Organic Supplements : Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580–1790 9780813944951, 9780813944937

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organic supplements

Organic Supplements Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580–1790

edited by Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park

university of virginia press Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press © 2020 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper First published 2020 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Jacobson, Miriam Emma, editor. | Park, Julie, 1970– editor. Title: Organic supplements : bodies and things of the natural world, 1580–1790 / edited by Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park. Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020007867 (print) | LCCN 2020007868 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813944937 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813944944 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813944951 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Nature in literature. | Human ecology in literature. | ­European literature—History and criticism. | Human ecology. Classification: LCC PN48 .O57 2020 (print) | LCC PN48 (ebook) | DDC 809/.9336—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007867 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007868

Cover art: Apollo and Daphne, Jean-­Etienne Liotard, 1736. Drawing after ­Lorenzo Bernini’s marble group in the Galleria Borghese, Rome. (Gift of Prof. J. W. R. Tilanus on behalf of his wife, Mrs. J. V. Tilanus-­Liotard, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

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contents ❖

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Process and Connection Julie Park and Miriam Jacobson

1

Part I. Inscription and Incorporation Feather, Flourish, and Flow: Handwriting’s Organic Technology Julie Park

29

The Flower of Ointments and Early Modern Transcorporeality Rebecca Laroche

61

The Paris Opéra as a Vibrating Body: Feeling Pygmalion’s Kiss Kevin Lambert

77

Part II. Interface and Merger Gorgonick Spirits: Myth, Figuration, and Mineral Vivency in the Writings of Thomas Browne Jessica Wolfe

103

Things with Kid Gloves Lynn Festa

128

Vegetable Loves: Botanical Enthrallment in Early Modern Poetry Miriam Jacobson

153

vi   Contents

Part III. Vitality and Decay Knowing the World through Rococo Ornamental Prints Michael Yonan

177

Fingers in the Pie: Baked Meats, Adultery, and Adulteration Diane Purkiss

199

Milton’s Hair Jayne Lewis

220

Afterword: Virtuous Properties of the Organic Supplement Julia Reinhard Lupton

247

Notes on Contributors Index

261 265

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acknowledgments ❖

This collection would not exist without the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. It was at the Folger where we met as fellowship recipients and began the collaboration that led to the creation of this edited volume. We are indebted to Angie Hogan, our editor, for never steering our project in the wrong direction. We are also grateful to our external reviewers for giving the constructive criticism and encouragement that made this collection stronger. Several colleagues helped this project grow in significant ways: George Boulukos, Holly Dugan, Wendy Beth Hyman, Sujata Iyengar, Aaron Kunin, and Brad Pasanek. Finally, we wish to thank our contributors, whose talent and good will made this project a source of many pleasures and wonders.

organic supplements

Introduction Process and Connection

Julie Park and Miriam Jacobson

I

n our time, the material objects on which we rely to perform our day-­ to-­day tasks, such as handheld technological devices for communication, are not usually made of natural materials, though they fulfill our practical needs in a fashion that seems organic for the fluidity with which they do so. The fact that a similarly functioning tool from the early modern period—an erasable tablet, commonplace book, or pocket diary—was made purely of natural materials suggests that altogether different relationships were in play between humans and the natural world, those in which humans and the natural world engaged in more sustained, interactive, and quotidian relationships with one another than today. This interactivity, in which nature responds to humans and humans respond to nature, can be discerned in the example of erasable tablets, in use from antiquity to the nineteenth century. On one hand, the pliancy of the beeswax used in erasable tablets affords human acts of record keeping and erasure. On the other hand, humans themselves must modify their actions when facing the limitations of a natural material, such as when the wax loses its viscosity and resists inscription. Many modern supplements remain detached from the body until they are subsumed by it, like vitamins—those “organic supplements” of contemporary life—that are kept in a separate container and can be taken out, ingested, and dissolved internally. But the natural objects that we are calling the organic supplement from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries occupied an intimate position in relationship to the human body and its movements and needs. In doing so they remained in flux as vital entities.

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For example, wigs, which were commonly worn, transformed the bodies of their wearers; at the same time, the material of these wigs—human or animal hair, caterpillar silk—was thought to remain alive during these periods.1 In this case and in the many others featured in this collection, the organic supplement was situated janiform, at the meeting and departure points of the natural and the artificial and the person, animal, or thing. This collection appropriates for its title and conceptual framework a name used for contemporary culture’s pill-­sized nutrients intended to compensate for dietary deficiencies or enhance general nutrition. Touting the superiority of ingredients that are natural rather than synthetic and free of pesticides and other toxic materials, the organic supplements available on today’s vitamin market promise the promotion of health for the individual and the environment. The choice to adopt the categorical term of present-­ day organic supplements for this collection is admittedly a playful one, yet it recognizes more serious transhistorical connections between a consumer product of late capitalist society and the objects, materials, and systems of belief of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries that underlie it. One of these connections is the notion that the use or perception of an entity derived from nature will create changes that are as significant to the human subject as they are to the environment from which the natural entity derives. Thus, for this collection, the term “organic supplement” does not so much dwell on the fact that human subjects are being supplemented but rather on the fact that humans are integrating organic elements into their functions and practices, much as they are doing the same, avowedly for much worse ends, by inserting their human functions and practices into the natural world. The years represented in this volume, 1580 to 1790, comprise a period in which the idea of the individual person came into sharper definition. Though the terms and the constituents of what made a person a person changed from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, one factor remained consistent: the increased tendency toward reflectiveness about personhood. To have a notion of the supplement, of what augments, extends, or enhances the person, is to have a notion of what individual personhood means in the first place. Whether through self-­fashioning, changes in private property laws, or philosophical notions of the self as articulated by the likes of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, the boundaries of personhood achieved greater definition from the late sixteenth century to the late eighteenth. At the same time, reflections on the relationships—the continuities

INTRODUCTION   3

and differences—between person, animal, plant, and thing became more prominent, as exemplified in the works of Buffon and La Mettrie, for instance.2 Challenging traditional historical frameworks that treat the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as discontinuous with the eighteenth century, this collection brings the two traditionally separate periods together to show how they shared a conceptual history of the organic supplement. This history reveals that from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth, aesthetic and scientific discourses energetically explored and questioned the relationships between material things and nature, as well as between natural and human worlds. The words organic and supplement point to the conceptual terminology that was already recognized and used in the period that concerns this collection, as well as an earlier one. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the evolution of the word organic encapsulates a fluid relationship between humans and nature and between nature and objects. First used to describe bodily organs performing vital functions (the jugular vein, c.  1400; bodily tissue, c. 1500), the word expanded beyond the body in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to include objects and instruments utilized by the body (cognate with organum and organ), both abstract and concrete (a metaphorical instrument or a means to an end, c. 1500; relating to a musical instrument or technique, c. 1631).3 Thus, when we examine “organic supplements” we are discussing both material fashioned from living matter in the modern sense of the word and, in the early modern sense, material objects serving as instruments or vehicles for thought, energy, and sound and as bodily organs composed of vital tissue. As early as the late fifteenth century and throughout the seventeenth, an organ could mean the voice and human speech as well as a musical or surgical instrument.4 A philological approach to the organic in the early modern context reveals that the word has contained a counterintuitive seeming admixture of technology and life force. The idea of the organ or the organic thing as a conduit for energy, vitality, sound, speech, and thought unites these multiple meanings. Very early uses of organ suggest “a person who acts as an intermediary” as well as an instrument “with which one works.” This sense of organ as mediator and instrument continues through the eighteenth century, as Julie Park reveals in her analysis of eighteenth-­century writing as an interplay of human and animal bodies (hand and quill) mediated by writing technique.

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Such interplay emerges in the spaces of the flourishing penmanship manual as well as the real and fictionally conjured handwritten letter. For Park, the arresting image of the actively writing hand grasping a quill pen invests epistolary fiction with emotional energy and material verisimilitude, and writing itself becomes invested with the power “to exchange organic (that is, organ-­related) sensory functions,” making the letters and words on the page “flourish”—blossom—and dance with vital movement in their function as supplements for bodily presence.5 Supplement is the organic’s other half in our conceptual frame. In their original usages, the terms overlap, yet supplement is a term whose applications are more far-­reaching. In its definition as “a thing (occasionally a person) added to make good a deficiency or as an enhancement; an addition or continuation to remedy or compensate for inadequacies,” the word was used in diverse contexts through the early modern period, from law and religion to cartography.6 In addition, supplement was used for print documents (it is still used this way today) that extended or completed any work, for military reinforcements of additional soldiers, and for legal oaths that confirmed “otherwise inadmissible or inconclusive evidence.”7 Certainly, the broad reach of its early modern usage to denote that which is “added” or the action itself of “adding to” a prior form in order to enhance it or compensate for a lack therein indicates the capaciousness of supplement as a categorical term and concept. In contrast, although prosthesis has become a fashionable and widely applied critical term in cultural and literary studies, its actual usage in the early modern period was far more limited, arising only in specific technical contexts. It has pertained since 1550 to grammatical insertion or “a putting of one letter to another,” as John Smith puts it in The Mysterie of Rhetorick Unveil’d (1673) and, only since 1706, a replacement for a “defective or absent” part of the body.8 Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, human and animal bodies came to be perceived and described more closely according to their physical adaptability, flexibility, and suppleness. Indeed, in sixteenth-­ century English, supplements could also be supple: Philip Stubbes uses supplement to indicate physical pliability: theater (and by extension whoredome) “consumeth the moisture and supplement of the body.”9 Therefore, an early understanding of supplement itself contained associations with the elasticity and flexibility that the word supple indexes.10 Prior to the seventeenth century, supple referred to pliant objects, internal organs, actions,

INTRODUCTION   5

and volition but not specifically to human and animal bodies. We interpret early modern organic supplements not only as physical replacements and enhancements as the term was used in the periods we examine but also as yielding, malleable, and supple things that dramatize in miniature the reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world that the essays in this volume examine. Scholars might be most immediately familiar with the theoretical concept of the supplement through Jacques Derrida’s chapter on Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, “. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . . ,” in Of Grammatology. Arising in his commentary on Rousseau’s attitude that writing is an agent that destroys presence even as it attempts to reconstruct it, the supplement in Derrida’s terminology is a rich figure for this double bind because its very “danger” has to do with how it unsettles “Nature” itself, as well as what is natural. Incontrovertibly, “Nature does not supplement itself at all; Nature’s supplement does not proceed from Nature, it is not only inferior to but other than Nature.”11 Speech is natural “or at least the natural expression of thought,” but writing is supplemental to it for it “is added to it, adjoined, as an image or representation.”12 Most suggestive in Derrida’s explanation is not just that writing is avowedly “not natural” as a supplement but also, as a supplement, an “adjoined” image or representation, it traffics in the imagination: “It diverts the immediate presence of thought to speech into representation and the imagination.”13 Derrida’s analysis of the supplement, adjoined to his commentary on The Confessions, the memoir of a prominent eighteenth-­century intellectual figure, Rousseau, portrays the supplement as a dangerous and spurious linguistic construct directly conducive to the workings of the imagination. How, then, can we read entities operating as such with the origins, markers, and substance of the organic, and as material things? If Derrida’s supplement defines itself against nature, what happens when the supplement is itself of nature? The work that philosopher Andy Clark has done to emphasize the “coalitions” that humans make with nonbiological entities, such as tools, has renewed critical fascination with the supplement and the possibilities of supplemented subjectivity that Derrida introduced earlier, taking them into the realm of cognitive processes.14 While Clark mentions the “old technologies” of the artist’s sketch pad and pen and paper, the devices for “extending” our minds that most concern him are technologies contemporary to his time, including digital cameras, robotic cameras, and cochlear implants.

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Thus, Clark’s supplements are the inorganic things—made of plastic, steel, fiber optics—that normally come to mind when we think of tools and prosthetic devices. His technological tools do not just form coalitions but “leak into our minds and selves,” rendering humans into “soft selves” that represent our “true nature.” That is, we are cognitively enhanced and rehabilitated by various tools that merge with both our bodies and minds and constitute “biotechnological hybrids.”15 But a look back toward historical periods that precede Clark’s twenty-­ first-­century landscape reveals that a wide array of tools and objects existed for effecting vital functions of everyday life made of materials that were still alive, originated from living sources, or occupied a status between natural and artificial. The quill pens, vibrating strings of musical instruments, herbal ointments, and kid gloves of this collection powerfully indicate how the tools of Clark’s “soft selves” both exist in and are constituted by history, and how nature itself is a central feature of that history. Scholars of the Renaissance and eighteenth century have long been interested in investigating the world of things and material culture.16 How might we rethink the relationships between humans and the material world that have been at the center of scholarly inquiry in the humanities and social sciences for at least the past twenty-­five years when we notice that nature forms an integral feature of those relationships? Thinking through this question is one of the aims of this collection. Might we consider that there is a history of humans being supplemented by entities from nature, fusing with them to become “bioorganic hybrids”? Clark posits that the “soft self,” with its “control-­sharing coalition of processes” that are at once “neural,” “bodily” and “technological,” has an “ongoing drive to tell a story, to paint a picture in which ‘I’ am the central player.”17 Yet this collection posits that the story of the supplemented, “soft” self is richer and has greater historical and ontological range than this when we turn our attention to its manifestations in a much earlier time period. To focus on notions and examples of organic things that supplement human selves throughout early modern Europe is to focus on process, which in itself is an integral feature of stories themselves.18 In stories, things happen and events take place, just as they do in the cultural drama of things of nature turned into objects of use and absorbed or stretched and penetrated by human bodies and their parts, whether as flowers turned into healing ointments or as animal skin fashioned into kid leather gloves. Rather than

INTRODUCTION   7

the “I” who triumphs as “the central player” in the stories that Clark’s “soft self ” tells, the supplemented selves of our collection reveal human subjects whose glory is continually questioned by their reliance on the natural things they reach for to make themselves whole. At the same time, the stories we tell in this collection are not just about human attachments to organic things but about how attendant cultural-­ historical values conceive, define, maintain, and illuminate the attachments of these things and their nature. In becoming attached to humans and integrated into their lives, these apparently ancillary organic things undergo metamorphic transformations and become incorporated deep into human bodies and the bowels—the organs—of the cultural unconscious, as in Diane Purkiss’s essay about the cultural practices of making and consuming meat pies in Renaissance England. As such, organic things are rendered into the made things of pies filled with once organic material, coming to adorn the surfaces of such human settings as the banquet tables of feasts, then disappearing into human bodies, and resurfacing in the cultural imaginary. These resurfacings include anxieties about various containers for bodies and their corporeal “insides,” like so many covered pies, from those of the encoffined dead to those of bridal beds lodging women. The poetry, diary entries, and tales of the period serve as processing agents for these projections, recycling, repackaging, and reinterpreting them through different textual arrangements, participating in the organic process of creativity in doing so. That these supplements have stories behind their displacements from their natural environments to human worlds is a “natural” function of organicism, for the organic, like organs themselves, is frequently defined by the connections it makes between itself and other entities, whether through acts of organization or through operating as tools for mediating human desires and the enactment of those desires, including cultural ones. A long dead poet’s carefully preserved hair might come not only to replace the lost poet himself but to serve as a physical embodiment of his poetry, as Jayne Lewis reveals in her essay “Milton’s Hair,” which returns to an understanding, prevalent in Milton’s own period, of organic as “instruments or members of the body.” Milton’s hair, even and especially long after his death, is both a living organ and an instrument, carrying and transferring Milton’s immortal poetic essence to those who saw or touched it, while at the same time interacting with and reshaping—one might say rebraiding—the cultural idea of Milton as author in fertile and nonnormative ways.

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Connections are also formed between organisms when humans and animals discover shelter and forms of dwelling in the specific properties and features of the environment. Twentieth-­century psychologist James J. Gibson supplies a critical vocabulary for the process by which these connections are made as a function of existing at all in an environmental “medium.” By construing the environment as a medium, Gibson conceives of it as a space made up of earth, air, or water through which animals, including humans, move and find their “ground” of “perception and behavior.”19 The environmental medium offers “affordances,” or “offerings of nature” that enable the animal to function physically: “It affords respiration or breathing, it permits locomotion; it can be filled with illumination so as to permit vision; it allows detection of vibrations and detection of diffusing emanations.”20 Operative in Gibson’s conception of the affordance is the way it posits a model of intersubjectivity. As he puts it, an affordance “cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-­objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. . . . It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points in both directions, to the environment and to the observer.”21 Such claims as the notion that the affordances themselves are “invariant,” remaining “strikingly constant throughout the whole evolution of animal life” run somewhat counter to the historically textured accounts of environmentally derived things in this collection. Yet the exquisite attentiveness to the materiality and interactivity of environmental objects in their affordances supplies an important theoretical model for the collection’s wide-­ranging examinations of organic supplements. For instance, similar to Gibson’s observations about the affordances of air when noting that it offers “a better medium for locomotion than water because it offers less resistance,” Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-­century English naturalist and physician who features in Jessica Wolfe’s essay, finds a worthy point of focus in the way “salt spirits have a power to congeal and coagulate unctuous bodies.”22 Whereas Gibson is more invested in understanding how the affordances of environmental elements, spaces, and objects enable animals to take specific actions, Browne fixates on the knowledge and information that studying the mutability of minerals might yield. And yet both evince the attitude that the details and qualities of environmental features and the materials of which they are made offer a means for understanding how and

INTRODUCTION   9

why certain fundamental processes and actions take place as a function of existing in the material world. Taking Gibson further, Tim Ingold’s notion of the “mutual permeability and binding” of the earth and sky demonstrates not just that the environment can be inhabited but that the indissoluble connection between its most fundamental spatial components allows the objects on which they settle to grow and become one mass, turning the surface of the earth into “a vaguely defined zone of admixture and intermingling.”23 For this reason, “wind and weather” serve as mediums for the substances of “leaf litter and detritus, mosses and lichens, stones and boulders” to turn something as seemingly straightforward as the ground of a forest into a “more or less impenetrable mass of tangled undergrowth” that is “split by cracks and crevasses, threaded by tree roots, and interspersed with swamps and marshes overgrown with rafts of vegetation.” The forest ground, in other words, and the organic materials that settle onto it turn into mutual extensions for each other, with the ground an environmental substrate for new inscriptions from nature. Distinguishing which element is supplemental to the other is impossible, for a “mutual permeability and binding” takes place as a “natural” consequence of being alive. The “very nature of living beings themselves,” which entails “processes of respiration, of breathing in and out,” is what allows them to “bind the medium with substance in forging their own growth and movement through the world.”24 In the scenario depicted by Ingold, nature and its different constituents are in ineluctable interaction with each other, producing a generative form of friction that allows new growth to emerge that did not exist before. Ingold’s notion of the “weather world” is one that recalls the unexpected new creations borne out of the juxtapositions between objects of nature in aesthetic environments, not just the natural ones of forests and other “terrestrial environments.”25 Here, a word used by eighteenth-­ century German architect Friedrich August Krubsacius for rococo design—“mishmash”—resonates with Ingold’s revelation of the purportedly smooth and coherent forest ground as a vital jumble of various things.26 The mock rococo cartouche that Krubsacius had created for him to make his point that rococo decorative prints embody an undignified “mishmash” of things includes representations of “reeds and straw, bones, pottery shards, shavings, feather brooms, wilted flowers, shattered shells, rags, feathers, wood

10    JULIE PARK AND MIRIAM JACOBSON

shavings,” etc.27 As Michael Yonan explains in his essay, Krubsacius appears on the surface simply to deride rococo ornament for tricking the eye with its elegant appearance of formal and aesthetic coherence when in fact it is composed of random pieces of garbage. Yet the critic’s derision also sheds light on the way rococo art promotes awareness of “a quite serious problem about the process of knowing the world sensorially, the way in which the viewing subject engages in art as a conduit to accessing nature.”28 In its very status as ornament, rococo adornment is supplementary—it adds to what already exists and supplies artificially the presence of what is absent, structurally as well as ontologically, especially as representations of natural and man-­made things, from shells and feathers to silk ribbons, in different materials from the original (engraved ink on paper for bones or wood for grape clusters). It also calls into question the very points where discrete things become connected to and supplemented by each other, becoming an organic, undifferentiated whole. In doing so, rococo’s seductively strange and playful forms implicitly demand the viewer to consider a question central to philosophy of the same time period: How does mind apprehend matter? How do blendings of materials from nature and those from art challenge such perceptual apprehensions? Looking at a rococo cartouche through Ingold’s perspective, one might view it not just as aesthetic representation but as a supplemental environment in itself, enclosing the viewer with its forest of organically entangled forms that cover the surfaces of the world with multiple textures. The perceptual explorations prompted by the cartouche’s mishmash environment anticipate Ingold’s notion that perceiving the textures of things in their multiplicity and realizing the material basis of their bonds with each other is an unfolding occurrence rather than a fixed condition, is being alive to life itself. Thus, as a living thing, the environment does not so much “exist” as it “occurs” and “unfolds,” like “the objects of the natural world.”29 And rather than “discerning” the unfolding nature of natural objects, one “perceives with” them. Indeed, to do so is to “join with them in the material flows and movements contributing to their—and our— ongoing formation.”30 To perceive with the objects of nature is to see and describe the properties of their materials, which in turn is to “tell the stories of what happens to them as they flow, mix and mutate.”31 In their focus on the processes and connections through which natural objects become part of the flow of early modern life and its cultural representational systems and discourses, the essays in this collection perform this work of storytelling.

INTRODUCTION   11

The process of discovering how one—whether a human, animal, or plant—might interact with the affordances of environmental features to allow certain actions and bindings to take place is in itself a narrative, as well as a transformation of beings and environmental objects alike.32 The uprightness and firmness of a tree trunk, for instance, affords the architectural support for a vine to move in an upward manner too, making its way around the tree base until it reaches the exposure to a light source it needs in order to survive. The vine’s movement toward the sky by way of the tree trunk is a journey, and its relationship with the tree support is one of winding contact and attachment. Another element of the process by which the vine becomes attached to the tree is the mutual transformation that takes place for vine and tree; while the vine changes its shape into a twisting and curling one in using the tree trunk as the medium, the tree itself becomes a part of the vine. So closely does it attach itself to the tree’s base that removing the vine without damaging the tree would be difficult. As Miriam Jacobson’s essay on the “botanical embrace” will show in the context of seventeenth-­century lyric, the vine is rendered an object of human fantasies about erotic intimacy with plants and the possibility of transforming into one. In doing so, a human might not only live out the vine’s stories of attachment and ensnarement but also turn into an entity like the tree trunk, allowing the human body to be overtaken by the vine as its tool for growth. William Hogarth’s account of how the idea for the original Corinthian column derived from “dock-­leaves growing up against a basket” presents another example of the way in which nature’s supplementation of preexisting objects, whether from nature or humans, provides rich food for the creation of beauty not just in literature but also aesthetic patterns in design.33 Rather than mapping out master structures that illustrate the dynamic interconnections between humans, nature, and the environment, we wish to shed light on the historical concepts and terms that denote systems of interrelations already inhering in the early modern period, from late sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century cosmologies to eighteenth-­century vitalism’s “cooperation of forces.”34 At the same time, we do not shun the term environment, a move made recently by literary critics.35 “Environment is a lousy term,” Sean Silver writes, citing Michel Serres for exposing its fallacy.36 Yet the term environment is far more varied and complex in the ways it has been used in both historical and theoretical literature than those who

12    JULIE PARK AND MIRIAM JACOBSON

reject the term recognize.37 Ingold has shown, for instance, how the environment is a vital locus of agentive drives and properties that not only act on humans but interact with them. And the term, tied to the physical state of being enclosed or “environed,” insists on the spatial and embodied conditions in which humans and nature interrelate with each other, a sense missing in “ecology.” Nathan Bailey’s etymological dictionary from 1775, presenting the word fully constituted as “environment” as opposed to the still more common “environ,” defines it as “an encompassing round.”38 Indeed, the element of the “round” emerged earlier in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1756, which defines environ as a function of explaining the meaning of the word surround: “to environ; to encompass; to enclose all sides.”39 The concatenation of “round,” “surround,” and “environ” evokes the phrase “in the round,” which in turn denotes the state of full dimensionality, with all sides of an item represented, like a sculpture or a theater design wherein the audience surrounds the stage from at least three sides, as in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. When Julia Lupton considers the idea of theatrical experience as an environmental one that invites the management of social relations in her recent book Shakespeare Dwelling, she writes that “theater is a testing ground for such explorations, since it assembles objects and persons in an experimental zone fraught with the possibilities of directionality.”40 So too do environmental surrounds offer a setting for fully dimensional and embodied experiences wherein their features potentially direct and engage with human players and dwellers in a multi-­directional manner. Rather than uniformly indicating a point of view that assumes the human’s dominance, the usage of the word environment in the eighteenth-­ century context demonstrates the human’s diminished stature in relationship to nature as the “environing” agent. Taking up the project of exposing the “vileness and misery of man,” the author of The Art of Knowing One-­ Self (1698), Jacques Abbadie, decries humans’ tendency to “measure every thing with Relation to our selves . . . to look upon our selves as the center of perfection, and to think the bodies that surround us, either too great, or too little, according as they are more or less proportion’d to the bulk of our own.” Abbadie uses the verb environ precisely to reveal the diminished status of the human body in relationship with natural worlds: “Go up a mountain, and tell how big those men appear who stand in the vallies beneath . . . or compare the dimensions of this body to these vast spheres,

INTRODUCTION   13

wherewith you are environ’d, with these moveable and luminous worlds.”41 If the human body is surrounded by natural worlds, it is only to showcase the dynamic luminosity of those worlds. Today we rarely connect the growth and decline of the natural world with the machinations of celestial bodies; studies of the universe are continually separated into disciplines and subdisciplines. Examinations of the sky and stars are the purview of astronomy, and the earth falls under the investigations of environmental science, ecology, and geology. But the early modern understanding of the cosmos considered the earth in constant dynamic relationship to the heavens. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that cosmos—the ancient Greek word for beauty, design, and organization—came to indicate the shape of the universe and the natural world in English, but the sense of the universe as a harmonious relationship of interactive parts is as old as Ptolemy.42 Although there were competing schematics, ever changing as new technological discoveries brought the unknown more sharply into view, many early modern thinkers described the universe and the natural world’s role in it as an affiliative and integrated cosmos. This early modern sympathetic universe embodies on a macrocosmic level the mutual and interconnected relationship of humans to the natural world that we find in the many examples of organic supplements the authors in this volume identify and anatomize. In the late sixteenth century, the Paracelsian physician Robert Fludd put forth his cosmological theory of integrated sympathies: the same three materials—blood, earth, and spiritual essence—flowed through all things.43 For Fludd, and for many early modern thinkers, the world was organized and defined by these sympathies; every creature integrated with its environment as well as with the divine. Even within the rigidly hierarchical Great Chain of Being, humans, animals, and supernatural spirits all shared the same plane as creatures, or created beings. Francis Bacon and René Descartes in the seventeenth century shattered this integrated universe, arguing that nature works in opposition to humans and must be harnessed, disciplined, and tortured by us into revealing its secrets (Bacon) and that the mind and body are fundamentally separate entities (Descartes). 44 One could even point to Montaigne’s essays, in the sixteenth century, as the beginning of individualist thought.45 But these thinkers were then followed by Spinoza, who renovated the older view of an integrated cosmos by treating the physical and mental

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worlds as intertwined, and any organizational cosmological scheme due to nature itself, with God existing solely within the laws of the natural world. Spinoza first articulated the dynamic vitalism of nature as a cosmic (organizing, environmental) force, reinvesting the Medieval Latin commonplace “natura naturans” (loosely translated as “nature does its own thing” or “nature naturing”) with vital force: “nature causes itself,” an idea that serves as a supplement to Lucretius, both echoing and supplanting Epicurean atomistic philosophy.46 Spinoza’s Ethics thus reinvigorates earlier understandings of a permeable and sympathetic universe by radically leveling the playing field, compressing all the hierarchies of a Great Chain of Being model into one plane: nature itself, which is indistinguishable from divinity. The term nature was both multivalent and contradictory across the long historical period the essays in this collection address. Broadly speaking, sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­century indices for nature could be divided into two categories: (1) internal wiring or truth of a person or thing and (2) in a rhetorical sense, the cosmic goddess Nature, who exercises transformative and creative power over the earth. This version of Nature has classical roots in Lucretius’s Venus and in Ovid’s numerous deities that control the seasons, the elements, plants, and flowers.47 Nature’s aesthetic force is imitated and challenged by human art (or artifice).48 By the seventeenth century, scientific advancement shifted the power balance between art and nature, allowing writers such as Bacon to call for humans to subdue nature, using violent and misogynistic rhetoric: “nature under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded.”49 As A. O. Lovejoy has demonstrated, from the late seventeenth century through the eighteenth, when “nature” as an aesthetic category expanded, the term inhabited an essential contradiction: even as the term came to mean symmetry or balance, it continued to indicate wildness.50 Each of the essays in this collection addresses the inherent contradictions of nature’s relationship to art(ifice) and to itself, by exploring the often permeable boundaries between human subjects and organic objects, amid a rapidly shifting understanding of both humans and the natural world. From the Enlightenment comes vitalism and its notion of living matter, a concept that is critical to the historical background of the organic supplement. The name of this movement that emerged in eighteenth-­ century France, Germany, and Britain, as well as its central concept would be adapted in the early twentieth century by Hans Driesch and Henri

INTRODUCTION   15

Bergson.51 It would then be reworked further in the early twenty-­first century by Jane Bennett and other proponents of what is known as “the new materialism,” whose interest lies in viewing matter “as an active principle,” to quote Bennett.52 Distinct from the organicism of the Romantic era, vitalism was a corrective to mechanistic philosophy’s view that mind and matter were separate from each other. Vitalists found a way to reconcile them, for their core premise was that living matter had a self-­organizing and self-­moving force that had a “teleological character.”53 With its emphasis on interconnections and “reciprocal interaction[s]” and “circle of relations” that replaced “aggregation and strict causal relations as defining principles of matter,” as Peter Reill puts it, vitalism’s principle of living matter promotes a view of humans and nature as being deeply engaged with and susceptible to each other in their relationships.54 By making interconnectivity so central, vitalism attenuated the causal view of the world and helped advance the notion that organic materials of nature function in mutually supplementary—that is, deeply interconnected and reliant—relationships with humans. For Kevin Lambert in his essay, “The Paris Opéra as a Vibrating Body,” humans themselves and their artistic creations can operate as organic supplements in the vitalistic worldview. Lambert shows how vitalist assertions that matter “was vibrant, organic, and sensuous” can have a bearing on the cultural activities of mid-­eighteenth-­century Paris, including the social networks of leading intellectuals and their production of music. Under vitalism’s spell, the Paris Opéra in 1748 was made into a “vibrating body,” as Lambert puts it, serving as a vehicle and organic supplement for a “new materialist philosophy” that was well under way in the middle of the eighteenth century.55 Opera communicated new philosophical discourses not only musically but through Rameau’s social alliances with such key intellectual players as Friedrich Grimm, whose “sensitive body” as an audience member was critical to increasing his status as a composer and theoretician of music that reverberated with vitalist attitudes. The recent turn toward ecocriticism in early modern and eighteenth-­ century studies has renewed and sharpened our focus on the role the natural world has played in cultures past, as well as such historical and transhistorical concepts as vitalism. Current ecocritical scholarship conceives of the long epoch of human life on this planet in terms of the Anthropocene age, and with this has come a desire to transfer our attention from

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human subjects onto the movements and relationships of nonhuman environments and ecosystems.56 This has coincided with the emergence of the philosophical and literary theoretical field of object-­oriented ontology, which seeks to destabilize the Anthropocene by examining nonhuman objects as vital, active agents in their own right, apart from and at times posed in resistance to human cultures and structures of power.57 Our collection, however, aims to complement (or “supplement”) such ecocritical discussions by bringing premodern humans back into conversation with the natural environment, not as agents of the Anthropocene but as participants—sometimes as subjects, but equally as objects—in an extended, organic world. In exploring the symbiotic and reciprocal relationships of human selves and bodies to the natural world, the essays in this book find common ground with the environmental historian William Cronon. His large-­scale cultural and economic analyses examine the dependency of the urban environment upon the nonurban natural landscape and reposition wilderness as a space constructed by and integral to its opposite.58 For Cronon, “The boundary between natural and unnatural shades almost imperceptibly into the boundary between nonhuman and human.”59 We find purchase in Cronon’s argument about the reciprocity between human industry and the natural world with Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of “correlationism.”60 Interpreting the relationship of humans to the world as both reciprocal and inevitable, Meillassoux’s correlationism in turn echoes Ingold’s concept of the “mutual permeability” between earth and sky and between environmental substance and medium that constitutes life. This sense of permeable or blurred boundaries between worlds is what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen conjures in the introduction to his edited collection Inhuman Nature: “Keen boundaries become on closer examination messy interstices, environmental meshes, ‘ecostices.’”61 This softening of boundaries between worlds permits organic supplements to function as affiliative organisms: complex and vital bodies of relationships between formerly disparate bodies and natural objects, working with and upon one another. The networks and assemblages of nonhuman agency that Jane Bennett reveals operating across “the human-­nonhuman divide” run parallel to our notion of the organic supplement.62 Ranging from decomposing garbage to electrical grids, Bennett’s vibrant fabrics reveal the presence of natural and nonhuman forces working collectively to reorganize and transform our world. Bennett reminds us, while drawing on

INTRODUCTION   17

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage and Spinoza’s divine and dynamic natura, that some of the most powerful and transformative events are consequences of intercommunicative networks of natural and manufactured environments.63 Organic supplements share affinities with Bennett’s concepts—both are dynamic, vital, continuous—but there are key differences: we are less interested in identifying the shape of networks themselves and more interested in deciphering the exchanges between humans and organic objects, as well as the transformations enacted upon both as part of this process. And while our early modern and eighteenth-­century organic supplements might be compared to Clark’s “coalitions,” they often contain more biological and physical energy derived from the natural world, as Lynn Festa argues in her essay on gloves, animal skin, and human skin. Such objects and materials have no relationship when regarded apart from one another, but when the human hand comes into contact with a leather glove, each transforms and acts upon the other, the hand shaping the leather to contain its imprint, the leather leaving an uncanny animalic sensation on the hand. Taken separately, they are hand and animal skin; taken together they become a vital organism, with the hand supplementing the leather and vice versa. Each of the essays in our collection reconceives the way an organism functions, by articulating the energies and relationships forged by the interactions that create the human and the natural world anew. Finally, as vibrant organisms, organic supplements often venture into posthumanist territory by enhancing, augmenting, and transforming human bodies.64 In Festa’s essay, gloves made from animal skin transform human hands, whereas in Miriam Jacobson’s, humans and plants form hybrid beings. Jayne Lewis examines the poetic energy attributed to Milton’s disembodied hair as if it took on a life of its own. Here we join Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano in reminding readers that “human” persists within the term “posthuman.”65 Object-­oriented ontology and Bennett’s vibrant matter theory have already been critiqued by ecofeminists and scholars of the premodern period for their disinterest in power structures and their frequent placement of human agency outside of the vital assemblages of things in a critique of anthropocentrism.66 Rebecca Laroche has noted that Bennett’s concept of the agency of nonhuman things ignores the complex embeddedness of humans and nature in the premodern world, “individuals who were embedded in the messiness of matter on a daily basis, and more importantly, tied to the material

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world around them . . . by labor and concrete knowledge that comes with it.”67 Laroche’s essay for this volume explores the early history of material embeddedness from a new perspective, examining how the natural environment might incorporate itself into human flesh and so enact a transformation. In Laroche’s analysis, such incorporation is multilayered: the purported flos unguentorum, or mystical “flower of ointments,” melts floral essences into skin to heal it, but its source of fame, its ambivalent connection to religious healing, and its status as handwritten receipt also work to transform and transmit new forms of textual knowledge. In each of its three parts, Organic Supplements focuses on resonant historical relationships between humans and objects of the natural world. Some of these relationships involve correspondences and sympathies, whereas others explore and challenge conventional antitheses. Each section integrates sixteenth-­to eighteenth-­century subjects together. The essays in part 1, “Inscription and Incorporation,” examine reciprocal relationships between natural objects and bodies in scenes of writing, medicinal recipe exchange, and musical composition and experience, wherein the possibilities of action afforded by the material properties of instruments derived from nature (writing instruments, medicines, and musical instruments) extend animal and human bodies beyond their own boundaries. In Julie Park’s “Feather, Flourish, and Flow,” skilled acts of cutting and holding transform the organic material of bird feathers into writing instruments that convey the writer’s mind and touch to distant readers only through the dynamic movements of the hand, which in turn imitate the liveliness of the natural world on the page through handwriting. Rebecca Laroche investigates the transcorporeal notion of scented balsams in “The Flower of Ointments and Early Modern Transcorporeality.” Beginning as external properties, they disappear into the skin, an act of bodily inscription and incorporation that is mirrored in the culture of recipe writing and exchange. Kevin Lambert, in “The Paris Opéra as Vibrating Body,” incorporates the emotional effects on the body of vibrating violin strings at the eighteenth-­century Paris Opéra, as orchestrated by Rameau in his opera-­ballet Pygmalion, with emerging philosophies of the vibrant and organic qualities of matter. In keeping with our notion of the organic supplement as dynamic, our section headings emphasize the connectivity or—to borrow a term from Park’s essay on penmanship—the “flow” of ideas from section to section. Thus the essays that make up part 2, “Interface and Merger,” examine

INTRODUCTION   19

organic objects that resist classification, occupy multiple states of being, and easily cross borders between human and nonhuman, animal and mineral, self and other, changing both sites in the process. As in the essays in part 1, bodies are reshaped here. Unlike those in part 1, however, the essays in this section explore the fusion—and confusion—of two or more disparate bodies and things. Jessica Wolfe’s essay “Gorgonick Spirits” attends to the early modern origins of biomineralization, or the transmutation of animal into mineral matter. Lynn Festa similarly probes categories of difference in “Things with Kid Gloves,” by examining the animal and human boundaries that surround the use of human hands. In her analysis, gloves circumscribe rather than inscribe, figuratively rewriting what it means to be a hand and what it means to be a human, or an animal. A glove marks the meeting point between animal, human, and thing, resisting classification as any one category. For Miriam Jacobson in “Vegetable Loves,” seventeenth-­century metaphysical poetry represents a rejection of Baconian impulses to harness and abuse nature and instead may be seen as a movement toward expressing human fantasies of becoming a plant-­human hybrid. The three essays in this section demonstrate how the organic medium is revealed as malleable, as much in multilayered Renaissance systems of classification as in the way a single eighteenth-­century object indexes diverse vitalities. At the heart of seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­ century discourse on human experience and perception lies an artificially represented natural world that supplements the real natural one. Part 3, “Vitality and Decay,” explores the progressive transformation of organic matter from one state to another, with surprising conclusions. Thus the organic matter interpreted by the authors in this section can take concrete and biodegradable form— pies, meat, and human hair—or it can occupy or metamorphose into an abstract and representational form, like decorative grotesque cartouches or figurative language, word play, and poetry. Michael Yonan, in “Knowing the World through Rococo Ornamental Prints,” addresses debates over the relationship between art and nature mediated by Rococo grotesque art, contending that assemblages of natural objects in decorative cartouches stage emerging debates over the very value of organic elements in the world as aesthetic supplements, or as subjects of ornamental representation. Diane Purkiss’s “Fingers in the Pie” returns to Hamlet’s “funeral baked-­ meats” to investigate the way early modern attitudes toward cold food “leftovers” create a rich figurative network of word play in Shakespeare’s

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tragedy in order to dramatize decay and a complete loss of materiality. Jayne Lewis’s “Milton’s Hair,” on the other hand, uncovers the eighteenth-­ century afterlife and legacy of a famous individual’s head of hair long after its owner has passed away, taking on a life of its own. The acts of decomposition and flourishing are thus paradoxically united: in Purkiss’s essay, what is supposedly preserved gradually putrefies, whereas in Lewis’s (the final essay in this book), what should remain dead is resurrected and repeatedly revivified. Julia Lupton’s afterword ends and reflects on the gathering by bringing the classically derived notion of virtue as an ethical as well as a physical “property or power” (what Gibson might call an “affordance,” she reminds us) to bear on the organic supplement. Conceiving of the essays in the collection as a “virtue ecology,” she plants the seeds of a new theoretical framework for understanding the properties and powers of relationships between human relationships and the natural world. In structure and approach, this essay collection reveals what we are describing as an early modern understanding of the interconnected relationships between human beings and living, organic matter. And yet collection, traditionally used to describe a volume of scholarly essays, is not the most apposite term for this book, for the term is aligned with a practice of detaching objects from their daily uses in life, isolating them in the drawers of cabinets and reorganizing them to be viewed behind glass. In contrast, anthology, as well as its cognates florilegium, posy, and sylva, terms traditionally applied to textual gatherings, embed the natural world in their etymology and figurative uses: a book of writings as a gathering of flowers, leaves, or forest trees. They serve as more fitting textual embodiments of the interactivity and engagement between humans and nature, bodies and materials, ideas and temporalities that this book seeks to explore and promote, creating affiliations and conversations between material objects, historical periods, and scholars in the round.

