Didactic Literature in England 1500–1800: Expertise Constructed 1138273465, 9781138273467

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DIDACTIC LITERATURE IN ENGLAND 1500-1800

Didactic Literature in England 1500-1800 Expertise Constructed

Edited by NATASHA GLAISYER SARA PENNELL

First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Copyright © Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business The Editors have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Didactic literature in England, 1500-1800 : expertise constructed   1. Didactic literature, English - History and criticism   2. English literature - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History   and criticism 3. English literature - 18th century - History and criticism   I. Glaisyer, Natasha II. Pennell, Sara   820.9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Didactic literature in England, 1500-1800 : expertise constructed / edited by Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell.     p.cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-75460669-7   1. Didactic literature, English-History and criticism. 2. English literature-Early   modern, 1500-1700-History and criticism. 3. English literature-18th century  History and criticism. 4. Learning and scholarship in literature. 5. England  Intellectual life. 6. Education in literature. I. Glaisyer, Natasha, 1972II.   Pennell, Sara.   PR408.D49 D53 2003   820.9–dc21                  2002032629 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0669-7 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-138-27346-7 (pbk)

CONTENTS List of Plates List of contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell 2 The Bible and Didactic Literature in Early Modern England Scott Mandelbrote 3 Didactic Sources of Musical Learning in Early Modern England Susan Forscher Weiss 4 Seventeenth-Century Didactic Readers, Their Literature, and Ours Randall Ingram 5 Polite Society and Perceptions of the Sun and the Moon in the Athenian Mercury and the British Apollo, 1691-1711 Anna Marie E. Roos 6 French Conversation or ‘Glittering Gibberish’? Learning French in Eighteenth-Century England Michèle Cohen 7 The Gardener and the Book Rebecca Bushnell 8 Deformity’s Filthy Fingers: Cosmetics and the Plague in Artificiall Embellishments) or Arts best Directions how to preserve Beauty or procure it (Oxford, 1665) Christoph Heyl

9 Richardson’s Barometer: Colonial Representation in Grammatical Texts Richard Steadman-Jones 10 Containing the Marvellous: Instructions to Buyers and Sellers Phyllis Whitman Hunter Bibliography Index

List of Plates 3.1 Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musick (London, 1597), p. 2 3.2 The Whole Psalmes in Four Partes (London, 1563), frontispiece of tenor partbook 3.3 John Playford, A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick (London 1694), p. 11 3.4 Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musick (London, 1597), p. 8 4.1 John Donne], Poems by J. D. (London, 1633), manuscript index 5.1 Frederick Henrik von Hove, ‘An Emblem of the Athenian Society’ (London, 1692) 6.1 Abel Boyer, The Compleat French Master for Ladies and Gentlemen (London, 1729), Dialogue X (excerpt) 6.2 Bernard Calbris, The Rational Guide to the French Tongue (London, 1797), p. 68 7.1 John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris (London, 1629), ‘Tulips’, p. 59 7.2 Otto Brunfels, Herbarum vivae eicones (Strasbourg, 1532), ‘Walwurz’, p. 75 7.3 Dydymus Mountain [Thomas Hill], The Gardeners Laqyrinth (London, 1608), frontispiece to the ‘Second Part’ 7.4 Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (London, 1635), p. 141. 7.5 ‘William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden (London, 1648), ‘The perfect forme of a Fruit-tree’, p. 47.

List of contributors Rebecca Bushnell is a Professor of English and Associate Dean for Arts and Letters in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles’ Theban Plays (Ithaca, 1988); Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, 1990); and A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, 1996). Michèle Cohen is Principal Lecturer in Humanities at Richmond American International University in London. She has been working for several years on masculinity, language and education in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and has published numerous books and articles on the subject. Her most recent publications include English Masculinities 1660-1800 (with Tim Hitchcock; Harlow, 1999), and ‘The Grand Tour: language, national identity and masculinity’, Changing English, 8 (2001). She is currently working on a cultural history of gender and education in England since the eighteenth century. Natasha Glaisyer is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of York. She is currently writing a book, The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660-1720. Christoph Heyl is a Lecturer at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. His main fields of research are the cultural history and literature of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Having completed a book on the private sphere in eighteenth-century middle-class London (A Passion for Privacy, forthcoming), he is now working on seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities and related phenomena. Phyllis Whitman Hunter is Associate Professor of Early American History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She studies consumption and cultural change, and has just published a book on this

topic: Purchasing Identify in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670-1780 (Ithaca, 2001). Randall Ingram is Associate Professor of English at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. Having published essays on authors and readers in seventeenth-century England, he is now at work on a book entitled The Making of Seventeenth-Century Books: Producers, Consumers, Materials. Scott Mandelbrote is Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Peterhouse, Cambridge and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Sara Pennell is an independent researcher, with interests in food, medical culture, dissemination of knowledge and domestic œconomies in early modern Europe. She is working on a book touching on all these subjects, The Uses of Food in England, 1500-1750. Anna Marie E. Roos is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. She has published articles in the history of early modern astronomy and medicine, as well as a monograph entitled Luminaries in the Natural World: Perceptions of the Sun and Moon in England, 1400-1720 (New York and Bern, 2001). She is currently working on a book project examining the role of early modern English newspapers published from 1690 to 1750 in the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Richard Steadman-Jones is a Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Sheffield, where he is responsible for developing interdisciplinary work spanning the departments of English Language and English Literature. He is particularly interested in European perceptions of non-European languages. His Ph.D. dissertation was concerned with representation of Urdu from the early years of British colonialism in India and is soon to be published by the Philological Society. Susan Forscher Weiss is the Chair of the Musicology Department at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Bologna Q 18: I-Bologna, Civico Musco Bibliographico Musicale Ms. BolC Q 18 (olim 143) (Peer, Belgium 1998), several articles in leading musicological journals, and of entries in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Acknowledgements This book arises out of a conference held at Newnham College, Cambridge in July 1998. We would like to thank the Wellcome Trust and the Master and Fellows of Jesus College, Cambridge for their financial support of the conference. We would also like to thank all the conference participants and in particular, the commentators, Anne Goldgar, Rob Iliffe, James Raven and Rosemary Sweet – for their contributions to the discussions we had, and for stimulating our enthusiasm to produce this collection of essays. Vivian Law, who also made invaluable contributions to the sessions as a commentator, sadly died before this book was completed. Chapter 5 by Anna Marie Roos, ‘Polite society and perceptions of the sun and moon in the Athenian Mercury and the British Apollo, 1691-1711’, draws on material from Chapter 6 of her book, Luminaries in the Natural World: The Sun and the Moon in England, 1400-1720 (Bern and New York, 2001). We thank Peter Lang Publishing for permission to use this material. Chapter 6 by Michèle Cohen, ‘French conversation or “Glittering Gibberish”? Learning French in eighteenth-century England’, draws on material from her book, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996), pp. 83-7. We thank Routledge for permission to use this material.

Note on the text We have intervened in the reproduction of original material within the essays as little as possible, except where confusion might arise, notably in the use of archaic typography (for example, ‘heauen’ is given as ‘heaven’). References are given in full in the footnotes, with the exception of standard reference works: the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter referred to as OED) and the Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter referred to as DNB).

Chapter 1

Introduction Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell

What more learning have we need of, but that experience will teach us without booke? We can learne to plough and harrow, sow and reape, plant and prune, thrash and fanne, winnow and grinde, brue and bake, and all without booke; and these are our chiefe businesse in the Country: except we be Jury-men to hang a theefe, or speake truth in a mans right, which conscience & experience wil teach us with a little learning, then what should we study for, except it were to talke with the man in the Moone about the course of the Starres?1 I believe by a too eager thirst after knowledge I have oftentimes, to gratify that insatiable humour, been at too great an expense in buying books and spending rather too much time in reading for it seems to be the only diversion that I have any appetite for.2

This book is born out of our common interest in didactic books and our shared curiosity about how to write their history. Despite the pre-eminence of how-to and self-help books in modern best-seller lists, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the long roots of this attachment to texts which purport to educate. Having embarked independently on research into culinary texts and merchant advice materials of the early modern period, we encountered similar difficulties and realized that although individual studies of certain texts had been undertaken, the study of didactic texts as a whole lacked thorough and critically sophisticated treatment.3 This can partly be explained by various material circumstances, not least the inevitable attrition rates among such cheap and often heavily used texts, but perhaps also at stake are academic judgements of what constitutes a valid text for study. In cultural histories of the early modern period the ‘literary’ text has tended to assume an ascendancy over those texts that had practical applications.4 Nevertheless, didactic texts have been employed in certain approaches: for example, as a medium through which to trace the development of the novel. To this end, Paul Hunter argues that ‘a recognition of just how basic the cultural devotion to didacticism was at the dawn of the modern era’ is crucial in understanding the shaping of the novel in the eighteenth century.5

Whilst we are convinced of the importance of these texts in this history, we are also determined to clarify the parts played by didactic literature in other phenomena historiographically controversial and important to scholars of early modern culture, such as the ‘Scientific Revolution’, consumption practices and the socio-cultural extension of literacy.6 Although histories of reading practices and the book have increasingly attracted scholarly attention, didactic texts and their uses have often been marginalized, if not overlooked.7 These texts require treatment in their own right, and this book seeks to establish some of the questions that will open up a long-needed debate on the significance and roles of didactic texts in early modern society. What, though, do we mean by ‘didactic literature’? It can be argued that every text in the early modern period had the potential to be viewed as didactic. Indeed, when Sir Philip Sidney conceived of reading of any sort as the best grounding for ‘the Trade of our Lives’, he was far from alone in his commitment to this catholic interpretation.8 Although we acknowledge the employment of didactic modes in a wide range of textual genres, including sermons and histories,9 we have chosen in this volume to concentrate mainly on those texts which were explicitly framed to instruct through the material they contained: amongst these are what we might today label as ‘how-to’ books. Such books made their claims to educate and inspire from the outset, and were constructed both textually and physically, to achieve those goals: the ideal didactic text of this sort was ideally ‘a Manual, that shall neither burden the hands to hold, the Eyes in reading, nor the Mind in conceiving.’10 From this (admittedly arbitrary) categorization we exclude conduct literature, primarily because this is one of the few fields of didactic material that has received coverage.11 Conduct and etiquette literature certainly shares many characteristics with those texts discussed in the following essays, and our hope is that new insights into this particular field may be gained from examining the wider category to which conduct literature belongs. The study of didactic texts provides an important route into considering early modern constructions of practical knowledge. It also allows us to explore contemporary structures of learning, and the categorization and hierarchies of types of knowledge, subjects that have long been the preserve of historians of education, but which have begun to

be explored more sociologically by Steven Shapin and others.12 Moreover, just as all early modern texts might be conceived of as didactic, we also recognize that explicitly didactic texts might serve many other ends than simply the narrowly pedagogic. The diverse uses to which a didactic text might be put is suggested by two British Library copies of Thomas Blundeville, The foure chiefest offices belonging to horsemanship (first published c. 1565-6), a handbook containing directions how to breed, train, diet and treat horses. One copy of the 1597 edition was owned by John Jodrell of Moorehouse, Staffordshire, who signed his name on the title page, added copious manuscript recipes for treating equine diseases and also listed the births of his three sons on the final page. The other volume, a copy of the 1580 edition, was owned by Gabriel Harvey who annotated the text extensively, emphasising fine turns of phrase as well as pieces of good advice; in his summary written in the front of the book, Harvey praised the book, not for its practicality but for its celebration of the chivalry of the warrior.13 Desirable though it would be to establish the quantitative presence of didactic literature as a publishing genre across the early modern period, the means to do this effectively are only now beginning to be available, through the various counts of titles published in the early modern period.14 No-one has yet undertaken to use these figures to survey particular types of literature systematically, in order to investigate particular trends within the larger aggregate movements. However, initial investigations of culinary texts and merchants’ manuals suggest that the publication patterns of these books mirrored the general trends.15 Without similar ‘counts’ for other types of didactic and non-didactic material, however, these findings do not allow us to argue that didactic material was an increasing proportion of published material across the period. But there are grounds to suggest that, even using our narrow definition of what constituted ‘didactic’ literature, these books (as new editions, and as subsequent editions of existing texts), made up a substantial proportion of material published across this period, and especially after 1650. Even if we cannot quantify output with any accuracy, evidence from the libraries of men and women show the prevalence of didactic material on their shelves. Thomas Teackle’s 1697 inventory of his Virginia estate reveals the wide reading tastes of a wealthy Anglican cleric: his library

included numerous medical books, like ‘Platerus Golden practice of physick &c by plater Cole and Culpeper’ and ‘Vademecum companion for a Chirurgion &c’, and financial texts such as ‘Arithmeticall Questions &c calculated by R. W.’.16 The book lists that Ann, Countess of Coventry compiled in 1702, contain not only classical and spiritual works, but also volumes entitled ‘The Compleat Gardiner’, ‘Art of Drawing’, ‘Queens Closet’, and ‘Harvy’s Physitian’.’17 Unlike Coventry – a woman, who in Ruth Perry’s words, ‘could afford to buy what pleased her’ – the maidservant Polly Atkins, who ordered a copy of William Leybourn’s ready reckoner Panarithmologia from a Warwickshire bookshop in 1770, probably purchased few other books.18 These people may have stood socially and geographically far apart, but their mutual interest in buying didactic works emphasizes the importance of this type of publication throughout the Atlantic world, across the social spectrum and the sexes. This importance was sufficiently accepted by contemporaries, as to be registered in fictional reading practices; thus we have the ‘Lady Leonora’, whom Addison wished had been guided by ‘such books that have a tendency to enlighten the understanding and rectify the passions’, as well as the romances that influenced her landscape redesign.19 Of course, ownership of books does not imply their owners read them; as Addison observes, several of the volumes in Lady Leonora’s library are there solely because ‘she had heard them praised or because she had seen the authors of them’.20 Likewise, books did not need to be owned by their readers to be read, and several didactic texts – on surgery and physic, French grammars, and writing – are listed in the catalogue of books available in the library of St John’s church, Bedford, ‘for the use of the present and all future Contributors and Benefactors.’21 The development of literacy in the early modern period – a literacy that was often based on the ability to read, and for many individuals, the ability to read only the printed word – encouraged, and was furthered, by such universal interests in these texts.22 Many didactic texts required, and some claimed to teach or improve, basic textual familiarity, as well as numerical and visual literacy. In the preface to his handwriting manual John Ayres stressed that ‘my design is not to tickle the Ear with Notions concerning Writing, but to present it to the Eye for your Imitation, to shew you what it is.’23 Readers of a navigational text such as John Aspley’s Speculum

nauticum (London, 1624) were expected to acquire and apply welldeveloped numeracy, as well as literacy skills, to deal with the mathematical-astronomical tables essential for navigation.24 The publications that fall into our ‘didactic’ category comprised a not insignificant proportion of the stock of booksellers and stationers in this period. As many booksellers specialized in certain types of publication, so we find George Conyers stocking his shops at Ludgate Hill and later Little Britain in the late seventeenth century with ‘cheap practical manuals on every conceivable subject’.25 The bookbuyer controlled to some degree the amount spent, in exercising choice over binding. Indeed, didactic texts increasingly belonged to those categories of popular books, along with catechisms, reference books and classical texts, which bookbinders might have kept readybound in standardized simple bindings for purchase.26 Although didactic books were published in formats ranging from flimsy pamphlets to elegant folio volumes, size did matter in the perception of such texts. Recalling Eliza Smith’s claim that her cookery book should be no ‘burden to the hands to hold’, the portability of books advertising themselves as ‘pocket books’ was not an empty selling point.27 There are also didactic ‘books’ amongst the cheapest and most ephemeral texts that survive from this period: the ‘Penny Merriments’ and chapbooks that Pepys collected so avidly. Amongst the examples that survive in the Pepys Library are a handful of cookery pamphlets, for example The Compleat Cookmaid: or, A Collection of most useful Dishes in Ciry or Country (London, 1684);28 although none carries a price, it is unlikely that any of these sold for more than sixpence. These pamphlets, as well as the more robust, bound texts, were still destined for shorter life spans than other genres, simply because they were (at least superficially) intended to be used, and used in situations that did not guarantee preservation. A notable example of this is explicidy stated in a loose advertisement pasted into a copy of Ayres’ Tradesman’s Copy-Book, detailing A Royal Sheet of Paper fill of Variety of the Clerks Hands, with Breaks of the Exemplifying Court Letters, and 166 Words abbreviated in Court-Hand, and fairly written at length in the Modish Engrossing Set-Hand (price 2s 6d) so contrived, as to be cut in parts, and rolled up in a Pen-Case.29

It is indeed an irony of book history that the volumes of didactic material that survive today were those that were often little used or carefully

preserved in libraries or closets. In looking at didactic texts historically, as a medium of knowledge construction and knowledge communication, we come up against the enduring debates over hierarchies of, and access to, knowledge. Any expansion in popular education, or demotic access to ‘more’ knowledge (whatever that knowledge is), is often accompanied by fears that established hierarchies are at risk.30 Yet the period that stretches from the expansion of vernacular printing in the mid-sixteenth century to the expansion of basic education in the early nineteenth century, was arguably an era in which ‘practical’, ‘sensual’ empirical knowledge assumed an unprecedented prominence, altering conceptions of what it was possible to know, and who could be permitted to know it. Central to this development were those who invoked novel pedagogical and epistemological philosophies. Francis Bacon’s declaration that ‘the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge’, and that that knowledge was not the preserve alone of sovereigns and their authority, underpinned a desire to establish ‘improvement’ as a cultural prerogative. This aim is a consistent thread through humanistic prescriptions in the early sixteenth centuries, to the encyclopaedic visions of Enlightenment philosophes.31 This trope of improvement, deriving from contemporary agrarian discourse, as an effect to be achieved in other ‘fields’ of potential profit, underpins not only Tudor pedagogies, but also the proposed Baconian and Hartlibian colleges and the later efflorescence of circulating libraries, ‘learned’ clubs and journals during the eighteenth century.32 These ventures promised an alternative (and by implication, better) conception of human activity to the traditional structures of scholastic learning. In support of a venture to achieve a comprehensive history of trades, William Petty argued: Boyes instead of reading hard Hebrew words in the Bible … or parratlike repeating heteroclitus nouns, and verbs, might read and hear the History of Faculties expounded, … As it would be more profitable to Boyes, to spend ten or twelve years in the study of Things, and of this Book of Faculties, then in a rabble of words[.]33

Although Petty focused on the input (through learning) of empirical knowledge, the value of such texts lay in their potential output. Terms like industry, use and improvement pepper the prefaces of didactic texts, acknowledging that, as texts of prescription, they lacked utility until put

into practice. Thus the anonymous author of England’s Happiness Improv’d: or, an Infallible way to get Riches, Increase Plenty and Promote Pleasure (London, 1697), a small book of wine, preserving and confectionery recipes, believed the text could not ‘but prove advantageous to all, and exceedingly so to those, who by industry will put in practice what is set down for their good improvement in knowledge.’34 A rhetoric of utility went hand in hand with a conception of the authors of these texts as equipped with the expertise to dispense appropriate knowledge. The decline of guild controls over certain trades, and the slow decrease in absolute numbers of apprentices across the long eighteenth century provided one of the information ‘gaps’ into which a didactic text might be introduced as a substitute for oral, face-to-face educative relationships.35 Moreover, the growth of trades and ‘skills’, ranging from surveying to japanning, that were not governed by existing organizational or institutional structures providled new territories for textual explication. The didactic text was arguably a substitute for communal dissemination, at times or in places when it was not available. Moreover, expertise was to be understood not only as knowledge of a skill but also as experience of that knowledge. Curricula vitae were an important part of prefatory commentary, in which real (or idealized) authors set down their credentials for knowing of what they wrote. A sense of expertise was also rooted in the perspective the ‘expert’ provided on other texts. The effective didactic text was one that successfully controlled much wider fields of information that otherwise threatened to become unbounded and unwieldy, without further digestion. Indeed, the author/fabricator of a didactic text in the late seventeenth century was doing for a much wider audience, with much more diffuse and provisionally active aims, what Gabriel Harvey was doing for his patrons and peers at the end of the sixteenth century: facilitating information retrieval and re-organization.36 The rhetorical premise of many didactic texts was thus one of judicious excerpting and summary. Readers were presented with the ‘readiest route’ through knowledge ‘thickets’, to ease consumption and ultimately use. In addition to comprehensive coverage, authors promised (if they did not always deliver) clarity. Hushcraft Stephens assured that in his bookkeeping text, ‘every thing [is] represented in a clear Light, free from the many Contraindications, Insignificant Forms, and obscure Terms, under which it

has been so long.’37 This assertion of clarity was often accompanied by condemnations of rival texts for their inaccessibility. Eliza Smith’s putdown of her (male) competitors reveals the key touchstones of practicality, plainness (both in language and scope), and experience upon which a didactic text should rely: There are indeed already in the world various books that treat on this subject, and which bear great names … but [I] found myself deceived in my expectations: for many of them to us are impracticable, others whimsical, others unpalatable … and recommended without … the Copiers ever having had any experience of the Palatableness.38

The territories of knowledge that didactic authors ventured to explore and explain for their readers were treacherous when it came to justifying what was excluded as well as what was included in texts purporting to be ‘complete’ or ‘useful’. The boundary between delivering useful knowledge, stripped bare of what was impracticable for the general reader, and oversimplification, was indeed a narrow one, and it could be argued that true experts would have found little to enlighten them in many didactic texts. Imperatives of completeness were also complicated by the incentive to present current, rather than merely re-current, knowledge. Readers as voracious as Thomas Turner, the East Sussex shopkeeper, desired his be nothing but several scrawls or lines of ink drawn upon white paper. But if a man that hath inward anticipations of learning in him look upon them, he will immediately have another comprehension of them than that of sense, and a strange scene of thoughts presendy represented to his mind from them. He will see heaven, earth, sun, moon and stars, comets, meteors, elements in those inky delineations. He will read profound theorems of philosophy, geometry, astronomy in them, learn a great deal of new knowledge from them that he never understood before, and thereby jusdy admire the wisdom of the composer of them. Not that all this was passively stamped upon his soul by sense from those characters. For sense, as I said before, can perceive nothing here but inky scrawls, and the intelligent reader will many times correct his copy, finding erratas in it.14

Innate ideas allowed human beings to read God’s hand in the book of nature and to tune their behaviour to the path of virtue extolled by Scripture, itself the product of infallible dictation by God. Such moral and emotional certainty came less surely to Doddridge and his contemporaries, though they were students of the Cambridge Platonists as well as of Shaftesbury. The principal reason for that was their acceptance of John Locke’s arguments about the primacy of the experience of the senses and their consequent belief that desire for the good or the beautiful, rather than the operation of the passions, might be the most efficient agent in the construction of a moral consciousness.15 Locke’s arguments about the importance of sense experience derived in part from reflection on the capacities of infants.16 His own suggestions for the education of children drew attention both to the importance of telling examples in generating self-examination and improvement and to the role of delight in exciting imitation and promoting learning. Locke claimed that: But of all the Ways whereby Children are to be instructed, and their Manners formed, the plainest, easiest and most efficacious, is, to set before their Eyes the Examples of those Things you would have them do, or avoid. Which, when they are pointed out to them, in the Practice of Persons within their Knowledge, with some Reflection on their Beauty or Unbecomingness, are of more force to draw or deterr their Imitation, than any Discourses which can be made to them.17

Locke argued that it was necessary to persuade children to develop a desire for learning, by making it ‘suitable to their particular Tempers’, and suggested that they should ‘be taught to read, without perceiving it to be any thing but a Sport’.18 Locke’s philosophy may have undermined the argument for a physiological process by which reading operated to excite the passions and inculcate virtue.19 In its place, however, readers of Locke who were also students of Shaftesbury substituted a pedagogical method that suggested that delight and the desire for the beautiful might be enough to move the child to a life of religion and virtue. In a remarkable Fast Sermon that he preached at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, on 31 March 1647, Cudworth attacked ‘our bookish Christians, that have all their religion in writings and papers … as if Religion were nothing but a little Book-craft, a mere paper-skill.’ He particularly criticized ‘the vulgar sort [who] think that they know Christ enough, out of their Creeds and Catechismes, and Confessions of Faith: and

if they have but a little acquainted themselves with these, and like Parrets conned the words of them, they doubt not but they are sufficiently instructed in all the mysteries of the Kingdome of Heaven.’20 Cudworth’s sermon explained the importance of spiritual illumination in moving the heart and mind of the Christian to a lively understanding of the Gospel and its meaning for human life. This stress on inspiration generated anxiety when it appeared to set the interior life of the believer above the lessons to be learned from revelation. Whereas Cudworth held that ‘if we would indeed know Divine Truths, the on ely way to come to this, is by keeping of Christs Commandments’, several of his contemporaries were more radical in the separation that they advocated between the teaching of the spirit and that of the letter.21 Thus the Quaker William Smith (d. 1673) argued that ‘the Scriptures are a true Testimony of what the Saints were made witnesses of; but the Spirit is the Rule from which the Scriptures were given forth; and it was the Rule unto them that gave forth the Scriptures, and they had the Spirit before they spake the Words’.22

Catechizing and the power of memory Smith’s A New Primmer, which was intended for binding with his New Catechism, represented a deliberate attempt to subvert the contemporary genre of didactic writing that had most to say about the biblical knowledge that was appropriate to children. Smith’s works were begun in prison at Worcester in February 1661 and completed from the county gaol at Nottingham during 1663 and 1664. They used the format of questions and answers ‘as from a Child’s Enquiry after Truth, to be informed by the Father’ to criticize, rather than to inculcate, respect for the Bible as the rule of faith, the learning of set prayers and the singing of psalms, the rendering of hat honour and the swearing of oaths.23 In place of the truths of formal religion, they explained the foundations and principles of ‘the poor affected people of God (called Quakers)’ and set out the doctrine of the inner light.24 Both Smith and Cudworth deplored the reliance in early modern religious education on the rote learning of catechetical texts, or their equivalents, which taught the letter of doctrine, including the basics of scriptural divinity, without inculcating the true spirit of Christian belief.

Nevertheless, for many of their seventeenth-century contemporaries, this was the preferred method of introductory biblical instruction. Protestants of almost all persuasions accepted that the Bible represented the ultimate doctrinal foundation for their faith. The most important lessons that it taught, which were necessary for the believer’s understanding of Christian salvation, could be presented in the form of questions and answers arranged according to the main heads of doctrine. Both the Church Catechism and the Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly, which continued to be used by the godly after the Restoration, were organized in this manner. They were designed to provide the religious instruction necessary for admission to communion or the Lord’s Supper. The Shorter Catechism, however, drew on a far greater range of biblical references. It provided a much more extensive guide to reformed teaching about the nature of belief in God and the duties that people owed to him than its rivals. But any gain in theological sophistication carried with it the danger that too great a demand was being made on the concentration, memory, and understanding of the catechumen. The Church Catechism, which in its simplest form was printed as a part of the Book of Common Prayer, dealt briefly with the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and the Sacraments. The absence of a more detailed apparatus of biblical reference helped to make the Church Catechism less contentious, as well as far briefer.25 For many authors, including churchmen such as Edward Fowler (16321714), Bishop of Gloucester, who wished to appeal also to dissenters, it was necessary to supplement the Church Catechism with additional scriptural references.26 Others extended the form of the catechism in various ways. Commonly, the catechism was accompanied by texts intended to teach basic literacy or was recommended for use alongside them at home or in school. Its structure was imitated by a variety of confessional authors, notably the Baptist Benjamin Keach (1640-1704).27 Like other texts that were intended for the barely literate, catechisms were often printed wholly or partly in Gothic or black-letter type. Although black-letter copies of the English New Testament continued to be published occasionally in the second half of the seventeenth century, especially in Scotland and the Netherlands, the overwhelming majority of new Bibles were printed exclusively in Roman type from the 1640s.28 There were those for whom an inability to read

anything other than black letter represented a significant hurdle to biblical literacy, but the sentiment of Henry Jessey (1601-63), another Baptist author of catechisms, seems to have been more representative. Jessey defended his use of Roman letters in his catechism by arguing that ‘for the Childs far greater profit, and more ease, and for preventing the more toil in reading the Testament, Bible, and any usuall book, it’s put in our most usuallletter; that English Letter being very seldome now in use, may be learned with more ease afterwards.’29 The entrance to reading provided by the catechism was often also a gateway to knowledge of the Bible. Thus Mrs Elizabeth Walker (1623-90), the devout wife of Anthony Walker, rector of Fyfield, Essex, taught her servants using both ‘A short and easie Catechism’ and the Church Catechism. She ‘used to hire them to their own good, giving them Sixpence to accomplish the first Task, then a Shilling, and so on, promising them a Bible when they could use it’.30 The Colchester minister, Owen Stockton (1630-80), composed an elaborate Scriptural Catechism to assist the study of the Bible and argued that illiterate people should ‘Bewail your sin, in neglecting to learn to read your self, and neglecting to cause your Children to learn to read the word of God’.31 Catechetical instruction played an important role in basic education provided by the charity schools sponsored by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in the early eighteenth century. James Talbot (1664-1708), rector of Spofforth in the West Riding and formerly Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge, insisted on the value of twice weekly catechizing, using a suitable exposition of the Church Catechism, for expanding the capacities of those who had recently learned to read. He suggested that the schoolmaster should encourage children to recognize that the foundation of all the moral instruction that they were receiving lay in the text of Scripture.32 Similarly, at the Blue-Coat School in Nottingham, children were exhorted ‘always to have their Bibles and Common-Prayer-Books with them’ to enable them to follow Church services on Sundays and to illustrate their learning of the catechism.33 Knowledge of the catechism and an ability to read the Bible were essential for admission to the more advanced education provided at grammar schools.34 The mode of question and answer that was familiar from the catechism could also be used to present an abridged version of the entire Bible

itsel£.35 The aim of this deployment of the catechetical technique was to encourage the memorizing of significant portions of Scripture. Poetic renderings of selected biblical texts often had a similar purpose.36 The godly were famed for their recall of apposite biblical passages. This was a skill cultivated by lay people as well as by divines. Josiah Langdale (b. 1673), who later became a Quaker, remembered that, while he was a servant in husbandry, he used to gad to sermons in the company of a blind thresher who knew many biblical passages by heart. Owen Stockton expected his children and servants ‘to get those Scriptures by heart which they were to keep in memory and repeat to him, as he called for them.’ Theophilus Gale (1628-78), when he was serving as tutor to Thomas and Goodwin, the sons of Philip, Lord Wharton, used to urge his charges ‘to spend their first & most serious thoughts in reading some portion of [th]e Scriptures & some practical divinity, fixing the heads of what they read in their memories, so as to be able to give an account thereof at night’37 The importance to godly and nonconformist readers of memorizing the Bible was in part a reflection on the practical and moral implication that they supposed Scripture to have. Recollection of the promises of the Christian religion provided ‘comforts and encouragements against the feare of death, called the old mans A. B. C.’, according to Simon Wastel (d. 1632), master of the free school at Northampton.38 The memory of personal behaviour, sin, and the experience of divine providence represented the raw material for calculating the state of one’s salvation. This reckoning represented a pale, earthly parallel to the coming judgment to which the soul would be put after death.39 It called to mind the original sin of Adam, with which many catechetical texts began. The example of Christ’s sacrifice, held in the mind of the believer, provided lively evidence for hope when otherwise there might only be despair: ‘Why else were Sacraments ordained by God, but as visible Idea’s of invisible things, whereby he admonisheth us, too forgetful of his benefits?’40 For early modern writers, memory was a faculty of the soul, dependent on sensation or sometimes thought for its existence. The formulation of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was jusdy famous and controversial: ‘when we would express the decay, and signifie that the Sense is fading, old, and past, it is called Memory. So that Imagination and Memory, are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names.’41 More conventional was Thomas

Jenner’s sense that memory was ‘the Souls storehouse’ and could be represented as a man dressed in black and writing at a table.42 For many seventeenth-century readers of the Bible, then, one of the principal tasks was to remember what had been read. Very many didactic works sought to supplement the guidance provided by the catechism. They tried to improve on the rather haphazard programme for biblical study provided by the directions for reading through the Old and New Testaments in the Book of Common Prayer. Above all, they looked to generate sensible guidance for the soul, as it tried to recollect what had been read, in the form of marginal notes, digests, and commonplace books. Leonard Hoar (1630? -1675), a Congregationalist who was ejected from the rectory at Wanstead in Essex in 1660 and who later became President of Harvard College, urged his students to read through an epitome of the text before opening their Bibles, and later to learn the epitome by itself. This, he argued, would help them to quote chapter and verse, ‘a thing of very great moment and use’.43 Francis Roberts (1609-75) suggested suitable topics for students of Scripture to note in order to have a better understanding of the sense of the text and a greater chance of remembering it. Readers of his Clavis Bibliorum were warned to approach the Bible ‘with a godly trembling’ and to consult it in a methodical and orderly fashion.44 At the end of his life, the puritan John White (1575-1648), for many yeats pastor at Dorchester, exhorted his parishioners to read Scripture as ‘a kind of holy conference with God’, urging them to prepare carefully for their encounter with the Bible and to study with books to hand to help them work the text into their hearts.45 The Presbyterian Isaac Ambrose (1604-63) echoed White’s phrase about the encounter between God and the believer over the words of the Bible. He drew up a strict calendar for reading Scripture, encouraged his audience to keep an analytical table of contents in mind when consulting the Bible, and pressed them to observe special passages that might be suitable for noting as heads in a commonplace book.46 Ambrose’s work made apparent the emotional and the technical requirements of biblical literacy. For him, reading the Bible was one part of a continuing act of self-analysis that also included the keeping of a personal diary of divine providences. It represented a process of recording and interpreting experience, with a view to extracting the truths that needed to be borne in mind until the soul was

interrogated on the Day of Judgment. Ambrose was not the only author to suggest that readers of the Bible should keep systematic notes, either in the text itself or in separate commonplace books. His notion of selfexamination was echoed in the practice of the future priest, Isaac Archer (1641-1700), when an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Archer began keeping a diary in 1659 and later rewrote it, recording that: I observed that in reading God’s word I could not frame my heart aright, and as I would, nor could I meditate on it, as was my duty, by reason of many idle and evill thoughts which came in, but were very unwelcome. However I was diligent in reading the scriptures every day, and read them once through in a yeare for the 3 first yeares according to Mr Bifield’s directions; yet gate I not much good for want of due meditation. I took notes also out of the Bible and put it under such heads as might suit any state of life what so ever.

Archer’s reading was guided initially by the work of Nicholas Byfield (1579-1622), although he later used A Discourse concerning the Gift of Prayer by John Wilkins (1614-72).47

From the examination of the present to the appeal of the past Godly and nonconformist readers of the Bible in the seventeenth century, therefore, seem to have concentrated on the extraction of personal meaning from particular texts of Scripture. They searched for evidence of the revelation of divine will in their own lives and in the Bible, both of which gave sensible evidence of providence.48 Marginal notes, bookmarks and entries in commonplace books recorded their findings and encouraged them to remember apposite sentences or verses.49 The poet and canon of Christ Church, Oxford, William Strode (1602-45) summed up many of these sentiments in his verses on ‘A Register for a Bible’: I your memoryes Recorder keepe my charge in watchfull order my strings divide the word aright pressing the text both day & night and what the hand of God doth writ behold my fingers point at it norr can St. Peter with his keyes unlock heauen gate so soone as these.50

The emotional power of this form of reading ought not to be underestimated. Numerous writers drew attention to the liberation that they felt when they ceased reading the Bible as a form of history and looked instead for the meaning that it gave to their own lives. The experience of the young Richard Baxter (1615-91) was typical: At first my Father set me to read the Historical part of the Scripture, which suiting with my Nature gready delighted me; and though all that time I neither understood nor relished much the Doctrinal Part, and Mystery of Redemption, yet it did me good by acquainting me with the Matters of Fact, and drawing me on to love the Bible, and to search by degrees into the rest.51

Other nonconformist autobiographies endorsed this sense that the narrative part of Scripture was a diversion from the doctrinal truths contained in the Bible. The first contact with the Bible that John Bunyan (1628-88) recorded was ‘in company with one poor man, that made profession of religion’. Bunyan wrote that ‘I betook me to my Bible, and began to take great pleasure in reading, but especially with the historical part thereof: for, as for Paul’s episdes, and scriptures of that nature, I could not away with them, being as yet but ignorant either of the corruptions of my nature, or of the want and worth of Jesus Christ to save me.’ As God’s providence began to work on Bunyan’s soul, however, he ‘began to look into the Bible with new eyes, and read as I never did before; and especially the episdes of the aposde Paul were sweet and pleasant to me: and indeed I was then never out of the Bible, either by reading or meditation, still crying out to God, that I might know the truth, and way to heaven and glory.’ Bunyan had discovered the communicative power of individual sentences of Scripture, which was independent of their place in any narrative.52 This awareness of the force of particular verses of the Bible encouraged godly readers to try to make sense of some of the most difficult places in Scripture.53 As a consequence, they placed increasing stress on the interpretation of the written word, in parallel to the power of preaching. Sight displaced hearing as the most important of the senses: ‘The eye taketh in sentiments more effectually than the ears: especially when men can ofter Read than Heare’.54 Yet, moved by the glory of God’s hand in the natural world, William Bilby (1664-1738) found that his ‘Constant Reading of [th]e holy Bible’ was transformed. He no longer searched the Bible ‘as [th]e woman looked for her lost groat or a person looks for his box of evidences

in great fears & horr[o]rs of soul’. Instead, he ‘read with new eyes’ in ‘a Cabinet full of [th]e richest Treasure’.55 There were thus nonconformist writers during the late seventeenth century who came to value the written word as a check on the excesses of preaching. Others were sceptical of interpretations of Scripture taken out of context and read through the prism of individual lives and memories. The significance of the passions in striking the heart of the child and encouraging an immediate response in religious sentiment was already apparent to many writers. The schoolmaster Charles Hoole (1610-67) stressed the promotion of delight in the child as a reason for reading the book of Genesis with four-year olds.56 Simon Patrick (1626-1707), later Bishop of Chichester and of Ely, ‘observed young people delight (as it is natural to doe) in reading the Historical Books of the Old Testament. Which truly are writ with such a spirit of piety, as is to be found in no other History’. Indeed he argued that the history of the Old Testament was uniquely suited for communicating the essentials of Christianity: ‘a belief of Divine Providence, which governs all things … And … a sense of the difference of Good and Evil,’57 Richard Lucas (1648-1715) similarly suggested that parents should ‘choose those Chapters to be read oftenest that are easie to be understood, and most practical’. Difficult, doctrinal texts were to be avoided in favour of what was ‘most moving and affecting’.58 Churchmen argued strikingly that harmony of prayer, hymnsinging and biblical readings in the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer ‘exalted’ and ‘delighted’ the soul.59 They even maintained that keeping a commonplace book was bad for the memory.60 One of the clearest expressions of a shift in ideas about the appropriate way to begin the study of the Bible can be found in the advice given by John Locke, who was himself an inveterate compiler of commonplace books, to Edward Clarke in 1686. As for the Bible, which children are usually employed in, to exercise and improve their talent in reading, I think the promiscuous reading of it, though by chapters as they lie in order, is so far from any advantage to children, either for the pleasure of reading, or principling their religion, that perhaps a worse could not be found … And what an odd jumble of thoughts must a child have in his head concerning religion, who in his tender years reads all the parts of the Bible indifferently, as the word of God, without any other distinction … And now I am by chance fallen on this subject, give me leave to say, that there are some parts of the scripture, which may be proper to put into the hands of a child to engage him to read; such as are the story of Joseph and his brethren, of David

and Goliath, of David and Jonathan, etc., and others, that he should be made to read for his instruction … and such other easy and plain moral rules, which, being fitly chosen, might be sometimes made use of both for reading and instruction together.61

Elsewhere, Locke criticized the practice of taking individual biblical verses as units for study ‘whereby they are so chop’d and rninc’d’ that ‘even Men of more advanc’d Knowledge in reading them, lose very much of the strength and force of the Coherence, and the Light that depends on it.’62 In the century that followed the outbreak of the English Civil War, there were a number of important shifts in the way in which people conceived of Scripture and of learning. Many of them reflected practices that had existed before, but some rested on new, theoretical assumptions. There was a general tendency among churchmen to be suspicious of interpretations of the Bible that rested on the authority of individuals. This rapidly spread to anxiety about the wisdom of methods of study that privileged private conscience and fragmented the narrative structure of the text. At the same time, doubts began to develop about the relative value of the critical assessment of divine judgment compared to the positive emulation of fine feeling in promoting moral behaviour. Different ways of thinking about biblical education persisted side-by-side with one another, of course, and could even be found at work in the same individual. The younger Samuel Wesley, for example, experienced an education in the mid-1690s that was both like and quite unlike that recommended by Locke. He was taught the alphabet ‘in a few hours’, and yet ‘as soon as he knew the letters began at the first chapter of Genesis’.63 Nevertheless, moderate dissenters in the eighteenth century like Doddridge or John Collett Ryland owed much to the ideas of Locke and to more orthodox churchmen such as the Cambridge Platonists. Striking evidence for a growing stress on the affective power of biblical stories, however, is provided by the expansion in the publication of narrative histories of the Bible that took place in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This was paralleled by an increasing provision of illustrated biblical texts for children that focused on the most significant stories in Scripture. The narrative histories that proliferated in the early eighteenth century fell into two distinctive types. The first was clearly aimed by its publishers at a market that included ordinary, household readers of the Bible. It consisted of works like Laurence Howel’s A Compleat History of the Holy Bible (3 volumes, London, 1716), which were profusely illustrated, with

pictures that echoed the subjects and sometimes even the designs to be found in separately published illustrations for the Bible and reproduced on tiles and other familiar objects. Howel claimed to be reacting directly against Thomas Ellwood’s Sacred History (2 vols, London, 1705-9), which like several Quaker works used a scholarly apparatus to cast doubt on clerical authority.64 The publications of Hamond, Clarke, and Stackhouse in varying ways built on the example established by Howel. The career of Thomas Stackhouse (?1681-1752), an apologist for impoverished clergymen and a successful exponent of publication by subscription, illustrated the buoyancy of the market for biblical histories. Stackhouse’s initial commission for A Complete History of the Holy Bible had been from a bookseller to whom he owed money and with whom he soon quarrelled. His New History of the Holy Bible came out on the heels of the venture that he had abandoned and quickly superseded it.65 The second type of biblical history whose popularity seems to have increased in the early eighteenth century was far more scholarly and included works like The Old and New Testament Connected (2 volumes, London, 1716-18) by Humphrey Prideaux (1648-1724), Dean of Norwich. Although the impact of such learned works was initially narrower, they helped to encourage and give authority to the growing interest in the Bible as an historical narrative. Inspired by Continental examples and fuelled in part by the activities of émigré engravers, illustrated versions of the text of the Bible also proliferated in England after the 1670s. Most of these publications drew on existing images that could be reworked and printed either with a perfunctory summary of the content of the relevant chapter of the Bible or with a brief retelling of the scriptural narrative.66 Several of them were based on Continental models, especially the work of the French Jansenist, Nicolas Fontaine (1625-1709).67 The most ambitious, notably some of the illustrated histories published by Richard Blome (d. 1705), reached prices that put them out of the reach of most readers. Blome admitted that his folio publications were ‘chiefly designed for the Curious’ and even the octavo edition of The History of the Old and New Testament that he published in 1691 was sold to subscribers at 25 shillings in sheets.68 Despite such reservations, however, it did become easier to bring together printed pictures and stories when reading the Bible in the early eighteenth century.

The increased awareness of the Bible as a collection of stories that could affect the emotions was paralleled by broader changes in reading habits during the eighteenth century. These included the growth of an appetite for secular narrative history and the development of the novel. Several of the new genres also drew strength from the philosophical and psychological underpinning that helped to explain contemporary attitudes to Scripture.69 For some mature readers, an increased awareness of the similarity of biblical and other narratives may have helped to generate doubts about the special status of the Old and New Testaments, which were already being likened to fables by deist writers.70 For the consumers of didactic literature, on the other hand, history proved a vehicle for spiritual delight. As often as not, its route led away from detailed criticism of the Bible and towards affection for the stories that it told. 1

Edmund Calamy, An Abridgement of Mr Baxter’s History of his Life and Times (2 vols, 2nd edn, London, 1713), ii, p. 793; cf. A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), p. 542. 2

David L. Wykes, “‘To let the memory of these men dye is injurious to posterity”: Edmund Calamy’s Account of the ejected ministers’, Studies in Church History, 33 (1997), 379-92; David L. Wykes, To Revive the Memory of Some Excellent Men’: Edmund Calmny and the Early Historians of Nonconformity (London, 1997); Burke W. Griggs, ‘Remembering the Puritan past: John Walker and Anglican memories of the English Civil War’, in Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and SelfFashioning in Post-Reformation England, eds Muriel C. McClendon, Joseph P. Ward and Michael MacDonald (Stanford, 1999), pp. 158-91, 327-32; cf. Eirwen Nicholson, ‘Eighteenth-century Foxe: evidence for the impact of the Acts and Monuments in the “long” eighteenth century’, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 143-77. 3

Calamy, Abridgement, ii, pp. 793, 151, 32 (John Collett Ryland’s copy of this work is in a private collection); cf. Matthews, Calamy Revised, pp. 502-3. 4

James Culross, The Three Rylands: A Hundred Years of Various Christian Service (London, 1897), quotation at p. 70; William Newman, Rylandiana. Reminiscences relating to the Rev. John Ryland, A.M. (London, 1835); Raymond Brown, The English Baptists of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1986). 5

Job Orton, Memoirs of the Life, Character, & Writings, of the Late Rev. Philip Doddridge, D. D. (this edn, Edinburgh, 1825; 1st edn, 1765), pp. 38-9. For Doddridge’s career and the middle way, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ed., Philip Doddridge (London, 1951); C. G. Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H. L. Short and Roger Thomas, The English Preslryterians from Elizabethan Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism (London, 1968), pp. 186-218; Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment. A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-1780 (2 vols, Cambridge, 1991-2000), i, pp. 164-85. 6

Cf. Naomi Tadmor, ‘”In the even my wife read to me”: women, reading and household life in the eighteenth century’, in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, eds James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 162-74.

7

See Sylvia Brown, ed., Women’s Writing in Stuart England. The Mothers’ Legacies of Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Joscelin, and Elizabeth Richardson (Stroud, 1999); Linda Pollock, A Lasting Relationship (London, 1987), p. 215; Valerie Wayne, ‘Advice for women from mothers and patriarchs’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 56-79; Diane Willen, ‘Godly women in early modern England: Puritanism and gender’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 43 (1992), 561-80. Examples of the practice in action include The Autobiography of the Hon. Roger North, ed. Augustus Jessopp (London, 1887), pp. 4-5; A Brand Pluck’d from the Burning: Examplify’d in the Unparalled’d Case of Samuel Keimer (London, 1718), p. 3; The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton of East Newton, Co. York, ed. Charles Jackson (Durham, 1875), p. vii; and Anthony Walker, The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker (London, 1690), pp. 69-73. 8

For example, A. W. Brink, ed., The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse (Montreal, 1974), pp. 100-1; Oliver Heywood, His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner (4 vols, Brighouse, 1881-5), i, p. 58; The Life of Adam Martindale Written by Himself, ed. Richard Parkinson, Chetham Society 4 (Manchester, 1845), p. 65; R. C. Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England (Manchester, 1972), pp. 101-5. 9

Anthony Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: the Influence of Continental Prints, 1558-1625 (New Haven, 1997), pp. 162-3, 190-3; Therle Hughes, English Domestic Needlework 1660-1860 (London, 1961), pp. 87-8; Pauline Johnstone, Three Hundred Years of Embroidery 1600-1900 (Netley, 1986), pp. 32-4; J. L. Nevinson, ‘Peter Stent and John Overton, publishers of embroidery designs’, Apollo, 24 (1936), 273-83; John Overton, Catalogue of Books, Pictures, and Maps (London, n. d.); Peter Stent, A Catalogue of Books, Pictures, and Maps (London, 1662); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 178-216; Anthony Ray, English Deftware Tiles (London, 1973), pp. 33-66, 116-30; Jonathan Home, English Tin-Glazed Tiles (London, 1989), pp. 5-7, 75-109. The best general accounts of the place of biblical images in the Protestant domestic interior concentrate on the early modern Netherlands, which provided the sources for many of the designs later produced in England: R. A. Leeuw, I. V. T. Spaander and R. W. A. Bionda, eds, Bijbels en burgers. Vijf eeuwen Ieven met de Bijbel (Delft, 1977); T. G. Kootte, ed., De Bijbel in huis. Bijbelse verhalen op huisraad in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Zwolle, 1991). 10

Cf. N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester, 1987), especially pp. 156-214. 11

Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, 1999), especially pp. 172-5; Benjamin Rand, ed., The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (London, 1900), pp. 151-220; see also Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 48-119; Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, ii, pp. 85-152, 192-5. 12

Henry More, An Account of Virtue, ed. and transl. K. W. [Edward Southwell] (2nd edn, London, 1701; 1st edn, 1690), p. 39; cf. More, Enchiridion Ethicum (4th edn, London, 1711; 1st edn, 1668), p. 55. 13

Dominic Scott, ‘Reason, recollection and the Cambridge Platonists’, in Platonism and the English Imagination, eds Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 139-50; Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought:’ 1640-1740 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 109-48; Susan James, Passion and Action. The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford, 1997), pp. 225-34; cf. Sarah Hutton, ‘Aristotle and the Cambridge Platonists: the case of Cudworth’, in Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Conversations with Aristotle, eds Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 337-49.

