On 3rd April 2024, the workshop “Past Privacy Matters: How to Study It and Why” attracted an audience of sixty-nine students and professors at the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM) in Santa Maria, Brazil, in addition to thirty-three attending online.

The workshop was organized by LAPS (Latin American Privacy Studies) and the postgraduate programme in history at UFSM (PPGH) in collaboration with the Centre for Privacy Studies (PRIVACY) at the University of Copenhagen. Natacha Klein Käfer (PRIVACY) designed the programme to bring together a small team of speakers, and Taís Tomazi (UFSM) arranged logistics on the ground with the help of PPGH students. The five lectures provoked an engaging discussion in Portuguese and English about the meaning of privacy and the challenges of studying it.

Speakers and participants were warmly welcomed by José Remedi, Professor of History and Vice-Dean of Humanities at UFSM. Professor Remedi expressed solidarity with striking university workers calling for improved wages and conditions.

In the opening lecture, Natacha Klein Käfer, Assistant Professor at PRIVACY, presented a methodological introduction to historical privacy studies. She gave an overview of the diverse research of the Centre for Privacy Studies, including publications and ongoing projects. Teams of scholars at PRIVACY focus on five key domains of knowledge: privacy in the context of law, health, the home, urban spaces and belief. An important tool of research are the heuristic zones developed by Professor Mette Birkedal Bruun, Director of PRIVACY [1]. The heuristic zones are neither a method, theory or result, but rather a tool for analysing the meaning of privacy in different contexts.

Natacha considered some questions privacy scholars ask, which may include, Who gets to decide what will be private? Is privacy imposed against someone’s will or willingly taken and defined? The following discussion highlighted that, although scholars are necessarily concerned with problems of identifying examples of privacy in different situations, the more important objective is not to define privacy in a concrete way but rather to focus on questions of its fluidity, how it is interconnected with aspects of the public. A withdrawal from public life, for example, may involve negotiating and giving public notice of the withdrawal.

The second session was presented online by Johannes Ljungberg, Assistant Professor at PRIVACY, on the topic of “What privacy are we talking about?” Johannes reviewed the historiography of privacy in the twentieth century in the context of the enshrining of privacy as a right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Johannes argued that Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere has skewed thinking on privacy because, while it is commonly claimed that privacy did not exist in the premodern period, it is rarely recognized that the same is true for the public sphere as Habermas defined it.

Johannes sparked a good discussion with four propositions about privacy. Particularly interesting is the proposition that “privacy is a product of social interaction”. This refers to the idea that we often only notice privacy when we lose it, as a result of some social intrusion. Johannes suggested that this may be a recurring historical phenomenon. One example was the call for privacy to be recognized as a right, by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in 1890 [2]. The historical context was the rapid spread of photography and newspapers, which, according to Warren and Brandeis, was turning gossip into a trade, broadcasting the prurient details of people’s private sexual affairs.

In “Researching privacy through the history of emotions: voices from the margins”, Jelena Bakić, Researcher at the Free University of Bolzano, presented three case studies from Renaissance Italy of two women and a man who shared personal reflections in dedicatory epistles to their published books. Jelena’s research demonstrates that paratexts can reveal significant insights into the particular circumstances and concerns of individual writers, despite the commonplace that paratexts are merely rhetorical.

One of Jelena’s cases was that of Camilla Herculiana, an apothecary and natural philosopher from sixteenth-century Padua, who complains that the time she has to write and work is severely restricted by her responsibility to her husband, caring for her children, and the demands of household management. Although women were expected to declare their dedication to husband and family, Camilla’s words also express an emotional and personal protest against the position of women in her society. Jelena’s vivid examples showed how the public and private are intertwined in women’s and men’s paratexts. Although the published paratext is a public statement, the public persona it presents generally reveals some details about the individual’s life. Its public and private meanings lie therefore in what the writer chooses to make public about their private experience.

In “Privacy and the novel: a history of utopian possibilities”, Liam Benison, Researcher at the University of Verona and University of Porto, discussed how utopias have been used by scholars as sources to understand the history of privacy. He argued that utopian texts are of great importance to the history of privacy because the problem of the private is at the heart of utopian thinking. His research focuses on how representations of doors in utopian architectures open up insights into how utopian writers conceived of privacy and frequently saw it as a threat in an ideal society, although they often availed themselves of privacy in their own lives.

