Renaissance humanism and ethnicity before race: The Irish and the English in the seventeenth century

Introduction: Defining race

This book is about the ways in which those living in seventeenthcentury Ireland used classical philosophy to understand the relationships between peoples. But before analysing what it meant to be a people in the seventeenth century, it is important to be clear on what race means in the twenty-first century. This is not a simple task. Even the most accomplished jurists struggle to define race. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN’s plenary Assembly in 1948, identified that crime as a series of acts committed with the intent of destroying ‘a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’.¹ The term ‘genocide’ itself, coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, was intended to refer to the murder of a race or nation.² The problem is that the ‘races’ described by eighteenth- nineteenth-, and twentiethcentury Europeans, are now understood to be mainly ideological constructs with only a limited basis in nature. While one can sort humans into genetic clusters associated with major geographic regions (such as Africa, Asia, and Europe), the genetic variation found within such large groups is far greater (eighty-five to ninety per cent) than that between them (ten to fifteen per cent).³ Prosecuting a crime defined in terms which many scientists now regard as unreal presents a considerable practical problem.

That the conceptualisation of race did indeed trouble the judges and lawyers charged with prosecuting genocide was evident in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 in which at least 800,000 Tutsi and pro-peace Hutu were murdered by the majority Hutu population.⁴ The difficulty for the prosecutors lay in the fact that the hard racial distinction between Tutsi and Hutu was itself an ideology: a set of assumptions, ideals, and goals; less coherent than a philosophy, more comprehensive than a programme, more explicit than a mentalité.⁵ While certainly there were some physiological and cultural differences between the tall, cattle-herding Tutsi, and shorter, peasant Hutu, those differences had been magnified by nineteenthand twentieth-century anthropologists, archaeologists, and missionaries who argued that the Tutsi, ‘Ethiopoid’ population of Rwanda had migrated there from the Horn of Africa, whereas the Hutus were a less intelligent ‘Bantu’ people of southern and central Africa. In reality, physiological differences were visible in some but not all Tutsis and Hutus, and mixed marriages were common. In addition, both groups spoke the same language, observed the same religions, and shared much common culture. Nevertheless, the European and Tutsi elites found this racialised pre-history a useful buttress to the colonial establishment, and its basic elements became a staple of political culture in both colonial and post-colonial Rwanda.⁶ The Belgian colonisers had established a system of identity cards and established racial identity on the basis of the number of cattle owned by a family. During the genocide, Tutsis were identified to their murderers as much by their identity cards as by their physical appearance.⁷

Lawyers and jurists dealing with the aftermath of the genocide have thus been forced to make a distinction between the objective reality of race and the subjective reality of race. If the perpetrator of genocide believes the group he or she persecutes is a race, then that race (or ethnic group) is a subjective reality.⁸ This was the approach adopted in 1999 by a Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. In its judgment, the chamber concluded that the Tutsis were an ‘ethnic group’ based on the existence of government-issued official identity cards describing them as such.⁹ Another chamber in 2001 grappled with the problem at greater length. In its judgment in the case of Prosecutor v. Bagilishema, the chamber argued that although ‘membership of the targeted group must be an objective feature of the society in question, there is also a subjective dimension’. The chamber admitted that the boundaries of a human group were often indistinct, and that it was often very hard to determine whether a person had been murdered because of membership of that group or for some other reason. Moreover, the perpetrators might ‘characterise the targeted group in ways that do not fully correspond to conceptions of the group shared generally, or by other segments of society’. It was in those circumstances, the chamber continued, that the perception of the perpetrator became key, that the subjective took precedence over the objective, in determining whether the crime of genocide had taken place.¹⁰ Lawyers remain uncomfortable with reliance on subjective criteria alone for practical evidential reasons: the subjective perception of the perpetrator alone is hard to prove without reference to objective criteria. In 2006, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia strongly recommended reference to both subjective and objective criteria.¹¹