Notes 1. See Lynn Festa, “Personal Effects: Wigs and Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 29.2 (2005): 47–90, and Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in

INTRODUCTION   21

Eighteenth-­Century England (New Haven, CT: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1993). 2. It is worth stating here that this transformation was a fraught one, and we are not suggesting here a grand récit of progress toward individual freedom but rather an interstitial zone in which the rhetoric of individuality and the human relationship to the natural world could be exploited by power structures to justify the unjust enslavement and oppression of human beings, as much as it could be employed to make a case for individual rights. For studies that look at this question in terms of enslaved persons, bondage, and indentured servitude throughout the time period of this collection, see George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-­ Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Urvashi Chakravarty’s forthcoming book, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude and Free Service in Early Modern ­England. 3. OED online, s.v. “organic (adj. and n.).” 4. OED online, s.v. “organ (n. 1).” 5. OED online, s.v. “organ (n. 1).” The dictionary notes a Greek etymology for organ as well in ὄργανον (tool, engine, instrument) and ἔργον (work). 6. For sixteenth-­century usages in law and religion, see definition 1a of OED, s.v. “supplement (1a).” For usage in a cartographic context, see in Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia s.v. “map” (London, 1728), 2:496. 7. See OED online, s.v. “supplement (1b, 1c, 2b).” 8. See OED online, s.v. “prosthesis (1 and 2a).” 9. See OED online, s.v. “supplement (n. 2)”; Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London: R. Jones, 1583), sig. Hiv. 10. Indeed, according to the OED, the adjective “supple” first appeared to indicate bodily nimbleness and grace in the sixteenth century and began to be applied to human and animal bodies by the middle of the seventeenth. OED online, s.v. “supple (adj. 3a, b).” 11. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 145. 12. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144. 13. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144. 14. See Andy Clark, Natural-­Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 15. Clark, Natural-­Born Cyborgs, 140, 139. 16. See, for example, Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass,

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eds., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Kowaleski-­Wallace, Consuming Subjects: British Women and Consumer Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 17. Clark, Natural-­Born Cyborgs, 138. 18. For a discussion of the constitutive elements of stories and narratives, see Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 31–32. 19. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 16. 20. Gibson, The Ecological Approach, 18. 21. Gibson, The Ecological Approach, 129. 22. Gibson, The Ecological Approach, 16, and Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 2.4:86, quoted in Wolfe’s essay in this collection, 111. 23. Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 119. 24. Ingold, Being Alive, 120. 25. Ingold, Being Alive, 116. 26. See Michael Yonan, “Knowing the World through Rococo Ornamental Prints,” in this volume, 177–98. 27. Yonan, “Knowing the World,” 183. 28. Yonan, “Knowing the World,” 183. 29. Ingold, Being Alive, 30. 30. Ingold, Being Alive, 30. 31. Ingold, Being Alive, 31. 32. For a recent work that applies Gibson’s theory of affordances to notions of design in Shakespeare, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). For a study that examines eighteenth-­century theories of perception in terms of Gibsonian affordances, see Jonathan Kramnick, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 33. See William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 46. 34. Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 7.

INTRODUCTION   23

35. See Sean Silver, The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-­ Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), and Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 36. Silver, The Mind Is a Collection, 15. Silver does not explain or contextualize further his usage of the term “lousy.” A direct consultation of Serres reveals that “environment” for him is problematic because it assumes that the human is at the center of whatever context nature provides for its activities. Serres writes, “So forget the word environment, commonly used in this context. It assumes that we humans are at the center of a system of nature.” See Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 33. 37. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, editors of Veer Ecology, and Vin Nardizzi in “Environ,” an essay appearing in the collection, counter the movement to discard wholesale the term environment with an “embrace” of its etymological and philological backgrounds, which reveal the history and legacy of its cultural meanings, for better or worse. Cohen and Duckert point out that the root verb in environment derives from virer, the French verb for “to turn.” As such, it represents the very motion of veering that often characterizes “a world full of inhuman forces, dynamic matter, and story-­filled life that inevitably go off course.” While expressing reservations about its continued use on the basis of its early modern manifestation as a military term, Nardizzi nevertheless underlines the persistence of the term environment along with environmental as “powerful keywords and conceptual anchors” for “ecocriticism.” See Vin Nardizzi, “Environ,” in Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, ed. Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 183–95, 184. 38. Nathan Bailey, The New Universal English Dictionary (London, 1775), s.v. “environment.” 39. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 2 (London, 1756), s.v. “surround.” 40. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 61. 41. Jacques Abbadie, The Art of Knowing One-­Self (Oxford, 1698), 12. 42. The first appearance of cosmos as universe, according to the OED, is in John Bulwer’s early Baconian work of cultural anthropology, Anthropometamorphosis (1650). OED online, s.v. “cosmos (n. 1).”

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43. Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia &c. (Oppenheim and Frankfurt, 1617–24). 44. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis and the Great Instauration, ed. Jerry Weinberger (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016); René Descartes, Meditations on the First Philosophy, ed. and trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 45. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 1993). 46. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order, ed. Matthew K ­ isner, trans. Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xxii, 28–29, 261. 47. On (1), see, for example, Lady Macbeth’s description of her husband: “Yet do I fear thy nature, / It is too full o’th milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way” (Macbeth 1.5.12–13). On (2) see Ovid’s Ceres, Proserpina, and Pomona in Metamorphoses, v, xiv, and Flora in Fasti, “May.” Ovid, The Metamorphoses: The New, Annotated Edition, ed. and trans. Joseph D. Reed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018); Ovid, Fasti, ed. and trans. Anne Wiseman and Peter Wiseman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 48. See Shakespeare, Sonnet 20, “with nature’s own hand painted” (1), “nature as she wrought thee, fell a-­doting” (10), and Twelfth Night’s “beauty truly blent, whose red and white / Nature’s own sweet cunning hand laid on” (1.5.193–94). 49. Bacon, New Atlantis and the Great Instauration, 28. On Bacon’s own botanical experiments manipulating nature, see Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 173. 50. Arthur O. Lovejoy, “‘Nature’ as Aesthetic Norm,” and “The First Gothic Revival and the Return of Nature,” in Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 69–77, 136–65. 51. On recent studies of eighteenth-­century vitalism, see Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment; Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall, eds., Vital Matters: Eighteenth-­Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); and Catherine Packham, Eighteenth-­Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). On Driesch, see Jane Bennett, “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 47–69. For representative new materialist scholarship, see the other essays

INTRODUCTION   25

in Coole and Frost, New Materialisms. Elizabeth Kowaleski-­Wallace provides a recent attempt at applying new materialism and cognate concepts in late seventeenth-­century vitalism to a reading of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock in “The Things Things Don’t Say,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 59.1 (Spring 2018): 105–22. 52. Bennett, “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism,” 47. 53. Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment, 7. 54. Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment, 7. 55. Kevin Lambert, “The Paris Opéra as a Vibrating Body: Feeling and Hearing Pygmalion’s Kiss,” in this volume, 77. 56. For a collection that considers the Anthropocene in terms of its geological manifestations and presence, see Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, eds., Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). 57. For more on object-­oriented ontology, see Graham Harman, Tool-­Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002); Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Harman, Object-­Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Penguin, 2018). 58. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), and Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. Cronon (New York: Norton, 1996). 59. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, xix. 60. Quentin Meillassoux, Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence (Paris: Seuil, coll. L’ordre philosophique, 2006). 61. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, introduction to Inhuman Nature, ed. Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2014), v. Cohen has done much to transform the field of premodern cultural studies in his writing and editorial work by contributing to this larger discourse, uniting the fields of object-­ oriented ontology, ecocriticism, and posthumanism. See, for example, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Human (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Cohen, ed., Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Cohen, ed., Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (Punctum Books, 2012); Cohen and Lowell Duckert, eds., Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Cohen and Duckert, eds., Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015);

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Cohen and Julian Yates, eds., Object-­Oriented Environs (New York: Punctum, 2016). 62. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 24. 63. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Baruch Spinoza, Ethics: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Seymour Feldman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992). 64. The term posthuman encompasses bodies and networks that augment and transcend our idea of the human and that occupy the threshold space between the human and nonhuman, from automata and cyborgs to intelligent parasites. See Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). For N. Katherine Hayles, “posthuman” depends upon the body being an original prosthesis that is then extended or replaced with other prostheses. See Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3. The term is problematic, as it implies the human as a finished, completed category. Furthermore, the many examples of the human in posthumanist analyses tend to be white, privileged bodies. 65. In the introduction to their recent collection Renaissance Posthumanism, Campana and Maisano point out that the idea of a “posthuman,” whether cyborg or animal agent, is not a new one; in fact it is a distinctly early modern and therefore humanist one. See Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano, Renaissance Posthumanism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 66. See, for example, Katherine Behar, ed., Object-­Oriented Feminism (Min­ne­ap­ olis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Jennifer Munroe, for example, points out that Bennett’s emphasis on “thing power” doesn’t account for power relations, an important component of ecofeminist approaches to the past: Jennifer Munroe, “Is it Really Ecocritical If It Isn’t Feminist? The Dangers of ‘Speaking for’ in Ecological Studies and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” in Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts, ed. Jennifer Munroe, Edward J. Geisweidt, and Lynne Bruckner (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 37–50. See also Munroe, Geisweidt, and Bruckner, introduction to Ecological Approaches, 4–5. 67. Rebecca Laroche, “Roses in Winter: Recipe Ecologies and Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Munroe, Geisweidt, and Bruckner, Ecological Approaches, 51.

❖ part

i❖

Inscription and Incorporation

Feather, Flourish, and Flow Handwriting’s Organic Technology

Julie Park

I

f technology is understood as an application of materials to achieve defined ends, and technique the methods by which those ends are met, then writing has always been both a technology and technique.1 Yet it was in the early modern period when writing was framed especially as a highly technical skill that required written or in-­person instruction, as well as manual dexterity and diligent practice, especially in the handling of the pen. Made out of the organic material of a bird’s feather, the quill pen needed to be cut with a sharp knife and was held at specific angles to produce the desired “hand at particular” or handwriting style. A precise amount of pressure from the writer’s arm on the page was required. These and many other physical exertions of control contributed to the desired display of “command of hand,” without which, according to eighteenth-­ century penmanship guides, “the most regular piece of writing will be like a dead corpse.”2 Letters, in other words, were not just “written” in the eighteenth century. They were made and even given life through acts of manual skill and physical coordination. The quill pen was the tool from nature that enabled these acts of making and giving life, extending the mind of the writer through the touch of the pen on paper and the hand on the pen. What exactly do we know about the physical characteristics of eighteenth-­ century written documents—letters or otherwise—and how they came to be created, beyond the common knowledge that they were made of paper and entailed the use of a quill pen? What was the relationship between the bodies of the letter writers and the documents that issued from their actions? And what forms of touch and motion mediated the relation between those

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bodies? Examining the skilled interactions between human hands and quill pens that made letter writing and its forms of remote touching possible, this essay posits that such technical interactions form the organic basis on which eighteenth-­century hands found the most expressive instruments for communicating thoughts and views. At the same time it suggests that eighteenth-­century fiction’s long-­celebrated verisimilitude can only be fully understood through the embodied practices of everyday life from which it purportedly derives. As an act of making, writing rendered not just vision but also touch significant in eighteenth-­century epistolary correspondence. Writing master Joseph Champion observes, “Penmanship, or Writing, is an art, mechanically speaking, dependent on the Hand and Eye.”3 While voice and by implication hearing have been emphasized in prior works on epistolary writing, the tactile dimensions of writing, including the materiality of the quill pen remain unexamined. The very means by which eighteenth-­century handwriting became a technology rested on the transformation of organic material, from the cotton, linen, and hemp rags used for paper to the iron galls of trees used for ink and the quills of birds used for pens. Of particular interest is the quill’s transmutation from organic material on an animal’s body to a tool attached to a human body, serving as a supplement for the human’s “organ of speech.” A riddle in a penmanship guide lays this scenario bare as it voices a feminized goose quill’s story of being “dragg’d” from her “­ Mother’s Side” by “Tyrant Man”: “He pick’d my Marrow from the Bone, / To vex me more, he took a Freak, / To slit my Tongue, and made me speak.”4 Here, the actions of the hand create the violent situation by which the goose quill acquires the prosthetic function of projecting the writer’s voice on the surface of the page. Without the human hand and its actions of scraping the feather’s shaft—or picking its “marrow” from its bone—to create a nib, and of cutting a slit therein, the quill would not be able to accomplish this feat. Writing allows the writer’s voice to be heard, yet it does so with words that are made through a practice of manual exertion rather than oral. The hand is made to speak through a mouth fashioned out of a feather, itself an appendage to a living creature with a mouth of its own. The manual and tactile aspects of eighteenth-­century writing indicate the extent to which eighteenth-­century epistolary narratives produce a level of fictionality whose materiality is tacit. This is to say that fictionality in epistolary narratives encompasses not just the authenticity of characters

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and their experiences but also the materiality of the medium the narratives purport to be. In other words, the printed “letters” that were held by readers’ hands in fiction by Aphra Behn, Mary Davys, and Samuel Richardson, for instance, were meant to be imagined as handwritten ones and as such, issued directly from the intimate touch of human hands on quill pens. In this way, epistolary novels try to represent the acts of writing letters as well as handwriting itself and the interiority they both engender (to be discussed later in this essay) with the technology of print. It is print that mediates the pen as a fictional presence, a notion demonstrated in Richardson’s Pamela when the heroine plans, during her captivity in Mr. B’s Lincolnshire estate, to “write on, as things happen.”5 Here, the novel presents its masquerade of having been issued directly from the hand of Pamela as it moves a pen across a blank page in reaction to immediate events and experiences. The novel most baldly presents the fiction that its own typography is handwriting when Pamela declares “I can hardly write; yet, as I can do nothing else, I know not how to lay down my pen. How crooked and trembling the lines!”6 Epistolary fiction such as Richardson’s invented not just a story but also its own materiality as a collection of handwritten letters. Necessary to integrate into literary history is an understanding of the technical manner with which those fictional touches on the pen and page, and the alluring flourishes they produced, were created. Such an awareness was implicit for contemporary readers of epistolary fiction at the time the genre became prominent but has been forgotten about through the passing of time and the changes in writing technology that have taken place therein. Writing technique in the eighteenth century as well as the early modern period entailed not just the use of writing tools but also detailed instructions on how to use them. For those without recourse to a hired tutor or private writing master, such instruction was found in the copybooks created by the most eminent writing masters of the period. Though copybooks appeared in the early modern era too, by authors such as Peter Bales and Richard Mulcaster, they predominated in the eighteenth century as guides for students learning to become clerks and keep accounts, not elite subjects receiving a humanist education, the subjects of Jonathan Goldberg’s influential study.7 Evincing the interplay between word and image inherent in penmanship, copybooks were divided in sections, one of letterpress text, the other of engraved plates. The letterpress section, usually placed at the

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beginning, instructs the writing student how to perform every step of the writing process, from making the pen and “managing” it to positioning the body, desk, seat and sheet of paper when writing.8 Detailed directions are sometimes given on how to create the letters of particular hands, such as the creation and positioning of particular characters and particular hands such as round, secretary, Italian, Roman, and German.9 Accompanying these typeset instructions were engraved sheets replicating the writing masters’ penmanship, including their feats of ornamental flourishing and command of hand. The student’s act of copying or tracing these engraved models equivocates between writing and drawing. One of the most successful and influential of copybooks, with a title that reflected its inclusive approach to penmanship, was George Bickham’s The Universal Penman, which presented the specimens of 25 different penmen in 212 folio pages and was issued to subscribers in installments of 52 parts from 1733 to 1741. Made up of verse, epigrams, and precepts on male and female conduct in various hands, as well as samples of documents used in trade transactions, copybook handwriting samples ensured that writing pupils would receive a moral education as well as a professional one. Indicating the valuation of the pen, the titles for the writing manuals and copybooks that proliferated during the early part of the century highlighted the pen or defined the writer by the tool. One who writes was not a writer, but a “penman.” The titles emphasizing the pen and its user include Writing Improved, or Penmanship made Easy (1712) and The Penman’s Diversion (1712) by John Clark, The Penman’s Companion (1732) by George Shelley, and The Practical Penman (1713) by Thomas Ollyffe. When attending to the spread of penmanship manuals and copybooks in eighteenth-­century England, scholars have fixated on their roles as tools for the advancement of mercantilism and commerce, as well as the competitive culture of writing masters that drove the emergence of such manuals.10 This view is supported by the fact that many samples in writing manuals are for documents a merchant would need to write in the course of day-­to-­day business. Some of the most beautiful examples of penmanship can be seen in these copybook samples of commercial documents, such as those displayed in Champion’s Penmanship Illustrated (1759–60). Here, elegant models of promissory notes, bills of parcels and exchange, receipts for the purchase of textiles and household furnishings, a letter of credit and a bill of entry

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inspire the eye with an idea of how commercial records can turn into aesthetic artifacts.11 A concluding poem validates the copybook’s focus on trade-­ oriented penmanship when proclaiming that “Merchants of great Benefit to the Publick / They knit Mankind together in a mutual Intercourse / of good Offices, distribute to the Gifts of Nature fine Work.”12 Yet penmanship was also a requisite of writing personal letters, an activity whose growth overlapped with the rise of trade in the eighteenth century, as well as of novels.13 Whereas the proliferation of letter manuals during the same period demonstrates the increased cultural significance of letter writing, the contents of the manuals themselves do as well with poems that extol writing’s ability to make personal contact possible across long distances. For instance, Bickham observes, “Among all the Inventions of Mankind none is more admirable, necessary, useful or convenient than Writing, by which a Man is enabled to delineate his very Conceptions, Communicate his Mind without Speaking, and correspond with his Friend at ten thousand Miles distance, and all by the Contrivance of twenty six letters.”14 Indicating that writing’s influence on trade is in fact inseparable from—as well as equal to—its role in interpersonal communication, the panegyric to “the curious art” of “fair writing” in Thomas Weston’s Ancilla Calligraphiae (1682) brings the two together in the same stanza: ’Tis writing doth facilitate Commerce, and all society, Is joined and made strong thereby, Friends absent, hereby do communicate, Each secret thought, and sentiment, Each private purpose, and intent.15

Epistolary narrative drew on the aspects of writing that allowed friends who were absent from each other to communicate each of their secret thoughts, sentiments, private purposes, and intent. Yet in many cases, imitating epistolary writing was not enough—through textual description its material embodiment needed to be fabricated as well. One of the earliest full-­length epistolary narratives, Aphra Behn’s amatory fiction and roman à clef, Love-­Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684, 1685, and 1687), takes pains to show its status not as a book but as a collection of found letters written by the characters in question: “These Letters were found in their Cabinets, at their house at St. Denice, where they both liv’d together

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for the space of a year, and they are as exactly as possible plac’d in the order they were sent, and were those supposed to be written towards the latter end of their Amours.”16 While the verisimilar device of found letters is folded into the plot of Behn’s fiction—they are represented as the letters written between the lovers in question after they have fled from their place of hiding—another level of realism emerges in their presentation as physical artifacts. Pointing out that the ordering of the letters is exactly as they had been written explains the ensuing narrative’s structure. At the same time, doing so reinforces the tactile and intimate qualities of the letters as handwritten documents. Not just anticipating the found manuscript convention of eighteenth-­ century Gothic fiction, Behn’s maneuver of presenting her narrative as real letters participates in the contemporaneous tradition of trompe l’oeil letter rack paintings created by Dutch artists of the second half of the seventeenth century, including Edvard Collier and Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts (figure 1). The unexpected effect of verisimilitude in both fiction and painting seduces the reader and viewer into a sense of having come across the belongings of actual, living people. In the paintings, the subtle lift of the quill pens against their backgrounds, along with the creases and folds in the creamy sheets of paper, gives a sense that one might be able to pick the objects up from the paintings’ surfaces and begin writing with the pen or unfold one of the letters to read it. In tricking the eye, these paintings raise the expectation of touch, of being able to reach out and hold someone else’s personal objects in one’s hands. The possibility of doing so is the painting’s fiction. Just as the paintings make us aware that the letters and pens can be held in the hands, they also remind us that they were made with them too. How might we, in contrast, understand the roles that letters play as objects of verisimilitude in epistolary narrative? An example of such material verisimilitude presents itself in Mary Davys’s Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady (1725), whose narrative displays self-­consciousness about the paper status of its fiction. Such self-­consciousness reveals itself when one of its fictional writers, Artander, refers to the “little foolish Sheets of gilt Paper” that constrict his writing and his correspondent’s. Likewise Berina in one letter relates how her design to “have fill’d up the empty Space of this Paper” is thwarted by unexpected visitors.17 While the visual medium of the seventeenth-­century trompe l’oeil paintings of the Low Countries

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Figure 1.  Trompe l’oeil board partition with letter rack and music book, Cornelius Norbertus Gysbrechts, 1688. (Statens Museum for Kunst)

allows us to see—rather than read about—the paper features of the letters as well as the instruments and materials used to create them, narratives allow us to read what is “inside” those letters.18 It is easy to forget, then, that the letters represented fictionally, whether in the verse of Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard or the prose of a Richardson novel, carry with them fictions of their status as material documents. They are ghost fictions, in a fashion, for while such documents never existed in the first place, the fact that even made-­up letters have material referents with

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historically defined traits renders those referents into phantoms of a material reality.19 Indeed, the specters of handwriting lurk in all works of print before the advent of typewriters, for the origin of any printed text lies in a handwritten manuscript.20 These ghosts tell stories about organic acts of touching, holding, moving, and flourishing we have yet to know and understand fully in encounters with the handwritten letters of fiction, art, and reality.

Organic The organic’s link to the technical is inherent in the Greek word for tool, organon, which was used by Aristotle as the title for his work of logic. In choosing to entitle his program of scientific method Novum Organum (1620), Francis Bacon expressed his aim to displace the classical philosopher’s system of thought with his own contemporary one. In part he did so by asserting the primacy of instruments themselves in the pursuit of nature’s truth: “Neither the bare hand nor the unaided intellect has much power; the work is done by tools and assistance, and the intellect needs them as much as the hand. As the hand’s tools either prompt or guide its motions, so the mind’s tools either prompt or warn the intellect.”21 Although Bacon distinguishes mental tools from manual ones, and the hand from the mind, his act of setting them in parallel relationship to each other suggests the possibilities of a direct relation between hand and mind, with manual tools aiding the mind. And while Bacon’s notion of the organic appears strictly to reflect the usage of his time, of pertaining to or serving as an instrument, there are stirrings of the meaning that would emerge slightly later of having organs or an “organized physical structure.”22 The scenario he describes, after all, reveals a relationship between hand, mind, and tools that is so interdependent that it is rendered an organized unit, an organism in itself. Certainly, the goose quill riddle mentioned earlier shows a form of organicism—residing in the complex of human, hand, pen, and animal—that disrupts the natural system to advance a human one whose basis is technological.23 This disruption of nature depicted in the riddle demonstrates the definition of organic that is more familiar today. The goose quill depicts herself as being at her most beautiful and vulnerable when she is in her original natural state, freshly plucked from the body of her mother, the bird:

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Nature to form Me took Delight, And clad my Body all in White. My Person tall, and slender Waist, On either side with Fringes grac’d. Till Me that Tyrant Man espy’d, And dragg’d me from my Mother’s Side. No Wonder now I look so thin, The Tyrant stripp’d me to my Skin. My Skin he flay’d, my Hair he cropp’d, At Head and Foot my Body lopp’d.24

Turning from an animal appendage to a human one is a degrading and violent process. Yet once the transformation has been made, with the goose quill’s bone marrow picked and her tongue slit, a turn described as “wonderful” takes place. The goose quill explains, “I speak to Eyes, and not to Ears.”25 At this point too, the instrumental meaning of “organic” takes hold, for she has turned from an element of nature to a writing tool. The wonderful capacities of writing, of taking on the organic function of a mouth that is heard by the eyes, have allowed her to dominate over her former maker. For, as she puts it, From Me no Secret he can hide, I see his Malice, and his Pride. And my Delight is to expose His Follies to his greatest Foes.26

When she boasts of her ability to see and reveal the worst of human motives and feelings, the goose quill registers writing’s ability to reveal and express interiority. The power that her access to human interiority gives her is so great that she declares, “Nay Man, my Master, is my Slave.” Evidence of this new status is her ability to “give Command to kill or save / . . . / And make a Beggar strut a Peer.” Ironically, through the exertion of telling her story, she only “hasten[s] her Fate” by making her tongue increasingly black and mouth “furr’d” with ink. Depleting her own capacities as a pen—“I hardly now can force a Word”—she “die[s] unpitied” and is “forgot.” Fulfilling her ultimate function as an organic supplement by contributing to the generation of future living matter, she expires “on some Dunghill left to rot.”27 Elsewhere, expressed in a poem in Charles Snell’s Art of Writing In It’s [sic] Theory and Practice is the idea that the pen can substitute for unavailable

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organs. Observing that the “fine device” was “descended” from Cadmus, the Greek god for language and writing, the poem lauds its abilities to mix sensory functions while substituting for organs of speech: To paint the Voice, and to discourse the Eyes, In Forms and colours Sense to cloathe he taught, And all the various Features of a Thought.28

Effecting a chiasmic exchange, the pen performs visual work for the oral function and oral work for the visual. In addition, the pen outfits “Sense” with forms and colors and supplies “Thought” with features. While giving the pen an agentive identity, the poem anthropomorphizes ideas and thoughts as naked, blank entities that need only the pen to give them shape, color, and definition. Here again, the relationship between human and tool is depicted as one in which human faculties are completely dependent on the tool to come fully into being. In short, the poem describes the process by which the pen allows abstract ideas—which would otherwise vanish as oral utterances—to become as visible and tangible as material reality. Peter Motteux’s poem “The Pen,” appearing in Art of Writing, perceives an organic continuum in the tool’s transcendent functions when referring to “That Still-­Life of the Quill, whose Strokes revive / What Mem’ry wou’d, but cannot, keep alive!”29 The quill’s own life, having become “still,” passes on, revives and sustains the life of memory. Here, organic supplementation entails using a tool originating from living matter to execute an act—writing—that gives metaphorical rather than actual life to a vital human faculty. Given the almost mystical nature with which writing was regarded throughout the eighteenth century, it should be no surprise that receiving a letter was a noteworthy and frequently emotional event. In this way, as penmanship poems suggest, writing’s supplementation extends to animating human relationships. Diary entries throughout the period certainly indicate that receiving a letter was a significant happening in daily life. In Thomas Parsons’s diary of 1769, the occasion of receiving letters—“Had a very affectionate friendly letter from Mr. Oland. . . . Had a Letter from Mr. Plummer who has an honest friendly Heart”—warrants an entry as much as receiving an in-­person visit does.30 Even at the end of the century, Jane Porter’s diary of 1796 shows a similar valuation of receiving letters, as

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entries centering on the writing and receiving of letters appear alongside ones that record the regular calling of a neighborhood beau, taking of walks, and drinking of tea.31 Fiction offers reflections on what letters mean to lovers as supplements for human organs and presence. Communicating how the physical act of writing conjures her lover Philander’s physical presence, the lovelorn Silvia of Behn’s Love-­L etters Between a Nobleman and His Sister writes to him: “And I at last have recourse to my kind Pen: For while I Write methinks I’m talking to thee, I tell thee thus my Soul, while thou methinks art all the while smiling and listening by, this is much easier than silent thought, and my Soul is never weary of this converse, and thus I wou’d speak a Thousand things.”32 Philander expresses his own valuation of the letter as a paper representative of Silvia in writing, “Thy Letter I confess is dear, it contains thy Soul and my happiness.”33 In both cases, the characters’ enthusiasm for writing and receiving letters is checked by desires that exceed what writing can convey. For Philander, additional news he longs to hear needs to arrive, and for Silvia, letter writing cannot substitute for real presence and the actual looks, touches, and sounds they bring. Perceptively she comments, Still, methinks words do not enough express my Soul, to understand that right there requires looks; there is a Rethorick in looks, in Sighs and silent touches that surpasses all there is an Accent in the sound of words too, that gives a sense and soft meaning to little things, which of themselves are of trivial value, and insignificant, and by the cadence of the utterance may express a tenderness which their own meaning does not bear; by this I wou’d insinuate that the story of the heart cannot be so well told by this way as by presence and conversation.34

In embodied presence, another language is able to emerge in which physical gestures and enunciations communicate a new multitude of meanings. Such an insight befits a work written by an author who began her career writing plays, a form that demands actual bodies for its full expression. Yet despite the recognition that real presence offers a superior form of telling “the story of the heart,” it is the technique of writing that yields and sharpens such internal realizations while at the same time making one’s mind and its material representative available to others.

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Technique: Body, Mind, and Tool Much as epistolary narrative has been distinguished for its ability to represent interiority like no other genre before it, writing itself has been noted for the exceptional interiority it too engenders.35 For Walter Ong, in its work of “heighten[ing] consciousness,” writing separates “the knower from the known” and thus facilitates writing’s ability to enunciate interiority, for in this separation, the psyche is opened “as never before” to an “external objective world quite distinct from itself.” Ong’s pronouncements show how writing fundamentally generates interiority by creating different realms for the mind that writes and the world that is written. The mind, in its act of writing, finds itself in a different relationship with its own thoughts as it moves simultaneously deeper into them in the act of writing about them. At the same time, the mind distances itself from its thoughts through representing them as words on a paper surface, separating them “from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist.”36 This phenomenon is a timeless one, yet the physical procedure by which writing gets written influences the way the relationship between mind and world is understood. In the case of a handwritten letter, especially one written according to the protocols of early modern penmanship, the relationship was one in which the motions of the body were thoroughly coordinated with those of the writing tool. This stress on the bringing together of disparate entities to produce the body of writing aligns with another striking eighteenth-­century figure of continuity between “the sensitive human body and the external world” that Kevin Lambert introduces in this volume: Diderot’s conception of the vibrating string. Penmanship manual instructions on proper posture and sitting throughout the eighteenth century indicate the unified relationship between body and text that handwriting protocols of the period prescribe. The writer’s embodied status also made an impact on both the process and product of writing. On one hand, the body and the position of its different parts are always implicated in the activity of writing. Indeed, writing takes place as a direct consequence of the body’s actions, even in its state of sitting. “The common Method of sitting” was viewed as presenting “inconveniencies,” for it made impossible the ability to “write either even, or to keep a Line of an exact Heighth.”37 Each aspect of this “inconvenient” posture resulted in a form of visual irregularity in the writing itself. As the body leans left toward the desk,

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the writing “falls” in evenness because it issues (away) “from” the writer. When writing with lines, the writing slopes downward at the end of the line because the hand “stretches” away from the eye, no longer directly beneath it. Finally, if one were to move after writing “too far,” the consequences would be writing that enlarges at the end of the line.38 Thus the body of the writer and image of the writing are inseparable from each other, insofar as the writing registers whatever the body is doing and wherever it is positioned. By extension, touch and sight are also inextricable in that acts of touching are entailed by the body’s mere presence when writing. Its movements and posture directly affect the image of what is written. Penmanship, with its attentiveness to the shapes, lines, and forms of writing, turns it into an image, an object of looking rather than reading, yet such intermedial transformation is borne directly out of bodily movement and its control. Handwriting’s distinction from print is apparent in the fact that the positioning of the printer’s hands and body will not immediately affect the forms of the letters themselves—their bowls, serifs, shoulders, and stems. We only need to think of the way our own bodies and hands interact with the letters that appear on the computer screen as a result of their actions. The manner in which we curve our fingers against the keyboard or hold our wrists above the desk will affect the speed and accuracy with which they appear but not in any way the appearance of the letters. A Garamond t will always be and look like a Garamond t, no matter what one does with one’s body to make it appear on the screen. Thus, in penmanship, the hand’s relationship to the lines and letters of writing is an organic one in that the lines of writing are exquisitely susceptible to the positions and motions of the writer’s hand as well as the will and fluctuations of the writer’s mind as they flow out of the hand; hand, pen, and mind form an integrated whole to produce lines of writing on the page. Writing master John Clark articulates the collaboration between head, hand, and pen that makes writing—the representation of ideas—possible: “The art of writing is a representation of our words. To obtain perfection in that art, the head must be fully informed of what the hand ought to do; not informed with vain and trifling fancies and straggling strokes, which are used by some as though they were of ornament, but of a just proportion of the characters; and this information is acquired by getting an exact idea of the hand you intend to be master of. In few words, writing is performed at once, with one operation of the pen.”39 The language of penmanship guides,

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directing an “obedient hand” that forms a direct link between mind and pen, urges it to produce “strokes” that charm all beholders and refrain from “flatness” or other “offenses to the eye.” The directions are compressed into apothegms that direct the body of the writer. Young Clerke’s Assistant: or Penmanship Made Easy (1787) advises “Rest your arm lightly between the wrist and the elbow. . . . Keep your body upright, and your elbow, almost close to your side. . . . Let your hair-­strokes be proportion’d to your body strokes and answer one another. . . . Rest your body on your left arm, and keep your paper down with your left hand.”40 Here, the body of the writer and the body of writing are corrected and re-­formed simultaneously with each other. In doing so, they perform the act of writing, which is “the art of exhibiting to the sight the conceptions of the mind, by means of marks or characters, significant by compact of the sounds of language.”41 While writing “enables us to transfer ideas from the eye to the ear, and vice versa,” it accomplishes another act of locomotion, bringing parties that are separated by space closer, thus bringing to “speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul.”42 Making this contact between souls especially intimate are the direct lines of connection and interaction between the writing on the page, the quill pen and the writer’s body and mind, connecting natural materials with the human user. Its product is brought to distant recipients, overcoming the limitations of physical space by creating a new one in the body and the act of writing.

