One of the most significant innovations in the history of Byzantine book culture is the adoption of the minuscule for the transcription of literary texts, which took place between the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth century: this script, which resulted from the process of normalization of a cursive that was already being used in bureaucratic milieus (Figure 2.2.1), superseded the traditional book scripts known as majuscule. This phenomenon shortly preceded a wide cultural revival by which the empire emerged from a long period of decline. This study makes suggestions concerning the interconnection between these phenomena and investigates their causes, focusing on the relationship between such mutations in Byzantine (book) culture and the deep socio-political changes that took place in the empire from the end of the eighth century, the precursors of which can be traced back to the seventh century. It is structured into three main sections: the first section below briefly presents the innovative character of ninth-century book culture, with special attention paid to the manuscript tradition and to the circulation of classical texts. The following section then focuses on the socio-cultural and political conditions in which the adoption of the minuscule for the copying of books took place.

In this collection of essays, we examine the significance of political communication in the comparative study of medieval polities. The workshop out of which this collection grew was initially intended to work towards an explanation of the divergent courses that Chinese and European history have taken in the second millennium through extended conversations about the role of political communication in the formation, maintenance, or fragmentation of empires and other kinds of polities. We abandoned the paradigm of Sino-European divergence in favour of a more open-ended investigation of the significance of communication processes and the politics of mediators and communicators in the histories of medieval Chinese and European polities. In the introduction we outline the analytical benefits of and the historiographical need for the micro- or meso-historical comparative case studies included in this volume. We first turn to the question of why and how historians have turned to political communication. Then we discuss the questions of why and how the authors employed comparative approaches. Lastly, we will also underscore the need for comparative histories of medieval polities, those included in this volume as well as those that are not.

Political Communication

Two factors in particular motivated the focus on political communication, which we broadly define as ‘the circulation of information and ideas concerning political institutions and events’1 or ‘the exchange of political knowledge and values among both state- and non-state actors’ (De Weerdt and Watts, Chapter 1).

First, twentieth-century literatures on the comparative history of empires and state formation tend to focus on state institutions, social organization, and ideologies which are typically understood as well-defined traditions with fixed characteristics (texts, rituals, and values whose meanings remain constant over time). In this literature, political communication appears irrelevant; ideological or cultural factors are reduced to broad cultural orientations that are more or less automatically shared by ruling elites and the governed. In his seminal macro-sociological study, The Political Systems of Empires (1963), Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, for example, sees the cultural orientations of imperial elites as the primary reason for successive Chinese regimes’ ability to accommodate change within pre-established political frameworks.

Abstract

This chapter proposes a method for the comparative analysis of political communications which is potentially applicable to different languages, cultures and political structures. Political communications are defined not in relation to culturally pre-determined categories of relationships (allies, clients, friends, etc.), but as individual interactions or transactions between actors which have specific functions at specific times. The concept of ‘communicative function’ is proposed as the basis for the profiling of relationships, which is in turn the basis for a culturally neutral comparative analysis of political communications. Examples are given of the application of this methodology to a number of Western medieval letter collections, an important source of evidence for political communications and networks, along with suggestions for future directions of research.

Keywords: communicative function, transactions, relationships, networks, letter collections

Political communications are the detectable components of the networks which historians now increasingly see everywhere as the substrate of human societies and as shaping forces in polities. They are the manifest interactions and exchanges which can be visualized as the nodes and vectors of social or political networks which in turn are emerging as an important explanatory model for group formation, influence, common action, trust-building and many other forms of political activity up to the level of state formation. While networks themselves are not substantive entities, neither are they metaphors; rather, they are descriptions of abstractions which can model or visualize the complex sums of the many human relationships and exchanges which constitute political activity.

A generic concept of political communications, as of networks, offers obvious potential for cross-cultural comparative history. The communications and interactions themselves, however, are embedded in social practices, articulated through linguistic and genre conventions, and related to philosophical traditions or shared assumptions which can differ between cultures to the point of apparent incompatibility. Where, for example, China's famously enduring examination system was founded on the belief that mastery of the written word corresponded to mastery of truth and to ethical purity, the ancient Western tradition of rhetoric took as equally axiomatic the exclusive authenticity of the spoken word and the indirectness or dissimulation of the written. How can any comparative study of texts cross so fundamental a divide even before we take into consideration the different linguistic and genre conventions, social hierarchies, or religious and political institutions, and the ever-changing historical contingencies of times and places, as well as the practical experiences of individual actors?

As explained elsewhere in this volume, scholars of China have only recently begun to explore letters as objects of literary and historical analysis. That said, for the Song Dynasty (960–1279) in particular we now have several important studies of epistolary culture. They have begun to show how Song letters were used to maintain relationships, carry on intellectual debates, transmit news, and realize political agendas. They have also demonstrated the usefulness of letters for tracing trace social, political, and intellectual networks.

