in all the important genres of his time. His comedies set a new standard for Renaissance theater and were enormously influential in Italy and in most of Europe. With his three books of letters he invented a new epistolary genre. He wrote religious works, biographies of saints, works based on games, and even an epic poem—Marfisa, meant to be a continuation of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.

Aretino was also the first writer fully to comprehend the importance of the printing press. As Brian Richardson has written in his book Printing, Writers, and Readers in Renaissance Italy (1999), “Aretino was unique in his ability to use his writings in order to exert leverage on patrons, but his literary and social success played a leading part in promoting new opportunities for other Italian writers from the 1530s onwards.” Born the son of a cobbler in Arezzo, Pietro Aretino used his skill with words and his sharp wit eventually to converse with popes, princes, and emperors. He showed that a writer, even one without the advantages of birth or a position at court, could become powerful while remaining independent. His rise to fame demonstrated to other writers that the social texture of Italy was changing, that there was a widening of the social circles from which successful authors might emerge.

Early editions of works by Aretino are very scarce, and Harvard alone in the United States has extensive holdings. This scarcity is due largely to Aretino’s disfavor with the Catholic Church, and the fact that many of his texts circulated as a result in hugger-mugger fashion. Two years ago the Clark acquired a wonderful example of this sort of under-the-counter form of publication, when it bought a manuscript version of some of Aretino’s poetry (including the infamous Sonnets) that was copied out sometime in the middle third of the eighteenth century and is clearly modeled on a printed book, as the manuscript has a title-page with a typical false imprint: “Cosmopoli | si trova | presso tutti gli amatori del solazzo” (Cosmopolis: At the Press of All Lovers of Pleasure). Many of the books in the newly acquired collection have false imprints as well. An edition of the Ragionamenti, for example, which bears no place of publication or publisher and is dated 1584, is identifiably an Amsterdam-printed book and can be dated to 1649 or 1651 from a chronogram. A second example is provided by an unrecorded book entitled Il terzo libro dell’opere burlesche di Messer Francesco Berni, di M. Gio. Della Casa, dell’Aretino. It claims to be printed in Florence by one of the Giunta family of printers in 1723, but, for internal reasons, can be dated after 1760. An edition of Aretino’s La puttana errante bears a commonly used false imprint for books of its kind. It is said to be printed in “Peking, nel XVIII secolo,” but Patrick Kearney, the erotica bibliographer, has assigned it to Paris, ca. 1780. The Clark copy is printed on special blue paper, which printers normally reserved for a very small number of copies from a larger edition.

The collection contains a number of very rare or unrecorded books. A copy of the 1535 I sette salmi della penitentia di David, for example, is a variant of the two known editions of that year, as is a 1542 edition of Aretino’s play Lo hipocrito, which is bound with four other plays. A 1545 edition of Aretino’s life of St. Catherine is apparently unique, as are two editions (tentatively dated 1611 and 1650) of a French translation of a work by Aretino entitled Les vies et faits de Lais & Lamia. Ortensio Lando’s Quattro libri de dubbi (1552) appears to be in an unrecorded early state, and a copy of Orlando furioso, edited by Ludovico Dolce, also contains hitherto unnoticed variants in the text. Represented among the Aretiniana are two rare editions (dated 1763 and 1768) of Henri-Joseph Du Laurens’s L’Arretin, issued under the amusing pseudonym Modeste Tranquille Xan-Xung.

The acquisition of the Aretino collection was made possible by the Ahmanson Foundation, and the Clark and the Center are deeply grateful to the Foundation for its generous and continuing support. The collection will be catalogued in the near future, and an exhibition and a conference are planned for the late spring of 2004.

Return to the listing of contents (no. 41).

Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925)
Bruce Whiteman, Head Librarian
No. 41 (Spring 2003)

When Oscar Wilde published his play Salomé in 1893, he dedicated it to his friend Pierre Louÿs, a young French poet and writer who would later regret his friendship with Wilde, out of an odd moral scruple—odd, given the risqué character of a good deal of Louÿs’s own work—and break off all relations. Wilde was in Paris in 1891, and Louÿs was one of the young idolizers who was often in his company, along with Marcel Schwob and André Gide. Wilde inscribed a copy of his collection of stories The House of Pomegranates to Louÿs very elaborately (“Au jeune homme qui adore la Beauté/Au jeune homme que la Beauté adore/Au jeune homme que j’adore), and he valued Louÿs’s advice deeply enough to ask him to review the French text of Salomé. (William Andrews Clark Jr. acquired Louÿs’s own copy of a rare trial edition of the play in 1932.)

