[In the following essay, originally presented at a symposium in 1988, Grafton examines the evidence of Harvey's critical reading as found in his marginalia, observing the links between reading, eloquence, and power in the social order of Tudor England.]

How did they understand Livy my grandfather my great grandfather—²

Zbigniew Herbert's question provokes and puzzles the historian of early modern culture as well as the reader of modern poetry. No Latin prose author stimulated more scholarly interpretations or artistic representations than Livy did between 1450 and 1650. His vast though incomplete epic of Roman history was thronged with exemplary heroes and heroines, terrifying villains, precedents for modern customs, and policies for modern rulers. His many dramatic incidents were not so much stable, classic emblems as fluid Rorschach blots into which artists and writers, politicians and schoolboys could read any emotion or experience that suited their immediate needs. The rape of Lucretia, for example, could stand for anything from the political lesson about the loss of Florentine liberty taught by Botticelli to the erotic drama of helplessness and compulsion imagined by Tiepolo. The smooth and eloquent lines of Livy's text were disfigured by commentaries that clung and spread like barnacles. The most eminent and passionate intellectuals—notably Machiavelli and Guicciardini—debated his relevance to modern conditions. No historian of early modern culture can avoid trying to explain why what now seems a swollen, bland, and artificial exposition of events and their morals served three hundred years ago as a lightning rod that drew down sharp and brilliant interpretations from the most diverse sectors of the intellectual firmament.

Herbert's poem is provocative in another, deeper way as well. In answer to his own question, he vividly reconstructs the physical and moral circumstances in which his grandfather and great-grandfather actually read:

certainly they read him in high school
at the not very propitious time of the year
when a chestnut stands in the windows—fervent candelabras of blooms—
all the thoughts of grandfather and great grandfather running breathless to Mizia
who sings in the garden shows her décolleté
also her heavenly legs up to the knees
of Gabi from the Vienna opera with ringlets like a cherub …(3)

Through the eyes of Middle European schoolboys in the age of Spring's Awakening, he makes us see the text of Livy as a splendid but alien tissue of social prejudices and densely ornate language. Any modern reader must sympathize with the alienation and day-dreams Herbert evokes; we remember that in the 1920s, when the (false) news spread that an Italian scholar had discovered the lost books of Livy, A. P. Herbert protested in Punch on behalf of the Amalgamated Society of Schoolboys, Past, Present, and Future that there was too much Livy already. But we are also amazed by the engagement the grandfather and great-grandfather eventually feel with Livy's Roman values and Latin style. And the historian must feel that even profounder emotion, envy. For the image of the Gymnasium classroom that Herbert calls so deftly back to life, with its shabby, frock-coated master, portrait of the emperor, and pervasive smell of chalk and disinfectant, is the modern artist's counterpart of one of the scenes of early modern life that cultural historians would now most like to reconstruct. We know that the first modern intellectuals, from Petrarch to Montaigne, read seminal texts like Livy's in profoundly novel ways, that these new readings were in themselves the beginnings of the intellectual revolution of modernity. But we know almost nothing of the concrete circumstances in which readers encountered texts. Where did they read? With whom? How did the physical form of the text they read hinder or promote the reader's engagement with it? How can we locate this activity in the larger constellation of intellectual experiences and social rituals it formed part of?

To be sure, scholars of several kinds have recently focused their attention on reading and its history. Intellectual historians have argued that the Renaissance brought about a transformation in the lens through which Western readers inspected classic texts. The humanists saw the classics not as permanent, impersonal auctoritates but as historical, contingent works by individuals working in specific circumstances, addressing specific audiences that were clearly different—and distant—from themselves. The great Greek and Roman writers came to be seen as pagans whose assumptions no Christian could fully accept. And the modern scholar learned to pick and choose his ancient authorities, concentrating on texts produced in historical circumstances sufficiently like their own to be relevant. Thus Muret and Lipsius discovered that the histories of Tacitus, the product of an age of tyranny, offered lessons clearly germane to their own late-sixteenth-century age of tyranny. Literary critics, concentrating on the readings of the classics embodied in early modern literary works, have paid less attention to historical insight than to allegorical imagination. They stress the novel willingness of Petrarch or Montaigne to transform even the stateliest of their readings by self-consciously aggressive interpretation. Thus Erasmus forced an exemplary allegory of Platonic love on the most unwilling of recipients, the first line of Virgil's second Eclogue: “Corydon the shepherd was hot for pretty Alexis.”

Historians of mentalities have worked out in rich case studies how a single imaginative reader could transform the most banal and traditional of texts into the most powerful—and heretical—of speculations or representations. Thus Carlo Ginzburg, in a dazzling piece of detective work, has shown that Titian rediscovered the erotic element in Ovid not by confronting the original Latin of the text or the humanist commentaries that had grown up around it, which he could not read, but by poring over the crude verse rifacimenti, prose allegories and woodcuts of the popular vernacular printed Ovids that he did know.⁴ Historians of the book, finally, have worked out how classical and other texts were selected, edited, printed, and stored—and often reshaped or radically distorted in the process. All historians of early modern culture now acknowledge that early modern readers did not passively receive but actively reinterpreted their texts.