Lines of Flourishing Fascinated with writing’s ability to exchange organic (that is, organ-­related) sensory functions, poems about writing in copybooks seize on the fundamental definition Ong gives writing as a form of expression that moves speech “from the oral-­aural to a new sensory world, that of vision.”43 Yet, what Ong points out that the poem does not is the way writing situates text in space while translating it into a visual object. This recognition of the spatial element in writing makes a difference when comparing handwriting with print, for the “sense of the word-­in-­space” in each is extremely different from the other. Whereas the “control of space” in writing (chirography) tends toward ornament and allows freer forms driven by inspiration, its look in print is even and linear and appears to have been produced by a far more elaborate mechanical tool, which indeed it has been.44 Print seems

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immediately more regulated and defined by lines, but it is handwriting whose products are referred to as “lines,” made of words, which in turn are made of letters, which themselves are composed of strokes. For the penmanship student, the line is the unit by which practice is measured: “Let every Day some labour’d Line produce; / Command of Hand is gain’d by constant Use” advises one manual.45 At the same time, lines are the spatial guidelines—implicit or explicit—against which letters are formed, ensuring they are even and regular.46 And yet in another usage, lines are components of all individual letterforms and, as such, a partner to the stroke, as exemplified in Snell’s Standard Rules of the Round and Round-­Text Hands, Mathematically Demonstrated (1715): “Lines and strokes have been Invented, that Letters might be composed of them.” Implicit in the set of meanings belonging to the language of penmanship lines are the acts of creativity they express and facilitate at the same time that they standardize writing. Penmanship’s organic form is rendered by ornamental curves, slopes, and hooks of handwriting that branch out from lines otherwise regulated by penmanship norms. Paradoxically, these creative digressions from standard proportions and directions can only be arrived at through monotonous copying, with the penman writing the same sentences or letters repeatedly to master different hands, from Italian and secretary to round hand. During the course of these endeavors, m ­ uscle memory locks into the hand and arm motions that create the desired proportion and slant of letters, as well as the distance between them. It is only at this point when writers may allow their lines to wander in pursuit of the flights of fancy that distinguish the most prominent specimens of ornamented writing and their display of “command of hand.” Reserved for only the most advanced in penmanship, the technique of command of hand was also known as “striking.” Numerous letters and receipts from the eighteenth century indicate that individuals practiced striking and command of hand especially in the signature lines of both personal and business documents (figure 2). Clark defines it succinctly as “the Performing of Flourishes or Letters by a quick Motion.”47 The skill of striking “proceeds from a peculiar Genius” and derives as much from the imagination as from intellect, or “a good Fancy and a sound Judgment,” neither of which can be “taught or communicated” beyond general guidelines. The guidelines in themselves recommend an “Easy and Natural” ornament that appears balanced, “not full of Strokes in some Parts, and in others empty

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Figure 2.  Example of flourish in signature line of letter from Tobias Butler to John Selwyn, February 8, 1777. (Huntington Library, Townshend Family Papers, TD 231)

and bald.” The overall effect to aim for is one in which the strokes appear to be alive and mobile, so that they “turn and play over one another with as much Wantonness and Variety” as possible. Their motions should be coordinated, “not running too much upon the spiral or Parallel,” and their strokes in dialogue with each other: “Let not two Dark Strokes cross, but let them answer one another, and lie all the same way like the Shades in a Picture.”48 In acts of flourishing the emphasis on a “natural” and vibrant style evinces a valuation of organic qualities, not least in its emphasis on an organized interplay between different strokes. At the same time that the lines of flourishing fall into a coordinated relationship with each other, so too do the motions of the arm and hand as they execute them. Clark’s instructions are detailed and precise: “The Centre of Motion in striking is at the Shoulder, from whence let your Hand and Arm swing together with a Sprightly Motion, without resting upon your Hand, and touching the Paper with any Thing but the pen, which must not be turn’d in the Hand while you are making any Stroke. The slower the Motion the surer; but yet there must be such a Boldness and Freedom observed, that the Stroke may be smart and clean, without Roughness or any Flats and Corners.”49 With an exuberant yet controlled movement, the hand and arm function as one unit with the pen and leave a mark on the page whose appearance is completely dependent on the actions of the body, as well as the internal psychology of the writer, which Champion’s instructions for

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the Dutch or Italian/French manner of striking reveal: “In performing this part of penmanship, in either taste, the center of motion is in the shoulder; therefore, you must lift your hand and arm entirely off the Table; and letting it swing light and easy, in the air, with courage try to sweep a single round, or ovaler.”50 In these instructions, the human body, pen, and writing occupy a state of mutual coextension, making unclear which part—human or natural—is the supplement. Yet the material aspects of command of hand are not the only coextensive elements. So too is the technique itself and its process, for in command of hand the rote practice of technique is inseparable from the creative acts that attend bursts of inspiration. Bickham explains how this might be the case: “Supposing, therefore, the Make and Proportion of the Letters and Joinings to be once well fixed and understood, and then if the Learner is us’d to copy the great Variety of Examples which are here produc’d his Hand will grow confirm’d in an Aptitude and Readiness, which will insensibly arrive at Perfection and Dispatch; and give in Writing, what we admire in fine Gentlemen; an Easiness of Gesture, and disengag’d Air, which is imperceptibly caught from frequently conversing with the Polite and Well-­bred.”51 Through acquiring the “ready and free command of his pen” that only regular practice can yield and letting internal whimsy guide the pen’s movements and its lines, a penman might make his writing all the more distinct and specific to a more exalted social identity that models effortless grace. Such lines spill out of the regularly ordered ones into the surrounding white spaces of the page, curling and curving into each other like the tendrils of a vine to form not legible letters but visual designs and patterns that exceed text to take on an organic appearance (figure 3). In accordance with this appearance of organicism, it seems no accident that the word for these ornaments, flourish, derives from the old French florir, or fleurir in modern French, meaning “to blossom.” Bickham’s description of flourishing suggests the organic potency of the imagination it mediates, in that he cautions the “penman” not to let “the Fancy” overtake “the End of Writing”: “Turns of the Pen, as seem rather design’d to fill up Vacancies on the Paper, than studiously composed to adorn the Piece, in Flourishing the Fancy would be so Luxuriant, was it not corrected by the Judgment, as almost to destroy the End of Writing, as Airs in Musick, when too often repeated, or too long or too variously performed, disorder the Harmony of a just Composure.”52

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Figure 3.  Organic lines of flourishing from The Beauties of Writing, Thomas Tomkins. (Getty Research Institute)

Bickham renders flourishing as a motion executed by a pen in the environment of paper “vacancies” that threatens to take on a life of its own if it were not for the influence of “Judgment.” The vitality of writing is registered in the power of the flourishing line whose direction remains on a certain level incalculable in the act of writing and grows in seeming independence from letterforms and textual content. The natural and organic in this sense appear aligned with what is creative, original, or inspired and flow out of the physical act of writing itself. Yet penmanship instructions routinely advise that the “idea” of what is to be written needs to be inside the mind before it emerges on the page. For instance, according to William Leekey, “The Art of Writing is a Representation of our Words. To attain the Perfection in that Art, the head must be fully informed of what the Hand ought to do.”53 Clark is even more explicit about the link between the hand and the head in determining what is written on the page. Writing and its appearance begin foremost as an idea, and to have command of hand is to have command of ideas as the lines quoted earlier by Clark declare: “to get such a Command of Hand, as to be able to express, with the Pen, that Idea upon the Paper, which is attain’d by constant and careful Practice after good Examples; the Learner being first inform’d of the most

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Figure 4.  The Pens Transcendencie, Edward Cocker, 1657. (Getty Research Institute)

necessary Things to be observed in his Practice of that Hand he intends to be Master of.”54 Edward Cocker, renowned for his fanciful ornaments of animals and humans made entirely out of writing strokes, presents command of hand as an act of both mimesis and invention (figure 4). On one hand, in order to produce “curious Ornamental Strokes, exact artificial letters” and “delightful Representations of Men, Birds, and Beasts,” the writing master “must first be acquainted with the nature and forms of the most graceful Strokes, with the true Shapes and Cuts of Letters, and with the various Parts and Proportions of Animals, according to the art of Drawing.”55 And yet Cocker also presents a process of writing in which the physical movements alone of moving hand and pen without touching the page might help stimulate the imagination to conjure what it wishes to draw or write when the pen actually makes contact with the paper sheet: “Move your Hand and Pen swiftly above the Paper, imagining that done on the Paper which you purpose to do, whether Strokes, Letters, Knots, &c. And when your Fancy works so strongly as to the perfect form and manner of what you intend, as that you could almost think it done, then put Pen to Paper, and with a bold free motion do it indeed.”56

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While most copybooks use a language of “boldness and freedom” as well as “courage” in their instructions on command of hand, Cocker’s especially suggests that flourishing is a bold and free act on both external and internal levels. What becomes transmitted on the page falls out of a fluid and organic relationship between the mind’s fancy and intention and the body’s movements. Here, penmanship is a procedure of metamorphosis and transmutation, whereby the internal logic of the penman’s intention freely and boldly becomes a material reality. On the other hand, the protean quality of penmanship emerges in the way loops, curls, lines, and strokes of writing turn from abstract shapes to such mimetic forms as animals, human beings, and mythological figures, at least for such writing masters as Cocker (figure 4) and George Shelley, who incorporated fanciful images in their work. Cocker and Shelley, showing that the same shapes and lines that are used to create letters can become images of recognizable beings, suggest that the strokes of penmanship themselves are the medium of fiction. At the same time, the fact that loops and undulating lines can merge with and transmogrify into letterforms demonstrates how penmanship delights in blurring the line between acts of looking and acts of reading, between surfaces and depths. Text such as the writing master’s name and business address are playfully concealed inside an ornamental flourish on the borders of a page (figure 5). Information does not so much become subordinated to the ornament as it becomes all the more significant for being submerged so artfully in a realm of fancy and mutation. Essentially a drawn line that extends from the organic appendages of a human body and an animal one to a biomorphic form on the page, the flourish as a generative medium of inspiration and visual grace models the deep relationship between organicism and creativity that daily acts of eighteenth-­century penmanship both realized and memorialized. Penmanship, in recommending the “bold, free motion[s]” of striking and command of hand as well as the repetitious copying of predetermined examples, appears to espouse contradictory principles. These concern the natural and original versus the mechanical and copy. The main practices of penmanship, of striking boldly and copying dutifully, demonstrate in their very coexistence the creativity belonging to the technical acts of handwork. The Latin proverb quoted in Art of Writing hinges on this coexistence: “Let every Day some labour’d Line produce; / Command of Hand is gain’d by constant Use.”57 With this, the glamour of

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Figure 5.  The Beauties of Writing, Thomas Tomkins, 1777. (Getty Research Institute)

command of hand is directly linked to repetitive practice and the daily production of a “labour’d line.” The 1678 manuscript copybook belonging to John Thorne illustrates this coexistence. Several of its pages feature Thorne’s repetitive labor of copying the individual letters and strokes of particular hands, or homiletic lines.58 In all the margins, an ornament flowers on the page, either an abstract design or a figurative illustration of an animal or human made out of pen strokes. On the page on which Thorne practiced Roman hand, the following line is written fifteen times: “Remember well and ever beare in minde That a true trustie Freind is hard to finde” (figure 6). The very first R is written as a drop case or oversized letter, with intricately curling flourishes extending from the outermost parts of the letter, including the swash and finial, and turns a letterform into an organic image. While the R in the left margin and row of ovoid flourishes in the right one evoke in abstraction organic forms, the bird located below the R represents an actual organic entity. As such, it provides the very tool that is used to draw it, as well as the forms, both textual and graphic, that surround it. The orderly and uniform appearance of lines copied one after another in the center of the page resembles a field or garden plot whose further growth is facilitated by the technique of command of hand, which engenders its freely formed frame of marvelous flourishes.

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Figure 6.  Calligraphic copybook, John Thorne, 1678. (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, MS.1952.009)

The productive tension between copying and command of hand correlates with the concept of “prehension” that Richard Sennett explains is central to all acts of skill. Accordingly, “mental understanding” is directly linked to “physical action” through prehension, defined as “movements in which the body anticipates and acts in advance of sense data.”59 Prehension’s anticipatory mode of “looking ahead” is an expression not so much of formulaic or mechanical response as of a creative force that generates narrative. The act of practicing, of “making something happen more than once,” introduces the narrative experience because “variations in that conjuring act permit exploration of sameness and difference.”60 Full of “ethical implication,” the stance of looking ahead engenders “alertness, engagement, and risk-­taking.”61 As such, one might say that it solidifies one’s connection to the state of being alive, as Tim Ingold might put it.62 At the same time that “doing something over and over” establishes “a repertoire of learned gestures,” a rhythm is developed that connects the hand to the eye, creating an organized unit out of two different parts of the body.63 In taking and transmuting the covering of birds to create a tool for writing, humans in the early modern period also took on the birds’ faculty of flying. The creative function of striking, as described earlier, requires the hand to fly over rather

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than land on the paper sheet with only the pen touching its surface, models a form of writing on the wing. Indeed, Cocker’s instructions for command of hand urges a practice of “always moving your Hand with a flying freeness” when commanding “circles, and Ovals of a moderate size.”64 Motteux, in his poem “The Pen,” mentioned earlier as appearing in Snell’s Art of Writing In It’s [sic] Theory and Practice (1712), perceives the “nimble Strokes” traced on paper—referred to as “Virgin-­Paper”—precisely as winged creatures that rise and fly over a fanciful landscape: O’er Virgin-­Paper when the Hand we trace, How new, how free, how perfect ev’ry Grace! So smooth, so fine, the nimble Strokes we View, Like Trips of Fairies o’er the Morning Dew. So Winter Starlings, rising in a Cloud, Shade Subject Plains, and dusk the Airy Road; In various Figures wind, and as they fly, Scheme a Wing’d Alphabet along the Sky. With Ease the pen, such Wonders can create, For ’tis Creation, thus at once compleat. Sure in its Flight, tho’ swift as Angel’s Wings; The Mind commands; and the bold Figure springs, While the slow Pencil’s discontinu’d Pace, Repeats the Stroke; but cannot reach the Grace.65

In these lines, the poem imagines writing as a series of winged entities, from fairies and starlings to the alphabet and angels, that rise above in the hand’s very act of tracing “nimble” strokes of writing “o’er” paper. Not just the hand but the writing itself floats above the page, emulating the bird’s winged capacity for flight, which works as a figure for the imaginative work performed by the pen. In this sense, the connection between human and bird as well as mind and material becomes more than one of organic supplementation—it is one of organic unity. The last four lines of the excerpt from Motteux’s poem point to the direct relationship between the mind and the physical act of writing. The comparison made with engraving—its tool and process—in the last two lines highlight the pen’s own agility of movement and the fluidity with which it translates thought to written characters. Because the reproductions of penmanship specimens published in copybooks were engraved, writing

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masters had ample opportunity to consider the distinctions between writing and engraving—or have them considered by their engravers. In doing so, the pen’s qualities of “subtle[ty]” and “spirit and vigor” as well as the “looseness of the Hand and Pen” were highlighted. The main distinction between writing and engraving is that rather than writing letters in a series of swift strokes, the engraver cuts those same letters painstakingly into a hard surface. For John Sturt, the engraver for John Ayres’s Tutor to Penmanship, whereas the pen “performs its Work with one Bold, Smooth, Free, Nimble Touch  .  .  . the Engraver must do it by many slow Motions and Strokes one in another.”66 The resulting engraved text bears a stiffness missing in the original written text. Indeed, the respective natures of the writing tool and the engraving tool, as well as the techniques for manipulating them, affect the appearance of liveliness produced by each medium. That the liveliness and looseness of command of hand in particular was viewed as “natural” is evident when Clark refers to his Penman’s Diversion (1710), “adorn’d with variety of loose, and easy Figures & Flourishes,” as “this Piece of Natural Penmanship.”67 Furthermore, George Shelley in his book entitled Natural Writing in all the Hands, explicitly laments the difficulty of finding an engraver skilled enough to “imitate Free Natural Writing.”68 Clearly, in comparison with engraving as another medium for inscribing letters, writing, in its freedom and smoothness of motion, was consistently viewed as a “natural” means of communication. When Edward Cocker recommends “You are always to move your Hand with the Pen in it, but never move the Pen in your Hand,” he promotes not just a natural form of writing but an organic one, whereby the human body part and the animal one function in tandem.69

Flow Nowhere was the appearance of fluidity in writing more pronounced than in round hand, eighteenth-­century England’s contribution to the development of modern handwriting. According to Aileen Douglas, eighteenth-­century England was the moment when “the multiple hands of the Renaissance— engrossing, secretary, court, italic and so on—gradually give way to the English round hand, the ancestor of modern handwriting.”70 Originating from italic script and an early seventeenth-­century French effort to make it less angular—hence its name—round hand was exported to England, where

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the tidy and continuously looping style was appropriated by merchants and tradesmen in their bills of lading, accounts, and receipts, as well as by families in their letters to each other. By 1754, round hand was the universal script of “all Degrees of Men in all Employments,” with law the only exception.71 Bickham in British Youth’s Instructor explains its appeal as deriving from its “Delicacy” as well as its “natural Tendency to facilitate and dispatch Business being considered.”72 Thus the modernity of round hand is recognizable in its convenience for commercial as well as interpersonal exchanges, afforded by its legibility as well as conduciveness to writing speed. Moreover, the efficiency with which round hand could be executed encouraged writers to observe the proper form prescribed in penmanship manuals. For instance, Clark instructs pupils to “Let all Strokes which Joyn the Constituent Parts of Letters, or the Letters themselves together, be made with the Corner of the pen, and as fine as the Hand will admit of; which Strokes must always have some Proportion to the Body-­stroke, and must be thicker, or finer according as the Character is lesser, or Greater: Turn not your pen, neither alter the Position of your Hand, but let it move with a steady easy Motion, and perform every Letter without Catchings, and convulsive Flutterings.”73 In Clark’s instructions, the bodies of the letters, pen, and writer are continuous with each other to create a smooth and fluid movement. The components of the round hand, broken down as “composed of an oval and Straight-­Line, and leans to the Right, making an Angle with the Line you write upon equal to 58 Degrees” facilitate this continuity.74 The round hand’s forward slanting evenness with every letter in each word joining each other is the very image of flow and the medium for the pen’s vaunted celerity (figure 7). As Simran Thadani points out, the round hand was significant for marking a decisive moment when print could no longer imitate script. Whereas type had been able to “imitate the letterforms of every major English script, gothic, roman, italic, or even secretary,” it was vanquished by the round hand’s perfect “cursivity” and decisive slant.75 Indeed, “the degree of difference, in the eighteenth century, between writing and type, was unprecedented.”76 Round hand, then, might be viewed as the vehicle for ensuring the “free,” “natural” and “bold”—the three terms of aspiration used most frequently by writing masters—qualities of writing that printing can never match. These terms are the basis on which writing might be viewed as an organic supplement to human acts of thinking and interaction.

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Figure 7.  New set of the round text, Penmanship Illustrated, Joseph

Champion, London: Printed for Robt. Sayer, Map and Printseller, c. 1759/60. (Huntington Library)

Whereas Douglas has made much of the role that round hand played in making eighteenth-­century English handwriting a significant agent in the development of England’s identity as a trading nation, I seek instead to emphasize its role in strengthening the relationship between the materials and processes of nature on one hand and the mental and corporeal activities of humans on the other. Round hand’s smoothness in shape and line not only allowed for greater legibility as well as faster computation of accounts and records but also facilitated greater flow in acts of intellection and their transmission. A poem by Nahum Tate, “Upon This Performance of Penmanship,” which serves as a preface to The Penman’s Magazine, the collection of work

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by late writing master John Sedden that George Shelley published, presents in the context of nature the idea that writing’s basic fluidity serves as an apt medium for the speed and mutability of thinking: The Penman with the single Help of Skill, With breathing Figures do’s his Landskip fill. Nature’s whole Family, Fish, Fowl, Beasts, Men Flow from the slender River of the pen. Struck at a Heat and to Perfection brought; Scarce Stampt so fast in the quick Mint of Thought. Strange Art that can so vast a Prospect yield, Describe and Draw to Life, Dress, Plant and Build With no Materials but a Liquid Thread, In Regularly Wild Meander’s led.77

Tate, then, figures the creativity of penmanship as both an intellectual act and a natural one wherein living landscapes are generated and populated “with no materials but a liquid thread.” This basic material of writing, its ink, supplies the vehicle for realizing the swift but immaterial motions of thought, which constitute an aspect of human nature. When Ong argues that writing is a technology, he uses the relationship between musicians and their instruments as an example. Just as the musician “interiorizes” the technology of an instrument, making “the tool or machine a second nature, a psychological part of himself or herself,” so too does the writer with his or her tools. Rather than dehumanizing the musician or writer, the interiorization of an instrument or tool renders him or her more human, as “the use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify the interior life.” In fact, writing for Ong is “an even more deeply interiorized technology than instrumental performance is.”78 While Ong does not provide a reason for this claim, one might guess it may be the fact that writing’s function is not just to translate speech into written words but also to translate it into the deeply interior function of thinking. In this light, the spurious materiality of eighteenth-­century epistolary narrative—returning to the issue that began this essay—appears a well-­ placed fiction insofar as the essential open-­endedness of the personal letter’s form is one that accommodates the organic lines of not just handwriting but thinking and narrative as well. Such lines, unlike those of print, may

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advance without a preconceived plan—once one’s copybooks have been mastered, that is—keeping in step with as well as encouraging the mind’s meanderings. The fact that Richardson first wrote a letter-­writing manual, Familiar Letters (or Letters Written to and for Particular Friends on the Most Important Occasions), and drew on his sample letters to create the narrative that would become Pamela indicates the inherently fictional aspect of letter writing. Letter-­writing manuals, like penmanship guides, encourage writers to appropriate the style modeled by others and in doing so, encourage them to produce fictions through the act of writing. Fiction is an inscription practice as well as an embodied and organic one, whether in real or fictive letters. To return to the material and technical sites of this inscription practice gives greater coherence to the bonds between different life forms essential to such human acts of creativity as writing.

Notes I am grateful to Jonathan Furner and Paula McDowell for their comments on this essay. 1. M. T. Clanchy makes this point with regard to medieval writing, claiming that “because it was more difficult to write with a quill on parchment than it is with a modern ballpoint on paper, writing was considered a special skill in the Middle Ages.” See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 115. 2. This line can be found in The Art of Writing (London: J. Newbery, 1746), 21. A similar line appears in John Clark’s Writing Improv’d or Penmanship Made Easy (London, 1714), 2. 3. Joseph Champion, Penmanship (London, 1770?), A2. 4. This poem, by Jonathan Swift, was published as “A humorous Encomium on the Goose-­Quill, by Way of Riddle,” in Art of Writing, 17. See also The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 3:915–16. 5. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (London: Penguin, 1985), 150. 6. Richardson, Pamela, 221. 7. Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 8. I borrow the term managing from Edward Cocker, who uses it in all his copybooks of the late seventeenth century. Early eighteenth-­ century

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penmen such as Charles Snell, John Clark, and others prefer the term of “holding” to refer to the manipulation of the pen by the hand. 9. For instructions on the creation of particular characters see Charles Snell, Standard Rules of the Round and Round-­Text Hands (London: Henry Overton, 1715). For instructions on the creation of particular hands, see Snell, Art of Writing In It’s [sic] Theory and Practice (London: Overton, 1712); Edward Cocker, England’s Pen-­Man (London: Nathaniel Brooke, 1671?); and many others. 10. See Aileen Douglas, Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Konstantin Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). For an argument about eighteenth-­century penmanship instructional discourse as a practice of geography, see Miles Ogborn, “Geographia’s Pen: Writing, Geography and the Arts of Commerce, 1660–1760,” Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004): 294–315. 11. Joseph Champion, Penmanship Illustrated (London: Robert Sayer, 1759–60). 12. Champion, Penmanship Illustrated, 2. 13. On the expansion of “epistolary literacy” among the eighteenth-­century English writing public, see Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For a study that argues the spread of letter writing in the British Atlantic world enacted an “ideology of agency” for members of the middle class who wrote letters, see Dierks, In My Power. On the novel’s rise as a literary genre, as well as epistolary fiction, see Ian Watt, Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). 14. George Bickham, The Universal Penman (London, 1743), 10. 15. Thomas Weston, Ancilla Calligraphiae (London, 1682), 26, quoted in William Massey, Origin and Progress of Letters (London: J. Johnson, 1763), 154. 16. Aphra Behn, Love-­Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, ed. Janet Todd (1684, 1685. 1687; London: Penguin, 1993), 10. Behn’s maneuver of presenting her narrative as a set of discovered letters anticipates the found manuscript tradition of eighteenth-­century Gothic fiction. 17. Mary Davys, Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady, in The Reform’d Coquet, Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady, and The Accomplish’d Rake, ed. Martha F. Bowden (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 111, 114. For foundational scholarship on epistolary novels,

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see Robert Adams Day, Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction before Richardson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966); and Ruth Perry, Women, Letters and the Novel (New York: AMS, 1980). 18. See Svetlana Alpers’s discussion of the relationship between visual representations of paintings and textual ones in Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 19. Not all printed texts were set originally from manuscripts. Allegedly, early modern printer and author Elinor James directly set some of her writings with type. See Paula McDowell, ed., Elinor James, The Early Modern English Woman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, series II, part 3, vol.  11 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). 20. For this idea, I am indebted to Jennifer Roberts and her work on the spatial reversals entailed in printmaking. Accordingly, behind every print is a forgotten matrix that depicts the print’s image in reverse. Wyeth Lecture in American Art, “Reversing American Art,” November 20, 2013, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, https://​www​.nga​.gov​/content​ /ngaweb​/audio​-­­video​/wyeth​.html. 21. Francis Bacon, New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 33. 22. See OED, s.v. “organic (2b).” 23. This notion will be examined further below. 24. Art of Writing, 17. 25. Art of Writing, 17. 26. Art of Writing, 18. 27. Art of Writing, 18. 28. Art of Writing, 7. 29. Peter Motteux, “The Pen,” in Snell, Art of Writing In It’s Theory and Practice, A2. 30. Thomas Parsons, entry for January 9, Diary 1769, Huntington Library, HM 62593. 31. Jane Porter, Diary of 1796, Folger M.a.17. 32. Behn, Love-­Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, 37. 33. Behn, Love-­Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, 36. 34. Behn, Love-­Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, 37–38. 35. See Watt, “Private Experience and the Novel,” chapter 6 in Rise of the Novel, 174–207. 36. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Routledge, 1988), 81. 37. Art of Writing, 41. 38. Art of Writing, 41.

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39. John Clark, Writing Improv’d or Penmanship Made Easy (London, 1714), 1. 40. Young Clerke’s Assistant: or Penmanship Made Easy (London, 1787), 5. 41. Henry Dean, Dean’s Analytical Guide, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 1808). 42. Dean, Dean’s Analytical Guide, n.p. 43. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 84. 44. Ong Orality and Literacy, 120. 45. Art of Writing, 20. 46. This is John Clark’s terminology throughout “An Introduction to the Art of Writing,” in Writing Improv’d. 47. Clark, Writing Improv’d, 5. 48. Clark, Writing Improv’d, 5. 49. Clark, Writing Improv’d, 6. 50. Joseph Champion, Penmanship (London, 1770), 14. 51. Bickham, Universal Penman, 2. 52. Bickham, Universal Penman, 9. 53. William Leekey, Discourse on the Use of the Pen (London, 1744), 9. 54. Clark, Writing Improv’d, 1. 55. Edward Cocker, Guide to Pen-­man-­ship (London: Robert Snow and William Rumbold, 1664), 11. 56. Cocker, Guide to Pen-­man-­ship, 12. 57. Art of Writing, 20–21. 58. John Thorne, “Calligraphic Copy Book,” 1678, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, MS.1952.009, 48. 59. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 154. 60. Sennett, 160. 61. Sennett, 154. 62. See Ingold, Being Alive. For Ingold, “being alive” entails being aware of the environment and one’s relation to it as a continual state of becoming and unfolding. 63. Sennett, 175. 64. Cocker, The Compleat Writing-­ Master (London: Thomas Basset and Robert Pawlet, 1670). 65. Motteux, “The Pen,” in Snell, Art of Writing In It’s Theory and Practice, A2. 66. John Sturt, “The Engraver to the Lover of Writing,” in John Ayres, Tutor to Penmanship (London, 1697–98), 23. 67. John Clark, The Penman’s Diversion (London, 1710?), 3. 68. George Shelley, Natural Writing in all the Hands (London, 1709). 69. Cocker, England’s Pen-­man, 5.

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70. Simran Thadani, “Penmanship in Print,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2013), 256–57; Aileen Douglas, “Making Their Mark: Eighteenth-­ Century Writing-­ Masters and Their Copy-­ Books,” British Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies 24 (2001): 145–60, 151. 71. George Bickham, British Youth’s Instructor, n.p. (London: Robert Sayer, 1754). 72. Bickham, British Youth’s Instructor, n.p. 73. Clark, Writing Improv’d, 2. 74. Bickham, British Youth’s Instructor, n.p. 75. Thadani, “Penmanship in Print,” 264. 76. Thadani, “Penmanship in Print,” 264. 77. Nahum Tate, “Upon This Performance of Penmanship, A Poem,” in Penman’s Magazine, ed. George Shelley (London: Thomas Read, 1705), 2–3. 78. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 82.

The Flower of Ointments and Early Modern Transcorporeality Rebecca Laroche

T

he textual history of the recipe Flos Unguentorum or “The Flower of Ointments,” both in the ointment itself and in the texts that record its making, encapsulates the moment when a supplement, if meant to be absorbed into the body, is more than supplemental. Called “the Yellow Salve” throughout the medical literature, it has been found in numerous collections from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It has also been labeled “The Angel Salve” or “The Jesus Christ Salve” because of its mythic origins, articulated as an angel delivering the recipe to a monastery in Germany, and sometimes more vaguely as provided “through revelation.” The religio-­mystical associations of the ointment appear overtly in a few examples from the sixteenth century and continue into the seventeenth century, but they endure in the words used to describe its process and efficacy and in the key shared ingredient of frankincense. These associations may have particular resonances for those putting it to use in a heightened religious context such as the English Civil War. Beyond this particular historical background moreover, the numinosity of the flower of ointments allows us to explore ointments in their quintessence as at once organically supplemental and vital in a way that commemorates human inseparability from the nonhuman. Serving as a point of reference, a sixteenth-­century print illustration of Flower of Ointments outlines its key elements, in particular its exemplary and divinely ordained healing properties, that will circulate throughout its textual life in the seventeenth century. Before turning to that circulation, however, examining sixteenth-­ century literary counterexamples of magical ointments from

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Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser demonstrates how an ointment’s mystical/magical aspects point to an early articulation of what Stacy Alaimo has called “trans-­corporeality,” which she describes as a process “in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-­than-­human world.”1 This “imagining,” continues Alaimo, “underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.’ It makes it difficult to pose nature as mere background, as Val Plumwood would put it, for the exploits of the human since ‘nature’ is always as close as one’s own skin—perhaps even closer.”2 In opening up the entire category of ointment recipes for such an interpretation, the following thus invokes Holly Dugan’s analysis of the ephemeral nature of the category of perfumes, as well as Mary Floyd-­Wilson’s consideration of sympathetic medicine in the early modern period that includes the wound salve among other examples.3 My intent is to put their research (and my own) into conversation with recent ecofeminist theorizations of the relationship between the human and nonhuman worlds. These are not simply cultural phenomena but rather moments that negotiate and theorize places of contact, ultimately examples of “entanglement” and “dependencies,” of transcorporeality. As an early modern version of this theorization, the history of the Flower of Ointment’s circulation urges us not simply to bracket its mystical origins and its vestigial framing as religio-­specific/scientifically spurious but rather to value the imaginative act—a different kind of knowledge or another way of seeing the nonhuman—these elements encapsulate and that circulation preserves. That is, this history, the textual transmission of an earlier sixteenth-­century Catholic recipe in a seventeenth-­century context, brings with it vestigial religious content that may be read outside of the context of religion. Rather, we may read this residual religious content as proto-­eco theorization, providing an alternative to the lineage of “ecophobia” that has been repeated regarding the early moderns.4 While the literary texts examined below express great anxiety around manifestations of the transcorporeal, recipes, alternatively, sanctify, celebrate, and preserve this potential in their intimacy with both human and nonhuman bodies established through material practice. The Flower of Ointments is one dynamic example in which the expression of the transcorporeal is thus conserved and valued. At its essence, this contribution to the discussion of “organic supplements” also asks us to reconsider the place of “how-­to” genres such as recipes within

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the wider valuation of texts, not for reasons of protoscientific intellection as Sara Pennell and Wendy Wall have done,5 but rather as multivalent documents with complicated textual histories that may capture something ineffable that we currently strive to theorize. As Jennifer Munroe, Michelle DiMeo, and others have also demonstrated, the interplay between individual examples of recipes can be a fascinating one, as particular practitioners modify and improve formulae based on their experiential outcomes and monetary demands, but this interplay between individual recipes may also reveal something nonpragmatic in import.6 An individual example of a recipe is most often but one among many, and if we begin with the assumption that it must be only technical in its origins and in its practice, we lose an important sense of its dynamism. Are recipes simply about material practice, and is religious context only historically and doctrinally specific in its importance? Of the thirty-­four examples of the Flower of Ointment I have drawn from thirty collections, ten from the seventeenth century will be the focus of this essay. A sixteenth-­century print version of the ointment recipe alongside two adjacent literary ointments provide the background and offer insight into the recipe’s circulation in later centuries. The only full text of the recipe I quote in this essay is from the anonymous Booke of soueraigne approued medicines and remedies, first published in 1577. Not serving as a primary or source text example, it rather communicates in total the many aspects of the recipe that are preserved in its circulation. Each later version has some variation of the following instructions, again, not because this is necessarily the original source but because these instructions define the recipe for what it is: To make Flos vnuguentorum. Take Rosen and Perrosen, of eche halfe a pounde, Virgyn waxe and Frankinsence, of ech a quarter of a pound, Mastick an ounce, Harts talow a quarter of a pounde, Camphere two drammes: melt that is to be molten, and beate into fine poulder, that which is to be poudred, that don, searce it, and boyle them all together, saue the Camphere, then strayne them into a pottel of white wyne, through a Canuas cloth, & so let them boyle together: when it is boyled, set it a cooling, vntil it be blood warme, then put into it your Camphere, and a quarter of an ounce of Turpentine, and keepe it with styrring vntil it be thorow cold; when it is cold, make it into roules, and so keepe them to your vse, for one of the purest salues that can be made.7

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Further, most recipes are either preceded or followed by the conditions cured by the ointment; this print version has the diseases on the subsequent pages: Thys oyntment or salue is most excellent for al the dyseases vnder written. Wherfore ye must haue respect in making it, that ye put not the Camphere and Turpentyne into the rest, before it be as cold as blood, for then it is all lost. These be the diseases that it is good agaynste: viz. for old woundes, it clenseth and gendreth good fleshe, it healeth faster than any other, for it wyll suffer no corruption or dead fleshe to be in a wounde. Also it is good for the head ache, a syngyng in the brayne, and for al maner of imposthumes in the head or body, for blowyng in the eares & cheekes, for sinues sprong, starke or shronke: it wyl drawe out any thorne or broken bone, it is good against the biting or stinging of any venemous beast, it wyl rot & heale al maner of botches, & it is good for a fester or Canker. Also it wyl drawe all maner of aches out of the Lyuer, splene, or Reynes. It is good for [h]oulyng in the members. Also it beyng layd vpon a womans Nauell as a playster, it wyl sease the flyxe of menstrues, it healeth the Hemerhoides, and is special good to make a Searcloth for the gout, ache, botche, or pestilence. Thys Intret is called Flos vnguentorum, for that is supposed for hys vertues to haue come to knowledge by reuelation. (sigs. Aiiv–Aiiir)

Notably, the nature of the revelation is nondenominational and vaguely worded here, and we will see how other later versions (both manuscript and print) expand on this wording, an expansion that may resonate with the particular household or print house that is recording/printing the recipe. Here, though, this vagueness seems particularly apt to introduce the sanctified nature of this medicine, requiring care in its making and storing. Juxtaposing this description of a holy salve “most excellent” in curing numerous diseases in its application to the skin with magical salves referenced in literary texts provides a foil to “hys vertues” celebrated above. In particular, Olympia’s ointment in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, part 2, written in 1588 and Duessa’s concoction applied to Fradubio in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, book 1, first published in 1590, may serve as counter­ examples to Flos Unguentorum’s efficacy.8 In no way sanctified in their use, these instances of the literary ointment’s concoction and application show us the blurred lines between human and nonhuman, making our skin one with “wicked herbs” (Spenser 1.2.42.3) or the “simplest extracts of all

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minerals” (Marlowe 4.2.61) from which we thought our bodies (and by extension, ourselves) distinct. In doing so, these anti-­exempla expose and exploit what the exemplar Flos Unguentorum tries to sooth and sanctify. Unlike any reader of the 1577 recipe text, Spenser’s Duessa has other intentions toward her “patient” Fradubio, after he sees her bathing her scabby skin in oregano and thyme, applying her own home remedy to her ailing dermis. That is, when she “besmeare[s]” (42.3) his skin with “wicked herbes and ointments” (42.3), it is not healed. Instead, it is turned into bark, “enclosing him” in “wood walls” (42.8). In the verse, the herbs are not alone in their wickedness, and it is the inclusion of an ointment, I propose, that makes this metamorphosis of skin into bark possible. Made largely from gums, such as the rosin, perrosin, camphor, frankincense, and mastic in the Flos Unguentorum, ointments in part originate from trees, and when applied to the skin, they are absorbed by it. This process informs Duessa’s magic: as the ointment is absorbed into his skin, Fradubio becomes a tree like the source for the ointment itself. Fradubio’s gloss that he is thus “banisht from liuing wights” (42.9) demonstrates how he insists upon the separateness of human from the living creature he has become, but ironically, he has become such because of the lack of separation the ointment exploits.9 The Marlovian example provides another interpretation of the mystical element of ointments, the way they underline our exchange with the nonhuman, and again shines an eerie light on the experience. With the violence and the tyrant’s power mounting, and having lost her husband and son, Olympia is vulnerable to the advances of King Theridamas, ally to Tamburlaine. Without weapons or poisons, she invents her defense through the cultural perception of women’s healing practice. She extends a gift, backed by false promises, to Theridamas: an ointment that will keep him impervious to harm in battle, thus extolling its virtues: An ointment which a cunning alchemist Distilled from the purest balsamum And simplest extracts of all minerals, In which the essential form of marble stone, Temper’d by science metaphysical, And spells of magic from the mouths of spirits, With which, if you but ’noint your tender skin, Nor pistol, sword, nor lance, can pierce your flesh. (4.2.59–66)

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In these lines, she describes how the ointment’s mineral content combines with the “tender skin” and makes it marble-­like, impenetrable. Her literalization of the Petrarchan blazon’s convention of “skin as marble,” moreover, is not incidental, as she is lodged within that tradition throughout the play—her looks are said to “have greater operation and more force / than Cynthia’s in the watery wilderness” (4.2.29–30), making this a kind of anti-­ Pygmalion moment, if you will, against the operatic dramatizations discussed by Kevin Lambert in the next essay.10 Moreover, ointments such as the Flos Unguentorum, in healing “all botches,” were seen to apply not only to plague sores and boils but also, in healthier times, to all kinds of imperfections. As a testament to its efficacy, Olympia then applies her unguent to her statuesque neck for the king to test his sword, but her ointment does not make her impenetrable as the rock distilled into the ointment as she claims. Instead, without access to sword and burning coals as her Roman antecedents, she uses this ruse to commit suicide by proxy. While this scene may draw on the belief in sympathetic medicine that Mary Floyd-­Wilson explores, Marlowe’s text undermines the confidence in “science metaphysical,” even as it raises the possibility of that metaphysical knowledge being at some level true.11 In an attempt to deny our mortality, to make us impermeable, the ointment ultimately underlines humanity’s permeability at the same time that it calls upon that permeability in the ointment’s application. Thus this passage introduces other fears about our transcorporeal nature: not distinct from the beings around us, we too are penetrable and mortal. Olympia’s supposedly magical salve and Duessa’s smear are not simply “demonic” versions of medicine but rather are intensifications of anxieties surrounding “ointmentness” itself. In becoming one with the skin, these unguents defy our very separation from them. These ointments remind us that we are porous and penetrable, subject to all manner of openings, and that our skin is tender. These literary examples taken from an allegory of compromised morality and from high tragedy use that reminder of human physical fragility for their own thematic ends: as Duessa and Tamburlaine both prey upon human vulnerability, the ointments extend that vulnerability to our very pores, becoming a version of Walter Benjamin’s glove as a “horror-­film scenario” discussed by Lynn Festa in a subsequent essay, but with the substance extracted from plants.12 In its salvific purpose and preparation, the Flower of Ointments is the positive side of human

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permeability that is otherwise laid bare by dark forces and made a nightmare in these literary texts. The Flos Unguentorum, existing within the practice of healing and hope, differently glosses the ability of ointments to penetrate into our inward parts, to disappear into and become one with the patient. In a historical moment before any real sense of the microbiome, the mystical healing substance that is Flos Unguentorum ultimately points to the inseparability of humanity from everything else. While its sanctified history underlines its exceptional capacity for healing wounds, its position as the flower or the height of ointments also allows us to theorize ointmentness in all of its aspects. That is, as the first ointment listed in many sections on ointments in various collections (as it is in the 1577 print text), Flos Unguentorum serves as an exemplum of efficacious ointments. It is the ur-­ointment, as well as the uber-­ointment. In being the “flower” of ointments, it is not only the “brightest and fairest example” of ointments but also the “quintessence” of ointments.13 The words ointment, salve, and unguent all figuratively extend to the spiritual realm, in essence dematerializing their healing and soothing qualities as soon as they are no longer traceable on the skin. This quick movement into spiritual value is seen philologically. The second OED meaning for salve after the material one that ties it to sores (ones that are not always physical) (n. 1), is “a remedy, esp. for spiritual disease” (n. 2); the first meaning given for ointment is wrapped within its sacramental role (n. 1); and unguent (n. 1a–b), the most recent of the synonyms, seems to come to the spiritual, not simply figurative meaning in the next century of its usage.14 This slippage also emerges in every Shakespearean use of salve, such as Dumaine’s call in Love’s Labor’s Lost for “some salve for perjury” after he has broken his oath to the king by falling in love (4.3.309).15 In early modern terms an ointment is often at once material and figurative (specifically spiritual); its ability to dissolve as it heals adds to its mystical, immaterial qualities. Ultimately, however, the ointment is also a sign of its corresponding ailment: our skin, having become like scales or bark, revealing blemishes, wounds, wrinkles, and corruptions, leaves us feeling other than our complete sense of self. In healing and soothing these fissures, ointments may return one to a sense of psychic as well as physical wholeness. The mysteries of all ointments, those substances that melt into the wound and

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the skin surrounding it, thus are signified by Flos Unguentorum’s mythic, spiritual associations. Its mystical component exists as an extension of its ointmentness. Through the ointment’s powers, we may be healed, but only if we abdicate our sense of self-­enclosure—the notion that divides us from them, human from nonhuman—and combine other natural forces with our own. The presence of the mystical encourages this reading of the thing itself as embodying a wider mystery; it serves as a prototheorization of transcorporeality.

