England's Asian Renaissance

By Su Fang Ng, Carmen Nocentelli, Abdulhamit Arvas and 7 more

England's Asian Renaissance explores how Asian knowledges, narratives, and customs inflected early modern English literature. Just as Asian imports changed England's tastes and enriched the English language, Eastern themes, characters, and motifs helped shape the country's culture and contributed to its national identity. Questioning long-standing dichotomies between East and West and embracing a capacious understanding of translatio as geographic movement, linquistic transformation, and cultural grafting, the collection gives pride of place to convergence, approximation, and hybridity, thus underscoring the radical mobility of early modern culture. In so doing, England's Asian Renaissance also moves away from entrenched narratives of Western cultural sovereignty to think anew England's debts to Asia.

Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Dec 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781644532423

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England’s Asian Renaissance

An Introduction

SU FANG NG AND CARMEN NOCENTELLI

In the summer of 1615, the Englishman Thomas Coryate reached the Mughal court at Ajmer, where he addressed Emperor Jahangir in formal Persian and received from him a hundred peeces of siluer.¹ He also visited Delhi, where he saw an ancient pillar that he pronounced to be a monument erected by Alexander the Great: "I haue beene in a Citie in this Countrie, called Delee, where Alexander the Great ioyned battell with Porus, K[ing] of India, and conquered him; and in token of his victorie, erected a brasse pillar, which remaineth there to this day.² The pillar that Coryate attributed with such confidence to Alexander is actually made of iron, not brass, and bears a Sanskrit inscription of Emperor Chandragupta II (c. 380–c. 415 C.E.), who reigned several centuries after Porus and Alexander lived. The classically minded Coryate, who had already traveled through Italy copying inscriptions and epitaphs, unsurprisingly saw India through the lens of ancient texts. But he tried to engage Asia on its own terms: in his speech to Jahangir, he solicited the emperor’s support by describing himself as a fooker Daruces (fakir dervish) or religious mendicant.³ He also made considerable efforts to learn local languages, as noted by the English East India Company chaplain Edward Terry, who recorded that Coryate suddenly got such a knowledge and mastery [of Persian and Hindustani], that it did exceedingly afterwards advantage him in his travels up and down the Mogul’s territories, he wearing always the habit of that nation, and speaking their language."⁴ Habiting himself in Indian robes, Coryate habituated his tongue to Indian languages.

An inveterate rambler long before the institutionalization of the Grand Tour, Coryate approached his travels in Asia as an extension of his experiences in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Neither merchant nor diplomat, he fashioned himself as something of a new type: the tourist. In so doing, he took a strikingly transcultural view of travel. The epistle to the reader prefacing the account of his European travels, Coryate’s Crudities, enumerates a long list of exemplary travelers—from Pliny and the queen of Sheba to Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua—to conclude that the main scope of travel is to purchase experience and wisdom.⁵ Coryate contrasts these exemplary figures to many … English travelers whose ethnocentrism he condemns with a line from a speech against Timarchus by the Greek orator Aeschines: οὐ τὸν τρόπον ἀλλά τὸν τόπον μόνον μετήλλαξαν (not his manner but his place only does he change).⁶ For Coryate, travel entails a transformation of the self, a change of manner or habit (τὸν τρόπον; nominative, τρόπος). The root meaning of τρόπος is turn, so we might think of it as a cultural swerve. This transculturation is also literally a translation, as Coryate turns or twists his tongue to speak several Eastern languages. And that linguistic turn is linked to his wearing, as Terry notes, the habit of that nation. In other words, Coryate ferries knowledge back to England through a bodily habituation.

Coryate was something of an eccentric, but his curiosity about Asia was not altogether unusual. During the long sixteenth century, as England’s contacts with the East deepened and intensified, Eastern commodities—spices, silks, cottons, porcelains, and other luxury goods—began infiltrating English life and culture, fostering an increased interest in all things Asian.⁷ In 1609, Robert Cecil’s shopping arcade on the Strand, the New Exchange, opened in London, offering China fans, ostrich eggs, porcelain dishes, and other exotic wares to an increasingly acquisitive public eager for Asian novelties.⁸ By 1616, words like curry (from the Tamil "kari, sauce), dungaree (from the Marathi ḍoṅgarī, cloth), and cha (from the Mandarin ch’a, tea) had entered the English language.⁹ By the mid-1660s, recipes for punch—a Kind of Indian drink made of liquor, citrus juice, and other ingredients—were already in print, and tea (from the Amoy Hokkien tê ) was supplanting cha as England’s preferred term for the Leaf and Drink" that came from East Asia.¹⁰ In 1683, a recipe book titled The Young Cook’s Monitor repeatedly called for ketchup (from the Amoy Hokkien "kôe-chiap, brine") as an ingredient in roasts and stews.¹¹