Louÿs had a succès de scandale with two early books that established his reputation as an important 1890s writer: his “forged” collection of poems, Les chansons de Bilitis (1894), which he published as though they were newly discovered poems by a hitherto unknown Greek poet, and his first novel, Aphrodite (1896). (François Coppée’s review of Aphrodite in Le Journal began by his admitting that he was constantly collaring friends and asking them whether they had read the book, and if not, why not.) Two books followed that were also very popular, La femme et le pantin (1898) and Les aventures du roi Pausole (1901). With these four works, Louÿs’s literary career was largely finished. Sanguines (1903), a collection of stories, Archipel (1906), a collection of newspaper articles, and Poétique (1916) sank pretty much without a trace, and only some scholarly and bibliographical work of his appeared during the last ten years of his life. His final decade was full of despair and sadness, as a note found among his papers after his death suggests. It begins: “S’il m’arrivait un bonheur, c’est-à-dire si je mourais…” [If something good should happen to me, that is, if I were to die . . .].

Given Louÿs’s important, if short-lived, friendship with Wilde, the Clark has begun to collect the French writer’s books. First editions of Aphrodite and Le femme et le pantin, the latter a lovely presentation copy, have already been acquired, as well as a number of posthumously published texts and editions of the early books. It was during the last decade of his life that Louÿs wrote a number of erotic works that were intended to remain unpublished, but eventually many of these were issued in more or less clandestine editions. Trois filles de leur mère is the best known of these, and the Clark recently bought a copy of the rather sumptuously printed first edition of this text, printed on paper watermarked “Syuol Erreip”—the author’s name spelled backwards—and published in 1926, shortly after Louÿs’s death. An extravagantly illustrated edition of Aphrodite from the late 1940s was also added to the collection recently, in a copy that includes fifteen of the original watercolors.

Return to the listing of contents (no. 41).

Fellows' Research

For this issue, essays were contributed by participants of three separate yearlong series:

I. Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600–1800
(Center & Clark Core Program, 2002–03).
II. Nations and Identities: Between Culture and State
(UCLA Humanities Consortium, 2001–02).
III. Nations and Identities: Knowledges and Technologies
(UCLA Humanities Consortium, 2002–03).

I. Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600–1800
(Center & Clark Core Program, 2002–03)

Massacre at Michaelmas, 1567
Allan Tulchin,
Ahmanson-Getty Fellow, Fall & Winter 2002–03; George Mason University, Fairfax
No. 41 (Spring 2003)

On September 30, 1567, in Nîmes, in the south of France, members of the Protestant community rose up against the town’s Catholic regime. Crying “Kill, kill the papists” [all translations in this essay are the author’s], they arrested leading Catholics, laymen and priests, and then massacred many of them in cold blood, up to eighty according to one estimate. This event, known as the Michelade, from its proximity to Michaelmas, September 29, is far less well-known than the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre and other occasions when Catholics attacked Protestants in sixteenth-century France. Nonetheless, the Michelade is a good example of how people in the sixteenth century could be led to commit horrifying violence when political rivalry was inflamed by religious conflict.

Nîmes in the sixteenth century was a town of about 10,000 people, already famed for its Roman antiquities, and an important administrative center in the region of Bas-Languedoc. It was the seat of an ancient bishopric, and the town’s chateau had a small garrison of royal troops. Its economy depended on four main sectors: agriculture, textiles and leather, trade, and government. Many people worked the fields outside of town; a large number were also occupied in transforming wool and cattle, the products of the Cévennes Mountains, northwest of town, into cloth and leather. The most important people in Nîmes, however, earned their living from government. The town had a presidial court, established in 1552 by King Henri II. Its judges were the most prestigious people in town. Both Catholic and learned in the law, they could not be removed because they had purchased their offices from the crown. The other main local institution, also dominated by lawyers, was the town council, headed by four consuls.