Read broadly, this return to wholeness is the magic of the salve that disappears into the organ it mends, and reading the ways in which the recipe’s circulation preserves its mystical content seeks to consider the maintenance of this way of knowing in the continuance of its making. The Flos Unguentorum is, nonetheless, a historically specific example circulating within a religiously divided context. The rest of this essay looks at the implications of the doctrinally specific (i.e., Catholic) terms of this origin, and how the circulation of the recipe in a time of religio-­political conflict diffuses that specificity at the same time it preserves it. In particular, it looks at examples of the recipe from ten collections, four print and six manuscript, dated from the years 1640–60, dates chosen for the English Civil War and Interregnum. The eight manuscript recipes come from four different repositories, the collections containing dates and consistent hands or having otherwise been determined to be from this twenty-­year period. While no two ­examples from the twelve recipes in these collections are exactly alike, all e­ xamples are not necessarily discrete, as more than one recipe could be taken from a common source (as I will discuss at different moments), or one may be a source for another, especially given proximity in time; my intent is not to show diversity but rather overall consistency and resonance. The close reading performed in this section may stretch the imaginings of those tied to only the literary as worthy of such scrutiny, but through the accumulation of evidence, I hope to convince readers that to view recipes in only material and secular terms is to limit their signification as well as that of the processes of making and the contexts of their circulation. Recipes are not static things, tied to one material moment, but live in a dynamic exchange between material and spiritual well-­being and conflict across historical chasms of time. The individuals practicing them saw their roles not

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simply in terms of immediate need but also of life everlasting, and the language of the recipes reflects this interchange. While four of the recipes refer directly to the origin myth, either by including the myth in the discussion of its virtues or in the title “Angel Salve” (doctrinally specific), the remaining eight all invoke a biblical context in vocabulary and ingredients (doctrinally diffuse). Perhaps the best-­ known collection to hold a direct allusion to the myth is Natura Exenterata, or Nature Unbowelled, printed in 1655 and connected to the house of Arundel through its front matter. After the prelude to the recipe that lists its many virtues, beginning with its capacity to heal wounds and including ailments from headaches to hemorrhoids, biting of mad dogs and plague sores, the page includes this explanation of its name: “And this intreat is called flos unguentorum, for it cometh of Jesu Christi by an Angell to a house of Religion at the red hill in Almayn, which wrought there many marvails, and never had other medicine but this.”16 Note that the wording is similar to but more developed than the 1577 print example, and another collection, an anonymous one found at Bryn Mawr College dated 1649 (notably before the print text), also includes the recipe for the flower of ointments, one that almost exactly corresponds to the recipe in Natura Exenterata and includes the origin myth.17 In addition, the Bryn Mawr collection contains several recipes from the Countess of Arundel, Anne Dacre Howard (1557– 1630), mother-­in-­law to Aletheia Talbot Howard (d. 1654), whose portrait graces the front matter of Natura Exenterata. Two other volumes, one by the historically identifiable Elizabeth Digby, wife of first Baron Digby of Geashill and daughter of Sir James Altham, and the other compiled by one Mary Miller, include distinct recipes called “Angel [or Angells] Salve” that do not expound on the myth but require virtually the same ingredients while varying slightly in instruction and details.18 The fact that the Countesses of Arundel were known Catholics may account for their inclusion of the divine intercessor and the even more Catholic “house of religion” in their recipe and may tell us something about the anonymous compiler of the Bryn Mawr manuscript as well.19 This speculation, however, is somewhat confounded by the Angel Salve examples. That is, Elizabeth Digby, no relation to the well-­known Catholic Sir Kenhelm Digby, seemed to have Calvinist origins and anti-­Catholic affiliations, making the recipe’s monastic origins and the divine intercessor less in alignment with her beliefs. She was the daughter of a nonconformist

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and married to a man whose first wife was Sarah Boyle (less known than her siblings, Robert, Mary, and Katherine), daughter of recognized anti-­ Catholic Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork; we may thus not want to assume anything about Mistress Mary Miller either. Similarly, the exclusion of the myth from the Elizabeth Downing example, which may have been copied from the Dacre manuscript into a collection to be owned by Anne Layfield in 1640, may stem from the editorial decisions made by Elizabeth Downing or by her soon-­to-­be-­nonconformist son’s, or it may simply be a matter of space, as the virtues taking up a whole page are truncated in the copying.20 The inclusion of the myth may or may not point to the particular religious leanings of a household, yet they persist. Similarly, the mythic associations of the recipe remain in the very essences, the ingredients and processes of the recipe itself, and it is through these less overt religious elements that the prototranscorporeal theorization arguably perseveres. For one, the recipe maintains a connection to its origin with Jesus Christ through the inclusion in all twelve examples (and most outside this period) of the ingredient frankincense, a gum, which gives the “Yellow Salve” its color. While as a gum it can be found in some other salves and perfumes, evidence that this ingredient is the most important and distinguishing ingredient in Flos Unguentorum can be found through a quick comparison of our examples. While most examples contain nine ingredients—rosin, perrosin, virgin wax, frankincense, mastic, animal fat (suet, tallow, or grease of hart, deer, or sheep), camphor, turpentine, and white wine—at least one of four of these (wax, rosin, turpentine, and animal fat) are found in a majority of wound ointments and salves. For evidence that these four are often foundational, one can turn to Elizabeth Digby’s 1650 collection, in which “A Salve for old Sores festered” (fol. 21r) contains all four but none of the others, adding verdigris and copperas, among various powders and gums. Of the five remaining ingredients in the Flower of Ointments, one recipe from Wellcome Manuscript 7391 (fol. 2) excludes two ingredients included in the others—perrosin and mastic—replacing them with rosemary powder (perhaps as a cost-­cutting measure), suggesting that neither is what distinguishes Flower of Ointments from other salves. The three remaining ingredients—wine, camphor, and frankincense—all have prominent biblical resonances, and given the recipe’s mythic origin, frankincense in particular takes on added significance.21 The ointment, a gift from Jesus Christ through an angel messenger, is thus defined by the consistent

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and prominent inclusion of an ingredient given as a valued gift by the magi who followed the angel messenger to the manger. Moreover, one of the print examples (The Skilful Physician, 1656) from this period includes the ingredient to be added in a case of the fistula, myrrh, also brought by the magi.22 Again, while both frankincense and myrrh appear in other recipes, their biblical associations contribute to Flos Unguentorum’s reputation. It is important here to remember Duessa’s “wicked . . . ointments,” a wickedness perhaps in part determined by their ingredients. They are not divine in origin but possibly made from more Ovidian stuff, such as the myrrh (notably not named) of incest and illicit desire. In contrast, the gums from which Flos Unguentorum are made are sanctified in their associations. Spenser’s allegorical example demonstrates how the medicine may be infused by the maker’s intent but also the context provided by the very ingredients. What makes ingredients “wicked” is not necessarily their healing or malignant properties but rather the cultural context through which they come into use. Here each cultural context, in the end, points to a different relation to our transcorporeality. Myrrha’s and Fradubio’s punishments are to be forever trees; the gums of Flos Unguentorum heal the skin speedily as they disappear into it. Another indicator of the recipe’s legacy of biblical associations is the use of the word precious in half of the examples (a word not found in the 1577 version), which is a word that may in part refer to the expense of the various gums and powders but one that also has biblical connotations. While there are several references to “the most precious ointment” of salvation in the King James Bible, I would like to posit that the allusion here is even more specific, as it is combined with the repeated designation of the ingredients to be made “blood warm” in six of our examples, a phrase that is sometimes repeated in different moments in the making. This may be because of the presence of “blood warm” in an early print sources, such as Soueraigne approued medicines, but the particular language is often retained with care. From the years in question, this particular constellation, “precious” and “blood,” given the mythic origins, would invoke for those who knew their King James Bible, a specific passage from the first letter of Peter, 1:16–22: .

Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy. And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man’s work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear: Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver

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and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot [italics added]: Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, Who by him do believe in God, that raised him up from the dead, and gave him glory; that your faith and hope might be in God. Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently. (King James Version)

My suggestion here is that some language within the tradition of certain recipes may be pointing to its overtly Christian context. That is, when included within a tradition of sanctified origins, the words precious and blood resonate and provide a context for the holy act of healing for which the recipe becomes a part, and the biblical tradition at its root, not coincidentally, depends on the vehicle of unblemished skin to convey salvation. Similarly, phrases such as “it suffer noe Corruption in A wound or any Evill flesh to be Ingendred therein” in Elizabeth Jacob’s 1654 example (another recipe with echoes of the 1577 print text) should also be read multivalently.23 In the context of one’s “unfeigned love of the brethren,” there is no distinction between the physical act of healing a wound and that of protecting your community from other forms of corruption. The recipe’s language is thus infused by the biblical context it references, making its numinosity not dependent on the presence of doctrinally specific angels, though perhaps tied to certain translations of the verse. Even the making of the recipe thus becomes a kind of religious act, or perhaps more appropriately for non-­Catholics, a residually religious act. We can see this also in the processes themselves, as they materially enact a kind of transubstantiation. In the Natura Exenterata as a key example, a “pottle of white wine” is added “with all the other Medicines together”; then the mixture is simmered until “all the white wine be almost consumed, and then let it coole, untill it be no hotter then blood.”24 The disappearance of the wine leading to the invocation of blood here echoes the Catholic Mass, in which wine becomes blood, or at least the Anglican service in which wine becomes as blood.25 It is important to note that the language may not necessarily be tied to any specific doctrine, but the recipe remains mystical beyond overt references to divine revelation.

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In the reintroduction of the mythic substructure and its residual traces, we may also read the circulation itself of the recipe as a kind of religious practice and the attributions that accompany the ointment recipe as a kind of religious kinship. In this reading, Madam Falconbridge ( Jacob), Mistress Poole (Digby), and Mistress Rowe (MS 7391) are articulated within a certain religious network.26 All of the ten examples list healing wounds as the ointment’s first/primary purpose, which raises the following question about the English Civil War: Did this recipe circulate among members of a particular side of the conflict, and were wounds acquired in that conflict associated with the wounds of Christ? To complicate matters, however, at particular junctures, such as in the 1640 Layfield manuscript held at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the recipe crossed allegiances.27 That is, in being in the hands of both Parliamentarians and Royalists, the salve, preexisting such divisions, knew no religio-­political boundaries. This is not to propose a symbolic transcorporeality but rather to show that in its textual history a specific mystical capacity may dissolve into a more general efficacy only to be solidified again in the resurrection of the doctrinal specificities of the myth or other sacramental signifiers. This line of questioning is not likely to be satisfied fully (a searchable database would help),28 but what it does allow us to consider is the constraints of the terms we permit into our inquiry. Reinstilling these practical documents with a sense of religious context more specifically, as well as mystical makeup more broadly, thus helps us to reassess our modern secularist assumptions around the practice of medicine, assumptions that pharmaceutically divorces human and plant physiology at the same time they buttress our attempts to defy our mortality. A recipe is a changing entity, never self-­enclosed and pure. Not simply a text left latent in a singular manuscript, waiting to be put into use, it circulates, is made in several places at once, and is simultaneously defined by its ingredients and transformed by its immediate surroundings. Like the Flos Unguentorum, once made, once used, the recipe and its product continue to transform, becoming one with its patients as it heals them. What is more, a recipe, in its intimacy with things of nature, may articulate aspects of being (such as transcorporeality) not fully realizable, or even demonized, in literary texts. Seeing a recipe as simply extraneous, “extraliterary,” supplemental, belies its dynamism and attempts to fix it as one thing, made of dead things, mere cellulose and stone, when neither plant nor mineral is simple or lifeless.

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Notes 1. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, the Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2. 2. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. Drawing on the theories of Alaimo and others, in Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, Jennifer Munroe and I discuss the moments in recipes in which “the line between (human) subject and (nonhuman) object blurs, becoming unrecognizable, unintelligible, ultimately unknowable,” and the moment in which mineral and plant ingredients made into ointment blend with human skin provides a clear example of such. See Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 33–34. In this essay, I am generally building on the theoretical frame Munroe and I established in that work. See also related theorizations in Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 3. Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Mary Floyd-­Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 4. Simon Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 5. Sara Pennell, “Perfecting Practice? Women, Manuscript Recipes and Knowledge in Early Modern England,” in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. Victoria Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 237–58; Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 6. Jennifer Munroe, “A Cordial for Those on a Budget,” The Recipes Project, October 1, 2013, https://​recipes​.hypotheses​.org​/2386; Michelle DiMeo and Rebecca Laroche, “On Elizabeth Isham’s ‘Oil of Swallows’: Animal Slaughter and Early Modern Women’s Medical Recipes,” in Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, ed. Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche, 87–104 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 7. A booke of soueraigne approued medicines and remedies (London, 1577), sig. Aiir. Subsequent signature numbers cited in the text. 8. Editions cited: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche Jr. and C. Patrick O’Donnell Jr. (London: Penguin Books, 1978); Christopher

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Marlowe, The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great, in The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 179–258. 9. Interestingly, wight originally was used to describe any living being, only centuries later taking on the human-­only definition. OED online, s.v. “wight (n. 1.a, n. 2.a).” 10. For a discussion of the “odd conjunctions between mineral and animal or vegetable bodies,” see Jessica Wolfe, “Gorgonick Spirits” in this volume. 11. Floyd-­Wilson, Occult Knowledge. This passage raises a question about how the absorption into her skin of “extracts of all minerals, / In which the essential form of marble stone” (Tamburlaine, part 2, 4.2.61–62) has made Olympia marble-­like in her resolve. We could, perhaps, argue that the ointment’s absorption makes it metaphorical, but then, she was determined before its application. 12. See Lynn Festa, “Things with Kid Gloves” in this volume. 13. OED online, s.v. “flower (n. 9, n. 8).” At root of both of these meanings seems to be the idea of the flower being “the most attractive or desirable part” of the plant but also may be an extension of its use in alchemy, which refers to the result of condensation after sublimation. OED online, s.v. “flower (n. 8, n. 1c).” 14. We may also add balm to this list, but it is not strictly a synonym, as it has associations with embalming. See for comparison Miriam Jacobson’s discussion of mummy in “Vegetable Loves” in this volume. 15. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Folgerdigitaltexts​.org. 16. Philiatros, Natura Exenterata, or Nature Unbowelled (London, 1655), 332. 17. “Medical and Cooking Recipes” (1649), Bryn Mawr College Manuscript 19, fol. 5. 18. Elizabeth Digby, “Receipts of Elizabeth Digby,” British Library Egerton MS 2197, fol. 20; Mary Miller, “Her Booke of Receipts” (1660), Wellcome Library MS 3547, 74. 19. Rebecca Laroche with Hillary Nunn, “Exploring CPP 10a214: The Angel (Not) in the Recipe,” The Recipes Project, March 21, 2013, https://​recipes​ .hypotheses​.org​/993. 20. For more on the relationship between the Dacre and the Downing texts, see Rebecca Laroche with Hillary Nunn, “Exploring CPP 10a214: Close Textual Ties,” The Recipes Project, March 23, 2017, https://​recipes​ .hypotheses​.org​/9141. 21. Camphor’s place in the early modern English translation of the Song of Solomon also may point to the origin in Jesus Christ’s sometimes equation with the beloved: “My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in

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the vineyards of Engedi” (Song of Solomon 1:14 [KJV]), frankincense and myrrh also belonging to the garden of these verses. Wine will be discussed below. 22. Brazil Bahia, The Skilful Physician (London, 1656), 236. 23. Elizabeth Jacob, “Elizabeth Jacob recipe book” (1654–), Wellcome Library MS 1654, fol. 113r, digital image 68. 24. Philiatros, Natura Exenterata, 333. 25. I am indebted to Amy Tigner for this suggestion in her comments for the Shakespeare Association of America seminar “Home Ecologies.” Email from Tigner to the author, March 21, 2017. 26. “English Recipe Book” (mid-­ seventeenth century), Wellcome Library MS 7391, digital image 2. Interestingly, the attribution to Mistress Rowe is shared in the Elizabeth Okeover manuscript (1675–1725), “Elizabeth Okeover recipe book,” Wellcome MS 3712, digital image 26. 27. Hillary Nunn with Rebecca Laroche, “Exploring CPP 10a214: A New Candidate for the Layfield Hand, Part 2,” The Recipes Project, June 2, 2016. https://​recipes​.hypotheses​.org​/7891. 28. For a discussion of such a project, see the Early Modern Recipe Online Collective, https://​emroc​.hypotheses​.org​/about.

The Paris Opéra as a Vibrating Body Feeling Pygmalion’s Kiss

Kevin Lambert

It is the dissonances in the social harmony that you have to know how to place, prepare and resolve. —DENIS DIDEROT, Rameau’s Nephew

I

n 1748, Jean-­Philippe Rameau made the Paris Opéra into a vibrating body. At the beginning of the third scene of Rameau’s acte de ballet, Pygmalion, the eponymous sculptor, in despair at the hopelessness of his feelings for the beautiful marble statue he has made, prays to Venus, goddess of love, for help. He falls silent, the music pauses, a bass note sounds in the strings, and then the strings and flutes together sound first a major twelfth then a major seventeenth above the bass. Pygmalion asks, “Where do these chords come from? What are these harmonious sounds?”1 Love flies over the stage and shakes her torch over the statue, and it comes to life (figure 1). Many of those in the Opéra’s audience were aware that the magical major chord Pygmalion could hear was an eighteenth-­century scientific object. Mathematician and natural philosopher Joseph Sauveur had claimed in 1704 that harmonic overtones could be heard sounding above the dominant notes in vibrating strings, musical instruments, and bells.2 And secretary of the Académie des sciences Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle would report in the 1720s that for the learned scientific opinion of the day musical harmony was not an arbitrary system; it was nature’s “system of music” that musicians had “fallen into without their knowing, guided only by their ear and their

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Figure 1.  The score of Rameau’s Pygmalion, showing the major triad as the statue comes to life (lower system). Pygmalion, acte de ballet, 1748. (Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University)

experience.”3 Now Rameau had arranged the orchestra to play nature’s chord, the naturally occurring harmonics of a musical sounding body, so that the audience could hear and feel its affect as Pygmalion’s statue came to life.4 Pygmalion’s success confirmed Rameau’s reputation as the leading progressive midcentury composer for the French opera. Giving the sounding body, or corps sonore such a prominent role also highlighted his status as the doyen of eighteenth-­century music theory. We now know a lot about how Rameau’s music theory was championed by philosophes such as Lockean philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and mathematician and encyclopedist Jean Le Rond d’Alembert in order to promote their philosophic and scientific ideals, but we know far less about how Rameau used the opera’s stage to demonstrate not just his theory of harmony but also the effect harmony could have on the fibrous feeling bodies assembled in his audience.5 That story is the subject of this essay. The relationship between the early modern French academies and the public was complex. Although culture made under the patronage of the

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academies served as reflections of the power of the absolutist state, particular works of art, literary texts, or scientific knowledge still needed a wider public to justify them. Just as the Academy of Music needed an audience to give musical performances meaning and value, so too did the Academy of Sciences.6 Members of the Paris Academy of Sciences routinely wrote exoteric books and performed public experiments in order to gain the public recognition required to maintain support for their work. The corps sonore was the empirical root of Rameau’s music theory. His performance of it to the audience at the Opéra in Pygmalion was, at least in part, in preparation for an opportunity to present his music theory to the Academy of Sciences, from whom Rameau sought scientific recognition.7 Understood in that context, putting the sounding body on the stage of the Paris Opéra followed the conventions of eighteenth-­century French science. Placing that performance in the context of an opera that told the story of Pygmalion was also significant. In the 1740s and early 1750s, a period I will call the “Pygmalion moment,” disillusionment with the promise of Cartesian mechanics as a source of a unified understanding of nature opened up the possibility that matter might have properties beyond extension and motion, including aversion, desire, and memory.8 Speculations about this material sensibility (sensibilité) also coincided with increasing claims about the authority of spontaneous emotion and feeling, the passions, as a source of knowledge and even political power.9 The correspondence between material and cultural sensibility has largely been explored in terms of the close interrelation between scientific, medical, and literary enterprises, especially the rise of the novel. Rameau’s use of the Pygmalion myth as a means of creating resonance between his music theory and midcentury materialism, however, is evidence for the importance of opera as an eighteenth-­century cultural resource. The physical resonances Rameau’s opera set up in his audience reverberated with philosophical writings such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1747) and, more importantly for the story told here, André-­François Boureau-­ Deslandes’s Pygmalion, or the Living Statue (1742).10 These vibrations rippled through the culture performing a kind of social chemistry, establishing reputations and forming beneficial alliances in a mid-­eighteenth-­century culture of sensibility and feeling. Put to work in this way, the eighteenth-­century French opera house became what Julia Lupton in the afterword to this volume calls a “virtue ecology,” a stage on which somatic and emotional musical effects were performed, a kind of “infinitely resonant movement in place.”

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As we shall see, Rameau consciously sought to take control of his audience through the affective power of his music from the very beginning of his career as a composer for the opera. But his audience resisted. It was only in this Pygmalion moment (from around 1740 to 1755), when speculation about matter’s sensibility made the physiological response to music appear less artificial, more natural, that Rameau finally won his audience over. Recognition as a man of feeling afforded status and reputation in mid-­ eighteenth-­century Parisian society. Mid-­eighteenth-­century sensibilité made public criticism, a defining Enlightenment discursive practice, credible. In her essay on writing and the quill, Julie Park describes an organic supplement as a tool originating from living matter to execute an act. Understood in those terms, the singers and dancers, musicians and their instruments were organic supplements that made the Paris Opéra vibrate both literally and culturally. But for the purpose of this essay, I also want to draw attention to the audience. Without an audience, an opera would not be a performance. And without certain members of the audiencethe individuals that publicized the performance and propagated its effectsit would not have been as great a cultural event. Friedrich Grimm was only one member of Rameau’s sensitive audience, but he was the most sensitive. Indeed, just like Pygmalion’s statue, Grimm was transformed when the corps sonore was sounded. Better than anyone else in the audience, Grimm was able to articulate his sensitive experience in a way that promoted Rameau’s status as a composer and music theoretician. This not only benefited Rameau and his campaign to establish the scientific authority of his music theory; it also established Grimm as a leading cultural critic in mid-­eighteenth-­century France. Grimm’s voice was important not only because of what he wrote but also because of the social circles he frequented. Grimm’s writings would resonate with those of his good friend Denis Diderot, who would publish on the vibrating string as both a musical and mathematical object in the same year Rameau’s Pygmalion was first performed.11 Diderot would help Rameau write a memoir used to describe his music theory to the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1749.12 Later, in his own writings such as the Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, Diderot would build on his knowledge of vibrating strings in order to model a mechanism for explaining the interconnectedness of the social and physical world that developed the affecting experience of Rameau’s music as Grimm had first described it.13

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For Diderot, cultural shock waves were a source of social knowledge. In his satirical novel Rameau’s Nephew, for example, it is when things are jolted out of place “that the man of good sense listens and untangles his world.”14 Social alliances were key for the promotion of reputations and ideas in mid-­eighteenth-­century Paris, and Rameau’s Pygmalion moment allied Grimm and Diderot to the composer in a way that would further the cause of the new materialism. The sounding of the corps sonore in the orchestra, the awakening of the statue on stage, and Grimm’s emotional response in the audience assembled a Pygmalion moment in which matter finally came alive.

Musical Jolts to the Public Body French opera as an institution dates from the founding of the Royal Academy of Music in 1669. Composer Jean-­Baptiste Lully, librettist Philippe Quinault, and Louis XIV, the embodiment of seventeenth-­century French national taste, were largely responsible for the creation of its most prestigious genre, French lyric tragedy (tragédie en musique). Its librettos retold noble and elevating stories from classical mythology in a five-­act structure that survived into the second half of the eighteenth century. French lyric tragedy was an essentially conservative form that developed at the same stately pace as its seventeenth-­century regal prologues, and successful composers were those best able to re-­create established musical effects supremely well. Lyric tragedy remained the preeminent French operatic form, and those written in the Lullian style would continue to be performed on the Paris stage into the second half of the eighteenth century. As we shall see, it was the restaging of André Cardinal Destouches’s lyric tragedy Omphale (1701) that would provide Grimm with the opportunity to fashion himself as a leading opera critic. But that is not to say that French opera lacked historical development. For example, the préramiste period, between Lully’s death in 1687 and Rameau’s first opera in 1733, is distinguished by some important innovations that reflected the gallantries of the regency period. Critical pamphlets and performance reviews published in fashionable literary magazines helped establish a public taste independent of the king’s. And new operatic genres such as the five-­act opera ballet forewent dramatic unity to better indulge the French taste for dance and spectacle.15

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The resulting thematic relationship between the five acts in an opera ballet also allowed for the development of shorter actes de ballets. New acts would sometimes be added when an opera ballet was restaged, and these entrées ajoutés gradually began to be performed independently. Rameau became a master of this new form, and his Pygmalion, the reworked last act of the opera ballet Le Triomphe des Arts (1701), would be considered its quintessence. Among the innovations Rameau brought to French opera, and certainly the most important for the story here, was the way in which he enlarged the role of the music as a means of creating emotional responses in his audience.16 Historian Downing Thomas has described some of the complex musical effects Rameau employed to evoke feelings in his audience as attempts to produce “jolts of somatic response in the spectator.”17 One such jolt, designed to induce a feeling of horror in the audience at the appearance of the three fates in Rameau’s first opera Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), was a swift descent by quartertones (the enharmonic genre), which was supposed to “revolt” the ear exactly because it sounded unnatural.18 Using music to create a physical feeling of dread was controversial. According to musical traditionalists, the idea of using music to make an audience actually feel horror was misguided and therefore bound to fail. For conservatives, musical pyrotechnics such as Rameau’s use of the enharmonic genre were little more than noise exactly because they were completely divorced from musical and literary meaning. A critic complaining about Rameau’s Les Indes galantes (1735) commented, “The music is perpetual magic in which nature plays no role. . . . Unintelligibility, gibberish, [and] neologism wishes to pass for discourse in music. There is too much of it. I am pulled about, flayed, dislocated by this diabolical sonata Les Indes galantes.”19 Such criticisms did not go unanswered, however. Pamphlet wars between conservative supporters of Lully’s tragic operas and progressives who favored Rameau’s attempts to make his audience respond emotionally to the music were a constant source of conversation in Parisian salons. The Querelle de Lullistes et Ramistes would rage for around fifteen years until the 1740s, when Rameau finally established himself as the undisputed successor to Lully. Rameau’s reputation depended less on his more extreme innovations, however, and much more on his skill at using harmony and chord progression to move his audience in a way now all too familiar to modern

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audiences from the affecting, tear-­jerking musical effects employed in Hollywood movies. For Rameau, harmony was a natural system, and the feelings it created were natural, not conventional. He therefore considered his theory of harmony a science, a status that required recognition by the appropriate authorities. It was for that reason Rameau began, in the 1730s, applying to European scientific societies, natural philosophers, and mathematicians to recognize his music theory as scientific. But it was only in 1749, a year after the first performance of Pygmalion, that he finally received anything like the scientific endorsement he wanted. Gaining the support of figures such as d’Alembert, a member of the Academy of Sciences, was crucial for achieving that end.20 But no less important was putting the sounding body on the stage at the Paris Opéra in order to open a dialogue with potential allies outside the academy. For Rameau, to display the harmonics of the sounding body as an agent in the Pygmalion myth was to demonstrate the affective power of his music to particular audience members such as Grimm and Diderot, friends of d’Alembert’s, and rising figures in the eighteenth-­century Parisian public who would recognize the corps sonore as resonant with recent controversial speculations about the nature of matter. In particular, the appearance in 1741 of the anonymously authored Pygmalion, or the Living Statue had made the materialist implications of Pygmalion explicit (figure 2). It is impossible to know how widely the text was read in 1740s Paris, but we know that Diderot read it. It is hardly a stretch to imagine that his good friend Grimm, who often accompanied Diderot to the Opéra, was familiar with it too.

The Animated Statue The Pygmalion story was known in mid-­ eighteenth-­ century France through its telling in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where it occupies only fifty-­ nine lines of book 10.21 In Ovid’s story, Pygmalion becomes disgusted by the Propoetides, prostitutes and, by association, all women. He therefore decides to live without marrying or taking a lover. At the same time, he takes to sculpting a statue of his ideal woman out of ivory. When the statue is finished, Pygmalion becomes obsessed with it, kissing and caressing it, bringing it presents, dressing it up, and even calling it his bedfellow. On a day dedicated to the festival of the goddess Venus, Pygmalion prays that he might have a wife, which the goddess, understandably given the story so far,

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Figure 2.  Title page of

Pigmalion (1741). Reproduced by permission of the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

interprets as meaning the statue. The statue comes to life, and she becomes Pygmalion’s wife, bearing him a daughter. Ovid’s story was retold many times and with great freedom throughout the eighteenth century, testimony to the resonances the myth had with some of the preoccupations of French Enlightenment philosophy, especially the consubstantiality of body and soul, the formation of knowledge and the individual, and the relationship between the self, the other, and nature.22 Pygmalion, or the Living Statue uses the myth in order to expound an Epicurean materialist philosophy explicitly enough to require that it be published anonymously and distributed in secret.23 Its author was philosopher and man of letters André-­François Boureau-­Deslandes.24

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Boureau-­Deslandes’s Pygmalion quickly gained a reputation as a scandalous book; the Dijon Parlement publicly burned it in 1742.25 Nonetheless, its text followed well-­established conventions shared by many works of philosophy seeking to engage a nonspecialist enlightened public. The preface of the book, for example, gallantly offers its story to an aristocratic woman, Madame la Comtesse de G., perhaps a fictional representative of the elite women who had hosted the French salon movement since the end of the seventeenth century.26 The comtesse is invited to set her prejudices aside to consider the potentially scandalous philosophical proposition that matter can think, and there is also a coy allusion to some erotic scenes the author hopes will not offend. Such rhetorical moves were not uncommon in nonspecialist eighteenth-­century philosophical and underground literatures that routinely explored not only intellectual but also sexual freedom in uncensored communications beyond the reach of religious and state authorities.27 Discretion was essential, of course, and the preface to Pygmalion ends by warning Madame to be careful: “There is a certain tone that carries the truth but it is not heard by everyone and even must not be. Piscis hic non est omnium.”28 As the Latin makes clear, this fish was not for everyone. In Boureau-­Deslandes’s Pygmalion story, a young philosopher-­artist from a well-­to-­do family vows himself to celibacy after refusing an arranged marriage to a beautiful rich merchant’s daughter. But then Venus, the goddess of love, visits him in a dream and demands that he make a statue of her. The result is so beautiful that the artist believes he has achieved perfection and begins meditating on the plausibility of a seemingly extravagant idea: that his statue might come alive. As he continues to meditate on this idea, it becomes increasingly plausible. The philosopher-­artist begins to wonder if he has seen slight movements in the statue and whether movement rather than the soul is the animating principle of life. After all, “A baby in its cradle may at first appear as something raw, rawer and more unformed even than marble. The machine [the baby] develops itself little by little, its springs play against one another, its fluids and solids fight and resist each other in turn; it is a continual action and reaction.”29 After struggle and movement have perfected the living machine, it must go into decline, grow old and die. But the soul will feel similar diminutions, suggesting that the life of the spirit is little different from that of the body. The philosopher-­artist begins to conclude that if movement is the animating principle of life and the statue really has moved, then perhaps it really can become a woman.

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The statue will indeed slowly come alive, of course, moving secretly at night until it achieves full consciousness. Arriving at his studio one morning, the sculptor finally discovers his statue as a fully conscious woman. After overcoming their mutual shock, statue and artist immediately (and rather implausibly) engage in a philosophical conversation informing the reader that there are living beings without number in the universe; that these beings all live in their own manner but together compose a single being, the all, that is called God; and that for individual thinking beings, life is remembering and death is interruption to a string of recollections. Life does begin again but with it a new series of ideas that have no relation to those that have gone before.30 Our Epicurean philosopher-­artist now suddenly notices that his interlocutor is a beautiful naked woman. Overcome with desire, he kisses the statue. They make love, and as the statue surrenders to the artist’s passion, she demands to know what the movements he has caused in her are called. “Pleasure, pleasure,” Pygmalion responds in a broken voice, “and the greatest of all pleasures.”31 They orgasm together, and the statue, lying thrown back on the couch, invites Pygmalion to have sex with her again. The repeated “shocks” (secousses) of that pleasure finally perfect her soul, and the philosophical conclusion is clear. Pleasure completes the Epicurean self.32 Although the combination of eroticism and philosophy in Boureau-­ Deslandes’s book is representative of late seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­ century underground books, it is not as scandalous a text as its public burning might suggest. Historian Henri Coulet has described Boureau-­ Deslandes’s Pygmalion as a philosopher à la Fontenelle, the subtle Epicurean former secretary of the French Academy of Sciences. Like Fontenelle, Boureau-­Deslandes’s Pygmalion is an artist-­philosopher who practices a way of living that combines solitary meditation, intellectual culture, conviviality, and sexual pleasure.33 Although Boureau-­Deslandes clearly insists on the right of the philosopher to retreat from society and to think skeptically, even radically, in order to advance knowledge, it is also clear that this Pygmalion, like the author himself, is a respectable and private person who shares his philosophical insights only with an elite circle of friends. Boureau-­Deslandes was of an earlier generation than Grimm and Diderot. For those like Fontenelle and Boureau-­Deslandes, materialist speculation was a private matter requiring discretion. Their fish was not for everyone because it was communicated subtly to a discrete and discerning audience.

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But for the younger Grimm, and especially Grimm’s friend Diderot, the time had come for a more public discussion of philosophical ideas, including materialism and sexual freedom, that would directly challenge the cultural authority of the French Catholic Church. Denis Diderot’s underground publication Philosophic Thoughts (Pensées philosophiques, 1746), for example, seems designed to provoke discussion rather than suppress it, and his reuse of Boureau-­Deslandes’s Pygmalion epigram “Piscis hic non est omnium” (this fish is not for everyone) in its front matter was a more radical provocation intended to announce, not only to religious conservatives but also to the older generation of closeted intellectuals such as Boureau-­Deslandes and Fontenelle, that a louder and more confident generation had arrived.34 Diderot’s fish is not just for those interested in discrete Epicureanism. It heralds a different kind of public voice, that of a younger generation as interested in developing public discursive practices as defending particular philosophical positions. This Diderotian critic will be a man of feeling, of passion, and the Thoughts begins their defense: “People declaim without end against the passions; . . . But it is only the passions, and strong passions, that can raise the soul to great things. Without them, there is no sublime, in morality or in achievement; the fine arts return to infancy, and virtue becomes petty.”35 But defending the passions is not enough to establish the man of feeling as a credible public critic, and it is here that the resonance between passions as a source of cultural authority and Rameau’s attempts to produce “jolts of somatic response in the spectator” will be of importance. Diderot’s close friend Grimm was exactly the kind of ambitious man of feeling Diderot championed in his Thoughts. And it would be Grimm, a more confident musical critic than Diderot, who would be better able to use his sensitivity to the emotional effects Rameau could arouse in his audience to establish himself as a critical authority. Grimm achieved that authority in 1752 with a pamphlet, La Lettre sur Omphale, and his passionate response to Rameau’s Pygmalion, especially to the scene in which the statue awakens.

The Pygmalion Moment: Enlightenment as a Culture of Affect The idea of displaying the corps sonore to the Parisian opera-going public within the framework of the Pygmalion story appears to have resulted from a late request to Rameau to contribute to a presentation of three short pieces, each of one act, drawn from classic opera-­ballets but with new

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words and music.36 According to the Mercure de France, Pygmalion was put together very quickly, in fewer than eight days, and is based on the last act of an unsuccessful five-­act opera, The Triumph of the Arts (music by Michel de La Barre, libretto by Antoine Houdar de La Motte), which was originally performed in 1700.37 The Triumph of the Arts had failed, it was generally agreed, because of La Barre’s music, something that must surely have attracted Rameau’s notice because his interest was only ever going to be in a libretto that needed an entirely new score.38 The libretto was also subject to changes. In the 1748 version, a mythical Propoetide in La Motte’s story, is rewritten to become a mortal female character, Céphise, who is a rival for Pygmalion’s love.39 La Motte had used the Propoetide in his libretto to represent the profane desires that Pygmalion sublimates to his work on the statue, work Venus rewards when she petrifies the Propoetide and animates the statue, leading to a triumphant celebration of love. In Rameau’s midcentury opera-­ballet, however, Céphise is given much less significance than she had as La Motte’s Propoetide. Diminishing and secularizing the rival for Pygmalion’s love shifts the emphasis away from the sublimation of profane desire and the power of love (in La Motte’s libretto) and toward the celebration of artistic creation, the music. Although Rameau’s Pygmalion was an instant success, not everyone was happy with its story’s modern resonance. A reviewer in the Mercure de France, for example, while celebrating Rameau’s music, refused even to mention the librettist Rameau had used, Sylvain Ballot de Sauvot, because “many people will find M. de La Motte’s Pygmalion more mutilated than Rome’s Pasquino.”40 Discovered in the early sixteenth century in a small square, the Pasquino was known as the Roman talking statue because disaffected Renaissance citizens, protesting municipal papal power, hung satirical poems and comments (pasquinades) about the statue’s neck. It was mutilated because of its age (dating from around the third century BCE).41 Pygmalion’s lover was also a talking statue with ancient Roman origins, but to understand fully the reviewer’s allusion we also need to know that La Motte, a close friend of Fontenelle’s, had provoked controversy in the late seventeenth-­and early eighteenth-­century quarrel between the ancients and the moderns by daring to rewrite Homer.42 Rameau had asked his librettist to rewrite La Motte’s rewrite of Ovid.43 What delicious irony, then, to see La Motte punished for daring to rewrite Homer when Ballot rewrote La Motte and mutilated his verses. The reviewer’s evident delight

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in the irony of seeing a modern mutilate a modern adds weight to the presumption that Rameau was understood to be hanging the very latest modern thinking (including vitalist materialist philosophy) around his reworked statue’s neck.44 The criticism in the Mercure de France notwithstanding, Rameau’s Pygmalion was a huge success. Between 1748 and 1751, the height of Rameau’s popularity as a composer for the opera, Pygmalion was performed at least three more times in Paris and at Fontainebleau.45 It must also have become the subject of many lively discussions because when it was staged at the Opéra in March of 1751, the Parisian public raced to see it.46 Any hint of criticism or delicious ironies had now evaporated, and in the Mercure de France Rameau is described as a “luminous, bold and fecund genius.”47 According to one biographer, memories of the triumphant success Pygmalion would enjoy in 1751 would bring tears to Rameau’s eyes when he looked back to it at the end of his life.48

Grimm, an Organic Supplement in the Opéra’s Audience Tears shed in his audience were also a mark of Rameau’s accomplishment. And no one’s tears would count more than Grimm’s, who was now able to fashion himself as Rameau’s greatest champion and most sensitive listener. Opportunity presented itself when, on January 14, 1752, the Opéra restaged a classic lyric tragedy in the Lulliste tradition, Omphale (1701, libretto by La Motte, music by André Cardinal Destouches). The German-­born Grimm had come to Paris in 1748 as a secretary to a German count and reader for the hereditary prince of Saxe-­Gotha. While in Paris he became a close friend of Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, with whom he studied music.49 Now twenty-­nine, Grimm had been living in Paris for three years and had as yet only a minor reputation as a man of letters. The publication of his pamphlet Lettre sur Omphale would sound the last word in the Querelle de Lullistes et Ramistes while simultaneously announcing Grimm’s arrival as a leading music critic.50 The authority for that critical voice would rest upon a demonstration of Grimm’s sensitivity to his own nature and especially upon his sensitive response to Rameau’s Pygmalion. Although as the title of the pamphlet suggests, Grimm’s purpose was to criticize Omphale, a French opera staple since the beginning of the century, it was not to attack French opera. On the contrary, as Paul-­Marie

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Masson has argued, Grimm used his critique of Omphale to celebrate modern French opera and its greatest composer, Rameau.51 And nothing illustrated Rameau’s genius to Grimm better than the experience of Pygmalion’s monologue leading up to the animation of the statue: In vain I would command my tears, in vain I would try to stop them. Only the one who made them flow could do that. He seized me suddenly by a stroke of genius: the two chords preceding Pygmalion’s prayer to Venus, which are all the more sublime for their extreme simplicity and the purity of their change from minor to major. With what felicity it expresses—with the song, with the bass, and with the symphony—these words: “could you seal up the fountain of my tears?” In a word, if the statue had not come to life, and if I had not been seized at the moment of the miracle by the bold and happy change from the G re sol to E si mi major, I would have ended up like the statue’s lover, saying to her in a modulation which rends my soul: “If heaven had not made you live, it would have condemned me to die! It would have condemned me to die!”52

What Grimm found so remarkable was the way Rameau had arranged the music that led up to the performance of the sounding body. Rameau’s chord progression seizes the sensitive listener and makes him feel unbearable desire for the experience of the numinous culminating chord, the corps sonore. Awakening the statue with the corps sonore represents, in allegorical form, the human awakening to the beauty of music. And making it resonate so powerfully with sensitive listeners such as Grimm established an important aesthetic and scientific point for Rameau: that the musical proportions that animated the statue were exactly those that had first inspired man to make music. But establishing an aesthetic of nature was equally important to the critical authority of philosophes such as Grimm. Grimm could feel Pygmalion’s desire because of the response his body had had to Rameau’s chords; that response was physical—it made Grimm cry. It was also involuntary. The composer had seized the critic and taken control of him. Grimm could not stop crying: “Only the one who had made them [his tears] flow could do that.” Grimm experiences his response to the music as natural, and so when he describes his reaction to Pygmalion, he is not just writing about music but also his own nature. And it was his sensitivity to

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Figure 3.  Jélyotte en Pygmalion, L.-­R . Bouquet. (Vladmir Féderov and Yevette Féderov, Jean-Philippe ­Rameau: 1683–1764 [exposition], Paris Bibliothèque nationale, 15 décembre 1964–14 février 1965, gallica.bnf.fr/)

that nature, to the effect of the music on his own body, that enabled Grimm to recognize the genius of the composer. Not all the audience would be so affected. Grimm looked “with sadness” on those in the public who preferred the ariette “Reign, Love” or the triumphant voice of the singer Jélyotte (both lavishly praised in the Mercure de France review) to the scene leading up to the awakening of the statue (figure 3).53 The French operagoing public loved Pygmalion, that was clear, but not everyone realized its true genius. Demonstrating his sensibilité in his Lettre sur Omphale gave Grimm credibility as a music critic who could identify what was really valuable about modern French opera.

