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Icon Animorum by John Barclay and the Origins of the Characterization of European Nations
‘The juxtaposition of different human types or nations is as old as history, geog¬
raphy, or ethnography. Hippocrates had already created a typology of men, peoples,
and cultures. Barclay regularly refers to the classical authors, from Ammianus Mar¬
cellinus to Virgil. Of “modern” authors he mentions only a few: Jean Bodin, Justus
Lipsius, Samuel Pufendorf, Gerardus Johannes Vossius: that is, all the specialists
of the doctrines of the state, some of whom were then the most “modern” authors,
famous contemporaries of Barclay. It is typical that theologians are (in fact) not
mentioned in the book.
In order to give a description of the book, the following items should be stressed.
Describing the various nations, the book uses the Latin word indoles as a general
term, but which has a wide range of meanings. It is not a simple task to present here
all the statements of Barclay, because his chapters are concise and apodictic. First,
he gives a short geographic and historical description of the country, but he does
not systematically cover the names of all rulers, important battles, capital cities, and
so forth. Then he presents a general interpretation of the social and political system
of the given nation. Usually he does not give contrastive characteristics with other
peoples, but occasionally he compares, for example, the French with the English, or
the Italian with the Spanish. The nation-describing chapters of the book are more
or less of the same length (20 to 30 printed pages), offering the possibility of a fairly
balanced (but not too long) presentation of the leading nations of Europe. The style
is not polemic; the statements are clear and short, not entirely positive or negative,
but well proportioned and written in a sophisticated (but not purely classical) Latin,
thus, offering a variety of possibilities for interpretation (or translating) of the key
words and summarizing statements. Barclay does not give statistics, figures, or scales
and maps; his remarks are those of a “philosopher of culture.” The chapters are not
divided into sections or paragraphs, and they look like carved sculptures of great
blocks of stone. The author uses the style of an experienced intellectual, suggest¬
ing in a smooth way that his statements will be considerably valid under different
circumstances and also in the future. Four hundred years after the publication of
Barclay’s book, its novelty and intellectual niveau remains.
Barclay was a moderate partisan of the theory of “milieu,” explaining social and
political features by the natural environment. As we know, Montesquieu and other
social philosophers—more than a century later—were later adherents of the same
approach.
The first descriptive chapter (III) deals with “Gallia and its inhabitants.” Ac¬
cording to the text it is the largest “province” in Europe. (The statement is false, but
it has been commonplace in European ideology until today). Barclay continues, “It
is the most developed place, enjoying the import of goods—silk from behind the
Alps, artefacts from Germany, necessary or luxury merchandise from England.”
* Hereafter I refer to parts of and quotations from the book by giving simply the page numbers in
brackets.
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