14

Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, ed. Sarah Hutton (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 73-152, quotation at pp. 99-100; cf. Ralph Cudworth, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons, at Westminster, March 31. 164 7 (Cambridge, 1647); Ralph Cudworth’s commonplace book, British Library, London, Ms. Add. 4984, fols 28v-34v; J. A. Passmore, Ralph Cudworth. An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 29-67. 15

James, Passion and Action, pp. 276-94;John W. Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford, 1956), pp. 26-114; Michael Ayers, Locke. Epistemology and Ontology (2 vols, London, 1991), i, pp. 13-77; W. M. Spellman, John Locke and the Problem of Depravity (Oxford, 1988), pp. 184-202. 16

John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), pp. 48-65, 104-18. 17

John Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, eds John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford, 1989), p. 143. 18

Ibid, pp. 208-9.

19

For a discussion of the way in which understanding of the physiology of reading derived from theories of the passions, see Adrian Johns, ‘The physiology of reading in Restoration England’, in Raven, Small and Tadmor, eds, Practice of Reading, pp. 138-61; cf. Johns, ‘The physiology of reading and the anatomy of enthusiasm’, in Religio Medici. Medicine and Religion in SeventeenthCentury England, eds Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 136-70. 20

Cudworth, Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons, p. 3; Alan Gabbey, ‘Cudworth, More, and the mechanical analogy’, in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640-1700, eds Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcroft and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 109-27. For a discussion of early modern ideas of the difference between human and animal speech and the extent to which this was determined by the passions, see R. W. Serjeantson, ‘The passions and animal language, 1540-1700’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62 (2001), 425-44. 21

Cudworth, Sennon Preached bqfore the Honourable House of Commons, p. 79.

22

William Smith, A New Primmer, Wherein is Demonstrated the New and Uving Way ([London], 1665), p. 10; cf. Smith, A New Catechism ([London], 1665), p. 13. On Quaker attitudes to the authority of the Bible, see T. L. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War. The Baptist-Quaker Cotiflict in Seventeenth-Century England (New York, 1997), pp. 20-33, 132-6. 23

Smith, A New Primmer, especially sigs A2r-4v and p. 88 (quoted from the tide-page); Smith, A New Catechism, especially sig. A8v. For details of Smith’s career, see The Journal of George Fox, ed. Norman Penney (2 vols, Cambridge, 1911), ii, p. 406. 24

Smith, A New Catechism, especially pp. 2-6 (quoted from the tide-page); see also Kate Peters, ‘”The Quakers quaking’’: print and the spread of a movement’, in Belief and Practice in Refonnation England, eds Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 250-67. 25

The fullest discussion of catechizing is Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530-1740 (Oxford, 1996); see also Arnold Hunt, ‘The Lord’s Supper in early modern England’, Past and Present, 161 (1998), 39-83; Christopher Haigh, ‘Success and failure in the English Reformation’, Past and Present, 173 (2001), 28-49; William Carruthers, The Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (London, 1897); S. W. Carruthers, Three Centuries of the Westminster Shorter Catechism (Fredericton, 1957). Cf. The Shorter Catechism Composed by the Reverend Assembly of Divines. With the Proof thereof out of the Scriptures (London, 1656); Thomas Lye, An Explanation of the Shorter Catechism, Compos’d by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, 1647 (London, 1676).

26

Fowler recommended A Scriptural Catechism: or, the Whole Duty of Man Laid down in Express Words of Scripture, Chiefly Intended for the Benefit of the Younger Sort (London, 1696). This was a version of R. E., A Scriptural Catechism (London, 1676), one feature of which was to combine the Church Catechism with Richard Allestree’s Whole Duty of Man. Cf. Benjamin Bird, The Catechism of the Church of England: with the Proofs thererof out of the Scriptures (London, 1674). 27

Green, The Christian’s ABC, pp. 170-229; examples include The ABC with the Catechism (London, 1680); Victor E. Neuburg, Popular Education in Eighteenth Century England (London, 1971), pp. 57-91. See also Benjamin Keach, Instructions for Children: or the Child’s and Youth’s Delight (London, [1664?]). 28

Keith Thomas, ‘The meaning of literacy in early modern England’, in The Written Word. Literary in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford, 1986), pp. 97-131, especially p. 99; Charles C. Mish, ‘Black letter as a social discriminant in the seventeenth century’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 68 (1953), 627-30; Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), pp. 62-6; T. H. Darlow and H. F. Moule, Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible 1525-1961, rev. and expanded by A. S. Herbert (London, 1968), pp. 188-236. 29

Henry Jessey, A Catechisme for Babes, or, Little Ones (London, 1652), sig. ASr; cf. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, revised by L. F. Powell (6 vols, Oxford, 193450), i, p. 43. 30

Walker, Mrs. Elizabeth Walker, p. 40; see also Sara Heller Mendelson, ‘Stuart women’s diaries and occasional memoirs’, in Women in English Society 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (London, 1985), pp. 181-210. The first catechism used by Mrs Walker was presumably a copy of John Wallis’ edition of the Shorter Catechism, initially published in 1648. 31

Owen Stockton, A Treatise of Family Instruction (London, 1672), pp. 207-8. On Stockton, see John Fairfax, The True Dignity of St. Paul’s Elder (London, 1681), pp. 54-7. 32

James Talbot, The Christian School-Master (London, 1707), pp. 27-8; see also R. W. Unwin, Charity Schools and the Defence of Anglicanism: James Talbot, Rector of Spofforth 1700-08 (York, 1984). The aids to the understanding of the catechism most commonly used in charity schools were John Lewis, The Church Catechism Explain’d by Way of Question and Answer; and Confirm’d by Scripture Proofs (London, 1700), which went through dozens of editions during the eighteenth century, and J. F. Ostervald, The Grounds and Principles of the Christian Religion, transl. Humfrey Wanley, rev. George Stanhope (London, 1704). The limits of the catechetical method and the rote learning that it implied are made clear in the conditions set by the Yorkshire petty schoolmaster William Humes in 1702: ‘I be not compellable to teach them any further then to read English and Chapters well in the Bible’, printed in J. S. Purvis, Educational Records(York, 1959), pp. 76-7. 33

Rules and Orders to be Observed by the Trustees, Master, Mistress, and Scholars of the Charity-S chool in Nottingham (Nottingham, [c. 1720]), number xi. 34

See for example, John Caffyn, Sussex Schools in the 18th Century, Sussex Record Society 81 (Lewes, 1998), pp. 202, 211. 35

The most striking example of this is The Doctrine of the Bible: Or Rules of Discipline, briefly Gathered thorow the Whole Course of the Scripture, by Way of Questions and Answers (London, 1666). This book was perhaps first published in 1602 and thirty-four editions of it had appeared by 1726. There were further printings later in the eighteenth century, including some from provincial presses. Other editions of a similar work were published in the early seventeenth century as The Way to True Happiness. See also Eusebius Pagit, The History of the Bible: Briefly Collected by Way of Question and Answer (London, 1682; 1st edn, 1602) and Green, Print and Protestantism, pp. 151-5.

36

Examples include Henry Jessey, A Looking-Glass for Children, ed. H. P. (2nd edn, London, 1673), which printed poetical lessons for youth by Abraham Cheare; Henoch Clapham, A Briefe of the Bible (Edinburgh, 1596); [John Taylor], Verbum Sempiternum (London, 1693; 1st edn, 1614);John Shaw, The Divine Art of Memory, transl. Simon Wastel (London, 1683), which had first appeared in Latin as Biblii summula (London, 1621); R. B. [Nathaniel Crouch], Youth’s Divine Pastime (3rd edn, London, 1691). 37

Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (New York, 1985), p. 103; Fairfax, True Dignity of St. Paul’s Elder, p. 56; Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Rawlinson Letters 49, fol. 1r. 38

Shaw, Divine Art of Memory, sig. A 7r.

39

For some discussion of this issue, see Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480-1750 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 28-80; John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination. English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford, 1991); J. Sears McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England. Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables, 1620-1670 (New Haven, 1976); and also Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 65166. 40

John Willis, Mnemonica; or, the Art of Memory (London, 1661), sig. A6r; cf. Simon Patrick, The Christian Sacrifice (London, 1671). 41

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), p. 16; cf. Udo Thiel, ‘Personal Identity’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, eds Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (2 vols, Cambridge, 1998), i, pp. 868-912. 42

Sir John Davies, A Work for None but Angels & Men, ed. Thomas Jenner (London, 1658), tide-page and pp. 5-8. 43

L[eonard] H[oar], Index Biblicus: Or, the Historical Books of the Holy Scripture Abridged (London, 1668), sig. A2v; see also Harold Smith, The Ecclesiastical History of Essex (Colchester, [1933]), p. 379. 44

Francis Roberts, Clavis Bibliorum. The Key of the Bible (2nd edn, London, 1649; 1st edn, 1648), pp. 11, 34-66. The quotation comes from the preface by Edmund Calamy, p. 5. 45

John White, A Way to the Tree of Life: Discovered in Sundry Directions for the Profitable Reading of the Scriptures (London, 1647), sigs A3r, a1r; pp. 1-25, 127-66 (quotation at p. 1). White’s attitude to the Bible, like that of many of the godly, was open to ridicule from those who did not sympathize with him. David Underdown, Fire from Heaven. Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1992), p. 29, reports a libel about White that circulated in Dorchester in summer 1606: ‘You carry your bible God’s word to expound/And yet in all knavery you daily abound’. 46

Isaac Ambrose, Premia, Media, & Ultima: The First, Middle, and Last Things (London, 1654), especially the second part; cf. : Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self. Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591-1791 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 75-7. 47

Matthew Storey, ed., Two East Anglian Diaries, 1641-1729. Isaac Archer and William Coe, Suffolk Records Society 36 (Woodbridge, 1994), p. 60; Nicholas Byfield, Directions for the Private Reading of the Scriptures, ed. J. Geree (4th edn, London, 1648), sigs A5r-a12v;John Wilkins, A Discourse concerning the Gift of Prayer (London, 1651). 48

Richard Baxter, The Unreasonableness of Infidelity (London, 1655), sigs a4r-5v; pp. 41-2.

49

Thomas White, A Little Book for Little Children (12th edn, London, 1702), pp. 18-19.

50

I have chosen to follow the text given in a manuscript verse miscellany that is in private hands. Cf. an autograph copy in Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. *CCC 325, fol. 79.

51

Matthew Sylvester, ed., Reliquiae Baxterianae: Or, Mr. Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times (London, 1696), p. 2. 52

John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. W. R. Owens (Harmondsworth, 1987), pp. 12-13, 16; cf. Brainerd P. Stranahan, ‘Bunyan’s special talent: biblical texts as “events” in Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress’, English Literary Renaissance, 11 (1981), 329-43; John R. Knott, jun., “‘Thou must live upon my Word”: Bunyan and the Bible’, in John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford, 1988), pp. 153-70. 53

See for example, Arthur Jackson, A Help for the Understanding of the Holy Scripture (Cambridge, 1643). 54

Frederick J. Powicke, ed., The Reverend Richard Baxter’s Last Treatise (Manchester, 1926),

p. 24. 55

Nottingham Subscription Library, MS Autobiography of William Bilby, pp. 2-3, 9 (this manuscript can now be found in Nottingham University Library, accession number 64; a typescript copy is available in Dr. Williams’ Library, London, MS. 12.62). 56

Charles Hoole, A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (London, 1660), pp. 2-

23. 57

Simon Patrick, A Book for Beginners, or, a Help to Young Communicants ([London], 1680), pp. 182-3. 58

[Richard Lucas], The Plain Man’s Guide to Heaven (London, 1692), p. 7; Richard Lucas, The Duty of Servants (3rd edn, London, 1710; 1st edn, 1685), p. 25. 59

Thomas Bisse, The Beauty of Holiness in the Common-Prayer (London, 1716), p. 53.

60

This was the advice of Basil Kennett, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford: see Keith Thomas, James Edward Oglethorpe 1696-1785 (Oxford, 1996), p. 9. 61

James L. Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke (Cambridge, 1968), p. 351; cf. Locke, Some Thoughts, pp. 213-14. 62

John Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul, ed. Arthur W. Wainwright (2 vols, Oxford, 1987), i, p. 105. 63

Susanna Wesley, The Complete Writings, ed. Charles Wallace, jun. (New York, 1997), p. 3

71. 64

Laurence Howel, A Compleat History of the Holy Bible (3 vols, 2nd edn, London, 1716; 1stedn, 1716), i, pp. xix-xx. 65

J. Hamond, An Historical Narration of the Whole Bible (London, 1727); Laurence Clarke, A Compleat History of the Holy Bible (2 vols, London, 1737); Thomas Stackhouse, A New History of the Holy Bible (London, 1733); see also R. M. Wiles, Serial Publication in England before 1750 (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 109-12. 66

See Green, Print and Protestantism, pp. 160-2; Ruth B. Bottigheimer, The Bible for Children from the Age of Gutenberg to the Present (New Haven, 1996), pp. 43-5; The History of ye Old & New Testament in Cutts ([London], 1671); A Compendious History of the Old and New Testament (London, 1726); Biblia or a Practical Summary of ye Old & New Testaments (London, 1727). The poetical versions of the Old and New Testament composed by the elder Samuel Wesley were also profusely illustrated: see The History of the Old Testament in Verse (London, 1704) and The History of the New Testament Attempted in Verse (London, 1701). 67

The most important were the various editions of Fontaine’s The History of the Old and New Testament. This work was first published between 1688 and 1690 in a translation sponsored by

Anthony Homeck (1641-97). Reprints and abridgements appeared throughout the next hundred years. Other works derived from Fontaine included [R. H.], The History of Genesis (London, 1690). See also Jean Mesnard, ‘Le Maistre de Sacy et son secretaire Fontaine’, Chroniques de Port-Royal, 33 (1984), 5-18; Daniel Emil Singleton, ‘A study of the Port-Royal Memoires, 1640-1760’, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (1990), pp. 237-317. 68

Sarah Tyacke, London Map-Sellers 1660-1720 (Tring, 1978), pp. 54, 84-6, 88, 110-11, quotation at p. 51; Sarah L. C. Clapp, ‘The subscription enterprises of John Ogilby and Richard Blome’, Modern Philology, 30 (1932-3), 365-79. 69

D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), especially pp. 125-31; J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels. The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York, 1990), especially pp. 303-55. 70

See Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, 1974).

Chapter 3

Didactic Sources of Musical Learning in Early Modern England Susan Forscher Weiss

Jessie Ann Owens, in her book Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600, mentions that the subject of musical education is one that is badly in need of more investigation.1 Although a number of younger musicologists are working in the area of music education in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, examining such topics as musical institutions, didactic sources, and compositional practice, at the present time, there does not exist a comprehensive scholarly source on the subject. There have even been two symposia, both coincidentally held in 1987 in Europe, on various topics relating to music education in the medieval era and in the Renaissance. One of these was the opening round table of the 14th Congress of the International Musicological Society in Bologna. A veritable cornucopia of topics was addressed, ranging from music curriculum to treatises to what was being taught within and outside the university and also in the surrounding schools, in the dance halls, in private lessons, and with or without manuals or texts. The question asked by Craig Wright, the session chair, was whether the bulk of those treatises were actual texts of lectures given within the universities. The obvious follow-up to that would be a question about the innumerable other books of musical learning that appeared following the advent of printing, everything from children’s primers to manuals for amateurs on how to sing, compose, and play a variety of musical instruments. It is one matter to know whether and what materials were used in musical instruction and yet another to know what actually went on in music lessons. We also need to determine where the lessons took place: in the classroom, on a one-to-one basis, within or outside of a school or institution. Beyond that, we must attempt to discover what was actually learned. This essay will begin to shed light on some of these issues by

examining a number of didactic sources that contributed to the musical education of men, women, and children in early modern England. In the first part of the sixteenth century in several places in Europe, children received their early education in various types of schools. We know, for instance, that children at the so-called ‘free song schools’ in England in the early sixteenth century learned music as singing and playing upon instruments, along with reading, writing, and the ABC’s in Greek and Hebrew. We have few, if any, actual texts. In the so-called English grammar schools, musical studies were not a priority, as teachers believed that music should be taught to choristers for practical reasons, not for its intrinsic value, but to fulfil the need for accompaniment to the liturgy. In the choristers’ schools, where music was included with other subjects such as grammar and rhetoric, boys alone were mainly prepared to take part in music of the divine service. Many composers were recruited from the ranks of these trained vocalists and a number of them became teachers, but probably few of these professional musicians taught at the universities.2 One famous English composer/teacher was Thomas Morley.3 Charles Burney writing in 1789, almost two hundred years after the publication of Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musick, states that the treatise was still the best in the English language.4 At a conference held in April of 1939, presided over by the well-known musicologist Francis W. Galpin, a question was asked as to the best book for the study of pricksong.5 The answer was of course, Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musick.6 Thurston Dart writing in 1962 at Jesus College, Cambridge, said that the book ‘contained all the ingredients – in three parts of course – for a student who wished to become a musicologist, the rudiments of music, counterpoint and canon and how to improvise, and a tract on how to compose.’7 There remains a void in our understanding of the educational landscape that set the stage for the publication and subsequent popularity of Thomas Morley’s musical primer. We need to determine how and for whom this and other didactic texts, which may have served as source material, assisted in providing a means of musical instruction in the Elizabethan times. Along the way, I hope to create a picture of musical literacy and learning in early modern England. The well-known dialogue between Hortensio and Bianca from Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, was written in 1596, a year before Morley’s treatise was published. In it, Bianca describes one of the most

famous didactic images of music in use from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, the so-called Guidonian hand. Hortensio: Madam, before you touch the instrument, To learn the order of my fingering, I must begin with rudiments of art; To teach you gamut in a briefer sort, More pleasant, pithy, and effectual, Than hath been taught by any of my trade; And then it is in writing fairly drawn. Bianca: Why, I am past my gamut long ago. Hortensio: Yet read the gamut of Hortensia. Bianca [Reads]: ‘Gamut I am, the ground of all accord A re, to plead Hortensia’s passion B mi, Bianca, take him for thy lord, C fa ut, that loves with all affection D sol re, one cliff [clef], two notes have I. E la mi, shew pity, or I die.’ Call you this gamut? Tut, I like it not: Old fashions please me best; I am not so nice, To [change] true rules for [old] inventions.8 Shakespeare’s play is mimetic, meant to maximize human interest and give artistic pleasure to the audience. The nine-line jingle has only two ‘didactic’ lines, the first and the fifth. The others are interpolations for the sake of the play. The fifth line, ‘D sol re, one cliff, two notes have I,’ is an indication that Shakespeare undoubtedly knew his gamut (musical scale). Morley’s book is didactic, filled with theoretical, moral, and practical knowledge. Through his characters, a teacher and his two pupils, Morley proceeds in dialogue to set down the precepts of the gamut with carefully crafted rules and exercises accompanied by illustrations. One of these demonstrates how each cliff (clef) or alphabetic name is accompanied by a note or sol-fa name from the lowest gamma ut to the highest ee Ia (Plate 3.1).

Plate 3.1 Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practical/Musick (London, 1597), p. 2. British Library shelfmark 59. c. 16, by permission of the British Library. The so-called Guidonian hand as a mnemonic for learning musical intervals (the distance between notes of the scale) via syllables known as solmization developed in the early Middle Ages.9 The Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo (c. 991-after 1033) is credited with developing this system of teaching young choristers to read music and not have to rely on rote learning.10 The system was still in use in the late sixteenth century, although it was in the process of being supplanted by a newer and less complex methodology. Shakespeare could have learned the principles of the gamut and sight-singing from a domestic music teacher or from one or another music psalters, or from one of the little books that circulated in London prior to the publication of Morley’s treatise. Morley and Shakespeare are products of the same rich educational system that was very likely set in place during the Carolingian era. Charlemagne sent the celebrated Yorkshire theologian, scholar, and teacher Alcuin to

spread his love for learning and music throughout England and across the channel to continental Europe at the beginning of the ninth century. Changes in musical composition, the development of musical notation, and the need for systematic instruction in singing and playing forced some musical theorists to think differently about the art of music. It was not until the ninth century that a written tradition began to augment the aural/oral approach to the teaching and learning of music. Universities, founded in the twelfth century, promoted musical literacy and were among the organizations that saw a need for song schools. These schools were often affiliated with cathedrals, collegiate churches, chantries, and sometimes guilds and hospitals. In addition to the singing of liturgical music, an interest in instrumental and secular music developed in the late twelfth century. We find numerous references to practical music-making and learning in literature and vernacular poetry, works such as the Roman de Ia Rose, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.11 Paradoxically, the growth in secular education led to both a decrease in emphasis on music within the curriculum of the grammar schools and in the musical training afforded young persons. Nor is an interest in practical music making revealed in the curriculum of the university. On the contrary, musical studies at the university were centred on their place within the mathematical quadrivium portion of the seven liberal arts, and were devoid of current considerations of practical matters. Music was considered one of the four ‘sciences’ along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, while the trivium included the ‘arts’ of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Emphasis was placed on Pythagorean relationships between music and the movement of the solar system, as well as on Boethius’ tripartite classification of music into three strata: musica mundana, the harmony of the universe, musica humana, the harmony of the human body and soul, and musica instrumentalis, the harmony produced by all sounding music.12 The requirements for the bachelor’s degree in music at Oxford between the years 1431 and 1565 reveal an increasing number of academic courses. By the late sixteenth century, in some English universities, students began to circulate petitions for the discontinuation of the music lectures (and a substitution of arithmetic) due to a lack of interest and poor attendance.13 The famous English composers of the time – Robert Fayrfax (1464-1521), Christopher Tye (c. 1505-c. 1573), and John Bull (c. 1562-1628) – did not lecture at the universities and this may have contributed to the lack of

popularity in the courses. Ironically, Bull needed special dispensation to lecture in music at a new college in London so he could teach in the English language (as he knew little Latin). Practising musicians, not university-trained pedagogues, probably trained these composers, ex cathedra. The texts in use, if any, were more likely to be the more practical treatises by Guido of Arezzo and others, rather than the academic texts in use within the university. The composers undoubtedly received their early education in music in the song schools of the private chapels of the gentry, where they were being trained as choristers.14 Training in these schools until the middle of the sixteenth century included lessons in grammar and chant, much of which stressed memory skills, followed by lessons in reading notes in pricksong.15 Music (singing, especially) was considered an aid to learning and was essential in teaching Latin, reading, and other subjects.16 The masters incorporated phrases consisting of proverbs, as well as classical, and sententious sayings into songs, to teach grammar and morality.17 Standard Latin grammar books, such as Robert Whittington’s (c. 1490-1558) and William Lily’s (c. 1468-1522) contained texts that were grave, didactic, and philosophical, but the sayings, especially set to music, made the memorization easier. Moral training based on Christian teaching was a significant part of children’s education. The young choristers also studied secular and instrumental music. Many of the songs they learned were part of choristers’ plays and are known to have been accompanied by instruments. A number of compositions in the Mulliner Book (British Library Add. MS 30513), compiled between 1558 and 1564, may have had connections to the pedagogical training of choristers. Jane Flynn suggests that the book’s contents and organization illustrate teaching methods used at cathedral and chapel song schools in sixteenth-century England.18 On the continent – particularly in Italy where the effects of humanism were felt much earlier than in England – treatises emphasized the more practical applications of musical knowledge. Pedagogy began to be directed at children, not as small adults, but as learners with different needs.19 François Rabelais set up an educational system that would prepare youths for practical endeavours. Rote learning and memorization was supplanted by thinking and problem solving through fun activities, such as singing, dancing, playing instruments, and card games. The Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540), a pupil of Desiderius Erasmus at the trilingual

College of Louvain, advocated theoretical and practical musical instruction for young men. Vives made several trips to England where he introduced his views at several grammar schools.20 Richard Mulcaster, the headmaster at the Merchant Taylors’ School in London, developed a curriculum in music that included singing and instruction in playing the lute and virginals.21 Although Henry VIII was a musician and a trained composer, his own son, Edward VI, was in large measure responsible for inhibiting the spread of musical learning. His Act for the Dissolution of the Chantries in 1547 did away with over two thousand song schools. At the choristers’ schools that managed to survive the dissolution – at Oxford, Cambridge, St. George’s Chapel and a number of other foundations – boys learned to sing in order to take part in the music of the divine service. In the years leading up to the Reformation choristers received their training in monastic schools in return for which they participated in the services. For a variety of reasons, some perhaps related to the influence of Erasmus (who himself may have had a bad experience at a choristers’ school), the third type of English elementary school, the secular urban grammar schools, did not emphasize musical studies.22 Another difficulty in the dissemination of new ideas and methods of teaching music in England stemmed from the expense of paper and the fact that it had to be imported from the continent, making printed books rare and costly. Many of their musical instruments also had to be imported, and often the tunes, dances, and treatises, as well as the musicians were foreign. Indeed, many of these imports were products of the German Lutheran educational system, which emphasised a systematic musical instruction for all children. We have documentation from a variety of sources and can gain additional insights from literature, such as Shakespeare’s plays, as to how Morley’s music lessons might have been structured.23 Morley, himself trained as a chorister and organist, was a student of William Byrd (c. 1540-1623), although it is not known for how long and when.24 He received a Bachelor of Music degree from Oxford in 1588, was a Gentleman of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel, was accomplished in Greek, Latin, and Italian and was said to have had a vast library. In addition, he was a printer, publisher, and politician. We also know that he was employed to teach the children of a wealthy and musically educated squire named Edward Paston (c. 1550-1630). Paston’s enormous library afforded Morley an opportunity to cull from all sorts of English and continental sources, one of which may have been British Library

Lansdowne MS. 763, a collection of musical treatises. This manuscript includes some of the earliest writings in the vernacular from the early fifteenth century and it had been the property of the great English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-1585).25 Included is a tract referred to by the noted antiquarian Sir John Hawkins as the ‘John Wylde treatise’, a manual devoted to the general fundamentals of music and to the art of solmization.26 Another is by Leonel Power and was intended to instruct the singer to extemporize by visualizing a note in his part as against a note in the plainsong as written at a particular interval below it.27 Power stated that his treatise was ‘for hem that wil be syngers, or makers, or techers.’28 Rob Wegman has pointed out that English vernacular treatises contain rudimentary mental aids that do not presuppose musical literacy of the kind obtained in choristers’ schools. These manuscript handbooks or primers (a name aptly derived from the first part of the daily Office)29 were intended to enable singers to extemporize various parts contrapuntally to a written plainsong. In that sense they are practical manuals.30

Plate 3.2 Frontispiece from the tenor partbook, Whole Psalmes in Four Partes (London, 1563). British Library shelfmark K.l.e.2, reproduced by permission of the British Library. Following the closing of the free song schools, more and more practical books, such as the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, which made its way to America in the seventeenth century, did much to educate the average English citizen.31 One of these, Whole Psalmes in Foure Partes, printed in London in 1563 by John Day, contains a frontispiece woodcut to the tenor partbook that depicts a gentleman, possibly the father of the house, giving a music lesson, pointing with his left hand to the extended thumb of his right. He is facing a woman and several young children. One of the children is holding a small book, perhaps the discantus partbook (Plate 3.2).32 Although there is no attempt made in the preface to explain the gamut, the notes of all the tunes in the psalter are printed with sol-fa names underneath. For some amateurs from the poorer classes, these psalters provided the only instruction in singing available at that time. The attempt to make the learning of music more accessible to nonprofessionals was not new to Morley. A number of other treatises on musical instruction were published in the sixteenth century and used by English university students. Many of these were written in Latin and published on the continent, but some were translated into English.33 John Dowland’s translation of Ornithoparcus’ Micrologus (Leipzig, 1517) was published in London in 1609. The following paragraph from chapter three of this tract reveals that the frustrations over the complexities of Guido’s gamut and so-called hand were neither new nor were they exclusive to the English: Seeing it is a fault to deliver that in many words which may be delivered in few (Gende Readers), leaving the hand, by which the wits of young beginners hindered, dulled, and distracted, leame you this fore-written scale by numbering it. For this being knowne, you shall most easily, and at first sight know the voyces, keyes and all the mutations.34

One of Morley’s aims and that of a number of other authors of published sixteenth-century textbooks of music, was to discover a less complicated system that would eventually replace the gamut, using sol-fa names for the rising major scale. While Morley still believed in the need for learning the gamut, he set out to enable the students to progress to an easier scheme – the fasola method. Morley undoubtedly knew the work of his immediate

predecessor William Bathe. The first music primer printed in English, William Bathe’s A Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song (1587) proposed scrapping the gamut altogether in the early stages of teaching. He referred to it as filled with ‘manifold, crabbed, confuse[d], and tedious rules’.35 He suggested a new method of sight-singing that used a fixed sequence of sol-fa names permanently related to the notes of the mixolydian scale (that beginning and ending on the note G). In this new system, the student had only to identify the position of ut on the staff in order to read a tune. Bathe, like his contemporary Francis Bacon, was influenced by a belief in empirical attitudes and boasted that he could, in the space of a month, teach a child of eight to sing difftcult ‘crabbed’ songs (referring to pieces with up to three sharps and three flats), to sing at sight, and to read in four clefs (C, F, G, and D).36 Bathe’s text heralded a new era in English texts that offered solutions to the beginner’s problems in learning music, a harbinger of changes to come in terms of the new approach to the teaching of sight-singing. This was followed by the anonymous Pathwaie to Musicke, published by William Barley in 1596, a compilation of various Latin and German treatises and more traditional in approach.37 The anonymous Pathwaie ends with what may be one of the most important tenets of teaching in the Renaissance: learning by imitating great teachers. For we more regarding that whiche doth to the learner bring most facilitie and whiche are to be observed guid, have laid doune suche breiff rules as we thought most necessary to that effect, leaving the rest to the Imitatione of guid authors, as M. Tallis, M. Byrd, M. Tailor and others.38

Others followed Bathe, the anonymous Pathwaie, and Morley, such as Ravenscroft’s A Briefe Discourse on the True Art of Charact’ring the Degrees (London, 1614), Charles Butler’s The Principles of Musick (London, 1636), and John Playford’s A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick (London, 1654).39 The books written by Christopher Simpson, Thomas Mace, and Italian and German theorists contain echoes of Morley’s methods and techniques.40 Some fifty years after Morley’s treatise, Playford included pieces like Morley’s madrigal ‘Now is the Month of Maying’. Playford wished to serve both the psalm-singing Puritan and the ordinary amateur. His treatise pointed more and more toward the rise of middle-class interest in domestic musicmaking, which by the eighteenth century, with the advent of equal

temperament and advances in instrument-making, finally abandoned the hexachord system. Almost in homage to Shakespeare and Morley, Playford included the following mnemonic (see also Plate 3.3): The first three Notes above your Mi Are fa sol la here you may see The next three under Mi that fall, Them la sol fa you ought to call If you’ll sing true without all blame

Plate 3.3 John Playford, A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick (12th edn, London, 1694), p. 11. British Library shelfmark 1042.e.11(1), reproduced by permission of the British Library. You call all Eights by the same name.41

The borrowing inherent in the compendious practices of didactic literature reflects the Renaissance practice known as imitatione.42 Morley and Shakespeare and other great imitators like Michelangelo and later J. S. Bach, took the best of what preceded them, used them as models and converted them into something perhaps even more sophisticated. Morley recorded the practices of others in a way that makes his text a perfect compendium for those wishing to learn music in his own and in succeeding generations. It was for many students of music in the early seventeenth century a more practical guide to the theory and science of music than any existing work. The book has also been studied for its social significance as much as for its importance musically.43 A cultivated English gentleman, according to Morley, must be able to bear his part by sight in a madrigal, as well as being able to sustain a point of view in a debate on music.44 In his lesson on composition in five parts, Morley weaves some contemporary sayings into his lesson, such as And though the lawyers say that it were better to suffer a hundred guilty persons escape than to punish one guiltless, yet ought a musician rather blot out twenty good points than to suffer one point pass in his compositions inartificially brought in.

A little later on, in response to Philomathes’ question about the excellence of his lesson, he answers ‘No, but except you change it all you cannot correct the fault which like unto an hereditary leprosy in a man’s body is incurable without the dissolution of the whole.’45 Philomathes asks his Master ‘What do you call going out of key?’, to which Morley (the Master) replies, ‘The leaving of that key wherein you did begin and ending in another.’ Philomathes asks again ‘What fault is in that?’ and receives the following response: A great fault, for every key hath a peculiar air proper unto itself, to that if you go into another than that wherein you begun you change the air of the song, which is as much as to wrest a thing out of his nature, making the ass leap upon his master and the spaniel bear the load.46

The use of questions and answers like these were already in use in grammatical texts. Unquestionably the dialogues could be transplanted from the text to the classroom. The pairing of musical or grammatical concepts with sayings or proverbs served as memory aids that combined moral lessons with the subject at hand.47 The organization of Morley’s book has been compared to a musical composition, but it has also been described as mathematical, not surprisingly since Morley was trained in mathematics. Early in the book Morley indicated that the arithmeticians set down many kinds of proportions, but that he would only deal with three, those common in the works of Plato and Aristotle: geometrical, arithmetical, and harmonical.48 The first part teaches singing, the second, counterpoint, and the third, composition in two to six voices with a discussion of musical forms. Once the students learn to read music and are able to sing the chant in measured notes or in rhythm, they are ready to improvise in what Morley calls ‘ftguration’ and he describes three ways of doing this. The examples Morley uses seem – in terms of today’s standards – quite sophisticated for a so-called primer. Morley’s source materials, as well as the educational system that trained and inspired him, are subjects of great interest. Morley relies heavily on his German, Italian, and even English predecessors. He argues for originality, criticizing the 1596 Pathwaie to Musicke as being a copy of works by two Germans.49 Among those authors he does credit are the German theorists, such as Nicolas Listenius (b. c. 1510), Johann Cochlaeus (1479-1552), and Heinrich Glarean (1488-1563), and the Italian Franchino Gaffurius (14511522). Many of these authors’ works were published in a number of editions and disseminated widely throughout Europe. Morley nonetheless fails to mention the debt he owes to the Italian Orazio Tigrini (c. 1535-91) and some of his information and tables – from sources like Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-90) and Alexander Agricola (1446-1506) – appear without citation. He shows his disregard for the German students who while studying at the Italian universities transmitted what he refers to as the ‘slightest kind of musick (if they deserve the name of musicke)’, vinate, to be sung during their drinking.50 In the late seventeenth century, Anthony Wood described Thomas Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction as ‘admirably well skill’d in the Theoretic part of music.’51 Burney said Morley was a theorist first and then a

practical musician. Morley’s book is not a school text, but one geared to the general public. Dedicated to Morley’s own teacher William Byrd, it was designed for private students, probably youthful, adolescent skilful beginners studying with a private master. Youths like Morley’s two students Polymathes and Philomathes, may have been from the rising middle class or from the aristocracy, boys on their way to becoming gentlemen. One part of this process involved studying music privately in an effort to take part in social activities, such as dances and parties.52 The book was not intended for the choirboys or university students. Morley aims the work at nonprofessionals, at gentlemen and gentlewomen who were amateur musicians, such as those portrayed by Shakespeare. The second edition, published in 1608, contains a list of errata in an appendix, mostly errors in spelling and punctuation; it generally presents an easier-to-read text. It must have been a welcome text for those critics of private music teachers. The loss of the song schools in England did establish a need for private teachers and enabled many men and women to eke out a fairly good living giving music lessons.53 Prior to Morley’s text, the musical culture of the sixteenth century owed most to teachers who were employed as household musicians for well-to-do families. These practitioners provided instruction in secular and instrumental music.54 One of these, the minstrel teacher Thomas Rede, is known to have given lessons in lute, harp, and dance to George Cely, an English wool merchant.55 Another is James Renynger who was engaged by the abbot of Glastonbury in 1534 to ‘teach six children in prick song and descaunte, and two of them to play on the organ.’56 But some private instructors were better than others. The unevenness in teaching ability is described by Thomas Ravenscroft, in his preface to A Brief Discourse of 1614. Ravenscroft complained that by the early seventeenth century, teachers of music, ‘common kinde Practitioners [G truly ycleped Minstrells, though our City makes Musicians of themD]’, brought music down to its basest, most mechanical functions.57 He advocated a return to the medieval practice of learning measured music. That editions of Morley’s text were used for over three hundred years cannot be denied. How it was used and by whom leads to other questions. One of the best ways to find answers is to examine some of the extant copies found in libraries in the English-speaking world for evidence of use.58 Recalling that ‘irony of book history’ mentioned in the introduction to this

volume that didactic materials ‘survive today that were often little used or preserved in libraries or closets,’ it should not come as a surprise to find so few annotations in the surviving copies of Morley’s book.59 Of course, that finding can be explained in a number of ways. Books were valuable commodities in the early modern era. The very first printed book of music – Petrucci’s Odhecaton A (Venice, 1501) – was not yet one hundred years old. Bibliophiles might purchase Morley’s book with little intention of consulting it. Accomplished musicians probably could have used the book and been able to master its contents by committing the rules and tenets to memory. One of these was probably Samuel Pepys, who owned both a copy of Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction (London, 1597: Pepys Library 2031) and also presumably John Playford’s A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick.60 In an entry to his diary on 22 March 1667 Pepys stated that he read Playford’s book while walking to Woolwich from Greenwich one evening. He claimed to use the Morley when he was sick with a cold and had to retreat to his bed.61 While it is doubtful that one could write in a book while walking, it seemed possible that Pepys, while lying in his bed, might have annotated his copy of Morley.62 He did not, but fortunately, other Englishmen did. A 1597 copy of Morley’s book in the Wren library at Trinity College and a 1608 copy held at Cambridge University Library have been examined by Anna Rees-Jones. Rees-Jones’ work, concerning keyboard manuscripts written by or for amateurs, led her to these sources for signs that linked one of them to a manuscript now located in the Bibliotheque Nationale (F-Pc MS Res 1186), probably copied by Robert Creighton (1593-1672), sometime Bishop of Bath and Wells. This manuscript contains transcriptions for keyboard of vocal pieces from Morley’s manual. Rees-Jones has identified the annotator of the Trinity copy of Morley as John Hackett (1592-1670), a close contemporary of Creighton who also retained a fellowship at Trinity before the Civil War, and became Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield after the Restoration. Jones was struck by the amount of printed music Creighton had access to in compiling his manuscript. Had he owned copies of everything he used, Creighton would certainly be considered an example of a nonprofessional consumer of written music. There is, of course, always the possibility though that printed copies of music were shared around, and that derivative manuscript copies reveal more evidence of borrowing rather than of ownership.63

Notably, the annotations in Hackett’s copy of the Morley are all related to the list of errata printed at the back of the 1597 edition. Every error acknowledged in the printed version is corrected by hand in the main sequence of the text. Although there is no evidence that Hackett himself attempted to discover errors, which would indeed be interesting from a musical literacy perspective, he did, at the very least, correct those that had been discovered at the proof-reading stage and acknowledged by the printer on the last sheets before the book was issued.64 The Folger Shakespeare Library holds two copies of the 1597 edition and tow of the 1608 printing.65 Most of the annotations in these Morleys are ownership inscriptions of the same sort as those found by Rees-Joes, but one reveals more about the owner’s usage of the book. One of the two copies printed in 1597 (STC 18133 copy 1) belonged at one time to a ‘W. Northall’ whose name is written in the margin on page eight, alongside some rules he copied from previous pages and whose same hand made the changes called for on the errata page, systematically crossing each out and entering the corrections within the body of the text (Plate 3.4). Northall undoubtedly copied these rules as an aid to help him sing the song that appears on the page following Morley’s comments, ‘This is well song. Now here be diverse other examples of plainsong, which you may sing by your selfe.’ Here is some evidence that an attempt was made to execute a musical exercise. Of perhaps equal interest and significance is the observation that the reader made no further annotations.

Plate 3.4 Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musick (London, 1597), STC 18133, copy 1, p. 8. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. This author’s experience with a number of annotated German and Italian music textbooks, such as those mentioned above, as well as many others of this same period, reveal some important differences in patterns and stages of musical learning.66 Clearly, some of the German and Italian owners were amateurs or young beginners whose marginalia reflect difficulty with the material or waning interest after the first few pages, but others were perhaps students with a more academic background in music. In a few cases, the glosses reveal critical skills, not the least of which include the discovery of errors on the part of the authors, which point to ownership by professional musicians. At least one of these has been identified as a famous eighteenthcentury music teacher.67 Morley’s text, with its scholarly material reserved for the ends of chapters, was not aimed at the serious music student, but at members of the English upper or rising middle classes. It appeared at a time when Sir Thomas Hoby’s English translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier was enjoying widespread popularity.68 Morley’s book was specifically aimed at youths who wished to become gentlemen or ‘perfect courtiers’ and would have very possibly enlisted the help of a tutor. Although an annotated Morley that can be identified with a teacher has yet to be uncovered, it seems reasonable to assume that W. Northall is the student and not the tutor. He seemed to be making a valiant attempt at following Morley’s instructions, only to give up in vain after page eight, reinforcing the age-old notion that Morley’s book is neither quite so ‘plaine’ nor ‘easie’ nor ‘practicall’ as he might have hoped it to be.69 1

Jessie Ann Owens, Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600 (New York, 1997), p. 12, n. 2 and 3. She cites a number of contributions to the field of music instruction and education including works by Nan Cooke Carpenter, Richard Rastall, Thomas D. Culley, Jeremy Yudkin, Bernarr Rainbow, K. W. Niemöller, Jos Smits van Waesberghe, Craig Wright, Kristine Forney, John Kmetz, John Butt, Jane Flynn, and Edith Weber. In 1998, a number of colleagues and I formed a consortium that meets annually to further the cause of historical musical pedagogy and literacy. In August 2002, we presented our most recent findings and the latest research in the field at the 17th Congress of the International Musicological Society in Louvain. 2

Foster Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660 (London, 1908, repr. edn, 1968), p. 205ff. As secular influence grew, music’s place in elementary education became less secure. With the growth of contrapuntal music, church leaders complained that music was preventing people from

understanding ‘what was thus foreign, and to maken men wery and undisposed to studdie goddis lawe for aking of hedis’ (quoted by Watson on p. 206). 3

Philip Brett, ‘Thomas Morley’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd edn, 29 vols, London, 2001), xvii, pp. 126-33. Morley was born in Norwich in 1557 and died in London in 1602. 4

Charles Burney, General History of Music (1776-1789), ed. F. Mercer (2 vols, London, 1935), ii, pp. 86-7. 5

Mensural notation, that is, measured music composed in two or more parts as opposed to plain

chant. 6

David G. T. Harris, ‘Musical education in Tudor times (1485-1603)’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, 65 (1938), 109-39. 7

Ibid., p. 139. Dart admits that there were some omissions in Morley’s book, such as instruction on underlay, ficta, the sharp, and performance practice (whether to use words or instruments). 8

William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, III:1, lines 64-81, in The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, eds William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Cambridge, MA., 1942), pp. 148-78, p. 163. 9

Solmization is the general term for the use of syllables such as ut re mi, fa sol Ia. It derives from sol-mi. 10

Claude Palisca, ‘Guido of Arezzo’, New Grove Dictionary, x, pp. 522-6. Sigebertus Gemblacensis (writing c. 1105-10) credits Guido with assigning the letters or syllables of the hexachord to the joints of the fingers on the left hand in his treatise Chronica. 11

Leonard Ellinwood, ‘Ars Musica’, Speculum, 20 (1945), 290-9. See also Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London, 1989), pp. 230-2. 12

Harris, ‘Musical education’. In addition to Boethius’ De institutione Musica (Venice, 1491/92) and Ornithoparcus’ more practical Musicae activae Micrvlogus (Leipzig 1517), two tracts by William Chell, a secular chaplain at Hereford Cathedral and a B.Mus. from Oxford (1524), were published, one entided Musicae practicae compendium and the other De proportionibus mathematicis. In 1586, John Case, trained at St. John’s College, Oxford, published the first of two treatises, The Praise of Music and two years later, the Apologia Musices tam vocalis quam instrumentalis. 13

Harris, ‘Musical education’, p. 123.

14

Ibid.

15

A. Hamilton Thompson, Song Schools in the Middle Ages, Church Music Society Occasional Paper 14 (London, 1942), pp. 6-8. 16

Paul Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore, 1989), p. 160.

17

Jane Flynn, ‘A reconsideration of the Mulliner Book (British Library, Add. MS 30513): music education in sixteenth-century England’, Ph.D. thesis, Duke University (1993), and Jane Flynn, ‘The education of choristers in England during the sixteenth century’, in English Choral Practice, 14001600, ed. John Morehan (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 180-99. 18 19

Flynn, ‘A reconsideration of the Mulliner Book’, p. 3.

There are many books on the subject of how children learned and were taught, notably Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, 2001), especially chapters 4-8; on music per se, see pp. 190-1, 226-31, 260. See also Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990), particularly pp. 187 ff for a description of the curriculum at the various categories of grammar and

song schools. See also Danièle Alexandre-Bidon and Didier Lett, Children in the Middle Ages: FifthFifteenth Centuries, transl. Jody Gladding (Notre Dame, 1999). 20

Erasmus’ treatise, De Ratione Studii (Strasbourg, 1511) formed the basis of fundamental philosophy of the English grammar schools: Eugene R. Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England (Pittsburgh, 1996), pp. 18-57. 21

Mulcaster had a spirit of national pride and urged the use of the vernacular as a sign of England’s emancipation from Catholic and papal dominance: see Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London, 1965), pp. 89-130. 22

Bernarr Rainbow, Music in Educational Thought and Practice (Aberystwyth, 1989), pp. 48-

50. 23

Such as Anthony Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses … To which are added, the Fasti or Annals, of the said university (London, 1691), an important source for Burney and Sir John Hawkins in the eighteenth century. 24

Joseph Kerman, ‘William Byrd’, New Grove Dictionary, iv, pp. 714-31.

25

Philip Brett, ‘Edward Paston’, New Grove Dictionary, xix, pp. 216-17. Paston was a Roman Catholic country gentleman who was known to have been proficient on the lute. His large collection of music manuscripts also contains some of the sole sources of compositions by William Byrd, as well as sacred and secular music written by continental composers. 26

Burney, General History, i, p. 686.

27

Sanford Meech, ‘Three musical treatises in English from a fifteenth-century manuscript’, Speculum, 10 (1935), 235-69, p. 263. 28

Rob Wegman, ‘From maker to composer’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 49 (1996), 409-79. Wegman suggests that such manuals – with musical notation for those who could not read mensural – catered to the growing workforce of nonclerical singers. Churches that lacked the funds to pay professionals were able to teach local citizens to sing discant on a voluntary basis. Methods of teaching singing in England must have worked well for there are many reports of continental musicians being impressed by English singing in the fifteenth century (p. 417). 29

Craig Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 500-1550 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 174-80. 30

In some German manuals of this same period, however, there is evidence of practical instruction in performance. Students were encouraged not only to strive for accuracy in pitch, but also to make an effort to sing with proper breathing and articulation. See Conrad von Zabern, ‘De modo bene cantand’ (transl.), in Readings in the History of Music in Performance, ed. Carol MacClintock (Bloomington, 1982), pp. 12-16. Von Zabern was a professor of music at Heidelberg around 1470. 31

Sternhold and Hopkins included a preface of theoretical instruction in many editions of their Whole Books of Psalms from 1548 onwards. By 1600 there were 74 editions and by 1700, another 235. By 1868, 601 editions of the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter had been published: Sir John Stainer, ‘On the musical introduction found in certain metrical psalters’, in Proceedings of the Musical Association. 27th Session. 1900-1901 (London, 1901), pp. 1-50. See also Watson, English Grammar Schools, p. 207. 32

The image may also be intended to symbolize the natural harmony of the family, as well as the importance of psalms in a domestic setting. 33

Several other instruction books were English translations of continental sources, including some ‘how to’ books for playing the lute and cittern from tablature, such as John Alford’s translation of Adrien Le Roy’s 1557 treatise on lute playing, A Briefe and easye instrution [sic] to learne the

tableture to conducte and dispose thy hande unto the Lute (London, 1586), and Anthony Holbome’s The Cittharne Schoole (London, 1597). See Nan Cooke Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities (Norman, 1958), p. 208; and Hiroyuki Minamino, ‘Sixteenth-century lute instruction books’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago (1988), pp. 197-215. 34

John Dowland (transl.), Andreas Ornithoparcus his Micrologus (London, 1609; repr. edn, Amsterdam, 1969), Chapter 3, p. 9. 35

William Bathe, A Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song (London, c. 1587; repr. edn, Kilkenny, 1982). An earlier version, Brief Introduction to the True Art of Musicke (London, 1584), written while he was still a student at Oxford, was never published. 36

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, with other parts of the great instauration, transl. and ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago, 1994), Book I, para XC. 37

Pathwaie to Musicke, ed. Cecil Hill (Colorado Springs, 1979; 1st edn, London, 1596). The translation is by Melville, a Scotsman, and Hill retains the Scottish spelling and punctuation. Were it not for Melville’s copy, the treatise would be lost, the last known copy having belonged to Sir John Hawkins in 1778, when he gave it to the British Museum (where it had not been found in the 1970s, but may have been since). 38

Pathwaie, p. 23.

39

Butler was the first English writer to replace ut and re in solmisation with sol and la in his treatise of 1636. There are a number of annotated copies of this treatise in the British Library. One of these is at shelfmark 52.d.30, and although I cannot be certain as to when the annotator lived, s/he is clearly familiar with music theory, as the marginalia reveal an understanding of the complexities of musical proportions. 40

See Christopher Simpson (d. 1669), The Principles of Practical Musick (London, 1665), and Thomas Mace (d. 1709?), Musick’s Monument; or, a Remembrancer of the Best Practical Musick (London, 1676). Among the continental authors who reflect on Morley are Michael Praetorius in his Syntagma musicum in quatuor tomos distributum (3 vols, Wittenberg, 1615/19) and Giovanni Battista Doni in his Compendio del Trattato de’ Generi de’ Modi della Musica (Rome, 1635); Susan Forscher Weiss, ‘The singing hand’, in Writing on Hands: Knowledge and Memory in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Claire Richter Sherman (Seattle, 2000), pp. 35-43. 41

Rainbow, Music in Educational Thought, pp. 77, 99, 103.