The Sensitive Public Critic A sensitive public critic such as Grimm was now authorized to pronounce on several cultural domains, including science, most effectively in his

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writings for the Correspondence littéraire, a gossipy and literary review sheet that was circulated among an elite European readership. Philosophical justification for the sensitive public critic also began to appear. The best known of these was Diderot’s Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, a philosophy of experiment that describes the man of feeling as an investigator of nature.54 In the early 1750s, both Grimm and Diderot returned to the argument that the passions were a source of authority in a way that developed Diderot’s earlier arguments in the Thoughts of 1746. More particularly, in Diderot’s Interpretation, we see the first appearance of what would become a central idea in Diderot’s later writings: the jolted, shocked, and resonating vibrating body as interconnecting mechanism between individual humans and their physical and social world. Just as Rameau’s vibrating body resonated out from the stage of the Paris Opéra into the audience, so a vibrating body resonates out from the middle of Diderot’s Interpretation. Beginning modestly enough with a string of a musical instrument, Diderot’s fifth conjecture, the center around which the whole Interpretation revolves, sweeps through a series of analogical speculations about collisions between elastic bodies and systems of molecules, and eventually about the whole universe.55 In so doing, Diderot makes the vibrating string a particular case of an elastic body and considers the universe as nothing less than a system of elastic bodies that together constitute one great elastic whole. Within this teeming mass of vibrations, “chaos is impossible, for it is an order which directly follows from the primary qualities of matter.”56 Diderot’s movement from vibrating string to metal rod to elastic human body to the universe creates a profoundly wholistic view of nature that denies any well-­defined boundary between a sensitive human body and the external world. Diderot developed that idea further in his later writings, notably Rameau’s Nephew, a satirical dialogue between a philosopher only referred to as “Me” and a fictional version of Jean-­Philippe Rameau’s nephew, known in the book as “He.” The dialogue is complex and explores questions rather than offers any clear answers. But set against the backdrop of the Pygmalion moment, the fictional confrontation between a philosopher and a struggling musician investigates the tension between the relative authority that should be afforded reason, the domain of the philosopher, and feeling, the affecting power of the composer. Certainly, for anyone familiar with Grimm’s response to the chords leading up to the sounding body’s awakening of the

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statue in Rameau’s Pygmalion, it is difficult not to see a strong resonance with the character of Rameau’s nephew in Diderot’s dialogue.

Rameau’s display of the corps sonore in his Pygmalion was high theater that animated not only Pygmalion’s statue but also Grimm. Grimm was an important organic supplement in Rameau’s audience because of his sensitivity. Grimm’s sensitive organic body was deeply affected by the emotional power of Rameau’s music, an effect he was then able to articulate to a wider European audience. Rameau’s Pygmalion needed a sensitive audience to amplify it, to transform the Paris Opéra into an assembly of sensitive persons and resonant surfaces, a virtue ecology that, like Diderot’s elastic body, could send out shock waves across the eighteenth-­century cultural world. In the Pygmalion moment, Rameau was able to exploit significant changes occurring in French Enlightenment culture: the decline in authority of Cartesian mechanical philosophy and the concomitant rise in the philosophy of John Locke, which argued that sense perception was the principal source of knowledge. He was able to do so because important members of his audience, none more effectively than Friedrich Grimm, also resonated with those changes. Grimm was a vital ingredient in the assembly of orchestra, performance, and audience that made the Pygmalion moment reverberate through the culture in a way very much in harmony with the kind of vibrating string Diderot would later describe in his Interpretation. Rameau’s shock to the cultural body vibrated through the audience and Grimm out into the wider French enlightenment society with the hope, no doubt, for a cultural reordering. For a brief moment, then, Rameau succeeded in making a spectacular cultural intervention that resonated with strategically important members of his audience. But it was a precarious achievement. Even as his Pygmalion was being celebrated, new controversies were about to explode. In the summer of 1752, the Querelle des Bouffons would erupt and shift the public’s attention away from harmony as the vehicle for communicating emotion and toward melody.57 And just as there was little agreement about aesthetics, so too the eighteenth-­century French sciences would increasingly dampen some of the more dangerous speculations that reverberated out from midcentury vitalist materialism. Early modern France was still subject to censorship, and as Diderot reluctantly began to understand in 1759, when the Encyclopédie was suppressed, the completely free and open

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exchange of controversial ideas such as philosophical materialism would remain an ideal. Nonetheless, the performance of Rameau’s Pygmalion still represents the high-­water mark of the Parisian Pygmalion moment because, just as Rameau intended, the coming to life of his Pygmalion statue was emblematic of the growing vitality of materialist philosophy in mid-­eighteenth-­ century France. To be sure, the many retellings of the Pygmalion myth in art and philosophy are testimony to the story’s resonance with the French enlightened culture that developed through the whole century.58 Indeed, it could reasonably be called the Pygmalion century. But confining the Pygmalion moment to this shorter period provides a particular double emphasis: on the moment itself as the efflorescence of sensationalist French philosophy and, more particularly, the centrality of music, especially opera, to that moment. Music, perhaps preeminently among the arts, evokes feeling, but to give that feeling transformative power an organic supplement such as Grimm was needed.

Notes Throughout this essay, in keeping with scholarly conventions, I use the modernized spelling of “Pygmalion” for the title and character of Rameau’s acte de ballet as well as Boureau-Deslandes’s novel, originally “Pigmalion.” When referring to Boureau-Deslandes’s novel in the notes, I retain the original spelling. 1. “D’où naissent accords? Quels sons harmonieux?” The Pygmalion libretto is available at http://​opera​.stanford​.edu​/iu​/libretti​/pygmali​.htm. The opera is available as a compact disc in Jean-­Philippe Rameau, Pygmalion, Nélee, & Myrthis, conducted by William Christie, performed by Les Arts Florrisant (Arles: Harmonia Mundi, 1992/1999), HMC 901381. 2. Joseph Sauveur, “Système général des intervalles des sons, & son application à tous les systèmes & à tous les instruments musique,” Mémoires de l’académie des sciences (Paris, 1701; quarto edition Paris, 1704): 297–364. Reproduced in C. Truesdell, The Rational Mechanics of Flexible or Elastic Bodies 1638–1788 in Leonhardi Euleri Opera Omnia, vols. 10 and 11, Serie Secundae, 2nd series (Basel: Swiss National Science Foundation, 1960), 11:121. 3. “Sur l’application des sons harmoniques aux jeux d’orgues.” Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences, 1702 (Paris, 1704): 92. “tombés sans les connoître, conduits seulement par leur oreille et par leur expérience.”

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4. The political scientist Jane Bennett has written about “publics with the capacity to affect and be affected,” and that is the kind of public I see here at the eighteenth-­century Paris Opéra. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 201), 100–104, esp. 101. 5. The best account is Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Christensen briefly discusses Rameau’s Pygmalion on pp. 218–31. I would especially like to thank musicologist Geoffrey Burgess for drawing my attention to what I have called the Pygmalion moment in French opera. For his discussion of its importance see his “Enlightening Harmonies: Rameau’s Corps Sonore and the Representation of the Divine in the Tragédie en Musique,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65 (2012): 383–462. 6. Mary Terrall, “Gendered Spaces, Gendered Audiences: Inside and Outside the Paris Academy of Sciences,” Configurations 3.2 (1995): 207–32. 7. In August of 1749, exactly one year after the first performance of his opera-­ ballet Pygmalion, Rameau presented his Mémoire où l’on expose les fondemens du système de musique théorique et pratique to the Académie royale des sciences. Diderot helped draft the memoire and his co-­encyclopedist Jean Le Rond d’Alembert wrote the lengthy and highly flattering report that finally gave Rameau’s music theory official recognition. 8. Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1680–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010). 9. Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-­Century France (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998); Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007). 10. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, trans. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994). [André-­ François Boureau-­Deslandes], Pigmalion, ou la statue animée (London: Samuel Harding, 1742). 11. Denis Diderot, Mémoires sur différents sujets de Mathématiques (1748), in Oeuvres complètes 25 vols., ed. Herbert Dieckmann, Jacques Proust, Jean Varloot, et al. (Paris: Hermann, 1975), 2:231–338. 12. Thomas Christensen, “Diderot Rameau and Resonating Strings: New Evidence of an Early Collaboration,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth

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Century 323 (1994): 131–66. Rameau’s “Mémoire où l’on expose les fondements du système de musique théorique et pratique” reproduced on pp. 153–66. 13. Denis Diderot, L’Interprétation de la nature, in Oeuvres, 9:25–111. 14. Denis Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau, in Oeuvres, 12:72. “c’est alors que l’homme de bon sens écoute et démêle son monde.” 15. Donald Jay Grout and Hermine Weigel Williams, A Short History of Opera, 4th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 132–46. 16. Charles Dill, Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 17. Downing A. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 179–200, 169. 18. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 163–69. Dill, Monstrous Opera, 46. Rameau, Génération harmonique, in Complete Theoretical Writings, 6 vols., ed. Erwin R. Jacopi (n.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1967–72), 3:91. 19. Pierre-­François Guyot-­Desfontaines, Observations sur les écrits modernes 3 September 1735, reprint, 24 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine, 1967) 4:238. Dill, Monstrous Opera, 7. 20. Christensen, Rameau, 133–68. 21. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary Innes (London: Penguin, 1955), 231–32. 22. Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 111–60; Henri Coulet, “Présentation,” in Pygmalions des lumières, ed. Henri Coulet (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 1998), 7–29; J. L. Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes: The Animated Statue in Eighteenth-­Century France,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960): 239–55. 23. I have used the 1742 edition (see n. 9 above), which is also available on Google books. It is also reproduced in Coulet, Pygmalions des lumières, 49–70. Coulet’s text follows the first edition but modernizes the French. For its publishing record, Jacques-­Elie Gastelier, Lettres sur les affaires du temps (1738–1751), ed. Henri Duranton, Robert Granderoute, Hervé Guénot, and François Weil (Paris: Champion-­Slatkine, 1993), 661–62n4. 24. Details of his life can be found in Jean Macary, Masque et lumières au XVIIe: André-­François Deslandes, “Citoyen et Philosophe” (1689–1757) (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975); J. L. Carr, “The Life and Works of André-­ François Boureau-­Deslandes,” (PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 1954). 25. Gastelier, Lettres sur les affaires, 662n4. 26. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

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27. Margaret Jacob, “The Materialist World of Pornography,” in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 157–202, 158. 28. [Boureau-­Deslandes], Pigmalion, xiv–xv. “Il y a un certain ton qui fait passer la vérité; mais ce ton n’est pas entendu de tout le monde, et même il ne doit pas l’être” (Coulet, Pygmalions des lumières, 50). 29. [Boureau-­Deslandes], Pigmalion, 54–56. “C’est ainsi qu’un enfant au berceau ressemble à quelque chose de brut, & de plus brut encore, de plus informe que du marbre. La machine se développe peu à peu, ses ressorts jouent les uns contre les autres, les fluides & les solides se combattent & résistent tour à tour, c’est une action & une réaction continuelle” (Coulet, Pygmalions des lumières, 59). 30. [Boureau-­Deslandes], Pigmalion, 66–71. (Coulet, Pygmalions des lumières, 61–62). 31. [Boureau-­Deslandes], Pigmalion, 81–83. “Plaisir, plaisir, répondit Pygmalion d’une voix entrecoupée, et le plus grand de tous [les] plaisirs!” (Coulet, Pygmalions des lumières, 63–64). 32. [Boureau-­Deslandes], Pigmalion, 84–85. (Coulet, Pygmalions des lumières, 64). 33. Coulet, “Présentation,” 24. 34. Denis Diderot, Pensées philosophiques ([Paris: Laurent Durand] La Haye, 1746). 35. Diderot, Pensées, 2. “On déclame sans fin contre les passions.  .  .  . Cependant il n’y a que les passions & les grandes passions qui puissent élever l’âme aux grandes choses. San elles, plus de sublime, soit dans le moeurs, soit dans les ouvrages; les beaux arts retournent en enfance, & la vertu devient minutieuse.” 36. The three opera ballets were acts taken from Les Fêtes de l’Eté; Amours déguisés; and Le Triomphe des Arts. Mercure de France, September 1748, 221–22. 37. Mercure de France, April 1751, 166. 38. Coulet, “Présentation,” 11–12. 39. Antoine Houdar de La Motte, Le Triomphe des Arts (Amsterdam: Henri Schelte, 1701), 41–44; Coulet, Pygmalion des lumières, 39–46. 40. Mercure de France, September 1748, 222. “beaucoup de personnes trouveront que le Pigmalion de M. de La Motte est plus mutilé que le Pasquin de Rome.” 41. Amanda Claridge, Judith Toms, and Tony Cubberley, Rome: An Oxford Archeological Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 211.

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42. Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 100. 43. Correspondance de Madame Graffigny, 13 vols., vol. 11, 26 avril 1749–2 juillet 1750, lettres 1391–1569, prepared for English Showalter with P. Allan et al. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004), 244n14. 44. There was also some amusing verse circulating among the Parisian public: “Against the honor of the dead sublime / You know, Houdard, what are your crimes / By the rigor of your penalty: / It is that our day, with impunity / Makes you the butt of vile outrage / Your Fate is decided at Passy / But what fate? / Tremble, here it is: / Ballot rewrote your work.” (Passy was the country home of Rameau’s patron Poupelinière.) Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, Correspondance littéraires, 2 vols. (1877; Nendeln: Kraus, 1968), 1:226. 45. Correspondance de Madame Graffigny, 9: 244. The Paris dates were September 10, 1748, and March 9 and December 2, 1751. 46. Mercure de France, April 1751. 47. Mercure de France, April 1751, 166–67. “le génie lumineux, hardi, & fecund.” 48. Paul-­Marie Masson, L’Opéra de Rameau (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1930), 79–80. 49. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (New York: Penguin, 1988), 326–63. 50. Paul-­Marie Masson, “La ‘Lettre sur Omphale’ (1752),” Revue de Musicologie, 24.73/74 (1945): 1–19, 2. 51. Masson, “La ‘Lettre.’” 52. Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Lettre de M. Grimm sur Omphale, tragédie lyrique, reprise par l’Académie royale de Musique le 14 Janvier 1752, in Denise Launay, La Querelle des Bouffons, 3 vols. (Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1973) 1:48–49. “ En vain je commanderois à mes larme, en vain je tâcherois de les arrêter. Cela n’appartient qu’à celui qui les fait couler. Il me saisit tout-­à-­ coup par un trait de génie; deux accords qui précédent la prière de Pigmalion à Vénus, & qui sont d’une simplicité extrême & un purchangement du mode mineur au majeur. Avec quel bonheur il exprime & par le chant, par le basse, & par la symphonie ces mots: “Pourrois-­tu condamner la source de mes larmes!” En un mot, si la statue ne s’animoit point, & si je n’étois saisi au moment du miracle par ce changement hardi et heureux du ton G re sol en E si mi majeur, il m’arriveroit comme à son amant ce qu’il lui dit dans une modulation que me déchire l’âme: “Si le Ciel ne vous eut fait vivre, Il me condamnoit à mourir! Il me condamnoit à mourir!”

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53. Grimm, Lettre, 42–43; Masson, “La ‘Lettre,’” 13; Mercure de France, April 1751, 167–68. 54. Denis Diderot, L’Interprétation de la nature, in Oeuvres, 9:25–111. 55. For what is now the classic discussion see Wilda Anderson, Diderot’s Dream (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 27–33. 56. Diderot, Pensées, in Oeuvres, 9:60. “le Cahos est une impossibilité; car il est un ordre essentiellement conséquent aux qualités primitives de la matière.” 57. Cynthia Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue, 1750–1764 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). 58. For example, art historian Victor Stoichita is tempted to say that the eighteenth century was “haunted by” the motif of the living statue. Stoi­ chi­ta, The Pygmalion Effect, 111.

❖ part

ii ❖

Interface and Merger

Gorgonick Spirits Myth, Figuration, and Mineral Vivency in the Writings of Thomas Browne

Jessica Wolfe

R

enaissance naturalists regularly acknowledge that certain organisms occupy the odd interstices or “difficult middles” between discrete but adjacent rungs of the scale of nature, terming them lithophytes, or stone-­plants, and zoophytes, or plant-­animals.1 Yet there existed during the period neither an exact idiom for describing, nor a natural-­philosophical consensus for classifying, those organisms or parts of organisms that appear to possess characteristics of both animal and mineral bodies or to manifest the capacity for mutual transcorporation: horns and tusks, teeth and bone, kidney stones and testaceous shells, toadstones and Bezoar stones, figured stones imprinted with animal shapes, and fossilized insects preserved in amber. Because animals and minerals were not regarded as contiguous on the scale of nature, and because minerals were not held to be living organisms by at least some natural philosophers of the period, the mutual participation and reciprocal transmutability of animal and mineral bodies prove especially baffling for Renaissance naturalists. The relationship between animal and mineral bodies was one of the magnalia naturæ (magnalities or mighty works of nature), to use a phrase popularized by Francis Bacon, an arena of natural philosophy that could answer foundational questions about life and matter.2 The concurrence or aggregation of animal and mineral bodies perturb and throw into question the latent correspondences and hierarchies that were commonly believed to govern the premodern scale of nature, all the more so when mineral bodies appear to be subsumed within, or perhaps merely to supplement, animal bodies. Thus the study of this relationship might help define more precisely the boundaries between

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living and nonliving organisms, as well as what distinction, if any, inheres between living organisms and their seemingly nonliving extensions, such as horns, tusks, or kidney stones. The first half of the seventeenth century enjoyed a great deal of intellectual advancement in the field of mineralogy and also a great deal of lively debate, much of it aimed at figuring out how minerals form, why they assume the particular shapes they do, and what relation, if any, stones and gems bear to animal and vegetable bodies, especially in their respective processes of generation. Leading this revolution in the reinterpretation of chemical and mineral form were natural philosophers such as Daniel Sennert (1572–1637) and Jan Baptist van Helmont (1580–1644), whose work adapted but also complicated Paracelsus’s idea of the Archeus, the “inner Alchemist” or mysterious shaping power that was widely held to govern the generation and growth of various bodies. Although vitalist in principle and idiom, this Paracelsian conception of an active, self-­organizing intelligence that maintains and shapes various organisms does not yield consensus over whether minerals are in fact alive or whether they grow in a manner analogous to animal and plant life. On one side of the divide, Daniel Sennert endorses the concept of an “Architectonick spirit” in minerals, likening their inner forms to those of plants and animals, while English Paracelsian Edward Jorden similarly speaks of a “seminarie Spirit of all minerals in the bowels of the earth.” But other contemporary naturalists and anatomists, including Anselm Boetius de Boodt and Gabriele Fallopius, distinguish the formative faculty of minerals from anything like a vegetative soul even as they routinely explain the growth of minerals in terms of seeds (semina) or in terms of what the Neapolitan apothecary and naturalist Ferrante Imperato (c. 1525–c. 1615) calls a “vegetable power” (virtù vegetale), phrasing that bestows upon minerals a vegetative and lively quality, if not strictly speaking a soul.3 Seventeenth-­century confusion over the status of minerals vis-­ à-­vis higher life forms is not restricted to questions of generation, however, but rather extends to all manner of change within the mineral realm as well as metamorphoses between it and other realms. In his Discourse of Naturall Bathes (1631), an important English source on mineralogy and metallurgy, Jorden defines minerals as “Inanimat perfect bodies” but then qualifies that definition by observing that they are not “permanent in one and the same kinde” in that they “participate with animales, vegetables,” and other minerals, “so to be transmuted into any of them.”4

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This essay examines late Renaissance debates over the “vivency” or aliveness of minerals, focusing on how and to what end seventeenth-­century natural philosophers puzzle over a variety of odd conjunctions between mineral and animal or vegetable bodies in an effort to identify the meaning of what Tim Ingold has called the “mutual permeability and binding” among different elements.5 I focus on the writings of the English naturalist and physician Thomas Browne (1605–82), who writes extensively about both mythical and physical accounts of the commonalities, reciprocities, and interchanges between minerals and other organisms with remarkable imaginative potency and a refined sense of the ontological and theological significance of the potential transmutability of animal into mineral matter or vice versa. Preoccupied with generation and corruption, with interstitial creatures or ones that possess what he calls “mixed and participating natures,” and with transformations ranging from the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly to the rotting of human flesh and the rusting of iron, Browne is remarkably attentive to the tropic powers of nature in ways sympathetic with the seventeenth-­century poets analyzed by Miriam Jacobson elsewhere in this volume, preoccupied with the mutually transformative and hybridizing effects of the botanical embrace of vine and tree.6 Although Browne does not believe in the transmutability of all matter to the degree that Jorden does, he is fascinated by form and transformation in the mineral world. By studying state changes such as liquefaction and concretion, rarefaction and condensation, and crystallization and petrification, Browne seeks to establish whether minerals grow and change in ways analogous to plants and animals or whether mineral growth might instead merely be described according to metaphors and similitudes that create a false or deceptive correspondence between stones and gems on the one hand and plants and animals on the other. Browne’s interest in mixture and metamorphosis in the natural world is complicated by his attunement to what this essay calls “figuration.” By figuration, I mean the role that figures of speech, especially metaphors, play in natural-­philosophical discourse, the capacity of nature to generate and replicate figures (shapes, patterns, or images), and the way quasi-­fictive figures—myths, fables, hieroglyphs, and the products of fancy—represent but also supplement natural facts. Browne’s interest in the “amphibious and mixt intention” of a nature that cherishes the intermingling of forms

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is counterbalanced by his skeptical recognition that figuration—the artful designs or simulations generated by nature itself, but also the rhetorical flourishes and fictions that describe, shape, and distort nature—makes it difficult to differentiate between physical transformation or genuine hybridity and those instances when apparent metamorphosis or mixture are merely a figment of human fancy, the vestige of a myth, or a specimen of nature’s own deceptive artistry (PE 3.13:152). The term figura originally meant “plastic form,” according to Erich Auerbach’s seminal essay on the subject, expressing something “living and dynamic” but also “incomplete and playful,” and these senses still inform natural-­philosophical discussions about figuration in nature during the seventeenth century, especially where questions about taxonomic relationships or the plasticity of boundaries are concerned.7 As the term figure accumulates additional meanings during the classical and medieval eras—copy or likeness, model, emblem or type, figment or phantasm—it begins to assume an especially pivotal role in mediating hermeneutic questions both within natural philosophy and outside of it. What forces, external or internal, create figures in nature? Are figures, or the apparent correspondences between them, reliable and decipherable marks of identity, cause, and relation in the natural world? Might these figurations instead constitute a kind of impersonation in which discrete and unrelated bodies mimic each other, or might they even signal the imposition of human fancy, or the equally fertile imaginative power of figurative language, upon that nature? The difficulty of answering such questions is especially evident in Browne’s interpretation of what were often termed animal concretions (or “concretes”), since the process by which an animal grows into a mineral, or grows a mineral-­like appendage or supplement, throws into doubt which aspects of the process might be literal and which metaphorical— which changes or mixtures are real, to use Browne’s terms, and which are merely “representments.” In his effort to establish more reliable boundaries between the animal and mineral realms, Browne focuses on what he calls the “authentick notations” evident in the teeth, horns, and antlers of cows, deer, and horses, visible markings that, like the rings of trees, allow naturalists to establish the age of the creature but also turn nature into something upon which metaphors or figures are superimposed (PE 3.17:166). Yet for all of Browne’s confidence in the legibility of a nature inscribed with notations and figures, the most bafflingly interstitial organisms often prove

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to be those in which the markings of one kind of organism are inscribed upon, or unfolded from within, another kind of organism: stones figured in the shape of animals, flies preserved in amber, or gall stones that conform to the same pyramidical shapes as diamonds and other minerals found in the earth. Writing about insects preserved in amber, objects of scientific and poetic fascination from Pliny and Martial down through the Renaissance, Browne observes that these may prove “not real but representative,” illusionistic vestiges of actual bodies no longer present, or copies without originals. Yet a moment later, he equivocates, writing that there are nonetheless instances in which “reals [have] made good their representments,” a comment that reveals his enduring preoccupation with the problem that the “real”—whatever is visible, material, or not merely instantiated in words or images—may not correspond with representations of the real, an error that he conceives as a form of idolatry in which one receives the “representation of things as the substance and thing it self ” (PE 2.4:86, 1.4:16).8 By the end of the seventeenth century, the problem of distinguishing nature’s realities from its representments had come to focus squarely on the problem of fossils, objects alternately understood to be figured stones or the petrified remains of formerly living organisms. The former theory allowed for the possibility that animal or plant figures were generated abiogenically, by mysterious plastic forces within minerals themselves, or as Athanasius Kircher explains it, with a “lithogenetic nature” (naturam lithogeneticam) that generates in stones figures of birds, alphabets, and even the figure of the crucified Christ (figure 1).9 A half century earlier, Browne already discerns in the generation of figured stones and fossilized insects a puzzle of supplementarity: Is an animal body added to stone, its vestiges then left behind, is it metamorphosed into stone, or does the stone merely project the figure of an animal body that was never present in the first place? The term figure, like the related word type, allows for the coexistence of all these possibilities, since “figure,” in Browne’s usage, may denote the form imposed upon an organic body by its own intrinsic powers (the “regular figure” of mistletoe); a form superimposed upon a natural body, like the “figures of men and women” carved into mandrake roots; or a fictive or mythic representation that becomes real, like the “Hieroglyphicall” figures of animals that originally possessed “no Copy in Nature” but that “after became Mythologicall unto the Greeks . . . and by processe of tradition, stole into a totall verity” (PE 2.6:143, 5.20:419, 3.4:173).

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Figure 1.  Mundus Subterraneus, Tomus II, Athanasius Kircher (Amsterdam, 1665), 8.9, p. 32, “Figuræ Volucrium, Quas natura in lapidibus depinxit” (Figures of birds that nature depicts in stone). (British Library)

In this respect, Browne both extends and complicates Bacon’s critique of figuration as an imperfect or error-­prone instrument of natural philosophy. While Bacon had sought to purge natural philosophy of the “delicate learning” that manifests itself in an overuse of “tropes and figures” that entice men to study “Words and not Matter,” Browne develops a more complex, and less hostile, view of metaphor, myth, and figure as he composes Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646; 1672), a work aligned with Bacon’s Instauratio Magna in some respects but divergent from Bacon in its insistence that nature itself is figurate, composed of figures at times produced by or

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aligned with the physical truth of things and at times not.10 Whereas Bacon imagines natural philosophy as moving away from a discipline that was formerly “full of Fables, and of Parables . . . and of Similitudes of all sorts,” Browne posits a reciprocally supplementary relationship between natural philosophy on the one hand and myths and figures on the other.11 His frequent invocation of myths of transformation between animal and mineral bodies, including Lot’s wife, Niobe, the Heliades, and Medusa, lay bare how such myths may explain and validate instances of natural metamorphosis but also may displace or supplant the “original” natural processes that they mythologize. Nature becomes a template upon which metaphors or figures are superimposed, such that “the idea of the original is created by the copies,” a problem that Browne attempts to solve hermeneutically, as well as experimentally, by exploring the relative soundness of literal and figurative interpretation in the pursuit of scientific truth.12

In both his Religio Medici (1643) and again in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne insists upon the literal truthfulness of the biblical story of Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt: “We will not question the Metamorphosis of Lots wife, or whether she were transformed into a real statua of Salt: though some conceive that expression Metaphorical, and no more thereby then a lasting and durable column, according to the nature of Salt, which admitteth no corruption” (PE 7.11:142–43).13 Although Browne grants in Religio that the transmigration of souls is generally “impossible,” a theory not even intended “positively, and in a literall sense,” by its founder, Pythagoras, his willingness to make an exception for Lot’s wife sheds light upon his understanding of the natural processes at work when organic bodies do, in fact, assume a mineral form. As is also the case with contemporary accounts of the hardening of amber, discussed below, the transformation of Lot’s wife confirms some key physical principles about salt, a mineral that was held by many natural philosophers of the period to be the “cause of Concretion and Coagulation,” to act as a preservative, and also to offer a vital clue to the relationship between mineral and animal bodies, inasmuch as it is found in earth and seawater but also in organic emissions such as sweat and urine.14 On the subject of Lot’s wife, Browne departs from his more customary skepticism toward the outlandish metamorphoses narrated by classical mythology. When Browne scoffs that “to weep into stones are fables,”

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for instance, he dismisses Ovid’s account of Niobe, the very mythological figure who was often interpreted during the Renaissance as a pagan analogue for Lot’s wife. Yet Browne is willing to entertain the transformation narrated at Genesis 19:26 as evidence of the natural course of corruption, induration, and petrification likewise manifest in the interred corpses that populate his 1658 Urn-­Buriall, variously dissolving and moldering as they become quarry for the earthy substances in which they are buried.15 Although teeth, bones, and hair “give the most lasting defiance to corruption,” Browne writes in Urn-­Buriall, human flesh, according to one particularly morbid description, is worn away by “the nitre of the Earth, and the salt and lixivious liquor of the body” such that it transforms “coagulated large lumps of fat, into the consistence of the hardest castle-­soap,” a concretion whose chemical components approach those by which a living body might be changed into a “real statua” of salt.16 What nature itself does not manage to transcorporate from flesh to stone or mineral may nonetheless be effected by human means, when succeeding generations “have our sculs made drinking-­bowls, and our bones turned into Pipes,” an observation that bears out Browne’s recognition that, when it comes to the transformation of animal into mineral bodies, art may complete or mimic what nature initiates.17 Lot’s wife is not simply calcified into salt but also reshaped into a statue, while skeletons petrify into artefacts, processes that confound the distinction between the real and the representative by opening up the possibility that physical transformations may be interpreted in a literal or figurative sense or both. When a body turns into a “real statua” of salt, art supplements nature: the representation complements, alters, and also displaces what it represents all at once. Browne’s insistence upon reading the transformation of Lot’s wife literally rather than figuratively runs counter to his belief that interpretive errors in the study of nature as well as scripture arise when errant readers “conver[t] Metaphors into proprieties” or otherwise fail to “attai[n] the deuteroscopy, and second intention of the words” (PE 1.4:13, 1.3:9). As Browne sees it, salt is the physical constituent that licenses a departure from a tropological interpretation of Lot’s wife and encourages the kind of reading also endorsed by seventeenth-­century biblical commentators such as Andrew Willet and John Downame, the former insisting that Lot’s wife is no factitious allegory but rather the true relation of a woman turning into a “pillar of materiall salt,” and the latter explaining how such a transformation

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may have transpired, since the location near the Dead Sea where Lot’s wife was transformed, according to Downame, “is noted for Salt as well as for Brimstone,” making it scientifically feasible that she was “strooke dead with lightning, and that her body was hardened and fixed in the place where it stood, and that it was of a salt and brackish smel.”18 As a physician especially admired for his treatment of kidney stones, Browne has a firm grasp of the process by which “salt spirits have a power to congeal and coagulate unctuous bodies,” whether in the “Manufacture of Soap” or birdlime or, quite possibly, in forming the “stones or calculous concretions in Kidney or Bladder,” the latter process demonstrating how living bodies may exhibit the kind of “lapidifical principle” evident in minerals, the intrinsic power or seed that causes concretion from within, as distinct from the effects of an external agent such as cold (PE 2.4:86).19 Browne’s observations on the formation of kidney and gall stones appear in a chapter of his Pseudodoxia devoted to “Bodies Electrical,” a chapter that probes the hazy, ambiguous boundary between minerals and the rest of created nature in various ways. One of a series of chapters in book 2 devoted to the formation and action of metals and stones, including crystal, the magnet and lodestone, and potable gold, Pseudodoxia 2.4 ends with a discussion of amber, now known to be fossilized tree resin, but regarded as a mineral by Browne, who erroneously “corrects” the widespread belief, derived from Pliny and other classical naturalists, that it is a “vegetable concretion” (PE 2.4:85–86).20 Browne’s inclination to classify amber as mineral hardened from a “fat and bituminous juice coagulated by the saltness of the Sea” is less motivated by sense evidence, experimentation, or authority than by a desire to distance the actual substance of amber from the myth that narrates its etiology, Ovid’s “Fable of Phæthons sisters” the Heliades, changed at the death of their brother into poplar trees, enfolded into the “creeping barke” which then sheds tears “hardned by the Sunne, to Amber grow.”21 By contrast to his interpretation of Lot’s wife, Browne here strives to distinguish fable from scientific fact. In so doing, he errs in repudiating the idea that amber is formed from “the gums of Trees,” although he is not averse to the possibility that electrical friction may also arise in vegetable and animal bodies, even conducting trials for electrical friction on the hooves of elk, hawks’ talons, the sword of a swordfish, tortoise shells, and “what is usually conceived Unicorns-­horn,” substances united by their shared resemblance to mineral concretions (PE 2.4:83).

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Cognizant of the problem that “similitudes, agreements, and conjugations of things” are of limited assistance in finding out natural causes, Browne is fascinated by but also suspicious of these apparent imitations of mineral bodies on or in animal bodies, many of which, including tree gum, teeth, and the bills of birds, had been classified by Bacon as “conformable instances”—structures that could either deceive or undeceive the natural philosopher on account of their “promiscuous similitude” to other, possibly unrelated, structures.22 Like the leftover food and the hair analyzed elsewhere in this volume by Diane Purkiss and Jayne Lewis, the mineral bodies that appear lodged within, or growing out of, animal bodies vex the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, not least because, like the gloved hands analyzed by Lynn Festa’s essay, the two kinds of bodies transform and act upon the other when they come into contact.23 Browne collected, examined, and made trials on various “animal concretes,” the minerally or stony protuberances found on, or in, animal bodies. In various writings on the subject, he demonstrates peculiar interest in substances that resist taxonomic classification: the enormous “teeth” of the elephant, perhaps more properly termed horns (PE 3.1:118); the “animal shapes” that may be discerned in minerals such as echinite (PE 3.24:188); or the “hard and lapideous concretions” (PE 3.13:150) in the heads of toads, which Browne supposes might be a mineral concretion that grows inside the animal or perhaps the petrified forehead bone of the toad itself. The enigmatic nature of animal concretions is especially on display in Browne’s discussion of unicorn horn, which he argues is not one substance but many, representing multiple “lapidescencies and petrifactive mutations of hard bodies; sometimes of Horn, of teeth, of bones, and branches of trees” (PE 3.23:184). The most reliable way of distinguishing these structures from each other is to submit them to physical experiment: true horn, Browne argues, mollifies with fire, or softens into a jelly, whereas objects masquerading as horn, such as the narwhal tusk, do not, a theory further elaborated by Robert Boyle in his 1661 Sceptical chymist.24 Browne’s recognition that the taxonomic status of a given organism— animal, vegetable, or mineral—may best be revealed by studying what transpires when it is subjected to cold or heat is closely indebted to Bacon’s extensive discussion of the “induration” or hardening of bodies in Sylva Sylvarum, which asserts that concretion may be effected in three ways: by cold, heat, or what Bacon calls “assimilation,” when a hard body, such as a

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tree, incorporates a soft one near it.25 Browne pluralizes and complicates Bacon’s understanding of the varied means by which concretion occurs: in one sole chapter of Pseudodoxia, he distinguishes no fewer than five discrete actions that fall within the general category of concretion: conglaciation, congelation, fixation, coagulation, and incrassation, each involving a discrete physical process. In his notebooks, Browne distinguishes these actions even further, noting that “many coagulums there are in nature,” including multiple rennets and salts.26 Natural phenomena that appear to jumble the animal and the mineral, or to posit a correspondence between them, are especially puzzling to Browne given his predominantly physico-­theological interpretation of created nature. Although Genesis leaves “no mention of Minerals,” this absence does not necessarily mean that minerals were not divinely created, nor does it imply that they are not alive (PE 2.1:57). And while Browne does argue for the importance of viewing minerals as a “very large Classis of Creatures in the Earth, far above the condition of elementarity,” which is to say they approach vivency much more than air or water alone, he also insists upon an interpretation of the biblical creation that imposes upon the natural world a “distinct creation of distinguisht creatures” in which stones, plants, sea creatures, and land creatures each emerge in “incommunicate varieties, and irrelative seminalities, as well as divided places; and so although we say the world was made in six days, yet was there as it were a world in every one” (PE 3.24:188). Embedded in a larger work that stresses “ecological entanglement” side by side with singularity, Browne’s conviction in the “incommunicate” or unrelated categories of created nature initiates a series of discussions in Pseudodoxia concerning the animal capacity to assimilate, or digest, mineral substances. This is a process that reverses the one traced by the editors in their discussion in the introduction to this collection of the Corinthian column that is imagined by Hogarth to begin its life as “dock-­leaves growing up against a basket.” Striking a skeptical attitude toward the medicinal value of potable gold, Browne argues that to expect a “substantial conversion,” or an efficacious absorption, of gold by the human digestive system is unreasonable, a “starving absurdity,” he quips, similar to the one “which befel the wishes of Midas,” while in a chapter devoted to the legend that the ostrich is capable of digesting iron, Browne marshals an impressive list of authorities who testify to the fact that while the bird may well consume various metals and stones, no “chilifcative mutation, or

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alimental conversion” occurs, and the pebbles expelled unchanged, much in the way that “we swallow Cherry-­stones, but void them unconcocted” (PE 2.5:90, 3.22:181). Nutrition and digestion provide Browne with one reasonably dependable method to distinguish between animate and inanimate, between animal and mineral. As he explains in a chapter of Pseudodoxia devoted to debunking the myth that chameleons live only on the “inanimated” substance of air, nutriment must consist of a living body or at least possess “approximate dispositions unto animation” (PE 3.21:175). Yet the laws of digestion do not establish entirely satisfactory boundaries between incommunicate bodies, and this is in part because Browne’s belief in the fundamental incompatibility, whether digestive or otherwise, of “distinguisht” creatures is difficult to square with his contrary interest in the recombinant, the hybrid, and the “amphibious,” with those organisms, ranging from coral and frogs to bats to humans, that he classifies as possessing a “middle forme” that enables them to “live . . . in divided and distinguished worlds.”27

Book 2 of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which begins the body of the work, opens with a chapter on crystal, the ideal substance with which to inaugurate Browne’s multifaceted investigation into questions of form and transformation in the natural world, as well as his exploration of the errors generated when myth is confused with scientific fact and metaphors with literalities. As he unravels several related falsehoods concerning crystal—that it is ice further congealed, that it is hardened by cold, and that it assumes its “strange” hexagonal form (as ice might, in a hexagonal ice cube tray) on account of the “surface where it concreteth,” Browne strikes a middle ground between those natural philosophers who hold minerals to be alive and those who do not (PE 2.1:54–55). He concedes that minerals “are determined by seminalities, that is, created and defined seeds committed unto the Earth from the beginning,” an idea that expands upon Augustine’s argument that all creatures were placed by God in the created world as seeds or “primordial causes . . . before they came forth in the visible shape proper to their kind.”28 Yet Browne also cautions that if minerals are alive, they are not so “in a distinct or indisputable way of vivency, or answering in all points the properties or affections of Plants,” a warning against false or totalizing correspondences that Browne reiterates at regular junctures of Pseudodoxia