The very conceptualisation of race thus remains a nagging problem in international legal systems, and in Western culture generally, into the twenty-first century. At this point it is useful to return to Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin, a Polish Jew who left his homeland in 1939, published a definition of genocide in 1944 considerably richer than that which eventually found its way into the UN convention.¹² Genocide, Lemkin wrote, was a

co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objective of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.¹³

Clearly, these ‘national groups’ of which Lemkin wrote were more than simple biological races: groups of people united by a common ancestry and probably therefore a common appearance. The biological and physical aspect of genocide was only one part of the overall picture. Lemkin also took the attack on a national group’s culture very seriously. He assumed that humankind was divided into cultures, that the values of these cultures might in some respects be incommensurable, that each culture had its own organising spirit or genius, and that this spirit would be evident in all the artefacts of that culture, whether that artefact be fine art or a legal system.¹⁴ Lemkin clarified his approach at the end of his chapter on genocide:

The world represents only so much culture and intellectual vigor as are created by its component national groups. Essentially the idea of a nation signifies constructive cooperation and original contributions, based upon genuine traditions, genuine culture, and a well-developed national psychology. The destruction of a nation, therefore, results in the loss of its future contributions to the world.¹⁵

In fact, as early as 1933 Lemkin had proposed to the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law in Madrid that ‘vandalism’ be made a new international crime. By vandalism, Lemkin meant the crime of destruction of art and individual cultural artefacts in general. As humanity was enriched by all the cultures of which it was composed, so humanity as a whole had an interest in the preservation of the physical objects (paintings, libraries, synagogues) which embodied those cultures. Alongside this new crime of vandalism, Lemkin wished also to establish ‘barbarity’ as an international crime, by which he meant murders, pogroms, and collective cruelties practised against any defenceless ‘racial, religious or social collectivity’.¹⁶

Lemkin’s struggles with definition illustrate the binary composition of European racial ideology. Race, since the early nineteenth century, has had a physical aspect and a cultural aspect. Racialism is the division of mankind into races; racism the ordering of those races into a hierarchy, generally with one’s own race at the top. The practices of physical racism are immediately familiar: charting different head shapes; measuring the different cranial capacities of different races; conducting intelligence tests designed statistically to confirm intellectual superiority and inferiority; the murder of members of one’s own race who suffer a physical or mental disability.¹⁷ Cultural racism not only generally acted as a reinforcement of physical racism, as in Nazi Germany; it could even be employed to justify racial domination by itself, as in Apartheid South Africa.¹⁸ After 1948, the Apartheid regime in South Africa was generally careful to avoid the physically racist language that the Nazis had stigmatised by their mass murder of Jews and others. The regime’s policy of separateness was instead justified by the concept of culture referred to above. South Africa was a country of several cultures, each (the regime insisted, at least in its more thoughtful moments) worthy of respect, each with its own system of values and characteristic forms of life, each destined to develop in its own way.¹⁹

Both of these two components of the modern ideology of race were developed in the eighteenth century, and so from this point on the term ethnicity will be used to mean ‘peoplehood’ in the loose sense, while race will be reserved for the post-eighteenth century ideology. Historians of such divergent fields of specialisation as George Mosse, George Frederickson, Ivan Hannaford, Colin Kidd, Sara Eigen, and Mark Larrimore all agreed that the ways in which the European elite spoke about Jews and non-European peoples changed during the eighteenth century, and that ethnic discourse before the Enlightenment was not the same as after. Eigen and Larrimore identified 1780–1820 as the period of transition.²⁰ Hannaford and others argued that the Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus was the first to tabulate humankind by physical characteristics in the same way as the rest of the animal kingdom. In the 1735 edition of his Systema Naturae (System of Nature) Linnaeus classified man as belonging to the primate genus, and further explained to his students at Uppsala that man shaded into ape and ape into man. By the tenth edition of the Systema in 1758, Linnaeus was dividing the species of homo sapiens into homo ferus, Europaeus, Americanus, Asiaticus, Afer, and monsters. Europaeus, or European, Linnaeus further described as ‘white, sanguine, muscular … most vigorous, an inventor … ruled by religious observance’; in contrast Afer, or African, was ‘black, phlegmatic … cunning, slothful, slovenly … ruled by caprice’.²¹