Yet all this intense specialized activity has led as yet to few powerful general results. In the first place, scholars have made far too little effort to combine forces. Practitioners of straight intellectual history still assume, in defiance of the critics, that the classics had a single, unequivocal sense that ignorant medieval readers distorted and that intelligent humanists finally recaptured. Literary critics still assume that the practice of a single exemplary writer—above all, his statements about his sources and his readers—can tell them everything they need to know about reading in a given century. Historians of the book embrace in their interdisciplinary enterprise economic history, social history, and the history of domestic furniture, but ignore the history of education and scholarship, as if educated men read books without employing any of the sharp intellectual tools they had spent their childhood learning to use. All students of reading have concentrated heavily on those acts that yielded emotional, personal, vivid responses to texts, as if the cooler searches for moral lessons and political axioms conducted by early modern readers from Machiavelli to Hobbes were insignificant because less appealing. And all students of reading have tried much too hard to find simple formulas that describe the reading practices of whole periods, and sharp moments of transition when one set of practices yields to another: when reading passes from speech to silence, from public to private settings, from intensive to extensive or passive to active.

This search for neat and dramatic periodizations merely distorts a complex and multivalent past. In any given period and milieu, many styles of reading coexisted and competed. John Lyly complained in 1578 that most texts were hardly read at all before they were recycled for wrapping paper: “Gentlemen use books as gentlewomen handle their flowers, who in the morning stick them in their heads, and at night straw them at their heels.”⁵ Thomas Nashe complained twenty years later that a “legion of mice-eyed decipherers and calculators” combed every word in print for possibilities of subversion, and “commacerated” their ruler with constant discoveries of unintended sedition.⁶ Between the use of most texts to wrap fish and the McCarthyite combing of all texts word by word stretches a spectrum of ways of reading. Its varieties and modalities await—and often invite—exploration.

I will use a single case study—a single early modern intellectual making meaning in Livy—to suggest some of the ways in which older and newer intellectual, critical, and social forms of analysis should be combined, if we hope ever to take “second steps in the history of reading.” My reader is a familiar figure, Gabriel Harvey (1550-1630), an ambitious Cambridge man from Saffron Walden, still remembered for his friendship with Edmund Spenser, his ambitions for high political office, and above all the magnificent quarrel with Thomas Nashe that led to the publication of Nashe's pamphlet Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596). Here Harvey became the victim of one of the most dramatic muggings in literary history. Nashe produced a masterpiece of invective against the upstart he called Gurmo Hidruntum, Dagobert Copenhagen, Wrinkle de Crinkledum and, “our Talatamtana or Dr Hum.” Harvey appears as a simpering fool who thrusts himself on pretty women and well-born men:

He is beyond all reason or God's forbode distractedly enamoured of his own beauty, spending a whole forenoon every day in sponging and licking himself by the glass: and useth every night after supper to walk on the Market Hill to show himself, holding his gown up to his middle that the wenches may see what a fine leg and dainty foot he hath in pumps and pantofles.

Harvey's social pretensions, foolish mannerisms, and elaborate handwriting are withered in turn by the blast of Nashe's abuse. Harvey himself is burned on our memory as a figure as corrupt and ridiculous as the dying Falstaff, “so lean and so meagre that you would think like the Turks he observed four Lents a year.”⁷

What we are less apt to remember about Harvey is that he was not only one of the great victims but also one of the great readers of all time. He bought, borrowed, and was given many books, classical and modern, Latin and vernacular. He read and annotated them with single-minded energy; the margins and blank leaves of any book he owned are adorned with symbols, exclamations, and whole paragraphs of comment, all painstakingly and elaborately entered in what Nashe memorably called his “flourishing flantitanting [flaunting] gouty omega first.” Often he secreted not one but several layers of notes, the result of repeated reading and meditation, that intricately intertwine in every space left vacant by the printer. More than fifty of his annotated books have been located; many of his notes have been painstakingly transcribed by Moore Smith and Colman. This corpus of printed books and manuscripts notes may be the richest set of materials we dispose of for reconstructing how our academic ancestors read.

Harvey's Livy—now deposited in the Firestone Library at Princeton—offers an especially rich lode of material to the historian's pick and shovel. It is a grand, heavy folio in sixes, printed in Basel in 1555. The text of Livy appears flanked by numerous critics and supporters. Two elaborate commentaries, one by Ioannes Velcurio and one by Henricus Glareanus, follow the text and explicate it, often phrase by phrase. Instructions for reading history precede it. Lorenzo Valla's iconoclastic demonstration that Livy had committed a genealogical error also appears, lest the reader feel even more reverence than a Roman classic properly demands. The entire book is heavily annotated by Harvey.

We may begin with the occasions of reading. Harvey's elaborate, dated notes reveal much about the times, places, and purposes of his several discrete assaults on this rich and polysemous mountain of text. He bought the book in 1568. In 1570-71 he entered in it a record of a Livian debate that he had witnessed:

Thomas Smith junior and Sir Humphrey Gilbert debated on behalf of Marcellus, Thomas Smith senior and Doctor Walter Haddon on behalf of Fabius Maximus, before an audience at Hill Hall consisting of me, John Wood, and several others of noble birth. At length the son and Sir Humphrey yielded to the distinguished Secretary.⁸

Other notes show that this debate was connected with at least one intense Livian experience. Harvey and Thomas Smith, Jr., read through the third decade, the story of Hannibal, in one week in 1570-71. Smith would shortly afterward die in the first colonization of the Ards, his father's Irish enterprise. Harvey records that they read along with Livy the military authors Vegetius and Frontinus, and that they did so critically: “We chose not always to agree with Hannibal, or Marcellus, or Fabius Maximus, or even with Scipio himself” (p. 518). Evidently, then, the reading was military in orientation, as its timing clearly suggests.

