Introduction

The concept of “redemptionism” propagated by the Soviet Union during the 1950s relied on a nonuniversalist notion of history, which allowed Moscow to achieve geopolitical preeminence in its sphere of influence and protect the stability of the regime. This approach allowed Moscow to extend its geopolitical influence and promote despotic principles to countries that were not within its immediate area of influence but that sought socioeconomic improvements and a detachment from the political guidelines drawn up by the United States.

A National Version of Marxism

By the time Nikita Khrushchev came into power, there was an idea that socialism could only be built according to the national characteristics of each society. This idea emerged as a result of the multinational nature of the Soviet Union. Additionally, the Soviet leadership was able to instill this idea due to the prestige that it gained as a result of victory in World War II, which was won with the collaboration of the different peoples of the Soviet Union. The endorsement of a national version of Marxism was a sign of the limitations to expanding Soviet ideology as well as the increasing difficulties experienced regarding the launch of a program of social and economic reforms at home. The Khrushchev period served to raise awareness about the possibility of using Communism in order to create an economic system that would surpass American capitalism. It was vital for the Soviet Union to ensure that it remained the beacon of socialism, which compelled Moscow to ameliorate socioeconomic conditions at home. This was the main legacy of De-Stalinization. Indeed, during the Malenkov-Beria-Molotov interregnum, the ministries were endowed with further decision-making powers in an attempt to raise living standards. There were some successes in agricultural production due to a partial liberalization of production, further investment, and the lowering of taxes in private markets and plots. The emphasis on national Marxism went hand in hand with the efforts to improve the socioeconomic situation. In the 1950s, and as a consequence of victory in World War II, there was an entrenchment of a national version of Marxism. Moscow's actions were seen by many as a renunciation of the possibility of replacing capitalism with a dictatorship of the proletariat at the world level.

In one Middle English version of the Secretum secretorum, the translator begins his work by layering and concealing the languages, translations, and individuals who have transmitted book and text: he acknowledges part of the textual tradition of this ‘booke of good and vertuous condicions to the gouernaunce of his royal persoon. whiche was made by the prince of philisophers [sic] Aristotle’. He incorporates not only Aristotle's opening letters to Alexander, but also the prologue of Philip of Tripoli, who translated the original Arabic Sirr al-asrār into Latin. Philip's own narrating voice intrudes to explain that he encountered a hermit who gave him the treatise and that ‘I translated this booke out of Greeke in to latynne’ for an unnamed ‘moost noble kinge’, in the same way that Aristotle compiled the text for his king Alexander. This story of the Secretum's translation elides both Philip's use of the Arabic original – instead claiming an imaginary Greek source – and the further passage of the Secretum into French and finally into Middle English, the language in which the reader receives this textual history. Indeed, the translation of Philip's prologue in the later translator's work almost seems to claim that ‘this booke’ is in Latin, not English. In this way, the English of the English translation is rendered less visible. The opening of the Secretum creates an edited narrative about its own languages, sources, and movements. In its particular manuscript context, this Secretum translation only further complicates the relationships among language, translation, and individuals. A motto and insignia at the start of the Secretum indicate that it was destined for a family in Calais. However, the manuscript's illuminations and borders indicate that it was made in London, not on the Continent, despite its Continental-looking bastard secretary script (see Fig. 7.1). Moving between languages, decorative styles, individuals, and physical locations, this Secretum reflects larger trends of translation and exchange across Europe in the later Middle Ages. Beyond this single manuscript, books and book owners in Calais were similarly embedded in such movement across borders, what we might call transnational exchange.

England and Middle English participated in a European literary culture: like this Secretum, many Middle English texts were translations from French, Latin, and other languages, while English book owners had a taste for works from abroad. English authors, too, entered into literary exchanges with Continental writers.

