to the soldiers from the Mark who fell in the wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870–71. The town has a considerable trade, with manufactures of woollens, silks, linens, hosiery and paper, as well as breweries, tanneries, boat-building and bicycle factories.
Brandenburg, originally Brennaburg (Brennabor) or Brendanburg, was originally a town of the Slavic tribe of the Hevelli, from whom it was captured (927–928) by the German king Henry I. In 948 Otto I. founded a bishopric here, which was subordinated first to the archdiocese of Mainz, but from 968 onwards to the newly created archbishopric of Magdeburg. It was, however, destroyed by the heathen Wends in 983, and was only restored when Albert the Bear recaptured the town from them in 1153. In 1539 the bishop of Brandenburg, Matthias von Jagow, embraced the Lutheran faith, and five years later the Protestant worship was established in the cathedral. The see was administered by the elector of Brandenburg until 1598 and then abolished, its territories being for the most part incorporated in the electoral domains. The cathedral chapter, however, survived, and though suppressed in 1810, it was restored in 1824. It consists of twelve canons, of whom three only are spiritual, the other nine prebends being held by noblemen; all are in the gift of the king of Prussia.
The “old” and “new” towns of Brandenburg were for centuries separate towns, having been united under a single municipality so late as 1717.
See Schillmann, Geschichte der Stadt Brandenburg (Brandenburg, 1874–1882).
BRANDER, GUSTAVUS (1720–1787), English naturalist, who
came of a Swedish family, was born in London in 1720, and was
brought up as a merchant, in which capacity he achieved success
and became a director of the Bank of England. His leisure time
was occupied in scientific pursuits, and at his country residence
at Christchurch in Hampshire he became interested in the fossils
so abundant in the clays of Hordwell and Barton. A set of
these was presented by him to the British Museum, and they
were described by D. C. Solander in the beautifully illustrated
work entitled Fossilia Hantoniensia collecta, et in Musaeo Britannico
deposita a Gustavo Brander (London, 1766). Brander was
elected F.R.S. in 1754, and he was also a trustee of the British
Museum. He died on the 21st of January 1787.
BRANDES, GEORG MORRIS COHEN (1842– ), Danish
critic and literary historian, was born in Copenhagen on the
4th of February 1842. He became a student in the university
in 1859, and first studied jurisprudence. From this, however, his
maturer taste soon turned to philosophy and aesthetics. In 1862
he won the gold medal of the university for an essay on The
Nemesis Idea among the Ancients. Before this, indeed since 1858,
he had shown a remarkable gift for verse-writing, the results of
which, however, were not abundant enough to justify separate
publication. Brandes, indeed, did not collect his poems till so late
as 1898. At the university, which he left in 1864, Brandes was
much under the influence of the writings of Heiberg in criticism
and Sören Kierkegaard in philosophy, influences which have
continued to leave traces on his work. In 1866 he took part in
the controversy raised by the works of Rasmus Nielsen in a
treatise on “Dualism in our Recent Philosophy.” From 1865
to 1871 he travelled much in Europe, acquainting himself with
the condition of literature in the principal centres of learning.
His first important contribution to letters was his Aesthetic
Studies (1868), in which, in several brief monographs on Danish
poets, his maturer method is already foreshadowed. In 1870
he published several important volumes, The French Aesthetics
of Our Days, dealing chiefly with Taine, Criticisms and Portraits,
and a translation of The Subjection of Women of John Stuart Mill,
whom he had met that year during a visit to England. Brandes
now took his place as the leading critic of the north of Europe,
applying to local conditions and habits of thought the methods
of Taine. He became docent or reader in Belles Lettres at the
university of Copenhagen, where his lectures were the sensation
of the hour. On the professorship of Aesthetics becoming vacant
in 1872, it was taken as a matter of course that Brandes would
be appointed. But the young critic had offended many susceptibilities
by his ardent advocacy of modern ideas; he was
known to be a Jew, he was convicted of being a Radical, he was
suspected of being an atheist. The authorities refused to elect
him, but his fitness for the post was so obvious that the chair
of Aesthetics in the university of Copenhagen remained vacant,
no one else daring to place himself in comparison with Brandes.