In 1576-77, just before Philip Sidney went on his mission to the Emperor Rudolph II in Prague, he and Harvey read books 1-3 of the first decade, which embrace the early history of Rome and its passage from monarchy to republic. The approach they took, Harvey says, was “as political as possible,” as befitted an ambitious courtier like Sidney. They paid no attention to scholarly questions and dismissed the humanist commentators: “De Glareani aliorumque annotationibus parum curabamus” (p. 93). But as we will see, they did use other secondary sources.

In 1584, back in Cambridge, Harvey read Livy again with Thomas Preston, master of Trinity Hall. They read Machiavelli's Discorsi at the same time, seeking to find the true political marrow hidden in the Latin text's dry bones. Indeed, Machiavelli's “method” and “politique positions” occupied them as intensively as Livy himself. They read several other up-to-date works on pragmatic politics as well, notably Jean Bodin's Methodus and Republic.

In 1590, finally, Harvey read Livy from still another point of view. “I haue seene,” he wrote,

few, or none fitter obseruations, or pithier discourses upon diuers notable particulars in Liuie, then sum special chapters in Augustines excellent bookes De Ciuitate Dei. Where he examines, & resolues manie famous actions of the Romans, with as sharp witt, deep iudgment, & pregnant application, as anie of those politicians, discoursers, or other notaries, which I haue read vpon Livie.

(sig. Z5 recto)

Harvey read the City of God not on its own but together with its almost equally vast Renaissance companion, the commentary by Juan Luis Vives, famous for its vast learning, penetrating inquiries into Augustine's lost sources, and exuberant excursuses on such indelicate matters as farting. Here Harvey often found that subjects touched on by Augustine had been studied “paulo exactius” by the modern scholar.

Harvey's Livy bears in its margins, then, the bright stones and strange creatures he fished up in at least four separate trawls through the text, the first three carried out in company and the fourth in that solitude into which he fell in later life. The social, public character of the first three readings cannot be emphasized enough. Reading for Harvey was a skill with social as well as intellectual value. It brought him into contact with the Smiths and Sidney, leaders of the expansionist war party that would soon succeed in tearing apart the loose but toughly woven fabric of Irish social life, but would largely fail to involve England and Elizabeth in a Europe-wide Protestant campaign against international Catholicism. Reading took Harvey into high company and great houses, much as the ability to provide astute financial advice might now pull its possessor up the social ladder.

But while Harvey's Livy affords us new insight into the concrete profits to be drawn from effective reading, its revelations do not stop there. Consider, for example, Harvey's numerous references to the other texts that he—and his fellow readers—consulted. He claimed to have embedded his Livy in a mesh of mutually reinforcing parallel texts: classical works with complementary information, modern commentaries with helpful interpretations, Augustine and Vives with their powerful points of view. These were not the empty professions of the modern critic who wordily proclaims his debt to unread classics, “to all the people who have made this article possible: Karl Marx, St. John of the Cross, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sacco and Vanzetti, Sigmund Freud, and C. G. Jung.”⁹ Harvey really did read everything he named. He says, for example, that when he and Sidney went through books 1-3, they compared them to Frontinus's Stratagems (first century a.d.). A copy of Frontinus that he owned survives in the Houghton Library at Harvard, and its copious notes deal with exactly the same problems and historical figures that the Livian notes attack. Harvey refers often to the Silva of political aphorisms (1583) by Lambert Daneau—a now forgotten work by a Calvinist minister chiefly remembered for his unsuccessful efforts to impose a natural science based on the Bible on the Protestant curriculum, and a church order based on the “Genevan Inquisition” on the liberal citizens and professors of Leiden. Harvey's copy of Daneau has so far evaded discovery, but his references are so frequent and precise as to make it clear that they were not conventional. He read the work as soon as it appeared, excitedly referring to its newness, and often praised it as a source of pungent and precise political axioms. And as he worked through Livy, Daneau's aphorisms often led him to choose subjects for comment and lessons for emphasis. When Harvey noted how wise Romulus had been to use religion to civilize and ceremony to overawe his primitive subjects, he simply repeated Daneau's lapidary Livian axioms.

Harvey's reading of Livy, with all its careful collation and cross-checking, was not unusual for him. His corpus of rhetorical works, which included his Quintilian (now in the British Library), several works of Cicero, and Ramus's commentaries, was similarly unified and explicated. And he himself describes other late Renaissance readers as going through similar efforts to domesticate and retrieve the vast quantities of information and advice that the printing press had put at their disposal. Dr. Dale, for example, a lawyer and statesman to whom Harvey devoted an admiring note in his Livy, had had a code worked out with his secretaries for finding the desired text quickly. “Da primum” meant that Dale wanted his Justinian, “Da secundum” that he wanted his Speculum iuris, “Da tertium” that he wanted Livy. Meanwhile Dale's own “manuscript codex of secrets” preserved and ordered the chief results of his consultation of the ancients.