Liam presented an overview of the methodology he is developing in the CETAPS Digital Lab at the University of Porto, which applies PRIVACY tools using digital humanities methods in practice. Liam’s presentation was followed by an interesting discussion regarding literature and privacy, and also about surveillance and privacy in the early modern period and today.

The final session, “Privacy through quantitative sources: a possible encounter”, was presented by Taís Tomazi, PhD candidate at UFSM. Taís discussed the value of the use of quantitative sources and considered some of the disadvantages. She looked at the use of databases, fontes seriais versus qualitative information and information derived from personal testimonies such as diaries or official documents such as legal trial records. By focusing on inventories from the nineteenth century in southern Brazil, Taís showed how it is possible to reconstruct private space and private life, and what are the challenges. A serial history, Taís’s research shows, offers an important and valuable avenue of research for the history of privacy.

Taís provoked an engaging discussion in which Professor Luís Augusto Farinatti (UFSM) pointed to how a sense of privacy can affect the way in which certain facts of history enter or do not enter the historical record. He gave the example of Gaúcho households in the borderlands between Imperial Brazil and Argentina that owned knives used in feuds. The knives legally had to be registered, but if a researcher looks for knives in the registers, they almost never find them, because families regarded the cultural tradition of feuding as private and none of the business of state authorities.

The workshop demonstrated a strong interest in historical privacy studies among students and staff at UFSM, and was productive in fostering new scholarly contacts between the speakers and UFSM researchers. The authors of this post are very thankful to Natacha for the opportunity to present at this event and for the warm welcome we received at UFSM. It was a wonderful and memorable experience and we hope the first of many future engagements with the new scholarly friends we met.

References

2. Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, ‘The Right to Privacy’, Harvard Law Review, 4.5 (1890), 193–220.

“The first gardens were not made, but discovered.” So begins Christopher Thackers The History of Gardens (1979) in his treatise on the first woody or grassy areas that we humans would soon consider as gardens, parks, or groves. Although the parks that Thacker initially discusses with this sentence are those untended gardens of the elusive nymphs, the bountiful flower goddess Flora or the ever-fruitful orchard of the Hesperides,  the sentence rings equally true to all the tended parks that would follow in the footsteps of these mythological spaces. These real places were all sprung from a sense of discovered beauty to quickly become a place of human control, walled limitations and man-made constructions.

The Garden of the Hesperides (1892) by Frederic Leighton.
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, UK, Public Domain.

During the coming three years I shall study how urban gardens and parks functioned as a middling area between public elements and private activities within the urban landscape in the PhD-project: Urban Gardens: A Public Place for Private Activities?. Specifically, I will study how parks were:

• locations for the intermingling of individuals across the social strata,
• tools for indirect communication between the elite (or the state) and the “people”,
• secluded places for private conversations and encounters,
• tools for peer-to-peer rivalry and a source of social capital for its owner and their visitors,
• disruptions, but also intrinsically connected parts of the urban landscape,
• locations for political gatherings and public protests,
• locations that were “hard” to control by the governing or policing body and thus became places commonly associated with illegal and anti-social activities. 

These perspectives on gardens will be pursued á longue durée, focusing on the continuity, the changing functions, and accessibility of urban gardens from antiquity to the early modern period. A multitude of varied urban landscapes will serve as cases for this project, but few such landscapes can exceed the historical continuity existing in Rome when it comes to urban gardens. The urban gardens and parks of Rome enable comparisons with how other urban landscapes of antiquity, such as Constantinople (Istanbul), Pergamon (Izmir), and Athens, developed and how urban landscapes that grew to prominence at later periods, such as those in Aachen, Florence, Paris, London, Copenhagen, Tunis, or even Boston were established. In summary this project primarily focuses on European gardens and parks in an urban setting, as well as the interconnected gardens of the extended eastern Mediterranean. 

Sommerdag i Villa Borghese i Rom (1922) by Hans Andersen Brendekilde.
Photo from Bruun Rasmussen Kunstauktioner, Public Domain.

Horti Luculliani – The First Urban Garden in Rome

To visualise a rough outline of the study and its approach, we can look at Rome’s first large urban garden, the Horti Luculliani as an example. In the first century BCE the Roman aristocrat and graecophile Lucius Licinius Lucullus (118–56 BCE) constructed his own enormous private pleasure garden within the urban landscape of Rome, the Horti Luculliani. The garden was primarily used as a meeting place for the retired general and his associates; it was never open to the general public. The Luculliani was thus a private garden that was only used by a highly curated group of individuals; at the same time it was a very publicly visible garden. It was located by one of Rome’s major roads, the Via Flaminia, on the slopes of the Pincian hill and towered over the Campus Martius.