The events that led immediately to the Michelade occurred against a background of several years of suffering brought on by failed crops, famines, and the financial burdens imposed on the town by the French king’s war against the Hapsburgs. The capacities of Nîmes’s council and court were seriously stretched by these challenges, but the breaking point came only after the arrival in late 1559 of Guillaume Mauget, the town’s first resident Protestant preacher. His presence unleashed Protestant sympathies and large numbers of townspeople began converting.

Until that time, Nîmes had been solidly Catholic. Its few Protestants, concentrated among the ranks of the merchants and clothmakers, had been intimidated by the threat of prosecution for heresy and thus presented no danger to the town’s governing elite. All this changed with the dramatic rise in conversions to Protestantism. Starting in 1560 and 1561, the new “heresy” began to infect even the town council and the presidial. With these conversions the town’s governing bodies became bitterly divided and effectively paralyzed, a situation that prevented the Catholic faction from intervening to slow the momentum towards apostasy.

This situation emboldened the Protestants to organize mass meetings and to increase their public preaching. The movement’s success attracted one of the greatest Protestant preachers of the age, Pierre Viret, who visited the city in late 1561. By 1562, as civil war began to break out across the country between the two religions, an astonishing eighty percent of Nîmes’s population had converted to the new religion. The town’s remaining Catholics were concentrated in low-status occupations such as agriculture and the humbler artisan trades, and thus were marginalized within the new structure of power. Despite this, during the 1560s, the crown, which remained Catholic, repeatedly interfered in local elections to keep Catholics in office. Angry Protestants wanted to drive a stake through the stubbornly quivering corpse of Catholicism.

On September 30, 1567, the second day of Nîmes’s annual fair, this pent-up rage finally exploded. But the violence was highly organized. Protestant troops formed into regular companies and began to march about the city in an effort to frighten the Catholic community. As they marched they shouted, and their slogans were crude but effective. Jeanne Auberte, the wife of Jean Valat, a merchant, reported that she pulled her children indoors because she heard a “great noise and tumult” from the street. When she went out she saw armed men heading up the street shouting, “Close the shops!” Other witnesses heard the troops crying, “To arms! To Battle,” “Kill! Kill! Kill the papists,” and, in an apparent reference to the Glory Days that would follow a Protestant victory, “Kill, kill! New World, New World!” However, most witnesses, admittedly all hostile and therefore perhaps prone to see wickedness in the actions of the Protestant insurgents, stressed the troops’ rage, not their religious fervor.

Having managed to wrest control of the keys to the town gates from the Catholic consuls to whom they were normally entrusted, the troops began rounding up prominent Catholics. The leaders of the Protestants, rapidly dubbed Messieurs by the people, had apparently prepared a list of victims ahead of time, which included many of the few remaining high-status Catholic men still in town, especially lawyers, priests, and officials. The first consul, Guy Rochette, was among those first taken, along with his half-brother Robert Gregoire. Rochette took refuge with his stepfather, Jean Gregoire. When Protestant troops showed up at the door demanding admission, Rochette’s mother lied and insisted that he was not there. Rochette, accompanied by his half-brother, then left the house, hoping to use his authority to restore order. Instead, his house was ransacked, and he and his brother were arrested. They were escorted first to the house of Guillaumes l’Hermite, a merchant and one of the leaders of the conspiracy, and then to the basement of the city hall. Apparently, this basement had a sinister reputation, since it was used as an abattoir to butcher animals for the sick during Lent. Rochette and Gregoire were not killed there, however. They, and the other victims, were taken to the courtyard of the bishop’s palace, where they were either stabbed or shot, and thrown down the bishop’s well.

Despite the horror of this episode, most Catholics in Nîmes were spared. Even many of the Catholic lawyers were eventually released. Protestant rage was reserved for priests, and for the Catholic members of the council and courts, whose presence in the governing bodies had been forced on the now-Protestant town by the Catholic French king. The Messieurs, the leaders of the Protestants, included most of the members of the presidial. The evidence provided by the identity of the victims shows that the Protestant leaders were determined not only to take control of the town but also to remove any potential Catholic challenge to their power. The Michelade, therefore, was not a riot: it was a coup d’état.

Return to the listing of contents (no. 41).