Any way of reading is at least in part a learned set of habits and techniques. In the late Renaissance, humanists, jurists, and theologians actively debated in glosses and treatises the best ways to read. A self-conscious reader like Harvey had his pick of sources from which a method could be drawn, and his Livy gives a number of indications about which of these meant the most to him. At the outset, commenting on a humanist's preface, Harvey remarks that he has developed his own “unique method” for reading all historians without confusing those of Roman and those of foreign affairs (sig. a 7 recto). At the other end of his book he thanks Sidney, Smith, and “Monsieur Bodin,” who “wunne mie hart to Livie” (sig. P1 recto). And in a comment on the Roman chronology of Glareanus, also included in his text, he made clear that he had met Bodin when the latter came to England in 1582 to help in the negotiations for the Alençon marriage: “My conversation with two expert Frenchmen, Jean Bodin and Peter Baro, helped me greatly; they consider Glareanus, Funck, Mercator, Crusius more industrious and precise than any ancient chronologer” (sig. P verso).

These nods are as good as a wink to anyone moderately steeped in late-sixteenth-century scholarship. They mean that Harvey set out to adopt to his own ends the method for critical reading of historians that Bodin had described in his celebrated Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem of 1566. This shapeless but fascinating book went through a number of editions and became the core of a well-known anthology, the Artis historicae penus. It urged that Western society—and the French monarchy above all—could be pacified and reformed only if intellectuals embarked on a critical study of all past organized societies. The student must read all past historians (helpfully assembled by Bodin in an impressive bibliography). He must extract all effective actions and sensible institutions, enter the passages describing these in a notebook, and evaluate them, using marginal symbols to indicate their import (CH meant consilium honestum; CTV meant consilium turpe utile). He must assemble all this material, however, not as a magpie makes a nest but as a beaver makes a dam: he must scrutinize the material before picking what was rewarding. He must learn to distinguish the critical historian from the incompetent, and the judicious historian from the biased. One who failed to make critical discriminations of this kind would be overwhelmed by the mass and number of texts he confronted. One who made them, by contrast, could know and understand the facts—could see how each society's institutions and deeds derived from the collective character imposed on it by geography and climate, and then see which of these might be adaptable to his own circumstances.

Bodin offered an exemplar theory of history, traditionally moralized and providential, but stripped of the unhistorical Golden Age at the start and freed from the eschatological straitjacket of the Four Monarchies. Any advanced Protestant reader—from the historian William Harrison to Harvey—had to find Bodin's book impressive, and to consider, if not accept, his offer of an Ariadne thread to lead through the labyrinth of histories. Harvey followed Bodin's advice, albeit in his own way. He certainly developed a code for annotating his histories. Astrological symbols were his favorite way to call attention to interesting historical lessons. The symbol of Mars indicated military matters; the symbol of Mercury indicated diplomacy. The symbol of an opposition (when two planets were 180° apart in the zodiac) indicated scenes of battle. Occasional Roman letters—like the ubiquitous JC, indicating legal information—filled in where the symbols gave out.

But as Harvey's use of astrological signs suggests, he always applied Bodin's instructions in his own way. Harvey claimed that Bodin won him to Livy. But in fact, Bodin had rated Livy fairly low as a historian. Livy was important and informative, but his work was marred by his “piety—or shall I say superstition—in which he surpassed everyone. Nothing is more common than cows speaking, the heads of the Scipios bursting into flame, statues sweating.” And Bodin followed ancient precedent in pointing out that “Livy and Sallust went too far for historians in inserting direct and oblique speeches into their works. As Cicero says, nothing is sweeter in straight history than elegant brevity. But if you took the speeches out of Livy, only fragments would be left.”¹⁰ No wonder that Caligula, in an outbreak of good sense, had wanted to burn all copies of Livy's Histories. They were a derivative mass of tralatician facts and invented speeches.

Harvey's reading of Livy differed sharply from Bodin's. In 1.23, when the Romans and Albans are about to go to war, the Alban Mettius makes an elaborate speech to the Roman Tullus Hostilius. He points out with polish and gravitas that the Romans and Albans should not fight, since they were linked by their common descent from the Trojans and threatened by a common enemy, the Etruscans. Harvey commented:

The Alban's speech to King Tullus is strong and prudent, at once just and temperate. Thus it seems rather a speech by Livy than by the Alban—or at least it is polished in the Roman style, like many barbarians' speeches later on. Let it be enough to have said this once: Livy is always Livy, whoever the speakers were.

(p. 12)

Harvey is positive exactly where Bodin had been negative. The artificiality of Livy's speeches becomes their strong point. After all, Harvey and Sidney were looking for guidance in courtly behavior—or, to put it differently, in effectively artificial speech. Powerful orations were what Livy offered them in plenty; they used as one collateral text a collection of his Conciones in which the intervening—and interfering—tissue of narrative had simply been pared away. Speeches seemed to them not peripheral but central to the text, and their artificiality not a detriment to their credibility but an enhancement to their value as models for imitation. Harvey's method of reading for models of effective speech at court was a conscious and personal refinement of Bodin's—a commentary as much on the Methodus as on Livy.