Modern reconstitution of the Horti Luculliani as made by André Caron (andrecaron@videotron.ca)  

The Horti Luculliani, later renamed as the Horti Asiatici, would eventually become imperial property during the reign of Claudius (10 BC–54 CE). As an imperial property, it was turned into a “semi-public” park and was used as a site for the emperors to withdraw but also for private gatherings of the political elite and it was regularly opened for the general populace during festivals and other events. It would survive in this fashion for most of antiquity, occasionally changing hands between an aristocratic elite and the emperor, until the 600s when it is mentioned for the last time as being the target of renovations performed by the Byzantine general Belisarius (c. 500–565). 

Sometime after these renovations, the park and most of the now ravished and greatly diminished surrounding urban landscape were abandoned and given up to ruralisation. Among the abandoned ruins of the gardens on the Pincian hill instead sprung up vineyards, used, owned, and frequented by papal dignitaries and their hired hands, and it was not until the 15th century that the area would again become included in the revitalised urban landscape of Rome. During this revitalisation, the former area of the Horti Luculliani, became part of three new renaissance urban parks: the monasterial garden of the Trinita dei Monti, and the two aristocratic park-palatial complexes: the Villa Medici and the Villa Borghese, which all still remain today. These complexes would all go through different stages of being private, semi-private, and, as they stand today, public. By the 18th and 19th century they were joined by many other public projects such as galleries, museums, a French institute and, by the early 20th century, the Bioparco di Roma, one of the first zoological gardens that was primarily aimed towards public amusement, and not, like many other early zoological parks, scientific endeavours. 

Thus, just by looking at one urban park in one urban landscape we are able to see the park going through a myriad of uses, all of them interlinked with the private and the public. In summary, my project will look at parks as places for curated private gatherings, tools for peer-to-peer rivalry, tools for the elite to curry favour with the general populace and with their associates, places for being withdrawn and having privacy, commercial meeting areas for the elite, places to show sophistication, wealth and erudition, and finally as public places where private visitors can come to relax, sightsee and be amazed.

La fontana dei Cavalli Marini a Villa Borghese (c.1880) by Aurelio Tiratelli.
Photo from Paolo Antonacci Roma, Public Domain.

Historians have shown how early modern European states used both of private and public resources to govern. Early modern states relied on social capital and social networks to function, and private contractors supplied their armed forces with both equipment and men. A recent article shows how the Swedish national bank was reliant on the personal credit of its employees.

This reliance on private resources is also prevalent when looking at the consular services of the early modern age. The Swedish consular service expanded drastically in the eighteenth century, especially in the latter decades, 48 consulates in total by 1789, and did so on a shoe string budget. Most consuls neither received a salary nor could levy fees on incoming ships. At the same time, cash and credit were necessary for the exercise of their office. This combination led to a striking amalgam between public office and private enterprise. In this post I focus on Swedish eighteenth century consulates in Spain, building on my two recent anthology[1] chapters[2].

The port of Cadiz in south-western Spain, a key port in the eighteenth century because most goods from the Spanish colonies landed here. Source.

In the eighteenth century, states appointed consuls in port towns across Europe. Their task was to promote trade, help nationals in need, and to correspond with their home authorities as well as diplomats and other consuls. They were not diplomats, but they performed some diplomatic duties and handled the day-to-day interactions between different nationalities on a much more frequent basis than diplomats did.

As for the Swedish consular service, a consul needed cash and credit to be able to serve. Most, if not all, consuls mostly made their living from private trade and had been merchants before their appointment. Their new post entailed many outlays. For instance, when consuls helped ships pay custom and clearance fees when entering and leaving port, for court and lawyer fees when Swedes ended up in court, or for hospital bills when Swedes needed health care, and so on.

Even though consuls made money from these outlays, as they charged ship owners and merchants brokerage fees, interest rates and fees for their services, it took at least several months for reimbursements to reach a consul in Spain from Sweden. And only in the much-frequented ports could these incomes reach substantial levels. Unsurprisingly, the Swedish consular decree of 1793 stated that a sufficient fortune was a prerequisite for receiving a consular appointment. If a consul filed for bankruptcy, he lost his position immediately.

