Privacy is commonly considered a modern phenomenon associated with life in the bourgeois home, a space supposedly free of the political exigencies of the ‘public sphere’, according to Jürgen Habermas’ influential The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, first published in 1962. However, while we might suppose that the people of premodern Europe living in crowded homes and cities had no privacy, premodern literature contains many references to privacy and the private/public distinction. Privacy appears to be a threat to social cohesion in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which imagines an ideally happy society without privacy or private property. This project’s aim is to explore how privacy is conceived in early modern utopian texts, paratexts, maps and images published between 1516 and 1750, in the context of the growth of individualism and capitalism.
Utopian sources are chosen because utopianism is an influential tradition of social criticism which focuses on relations between individuals and society as a whole. Although utopias are sometimes derided as a form of political fantasy or escapism, they are important, not only for inspiring political change and revolutionary thought. The many works of social critique and satire written in emulation of More’s Utopia give explicit form to social and political conceptions such as those concerning privacy and the private. They do so by presenting an imaginative vision of a non-existent society through which readers reflect on their own world. Through these means utopian sources offer an important record of how people in the past conceived of privacy in the context of social relations.
Primary sources are utopias in Latin, Italian, English, French and Dutch, including: Thomas More, Utopia (1516); Anton Francesco Doni, Mondo Savio e Pazzo (1562); Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World (1666); Denis Vairasse Histoire des Sévarambes (1675–79); François Fénelon, Les Avantures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse (1699); Hendrik Smeeks, Beschryvinge van het magtig Koningryk Krinke Kesmes (1708).
An interdisciplinary methodology is adopted combining close reading of the sources, approaches in literary criticism, historical privacy studies, book history and paratextual studies, along with digital humanities tools.
Main objectives:
- To identify spatial thresholds of privacy in the sources with
reference to the six heuristic zones of Mette Birkedal Bruun’s privacy work method, with the aid of digital humanities tools; - To explore the meaning of these conceptions of privacy in historical context using slow reading and secondary sources;
- To investigate how paratexts of the sources (e.g. frontispieces, prefaces, illustrations and handwritten notes) convey notions of privacy through the presentation of the authors’ works to readers.
Researcher: Liam Benison: ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4989-4370
This project is hosted by the Department of Cultures and Civilizations at the University of Verona, financed in Italy via the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Seal of Excellence scheme
(CUP: B37G22000830006), under supervision of Federica Formiga.
The digital humanities component is supported by the CETAPS Digital Lab, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto, with guidance from Luciano Moreira.
This project was inspired by collaborations with colleagues in the Centre for Privacy Studies (PRIVACY), University of Copenhagen, and guidance from PRIVACY director, Mette Birkedal Bruun.
Image: Frontispiece of Hendrik Smeeks, Beschryvinge van het magtig Koningryk Krinke Kesmes… (Amsterdam: Nicolaas ten Hoorn, 1708), courtesy of Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague.