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Six months after Matthias Lunding began his tour, Denmark was visited by another enlightened traveller, the French-Venezuelan revolutionary general and politician Francisco de Miranda, who was educating himself and escaping at the same time by touring Europe. He stayed in Denmark from Christmas 1787 until Easter 1788. He too kept a diary of his observations. Miranda’s diary was published in a Danish translation in 1987, commented and edited by H. Rostrup, entitled Miranda i Danmark. Francisco de Mirandas danske rejsedagbog 1787-1788. It is instructive to compare it with Lunding’s, because they were both moving to some extent in the same reform-minded circles of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Yet we notice a clear difference in their basic outlook and temperament. Whereas Lunding is subdued and discrete, Miranda is lively and direct. If Lunding is the sober, almost plodding observer, Miranda is the enthusiastic, indignant, and emotional champion of the new ideas. Whereas we have to examine Lunding closely to detect whether he may have visited a brothel in Hamburg while on his travels, Miranda is much more forthright in his description of the Jewish girls who were provided for his nocturnal amusement:

When we had eaten I went to visit my girl, with whom I drank tea, and then I went to bed with her until 11 o’clock, and I screwed her twice. (Rostrup 1987: 75)

Miranda wrote this after first having described a pleasant dinner party the same evening in the English Club, where many of the leading cultural figures and politicians of the day were present. After satisfying his bodily needs, he went home and read Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work on the Polish constitution.

It is clear in general that Miranda is a sensual man with an eye for female beauty, and that he enjoyed life in Copenhagen. He says, for instance, about Ernst Schimmelmann, the minister of finance, that he is young and “married to a likewise young woman who is not bad” (Rostrup 1987: 55). He is referring to Countess Charlotte Schimmelmann. He visits the Schimmelmann family on Christmas Day, drinks tea with them, and talks about literature. For Miranda it was not far from mind to body, but it would be wrong to perceive him as either a pre-modern “nature person” or as a timeless hedonist and skirt-chaser. He is a representative of a personality type at the transition to modernity, for whom the body was entitled to all its rights, but with style: first he drank tea …

He took a keen interest in contemporary political and social matters, which led him to visit the prisons of Copenhagen. Here we see the enlightened citizen of the world, showing his humanistic and philanthropic horror at the dreadful conditions, but also the modern rationalist who, almost like a prototype of Foucault, cannot understand why the prisoners primarily have to suffer punishment to their bodies, with torture and whipping, when they could instead be making themselves useful by doing productive work while they are incarcerated. He thus combined utility with humanism. The same complaint about wasted talent is evident from his description of one of the girls in the House of Correction at Christianshavn:

I saw here a beautiful and strong girl of 18, with the most sensual looks I have ever seen, wild to get screwed – and sentenced to stay here for life! Because she had a child that she was thought to have killed! (Rostrup 1987: 109 ff.)

This is not just an epicurean speaking, but also a pragmatist and an advocate of natural law. Miranda appears to think that nature’s gifts should not be allowed to perish unused, but should be fulfilled. For him the human body is not primarily a static lump that is liable to degradation and castigation, but a productive entity which should – albeit preferably with discipline and honour – be allowed to act and develop, whether it be in work or sex. With a patriarchal concern that is typical of the times, he also turned to Ernst Schimmelmann to obtain more humane and rational treatment of prisoners.

In both the slightly cool Lunding and the sensual, passionate Miranda, we thus find that the modern viewpoint, that people, including the weakest members of society, should not so much be punished as improved and disciplined. We likewise note a patriarchal will to intervene and put things right on the basis of the view that activity is better than idleness. The starting point for one of them is of course an economically coloured mercantilism, for the other a sentimental and idealistically coloured libertarian humanism, but the basic attitude is the same: the combination of new rationalistic thought and humane concern, besides a patriarchal know-all attitude. One can also detect a modern understanding that the human body thrives best in activity and vigour. Lunding wrote of his visit to the Vajsen House in Altona that the boys there were healthier and fitter than the girls, “no doubt because they had more movement and freedom”(Paludan 1979: 59 ff.).

At the same time, both men stress the beneficial effects of order and cleanliness, fixed routines and supervision. It is keeping with this that Miranda’s attempt to improve prison conditions led to a royal ordinance of 19 May 1798, which ruled that prisoners who had committed serious crimes should be separated from those who were guilty of minor offences and could therefore be improved provided the bodies were properly distributed in time and space. The modern tendency towards parcelling and division is clear enough, along with the emphasis on ordered conditions for matters large and small, ranging from the finances of the realm to children’s homes and poor relief. This universalistic tendency and longing for order in the midst of diversity is, despite all the differences in the individual contributions, a recurrent characteristic of the enlightenment project of rationalism. It is primarily general principles that determine both Miranda’s reforms and Lunding’s observations and descriptions.

Whereas Miranda subsequently disappeared from Danish history, Matthias Lunding continued his work, and in 1789 he succeeded his father as director of the Royal Orphanage for Newborn Children, in keeping with the ideas about the relationship between production, growth, work discipline, and the eradication of poverty which his father’s colleague Niels Ryberg had launched in the 1770s. Let us follow Lunding on his trip to spinneries and spinning schools in south Fyn and elsewhere: For epoch-making things were happening in terms of the history of the body, precisely at the time when Lunding started his tour.

In a letter dated 2 July 1787, Sybille Reventlow writes about her husband Johan Ludvig (cf. below):

In the afternoon Ludvig danced with the peasants’ children and had them perform a great many physical exercises, and in the evening we all danced with our people. (Reventlow 1902: 114)

This was not a matter of wild, spontaneous play, but staged play, organized and controlled from above. These seem to be the first organized athletic events in Denmark. This was the decisive point: that not only the head but also the body now became an object for enlightenment, education, and imprinting. Even the breaks at the estate schools, when the children had formerly frolicked freely, were now to be brought into organized play.

It is clear from the same letter that Reventlow was busy in those days with the agrarian reforms on his lands, by which the common fields and villages were split up and enclosed in individual lots and farmsteads. On the preceding Sunday he had preached a fiery sermon to his peasants, with such enthusiasm and emotion that his listeners – who included the poet Jens Baggesen – had been moved to tears. We even read that Baggesen wept so violently that he was not himself for the rest of the day.

The question that now forces itself upon us is: what is the connection between these two champions of enlightenment, between Reventlow’s agricultural projects and dances with the children, and Baggesen’s being moved to tears? Let us look for an answer to this by peering over Lunding’s shoulder in south Fyn, and we will see that the events outlined here were not just chance happenings but important occasions in (bodily) history.