42

Honey Meconi, ‘Does Imitatio exist?’, Journal of Musicology, 12 (1994), 152-78, is one of a number of articles on this subject in music. In 1532 the German theorist Johannes Frosch (c. 1470after 1532) linked the term imitatione with composers in his Rerum musicarum opusculum rarum ac insigne (Strasbourg, 1532). Writers were encouraged to keep a notebook to write down choice excerpts from their reading and to use these in their own writing. Frosch recommends this to composers and provides examples. 43

Brett, ‘Morley’, p. 133.

44

Carpenter, Music in the Universities, p. 182.

45

Thomas Morley, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, ed. R. Alec Harman (2nd edn, New York, 1963), p. 272. 46

Ibid, p. 249.

47

Orme, Education and Society, pp. 153-75, 192-6.

48

Morley (Harman edn), Plain and Easy Introduction, p. 137.

49

Lucas Lossius (or Lotze: 1508-82), in his Erotemata musicae practicae (Nuremberg, 1563) and Fredericus Beurhusius (Friedrich Beurhaus: 1536-1609), in his Musicae erotematum (Dortmund,

1573) are the two German writers Morley refers to as having been the templates. Beurhusius uses Petrus Ramus (1515-72) as his model, as did his friend Johann Thomas Freig in Basel, who is also cited by Morley in his list of authors. Elizabeth Crownfield is currently writing a dissertation at New York University on the intellectual and cultural context of Morley’s Plaine and Easie Introduction, and includes a chapter on his interest in Ramus. 50

Morley (Harman edn), Plain and Early Introduction, p. 180. Drinking songs were a very popular genre in German-speaking lands, but many English children’s plays also contain a wide variety of these songs, some as rounds or catches, some as part-songs, and others as fiddlers’ tunes. The songs become part of a game where the one who missed a word or note would pay for the next round of drinks. 51

Morley (Harman edn), Plain and Easy Introduction, p. xx.

52

Carpenter, Music in the Universities, p. 345. One can speculate that Morley’s complaint about German students singing ‘vinate’ (see Carpenter, p. 37 and n. 48) serves as a kind of moralistic warning to his two young English gentlemen (and to all readers of his book). 53

Harris, ‘Musical education’, pp. 134ff.

54

Ibid., p. 136.

55

Alison Hanam, ‘The musical studies of a fifteenth-century wool merchant’, Review of English Studies, 8 (1957), 270-4. 56

lain Fenlon, ‘Education’, New Grove Dictionary, vi, p. 10.

57

Thomas Ravenscroft, A Briefe Discourse on the True Use of Charact’ring the Degrees (London, 1614; facsimile edn, Amsterdam, 1971), sig. A.1v, See also Andrew Hughes, ‘Memory and the composition of late medieval office chant: antiphons’, in L ‘Enseignement de Ia musique au Moyen Àge et à la Renaissance (Asnieres-sur-Oise, 1987), pp. 53-73. 58

A search through the English Short Tide Catalogue yielded dozens of copies in libraries in the United States and the United Kingdom. According to Thurston Dart in his foreword to the Harman edition of Morley, a German translation was known to have been made by Caspar Trost in the early seventeenth century. Unfortunately, this never seems to have been published, a fact that is surprising in view of the popularity of Morley’s music and the numbers of German contrafacts. There may be English copies in European libraries and those would reveal further clues as to the widespread popularity and significance of Morley’s contribution to music learning. 59

See above, pp. 14-15. Several scholars are working with annotated music texts. One recent reference to an annotated copy of Morley is in Christle Collins-Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory: Hearing with the Eyes (Cambridge, 2000), p. 9, where she refers to some writing in the Library of Congress copy. These annotations she believes to be in a seventeenth-century hand and provide points of reference in reading the music. She suggests that the infrequency of these annotations may be an indication that certain skills were assumed; yet this is a suggestion that cannot be substantiated and one which calls for further documentation. 60

None of the various editions of Playford (1664, 1666, 1667) survives in the Pepys library. Although not every book once owned by Pepys is contained in the Library, the librarians tell me they have never heard of a Pepys copy of John Playford’s book. There is doubt whether he owned a copy, despite his friendship with Playford and his possession of a number of books published by Playford (see Pepys Diary, x, p. 337 and xi). The first edition of A Breefe Introduction is 1654, by which time Pepys was an accomplished musician and had left university, where he might have had the leisure to learn from the book. It is striking that in his accounts of his struggles with the principle of composition he makes no references to the digest of Morley contained in A Breefe Introduction. 61

See above, pp. 14-15.

62

I wish to thank Richard Luckett, the Pepys librarian and Aude Fitzsimons, the Assistant Librarian at Magdalene College, Cambridge for supplying me with this information. Pepys’s copy of Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction contains no marginalia. This is, unusually, specifically noted in the Pepys Library Catalogue (vol. iv, Music, Maps and Calligraphy); they do not normally note the absence of marginalia, because they scarcely occur in Pepys’s books, and with two exceptions, are not by him. ‘W’hy they note ‘no marginalia’ in this instance is because of a persistent impression, which must derive from some published source, that these exist. 63

Anna Rees-Jones, personal correspondence, 30 April 2001. Jones is a graduate student at Cambridge working on music script and print, and musical instruction books in England in the seventeenth century. She has been working on two annotated copies of Morley, which are in the Wren Library, Trinity College. I wish to thank her for sharing her notes with me. See also Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 23-46 for a description of how consort music first circulated and was sold in manuscript before finding its way into print. 64

Rees-Jones reported also on her examination of the 1608 Cambridge copy of Morley. She found no verbal annotations in this volume (signed by ‘R. Bulstrode’ [Sir Richard Bulstrode, 16101711]), though a few occasional pencil marks occur in the margin, presumably to highlight the text alongside. Most contemporaneous annotations were made in pen, so anything appearing in pencil is assumed to date to a later era. 65

My thanks to Rachel Doggett, Curator of Books and Exhibitions, and to Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, for allowing me access to these works and other works, among them the Dowland lute manuscript (V.b. 280), described by John Ward in his article ‘The So-Called “Dowland Lute Book” in The Folger Shakespeare Library’, Journal of the Lute Society of America, 9 (1976) 5-29, and the printed volumes of Dowland’s ‘songes or ayres’, published between 1597 and 1603. Mr. Folger acquired the manuscript in 1926 at a Sotheby’s sale. For many years it was assumed that it belonged to Dowland and had remained in his family until that date in the twentieth century. John Ward argued that the annotations in the manuscript were probably not made by Dowland, but perhaps by a student, as they are not the kind of details for performance that would have been made by an accomplished musician. In fact, the name of the student, Anne Bayldon, can be seen on several pages within the manuscript. Some of the annotations in another of the copies of Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction owned by the Folger appear to be the markings of a child (STC 18133 c. 2). 66

Among these are Flores musicae omnis cantus Gregoriani (Strasbourg, 1488) of Hugo von Reutlingen (c. 1285-c. 1360) the De musica (1490) of Adam von Fulda (1445-1505), Bonaventura da Brescia (fl. 1487-97) in his Breviloquium musicale (Brescia, 1497), Orazio Scaletta (c. 1550-1630) in Scala di musica molto necessaria per principianti (Venice, 1585), and Adam Gumpeltzhaimer (15591625) in his Compendium musicae latino-germanicum (Augsburg, 1591). See Susan Forscher Weiss, ‘Musical pedagogy in the German Renaissance’, in Cultures of Communication from Reformation to Enlightenment: Constructing Publics in the Easy Modern German Lands, ed. James Van Hom Melton (Aldershot and Burlington, 2002). 67

The teacher in this case is Padre Martini whose students included the young Mozart.

68

[Baldassare Castiglione], The Courtyer … done into Englyshe by Thomas Hoby (London,

1561). 69

Heather Wolfe has examine the writing – looking closely at the letters e, h, r and superscript r, as well as -es at the end of a word – in STC 18133, copy 1, page 8 and is certain that it is a fairly standard secretarial hand of the seventeenth century. The identity of W. Northall is uncertain; there are a number of references in the online catalogue for the Public Record Office for William Northalls who would have lived in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, including one reference to a William Northall, plaintiff in a Star Chamber case under Henry VIII (STAC 2/17/155). It is possible

that this Northall is an ancestor of the annotator of the Folger STC 18133, copy 1, but any attempt at matching the owner with one of these W. Northalls would be conjectural at this time.

Chapter 4

Seventeenth-Century Didactic Readers, Their Literature, and Ours Randall Ingram

In their call for papers, the organizers of the 1998 conference ‘Expertise Constructed: Didactic Literature in the British Atlantic World, 1500-1800’ offered a list of works considered ‘didactic literature’: ‘from vade-mecums of bee-keeping to grammars, from “compleat” cookery courses to universal manuals on arithmetic.’ Although this list sketches a range of labours that might be described and prescribed by early modern didactic works, the list also offers examples where early modern and current assumptions about ‘didactic literature’ overlap; early modern authors, stationers, and readers and twenty-first-century scholars might all agree that these works are ‘didactic’. But because of historically-specific pressures on early modern texts and practices, the boundary was not always so clear between what we now call ‘didactic literature’ and what we call simply ‘literature’, between books for practical use and books for aesthetic appreciation. In midseventeenth-century England, the lasting influence of humanist pedagogy, the emerging conventions of literary authorship, and the anxiety about the material stability of print all make the distinction between ‘didactic literature’ and ‘literature’ more complex than a list of didactic works implies. Volumes that now seem most clearly literary were in fact immediately practical works for some seventeenth-century readers, and volumes that seem clearly didactic were in fact often literary exercises. Specifically, one seventeenth-century reader’s response to an influential single-author book of poetry suggests how a volume’s signs of aesthetic quality can enhance its practical utility, and collections of posies published in the mid-seventeenth century suggest how a volume’s signs of practical utility enhance its aesthetic quality. Together, these case studies begin to map the didactic potential of apparently literary books and the literary

potential of apparently didactic books in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. To start at the end rather than in the midst of the seventeenth century, in 1694, an aspiring professional worried that his product did not conform to prescribed standards. The aspiring professional was John Oldham, and his product was a literary collection entitled Poems and Translations, to which he prefixed the following explanation: The Author of the following Pieces must be excused for their being hudled out so confusedly. They are Printed just as he finished them off, and some things there are which he design’d not ever to expose, but was fain to do it, to keep the Press at work, when it was once set a going. If it be their Fate to perish, and to the way of all mortal Rhimes, ‘tis no great matter in what method they have been plac’d, no more than whether Ode, Elegy, or Satyr have the honor of Wiping first. But if they, and what he has formerly made Publick, be so happy as to live, and come forth in an Edition all together; perhaps he may then think them worth the sorting in better Order. By that time belike he means to have ready a very Sparkish Dedication, if he can but get himself known to some Great Man, that will give a good parcel of Guinnies for being handsomly flatter’d. Then likewise the Reader (for his farther comfort) may expect to see him appear with all the pomp and Trapings of an Author; his Head in the Front very finely cut, together with the Year• of his Age, Commendatory Verses in abundance, and all the Hands of the Poets of Quorum to confirm his Book, and pass it for Authentick. This at present is content to come abroad naked, Undedicated, and Unprefac’d, without one kind Word to shelter it from Censure; and so let the Criticks take it amongst them.1

By drawing attention to where his book falls short of readers’ expectations, Oldham also draws attention to his understanding of those expectations. However worried Oldham may be about his book, he can at least be confident, writing as he does near the end of the seventeenth century, about what constitutes ‘all the pomp and Trapings of an author’. Oldham here ticks off a catalogue of bibliographic features that ‘pass [a book] for Authentick’, but from where did he learn these features? What prescriptions from what didactic works does he refer to? What grammar explains proper use of this set of signs? While no specific didactic work seems to have taught Oldham how to construct an authoritative book, he could have learned as other authors and publishers of the seventeenth century seem to have learned, by professionally informed reading of other books that seem, if not necessarily stable or definitive models of literary authority, at least successful accommodations of emergent conventions. This professionally informed reading resembles the ‘reading for action’ that Lisa Jardine and Anthony

Grafton have described in their article “‘Studied for action”: how Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’. Jardine and Grafton chronicle how Harvey read Livy over the course of his career as a text practically and immediately useful for furthering that career. Of his method of reading, they argue that scholarly reading (the kind of reading we are concerned with here) was always goal-oriented – an active rather than a passive pursuit. It was conducted under conditions of strenuous attentiveness; it employed job-related equipment (both machinery and techniques) designed for the efficient absorption and processing of the matter read.2

Neither early modern editions of Livy nor seventeenth-century literary books seem to belong among the list of didactic works such as grammars and cookery books. But subjected to the process of reading that Jardine and Grafton describe – and which marginal evidence records in many extant early modern books – a broad range of texts seem to have had practical utility for their readers. In particular, Harvey’s reading Livy as an instruction book for his own professional activity and Oldham’s reading the apparatuses of contemporary literary books as instruction books for realizing his own literary ambitions exemplify how reading in early modern England complicates the category of ‘didactic literature’. The examples of Harvey and Oldham indicate that didactic force does not simply reside in texts severed from contemporary practices. Of course, Oldham would seem to belong to a tiny minority of readers who might approach single-author books of poetry didactically. After all, those books provided clear models for his own volume. In his preface, however, Oldham imagines his suitably ‘Authentick’ book less as a realization of his own ambition than as a reassurance for his late seventeenth-century readers, who had come to expect the indicators of an authorized edition: the ‘pomp and Trapings’ of authorship, Oldham claims, will ‘comfort’ ‘the Reader’. If by 1694 readers had become comfortable with bibliographic signs of authority, those expectations were formed in part by single-author poetry collections published in the mid-seventeenth century, when the ‘Trapings’ of literary authorship in printed books were still being actively negotiated. Examples from the mid-seventeenth century show that not only would-be professional authors like Oldham read singleauthor collections of poetry didactically. Beyond a few careerist readers such as Oldham was a vast field of anonymous readers who seem to have had no ambition for public authorship as it was coming to be defmed, but who participated in the long-lasting humanist tradition of approaching

published texts as practical guides for their own discourse. These readers could have consulted many published compendia of brief, pithy passages considered worthy of imitation, compendia such as this book published in a revised edition in 1630 with a decidedly unpithy title page: A helpe to memory and discourse with table-talke as musicke to an banquet of wine: being a compendium of witty and useful propositions, problems, and sentences, extracted from the larger volumes of physicians, philosophers, orators, and poets, distilled in their assiduous and learned obseroations.3 But in addition to such obviously didactic works, and as further evidence of the sometimes blurry boundary between ‘didactic literature’ and ‘literature’, readers at mid-century also looked to single-author collections of poetry for practical guidance. In fact, the more seemingly ‘literary’ a book, the better suited it may become as a resource for writing. The signs of authorial legitimacy in which many single-author books of the mid-seventeenth century are packaged – the engraved frontispieces, the letters from the printer, the commendatory poems – not only establish the status of the author and the aesthetic value of the texts enclosed, but also establish those texts as worthy resources. Gestures toward presenting a work as monumental, then, can paradoxically be gestures that open the text to use by didactic readers. Because the array of conventions that establish the authority of early modern printed books can also make those books attractive resources for writing, some of the books discussed as crucial events in the intertwined histories of print and authorship seem also to have been useful works for contemporary readers. For example, the first printed collection of John Donne’s poems, Poems by J. D. (1633) is often cited as a foundational artifact for the establishment of print authorship. Arthur F. Marotti writes that [t]he virtually simultaneous, posthwnous publication of John Donne’s Poems and George Herbert’s Temple in 1633 however, was a watershed event that changed the relationship of lyric poetry to the print medium, helping to normalize within print culture the publication of poetry collections by individual authors … After the publication of Donne’s and Herbert’s poems, and certainly after the appearance of the nwnerous singleauthor collections whose publication was partly authorized by the Donne and Herbert editions, lyric poems themselves were perceived less as occasional and ephemeral and more as valuable artifacts worth preserving in those monwnentalizing editions that were among the most prestigious products of print culture.4

Although current scholarship valorizes Donne’s Poems as a ‘prestigious product’, the volume seems to have held particular didactic appeal for at least one seventeenth-century reader, and for that reader, Poems seems to have been not only a prestigious product but also useful raw material. At the end of one copy of the book (held at the Folger Shakespeare Library), a reader has written ‘An Index’, a collection of alphabetized topics, from ‘Age’ to ‘Writers’ (Plate 4.1).5 By doing so, the reader has attempted to impose an order on the collection that will allow the reader to find useful phrases quickly to incorporate into the reader’s own writing or speech. Consequently, the topics listed in ‘An Index’ seem determined at least as much by the reader’s own anticipated needs as by the topics of Donne’s verses. For instance, the reader has gathered far more page numbers for the heading ‘Expressions’ than for any other heading: ‘God’ gets two references, ‘Expressions’, fourteen. Because they seem partially shaped by the anticipated needs of this particular reader, the items listed in ‘An Index’ can be unabashedly idiosyncratic. Many readers might pick items like ‘Church’, ‘Bodys’, and ‘Woman’, but how many would single out for attention a heading on ‘Short Gallerys’? (The reference leads to a conceit in ‘A Letter to the Lady Carey and Mrs. Essex Riche’, where Donne attempts to make his brief episde seem larger by putting two mirrors of virtue in it, just as owners of ‘Short Gallerys’ make them seem larger using mirrors.) Such items emphasize that the compiler of ‘An Index’ may have thought of this list more as a personal and personalized resource than as a definitive reference tool for wide use – ‘An Index’ instead of ‘The Index’. Donne’s poems are usually not included among the examples of ‘didactic literature’, but this particular copy of Poems by J. D. seems to have served as a writing reference for its owner. And by reading didactically, this owner has reinforced the claim to ownership, because as the marginalia in instructional works often demonstrate, didactic reading can be a powerfully appropriative process of making one copy of one book the individuated property of its reader-owner. This owner of this copy of Donne’s Poems seems much less concerned with how Donne might express his own subjectivity than with how these ‘Expressions’ might be taken from Donne’s book and used in some other personalized context. Who is speaking sometimes seems to matter less to this reader than what is said. As a result, some of the reader’s references under ‘Expressions’ point to exacdy the kind of witty figures that we might expect a reader to harvest for

later writing. For example, ‘An Index’ sends us to page 119 for one expression, and on that page the reader has marked this passage from Donne’s ‘An Epithalamion, or Marriage Song on the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine being Married on St. Valentine’s Day’:      Up, up, fair bride, and call, Thy stars, from out their several boxes, take Thy rubies, pearls, and diamonds forth, and make Thyself a constellation, of them all.6 This comparison between jewels and stars, and by extension, the comparison between a bejewelled bride and a constellation, is just the type of fragment that humanists might have encouraged their students to gather a century before Donne’s book was published. ‘An Index’, like many other and later compilations, indicates how long related practices survived among English readers.7

Plate 4.1 ‘An Index’, written on the final leaves of a copy of John Donne’s Poems by J. D. (1633), held at the Folger Shakespeare Library (STC 7042, copy 2). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. At other times, though, the compiler of ‘An Index’ points to expressions that would not transfer easily to other contexts. The most surprising of these may be the reference to page 350, ‘A Hymn to God the Father’, where Donne puns on his name and perhaps on his wife’s name at the end of each stanza (e.g., ‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done,/ For, I have more’).8 Where the bride/constellation figure does not seem tighdy or specifically bound either to the author or to the addressee, these puns would seem highly individual and personal – only another writer named ‘Donne’ could use these puns as Donne himself has. Even what seems most individual in Donne’s book is marked for appropriation or imitation – maybe precisely because it does seem most individual and, to use Oldham’s word, ‘Authentick’.9 That the compiler is drawn to this passage in this book, just where Donne announces his proprietary authorship most explicidy, suggests that the compiler understands Poems by J. D. as a book that will help the compiler to become not simply a better writer, but a writer who is more like an author. In this particular copy of Donne’s Poems, established practices of humanist reading and emerging conventions of print authorship collide. Any number of English books available in the 1630s could have supplied the compiler of ‘An Index’ with a list of ‘Expressions’, and some books, like the more explicidy didactic A help to memory and discourse, were developed primarily to provide such lists. But this reader, unlike humanist readers of the preceding century, seems to want more than a collection of free-floating, endlessly iterative ‘Expressions’. Rebecca Bushnell has shown that by the mid-sixteenth century humanists alternated between approaching books as collections of (re)usable fragments and approaching books as organic wholes. This transition, she writes, is captured in the differences between describing a book as a garden and describing a book as a body: The book imagined as a body … especially the body constructed in its emergent ‘classical’ conception, was quite different from the ‘garden’ book. The visitor passed

from one garden ‘room’ to another, all the while admiring and perhaps gathering the various and abundant plants. By analogy, the reader’s experience of the book was like that of the intelligent consumer who could appropriate the best parts from the larger arrangement. The body, however, was conceptualized as a unified structure from which no element could be removed without injuring the others.10

The writer of ‘An Index’ culls from Donne’s book as from a garden, but the same writer also carefully restores controversial lines omitted from Donne’s poems. The printer of the 1633 collection omits some controversial passages of Donne’s poetry, for instance, substituting dashes and blank space for Donne’s bitterly ironic lines in ‘Satyre 2’: ‘Bastardy abounds not in Kings titles, nor/Symony and Sodomy in Churchmens lives.’11 The same hand that wrote ‘An Index’ also wrote those lines into the blank spaces left by the printer, assuring that even if the bodies of kings and churchmen may be suspect, the body of this book (a trope often deployed in posthumous editions like Poems by J. D.) will be whole. To mix the sixteenth-century metaphors terribly (because indeed, the concepts were mixing in the midseventeenth century), for this reader, only a body can be a worthwhile garden. Only the complete body of an ‘Authentick’ book can teach the reader what earlier books could not: how to channel some of the nascent forms of authority into the reader’s own writing. The characteristics that make Poems by J. D. an important book in critical histories of print and authorship also make it a useful didactic work for this reader. ‘An Index’ marks the permeable boundary between ‘didactic literature’ and ‘literature’ in mid-seventeenth-century England, demonstrating how the characteristics that make a book authoritatively literary could also open the book to practical use. While authors, printers, and publishers were changing the status of literary authorship and hence were changing the signs by which aesthetically valuable writing might be recognized, some readers who aspired to write well turned for guidance to the ‘Authentick’ books that were redefining good writing; such literary books were uniquely positioned to serve as didactic literature. Consequently, by the time Oldham published his apologetic preface in 1694, readers so expected authenticity that they had themselves become, at least in Oldham’s imagination, powerful enforcers of literary authority. By reading didactically, they too had learned what an author ought to do. The compiler of ‘An Index’ demonstrates how early modern reading practices trouble the neat separation of ‘didactic literature’ and ‘literature’.

Some of the most popular poetic forms of mid-seventeenth-century England similarly show the difficulty of that separation. For instance, the posy, a short poem often associated with inscription in rings, on cutlery, and other surfaces, has often seemed too slight for serious literary study, even though many early modern volumes of poems include sections of posies.12 How should we view a collection of very short printed poems gathered in a group entitled ‘Posies’? As portable discourse to be engraved into rings and other goods, or as little poems to be appreciated in printed form rather than actually transcribed? As ‘didactic’ or as ‘literary’? These questions of appreciation and appropriation arise with special force in the 1640s and 1650s, when posies regularly appeared in printed books such as Cupids Posies, For Bracelets, Handkerchers, and Rings (1642); the significantly enlarged second edition of Loves Garland: or, Posies for Rings, Handkerchers, & Gloves: And such pretty Tokens that Loves send their Loves (1648); The Card of Courtship, or The Language of Love (1653); and finally, The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence; or, the Arts of Wooing and Complimenting (1658). If, as Joan Evans shows in her catalogue of English Posies and Pory Rings, posies proliferated in seventeenth-century England, their appearances in printed books were concentrated in the 1640s and 1650s.13 Of these four printed books, Loves Garland and Cupids Posies are collections exclusively of posies, and the other two at least purport to be how-to books, namely, how to succeed in love. These books claim to address readers across lines of class and gender. The title page of The Card of Courtship directs the volume ‘To the longing Virgins, amorous Batchelors, blithe Widows, kinde Wives, and flexible Husbands, of what Honour, Title, Calling, or Conversation soever within the Realm of Great Britain.’ The prefaces to The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, written by Edward Phillips, attempt to be similarly inclusive. Although it is clear what the longing, amorous, blithe, kind, and flexible might do together, how, exactly, the books might help them is less clear, because these books package apparently literary texts in the framework of how-to manuals. For instance, The Card of Courtship begins with a series of ‘Complemental Dialogues’, presumably exemplary conversations to guide novices in love. But a number of these dialogues are in rhymed couplets, and all present dramatic situations that illustrate how some of the impulses impeded by closed theatres have been diverted into model dialogues. The first dialogue

begins this way: ‘A Virgin licensed by her Father to make choice of whom she likes best for her husband, Imagine you hear one who affects her, courting her after this manner: with their names suppose to be AMANDUS, and JULIETTA.’14 Rather than directing virgins who have the freedom to choose their spouses, perhaps a tiny minority of the volume’s readership, the dialogue is forthright about engaging readers in an imaginary situation; even readers who are in the position of neither Amandus nor Julietta might enjoy access to this private conversation. The prefatory poem ‘To the Reader’ in The Card of Courtship accordingly extends the book’s appeal beyond the purely practical and promises that readers already happy in love will also enjoy the book: Here read, how beauty to command, Though rugged, like the Panthers skin; Here thou maist leame to love and win. Or if so happy’s thy condition, Thou of thy love hast the fruition: Here such pleasures thou mayst find, So sweet, and of so various kind, That rockt into a pleasing dream, Thou’lt wish I’d had an ampler theam.15 As the appeal of this prefatory poem makes clear, instructional and literary material are not always separable in volumes of the period; a given complemental dialogue may be framed as providing practical assistance to a narrow audience and offer aesthetic pleasure to a broad audience. The stationer selling The Card of Courtship was, after all, Humphrey Moseley, whom Ann Baynes Coiro has justly called ‘the leading purveyor of high literary culture in the seventeenth century.’16 Customers of Moseley’s stall could have found the appeal of The Card of Courtship similar to the appeal of Moseley’s other, now more famous, literary volumes. Just as The Card of Courtship shared shelf space with elaborately prepared single-author volumes of poetry by Cartwright, Milton, Shirley, and Waller, the section of posies in The Card of Courtship is tucked between a section entitled ‘Odes’ and a section entitled ‘Songs and Sonnets.’ Because the posies themselves resemble those on extant early modern rings, this context suggests the

blurring of ‘literary’ and ‘practical’ throughout the volume. Wedged between the ‘Odes’ and the ‘Songs and Sonnets’ are posies that would not be out of place carved into a lover’s token – from the perspective of later categorization, the practical, or at least the practicable, nestled within the literary. The posies in Mysteries of Love and Eloquence appear in what seems to be a more obviously practical reference work. Mysteries of Love and Eloquence is a heterogeneous volume that includes such practical guides as a rhyming dictionary and a list of epithets under the title ‘A Garden of Tulips.’ But many of the book’s posies vary markedly from the posies in extant rings. Some are limited because they depend upon specific names: ‘My dearest Betty/Is good and pretty’; ‘I did then commit no folly,/ When I married my sweet Molly.’ Although such couplets might provide general examples of how one might play on the beloved’s name, they would be directly useful only to someone giving a token to Betty or Molly. Other posies in Mysteries of Love and Eloquence are bawdier than anything inscribed in extant rings surveyed by Joan Evans: ‘Dorothy this Ring is thine,/ And now thy bouncing body’s mine.’ When the posies present a female voice, that voice attests to the virility of a male partner: ‘My Henry is a rousing blade,/ I lay not long by him a maid.’ The posies in Mysteries of Love and Eloquence are thus a mixed lot, some feasible as posies for rings, and others posies only more generally, more consistent with contemporary jest-books than with contemporary jewellery. Besides the posies in ostensibly instructional books such The Card of Courtship and Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, a few small octavos consist entirely of posies. One of the first of these books was published in 1642, and as its title demonstrates, it encompasses a variety of inscribable surfaces: Cupids Posies, For Bracelets, Handkerchers, and Rings. With Scaifes, Gloves, and other things. Where Mysteries of Love and Eloquence puts implausible posies in the context of an instructional book, Cupids Posies puts plausible posies in the context of a seemingly literary volume ‘with all the pomp and Trapings of an Author’. The title page states that the volume was ‘Written by Cupid’, and the volume parodically represents Cupid’s authority with some of the emerging signs of print authorship: a frontispiece portrait of Cupid, a dedicatory poem from Cupid to Venus, a prefatory poem to readers, and a concluding poem in which Cupid states that he will publish more verses if these find favour. But even given these

rudimentary displays of literary authorship, the volume emphasizes the utility of its posies. The prefatory poem makes clear that, properly inscribed on love tokens, the ensuing posies can help lovers: These same Posies which I send, And to Lovers do commend; Which if they be writ, within The little circle of a Ring, Or be sent unto your Loves With fine Handkerchers [or] Gloves: I do know that like my Dart, They have power to wound the heart: For instead of Flowers and Roses, Here are words bound up in Posies.17 The reference to flowers at the end of this poem implies that posies of words can be more effective than posies of roses, and readers are invited to select from among Cupid’s selection as they might gather from a garden. A number of Cupids Posies also appear on rings catalogued by Joan Evans – for example, ‘Loues delight is to unite.’18 Regardless of the exact relation between poems in the volume and on the rings, regardless whether book or ring or some other text(s) came first, the reappearance of these posies in such seemingly different material settings hints at the expansive range of inscribable surfaces in early modern England, a range analysed more fully in Juliet Fleming’s study of sixteenth-century graffiti.19 Of course, most of the posies in Cupids Posies exist now only as printed texts, and despite the book’s insisting upon the utility of these posies, some seem to exist primarily as texts that evoke a speciflc situation. Consider this posy, with a telling title: ‘A Lover coming into a Maidens chamber in her absence did write this posie on her looking glass’: In this same Looking-glass, my watry eyes I see: But I do wish that thou could shew her cheerful eyes to me: Yet why do I accuse thee here,

tis not thy fault for thou art clear.20 The paratextual function of the title is all-important; if the title did not place the posy within a social and material setting, it would make little sense. Although Cupids Posies promises – and delivers – posies that can be made suitable engravings for love tokens, this posy seems more concerned to narrate a past event, not so much encouraging readers to trespass and vandalize, as encouraging them to imagine a poem on a printed page relocated to a mirror. The other book of posies published in the 1640s is the signiflcantly enlarged second edition of Loves Garland: or, Posies for Rings, Handkerchers, & Gloves: And such pretty Tokens that Lovers send their Loves. Like Cupids Posies, Loves Garland includes several posies that also appear on extant rings.21 But unlike Cupids Posies, Loves Garland never promises assistance to the lovelorn but instead presents posies of extraordinary material and social specificity. The title of this posy, for example, is longer than the great majority of posies in rings: ‘The posie of a pitifull Lover writ in a Riban Carnation three penny broad, and wound about a fair branch of Rosemary, upon which he wittily playes thus.’ This pitiful lover’s token is not a vague ring, but a ribbon of a specific width and a specific colour twisted around a specific plant. The posy calls for an even more specific situation: Rosemary Rose, I send to thee, In hope that thou wilt marry me. Nothing can be sweete Rose, More sweeter unto Harry, Then marry Rose, Sweeter than this Rose mary.22 This posy only works if a man named Harry sends rosemary bundled as the title describes to a woman named Rose as a proposal of marriage. And in Loves Garland, Rose responds in kind, with a posy entitled, ‘The sweet reply in a conceit of the same cut, sent by Rose with a Viall of Rose-water of her own making’: Thy sweet commends againe,

my sweetest Harry, And sweet Rose water for thy sweet Rosemary, By which viall sweet Rose doth let thee see, Thy love’s as sweet to her, as hers to thee.23 Although this posy provides a relatively rare example of a posy supposedly designed and sent by a woman, it seems more concerned with completing a narrative than with providing models for female readers. A number of the posies in Loves Garland require similarly specific conditions, while others are brief, portable fragments like those inscribed in rings. This overview of posies in printed books underscores the difficulty, even impossibility, of distinguishing posies offered as practical assistance from those offered for appreciation. Again, ‘literary’ and ‘didactic’ seem thoroughly intertwined in many early modern texts and practices. The question, however, is not simply whether the posies in printed books were meant to be actually carved into other objects or only enjoyed on the page, but how those possibilities are entangled: how and why does imagining a poem in a book scratched onto a ring or woven into a scarf enhance the value of the poem on the page? How and why might a printed book be a valuable source for mottoes to be inscribed on other surfaces? The interplay of these questions reveals the complex position of printed verse collections in seventeenth-century England, especially at mid-century: on the one hand, they can function as repositories of authority, and on the other hand, their material fragility requires that they constantly be reimagined as something else – metal, wood, stone, cloth. Scholars have shown how seventeenth-century literary books could become monumental assertions of authorial will, a process often said to start with Ben Jonson’s Workes of 1616, but the century’s lingering doubts about printed pages have been less often discussed.24 Many of the events of mid-century seem to have exacerbated those doubts: if marble monuments can be destroyed in tumultuous times, what will become of paper monuments? Posies of the 1640s and 1650s suggest how the promise of didactic utility could project

literary texts beyond the fragility of printed books, imaginatively transferring poems from pages to rings, from ‘literary’ to ‘didactic’. In both the case of posies and the case of ‘An Index’, the fluctuating relation between the didactic and the literary corresponds to the unclear status of printed books in mid-seventeenth-century England: a book of poems could offer a new mode of authority and hence provide a new resource for didactic appropriation, or a book of poems could emphasize its own fragility and hence project didactic uses for its poems. In the first case, an apparently literary apparatus frames didactic texts, and in the second, an apparently didactic apparatus frames literary texts. Before John Oldham worried in 1694 that his Poems and Translations did not flt readers’ expectations for literary books, his predecessors at mid-century worried that readers – and worse, nonreaders – would have no informed expectations and would not be able to see the differences between a literary work and a useful commodity. For example, scholars have recognized the literary ambition of Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648), but as one of several poems entitled ‘To His Book’ shows, Herrick seems particularly concerned about how tradesmen might use his book: Make haste away, and let one be A friendly Patron unto thee: Lest rapt from hence, I see thee lye Torn for the use of Pasetrie: Or see thy injur’d Leaves serve well, To make loose Gownes for Mackarell: Or see the Grocers in a trice, Make hoods of thee to serve out Spice.25 Herrick fears that his book will be put to practical use as a material object, so that his words are not only wrested out of context, as in ‘An Index’, but become irrelevant. Herrick’s cooks and grocers have not yet learned that some books are for appreciating and some are for using in their daily labour, but Herrick’s representation of these thoughtless, possibly illiterate tradesmen contributed to the valorization of the literary book as a special artifact, properly separate from the workaday world. In 1648, however, that separation had not yet prevailed, so that what we now call ‘didactic

literature’ cannot always be easily distinguished from what we call ‘literature’. 1

John Oldham, Poems and Translations (London, 1694), sigs A3r-A4v.

2

Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘”Studied for action”: how Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30-78, pp. 30-1. 3

A helpe to memory and discourse (London, 1630).

4

Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, 1995), p.

247. 5

The following discussion refers to a specific copy of Poems by J. D. (London, 1633) held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., STC 7042, copy 2. 6

Ibid., p. 119.

7

For rich discussions of seventeenth-century practices of gathering textual fragments in commonplace books, see Peter Beal, ‘Notions in garrison: the seventeenth-century commonplace book’, in New Way of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 19851991, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY, 1993), pp. 131-47 and Max W. Thomas, ‘Reading and writing the Renaissance commonplace book: a question of authorship?’ in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, eds Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham, NC, and London, 1994), pp. 401-15. 8

Ibid., p. 350.

9

The word ‘Authentick’ is a rich marker at the intersection of didactic literature and the history of authorship. According to the OED, meanings of ‘authentic’ ‘seem to combine ideas of ‘authoritative” and “original.”’ Because both meanings are operative in seventeenth-century England, an ‘authentic’ book can suggest both a trustworthy resource and an accurate representation of an author’s achievement, a book thus suitable both for appropriation and appreciation. 10

Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Easy Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, 1996), p. 138. 11

John Donne, Complete English Poems (London, 1994), p. 157.

12

See George Puttenham’s definition of the posy in The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), p. 47. According to Puttenham, his contemporaries ‘do paint them [posies] now a dayes upon the backe sides of our fruite trenchers of wood, or use them as devises in rings and armes and about such courtly purposes.’ 13

Joan Evans, English Posies and Posy Rings (London, 1931).

14

The Card of Courtship (London, 1653), p. 2.

15

Ibid., sig. B 1r.

16

Ann Baynes Coiro, ‘Milton and class identity: the publication of Areopagitica and the 1645 Poem’s, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 22 (1992), 261-89, p. 277. 17

Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (London, 1658), sig. A3r.

18

Evans, English Posies, p. 75.

19

Juliet Fleming, ‘Graffiti, grammatology, and the age of Shakespeare’, in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, eds Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 315-51.

20

Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, sig. ASr.

21

See, for example, ‘No hap so hard/as love debard’ (Evans, English Posies, p. 83).

22

Loves Garland: or, Posies for Rings, Hand-kerchers, & Gloves: And such pretry Tokens that Lovers send their Loves (London, 1648), sig. A7v. 23

Ibid., sigs A 7v-A8r.

24

For a discussion of print authorship that emphasizes the foundational status of Jonson’s Workes, see Richard C. Newton, ‘Jonson and the (re-)invention of the book’, in Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, eds Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh, 1982), pp. 31-55. For a more inclusive history that traces the rising status of poetic authorship in seventeenth-century England, see Marotti, Manuscript. 25

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (London, 1648), p. 324.

Chapter 5

Polite Society and Perceptions of the Sun and the Moon in the Athenian Mercury and the British Apollo, 1691-1711 Anna Marie E. Roos

Advertisements for public lectures on natural philosophy, the opening of the first museums of natural history, and the proliferation of instrument makers selling pocket microscopes, telescopes and orreries, ‘for Ladies and Gentlemen rather than noblemen or Princes’, illustrated that there was a demand in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England for scientific knowledge among ‘wider polite society’.1 Despite rich scholarly analysis of the interplay between cultural factors and the reception of the new science in early modern English society, little work has been done to elucidate the role and influence of the first subscription newspapers in this dissemination of natural philosophy.2 Question-and-answer coffeehouse newspapers, with subscribers writing the inquiries and editors providing the responses, such as the Athenian Mercury (1691-7) and the British Apollo (1708-11) particularly demonstrate the tenets of the natural world about which the larger public was curious; their low cost also meant that they were more accessible to a variety of audiences.3 This essay will specifically analyse the interdependence in these newspapers between politeness, the fashionable study of science and the presentation of scientific ideas about the sun and the moon, or the luminaries. The manner in which heliocentrism and the ideas of an inhabited moon were presented in the Mercury and Apollo will be shown to have been greatly influenced by the culture of sensibility.

Newspapers flourished in London in the 1690s, partially as a consequence of the non-renewal of the Printing Act of 1695, and in 1709 approximately 18 were being published.4 The first newspaper to utilize the question-and-answer format was John Dunton’s Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury, the success of which gave rise to a number of imitators such as the British Apollo.5 The two papers answered a large volume of readers’ questions about a variety of subjects, including literature, politics, and conduct advice in their attempt to provide ‘curious amusements for the lngenious’.6 Querists in both the Mercury and Apollo were also extremely curious about the natural world.7 Both publications employed anonymous experts to answer a significant proportion of readers’ queries about the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Gahleo, and Descartes. In the case of the Mercury, Cambridge mathematician Richard Sault (d. 1702), bookseller John Dunton (1659-1733), and theologian Samuel Wesley (1662-1735) perused the Philosophical Transactions to answer questions for their readers, with a particular fondness displayed for the work of Robert Boyle and Rene Descartes.8 An average of 39 scientific questions were addressed in each volume of the Mercury, the total of 760 amounting to 20 per cent of all questions in the twenty volumes of the newspaper; the Apollo had a similar percentage of queries about natural philosophy, and in fact, there were more printed inquiries about ‘science’ in the Apollo than on any other subject.9 The inquiries sometimes went beyond letters; one of the querists of the Apollo apparently sent a package of bones to be identified by the editors without including return postage.10 This miscellaneous inclusion of subjects of natural philosophy with those of literature and politics arguably had more influence in introducing ‘scientific’ subjects to the audience of these coffeehouse newspapers than journals devoted purely to natural philosophy. Although the Mercury’s weekly print run for subscribers was only in the hundreds, because copies of newspapers were also sold in bookshops, passed around and read aloud in coffeehouses, as well as being sold in the street by hawkers, the total audience was likely in the thousands; the Apollo had similar audience numbers.11 Some, such as author, critic and wit Charles Gildon, who wrote a History of the Athenian Mercury (1692), felt that this popular newspaper did as great a service, if not a greater one as the Royal Society in disseminating scientific knowledge.12 Gildon wrote:

England has the Glory of giving Rise to two of the noblest Designs that the Wit of Man is capable of inventing, and they are, the Royal Society, for the experimental improvement of Natural Knowledge, and the Athenian Society for communicating not only that, but all other Sciences to all men, as well as to both Sexes, and the last will, I question not, be imitated, as well as the first, by other Nations.13

Jonathan Swift’s first published poem, Ode to the Athenian Mercury, also praised the newspaper’s efforts in communicating science to the public, and the Mercury’s editor Dunton believed that it was incumbent upon people in his profession to be acquainted with mathematics and natural philosophy so as ‘to give a Man some Knowledge … of the World he inhabits’.14 In these newspapers, title page after title page addressed its audience as the ‘curious’, the ‘inquisitive’, or the ‘ingenious’, promising to give recreational pleasure and benefit via instruction in astronomy and other scientific subjects. Knowledge about elements of the natural world was thus presented to entertain and delight as well as to instruct. Aristocratic virtuosi or curiosi expressed their curiosity about nature through the purchase, collection, and arrangement of objects of nature and scientific instruments; the purchase of these newspapers allowed ‘Londoners who frequented the coffee houses’ where respectable dress, manners and the price of a drink afforded entry, as well as ‘country gentlemen interested in the town’, to participate vicariously in these fashionable pursuits.15 Lawrence Klein has shown that late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England was a society in which Whig and politically moderate gentlemen, latitudinarian clergy and prosperous Dissenters created a culture of politeness to formulate the ‘hegemony of the landed classes’.16 Although the purpose of politeness was initially to emphasize the exclusivity of the elite, it was subsequently marketed to non-elites in a variety of encyclopaedic guides as well as in newspapers like the Mercury and the Apollo, particularly between 1660 and 1730.17 Dictates of polite culture and curiosity about the new science influenced which tenets of natural philosophy were accepted and rejected in the newspapers. This was particularly true in the case of novel scientific knowledge about the luminaries, concerning heliocentrism, as well as the ideas of the plurality of worlds and an earth-like and inhabited moon. The Mercury and Apollo indeed aimed to be like ‘virtual salons’. The Mercury in the 1690s fielded public controversy over such issues as Copernicanism with a display of neutral and witty discourse to promote an aura of

gentlemanly disinterestedness and objectivity. However, by the first decade of the eighteenth century, the overweening influence of Newtonianism in England and its implicit acceptance of a sun-centred universe made it less deliciously subversive to talk about; as Newtonianism increasingly became connected to polite sociability, the Apollo subsequently publicized that belief in heliocentrism was a means to distinguish the polite from the vulgar.18 Moreover, because the influence of French absolutism and culture on English society was under increasing suspicion after the Restoration, the ‘Frenchness’ of Cartesian science and its support of the idea of a plurality of worlds were viewed with growing scepticism. Thus, there is a shift in the manner in which scientific ideas about the sun and moon are presented in the newspapers from 1691 to 1711, a shift affected by the increasing influence of the culture of sensibility and politeness.