EARLY MODERN EUROPE WAS enthralled by China and its main protago-nist from the late sixteenth century onwards, Confucius. This ancient sage was the subject of books and pamphlets, his likeness was depicted in print and on porcelain and his teachings were discussed in the pages of newspapers and journals throughout Europe. In 1740, the French writer Jean Baptise Boyer, marquis d’Argens, even dedicated his Lettres chinoises to the soul of this long departed Chinese savant: ‘Manes du plus grand homme qu’ait produit l’Univers, souffrez que je vous donne un témoignage du profond respect que j’ai pour votre mémoire’.

Separated in time by a millennium and in space by thousands of miles, D’Argens's dedication seems counter-intuitive. Dedications were usually aimed at remunerated (or prospectively remunerated or otherwise beneficial) patronage, and D’Argens could hardly have expected the soul of Confucius to grant him any earthly rewards in exchange for a flattering inscription. Yet there was more to be gained here than direct financial compensation. By ‘teaching the public what my feelings are for the greatest man the universe has produced’, D’Argens's dedication appealed in both sentiment and subject to the ever-growing number of early modern readers clamouring for knowledge about China. One result of this inquisitiveness has already been noted in Petiver's particular interest in and naming of specimens sent from China; D’Argens responded to the eagerness for knowledge of China with an epistolary novel: a genre that had only recently come into being.

As the Western humanities have increasingly focused on global per-spectives in the last couple of decades, scholars have emphasised the interconnectedness between cultures in Asia and Europe. A wide range of topics have been covered, often with a focus on the interactions facilitating the transmission of goods such as porcelain, lacquerware, silks and spices as well as shared knowledge about medicine, philosophy, writing systems and how this dissemination of goods and knowledge impacted upon the respective societies into which they were introduced.

The role of the Jesuits in the early European study of China and Con-fucius has been emphasised by, among others, David Mungello, who considers these premodern interactions as a form of ‘proto-sinology’.

When freelance journalist and film dramaturge Lars Meyer coined “New German Discourse Comedy” in his 2019 assessment of emergent sensibilities among young German filmmakers, he clearly found inspiration in another widely embraced German neologism: “discourse theater.” Regarding the “discourse” in “discourse theater,” cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen argued some fifteen years earlier for “a new genre” in German theater, spearheaded above all by Berlin dramaturge René Pollesch, in which the highly “artificial language of academic texts” acquires everyday use value. Tallying the kinds of inscrutable texts in play for Pollesch, Miriam Dreysse went farther by pointing out in detail that it’s not just any theory but rather “sociological theories of neoliberal late-capitalist societies,” in particular “critical urbanism, postcolonial studies, gender and queer theory,” that serve to help Pollesch’s actors scrutinize their lives caught within the matrices of heteronormativity and neoliberal labor relations. Far from wanting to intimidate or indoctrinate audiences with such highfalutin discourse, the grounds for taking recourse to theory, Pollesch himself once explained, has to do with the fact “dass wir Sehhilfen bekommen für die Wirklichkeit” (that we acquire visual aids for reality) otherwise disorienting and impenetrable for actors and audiences alike.

At first glance, Meyer’s nascent catalogue of films exemplary of his new rubric “New German Discourse Comedy” does recall Pollesch’s theater by dint of its films’ explicit inclusion of theory. With its gratuitous recitations from theoretical tracts, Meyer’s corpus makes no secret of the importance it places on academic discourse. Take, for example, Max Linz’s debut Ich will mich nicht künstlich aufregen (Asta Upset, 2014), which has its heroine reading aloud from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Or consider the nameless heroine suffering from writer’s block in Susanne Heinrich’s debut Das melancholische Mädchen (Aren’t You Happy?, 2016–2018) who reads from the German translation of Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999) on an exercise bike. And then there is Irene von Alberti’s Der lange Sommer der Theorie (The Long Summer of Theory, 2017), which not only lifts its title from cultural historian Philipp Felsch’s 2015 history of Berlin theory clearinghouse Merve Verlag but also features characters reading from his book. Most recently, Julian Radlmaier’s Blutsauger (Bloodsuckers, 2021) includes readings and discussions of volume one of Marx’s Capital (1867), from which the film takes its inspiration.

