Craft Secrets Religiously Kept

Over a thousand pages long, and years in the making, Neil Kamil’s Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517–1751 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, pp. xxiv+1058, $75) is a monumental work on a number of levels. Here Kamil weaves a brilliant tapestry of objects, texts, artisanal networks, apocalyptic battles, and political maneuvers. He elaborates the political context and material forms of an “artisanal soulishness” that stretches over two centuries: from the Huguenot French potter Bernard Palissy in the sixteenth century, through the artistic expression of Johann Theodore de Bry and William Hogarth and the alchemical searches of Robert Fludd and John Winthrop the Younger, and finally to the eighteenth-century Long Island furniture makers James and Samuel Clements. It is this “soulishness,” with its artisanal synthesis of holiness and materiality, which serves as the refuge, means of mobility, and stable center of unity for Huguenot Protestant culture in its diaspora throughout the Atlantic world.

Given such a broad canvas, it is not surprising that Kamil crosses over a variety of historical specialties. In fact he offers some significant reinterpretations for the political and economic history of Atlantic states, the history of science and technology, and art history and connoisseurship. This is so not only in regard to the specifics of the events and objects Kamil elucidates, but also more broadly in historical perspective. Fortress of the Soul asks us to think about power and assimilation in a new way, at least as appertains to Protestant Europe and colonial America. The book does not explore structures of domination and appropriation, but uncovers strategies for safety, resistance, and covert interpretation among Huguenot survivors of the wars of religion. Fortress follows these strategies into a new vision of identity and assimilation in the new “Babel” of the New World.

Of particular interest to historians of technology is the argument most fully articulated by the potter Bernard Palissy: No faith can be put in the technologies of conventional military resistance such as fortresses and cannon (as later borne out by the tragic collapse of La Rochelle during Richelieu’s final siege in 1628); the Protestant cause in Catholic France will be maintained by artisans who can carry the tools of their trade on their backs. Like the snail, the Protestant commoner should remain small, hidden, and mobile, and present the appearance of assimilation in his hostile environment. The power of these small, politically insignificant artisans is that they create material objects, not that they destroy them. This material production on the one hand serves the worldly desires of dominant political masters, but on the other manifests the artisans’ own spiritual discipline.

It is through intensive examination of material artifacts that Kamil builds out the artisanal networks that created them and reconstructs the mental, spiritual worldview they were meant to convey. At the outset, Kamil claims that “Material things were silent extensions of an entire cosmos of Huguenot artisanal discourse, mediating, like the refugees themselves, among different Protestant groups, as well as vis-à-vis their intractable enemies” (p. xix). Palissy’s pottery, Hogarth’s art, Long Island furniture: all have been seen in terms of their popularity as commodities, but all are connected to Huguenot communities and a sinuous aesthetic that according to Kamil must be followed through winding paths. Kamil takes his readers on just such winding journeys. He traces Palissian figures to “rustic” motifs, alchemical symbology, and Jean de Léry’s history of Brazil; he connects the signs of a Hogarth painting to Huguenot artisans in London, Robert Fludd’s magical arts, and popular stories of biblical characters; he draws the similarities between the front stretcher of a chair turned in Long Island, the architecture of a French Protestant church, and the printer’s device in a Protestant reader.

Kamil argues that these sinuous connections are necessary to a community that learned to dissimulate in order to avoid assimilation, or even annihilation. If safety for Huguenots was to be found in dissimulation, assimilation in appearance only, then resistance and identity could be maintained by alternative modes of apprehending appearances. The cosmic significance of a platter or an armchair would be clear to co-religionists, if not to the average consumer—or for that matter to the average historian.