As Asian imports changed England’s tastes and enriched its language, Eastern themes grew more conspicuous both on stage and on the page. Between 1561 and 1660 alone, over seventy plays featuring Eastern characters or locales were performed in or around London.¹² Asian language primers such as the "Certaine wordes … of Iaua" in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598–1600) quickly gave way to dictionaries and grammars such as John Greaves’s Elementa Linguae Persicae (1649).¹³ Dozens of Asian maps were drafted and reproduced, from William Baffin’s 1619 map of the Mughal Empire (also known as Sir Thomas Roe’s map) to the map of China augmented by John Speed in 1626. Hundreds of travelogues, letters, and reports on Asian commodities, peoples, and polities appeared in print or circulated in manuscript. As Donald Lach and Edwin Van Kley have noted for Europe at large, few literate people could have been completely untouched by this large print corpus or unaffected by the cultural shifts it triggered.¹⁴

Beyond Commercium

The story of Europe’s trade with Asia is at the heart of many recent studies on global traffic and its effects on cultural representations. This scholarship has effectively reoriented our understanding of the Renaissance, which we now view less as an autarchic triumph of Western genius and more as a result of Europe’s entanglement in an East-centered world-system.¹⁵ Broadly speaking, this reconceptualization has prompted two shifts in the way that we approach the period. First, we have come to realize that the cultural efflorescence known as the European Renaissance cannot be separated from the two-way material exchange between East and West.¹⁶ Second, we now understand that this exchange concerned not only goods and commodities but also narratives, attitudes, and ideas.¹⁷

The impact of these cultural and intellectual imports was deeply transformative for England: contact with Asia affected the country’s mental landscape just as much as it affected England’s material world. In a recent history of early modern London, for instance, Robert Batchelor argues that Asian knowledges effectively revolutionized England’s political, economic, and social order.¹⁸ Along similar lines, literary scholars have illuminated the ways that contact with Asia inflected English literature and culture. Jonathan Burton uses the metaphor of trafficking to understand how early modern England represented the Islamic East and constructed its own identity.¹⁹ In a series of studies, Daniel Vitkus explores the impact of global trade on English theater’s representations of Islamic Others.²⁰ Many of the essays in Jyotsna Singh’s A Companion to the Global Renaissance deal with Anglo-Asian exchanges, and Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng’s edited volume focuses on the cultural impact of long-distance trade.²¹

As the brief survey above may have already suggested, tropes of commercium—in its related meanings of social intercourse and commodities exchange—have proven especially resonant for studies of English contacts with other cultures. In fact, trade is the starting point for several monographs on Anglo-Islamic or Anglo-Asian exchange. These include Robert Markley’s The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730, which foregrounds England’s desire for spices and luxury goods; Jerry Brotton’s This Orient Isle, which details Queen Elizabeth I’s commercial dealings with Morocco and the Ottoman Empire; and Miriam Jacobson’s Barbarous Antiquity, which examines how the Anglo-Ottoman trade inflected English renderings of Greco-Roman antiquity.²²

As profitable as this work has been in countering traditional understandings of the Renaissance, it has only begun to dismantle the deep-seated dichotomies that still distinguish Europe from Asia. England’s Asian Renaissance contributes to this larger endeavor by reassessing the role of commercium as a model to conceptualize early modern circulations of narratives and ideas. Take, for instance, the eminently useful trafficking, a term Burton derives from Hakluyt to signify any form of intercourse, communication, or business involving an exchange.²³ As a way of supplementing unidirectional colonial models with bilateral mercantile and cultural exchanges, Burton’s model significantly enriches our understanding of how cultures moved and were transformed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing that at the intersection of various and even conflicting forces, cultural transfers served as so many "entrepôt[s] … from which those forces inevitably c[a]me away changed."²⁴ Just as Burton supplements unidirectional models with bilateral ones, this volume seeks to supplement tropes of commercium to include interactions that commercium often leaves out. Conceptual homologies between cultural transfer and commercial exchange tend to privilege unmediated exchange over mediated diffusion, potentially obscuring more circuitous patterns of cultural cross-fertilization. They emphasize synchrony over diachrony, thereby foreclosing longue durée perspectives. What is more, they implicitly construe culture as a bounded (if elastic) entity that is ethnically marked, historically consistent, and geographically circumscribed.