Editors and audiences Who were the editors and audiences for the Mercury and the Apollo? Although the editors of the Mercury implied to their readers that they encompassed a large group of virtuosi, the few men that were actually in charge of the publication did in fact have some professional connection to astronomy and the mathematical sciences in their own right.19 Richard Sault, one of the co-founders of the Mercury, kept a ‘mathematick school’ near the Royal Exchange in London, and had some of his mathematical works published in the Philosophical Transactions.20 Sault also collaborated with authors of popular pamphlets of scientific knowledge, such as William Leybourn, an almanac maker and surveyor; in 1694, Sault appended his Treatise of Algebra to Leybourn’s astronomical manual Pleasure with Profit, a work with extensive engravings that was aimed at a readership of wealthier gentlemen; Leybourn’s work was recommended by John Houghton, a fellow of the Royal Society.21 Leybourn’s Pleasure with Profit was in turn published by the editor of the Mercury, Whiggish Dissenter John Dunton. The editors of the Mercury were thus members of a larger protoprofessional class who attempted to associate themselves with polite society. Despite the fact he made his living as an author and printer, Leybourn identified with the gentleman’s reluctance to publish; he utilized a pseudonym when publishing his Planometria, or the whole art of

surorying land because the treatise was ‘so immaterial … and too particular for a Subject of so large an extent’ and too artisanal a topic for the cultured image he was trying to cultivate.22 Dunton, like Leybourn, identified himself and the audience for his publications with the culture of gentility; he claimed his ‘Athenian Prqject … was well receiv’d by the Politer sort of Mankind.’23 Dunton also distanced himself from publication because he was anonymous in his position as an editor of the Mercury, although his other extensive publishing activities argue that Dunton generally did not display the gentlemanly reluctance to publish. In fact, the middling Dunton often instead publicized self-fashioned feelings of aristocratic duty to relay scientific information with candour to serve the nation. Even over the time of the Mercurys production, Dunton increasingly announced his desire to move away from the large numbers of questions of the heart published in his paper to incorporate more queries about natural philosophy and mathematics for the betterment of a larger sector of society.24 In the case of the Apollo, the identity of the writers of the newspaper is more open to speculation; there were probably as many as twelve men in this ‘society of gentlemen’ who answered questions, and of these only six can be identified with certainty.25 Of these six, two were professionals in the sciences. Dr William Coward (1657?-1725) was an oculist, and an intimate of Dr Hans Sloane, president of the Royal Society (1727-41). Sloane corrected proofs for Coward’s Ophthalmoiatria (1706), a work that ridiculed the Cartesian placement of an immaterial soul in the pineal gland.26 Dr James Mauclerc was a physical scientist and theologian, who answered some seventy questions in each of the first two volumes of the Apollo. The identity of the audience for the scientific principles presented in these papers is yet more controversial. On the surface, the audience for the Mercury and Apollo appeared to be prosperous or at least aspiring to gentlemanly prosperity. The Apollo charged a half crown for its advertisements, which included advertisements for runaway apprentices, a lost ring with diamonds, a missing puppy, and a vellum pocket book, with ‘divers Receipts for Rent in it’, indicating the social grouping of some of its prosperous intended audience.27 Although some readers could have been gentleman landholders with rent receipts, notices for missing apprentices

indicate that those engaged in business, who might be among the middling sorts, were also subscribers. If we in fact examine the ‘Emblem of the Athenian Society, 1692’, engraved by von Hove to serve as the frontispiece to Gildon’s History of the Athenian Society, we see how editor John Dunton conceived of the audience for his newspaper (Plate 5.1).28 The editors, some veiled to preserve their anonymity, are portrayed in a coffeehouse with the owner whose ‘query [was] quickly understood, he only asks – d’ye think his coffee good.’29 Pens in hand, the editors are shown receiving the majority of their queries from respectably dressed female and male subscribers. Some of the men are illustrated using globes or pointing their crossstaffs at ‘all England’s rarityes … gathered here’, such as multiple suns orparhelia, and a comet.30 One of the verses in this emblem refers to these astronomers and their questions: Thinking our Notions too jejune Some take their Aim at Madam moon

Plate 5.1 Frederick Henrik von Hove, ‘An Emblem of the Athenian Society’. Frontispiece to Charles Gildon, History of the Athenian Sociery (London, 16 92). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Some bring hard queries, which we crack, And throw the gazing World the Kernels back.31 However, the London mob is also illustrated in the emblem; though most are engaged in some sort of violence (including beating and hanging and imploring the ‘noble Athenians’ for help), in the lower right, handing in their letters to the editors, there are a few female washerwomen. The washerwomen are described in the following verse: avoid you rest of noisy fools once more you are not in our rules could we but please if learned few which send [letters] … we could dispense with you32 One interpretation of this verse is that because the Athenian Mercury fashioned itself as a respectable publication, it was of considerable irritation to its editors that its audience was not completely contained within the parameters of polite society. Of course, Dunton may merely have been commenting that one had to be respectable to know who was not.33 He certainly thought himself in a position to know, as he had written several works about the reformation of manners and polite society.34 Brian Cowan has also illustrated that Dunton associated female presence in coffeehouses with sins of bawdry, the bookseller intimating that the coffeehouse was a ‘fit place for gendemen of leisure … but not for lower classes, whose interests there must needs be licentious.’35 Indeed, because the paper could be read in a coffeehouse essentially for the price of a cup of coffee, it is possible the stray washerwomen may not only have been guilty of licentiousness, but of other sins, such as stealing copies. In fact, this possibility of stolen Mercuries may be alluded to in the

engraving itself, which prominendy illustrated a selection adapted from an emblem book in its upper lefthand corner alongside the price of the publication.36 In this ‘emblem within an emblem’ a monkey thrusts a cat’s paws into a roasting fire of chestnuts, and remarks ‘Viviturne rapto’ (or ‘May he [or she] not live by plunder’) and ‘How sweet is interloper’s hire!’ Another possibility is that this admonition was to the female hawkers of the newspaper. Berry has noted that these female newspaper sellers or ‘Mercuries’ were mentioned by name in Dunton’s autobiography, The Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705).37 Despite Dunton’s assertion that the Athenian Mercury was read by ‘the Politer sort of Mankind’, the newspaper hawkers and the washerwoman were literal and social plunderers of polite discourse.38 As Rob Iliffe has commented, some contemporaries felt the Athenian Mercury was dangerous because it was a levelling text, ‘with no markers for the reader to distinguish between the social hierarchy of the contributors.’39 Therefore, Dunton’s appeal to politeness may have not only been a technique to make his paper fashionable, but one which attempted to prevent it from being considered subversive.40

Copernicanism among editors and readers Although the natural world was certainly an object of serious study among scientists during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it provided concomitantly interesting subjects of entertainment and edification for a wider reading public that encompassed, but also superseded, the boundaries of polite society. Many astronomical discoveries and theories of the new science, such as Copernicanism, the possibility of lunar inhabitation, and the plurality of worlds were topics that were still a matter of vociferous discussion in late seventeenth-century publications of popular astronomy. Although by the late seventeenth century, Copernicanism was not a subject for dispute among mathematicians or astronomers, there was not universal acceptance of heliocentrismin wider society on religious grounds, and the literary world was especially hesitant to accept wholeheartedly the Copernican doctrine.41 The same trend is seen among editors and readers of the newspapers. The editors of the Mercury did not advocate any single cosmological theory. One reader posed a question which indicated that choosing a planetary system was still very much a contested and perplexing matter: ‘Doth the Earth or the Sun move?’ The Mercury

replied, ‘Those philosophers that are for Terremotion, yet will have the Sun to move about its Centre, and those that are for a fixation of the Earth will have the Sun move according to the common Acceptation. That much at present to the Importunate Querist.’42 Seven months later, another querist asked, ‘What is your Opinion concerning the motion of the Earth or the Sun: I desire neither Reasons nor Authorities, but upon the whole, your own Opinion upon this Matter?’43 Apparendy versed in the heliocentric cosmology of Descartes, the editors of the Mercury still hedged their bets: ‘We disagree in our Opinions about it, the Ptolomaick System is very false in some things, and the Cartesian is not demonstration, as all Des Cartes’ proselytes confess themselves; there are very plausible Arguments on both sides, and plausibility is the utmost either party can pretend to.’44 Why was the Mercury so evasive in its opinions about cosmology? Certainly, the editors’ refusal to answer the question kept readers guessing about what the editors really thought, which was good for business; it is not surprising that letters continued to pour in, pressing the anonymous editors for their true opinions on the matter. In fact, Dunton was an avowed Copernican, who believed in ‘ten thousand more Worlds than are already discover’d’, preferred ‘Galileo’s Tube to Ptolomy’s Spectacles’ and thought that the planets were inhabited.45 Further, books of popularized astronomy often included a compendium of all astronomical systems, such as John Seller’s Pocket Book of astronomical illustrations, in which he provided a nicely rendered ‘curious and choice collection’ of diagrams of the Tychonic, Ptolemaic, and Copernican systems, along with reprints of the latest solar and lunar maps.46 As in Seller’s book, presentation of all the astronomical systems in the newspapers may also have been perceived as giving the buyer better value, a larger collection of scientific ideas for his virtual printed cabinet of curiosities that could at least abstracdy emulate the virtuoso’s literal collection of interesting objects from the natural world.47 The presentation of both sides of the astronomical debate also gave the author or editor an aura of disinterestedness and objectivity. The Mercury after all was described in its tide by the adjective ‘casuistical’ and in addition to its presentation of scientific advice, it addressed itself to solving cases of conscience, so trustworthy advice would be crucial to its survival.48 Science in these newspapers was also presented as a gendemanly

version of civil conversation, one that would establish credibility and a polite atmosphere of trust between author, editor, and reader.49 The atmosphere of polite conversation was one of genial tolerance and nondogmatic conclusions, rather than emphasizing exact logic. Shapin has illustrated that these norms of polite conversation were ‘a characteristic mark of the English natural-philosophical enterprise’, which vigilandy protected the factual domain along ‘with injunctions to speak modesdy, diffidendy, and doubtingly about the domain of the theoretical.’50 In its attempts to preserve mannerly conversation about a publicly controversial topic such as heliocentrism, a publication like the Mercury was emulating the polite discourse of the gendeman virtuosi. However, by the first decade of the eighteenth century, Copernicanism was no longer a scandalous topic in popular literature. Newton’s theories, made respectable by their association with natural theology, relied implicidy upon heliocentrism and had been popularized in coffeehouse lectures beginning in 1698.51 Subsequendy, we find that coffeehouse newspapers like The British Apollo considered the Copernican theory part of polite conversation. In the 1708 quarterly supplement, where the editors ‘inserted those Questions for which we had not Room before’, one reader, using scriptural argument, challenged the editors’ support of an immovable sun. The querist wrote, ‘Gentlemen, in your Paper Numb. 69. You hold the Sun to be an Immoveable Center [sic], and the Earth to be Elliptical, which Opinions seem not to be consonant to Scripture or Reason.’52 The reader mentioned that in the Bible ‘in the Days of Joshua the Sun was stop’d in its course for some time … Again, if the Sun be fix’d, how was it plac’d in the Firmament (as we read in Genesis) for Signs and Seasons, for Days and Years’.53 The editors replied that they adhered to the theory of accommodation, which postulated that the Bible was totally excluded from any scientific discussion of astronomy on the grounds that it was not meant to convey accurate scientific information. They wrote the Scriptures were never design’d to teach us a System of Astronomy, and therefore accommodated themselves to the Capacities of Men, who in those Easy times understood nothing of the Earth’s Motion. And this is but a common mode of Speech, since those great Astronomers, who defend the Copernican System, do yet commonly say, that the Sun is Set; which is yet no other than a Compliance with the vulgarly receiv’d Hypothesis.54

No fewer than seven questions and answers reaffirming the validity of the Copernican system were published in the Apollo between 1708 and 1711, indicating that between the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first decade of the eighteenth century, Copernicanism began to be seen as a key component of polite knowledge. However, despite the editors’ efforts, some querists were even more fundamentally confused about astronomy. For instance, the issue of whether the earth or the moon moved was the subject of a dispute between friends, and the Apollo was called on to mediate: ‘Q. Gentlemen, The other Night a Friend of mine and I, looking at the Moon, fell into a deep Dispute, whether it is Fixt or Moveable; his Opinion of it was that it is Fixt, and the Earth Moveable; but mine was that the Moon is Moveable, and the Earth Fixt. Your Opinion in this point will be very acceptable to Your subscriber, N. J.’55 The Apollo’s answer demonstrated a firm commitment to the Copernican system, and even some embarrassment that one of their subscribers was still uninformed about the motion of the earth: A. Both you and your Friend are mistaken: For every one that understands but the first Elements of Astronomy knows, that according to the Copernican System of the World, the Earth Moves about the Sun in the space of a Year, and that the Moon moves about the Earth every Month. And as for the Diurnal Motion of the Moon and the whole Heavens, that is caused by the Revolution of the Earth about its Axis every 24 Hours. These Things are so Vulgarly known, that were it not to gratify the Querist, we sho’d be ashamed to Explain them.56

And when two querists desired the Apollo to decide whether the sun went around the earth, or the earth around the sun in 24 hours, the Apollo joked that the one opinion was the Ptolomaic hypothesis and that the other querist’s opinion of a year lasting one day was ‘so very New, as to be intirely his own’,57 Although by 1708, the editors of the Apollo evidently considered knowledge of earthly motion something that certainly should be known to members of polite society, if not the ‘meaner sort’, querists were not ashamed to ask what was for them still a perplexing question. Others wanted to know answers to even more basic questions, such as when and why the ‘Moon appears in different forms, as a full moon, an Half Moon, &c’, or ‘Why the sun shines when it rains?’58 Although some had more sophisticated questions, such as ‘Why dothe the Moon in the space of 24 Hours, sometimes move in Her Orb above 15 Degrees, and at other times

Scarcely 12?’, one also suspects that some subscribers struggled to believe any astronomy, as opposed to keeping to notions based on simple sense experience and Biblical teachings.59 Just as it was difficult for subscribers to reconcile Copernicanism with the daily experience of a non-moving earth, it also proved perplexing for one querist of the Apollo to comprehend the relative sizes of the sun and the earth, and so he decided to wager on the outcome. Along with threats, explaining to the editors that the outcome of a wager depended upon the answer was a common technique to ‘hurry’ an answer.60 The editors of the Apollo settled 123 real and fictitious bets during the paper’s publication, with wagerers betting fowl, bowls of punch and wine, and sums up to 20 guineas.61 Thus, one reader stated, ‘I some time since laid a Wager with a Person, who affirrned, that the Sun was far greater than the whole Earth, which I did say was impossible: but it was resolved to refer it to your Arbitration (being assured of your impartiality).’62 One wonders what the querist’s response was when the editors of the Apollo informed him that ‘the magnitude of the Sun beyond that of the Earth, is, according to Computation, in the proportion of 450 to an Unity’ [450 times larger than the Earth], or if the bet was paid.63

Pluralities of questions and pluralities of worlds Another subject for controversy in the newspapers was the idea of the moon as an earth-like world, reflecting the controversy over the plurality of worlds in wider society.64 In the first half of the seventeenth century, works published or known in England – Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Venice, 1610), Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634), John Wilkins’ Discovery (London, 1636), and Johannes Hevelius’ Selenographia (Danzig, 1647) – had advocated a moon with seas, mountains, and perhaps inhabitants. However, in 1651, the Jesuit and anti-Copernican Giovanni Battisti Riccioli argued against the idea of an inhabited moon in his magisterial work Almagestum novum astronomia.65 In response to Bernard le Bouyer de Fontanelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (translated by Aphra Behn into English in 1688), in which he posited a lunar atmosphere and inhabitants, Christian Huygens in the work translated as The Celestial worlds discover’d (London, 1698), believed that ‘the lack of atmosphere and thus the lack of water was confirmed by the immediate occultation of a body by the moon, without passing through any apparent atmosphere’, and

thus that the moon was lifeless.66 As the scientific community increasingly disavowed the notion of ‘lunarians’ or inhabitants of the moon, the idea of an inhabited moon became a ripe one for satire among Restoration authors. Samuel Butler’s The Elephant in the Moon (167 6), which mocked the Royal Society, Aphra Behn’s adaptation of a French farce about a lunar race entitled The Emperor in the Moon (1687), and Elkanah Settle’s opera, The World in the Moon (1697), used the lunar landscape not as an inspirational place of scientific wonder and discovery, but rather as a dystopia to lampoon human failings, including those of the scientific credulity of the virtuosi.67 The same shift of attitude towards the idea of a plurality of worlds is evident in the Mercury and the Apollo. There is a relationship between the Copernican theory and the acceptance of the idea of an inhabited moon; heliocentrism destroyed the Aristotelian idea of a qualitative dichotomy between the earth and heavens and thus made a theory of an infinite number of possibly-inhabited worlds more plausible. Certainly we see the same pattern of studied neutrality in the presentation of an inhabited moon and the plurality of worlds in the Mercury as we did in the presentation of Copernicanism. The Mercury, responding to a question about the purpose of the stars, said only that perhaps [the stars served] ‘for Worlds or Receptacles for other unknown Creatures of a distinct Species from Man; or for other uses.’68 However, this neutrality in the Mercury was supplanted by more evident and satiric scepticism about the plurality of worlds in the Apollo. Some of this perceptual shift may have had to do with increasing concern about the influence of French politesse and scientific discourse on English society. After the 1688 Revolution, there was a re-evaluation of the cultural relations between England and France that was bound up with the Whiggish distaste for French absolutism.69 Behn’s translation of Fontanelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, a casual and amusing scientific explanation of Descartes’ discussion of the Copernican system, thus revealed a growing suspicion about the influence of French culture and science in England as well as a deep scepticism about many of the precepts presented in Fontanelle’s work.70 Descartes’ idea of the plurality of worlds and the related concept of an inhabited moon became associated with the dangers of French influence; just as the English uncritically accepted

French fashions, Behn complained they credulously accepted French scientific ideas. In Behn’s opinion, Fontanelle’s popularization of Cartesian cosmology hath failed in his Design; for endeavouring to rend this part of Natural Philosophy familiar, he hath turned it into Ridicule; he hath pushed his wild Notion of the Plurality of Worlds to that heighth [sic] of Extravagancy, that he most certainly will confound those Readers, who have not Judgment and Wit to distinguish between what is truly solid (or, at least probable) and what is trifling and airy … [he claimed] that there are thousands of Worlds inhabited … besides our Earth, and hath urged this Fancy too far.71

For Behn, Fontanelle had clearly let his own imagination run away with him, stepping outside the boundaries of reasoned consideration of matters of fact typical of English scientific discourse, and thus failing to communicate the theories of astronomy to his polite audience. If Fontanelle had rather adhered more to the opinions of’learned Men’ and the Philosophical Transactions, the journal of the Royal Society, ‘he had deserved much more Praise’.72 The suspicion and ridicule associated with the extravagance of the Cartesian matter theory and his cosmology was also displayed in The British Apollo. Readers would sometimes append facetious names to questions, such as ‘Archimedes’, ‘Pythagoras’, or even ‘Dorothy Pear-Tree’ and ‘Stark-Staring Margery.’73 In a similar manner, one reader wrote: Apollo, In a Dispute concerning Matter, it was ask’d how the Particles of it hung together, some would solve it by pressure of the Air [Robert Boyle’s explanation], or rather A ether [a Cartesian explanation]; but this not giving Satisfaction to all that were present, you are desir’d to set it in a Clearer Light, by doing which you’ll oblige your Subscriber, and I may say, Serviceable Friend, D-s C-rt-s.74

The scepticism about matter philosophy was so pronounced that ‘Descartes’ himself was portrayed asking the Apollo for clarification! The persona ‘DsC-rt-s also described himself as a ‘serviceable’ or useful friend, but perhaps Cartesian philosophy was even too ‘serviceable’ for his own taste. After all, Descartes gave detailed explanations about how the size, shape and motion of unseen bits of matter produced all types of physical effects, his disciples following suit in using Cartesian explanations to account for all natural phenomena. We have seen that the editors of the Mercury had commented that ‘the Cartesian system is not demonstration, as all Des Cartes’ proselytes confess themselves’, and in fact the speculative tenor of Cartesian philosophy was troubling to a number of English critics and

popularizers of science who advocated Baconian empiricism.75 For instance, Edward Howard in the preface to his Remarks on the New Philosophy’ of Descartes (London, 1700) complained that ‘if we confide on the Principles of Des-Cartes, we must rely on fictitious Inventions, instead of warrantable experience.’76 As in Behn’s work, French philosophy was again portrayed as an extravagant philosophy that did not give satisfying intellectual explanations. In a like manner, the Apollo lampooned the idea of the plurality of worlds promoted by Cartesian philosophy. One querist asked: Astronomers say, There’s a World in the Moon: But what says your Godship, Apollo; For if by Your Light To Us She seems Bright, Whose Dictates so safe can we follow? Since all their fine Lectures At best are Conjectures And of what Themselves are not sure, Apollo, or None Is able Alone, This mighty great doubt for to cure.77 The Apollo replied that it could not cure this reader’s great doubt about a world in the moon, and countered in a witty and satiric fashion replete with double entendre. Apollo surveys More Illustrious Orbs, And so disregards his small Sister, That as oft as this Globe Her light did Disrobe, He scarcely can say, he Mist her. But to so many Lectures Not to add New Conjectures,

His sons will not give a Decision; For to lay about, Amidst so much Doubt, Perhaps might but cause a Derision.78 As they did with the idea of a world in the moon, the Apollo treated the subject of lunar inhabitants with a mocking incredulity. In a question which bordered on the facetious, one writer was apparently aware of tales of a populated moon and tired of a disloyal amour. She wondered if ‘luna is inhabited’ and if there were ‘faithful Lovers there’.79 The editors replied in kind to the reader termed ‘the impatient Constantia’; although it was possible the moon was inhabited, it mattered not whether ‘those Lunarians [be] false or true … Or be they brightest Forms or shew, Like Swine in foulest Weather’.80 After all, the editors explained getting to the moon and its lovers was more of a problem: ‘twill harder be to solve how you, / Alas! Will mount up thither.’81 Clearly, a serious answer about such fancies as an inhabited moon would expose the Apollo to the same satire that the editors promulgated.82

Conclusion To a significant degree, the newspapers analysed in this essay mirrored current scientific debates and perceptions of the luminaries. However, the manner in which these ideas were presented was greatly influenced by the dictates of polite culture. The Mercury promoted conversation with an aim of ‘resolving all the most nice and curious questions proposed by the ingenious of either sex’, and fielded academic controversies with a display of witty discourse. The ‘virtual salons’ of the Mercury were ones in which the editors often presented both sides of scientific debates for the delighted and acquisitive curiosity of their readers, as well as for the benefit of the publishers’ pocketbooks. However, when firm judgement was eventually passed by the Apollo about tenets of natural philosophy, polite conversation could turn into satiric censure. Heliocentrism was no longer deliciously naughty to talk about by the early eighteenth century; disbelief in its tenets became a mark of one outside polite society. Because French politesse was under suspicion, Cartesian science and its conception of a plurality of worlds was also

viewed with increasing scepticism. By the early eighteenth century, there was an increasingly fine line between being ‘scientifically literate’ in, and scientifically credulous of, polite and impolite curiosity about the natural world. Like other forms of knowledge, perceptions of the natural world were guided by the need for norms of sociability that often bypassed scientific authority. 1

The quotation is from Thomas Wright, A description of an astronomical instrument, being the Orrery Reduced (London, 1720), frontispiece. An orrery is a small model of the universe along with a moveable calendar. For more on public science, see Alan Q. Morton and Jane A. Wess, Public & Private Science: The King George III Collection (Oxford, 1993);J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries. A Study of Easy Modern Plysics (Berkeley, 1979); J. E. McClellan, Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1985); R. Porter, S. Schaffer, J. Bennett et al, Science and Profit in 18th Century London (Cambridge, 1985); Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, 1994). 2

Adrian Johns and T. Christopher Bond briefly mention the Athenian Mercury and its role in the dissemination of science, but mostly in relation to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. See Adrian Johns, ‘Miscellaneous methods: authors, societies, and journals in early modern England’, British Journal of the History of Science, 33 (2000), 159-86; T. Christopher Bond, ‘Keeping up with the latest transactions: the literary critique of scientific writing in the Hans Sloane years’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 22 (1998), 1-17. Other studies of the Mercury and British Apollo are almost entirely empirical, concentrating on counts of the numbers of questions in the newspapers that are scientific in nature. See Gilbert D. McEwen, Oracle of the Coffee House: John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (San Marino, 1972), p. 114. Subjects covered in McEwen’s survey of the Mercury included astronomy, chemistry, geography, geology, mathematics, medicine, meteorology, mineralogy, natural history, navigation, physiology, physics, and psychology. For a survey of the amounts and types of questions asked of the Apollo, see William Francis Belcher, ‘A study of the British Apollo, 1708-1711’, Ph.D. thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1950), pp. 175306. 3

The question-and-answer format was commonly used in formal literature of religious and political controversy, especially by L’Estrange’s Observator of 1681. The difference with the Mercury and the Apollo was that the editor did not pose questions for the sake of the point he wished to make. The question of the authenticity of these sources is also one that must be addressed. Since actual letters from subscribers to the editors of the Athenian Mercury survive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, most of the questions can reasonably be assumed to be authentic. See Helen Berry, “‘Nice and curious questions”: coffee houses and the representation of women in John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury’, The Seventeenth Century, 12 (1997), 257-76, p. 258; William Belcher’s study of the Apollo also indicated that the boys that delivered the newspaper also collected queries from subscribers, indicating that the paper had authentic materials, although some of the humorous poetic questions may have been inserted by the editors. See William F. Belcher, ‘The sale and distribution of the British Apollo’, in Studies in the Easy English Periodical, ed. R. P. Bond (Chapel Hill, 1957), pp. 75-101. 4

For a discussion of the censorship of early English newspapers, see Joseph Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620-1660 (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 5-31; Michael Harris, ‘The structure, ownership, and control of the press, 1620-1780’, in Newspaper History from the

Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, eds G. Boyce, J. Curran and P. Wingate (London, 1978), pp. 82-97; Keith Williams, The English Newspaper. An Illustrated History to 1900 (London, 1977), p. 19. 5

The Athenian Gazette or Casuistical Mercury Resolving all the most Nice and Curious Questions. Proposed by the Ingenious of Either Sex (4 vols, London, 1691-7); The British Apollo Or, Curious Amusements for the Ingenious. To which are Added the most Material Occurrences Foreign and Domestick. Petform’d By a Society of Gentlemen (4 vols, London, 1708-11). On one occasion when John Dunton was berating the Apollo for having stolen his idea of a question-and-answer format, the Apollo announced an issue on the subject of Dunton which was distributed free of charge to subscribers. See British Apollo, 1: 50 (30 July-4 August 1708), p. 1, and 1: 52 (6-11 August 1708), p. 1. 6

British Apollo, Frontispiece.

7

Barbara Benedict also explores the role of curiosity as a fashionable attitude in the British Apollo. See Barbara M. Benedict, A Cultural History of Easy Modern Inquiry (Chicago, 2001), pp. 98-101. 8

Bond, ‘Keeping up with the latest transactions’, p. 10.

9

McEwen, Oracle of the Coffee House, p. 114.

10

Athenian Mercury, 4: 17 (24 November 1691), p. 4.

11

Berry, ‘”Nice and curious questions”’, pp. 258, 275-6.

12

Bond, ‘Keeping up with the latest transactions’, p. 11.

13

Charles Gildon, A History of the AthenianS ociery (London, 1692), reprinted in The Athenian Oracle, eds John Dunton, Richard Sault, Samuel Wesley and Charles Gildon (4 vols, 3rd edn, London, 1728), iv, p. 6. 14

John Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton (London, 1705), p. 28. Swift’s poem may be found in the Supplement to the Fifth Volume of the Athenian Gazette (London, 1691), pp. 2-6. 15

McEwen, Oracle of the Criffee House, p. 30.

16

Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Shaftesbury and the progress of politeness’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 18 (1984-5), 186-214. 17

Klein, ‘Politeness for plebes’, p. 363.

18

For the effects of the popularization of Newton on coffeehouse culture, see Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660-1750 (Cambridge, 1992). 19

Playwright Elkanah Settle’s parody of the Athenian Mercury, The New Athenian Comedy, satirizes the paucity of numbers in the newspaper’s editorial staff. Settle commented specifically about the representation of the editors in the ‘Emblem of the Athenian Society’ (discussed below), and stated, ‘I confess Mr. Engraver has made a pretty Jolly Company of ‘em: but there indeed the Painter is a little too poetical; and our Athenians have a little strain’d a point: For when the true Muster Roll of that not ovemumerous Society shall be examined, for supply of that defect, you must consider that the Veil’d Faces are by way of Faggots to fill up the Troop; And in that fair Convention of divine Enthusiasts you must not take ‘em all for the Boanerges of Wit, the Organs of Thunder, but like Guns in a Fireship, a Tire of painted wooden Tools to make up the Show.’ Setde sarcastically observed of the editors, that ‘the fewer the hands, the harder the Labor, and consequendy the greater the Honor, the Illustration of which Honor is the subject of our present Entertainment.’ See E[lkanah] S[ettle], The New Athenian Comedy (London, 1693), ‘The Preface to the Reader’, sig. a1v.

20

DNB, s.v. ‘Sault, Richard’.

21

Richard Sault, A Treatise of Algebra, According to the late Improvements, applied to Numerical Questions and Geometry, annexed to William Lrybourn, Pleasure with Profit: Consisting of Recreations of Divers Kinds (London, 1694); John Houghton, A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, 46 (16 June 1693), p. 1. 22

Henry Lowood and Robin E. Rider, ‘Literary technology and typographic culture: the instrument of print in early modern science’, Perspectives on Science, 2 (1994), 1-37, p. 18. For more on Leyboum’s publishing career, see Anna Marie Roos, ‘William Leyboum’, in Absolutism and the Scientific Revolution, 1600-1720: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Christopher Baker (Westport, CT, forthcoming 2002). 23

Dunton, Life and Errors, p. 261.

24

Bond, ‘Keeping up with the latest transactions’, p. 12. Dunton tried to deal with questions from women separately in the Ladies Mercury, publishing under the pseudonym of T. Pratt; the Ladies Mercury only lasted a few issues. In its first edition, ‘Pratt’ carefully addressed the editors of the Athenian Mercury, claiming their paper was ‘not at all intended to encroach upon your Athenian Province. We acquiesce to yield up to You that fair and larger Field; the Examination of Learning, Nature, Arts, Science, and indeed the whole World; being contented to bound our narrow Speculation to only that little Sublunary, Woman’ (The Ladies Mercury, 1 (27 February 1693), p. 1). 25

Belcher, ‘A study of the British Apollo, 1708-11’, pp. 156-7.

26

DNB, s.v. ‘Coward, William’.

27

‘Lost and found’, British Apollo, 1: 1 (13 February 1708), p. 1.

28

‘An Emblem of the Athenian Society’, in Gildon, History of the Athenian Society. Kathryn Shevelow also analyses this emblem more generally for evidence of female readership in Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Easy Modern Period (London, 1989), pp. 82-6. 29

‘An Emblem’.

30

Ibid.

31

Ibid.

32

Ibid.

33

My thanks to Dr Natasha Glaisyer for this insight.

34

John Dunton, Proposals for a National Reformation of Matters (London, 1694); John Dunton, England’s Alamm (London, 1693); John Dunton, Dunton’s Whipping Post (London, 1706). 35

Brian Cowan, ‘What was masculine about the public sphere? Gender and the coffeehouse milieu in post-Restoration England’, History Workshop Journal, 51 (2001), 127-58, p. 148. My thanks to Dr Cowan for the reference to his article. 36

Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), p. 58. In Whitney’s work, the emblem illustrates an ape thrusting a dog’s paws into a fire, and the sententiawas ‘Non dolo, sed vl. Diehl interprets this emblem in the following fashion: ‘Just as the ape who wanted chestnuts roasting in the fire thrust the dog into the fire to get the chestnuts for it, so kings, heartless in their ambition, force subjects to undergo trial so that their desires are gratified.’ See Huston Diehl, An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500-1700 (Norman, 1986), p. 14. 37

Dunton, Life and Errors, p. 316, quoted in Berry, “‘Nice and curious questions’”, p. 258.

38

Dunton, Life and Errors, p. 261.

39

Robert Iliffe, ‘Author-mongering: The “editor” between producer and consumer’, in Bermingham and Brewer, The Consumption of Culture, pp. 166-92, p. 169. 40

Helen Berry, in a recent article, has instead argued that the ‘Emblem’ of the Mercury illustrates that the Athenian Mercury’s core readership was among men and women of the middling sort. While this is true, it seems important to note that Dunton shows evidence of a worrisome fringe readership from the lower orders that threatened polite bourgeois culture. See Helen Berry, ‘An early coffee house periodical and its readers: the Athenian Mercury, 1691-1697’, The London Journal, 25 (2000), 14-33. 41

Sarah Goodfellow, ‘Such masculine strokes: Aphra Behn as translator of a Discovery of New Worlds’, Aibion, 28 (1996), 229-50, p. 242. 42

Athenian Mercury, 2: 6 (13 June 1691), question 9.

43

Athenian Mercury, 5: 7 (22 December 1691), question 11.

44

Ibid.

45

Dunton, Religio Bibliopolae: Or The Religion of a Bookseller (London, 1728), pp. 55-6. This work’s first edition was in1694. Adrian Johns also notes that Dunton was a fervent believer in heliocentrism; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998), p. 144. 46

John Seller, Pocket Book, Containing severall Choice Colleaions in Arithmetic, Astrono”!)’, Geometry, Surveying, Dialling, Navigation, Astrology, Geography, Measuring, Gageing (London, 1677). There is also a diagram of Descartes’ theory of the tides, and the phases of the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, Mercury, as well as the moon and the sun with its sunspots. Seller was hydrographer to the king, compiler, publisher, and seller of maps, charts and geographical books. His shop was in the Hermitage at Wapping; DNB, s.v. ‘Seller, John’. 47

Klein, ‘Politeness for plebes’, pp. 368-9.

48

For a discussion of the Mercury and casuistry, see G. A. Starr, ‘From casuistry to fiction: the importance of the Athenian Mercury’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 28 (1967), 17-32. 49

In a later work, Athenianism: or, the new projects of Mr. J. D. (London, 1710), Dunton explicitly claims that his ‘chief Design in writing and publishing these Six Hundred Projects, is to furnish the VIRTUOSI with Matters fit for pious and ingenious Conversations, which perhaps I have perform’ d in some Measure, because of the great, and not unpleasant Variety of Things they contain.’ In this case, Dunton’s virtual conversations were intended to spur real ones. See ‘The Dedication to the Athenian Society’, in Athenianism, p. iv. 50

Shapin, Social History of Tmth, p. 125.

51

Stewart, The Rise of PublicS cience, p. 111.

52

The British Apollo, Being the Quarterly Paper, in which are Inserted those Questions and Answers, for which we had not Room before, 1: 1 (April 1708), p. 1. A quarterly supplement to the Apollo was issued with each of the three volumes. The reader’s comment that the earth was elliptical clearly indicates confusion about Kepler’s first planetary law, which states that planetary orbits are elliptical. 53

Ibid.

54

Ibid., pp. 1-2.

55

British Apollo, 3: 75 (15-18 September 1710), p. 2.

56

Ibid.

57

British Apollo, 1: 15 (31 March-3 April 1708), p. 1.

58

British Apollo, 2: 27 (24-29 June 1709), p. 2; British Apollo, 2: 1 (30 March 1708), p. 2.

59

British Apollo. Being the Supernumerary paper for the Month of April in which are Inserted those Questions and Answers, for which we had not Room before, 1: 1 (April 1708), p. 2. 60

Belcher, ‘A study of the British Apollo’, p. 46.

61

British Apollo, 2: 91 (20-23 January 1710), p. 2; 3: 148 (2-5 March 1711), p. 2, and 3: 57 (47 August 1710), p. 1. Readers of the Apollo were not unique in their wagering upon scientific outcomes; scientists throughout history have bet on scientific results, or used prizes of liquor, books, or sums of money as rewards for discovery. See James Glanz, ‘Putting their money where their minds are’, The New York Times on the Web (August 25, 1998), http://www.ishipress.com/scibets.htm. 62

British Apollo, 1: 66 (24-29 September 1708), p. 2.

63

Ibid.

64

Karl S. Guthke, The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds, from the Copernican Revolution to Modern Science Fiction, trans. Helen Atkins (Ithaca, 1990); Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge, 1982). 65

Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Almagestum novum astronomiam veterem novamque complectens observationibus aliorum, et propriis novisque theorematibus, problematibus, ac tabu/is promotam, in tres tomos ditributam (Bologna, 1651). 66

Steven J. Dick, ‘The origins of the extraterrestrial life debate and its relation to the Scientific Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 41 (1980), 3-27, p. 16; Christian Huygens, The Celestial worlds discovered, or, Conjectures concerning the inhabitant, plants and productions of the worlds in the planets (London, 1698). While Huygens doubted there was a ‘world in the moon’, he did think it was possible that other planets in the solar system were inhabited, so he was not wholly opposed to the idea of the plurality of worlds as such. 67

Benedict, Curiosity, pp. 59-60. Samuel Butler, ‘An Elephant in the Moon’, in The genuine remains in verse and prose of Mr. Samuel Butler, Author of Hudibras … In Two Volumes (2 vols, London, 1759), ii, pp. 25-58; Aphra Behn, The Emperor of the Moon, a farce; as it is acted by Their Majesties servants at the Queens Theatre (London, 1687), in The Works of Aphra Behn. Volume 7: The Plays 1682-1696, ed. Janet Todd (London, 1996); Elkanah Settle, The World in the Moon, an opera, as it is perform’d at the Theatre in Dorset garden by His Majesty’s servants (London, 1697). 68

Dunton, Religio Bibliopolae, p. 56; Athenian Mercury, 6: 22 (1 0 May 1692), p. 1.

69

Lawrence E. Klein, ‘The figure of France: the politics of sociability in England, 1600-1715’, Yale French Studies, 92 (1997), 30-45, p. 44. 70

Anna Marie Roos, Luminaries in the Natural World: The Sun and the Moon in England, 1400-1720, Worchester Polytechnic Institute Studies 20 (New York and Bern, 2001), pp. 235-6. While my book was in press, Mary Terrall came largely to the same conclusions about Behn’s wariness of French culture and Descartes: see Mary Terrall, ‘Natural philosophy for fashionable readers’, in Books and the Sciences in History, eds Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 239-54, p. 243. 71

Aphra Behn, ‘The Translator’s Preface’, in A Discovery of New Worlds from the French by Bernard De Fontanelle (London, 1688), in The Works of Aphra Behn. Volume 4: Seneca Unmasqued and Other Prose Translations, ed. Janet Todd (London, 1993), p. 77. 72

Ibid., pp. 77-8.

73

British Apollo, 1: 65 (22-24 September 1708), p. 1 (‘Pythagoras’); British Apollo Quarterly (1708), p. 8 (‘Archimedes’); British Apollo, 1: 93 (29-31 December 1708), p. 3 (‘Dorothy PearTree’); British Apollo, 1: 82 (19-24 November 1708), p. 3 (‘Stark-staring Margery’). 74

British Apollo, 2: 54 (28-30 September 1709), p. 2. The material within brackets is my own.

75

Athenian Mercury, 5: 7 (22 December 1691), question 11.

76

See Peter Harrison, ‘The influence of Cartesian cosmology in England’, in Descartes’ Natural Philosophy, eds Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster and John Sutton (London, 2000), pp. 168-92, p. 177. 77

British Apollo, 1: 66 (24-29 September 1708), p. 3.

78

Ibid.

79

British Apollo, 1: 13 (24-26 March 1708), p. 2. Ibid.

80

Ibid.

81

Ibid.

82

Another possibility is that William Coward, one of the editors of the Apollo, repeatedly attacked Descartes and his ideas of mind-body dualism in print: DNB, s.v. ‘Coward, William’.

Chapter 6

French Conversation or ‘Glittering Gibberish’? Learning French in Eighteenth-Century England Michèle Cohen

The idea that French is a frivolous and ‘showy’ female accomplishment has beleaguered the study of French in England for over a hundred years. It has meant that for English men to speak French is somehow effeminate.1 But it has not always been so. What tends to be forgotten is that for centuries, no English gentleman would have been considered accomplished if he did not speak French. French had long been central to the education of the English nobility of both sexes, and was considered essential not just to the social, but to the public career of young men of rank. But it was in the eighteenth century that French cultural practices and the French language became central to the fashioning of the gentleman.2 This is related to the rise of ‘Politeness’, a ‘complete system of manners and conduct based on the arts of conversation’.3 Since French was thought to be the most polite and refined European tongue, it was not just fashionable for gentlemen to learn it, but also necessary. Thus, though both sexes were expected to speak French, it was actually more important for men to know it than for women. Indeed, as educationalist Vicesimus Knox remarked in 1781, for a gentleman ‘to be ignorant of [French] is both a disgrace and a disadvantage’.4 By the middle of the nineteenth century, this had all changed. “While the fashion for learning French had increased for girls, English gentlemen either knew French but pretended not to, or did not know it at all. Prime Minister Melbourne who, according to Queen Victoria spoke French ‘very well’, ‘took pleasure in the affectation that he spoke French badly’.5

The aim of this chapter is to trace this remarkable transformation by looking at grammars for teaching French in England over the eighteenth century.6 These texts reveal that there was a shift from an emphasis on speaking and conversation in the early part of the century, to a stress on grammar at the end of the century. This shift, importantly, downgraded speaking, though this is not obvious from what is being said about the aims of French instruction. It also entailed, eventually, a gendering in the study of French, so that by the middle of the nineteenth century ‘French conversation’ had become the female accomplishment par excellence, while French was taught to males as if it was a dead language.7 The authors of the texts were not ‘grammarians’ as such but more or less renowned teachers who wrote up their methods.8 Abel Boyer is one exception, publishing political pamphlets and The English Theophrastus (London, 1699), as well as a famous Dictionnaire Royal (London, 1699).9 His Compleat French Master for Lzdies and Gentlemen was a highly popular grammar, running through sixteen editions between 1694 and 1767. Francis Cheneau, on the other hand, was a well-known teacher who attracted the young nobility and gentry for French instruction at his house in Westminster as well as Bishop Sprat’s sponsorship. Yet another author, Claude Mauger, was ‘the most popular French teacher in the late seventeenth century’.10 Teacher and author Lewis Chambaud’s grammars were recommended by Erasmus Darwin in his Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schoofs.11 Pierre de Lainé was French tutor to the British royal family, while James Fauchon taught French at Cambridge and Philip le Breton was master of the academy in Poland Street, London. In the introduction to his article on the teaching of French pronunciation in eighteenth-century England, J. S. Spink provided unequivocal evidence of the growing popularity of French study throughout the century. He calculated that ‘between 1694 and 1800 no fewer than 88 different grammars, dictionaries and methods … of the French language were published in England’, 47 of the 88 being published after 1780.12 Where was French instruction available? The ‘great schools’ (such as Eton and Westminster) did not include French in their curriculum, as they concentrated on Latin and the classics.13 Grammar schools were usually classical as well, though, as John Roach has argued, they might also offer ‘modern’ subjects, including French. Modern subjects generally constituted the curriculum of the various private

schools, academies and boarding schools that flourished in the eighteenth century, since anyone who so wished could establish one.14 Their advertisements typically vaunted their French instruction in more detail than their other offerings.15 Thus, the boarding school for young gentlemen established in 1747 at Theobald’s House near Cheshunt, claimed that ‘for the Ready Attainment of French, a Native of the Country attends Youths from Morning till Night, both in School and at their Diversions’. The boarding school for young ladies run by Mr and Mrs Phillips in Lawrence Street, near Chelsea, advertised in 1750 that ‘for the better and more speedy Accomplishments of the Boarders, Lectures on Religious Subjects and the Social Virtues, in French and English alternately, are given twice a week gratis, in a new Method, never practised before in a Boarding School for young Ladies’.16 These schools were likely to be attended by the middling classes, though debates over the ‘promiscuous’ mix of middling and upper classes, especially in girls’ boarding schools, suggest that the issue is quite complex.17 Elite males and females were both taught mainly at home, especially in the first part of the century, and learned French with a private tutor or governess. There was however a major difference in the way they might achieve fluency. Boys might learn the rudiments of the language at home but they were expected to perfect their French in France, when travelling on their grand tour.18 This was so common a practice that a model letter in a French grammar book has a girl writing to her brother travelling on his grand tour, apologising for her errors: she is only learning French ‘en Angleterre’ while he, à la source in France, is certain to attain perfection.19 Advertisements placed by tutors offering their services took account of this difference. Mr Mack Gregory could teach ‘the French of Paris and Angers’ not just to ‘gentlemen who have not Travel’d’, but to ladies ‘who can’t easily Travel’, promising that they might ‘be as well Accomplished here at Home’.20 Paris and Angers were two cities on grand tourists’ itineraries, where they might have stopped for a while to study French with the local accent. Advertisements also addressed the anxiety that one might be taught a ‘popular’ accent by a teacher or governess of the wrong social class.21 Some authors actually claimed that they would teach the pronunciation of the polite.22

The main difference between pupils was not social class as such, but rather whether they were learned – that is knew Latin – or not. This mattered because at the time, French grammatical categories, like those of English, were stretched onto the frame of Latin grammar. One consequence is that nouns were declined. For example, Nominative:

une chanson

a song

Genitive:

d’une chanson

from/of a song

Dative:

à une chanson

to a song

Vocative:

O chanson

O song

Ablative: d’une chanson of a song Texts sometimes specified whether they were designed for the learned and/or for the unlearned as well. It was not until 1750 that Lewis Chambaud declared that there were ‘no such things as cases and declensions’ in French and English.23 Even then, it took more than fifty years for the practice to be abandoned. Boys from elite families studied Latin and were therefore familiar with both grammar and the vocabulary of grammar, but their sisters were not. However, though Abel Boyer had claimed that females were ‘cloy’d and puzled, by the long intricate Rules which are commonly set down in Grammars’, their lack of Latin grammar training was not generally treated as a serious problem.24 A dialogue in Claude Mauger’s French Grammar shows how they could be taught grammar while learning French – or at least, how French masters thought they would teach them. Entre une Dame et le Maitre de Langues. Monsieur, je n’ay pas apris la Langue Larine, je ne sçay pas ce que c’est que Grammaire, qu’un Nom, qu’un Verbe … je voudrais pourtant bien apprendre par Règles … Je vous prie de m’en informer. Il est très raisonnable … il faut sçavoir les fondemens. La Grammaire est l’Art de bien parler.25 [Sir, I haven’t learned the Latin tongue, I do not know what Grammar, Noun, Verb mean, and yet I would like to learn by rule. Would you please teach me about them. It is a very reasonable request It is necessary to know the foundations. Grammar is the art of speaking well.]

The lady then asks what is a syllable, then a phrase, then how many parts language is composed of, and so on. At no point is her ignorance used to denigrate her, on the contrary. At mid-century, author James Fauchon even claimed that his female pupil (to whom his book is dedicated) had made more progress ‘without any previous knowledge of Grammatical Rules’ than someone trained ‘of a Scholastick education’.26 While this obviously served to advertise the efficacy of his own method, it also provides evidence that in the eighteenth century, French instruction was not gendered, unlike in the nineteenth century, when females were thought unable to cope with grammar.27 Easy eighteenth-century texts were usually constructed on the following model: a short grammar section which included pronunciation, prosody, the parts of speech, syntax and verbs, and a large section I call ‘language’: vocabulary, ‘Familiar Phrases’, ‘Dialogues’, Gallicisms, Anglicisms and proverbs, poems, ‘Jest and Repartees’, a choice of ‘letters upon Gallantry’ and even songs.28 My discussion of these early texts will focus on ‘Familiar Phrases’ and ‘Dialogues’, as these were considered the main means of achieving the ‘Habit of speaking’.29 ‘Familiar Phrases’ were brief exchanges intended to provide pupils with phrases or sentences which modern language teachers would now call ‘functional’: how to thank, agree, consent and deny, get angry, what to say when playing cards or billiards, how to inquire about the health of one’s interlocutor: Bonjour Madame

Good day Madam

Bonjour Mademoiselle

Good day Miss

Comment vous portez-vous?

How are you?

Fort bien, à votre service,

Very well, at your service

D’où venez-vous?

Where are you coming from?

Je viens de chez nous

I have come from home

Avez-vous déjeuné

Have you had lunch?

Pas encore

Not yet

Voulez-vous déjeuner

Would you like to have lunch?

Je vous remercie

Thank you

Je n’ay pas d’appétit

I have no appetite

Qu’avez-vous?

What is wrong?

J’ay mal à la tête

I have a headache30

and so on. ‘Dialogues’ consisted of longer exchanges often depicting the dramas of everyday life. These ‘discourses by way of conversation, both upon serious and delightful Matters’ included dialogues such as ‘between a gentleman and his tailor’, ‘between two young ladies’, ‘between a lover and his mistress’, ‘between a father and a daughter whom he wants to marry off to a much older man’, about the English countryside and the English nation, and, often, a conversation on learning French and how pleasant and important it is to learn this ‘universal’ language.31 ‘Dialogue X: Pour Parler Frans;ois’ (Plate 6.1), concerns the importance of learning French, a universal language and spoken at European courts; the interlocutors compare French and English and which is more difficult to learn; the best method for learning French is to speak it, even if one knows only a few phrases.32 Neither ‘Dialogues’ nor ‘Familiar Phrases’ were graded for difficulty, nor were they designed to illustrate grammatical points. They were intended to be memorized. Dialogues could also serve to advertise an author’s publications – Boyer refers to his own Dictionnaire Royal in the dialogue cited above – or his method; Francis Cheneau, who opposed the memorizing of dialogues, has a character declare that he wants to try Cheneau’s method because learning by rote is so difficult and time-consuming. In another dialogue, someone’s sister has reached the stage of being able to ‘tourner tout I’Anglois en Franrois’ [translate all English into French] quickly and easily because she has followed Cheneau’s method. Dialogues could also be used to make a dig at the competition. Two characters discuss how difficult it is to find a good French teacher. One reason is that he should be both sçavant [learned] and speak French fluently but there are many French teachers who claim to know Latin even when they do not; ‘they use all the same Mauger’s Grammar’ which not only does not explain everything, but is full of errors.33 In addition to memorizing ‘Dialogues’ and phrases for conversation, pupils were encouraged to write ‘compositions’, that is, to translate texts from English to French with a dictionary, referring to rules as the need arose. We learn from Boyer’s ‘Dialogue X’ quoted above what books might be

used for such composltions: the common prayers, La Fontaine’s edition of Aesop’s Fables, Molière’s Comedies, Telemachus, Don Quixote. Though some moralists objected, it seems to have been common, especially for girls, to read prayers or psalms in French as part of language practice. Mrs Delany, for example, advised her niece to ‘read the Psalms for the morning in French, and some French lesson’ before breakfast, if there was time.34 Composition was Cheneau’s favourite and much advertised method, as he explains in the introduction to his French Grammar.