It may be objected that Harvey could have misunderstood Bodin's precepts. But this is to underestimate both his capacity as a scholar and the vast extent of intellectuals' interest in Bodin. Nashe, recounting the prodigies that accompanied Harvey's birth (his mother had dreamed that “her womb was turned to such another hollow vessel full of disquiet fiends as Solomon's brazen bowl wherein were shut so many thousands of devils”), claims to hold back to suppress some details, in order to appear a credible historian: “Should I reckon up but one half of the miracles of his conception that very substantially have been affirmed unto me, one or another like Bodin would start up and tax me for a miracle-monger as he taxed Livy” (pp. 285, 287). And Montaigne, who learned from Bodin to enter summary evaluations in the end papers of his copies of historians, also both applied Bodin's method and rejected some of the conclusions Bodin drew with it. Bodin had called Plutarch a fabulous writer because he told the story of the Spartan boy. Montaigne devoted a long section of his essay on Seneca and Plutarch (2.32) to refuting Bodin's criticism. He claimed to have seen simple peasants and hardheaded Gascon women endure worse torments than the boy did, and for no more obviously urgent reason. Harvey's use of Bodin emerges then as typical. The critical late-sixteenth-century reader often found his tools in the kit Bodin had assembled. But he felt as free to alter and improve them as he did to read new lessons into the texts they were meant to manipulate.

The best way to enhance our sense of how Harvey made Livy meaningful is to proceed from principles to applications. How did Livy's early Rome change contours, shadows, and colors as Harvey switched microscopic lenses and inspected it again and again? We cannot work through the whole corpus of his notes. But two studies in his ways of reading will establish the identity of the major hoops through which Harvey made his author jump.

Toward the middle of book 1 Livy tells the story of the Horatii and the Curiatii. Romans and Albans, both descendants of the Trojans, have both stolen one another's cattle, refused restitution, and leveled ultimatums. They confront one another in order of battle but decide, given the danger posed by the Etruscans to both parties, to avoid a full-scale combat and arrange a trial by battle in its place. Each army has a set of triplets, the Roman Horatii and the Alban Curiatii, that can represent it. A treaty is made and solemnized with elaborate ritual. The brothers fight. Two Romans fall, but the third, unhurt, runs away, separates the three Albans and kills them one by one. Horatius, returning in triumph to the city, meets his sister, who had been engaged to one of the Curiatii. She cries out with sorrow on learning of her lover's death. Horatius promptly kills her, is found guilty of treason, and is then freed because of his popularity and his sister's lack of patriotism. Peace is made; but it does not last long.

The story has everything. Livy gives the details of disagreements among ancient scholars (over which set of triplets had which family name). He lovingly describes Roman institutions, showing the “fetial” (priest) pluck and use the holy herb needed for making treaties, and describing how the king and duumvirs declared and staged a trial for treason. Horatius provides an example of courage, patriotism, and athletic prowess—but also of the errors to which too much zeal and courage can lead. Mettius the Alban provides an example of statesmanlike prudence and eloquent oratory. And Horatius's nameless sister makes a fine subject for a cautionary tale about the eternal female conflict between love and duty.

Harvey had ample exegetical resources on hand as he attacked this passage. The commentators in his Livy, Glareanus and Velcurio, both discussed book 1, and though Glareanus left the Horatii alone, Velcurio treated them at length, paraphrasing every phrase or sentence that could possibly pose a difficulty. After the first two Horatii die, Livy describes the situation of the third: “Forte is integer fuit, ut universis solus nequaquam par, sic adversus singulos ferox” (1.25.7; The young man, though alone, was unhurt. No match for his three opponents together, he was yet confident of his ability to face them singly). Velcurio found a surprising amount of grist for his mill here: “Is) scilicet Horatius. Integer) id est, non vulneratus. Vniversis) scilicet tribus coniunctim.”¹¹ And he went into technical detail of a more refined sort as well when it came to the legal aspects of Horatius's murder case, explaining at length why the taking of private revenge amounted to treason as well as parricide: “He punished his sister by private vengeance, when she should have been punished by the magistrate” (sig. K1 recto).

Harvey's notes on the passage show no interest whatever either in elementary problems of construing or in deeper ones of law and antiquities. Instead, he draws a political lesson:

Monomachiae Exemplum nobile. sed decisio praeceps magis, quam politica. Nec vero Politicum est, rei universae summam committere tam paucorum Virtuti, aut Fortunae. Sed hic usus manavit a paucorum Antiquorum Heroica Virtute: qua omnia magna videbantur decernenda. (A splendid example of single combat. But this was a rash rather than a politically prudent way to reach a decision. It is in fact not politically prudent to entrust the general welfare to the virtue of fortune of a few. But this custom derived from the heroic virtue of a few of the ancients, by which, it seemed, all great questions should be decided.)