This is not to say that commercium models should be discarded, or to propose that cultural differences should be swept aside as irrelevant. Rather, it is to suggest that foreign trade—the exchange of one country’s superfluities for the wares, which forreine Nations doe afford, as the mercantile theorist Thomas Mun would have it—is neither the only nor always the most effective model to describe early modern processes of cross-cultural transfer.²⁵ In other words, while the China fans, ostrich eggs, and porcelain dishes offered for sale at the New Exchange were understood, prized, and promoted qua Eastern commodities, cultural imports from Asia were not always billed or even recognized as such.

The Hindu fable book known today as Pañcatantra (c. 300–400 C.E.), for example, entered English literary history as The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570; repr. 1601), a title that emphasized the Italianness of the latest mediating text—Anton Francesco Doni’s La Moral Filosophia (1552; repr. 1567)—over the original Asianness of the material.²⁶ Recent editors of The Morall Philosophie of Doni have decried this title as especially infelicitous: not only does it seem to promise more than the book can deliver, but it also obscures the fact that this work is nothing less than … one of the most enduring works of imaginative literature of all time.²⁷ Granted, the English book’s subtitle dutifully acknowledges that its stories were first compiled in the Indian tongue (figure I.1). But the effect of the acknowledgment is blunted by the engraving beneath it, which adapted for English audiences Doni’s well-known emblem of three figures and seven globes with a Pauline quotation in Greek, ἡ γὰρ σοφία τοῦ κόσμου τούτου μωρία παρὰ τῷ θεῷ ἐστίν (for the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God). Balancing ancient Indian wisdom and sixteenth-century Italian culture, the title page of The Morall Philosophie of Doni hovers precariously between the two.

As it turns out, this equipoise is neither trivial nor coincidental. Although largely ignored by contemporary scholars, the work of Doni enjoyed wide currency in early modern Europe and was even heralded as an intellectual breakthrough. The Frenchman Gabriel Chappuys, for one, commended Doni’s publications as novelties of near-divine excellence, while the Anglo-Italian John Florio described them as fantasticall and strange.²⁸ For his part, Doni’s English translator, Thomas North, praised the veyne of delite running through his Italian source, writing: amongst a number of Italian Authours, which I have read, I coulde finde none better in my poore opinion for mee to deale in, and pleasanter … at voyde times to reade than this.²⁹ Thus, it was not out of indolence or lack of imagination that the animal tales of the Pañcatantra appeared in England as The Morall Philosophie of Doni. Rather, by pointing to Doni’s work, North was capitalizing on a contemporary literary vogue. That he should have chosen to do so suggests that his audience had little interest in separating Europe’s modern delite from the ancient Philosophie of Asia.³⁰ Both were matters of curiosity and interest. What is more, each was inevitably implicated in the other. The cultural and intellectual ferment to which both Doni and North bore witness depended, at least in part, on the reception of Eastern works such as the Pañcatantra. In turn, the relevance of such works was intimately bound to their perceived connection to the challenges and developments of the early modern period.

Figure I.1. Title pages of Doni’s Moral Filosophia (1552), left, and North’s Morall Philosophie (1570), right. North’s reproduction of Doni’s well-known device of the seven globes suggests the extent to which the book sought to capitalize not only on ancient knowledge in the Indian tongue (as indicated by the volume’s subtitle) but also on fashionable sixteenth-century Italian culture. Images courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

This means that patterns of cross-cultural fertilization during the early modern period were subtler and far more intricate than the paradigm of commercium—with its emphasis on direct contact, courte durée, and distinctiveness—would allow for. Tending to these subtler and more intricate patterns means focusing on diachrony and mediation just as much as on synchrony and direct interaction, balancing the openly exotic against the seemingly domestic, and foregrounding mixedness instead of separateness. Here again, the case of the Pañcatantra is instructive. When North set out to anglicize Doni’s Moral Filosophia, he was tapping into a long tradition of translations, adaptations, and retellings that had already turned Sanskrit into Pahlavi, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, and Italian: "This precious Iewell (beloved Reader) was first founde written in the Indian tongue … and thence conveyed into Persia, and was coated wyth their language … and from the Persian spéech a long time after by the auncient Fathers … brought into the natyve Arabian: & from that translated into Hebrue by Ioel gran Rabi a Iewe: at length reduced into Latine: and passing through many languages became a Spaniarde, with the tytle of Exemplario: and so in time brought to Venice, and there put into Italian … and nowe lastly out of Italian made vulgar to us."³¹