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Epidemica, from the mandrake root that only vaguely resembles the hinder parts of a human body to the sea creatures that, despite boasting names such as the seahorse and dogfish, do not correspond perfectly with their counterparts on dry land (PE 2.1:57, 2.6:102, 3.24:187). Within the discipline of natural philosophy and also outside of it, the confusion generated by false correspondences is construed by Browne as an error that arises when the figurative is mistaken for the literal or the real for the verbal, mistakes that in turn obscure the proper relationship between scientific fact and myth or fable. To maintain that the seahorse and the horse are related is an error akin to interpreting the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians as “naturally making good their artificiall representations” or of naming plants according to the diseases they cure and then framing superstitious stories to “make good their foundations,” phrasing that in both cases highlights how attempts to confirm or justify a correspondence (“to make good,” in Browne’s parlance) demands a false accommodation of “incommunicate” things with each other (PE 1.9:36, 2.7:111). Browne’s caution in assigning minerals only a debatable or indistinct “vivency” signals his desire to distance himself from the Neoplatonic hylozoism of late sixteenth-­century natural philosophers such as Gi­ro­ la­mo Cardano and Bernardo Telesio, who held that a quasi-­material spirit infused (and thus unified or harmonized) all matter in the cosmos. By the 1650s, this theory had been subjected to serious attack and modification by Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, who instead ascribe the organization of all forms in nature to a “plastick” or formative faculty, guided by divine Providence, which possesses what More calls a “vital congruity” or self-­organizing power, and in later works, both More and Cudworth distance themselves even further from hylozoism, especially from its central doctrine that the world is “One Huge Plant or Vegetable,” as a theory that carries with it dangerously atheistic implications, particularly because it eliminates consideration of final causes and occludes the operation of divine Providence in the natural world.29 Browne solves this problem, as do other late Renaissance natural philosophers such as Jacob Schegk (in his 1580 De Plastica seminis facultate), by redefining the “plastic” or seminal faculty in minerals as neither animate nor inanimate but rather—like sperm—an instrument for the generation of an animate body that has a productive potentiality but no actual vivency.30 Yet despite their caution in assigning life to minerals, Schegk, Sennert, de

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Boodt, and other like-­minded natural philosophers nonetheless attribute the hardening of minerals to a “lapidifical” juice, Browne’s preferred translation, along with “liquor,” of the Latin succus, a vital sap or liquid found in minerals but also in plants, deemed fundamental to the generation, growth, and nutrition of both.31 Despite the vegetative metaphors punctuating his discussion of crystal formation, Browne’s caution about the metaphors and figures that govern mineralogical discourse anticipates the groundbreaking work of Nicolaus Steno (1638–86), whose 1669 Prodromus, a study of mineral stratification that rejects the predominantly analogical thinking of earlier seventeenth-­ century mineralogists, insisting that “mountains do not grow in the way plants do,” that crystal does not “grow vegetatively” (vegetando crescere), and that rocks have nothing in common with the bones of animals.32 Warning that a mineral such as crystal does not “answer” plants in all points or properties, Browne labors to rectify errors that arise from the confusion between, or the conflation of, “postulatory” similitudes, or what he later terms “reall correspondencies” (PE 2.6:101, 5.22:313). His attention to this problem elaborates upon Bacon’s recognition that the “human understanding  .  .  . easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things that it really finds,” a dilemma that proves especially thorny for establishing a taxonomy of the natural world.33 Browne’s response to this problem is complex. On one hand, he censures the errors generated by an “assimilating phansie” that imposes more similitude or uniformity upon nature than in fact exists in it, thus allowing “vegetable Realities” to be “forced into Animall Representations” as in the case of the mandrake, whose bipedal roots resemble human legs to some much in the way that, when we look at clouds, we “behold them in shapes conformable to pre-­apprehensions,” fashioning them into weasels or walruses according to our imagination (PE 2.6:101). Yet Browne is also captivated by nature’s habit of copying or transcribing itself, creating figures of one organism in another: in “vegetables . . . which carry a neare and allowable similitude unto animals” such as the Man-­Orchis, or in the “animall shapes” that may easily be discerned in minerals such as the star-­struck asteria (Lapis stellaris) and conchites, which are not shell-­shaped stones but rather fossilized animal shells (PE 2.6:101, 3.24:188). Putting aside the deceptiveness of names, which may generate real correspondences where they do not exist, how can minerals and vegetables be said to share no characteristics in common when one can

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so easily detect “vegetable figurations, upon the sides of glasses, so rarely delineated in frosts” (PE 3.21:177)? Like Bacon, Browne recognizes that the misapprehension of names can promote false analogies, a problem that still haunts ecocritical discourse eager to strip away the anthropomorphic and anthropocentric impositions of language itself.34 The eaglestone (or ætite) and the seahorse, to use two examples cited by Browne, bear no physiological kinship whatsoever to eagles or horses, thus creating what Pseudodoxia calls a “fallacy of Aequivocation, from a society in name inferring an Identity in nature” (PE 2.1:58).35 Such confusion can generate taxonomic disarray, but it can also produce bad medicine, particularly when the purported efficacy of plant or mineral remedies is established through signatures, the visual correspondences that—like the kidney stone or lungwort plant that were believed to break up kidney stones and cure pulmonary ailments, respectively—were the cornerstone of the Paracelsian belief that nature inscribed each organism according to its curative benefit.36 Although Browne expresses distrust in the doctrine of signatures, he does not reject the fundamentally artisanal view of nature associated with Paracelsianism, and he seems ambivalent about how best to interpret those instances when nature’s intrinsic artistry fashions semblances that are not merely “nominal” (or verbal) but exist in real and material form. As I suggested at the beginning of this essay, the puzzle of how to interpret minerals (or vegetables) that mimic the shape or pattern of animals is underscored by Browne’s use of the word figure, which appears more than sixty times throughout Pseudodoxia, its equivocal and multiple meanings encapsulating the predicament that it is often difficult to discern where fancied similitudes end and where nature’s own bizarre impersonations begin. Figure, in Browne’s writings, may refer to the physical form of a natural organism or of an abstract geometrical shape, such as the bones that “afford . . . figure” to a body; to an image or artifact created so as to resemble something in nature; or to a visual or verbal symbol that encourages an allegorical or “deuteroscopic” interpretation beyond the literal, for instance “Hieroglyphicall figures” or the “Figures, or Tropologies” that certain readers fail to discern in the scripture when their understanding is “confined unto the literal sense of the Text” (Urn-­Buriall 3:50; PE 1.3:9). In his discussion of how crystal arises out of a “seminal root” distinctive to itself, Browne’s use of the term figure signals his appreciation of the contiguities

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between nature and art while also establishing his belief that nature generates various and discrete figures out of a primordial and “confused” matter: As for the figure of Crystal (which is very strange, and forced Pliny to despair of resolution) it is for the most part hexagonal or six cornered; being built upon a confused matter, from whence as it were from a root angular figures arise, even as in the Amethyst and Basaltes. Which regular figuration hath made some opinion, it hath not its determination from circumscription, or as conforming unto contiguities, but rather from a seminal root, and formative principle of its own, even as we observe in several other concretions. So the stones which are sometime found in the gall of a man, are most triangular and pyramidal, although the figure of that part seems not to cooperate thereto. So the Asteria or lapis stellaris, hath on it the figure of a Star, so Lapis Judaicus hath circular lines in length all down its body, and equidistant, as though they had been turned by Art. (PE 2.1:55)

Whereas the Garden of Cyrus emphasizes the uniformity of a nature whose quincuncial patterns recur in organisms ranging from crucigerous stones (marked with the figure of a cross) and the five-­cornered branches of the oak tree to the “retiary spider,” all evidence of the “elegancy” of nature’s hand in generating “correspondencies,” Pseudodoxia attends to the distinctiveness of each individual mineral figuration, explaining the singularity of each not according to its “circumambiency” (that is, the container in which it is formed) but rather according to the unique and intrinsic “formative principle” of each.37 In this respect, Browne deviates from Bacon, who observes in his Sylva Sylvarum that while plants are “Figurate and Determinate, which Inanimate Bodies are not” because the former possess the capacity to nourish and propagate while metals and minerals do not, a distinction that carries with it crucial ontological implications, since the nutritive or vegetative soul is, in an Aristotelian scheme, the one that bestows life and is thus shared by all animate creatures.38 But seventeenth-­century mineralogists such as Sennert and de Boodt cleave much closer to Browne’s position, maintaining that minerals do nourish and propagate, and also grow into peculiar figures, by virtue of the “power of [their] own seminality” (potius ex proprio seminario) or through an “Architectonic spirit and formative faculty” although de Boodt, for one, stops short of asserting that this means minerals are alive

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in the same sense that plants and animals are.39 Like de Boodt and Sennert, Browne theorizes mineral formation as owing to an internal “lapidifical spirit,” or what Browne sometimes calls a “concretive spirit,” a theory indebted to the Galenic concept of a “molding faculty” or power (δυναμις διπλαστικη) used to explain the formation of embryos, and one which diverges from the traditional explanation of mineral formation in Aristotle’s Meteorologica, which holds that stones and minerals are formed by the exhalation of subterranean vapors that congeal, and at times crystallize, elements in the earth.40 Browne chooses a striking metaphor to explain the workings of crystal’s peculiar concretive spirit, describing how the mineral contains its own “seeds of petrification” such that it acts as the “Gorgon of it self,” an allusion to Ovid’s fable of Medusa and Perseus in books 4 and 5 of The Metamorphoses that adds a sense of preternatural mystery to Browne’s discussion of mineral formation (PE 2.1:56). The image derives from Albertus Magnus, whose De Mineralibus (thirteenth century) asserts that the “mineralizing power” responsible for converting earth and water to stone is confirmed by the story of the “Gorgon, who is said to have converted into stone those who looked upon her.”41 Routinely invoked by medieval and Renaissance alchemists as a symbol for alchemical transmutation, the Gorgon becomes, by the early seventeenth century, a kind of mythological ellipsis for the mysterious process of lapidification, especially that of animal and human bodies.42 Both Santorio Santorio and Andreas Libavius refer to waters and spirits that possess petrifying powers as “Gorgonei fontes,” while Pseudodoxia’s earliest English readers, including Robert Boyle and Walter Charleton, invoke the same Ovidian myth to explain the action of cold as a “Gorgonick spirit” or to theorize how the “Gorgon, or Lapidifactory principle, to which all Concreted substances ow their Coagulation . . . is a Saline Fixative Spirit,” a theory that Charleton extends, in his 1650 Spiritus Gorgonicus, vi sua saxipara exutus, to an explication of how calculi in the human body are formed by a stone-­producing spirit omnipresent in created nature.43 Like Browne’s repeated assertion that the transformation of Lot’s wife may be interpreted literally because the metamorphosis it narrates accurately depicts the lapidifical powers of salt, his invocation of the Gorgon to explain the formation of crystal places myth and science on a level without assigning a clear priority to either. Browne’s recourse to a metaphor

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drawn from Ovidian mythology in order to explain the concretion of crystal reflects his appreciation that the Metamorphoses narrates the restless transformation of bodies, depicting how “None holds his owne: for Nature ever joyes / In change, and with new formes the old supplies.”44 Various chapters in books 2 and 3 of Pseudodoxia Epidemica are interlaced with a common scaffolding of Ovidian fable, and while Browne at times invokes classical myths in order to debunk them as absurd, he is equally likely to concede that the “use of fictions, Apologues and fables be not unwarrantable” for the pursuit of scientific truths, at least if those fables are interpreted in an adequately figurative sense (PE 1.9:37). What results is a complex and nuanced meditation on the interrelationship between myth and science in which each discipline of knowledge neither confirms nor undermines the other in any simple sense but rather demands the exercising of a deuteroscopic hermeneutic in order to reconcile the two. Browne’s allusion to crystal playing Perseus to its own Medusa in book 2, chapter 1, of Pseudodoxia, for instance, is linked thematically to a discussion of coral five chapters later, a “stone-­plant” whose concretion, effected according to Browne not by the air but rather by the “coagulating spirits of Salt, and lapidifical juice of the Sea,” also possesses an Ovidian etiology. According to Ovid, coral forms out of seaweed that hardens from contact with the decapitated head of Medusa when Perseus lays it to rest on the seashore: the ground he strew With leaves and twigs that under water grew: Whereon, Medusa’s ugly face he layes. The greene, yet juicy, and attractive sprayes From the toucht Monster stiffning hardnesse tooke; And their owne native pliancy forsooke. . . . . . . The Corall now that propertie doth keepe, Receiving hardnes from felt ayre alone: Beneath the Sea a twig, above a stone.45

Although Browne never mentions Ovid explicitly in his account of how coral “overcomes its vegetability, and converts  .  .  . into a lapideous substance,” the mythological groundwork of the phenomenon informs his explanation as well as shaping its status as a magnality of nature, one of a number of natural oddities addressed in the Metamorphoses that resurface in the pages of Pseudodoxia Epidemica (2.5:96).

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On the surface, at least, Browne’s attitude toward the scientific import of myth closely resembles that of Bacon, whose De Sapientia Veterum (1609) interprets various mythological figures as moral or natural allegories. Yet while Bacon expresses the concern that fables are made of “pliant stuff ” and may thus be manipulated with a “little dexterity and discourse of wit” so as to become overlaid with meanings never intended by their creators, Browne instead stresses the ways that myth and science alike are obligated to and measured by the same set of natural laws.46 Moreover, whereas Bacon challenges the idea that “Allegories are alwaies adventitially, & as it were by constraint . . . included in Fables,” an argument motivated in part by his distaste for the alchemists who “sottishly . . . appropriate the Fancies and Delights of Poets” in order to explain the transformation of metals, Browne postulates that myth may be superimposed upon a foundation of natural philosophy and conversely that nature may also imitate myth and thus turn a fictive “representment” into something real, as in the case of the Roman emperor Domitian, whose depravity enticed him to “act the fable” of the Minotaur “into Realitie” by committing acts of bestiality (PE 1.6:37). While Bacon understands myths, like the hieroglyphs to which he compares them, as “pictograph[s] comprehensible through physical congruity” with the natural world, Browne allows for the possibility of a less stable and more convoluted relationship between figure and fact, one in which natural-­philosophical ideas may be “delivered Hieroglyphically, metaphorically, illustratively, and not with reference unto action, or causality,” like vehicles without tenors (PE 4.12:342).47 Although it is an error, Browne argues, to “receive figures for realities” or to expect the wrong kind of “verity” from fables, he sidesteps Bacon’s investigation into the chicken-­and-­egg question of whether myths precede their scientific undermeanings or vice versa. Instead, Browne modifies Bacon’s essentially “instrumental” attitude toward myth, which holds that fables either conceal or reveal natural fact, into a hermeneutic choice between reading both nature and myth literally or figuratively, a set of contrary alternatives that render the relationship between the real and the representation, and between original and copy, more porous and flexible.48 Consequently, several passages in Pseudodoxia claim that myths concerning metamorphosis are a good deal less absurd than kindred legends of transcorporation and monstrosity endorsed by natural philosophers (PE 3.4:125). Addressing the vulgar error that deer do “yearly lose their pizzel”

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and subsequently grow a new one, Browne argues that even the “fansies of Poets” do not require credence in such outlandish “renovations,” since the missing part of Pelops’s shoulder is “pieced out with ivory” rather than with new flesh, while the “limbs of Hippolitus [are] set together” by Æsculapius but not regenerated anew by the physician (PE 3.9:139–40). So too, according to Browne, “Poets have been more reasonable then Philosophers, and Geryon or Cerberus less monstrous than Amphisbæna,” because every organism has an anterior and a posterior, an arrangement nullified by a serpent with a head at either end but not by the Hesiodic monsters whose triple heads are all located at one end (PE 3.15:155). To weep oneself into a stone may indeed be a fable, and yet we may all be reduced to a real statue of salt. For Browne, fables may prove truer than science, so long as they obey the biological and chemical precepts that govern the organization and transmutation of real bodies.

Notes 1. The phrase “difficult middles” belongs to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval England: on Difficult Middles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); on early modern conceptions of hybridity, see also Steve Mentz, “‘Half-­Fish, Half-­Flesh’: Dolphins, the Ocean, and Early Modern Humans,” 29–46 in The Indistinct Human in Early Modern Literature, ed. Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 2. On magnalia naturæ, see Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London, 1627), 9.24:81. Vivency is Thomas Browne’s coinage, used in a passage of Pseudodoxia Epidemica (London, 1672), cited below. 3. Daniel Sennert, Thirteen Books of natural philosophy (London, 1660), 5.4:143; 112; Edward Jorden, A discourse of naturall bathes, and minerall waters (London, 1633), 84; Anselm Boetius de Boodt, Gemmarum et Lapidum Historia (Leiden, 1636), 1.13:44; all indebted to Gabriele Fallopius, De Medicatis Aquis atque de Fossilibus (Venice, 1564); Ferrante Imperato, De Fossilibus Opusculum (Naples, 1610), 24.21:659. On debates over petrogenesis and the nature of the mineralizing or lapidific power, see Hiro Hirai, “Les logoi spermatikoi et le concept de semence dans la minéralogie et la cosmogonie de Paracelse,” in Revue d’histoire des sciences 61.2 (2008): 245– 64, and Kevin Killeen, Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 120–35. On Paracelsus’s concept of the Archeus, see

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Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel: Karger, 1982), 105–6. 4. Jorden, A discourse of naturall bathes, 21–22. 5. Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description (New York: Routledge, 2011), 120. 6. Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica 3.11:142; subsequently cited parenthetically as PE with page number following book and chapter. 7. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 12. 8. On insects preserved in amber, see Martial, Epigrams 4.32, 4.59, 6.15, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Browne’s assessment of whether insects are actually lodged in amber or merely appear to be is indebted to an exchange between Galenus Bellobonus and Giorgio Melichio (Melich), in Albertinus Bottonus, De Recta Medicamentorum (Passau, 1586), 282–83, which argues that there “appears to be no trace” (nullum apparet vestigium) of the insects seemingly encased in amber, objects then compared to the “various images & statues created by artists” (varias figuras, & statuas fingunt artifices). 9. See Martin Lister, “A description of certain stones figured like plants, and by some observing men esteemed to be plants petrified,” Philosophical Transactions 8.92–100 ( January 1673): 6181–91; Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus (Amsterdam, 1665), 2.8.1.8:22, with illustrations of figured stones representing the Latin alphabet, birds, and religious images on 23, 32, 36; Nicolaus Steno, The Prodromus of Nicolaus Steno’s Dissertation Concerning a Solid Body Enclosed by Process of Nature within a Solid, trans. John Garrett Winter (New York: Hafner, 1968), 189–99. 10. Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning (London, 1640), 1.4:27–28. 11. Bacon, Advancement and Proficience of Learning, 2.11.3:107–8. 12. Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 12. See the discussion of Derrida’s theory of the supplement. 13. Compare Browne, Religio Medici (London, 1643), 1.36:85: “I cannot beleeve the wisedome of Pythagoras did ever positively, and in a literall sense, affirme his Metempsychosis, or impossible transmigration of the soules of men into beasts: of all Metamorphoses or transmigrations, I beleeve onely one, that is of Lots wife.” 14. Sennert, Thirteen Books 5.4:142–43, although Sennert partially disagrees, arguing that the “Stoney hard concretion or growing together of Bodies

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doth proceed from a Stone making spirit or Juyce” that is found “in the Earth and in the water, but not without Salt.” 15. Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, urne-­buriall, or, a discourse of the sepulchrall urnes lately found in Norfolk (London, 1658), 5:77. 16. Browne, Hydriotaphia, 3:48. 17. Browne, Hydriotaphia, 3:48. Transcorporeal, a word popularized by Stacy Alaimo in her Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 48, 144, to describe “landscapes” that permit exceptional porosity between humans and the environment, is a variation of Browne’s coinage transcorporating, from the Latin transcorporatio; see Browne, Hydriotaphia, 4:55 for the first usage. 18. Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Genesin & Exodum (London, 1633), 179–80; John Downame, Annotations upon all the books of the Old and New Testament (London, 1645), sig. f1v. Both Willet and Downame are responding to Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, ed. and trans. Henry St. John Thackeray (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1:12, who claims to have seen the pillar of salt. Compare Thomas Adams, A commentary or, exposition vpon the divine second epistle generall, written by the blessed apostle St. Peter (London, 1633), 638, denying the metaphorical link between Lot’s wife and the Covenant of Salt, “for salt hath a preserving propertie, to keepe things from putrefying, decaying, and corrupting. But she was turned into a materiall salty pillar.” 19. On the idea of a lapidifical principle or spirit, see de Boodt, Gemmarum, 25; Jan Baptista van Helmont, A ternary of paradoxes, trans. Walter Charleton (London, 1650), Prolegomena, sig. E2v; Norma Emerton, The Scientific Reinterpretation of Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). For Browne’s writings on kidney stones, see Works, 4 vols., ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 4:27, 284–90, and A. Batty Shaw, “The Norwich School of Lithotomy,” in Medical History 14.3 (1970): 221–59. 20. On the identity of amber, see Pliny, Natural History, 37:11, arguing that it is a marrow or gum discharged from trees that is “gradually hardened by heat or cold, or else by the action of the sea.” Browne is following de Boodt, Gemmarum, 2.158:321, asserting that amber (“succinum”) is a species of bitumen, hardened by the sea and condensed by salt (à maris frigiditate, & salsugine condensatum) but also arguing (2.159:323) that there are three species of amber: mineral, animal, and vegetable. 21. Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, 2:340–66, trans. George Sandys (London, 1628), 41–42. On the Heliades, see Apollonius Rhodius,

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Argonautica, ed. and trans. William H. Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 4:598–625; Quintus Smyrnæus, Fall of Troy, ed. A. S. Way (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 5:300–304; Philostratus the Elder, Imagines, trans. Arthur Fairbanks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 1:11; de Boodt, Gemmarum 2.159:325–26, relates the fable in order to disprove the vegetable etiology of amber. 22. Bacon, Novum Organum: with other parts of the great instauration, trans. and ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 2:52; Bacon, Advancement and Proficience of Learning, 2.1.1:77. 23. On Browne’s collection of and experiment upon these substances, see Works, 3:345–46, describing specimens sent from Iceland; Works 4:323, writing to William Dugdale about petrified bones and fossils; Henry Oldenberg to Boyle, March 3, 1668, detailing a petrified bone and other specimens Browne sent to the Royal Society; see also Reid Barbour, Thomas Browne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 386. Browne’s skepticism about both the identity and medicinal efficacy of bezoar and unicorn horn falls in line with many other physicians and natural philosophers of the period. On the former, see Philbert Guybert, Les Tromperies du bezoar découvertes (Paris, 1629); and Laurens Catelan, Traicté de l’origine, vertus, proprietez et usage de la pierre Bezoar (Montpellier, 1623). On the latter, see Caspar Bartholinus, “De Unicornu Eiusque Affinibus & Succedaneis,” in his Opuscula Quatuor Singularia (Copenhagen, 1628) and Andrea Marini, Discorso contra la falsa opinione dell’Alicorno (Venice, 1566). 24. See Robert Boyle, The Sceptical chymist, or, Chymico-­ physical doubts & paradoxes touching the spagyrist’s principles commonly call’d hypostatical (London, 1661), 432–33. At PE 3.13:151, Browne proposes a similar experiment to test toadstones, which “if true stones” will not give off a “burnt odour” when a hot iron is applied, but “may be apt to do, if contrived out of animal parts or the teeth of fishes.” 25. Bacon, Sylva 1.82–85:26–27. 26. PE 2.1; see Browne, Notes on Coagulation, Congelation, and other properties, in Works, 3: 441–42. 27. Browne, Religio Medici, 1.33, p. 77; for Browne’s ideas on amphibiousness, see also PE 3.13:152 on the frog and 3.11:142 on the bat. 28. PE 2.1:55; Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis 6:10–14, 2 vols., trans. John Hammond Taylor (New York: Newman, 1982), 1:189–96. Augustine uses the idea of “seminal causes” to explain a variety of problematic biblical passages, positing that all primordial seeds come into being

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in a single instant of creation, implanted at that moment with a potentiality or what he calls a “foreknowledge” of their use (1:142). 29. Henry More, The immortality of the soul, so farre forth as it is demonstrable from the knowledge of nature and the light of reason (London, 1659), 263–65; Ralph Cudworth, The true intellectual system of the universe (London, 1678), 132, 687. Cudworth attacks the doctrine that holds the whole world to be “One Huge Plant or Vegetable, a body endued with one Plastick or Spermatick Nature, branching out the whole, Orderly and Methodically, but without any Understanding or Sense” (132). 30. On the plastic or seminal faculty, see Hiro Hirai, “Jacob Schegk on the Plastic Faculty and the Origin of Souls,” in Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy: Renaissance Debates on Matter, Life, and the Soul (Leiden: Brill, 2011), and Guido Giglioni, “Panpsychism versus Hylozoism: An Interpretation of some Seventeenth-­Century Doctrines of Universal Animation,” Acta Comeniana 11 (1995), 25–45. At PE 3.6:129, Browne refers to this “plastick or formative faculty” as the “inward Phidias,” an allusion to the ancient sculptor who turns a homogenous block of marble into a body with distinct form. 31. Both the Latin and English terminology is common; see Georgius Agricola, De Natura eorum, quae effluvunt ex terra, in his De Ortu et causis subterraneorum (Wittenberg, 1612), 182, 204, 206; Bacon, Sylva, 1.83:26–27; Sennert, De Chymicorum cum Aristotelicis et Galenicis consensu ac dissensu, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1633), 179; de Boodt, Gemmarum, 1.9:24–25; Boyle, “Of the Existence of the Lapidescent Juice,” in The Works, 14 vols., ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis (London and Brookfield VT: Pickering & Chatto, 1999–2000), 13:377–402. Compare Thomas Browne’s letter to his son Edward, dated June 25, 1669, on the “succus Lapidescens or metallificus” (Works, 4:46–47). 32. Steno, Prodromus, 169–75. 33. Bacon, Novum Organum, 1:45. 34. On this point, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015): “Any speaking of the nonhuman is a translation, and therefore error prone, filled with guesswork, and inclined toward fantasy” (36). On the problem of metaphor and figuration in ecological discourse, see also Susan Crane, Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 83–86, and Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 2. 35. Bacon, Novum Organum, 1:60; on Browne’s understanding of verbal fallacies, see also PE 1.4:13 and compare 3.12:146.

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36. On the kidney stone, see Sennert, Thirteen Books, 5.4:151; on lungwort or pulmonaria, see John Gerard, The herball or Generall historie of plantes (London, 1633), 809. 37. Browne, The Garden of Cyrus, 3, in Hydriotaphia, 142, 153–54. 38. Bacon, Sylva, 7.602–4:154; on the vegetative soul, see Aristotle, On the Soul, ed. and trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 2.4 (415a23–25). 39. Sennert, Thirteen Books, 5.1:132–33; de Boodt, Gemmarum, 1.13:40–43. Browne’s language and sentiment follow de Boodt, Gemmarum, 1.11 and 1.13 (pp. 31, 46), also cited from de Boodt’s 1609 text by Sennert, De Chymicorum, 176–77, writing that the figure of crystal is not derived from “extrinsic forms . . . but from the power of its own seminality” (formas extrinsecas . . . sed potius ex proprio seminario) or “from its Architectonic spirit and formative faculty” (ab Architectonico spiritu & formatrice facultate). Compare Andreas Cesalpinus, De Metallicis Libri Tres (Nuremberg, 1602), 2.19. 40. De Boodt, Gemmarum, 1.9:25; PE 2.1:56. For Aristotle’s theories, see Meteorology, 378a–b, and the discussion by Killeen, Biblical Scholarship, 122. 41. Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 1.2.8:53. 42. On alchemical interpretations of myth during the Renaissance, see Didier Kahn, “Alchemical Interpretations of Classical Myths,” in A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology, ed. Vanda Zajko and Helena Hoyle (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2017), 165–78. 43. Santorio Santorio, Methodi Vitandorum errorum omnium qui in arte Medica contingunt (Geneva, 1630), 33; Andreas Libavius, Singularium Pars Tertia (Frankfurt, 1601), 1.9:74, 5.16:357. On the Gorgon as the principle of concretion, see Helmont, Ternary of Paradoxes, sig. E2v, observing that the “onely Gorgon, or Lapidifactory principle, to which all Concreted substances ow their Coagulation  .  .  . is a Saline Fixative Spirit,” and Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays, in Works, 2:192–93, discussing the existence of a “plastick Principle or a Gorgonick spirit in all other quick and notable Indurations of Bodies in the cold.” 44. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 424. 45. PE 2.5:96; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 116. 46. Francis Bacon, The Wisdome of the Ancients, trans. Arthur Gorges (London, 1619), preface, n.p. 47. Rhodri Lewis, “Bacon, Allegory, and the Uses of Myth,” Review of English Studies 61.250 (2010): 360–89, 382. 48. On Bacon’s instrumental view of myth, see Lewis, “Bacon,” 366.

Things with Kid Gloves Lynn Festa

I

t is indeed to be admired,” the satiric political thinker Bernard Mandeville wrote in 1724, “how so sensible a Creature as Man, that pretends to so many fine Qualities of his own, should condescend to value himself upon what is robb’d from so innocent and defenceless an Animal as a Sheep, or what he is beholden for to the most insignificant thing upon Earth, a dying Worm.”1 Inviting us to marvel at the paltry trophies of self-­deceiving man (“It is indeed to be admired”), Mandeville’s rhetoric mirrors and ironizes human pleasure in filched feathers, exposing the preening emperor’s new clothes as the cast-­off detritus of beasts and worms procured through butchery, highway robbery, or graveyard theft. “For what else,” he inquires, “but an excess of stupid Vanity, could have prevail’d upon our Reason to fancy that Ornamental, which must continually put us in mind of our Wants and Misery, beyond all other Animals that are ready clothed by Nature herself ?”2 Driven by privation and draped in borrowed resources, humanity exists in a state of piracy, parasitism, and indebtedness to the very creatures over which it claims dominion. Mandeville dismantles the self-­deceptions of human vanity, mocking the conversion of clothing from the token of human insufficiency and dependency—required “to hide our Nakedness, and to fence our Bodies against the Weather, and other outward Injuries”3—into a source of pride. In reinstating the material origins of the finished product—the composition of silk garments from vermicular excrement to adorn the human body—Mandeville reminds us that the things that produce distinctions between human and animal incorporate the elements they pretend to transcend. The organic supplement that

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purports to elevate humanity above the animal simultaneously proclaims its frailty and dependence upon “lesser” creatures and inanimate things. In what follows, I want to think about the complex ways the “organic supplement” is understood to separate human from animal in the eighteenth century by focusing on a ubiquitous accessory during the period: the leather glove. Made from the skin of calves, sheep, goats, or other animals, the leather glove sheaths and mimics the hand, often understood to be a signal distinction between human and animal. (The French naturalist Buffon among others anticipates Heidegger’s declaration that “the hand is, together with the word, the essential distinction of man” by two centuries: “Man,” Buffon writes in his Natural History (1749–88), “if we estimate him by his material part alone, is superior to the brute creation only from the number of peculiar relations he enjoys by means of his hand and of his tongue.”)4 Humanity encases the hand that distinguishes it from animals in an artifact wrought from the hides of beasts. Even as the glove as article of clothing trumpets human difference—“With the exception of man,” in Derrida’s succinct formulation, “no animal has ever thought to dress itself ”5—it also raises questions about where one body ends and another begins. What at first glance seems to be a detachable ornament sheathing a discrete body part proves to elide the neatly delimited thresholds between them, either by absorbing elements of the body and carrying them away or by cleaving too closely to the body. In eighteenth-­century discussions, the glove wavers between a homely, familiar item that fits snug to the hand and its ghostly husk when detached from its wearer. Part of the uncanniness of the glove issues from its reassertion of the animal origins from which humanity, despite its refashioning of the object world, has not fully dissevered itself. As organic supplement, the glove simultaneously exposes the inadequacy of the body without the supplement of things (the fragility of the naked hand) and displays the human ability to instrumentalize the material world in ways that augment our powers to transform it. In its material form and in its figurative incarnations in language, it reveals the fissures and conjunctions between nature and artifice, between essential body and superfluous accessory, between detachable part and integral whole. At a moment in which Enlightenment philosophers, political theorists, natural historians, and travel writers sought to identify the traits that distinguish human from animal, the material objects encasing the body point not to

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a stable essence but to a ceaselessly reasserted distance from the natural world, its animal drives and cravings. Even as the glove creates a physical barrier between hand and outside world, it simultaneously weakens that partition, for the materials from which the glove is wrought (animal skins, Mandeville’s dying worms and shorn sheep, even a spider’s web) are themselves extensions of a creaturely nature to which humanity is inescapably bound.6 The contiguity of human with animal skin reinstates a repressed proximity that bespeaks creaturely connections that precede and exceed the officially sanctioned relations of civilized intercourse. The worn skin melds with the hand that wears it, taking on its form, its scent, its history. Indeed, the glove meant to fit the hand may instead adhere so closely that it threatens human autonomy, turning the complementary relation of glove to hand into a menacing similitude. Even as it serves as a prophylactic that distances the body from its animal nature, the leather glove reconnects the individual with an animality that it has not transcended. As Erica Fudge puts it, “The persistent presence of the animal in the animal-­made-­object seems always to defy the objectification that attempts its absenting.”7 It is not simply that the accessory tries (and fails) to redefine essence but that the organic supplement unveils the labor involved in dissevering the body from its animal nature—and the impossibility of fully succeeding. The glove embroils the ostensibly aloof subject it adorns in sensory relations with other bodies and with the empirical world. Even as the quill pen, analyzed by Julie Park in this volume, supplements the organ of speech, entwining mind, body, and implement, so too does the glove supplement the laboring hand, binding body to accessory. The glove that mediates the hand’s encounter with the environment—buffering the senses by warming a cold hand, blunting the prick of a thorn, enhancing the hand’s ability to grasp a slippery item—itself becomes an object of tactile and olfactory apprehension. If writing heightens consciousness by materializing speech and thought in visual and tactile form, as Park argues, the glove, as an object that mediates the senses, enables the senses themselves to become an object of reflexive critique. In absorbing the animal properties of the body of its wearer, the glove makes them available for apprehension in objectified form. On these terms, the material culture of the glove participates in the history of the human senses—and of the human senses as themselves historical artifacts that distinguish human from animal.

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The glove indicates the capacity of humanity to make itself an object in its quest for perfectibility. Even as the glove is the product of labor and technology, so too is the hand an artifact “highly perfected by hundreds of thousands of years of labour,” as Frederick Engels puts it—part of a broader Enlightenment account of humanity progressively superseding its creaturely limits.8 The glove surfaces repeatedly in eighteenth-­century texts around matters of orthopedic and prosthetic alteration that create a kind of pedagogy of the hand.9 Gloves furnish the hands with a protective carapace that makes them fit for labor and signify a readiness to work (as in pulling one’s gloves on) or to fight (tossing down one’s glove), but they also proclaim the hand’s idleness or leisure, its exemption from work or use. When the members rebel against the belly in Aesop’s famous fable, the hands “vow’d and swore, / They’d e’en wear Gloves, and work no more.”10 In practice, of course, gloves may disable the hand for certain uses. Although gloves indicate delicacy of handling (as in the expressions “to treat with kid gloves” or “white glove delivery”), writing or dining while wearing gloves can be cumbersome, and gloves make it difficult to sort things with precision. Indeed, that a glove hampers labor is proverbial in the eighteenth century: “Handle your Tools without Mittens; remember that [‘]the Cat in Gloves catches no Mice,’ as poor Richard says.”11 The figurative life of the glove is drawn from and modifies the object’s material properties in some of the same ways that, as Jessica Wolfe argues in her essay in this volume, Thomas Browne’s account of mixture and metamorphosis is shaped by the effort to accommodate myth to the biological and chemical principles he believed governed real bodies. Even as Browne sought to reconcile the designs of nature to the fictions that describe and distort it, so too does the glove offer a glimpse of the persistent tension between the organic object’s materiality and the social and historical relations expressed in its practical and rhetorical use. The adages and maxims that refer to gloves attest to the ways the material object may take on a metaphorical life that reflects and at times exceeds its daily use. If the proverbial bond of “hand and glove” expresses a relation of fit that fuses disparate entities into one, it may also veil the force that makes one entity yield to the other, as in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française’s description of a malleable person as “souple comme un gant” (supple like a glove).12 The pliability that allows glove to yield to hand makes for a neat fit but also easy mastery, while its detachability enables it to be donned and shed at

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will. The figurative life of the glove capitalizes on these properties. In John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee’s Oedipus (1678), for example, Creon describes his conscience as “my Slave, my Drudge, my supple Glove; / My Upper-­ Garment, to put on, throw off, / As I think best.”13 If the rhetorical life of the material object has much to tell us about the way the object exceeds its nominal linguistic form, the transcription of other forms of dominion onto the figure of the glove reminds us that things do not always cleave to the cookie-­cutter outline demarcated by the word. Notwithstanding their proverbial complementarity, hand and glove did not always fit seamlessly together in the eighteenth century. As personal possession or as fabricated object, the glove is human scaled, and it is tempting to think of this small and manageable item as the product of a single pair of hands. Yet the seeming identity between artisan and crafted object is belied by the transnational networks of raw materials, labor, skills, and craft knowledge needed to produce a glove.14 “It is a proverb,” Ephraim Chambers notes in his Cyclopedia, that “for a glove to be good and well made, three kingdoms must contribute to it; Spain to dress the leather, France to cut it, and England to sew it.”15 A multitude of hands were needed to convert leather (deer, goat, sheep, lamb, kid, dog) into the finished product. The importance of the trade is reflected in the numerous legal protections against imported skins and gloves from the Elizabethan period through the mid-­nineteenth century. William Pitt’s 1785 stamp duty on gloves was designed to profit from the estimated three million people who purchased at least one pair of gloves per year and from the handful who acquired more than twenty.16 Gloves required higher quality leather than shoes, breeches, or jackets. French kids, slaughtered before they were fed on grass (which roughened the “grain”), furnished smooth, supple, unblemished skins for the finest gloves, while the hides of English deer, goats, sheep, and lambs were conscripted for their less expensive counterparts. The thicker skins of cattle were used for footwear, saddlery, and protective work gloves.17 Hides had to be cleaned, scraped, tanned, and dressed—a foul-­smelling labor-­intensive process that yielded skins of uneven quality. The fit and beauty of the glove depended upon the skill of the cutter to accommodate irregularities while minimizing waste: “An imported kidskin,” Cumming tells us, “might yield up to one and a half pairs, a lambskin would vary between one and two pairs.”18 The specialized stitching was then outsourced, often to women.