Yet, the costs of exercising the consular office only partly explains the importance of cash and credit. As the decree also stated, it was undesirable that a consul allowed for the ‘decay of his credit’ (understood here as both reputation in a broader sense and trust in a financial sense), as this decay not only destroyed public confidence for himself, but also for Swedish trade. The reason for this is that, by appointing someone a Swedish consul, the Swedish crown had become associated with his firm, and even authorized it to some extent. The job applicants themselves recognized the boons of this affiliation. When Gustaf Baumgardt was appointed Swedish consul in 1776 in Alicante, he advertised his new position to Swedish merchants, making it clear that this appointment would benefit his private enterprise.

In exchange for an improved legal status, the Swedish authorities seems to have viewed it as the consuls’ task to improve and benefit Swedish trade by engaging in trade themselves. In Cadiz, this connection was so strong that the consul had to notify the Swedish authorities if he entered in any trade partnerships, and he was expected to choose a Swede.

Sometimes, public and private interests intermingled perfectly. Hans Jacob Gahn, consul in Cadiz between 1773 and 1800, managed to broker a deal with the Spanish navy to become its contractor for supplying copper sheets for its ships in the early 1780s. Copper sheets were used to make ships less susceptible to decay and formed part of the naval arms race between Spain, France and Great Britain at the time. Although some copper was brought to Spain from the Habsburg Empire, as Gahn partnered with the Italian merchant and consul Pablo Greppi, most of it seems to have come from Swedish copper mines, increasing Swedish metal exports.[3]

The Spanish frigate “San Carlos” in Port Mahon, Menorca. Source.

The association of a private firm with the Swedish crown also meant that the consulate served as a training ground for future merchants and consuls. To take an example, Jacob Martin Bellman, consul in Cadiz between 1744 and 1766, had it written in his instruction that it was “the duty of the consul to employ Swedish youths as assistants in his trading house in order to provide them the opportunity to learn about trade so that they may be of future benefit and use to the king and the realm.”

Consuls were supposed to employ young Swedes, give them training in international trade, and thereby produce skilled merchants who would either take up positions as consuls themselves or at least benefit the Swedish nation as merchants, enriching themselves and the Swedish trade and industry all at the same time. Although the Swedish authorities could do very little to enforce this demand, they expected the consul to repay his appointment not only with service but also with the training of new merchants.

The effects of this alliance of public office and private venture also manifested itself in the consular house. Here, the consul lived, ran his merchant operation, and operated his consulate. Consequently, his merchant office also doubled as his consular office, and his staff also worked for the consulate. As an example, Gahn’s business partner also worked as his vice consul, and the provincial historical archives in Cadiz show that the vice consul and several others of Gahn’s staff served Swedish ships and sailors as interpreters and legal aides whenever they needed help in the port. The consul himself is seldom visible in the material, his staff took care of his duties for him.

The consulate, moreover, kept his archives, including his formal correspondence with the Swedish authorities, other consuls, diplomats, merchants, and other people he kept in touch with. Bellman and Gahn kept in touch with, among other, the botanists Carl Linneaus and José Celestino Mutis. Sadly, there are no archives left from any of the eighteenth century Swedish consulates in Spain but they were important, not least to the Swedish authorities. When a Swede serving as the Russian consul in Cadiz also applied for the Swedish post, one of the arguments against him was that his Russian staff would have access to the Swedish archives.

Finally, the consular house also served as a house of representation. Although the house could not display a coat of arms on the front, it was adorned with a Swedish flag and could also contain many artifacts that showed its intrinsic connection with Sweden. The Swedish consul in Alicante in the late 1700s writes that the flag was important to the honour of the Swedish nation. Additionally, visitors to the Cadiz consulate in 1748 and 1751 wrote about how the consul had decorated one of his rooms in the colours blue and yellow and that he had adorned the walls with portraits of the late king Fredrik I, the present King and Queen, and the Crown prince. The room was clearly used for Swedish representation abroad.

Private businesses and public affairs clearly mixed in Swedish consular houses in eighteenth century Spain. My findings, thus, further adds to the results from previous research on the mixing of public and private resources in the early modern European consular service.

Crucially, the execution of the consular office rested on personal credit wedded with state authority, and the large outlays required from the incumbent necessitated some type of income from trade. A consular appointment resulted in the association between a merchant or merchant house and the Swedish crown, to the benefit of both, at least in theory. Very few precautions about the potential drawbacks of greed are noticeable in the material, and when they surface, they mostly relate to nationality. People who were not subjects to the Swedish King were seen as less trustworthy and more prone to prioritize their private affairs to the detriment of the public interest. How things worked in practice needs further empirical studies.