II. Nations and Identities: Between Culture and State
(UCLA Humanities Consortium, 2001–02)

Propriety and Convenance: Smith and de Grouchy
Laura Schattschneider,
Mellon Fellow, 2001–03; New York University School of Law
No. 41 (Spring 2003)

Sympathy, the idea that emotions can be shared, was central to French and Scottish explanations of community in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The influence that these two schools of thought had on one another has made me curious about how theories of sympathy were translated from 1760 to 1800. How were ideas about the communicability of sentiment affected by their own modes of communication?

With this question in mind, I have begun to examine closely the Clark Library’s copy of Théorie des sentiments moraux (1798), a translation by Sophie de Grouchy of the seventh (1792) edition of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. De Grouchy, wife of the marquis de Condorcet (the Girondin philosophe, political economist, and victim of revolutionary terror), began work on her translation in the early 1790s, but her precarious situation under the Jacobin regime prevented timely publication of her text. Included with de Grouchy’s translation were eight letters of her own, more a collection of musings on sympathy than a fully constructed system like Smith’s.

Smith depends heavily upon the Stoic idea of self-possession and displacement from one’s own desire to show how sympathy curbs rampant self-interest: he argues that in order to function effectively in society we must see ourselves and our actions from the perspective of a dispassionate “impartial spectator.” That is, we must sense the inconsequence of our individual desires and cede them to the greater good. The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ “impartial spectator” was key to Smith’s social thought: it secured the equitable operation of the Wealth of Nations’ “invisible hand.”

De Grouchy’s conclusions about what constitutes a just society do not differ much from Smith’s, but she makes no mention of an “impartial spectator.” Instead, she proposes that our natural capacity to feel for others in individual moments is extrapolated into a general principle whereby we seek the satisfaction of acting benevolently and avoid remorse for committing acts of injustice. General moral principles thus originate, for de Grouchy, in individual experiences. The most important of these experiences for her is an idealized form of romantic love, which, as she puts it, “attache plus de prix à la possession qu’à la jouissance” [places a greater value on possession than upon enjoyment]—a love founded upon reciprocal sympathy, in which each lover is invested in the other’s happiness. Indeed, she criticizes Smith for not recognizing love’s enlightening power and for focusing only on the ways love blinds us to the general good, ways she herself ascribes to love’s perversion by inequitable laws and institutions. Whereas in Smith’s version of sympathy, we must detach ourselves from our most passionate attachments in order to act justly, for de Grouchy, our most passionate attachments, bien dirigé, will lead us to universal sympathy. Thus, like all the human rights de Grouchy considers to be fundamental, possession, if protected by reason and equitable law, will make us more inclined to respect the possessions of others. This way of seeing one’s property (and personal attachments) is de Grouchy’s variation upon Smith’s famous modification of the golden rule, “love ourselves only as we love our neighbor”: for her, it is something more like “love our neighbor’s rights because we have learned to value our own.”

Given these differences between Smith’s and Sophie de Grouchy’s discussions of sympathy, I was struck by a problem that de Grouchy must have faced in translating the word propriety. A central concept for Smith, propriety is defined in the Theory of Moral Sentiments as the “suitable or proportionate connection between an emotion and the object or circumstances that cause it.” The propriety of a word or behavior (especially when these are used to express our emotions in a given situation) may only be ascertained from the standpoint of the “impartial observer.” To act with propriety, therefore, we must pretend we do not care about the things in which we are most interested. Smith here seems to be working with the word’s rhetorical meanings, in which propriety is an element of decorum. Indeed, the “impartial spectator” comes into being in Smith’s text shortly before this definition of propriety, in a discussion of dispassionate aesthetic taste.

Smith was writing during a period in which the meaning of the term propriety appears to have been shifting, and I have started to wonder to what extent his discussion contributed to this change. The term is derived from the Latin proprietatem, also the root of the English property. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, propriety clearly referred to property, as well as to proper speech: Samuel Johnson, for example, defined the term in 1755 in both the proprietary and rhetorical senses, as “exclusive right” and “accuracy; justness.” By the late eighteenth century, however, a new definition appears: the Oxford English Dictionary cites the first known instance of our modern, etiquette-driven sense of the word in Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782). Smith, writing in the interim, seems to be drawing upon a colloquial meaning that Johnson did not record, in which propriety denotes “appropriate behavior,” especially when he discusses the extent to which one might voice complaints of physical or mental suffering and still retain the sympathy of one’s interlocutors. However, even if the proprietary senses of propriety faded away in part because of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, were they completely forgotten by readers of Smith’s Wealth of Nations?