The current chapter aims to contribute to our growing understanding of the various ways letters functioned in Song men's social and political lives, as well as to illustrate some of the conventions of epistolary writing in the Song. I focus on the correspondence of a late Song literatus named Yao Mian 姚勉 (1216–1262). Yao is a fascinating and somewhat tragic character: born in the relative backwater of Xinchang 新昌 (present day Yifeng 宜豐 county, in Jiangxi), he came of age when the Song government was already in decline, threatened by Mongol invasion and led by a factionalized court and a distracted and self-indulgent emperor. Although he was a top-ranked degree-holder, served briefly at court, and corresponded with some of the most eminent political figures of the period, Yao Mian's own political position was marginal. His examination success came late, and both personal and political factors kept him out of office for the majority of his adult life. We know about him today almost exclusively through the survival of his own collected works.

It is a pleasant task to comment on a volume of such rich, and richly varied, research in comparative history. I have learned much in reading the volume's offerings, both about my own field and about several fields in which I have no expertise. What I will offer here is no more than rumination on a selection of the volume's articles — those that undertake specific comparisons between China, which is my own area of specialization, and Europe, which is not. I offer thoughts on how these articles do comparative history, and what one may learn about how to do comparative history from them; but thoughts also about what comparative history might be for: what answers the articles’ authors seem to give to that question, and what possible other answers they seem less inclined to give. I should say at the outset that I find each of these articles a highly successful piece of comparative-historical work, and that insofar as I may talk about what they do not do, it is not to find fault but to explore what possibilities comparative history might offer.

The articles vary, obviously, widely in topic; but to my eye they share much in method, in logic of argument, and in presentation — even to some degree in form. In their exemplary article ‘The Printers’ Networks of Chen Qi (1186–1256) and Robert Estienne (1503-1559): a micro-comparative approach to political dependence and censorship’, Chu Ming Kin and Julius Morche remark on their own procedure: ‘While there is ample historiographic precedent for comparing Song China to the European Renaissance, the direct juxtaposition of microhistories might seem an unusual analytical approach’ (p. 384; emphasis mine). In fact in these articles the approach is not unusual: both ‘microhistories’, or something like them, and ‘direct juxtaposition’ of the resulting narratives recur almost throughout. Technically, as the term ‘microhistory’ usually tends to be applied to work that focuses closely on a single individual or small group, the only other strictly ‘microhistorical’ chapters alongside Chu and Morche's may be those of Bernard Gowers and Lik Hang Tsui on Yue Fei and Thomas Becket, and of Ari Levine on the historiographies of Ye Mengde and Niketas Choniates. Gowers and Tsui call what they are doing not ‘microhistory’ but ‘micro-comparison’ (p. 482), yet clearly affiliate themselves with ‘microhistory’ through their invocation of Carlo Ginzburg (p. 482).

After Jurchen invaders from Inner Asia besieged and conquered Kaifeng in 1126–1127, and Constantinople fell to the Latin armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, political information about these courts and capitals was preserved and retransmitted by elite scholars, whose accounts of imperial collapse circulated amongst communities of diasporic literati. Producing parallel narratives of the fall of Kaifeng and the sack of Constantinople, Ye Mengde 葉夢得 (1077–1148) and Niketas Choniates (c.1155–1217) chronicled the collapse of these imperial centres in an effort to reconstruct post-conquest political communities. While Ye and Niketas were operating within separate conceptual frameworks of imperial authority and structuring their narratives according to different literary blueprints, their surviving memoirs documented personal displacement as well as cultural and political trauma writ large. By recording and commemorating the chain of events that culminated in the collapse of the Northern Song and Byzantine Empires from exile, both authors were converting orally transmitted anecdotes into enduring textual representations; in other words, they were transmuting communicative memory into cultural memory. Braiding dynastic history with personal recollection, their texts commemorated the breaching of imperial frontiers by ‘barbarian’ invaders, who had dislocated educated men like themselves into the hinterland, where dispersed networks of elites could be reconnected through the sharing of narratives about the recent dynastic past.

How does a government ensure that the populace is informed of issues that concern them? In the developed world today, many means of communication are available. Government leaders can call press conferences and leave it up to news organizations to spread word of new policies via television, newspapers, and the Internet. The postal system is also often used, for instance, to inform those with government pensions of changes in their benefits. To make sure that those involved in a lawsuit show up in court, officers of the court deliver summons to them in person, witnessing that they received the notice. In the US, civil lawsuits often require that decisions be published, with the result that newspapers, especially free ones, are filled with pages of legal notices that hardly anyone ever reads.

The means of communication available to governments in earlier times were of course more limited. Oral communication was the most basic, used everywhere, but it had its limitations. Those not present when an announcement is made might get only a distorted, hearsay version of it. With writing, the means of communication were expanded, as recipients did not need to be gathered together to hear an announcement.

By telling the story of interwar environmental perspectives, the introduction wishes to navigate and explain different trends in the history of global environmental law and in studies on the League. Using these questions to track possible links between history, law, and environment, the book shall explore those opportunities in environmental law and international relations in which the League was so deeply involved. As the introduction will explain, this reclaiming of the past enables us to deepen the conventional analysis beyond what we would describe as “historiographic amnesia,” which is typically characteristic of research about the League, as exemplified by the paradigm of the Rise and Fall of the League of Nations. As such, the story of the League as a whole, with its different (and sometimes inconsistent) challenges – which up until now have been missing from both the history of international law and environmental history – serves as fresh territory for new, unique exploration. The introduction will show how the two different research fields – that of the interwar period, and that of the evolution of international environmental law – can be bridged together by revealing the exciting plot of the environmental regime of the League