[1] Published in https://presses-universitaires.univ-amu.fr/maison-consulaire.

[2] Published in https://nordicacademicpress.se/product/gender-materiality-and-politics/.

[3] In the 1790s, Gahn won the contract to supply the Spanish navy with lumber but this time the lumber was brought from Russia.

Noise and silence are notions that elude a hard definition, just like privacy. Precisely for this reason, they are powerful tools that will give new insights into the early modern world.  Sonic history brings innovative insights into history and privacy. Noise and silence played a crucial role in the appropriation, display, control of power and political performance. Speaking, producing sound, being silent or being silenced involved cultural and social protocols of rank, power, and proximity.

Historians rarely listen, musicologists listen mostly to music but rarely to silence and noise, and sound studies scholars focus mainly on contemporary topics. The acoustic turn allows us to combine theoretical approaches from the three fields along with methods inspired by historical performance practices. Aurality defines a community that shares and hears the same sounds. However, people can feel both unisonance and dissonance, by hearing the same soundscape but interpreting it differently, according to their social level or gender. In order to study inclusion and exclusion in sonic interpretation, we shall therefore consider not only the members of the court, but reach across social classes and consider everyday life.

The sound of the past is irremediably lost, along with listening habits. However, a keen scholarly analysis of a variety of sources allow us to reconstruct the historical sonic environments. Written sources can be analyzed lexically to uncover words referring to sound, noise, music, silence, listening and hearing practices. Visual sources also shed light on sonic practices and can be interpreted not only with the eyes but also with the ears. Moreover, physical evidence such as original spaces and artefacts of the past have been preserved and can literally be heard and even recorded, giving access to a sonic reconstruction. Bringing sound into historical studies creates a change in paradigm: what was once fixe has become dynamic, what was silent can be heard. Sound is immersive and dynamic; it travels through time and space and therefore involves temporality and humans. Sonic practices and aurality are crucial to study privacy because of the focus they bring on its main producer, the human body and its relationship with its environment.

Visual or aural privacy were rare commodities in the early modern world. What could be heard or not is therefore highly significant and sheds new light on its social structures. The study of soundscapes reframes and redefine spaces by revealing new boundaries and thresholds. It brings new insights into private and public spaces and the overlaps between them. The porosity of sound and its power to cross physical boundaries allows us to consider outdoor sounds penetrating inside, but also indoor sounds that spill outside, expanding into surrounding areas.

In acoustics, silence is defined as a sound below 20 decibels, whereas noise is a non-periodical sound. But these definitions do not take into account the listener, perception, and the context. Silence and noise are always culturally and socially defined. Silence is a threshold between sounds, be it in music, and speech, but also between noises. Silence can never really be experienced, since in extremely silent environment such as an anechoic chamber, one can distinctly hear his own blood flowing and his own heart beating, along with possible experiences of disorientation and hallucinations. Noise in English refers etymologically to nausea and is connected to seasickness, whereas the French bruit and the Italian rumore link the word to animals, respectively the deer (bramer) and the lion (ruggire).

Both silence and noise can be considered in positive or negative ways, according to the context; both can be weaponized. Silence can be seen as a sanctuary, but it can also be used as an instrument of torture, just like noise. Noise has traditionally been associated with the unmusical, the unintentional, the disruptive. But it has been used musically in pieces inspired by animal vocalizations, battles, or street calls since the Renaissance. Noise implies a judgment about the quality of the sound and is always understood in a contextualized relationship with the social and musical order. The early modern audiences had a noisy form of listening. History shows a progressive containment of noisy and rowdy publics toward a more enlightened and silenced notion of listening. History also shows a progressive domesticating of the body by silencing the noises it produces.

Silence and noise are time-specific; the former associated with the night, the latter with daily activities. Noise is a disruption of the social order if it happens at night. Both notions are also site-specific; silence is associated with a variety of natural sites (desert, wood, garden), whereas noise is mostly associated with the city. Finally both are linked to specific activities; for example, silence with devotion, noise with carnivalesque activities. But the early modern churches were places of sociability and tended to be noisy. The omnipresent bells rhythmed the daily activities and early modern cities were populated by a variety of animals, speeding carriages, street sellers, blacksmiths, cooks, and other workers producing a lot of noise. Finally, silence can be a political weapon of domination, but also a form of protest and a message. Noise, on the other hand, can also be a form of protest, perceived as a sign of political dysfunction; untimely voices disrupt the social order.

White noise