As it moved across lands and languages, the Pañcatantra took on many different names—Kalila wa Dimna, Directorium humanae vitae, and Exemplario contra los engaños y peligros del mundo, among others—each expressing a distinct arrangement of materials as well as a modified understanding of the tales’ purpose and meaning. This was no linear movement, of course. As Sharon Kinoshita has noted, premodern translation was almost always polydirectional.³² It also did not involve wholesale translations from one language to another. Rather, the journey of the Pañcatantra from India to England followed patterns of piecemeal mobility that confound traditional models of source study and influence.³³ In the process, the tales of the Pañcatantra were melded with Arabic narratives, Aesop’s fables, and Italian novellas: Brahmin values became Muslim and then Christian; jackals metamorphosed into asses and mules; and proper names were altered and transformed (Vishnu Sharma turned into Sendebar, Sanjivaka into Chiarino, and Nandaka into Incoronata).

As a result, by the time The Morall Philosophie of Doni appeared in England, tales first compiled in the Indian tongue could sound familiar if not entirely homespun. It is perhaps a sign of this familiarity that Sir Amorous La Foole, the vapid dandy (and New Exchange frequenter) of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene (1609 or 1610), should confuse Doni’s excellent Booke of morall Philosophy with the tales of Reynard the Fox, a northern European fable cycle that was not part of The Morall Philosophie of Doni or of any other text derived from the Pañcatantra.³⁴ For the seventeenth-century fashion victims lampooned by Jonson in the figure of La Foole, there was evidently little difference between the two sets of tales.

The chain of permutations that turned the Pañcatantra into Kalila wa Dimna, Directorium humanae vitae, and eventually The Morall Philosophie of Doni suggests that processes of cross-cultural transfer were often less a matter of commercium than of translatio. As Umberto Eco points out, the latter term first appeared in the sense of ‘change,’ even of address, ‘transport,’ banking operation, botanical graft, and metaphor.³⁵ Long before it took on the meaning of turning from one language to another, then, translatio denoted physical movement as well as transformation. It was quite literally a carrying over that had geographical, linguistic, and cultural implications. By the Middle Ages, this carrying over had acquired crucial political meanings: as translatio imperii, it mapped the rise and fall of different power centers as a westward movement from Troy to Rome and then to France and England; as translatio studii, it charted the cultural transfers that legitimated the movement of translatio imperii. Hence the formula translatio imperii et studii, whose doubled construction—a conjunction of power and knowledge that marked a distinctly premodern understanding of the political uses to which knowledge could be put—linked the migration of political power with the dynamics of cultural transfer.³⁶

Read in this perspective, North’s references to the Pañcatantra’s permutations do more than merely acknowledge the polydirectionality of premodern translation. They also complicate the standard account of translatio imperii et studii as a westward transfer of power and knowledge. As Kinoshita has shown in regard to Kalila wa Dimna, translations of the Pañcatantra consistently mobilized "the practice of translatio studii in the service of translatio imperii," as each permutation of the text made a bid for power by laying claim to cultural hegemony.³⁷ But while the Pañcatantra followed the movement of empire, it did not always move from east to west. Instead, it took a circuitous route across multiple mediating spaces—Spain, Italy, Persia, and Arabia—that connected Northwestern Europe to the Indian subcontinent and beyond. Far from describing a linear trajectory, then, the permutations of the Pañcatantra map a Eurasian continuum roughly centered in the eastern Mediterranean. In so doing, they also chart "an alternative history of translatio" in which rulers as apparently distant as the Capetians of France, the Ilkhans of Persia, the Abbasids of Baghdad, and the Ivreans of Iberia partook of a single culture of empire.³⁸

Insofar as North’s translation of Doni’s Moral Filosophia marked England’s entrance into this ongoing culture of empire, it serves as a reminder that the reception of Eastern knowledge in early modern England was effectively a bid for both political and cultural power. Indeed, most of the Englishmen whose names we have thus far mentioned were drawn to Asia for openly political reasons. Hakluyt, whose Principal Navigations reproduced "wordes … of Iaua," was a notorious propagandist for empire. Baffin, who drew the first broadly accurate map of northern India, was a navigator and explorer. And North certainly realized that the Pañcatantra gave him a way to offer advice and advertise his wisdom to the wealthy and powerful. Even Coryate, despite his relative marginality as an eccentric, understood full well how translatio studii related to power. Not only did he deploy Persian to gain Jahangir’s attention, but he also made his English publications stand out by peppering them with Asian words, sentences, and speeches.³⁹ Throughout the early modern period, England’s engagement with the East was underwritten by attempts to reshape power relations across a wide range of social and political dynamics, from diplomacy and courtiership to social policy, religion, and everyday