Good to Think with: Domestic Servants, England 1660–1750
From Firenze University Press Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS)
Jeanne Clegg, BSFM: Laboratorio editoriale OA
- Thinking with Servants
‘Good to think with’ is an expression borrowed via Carolyn Steedman (in adapted form) from a passage in which Claude Levi-Strauss proposed that people, animals, any natural species, can be used for cognitive purposes (Steedman 2009, 15n). Th is is how Steedman applies it to domestic service in England in the long eighteenth century:
Domestic servants were used — more than any other social group — to write histories of the social itself. This was an important aspect of their function, not the same as dusting, boot-cleaning and water-carrying but, rather, an involuntary labour, by which they were employed by all manner of legal theorist and political philosopher, to think (or think-through) the social and its history. (13–14)
Among the political philosophers in question is John Locke, who in 1689 used a servant cutting turf to show how the products of one man’s labour may be appropriated by another, and in 1693 cited nursemaids’ story-telling as illustrating barbaric methods of education. In his Commentaries (1765 -1769), that most influential of legal theorists, Sir William Blackstone, classified the master-servant relationship as the first of the three great relations of private life to come within the remit of the law. Servants have been used to think (or think-through) key aspects of social life in many times and places. In Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600, Dennis Romano shows how the late sixteenth-century physician and playwright, Fabio Glissenti, used servants, gondoliers and other ‘persone basse, e vili’ to ‘serve as representations of the senses triumphing over reason’, to recommend the importance of a good death, and to justify a static political and social hierarchy (1996, 37, 40). Romano himself uses ‘the lens of intimate relations between masters and servants’ (xv) to investigate the Venetian shift ‘away from egalitarian republicanism and communal values and toward an ever more hierarchical and stratified society’ (228). The decision to use domestic service as a key was not difficult, he explains,
since the master-servant tie was one of the most fundamental relationships that characterized European society before the era of the French Revolution … Like the bonds between lords and vassals, masters and apprentices, even fathers and sons, ties between masters and servants linked tens of thousands of Europeans in relationships imbued with economic, social and political significance. No relationship, with the exception of that between husbands and wives, better expresses the patriarchal and hierarchical ideal of early modern society … (xv)
Quite different but equally ‘social’ are the aims of the recently concluded ‘Servant Project’, a vast network of scholars who have investigated and promoted the social ideals affirmed by the European Constitution of 2004 — human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity — through case studies of master-servant relationships in regions as far apart as Sweden, Japan, Turkey and Latin America, and over a time scale stretching from the middle ages to the twenty-first century.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-15767
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/article/view/7033