Plate 6.1 Excerpt from ‘Dialogue X’, in Abel Boyer, The Compleat French Master for Ladies and Gentlemen (10th edn, London, 1729). British Library shelfmark 1607/249, reproduced by permission of the British Library. At first, read over all [the grammar] rules two or three days, stop a little to the Articles, and see the Appellative Nouns which take always le, la, les, … and du, de, de la, des …

Contrary to the proper names which take not; See the Tables of all the Verbs Regular, and Irregular … Begin the third day to compose by the help of a Dictionary; without which you shall never have the French. Continue every day to turn what English you can into French, and it will not be past a month but you shall find a great Improvement.35

Not surprisingly, a character in a dialogue remarks that one learns much more when one has to find words oneself in a dictionary, as Cheneau recommends. Composition, however, also required that masters spend time correcting the translations. This is perhaps why Cheneau defines a bad teacher as one who just gives his pupils dialogues to learn by heart and not enough compositions. In the first part of the eighteenth century, there was only one way to proflciency – constant oral practice: ‘La Méthode la plus facile pour apprendre le Franrois, est de le parler souvent’ [The easiest method for learning French is to speak it often].36 As Cheneau tells us, ‘I [have] always caused my Scholars, after their Compositions were perfected, to get them by Heart, and take every Opportunity to speak and hold Discourse; for it is Practice only that can make the greatest Scholar perfect in Conversation of every Language’37 Most authors nevertheless also recommended a foundation in grammar and joining rules to practice.38 Without grammar, wrote Guy Miege, learning a language is ‘properly building in the Air’,39 A comparison of French language teaching texts published in the first and the second half of the eighteenth century reveals that a major shift was taking place. Comparing what two authors said was the best way to learn to speak French highlights the nature of this shift. For Cheneau in 1723, it was by constant practice; for Chambaud in 1758, it was by understanding the rules of the language. The impetus to learn French grammatically rather than by conversation originally lay in the concern to achieve and maintain a standard of correctness, and it would seem that at least until the mid 1770s, there were controversies about whether French should be studied mainly by memorizing texts and practising them orally, or by rules. But the trend towards grammar is clear. For example in the first (1694) edition of Abel Boyer’s Compleat French Master, the number of pages allocated to grammar is 127 and to vocabulary and language is 254; in the eighth edition of 1729, the number of pages allocated to grammar is 157 and to language, 215. By contrast, in Lewis Chambaud’s Grammar of the French Tongue (1758), the grammar section takes up 306 pages and the language section 55, and in V. J. Peyton’s The True Principles of the French Language (1757), the grammar section

spreads over 392 pages and the language section over 156 pages.40 The ‘Art of Grammar’, wrote Peyton, was ‘the golden Key to unlock all other liberal Arts and Sciences’. To learn it meant becoming one of the initiates, an invitation directed particularly at females.41 There was also a practical reason why a grammar-based method was attractive. Learning large amounts of vocabulary and dialogues by rote was very time-consuming, and the claims made for grammar made it appear like a short cut to proflciency. But there were other reasons as well. It is the way Lewis Chambaud defined grammar that best reveals the tenor of the shift. In the introduction to the Grammar of the French Tongue, he defined ‘grammar’, conventionally, as ‘the art of speaking a language’ but in addition, he defined an ‘art’ as ‘a set of Rules digested into a methodical order, for the teaching and learning of something.’42 The key word here is ‘rule’. Like Cheneau and Boyer, Chambaud’s aim was to enable students to converse on all occasions, but his method for achieving fluency was diametrically opposed to theirs. For them and other authors in the first part of the century, rules were a sort of mode d’emploi, a set of practical instructions to help composition, conversation and correctness. This is precisely what Chambaud criticized: masters make students ‘get by heart words and common loose-sentences, but without shewing them what grammatical dependance [sic] each word has upon another’. When pupils translate French authors, he advised, they must ‘minutely’ take notice of the order of the construction, and then, and not before, turn English into French.43 Chambaud stressed rules and syntax not merely to achieve correctness, but because The right placing and using of words … require a constant and steady application of mind, and cannot be acquired but by much meditating upon the language’.44 Grammar, unlike rote, involved the mind. Chambaud’s work is crucial to the history of French language teaching in England, because it represents the emergence of modern methods. The conceptual basis for his method became the rationale for French instruction in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. For instance, one central feature of Chambaud’s work was the concept of grading for difficulty, a feature which became commonplace but which earlier texts lacked. Grading is at the heart of Chambaud’s complex re-structuring (or deconstruction) of grammar. The section on pronunciation in The Art of Speaking French is an interesting illustration of his methodology. It is not that previous grammars lacked sections on pronunciation, but that they

lacked the careful incremental steps that were at the heart of Chambaud’s method. The pronunciation section, which spreads over seven pages, begins with tables on the pronunciation of all the vowels. The next set is a table of mostly nonsense syllables to be learned by heart. ou

u

an

in

on

un

hou

hu

han

hin

hon

hun

mou

mu

man

min

mon

mun

bou

bu

ban

bain

bon

bun

pou vu ven vin This table is followed by lists of monosyllabic words, aout, beau, bee, mai, mou [August, handsome, beak, May, soft], two more tables of words ending in ‘consonants that ought not to be pronounced’, and one table of combination of sounds. Each step had to be fully mastered before the next was attempted. ‘When [the student] has learnt all those combinations, go through them over again after the same manner … ‘till the Master is convinced by his pupil’s reading that he has them thoroughly, and they have made a lasting impression on his mind.’45 After the pupil had mastered the pronunciation, he was set to learn the grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Chambaud rejected the usual order of presentation starting with articles and began instead with adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions, which he argued were easier because they were invariable. When the pupil had gone through the grammar, ‘make him parse, that is, account for the construction of every word of his lesson, and shew how each governs or is governed of another in the sentence.’ Nothing could be left unexplained because the sooner the student learned these exercises, the sooner he would be able to practise the language.46 Despite the much greater importance he gave to grammar, Chambaud did not completely abandon functional elements of language like the earlier ‘Familiar Phrases’, however the space devoted to these was much reduced.47 His ‘common forms of speech’ include exchanges like the following: AL’école

At school

Qu’est-ce que vous avez

What is the matter

Il se moque de moi

He is making fun of me

Il me dit des sottises

He says silly things to me

Venez ça vous deux

Come here both of you

Monsieur ce n ‘est pas moi

Sir it is not me

Vous allez avoir le fouet

You will be whipped

Culotte bas

Down with your trousers

Monsieur je vous en prie …

Sir I beg you

Je ne le ferai plus

I will never do it again

Never in my whole life jamais de ma vie.48 Nor did he oppose ‘Dialogues’ as such, though as early as 1751, he was contemptuous of the ‘Dialogues’ written by French masters – full, as he put it, of ‘oui Monsieur and non Madame … inserted for want of better material’. His own ‘Dialogues’ consisted instead of selected extracts from Moliere’s comedies, because, as he put it with unusual modesty, they were better than any he could have written.49 The preface to The Att of Speaking French (1772), which is a treatise upon method as well as a manual for language teachers, represents the culmination and refinement of Chambaud’s ideas since the early 1750s. In this preface, we can see that the controversy about rote learning and practice versus grammar was still ongoing. ‘Some people’, Chambaud writes, ‘urge that the best way to learn language is … by practice; that it is impossible to make … rules upon a living language, which is entirely grounded upon use; … [and] that ‘tis too tedious and painful for children to get such a Grammar by heart’. But, he argued, there was no other way of attaining ‘exactness and propriety in the writing and speaking of a language … than studying methodically the principles and rules of it, after the manner I propose’. Above all, the aim of language learning was not ‘to pratde something of French’. This was a direct criticism, not just of the methods by which masters ‘labour hard to beat into [the pupilsj heads as many common sentences as they can’, like parrots, but more importandy, of the social role of French in the polite society of the time.50 Like many educationalists and moralists of his day, Chambaud condemned parents’ desire for their children to display in ‘an assembly that they can speak some French words and phrases’.51 While ignorant parents were satisfied, the pupils learned nothing of method or principles, and knew nothing ‘thoroughly’ – a term which was

to become a byword of French teaching by the grammatical method. It was precisely because pupils were forced to speak French all the time, Chambaud explained, that they merely acquired ‘the knack of talking a glittering Gibberish, which no-body can make anything of. He even opposed the practice of sending boys to France to live with French families, at least until they were ‘grounded’ in the principles of the language.52 This may seem extreme, but it became the rationale upon which French was taught in the nineteenth century. As the eighteenth century came to a close, however, increasing numbers of authors noted that learning grammar was ‘disagreeable’ and that the study of language was ‘dry, tedious and tiresome’ or ‘disgustful’ to young people. It was even claimed that ‘many grammars protract the improvement of youth’.53 Grammar had not fulfilled its promise; it was not a panacea. This may account, at least in part, for the proliferation of texts that claimed to avoid the shortcomings of rule-based methods by devising ‘new and original’ plans.54 What these might entail can only be conveyed by providing some illustrations. The ‘originality’ of John Murdoch’s plan, in The Pronunciation and Orthography of the French Lmguage Rendered Perfectly Easy on a Plan Quite Original (1788), consists of introducing sounds in lists of monosyllabic words and nonsense syllables so as not to ‘distract’ the attention from the ‘single focus’ of the sound to be learned. Thus the vowel A is exemplified by a list of words including a

a

ça

that

pat

nonsense syllable

bac

nonsense syllable

fac

nonsense syllable

carnaval

carnival

caftan

caftan

plantat

planted

amassant

gathering

campagnard

rural

the vowel O is exemplified by o

o

os

bone

coq

rooster

bloc

block

fond

bottom (of container)

pont

bridge

porc

pig

jonc reed By using words containing only the vowel to be exemplified, Murdoch claimed, pupils would avoid the confusions they usually face. He seems however to have overlooked the confusion that was bound to arise when pupils encountered the nasalized ã (in caftan, plantat, amassant and campagnard) and õ (in fond, pont, jonc) in his examples, for which he provides no explanation. Another ‘originality’ is his organization of the vocabulary phonetically, to illustrate sound distinctions. This includes homophone groupings such as cinq, sein, sain, seint [five, breast, healthy, nonsense syllable]; words that differ from each other by one gradation in sound such as somme, sommet [sum, summit]; and finally, ‘those French words where the same letters differ in sound, or signification and sometimes both, according to the accentuation or connection with other words.’ For example, est varies both in sound and in meaning depending on where it is placed in a sentence: il est vrai, est-il vrai, and l’Est est un point cardinal [it is true, is it true, the east is a cardinal point).55 Bridel Arleville’s plan, in Practical Accidence of the French Tongue upon a more Extensive and Easy Plan than any Extant (1798), promised to be an improvement on other grammars because it join[ed] practice to theory, and of course must facilitate the progress of learners, without constraining them to the tedious task of getting by heart 100, and, as in some Grammars, 160 pages of elementary rules, the dryness and insignificancy of which, when not exemplified, are sufficient to dishearten the most willing scholars.56

Arleville’s ‘easy’ plan produced instead a verb section which spread over one hundred and sixty three pages, about two thirds of his text. The

following is an excerpt of his ‘System of Verbs’ that he grouped according to their alphabetical and phonetic terminations. So Verbs in -aindre plaindre

to pity

craindre

to fear

contraindre to constrain form their singular of the present of the Indicative by changing -dre final of the present of the infinitive into s, s, t, and their perfect like those in -aincre. Verbs in -eindre ceindre

to inclose or gird

feindre

to feign

peindre

to paint

enfreindre

to infringe

empreindre to imprint are conjugated like the verbs in aindre. Verbs with the next termination, oindre, are also said to be conjugated like the verbs in aindre and so on. Each set of terminations was followed by ‘promiscuous exercises’, sentences to translate into French. The exercise following verbs in -aindre, -eindre and oindre. included sentences such as ‘I besprinkled puss [pussy cat] so finely as to put out all at once the fervour of his friendship; You would openly violate the laws if you were not afraid of punishment; in pretending to go a hunting, he took flight’.57 Though Arleville expected his plan to lessen ‘the labour and fatigue of Teachers’ by contributing to ‘the quicker improvement of their Pupils’, it is not immediately obvious to a modern reader how it facilitated the learning of verbs. Ultimately, one cannot fail to wonder about the efficacy of a system which provides a separate termination for verbs in euvoir of which pleuvoir is the sole member.58 Not all of the new plans and innovations were as ill thought-out as Murdoch’s or as laborious as Arleville’s. Bernard Calbris, for example, designed an elegant set of tables mapping the place of pronouns where the layout on the page clearly illustrates the structural ordering of the pronouns in simple sentences (Plate 6.2). Table 2 and 3 illustrate the same process with Y and En, and Table 4 all the pronouns at once.59

Overall, the most striking characteristic of the grammars and practical plans devised in the latter part of the century is that whatever the organizing principle, it entailed the sacrifice of meaning. From Huguenin Du Mitand’s pronunciation exercises including monosyllabic phrases of the type:

Plate 6.2 Table of the order of pronouns in the passe compose, in Bernard Calbris, The Rational Guide to the French Tongue (London, 1797), p. 68. British Library shelfmark 1212.e.15, reproduced by permission of the British Library. un bain froid

a cold bath

un beau jeu

a good game

deux à deux

two by two

des oeufs frais

fresh eggs

je vous ai vu I saw you and so on for 110 examples, to Reverend J. B. A. Gérardot’s exercise on the accidence of nouns, with such phrases as ‘From under the Slime of the Pond’, ‘Besides the Limbs of the Calves’, the communicative aim of language learning had become secondary.60 Chambaud’s contention, that it was grammar that was concerned with the ‘Genius of the language’, relegated ‘the significations of words’ or idioms to dictionaries.61 Indeed, vocabulary could even be a by-product of grammar teaching. Henri Gratte claimed that ‘On ne peut pas douter que quand un Enfant aura appris et recite attentivement toutes les Règles contenues dans cette Grammaire avec leurs Exemples, if ne sache la signification des mots qui y sont renftrmes.’62 [It is certain that when a child will have learned and recited all the rules contained in this grammar, he will have mastered the meaning of all the words they include.] Although, as noted earlier, Chambaud retained phrases and dialogues, it was the paradigmatic organization of language that best suited his methodology. For example, the Art of Speaking French contains ‘lists of verbs, which, together with a noun, form one particular idea’. Verbs like faire, dire, avoir [to do, to say, to have] are represented not in functional meaningful expressions but paradigmatically. For faire alone, there are ninety-four examples: faire attention

to be careful

foire banqueroute

to be bankrupt

faire envie

to make envious

faire bonne chère

to eat well

foire semblant

to pretend.63

Earlier in the eighteenth century, grammar may have been a way of avoiding memorizing large chunks of language such as those in ‘Dialogues’ or ‘Familiar Phrases’ sections. By the end of the century, learners were still required to memorize large chunks of language, but now these were grammar rules, interminable lists of verbal constructions or nonsense syllables. Pronunciation was practised by reciting rules, and dialogues between teacher and pupil consisted of exchanges about points of grammar.64 The most telling example is Bernard Calbris’ ‘A French Plaidoyer Between Five Young Ladies’. Five young noblewomen are engaged in a contest, organized and arbitrated by their learned aunt the Marquise de _, which consists in explaining clearly and elegantly the rules of French syntax. There is no other conversation between them. The Marquise asks the questions: Melle Antonine, ne pourriez-vous point dans une seule regie nous expliquer la concordance de L’Adjectif avec le Substantif?’ Melle Antonine replies: L’Adjectif s’accorde avec son substantif (ou ses substantifs) en genre et en nombre; et s’ils sont de different genre, il s’accorde toujours avec le Masculin, excepte le cas ou il n’y auroit que deux substantifs et que l’Adjectif viendroit immediatement apres ce dernier. [Miss Antonine, could you explain the agreement of the adjective with the noun with one single rule? Miss Antonine replies: the adjective accords with the noun (or nouns) in gender and number; if they are of different genders, it always accords with the masculine, except when there are only two nouns and the adjective follows the latter].

The Marquise praises the brevity of Melle Antonine’s explication and asks Melle Julie to explain the ordering of adjectives with the same conciseness.65 The contest goes on for 160 pages, providing a thorough exposition of French grammar rules. Calbris may have aimed to enliven the tedious study of dry rules by personalizing it, but the difference between his text and the dialogues in Boyer, Cheneau and even early editions of his own books could not be more dramatic. Although it was still maintained that being able to hold a conversation in French was of the utmost difficulty, ‘Quiconque a l’expérience avouera qu’il a été capable de traduire toute espèce de livres François surtout en prose, avant de pouvoir ou entendre ou tenir une conversation’66 [Anyone who has tried it will admit that he will have been capable of translating all sorts of French books especially in prose before

being able to understand or hold a conversation], the very meaning of ‘conversation’ was changing. No longer about the ‘trifling topics of familiar discourse’ and ‘common compliments’ that constituted the knowledge of those taught French conversationally, it could mean just reading aloud. Throughout the eighteenth century, the ability to converse had been the main aim of French instruction for both sexes, and the possession of a good French accent one of the most desirable of accomplishments. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the study of French had become gendered. As method was increasingly associated with rationality, and grammar with forming and training the mind, the aim of language teaching to boys became the training and ‘opening’ of the understanding through rules of grammar, and speaking held very much second place in their French language classes. In the best schools, ‘it is usually required that the pupils converse exclusively in French, at least during the hours allotted to the study of that language’.67 These might add up to two or three hours a week. The opposite was true for girls, for whom the fashion for speaking French had been increasing, especially since the French Revolution, with the influx of aristocratic emigres who could teach the best French, spoken at Court.68 And as boys were taught French as if it were Latin, French conversation became the social acquirement without which no young lady would be considered accomplished.69 Indeed, did not Fanny Price’s cousins ‘hold her cheap on finding out that she had but two sashes, and had never learnt French’?70 I am grateful to Carol Percy for judicious comments and useful suggestions on an earlier version of this chapter. 1

Girls usually outnumber boys by about a third in French classrooms, a situation that has long worried the modern language establishment. Among the reasons adduced to explain the gender imbalance, one recurs: boys perceive French to be a ‘girls’ subject’, a ‘female’ language. See Michele Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996). This was exploited in1998 in a television advertisement for a BBC ‘football survival French course’ (as England was preparing to play in France for the World Cup) showing that even men behaving badly – that is, ‘real’ men – could learn to speak French. In the eighteenth century just as today, French was the main foreign language studied. Italian was next most popular, though far fewer people learned it. 2

Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity.

3

John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), p. 111; Lawrence E. Klein, Shriftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourses and Cultural Politics in Easy Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994). 4

Vicesimus Knox, Liberal Education (London, 1781), p. 148.

5

L. G. : Mitchell, Lord Melbourne, 1779-1848 (Oxford, 1997), p. 203.

6

I am using the term ‘grammars’ loosely, to refer to a variety of texts designed to teach French. Charles P. Bouton, Les Grammaires Françaises de Claude Mauger a IV sage des Anglais (Paris, 1972), suggests that most of these grammars were written by French masters who had become grammarians by necessity. The texts I discuss were selected from R. C. Alston, A Bibliography of the English Language (12 vols, llkley, 1985), xii: I (The French Language Grammars: Miscellaneous Treatises, Dictionaries). 7

The Schools Inquiry Commission (23 vols, London, 1867-8) particularly commended Newcastle Grammar School because it taught French ‘precisely in the same way as the ancient languages … grammar, not vocabulary, being the first consideration’ (viii, p. 401). 8

Claude Amoux complained that ‘as soon as a Frenchman lands in England, if he has not profession or talent, he becomes a French master and publishes a grammar’ (translated by this author from the original French): New and Familiar Phrases and Dialogues in French and English (’4th edition’, London, 1761), ‘Discours critique sur les Grammaires’, sig. A4r. 9

Guy : Miège is another exception. He published The Present State of Great Britain (London, 1708), as well as The Grounds of the French Tongue (London, 1687). 10

Kathleen Lambley, The Teaching and Cultivation of the French Language (Manchester, 1920),

p. 300. 11

Erasmus Darwin, Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (Derby,

1797). 12

J. S. Spink, ‘The teaching of French pronunciation in England in the eighteenth century, with particular reference to the diphthong ol, Modern Language Review, 16 (1946), 155-63, p. 155. These figures should be placed in the broader context of the expanding print culture of the period, in particular, that of English grammars. See Carey Mcintosh, The Evolution of English Prose, 1700-1800 (Cambridge, 1998). 13

At Eton, however, French could be taught as an extra, if parents wished to pay for it, a practice that continued well into the nineteenth century and led Mr Tarver, sole French master in the 1860s, to remark that he was a mere ‘objet de luxe’: Clarendon Commission (4 vols, London, 1864), iii, QQ. 3740, 7025. 14

John Roach, A History of Secondary Education in England, 1800-1870 (London, 1986); Nicholas Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1951). 15

For young gentlemen, these might include Greek, Latin, bookkeeping, dancing, fencing and fishing; for young ladies, dancing, music, needlework pastrymaking, pickling, drawing and writing. 16

Daniel Lysons, Collectanea; or a collection of advertisements and paragraphs from the newspapers, relating to various subjects (2 vols, London, n.d.), i, p. 17. 17

See P.J. Miller, ‘Women’s education, ‘self-improvement’ and social mobility-a late eighteenth century debate’, British Journal q[Educational Studies, 20 (1972), 302-14; l\fichele Cohen, ‘Gender and the public/private debate on education in the eighteenth century’ (forthcoming). 18

Michèle Cohen, The Grand Tour: constructing the English gendeman in eighteenth-century France’, History q[Education, 21 (1992), 241-57. 19

Pierre de Lainé, The Princely Way to the French Tongue (London, 1677), p. 345.

20

Lysons, Collectanea, i, p. 16.

21

Thus ‘Mademoiselle Panache’, in Maria Edgeworth, The Good Governess (London, c. 1800) is a lower-class Frenchwoman who poses as middle-class to work as a French governess in an aristocratic family. It is her language that finally exposes her imposture.

22

James Fauchon, The French Tongue Made easy to Learners (Cambridge, 1751), sig. c2v.

23

Lewis Chambaud, A Grammar of the French Tongue (London, 1750; 2nd edn, 1758), p. 89.

24

Abel Boyer, The Compleat French-Master for Ladies and Gentlemen (London, 1694), pp. 1-2.

25

Modern translation by this author: Claude Mauger, Claudius Mauger’s French Grammar (‘16th edn’, London, 1694), p. 45. 26

Fauchon, French Tongue, sig. A3v.

27

In the nineteenth century, the meaning of ‘grammar’ changed, encompassing not just rules and parsing but etymology. See Michael Stubbs, Knowledge about Language: Grammar, Ignorance and Society (London, 1990), for a discussion of the changing meanings of grammar. 28

In these early texts, ‘Familiar Phrases’, ‘Dialogues’, expressions and vocabulary were all laid out in the same manner: each page with French in one column and the corresponding English translation in the other column. 29

Lewis Chambaud, Dialogues French and English Upon The Most Entertaining and Humorous Subjects (London, 1751), p. iii. 30

Francis Cheneau, The True French Master (this edn, London, 1752; 1st edn, 1723), p. 157.

31

Boyer, Compleat French Master (1694), ‘The Preface to The Reader’, sigs A6v-A7r.

32

Abel Boyer, The Compleat French Master for Ladies and Gentlemen (10th edn, London, 1729), pp. 274-6. See also Cheneau, True French Master, pp. 160-1, for a dialogue on the same topic. 33

Francis Cheneau, French Grammar (London, 1685), pp. 168, 176-7.

34

Mrs Delany, At Court and among the Wits, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (London, 1925), p. xx.

35

Cheneau, French Grammar,’To the Reader’, sig. A4r.

36

Boyer, Compleat French Master (1729), p. 276.

37

Cheneau, True French Master, sigs A3r-A3v.

38

Boyer, Compleat FrenchMaster(1694), p. 1.

39

Miege, Grounds of the French Tongue, ‘To the Reader’, sig. A3r.

40

However, in the latter half of the century, a nwnber of authors published the grammar and the ‘language’ separately. 41

V. J. Peyton, The True Principles of the French Language (London, 1757), sig. A4v.

42

Chambaud, A Grammar, p. 1.

43

Ibid., p. iv.

44

Lewis Chambaud, The Art qf Speaking French (Dublin, 1772), p. xvii.

45

Ibid., p. xiii.

46

Ibid., pp. ix, 8-15.

47

Twelve out of a total of 152 pages in Lewis Chambaud, The Elements of the French Language (London, 1762). 48

Ibid., p. 81.

49

Chambaud, Dialogues, pp. iii-iv.

50

Chambaud, Att of Speaking, pp. xvi-xvii, xxi.

51

Cham baud, A Grammar, p. xix; Art of Speaking, p. xvii. See also Henri Gratte, Nouvelle Grammaire Françoise à l’Usage de la Jeunesse Angloise (London, 1791). 52

Cham baud, Arl of Speaking, pp. xvi, xx.

53

George Picard, The English Guide to the French Tongue (London, 1778), ‘Preface’, p. iii; George Picard, A Grammatical Dictionary (London, 1790), Preface; Bernard Calbris, The Rational Guide to the French Tongue (London, 1797), Preface; Marc Antoine Pomy, The Practical French Grammar (this edn, London, 1812; 1st edn, 1763), ‘Preface’, p. ii. 54

Gratte, Nouvelle Grammaire, p. vi.

55

John Murdoch, The Pronunciation and Orthography of the French Language Rendered Peifectly Easy on a Plan Quite Original (London, 1788), pp. 4, 8-9, 11. 56

Bridel Arleville, Practical Accidence of the French Tongue upon a more Extensive and Easy Plan than any Extant (London, 1798), p. iii. 57

In this context ‘promiscuous’ means ‘mixed, of various kinds’ (OED); Arleville, Practical Accidence, pp. 7 4-6. 58

Ibid., pp. vi, 171.

59

Calbris, Rational Guide, pp. 101-4.

60

Huguenin Du Mitand, A New French Spelling Book (London, 1784); Rev. Jean Baptiste Antoine Gerardot, Elements of French Grammar (London, 1815), p. 25. 61

Chambaud, Art of Speaking, Appendix, p. 10.

62

Gratte, Nouvelle Grammaire, p. viii. This was also the principle upon which Latin was taught: see Knox, Liberal Education. 63

Modern translation by this author; Chambaud, A Grammar, pp. 352, 254.

64

Gratte, Nouvelle Grammaire, p. vi.

65

Calbris, Rational Guide, Partll, pp. 15-16.

66

Calbris, Rational Guide, p. 179.

67

Philip Le Breton, Elemens de la Grammaire Franfoise (London, 1815), p. iv.

68

G. T. Clapton and W. Stewart, Les Etudes Françaises dans I’Enseignement en Grande Bretagne (Paris, 1929), p. 72. See also Edgeworth, Good Governess. 69

See Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity.

70

Jane Austen, Manifield Park (New York, 1964; 1st edn, London, 1814), p. 13.

Chapter 7

The Gardener and the Book Rebecca Bushnell

Modern readers seem to have an inexhaustible appetite for gardening books: bookshops display an astonishing bounty of texts in the gardening section (usually located near the interior decorating and cooking areas). The overwhelmed booksellers categorize these books differently in every store: for example, you will find sections with books on annuals, perennials, vegetables, or roses (grouped by plant types), but also areas on container gardening, shade gardening, or organic gardening (grouped by type of garden practice). Writers, publishers, and booksellers alike face questions not easy to answer: why do gardeners need books? How do they use them? How does a book shape gardening practice, and how, in turn, is it shaped by practice or use? Every gardener knows that reading about gardening and doing it are very different experiences and not just in the volume of sweat generated. The knowledge gained by reading books is not the same as that generated by practice in the garden. Practice and the knowledge gained from experience are always local and time-bound. Experience may generate a rule that holds true for a succession of seasons, but even then, an individual garden climate can change over time, as trees grow or fall, or structures rise. The rules in books may try to address variation, but in the end, these rules depict an ideal, rather than real, garden, one that exists only in the mind and between the covers of the book. This essay explores several aspects of the complex relationship between book and practice that were in play when the gardening book developed in England in the early modern period. My concern here with printed books is quite deliberate, for, indeed, while writers had long produced herbals and gardening instructions in manuscript, the growth of the horticultural advice business cannot be separated from the history of the printed book. In his study of early modern secrets books William Eamon has argued that print

technology profoundly influenced the organization and dissemination of all kinds of ‘popular’ knowledge and instruction: as he writes, ‘one of typography’s most important contributions to sixteenth-century literature was to produce a barrage of how-to-do-it manuals and of technological treatises detailing the manual side of the arts’.1 Eamon argues that in this case, It should be stressed that printers, not craftsmen, created the Kunstbüchlein and were largely responsible for disseminating technological information in the early sixteenth century. Although these works had their origins in the workshops, the information was gathered, assembled and distributed by printers who recognized the needs of a new body of readers. To the random assortments of recipes that had formerly circulated among craftsmen, printers added tide pages, tables of contents, glossaries of technical terms, and prefaces bringing them to the attention of a new public.2

As in other how-to books, the gardening book used the apparatus of the printed book – title pages, prefaces, woodcuts, tables of contents, and indices – to shape the rhetoric of instruction; at the same time market pressures influenced how the books were formatted and produced for different sorts of gardeners. The first part of this essay examines some of the ways in which garden books self-consciously described their own use, in pointing to their size, comprehensiveness, style, and cost. The second half focuses on the role of illustrations in the seventeenth-century English horticultural manual, which was designed to instruct the readers in the cultivation of flowers and fruit (as opposed to the herbal, a book about plants that focused more on their medicinal uses than their cultivation, or the florilegium, which served only to depict flowers and plants). The use of illustrations was linked in contradictory ways to the market, insofar as illustrations affected both the cost and accessibility of books. However, I would also argue that technology of the woodcut illustration conveyed a distinct image of practice to the gardener: the woodcut’s restrained form suggests the cutting, binding and shaping of plants to what William Lawson calls their ‘perfect form’. In this sense, above all, the early gardening book’s form as a book represented the profession’s belief in the power of the gardener’s technique and mastery over the organic forms of nature.

Books as tools As the gardening book took shape in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, writers, together with the printers, disputed what it meant to design

such a book. The extremes are marked at one end by John Parkinson’s Paradisi in Sole (1629), and at the other end by William Lawson’s The Country Housewifes Garden (1617). Parkinson’s book is a compendious and amply illustrated folio volume, dedicated to the Queen Henrietta Maria; Lawson’s book is a slim quarto design for use by the generic ‘country housewife’. Parkinson’s massive volume is prefaced by numerous letters of commendation, comprehensive in its coverage of the known plants of his time, and generously illustrated with woodcuts. In this sense, the book resembles most of the folio herbals of its time. The first printed herbal, Banckes’ Herbal, first published in 1525, was small and modest in style; almost at the same time (1526) appeared The Grete Herbal (translated from French), a folio volume of 372 pages, with abundant illustrations. From this point on, buyers of herbals could choose from amongst small quarto books and larger folio editions, but it was the large folio editions such as John Gerard’s Herbal that set the standard for the genre. However, Parkinson took care to distinguish his Paradisi in Sole from a herbal, expecting that his distinct audience would require a new kind of book. His letter to the reader complains that none of them [the herbals] have particularly severed those that are beautifull flower plants, fit to store a garden of delight and pleasure, from the wilde and unfit: but have enterlaced many, one among another, whereby many that have desired to have faire flowers, have not known either what to choose, or what to desire. Divers Bookes of Flowers also have been set forth, some in our owne Countrey, and more in others, all which are as it were but handfuls snatched from the plentifull Treasury of Nature, none of them being willing or able to open all sorts, and declare them fully; … To satisfie therefore their desires that are lovers of such Delights, I took upon me this labour and charge, and have here selected and set forth a Garden of all the chiefest for choyce, and fairest for shew, from among all the severall Tribes and Kindreds of Natures beauty, and have ranked them as neere as I could, or as the worke would permit, in affinity one unto another.3

Parkinson’s book thus promotes at once its own selectivity and its comprehensiveness, appropriate for a reader interested in garden aesthetics but not for the physician or householder interested in using plants to cure diseases. The herbal’s form was highly conservative, organized around the description of plants for their human uses and detailing the kinds, the description, the place, the names, the temperature, and the ‘virtues’.4 When John Gerard published his herbal in 1597, he saw himself as following William Turner, while improving and amplifying his approach. When Thomas Johnson came, in turn, to prepare a new edition of Gerard’s herbal in

1636, he presented his book as setting out the latest word in herbals (while it was really an overlay onto the text, with additions and corrections marked by a double cross mark) – a typical way of marketing a herbal as ‘new and improved’ yet not substantially different. Parkinson, however, imagines his reader as needing a new book not just because it has more items but because he has organized plants according to their ‘beauty’ and ‘affinities’, not for their medicinal uses. Further, he asks his reader to appreciate that he has presented his plants in ‘ranks’ in both senses of the word: both by affinity group and in a hierarchy. The book’s large size, the accumulation of letters of dedication, the comprehensive index including both Latin and English names, all add up to fashion a book meant to shape an aristocratic garden aesthetic: one that is refined, exclusive, authoritative and orderly. In contrast, William Lawson’s The Countrie Housewifes Garden, containing rules for herbes of common use is a brief quarto pamphlet. Its few illustrations are ten patterns for knots, and the rules of cultivation are succinct. It also includes a section on the ‘husbandrye of Bees, published with secrets, very necessary for every housewife’. The book has no letter of dedication or epistle to the reader; it also lacks an index (the very short table of contents appears at the end of the book). Aware of the book’s conspicuous brevity, Lawson does offer a short note of explanation: I recken these hearbes onely, because I teach my Country Housewife, not skilfull Artists, and it should be an endles labour, and would make the matter tedious to recken up, Landibeefe, Stocke-July flowers, Charvall, Valerian, Go-to-bed-at noone, Pyonye, Licoras, Tansye, Garden-mints, Germander, Centaurie, and a thousand such Physicke hearbes. Let her first grow cunning in this, and then she may inlarge her Garden, as her skill and ability increaseth. And to helpe her the more, I have set her downe these observations.5

The implication here is that in fact the country housewife hardly even needs or wants a book, since first she should learn through the experience of growing those things for which true ‘skilful artists’ do not care. Indeed, while he does offer designs for garden forms, Lawson also assumes that the housewife will be busy with her own practice, and less concerned with books: The number of formes, mazes and knots is so great, and men are so diversly delighted, that I leave everie Housewife to her selfe, especially seeing to set down many had bin but to fill much paper, yet lest I deprive her of all delight and direction, let her view these few, choyce, new formes[.]6

Again, the writer betrays some impatience with writing too much for this reader, even as he displays his trust in her instinctive knowledge of what is delightful and his awareness of her possible attraction to novelty. Lawson concludes his gardening section by emphasizing, once again, that his book is only as good as the housewife who uses it: Thus have I limmed out a Garden to our Country Housewifes, and given them rules for common hearbes. If any of them (as sometimes they are) be knotty, I refer them to other Writers. The skill and paines of Weeding the Garden with weeding knives or fingers, I refer to her selfe, and her maides, willing them to take the opportunity after a showre of raine; with all I advise the Mistresse, eyther to be present her selfe, or to teach her maides to know hearbes from weedes.7

It is apparently not gender that differentiates Parkinson’s grand volume and Lawson’s slim pamphlet, since both of them imagine a female reader: but the one was a queen, who stood in for ‘the Lover of these delights’ of the garden, whereas the other was a country housewife (albeit one equipped with servants), concerned with the productivity of her own plot of land. For Parkinson’s reader, the garden book was both a treasury and an image of an ordered and ranked society of nature; for Lawson’s housewife, it was a supplement to her practice, and thus as casual and unsystematic in form as that practice itself. The flower gardening books of the second half of the seventeenth century often self-consciously react to the example set by Parkinson’s folio volume, as well as the folio herbals. In his Flora: seu, De Florum Cultura. or A Complete Florilege (London, 1665), John Rea tells the reader that he looked at Parkinson’s book and thought about revising it. However, he came to the conclusion that an entirely new book needed to be written, because Parkinson’s lacks ‘the addition of many noble things of newer discovery, and that a multitude of those there set out, were by Time grown stale, and for Unworthiness turned out of every good Garden’.8 In fact, his effort is not unlike Parkinson’s. But other later books emphasize the novelty of their useful form, especially with regard to size and cost, and their own accessibility to the ‘general reader’. This difference is explicitly set forth in Samuel Gilbert’s Florist’s Vade Mecum of 1682 (Gilbert was Rea’s son-inlaw). As Gilbert describes it, his is a small book, ‘the whole fitted for a pocket companion to all Lovers of Flowers and their propagation’. This text, which provides a month-by-month description of flower cultivation, represents itself as closely modeled on practice, ‘this Tract being really

designed for the benefit of the meanest Florist, that perhaps understands not how, or hath not the conveniency in searching a Dictionary to know the meaning of Esculent, Horti culture, Sterilize, … irrigate,&c.’.9 That is, the book is imagined as sufficient unto itself; it is not to be consulted in a library with the aid of a dictionary. Instead, its function as a pocket companion means that it may be literally carried into the garden. Further, its provision of month-by-month advice fashions it in the image of the garden year: it is less a ‘reference book’ and more a story of the gardener’s lived year, day by day. Gilbert’s notion here of his audience as the ‘meanest florist’, inexpert in technical terms yet at the same time a specialist in flowers, and of his book as entirely oriented toward practice is echoed elsewhere. For example, William Hughes, in The Flower Garden (1672), notes that he does not intend this first part to Flowrists, Gardeners, or others, who have experience in this recreation, though to them also it may be useful, but chiefly for more plain and ordinary Country men and women as a perpetual Almanack or Remembrancer of them when, and which way, most of their Flowers are to be ordered[.]

On this basis, he justifies his book’s brevity, as ‘the price thereof is small, and therefore within the most ordinary reach which larger books are not’.10 This rhetoric justifying the smaller, pocket volume and accessibility was hardly new in how-to and garden books, but here it became allied with something different, which is ‘scientific’ education for the common gardener. Let me note, of course, what should be obvious, that much of this rhetoric of accessibility is exactly that: rhetoric. Given what David Cressy and others have told us about the literacy levels of husbandmen and labourers in this period, it is unlikely that these books were widely read by those ‘mean’ folk and workmen of which the prefaces of how-to books so often speak.11 It is maddeningly difficult to establish in fact who were the readers of these books, since they tend not to be the kind of volumes that survived in private libraries. One can at best speculate that the readers of these books were for the most part the literate middling sort, who were the greatest consumers of such artifacts of popular culture, as well as the professional estate gardener and the gentleman interested in the cultivation of his own garden. In any case, one cannot always conclude that smaller books were more popular. An example from. the history of the herbals themselves may prove a cautionary tale. In 1578, Henry Lyte published his translation of Rembert

Dodoens’ herbal as A Niewe Herbal, Or Historie of Plants in a large, amply illustrated folio edition of 779 pages (plus front matter). The front matter includes Lyte’s coat of arms and a letter of dedication to Queen Elizabeth, which states that he is publishing this translation for her pleasure and the country’s profit and to show himself a thankful subject.12 At the same time, his preface to the reader does proclaim that he wanted to translate the text for the good of his country including the ‘unlearned’ if literate reader. In 1606, William Ram decided to publish a ‘digest’ of Lyte, called Rams little Dodeon: A breije epitome of the new herbal, or history of plants, which advertises the virtue of its brevity and little cost in the letter to the reader: So, as where the geat [sic] booke at large is not to be had, but at a great price, which canot be procured by the poorer sort, my endevor herein hath bin cheifly, to make the benefit of so good, necessary, and profitable a worke to be brought within the reach and compasse aswell of you my poore Countrymen & women, whose lives, healths, ease and welfare is to regarded with the rest, at a smaller price, then the greater Volume is:13

Further, in marked contrast to the dedication to the Queen in Lyte’s book, Ram decided that he should dedicate his version directly to ‘thee my poore and loving countryman whosoever, and to whose hands soever it may come. For whose sake I have desired publication of the same, beseeching Almighty God to blesse us all’.14 Despite Ram’s intentions in writing a popular book, however, the Lyte book seems to have sold better; only one edition of Ram’s book seems to have been published, whereas Lyte’s had achieved four editions by 1619. Wright concludes that a wider range of people were more interested in botany and more willing to spend the money on a folio: ‘Expensive as the large herbals were, the interest of the public was such that many a citizen who would have begrudged a few pence for any lesser book, parted with the price of one of the huge illustrated folios’.15 It is also possible that the audience at which Ram’s book was directed did not in fact exist as he describes it, whereas Lyte’s introduction, which includes the rhetoric of public service to the meaner sort, shows a better sense of how the market worked.16 If we accept Wright’s argument, this story thus suggests that it cannot necessarily be concluded that more people bought cheaper books. However, it is also true that it was not just the poor, in turn, who benefited from smaller and cheaper books. In his conclusion to his epistle of his Adam in Eden: or, Natures Paradise. A History of Plants, Fruits, Herbs and Flowers, William Coles deliberately defined his book’s readership as that of

both professionals (‘Physicians, Chirurgions & Apothecaries’) and the ‘Nobility and Gentry’, as opposed to the ‘poore countrymen’ to whom Ram had dedicated his book. When he then commends his own book for its brevity and low cost, in this case, it appears it was not to increase its accessibility to the unlearned; rather it was a mark of the book’s professional value: When I undertook this work, I was not insensible of the meanenesse of mine own endowments, neither did I, without a modest reflection upon my selfe, survey those larger gifts which Mr. Gerard, Mr. Johnson, and Mr. Parkinson present unto the World: Not to mention many other Writers: for they stood on the shoulders of others, as I am sometimes faine to do: I thought it no adventure, but a necessary endeavour to do my Country further service: and, without arrogance I avouch it, I determined my selfe happy in these my undertakings and that more especially for these following Reasons. 1. As their Volumes are too chargable for every common Buyer, so they are fraught with divers passages that tend not to edification, all which I have waved.17

By the middle of the seventeenth century, it appears that brevity and smaller cost were less marks of a class distinction than a standard for books of science that were intended to be kept in hand. In the earlier period, then, one can argue that the status of the folio books was a firm selling point to the better sort; in the latter period, however, a smaller book was just as saleable to the better sort, in this case because it was brief, practical and up-to-date. When John Worlidge declared in his Systema Horticulturae that ‘my principal design [is] not only to excite or animate such that have fair estates and pleasant Seats in the Country to adorn and beautifie them: But to encourage the honest and plain Countreyman in the improvement of his Ville, by enlarging the bounds and limits of his Gardens as well as his Orchards, for the encrease of such Esculent Plants that may be useful and beneficial to himself and his Neighbours’, he is explicitly fitting his project into the broader aims of the Royal Society and men such as Samuel Hartlib. He tells the reader that he has shaped his books for this broad audience according to the guidelines set by Ralph Austen in his book on The Spiritual Uses of Orchards: I hope therefore that this objection will have no place against this tract, the rather because it hath the characters (that Mr. Austin hath proposed in his Epistle dedicatory, before his Treatise of Fruit-Trees) that books of this nature should have viz. I. That they be of small bulk and price, wherein I hope I have conformed, considering the variety of matter herein discoursed of.18

The strictures to which Worlidge refers come from the second edition of Austen’s treatise’s epistle dedicatory to Robert Boyle (which replaced a letter to Samuel Hartlib in the earlier edition). In that letter, Austen cites the following requirements of the characters of books that will serve the new husbandry: First, that they be of small Bulk and Price; because great Volumes (as many are upon this Subject) are of too great Price for mean Husbandmen to buy, as also take up more time to peruse then they can spare from other Labours. Secondly, that the Stile and Expressions be plaine and suited to the Vulgar (even to the Capacities of the meanest, for these (Generally) must be the Workmen and Labourers thereabout.19

The size and format of these books are thus tied to the notion of broader readership and accessibility for the ‘mean husbandman’ that is brought up in the case of earlier books. But there is also something new in Worlidge’s adoption of Austen’s strictures for a book designed for both estate owners and honest countrymen. Just as these new books commend themselves on the basis of their accessibility (both in terms of price and readability), they also present themselves as physically useful – as field companions – designed for the character of the people who use them and the nature of their lives. It is very likely that, despite this rhetoric of serving the ‘workman’, these books would fall into the hands of the professional and gentleman reader whose tastes they now suited. The self-image offered here to the owner of this book is that of the practical man who works as much as he reads, even though in reality he might do very little of the work himself.

Picture plants We now expect any garden book to be lavishly illustrated with full-colour photographs; it is all the more surprising then, to see the bare pages of early gardening manuals (even the herbals have pictures, however crude). Many histories have been written of flower painting and botanical illustration, but this essay focuses on illustrations in horticultural manuals, which few scholars have discussed. In the husbandry and general gardening books, the figures tend to depict tools and horticultural practices (watering, grafting, or weeding) or designs for garden knots, but not flowers or plants. What were these illustrations meant to do? Some prefaces for the earlier books suggest that illustrations could increase the book’s accessibility. Reynolde Scot, or rather his printer, suggested in his book on growing hops that he included pictures as an aid to

the unlettered reader: ‘I also pray you to take somewhat the more paines in conferring the wordes with the figures, which will mutually give lyght one to the other, and finallye will assist the understanding of you the Reader, but cheiflye of him that cannot reade at all, for whose sake bee devised and procured these Figures to be made’.20 Such would also seem to be true of the figures of tools and gardening practices that supplement the texts in books like Gervase Markham’s English Husbandman and William Lawson’s A New Orchard and Garden. For example, Markham’s book pictures the assembling of a plough, piece by piece, as an accompaniment to the text describing the parts of the plough. At the same time – then as now – illustrations added to the book’s cost, and thus conflicted with the professed aim of accessibility. In his New Orchard William Lawson praises the woodcutter’s art and the printer’s generosity: ‘The Stationer hath (as being most desirous with me, to further the common good) bestowed much cost and care in having the Knots and Models by the best Artizan cutte in great varietie, that nothing might be any way wanting to satisfie the curious desire of those, that would make use of this booke’.21 Apparently the expense of illustrations prevented John Rea from including engravings in his Flora, despite his own desires. In his preface to the reader Rea dismisses the need for pictures: As for the cutting the Figures of every Plant, especially in Wood, as Mr. Parkinson hath done, I hold to be altogether needless; such Artless things, being good for nothing, unless to raise the Price of the Book, serving neither for Ornament or Information, but rather to puzzle and affright the Spectators into an Aversion, than direct or invite their Affections; for did his Flowers appear no fairer on their stalks in the Garden, than they do on the leaves of his Book, few Ladies would be in love with them, much more than they are with his lovely Picture. I have therefore spared myself and others such unnecessary Charge, and onely added some draughts for Flower-Gardens.22

There is a story behind this argument that woodcuts are unnecessary and indeed undesirable: apparently Rea did want to have illustrations in his book, but the prospect ‘so affrighted the stationers, that they offered him but thirty pounds for his pains. This displeased him so much that he brought home his manuscripts’.23 In this case, it is the writer himself who could not afford to have pictures in the book, even though in his preface he avers that he omitted them, not because they raised the price but because they are unsighdy and crude.

Plate 7.1 ‘Tulips’, in John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Temstris (London, 1629), p. 59. Reproduced by permission of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

Plate 7.2 Illustration of ‘Walwurz’, in Otto Brunfels, Herbarum vivae eicones (Strasbourg, 1532), p. 75. Reproduced by permission of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. Even while these remarks are thus disingenuous, since Rea would have included illustrations if he could have afforded them, his dismissal of the inadequacy or ‘frightful’ nature of Parkinson’s woodcuts, which cannot show ‘the true beauty of flowers’ (Plate 7.1) suggests a new self-consciousness about the style of such woodcuts, which functioned less to represent plants themselves than an idea of a plant. It is well known that in early herbals crude and inaccurate woodcuts of plant and flower images were used repeatedly (and inappropriately) and reworked. Historians of botany recount how Hans Weiditz in Otto Brunfels’ Herbarum vivae eicones (Strasbourg, 1530-36) and Leonhart Fuchs in his De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (Basel, 1542) broke new ground in representing plants as drawn from life (Plate 7.2).24 Gill Saunders has recendy reframed this narrative by arguing that the traditional herbal woodcuts were intended less to depict the plants than they were to function as elements of the books’ design: Their value and significance varies with each publication, but generally the illustrations in the earliest printed herbals are little more than decorative motifs breaking up the blocks of text: the Grete Herbal (1526) with its images contained within a framing line, is printed to look like a manuscript, including illuminated initials. The strongly symmetrical illustrations resemble printers’ devices, decorative motifs, ciphers or pictograms of the plants they ‘represent’. With the exception of Fuchs, and some plates in Brunfels, the illustrations in these early herbals are small, cut from the same block as the text (Grete Herbal) or fitted into the text in a cramped and rather arbitrary fashion.25

In line with this function in the book, then, the image of the plant was made symmetrical and rectangular to fit into the woodblock shape.26 If the book was often imagined to be like a garden at this time, these woodblocks convey an image of a garden as a book.27 This regularity and abstraction are, of course, in line with the geometric design of flower plots in general in the period. Markham includes in his books models of ‘the fashion of the gardenplot for pleasure’: ‘the Plaine Square’, ‘the Square Triangular or Circular’ (a square with four triangles and circle inside), ‘the Square of eight Diamonds’.28 It is a world in which the organic is subdued at every level by the knife and the surveyor’s rod.29

Despite the innovations of continental illustrators such as Weiditz and Fuchs, English books continued to use this kind of patterned illustration of plants throughout the seventeenth century. Saunders notes of Parkinson’s Paradisi in Sole, which has the only significant images of flowers in any English gardening manual at the time, that, ‘though most of the illustrations are original they did not gain thereby; they are crude, stiff, schematic … The plant forms are much simplified, stiff and formal; they are often reduced to almost geometric regularity, or to formulaic structures’.30 As Rea suggests, they might not evoke desire in the ladies or aesthetic pleasure; what they do serve to do, however, is to further Parkinson’s aim to represent the natural world as defined by place, order, and rank. Among horticultural books of the period Parkinson’s book is unusual for having pictures of identifiable plants: for the most part figures are used to illustrate garden practice. Thomas Hill’s Gardener’s Labyrinth (reprinted under several names in the sixteenth and seventeenth century) set the example by offering pictures of appropriate tools with their use in a garden setting, including the second part’s title page image that shows men working in an enclosed garden (Plate 7.3). In this image, some of the plants in the bed are differentiated and possibly identifiable, including what looks like a single gillyflower or dianthus in the bed on the right. However, the woodcut foregrounds the gardener’s technique, rather than the plants themselves. In Markham’s The English Husbandman, even where pictures of plants appear, they are included to depict the uses of tools or garden design. For example, the book includes figures to guide grafting, where the plant bends to the will of the illustrator, as well as to the hand of the gardener (Plate 7.4). In such figures the plant itself is generic and cut to fit the size of the woodblock, bringing it into line with the other ‘model’ and mechanistic illustrations in the rest of the book.31 Thus, not only do the regularity and geometric form of the plant’s image reproduce garden geometry, but they also convey the gardener’s confidence in his or her technique and mastery of nature. William Lawson’s entire New Orchard and Garden celebrates the gardener’s regulation of plants. On page 35 Lawson boasts that he ‘can bring any tree (beginning by time) to any forme. The Peate and Holly may bee made to spread, and the Oake to close’.32 This boast is followed by a block print of the ‘perfect forme of an Apple tree’ (Plate 7.5). In this illustration, the ‘perfect forme’ is made to conform to the rectangular shape of the block itself. In the text Lawson does

apologize for what he calls the ‘deformity’ of the drawing, but only ‘because I am nothing skilfull eyther in painting or carving’, not because it might be a ‘deformed’ shape of a tree.33 There is a symmetry then, between the body of the book and the shape of the plant (even while the author is conscious of the difference).

Plate 7.3 Frontispiece from the ‘Second Part’, Dydymus Mountain [Thomas Hill], The Gardeners Labyrinth (this edition, London, 1608). Reproduced by permission of the Special Collections Department and the Bush-Brown Horticultural Collection, Special Collections Department, Temple University Libraries.

Plate 7.4 Illustration of a graft, in Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (London, 1613; this edn, 1635), p. 141. Reproduced by permission of the Special Collections Department and the Bush-Brown Horticultural Collection, Special Collections Department, Temple University Libraries.

Plate 7.5 ‘The perfect forme of a Fruit-tree’, in William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden (London, 1617/18; this edn, 1648), p. 47. Reproduced by permission of the Special Collections Department and the Bush-Brown Horticultural Collection, Special Collections Department, Temple University Libraries. The format, shape, typography, and illustrations of a garden book, as much as the content, thus embody a message about garden practice. First, and most critically, their size and paratextual matter send a message about where and how the book is to be used: as a reference tool, an authority, or an accompaniment to work out in the garden – no matter if many of those who consulted the pocket companions may just have been ‘armchair’ gardeners, or masters of others who actually worked in the garden. The illusion they project is of a book itself as a working tool. Further, just as the full-colour illustrations of modern gardening texts evoke desire for a garden that one cannot ever hope to produce, so the early books, too, reveal a fantasy of control and mastery of nature. A successful garden book, then as today, is able to persuade us that, indeed, reading about gardening is close to the act of working in the garden – but it is so much easier. 1

William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Earjy Modern Culture (Princeton, 1994), p. 113. 2

Ibid., p. 125.

3

John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris (London, 1629; repr. edn New York, 1976), ‘The Epistle to the Reader’, n.p. [p. 3]. 4

As Gill Saunders notes, ‘Systematic botany – the process of cataloguing all existing species – has its foundations in the herbal tradition with its practical needs for description and discrimination, but there was no “scientific” method of classification available to the herbalist. Plants in herbals are ordered according to a variety of principles (often within the same book), many of which relate to their medicinal properties. Some followed Dioscorides, Theophrastus and Pliny in distinguishing them according to taste, smell and edibility, or by those parts of the body which they were used to heal’; Gill Saunders, Picturing Plants: An Analytical History of Botanical Illustration (Berkeley, 1995), p. 24. 5

William Lawson, The Countrie Housewifes Garden (London, 1617; repr. edn New York, 1982),

p. 17. 6

Ibid., p. 3.

7

Ibid., p. 19.

8

John Rea, Flora: seu, De Florum Cultura. or A Complete Florilege (London, 1665), ‘To the reader’, sig. b1r. 9

Samuel Gilbert, Florist’s Vade Mecum (2nd edn, London, 1682), ‘The Epistle to the Reader’.