Many historians put the objects of their inquiry in context of war and violence, but for Kamil violence actually constitutes the creative processes that gave rise to the material world of Huguenot artisans. His almost palpable descriptions of religious violence are integral to his reading of artisanal artifacts and belief, and are related through alchemical reference. He gives equal weight to the subjects of his subtitle: violence, metaphysics, and material objects. Alchemy, the art that applies violence in the creation of material effects within a metaphysical explanatory framework, forms the connective tissue among them. Kamil takes alchemical-political interpretation into the realm of lived experience, and insists that we recognize that events such as Palissy’s development of a white translucent glaze or John Winthrop’s forays into Long Island politics and real estate are in fact personal alchemical quests in the face of military or political disappointment. We are told that “In the secret world of alchemy, personal and collective histories of violence were artfully synthesized” (p. 681). Alchemy makes understandable transformation by fire; it signifies the violence and torture that gives rise to reformations, both on the macrocosmic-social and microcosmic-personal levels.

Alchemy also provides a model for hopes to claim the New World for Huguenot society, where the rustic naturalism of America itself would be rehabilitated. Importantly, Kamil claims that a vision for Protestant hopes in the New World began in sixteenth-century France. Palissy’s “alchemical theater of the torture and execution of the first [French Huguenot] leaders” (p. 219) would be succeeded in the 1650s by the alchemical physician’s chair of John Winthrop Jr., governor of Connecticut. That chair would seat the adept himself, and express his North American quest for the philosopher’s stone. (Here the plot begins to be even more complicated by Kamil’s persuasive argument that the “philosopher’s stone” for Winthrop was the Northwest Passage, and his less persuasive attempt to maintain a crossover between alchemy and geomancy [the magical art of reading earthen formations] throughout the book.)

In America, apocalyptic waiting would continue to be expressed through material objects and the salubrious labor that fashioned them. During his 1703 imprisonment in Flushing, New York, the Quaker preacher John Bownas would find “refuge in artisanal production” (p. 837). Hybridization between Huguenot and other quietist reformers would result in hybridized craft traditions. Threat of violence and suppression gave Huguenots common cause with other quietist, politically unempowered groups, and these groups shared a common idiom in the objects they made.

It is perhaps Kamil’s use of the alchemical tradition that will raise the most concern on the part of historians of science and technology. Fortress is not about alchemy. Rather it uses alchemical literature as a kind of Rosetta stone that decodes meanings lying in the shadows of Huguenot artifacts. However, Kamil draws a very straight, almost unmediated line between Renaissance Neoplatonism, Paracelsian alchemy, and Robert Fludd’s work (on the one hand), and his reading of a large variety of Protestant artisanal experience and production (on the other). In its bold connections among texts, events, and objects, Fortress is reminiscent of the work of Dame Frances Yates, which in fact Kamil employs unproblematically. For Kamil, interest in Paracelsian alchemy leads not to questions of epistemology or approach to nature (questions we are now so comfortable with), but rather to the deciphering of a covert language of spirituality and politics (a project with a checkered past). His use of alchemical literature as a code for political and millenarian Protestant hopes will no doubt raise flags. Readers who despise such works as The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972) are likely to have difficulty with Fortress of the Soul. However, just as Dame Yates opened up whole new materials, connections, and avenues of research, Kamil’s work is bound to do so, even on a belligerent read. Fortress is rich in historical detail and detective work; it presents an extraordinary moving interactive picture of the great and little worlds of Huguenot life over two centuries, and its intellectual ambition, even if sometimes overwrought, is always intriguing.

Fortress is not about alchemy, but it is certainly about interpretation; it is a masterwork exercise in the ways in which objects can be read. This is clear from the very first chapter, in which Kamil explores the meaning of a silver basin presented to the Catholic King Charles IX by Protestant subjects of La Rochelle, to the final chapter, in which Kamil examines the providential significance of sundials and beakers within a prerevolutionary discourse of (English) royal prerogative. Interpretation for Kamil is not merely an academic exercise for historians, but the subject of history. In this way, Fortress represents the ultimate project of cultural history.

Many will object to specifics of Kamil’s interpretation, perhaps even to his underlying insistence that an alchemical-German spiritual-Neoplatonic worldview holds the key to the meanings embedded secretively into Huguenot arts. However, all this will only point up the core assumption of this work: true power is found in the control over meaning, and, as successive administrative authorities found, “private messages could not be controlled” (p. 921). Kamil has made it his herculean task to discover and make public a great number of the private and collective messages from the Huguenot past; he draws them into a compelling story of survival and hope among a community torn by violence and persecution.