The Eloquence of the Body: Perspectives on Gesture in the Dutch Republic (review)

Herman Roodenburg begins his delightful new book on the bodily manners of the Dutch Golden Age with a claim that I suspect may well be mostly true in the Netherlands where he is from, but would not be so for much of the rest of the world. He asks if the rich are physically different from other people, and then answers that they are not, not now anyway, even though they were very much so in the past. It is this past physical manifestation of wealth, power, grace and status, what he often resorts to calling a je ne sais quoi, that he seeks to uncover in its historical origins in Renaissance Italy, and its transmission across Europe to even the more peripheral courts of the Low Countries in the early modern period. However, for this reader sitting on the other side of the Atlantic, much of what Roodenburg finds to have been the markers of social class in a by-gone age still resonate. Thus I read this book with two levels of interest: one, the historian's and the other that of the social observer of my own world.

This book is informed by a wide variety of literatures drawn from the disciplines of family history, literary history, art history, performance studies, the study of what the Dutch call ego documents, and cultural studies more generally. It takes seriously the post-modernist readings of the body as sign as well as Foucault's understanding of the body as an instantiation of social discipline. Yet it does so much more than simply recast these kinds of arguments. A central emphasis of the book is that the body is not just passively acted upon, but that it is capable of its own action—a statement that seems so obvious on its face that it should not need to be argued, yet it does. This activity works primarily through the mechanism of the body's ability to remember. The capacity for developing bodily techniques, what Roodenburg calls habitus, allows for the development of a rich thesis about the meaning associated with certain bodily traits. He argues that these traits can be acquired by repetition and training, the kind of training that happens in a well-ordered garden for example, or in the riding of a bicycle. Children, if given dancing, fencing and riding lessons, and if constantly corrected in their posture, bearing and gesticulations, indeed even facial expressions, will learn to carry themselves with the je ne sais quoi that will mark them out for all to see as members of a social elite.

As Roodenburg himself acknowledges at the outset of his study, this quintes- sentially Renaissance proposition is full of paradox. If the carriage of a person is to be an infallible marker of his or her social status, what does it mean to say that it can be learned? He says of Castiglione, the father of the courtly behavior manual genre, that "he professes to teach what cannot be learned and he aims, though not exclusively, for an audience, the nobility at court, that is not supposed to need any teaching" (p. 10). But fortunately for historians grace could be learned, and a tremendous effort was made by early modern Dutch elites to inculcate graceful behavior in both themselves and their children, leaving us with sources more numerous than might have been expected. For indeed, the other great paradox of this book is that it purports to reconstruct from actors long since deprived of their bodies something as ephemeral (at least in the absence of video cameras) as their posture and gestures. Roodenburg is worth reading precisely because he is so successful in bringing those bodies back to life.

In this effort he is helped tremendously by the prolific ego documentation of the socially ambitious Huygens family: father Constantijn, grandfather Christiaan, and grandsons of the same names. Their individual libraries have all been catalogued, they...