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(Standardized sizes only emerged in the 1830s.) Leather gloves were often scented (not least to disguise the residual stench from the lime, dung, fish oil, and alum used in tanning), a fashion usually traced to Catherine de Medici in France and to Elizabeth I in England. Rival companies—the glove makers and leather sellers, as well as the perfumers, apothecaries, grocers, and haberdashers—competed for rights to this lucrative trade.19 Only leather gloves were the province of the glovers’ guild. Fabric and yarn gloves of silk, cotton, linen, and wool were often made by milliners and sold in dressmakers’ and haberdashers’ shops, alongside jewelry, ribbons, trimmings, and other notions. Changes in textile machinery fostered mass production in the latter half of the eighteenth century, allowing gloves to command a broader market. Light cloth gloves became affordable items, purchased to complement a particular dress or as part of an ensemble, with shoes and fan to match. By the end of the century, cotton gloves could be had for 1s, with women’s linen gloves and mittens available for 2s. Leather gloves continued to be considerably more expensive, with men’s lambskin gloves at 4s 6d and kid gloves starting at 11s.20 Relatively few examples of gloves for everyday use survive; those preserved in costume collections are typically either expensive high-­fashion gloves or elaborately embroidered ceremonial gifts. Gloves possessed important ritual functions throughout the early modern period, variously serving as representations of “a legal contract, a form of peppercorn rent, a reward for service or a form of supplication for expected favours.”21 Gloves materialize status and transfer power from monarch to subject, from lover to beloved, from master to servant, showing “the power of people to be condensed and absorbed into things and of things to become persons,” in the evocative formulation of Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones in their study of the Renaissance glove.22 Gloves serve as love tokens and memorial gifts, distributed at weddings and funerals, and even by highwaymen at the gallows—with the standing of the guests or mourners registered by the quality of the leather or the perfume. So great was the expense that American Revolutionaries discontinued the practice of distributing black gloves at funerals.23 While the value of such ceremonial gloves issues from their capacity to secure continuity and custom as symbolic gifts, their ritual significance wanes in the eighteenth century. Glove styles become simpler and less distinctive over the course of the period, although individual gloves continue to be singularized as items

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of sentimental value, and older gloves are cherished as antiquarian rarities itemized in catalogs of curiosities, materializing—like Milton’s hair as analyzed by Jayne Lewis in this volume—the ways organic objects and body parts may serve as living vessels of values both material and immaterial, even beyond the grave. The relative absence of gloves in eighteenth-­century portraiture likewise suggests their dwindling sartorial importance and diminishing role in social etiquette.24 The French proverb “L’amitié passe le gant” captures the propriety-­bending failure to remove the glove before shaking hands, indexing the ways the accessory marks degrees of formality between subjects.25 Yet the elaborate rules that orchestrated the wearing and removal of gloves increasingly fell into desuetude during the century. Whereas in 1671 Madame de Sévigné triumphantly weaponizes glove etiquette to cut out a rival in handing a napkin to one of the royals,26 by 1795, Horace Walpole describes the forgiving attitude of the queen when he “had no glove ready when I received her at the step of her coach: yet she honoured me with her hand to lead her upstairs; nor did I recollect my omission when I led her down again.”27 Over the course of the century, writers increasingly single out excessive punctiliousness about glove etiquette, rather than its neglect, for mockery.28 Thus one periodical writer mocks the affectation of a young lady who starts “if any one touches her Hand, tho’ she has a Glove on, . . . as if Temptation and Unchastity were situated at the Ends of one’s Fingers,” while another writer scoffs at the exaggerated sense of delicacy in “old maids” who pretend that “to pull off your gloves in their presence is beginning to undress.”29 While the glove as a signifier of refinement serves as the polite buffer between the too immediate contact with another’s flesh, it also serves as a proxy for it. In a 1783 letter, Charlotte Ann Burney Francis Broome—sister to the novelist Frances Burney—describes the drawing-­room overtures of a gentleman who seizes upon her gloves as a flirtation device: “They were,” she writes, “crumpled and creesd, as gloves commonly are when on, and I said it was the wrincles in my flesh, upon which he stroakd my glove down and cried ‘Its not proud flesh tho.’”30 When Broome removes the glove and the gentleman begins “examining the fingers’ ends,” Burney’s sister struggles to contain her vexation. “My gloves,” she notes, “like my neighbours’, are commonly a little soild with moisture in the fingers,”31 and the gentleman’s interest, not in the idealized body, but in the indecorous sign of the body’s excretions, hints at the animal attraction veiled by the social rites of

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flirtation. The glove that bears the impress of the body becomes an extension of it. The fashionable accessory meant to declare the stylish body’s independence from its animal origins instead betrays their inextricable alliance, as the object regulated by manners violates the taboos it is designed to uphold. Exploiting Broome’s jesting fusion of creased glove and wrinkled flesh, the gentleman converts the modest sheath into an erotic proxy. The close relation of gloves to the hands (emphasis on the plural) means that in daily life, they are typically encountered in pairs. That gloves usually come in twos reminds us that we should not conceptualize them as singular objects but as units altered by their relation to each other and even—given their material origins—as hybrid entities that belong to a greater ensemble. For it is not only the glove that is altered when one is removed or lost but also the hands: as Stallybrass and Jones point out, to take off one glove is to unpair the hands—a removal that both exposes bare skin and offers, in the empty cocoon of the glove, the shadow of a “ghostly ‘hand.’”32 Thus, the crumpled, limp leather glove held in the hand of the sitter in Titian’s Man with a Ripped Glove (1520–23) suggests an “emptying out of the bodily form,” as it transfers the “ravages of age and violence from the enigmatic youth to the ‘thing’ that he wears.”33 While the superadded object—a kind of sartorial counterpart to the portrait of Dorian Gray—absorbs the symptoms of age, it also reminds us that the clothing that houses the flesh persists, even after death has uncoupled the body from its trappings. As Stallybrass and Jones argue, the fact that accessories operate as both extensions of the body and “detachable parts” means that they “trouble the conceptual opposition of person and thing.”34 If the glove can be parted from the hand, so too can it be separated from its mate. The unity of the glove always harbors within it the shadow of its missing other: we encounter one glove only under quite specific circumstances. A single glove is often a sign of the other gone missing or of something uncoupled from normal circuits of use or exchange (as a gauntlet thrown down in challenge, as love token or fetish).35 As Derrida observes in The Truth in Painting, because pairing “rivets things to use, to ‘normal’ use,” the unpaired glove finds itself exposed to “a certain uselessness . . . a so-­called perverse usage.”36 It is at those moments in which a thing balks customary use that we become acutely aware of its materiality—a reinstatement of the glove’s animal origins that not only interpellates the senses but points to the ways the glove may be turned to carnal ends.

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Contemporary etymologies make these associations explicit. The Encyclopédie derives “gant” from “vagina” or “Wante, an Flemish or Old German word, which means the same thing,” and in idiomatic usage, the glove often served as a euphemism for virginity.37 (The French usage—“Elle a perdu ses gants” [She lost her gloves] and “Il en a eu les gants” [He has had her gloves]—surfaces in the much-­cited anecdote of Prince Henry’s humiliating public rejection of Lady Essex in the court of James I: “He did not care to wear a glove which another had stretched.”)38 Bawdy plays on gloves abound throughout the eighteenth century, most famously in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, where Yorick conducts a flirtation with a grisette by inserting and withdrawing his hand from an array of gloves, a conceit pursued in both John Hall-­Stevenson’s Yorick’s Sentimental Journey, Continued (1769) and Andrew Becket’s A Trip to Holland (1786). The fringed glove worn by men is often said to be a shortcut to the heart of frivolous ladies, and throughout the century certain styles of gloves serve as shorthand for foppishness—part of a “receipt to make a macaroni.”39 Such erotic or bawdy associations find a precedent in seventeenth-­ century love-­token poems such as Richard Lovelace’s “Ellinda’s Glove,” where the glove becomes an amorous proxy, enacting invasive fantasies of invisible, imagined possession of the mistress. The glove poems thus participate in the longer tradition of early modern verse, analyzed by Miriam Jacobson in this volume, which imagines vines as amatory avatars that escape the constraints of human corporeality. The transfiguration of the body into plant life licenses the male speaker’s invasive exploration of the beloved’s body, engrafting the vine as erotic proxy onto the female form. Whereas the fusion of plant and person in these verses fosters reflexive scrutiny of the blurred border between sentient and vegetal life, the intimacy of hand and glove traced in the glove poems binds fantasy to flesh, the artifacts of high human culture to base animal urges. Although eighteenth-­ century literary decorum turned more elite writers away from the composition of such libertine verse, gloves were featured in occasional poetry written on gloves or sent to accompany a gift.40 The sexual and gender dynamics become twisted in unexpected ways in these poems. Thus the “thrice happy Glove” in John Theobald’s ode to “Chloe’s Glove” serves initially as an imaginative embodiment of the male speaker, but the anatomical analogy soon breaks down: the glove as masculine proxy is penetrated by a female hand, which the glove then uses to give itself (so to speak) a hand

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job from within: “when her Lilly Hand you [the glove] touch, / and all that Velvet Softness press,” such “surprizing Pleasure [is produced that] . . . / You die away dissolv’d in Bliss.”41 If the transformation of the lover into the thing allows for proximity, the intimacy it procures is, as Stallybrass and Jones observe of earlier examples, gained “not through potency but through diminution,” the imagined reduction of self to “a malleable layer of skin.”42 Simultaneously proxy and usurper, the “Virgin Kid” in an anonymous verse is urged to transport a “lambent Kiss” to the “Virgin’s Hand.”43 The mediation of the thing offers a virtual embodiment through which the imagination of the lover may move across the corporeal landscape, pressing “her Breast, her Lip, her Hair” and “nip[ping] her Lilly Arm,” although the glove, as a “senseless Thing” lacking sentience and thought, “reap[s] a Bliss Thou dost not understand.”44 (The woman’s answer to one valentine points out the creepy invasiveness of these poems: “To stick as close as gloves to me, / Lord, what a strange thing that would be.”)45 The material object serves neither as a fetish object—a readily accessible proxy that stands in for and gives shape to desire—nor as an imaginative concretization of an absent beloved; it rather becomes a mobile virtual avatar through which an erotic fantasy can be worked out, as the glove moves across the beloved’s body. Operating as a kind of extended riff on Romeo’s rapturous wish “O, that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek” (2.2.24–25), these poems derive their erotic charge from the fantasy of the sensory experience of an insensate thing, a fantasy produced through an extended prosopopoeia of the glove as a proxy self, a second-­person address that dictates to the object the nature of its anticipated pleasures and participates in them vicariously. This rhetorical transformation of self into glove is recapitulated in the popular enigmas and riddles that abounded in eighteenth-­century ladies’ periodicals. Here the glove is imagined to acquire the first-­person speech and capacities of self-­description typically allotted exclusively to humans: Think not, fair ladies, I’m a Cheat, Tho’ I have never seen as yet A hand I could not counterfeit. And though to Brutes my Birth I owe, And so my Pedigree’s but low, By Education’s friendly Aid, See! what Improvement may be made.46

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Simultaneously autobiography and bildungsroman, the riddle traces the glove’s origins from its birth to the softening education that removed its (literal and figurative) “roughness” to its social circulation in the world and its ultimate demise. In the riddles, what is described as an animal (“to Brutes my Birth I owe”) possesses the grammatical powers of a human speaker that behaves like a person (“Tho’ my parents were poor, and had nothing to leave, / But their coats on their backs, when they went to their grave; / I soon got them dy’d; and as spruce as an heir, / Who mourns for the loss of his father, appear”),47 but proves to be a thing. The speaker proffers a series of possible identifications (as human, as animal, and as thing) and then snatches them away. The gloves describe themselves as enjoying a social life separate from the hands that wear them (“all night we sport it with the fair, / Play with her fan, or adjust her hair”), but they also take on the guise of humans (“I dress like the ladies.—A girdle my waste [sic] / Surrounds, that my shape mayn’t be farther increas’d”).48 In the riddle, as Daniel Tiffany puts it, the thing “becomes human [by speaking] and then performs a verbal striptease in the dark, before our eyes, divesting itself of its human attributes. . . . For that is what a riddle does: it withholds the name of a thing, so that the thing may appear as what it is not, in order to be revealed for what it is.”49 The fanciful reclassification of the glove bespeaks a playful recognition of the ways the organic supplement conflates categorical thresholds between species. In offering a life history of the glove, the riddle reconstructs its movement in and out of the sphere of human culture. Like the meat pies analyzed by Diane Purkiss—those crust-­ covered dishes of mystery meat that materialize upon the banquet table and subsequently disappear into the interior of the diner’s body—the glove incarnates cultural anxieties about the hidden insides of bodies as well as about consumption and the incorporation of other bodies into our own. It is perhaps for this reason that, both in content and in form, these riddles so resolutely affirm a fundamental anthropocentrism. The glove acquires a voice in order to proclaim its joyous servitude and perpetual readiness to hand (“Your entrance on the stage of life we wait, / Attend your youth, your nuptials celebrate”) and even where it takes on the role of va­ni­ tas or even memento mori (“As beauty fades, we soon become despis’d, / Are turn’d off penniless, no longer priz’d”)50 the glove affirms its address to the human whose voice it dislodges. The estranged perspective that renegotiates the relation between self and other, subject and object, reveals the

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enigmatic character of all things in the world, an unyielding opacity that resists an easy unriddling. The pleasure of the riddle, as Walter Benjamin has argued, resides not in the “fact that the artifacts or events are a mystery; it lies in the fact that they, like all being, have a share in mystery.”51 Indeed, for Benjamin, gloves harbor this mystery in their very substance. Benjamin’s curious entry on “Gloves” in “One-­Way Street” suggests that the glove is a purveyor of atavistic horrors that discloses the disavowed kinship of human and animal. In an aversion to animals the predominant feeling is fear of being recognized by them through contact. The horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure awareness that in him something lives so akin to the animal that it might be recognized. All disgust is originally disgust at touching. Even when the feeling is mastered, it is only by a drastic gesture that overleaps its mark: the nauseous is violently engulfed, eaten, while the zone of finest epidermal contact remains taboo. Only in this way is the paradox of the moral demand to be met, exacting simultaneously the overcoming and the subtlest elaboration of man’s sense of disgust. He may not deny his bestial relationship with animals, the invocation of which revolts him: he must make himself its master.52

Touching—the contact between skins and surfaces—brings the reviled kinship “deep in man” to the literal surface, as the glove fashioned into the semblance of the hand proves to reveal the inner truth it is designed to deny. In a kind of horror-­film scenario in which one locks the door to realize that the killer is already in the room, the glove that ostensibly creates a barrier between the animal and the human proves to be fashioned out of the thing most feared and reviled. Gestures of mastery and differentiation turn out to entail absorption and incorporation, but whereas eating oversteps horror by violently engulfing the animal (even as it assimilates it into the body), the glove that is meant to guarantee an absolute difference instead mimics and envelops the hand, sparking through the contact of surfaces the suppressed awareness of a likeness harbored within. “It is difficult,” as Scott Juengel observes of this passage, “to know whether the glove is the occasion of, or the answer to, this disgusting touch, this animal nausea: Is man’s horror directed at the animal hide reshaped to fit the human hand, an object of obscene similitude? Or are gloves our protection against contact’s fateful recognition?”53

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If, for Benjamin, the glove incarnates the “obscene similitude” of human and animal, in eighteenth-­century discourses that horror is compounded by the properties of the skin, newly understood to be a protective integument and an organ of perspiration and even respiration: a permeable membrane that receives and repels, protects and absorbs. “We may sometimes, in the skin of a living man, discern pores, with good microscopes,” the seventeenth-­century natural philosopher Robert Boyle observes in his essay “The Porosity of Bodies,” “and easily, on the inside of gloves, which are made of skins dressed, perceive numbers of these little out-­lets, orderly ranged.”54 Boyle’s comparison of human and animal skin reveals a permeability shared by all bodies. No longer “a material seal shutting the inside off from the outside” but “a collection of real, minute orifices—the pores,”55 the skin becomes a medium of exchange rather than a barrier between inside and out. The absorptive properties common to hand and glove alike reassert the proximity of animal and human flesh. Far from serving as a prophylactic that separates subject and object, the glove comes to be the medium for their interchangeability. The glove that serves as a buffer against social and physical contamination thus may also become a vehicle of contagion, said to be a carrier of plague, smallpox, syphilis, and “the Itch.”56 “What can the Glove of a Person that has the Itch, communicate to one that is sound?” one medical writer asked.57 On these terms, the glove excites the same disquiet about the porosity of the body described by Rebecca Laroche in this volume, where the salves and ointments meant to preserve and seal the body instead attest to the permeability they seek to deny. The absorption of unguent into skin incorporates the vegetable supplement into the organic human form, in much the same way that the glove may communicate disease to the skin. “We know full well the Texture of the human Body to be such,” the Dutch physician and botanist Herman Boerhaave writes in his 1729 Treatise on the Venereal Disease, “as by bare cuticular Contact to admit into it Particles so exceeding small, as to escape all Notice of the Senses, yet capable of altering entirely the Nature of our Fluids, and rendering them such as to bring our Health, nay our Lives under the greatest Danger.”58 Boerhaave’s assertion that these particles fly under the senses omits the faculty often said to detect these invisible agents: the olfactory. Subvisible particles were believed to manifest themselves in odors and in the capacity of material objects to become imbued with aromas.

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It is thus not surprising that when Boyle tries to explain the invisible effluvia “which no sense can immediately perceive,” the example to which he turns is the glove. Boyle marvels at the fact that one of his gloves has retained its scent undiluted for over thirty years: “We must conclude those odoriferous steams to be unimaginably subtile, that cou’d, for so long a time, issue out in such swarms from a little perfum’d matter lodg’d in the pores of a glove, and yet leave it richly stock’d with particles of the same nature; tho’ I never, since I had them, so much as shut them up in a box.”59 Odor is a strangely inexhaustible particulate emission, an intangible matter “lodg’d in the pores” or interstices of the physical being that moves through the air. “Out of the Pores of all Bodies,” declares one treatise on the curative powers of externally applied remedies (such as the anodyne necklace), “there is more or less a constant Emission and Exhalation of subtle Steams and Atoms. The Truth of which . . . appears from nothing in the World so clear, manifest, & evident, as the Sense of smelling, by which every one daily experiences Bodies at a distance, to emit and send forth more or less vast quantities of . . . Steams, Atoms, and Effluvias.”60 Smell thus points toward the occult powers of objects: their radically interior and secret nature on the one hand, and their ability to transgress physical boundaries and act over distance on the other. Through smell, as the introduction to a recent anthropology of the olfactory notes, “one interacted with interiors, rather than with surfaces, as one did through sight,” and because odors emanate from objects, they “cannot be readily contained, they escape and cross boundaries, blending different entities into olfactory wholes.”61 In this sense, the scent of a glove invites us both to bore into the inner recesses of the physical object and to think about the ways it exceeds its material borders. If close-­fitting gloves extend the visceral sense of the body’s edges, making an external layer integral to the form—“Touching my Glove that touches my Skin . . . touches the Fluids of my Nerves terminating in it,” as one philosopher put it62—the aromas of body odor or perfume likewise challenge the neat demarcation of the body’s outward limits. The glove as organic supplement not only reflects but also takes active part in the distribution—or redistribution—of the senses. For smells infiltrate and travel between bodies, collapsing inside and outside. The difficulty in assigning them to a particular location means that they involve a peculiar ontology. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno observe in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “Of all the senses, that of smell—which

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is attracted without objectifying—bears clearest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become the ‘other.’ As perception and the perceived—both are united—smell is more expressive than the other senses. When we see we remain what we are; but when we smell we are taken over by otherness. Hence the sense of smell is considered a disgrace in civilization, the sign of . . . base animals.”63 If the shift between the transitive and intransitive forms of the verb in the expression “we smell” bespeaks the difficulty in assigning origins to sensory experience, the ease with which aromas travel between bodies similarly breaks down the cleavage of subject and object. Understood as a tactile and olfactory object, the glove solicits not only the exalted pleasures of the eye but also what Susan Stewart calls the “animal and servile senses”: smell and touch pitch “a subjectivity separated from nature, protected by mediation,” back into the creaturely body, reminding us that the aloof subjects of civilization are nonetheless “propelled by a desire born out of the very estranged relation thus created.”64 The organic supplement that indicates civilized distance from the body reinstates the wearer or bearer of the glove in the material sensory world from which she or he sought provisional escape, as the glove that separates body and world itself becomes a porous interface that solicits rather than muffles the senses. The scented glove points to the complex role played by the organic supplement in the refashioning of the senses associated with the civilizing process. As Freud famously contended in Civilization and Its Discontents, the “adoption of an erect posture” transformed the human senses, as “man’s raising himself from the ground” not only exposed the genitals, elevated the eye, and liberated the hand (since we no longer went on all fours) but also led to a “devaluation of olfactory stimuli.”65 As both tactile and olfactory object, the glove reconnects the body to its purportedly transcended bestial origins, for the skins that encased the hand were, at the beginning of the century, still at times doused in strong, animal-­based scents such as civet, musk, and ambergris preferred in the Renaissance.66 As Fudge notes, “Early modern humans actually chose to smell like animals.”67 Over the course of the eighteenth century, these animal-­based perfumes gradually give way to the floral and herbal scents favored by nineteenth-­century tastes, perhaps thereby augmenting the distance between human and nonhuman animals.68 The transformative properties assigned to gloves in eighteenth-­century advertisements promise to consolidate this distinction. Dog-­ skin and “chicken”-­skin gloves are extolled for their ability to preserve or restore the

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softness and white tincture of the skin that signified civilized (increasingly racialized) refinement—although they notably invite European consumers to filch these desired qualities from animals. “Little Chicken,” The New Bath Guide (1766) pleads, “Let thy Skin my Skin improve.”69 The desire for fair skin drove some to great lengths. The actress George Anne Bellamy recounts how, in an effort to render her arms “more conspicuously white,” she procured chicken-­skin gloves from the famous perfumer Richard Warren, encased her hands in these “wonder-­working coverings,” and manacled them to the headboard to drain the blood out and “accelerate the wished-­for effect.” Having cut off the circulation to her right hand, she was obliged to apply a mustard plaster, which led to such discoloration of the skin that “both the public and myself were debarred from the pleasure of viewing the beauty I so much prided myself in, for a long time, as I was obliged to wear gloves during the remainder of the winter.”70 Such cosmetic practices are often described in terms of the very animality they purport to transcend. While The Universal Magazine lauds the virtue of dog-­skin and chicken-­skin gloves to “render the hue of the skin, which was before as coarse and red as a chair-­woman’s . . . delicately white and soft,” the article also associates the whitened skin with “a new-­born babe’s or a sucking pig’s,” before disclosing the debased origins of the “chicken-­skin” in “the guts of oxen and other animals . . . beat into a sort of skin, like that which is commonly called goldbeaters skin.” Satirizing the extraordinary claims made in Warren’s advertisements for chicken-­skin gloves, the author notes that “some incredulous ladies, having made trial of but one glove only for eight or ten nights, found such an alteration for the better, that they scarce knew their own arm again. It must have been no common sight to see a lady, after such a patient experiment, with one arm as white as any veal or house-­lamb, and the other perhaps as red as bull-­beef.”71 Animality resides on both sides of the equation: in the whitened hand (like “veal or house-­lamb”) and in the arm in its natural state (“bull-­beef ”). The attempt at cosmetic refinement converts the body from one kind of meat to another. While these satirical passages insist on the metaphorical relation of human to beast, the promise of the chicken-­skin glove rests on the supposedly real powers of animal skins to alter the human body, powers akin to the healing “Ointment of Flowers” described by Laroche, and the salts, stones, and other minerals believed to harbor transformative properties in Wolfe’s account of Browne. And if, as Wolfe argues, it is at times difficult

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to draw the line between living organisms and their seemingly nonliving extensions, such as horns, tusks, and teeth, what happens when the human hand takes on the appearance or properties of the glove itself, as the worn or stained palm acquires leatherlike qualities?72 Sneering at the calloused hand of the hardworking Michael, the snooty schoolboy Valentine demands where he bought “these tanned leather gloves?”—a query that elicits Michael’s impassioned defense of the honest hard work that has calloused his skin.73 Conversely, travelers often describe the mistaking of glove for hand. The Abbé Poiret, in his Travels through Barbary, describes the natives’ perplexity at “my gloves, which . . . were green, taking that to be the colour of my skin,”74 while Elizabeth Craven, in her 1789 Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople describes the wife of a Cossack chief as uneasy at her gloves: “I took them off; upon which she drew near, smiled, took one of my hands in between her’s, and winked and nodded as a sign of approbation, but she felt my arm up beyond the elbow, half way up my shoulder, winking and nodding.”75 Both accounts echo Swift’s satire of the assimilation of worn superfluity to biological body in part IV of Gulliver’s Travels, where Gulliver’s reluctance to remove his clothing before the horselike Houyhnhnms stems from his fear that they will perceive his similarity to the Yahoos. “I happened to wear my Gloves,” he announces, “which the Master-­Grey observing, seemed perplexed, discovering signs of Wonder what I had done to my Fore-­feet; he put his Hoof three or four times to them, as if he would signify, that I should reduce them to their former shape, which I presently did, pulling off my Gloves, and putting them in my Pocket.”76 Because the Houyhnhnms cannot conceive “the Thing which was not,” they cannot envision the play of surfaces that would enable a creature to alter its identity, to delight in fiction, to imagine what it would be like not to be like themselves. Absorbed as part of Gulliver’s form, the glove alters the hands (or “Fore-­feet”), nudging him into another category altogether. Surfaces, not depths, govern identification, so that the capacity to read things “correctly” pigeonholes the individual within a culture and even within a species. In eighteenth-­century satire, it is not only who wears gloves but also who becomes them that distinguishes human from animal, or one kind of human from another. The conversion of human skin into leather is a recurrent trope in political and economic polemics throughout the period, a trope that uses questions of rightful and wrongful use to structure distinctions

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between human and nonhuman (both as agents and objects). The most famous example is Swift’s 1729 Modest Proposal, which argues that Irish children should be eaten, and their carcasses flayed, since the skins, once “artificially dressed, will make admirable Gloves for Ladies, and Summer Boots for fine Gentleman.”77 By literalizing what political economy does in the abstract, Swift brings home the full horror of British policy on Ireland. Here the threshold between kinds of beings is not governed by distinctive essence or even by appearance (indeed, part of the horror is that one might not be able to tell the difference between a kidskin glove and a glove made from an Irish kid). Instead, the presiding issue involves rightful or wrongful use: the instrumental relations that bind person, animal, and thing together.78 What is meant to be an end in itself becomes instrumental, as the mistaking of essential humanity for supplementary adornment, of organic for inorganic, of person for animal or thing, precipitates a crisis of classification. Rather than inhering in inalterable properties, the traits that distinguish humanity are expressed through relations to other creatures that are mediated by material things: the organic supplements that prop up, but also menace, assertions of species distinction. The moments in which persons and things or humans and animals are confused usually—and for good reason—produce an affirmation of the necessary difference between them, but it is worth noting that the treatment of human skin as leather is not always horrible. In eighteenth-­century surgeons’ manuals, for example, the analogies that effectively convert a human body into a thing, a hand into a glove, while disconcerting, are not inhumane but restorative. The suture that best closes an artery, John Bell announces, is that “which the currier makes when he mends breaches in the tanned skin,” while the stitches suited to close wounds and make skin whole are borrowed from and named for the currier, the shoemaker, the glover, and the tailor.79 The application of the terms of leatherworking to the human body underwrites an act of surgical mending that makes the sundered flesh whole. The restored integrity of a human bien dans sa peau depends upon working upon the hand as if it were a glove, upon a person as if she were a thing—a reminder of the shared properties that bind humans to other creatures. Poised at the nexus of human, animal, and thing, the glove proclaims both our dependency—a hand so frail it requires a protective covering— and our mastery—our ability to extract what we want from the material world. Yet even as the art that tailors the animal skin to the human body

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seeks to mark the distance between the civilized body and its creaturely nature, the glove that slips around the hand reaffirms affiliations that cannot be—should not be—superseded or denied. The flex of the glove-­sheathed hand that signals human empowerment also bespeaks the relations of vulnerability, reciprocity, and dependency that bind us to other creatures and to one another.

Notes 1. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), 1:127. 2. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 1:127. 3. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 1:127. 4. Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 80; Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Natural History, General and Particular, trans. William Smellie, 9 vols. (London, 1785), 2:2. The centrality of the hand to eighteenth-­century natural historical classification is apparent in the nomenclature of the “quadruped” and the distinction of hand from paw, talon, claw, and flipper. 5. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5. 6. On gloves from spiderwebs, see Oliver Goldsmith, An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature, 8 vols. (London, 1774), 7:262–63. 7. Erica Fudge, “Renaissance Animal Things,” in Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective, ed. Joan Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Young­ quist (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 50. 8. Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” (1876), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 355. 9. Nicolas Andry de Bois-­Regard, Orthopædia: or, The Art of Correcting and Preventing Deformities in Children, 2 vols. (London, 1743), 1:167, 187–88. 10. Aesop, Æsop naturaliz’d: in a Collection of Fables and Stories from Æsop, Locman, Pilpay, and Others, 3rd ed. (London, 1711), 143–44. The subsequent lines trace the transformation of the hand by labor: “For they were forc’d to dig and thresh, / Till they grew Horn instead o’ Flesh; / And to this Slavery were put, / To feed a vile ungodly Gut. / Thus being all enrag’d, and stout, / They strait for Liberty cry out” (144).

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11. The Pleasing Instructor: or, Entertaining Moralist, 4th ed. (London, 1763), 85. Also “A mufled Cat was never a good Hunter. Spoken to them that set about Work with their Gloves on,” in A Complete Collection of Scotish [sic] Proverbs Explained, ed. James Kelly (London, 1721), 50. 12. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 4th ed. (1762), American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL), Dictionnaires d’autrefois, s.v. “gant.” 13. John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, Oedipus (London, 1713), 49–50. See also William Taverner, The Artful Wife (London, 1718), 11. 14. In addition to the texts cited below, see C. Cody Collins, Love of a Glove: The Romance, Legends, and Fashion History of Gloves, rev. ed. (New York: Fairchild, 1947); S. William Beck, Gloves, Their Annals and Associations (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1883). 15. Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 5 vols. (London, 1788), vol. 2, s.v. “glove.” 16. See Mike Redwood, Gloves and Glove-­Making (Oxford: Shire Books, 2016), 31; Valerie Cumming, Gloves (London: B. T. Batsford, 1982), 54. 17. Redwood, Gloves and Glove-­Making, 23. 18. Cumming, Gloves, 12. 19. See Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 126–53. The French leather glove makers guild was established in 1190 and received a monopoly on perfume in 1614. On the legal battles between French guilds, see Morag Martin, Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 35. 20. Cumming, Gloves, 52–53. 21. Cumming, Gloves, 21. 22. Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 176. 23. On gloves at weddings, see Cumming, Gloves, 44. On the highwayman, see The Genuine History of the Life of Richard Turpin (London, 1739), 32. On the revolutionaries, see Extracts from the Votes and Proceedings of the American Continental Congress, at Philadelphia on the 5th of September, 1774 (Annapolis, MD, 1774), 11; Samuel Stearns, The American Oracle (New York, 1791), 242–43. 24. Of the approximately thirteen hundred portraits produced in Joshua Reynolds’s studio, Angus Trumble finds “only sixteen sitters who wear

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both gloves, and twenty-­eight who wear one only”; in five cases the sitter holds a glove, while in the sixth the glove is “draped nearby as a prop.” Trumble, The Finger: A Handbook (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2010), 125, 127. 25. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, s.v. “gants.” 26. Marie de Rabutin-­Chantal Sévigné, Court Secrets: or, The Lady’s Chronicle Historical and Gallant. From the year 1671, to 1690 (London, 1727), 7. The ostentatious dropping of a glove is increasingly castigated as an artificial performance. An oft-­reiterated anecdote of a lady who sends her gallant into a lion’s den to retrieve her glove concludes with the miffed gentleman performing the task and then ditching her for exposing him “to the Fury of a Lion for a paltry Glove.” Look E’re You Leap: or, A History of the Lives and Intrigues of Lewd Women, 10th ed. (London, 1720), 57. 27. Horace Walpole to Conway on 7 July 1795, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 39:511–12. 28. Dorothea Du Bois, The Lady’s Polite Secretary, or New Female Letter Writer (London, 1771), 213. 29. Henry Stonecastle, The Universal Spectator, 4 vols. (London, 1747), 3:101; Adam Fitz-­Adam, The World, 6 vols. (London, 1757), 6:240. 30. “Proud flesh” is the swollen tissue formed around wounds when healing, also used in bawdy contexts. 31. Diary of Charlotte Ann Burney Francis Broome, 1783, in The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768–1779 . . ., 2 vols., ed. Annie Raine Ellis (London: G. Bell, 1889), 2:312. 32. Stallybrass and Jones, “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe,” 183. 33. Stallybrass and Jones, “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe,” 183. 34. Stallybrass and Jones, “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe,” 176. 35. In Pope’s Rape of the Lock, the baron sacrifices “three Garters, half a Pair of Gloves; / And all the Trophies of his former Loves.” The unpairing of the gloves, like the odd number of garters, shifts the tokens into the domain of the fetish. The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), canto 2, lines 39–40, p. 224. For glove fetishism, see Colley Cibber, The Non-­Juror (Dublin, 1719), 12. Fanny Hill describes a client who liked “to present me at once with a dozen pair of the whitest kid-­gloves at a time: these he would divert himself with

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drawing on me, and then biting off their fingers ends.” John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 2 vols. (London, 1749), 2:165. 36. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 332–33. 37. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc. s.v. “ganterie (art méch)” (Chicago: University of Chicago ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017), ed. Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, http://​encyclopedie​ .uchicago​.edu/), 17:792. 38. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, ARTFL, Dictionnaires d’autrefois, s.v. “gants.” A Dictionary of Love (London, 1777), s.v. “maidenhead.” For a discussion of the etymology, see Beck, Gloves, 3–5. 39. The Convivial Magazine, and Polite Intelligencer (London, 1775), 90. See also Spectator 15.1 (March 17, 1711): 83; Guardian 149.2 (September 1, 1714): 353 40. On love-­ token poems, see Pamela Hammons, Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). 41. John Theobald, “Chloe’s Glove,” Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1719), 34, 35. See also Aaron Hill, “The Valentine,” The Works of the Late Aaron Hill, Esq, 4 vols. (London, 1753) 3:352–53. 42. Stallybrass and Jones, “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe,” 189. 43. “Song 432,” The Aviary; or, Magazine of British Melody (London, 1750), 198. See Barbara Benedict, “Encounters with the Object: Advertisements, Time, and Literary Discourse in the Early Eighteenth-­Century Thing-­ Poem,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 40.2 (2007): 193–207. 44. The Musical Miscellany, 6 vols. (London, 1729), 3:153, 152. 45. “To a lady, with a Pair of Gloves,” in The New English Valentine Writer (London, 1784), 41. 46. Miscellaneæ curiosæ: or, Entertainments for the Ingenious of Both Sexes (York, 1734–35), 13–14. 47. Enigma 39, The Diarian Miscellany: Consisting of All the Useful and Entertaining Parts, Both Mathematical and Poetical, Extracted from the Ladies’ Diary, 5 vols. (London, 1775), 4:385. 48. The Diarian Miscellany, 5:71, 4:385. 49. Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 42. 50. The Diarian Miscellany, 5:71.

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51. Walter Benjamin, “Riddle and Mystery,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap, 1996), 267. 52. Walter Benjamin, “One-­ Way Street,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 66–67. Contrast Benjamin’s memory of his childhood delight in enveloping his hand in his rolled socks: “Nothing was more pleasurable than to sink my hand as deeply as possible into their insides.” “The Sock,” qtd. in Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 11. 53. Scott Juengel, “Of Beauty, Cruelty, and Animal Life: Hogarth’s Baroque,” differences 16.1 (2005): 55. 54. Robert Boyle, The Philosophical Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle Esq., 3 vols. (London, 1725), 1:441. 55. Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-­Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 121. 56. On the plague, see Paul Chamberlen, A Philosophical Essay upon Actions on Distant Subjects, 3rd ed. (London, 1715), 8. Daniel Turner notes that syphilis cannot be transmitted through gloves in Syphilis: A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease (London, 1717), 11. On “the itch,” see Turner, De morbis cutaneis, 2nd ed. (London, 1723), 49; and Thomas Sydenham, Praxis Medica. The Practice of Physick (London, 1707), 100. 57. Jacques Boüez de Sigogne, New Method of Curing the Venereal Disease (London, 1724), 33. 58. Herman Boerhaave, Treatise on the Venereal Disease (London, 1729), 15. The same holds for those who work with dangerous chemicals. See Bernardino Ramazzini, A Treatise of the Diseases of Tradesmen (London, 1705), 24. 59. Robert Boyle, “The Nature, Properties, and Effects of Effluvia,” in The Philosophical Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 1:415, 416. 60. See Chamberlen, A Philosophical Essay upon the Celebrated Anodyne Necklace, 16. The sense of smell is a signal difference between humans and animals in these treatises: “Tis also from hence that Gloves & other things having once been perfumed, will for a long time after at a Distance emit sweet Effluvia’s and Atoms to our smell: And that Dogs will pursue the steps of a Man or their Game at a great Distance.” An Essay on the Ancient and Modern Use of Physical Necklaces for Distempers in Children (London, 1719), 15.

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61. Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, “Introduction: The Meaning and Power of Smell,” in Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, ed. Classen, Howes, and Synnott (London: Routledge, 1994), 4. Air was understood as a fluid that “held in a state of suspension the substances given off by bodies.” Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, trans. Miriam Kochan et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 13. 62. Conyers Place, The Doctrine of Light, Sight, and Colours, and our Notions of the Nature of Them Reform’d (London, 1738), 24. Prioritizing sight, Place contends that through the other senses, “I perceive objects, by contiguity only; as thro’ a Glove of Nature’s making. And the perception is therefore obscure . . . as thro’ an Interclose, where I, on one side of it, do perceive something . . . on t’other” (23). 63. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 2002), 184. In the original context concerning anti-­Semitism, the prohibited impulse to seek out “‘bad’ smells” may only be indulged if “the final aim is its elimination” (184). On the ontology of smells, see Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 58. 64. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 19. 65. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 52n. 66. On the animal origins of ambergris, see Dugan, Ephemeral History, 130–31; on civet, see Fudge, “Renaissance Animal Things,” 50–53. 67. Fudge, “Renaissance Animal Things,” 51. 68. On the shifting taste in scents, see Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, 73. 69. Christopher Anstey, New Bath Guide: or Memoirs of the B—R—d Family (London, 1766), 23. 70. George Anne Bellamy, An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy, 6 vols. (London, 1785), 6:72, 73. 71. “Of Cosmetics, Lotions, Dews, &c,” The Universal Magazine, in The Beauties of All the Magazines Selected, 3 vols. (London, 1762), 1:181. Richard Warren and Co. Perfumers, at the Golden Fleece, in Marylebone-­Street (London, c. 1780), 1. 72. “Do we not see that the skin of the palms of hands of smiths and watermen, become thickened and callous, and feel no inconvenience from substances that would absolutely blister a hand, in the habit of wearing

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gloves?” Edward Coleman, Observations on the Formation and Uses of the Natural Frog of the Horse; with a Description of a Patent Artificial Frog (London, 1800), 8. 73. Arnaud Berquin, The Children’s Friend (London, 1788), 108. An oft-­ reprinted jest throughout the period involves a “Dyer in a Court of Justice being ordered to hold up his Hand, which was very black[. T]ake off your Glove, Friend, said the Judge.—Put on your Spectacles, my Lord, answered the Dyer.” Robert Baker, Witticisms and Strokes of Humour (London, [1766]), 30–31. 74. “Review of Travels through Barbary . . . in the years 1785 and 1786,” in The English Review, or An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature, 26 vols. (London, 1795) 17:264. 75. Elizabeth Craven, A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (Dublin, 1789), 228. 76. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Albert Rivero (New York: Norton, 2002), 196. 77. Swift, “A Modest Proposal,” in Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, vol. 12, Irish Tracts, 1728–1733, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), 112. 78. See John Hill, Some Projects Recommended to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (London, 1761), 2–3; Peter Pindar, Hair Powder: A Plaintive Epistle to Mr. Pitt, new ed. (London, 1795), 19–20. 79. John Bell, Discourses on the Nature and Cure of Wounds (Edinburgh, 1795), 21n; Johannes van Horne, Micro-­Techne; or, A Methodical Introduction to the Art of Chirurgy (London, 1717), 42.