While Isaiah Berlin has pointed out that the modern concept of culture was foreshadowed in the work of other Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment philosophers and historians, such as GiambattistaVico, Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Johann Georg Hamann, and even Adam Ferguson, nevertheless Johann Gottfried Herder may be regarded as its true inventor. It was the Prussian Herder in his Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (This Too a Philosophy of History for the Development of Humanity) of 1774 who insisted that man was divided not into races but into cultures, each contributing in its own way to humanity’s Fortgang or advance, although the everyday ideals of each culture were unlikely to be commensurable with each other. Herder held each culture to be animated by its own Geist, and this spirit or mind would be evident in all the works and ideals of that culture, from breadmaking to religious ritual. One culture could not be superior to another, he wrote; the idea was as absurd as the Enlightenment’s search for an ideal man or ideal society. Herder disliked the racialism and racism of scholars like his old teacher Immanuel Kant, opposed the slave trade, and thought Africans the equal of Europeans.²² Nevertheless, the European Jews were a special problem for Herder. He admired the ancient Hebrews very much; but their descendants in Europe were out of place, exiled from the environment in which they had developed and inevitably alienated from the society in which they lived. As he put it in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind) of 1784–91, the Jewish people were no more than a ‘parasitical plant on the trunks of other nations’.²³ Although Linnaeus and his successors like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach belonged firmly to the European Enlightenment, and Herder and the German nationalists who took up and used his concepts (very often in ways Herder would have disliked) were certainly representatives of the Counter-Enlightenment, ideas of physically separate races and of culturally separate peoples very quickly became intertwined.

European racialists after the eighteenth century thus defined certain peoples as races on the basis of both their common physical attributes and their common culture (though in individual ideologies one element, physical or cultural, might predominate), and racists sorted these races into a hierarchy with Europeans at the top. In other words, the modern ideology of race is a language and a set of concepts concerned both with human bodies and with human societies. Analyses of pre-modern ideologies of ethnic superiority which attempt to decide if such-and-such an ideology is more or less similar to modern racism must attend to contemporary understandings both of bodies and of societies. Historians’ common tendency to privilege the body over society in exploring the history of race is not analytically rewarding. For example, in the introduction to a valuable collection of essays, Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac and Joseph Ziegler, adopted a definition of racism which included the sorting of peoples into a hierarchy of groups on the basis of a presumed connection between physical and mental qualities, but excluded discrimination on a religious or social basis.²⁴ But as Ziegler insists in his essay on physiognomics (the practice of deducing character from appearance) in that volume, medieval and early modern sciences that did posit connections between physical appearance and moral capacity were simply never employed to feed, for example, anti-African racisms of the sort constructed by Linnaeus.²⁵ Moreover, the definition of racism adopted by Eliav- Feldon, Isaac and Ziegler excludes theories of civility and barbarism from consideration completely. The theory of human society in which civility and barbarism were central terms was woven into all European descriptions of themselves and of non-European societies; excluding this theory from the pre-history of race is quite wrongheaded. María Elena Martínez grappled with the same problem in her excellent work on limpieza de sangre (the Spanish practice of discriminating against Christians of Jewish ancestry) in New Spain. Martínez felt that defining race as an ideology concerned with the body alone was a mistake; this ignored the fact that racial discourse invoked ‘nature or biology more at one point, culture more at another’.²⁶ For this reason, Martínez preferred to speak about different racisms each produced by specific social and historical circumstances, rather than positing one constant form of racism in Europe and America between the Middle Ages and the present, or allowing an invention of racism in the eighteenth century. However, had Martínez recognised that European ways of speaking about human societies changed profoundly between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth, and recognised that modern racial ideologies rest on modern ways of speaking about human societies, the concept of culture, and on ways of speaking about human bodies, her problem of definition would have been resolved. Adopting a two-fold characterisation of racial ideology also aids understanding of what Thomas McCarthy has labelled ‘neo-racism’, which continues to function even though physical or biological racism has long been outlawed in Western society.²⁷ In fact there is nothing new about this sort of racism. Saul Dubow has described the radical Afrikaners’ abandonment of physical racism in the wake of the Second World War and their justification of the Apartheid regime through frankly Herderian talk of cultures and their separate development.²⁸ French historians tend to struggle not with a definition of race that is too narrow, but too broad: the French word racisme is commonly applied to any species of prejudice, including prejudice against young people (racisme anti-jeunes), regardless of their appearance or culture. So André Devyver’s encyclopaedic study of those early modern ideologies which prescribed an ethnic origin for the French nobility distinct from and superior to that of other Frenchmen paused only to borrow a term from Jean-Paul Sartre, social racism, before concluding that those noble ideologies were indeed racist.²⁹ As Devyver noted, for Sartre racist theory, whether biological or social, was only a small and unimportant part of racist praxis; the intention of the actor was irrelevant.³⁰ Non-Marxists will be reluctant to adopt these positions.