10

William Hughes, The Flower Garden (‘second edition, enlarged’, London, 1672), sigs A3r-

A3v. 11

It has often been argued, in the case of the history of printing and the book trade, that in the early period of printing in England, the evidence of more books being published means more readers were reading them and that there were more people with sufficient surplus wealth to buy books. See Louis B. Wright, Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill, 1935), p. 81. Since Wright, a great deal of discussion has ensued over the question of the level of literacy in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. H. S. Bennett also argued that ‘while the growth of literacy cannot be exactly measured by the output of books from time to time, the two things are not altogether disassociated. The increase in the number of printers must be linked to the growing demand for their wares’; H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1457-1557 (Cambridge, 1952), p. 29. David Cressy, in his important work on literacy, has criticized this kind of argument, noting that ‘a relatively small number of regular book-buyers could absorb most of the output of the London press, and when output increased it is at least conceivable that the same people bought more’; David Cressy, Literary and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), p. 47. Cressy argues for a much lower level of literacy across English society, especially among those who lived in the country and who could be classified at the rank of yeoman or husbandman. 12

Henry Lyte, A Niewe Herbal, Or Historie of Plants (London, 1578).

13

Rams little Dodeon [sic]: A breife epitome of the new herbal, or history of plants … Collected out of the most exquisite newe herball, or history of plants, … by … D. Reinbert Dodeon, … and lately translated into English by Henry Lyte, Esquire: And now collected and abridged by William Ram, Gent. (London, 1606), sig. A2r. 14

Ibid., sig. A2v.

15

Wright, Middle Class Culture, p. 576. In the case of Gerard, Wright notes that in the Huntington copy of Johnson’s 1633 Gerard, a note on the flyleaf tells us that it cost £2 8s, on 1 September 1654 (p. 577). See also Bennett, English Books,’Up to about 1550 most herbals were of little consequence … The herbalists of the second half of the century had a high standard to keep, and the day of the cheap, ill-informed little book was over. The few herbals that were printed were for the most part large and well-illustrated volumes, and also for the most part translations’ (pp. 187-8). Terry Comito compares the ‘predominantly middle class audience’ of the gardening manuals to the ‘aristocratic patrons of the herbals’, but it is unlikely that the audiences can be separated so distinctly (since the herbals varied so much in format and size); Terry Comito, The Idea of the Garden in the Renaissance (New Brunswick, 1978), p. 21. 16

At the same time, there is evidence that people thought that the market could only support the publication of a few of such large folios at a time: in 1635, John Parkinson’s massive herbal Theatrum Botanicum, was entered by its printer Richard Cotes into the Stationer’s Register (on 3 March) but it did not appear until 1640, presumably because of the competition offered by Thomas Johnson’s reissuing of Gerard’s Herbal in 1633 and again in 1636. See Blanche Henrey, British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800 (2 vols, London, 1975), i, p. 80. 17

William Coles, Adam in Eden, or, Natures Paradise (London, 1657), sig. (a)1v. Coles also insists that ‘neither have I persued this imployment only for the private contentment that I received thereby, much lesse out of greedinesse of gaine, but from a Zeale to the publique good, as having observed, that through the ignorance and negligence of pretenders to the knowledge of this art, sundry

unhansome dysasters to have happened to the ruine of many, and amonge those, to some that deserved most of their Country’ (ibid.). 18

John Worlidge, Systema Horticulturae. or, The Art of Gardening (London, 1677; repr. edn, New York, 1982), sig. A5v. 19

Ralph Austen, A treatise of fruit-trees … The third impression, revised with additions (Oxford, 1665), sigs A4v-A5r. 20

This note comes from ‘The Printer to the Reader’, a letter in the 1574 edition, omitted from later editions: A Perfite platforme of a Hoppe Garden, and necessarie Instructions for the making and maytenaounce thereof, with notes and rules for reformation of all abuses, commonly practiced therein, very necessarie and expedient for all men to have, which in atry wise have to doe with Hops. Made by Reynolde Scot (London, 1574), sigs B3r-B3v. 21

William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden (London, 1617/18), sig. A3v.

22

Rea, Flora, sig. b2r. See also Coles’ critique of the cuts in herbals of his time: ‘Though their Cutts do take up much roome and render their Books much more abundantly deare, yet they are so much inferior to those of Matthiolus and Dioscorides, in respect of the smallnesse of their Size, and the false placing of them, that the Botanick is as commonly puzzled as satisfied, and thereby disabled to give an ingenious account of them.’ (Adam in Eden, sigs a1 v-a2r). 23

See Henrey, British Botanical Literature, i, p. 195, citing a letter to Samuel Hartlib (repeated in one of Hartlib’s letters to Boyle). 24

See Saunders, Picturing Plants, Chapter 1.

25

Ibid, p. 28.

26

‘The obsessive impulse towards symmetry and rectangularization was disrupted by Brunfels and Fuchs’: Ibid., p. 32. 27

See Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Easy Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, 1996), Chapter 4. 28

Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman: The First Part (London, 1613), pp. 113-15.

29

I am grateful to Crystal Bartolovich for sharing with me her presently unpublished work on the subject of surveying. See also Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (Cambridge, 1996), Chapter 6. 30

Saunders, Picturing Plants, pp. 103-4.

31

See also Markham, English Husbandman, p. 68, concerning sets for vines, more tools on pp. 97-8, and a garden fence, on p. 111. 32

Lawson, New Orchard, p. 35.

33

Ibid., p. 37.

Chapter 8

Deformity’s Filthy Fingers: Cosmetics and the Plague in Artificiall Embellishments) or Arts best Directions how to preserve Beauty or procure it (Oxford, 1665) Christoph Heyl

This essay offers an analysis of arguments put forward and rhetorical strategies employed in Artificiall Embellishments, a remarkable little book on cosmetics by an anonymous author printed at Oxford in 1665.1 One of the reasons why this book is of considerable interest is the way its subject matter is being treated. Like most other books of its type, it contains a large number of recipes for homemade cosmetics serving a wide range of purposes. These are grouped in chapters ranging from the general to the specific, beginning with ‘Of the whole Body, and the beautifying thereof, or ‘What course of life is probably the best either to procure beauty or to preserve it’ and then moving on to aspects such as ‘How to repair the beauty of an itchy or scabby skin’ or ‘How to beautifie the fore-head’. Each chapter contains a number of recipes, some of them quite elaborate. What makes this book more than a mere collection of such recipes is that there are short – sometimes very short – introductory essays dealing with the topic of each chapter.2 These are in fact virtuoso literary performances abounding with allusions and saturated with intricate imagery. The preface addressed ‘to the Ladies’ gives a taste of things to come; it is made plain from the very beginning that we are dealing with no common example of the genre.

Deformiry (fairest Ladies) is a single name, yet a complicated misery; for a young Algebraist in this only word, knows how to read a whole Iliad of evills. Poets fancy the creature to be hatcht in Hell; neither do they greatly injure it, forasmuch as it brings with it sufficient matter for a whole Hell of misery to those, whose darkned soules are clouded with it’s frightfull adumbrations. [ … ] For those whose bodyes are dismist natures presse with some errata’s, and have not the royall stamp of Beauty to make them currant coyne for humane society, make choice of obscurity;judging death lesse instifferable, then that ignominy which too often attends deformity. It is a disease usually looked upon as infectious, and hath one symptome of dangerous consequence, it breeds obstructions, and that chiefly to Ladies preferment, since none save Grooms or Oastlers think those worth their courtship, who are rusted over with ill-enticing looks. Now to quit you Ladies from the loathsome embraces of this hideous Hagge, … I have published these Cosmeticks; so beautifying, that those who use them shall Diana it in company, and with a radiant lustre outshine their thick-skind companions, as so many browner Nymphs. Though you may look so pallidly sad, that you would be thought to be dropping in your Graves; and though your skins be so devoid of colour, that they might be taken for your winding sheets; yet these Recipe’s will give you such a rosie cheerfulness, as of you had new begun your resurrection. They are the handsome ladies Panacaea, of such ejficary that they will teach you creatures of mortality to retrace the steps of youth, and traniforme the wrinkled hide of Hecuba into the tender skin of a tempting Helena.3

The language employed here is highly elaborate. A high overall level of rhetorical ornatus is maintained throughout, and of course ornatus is to language what cosmetics are to the body: the text and its subject-matter move along parallel lines. The imagery employed and the high density of straightforward and more obscure allusions combine to make the text fairly demanding. Deformity, so the preface says, can be read. The body and its appearance is legible – particularly to the ‘young Algebraist’, as the text mysteriously but quite aptly states. Algebra (derived from the Arabic al-jebr) literally means ‘the reunion of broken parts (of the body)’, that is, the healing of deformities.4 The mere word ‘deformity’ spells out a whole history of calamities, an ‘Iliad of Evils’. In these first paragraphs of the book, there are allusions not only to the Iliad (directly and through mention of Hecuba, the wife of Priam), but also to the Odyssey (‘Helena’), and to literature in general: ‘Poets fancy the creature to be hatcht in Hell’. By means of establishing links to other literary works, the text under discussion draws attention to the fact that its purposes are literary as well as merely utilitarian. To be fully appreciated, it requires knowledge of classical literature and languages – otherwise’ rhetorical figures such as the almost

bilingual pleonasm ‘darkned soules … clouded with frightfull adumbrations’ would be quite lost on the reader. Both the human body and the text discussing it are made to appear as a plastic medium inviting manipulation or ad hoc transformation to achieve the desired effect. Readers obviously interested in and presumably in need of cosmetics can be addressed as ‘fairest ladies’; the ‘wrinkled hide of Hecuba’ can be transformed into the ‘tender skin of a tempting Helena’, just as nouns can be transformed into verbs: ‘those who use [cosmetics] shall Diana it in company’. As the text is all about the treatment of the female body, the author playfully inverts this relationship and discusses the female body as a text. Bodies are dismissed from ‘natures presse with some errata’s’ – ultimately a Platonic concept: the ‘idea’ of beauty is there, but it has been unsuccessfully captured in a text riddled with misspellings. Given this state of affairs, it is only good scholarly practice to correct such physical typos: by means of cosmetics, one can prepare, as it were, an improved edition of the imperfectly reproduced text. In its rapid and associative transition from image to image, the text almost appears like a prose equivalent of some particularly fast-moving specimen of Metaphysical poetry. It moves almost effortlessly from texts and the act of reading (‘read a whole Iliad’) to the printing of texts (‘nature’s presse’, ‘errata’s’), from printing to the technically related process of minting coins (‘royall stamp’, ‘currant coyne’), from coins to ‘Ladies’ preferment’, that is the chance of finding a reasonably wealthy husband, and from marriage to a revolting parody of love and sexuality, the ‘loathsome embraces’ of the ‘hideous Hagge’ that is deformity – and so on. Sometimes the author compresses a tour de force sequence of associations in a single sentence, moving from eating to drinking and then straight on to the paraphernalia of excretion: ‘Other Ladies in your company shall look like brown-bread sippets in a dish of snowie cream, or if you will, like blubberd juggs in a cupboard of Venice glass, or earthen Chamberpots in a Goldsmiths shop.’5 The text makes it obvious that both author and envisaged audience are still largely unaffected by considerations of what would in eighteenthcentury parlance be described as ‘delicacy’. The readers of Artificiall Embellishments are supposed to handle and use substances such as ‘mans

urine’, ‘Hens dung, the whitest and freshest you can get’, or to contemplate taking ‘twelve or thirteen Lizards’ and ‘cut off their heads and tails’.6 There are recipes not only for curing facial bums but also ‘to help the Complexion when it is marr’d with blew and congealed blood, or black and blue, proceeding from a stroak, or bruise.’7 The author does not make any attempt to disguise the fact that the consequences of occasional physical violence were very much an emergency to be reckoned with. One can detect a deliberate use of prima facie ‘disgusting’ images in a book that is, after all, primarily aimed at a female readership. The author never hesitates to call a spade a spade: How much evacuation or retention of the excrements either promote or hinder a good complexion, you may easily imagine, if you consider that the reaking entrails are the bodies sinke, which, if not duely cleans’d and scour’d, affects the face with such noisome exhalations, that the squeamish Queen of Love will never be wonne upon to make it her court of residence.8

The fact that the discussion of bodily functions or malfunctions is usually clothed in straightforward or more complex conceits does not mean that these topics are being ‘sanitized’ or obscured in any way whatsoever: quite the contrary. Instead of having recourse to euphemisms, the author employs images that are every bit as unappetizing as the things they represent. The introduction to a chapter on ‘How to cleanse the sweaty and sluttish Complexion’ is a case in point: The Microcosme through the sordid sluttishness of some is often drown’d in a nasty deluge of sweat; out a designe [sic] perhaps to take Cupid captive, and birdlime his Wings with such clammie excrements: but if they have no other tempting bait, then the greasie pomatum which their own ill stuff’d bodies supply them with, I am afraid (though being blind he cannot see them) he’l [sic] smell them a mile off, and so keep his distance. They would doe much better to break off this petty plot upon Cupid, and scoure their bodies well with these abstervises. Take bryony roots half a handfull …9

The image of sweat as the flood devastating the human microcosm is introduced and quickly abandoned for a conceit in which sweat becomes an altogether inadequate device to capture Cupid. From the very first page, one of the most predominant images – the most predominant image even – is that of deadly disease and death itself, often in startlingly dramatic forms. The first three paragraphs of the introduction

contain a cluster of related words and phrases such as ‘death’, ‘disease usually looked upon as infectious’, ‘symptome of dangerous consequence’, ‘looks so pallidly sad’, ‘dropping in your Graves’, ‘skins devoid of colour’, ‘windingsheets’, ‘resurrection’, ‘Panacea’, ‘mortality’. Such elements of morbid medical discourse did of course sometimes find their way into texts dealing with cosmetics, but usually in a much more diluted form. Why is it that the very opposite of the effect one would like to achieve by using cosmetics – the full visual impact of death instead of the sought-after appearance of youth and beauty – could become such a prominent feature of this text? The time and the place of publication of Artificiall Embellishments provide a clue and ultimately an answer to this question. The book was printed at Oxford in 1665. 1665 was the year of the Great Plague, the year of the horrifying events so vividly described in Samuel Pepys’ eyewitness account and later in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. The epidemic lasted well into 1666, and it had its worst effects in London; estimates vary from about 68,500 to 100,000 victims in the capital alone.10 The well-to-do fled while they could, and they did so in ever-increasing numbers from April onwards, Oxford being among the obvious places of refuge. In plague times, it was usual for mortality to peak in the hot summer months. The court left London in June, going first to Hampton Court, then to Salisbury and eventually ending up in Oxford in September. Parliament was summoned to Oxford for early October. Charles installed himself in Christ Church, while both the Queen and Charles’ then-pregnant mistress, Lady Castlemaine, were put up in Merton College. After Parliament came the lawyers, as the Michaelmas term was adjourned from Westminster to meet at Oxford in November.11 It was only on 1 February 1666 that King Charles felt it safe to return to Westminster. In his monograph on the Great Plague, Walter Bell comments that little news of the plague filtered into Oxford and that the court and its hangers-on were obviously and understandably anxious to forget all about it. L’Estrange’s bi-weekly sheets, The Newes and The Intelligencer, left any curiosity there might be unsatisfied, printing little beyond a summary of the weekly Bills of Mortality – three or four lines indicating how the Plague’s virulence rose or fell. Visitors from the infected capital were few in number, and found themselves objects of distrust…. The statesmen were atoms adrift in a whirl of enforced gaiety and irresponsible lightheartedness. The talk of Oxford was not about London’s many thousands of Plague

victims, but of the impending birth in its midst…. With balls and entertainments and scandal the exiles from Whitehall made life bearable, out of place as they felt in the University city.12

This is the background against which Artificiall Embellishments was published.13 The complexities, the learned or otherwise obscure allusions of the text were pitched at an audience mainly composed of elite refugees from London. There is consequently a number of references – plainly obvious for those in the know – to the court: a ‘Royal soul’ should have a ‘White-hall’, that is, a beautiful body for its lodging. The body must be granted supplies suiting its ‘active powers’ so that it can repel ‘disobedient matter’,14 just as the Oxford Parliament voted supplies for Charles’ war against the Dutch. Chapter I is entitled ‘How women with Child are to order themselves that they may be delivered of fair and handsome children’, a situation that is not at first glance readily associated with cosmetics. However, there might well be a link between the existence of this chapter and the fact that Lady Castlemaine’s pregnancy was a much-discussed topic. The readership of the text was perhaps even more elite in social than in cultural terms, and so it is not surprising that imagery referring to social difference, to status and privilege appears with a certain regularity. This is what the author has to say about ‘How to repair the beauty of an itchy or scabby skin’: I am afraid, Ladies, that whilst I prescribe remedies for so loathsome a skindefiling malady, you will think I have forgot ye, and am now addressing my self to your kitchin maids … If ever then you see ill disposed humours grow so strong, to break their way through the inclosing skin, it will do you no harm to have something in readiness that may check their presumption.15

Scabby skin is discussed in terms of social order. Medical conditions of this type are supposed to be a problem of domestic servants. If this disease affects their betters, then this is a case of ‘presumption’. The disease, as it were, behaves with a deplorable lack of deference, thus committing a blatant act of transgression. The scars caused by the smallpox (or possibly even by venereal disease) are described in a similar way: ‘The feature fretting Pox, if it sets but a foot within that paradice [sic] of perfections, the face; it leaves more disfiguring impressions there, than a Coridons clouted shoes on a Cedar floor.’16 The

disease has no business to affect the face of a lady in the first place, it behaves like a rustic thoughtlessly ruining an expensive and beautifully fmished floor. Beauty self-evidently appears as an attribute of rank. Therefore, the scars left by the ‘Pox’ are socially inappropriate, as is ugliness in general – hence the need to rectify these acts of transgression by means of cosmetics. Still much more powerful than such images of social order and its reversal is the recurrent and drastic imagery of disease, death and decay. The text as a whole is deeply affected by the horrors of the plague. Morbid imagery, medical discourse and hence by implication the plague itself provide a potent sub-text to the entire book. The plague was the unmentionable everybody tried to forget, the repressed but nevertheless ever-present threat from which everybody tried to escape. Unmentionable though it was, in the text under discussion it is plainly present in the shape of recurrent lexical clusters impregnated with the horrors of death. The plague is also present on an allusive level. Let me briefly return to the first sentence of the preface: In the word ‘deformity’, a young Algebraist ‘knows how to read a whole Iliad of Evills’. As any reader of the Iliad would have known, the very first lines of the text describe the outbreak of the plague in the Greek camp: ‘he [Apollo] in wrath against the king roused throughout the host an evil pestilence, and the folk were perishing.’17 Thus the plague is present in Artificiall Embellishments – veiled and only faintly perceptible, but defmitely there – from the very first line of its preface. Images associated with mortality are brought up repeatedly. In the introductory essay entitled ‘Of the whole Body, and the beautifying thereof, the body is called ‘that weak and moving mansion of mortality, … exposed to the treacherous underminings of so many Sicknesses and Distempers’. It is a ‘fading house of distemper’d clay’; ‘to morrow it will be so white washt with a meager paleness, as if Death had took it to hire, and make it a whited Sepulchre’.18 The ‘whited sepulchre’ is easily recognized as a reference to Matthew 23, verse 27: ‘for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.’ It is remarkable how a locus classicus for denouncing dissimulation, which could so easily be employed in harangues against cosmetics, is here assimilated into a defence of cosmetics. An obvious

anticosmetics topos is being subverted – a bold move on the part of the author which appears even bolder when one considers the sinister overtones the image of a sepulchre must have acquired at a time when the plague was on everybody’s mind. The author almost seems to be overdoing it, recklessly conjuring up the idea of death’s aspect being made momentarily more agreeable by applying a thin coat of paint. The author discusses whether it is possible ‘to sublimate Nature beyond the reach of Sickness … and by cosmetick Antidotes to fortifie it with an incapacity of being surprized by any feature-fretting malady’ – surely a most heartfelt wish in plague times.19 Alas, this cannot be done – but at least it is feasible to keep ‘Deformity’s filthy fingers’ at bay so as to strengthen ‘the Lure of Love’.20 Gluttony is to be avoided because it ‘makes a Lady … a Mountaine of greasie mummy.’21 In the seventeenth century, ‘greasie mummy’ still meant both a corpse, and a drug made of corpses: genuine mummy, mumia vera, was imported from Egypt and prized for its medicinal virtues.22 Discussing the topic of reducing weight, the author employs the image of swelling carcasses: it would of course have been well known that dead bodies tended to swell as they decayed.23 On the other hand, women who are too meagre are ominously described as ‘breathing skeletons’, dwelling on the visibility of their bones.24 In the introduction to the chapter ‘How to polish the Skin when it is disfigured with Scars or marks of the Small Pox’, the author again has recourse to medical discourse: CV arious are the surprising casualties that deforme a polisht Skin; each wound is a grave where loves dumb orator lyes inshrin’d; and Chirurgeons usually the unskilful Plaisterers, that make an ill-rais’d cicatrice the swelling monument to departed beauty.’25 The mentioning of ‘Plaisterers’ recalls the ‘whitened sepulchre’ image. At the same time, there are sinister overtones of contemporary treatments of the plague (that is, opening the pestilential buboes or ‘tokens’) and the use of ‘Antipestilential Emplasters.’26 In the essay ‘What course of life may probably be the best either to procure beauty or to preserve it’, the author’s advice is to avoid ‘perturbations of the mind’ and especially grief as it ‘renders those who over much indulge in it, so wannish and pale, that they seem but walking

shrouds to carry themselves to their own shady sepulcher’.27 One cannot help thinking of Defoe’s horrifying tales of nearly-dead plague victims struggling to fling themselves into a plague pit: ‘people that were Infected, and near their End, and dilirious also, would run to those Pits wrapt in Blankets, or Rugs, and throw themselves in, and as they said, bury themselves’.28 Defoe’s text is of course neither an eyewitness-account, nor necessarily reliable in all of its details. However, descriptions of nearly-dead infected persons losing their wits and staggering about in the streets like walking corpses are common. Examples can be found in Nathanael Hodges’ Λοιμολογía: sive Pestis Nuperae apud Populum Londinensem grassantis Narratio Historica (London, 1671) and Thomas Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the Ciry (London, 1667).29 Considering the contemporary connotations of ‘walking shrouds’, what the text would seem to imply is that it is not a good idea even to think about unpleasant things (and the plague is a very unpleasant thing indeed), because this might make one look like a plague victim. Having been present on an allusive level throughout the text of Artificial! Embellishments, the plague eventually rears its ugly head more explicitly towards the very end of the book. The last section of the text is entitled ‘Sents [sic] and Perfumes fitted for several occasions’. Its introduction is every bit as lighthearted as those to the preceding chapters, revelling in ostensibly carefree hyperbole: ‘these following [recipes] shal make ye walking gardens, so that ye shallead your servants by the noses after ye; they shal all turn Camoeleons [sic] and [l]ive on that aire which ye perfume.’30 However, it could hardly escape any reader’s notice that the recipes given here (which are the most elaborate and costly ones to be found in the entire book) were in fact luxury versions or exact equivalents of some of the most popular prophylactic and curative measures employed against the plague. The dominant school of thought among authors of plague pamphlets was that the epidemic was caused by ‘pestilential Miasms, insinuating into the humoral and consistent parts of the body’.31 Strong, offensive smells were widely regarded as direct causes of the plague. A pamphlet entitled Cautionary Rules for preventing The Sickness published by order of the Lord Mayor in 1665 established a clear connection between ‘Stenches,

corrupt Vapours and Fumes, generated by nastiness’ and the incidence of plague cases: Hence it is that the Contagion has as yet kept it self amongst the poor and indigent People living in close Houses where many Families are thrust together, and where there is constantly a foul offensive Smell, almost suffocation a stranger at his first approach. From hence, I say, the Fomes [sic] of the Pestilence is held up and continued, and the Air will more and more from hence be vitiated unless preventive means be used.32

It stands to reason that, given such assumptions, the most practical preventive measures were thought to be manifold uses of perfumes. Hence we find analogous recipes and instructions how to use and apply them in Artificiall Embellishments and in contemporary plague pamphlets, the only difference being that in the first instance they are discussed in terms of cosmetics, that is as luxury items, while in the second instance they are discussed in medical terms, that is as necessary means to ensure one’s survival. The same substances – rue, rosemary, cloves, laudanum, cinnamon, amongst others – are mentioned over and over again in both contexts. We find a discussion of pomanders (mixtures of aromatic substances made into a ball to be carried about) both in Artificiall Embellishments and in Golgotha; or, A Looking-Glass for London (London, 1665), in Gideon Harvey’s A Discourse of the Plague (London, 1665) and in Richard Kephale’s Meclela Pestilentiae (London, 1665).33 Given the background of the plague and hence the perfectly obvious contemporary connotations of preparing such pomanders, it is not surprising that here, at last, the author of Artificiall Embellishments abandons – if only for a brief moment and towards the very end of the book – his elaborate façade of carefree frivolity. Having given a recipe for making a particularly elaborate pomander, he apparently cannot help slipping in a reference to what has so far been treated as unmentionable. The pomander in question is recommended as follows: ‘Beside the exceeding pleasant smell, it is good in Pestilential times, and in Fits of the Mother.’34 Although this is the only time the plague is mentioned explicitly, the last few pages of the book contain further hints which could easily be connected with the epidemic. The chapter entitled ‘Sweet Waters, Oils and Essences’ contains the following recipe: ‘Take oiles of musk one dram, of cloves six graines, a little Virgin wax, mix them together according to art, and you shall have an odoriferos [sic] balsam that comforts the brain and revives the

spirits, if ye anoint the nostrils with a little of it.’35 Gideon Harvey recommends the same practice under the heading ‘The Preservative Cure’: ‘The Indicata relating to those Indicandia are: 1. Perfumes to smell to, correcting and purifying the air before it is attracted by the Lungs, or rather antipestilential unguents and oyls to anoint the nostrils with; for it is tedious to be alwaies obliged to hold a perfume to ones nose’.36 Authors of other plague pamphlets agree.37 What is presented in Artificiall Embellishments as an innocent cosmetic could in fact be easily recognized as a popular prophylactic against the plague. A more explicit hint as to obvious applications of the recipes given in this section follows. In the year 1665, as soon as one read the heading ‘Sweet Candles, and Perfumes to Burn’,38 one would have been more than likely to think of the manifold techniques of fumigation which were frantically employed all over London in an attempt to protect oneself from contagion. Appropriate recipes are a standard feature of plague pamphlets. The 1665 Cautionary Rules for preventing The Sickness, for instance, contain the following: ‘Take four Bay-leaves, a little Rosemary, a little Lemmon-peel, four Cloves bruised, some Vinegar and Rosewater, put them into a Pan, and set it gently steeming over a few Small-coal: There are perfuming Pots for the purpose.’39 Richard Kephale similarly advises readers of his Medela Pestilentiae,’for Correction of the Ayre … That the House be often perfumed with Rue, Angelica, Gentian, Zedoary, Setwel, Juniper wood or berries burnt upon embers, either simply, or they may bee steeped in Wine Vinegar, and so burnt.’40 The ‘correction of the aire’ is also the object of analogous perfumes described in Artificiall Embellishments. Having given a luxury version of the sort of recipes which could be found in contemporary plague pamphlets (the mixture includes precious ingredients such as amber, civet, musk and ivory), he concludes: ‘This is a perfume for Persons of quality, One or two of them [one or two doses] cast upon coals or put into a quantity of rose water that is set over the coals, will fill the room with a ravishing and coelestiall vapour, that refreshes the braine and vitall spirits and corrects the malignity of any contagious aire.’41 The parallels between the procedures described in Artificiall Embellishments and in plague pamphlets alike, not least the revealing similarities in the very phrasing of these descriptions, are obvious. It was not necessary to mention the plague explicitly in the passage quoted above,

as there could have been no doubt whatsoever about the sort of contagion that was on people’s minds at the time. Except for these brief allusions towards the very end of the book, the epidemic is never mentioned openly. Nevertheless, the horror of the plague is deeply imprinted on the whole of the text. The entire book can be read as an exercise in tacit morale boosting, working on a cosmetic façade that might possibly hold out against grim death itself. Thus, it could not differ more from the mainstream of religiously framed plague pamphlets which were meanwhile published in London. These tended to identify the ungodly pursuit of skin-deep beauty as one of the sins with which Londoners had brought the plague upon themselves. Thus Vincent condemned the pride, which the daughters of London have had of their beauty, though it be but skindeep, and the body is but a skin-full of dirt, and the choicest beauty without discretion, like a Jewel hanged at the ear or nose of a Swine: And the Lord knows what monstrous, and defiled, and deformed insides the most of those have had, who have been so fair and adorned outwardly. Many in London have been proud of their fine cloaths, and fair faces …42

However, there are other areas in which Artificiall Embellishments and a number of plague pamphlets overlap. It is worth bearing in mind that in plague pamphlets, perfumes were discussed not only as a potent prophylactic but also as a means of dispelling fear. In Kephale’s Medela Pestilentiae, we find the following passage: ‘Such as are to go abroad, shall do well, to carry Rue, Angelica, or Zedoary in their hands to smell to, and of those, they may chew a little in their mouths, as they go in the street, especially, if they bee afraid of the place.’43 It was taken to be of vital importance to dispel fear because the fearful were often regarded as the most likely victims of the plague. Humphrey Brooke, for instance, explicitly links contagion with ‘our Bodies thereunto disposed by Disorder and Fear’ in his Cautionary Rules for preventing The Sickness.44 Brooke then proceeds to discuss what, in modern parlance, could be described as psychosomatic aspects of the plague threat. His discussion of this aspect is worth quoting in extenso:45 the most prevalent Inducers of Disease are Fear and its attendant Sadness or Dejection of spirit: Against these let me take the freedom to avouch that they are at least the occasional or disposing cause of the Pest: How else can it be that Physicians, Chirurgions, Nurses, should visit and attend upon those in the highest degree infected, handle their Sores, drawing their Breath, as must needs, being long time in the Room, and yet for the most part escape untoucht? When others, passing but by a House or near

a person Infected, yea, hearing a sad Story, shall immediately sicken, goe home and die: it cannot be the strength of the others Antidotes, since they use but what they advise; but Resolution of l\1inde, and freedome from those Dreads which are justly called Pabulum Pestis, the Food of the Pest. I speak not this to make you careless of Dangers, but to take that vain and groundless Timidity out of your mindes that exposes you upon every little occasion offered, sinking you often suddenly, and beyond the possibility of Recovery.

‘Freedome from those Dreads which are justly called Pabulum Pestif must have been exactly what those who could afford to do so, above all the court and its hangers-on at Oxford, sought while away from London. Considered in this context, Artificiall Embellishments, replete as it was with witty conceits, elaborate language and its array of ostensibly frivolous topics, could almost be regarded as prophylactic reading matter. In its attempt to take its readers’ minds off the plague, the text can be seen as an effort to ward off those fears that were thought to make people vulnerable to contagion. In this respect, it fits in well with the atmosphere prevailing among the refugees in Oxford as described by a French visitor, Denis de Repas, in a letter to Sir Robert Harley:46 There’s no other plague here but the infection of love; no other discourse but of ballets, danse and fine douse [clothes]; no other emulation but who shall look the handsomere, and whose vermillion and Spanish white is the best; no other fight than for ‘I am yours’. In a word, there is nothing here but mirth, and there is talk that there shall be a proclamacon made that any melancholy man or woman coming in this towne shall be turned out and put to the pillary; and ther to be whep till he has learned the way to be mery a la mode.

In discussing things such as ‘vermillion and Spanish white’, Artificiall Embellishments was plainly part of an effort to be ‘mery a la mode’ while the plague was raging nearby. On one level, Artificiall Embellishments can be read as a sustained and resourceful attempt to construct a carefree façade, which could in itself be considered as a prophylactic measure. However, as has been shown, the author ultimately failed in his attempt to provide innocent and amusing reading matter for a readership who would have been more than willing to be diverted. The all-pervading fear of the plague seeped little by little into the text. For the most part without acknowledging it openly, it persistently circles around the unspeakable, the terrifying symptoms of the epidemic and the physical proximity of death. Written under extraordinary circumstances, it goes far beyond what is to be expected of a work of its genre. Artificiall Embellishments demonstrates

forcefully how a didactic book on cosmetics can pursue more than one hidden agenda. 1

Artificiall Embellishments or Arts Best Directions How to Preserve Beaury or Procure it (Oxford, 1665). The British Library catalogue attributes the text to T. Jeamson; however, the dedication (‘To the Honourable And Truly Vertuous A. E.’) is signed ‘M.S.’. 2

Other books of recipes of the period such as W. M., The Queens Closet Opened (London, 1655) may contain allusive components but lack such para-texts. They typically present an unbroken sequence of recipes, each following formulas such as ‘Take x, y and z …’, ‘It is very good for …’, and so on. 3

Artificiall Embellishments, pp. iii-v.

4

Algebra is derived from the arabic ‘al-jebr, the redintegration or reunion of broken parts, f. )ahara to reunite, reintegrate, consolidate, restore, hence, the surgical treatment of fractures, bonesetting’ (OED). The Sinonoma Bartholomei, a late fourteenth-century glossary of medical terms defines the ‘algebra’ as ‘restauracio camis’: see Sinonoma Bartholomei. A Glossary from a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript in the Library of Pembroke College, Oxford, ed. J. L. G. Mowat (Oxford, 1882), p. 10. On p. 3 of Artificiall Embellishments, the text is described as a ‘magazeen of Medicines, endeavouring to unite all parts of the body in charming Concords of alluring features’. Maybe it is no coincidence that this paraphrase of ‘algebra’ is preceded by another technical term taken from the Arabic (magazine is derived from makazin, plural of the arabic makzan, meaning storehouse: OED, q.v.). 5

Artificiall Embellishments, p. vi.

6

Ibid., pp. 67, 93, 67.

7

Ibid., p. 87.

8

Ibid., p. 21.

9

Ibid., pp. 42-3.

10

C. Morris, ‘The Plague’, in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds R. C Latham and W. Matthews (11 vols, London, 1970-83), x, pp. 328-37; B. Weinreb and C. Hibbert, eds, The London Enryclopaedia (London, 1987), p. 237 ff. W. G. Bell, The Great Plague of London (repr. edn, London, 1994; 1st edn, 1924); and Liza Picard, Restoration London (London, 1997), p. 100 ff. 11

Bell, The Great Plague, pp. 298, 308.

12

Ibid., pp. 299-301.

13

Internal textual evidence suggests that Artificiall Embellishments was published during the winter months of 1665: that is, when the court was present at Oxford. There is a recipe beginning thus: ‘But to make an exact perfume, Take an ounce and a half of white snow’: Artificiall Embellishments, p. 187. 14

Ibid, p. 2.

15

Ibid, pp. 46-7.

16

Ibid., p. 54.

17

Homer, The Iliad, transl. A. T. Murray (London and Cambridge, MA, 1960), Book I, lines 910, pp. 2-3. The first book of the Iliad has, since antiquity, been known by its informal title, Iλιáδοζ, A: λοιóσ μηνισ (‘First book of the Iliad: Plague/ Wrath’). This brief indication of the book’s subject

matter was probably added by Aristarchus, head of the Alexandrian library, who prepared an edition of Homer’s texts in the second century CE: K. Ziegler and W. Sontheimer, eds, Der Kleine Pauly. Lexikon der Antike in fünf Bänden (5 vols, Munich, 1979), i, p. 554. 18

Artificiall Embellishments, p. 5.

19

Artificiall Embellishments, p. 6.

20

Ibid., p. 6.

21

Ibid., p. 24.

22

For evidence that this was still current practice in the seventeenth century see OED, q.v. The Sinonoma Bartholomei defines mummia as ‘quiddam est quod invenitur in sepulcris Babiloniorum’. In the body of the MS, there are further explanations: ‘Solebant enirn antiqui corpora mortuorum balsamo vel mirra condire ad conservacionem corporum a corrupcione, et apud paganos adhuc ita fit praecipue circa Babiloniam, ubi ist copia multa balsami, et hoc faciunt maxime circa cerebrum et spinam, unde sanguis ad cerebrum calore balsami trahitur et excoquitur. Similiter cerebrum aduritur et desiccatur et in mummiam transmutatur. Similiter circa spinam mummia invenitur. Est autem eligenda quae nigra est et solida et fetida.’ (‘The ancients used to treat the bodies of the dead with balsam or myrrh so as to preserve them from decay, and among the heathens living around Babylon, where balsam is common, this is still done, and they apply it principally around the head and the spine. The blood is drawn from the spine by the heat of the balsam, and it is baked there. In a similar manner, the head is transformed into mummy by heat and desiccation. In a similar manner again, mummy is to be found around the spine. The best quality is black, solid and stinking.’), Sinonoma Bartholomei, p. 31. See also A. L. Mayhew, ed., A Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Wordr, especiallY from the Dramatists. Collected by W. Skeat (Oxford, 1914), q.v. 23

Artificiall Embellishments, p. 63.

24

Ibid., p. 65.

25

Ibid., p. 54.

26

‘For the swelling under the ears, arm-pits, or in the groines, they must bee alwaies drawn forth, and ripened, and broken with all speed’: Richard Kephale, Medela Pestilentiae: Wherein is contained several Theological Queries concerning the Plague, with approved Antidotes, Signes, and Symptoms: Also, An exact Method for curing that Epidemical Distemper. Humbly presented to the Right Honourable, and Right Worshipful, the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of the City of London (London, n.d. [1665]), p. 22 ff. For ‘Antipestilential Emplasters’, see Gideon Harvey, A Discourse of the Plague. Containing the Nature, Causes, Signs, and Presages of the Pestilence in general Together with the state of the present Contagion. Also the most rational Preseroatives for Families, and choice Curative Medicines both for Rich and Poor. With several waies for purijjing the air in houses, streets &c. Published for the benefit of this Great City of London, and Suburbs. By Gideon Harory, M.D. (London, 1665), p. 14 and passim. 27

Artificiall Embellishments, p. 21.

28

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year. Authoritative Text, Backgroundr, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Paula Backscheider (New York and London, 1992), p. 53. 29

‘Foras occurrebandt correpti hue, illuc, per plateas, inebriatorum more, titubantes; illic jacuerunt Comatosi, & tantum non semimortui; quae gravis somnolentia non nisi sonoro tubae novissimae clangore discutienda: istic obviam se dederunt enormi vomitione fatigati, epoto velut aconito; medio in foro bene valentes derepente conciderunt; perinde acsi Contagium prostitisset Venale’ (‘Those seized [by the plague] rushed outdoors, up and down through the streets, staggering as if they were drunk; there they dropped to the ground, comatose and more than half dead, and their sleep was such that they were only to be woken by the sound of the last trump; they they succumbed,

exhausted by copious vomiting, as if they had swallowed poison; the healthy suddenly collapsed in the middle of the market place, as if the contagion had been for sale there’): Nathanael Hodges, Λοιμολογía: sive Pestis Nuperae apud Populum Londinensem grassantis Narratio Historica. Authore Nathanaele Hodges, M.D. é Cofleg. Londin. (London, 1671), p. 21; see also T. V[incent], Gods Terrible Voice in the City (London?, 1667), pp. 31-2. 30

Artificiall Embellishments, p. 175.

31

Harvey, A Discourse of the Plague, p. 2.

32

Humphrey Brooke, Cautionary Rules for preventing The Sickness; Published by Order of the Lord Mayor (London, 1665), p. 3. 33

Artificiall Embellishments, p. 17 6; J. V., Golgotha; or, A Looking-Glass for London, and the Suburbs thereof. Shewing the Causes, Nature and Efficacy of the present Plagues; and the most hopeful Way for Healing (London, 1655), p. 24; Harvey, A Discourse of the Plague, p. 13 ff; and Kephale, Medela Pestilentiae, p. 12. 34

Artificiall Embellishments, p. 177.

35

Ibid., p. 184.

36

Harvey, A Discourse of the Plague, p. 13.

37

For example, Kephale, Medela Pestilentiae, p. 12 ff.

38

Artijicia/1 Embellishments, p. 188.

39

Brooke, Cautionary Rules, p. 2.

40

Kephale, Medela Pestilentiae, pp. 12, 61.

41

Artijicia/1 Embellishments, p. 191. This recipe is followed by another one ‘of the same virtue with the former and used in the same manner’ (ibid.). 42

He also advocates a process of religious self-examination which is described in terms of the visual self-examination preceding the application of cosmetics: ‘Sinners, … take the glass of the Word, and look upon your faces in it, and see how many spots it will discover which you never did perceive; not beauty spots, but spots of deformity, Plague-spots, Death-marks, Hell-tokens, such as will bring upon you inevitable misery, unless they be wiped off: T. V[incent], Gods Terrible Voice in the City, pp. 124, 168. See also J. V., Golgotha, p. 5. 43

Kephale, Medela Pestilentiae, pp. 12-13.

44

Brooke, Cautionary Rules, p. 2.

45

Ibid., pp. 7-8.

46

Dated 19 October 1665: Historical Manuscripts Commission 14th Report, Appendix Part II: Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Portland, Volume III (London, 1894), p. 293; quoted in Bell, The Great Plague, p. 300.

Chapter 9

Richardson’s Barometer: Colonial Representation in Grammatical Texts Richard Steadman-Jones

The Manners of Mankind must ever form an interesting enquiry. In every age and climate they display a wonderful diversity of character; and exhibit a picture so variously coloured that we are convinced by experience alone, that the great original of the whole is Man. In all investigations of this important subject, Language claims a superior degree of attention: in so many points it will be found a most unerring guide; and, when viewed on philosophic ground, may be considered as the great barometer of the barbarity or civilization of a people. John Richardson, 17771

It is now well known that the emergence of the British colonial state in late eighteenth-century Bengal prompted the servants of the East India Company to take an increased interest in the languages of South Asia. This new enthusiasm for linguistic study encompassed both the ‘classical languages’ of India, that is Persian and Sanskrit, and also some of its ‘vernaculars’, notably Urdu and Bengali. From the 1770s onwards more and more examples of that supremely didactic genre, the grammar, were published, each stressing the importance of a knowledge of languages to the effective administration of the Indian Empire.2 By the early decades of the nineteenth century so much material had appeared, at least on Urdu, that there was vitriolic competition among rival authors and publishers for a share of the growing market in grammatical texts and new recruits to the Company’s service would almost inevitably encounter such material in their early years in India. This essay will focus on one particular grammarian, a Scot named John Gilchrist, who arrived in India in the early 1780s and went on to publish a serialized dictionary of Urdu, complete by 1790, and a grammar of the same language in 1796.3

The last three decades have witnessed a wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary debate about the role of cultural activity, and particularly the ‘making of knowledge’, in the establishment and maintenance of colonial power. Given this interest in the political dimensions of intellectual activity, it is not surprising that a certain amount of attention has been paid to colonial grammars in general and the work of John Gilchrist in particular, notably by the anthropologist of South Asia, Bernard Cohn. In an important article on issues of language in British India, Cohn identifies complex political currents running through the material.4 On the one hand he sees the grammars as elements in a process through which western scholars transformed fields of knowledge which had previously been the province of Indian authorities, an argument with a distinctly Saidian flavour, although Cohn describes his analysis as ‘influenced by the work of Michel Foucault’ rather than aligning it explicitly with Said’s concept of ‘orientalism’.5 On the other hand he cites several writers, including Gilchrist, who emphasized the need to learn local languages in order to negotiate the minefield of Indian etiquette. Assertions of this kind betray a certain anxiety at the perils of conducting oneself within a hybrid colonial culture, an issue that, since the publication of Cohn’s article, has become an increasingly important area of investigation within the field of post-colonial theory.6 Cohn’s discussion of colonial grammars convincingly demonstrates that these rich and problematic texts have an important place in the emergent colonial culture of the late eighteenth century. His analyses, however, have tended to focus more on the programmatic statements which introduce and comment on grammatical publications than on the linguistic analyses presented in the bodies of the grammars themselves. The result is that, although they provide powerful accounts of the reasons the British had for learning Indian languages and the impact of colonial language policy on native speakers, they do not examine the ways in which the analysis of the forms and structures of languages could be understood as political. The aim of this essay is to enrich accounts such as Cohn’s by showing that embedded in the technical details of Gilchrist’s linguistic description are political statements in dialogue with those which appear in prefaces and appendices. This will be achieved through a close examination of the ways in which Gilchrist represents two particular features of the Urdu language. It may seem surprising to claim that technical grammatical discourse is susceptible to this kind of close reading but to eighteenth-century readers,

for whom grammar was a basic component of education, the description as well as the deployment of languages was an inherently political activity. This politicized view of language is beautifully articulated in the quotation at the beginning of the essay from the work of the eighteenthcentury scholar of Arabic, John Richardson: ‘[I]n so many points [language] will be found a most unerring guide; and when viewed on philosophic ground, may be considered as the great barometer of the barbarity or civilization of a people’. This assertion rests upon the idea that western learning has successfully identified both the functions that language must fulfil in the life of a civilized people and also the forms that most effectively realize those functions. The nature of this idea will be explored more fully later in the essay. The important point here is that if a description of a language is felt to lay bare the character of a people, then it is easy to see how linguistic analyses could participate in an over-arching political rhetoric about the direction colonial society was to take. By presenting a language as more or less ‘civilized’, more or less-’barbarous’, a grammarian could advocate to his readership a particular way of viewing and interacting with its speakers. This is the idea that will be explored in the rest of the essay and the argument will be articulated in three sections. The first will discuss the context in which Gilchrist’s texts were written and, with reference to Cohn, examine the anxieties that surrounded language learning in colonial India. The second will develop the reading of Richardson’s image of the barometer by exploring the ways in which linguistic analyses could produce different impressions of languages and their speakers. The final section will set out a detailed reading of two passages from Gilchrist’s work in order to illustrate the ways in which his linguistic representations interact with the agenda expressed elsewhere in his published writing. An important aspect of the discussion will be the ways in which commercial competition with other writers and publishers led Gilchrist to clarify the political meanings of his work. The need to win over his readership very much influenced the form of the texts that Gilchrist produced after his long years of study in the cities of the Gangetic plain and it will be important to understand the nature of the rivalries that he formed as he attempted to achieve this kind of communication.