(p. 13)

Harvey was hardly the first to suggest that this trial by combat had been imprudent and was not an example to emulate. Daneau had derived a similar axiom from the same passage: “It is always dangerous and often useless to entrust the general welfare (summa rerum) to a dual of two or more in a war. For the vanquished do not keep faith, and they do not suffer a great loss because of it.”¹² And Machiavelli—who no doubt lurks, here as elsewhere, behind Daneau—had devoted three chapters of his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio to the story. He made it the pretext for a long and general argument that “one must never risk his entire fortune with part of his forces.”¹³ He drew from it the specific recommendation that one should not try to stop an enemy at one's border by confronting him with a small force (1.23). And he found in it food for reflection on the corruption of republics, arguing that while good citizens must be rewarded, it had been wrong simply to let Horatius go free after he had been fairly condemned for killing his sister (1.24).

Harvey begins from the prudential, “political” reading of Machiavelli. Like Machiavelli—and like his contemporaries Justus Lipsius, and Daneau, whom he much admired—he wanted to extract and shrink to durable, pill-like axiomatic form the pragmatic lessons of the text. But unlike them, he wanted to speculate about other matters as well. What captivated his imagination was less the imprudence of the custom Livy described than the reasons why it had been practiced. He locates these in the ancients' belief in individual heroism, which made them think single combat an appropriate way to solve such problems. He may deplore the early Romans' heedlessness, but he applauds their chivalry. And his other notes show that what he—and perhaps Sidney—most appreciated in Livy was less the pragmatic maxims he could inspire than the heroic feats of arms that he so vividly described. Harvey's further notes on the passage include a Mars symbol; the exclamation Vnicus Horatius; and, most revealing of all, a reflection on the feigned flight by which Horatius tricked his opponents into separating: “strategematica fuga. ne Hercules quidem contra tres, aut duos selectissimos Pugiles” (p. 13).¹⁴ Here we see Harvey making clear what Livy meant to him: a treasury of military devices to be imitated and heroic battles to be savored. This was what Harvey found in Roman history as he read about it elsewhere as well—for example, in his copy of Machiavelli's Art of War, also in Princeton, where one battle scene more than a page long is decorated with a mars symbol at the end of every line. Harvey read not simply to reflect, boil down, and imitate, but also to savor, speculate, and admire. No wonder that the pleasures of the naked text outweighed the more refined rewards of learned commentary, when he and Sidney did their reading.

Yet Harvey did not stop here. A further note on the slaying of Horatius's sister takes quite a different tack.

De impietate belli, quod Albanis Romani intulerunt; et de victoria dominandi libidine adepta. August. l. 3. c. 14. de Civit, ubi de Horatiis, et Curiatijs scite. [In darker ink:] Ecce biblica Goliae, et Davidis monomachia. Heroica etiam Herculis, et Cygni apud Hesiodum: Achillis, et Hectoris apud Homerum: Æneae, et Turni apud Virgilium.

(p. 13)¹⁵

Here Harvey, probably reading by himself and later in life, refers to the eloquent chapter (3.14) of the City of God in which Augustine ponders the Horatii and the Curiatii, condemns the murder of Horatius's sister, and insists that the war itself deserved not honor but condemnation, like a gladiatorial combat. Harvey knew that Augustine's account amounted to an attack on the whole Roman heroic scheme of values that he and Livy loved. “Ecce quoties et quomodo humanam Livij prudentiam, divina redarguit Augustini Sapientia” (p. 6; See how, and how often, the divine wisdom of Augustine refutes the human prudence of Livy), he wrote early in book 1. He concluded that while each city had its virtues, the divine one was both firmior and foelicior. The application of Augustine in the 1590s seems to undermine the “heroic” reading of Livy with Sidney in the mid-1570s, as if the older and wiser Harvey—perhaps saddened by the death of Sidney and the downfall of the aggressive Protestantism Sidney symbolized—had repented. Yet this simple, sentimental account does violence to the form and content of Harvey's note. He does not stop with Augustine. His final lines on the passage list heroic duels from Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, and the Old Testament as well, offering David and Goliath, perhaps, as an example of a vivid heroism that even Augustine could not condemn.

How did Harvey read Livy? Clearly this simple question cannot be simply answered. Harvey's reading of Livy is not a single thing and never froze in a fixed form. It did not eventuate in a formal commentary, and probably was never meant to do so. More remarkably, it seems never to have established a single fixed method or point of view. Rather, it was centrifugal and mobile. Harvey proceeded from Livy to his friends, from life to Livy, from treatise to text and text to treatise, finding that each reflected light on the other. There was no point at which the investigation logically had to stop, for each deeper insight into a single passage could result in novel interpretations of the rest. And the whole game started anew every time a new event or text, a Sidney or a City of God, penetrated Harvey's consciousness and set it turning again. This centrifugal mode of reading—one in which the journey seems eternal and the arrival disappears from view—bears a strong resemblance to some contemporary ways of reading the sacred texts. And it helps, I think, to explain just how Livy's crisp, vital heroes and episodes could slip so easily as they did from meaning to meaning. What mattered, in the end, was less the power of the solution than the ingenuity with which it was proposed; the humanists, like participants in a perpetual Passover seder, seem drunk with the possibilities of interpretation afforded by an emblematic history.