The most accomplished historians of early modern Ireland have demonstrated keen interest in pre-modern or early modern ideologies of ethnic superiority; but not all of these historians have distinguished between those early modern ideologies and the modern ideology of race. Nicholas Canny has been at the forefront of this analytical effort, and has been careful to insist on the importance of the eighteenthcentury change in the discourse of peoples noted above: pre-eighteenth-century ethnic ideologies, even at the popular level, were quite different to post-eighteenth-century racial ideologies.³¹ This point has been recognised also by John Montaño.³² Jane Ohlmeyer has demonstrated that the concepts of civility and barbarism were central to colonialist ideology within Britain and Ireland in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Montaño has reinforced Ohlmeyer’s arguments on the importance of certain models of agriculture to those categories. The life of towns and cities, and the manorial agriculture which fed them, were regarded by English colonists as civil; the pastoral agriculture of Irish and Scottish Gaeldom, barbarous.³³ Nevertheless, both Ohlmeyer and Steven Ellis have described those categories of civility and barbarism in terms which assimilate them to later, posteighteenth-century, racial theory. So Ohlmeyer argued that English use of those categories, civil and barbarous, constituted an ideology of racial superiority; members of the Scottish and English elites regarded the Gaelic Irish, Highlanders, and Borderers as a lower form of humanity both in mind and in culture.³⁴ Ellis has gone further, choosing to invoke nineteenth- and twentieth-century German racialist and racist ideology: the English regarded the Gaelic Irish as Untermenschen (sub-humans); sixteenth-century Ireland saw a Kulturkampf (war for civilisation) between English and Irish.³⁵ However, Ellis’s wider argument was that the category of barbarian was one which the English elite applied to irrational Englishmen as well as irrational Irishmen, a point reinforced by Deborah Shugar.³⁶