The writer and his readers

John Gilchrist was born in Edinburgh in 1759, the son of a merchant named Walter Gilchrist.7 Despite this auspicious start, John’s prospects were ruined in the year of his birth by the disappearance of his father. Walter Gilchrist was rumoured to have moved to America or the West Indies but the family never succeeded in making contact with him again and ended up dispersed and in straitened circumstances. John was educated at George Heriot’s Hospital, a charitable institution for the orphaned sons of Edinburgh freemen, and was apprenticed to a surgeon at the age of fourteen. In the early 1780s he was serving as a surgeon’s mate in the Royal Navy and he seems also to have spent some time in the West Indies where, it is tempting to speculate, he may have been looking for this father. By 1782, however, he had decided on a change of course. He travelled to India seeking an appointment in the Company’s army and was rewarded with a position in General Goddard’s detachment, then stationed in Bombay. Telling his story some sixteen years later, Gilchrist claimed that, as soon as he took up his appointment, it became evident that he needed to learn Urdu in order to communicate with the Indian soldiers or sepoys. A project that began as a practical response to his immediate circumstances, however, eventually took over Gilchrist’s life and transformed him from a surgeon’s mate into an orientalist scholar. There was little existing material for Europeans wishing to learn Urdu and Gilchrist resolved that he would fill that gap in the market. In 1785 he was given leave of absence to work fulltime on a dictionary and grammar of Urdu and he travelled extensively in northern India in order to work with native speakers and to gather material. Between 1787 and 1790 the instalments of his dictionary were slowly and painfully published, and in 1796 he finally completed the undertaking he had begun over ten years earlier, by publishing his grammar of the Urdu language at the Chronicle Press in Calcutta.8 Throughout his published work Gilchrist emphasizes the practical benefits that would accrue to the Company if more of its servants spoke Urdu. Soldiers would be able to issue commands more effectively. Civil Servants would have a firmer grasp of the administrative proceedings they were supervising and would be in a better position to protect the interests of ordinary Indians from a supposedly corrupt elite. At the same time, however, Gilchrist always saw his linguistic work as a means of advancing his own personal fortunes. For the boy whose father deserted him in the

year of his birth financial concerns were never far away and the prefaces to his published volumes frequently contain detailed discussions of the sales of his earlier works. Gilchrist’s linguistic writing needs to be interpreted in this commercial context. To ensure that his texts were widely read by the servants of the Company, he needed to establish that they were the best material available in that relatively small market and this involved fighting off one competitor in particular. In 1772 Captain George Hadley, recently retired from the Company’s service in Bengal, had published an outline of Urdu grammar along with a vocabulary under the title, Grammatical Remarks.9 The work appeared in London. Hadley’s text did not describe the elevated styles of Urdu to which Gilchrist was exposed in his work among the ‘learned natives’ of the northern cities. It presented a simplified variety of a kind used in interactions with soldiers and servants. There is virtually no attempt to render Urdu sounds which are difficult for speakers of English, for example the retroflex flap and stops,10 and in a number of ways the grammar resembles that of a pidgin – for instance, in the use of independent lexical items to mark the plurality of nouns.11 Despite its failings, however, it is clear that there was a real demand for a work of this kind and Hadley’s grammar achieved a certain degree of popularity. A second edition appeared in 177 4 and a third in 1784, when Gilchrist was preparing for his leave of absence. Indeed when Gilchrist first started to learn Urdu he was ‘of course referred to Hadley for the rudiments of the language’ but he quickly formed a low opinion of the text and this motivated him to assemble materials of his own. One of Gilchrist’s major concerns was to dissuade his readers from relying on the ‘jargon’ described in Hadley’s little book and to apply themselves to a variety sanctioned by the ‘learned natives’ with whom he himself had worked.12 Clearly this was a commercial strategy, at least in part. Hadley’s grammar had a healthy readership, which Gilchrist saw as a potential market for his own publication. Nevertheless, Gilchrist’s warnings against ‘jargon’ form part of a highly politicized account of life in the colony. Gilchrist was obsessed with the need to understand Indian codes of etiquette, not least because of the danger that they could be exploited to produce subde forms of anti-colonial resistance, a position well summarized by Cohn:

The European has to learn to insist on proper performance of the Indian’s social and verbal codes in dealing with superiors. One should not let an Indian subordinate get away with behaviour or speech acts which would be offensive not only to the European but to an Indian of superior quality.13

If the servants of the Company did not grasp local standards of behaviour they risked becoming objects of mockery or ridicule. This argument extends to linguistic behaviour in various ways. In the grammar, for example, Gilchrist warns the reader to pay attention to the use of familiar and respectful pronouns in Urdu, in case he is unwittingly insulted by his interlocutor. He asserts that ‘details of this kind’ may be of ‘more consequence in our daily transactions with the Hindoostanees, than we have hitherto been aware of and warns that small errors will end in the ‘humiliation and extinction of the British name in this portion of their empire’.14 To use Hadley’s ‘jargon’ is similarly to invite ridicule and Gilchrist goes to some lengths to emphasize that Indians themselves have very little respect for it. The ‘jargon’, he says, ‘exists no where, but among the dregs of our servants, in their snip snap dialogues with us only’. Even the servants do not use it amongst themselves for ‘they would not degrade themselves by chattering the gibberish of savages, while conversing with, or addressing each other, in the capacity of human beings’.15 According to Gilchrist, however, Hadley’s grammar had convinced a whole generation that the pidgin variety used with servants exhausted the scope of the Urdu language and that there simply was no other variety to learn. Gilchrist later claimed that from the outset it had been his intention to dispel this myth and establish Urdu as an object of serious study. In retrospect, he was astonished at his own temerity: [I was] a young man, who had hardly been three years in India, and yet dared to dissent from, and teach those wise heads, who had grown grey in the service, ‘that the Hindoostanee was a language, worthy their acquisition, in every respect, and moreover, that such a thing as a jargon being current over mighty civilized empires, was a monstrous conception, that could exist nowhere but in their own brains.’16

Of course Gilchrist cannot be characterized simply as the champion of ‘proper’ Urdu in opposition to the bastardized variety of the kitchen and the camp. As Cohn points out, the decisions that writers like Gilchrist took about which varieties to describe and in what manner to describe them to some degree transformed the languages themselves and hence also the social reality of which they were a part.17 Nevertheless, the idea that Urdu

is a civilized language, to be taken seriously by the British community, is a central part of Gilchrist’s message and to communicate it effectively it was necessary for him to distance his work as much as possible from that of Hadley. One way in which Gilchrist did this was to construct his work both in style and substance as the product of scholarship rather than simply of practical experience. The dictionary and grammar together form a series of three quarto volumes. The quality of the typography is high and there is a great quantity of Perso-Arabic typeface. The grammatical description is wide-ranging and detailed and each point is supported by copious quotations from the Urdu poets. There are also extensive footnotes, which refer frequendy to western authorities so that Gilchrist’s mastery of both eastern and western knowledge is asserted throughout the text. This carefully constructed edifice of scholarship certainly impressed the elite elements of the colonial establishment. When Gilchrist returned to Calcutta in 1798, Marquis Wellesley, the Governor-General, gave him the opportunity to run an ‘oriental seminary’ to give newly recruited servants of the Company a grounding in both Urdu and Persian. Then in 1801, when this experimental project was superseded by the opening of Fort William College in Calcutta, Gilchrist was made Professor of Hindustani and put in charge of one of the largest departments in the new institution, a position of considerable influence.18 Yet Gilchrist’s early works did not find such favour with the general readership. A fourth and expanded edition of Hadley’s work was published in 1796, the very year in which Gilchrist’s grammar appeared. This was certainly a canny move on the part of the publisher since the little book of ‘jargon’ continued to sell well and new editions appeared in 1801, 1804, and 1809, with some evidence of pirated editions also circulating in Calcutta.19 It is unsurprising that ordinary readers preferred a compact and straightforward octavo volume to Gilchrist’s monumental stack of books and in the preface to a new work of 1798, The Oriental Linguist, Gilchrist states that he has been experiencing ‘pecuniary embarrassments’ as a result of ‘[t]he sale of Hadley’s insigniftcant catch-penny production’.20 In order to compete he reorganized his material into a series of more ‘conciliating’ publications.21 The ferocious performance of scholarship is modifted; dialogues and familiar phrases are incorporated in imitation of some of

Hadley’s later editions; the grammatical exposition is considerably simplifted; and Urdu forms are presented in Roman characters only. Gilchrist’s later works abandon the strategy of establishing difference and compete with Hadley’s by imitating them in all but the language they describe. Throughout the full range of his work, however, Gilchrist continued to emphasize that the variety he was describing was not a demeaning ‘jargon’. A constant theme of his writing, whether he is playing the orientalist scholar or the popular language master, is that Urdu has all the marks of a ‘civilized’ language, the marks that in Richardson’s terms make the language a barometer of the condition of its speakers. By foregrounding features of the language which, for eighteenth-century readers, seemed ‘rational’ and ‘civilized’ and by the artful presentation of ones that might have seemed more problematic, he produces a representation of Urdu as a language worth studying properly and not a variety that even the servants disdain to use. As we address the question of how languages were felt to act as indicators of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarity’ it will be important to remember the sense of disquiet which informs Gilchrist’s analysis. Read in this way, his artful deployment of the forms and structures of the Urdu language emerges as a warning that the colonizer scorns the culture of the colonized at some peril.

The politics of grammatical representation Over the course of the nineteenth century the study of language was gradually reconceived as a science in which generalizations were built on the empirical investigation of data and linguists increasingly asserted their autonomy of the philosophical disciplines.22 During the eighteenth century, however, when Gilchrist and Richardson were writing, languages were usually characterized not as natural entities but as the products of human ingenuity or, to use the contemporary terminology, as ‘arts’ invented to solve the problem of externalizing thought and communicating it to others. It was the task of the practical grammarian to describe how a particular language solved this problem by reducing it to rules for the benefit of learners. The investigation of language as a human faculty, however, was conducted firmly under the auspices of other disciplines. If language was an ‘art’ for the communication of thought, for example, then the nature of language should surely be investigated with reference to

those other forms of inquiry which dealt with the nature of the mind and the world, logic and metaphysics. The field of ‘general grammar’ was concerned with just this kind of analysis. Linguistic facts, the existence of nouns and adjectives, for example, were explained with reference to categories provided by the various philosophical sub-disciplines, in this case the metaphysical distinction between substance and attribute. The ‘inventors’ of language were held to have created these two parts of speech because both kinds of entity exist in the external world and so human beings need to communicate ideas about both of them in ordinary discourse.23 It is important to emphasize that general grammar developed as a way of exploring western languages, particularly Latin, Greek, and French, and that it effectively constituted a philosophical justification of the forms of those particular languages. When travellers, traders, and colonists encountered non-European languages that did not conform to the same formal patterns, it was not always straightforward to assimilate them into this framework of thought. The fact that it was difficult to correlate the forms of ‘exotic’ languages with the categories of western philosophy in some cases led to the languages being criticized as ‘unphilosophical’ and ‘barbarous’. If philosophy provides universal truths about the nature of the world, the reasoning went, then languages which show no awareness of those universal truths must indeed be inferior to those which do.24 Richardson’s idea of language as ‘the barometer of the barbarity or civilization of a people’ rests upon this kind of reasoning. Languages are more or less ‘barbarous’, more or less ‘civilized’, to the extent that they show an awareness of the nature of the world as revealed in western learning. For a writer such as Gilchrist, striving to persuade his compatriots that they have to rethink their relationship with a language they perceive as a ‘barbarous jargon’, this perspective opens up certain problems. Even today, language learners are likely to scoff at features of languages that they find strange or difficult and, when this attitude was reinforced by a scholarly discourse that stigmatized such features as ‘barbarous’ or ‘unphilosophical’, the practical grammarian faced serious difficulties in attempting to change attitudes. But the ‘knowledge’ produced within discourses like the ‘general grammar’ was not as monolithic as the preceding discussion suggests. It

was open to grammarians like Gilchrist to criticize, to modify, and to interact with that body of material in a more creative way than is often thought possible within the unpromising genre of grammar. Moreover, it is the procedures that he used in negotiating this interaction which allowed him to undertake his ‘defence’ of Urdu. First, there might be features of the language, which could actually be presented as ‘philosophical’ in western terms and these could be foregrounded through rhetorical devices including metaphor and other kinds of imagery. Second, the European languages sometimes revealed themselves in surprising ways when subjected to close scrutiny and descriptions of non-European languages could be authorized by showing that they worked in the same way as some accepted analysis of English or Latin. This kind of procedure had the advantage of allowing the grammarian to cite the names of earlier scholars in his work and even suggest that he had some kind of intellectual community with them. It is important to recognize that, as grammarians such as Gilchrist set out the forms and structures of languages, they inevitably opened them up for scrutiny and criticism. At the same time, however, through the artful deployment of material, it was possible for them to anticipate and avert this hostile attention. This will become evident as we examine two areas of the grammar where Gilchrist applies the kind of strategies outlined above: first, the treatment of irregular verbs, and second, the expression of the concept of possession. Given the importance that Gilchrist places on detail in the presentation of the colonial self, it is natural that the political meanings of his work should also be visible in these detailed linguistic analyses.

Signs of civilization: the verbal system A feature of Urdu that Gilchrist consistendy singles out for praise is the uniformity of its verbal system. He stresses repeatedly that Urdu has only one conjugational pattern. Chapter five of the grammar, ‘Of Verbs’, begins: ‘We are now arrived at that part of the Hindoostanee, which of all others will prove the most agreeable and satisfactory; the whole of the verbs being reducible under one conjugation, whose changes of mood and tense … are as obvious and easy, as the personal inflections are simple and uniform.’25 In the preface to the dictionary, he repeats this point and says of the verbal system that no other part of the grammar ‘can afford so much to admire, and so little to censure’.26 He also emphasizes that Urdu has few irregular

verbs. In the grammar he asserts that they are ‘so few in number, as scarcely to merit a recital; which is a circumstance that has not probably a parallel in any ancient or modern language, and will be very acceptable to the reader’.27 For the modern learner, too, these features are attractive since they render the acquisition of the language simpler. For Gilchrist, however, the uniformity and regularity of the verbal system have a deeper significance. Linguistic texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often express the idea that a truly ‘rational’ language would be entirely regular and uniform and that the more irregular a language is, the more defective it must be. In 1668, for example, Bishop John Wilkins, a leading member of the Royal Society, published a proposal for a ‘philosophical language’ that was to serve as a vehicle for scientific inquiry.28 Wilkins’ essay includes a critique of the grammar of Latin intended to show that this rival medium of learned discourse was in fact unsuited to the role that had been conferred on it. Wilkins criticizes the fact that Latin nouns are distributed across five declensions. ‘They are’, he says, ‘unnecessary and inconvenient’.29 Similarly the ‘four distinct ways of conjugating Verbs’ result in an absurd proliferation of forms.30 Wilkins’ own philosophical language will not suffer from these failings. Nor, according to Gilchrist, does Urdu. Thus, his repeated assertion that all the verbs are ‘reducible under one conjugation’ must be read in the light of the notion that reason should inform the construction of languages. Yet the simplicity of the Urdu verbal system was not obvious to all eighteenth-century observers. In the first three editions of Hadley’s work the language is said to have no less than five conjugations.31 Thus, to establish the rationality of Urdu grammar, Gilchrist needed actively to argue against this position at a technical level. His argument proved persuasive and, in the fourth edition of Hadley’s work, only one conjugation is postulated. This change of heart, of course, elicited vociferous accusations of plagiarism from Gilchrist. The image he uses in vilifying Hadley is interesting. He compares the grammar of Urdu to a landscape and asserts that the verbal system is the most beautiful part of the ‘philological champaign’. Hadley, meanwhile, is compared to an owl ‘who has long perched on the watch tower of Hindoostanee grammar … with hootings ominous and fatal enough, to have far encroached on the long secluded

day’.32 The point of the comparison is that the owl’s ‘nocturnal vision’ has prevented it till now from seeing the beauty of the landscape. Thus, Hadley’s failure to grasp the simplicity of the verbal system is understood as a failure to appreciate its excellence. In his critique of Latin grammar, however, Wilkins also deals with the issue of irregularity. Latin morphology would be problematic enough, he says, if the rules were ‘general and constant’, but ‘the exceptions and Anomalisms … are so very numerous that there is much more pains required for the remembring [sic] of them, than of the Rules themselves: insomuch that many eminent Grammarians have written against Analogy, both in Greek and Latin’.33 He offers a ‘brief view’ of these ‘anomalisms’ stating that there are so many exceptions in the conjugations of verbs, particularly in the formations of preterites and supines,34 that it is difficult to list them. ‘Some are wholly without them, others have them without any Analogy; as Fleo Flevi, Sero Sevi, Fero Tuli.’ Furthermore, different verbs sometimes have the same preterites or supines while some are ‘of none of the four conjugations’: sum (I am), volo (I want), fio (I become), and eo (I go), for example.35 Urdu undeniably has some irregular verb forms, albeit few, and Gilchrist clearly sees them as imperfections. The perfect participles of karnâ (to do), marnâ (to die), denâ (to give), and lenâ (to take), for example, are irregular. We would expect their perfects to be karâ, marâ, dryâ, and leyâ and the fact that the forms kiyâ, muâ, diyâ, and liyâ are in use clearly needs explanation.36 In presenting each, Gilchrist provides a brief discussion of how he believes the anomaly to have arisen. In all four cases he claims that the problematic forms are not irregularly derived from contemporary infinitives but are regular formations from old or disused infinitives, namely ‘keena’, ‘moona’, ‘deena’ and ‘leena’.37 The same explanation appears in one of his later works, The Anti-Jargonist. The ancient infinitives keena, moona, have probably left their regular preterites kee, a, moo, a as dying bequests to kuma, to do; murna, to die, and when proving too powerful mementos have almost buried in oblivion the regular tenses kura, mura, of these surviving legatees, who may thence be said to inherit rather superfluous than irregular preterites.38

Gilchrist goes on to say that this explanation will

in a great measure rescue the language of Hindoostan from the reproach of a single irregular verb, in this philological attempt of ours to recover its disfigured body, from the clumsy paws of those bruins, who have preposterously endeavoured to lick its mangled carcase as a jargon, into some intelligible shape or form.39

The implication is clearly that the existence of obsolete verbs from which the anomalous forms were derived would mitigate the anomalies, and the legal metaphors strongly reinforce the normative character of the discussion. Gilchrist is not merely showing how the irregular forms have come into existence but attempting to justify them by showing that they do not violate the principles on which languages should be constructed. It is also important to note that the project of ‘rescuing’ the language is set in opposition to the work of ‘bruins’ such as Hadley, whose attempts to analyse a ‘jargon’, by defmition, entail the acceptance of linguistic corruption. Here, then, Gilchrist pursues his communicative goals by presenting an argument from the history of the language and he reinforces his point by using metaphor. He implicitly likens himself to a lawyer and his opponents to the comical animals of fabular tradition, licking a corpse in an effort to make it live. In so doing he hammers home the message that Urdu is ‘rational’ and ‘civilized’ while at the same time representing himself, in contrast to Hadley, as a reputable scholar. By foregrounding a feature of the language that is identified within philosophical texts as a virtue, Gilchrist is able to comment upon the nature of Urdu, upon his own status as a scholar, and upon the deficiencies of his major rival, Hadley.

The possessive adjective The second example of Gilchrist’s grammatical analysis relates to the postposition, kâ, which is used in Urdu to indicate possession. It is a feature of this particle that it must agree in gender and number not with the noun to which it is attached but with the following noun. Thus ‘Sunil’s brother’ would be translated sunîl kâ bhâî where kâ is masculine singular to agree with bhâî (brother). ‘Sunil’s sister’, however, would be translated sunîl kî bahn where kî is feminine singular to agree with bahn (sister). Within the parameters of eighteenth-century linguistic thought this might be viewed as strange behaviour for a postposition. Prepositions were categorized as belonging to the ‘undeclined’ parts of speech and having no ‘accidents’ to be expressed through inflection.40 Postpositions were understood to be

similar in character to prepositions, so what is the justification for a postposition that declines? Gilchrist’s approach is to claim that the particle kâ is actually an adjectival ending that converts the preceding noun into an adjective. This seems a more acceptable description. Eighteenth-century readers with even the most basic knowledge of French, Latin, or Greek would be perfectly used to the idea that adjectives have inflections. What might continue to cause problems, however, is the idea that possession is expressed by converting the noun marking the possessor into an adjective. Surely possession is a relation and should be expressed either by a case ending or a preposition? But this is another challenge to which Gilchrist can rise and he does so by drawing a comparison with a feature of English grammar, namely the apostrophe-s, which is also used to denote possession. Gilchrist refers to a work by another member of the seventeenth-century Royal Society, John Wallis’ Grammatica linguce Anglicance, first published in 1652, and says, ‘This genetive [the postposition kâ], like ours [the apostrophe-s], so much resembles an acjjective, that I cannot help thinking the learned Wallis had some reason for calling this form of the noun one’. The reference is to Wallis’ chapter on adjectives where he claims that there are two types of adjectives that are formed directly from substantives: ‘The first of these may be called the possessive acjjective [Acjjectivum Possessivum]. It is formed from any substantive, singular or plural, by the addition of s (or es, if required by the pronunciation)’.41 This is a clever tactical move on Gilchrist’s part. If the learned Dr Wallis thinks that English expresses possession by converting nouns into adjectives then it is hardly appropriate to criticize Urdu for doing the same thing. To a certain extent Gilchrist is interpreting the discussion of the acjjectivum possessivum for his own purposes. Wallis does not explicitly discuss his motives for describing the apostrophe-s form as an adjective but the anonymous author of the Bellum Grammaticale, a work published in 1712, which discusses three contemporary grammars of English, provides a suggestion. This author criticizes one of his targets, James Greenwood, for not following this analysis and says that, if it is adopted, ‘there is no need of endeavouring to thrust one Case into our Language, quite contrary to its Genius, which hates Cases, since the Way Dr. Wallis has judiciously chose, answers the End as well, and agrees better with the Nature of our

Tongue’.42 On this reading, the argument is language-speciflc. In order to avoid saying that English has any cases at all, Wallis has made the one possible candidate into an adjectival termination. Gilchrist, however, does not present Wallis’ analysis as a languagespeciflc argument that happens to provide a model for his own interpretation of the Urdu data. Instead he treats Wallis’ analysis as if it were presenting a crosslinguistic theory about the expression of possession and he characterizes his own discovery concerning Urdu as providing further evidence for this universal theory. This impression is reinforced in one of his later works, The British Indian Monitor, where he states that ‘Ka, of, ’s has not only all the governing qualities of a postposition in the Hindoostanee, but is itself a declinable adjunct, that admirably proves the intimate connexion between genitive and adjective forms in most languages’.43 By this stage the theory has expanded to embrace ‘most languages’ and the claim is supported with the observation that the Latin form cujus (of whom, of which) is sometimes treated as the invariable genitive form of the relative pronoun and sometimes as an adjective which varies for gender, case and number. The implication is that in such illustrious company – first English, and now Latin – Urdu can hardly be criticized for its adjectival possessives. In his discussion of the expression of possession Gilchrist takes a potentially problematic feature of Urdu and finds precedents for it in prestigious analyses of other languages. The very fact of citing Wallis’ important grammar of English is a powerful strategy of self-legitimation as a scholar. Instead of simply pointing to Wallis’ work in defence of his analysis, however, Gilchrist goes a stage further by putting the two analyses side by side and claiming to be developing a universal theory which originates with Wallis, a claim which becomes more strongly expressed as time passes: the similarity of adjectival and genitive forms in Urdu, English and Latin is evidence that, in some underlying sense, the genitive is an adjective. In this way Gilchrist presents himself as someone akin to Wallis, who thinks philosophically about language and is not, like Hadley, a mere purveyor of shoddy text books to undiscriminating readers. Again, in the midst of his technical grammatical description, he is developing a detailed representation of himself and his object of study.

Conclusion The preservation of face was of primary importance for the Company servant who was presenting himself before the colonized population. In the institutional context of Fort William College Gilchrist was given authority to convey this message to students for whom attendance at the College was a requirement. To reach a more general readership, however, he had to compete in the literary market place and this involved producing texts that would win readers over from Hadley’s descriptions of ‘jargon’ and convince them that they needed to engage with the styles of Urdu presented in his own work. It is clear that the mass of scholarship presented in the grammar and dictionary did not serve this purpose. It impressed Wellesley enough to appoint Gilchrist to the staff of the new college, but it possibly alienated those other readers who continued to purchase Hadley’s little book throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century. As the style of the texts changed, however, and Gilchrist’s books began to resemble Hadley’s in their provision of dialogues and their more compressed treatment of the grammar, the kind of strategies described in the last section endured. In a sense it mattered little whether individual readers were interested in the theory of general grammar or had even heard of the learned Dr Wallis. What is important is the cumulative effect of repeatedly setting Urdu alongside European languages, finding it a match for them, and arguing for its learned and worthy qualities. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, colonial anxiety informed the construction of languages as objects of study at the most detailed level and the grammatical literature of empire is particularly interesting from this perspective because in it we see members of the British community attempting to mobilize opinion amongst themselves. In the late twentieth century grammar is no longer the foundation of a liberal education. However, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries grammatical studies were still central even to basic schooling. The result is that texts that would have seemed allusive, provocative, even witty or playful to their contemporary readers have hardened and been rendered opaque to the modern eye. We need to learn how to read these texts because they are not simply the repositories of out-of-date technical information. They are an important source of nuanced information about the micro-economy of cultural encounters in the period of emergent colonialism.

1

John Richardson, A Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of the Eastern Nations (Oxford, 1777), pp. 1-2. 2

For an influential work on Persian, see William Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language (London, 1771). Although Jones had not visited India when his grammar was published, his text was nevertheless seen as an important resource for employees of the Company. For a work more rooted in the Indian context see Francis Gladwin, The Persian Moonshee (Calcutta, 1795). The earliest grammars of Sanskrit to be written in English date from the first decade of the nineteenth century. See William Carey, A Grammar of the Sungskrit Language (Serampore, 1804) and H. T. Colebrooke, A Grammar of the Sanscrit Language (Calcutta, 1805). By this stage, however, British officials had been studying Sanskrit for many years and translating Sanskrit texts into English. See for example, Charles Wilkins, The Bhagavat-Geeta; or, Dialogues of Kreeshna and Atjoun (London, 1785). For an important early work on Bengali see Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, A Grammar of the Bengal Language (Hoogly, 1778). Easy work on Urdu will be discussed below. 3

John Gilchrist, A Dictionary, English and Hindoostanee (2 vols, Calcutta, 1787-90) and John Gilchrist, A Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language; or, Part Third of Volume First, of a System of Hindoostanee Philology (Calcutta, 1796). The term ‘Urdu’ is an acceptable contemporary name for the variety described by Gilchrist but he usually uses the term ‘Hindoostanee’. 4

See Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The command of language and the language of command’, in Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi, 1985), pp. 276-329. 5

Ibid., p. 284. Cf. Edward W. Said, Orienta/ism (London, 1978).

6

See, for example, Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994).

7

Sources for the life of John Gilchrist include a ‘Preface’ dated at Calcutta, 1 August 1798, bound as pp. i-liii of his Dictionary and Grammar, and a collection of material published under the tide Whicker v. Hume: Appendix to the Case of the Respondents, The Trustees of Dr Gilchrist’s Will (n.d.). This documentation was used as evidence when his will was disputed after his death in 1843 and a copy is kept in the office of the Gilchrist Trust in London. Evidence for Gilchrist’s service in the Royal Navy is to be found in the PRO, ADM 106/2899, Series DJ, 379 and 198. 8

Gilchrist’s application for leave was supported by Captain John Rattray and Dr Francis Balfour, both servants of the Company and it was granted by Sir John MacPherson ‘with a liberality becoming his high station, and worthy the gentleman and scholar’, as Gilchrist puts it in his ‘Preface’, p. vii. Gilchrist experienced considerable financial difficulties during his leave owing to the expense of maintaining an ‘establishment’ of informants and the difficulty of keeping his financial affairs in order at such a distance from Calcutta. In 1787 he began cultivating indigo to support himself and it was obviously with some relief that he returned to Calcutta in 1798. 9

George Hadley, Grammatical Remarks on the Practical and Vulgar Dialect of the Indostan Language (Commonly Called Moors) (London, 1772). 10

Retroflex sounds are made by curling the tongue upwards, so that the underside touches the roof of the mouth. In a flap the tongue is in motion and only strikes the roof of the mouth briefly. In a stop the tongue is held against the roof of the mouth and obstructs the flow of air for a slightly longer period. Retroflexion is a characteristic feature of many South Asian languages. 11

By ‘pidgin’ I mean a reduced but stable variety that arises in conditions of cultural contact and facilitates communication between people of different linguistic groups.

12

In the eighteenth century the term ‘jargon’ was used to denote stigmatized language varieties such as contact languages, the private languages of particular social groups, and the languages of ‘savage’ peoples. See Peter Burke and Roy Porter, eds, Languages and Jargons: Contributions to a Social History of Language (Cambridge, 1995). 13

Cohn, ‘The language of command’, p. 312.

14

Gilchrist, A Grammar, p. 300.

15

Gilchrist, ‘Preface’, p. v.

16

Quotation marks in original; ibid., p. vii.

17

Cohn, ‘The language of command’, pp. 325-9. See also David Lelyveld, ‘Colonial knowledge and the fate of Hindustani’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35 (1993), 66582. Both works provide a rich analysis of the importance of the role of language in the colonial state. 18

See Sisir Kumar Das, Sahibs and Munshis: An Account of the College of Fort William (Delhi, 1978) and David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (Berkeley, 1969). 19

The catalogue of the National Library of Congress lists editions for 1790 and 1797 and suggests that they may have been published in Calcutta. 20

John Gilchrist, The Oriental Linguist (Calcutta, 1798), p. i.

21

These include The Oriental Linguist itself and also The Anti-Jargonist (Calcutta, 1800), The Stranger’s East Indian Guide to the Hindoostanee (Calcutta, 1802), The Hindee Directory (Calcutta, 1802), A Collection of Dialogues on the Most Familiar and Usiful Subjects (Calcutta, 1804), and The British-Indian Monitor (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1806-8). For a discussion of Gilchrist’s attitude to the use of dialogues see Richard Steadman-] ones, ‘Learning Urdu in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: dialogues and familiar phrases’, in History of Linguistics 1996, eds David Cram, Andrew Linn and Elke Nowak (2 vols, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1999), ii, pp. 165-72. 22

See, for example, Anna Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics (London, 1998), pp. 83-123. 23

A key text here is C. Lancelot and A. Arnauld, Grammaire générale et raisonnee (Paris, 1660), usually known as the Port Royal Grammar. For an influential general grammar from England see James Harris, Hermes; or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (London, 17 51). 24

See Rüdiger Schreyer, ‘Linguistics meets Caliban or the uses of savagery in eighteenthcentury theoretical history of language’, in Papers in the History of Unguistics: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS III), eds H. Aarsleff, L. G. Kelly and H.-J. Niederehe (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 301-14. Schreyer provides a useful discussion of the perception of Native American languages in enlightenment texts. 25

Gilchrist, A Grammar, pp. 98-9.

26

Gilchrist, ‘Preface’, pp. xliv-xlv.

27

Gilchrist, A Grammar, p. 143.

28

John Wilkins, Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668). Gilchrist writes enthusiastically of Wilkins’ plan in his ‘Preface’, p. XXXV. 29

Wilkins, Essay, p. 444.

30

Ibid., p. 446.

31

Hadley clearly arrived at this rather inelegant analysis by classifying verbs according to the sounds appearing at the end of their stems. This procedure was conventionally used in the

description of the Latin verbal system and in that context, it produces a more effective analysis. 32

Gilchrist, ‘Preface’, p. xl.

33

Wilkins, Essay, p. 449.

34

The terms ‘preterite’ and ‘supine’ denote verbal forms within the Latin grammatical tradition. The Latin preterite can be used to translate English phrases such as ‘I walked’ or ‘I have walked’. The supine is a type of verbal noun. 35

Ibid.

36

For a discussion of the distribution of these forms in eighteenth-century Urdu texts, see M. K. A. Beg, Urdu Grammar: History and Structure (New Delhi, 1988), pp. 183-4. 37

Gilchrist, A Grammar, p. 143.

38

Gilchrist, The Anti-Jargonist, p. lxv.

39

Ibid.

40

Ian Michael, English Grammatical Categories and the Tradition to 1800 (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 443-8. 41

John Wallis, Grammar of the English Language, transl. J. A. Kemp (London, 1972), pp. 304-

42

Bellum Grammaticale; or, The Grammatical Batte/Royel (London, 1712), p. 31.

43

Gilchrist, The British Indian-Monitor, i, p. 141.

5.

Chapter 10

Containing the Marvellous: Instructions to Buyers and Sellers Phyllis Whitman Hunter

The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed a surge in longdistance trade accompanied by the growth of colonial settlements in the new world, and trading posts in the Far East. Trade and travel engendered a world of mobile people and portable property. Imported goods and fashionable display became a commonplace part of many peoples’ everyday lives. In analysing this period, J. G. A. Pocock discerns the rise of a ‘social personality founded upon commerce: upon the exchange of forms of mobile property.’1 Commercial contacts with foreign lands were supplemented by growing numbers of what cultural historian Barbara Stafford calls ‘scientific travellers’ whose accounts became available to a broader reading public. In her study of eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel accounts, Stafford asserts that there were two contrasting modes of perception that pervaded these works. One, the picaresque, depended on ‘the astonishing, the novel, the unusual, and the extraordinary’ for its allure and could be found in wonder tales, travel literature, and novels. The other mode, used by the scientific traveller, depended on viewing nature as empirical evidence.2 A sense of people and goods in motion called forth what Pocock terms ‘modes of consciousness suited to a world of moving objects’.3 In my analysis, evolving modes of consciousness encompassed two alternative responses to the foreign, the exotic, and the marvellous: ‘excitement’, a desire to experience or imagine; and ‘containment’, a need to confine and control. Excitement and containment appear, I argue, not only in literature and travel journals, but also in the more mundane world of consumption and commerce, shaping the marketing of consumer goods and guiding the

development of bookkeeping practices. This essay will explore the evidence for excitement and containment in two related forms of commercial didactic literature – advertisements and merchant guidebooks – and consider the relationship between prescription and practice, particularly in commercial record keeping. The tensions between excitement and containment in perceiving and interacting with the world were central to the development of the novel, the spread of Enlightenment ideas, and also to the growth of capitalism. Foreign trade and travel stimulated a growing fascination with exotic and unusual imported goods. No longer did objects bearing ancient marks of lineage and patina confer status and prestige. Instead, a bourgeois public clamoured for the new, the novel, and the foreign. Savvy merchants like Sir Joshua Child took advantage of this by instructing their agents overseas to search out fresh designs in flowered silks, knowing that ‘English Ladies … will give twice as much for a new thing not seen in Europe before.’4 Novelty, an essential element of the ‘Consumer Revolution’ as conceived by scholars of material culture, required an intense attention to visual detail. Participation entailed meticulous scrutiny of the ‘flower and figure’ of imported silk, careful management of new products like tea and chocolate, and the practised use of foreign goods in social rituals that conftrmed British identity.5 Forging a consumer society required new forms of education and improved methods of conducting commerce. In the process of creating demand, advertisements for fashionable goods constituted a form of didactic literature for consumers. Like tradesmen’s vade-mecums, and merchants’ accounting practices, advertisements shared a language of excitement and containment that aimed to instruct citizens in a world flooded with new goods from abroad, new ideas about the self, and new conceptions of the universe.

Advertisements for imported goods Fashionable consumption, like traveller’s accounts, combined empiricism – in the careful attention to changes in the pattern, colour, and texture of materials, with sensibility – in the pleasure and wonder of not just the new, but the novel, that is, ‘a thing not seen in Europe before’. In making Indian calico a marker of elite status, genteel Anglo-Americans appropriated

foreign goods much like travellers seek souvenirs ‘in order to transform and collapse distance into proX1m1ty to, or approximation with, the self.’6 According to cultural critic Susan Stewart, ‘the souvenir [or calico] contracts the world in order to expand the personal.’ In collecting artifacts or in buying calico, ‘the self generates a fantasy in which it becomes the producer of these objects’ and arguably the owner of an imaginary experience of trans-oceanic travel and market exchange in ports like Surat and Madras.7 Advertisements in British and colonial American newspapers played a critical role in promoting excitement of the self-produced fantasy and domesticating or containing foreign products. Merchants channelled demand through detailed and enticing advertisements that encouraged buyers to carefully observe visual details in order to discriminate among fashionable wares. Through close description, promotional notices taught consumers about novelty and variation. In studying colonial American papers, Timothy Breen found that in the 1720s ‘merchants seldom mentioned more than 15 different imported items per month … the descriptions were generic: cloth, paper, ceramics.’ By the 1770s New York papers might list over nine thousand items during a month. Breen concludes that one outcome of what Anglo-American scholars call the Consumer Revolution was ‘an impressive new vocabulary’.8 An advertisement in the Pennrylvania Gazette from January 1755, typical of those found in many colonial newspapers, announced an assortment of dry goods for sale in the store of Philadelphia importers Rhea and Wickoff. A long list contained over 55 different types of various fabrics carefully differentiated by various characteristics. Suppliers distinguished cloth by type – lawn, cambric, chintz, crapes, muslins; finishing treatment – harrateen, watered silk; colour – blue, scarlet, purple; weave – three-quarter and seveneighths checks and stripes; and place of origin – Hamburg, Russia, Italy, Ireland, India, and China. In some instances, place of origin came to identify a type of fabric such as ‘Padausoy’ after a region in India, ‘Chainey’, a kind of Chinese silk, and ‘Holland’, a fine linen. The introduction of brand names offered another means of discrimination evident in commercial advertisements; announcements identified goods by the maker, such as Weston’s snuff and Hose’s damask shoes.9 As with novels, travellers’ accounts and guidebooks, the careful description and differentiation found in consumer

advertisements communicated a detailed visual, tactile, and social knowledge to the readers. American shopkeepers selling fashionable goods often became ‘tutors’ to those aspiring to Georgian gentility.10 Notices educated consumers on how to take care of their delicate and expensive imported fabrics. In a 1735 edition of the Pennrylvania Gazette, a shopkeeper touted as just imported’ a ‘Superfine Crown Soap’ that ‘cleanses fme Linens, Muslins, Chines, Cambricks, &c. with Ease and Expedition.’ The purveyor explained that these fine fabrics ‘often suffer more from the long and hard Rubbing of the Washer,’ and ‘through the ill Qualities of the Soap … than the Wearing.’ Superfme crown soap was especially useful for washing ‘Scarlets, or any other bright and curious Colours, that are apt to change by the Use of common Soap.’11 Through advertisements, both merchants and consumers learned to distinguish by sight and touch the value and fashionable connotations of a wide variety of materials and styles, as well as how to care for their prized goods. Emphasizing novelty created a sense of excitement that promoted consumer culture. In 1733, the Boston Gazette carried the announcement of ‘Mrs. Elizabeth Hatton from London [who] makes Manteaus, Cloaks, Manteels, and all sorts of Women’s Apparel after the newest Mode.’ Mrs. Hatton also had ‘new Patterns of Sieves by the last Ships, from the Queen’s Manteau and ScarfMaker’. The emphasis was on both novelty and knowledge. Mrs. Hatton signalled the importance of keeping up with the rapid changes in fashion by insisting that ‘she’ll constantly be supply’d’ by the Queen’s dressmaker ‘as the mode alters’.12 Like Hatton, a goldsmith in Charleston, South Carolina, made snuffboxes ‘after the newest and neatest fashions’. Artisans advertised their knowledge of the latest fashions, imparting a kind of cultural authority to their finely wrought goods and to those who purchased them.13 Advertisements proclaimed the availability of new kinds of furnishings and products just coming into use during the early eighteenth century like chests of drawers and dressing tables. In Charleston, Henning and Shute sold ‘scriptoires and chests of drawers, pier glasses and sconces’ and Croakatt & Seaman promoted looking glasses and dressing tables ‘just imported in the ship Charles, Capt. Reid from London’. On the same vessel arrived ‘fine plain or gold and silver laced hatts’, and ‘India goods’ such as

taffetas, grosgrains, shagreens and calicoes. The valuable cargo included green and bohea tea, along with the chinaware and ‘silver teaspoons, Tongs, and strainers’ necessary for serving hot beverages. Other Charleston merchants offered ‘dressing Tables & card Tables,’ fans, and silver buttons. Selection among these rapidly proliferating choices in fabrics, furniture, and tableware required an attention to detail that functioned as a vital element in domesticating and containing mobile property.14 But a second conceptualization, that of excitement, was also at work. Fine detail and concrete depictions of each imported object were mentally projected onto a large geographical landscape by the words printed at the head of the notice, just imported … from London’. The shopkeeper’s collection of Chinese silks, Italian crapes, Irish and Russian sheeting, Hamburg and Holland lawns, and Scotch handkerchiefs presented an assemblage of goods gathered from a global network of commercial exchange.15 The connection of fragments, in this case pieces of material, to the imposing but immaterial representation of transatlantic voyages and worldwide imperial connections gave imported objects their exoticism and novelty and thus their ability to inspire recurring demand. One issue of the Spectator, influential in America as well as England, explained the appeal of imported goods by noting that ‘novelty is a very powerful … most extensive Influence.’ But, the author continued, ‘it is the Source of Admiration, which lessens in proportion to our Familiarity with Objects, and upon thorough Acquaintance is utterly extinguished.’16 The allure faded quickly and could only be rekindled by new and different possessions. Owning fashionable goods also required knowledge of how to use them. Newspaper notices acquainted families with the kinds of accomplishments suitable for well-bred young men and women. Thomas Ball in Philadelphia offered to teach writing, arithmetic and French to young gentlemen while his wife taught writing and French to the ladies. Ball’s sister, ‘lately arrived from London’, provided instruction in other ‘feminine’ skills such as ‘playing on the Spinet, Dancing, and all sorts of Needle-Work’. Five years later, Jane Voyer of Charleston let it be known that she intended to teach ‘embroidery, tapistry, drawing, French, and all sorts of work fit for young Ladies to learn’. With ‘good Encouragement’ Voyer hoped to establish a boarding school where she could also provide instruction in dancing and

music. This kind of advertising alerted the would-be gentry to the skills that would enable them to participate in polite society.17 Announcements also instructed readers on the usefulness of didactic literature. A notice for the manual Every Man his own Doctor: or the poor Planter’s Physician, just published in Philadelphia, promised to teach people to cure themselves by ‘plain and easy Means’. Purchasers would save money in the process because the medicines recommended were ‘chiefly of the Growth and Production of this Country’. Advertised publications like English Uberties, or the Free-born Subject’s Inheritance (first edition, London, 1682; fifth edition, Boston, 1721) aimed to instruct colonists in their legal rights including the Magna Carta and ‘a short history of the Succession, not by any Hereditary Right’. The book placed these abstract rights into the context of daily practice by including explanations of ship money, tonnage and poundage, and duties of various local officials such as justices of the peace and overseers of the poor.18 These works and others like them, promoted the value of self-instruction. Hallmarks of the emerging world of mobile people and property, advertisements for didactic literature and imported goods shared the empiricist goal of containing movement and change within detailed descriptions and precise prescriptions. But, implicit in their efforts to contain, were the fantasy and excitement of exotic possessions and novel experiences.

Accounting manuals for merchants Fascination with foreign goods simultaneously called forth an increasingly methodical control over moving and marketing goods. The tension between concrete objects in hand and imaginary voyages abroad created an instability, a constant motion between the here and now and the distant and unknown. That fluctuation may have inspired consumer spending but it threatened commercial profits. Men and women of commerce faced a daunting task in containing their expansive enterprises – ships traversing distant oceans and goods and credit being transferred on their behalf at foreign ports throughout the world. To contain instability and reduce risk, traders continually attempted to methodize business, to record details, to negotiate values, and, at least temporarily, stabilize mobile goods. Keeping

accounts provided a means by which merchants could momentarily pause the incessant movement of goods. A genre of instructional manuals emerged, during the early modern period, to teach merchants and gendemen of wealth and property the methods of Italian [double-entry] bookkeeping.19 Contemporaries interpreted the increasing emphasis on careful calculation as an outgrowth of the scientific revolution. Roger North, the author of The Gentleman Accomptant published in London in 1714, claimed that the ‘Method is so comprehensive and perfect, as makes it worthy to be put among the Sciences, and to be understood by all Virtuosi’.20 The strict Italian method required three types of account books: a wastebook or daybook, a journal, and a ledger. Conceived as the ‘foundation upon which the whole superstructure of a merchant’s accounts is raised,’ the wastebook required ‘every circumstance of date, conditions, and amount of the transaction’ to be recorded immediately in ‘plain simple language’; the entries must be ‘stricdy made in order of Time, as the Business is done’.21 For commercial accounts, accuracy became dependent on immediacy, ‘at the time of it’. Again and again, authors in the prescriptive literature stressed the importance of attention to carefully observed and recorded details. William Gordon’s 1765 treatise, The Universal Accountant, insisted that ‘Regular books frequendy examined, will contribute more to prosperity in trade, than great address and abilities without them.’ Careful records allowed a merchant to know ‘at a glance’ or within ‘a few hours’ where he stood. Gordon suggested, ‘[i]n order to give the merchant a constant view of the obligations he comes under, and the means he hath of retiring them, he ought to have a book lying open in his counting-house’. Without the careful bookkeeping plied in these manuals, ‘a person can only be said to deal at random, or at best can be called but guess’d work.’22 In practice, most colonial merchants kept careful records. Since business, even in the most cosmopolitan American ports, relied on exchange of goods and credit, careful records did indeed make the difference from ‘guess’d work’ and potential insolvency. Merchants used account books of all sizes. Samuel Grant, a cloth merchant, tailor and upholsterer in Boston, Massachusetts kept a massive daybook of 922 pages to record his transactions between 1737 and 1758.23 Grant’s account book probably represents the first of three types of accounts that contemporary

bookkeeping manuals recommended for the strict ‘Italian’ method. The book records entries by date, includes the name of the customer, a brief description of the item purchased and the unit cost, as well as a total bill, customer by customer. To the left of each name is a carefully inscribed number, which indicates the folio in Grant’s journal (no longer extant), which would have included both debit and credit sides for each customer’s account. His round hand and precisely aligned columns inscribed debits and credits as small as a few shillings or as substantial as £250 with the same attention, demonstrating his commitment to the neatness and accuracy called for in numerous manuals. In recording both large and small debts in a careful and consistent manner, Grant fulfilled Daniel Defoe’s dictum: ‘he that delights in his trade will delight in his books.’24 In his guide to business, called The Complete English Tradesman and published in London in 1726, Defoe insisted that a tradesman must ‘keep his books always in order; his day-book duly posted, his cash duly balanced, and all people’s accounts always fit for a view.’ The businessman needed to keep ‘an exact account of what goes out and comes in’ because ‘a tradesman’s books should always be kept clean and clear.’ Without this careful stocktaking, recorded in writing and ciphers, the tradesman or merchant, so Defoe concluded, ‘knows nothing of himself, or of his circumstances in the world’. Here we see how exact observation and careful accounting lead from confusion to clarity and become the ground for valuing goods and stabilizing identity. Elsewhere, Defoe reiterated the importance of accounts as a way of reflecting on and knowing the self; a merchant who had not duly posted and balanced his books ‘can give no account of himself to himself, much less to any body else’.25 In a world of mobile property, identity and authenticity could be located in the outward, observable, and recorded details. As an equivalent of fashionable presentation and scientific travel literature, accounting for goods and credit represented the self in a world increasingly understood in terms of property and markets. Like the attention of consumers and travellers, that of merchants fluctuated between close detail and imaginary constructs of distant events as they attempted to visualize the other end of market exchange that might take place on a Caribbean island or in an Asian port. Gordon and his colleagues understood that, because ‘Merchants being inured, from their

first setting out in the commercial life, to risks and hazards, send their property to foreign countries, and bring home the produce in return’, they must always aim to control risk. ‘In every case’, he remarked, ‘it requires foresight to judge exactly when to launch out, and when to wind up’. To make their decisions, merchants constructed an imaginary landscape of commercial imperialism. ‘For this purpose,’ Gordon explained, ‘it is extremely proper, that a trader should know how the several parts of the world are connected together in their mutual intercourse of commerce, how the redundancies of one country supply the wants of another, in what articles the markets are scarce, and in what they are overstocked’. In this way a trader ‘may at all times be capable of foreseeing, when any branch of trade in which he is concerned is likely to be stagnated, and take his measures for preventing the bad consequences accordingly. ‘26 Meticulous accounts were an integral part of this project as Wardhaugh Thompson, author of the 1777 Accomptant’s Oracle, acknowledged: ‘Thus you see, that when the sum is large, and the distance of time great, between that of the debt and credit sides being due, it then becomes an object of no small importance’.27 An account of a single voyage or ‘adventure’ to the west or the east, displaying debits on the left side and credits on the right, elided vast distances and incorporated multiple exchanges of goods and services. Thus, marks on a page became signs of containment making unknown risks bearable. But the containment was incomplete. Like an advertisement for imported goods, the title at the top of the account page, ‘Adventure to Surinam’ for example, continually animated the details recorded below. The distant site announced potential proftts or catastrophic losses. In each case, the very forms, the rectangular shapes of advertisements and account pages with their symmetrical lines seemed to frame and contain the goods represented within. In contrast, the naming of distant ports moved the reader beyond detailed categories and out of the frame to a broad trans-oceanic space.28 In spite of the pressures toward rationalization in business decisions charted by most economic historians, eighteenth-century merchants participated more in a project of recording details, containing far-flung goods, and accounting for credit; they spent little or no time in calculation of net profits or return on investment. Yet accounting had both practical and metaphysical designs. In transcribing detail, merchants strived to transform

mobile property and marvellous experience into stable representations of value. In her study of commercial culture in England, Natasha Glaisyer suggests that the language used in guidebooks for merchants ‘sought to construct stable images’. The specialized terms used in commerce, Glaisyer argues, were ‘pinned down through straightforward definitions, which distanced commerce from instability and so sought to provide a legitimate basis for its operation’.29 The detailed records and particular terms served both practical and cultural ends. Accounting manuals called for an up-to-the minute record of daily events in the shop and warehouse including purchases and sales whether by credit or cash, the pick up and delivery of goods, loans, and exchanges. As John Mair noted in his very popular manual, Book-Keeping Methodiz’d,’The Waste-book narrates Things in a plain, simple, natural Way, according to the Order of Time in which they were transacted.’ From this wastebook, each entry was then to be transferred to a journal and then to a ledger. The journal was designed to be a more careful, thorough day by day accounting of the business transacted and a sort of way station to the final or ‘principal book’, the ledger. Each of the items entered in the journal should, according to the directions in the guidebooks, also be posted in the ledger as a credit to one account and a debit to another. Hence the term double-entry. This provided a running record of values owed to or due from each person or group of investors with whom the merchant did business.30 The pages of the ledger recorded exchanges under various categories of commodities, cash, and profit and loss statements. The information in the ledger allowed merchants to consider their cost of goods when calculating profits and provided a separate picture of various types of businesses. In The Gentlemen’s Complete Book-keeper of 1741, Richard Hayes recommended balancing ledger accounts on separate sheets of paper. When completed, ‘these Balance Papers are to be carefully laid up in your Escruittore or Desk, to turn to at any Time hereafter, if you should want to know how much your Estate was worth, or in what Posture your Estate lay, in any particular Year.’31 Therefore regular balancing of accounts, using this method of double-entry bookkeeping, was perceived by contemporaries and later historians as critical to the rational calculation of modern capitalism. Although most guidebooks or vade-mecums designed for traders called for double-entry book-keeping ‘in the Italian style’, few merchants

practised this recommended method. One important element of doubleentry systems required a set of separate merchandise accounts where the cost, of procuring calico for example, was offset by credits for sales of calico. By balancing this type of account periodically a merchant could determine at least the operating profits made on trade in calico. But accounts of merchandise rarely appeared in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury merchants’ records. Noted historian of accounting Basil Yamey concluded that ‘methods in the text-books were more systematic and comprehensive than those used in practice.’32 In a study of extant ledgers and other account books of several leading English merchants covering over a century of enterprise (1655-177 4), Yamey found few of the merchandise accounts deemed necessary by the manuals. In one notable example, Sir John Banks, Governor of the fabled East India Company, who left a fortune of £200,000 at his death in 1699, maintained a separate account of purchase and sales for coffee, calicoes, and pepper. While he did record purchases and sales, the accounts were ‘simply carried forward … without any calculation of profit or loss’. In all three of Bank’s extant ledgers, Yamey found only one entry concerning profit and loss. Like Banks, few of Yamey’s merchants balanced their accounts regularly.33 Instead of following the prescriptive literature, most merchants and shopkeepers in Anglo-America kept only two kinds of accounts: one that represented a wastebook or daily record and the other, a journal that included a running list of debits and credits under individual or finn names. Neither matched receipts with costs, nor demonstrated any attempt to figure return on investment. While most merchants could then determine fairly quickly how they stood in relation to their customers and trading partners, without separate accounts for each commodity or type of business, the original cost of goods disappeared. And with it, the possibility of a careful determination of net profits or return on investment – both now considered essential calculations for rational decision-making – vanished as well. English and American merchants of the period rarely, perhaps never, figured net profit or, in modern parlance, the bottom line.34 A leading merchant of mid-eighteenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, who carried on an extensive trade with Southern Europe, offers an interesting case study of someone we know was trained in double-entry

book-keeping, yet chose not to use it once he established himself in business. As a youth, Timothy Orne (1717-67) was apprenticed to a Boston merchant. During this period he kept an immaculate set of records for what must have been a hypothetical business. In these early account books, comprising a matching wastebook, journal, and ledger, he meticulously recorded costs of various barrels of raisins and other imported produce, balancing different cost bases against sales made at different times and prices. Yet when Orne entered his father’s business and began sending cargoes on his own account, the careful consideration of costs versus sales disappeared from his records.35 Like the merchants studied by Yamey and other economic historians, Orne may have tabulated the running account of any individual customer or trading partner and usually sometime during the winter months or upon notice of a credit crisis or death, he determined an overall sum of money due to him or (rarely) funds he owed to the customer. But any effort to determine profit and loss on a type of business or over a measured span of time is absent from the account books. As a managing partner for numerous joint ventures to the West Indies and Spain or Portugal, Orne calculated what he termed ‘neet proceeds’ and the proportion of proceeds due to each partner. To determine this, he deducted sales commissions, customs fees, warehousing and dockage in the foreign ports, but neither estimated nor went back into his records to determine the cost of commodities shipped abroad.36 After extensive research in Orne’s papers, I found a set of four small soft cover memo books, one for each year from 1763 to 1767, the year of Orne’s death, at the age of 51. In these memo books Orne appeared to be calculating his net worth. He added up his stock in fish and English goods, outstanding loans (Orne acted as a private banker for people throughout eastern Massachusetts), real estate holdings, investments in shipping, cargo, and adventuring, and money due from abroad. In 1763 Orne determined that the value of his capital stock amounted to £19,613. By January of 1766 this had risen to £24,890; he had succeeded in increasing his net worth by about 10% per year during this period. His diversified business empire included banking and marine insurance, his own fishing fleet, ‘adventures’ to Southern Europe and the West Indies, and substantial real estate holdings. In these small memo books, Orne gathered together the estimated

value of his far-flung enterprises to produce a rough calculation of his own estate. The details were handwritten in a small script on unlined paper. Indeed, the books appear to be private records – kept apart from the more public journals and ledgers.37 Precise records did have their public purposes. Manuals cautioned traders and clerks not to erase or scratch out, in part because records might be used in courts of law. There an undisturbed record with corrections added at the end went a long way towards establishing the honesty and credit of the claimant or defendant. In The Universal Accountant, Gordon observed, ‘were merchants to admit of erasings or total cancellings in their books, it would be impossible to trace fraud with any degree of certainty; but when every thing stands fair and naked … it would be impossible … to contrive or carry on a designed fraud’.38 Again, the emphasis was on careful reporting, not on profitable decision-making. According to the authors of these tracts, careful record keeping had implications beyond any single trader’s profit or loss. Gordon claimed that ‘the want of proper intelligence and precaution’ brought on ‘one half of the failures among considerable merchants, the decay of our manufactures at home, and impunctuality of our correspondents abroad.’ The personal and the imperial were seen by Gordon and others as interchangeable, or at least as interconnected through questions of capital and credit. ‘Credit is the great foundation of commerce, not only between man and man, but likewise between nation and nation.’39 In an era where little was fixed and credit relations could only be grounded upon careful bookkeeping, commercial agents engaged in a daily round of conversation, correspondence, and posting accounts in a constant effort to determine exchange value and transpose moving commodities into flxed notations within the leathercovered pages of daybooks, ledgers, and journals. Instruction in double-entry bookkeeping methods appeared in more generalized works as well, including the widely popular The Instructor, or Young Man’s Best Companion by George Fisher. According to the original title, the work contained instructions on spelling, reading, writing and arithmetic ‘in an easier way than any yet published’ and also included ‘the Family’s best companion’ with directions for ‘marking on linnen; how to pickle and preserve; to make divers sorts of wine … A compleat treatise of