The French cognate to propriety, propriété, shares the rhetorical senses of the English term: entries in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française dating back to 1692 include the meaning “propre sens de chaque mot” [each word’s proper meaning]. However, the eighteenth-century French term primarily references property, and its meaning never encompasses the behavioral sense of the English cognate. De Grouchy must therefore use the word convenance in translating Smith’s propriety, although she occasionally resorts to propriété in what appears to be a kind of inadvertent anglicism. Convenance from 1694 does denote the behavioral definitions of propriety. It is derived from the Latin root convenientia, which also bestows “convenience” upon the English language, and which is a Latin term for rhetorical decorum used by Horace in the Ars poetica. Neither the root nor its derivative contains the semantic overtones of property and self-possession that buzz about the term propriety. Instead, the semantic nuance of convenance is confined to that which is simply, naturally, “fitting.” It is thus a term much better suited to de Grouchy’s descriptions of romantic love, in which two individuals are bound by a kind of reciprocal self-possession.

Thus, although de Grouchy supported Smith’s liberal ideal of individual property rights, her translation of propriety as convenance recalibrates the resonances of property rights that accompany propriety to better fit the domestic, private sphere of sentimental attachment. At the same time, Smith’s use of the term seems a bridge to its newer meanings, in which its sphere is confined to the decorum of the drawing room. This semantic shift occurs during a period in which the issue of property rights divided republicans on both sides of the Channel. As I continue to investigate the circulations of sympathy and its translations in Scotland, France, and America, I will keep pondering what gets lost when propriety loses its connection to property rights, and when propriety becomes convenance. I welcome any light members of the Clark community might be able to shed on my investigations.

Return to the listing of contents (no. 41).

An Experimental Philosophy in Early America
Colleen Terrell,
Mellon Fellow, 2002–03; Georgia Institute of Technology
No. 41 (Spring 2003)

In 1758 a young John Adams recorded in his diary his belief that “the Man, who has a faculty of inventing and combining into one Machine, or System, for the Execution of some Purpose and Accomplishment of some End, a great Number and Variety of Wheels, Levers, Pullies, Ropes &c., has a great Mechanical Genius.” Adams was not alone among America’s Founding Fathers in his fascination with machines and his admiration for mechanical creativity. From Benjamin Franklin’s myriad inventions to Thomas Jefferson’s perpetual tinkering with agricultural implements to Thomas Paine’s designs for an iron bridge, the activities of America’s political leaders both before and after the Revolution reveal their broad collective interest in and talent for mechanical pursuits.

My current book project, “Nation ex Machina: The Politics and Mechanics of New World Creation,” originates in the assumption that it is not a coincidence that so many of colonial America’s intellectual elite were simultaneously engaged in the production of both a new nation and new machines. Mechanics provided not only what we might call, following historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick in The Age of Federalism (1993), a “grammar” of nation building—that is, a common conceptual apparatus for describing the theoretical and material challenges of national founding—but also, through its compelling description of a clockwork universe fabricated by a Divine Maker, a model of artisanal creation ripe for emulation.

Eighteenth-century Americans shared with their English counterparts a mechanistic worldview inaugurated by the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution. That the dissemination of this philosophical framework took place on both sides of the Atlantic is evident from surviving catalogues of books owned by colonial educational institutions such as Harvard and Princeton, as well as those owned by individuals like Jefferson, whose personal library became the founding collection of the Library of Congress. Copies of many of these books can be found now in the Clark’s holdings, and their contents help establish the tenor and pervasiveness of the mechanistic perspective with which the colonists would have been familiar.

The emerging field of physical mechanics, as exemplified by Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), involved the application of pure mathematics to analyses of force, motion, and equilibrium. These analytical techniques proved useful in a variety of investigations, as natural philosophers sought mechanical explanations—often codified in elegant, quantifiable formulae—for everything from the motions of planets, pendulums, and projectiles to the behavior of static fluids, the reflection and refraction of light, or the circulation of the blood. In essence, mechanical (or “corpuscular”) philosophy provided an abstract method for analyzing the chains of cause-and-effect relations that governed the behavior of natural phenomena. As John Harris explained in the entry for “Mechanical Philosophy” in his Lexicon Technicum: or, An Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1704), “it is the chief End, Design, and Business of natural Philosophy to consider Effects; and by reasoning upon them and their various Phaenomena, to proceed regularly at last to the Causes of Things; and especially to the Knowledge of the First Cause.”

