In April of last year I had read there was a new biography of the Augsburg banker and money titan Jacob Fugger. Whether or not he was The Richest Man Who Ever Lived , I got this book by Greg Steinmetz on a whim and started into what reveals itself as a very easy introduction. A plain-spoken, if somewhat flatly episodic view from peak to peak along many of the ridges atop that European Renaissance world of commerce and finance. At twenty-seven years of age, Fugger gave a loan to the Archduke of Augsburg. By the age of thirty, in order to resolve a dispute with Venice, Fugger had exchanged a loan of 100,000 florins to the same Arch-duke for the rights of the mine at Schwaz until the principle of that loan could be paid off and also crucially, for control of the Augsburg state treasury. He also made investments in a particular Portuguese trip around the southern tip of Africa, along the way negotiating deals with princes, emperors and popes, reaping profits again and again. Sitting on top of the world indeed.
Still he preferred to work alone. As the decade of the 1490's proceeded, Fugger developed a rare partnership with one Johannes Thurzo. This man Thurzo, related to Ladislaus (through the Jagiello's of Poland) now the King of Hungary, was extended royal grants along the Carpathian mtns. allowing Fugger to put up the money to purchase lands there rich in copper. The consequent production system set in motion by Thurzo, a more sophisticated extraction, smelting and transport process, made Fugger one of the richest men in the world. By 1498 in the tail end of the decade, he had gained so much of the market that he flooded Venice with this metal and broke up and dismantled a number of competitors there. I'd like to see if this helped precipitate the fall of the Garzoni bank early the next year.
The copper shipments from Hungary extended into the Baltic and North Seas. In November 1510, a Dutch ship set off from Danzig full of Fugger's copper. It was boarded and captured by agents of the Hanseatic League. The Hansa one of the most powerful of forces in Europe, were a storied association of men in cities and on boats that had held the monoploy of trade in the northern seas for centuries. This mercantile endeavor set cities and kingdoms against each other to reap profit as well as organize the largest fairs and trading festivals from Novgorod to Bruges. They had built their maritime empire on herring and then cod, meanwhile branching out into timber and tin, furs and pepper, copper and silver.
It was then I wanted to learn about this well established, oft-times brutal, mercantile force and found a reprint of a quick read entitled The Hansa , first published in 1929. Full of seafaring tales and bitter rivalries, this bare, apologetic, almost monograph is doubled in length by mostly translated excerpts from texts from the various periods. Selections from Richard Hakluyt and John de Mandeville are set out as well as portions of the medieval maritime laws of Visby, items from the treaty of Stralsund, and lists of attacks by part-time pirates, once supported as Hansa agitators. Steinmetz in his book on Jacob Fugger has his exploits outshine and overwhelm the dominant Hansa. The older monograph by E. Gee Nash marks these difficulties for the Hansa as just one among many of the ups and downs in a long series of endeavors. Its selection of details in the translated sections can still reveal useful context. There have been several times I've wanted to post a number of these items here. It's too bad this book reads like it was produced as a popularizing pamphlet rather than real history. It suffers from that special blend of romantic sea urges full of daring-do set in larger type and spacing for encouraging high school boys at prep schools in the American 1920's, on behalf of their grandfathers.
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As the north was still building their various extractive and monopolizing economies and working its way in and out of endless conflict, the south was still fighting over land and titles and the opportunity to be heard. And for some, to let old voices be heard, to push for reform, and to reset or reinterpret old voices and old manuscripts in new ways. One of these sorts of explorers was Poggio Bracciolini, mentioned before. Famously, this papal notary and source of mostly reliable quips had also been one of the great book discoverers of the fifteenth century. Just a few years ago, Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard fame, an editor for the standardizing Norton English Literature and Norton Shakespeare tomes, released an overview uncovering the discovery of T. Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. Greenblatt calls it The Swerve (2011) and while ostensibly the subject and subtitle is 'How The World Became Modern', it spends only a few chapters on the content of Lucretius' once famous but also now obscure again, 1st c. BCE Latin poem describing his remarkable epicureanism.
Instead, most of Greenblatt's book explores the various methodological and environmental contexts by which this particular book of Lucretius was passed on, then rediscovered, and also, almost as an accidental by-product of the time, became its own issue when it was rediscovered and disseminated.
Like seeds spread by Love Herself, the elements would grow wings and speed, so filled with desire that they could attract and repel, at ease or all in a rush, each in its own nature, each toward its own end, each end begun a new becoming sprung.
It was after I had remembered and ordered the modern day (20th c.) version of Lucretius in latin (with the intro and the commentary by Leonard and Smith), and had begun reading it ever so slowly, that a friend lent to me on impulse the relevant book of Greenblatt. Already I've sped through two-thirds of that so, more of Bracciolini's life and contexts will wind up here.