Harvey's encounters with book I produced layers of interpretation that acted rather like polarized lenses. Each was clear enough in itself, but when superimposed, they tend to obscure rather than to magnify the text. But other encounters with other sections were more dramatic and direct. In his week-long collaborative reading of the third decade, the story of Hannibal, Harvey moved quickly (the text takes up four volumes of the modern Loeb edition). He read with only one end in view: to grasp and then to criticize the tactics of Hannibal and his Roman adversaries. Harvey represents himself and Smith, Jr., as two young military intellectuals on the make, learning through Livy how to think strategically for themselves: “We were freer and somewhat sharper judges of Carthaginians and Romans than was appropriate to men of our fortune, virtue, or indeed learning; at least we learned not to adulate anyone, ancient or modern” (p. 518).

Harvey's summary references through the decade to Hannibal and the Romans are single-minded in their concentration on leadership:

Fabius Maximus bie Warie, & cautelous proceding, somewhat cooled his [Hannibal's] heate: but liker slie Saturne, then gallant Jupiter, or braue Mars. Onlie Marcellus, & Scipio beat him at handstrokes

(22 ad init.)

Braue & redowted young Scipio: full of mightie courage, & valour

(22.53)

Flauius, uersutus pragmaticus

(25.16)

Fabius, bello melior: Marcellus, praelio: Martius, facinore: Nero, itinere: Scipio omni bellica laude excellentissimus

(25.20)

Martius, a most braue & terrible knight, at a pinch. Which of the Heroical Worthyes could have dun more in the time?

(25.37-39)

[Scipio] As peerles fine, as matchles braue: a Mirrour of sweetest courtesie, & terriblest valour

(29.18)

The purpose of these laundry lists of heroic virtue is plain. Harvey saw—and no doubt took part in—debates about Carthaginian and Roman leaders. These lists of deeds and adjectives were the substantive preparation for such debate. Much as Erasmus compiled as his distinctive aid to eloquence a matchless list of 250 ways to say “Thank you for the letter” in classical Latin, so Harvey and Smith, Jr., devoted much of their private effort to assembling material to be used in public.

But the third decade has a strong narrative line as well as individual stories of heroism. At the outset Hannibal's march on Rome seems irresistible, his victory inevitable. By the end his army is in disarray and Hannibal himself in despair, while Scipio returns to Rome in triumph. Harvey's marginal notes show how eagerly he followed Hannibal's progress and appreciated the Carthaginian general's industria, & uigiliantia horribilis. Hannibal stalks onward like an ancient Clint Eastwood, implacable and unbeatable. Yet Harvey and Smith found more than virtue in Hannibal's feats of arms. They saw the seeds of his eventual failure planted early in his campaign. In book 22 he fails to take the opportunity afforded by Cannae and attack Rome at once; in book 23 he winters in Capua, letting his army lose cohesion and morale; in book 30 he has become pitiable. Harvey remorselessly tracks each error of judgment. At book 30 he reflects: “Hannibal was beaten first in spirit; it's no surprise, then, that he was immediately beaten in the flesh as well. One's fortune corresponds to one's strength of mind and body” (p. 510). Harvey finds a simple explanation for Hannibal's many related failures. He lacked the indomitable will needed to make the most of each opportunity as it occurred. “Occasion is only a point: now or never.” “The sole essential for a great man is to seize the instant with great possibilities forcefully, with shocking power, and to play the powerful leader, when it is important to do so, with terrifying power” (p. 317). Indecision, Machiavelli had long ago shown, was the most destructive of all errors in a ruler. Now Harvey read indecision into Livy's Hannibal.

The motive for this reading is not far to seek—and need not be overdetermined, since it was inspired at least in part by Livy's own clues. Harvey read the Carthaginian and Roman past in terms of the English present. A rising member of the rising war party, he ached for action, like his patrons. By finding the reason for Hannibal's failure not in want of resources but in failure of will, he taught exactly the historical lesson that Walsingham and Leicester would have most liked Elizabeth to learn. The alchemy of present needs turned Hannibal from Fortinbras into Hamlet, in the margins if not in the text.

Harvey's transformation of Hannibal involved not only the explanation of a failure but the development of sympathy for it. Harvey seems, as the third decade proceeds, to feel sorrier and sorrier that Hannibal did not carry out his aims. If he had only acted when he should have … “Maharbal's consummate advice [to march on Rome immediately after Cannae] could have made Hannibal as great as Alexander. But Hannibal, intent on lesser goods, lost his one chance for the greatest success. Now or never” (p. 317). To find the moral he needed in decade 3, Harvey had to feel sympathy for the devil, had to find in Livy's glorification of Rome the possibility of a counterhistory that glorified Carthage. This he did with ease and dexterity that one might not expect from a humanist.

“Only my father and myself after him,” writes Herbert,

read Livy against Livy
carefully examining what is underneath the fresco
that is why the theatrical gesture of Scevola awoke no echo in us
…
                              My father knew well and I also know
that one day on a remote boundary
a local conflagration will explode
and the empire will fall.(16)

Harvey and Smith were certainly no Freuds; they did not identify themselves with Hannibal or their enterprise with subversion. Yet their margins swarm with enticing modernist possibilities that one would not expect from the tidy text imprisoned in its moralizing and critical humanist verities by its editors.