Nevertheless, it is Canny’s theorisation of ethnic relationships in early modern Ireland which remains the most comprehensive. During the 1970s, Canny argued that the chief ideological resource of sixteenth-century English colonists and adventurers were English translations of travel accounts of the East and of the New World, such as those by Richard Eden or Joannes Boemus. From this resource, as well as from a smaller quantity of Roman examples, the English constructed a category of barbarism into which the Irish were placed. Canny also held that the English worked out a rough theory of cultural evolution, which posited the Irish as a less developed people than themselves. When these English colonists then moved on to North America they abandoned their use of Roman examples, but took with them this theory of cultural evolution developed during their Irish experience. In a sort of ideological feed-back loop, these categories and theories were then applied both to Native Americans and to Africans in the New World.³⁷ Then, in a 1974 O’Donnell Lecture, Canny introduced a counter-current to this colonial theory: the Renaissance humanism employed by the Irish elite of English descent from the mid-sixteenth century on. Canny characterised these English Irish humanists briefly as persons committed to active citizenship (rather than merely passive subjecthood) and the use of English law; their humanism was derived from the philosophy of Aristotle and taught in the grammar schools of Dublin, Kilkenny, and Waterford, at Oxford, and at the Inns of Court.³⁸ The practical expression of this English Irish ethos was the policy of surrender and regrant, under which barbarous Irish tyrants recognised that becoming civil English noblemen was their only rational course of action. But from the 1540s to the 1560s, Canny argued, humanism in England changed while humanism in Ireland remained the same. During the mid-sixteenth century educated Englishmen acquired a fresh understanding of social change, an understanding based on their experience of societal changes in England, on the historical theory of Jean Bodin, and on accounts of extra-European societies. Englishmen now envisaged the transition from barbarism to civility as an evolutionary process, and had a more pessimistic appreciation of the difficulty of that process: they now believed they would have to use more violence to civilise Irish society.³⁹ This new anti-Aristotelian tendency in English thought was reinforced by the influence of the French logician Petrus Ramus in the English universities.⁴⁰ Canny’s monograph on the Elizabethan conquest reinforced these arguments: the English had acquired a concept of cultural or historical development, similar in many ways to Spanish ones, and employed this concept habitually in their analyses of Irish problems.⁴¹ And the poet Edmund Spenser, Canny believed, was the key transmitter of this new, harsh humanist historicism, committed to conquest and plantation, into the seventeenth century.⁴²

There were a number of problems with Canny’s thesis. First, Canny’s account of intellectual influences travelling first west to east and then east to west was received sceptically by historians of colonial North America. There was little evidence, they argued, that the English employed either Spanish or Irish precedents or models for their American colonies. The few elaborate English defences of colonial activity, such as Sir George Peckham’s A True Reporte of 1583, did not draw categories and concepts from England’s Irish experience, but from conventional legal theory and the Christian obligation to evangelise.⁴³ Canny himself did not attempt to develop his original position on this point in later treatments of the topic.⁴⁴

The second problem with Canny’s thesis lies in his characterisation of Renaissance humanism. Canny was right to argue that Aristotelian philosophy was a staple of almost all contemporary educational institutions, but he was wrong to argue that that Aristotelianism declined in England from the mid-sixteenth century. The English universities remained wedded to Aristotle until well after 1650, and English Ramism amounted to no more than some minor pedagogical reforms. The substance of the moral philosophy curriculum was still based on Aristotle and Cicero; indeed the theory of the origins of human society by Thomas Starkey that Canny quoted was not in fact new, but just a paraphrase of a passage in Cicero’s De Inventione.⁴⁵ Moreover, Canny allowed an historical or cultural perspective to his Englishmen which in reality would only emerge slowly during the Counter-Enlightenment from the work of Giambattista Vico and J. G. Herder; in this he had been misled by a body of scholarship which mistook Renaissance scholars’ use of sophisticated tools for dating texts for a true historical consciousness which saw the spirit of a people develop or advance through time.⁴⁶ John Montaño also attempted to ascribe the culture concept to sixteenth-century Englishmen; but his valuable analysis of multiple treatises on the government of Ireland in fact evidenced theories of law and custom among English Irish and English, not any theory of culture.⁴⁷ Ciaran Brady has argued vehemently that the principal focus of all the early Tudor treatises on the government of Ireland ‘lay not primarily with culture, society, and religion, but specifically and conventionally with the question of law, or rather of its absence’, a point confirmed by Montaño’s study.⁴⁸ The idea that right and wrong could be different in different times or different places was a fundamentally un-Christian one which would only emerge after the Enlightenment revolution in the European understanding of human reason and human societies.