In the midst of these polemics the critic began to issue the most
ambitious of his works, Main Streams in the Literature of the
Nineteenth Century, of which four volumes appeared between
1872 and 1875 (English translation, 1901–1905). The brilliant
novelty of this criticism of the literature of the chief countries
of Europe at the beginning of the 19th century, and his description
of the general revolt against the pseudo-classicism of the
18th century, at once attracted attention outside Denmark. The
tumult which gathered round the person of the critic increased
the success of the work, and the reputation of Brandes grew
apace, especially in Germany and Russia. Among his later
writings must be mentioned the monographs on Sören Kierkegaard
(1877), on Esaias Tegnér (1878), on Benjamin Disraeli
(1878), Ferdinand Lassalle (in German, 1877), Ludvig Holberg
(1884), on Henrik Ibsen (1899) and on Anatole France (1905).
Brandes has written with great fulness on the main contemporary
poets and novelists of his own country and of Norway, and he
and his disciples have long been the arbiters of literary fame in
the north. His Danish Poets (1877), containing studies of Carsten
Hauch, Ludwig Bödtcher, Christian Winther, and Paludan-Müller,
his Men of the Modern Transition (1883), and his Essays
(1889), are volumes essential to the proper study of modern
Scandinavian literature. He wrote an excellent book on Poland
(1888; English translation, 1903), and was one of the editors of
the German version of Ibsen. In 1877 Brandes left Copenhagen
and settled in Berlin, taking a considerable part in the aesthetic
life of that city. His political views, however, made Prussia
uncomfortable for him, and he returned in 1883 to Copenhagen,
where he found a whole new school of writers and thinkers eager
to receive him as their leader. The most important of his recent
works has been his study of Shakespeare (1897–1898), which was
translated into English by William Archer, and at once took a
high position. It was, perhaps, the most authoritative work on
Shakespeare, not principally intended for an English-speaking
audience, which had been published in any country. He was
afterwards engaged on a history of modern Scandinavian literature.
In his critical work, which extends over a wider field than
that of any other living writer, Brandes has been aided by
a singularly charming style, lucid and reasonable, enthusiastic
without extravagance, brilliant and coloured without affectation.
His influence on the Scandinavian writers of the ’eighties was very
great, but a reaction, headed by Holger Drachmann, against
his “realistic” doctrines, began in 1885 (see Denmark: Literature).
In 1900 he collected his works for the first time in a complete
and popular edition, and began to superintend a German
complete edition in 1902.
His brother Edvard Brandes (b. 1847), also a well-known critic, was the author of a number of plays, and of two psychological novels: A Politician (1889), and Young Blood (1899).
BRANDING (from Teutonic brinnan, to burn), in criminal law
a mode of punishment; also a method of marking goods or
animals; in either case by stamping with a hot iron. The
Greeks branded their slaves with a Delta, Δ, for Δοῦλος.
Robbers and runaway slaves were marked by the Romans with
the letter F (fur, fugitivus); and the toilers in the mines, and
convicts condemned to figure in gladiatorial shows, were branded
on the forehead for identification. Under Constantine the face
was not permitted to be so disfigured, the branding being on
the hand, arm or calf. The canon law sanctioned the punishment,
and in France galley-slaves could be branded “TF” (travaux
forcés) until 1832. In Germany, however, branding was illegal.
The punishment was adopted by the Anglo-Saxons, and the
ancient law of England authorized the penalty. By the Statute
of Vagabonds (1547) under Edward VI. vagabonds, gipsies and
brawlers were ordered to be branded, the first two with a large
V on the breast, the last with F for “fraymaker.” Slaves, too,