BY ITSLEGAL DEFINITION, the Bundesgrenzschutz was a law enforcement agency. Its jurisdiction was restricted to a space within thirty kilometers of West Germany's frontiers, and its size was limited to 10,000 men. In reality, however, the Federal Republic's conservative government never intended to use the force they envisioned for border security. Instead, border security was a convenient justification that enabled Adenauer and his second Interior Minister, Robert Lehr, to establish a militarized civil guard they could deploy against West Germany's internal enemies. They believed and argued that the survival of the democratic state depended upon its ability to use decisive force. Adenauer, Lehr, and others in the Interior Ministry approached domestic security based on their experiences of political violence and revolutionary chaos during Germany's interwar years. Although grounded in the reality of their experiences, they also exaggerated these fears to convince the Allied High Commission that building a federal police force was urgent to the survival of the Bonn Republic. West Germany had neither an independent army nor a centralized police force. The government created the BGS to fill this void and in so doing, set the tone for its militarized organizational culture for decades to come.

Border Security: A Solution Searching for a Problem

When it was founded in 1949, West Germany lacked the monopolization over legitimate coercive violence that sociologist Max Weber has identified as fundamental to the modern state. Allied armed forces provided for national defense and its state police agencies handled criminal activity. The Allies intended to gradually transfer more autonomy to the new West German government, but they were reluctant to relinquish their controls over internal security and policing. Because of the crimes perpetrated by Nazi police forces during the war, the Allies believed the West Germans needed more time to accept and practice democracy before being given full control over civilian law enforcement. Against this backdrop, Chancellor Adenauer began seeking a security force he could use to defend the state against its internal political enemies. He complained to the Allies that his government was weak and in grave danger of being undermined or overthrown by communist revolutionaries. To be sure, he never invoked the threat from right-wing radicals in his descriptions of the revolutionary violence his nation allegedly faced.

It is fitting to conclude by revisiting Mary Braithwait, who we first encountered in Chapter 1. She is one of the women at the heart of this book: ordinary, not especially wealthy, and only indirectly known to us through glimpses in the records. Nearing the end of her life in 1779, Braithwait channelled considerable energies into a series of additional notes attached to her formal will. In doing so, she drew on practices and languages of description accumulated across her lifetime. By bequeathing items such as ‘2 flanel peticoats’ and ‘2 flanel aprons’ to her ‘helpless’ sister Grace, she put intimate knowledge of her wardrobe to use alongside a broader material literacy which deployed a widely recognisable descriptive language for clothing and textiles. By signalling what was ‘best’ or ‘new’, she also took part in similar processes of ordering to those used by other women across the social hierarchy. Braithwait’s probate records are a rare instance of instructions spilling out beyond the contained legal strictures of a will, but act as a broader example of how women in eighteenth-century England were able to put these skills and knowledge to use when describing their clothing.

It is practices of description like this that the previous chapters have been concerned with, though they have by no means covered all the descriptive patterns, terms, or meanings surrounding women’s clothing and textiles in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century saw a transformation in practices of description, aided not only by an expanding world of goods which necessitated new descriptive languages but also by wider changes such as an ever-growing print culture. Acts of description increased and were accumulated across a broad range of textual genres, as shown in Chapters 1, 2, and 3. As Chapter 3 also demonstrates, this impacted across the social hierarchy, albeit in different ways. There is therefore still much to be done to investigate the impact of these flourishing languages of description; both Chloe Wigston Smith and Jennie Batchelor have demonstrated the gains to be made by examining literary depictions of clothing alongside a wider range of printed materials, for instance. The circulation of knowledge about fashionable trends via manuscript, print, and beyond has also been largely bypassed in my discussion, but formed an important descriptive practice in its own right.