The lessons to be drawn from this rich material are themselves rich. First, it seems clear that the existing separation between intellectual history and history of the book is artificial, not natural. Harvey's case would resist any analysis that did not employ both sets of methods in complementary ways. Classicists have combined the two approaches since the eighteenth century; medievalists see them as complementary. Early modernists could learn from their colleagues in this as in other respects. Second, it seems clear that Harvey's methods and experiences were not eccentric but normal. Collateral evidence shows that contemporaries of social standing as high as Harvey's, or higher, and intellectuals now far better known than he, shared his concerns, interests, and approaches. Third, Harvey's case establishes that reading in the Renaissance was above all a rhetorical enterprise. Like rhetoric, it was a public enterprise, aimed at an audience. Like rhetoric, it proceeded by well-defined rules. Like rhetoric, it sought not to attain deep truths but to advance convincing arguments. Like rhetoric, it aimed always at a defined and limited audience and a set occasion. Harvey and his contemporaries read for effect. Their interpretations—even when privately arrived at—were meant to serve as preparation for public performances. That explains why the reader in the margins of Harvey's Livy feels so evidently free to shift assumptions, styles, and points of view from decade to decade in Livy and in his own life. Reading was a tool, not an end.

Was Harvey deluded to think that flexible reading could take him to the top? Not necessarily. Another collateral document suggests how sharp his insight may have been. A memorandum prepared by Robert Beale for the private use of Edward Wotton, it explains in severely practical terms the “Office of a Councellor and Principall Secretarie to Her Majestie.” It offers sage advice about how to define the Privy Council's agenda, avoid cabinet councils “which doe but cause iealousie and envie,” and abbreviate the letters submitted to the council so that its members will at least have read a summary of the matters they must decide on. It also offers readings of many ancient historians: “Remember what Arrian sayeth in the life of Alexander. … So likewise towards your fellow Councellors behave yourselfe as Maecenas counselled Augustus. … Be dilligent. Remember the sayinge of Salust.” Beale is quite unapologetic in his provision of these humanist axioms. Indeed, he emphasizes in his conclusion that a good principal secretary must be a good reader of the classics: “By the readinge of histories you may observe the examples of times past, judginge of their successe.”¹⁷

I submit that Harvey hoped his skills could win him a position exactly like Beale's, as a valued political adviser who combined practical experience and legal expertise with detailed study of the ancients. Harvey's mode of reading, in fact, was precisely the sort of serious political discourse that his authoritative contemporaries esteemed. And I would suggest that, though Harvey did not succeed as wildly as he hoped—“hewed and slashed he had been as small as chippings if he had not played ‘Duck, Friar’ and hid himself eight weeks” from a peer he attacked, and landed in Newgate for a while and had in the end “to spur cut back again to Cambridge”—his humanism was not at fault. Harvey's ability to read was perhaps his one uncontested asset; it took him far and yielded fascinating and contradictory visions of the Roman past. Can we ask more of commentary?

Notes

1. This paper offers a first, informal report on my contribution to a collaborative enterprise: a study of Gabriel Harvey and other late Renaissance readers, to be written by me and Lisa Jardine. It owes a considerable debt to Professor Jardine's counsel and criticism.

2. Zbigniew Herbert, “Transformations of Livy,” tr. J. Carpenter and B. Carpenter, The New York Review of Books, November 6, 1986.

3. Ibid.

4. See in general A. Grafton, “Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts: Comments on Some Commentaries,” Renaissance Quarterly, 38 (1985): 615-49; for Ovid see C. Ginzburg, “Tiziano, Ovidio e i codici della figurazione erotica nel Cinquecento,” in Miti emblemi spie (Turin: Einaudi, 1986).

5. J. Lyly, The Anatomy of Wyt, 1578, in Life in Shakespeare's England, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), p. 150.

6. T. Nashe, Lenten Stuffe, 1599, in Life in Shakespeare's England, pp. 148-49.

7. T. Nashe, “The Life of Gabriel Harvey,” in Nashe, Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 281-316.

8. T. Livii Patavini, Romanae historiae principis, Decades tres cum dimidia (Basel: Hervagius, 1555); Wilmerding Deposit, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library, p. 428. Here and below translations are my own. Passages by Harvey in Elizabethan English are the original texts; those in modern English, like this one, are translated from his Latin. For Harvey's library see V. Stern, Gabriel Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979); for his marginalia see the specimens edited by G. C. Moore Smith, Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913); a much fuller edition is being prepared by W. Colman.

9. F. C. Crews, The Pooh Perplex (New York: Dutton, 1963), p. 41.

10. J. Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Paris: Juvenis, 1572), pp. 75-76, 73-74.

11. Livii decades, sign. K 1 recto.

12. L. Daneau, Politicorum aphorismorum silva (Leiden: Maire, 1620), p. 124.

13. N. Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di T. Livio (Rome: Blado, 1531), 1.22.

14. A strategic flight. Not even Hercules could handle three, or two outstanding opponents in a fight.

15. See Augustine, City of God III.xiv, on the impiety of the war that the Romans waged against the Albans, and the victory that resulted from desire to rule; there he skilfully treats the Horatii and the Curiatii. [In darker ink:] Cf. the biblical duel of David and Goliath. Also the heroic ones of Hercules and Cycnus in Hesiod, Achilles and Hector in Homer, Aeneas and Turnus in Virgil.

16. Herbert, “Transformations of Livy.”

17. C. Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and Queen Elizabeth, 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), pp. 423-43.