Chapter in a Box

Recently, I posed a question for my fellow writers and scholars:  if you had to pack a writerly “bug-out bag,” something you could grab in case you had to vacate your home quickly in an emergency, what would you put in it?

This task was much on my mind because I was then faced with the problem of setting aside just one box full of books that I could keep with me throughout this summer of dislocations and relocations.  The night before packers came to my home to box up all our earthly possessions and send them to storage, I was assembling a collection of books that I could use throughout the summer to continue my work on my manuscript.

I call this collection my “chapter in a box.”  Here are the books I packed:

• Mercedes Serna, editor, Crónicas de Indias
• Ángel del Río and Amelia A. de del Río, editors, Antología general de la Literaturea Española, 2 vols.
• Robert Leggewie, editor, Anthologie de la littérature française, 2 vols.
• Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works
• James Fennimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales, Vol. I**
• Benjamin E. Park, American Nationalisms**
• John T. Shawcross, editor, The Complete Poetry of John Milton
• Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs**
• Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country
• The Norton Anthology of Western Literature, Eighth ed., 2 vols.
• Edward L. Widmer, Young America**
• Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
• Thomas Wyatt, The Complete Poems
• Joanna Brooks, editor, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan
• John Donne, The Complete English Poems
• Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello**
• Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit**
• Alan Taylor, American Colonies

There are some titles missing here, clearly.  I forgot to grab Montaigne and Rousseau, I don’t have the Quixote here, and my Bevington Shakespeare got loaded into one of God only knows how many book boxes and moved to storage.

Still, this collection of books represents a solid foundation of primary sources for a chapter on ideas of “civilization” from the Early Modern period to the Enlightenment.

The books in this photo are stacked in the reverse order in which they were packed. Thus, I regard Spanish literature, including the literature of conquest, as foundational to the construction of the idea of civilization.  A few years ago, I argued on this blog that the first written sources for American intellectual history were and still are written in Spanish, while the deepest founts of American thought are Indigenous in origin.  We can write no history of American thought from its beginnings without delving into Spanish sources and Native narratives.

So I must live up to my own expectations here.

In the midst of a whirl of activity that shows no signs of abating for the better part of a year, I have managed so far to read the Spanish literary anthology all the way up to La Celestina.  At that point, I switched to the anthology of chronicles of “the Indies” to bring myself up to the same era but via the writings of the “discoverers” and colonizers of the “New World.”  (I know we had this discussion on the blog before, but having read these sources in Spanish anew I find it interesting that Columbus did not describe his work as that of “discovery” until his fourth and final letter to the Catholic Monarchs, and that was primarily in connection to his navigational theory that the earth was pear-shaped, a theory widely mocked by map-makers in his own time.)

An interesting point that has emerged so far from my reading is what strikes me as a very early use of the term “pacification.”  For instance, in his second report to the Spanish Crown, Hernán Cortés apologized for not having written at length sooner, giving as an excuse the fact that he was “ocupado en la conquista y pacificación de esta tierra”—“occupied in the conquest and pacification of this land.”  The word as he used it there seems to have changed very little in meaning up to the present day, so that if Cortés had heard talk of the “pacification” of the Vietnamese countryside, he would have understood both the goal and the methods of the effort.  This is hardly a novel insight on my part; historians of colonialism and conquest must have made this point many times over.  Without access to JSTOR and/or an academic library, it’s hard for me to give the idea proper attribution, but it is surely not original with me.

I asked a colleague of mine who translates from Spanish to English if this was the earliest use of the term “pacification,” or if it had been part of the language of the Reconquista in relation to the Moorish population of Spain.  My colleague, Dr. George Henson, identified the earliest use, from 1422, in an anonymous source discussing “the pacification of the neighbors of Escalona,” a village in the northern part of the province of Toledo.  So this term as an abstract noun describing an action does indeed date from the Reconquista period, though as Dr. Henson points out, these abstract nouns derived from Latin are Renaissance terms that entered the Romance languages and English at about the same time.

If only I had access to the OED at the moment to identify the very first use of “pacification” in English!  My compact OED—the single greatest reason to join the Book of the Month Club—is languishing in a warehouse with my other books. The best I can do now in my long liminial lounging is Merriam-Webster online, which indeed identifies the first use of the term as occurring in the 15^th century.

Thus Europeans had some idea of “pacification” before they encountered a whole New World to “pacify.”  Whatever the meaning of that term had been prior to 1492, did it take on ethnic or racial as well as religious or military overtones?  What is the connection between “pacification” and “civilization” as nouns describing a process?

I don’t know yet.  But I aim to find out.

If a kind reader who does currently have access to the OED would care to comment on the usage of “pacification” and “civilization” in English, that would be wonderful.

And if anyone would care to share what they would pack in their own “chapter in a box,” that would be wonderful as well.

In the meantime, I’m going to finish reading Cortés and then switch back to La Celestina, which ought to be read—as all literature ought to be read—in relation to its historical context.  My poor New Critical professors are rolling in their graves, I’m sure.  Just wait until I get to the historical context of the 1980s!

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**for the next chapter, but in the mix now for variety