Irish historians have left Canny’s brief reference to Aristotelianism and the institutions in which that philosophy was taught undeveloped, and indeed Canny himself never precisely defined what he meant by Renaissance humanism. In contrast, Brendan Bradshaw defined the phenomenon with pugnacious precision: Renaissance humanism was a common perception of the human condition, world view, and philosophy of life derived from the philosophy of Plato.⁴⁹ Bradshaw portrayed the leaders of this movement as the sophisticated intellectuals of royal and noble courts, so that Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, for example, informed the historian both about More’s own vision of society and about the mentalité of humanists of his generation. And to be a true humanist, Bradshaw insisted, one had to subscribe to a very optimistic anthropology: humanists were inspired by the Book of Genesis’s description of man in his original state of perfection, before Adam’s fall, to revolt against late medieval pessimism.⁵⁰ Consequently Bradshaw was sceptical about the ability of Protestants, who emphasised the damage which the fall of man had wreaked on human capacities, to be humanists:‘to speak of Protestant humanism is, strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms’.⁵¹ This identification of Renaissance humanism with Christian Platonism enlivened all of Bradshaw’s research into Irish humanism; he argued that humanist patriotism in turn acted as a catalyst for a new Irish nationalism in the second half of the sixteenth century.

This approach raises numerous difficulties. Bradshaw’s definition of humanism was pugnacious because pitched directly against the authoritative work of Paul Oskar Kristeller. Kristeller had identified humanism as primarily an educational movement devoted to the cultivation of the humanities and also as a classical mode of discourse: put crudely, humanism was doing things in Latin and Greek.⁵² Bradshaw wished to use his own much broader definition of humanism in order to incorporate figures like Manus O’Donnell, mid-sixteenth-century lord of Donegal, into the European Renaissance; this demanded the reduction of humanism to no more than a social and philosophical mood.⁵³ Moreover, taking the work of a radical intellectual like Sir Thomas More as a guide to the world view of his more conservative contemporaries is highly questionable. The scepticism with which More examined the institution of private property in Utopia was most certainly not normal among the elite.⁵⁴ To understand the place of humanism in the lives of ordinary gentlemen and noblemen in early modern Ireland one must turn to the curricula of the grammar schools and universities. These prestigious institutions educated a remarkably high proportion of the European population: in England about one in fifty of the male year-group entered Oxford and Cambridge during the 1630s; in Spain about one in thirty of the male year-group went to university in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.⁵⁵ The success of the early modern universities as agents of cultural transmission is now widely accepted; as Laurence Brockliss put it, ‘the professor formed the minds of the elite in the same way as the priest and the parson formed the minds of the poor’.⁵⁶ Next, the ethics, politics, and general anthropology taught to the European elite in the grammar schools and universities was distinctly Ciceronian and Aristotelian; Plato was generally thought suitable only for the most advanced students.⁵⁷ Finally, Bradshaw’s argument that there were no Protestant humanists founders both on the practice of Protestant scholarship in the humanities at all levels (the University of Leiden remained the foremost centre of classical studies throughout the seventeenth century), and on the theories of ethics and politics advanced inside and outside Protestant universities.⁵⁸ It is senseless to deny the label of humanist to Archbishop James Ussher, who learned to write a particularly elegant Latin in Dublin in the 1580s and 1590s, and whose scholarly prowess deeply impressed his Catholic contemporaries despite his ferocious hostility to their faith. And Ussher, like the majority of Protestants, was convinced of the worth of classical learning and moral philosophy to Christian life.⁵⁹

Two steps are necessary in order to resolve many (though not all) of the difficulties treated above. The first is to adopt Kristeller’s definition of Renaissance humanism: primarily doing things (reading, translating, speaking, writing) in Latin and Greek, and then (by cautious extension) doing things with classical concepts in the vernacular. That process of using the classical languages must also be related to the institutions in which they were employed most intensely: the grammar schools and universities, and the Ciceronian and Aristotelian