Farriery’ and ‘good advice to gentlemen and farmers’, as well as ‘how to qualify any person for business, without the help of a master’.40 The Preface listed the steps necessary in ‘forming the Young Man’s Mind’ beginning with English, ‘our Mother Tongue’. The list continued: second was ‘a good Hand for Writing’; third, knowledge of ‘some few Epistles … in a familiar Stile, and on sundry Subjects and Occasions’; fourth, ‘the Science of Arithmecick’; and flfth, ‘the ingenious Art of Bookkeeping after the Italian Manner’. Fisher extolled the importance of bookkeeping as ‘an Accomplishment that capacitates him[the reader) for business in the highest Degree’.41 In the body of the text, Fisher described ‘the Pleasure that accrues to a Person by seeing what he gains by each Species of Goods he deals in and his whole Profit by a Year’s Trade.’ Like many of the more specialized manuals, The Instructor asserted that this detailed double-entry method of accounting was essential for the man of business to ‘know the true State of his Affairs’, so that ‘he may, according to discretion, retrench or enlarge his Expenses.’ In other words, this kind of informacion was necessary to make rational decisions based on profit or loss. Apparently Fisher had no trouble making profitable decisions; he had a winner in The Instructor, which was reprinted numerous times, continuing its popularity into the early decades of the nineteenth century.42 In the 1740s, the always enterprising Benjamin Franklin, in partnership with bookseller David Hall brought out a colonial edition of Fisher’s work in Philadelphia. Franklin changed the title to The American Instructor and revised, corrected, and added material to the book, rendering ‘the whole better adapted to these American colonies, than any other book of the like kind’. Franklin and Hall reprinted the work several times followed by other printers in Philadelphia, Boston, Worcester, New York, and Burlington, New Jersey. Before 1800 Franklin’s revised edition had been reprinted at least ten times while Fisher’s original The Instructor continued to be reprinted every few years in Britain.43 Franklin and Hall advertised their product in the Pennrylvania Gazette, either in a long list of other works, or sometimes in what might be considered a display advertisement featuring Fisher’s American Instructor and using Fisher’s words to claim that it would ‘qualify any person for business, without the help of a master’. The Philadelphia printers sold their

editions to booksellers in many of the colonial cities. Bookseller William Hunter in Williamsburg, the colonial capital of Virginia, received an order of books from Benjamin Franklin that included 45 copies of The American Instructor. An inventory of Jeremy Candy’s shop in Boston from 1768 included three ‘Fishers’ and 20 ‘Fishers Tutor’. Franklin’s version of Fisher’s Instructor was most likely used as a school text as well as a selfhelp guide for apprentices and businessmen and women.44 The popularity of Fisher’s text and the more focused manuals of accounting in Britain and America suggests that a relatively large number of people, primarily male, were introduced to the virtues of double-entry bookkeeping. But, evidence proffered so far by economic historians reveals that few merchants or retailers followed the prescribed practice.45 They kept careful records of transactions but not the double-entry procedures now considered the basis for ‘rational policy’. Even though few merchants followed the prescriptions detailed in accounting manuals, the texts continued to be published and reprinted frequently. No doubt they provided a reliable source of income for printer/publishers and, depending on contractual arrangements (where they existed), for the author as well. The producers and sellers of these works clearly managed to convince numerous middling and gentry groups that some knowledge of double-entry bookkeeping was necessary to negotiate the increasingly commercialized world of eighteenth century AngloAmerica. They achieved this by associating bookkeeping with empirical inquiry like that evidenced in the ‘scientific traveller’ and emphasized by the virtuosi of the Royal Society in their instructions to mariners ‘to keep an exact Diary’ for observations abroad.46 John Mair, whose popular works on bookkeeping continued to be reprinted throughout the eighteenth century, claimed to present ‘the principles of the art … clearly and minutely’. In his guides ‘the rules arising from the theory are methodically digested; the several parts are connected in such a manner as to hang firmly together.’47 The manuals stressed an empiricist view – following a strict method would yield visual evidence of truth. The Gentleman Accomptant claimed ‘the Dr. [debit] and Cr. [credit] is pure and perfect right Reason, and contains the whole material Truth and Justice of all the Dealing, and nothing else’.48 Repetitive, daily attention formed an important component of the strict

method. Thompson’s text encouraged readers ‘to examine carefully your bill-book every morning, and what bills you find become due that day enter in your Waste-Book … and thereby prevent confusion’.49 In The Universal Accountant, Gordon emphasized that the merchant needed ‘a constant view of the obligations he comes under, and the means he hath of retiring them.’50 Without that access to reliable information, the trader or gentleman risked ‘his capital, or even credit’ in ‘rash and adventurous’ dealings.51 Detailed records aided the merchant in recalling the particular circumstances of each transaction, helping him to visualize, as Yamey puts it, ‘the physical attributes and economic circumstances of any particular asset’ and to ‘reconstruct in some minuteness the course of particular transactions.’52 In both commercial accounts and marketing strategies merchants participated in an effort to reduce to writing the numerous overlapping and complex arrangements involved in trading goods from distant cities and foreign lands. Both the instructions merchants received and the suggestions they issued to consumers called for an attention to detailed description and careful differentiation. Through an effort at precise written description whether in account books or advertisements, merchants attempted to both invoke and simultaneously contain the wonders of exotic goods and distant lands. Sellers and buyers depended on change and the movement of goods across long distances. Using a form of imaginative labour to represent and contain ‘the marvellous’, accounting manuals and guide books offered a pathway for traders to navigate the system of overseas commerce just as advertisements and periodicals presented a method for buyers to negotiate the corridors of fashionable consumption. In each instance, instructions stressed a careful attention to and recording of perceptible details. If exotic goods could be contained in precise notations within merchants’ account books and advertisements for stylish objects, their potential to disrupt could be channelled into a power to reaffirm individual identity and imperial nnagmmgs. 1

J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), p. 109. See also Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 188.

2

Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1984), pp. 3, 37-41. 3

Pocock, Virtue Commerce, and History, p. 109.

4

East India Company Dispatch Book, 23 March 1687, Vol. 91, p. 275, quoted in K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge, 1978), p. 281. 5

On the consumer revolution see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, eds, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, 1982); and Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington, 1988). 6

Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore, 1984), p. xii. 7

Ibid. Of course the actual work of production and shipping carried out by Indian labourers and European seamen is obscured by the idealized image of domesticated exoticism. For a thorough study of the East India Company trade with Asia during this period see Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia. 8

T. H. Breen, “‘Baubles of Britain”: the American and consumer revolutions of the eighteenth century’, in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, eds Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, 1994), pp. 444-82, pp. 452-3. 9

Pennsylvania Gazette (7 January 1755).

10

Richard L. Bushman, ‘Shopping and advertizing in colonial America’, in Carson, Hoffman, and Albert, OJ Consuming Interests, pp. 233-51, p. 250. 11

Pennsylvania Gazette (11-18 December 1735).

12

Mrs Hatton’s advertisement appears in the Boston Gazette (21 May 1733). For a treatment of fashion as a visual system of classification, and the ‘ongoing reformulation’ of that code during the eighteenth century, see Karen Calvert, ‘The function of fashion in eighteenth-century America’, in Carson, Hoffman and Albert, OJ Consuming Interests, pp. 252-83. 13

South Carolina Gazette (5-12 July 1735).

14

South Carolina Gazette (1-8 November 1735); South Carolina Gazette (8-15 November 1735); South Carolina Gazette (24 December-S January 1740); South Carolina Gazette (15-22 March 1734/5). 15

Pennsylvania Gazette (7 January 17 55).

16

The Spectator; ed. Donald F. Bond (5 vols, Oxford, 1965), v, p. 139.

17

Pennsylvania Gazette (5-13 March 1729/30); South Carolina Gazette (5-12 January 1740).

18

Pennsylvania Gazette (16-23 January 1734/5); Pennsylvania Gazette (28 J anuary-4 February 1734/5). 19

See B.S. Yamey, Accounting in England and Scotland: 1543-1800 (London, 1963; repr. edn, New York, 1982); see also Natasha Glaisyer, ‘The culture of commerce in England, 1660-1720’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge (1999), pp. 242-3, 272. 20

[Roger North], The Gentleman Accomptant: or, an Essay To unfold the Mystery of Accompts (London, 1714; repr. edn, New York, 1986), p. 1. 21

William Gordon, The Universal Accountant, and Complete Merchant (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1765; repr. edn of 2nd vol., New York, 1986), ii, p. 18; Wardhaugh Thompson, The Accomptant’s

Oracle, or, Kry to Science (York, 1777; repr. edn, London and New York, 1984), p. 72; [North], Gentleman Accomptant, p. 5. 22

Gordon, Universal Accountant, ii, pp. 7-8, 12; Thompson, Accomptant’s Oracle, p.1.

23

American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, MSS Collections, Samuel Grant Account Book. 24

Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (London, 1726; repr. edn, Gloucester, 1987), p. 187. 25

Ibid., pp. 14, 187-8.

26

Gordon, Universal Accountant, ii, pp. 2, 3, 8.

27

Thompson, Accomptant’s Oracle, p. 223.

28

In smaller colonial ports like Salem, Massachusetts, merchants and their ship captains often became trusted friends; their families might belong to the same social groups. Many of a ship’s crew had families residing in port so the loss of a ship at sea, a fairly rare occurrence, could be a local catastrophe not just for the merchant owners and investors but for the entire community. On the complex interconnections of an eighteenth-century merchant’s commercial and social life see Phyllis Whitman Hunter, ‘Ship of wealth: Massachusetts merchants, foreign goods, and the transformation of Anglo-American culture, 1670-1760’, PhD thesis, College of William and Mary (1996), Chapter 7. 29

Glaisyer, ‘The culture of commerce’, pp. 280-1.

30

John Mair, Book-Keeping Methodiz’d (Edinburgh, 1736), quoted in Yamey, Accounting in England and Scot/and, p. 33; John Mair, Book-Keeping Moderniz’d or Merchant-Accounts by double Entry, according to the Italian Form (Edinburgh, 1773; repr. edn, New York, 1978), p. 59. See also William Gordon quoted in Yamey, Accounting in England and Scotland, p. 31. Book-Keeping Moderniz’d was a revised and enlarged edition of Mair’s popular Book-Keeping Methodiz’d; like the earlier version, it appeared in many subsequent editions. 31

Richard Hayes, The Gentleman’s Complete Bookkeeper (London, 1741), p. 83.

32

Basil S. Yamey, ‘Scientific bookkeeping and the rise of capitalism’, Economic History Review, 1 (1949), 99-113, p. 101. 33

Yamey, Accounting in England and Scotland, pp. 181, 193-6; Yamey, ‘Scientific bookkeeping’, p. 106. 34

The analysis presented in this paragraph and elsewhere in the chapter derives from my extensive research in the papers of numerous Massachusetts and South Carolina merchants. 35

Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, Phillips Library, Timothy Orne Papers of the Orne Family Papers, vols 5, 6, and 7. The Orne Papers contain an extensive number of account books and folders of business correspondence. I am indebted to Robert Gross’ suggestions in deciphering Orne’s work during his apprenticeship. 36

See for example the five voyages made by the brigantine Betry and Molly carrying fish to the West Indies from 17 46-17 49 that produced cumulative ‘profits’ of £3075; Orne Family Papers, Timothy Orne Ledgers from 1738-1749. 37

Orne Family Papers, Stock of Shares. These amounts appear to be calculated in Massachusetts New Tenor, which at this time was not highly inflated in comparison to pounds sterling. Orne usually maintained a substantial credit balance with his factors in England and Spain unlike many of the Chesapeake planters studied by Jacob Price and others. See Jacob M. Price,

Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade: The View from the Chesapeake, 1700-1776 (Cambridge, 1980). 38

Gordon, Universal Accountant, ii, p. 50.

39

Ibid., ii, pp. 2, 6-7.

40

George Fisher, The American Instructor: Or, Young man’s best companion. Containing spelling, reading, writing, and arithmetic, in an easier way than any yet published (‘14th’ edn, New York, 1770), ‘Preface’, p. iv. 41

Ibid.

42

Fisher, The American Instructor, p. 153.

43

For further information on Franklin and Hall’s partnership and bookselling business see Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, A History of the Book in America Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 263-5, 276-9. 44

Pennsylvania Gazette (16 January 1750); Cynthia Z. Stiverson and Gregory A. Stiverson, ‘The colonial retail book trade: availability and affordability of reading material in mid-eighteenthcentury Virginia, day by day’, in Printing and Society in Easy America, eds William L. Joyce, David D. Hall Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench (Worcester, MA, 1983), pp. 132-73, p. 156; Elizabeth Carroll Reilly, ‘The wages of piety: the Boston book trade of Jeremy Condy’, in Joyce, et al, Printing and Society, pp. 83-131, pp. 128, 131. 45

In their overview, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985), pp. 3446, John]. McCusker and Russell R. Menard note the popularity of accounting manuals and merchant handbooks but offer no definitive statement on the use of double-entry bookkeeping by American merchants. In an extensive study of the accounts and business of Thomas and John Hancock, important Boston merchants, W. T. Baxter, a professor of accounting, notes the neglect of annual profit and loss calculations and asserts that John Hancock ‘lacked the figures necessary for rational policy’; W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1724-1775 (Cambridge, MA, 1945), pp. 37, 243. 46

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1 (1667), p. 141. In his study of Eastern and Western culture, Jack Goody suggests that bookkeeping ‘may have developed under an aesthetic impulse, a pressure towards symmetry, neatness, and perfection in the organization of accounts.’ Recognizing that few traders actually used the full complement of procedures, he suggests that this drive for order ‘drove accountants to elaborate their systems beyond the immediate demands of utility’; Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge, 1996), p. 62. 47

Mair, Book-Keeping Moderniz’d, p. vi.

48

[North], The Gentleman Accomptant, p. 4.

49

Thompson, Accomptant’s Oracle, p. 239.

50

Gordon, Universal Accountant, ii, p. 7.

51

Ibid., p. 11.

52

Basil S. Yamey, ‘Accounting and the rise of capitalism: further notes on a theme by Sombart’, Journal of Accounting Research, 2 (1964), 117-36, p. 125.

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Biblia or a Practical Summary of ye Old & New Testaments (London, 1727). Bird, Benjamin, The Catechism of the Church of England: with the Proofs thereof out of the Scriptures (London, 1674). Bisse, Thomas, The Beauty of Holiness in the Common-Prayer (London, 1716). Blair, Patrick, Pharmaco-botanologia (London, 1723-8). Blundeville, Thomas, The foure chiefest offices belonging to horsemanship (London, c. 1565-6). The Boston Gazette. Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (6 vols, Oxford, 1934-50). Boyer, Abel, The Compleat French Master for Ladies and Gentlemen (1st edn, London, 1694). Boyer, Abel, The Compleat French Master for Ladies and Gentlemen (10th edn, London, 1729). da Brescia, Bonaventura, Breviloquium musicale (Brescia, 1497). Breton, Nicholas, The Court and Country, or a Briefe discourse dialoguewise set downe betweene a Courtier and a Country-man (London, 1618). Le Breton, Philip, Elemens de la Grammaire Françoise (London, 1815). The British Apollo Or, Curious Amusements for the Ingenious. To which are Added the most Material Occumnces Foreign and Domestick. Perform’d By a Society of Gentlemen (4 vols, London, 1708-11). The British Apollo, Being the Quarterly Paper, in which are Inserted those Questions and Answers, for which we had not Room before (April 1708). The British Apollo. Being the Supernumerary paper for the Month of April in which are Inserted those Questions and Answers, for which we had not Room before (April 1708). Brooke, Humphrey, Cautionary Rules for preventing The Sicknness; Published hy Order of the Lord Mayor (London, 1665). Brown, John, Description and use of the carpenters-rule (London, 1662).

Brugis, Thomas, Vade Mecum: or, a Companion for a Chirur;gion (London, 1652). Brunfels, Otto, Herbarum vivae eicones (Strasbourg, 1530-36). Bunyan, John, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. W. R. Owens (Harmondsworth, 1987). Burney, Charles, General History of Music (1776-1789), ed. F. Mercer (2 vols, London, 1935). Butler, Charles, The Principles of Musick (London, 1636). Butler, Samuel, ‘An Elephant in the Moon’, in The Genuine Remains in Verse and Prose of Mr. Samuel Butler, Author of Hudibras … In Two Volumes (2 vols, London, 1759), vol. 2. Byfield, Nicholas, Directions for the Private Reading of the Scriptures, ed. J. Geree (4th edn, London, 1648). Calamy, Edmund, An Abridgement of Mr Baxter’s History of his Life and Times (2 vols, 2nd edn, London, 1713). Calbris, Bernard, The Rational Guide to the French Tongue (London, 1797). The Card of Courtship (London, 1653). Carey, William, A Grammar of the Sungskrit Language (Serampore, 1804). Case, John, The Praise of Musicke (Oxford, 1586). Case, John, Apologia musices tam vocalis quam instrumentalis et mixta: (Oxford, 1588). Castaing, John, An Interest-Book at 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 per C (London, 1700). A Catalogue of Books in the Library at Bedford. The Foundation whereof was Laid in the Year 1700 (London, 1706). [Castiglione, Baldassare], The Courtyer … done into Englyshe ry Thomas Hory (London, 1561). Chambaud, Lewis, Dialogues in French and English (London, 1751). Chambaud, Lewis, A Grammar of the French Tongue (London, 1758). Chambaud, Lewis, The Elements of the French Language (London, 1762). Chambaud, Lewis, The Art of Speaking French (Dublin, 1772). Chamberlain, Robert, The Accomptant’s Guide or Merchant’s Book-keeper (London, 1679).

Cheneau, Francis, French Grammar (London, 1685). Cheneau, Francis, The True French Master (London, 1752; 1st edn, 1723?). Clapham, Henoch, A Briefe of the Bible (Edinburgh, 1596). Clarke, Laurence, A Compleat History of the Holy Bible (2 vols, London, 1737). The Clergyman’s Companion in visiting the Sick (London, 1717). Colebrooke, H. T., A Grammar of the Sanscrit Language (Calcutta, 1805). Coles, William, Adam in Eden, or, Natures paradise (London, 1657). A Compendious History of the Old and New Testament (London, 1726). The Compleat Cookmaid: or, A Collection of most useful Dishes in City or Country (London, 1684). Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, 1999). Cudworth, Ralph, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons, at Westminster, March 31. 1647 (Cambridge, 1647). Cudworth, Ralph, A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, ed. Sarah Hutton (Cambridge, 1996). Culpeper, Nicolas, Pharmacopoeia Lmdinensis (London, 1653). Darwin, Erasmus, Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (Derby, 1797). Davies, JohnSir, A Work for None but Angels & Men, ed. Thomas Jenner (London, 1658). Defoe, Daniel, The Complete English Tradesman (repr. edn, Gloucester, 1987; 1st edn, London, 1726). Defoe, Daniel, A Journal of the Plague Year. Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Paula Backscheider (New York and London, 1992). The Doctrine of the Bible: Or Rules of Discipline, briefly Gathered thorow the Whole Course of the Scripture, by Way of Questions and Answers (London, 1666). [Dodoens, Rembert], Rams little Dodeon [sic]: A breife epitome of the new herbal, or history of plants. … Collected out of the most exquisite newe

herbal/, or history of plants, … try … D. Reinbert Dodeon, … and lately translated into English try Henry Lyte, Esquire: And now collected and abridged try William Ram, Gent. (London, 1606). Doni, Giovanni Battista, Compendia del Trattato de’ Generi de’ Modi della Musica (Rome, 1635). [Donne, John], Poems try]. D. (London, 1633). Donne, John, Complete English Poems (London, 1994). Dowland, John (transl.), Andreas Ornithoparcus his Micrologus (repr. edn, Amsterdam, 1969; 1st edn, London, 1609). Dunton, John, England’s Alarum (London, 1693). Dunton, John, Proposals for a National Reformation of Matters (London, 1694). Dunton, John, The Life and Errors of john Dunton (London, 1705). Dunton, John, Dunton’s Whipping Post (London, 1706). Dunton, John, Athenianism: or, the new projects of Mr. J. D. (London, 1710). Dunton, John, Religio Bibliopolae: Or The Religion of a Bookseller (London, 1728). E., R., A Scriptural Catechism (London, 1676). Edgeworth, Maria, The Good Governess, and other Stories (London, [c. 1800]). England’s Happiness Improv’d: or, an Infallible way to get Riches, Increase Plenty and Promote Pleasure (London, 1697). Erasmus, Desiderius, De Ratione Studii (Strasbourg, 1511). [Evelyn, John], Diary of john Evelyn, ed. William Bray (4 vols, London, 1879). Fairfax, John, The True Dignity of St. Paul’s Elder (London, 1681). Fauchon, James, The French Tongue (Cambridge, 1751). Fisher, George, The American Instructor. Or, Young Man’s Best Companion. Containing Spelling, Reading, Writing, And Arithmetic, In An Easier Way Than Any Yet Published … The Whole Better Adapted To These

American Colonies, Than Any Other Book Of The Like Kind (NewYork, 1770). Frosch, Johannes, Rerum musicarum opusculum rarum ac insigne (Strasbourg, 1532). Gérardot, Jean Antoine Baptiste, Elements of French Grammar (London, 1815). Gilchrist, John, A Dictionary, English and Hindoostanee (2 vols, Calcutta, 1787-90). Gilchrist, John, A Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language; or, Part Third of Volume First, of a System of Hindoostanee Philology (Calcutta, 1796). Gilchrist, John, The Oriental Linguist (Calcutta, 1798). Gilchrist, John, ‘Preface’ (Calcutta, 1798), bound as pp. i-liii of A Dictionary, English and Hindoostanee. Gilchrist, John, The Anti-Jargonist (Calcutta, 1800). Gilchrist, John, The Hindee Directory (Calcutta, 1802). Gilchrist, John, The Stranger’s East Indian Guide to the Hindoostanee (Calcutta, 1802). Gilchrist, John, A Collection of Dialogues on the Most Familiar and Useful Subjects (Calcutta, 1804). Gilchrist, John, The British-Indian Monitor (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1806-8). Gilbert, Samuel, Florist’s Vade Mecum (2nd edn, London, 1682). Gildon, Charles, A History of the Athenian Society (London, 1692), reprinted in The Athenian Oracle, eds John Dunton, Richard Sault, Samuel Wesley and Charles Gildon (4 vols, 3rd edn, London, 1728), vol. 4. Gladwin, Francis, The Persian Moonshee (Calcutta, 1795). Gordon, William, The Universal Accountant, and Complete Merchant (2 vols, repr. edn, NewYork, 1986; 1st edn, Edinburgh, 1765). Gratte, Henri, Nouvelle Grammaire Françoise à l’Usage de la Jeunesse Angloise (London, 1791). Gumpeltzhaimer, Adam, Compendium musicae latino-germanicum (Augsburg, 1591).

[H., R.], The History of Genesis (London, 1690). Hadley, George, Grammatical Remarks on the Practical and Vulgar Dialect tifthe Indostan Language (Commonly Called Moors) (London, 1772). Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey, A Grammar of the Bengal Language (Hoogly, 1778). Hamond, J., An Historical Narration of the Whole Bible (London, 1727). Harris, James, Hermes; or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (London, 1751). Harvey, Gideon, A Discourse of the Plague. Containing the Nature, Causes, Signs, and Presages of the Pestilence in general. Together with the state of the present Contagion. Also the most rational Preservatives for Families, and choice Curative Medicines both for Rich and Poor. With several waies for purifying the air in houses, streets &c. Published for the benefit of this Great City of London, and Suburbs. By Gideon Harory, M.D. (London, 1665). Harvey, Gideon, The Family Physician, and the House Apothecary (London, 1676). A helpe to memory and discourse (London, 1630). Herrick, Robert, Hesperides (London, 1648). Heywood, Oliver, His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner (4 vols, Brighouse, 1881-5). The History of ye Old & New Testament in Cutts ([London), 1671). H[oar], L[eonard), Index Biblicus: Or, the Historical Books of the Holy Scripture Abridged (London, 1668). Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991). Hodges, Nathanael, Λοιμολογía: sive Pestis Nuperae apud Populum Londinensem grassantis Narratio Historica. Authore Nathanaele Hodges, M.D. è Colleg. Londin. (London, 1671). Holbome, Anthony, The Cittharne Schoole (London, 1597). Homer, The Iliad, transl. A. T. Murray (London, 1960). Hoole, Charles, A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (London, 1660).

Houghton, John, A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (London, 1692-1703). Howel, Laurence, A Compleat History of the Holy Bible (3 vols, 2nd edn, London, 1716; 1st edn, 1716). H[ughes], W[illiam], The Flower Garden (2nd edn, London, 1672; 1st edn, 1671). Hunter, William, The Tidesman’s and Preventative Officer’s Pocket Book, Explaining the General Nature of Imporlation and Exporlation, so far as it Concerns them in the Execution of the Water Guard Duty (London, 1765). Huygens, Christian, The Celestial worlds discover’ed, or, Conjectures concerning the inhabitant, plants and productions of the worlds in the planets (London, 1698). Jackson, Arthur, A Help for the Understanding of the Holy Scripture (Cambridge, 1643). [Jeake, Samuel], An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye 1652-1699, eds Michael Hunter and Annabel Gregory (Oxford, 1988). Jessey, Henry, A Catechismefor Babes, or, Little Ones (London, 1652). Jessey, Henry, A Looking-Glass for Children, ed. H. P. (2nd edn, London, 1673). Jones, William, A Grammar of the Persian Language (London, 1771). Keach, Benjamin, Instructions for Children: or the Child’s and Youth’s Delight (London, [1664?]). Kephale, Richard, Medela Pestilentiae: Wherein is contained several Theological Queries concerning the Plague, with approved Antidotes, Signes, and Symptoms: Also, An exact Method for curing that Epidemical Distemper. Humbly presented to the Right Honourable, and Right Worshipful, the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of the City of London (London, [1665]). Knox, Vicemus, Liberal Education (London, 1781). The Ladies Mercury (27 February 1693). de Lainé, Pierre, The PrincelY Way to the French Tongue (London, 1677).

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[Martindale, Adam], The Life of Adam Martindale Written by Himself, ed. Richard Parkinson, Chetham Society 4 (Manchester, 1845). Mauger, Claude, Claudius Mauger’s French Grammar (London, 1694). Miège, Guy, The Grounds of the French Tongue (London, 1687). Miège, Guy, The Present State of Great Britain (London, 1708), Du Mitand, Huguenin, A New French Spelling Book (London, 1784). More, Henry, An Account of Virtue, ed. and transl. K. W. [Edward Southwell] (2nd edn, London, 1701; 1st edn, 1690). More, Henry, Enchiridion Ethicum (4th edn, London, 1711; 1st edn, 1668). Morley, Thomas, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London, 1597). Morley, Thomas, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, ed. R. Alec Harman (2nd edn, New York, 1963). Murdoch, John, The Pronunciation and Orthography of the French Language Rendered Peifectly Easy on a Plan Quite Original (London, 1788). Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (London, 1658). [North, Roger], The Gentleman Accomptant: or, an Essay to Uifold the Mystery of Accompts (repr. edn, 1986; 1st edn, London, 1714). [North, Roger], The Autobiography of the Hon. Roger North, ed. Augustus Jessopp (London, 1887). Oldham, John, Poems and Translations (London, 1694). Orton, Job, Memoirs of the Life, Character, & Writings, of the Late Rev. Philip Doddridge, D. D. (this edn, Edinburgh, 1825; 1st edn, 1765). Ostervald J. F., The Grounds and Principles of the Christian Religion, transl. Humfrey Wanley, rev. George Stanhope (London, 1704). Overton, John, Catalogue of Books, Pictures, and Maps (London, n. d.). Pagit, Eusebius, The History of the Bible: BrieflY Collected by Way of Question and Answer (London, 1682; 1st edn, 1602). Parkinson, James, Medical Admonitions to Families, Respecting the Preseroation of Health, and the Treatment of the Sick (London, 1801).

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Strangehopes, Samuel, A Book of Knowledge in Four Parts (London, 1696). Supplement to the Fifth Volume of the Athenian Gazette (London, 1691). Talbot, James, The Christian School-Master (London, 1707). [Taylor, John], Verbum Sempiternum (London, 1693; 1st edn, 1614). Thompson, Wardhaugh, The Accomptant’s Oracle, or, Kry to Science (repr. edn, New York, 1984; 1st edn, York, 1777). [Thornton, Alice], The Autobiograp’D’ of Mrs Alice Thornton of East Newton, Co. York, ed. Charles Jackson (Durham, 1875). [Turner, Thomas], The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1154-1765, ed. David Vaisey (East Hoathly, 1994). V., J., Golgotha; or, A Looking-Glass for Lone/on, and the Suburbs thereof. Shewing the Causes, Nature and Efficary of the present Plagues; and the most hopeful Way for Healing (London, 1655). V[incent], T., Gods Terrible Voice in the City (London?, 1667). Walker, Anthony, The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker (London, 1690). Wallis, John, Grammar of the English Language, transl. J. A. Kemp (London, 1972; orig. publ. as Grammatica lingua Anglicance, Oxford 1652). Wesley, Samuel, The History of the New Testament Attempted in Verse (London, 1701). Wesley, Samuel, The History of the Old Testament in Verse (London, 1704). Wesley, Susanna, The Complete Writings, ed. Charles Wallace, jun. (New York, 1997). Whicker v. Hume: Appendix to the Case of the Respondents, The Trustees of Dr Gilchrist’s Will (n.d.). White, John, A Way to the Tree of Life: Discovered in Sundry Directions for the Profitable Reading of the Scriptures (London, 1647). White, Thomas, A Little Book for Little Children (12th edn, London, 1702). Whitney, Geoffrey, A Choice of Emblemes (Lei den, 1586). The Whole Psalmes in Foure Partes (London, 1563).

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Index accounting see bookkeeping Acts of Parliament Act of Uniformity (1662) 19 Act for the Dissolution of the Chantries (1547) 47 Printing Act (1695) 80 Addison, Joseph 5 advertisements 85, 101-2, 169-74, 177, 185 see also books, advertisements for Alcuin 44 Ambrose, Isaac 32 America 155, 169-85 apprentices 14, 155, 183 apprenticeship 9 Apsley, John 6 Archer, Isaac 32 Aristotle 23, 55, 94 arithmetic see mathematics Arleville, Bridel 112-13 astronomy 16, 24, 45, 79-98 Atkins, Polly 5 Austen, Jane 117 Austen, Ralph 126-7 Ayres, John 5, 7 Bach, Johann Sebastian 54 Bacon, Francis 7-8, 51, 96 Ball, Thomas 173 Banks, Sir John 179 Barley, William 51

Bathe, William 51-2 Baxter, Richard 33 Bayldon, Anne 59 n. 65 Bedford, Bedfordshire 5 Behn, Aphra 93-6 Bengal 152 Bible 8, 16, 19-39, 91-2 Bilby, William 34-5 Blaque, Joseph 12 Blaque family 12 blood 140 Blundeville, Thomas 3, 11 Boccaccio 45 body, the 45, 50, 54, 71, 137-9, 142-3, 146, 149 see also blood and sweat Boethius 45 Bombay 155 bookkeeping 175-6, 179-81, 184 manuals 13-14, 18, 169-70, 174-85 books advertisements for 7, 12-13, 105 binding 6, 15 bookmarks 33 dedications 12, 56, 64, 104, 119, 121, 124 errata 24, 56, 59, 61 formats and sizes 6, 119-27, 158-9 see also chapbooks; dialogues; dictionaries; grammars; question and answer illustrations 20, 37, 44, 74, 118-36 engravings 17, 37-8, 64, 66, 85, 128 woodcuts 17, 50, 119-20, 128-32 indexes 10, 15, 65-72, 119, 121 manuscript additions 3, 11, 15, 19, 24, 32-3, 57-61, 65-72 typefaces 28, 158-9

book trade 6 book binders 6 book sellers, stationers and printers 6, 13, 37, 48, 73, 119, 127-8, 131, 182-3 hawkers 81, 88 prices 7, 38, 119, 125-6 subscription publication 37-8 Boston, MA 172, 176, 180, 183, Boyer, Abel 100, 103, 105-8, 116 Boyle, Robert 81, 95, 126 Le Breton, Philip 101 Brooke, Humphrey 149-50 Brunfels, Otto 131 Bull, John 45 Bunyan, John 34 Burlington, NJ 183 Burney, Charles 41, 56 Butler, Charles 52 Butler, Samuel 94 Byfield, Nicholas 33 Byrd, William 47, 52, 56 Calamy, Edmund 19-20 Calbris, Bernard 113, 116 Calcutta 155, 158-9 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire 32, 47, 101 Cambridge Platonists 23-4, 36 Cartwright, William 73 Castiglione, Baldassare 61 catechisms and catechizing 6, 19, 25-33 see also dialogues and question and answer Catherine of Braganza, Queen consort of Charles II 141 Cely, George 56

Chambaud, Lewis 101, 103, 108-11, 115 Chamberlain, Robert 14 chapbooks 6 Charlemagne 44 Charles II 141-2 Charleston, SC 172-3 Chaucer, Geoffrey 45 Cheneau, Francis 100, 105, 107-8, 116 Cheshunt, Hertfordshire 101 Child, Sir Joshua 170 children 19-20, 24, 26, 28, 35, 40-1, 46, 48, 50-1, 56 n. 50, 59 n. 65 China 171, 173 Clarke, Edward 35-6 classical texts 4, 6 clubs 8, 17 see also subscription book club Cochlaeus, Johann 55 coffeehouses 17, 81-2, 85, 90 Colchester, Essex 28 Coles, William 125 College of Louvain 47 Colson, Nathaniel 12 commonplace compilation 20, 32-3, 35, 54 n. 42, 67-70 conduct literature 2, 81 Condy, Jeremy 183 consumption practices 2, 169 continental manuals 61 influence of 37-8, 50, 55 influence of English manuals on 52 translations into English 13, 50, 120 Conyers, George 6 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third Earl of Shaftesbury 23-5 Copernicus and Copemicanism 17, 81-2, 88-94

cosmetics 17, 137-51 courtship see love Coventry, Ann Countess of 4 Coward, William 85, 97 n. 82 credit 175-6, 180-2 Creighton, Robert 58 Cudworth, Ralph 23, 25 culinary manuals 1, 4, 8-10, 13-14, 182 Culpeper, Nicholas 4, 11 Cupid 140 dancing 40, 47, 56-7, 101 n. 15, 173-4 Darwin, Erasmus 101 Day, John 50 Defoe, Daniel 141, 145, 176 Descartes, Rene 81, 83, 85, 89, 94-6, 97 n. 82 dialogues 44, 72-3, 104-5, 107, 110, 115-16, 159, 167 see also catechisms and catechizing and question and answer dictionaries 74, 100-1, 105, 107, 115, 123, 153, 155, 158, 162, 167 Doddridge, Philip 20, 22, 24, 36 Dodoens, Rembert 124 Donne, John 16, 66-72 Dorchester, Dorset 31 Dowland, John 50, 59 n. 65 Dunton, John 17, 80-9 earth, the 82, 89, 91-5 East India Company 153, 155-7, 159, 167, 179 Edinburgh 155 Elizabeth I 124 Ellwood, Thomas 37 embroidery see needlework emotions 23 Enlightenment 7, 170

equine manuals 3, 13, 182 Erasmus, Desiderius 47 etiquette 157 see also conduct literature Evelyn, John 12 fabric 170-4 Fauchon, James 104 Fayrfax, Robert 45 Fisher, George 182 Fontaine, Nicolas 38 de Fontanelle, Bernard le Bouyer 93-5 Fowler, Edward 27 Franklin, Benjamin 182-3 Frosch, Johannes 54 n. 42 Fuchs, Leonhart 131-2 furniture 21, 172-3 Fyfield, Essex 28 Gaffurius, Franchino 55 Gale, Theophilius 30 Galileo 81, 89, 93 gardening manuals 4, 17, 118-36 gardens 71, 74-5, 118-36 gender 17, 87-8, 100, 104, 116-17, 121-2 Gerard, John 120-1, 125 n. 15 German 51 geography 13, 15 see also surveying geometry see mathematics Gerardot, J. B. A. 115 Gilbert, Samuel 122-3 Gilchrist, John 153-67 Gilchrist, Walter 155 Gildon, Charles 81, 85 Glarean, Heinrich 55

gluttony 144 Goddard, General 155 Gordon, William 175, 177, 181, 184 grammars 17-18, 46-7, 103, 99-117, 152-68 Grant, Samuel 176 Grate, Henri 115 Greenwood, James 166 Guido of Arezzo 44-5 guilds 9, 44 see also apprentices, apprenticeship Hackett, John 58 Hadley, George 156-9, 163, 165, 167 Hall, David 182-3 Hamburg 171, 173 Hamond, J. 37 Hampton Court 141 handkerchiefs 72, 74-5 handwriting instruction 41, 173 manuals 5, 7, 13, 182 Harley, Sir Robert 150 Hartlib, SamuelS, 126 Harvard College 31 Harvey, Gabriel 3, 9, 64-5 Harvey, Gideon 148 Hatton, Elizabeth 172 Hawkins, Sir John 48, 52 n. 37 Hayes, Richard 179 Hecuba 138-9 Helena 138-9 Henrietta Maria, Queen consort of Charles I 119 herbals 4, 11, 118-22, 124-5, 127, 131 Herbert, George 66

Herrick, Robert 77 Hevelius, Johannes 93 Hill, Thomas 132 histories 2, 22, 37-9 history of trades 8 see also Hartlib, Samuel and Royal Society Hoar, Leonard 31 Hobbes, Thomas 31 Hoby, Sir Thomas 61 Hodges, Nathanael 145-6 Hoole, Charles 35 Hope, Sir William 13 horticultural manuals see gardening manuals Houghton, John 12, 84 Howard, Edward 96 Howel, Lawrence 37 Hughes, William 123 humanism 7, 65, 67-70 Hunter, Joseph 14 Hunter, William 183 Huygens, Christian 93 Hyde, Edward, first Earl of Clarendon 12 improvement 8 India 152-68, 170-1 Ireland 173 Italy 171, 173 Jeake, Samuel 12, 14 Jenner, Thomas 31 Jessey, Henry 28 jest-books 74 Jodrell, John 3, 11 Johnson, Thomas 120-1 Jonson, Ben 77

journals see newspapers Keach, Benjamin 27 Kephale, Richard 148-9 Kepler, Johannes 93 Kidder, Edward 13 Knox, Vicesimus 99 de Lainé, Pierre 101 Langdale, Josiah 30 languages and language learning Bengali 152 French 17, 99-117, 161, 165, 173-4 Greek 41, 161, 164-5 Hebrew 8, 20, 41 Latin 46, 50-1, 101, 103, 105, 117, 161-5, 167 Persian 152, 159 Sanskrit 152 Urdu 18, 152-68 see also grammars Lawson, William 119, 121-2, 128, 132-6 learning to read 20, 27-9, 36, 41, 46 see also literacy libraries 5, 8, 12, 48 Leyboum, William 5, 83-4 Lily, William 46 Listenius, Nicolas 55 literacy 2, 5-6, 17 see also learning to read Livy 64-5 local officials, manuals for 13, 174 Locke, John 24-5, 35-6 London 44-5, 47, 51, 82, 87, 141-2, 148-9, 156, 172-3 Greenwich 14, 58 Lawrence Street 102 Little Britain 6

Ludgate Hill 6 Poland Street 101 Royal Exchange 83 Westminster 25, 100, 141 Whitehall 142 Woolwich 14, 58 looking glasses 67, 75, 173 love 72-6, 84, 150 Lucas, Richard 35 Lyte, Henry 124-5 Mace, Thomas 52 Madras 171 Mair, John 178, 184 marginalia see books, manuscript additions Markham, Gervase 128, 132 mathematics 6, 24, 45, 55, 83-4, 173 manuals 13, 84 see also scientific instruments Mauclerc, James 85 Mauger, Claude 101, 103, 105 medical texts 4, 14, 137-51, 174 see also herbals Melbourne, William Lamb 100 memorization 20-1, 29-31, 44, 46, 58, 105, 108-10, 115 see also parrots merchant advice manuals 1, 4, 18 see also bookkeeping manuals Michelangelo, Buonarroti 54 Miège, Guy 107 Milton, John 73 mirrors see looking glasses Du Mitand, Huguenin 113 Molière 107, 110 Moon, the 80, 82-3, 85, 91-7 More, Henry 23

Morley, Thomas 15-6, 41-62 Moseley, Humphrey 73 Mulcaster, Richard 4 7 Murdoch, John 111-13 musical instruments 40-2, 46-7, 52, 56, 173 musical theory fasola method 51 gamut 42-4, 50-1 Guidonian hand 42 music manuals 14-16, 40-62 natural philosophy 79-98, 17 6, 184 Naude, Gabriel 12 navigation manuals 6, 12, 14 needlework 16, 21, 173-4 Netherlands, the 28, 173 newspapers 8, 12, 17, 79-98, 171-4 see also advertisements and books, advertisements for Newtonianism 83, 90 New York, NY 183 nonconformity and dissenters 16, 19-39, 82 North, Roger 175 Northall, W. 61-2 Northampton, Northamptonshire 19-20, 30 Nottingham, Nottinghamshire 26, 29 novel, the 2, 38, 170, 172-3 novelty 170-4 numeracy 6 Oldham, John 63-5, 77 Orne, Timothy 180-1 Ornithoparcus 50 Overton, Henry 13 Oxford, Oxfordshire 33, 45, 47, 137, 141-2, 150

Parkinson, James 14 Parkinson, John 119-22, 126, 128-9, 131-2 parrots 8, 25, 110 Paston, Edward 48 Patrick, Simon 35 patronage 9, 12 see also books, dedications penmanship texts see handwriting Pepys, Samuel 6, 12, 14-16, 58, 141 perfume 146-9 periodicals see newspapers Petrucci 57 Petty, William 8 Peyton, V.J. 108 Philadelphia, PA 171-4, 182-3 Phillips, Edward 72 pictures 21 plagiarism 163 plague 141-51 Plato 23, 55, 139 Playford, John 14, 52, 58 poetry 16, 29, 44, 63-78, 139, 158 see also posies politeness 17, 79-99, 102, 110, 174 Portugal 180 posies 16, 63, 72-7 Power, Leonel 48 prayer and prayers 15, 35, 107 preaching 34-5 Prescott, Henry 15 Prideaux, Humphrey 37 printers see book trade, book sellers, stationers and printers pronunciation 102, 104, 109, 111-15, 156 psalms 20, 26, 50, 107

Ptolemy 89, 92 Pythagorus 45 question and answer 26-33, 54-5, 80-2, 84-5, 89-97 see also catechisms and catechizing and dialogues Rabelais, François 46 Rabisha, William 10 Ram, William 124-5 Ravenscroft, Thomas 52, 57 Rea, John, 122, 128-32 reading Bible 32-5 note taking while 32 sites of 14-15, 58 taking pleasure in 25, 34-5, 82, 97 see also books, manuscript additions; commonplace compilation; learning to read Rede, Thomas 56 Reformation of Manners 87 Renynger, James 56 de Repas, Denis 150 Riccioli, Battisti 93 Richardson, John 152, 154, 159-61 rings 72, 74-7, 85 Riverius, Lazarus 12 Roberts, Francis 31 rote learning see memorization Royal Navy 155 Royal Society 81, 94, 126, 162, 166, 184 Russia 171, 173 Ryland, Elizabeth 20 Ryland, John 19-20, 22

Ryland, John Collett 19-20, 36 Salem, MA 177 n. 28, 180 Salisbury, Wiltshire 141 Sault, Richard 81, 83 scientific revolution 2 see also natural philosophy schools 40-1, 45, 101-2, 117, 183 academy at Northampton 20 Blue Coat School, Nottingham 29 boarding schools 101-2, 174 charity schools 29 choristers schools 41, 47-8 confectionery school 13 Eton 101 Fort William College, Calcutta 159, 167 Free School, Northampton 30 George Heriot’s Hospital 155 grammar schools 29, 41, 46-7, 101 mathematics school 83 Merchant Taylors’ School, London 47 song schools 41, 44, 47, 50, 56 Westminster 101 scientific instruments 13, 79 Scot, Reynolde 127 Scotland 28, 173 Seller, John 89 senses 23, 34 sermons 2, 30 Fast Sermon 25 Settle, Elkanah 94 Shakespeare, William 42, 44, 47, 52, 54, 56 Shelley, George 13 Shirley, James 73

Sidney, Sir Philip 2 Simpson, Christopher 52 singing 26, 35, 41, 44, 46-7, 50-2, 55 Sloane, Hans 85 smallpox 142, 145 Smith, Eliza 6, 9-10 Smith, William 26 soap 172 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 29 Socrates 23 Spain 180 spiritual works 4 see also Bible; catechisms and catechising; prayer and prayers; psalms; sermons Spofforth, West Riding of Yorkshire 29 Sprat, Thomas 100 Stackhouse, Thomas 37 stationers see book trade, book sellers, stationers and printers Stephens, Hushcraft 9 Stockton, Owen 28, 30 Strode, William 33 subscription book club 14 Sun, the 80, 83, 85, 89, 91-3 Surat 171 surveying 9, 13, 84 see also Leyboum, William sweat 140 Swift, Jonathan 82 Talbot, James 29 Tallis, Thomas 48, 52 tea 173 Teackle, Thomas 4 Telemachus 107 Thompson, Wardhaugh 177

Tigrini, Orazio 55 tiles 20-2, 37 travel accounts 169, 172, 176 Turner, Thomas 10, 13, 15 Turner, William 120 Tycho Brahe 89 Tye, Christopher 45 universities 44-5 see also Cambridge, College of Louvain; Harvard College, Oxford verbs 103-4, 107, 112-15, 162-5 Victoria, Queen 100 Villiers, Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine 141-2 Vincent, Thomas 20 Vives, Juan Luis 47 Walker, Anthony 28 Walker, Elizabeth 28 Waller, Edmund 73 Wallis, John 166-7 Wanstead, Essex 31 Warwick, Warwickshire 19-20 Warwickshire 5 washerwomen 87 Wastel, Simon 30 Waylet, Mr 12 Weiditz, Hans 131-2 Wellesley, Marquis 158, 167 Wesley, Samuel, the elder 81 Wesley, Samuel, the younger 36 West Indies 12, 155, 180-1 Wharton, Goodwin 30 Wharton, Lord Philip 30 Wharton, Thomas 30

White, John 31 Whittington, Robert 46 Wilkins, John 33, 93, 162-4 Williamsburg, VA 183 Wood, Anthony 56 Wood, Timothy 19 woodcuts see illustrations Worcester, MA 183 Worcester, Worcestershire 26 Worlidge, John 126-7 Zarlino, Gioseffo 55