Harris’s reference to a “First Cause” suggests how the immutable natural laws governing physical matter offered one proof of a divine intelligence underlying their conception. As William Wollaston put it in The Religion of Nature Delineated (1722)—an edition of which Franklin helped typeset while working in a London printing house—“the astonishing magnificence” of the “frame and constitution of the world” shows beyond a doubt “that there is some Almighty designer, an infinite wisdom and power at the top of all these things.” This was the divine being whom Jefferson called the “fabricator of all things from matter and motion,” a deity who created the Newtonian “System of the World” just as sublunary artisans crafted clocks and other machines.

The principles of mechanical philosophy were popularized not only by Newton’s Principia and its translations, but also by texts such as J. T. Desaguliers’s Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), which sought to render abstract mathematical concepts accessible to a larger audience through the use of detailed explanations, simple physical experiments, and beautifully engraved plates. These texts often emphasize the way knowledge of the effects of natural forces enables one to harness them in functional machines, accompanying theory with illustrations of its practical application. Harris notes in the Lexicon Technicum that there are six “simple machines’’ used to transmit or modify forces—the balance, the lever, the pulley, the wheel, the wedge, and the screw—and that “compound machines . . . are innumerable, in regard that they may be made out of the Simple, almost after an infinite manner.” Mechanical analysis could thus also be used to understand how complex machines like clocks, mills, and pumps worked, by breaking them down into the simple machines of which they were composed and then reconstructing them once again. Jefferson designed a prize-winning plough this way, mathematically combining two wedge shapes into a single curved plane to generate a “mouldboard of least resistance.”

This complementary, reciprocal method of analysis and synthesis—what Roger Cotes, in his preface to Andrew Motte’s English translation of the Principia (1729), called the “incomparably best way of philosophizing”—became a hallmark of Enlightenment reason. It offered more than a way to understand the natural world; as a formal analytical tool it could be applied repeatedly to empirical information of all kinds, from physics and mathematics to politics and history. Within this broad methodological compass, it was possible for eighteenth-century thinkers to reason analytically about the cause-and-effect relations at work in the “machinery” of society and government just as they reasoned about the more concrete motions of matter in the most efficient ploughs. Thus one finds Franklin constructing a model of civic virtue in the same mechanical terms with which he might have discussed his three-wheel clock; Adams describing “this complication of machinery, all these wheels within wheels” that constituted the elaborate system of political checks and balances built into the Constitution; Jefferson comparing America to “a new creation . . . made on an improved plan.”

In fact one can find a host of similar images throughout the literature of early America, images that suggestively describe the diverse tasks of “forging” the union—its landscape, citizenry, and revolutionary republican government as well as its literary narratives—in the language of mechanical invention. Steeped in the theories and methods of contemporary Anglo-American science, America’s Founding Fathers pursued the challenge of creating new social and political structures in the New World as though it were a question, as Adams might have said, of “Mechanical Genius”—of finding the best system for the purpose.

Return to the listing of contents (no. 41).

Illustrations are identified in order of appearance. When not otherwise credited, images are from materials in the Clark Library collection.  All rights are reserved.

— Portrait of Pietro Aretino from Talanta Comedia, di Messer Pietro Aretino (1542).

—Pietro Aretino, I Sette salmi della penitentia di David (1535).

—From Pierre Louÿs’s Les aventures du roi Pausole (Paris, 1948).

—The Michelade as depicted in Léon Ménard, Histoire . . . de Nismes, vol. 5 (Paris, 1754; Marseille: Laffitte Reprints, 1976). Collection of Allan Tulchin.

—Title page to Sophie de Grouchy’s 1798 translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and the first page of de Grouchy's Lettres sur la sympathie.

—Benjamin Franklin’s three-wheel clock, in James Ferguson, Select Mechanical Exercises, 2d ed. (London, 1778).

—A water mill, in J. T. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy, vol. 2, 2d ed. (London, 1745).

Return to the
Top of this page.
Center & Clark Newsletter On Line Home.
Center and Clark Publications.
Center's home page.
Clark Library's home page.