Already, three years ago I had promised to look more into the life of ser Bracciolini, and like so many other times, the more I looked, the more I found. For two of his contemporaries, one a famous critic, and the other, one of the most famous of the early Italian humanists, Bracciolini even makes mention of or, took time to publicly attack. Both have newly published works in blingual texts for english, in the 21st century by Harvard in the I Tatti Renaissance Library.
Correspondence (2013) of Lorenzo Valla includes letters both to and from this author. So it is this also provides the voices of a great many doers and thinkers, and a few other walks of life, over the decades across cultural Italy during the middle of the fifteenth century. On Exile (2013) has Francesco Filelfo composing a dialogue (c. 1445) with several members of exiled Florentine society taking part. The fact that this dialogue is a composed fiction that seems to purposefully not follow the motives or events discussed, adds even more interest. Not objective, not entirely factual, but instead intended as 'edifying'.
Additionally, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library has seen fit to publish A New Herodotus (2014) in a bilingual text for english along with a companion volume to provide much needed context for what should become an instant classic. Of course it won't, but it should, as it depicts the advance of the Ottoman Turk into Europe in the fifteenth century from a hitherto unacknowledged but excellent source.
There is a new biography of Martin Luther (2017) by Lyndal Roper I've just begun that looks absorbing.
There are several letters appealing for unbiased ears, and a crafty dialogue in Apologetic Writings (2015) by Girolamo Savonarola, also published thru the I Tatti Renaissance Library.
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Several works of fiction have made it to the top of a pile that has fallen over so many times that I couldn't avoid it anymore. So this year I told myself I'd read as many as I could. With these following books, some 1400 pages of fiction have crossed my eyes, so slow, with only half of the Blas de Robles book still left to see. Books that travel, think, explore.
The First I saw and began last year was an uncorrected proof of Charlie Smith's Ginny Gall (2016). It arrived in a donation bag at the local homeless shelter (and where it was returned to and now sits on the shelf awaiting another reader). Abundant in flora, bursting with emotion, painful and still sublime, both slick and sandy, this internal, swirling travelogue takes us with a young African-American male from Chattanooga, TN to the rails and America, through the depression years, and to prison for a crime he did not commit, and back. Heartbreaking, vicious, plaintive, mature, immediate, the visions this book conjures swell all senses and mocks the jailer, the owner, the censor, the judge. Pine trees that weep with compassion, Magnolia that bloom, dripping with a wary, still heavy sense of cautionary alarm, begging for a breeze to send such compressed desires aloft.
Translated from the French in 2011, Where Tigers Are At Home was originally published in a French edition 2006 by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles. It and its author won the Prix Medicis prize for literature in 2008. This prize is awarded to authors 'whose fame does not yet reach their talent'. This 800 plus page fiction intertwines several very different strands of action in modern day northern Brazil and intercuts them with what acts like eye-witness accounts of the travels and exploits of the famous seventeenth century Jesuit inventor and polymath Athanasius Kircher. There is the group of geologists heading inland, upriver to capture and document what is hoped to be a missing link between Africa and South America. There is the bitter wife of the arrogant governor who stuffs her emotions with alchohol, always seeking an ally or a ladder to climb out of her brutal husband's tightening circles. There is the despairing, cycnical french correspondent whose wife has left and whose daughter and her friends are running from debt and responsibility at a full gallop into hedonism and uncivil pleasure. A wandering woman shares the correspondent's interest in Kircher and in his research. He likes the bounce in her skirt and her quick ripostes, but she knows more than she lets on. There are the locals in a small village where a jet plane has crashed in the middle of the night. The correspondent's wife did go on that geology float. That expedition at first looks like a modernized African Queen tale, but it gets ambushed by bandits with machine guns, and those left still alive are cut off from any contact with the outside world. The governor's son is also on that float trip.
Thomas Pynchon's latest novel The Bleeding Edge (2013) is set in the New York City year of 2001. At the height of the dot-com financial bubble and amidst real estate and impenetrable virtual reality shifts, Maxine Tarnow, a loan-fraud investigator with courage to spare, tries to find out the eternal question, what just happened? Complex, ever-shifting, the backdrop and cast of characters speed by like credit card swipes at a peep show stealing a looksee in on the future. Or, set in 2001 New York, it still seems before it's time - like ghosts coming up to us and whispering the truth softly, gently ... and then, handed a corndog on a stick and slipping naturally onto a just-arrived child's carousel horse, with no visible wheels or locomotive possibilities, zips off down the street blaring some other generation's showtune. Echoes of which bounce back off of windowpanes, taco trucks and the gleam of receding taxi rearwindows.
In the last month I've also just read the last hundred pages of James Joyce's Ulysses. Again. These bits of review and crit should continue as I read more of modern fiction over time.
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