Vegetable Loves Botanical Enthrallment in Early Modern Poetry

Miriam Jacobson

P

lants and vines were curious things in the early modern English imagination. At the same time that botanists and horticulturalists strove for ever more precise and accurate descriptions and depictions of leaves, flowers, roots, and stalks, they also depicted the liveliness of plants using the language of the human body. A strange admixture of a clear classification system for plant life and blurred edges between those categories created a world—on the page, if not in the hands of collectors and gardeners—in which the boundaries between human and plant bodies seemed, if not entirely fluid, then at least quite easily crossed. Following in the footsteps of John Gerard’s Herball (1597, 1633, 1636), John Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum (1640) divides plants into broad categories called “tribes” that include trees and shrubs, bulbs, vines, herbs, and “strange and exotic plants.” So far, so good. And yet one of the entries in the volume’s final book on “strange and exotic plants” (many of which substances, like the animal secretions ambergris and musk, would not qualify as plants at all today) is Mumia, or mummy: the broken, cured, and desiccated limbs of a formerly entombed ancient Egyptian, stolen from pyramids and illegally imported to Europe to be sold in apothecary shops as a cure for epilepsy and blood clots. Although some early modern doctors of physic argued that mumia was merely the spices, myrrh, and bitumen—all organic matter—used in the embalming process and that the actual human flesh had dissolved over time, Parkinson’s entry for mumia in the Theatrum includes a crude woodcut of a dismembered corpse lying next to its ransacked sarcophagus (figure 1).1 Is this a body, a plant, or both? Early modern

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Figure 1.  Illustration of

“Mumia,” Theatrum Botanicum, John Parkinson (London: Thomas Coates, 1640), 1593. (Hargrett ­Library, University of Georgia)

horticulturalists and natural philosophers might argue that there is little difference, particularly when a body ceases to be alive—at that point, it might be said to leave the creaturely world and enter the botanical one, either through decomposition and vermiculation, or in the case of mummies, by means of some sort of mystical fleshly dissolution or absorption into the embalming spices over time. Parkinson’s tribe of “strange and exotic” plants suggests broadly that the boundary between human and vegetable states was flexible indeed. This essay maintains that the early modern relationship between plants and the human body was less distinct and more interdependent than it is now, by scrutinizing an early modern fantasy that takes shape in seventeenth-­century metaphysical poetry: the desire to leave one’s human body behind and metamorphose into a plant. Just as plants and vines were described in botanical literature as possessing humanoid or animal characteristics, so, too, was the human mind and body connection described in natural philosophy as having a “vegetable” or “vegetative” soul. As Jayne Lewis describes elsewhere in this collection in her marvelous analysis of

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the posthumous literary metamorphosis of Milton’s hair into a vine, elements of the body might be configured in botanical terms—hairs were leaves and plant matter, for instance—just as the disparate parts of plants might bear human body parts such as hairs, arms, legs, and fingers. I point out this rhetorical fluidity between plant life and human matter in botanical and early scientific discourse not merely to suggest that ontological slippage between these categories dominated the period (or even to posit that there could be no slippage given that the categories themselves had not yet become discrete) but to argue that the desire for human-­botanical plasticity we see emerging in seventeenth-­century poetry rather pointed to these two categories defining themselves against one another and beginning to separate more clearly: in other words, what it meant to be a human, thinking, moving body was beginning to be defined against what it meant to be a nonsentient but still living plant. The more clearly this distinction came into view, the more powerful became the fantasy of imagining yielding one’s body to nonsentient (or differently sentient) plant life, “ensnared with flowers” and “metamorphosed to a vine.”2 In the several poems and images I will examine in this essay, we see bodies entwined with and becoming vines (“The Vision” and “The Vine”), slow seduction as a vegetable (“To His Coy Mistress”), and souls freed from their fleshly trappings transmigrating into green sunlight filtered through leaves, trees, and birds (“The Garden”). In each of these poems, as the human mind attempts to escape or transform its corporeal imprisonment, the plant world functions as an organic supplement, augmenting and enhancing the body and freeing the mind from its human bodily limitations. In “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvell famously describes the fantasy of being able to love and praise his mistress until the end of time as “my vegetable love” (11). To early modern English readers this adjective would have connoted botanical life, and its ability to “grow” (11) slyly suggests a penis. But “vegetable” also suggests the nonsentient faculty of the brain as described by Aristotle and referred to in the Middle Ages and early modern period as the “vegetable soul” (which is probably the philosophical origin of the twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century English description of an unconscious human being as a “vegetable”).3 This vegetative aspect of all life is also a generative force. As Bruce Smith puts it, “The ‘vegetable soul’ that mankind imagined itself sharing with both plants and animals includes reproduction.”4 In 1641, Robert Naunton employed the noun vegetable to

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describe an individual leading a monotonous life, a kind of mindless soul, whose body obeys its own rules independent of the mind (with an added sexual connotation): “He was a meere vegetable at Court that sprung up at night and sunke again at noone.”5 But as Zachary Fisher points out, there was also already an early modern understanding of love experienced by the Aristotelean vegetable soul shared by plants and animals: Robert Burton describes this as “natural love” in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and connects it to Aristotle’s principle of “affinities” that attempts to explain the physical laws of the universe.6 Thus, from an early modern philosophical standpoint, “vegetable love” was a love bigger and stronger than physical attraction and operated on a cosmic rather than a terrestrial scale. Burton’s “natural love” of the vegetable soul constitutes the unseen and unknown cosmological forces that bind the universe together. It is a love more mysterious, profound, and interconnected than mere human desire. A “vegetable love” is thus both a humanoid and distinctly nonhuman force. It has agency and a tremendous capacity for physical growth and reproduction but presumably, like most plant life, lacks consciousness and rational and imaginative thought. It reveals that early modern writers—poets in particular—were able to understand and imagine elements of the natural world as having agency apart from human beings, an agency that poets frequently imagine being able to claim for themselves. Yet early modern poets also come to understand that giving up their human agency in exchange for a botanical embrace does not merely supercharge them with plant power but also risks dehumanizing them, though as Douglas Trevor contends in his discussion of Robert Herrick’s poem “The Vine,” sometimes this loss of humanity is less a risk than the ultimate objective. For Trevor, Herrick’s poet “wants to transform human sexual desire away from the human . . . unauthored by human agency in the first place, as something unmediated by cognitive reflection and therefore purely natural,” and this allows him to do transgressive and disrespectful things, to imagine physically imprisoning and possessing his mistress against her will.7 Enter the vine, a climbing, twisting, tentacle-­like plant whose unique winding curves and bendy tendrils lent it an immediate appearance of aliveness. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English word vine was primarily synonymous with one trailing vine in particular, vitus vinifera, the grapevine that produces wine (derived from Latin vinum), although more generally it could mean any grape or ivy plant of the genus vitus.8 John

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Gerard describes several plants in his Herball (1597) as “vines”—there is a vine-­like leek, and nightshades and sarsaparilla or “Bindeweed” behave like vines—but the word vine is reserved for vitus species: grape, ivy, and bryony (wild grape).9 Grape vines appear poetically in the 1611 King James Bible’s translation of the Song of Solomon, which compares the woman’s breasts to “clusters of the vine” and the beloved to “a cluster of camphire [henna] in the vineyards of En-­gedi” (Song of Solomon 7:8, 1:14 [KJV]). Vine as grapevine also appears as a figure for Jesus in references to John 15:1–5 that Richard Hooker employs in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastial Politie (1597): “That true Vine whereof we both spiritually and corporally are branches.”10 A number of seventeenth-­century devotional poets allegorize Christ as the grapevine: in George Herbert’s “Love-­Joy,” the poet has a vision of a vine dropping grapes inscribed with Christ’s signature, and in “The Bunch of Grapes,” the speaker imagines a Protestant typological context for Psalm 80, in which the Israelites in the desert receive a divinely prolific grapevine. For Herbert, the vine in the desert is Christ, and his arresting metaphysical conceit compares Christ’s torture on the cross to a winepress (with a pun on being “pressed into service”), the final result producing transubstantiated wine-­blood consumed by the speaker: “Ev’n God himself, being pressed for my sake” (28).11 Edward Geisweidt and Marjorie Swann have revealed how early modern botanical writing gave plants humanoid characteristics—hairs, sensing skins, reproductive organs—just as some human body parts (like hair) were themselves described in botanical terms, as Jayne Lewis’s essay in this volume, on Milton’s hair, will explore in more detail.12 Gerard’s description of bryony, “the white vine,” a wild grape native to England, compares the vine itself to human behavior and bodies, but stops short of full prosopopoeia, instead leaving readers with the sense that this powerful vine (with a number of medical “vertues” including removal of bruises and freckles, intestinal purgation and the loosening of stillborn children and placentas) is terrifying because it resembles us. The vine has “many clasping tendrils . . . wherewith it catcheth hold of the things that are next unto it.”13 Moreover, the enormous root that grows beneath the delicate vine has a unique size, one that Gerard has witnessed courtesy of “The Queene’s chiefe Chirurgeon. Master William Goodorus, a very curious and learned gentleman,” who showed him a root the exact size of a human baby, “of the bignesse of a childe, of a yeere olde.”14 Unlike a one-­year-­old, however, the root weighed “halfe an hundred weight” or fifty-­six pounds (more than twice the weight of an overweight

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one-­year-­old by today’s standards). Black bryony is described in a similar manner, its root also heavy and big, in this case “oftentimes as bigge as a man’s legge.”15 Gerard’s text seems to flirt with describing vines as both animated and similar to human bodies, while at the same time keeping them separate life forms. The boundaries between vine and human are continually crossed and contested. These are vital vines. Twining grapevines feature prominently in Robert Herrick’s only published collection of poetry, Hesperides (1648), particularly in his several loosely translated anacreontics. Anacreon, the Greek poet famous for celebrating the enchantments of love, wine, and verse, is re-­created by Herrick to celebrate a (likely artificial) mid-­seventeenth-­century carpe diem attitude. Herrick closely associates Anacreon with the grapevine, both in “The Vision (Anacreon)” (a translation of the poem that opens the Anacreontia) and “The Vine,” erotic dream visions involving nonnormative sexuality that bear a striking resemblance to more modern cultural practices of sadomasochism.16 In “The Vision (Anacreon),” the ancient Greek poet appears crowned with vines while a nymph stands “tapping his plump thighs with a myrtle wand” (8)17 and in “The Vine,”18 the poet dreams of a metamorphosis into a vine that binds and imprisons his beloved. The poet fuses his image of Anacreon with one of the early modern visual traditions of depicting Bacchus as a sensual and athletic young man, offering the pleasures of the body alongside the pleasures of wine, slyly daring the viewers to take any risk with him. Nearly all sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century paintings, drawings, and prints of Bacchus depict him with a crown of grapevine entwined in his locks and another growing from his staff.19 In Hendrik Goltzius’s engraving of Bacchus (figure 2), for example, the grapevine’s tendrils, leaves, and fruit twine so closely about the god’s head so as to be indistinguishable from his hair. The vine also drapes itself about his hips, both modestly and immodestly concealing and pointing out his private parts, though the engraving’s frame cuts off the picture just in time. One hand clutches a bunch of grapes curling with vine leaves and spilling out of the fingers, while the other arm raises a drinking vessel (bearing a grotesque face) high above his head, both in salute and invitation to the viewer. Bacchus peers slyly out from under the raised bowl with feline closed eyes and full mouth. Goltzius’s Bacchus is an erotically charged image, revealing temptations of the vine as mere conduits to the temptations of the flesh. The curling, twining effect of the

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Figure 2.  Bacchus,

Hendrik Goltzius, engraving. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

grapevine in his curls and around his waist suggests that the vine, with its analog in locks of hair, has fused itself to Bacchus’s body, that it is not separate from him, but physically part of him, a Sampson-­like living, organic supplement that is the source of his power over others. The “crawling vine about Anacreon’s head” (2) in Herrick’s sonnet “The Vision (Anacreon)” is closely tied by association to the wine falling from his mouth and oil dripping from his curls, taken together a compendium of images of wild, Bacchic delights, but the syntax of the poem’s opening lines gives precedence and agency to the vine itself, not to Anacreon: “Methought I saw (as I did dream in bed) / A crawling vine about Anacreon’s head” (1–2), implying that the ancient poet is possessed by the spirit of the grapevine, which works its magic on his body, causing the blood to rise in his cheeks, the wine and oil to pour and drip from his face, and his speech to slur (“Tippled he was, and tippling lisped withal” [5]), ultimately resulting in the ancient poet losing his grip on the ground, “and lisping reeled, and reeling like to fall” (6). In this utterly possessed condition, Anacreon surrenders himself not only to the spirit of the vine but to the gentle blows of a

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“young enchantress” (7) with a myrtle wand. The poet manages a kiss and a cuddle but not much else, being too drunk. This angers the nymph, who seizes his crown of vine and grapes and gives it to the speaker. The sonnet ends with a couplet that places the speaker’s mental faculties in thrall to Ancreon’s (or rightly Bacchus’s) grapevine crown, equally possessed and equally powerless and lacking in agency: “Since when (methinks) my brains about do swim / And I am wild and wanton like to him” (13–14). The only humanlike figure with any agency in “The Vision (Anacreon)” is the enchantress, who wants more than she is getting. Neither Anacreon nor the speaker has much control over his movements or thoughts. More powerful, and more dangerous, is the vine itself, an enchanted thing, a wreath that once put on, controls and contorts the thoughts and actions of the wearer. Early modern writers were well aware that real vines have a dangerous tendency to escape or exceed their containers. Just as viniculture advanced in the early seventeenth century, so did the number of compound words describing structures built to contain and train unruly vines. The words for the tools “vine-­frame,” “vine-­prop,” and “vine-­hook” all came into use in the early seventeenth century.20 And even in Milton’s Eden, Adam and Eve are constantly pruning and training overgrown vines in a somewhat fruitless manner. As Eve (already under Satan’s dream influence) points out to Adam: “what we by day / Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind, / One night or two with wanton growth derides / Tending to wild” (IX. 209–12).21 Not only imbued with the drunken potential of wine, vines themselves tended to wild, wanton behavior unless properly controlled. In “The Vision (Anacreon)” only the sonnet’s rhetorically organized quatrains and rhyming couplets impose any kind of control over the wanton and ungovernable characteristics exercised by the vine wreath upon its wearers. Fused to their brows, the grape wreath functions as an organic supplement, melding physically with their hair and plugging itself invisibly into their brains and central nervous systems. Much like “The Vision (Anacreon),” the poem “The Vine” depicts another erotic dream, as the sleeping speaker’s unconscious transforms his body entirely into a twisting, writhing vine capable of grasping and encircling his beloved Lucia in myriad ways, inhabiting multiple places simultaneously: “I dreamed this mortal part of mine / Was metamorphosed into a vine” (1–2). It seems worthwhile to note that the majority of early modern poetry about vines, even poems that look at vines erotically or as penises

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(Christ’s or a lover’s) do not do what Herrick’s does: they do not animate the vine, imagine how a vine might navigate its own sensory experience of “Tendrils” (5) and “Nerv’lits,” (7) or imagine it moving, alive, vital. In all the other poetry, vines are analogies, metaphors for faithfulness, strength, a lover’s embrace, or a god’s love. Herrick’s depiction of a vine is thus unique to early modern poetry in that it transcends or bypasses metaphor in favor of a literal description of man as vine: as a memorable and vivid dream vision, the speaker himself is transformed into a vine; the vine is him; he is the vine. Interestingly, this has more in common with seventeenth-­century devotional poetry like Herbert’s that allegorizes Christ as the vine but then speaks literally of consuming him through transubstantiated wine, than with the countless poems and emblems that describe vines as symbols of faith and love. Herrick’s poem resurrects and reanimates a rather conventional metaphor taken from love poetry both divine and secular by removing the distance that rhetorical comparison and metaphor generate. In this poem, the vitality of the nonhuman botanical thing into which the poet has transformed seizes control of the poet’s own body as well as that of his beloved. As in “The Vision (Anacreon),” the poem’s form of heroic couplets seeks to impose order on a disorderly fantasy (and Herrick is no stranger to the delights that disorder promises) without fully mastering this feat.22 The poem is composed of an uneven number of lines (23), most of which take the form of end-­stopped heroic couplets, all except for the rhymed, enjambed triplet that ends at poem’s center: “About her head I writing hung, / And with rich clusters (hid among / The leaves) her temples I behung” (9–11). Equipped with “Tendrils” that “surprise” (6), “Nerv’lits” that embrace (8), “rich clusters” that hang (10) and “curls” that “craule” (13) and “enthralle” (14), the speaker as vine has had his physical capacity of movement exponentially increased: he can now simultaneously move and feel multiple things in multiple ways. Instead of moving from action to action like a Petrarchan blazon that enumerates the beloved’s body parts one by one, first kissing her brow, then her cheeks, then her lips, etc., the speaker as vine is suddenly in all places, doing all things at once, and the poem itself becomes a kind of four-­dimensional hyperblazon that compresses time, place, and action into one space. This distillation and compression of sensation and movement into an instantaneous moment is the exact opposite of what Marvell does at the end of the first stanza of “To His Coy Mistress.” There, the speaker dilates and extends the blazon

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across an imagined history all the way to the apocalypse: “An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; / Two hundred to adore each breast” (13–15), with the poet fitting “an age at least to every part” (16). Here, the speaker is everywhere at once and in one single moment. The embrace does not progress slowly, point by point, but frenetically collapses time and space into a single, rapid entanglement. And as entangled as the poet’s “Nerv’lits” are with Lucia’s hair, so is the appetitive aspect of his mind with the botanical awareness of his new body. Fictional transformations of humans into plants are not new to English literature: Herrick’s and Marvell’s audience was well aware of Ovid’s depiction of the metamorphoses of Daphne, Syrinx, Cyparissus, Phaeton’s sisters, and Myrrha into plants, bushes, and trees.23 Petrarch frequently alludes to Apollo and Daphne in his Canzonière, connecting his unattainable beloved Laura to the metamorphosed Daphne as laurel, with Apollo, the god of poetry, as his own inspiration. The Ovidian metamorphosis of the fleeing woman into a tree or plant was a well-­known trope for early modern poets, less so the metamorphosis of the male lover into a plant. Petrarch’s poetry provides one exception: in canzonière 22’s sestina “A qualunque animale alberga in terra,” (the time to labor, for every animal that inhabits the earth), the speaker inverts the pursuit of Daphne myth and describes himself as having sprouted branches and leaves, as if the transformation of Laura into Daphne-­laurel has been transferred onto the poet himself. Throughout the sestina, the speaker describes himself as “transformed to dry earth” and made into a “wild man of the woods” by his unfulfilled desire. His final prayer is for the gods to reverse Daphne’s/Laura’s laurel metamorphosis and transfer it onto his own body: “and may she not be changed to green woodland, / issuing from my arms, as on the day / when Apollo pursued her down here on earth.”24 By absorbing her metamorphosis, Petrarch could have the real girl back again, if only for a moment. Are Ovid’s characters or Petrarch’s sestina models for Herrick’s imagined transformation into a vine? Both present fruitful associations: Cyparissus in particular—the sole male character to change into a tree in Ovid’s poem—suggests nonnormative, cross-­species love and devotion, begging to be rooted to the spot where he accidentally killed his beloved tame stag. His transformation appears in Cornelis Cort’s 1565 engraving from a series on rural gods (figure 3). In it, his branching hair and hands seem to mimic the stag’s antlers. As a vine embracing a human, the speaker’s love is emphatically cross-­species.

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Figure 3.  Cyparissus, Cornelis Cort, 1565. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Petrarch’s transferal of Daphne’s metamorphosis onto himself, on the other hand, underscores the flexible role of lyric poetry in effecting change, as well as its paradoxical ability and inability to obtain the object of the poet’s affections: lyric poetry can produce a fantasy of union, but as Petrarch and Herrick repeatedly discover, poetry, no matter how vivid, only exists on the space of the page and in the abstract; immaterial, it dissolves like a dream. Despite being the immaterial stuff of fantasy, Herrick’s body as vine has a vivid material presence, much of which is accomplished through verbal animation in the poet’s use of active verbs of movement: “crawling one and every way” (3), the vine hangs “writhing” (9), his curls crawling about her neck (14), and the speaker creeps around Lucia’s lower abdomen (9). This erotically charged vine is vital material because it moves of its own accord. Although they disagree over this poem’s expression of sexuality, Valerie Traub (who presents a queer, pansexual reading) and William Kerrigan (whom Traub describes as “heterosexist”) both point out the interchangeability of genderless active and erogenous body parts in the poem, which Traub, accurately I think, describes as a “mutability” and “transitivity of imagined body parts.”25 The speaker’s body is so transposed into vine-­like

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elements that it is impossible to figure out which human body part has become which viniferous component. Are his hands transformed into “My curls” which “about her neck did crawl” (14), or are these curls the animated hairs on his head transposed into plant life? Has the skin become “my soft Nerv’lits” (8), or is this a multiplication of erogenous zones? Most importantly, which body part is Herrick indicating by “this mortal part of mine” (1)? At least two other seventeenth-­century English lyrics compare vines to penises: Hugh Crompton’s poem “To Caelia, in the Fields” thinly metaphorizes his beloved’s body as fertile ground wherein “I’ll plant my vine of love” (26), eventually promising frankly to fill her with “marrow” (36) like “yon big-­bellied ewe” (35).26 The poem rather crudely drives home the vine-­as-­ penis and seducer-­as-­vintner metaphor: “Then have at all; upon’t Ile enter, / And plant my vine there at a venter” (39–40). A “venter” is an obscure sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century word indicating three things: (1) a second wife or female lover, one who specifically produces extra offspring for a husband; (2) the womb itself; and (3) one of the four stomachs of a ruminant (such as the aforementioned ewe), but the word also produces a near homophonic pun with “vintner.”27 In a more chaste but no less graphic manner, William Cartwright’s New Year’s meditation poem “On the Circumcision” reads the baby Jesus’s circumcised member both typologically for the passion and allegorically as the grapevine that will nourish the Christian church. At the same time, the poet relishes the chance to make a metaphysical bathroom pun on “water”: “Fear not the pruning of your vine, / He’ll turn your Water into Wine” (5–6).28 Herrick likely had such phallic imagery at his fingertips, and the lascivious intent of this vine coupled with the disappointing “stock” at the end of the poem when the speaker wakes explicitly invoke an image of the male member. However, the phrase “mortal part” suggests something quite different: a distinction being made between body and soul. The soul is immortal and can transcend the body; its mortal is cage, subject to death and decay where the soul is not. “This mortal part of mine” thus means the speaker’s entire body from the hairs on his head to the nails on his toes, something both transient and capable of corruption. I would argue that Traub’s “transitivity” of metamorphosed body parts in Herrick’s vine poem does more than scramble differences of sex and gender: it also highlights the desirable differences between plant and human: there are no human corollary components to masses of tendrils and nervelets, which might be tiny sinews,

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sensory cords, or botanical veins—all concurrent definitions of nerve in the period.29 Curly locks can resemble tendrils, but they cannot act as a vine’s corkscrew fibers do and independently coil themselves around objects. This is precisely Herrick’s point: only as a grapevine would the speaker be able to entangle himself with his Lucia this fully and this confusedly; this vine possesses tensile capacities that the human body lacks. On the other hand, this is a fully sensorial vine; like a human being, it has highly sensitive nerve endings in every part, although it seems as though every part constitutes an erogenous zone. This gives the vine hyperanimal, human characteristics (insomuch as seventeenth-­century natural philosophers thought that plants were not subject to the five senses in the way that animals were). It is important to remember here, however, that only the speaker’s “mortal part,” his body, has been transposed into a vine. This suggests that his immortal part, his soul and his consciousness, remain human.30 The speaker’s desire here is not quite to metamorphose into a vine but to retain his thinking identity, to be able to experience his desire for Lucia more profoundly and possibly to be able to please his beloved physically more fully than his human, male body is capable of doing. Thus, Herrick’s corporeal vineness makes him less human, while at the same time his consciousness generates human self-­awareness. The vine functions here as organic supplement, fusing immaterial human consciousness with living, animated, botanical material. It both extends and augments the physicality of the human body, stretching and bending its musculature to make a tighter and more enveloping embrace possible, while at the same time its imagined hypersensitivity to touch enhances the new body’s tactile experience. Herrick’s vine’s power has violent implications: it not only aims to imprison Lucia utterly and all at once, “all partes there made one prisoner” (17); it is also suggestive of rape, as when the speaker compares his embraced Lucia to “Young Bacchus ravisht by his tree” (13). The early modern horticultural practice of grafting offers a parallel interpretation here: just as gardeners grafted or melded branches from one variety of tree onto another to produce multivalent trees yielding a variety of types of fruit, so the vine implants itself in the speaker’s faculties of perception and attempts to engraft itself onto Lucia’s body.31 Seventeenth-­century poets were both intrigued by and wary of grafting, which they described as bending nature against itself, building monstrous creations. Marvell’s mower laments how much “luxurious Man” (1) has gotten his hands dirty in messing around with nature’s

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plants and trees. Grafting has yielded “Forbidden mixtures” (22) and “adulterate fruit” (25).32 It would not be a stretch of the imagination to interpret Herrick’s poem as transposing the unnatural or monstrous aspect of early modern horticultural practices like grafting onto the nonnormative and not entirely human erotic embraces of the speaker’s fantasy and his beloved. The tightness of the embrace suggests not only violent possession of the beloved’s body but, if carried out fully, complete takeover and individual obliteration, not unlike the bodily fusion that happens to Ovid’s Hermaphroditus when the nymph Salmacis refuses to let go.33 We need only glance at the early modern decorative arts tradition of ornamental grotesques to see images of bodies grafted onto plant matter. Grotesques appeared in the margins and borders of printed books, paintings, and sculptural decorations. Many from the seventeenth century mixed botanical transformations—cherubs, randy satyrs, and terms transforming into gigantic curlicues and twirling flourishes of acanthus leaves at the legs—with elements taken from grottoes (scallops, nautiluses, and conchs).34 Other such grotesques depict various human and animal bodies encircled and ensnared by botanical flourishes, much like Herrick’s Lucia (figure 4). These paintings, engravings, and woodcuts were ubiquitous, especially in printed books on title pages and as vignettes (which means “little vines”). Many printed grotesques followed the medieval sculptural tradition of depicting the green man on keystones as a face composed entirely of leaves and vines. It is easy to imagine Herrick drawing on one of these plant-­human grotesques as a model for his vine metamorphosis fantasy, his no longer quite human face peeking out from a crinkled arrangement of grape leaves. Just as the speaker as vine begins to cover or “hide”—and therefore touch—his beloved’s “parts, which maydes keep unespy’d” (19) in a masterful stroke of occupatio (rhetorical withholding), the poet suddenly awakens tragically (“Ah, me!”) returning to his erect but flawed human body, weak and powerless in its lack of plasticity, “more like a stock than like a vine” (23). The metamorphosis dissolves just in time, before any consummate ravishment, fusion, or obliteration can happen. In addition to creating an echo of “stalk,” and suggesting a block of wood, the word stock in early modern English connoted a withered, passive tree trunk lacking leaves, onto which a younger, more vital tree branch could be grafted.35 It was also a term used to describe a person who was “lifeless” or “void of sensation.”36 The dream vision of metamorphosis into a vine gives the poet a glimpse

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Figure 4.  Page from Disegni varii di Polifilo Zancarli, c. 1625. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

of vital, nonhuman agency and then, once he awakens, ironically deprives him not only of this power but of his own humanity. Like Gerard’s bryony, Herrick’s vine is a dangerous and powerful nonhuman creature, desired, as Trevor argues, precisely because of its inhumanity, but destructive for both the enthralled Lucia and the speaker himself, who, in a fantasy about exceeding the limits of humanity, awakens only to find himself passive and contained by his human body. At the end of the poem, the body or “mortal part” imprisons the speaker in its rigidity. Longing for the animated flexibility of the vine, the speaker finds himself experiencing a moment of bodily dislocation, as if he no longer belongs in this human shell, his erection too automatic and mechanical to serve as an appropriate instrument of desire. Lacking the harmonious movement and suppleness of its botanical supplement, the speaker finds himself alone with a mere organ.

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Like Herrick’s speaker, Marvell’s poet conjures an imaginary botanical enthrallment and imprisonment in “The Garden,” wishing also to exchange his limiting human body for an arboreal quintessence. Drawing more explicitly on Ovid’s Daphne and Syrinx in stanza 4, the speaker invokes the tree and reeds into which they transform as fittingly calm and collected endings to a feverish chase. Swann reads the speaker’s desire to become a plant as asexual and innocent, but at least in stanza 4, I think Marvell wants simply to move to a moment past pursuit and consummation, not to reject those things entirely.37 Yes, he rewrites the myths of Daphne and Syrinx not as escaped rapes but as predicted endings: “Apollo hunted Daphne so, / Only that She might Laurel grow” (29–30),38 but this is a kind of deterministic or typological reading of Ovid, not a suggestion that Apollo and Pan actually wanted Daphne and Syrinx to metamorphose into plants.39 If “The Vine” describes a passionate and violent ravishment as if Apollo and not Daphne were the laurel, then Marvell’s “The Garden” prefers to focus on a more chaste embrace, or at least a postcoital afterglow, “When we have run our Passion’s heat / . . . / Still in a Tree did end their race” (25–28). Throughout this contemplative poem, the speaker seeks to transcend the earthly and fleshly limitations of his own body and become not simply a plant or tree but a mind free to wander in the sunlit leaves, absorbed by the essence of plantness itself, abstracted somewhat from physical organic matter yet still thrumming with aliveness and color, “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green Thought in a green Shade” (47–48). There is no single English word for sunlight filtered through green leaves, but the Japanese have the word komorebi to describe this visual process.40 Marvell’s “green Thought in a green Shade” seems to come close. Intriguingly, Marvell’s speaker ascends to this transcendent mental state not directly as in a religious rapture but through a violently erotic tangle with vegetation in stanza 5 that calls to mind Herrick’s animated, writhing vine: What wond’rous Life is this I lead! Ripe Apples drop about my head; The Lustrous Clusters of the Vine Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine; The Nectaren and the curious Peach Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on Melons, as I pass, Insnar’d with Flow’rs, I fall on Grass. (33–40)

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On one hand, all nature silently serves itself to the speaker much like Jonson’s fantasy of bounty obscures labor and class division in “To Penhurst,” where fish eagerly leap into nets and orchard trees softly drop their fruit into children’s hands.41 On the other hand, there is violence and physical possession in the stanza as well: the speaker’s head pelted with apples, the grapes forcing themselves against his mouth, the creepy stone fruit reaching armlike into his hands, the booby-­trapped melons that are there to allow a net of flowers to ensnare the speaker, incapacitating him physically, bringing him prostrate to the ground in a “fall” that is both physical and suggestively spiritual, as it references the original sin tied to tasting forbidden fruit. Swann elegantly notes that this fruity molestation mimics the movement of a blazon.42 I would go further to suggest that it’s a Petrarchan blazon in reverse: instead of the speaker’s poetry elevating the beloved, the fruit blazon bombards and assaults the speaker until he is toppled. Here, Marvell’s speaker is ravished by the vine and its molesting friends, not by his beloved. In fact, this poem has no beloved Petrarchan muse, unless we are to read the garden itself as fulfilling that role. This little memorial reenactment of the Fall is necessary, because the Fall brings out death of the flesh and the promise of resurrection of the soul. This allows the speaker momentarily to relinquish the flesh and set his avian soul (52–56) free to roam unencumbered by the body, his mind reduced utterly “to a green Thought in a green Shade” (48). The arresting phrase “Annihilating all that’s made” (47) is somewhat like a Marvellian answer to Herrick’s “this mortal part of mine.” “All that’s made” refers to bodies, creatures, and humans, all created by their maker, God. But it also references poetry, which is a fashioned artifact, deriving from the Greek word poiein, “to make.” To annihilate “all that’s made” means to reduce human bodies, and even the very poem that itself has been performing this act of reduction into pure and almost consciousness. I write almost here because although disembodied, the color green nevertheless possesses materiality, not only because it invokes images of plant leaves and komorebi, but because colors are made up of light, which is made of up waves and particles. Bruce Smith reminds us that green vibrates at 500–510 nanometers a second.43 In Marvell’s “Garden” fantasy, it is color and light (or “shade”) that indicate the presence of an organic supplement, although it might be better to call it an organic subtraction, for this metamorphosis cannot happen without the speaker divorcing his soul from his body.

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I want to suggest further that poetry itself plays the role of organic supplement here, because it is the only force in a poem capable of annihilating and remaking itself. The poet imagines sending his soul into “the fountain’s sliding foot” (49) (suggestive of poetic feet) or “some fruit-­trees mossy root” (50), but this is only possible if he can truly cast “the body’s vest aside” (51), a conversion of the erotic imagery of dishabille usually found in seduction poems (like Donne’s elegy “On His Mistress”) into language of spiritual purification. At the poem’s end, the speaker returns to the engine of poetry with metaphors of the computation of time, the “industrious bee” and the sundial. Longing for a world in which time was told in a natural, nonmechanical and nonhuman manner, through “herbs and flowers,” the poet nevertheless must end his highly formal poem by reminding readers of the time-­bound, mechanical structure of poetry itself. The speaker’s return to the work of poetry as an instrument of time and industry at the end of “The Garden” parallels Herrick’s speaker’s return to waking life and the inflexible, mechanical features of the body. Both poets must confess their fantasies of corporeal-­botanical transformation and dissolution to be immaterial in the face of waking life, and poem’s ending.

Notes Many thanks to Ari Lieberman for his comments and suggestions on this essay. 1. John Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum: The Theatre of Plants, or, an Herball of Large Extent (London: Thomas Cotes, 1640), 1593–94. 2. Andrew Marvell, “The Garden,” in Miscellaneous Poems by Andrew Marvell, Esq. (London: Robert Boulter, 1681), 40; Robert Herrick, “The Vine,” in Hesperides, or the Works both Human and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq. (London: John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, 1648), 40. 3. OED online, s.v. “vegetable (adj. 1).” See Nigel Smith, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell (London: Routledge, 2006), 81n11, and Marjorie Swann, “Vegetable Love: Botany and Sexuality in Seventeenth-­Century England,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, ed. Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 139–40. 4. Bruce Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 66. 5. Robert Naunton, Fragmentia Regalia (London, 1641), sig. D4v.

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6. Zachary Fisher, “‘Vegetable Love’: Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress,’ Herrick’s ‘The Vine,’ and the Attraction of Plants,” blog entry, August 2014, Shaping Sense: The Paramaterial Phantasy, https://​senseshaper​.com​/vegetable ​-­­love​-­­marvell​-­­coy​-­­mistress​-­­herricks​-­­vine​-­­attraction​-­­plants/; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: John Litchfield and James Short, 1621), part III, 15–16. 7. Douglas Trevor, “The Private Lives of Trees and Flowers,” in The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Volume II, ed. Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar, and Bryan Reynolds (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 117–39. 8. OED online, s.v. “vine (n.).” 9. John Gerard, The Herball, or a Generall Historie of Plantes (London: John Norton, 1597). 10. Quoted in OED online, “vine (n.).” 11. George Herbert, “Love-­joy,” in The Temple (Cambridge: 1633), 109. Other seventeenth-­century devotional poets who describe Christ as the (grape) vine include Rowland Watkins (1662): “I am the true vine”; Nicholas Billingsley (1667), “On a Cluster”; and the emblem book poets George Wither (1635), Emblem XVIII, “Although there bee no timbler in the Vine,” and Francis Quarles (1632), “Bridegroome: Sonnet XXIIII.” 12. See Edward Geisweidt, “Horticulture of the Head: The Vegetable Life of Hair in Early Modern English Thought,” Early Modern Literary Studies 19 (2009): 6.1–24; and Geisweidt, “‘The Nobleness of Life’: Spontaneous Generation and Excremental Life in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lynne Bruckner and Daniel Brayton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 89–104; Swann, “Vegetable Love,” 139–58; Jayne Lewis, “Milton’s Hair” in this volume, 220–46. 13. Gerard, Herball, 719. 14. Gerard, Herball, 719. 15. Gerard, Herball, 721. 16. Robert Herrick, Hesperides, or the Works both Human and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq. (London: John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, 1648). All subsequent quotations of Herrick are from this edition. “The Vision (Anacreon)” is not to be confused with another Herrick poem in Hesperides also called “The Vision,” which also depicts an erotic dreamlike hallucination. The former is a tight, fourteen-­line sonnet that describes a drunken Anacreon getting whipped by a nymph, the latter a longer, twenty-­two-­line poem in heroic couplets that describes a scantily clad maiden of Diana. 17. Herrick, Hesperides, 371.

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18. Herrick, Hesperides, 14. 19. There are two renditions of Bacchus in early modern visual art, one depicting the god as a corpulent, fleshy, older man and the other depicting him as a dangerous, sensual youth. Herrick’s Bacchic Anacreon in “The Vision,” along with his comparison of his beloved Lucia to Bacchus in “The Vine,” both draw on the latter tradition, as do the painters Leonardo (St. John/ Bacchus), Titian (Bacchus and Ariadne), Doso Dossi, Caravaggio, and Velázquez and the sculptors Michelangelo and Sansovino. 20. OED online, s.v. “vine (n.).” 21. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 270. 22. See Herrick, “Delight in Disorder,” in Hesperides. 23. In the first book of the Metamorphoses, fleeing a rapacious Apollo, Daphne transforms into a laurel tree (I. 534–60). Fleeing Pan, Syrinx is translated into a bank of river reeds (I. 696–715); later Phaeton’s sisters the Heliades become poplars (II. 340–85) and Myrrha a myrrh tree that gives birth to Adonis (X. 486–511). Cyparissus, the only male character in the Metamorphoses to change into a tree, becomes a cypress as atonement after having accidentally stabbed his favorite stag (X. 86–158). Ovid’s Metamorphoses appeared in English translation by Arthur Golding (London: William Seres, 1567) and George Sandys (Oxford: John Litchfield, 1632), but Herrick and Marvell likely read it in Latin in grammar school. Latin editions of Ovid abounded in the sixteenth century, but the best known were illustrated editions by Bernard Salomon (1557, 1583), Bersman-­Mycillus (Leipzig, 1582), and Johann Spreng and Virgil Solis’s beautiful edition of 1563. 24. Francesco Petrarca, The Complete Canzonière, trans. A. S. Kline (2001), Poetry In Translation, http://​www​.poetryintranslation​.com​/PITBR​/Italian​ /Petrarchhome​.htm. 25. Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 145. See also William Kerrigan, “Kiss Fancies in Robert Herrick,” George Herbert Journal 14.2 (Spring 1991): 155–71. 26. Although Crompton’s poem appeared first in print nine years after Herrick’s Hesperides, it was likely circulated in manuscript before that date. Hugh Crompton, “To Caelia, in the Fields,” in Poems (London, 1657). 27. OED online, s.v. “venter (n. 1).” 28. Cartwright’s poem was published in 1651 but circulated in manuscript before the poet’s premature death at thirty-­two in 1643. William Cartwright, “On the Circumcision,” in Poems (London, 1651).

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29. The OED cites this very poem alone in its definition of nervelet as “tendril”; however, nerve had indicated the sensory cords of the central nervous system, sinews, and the veins of plants since the early fifteenth century. OED online, s.v. “nervelet (n., 1)” and “nerve (n., I 1a; 2; 3).” 30. I am assuming a near post-­Cartesian consciousness here, in which the mind’s thought processes define the speaker’s identity as per Descartes’s cogito, first published in 1637. 31. For more on grafting as a practice and in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­ century English culture, see Leah Knight, Reading Green in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2014); and Vin Nardizzi and Miriam Jacobson, “The Secrets of Grafting in Wroth’s Urania,” in Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, ed. Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 175–94. 32. Andrew Marvell, “The Mower against Gardens,” in Miscellaneous Poems by Andrew Marvell, Esq. (London: Robert Boulter, 1681), 40. All further quotations from Marvell’s poetry come from this edition. 33. Ovid, Metamorphoses, IV. 274–316. See also Francis Beaumont, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (London: John Hodgets, 1602). 34. The origin of the English word grotesque, which replaced the more widely used word antic (from stila antica, or antique style) in the second half of the seventeenth century, derives from the Roman excavation of Nero’s villa the Domus Aurea, which had sunken so far underground that people believed the rooms decorated with classical chimeras were intended as grottoes. See OED online, s.v. “grotesque (n. and adj.).” 35. OED online, s.v. “stock (n. and adj., AI1a and b, 2b.”. 36. OED online, s.v. “stock (n. and adj. AI1c).” 37. For Swann, the speaker’s fantasy to return to an innocent, nonsexual state embodied by plants is not without irony. See Swann, “Vegetable Love,” 146, 149; and Trevor, “The Private Lives of Trees and Flowers.” 38. Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems, 49–51. 39. Here I disagree slightly with Swann’s reading that “Apollo and Pan . . . wanted Daphne and Syrinx to turn into plants.” Swann, “Vegetable Love,” 147. 40. See Caitriona O’Reilly’s poem “Komorebi,” published in The New York Times, https://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2015​/11​/22​/magazine​/komorebi​ .html?​_r​=​0, November, 20, 2015. O’Reilly draws indirectly and directly on Marvell’s “The Garden,” not only in her poem’s references to “shade” and escape but in her description of the cormorant’s wet wings (Marvell imagines his soul entering a bird that “whets, and combs his silver wings” [54]). O’Reilly’s cormorant may also refer to Satan’s taking the form of

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a cormorant to view paradise for the first time in Milton’s Paradise Lost, book IV. 41. Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst,” in The Workes of Ben Jonson (London: William Stansby, 1616). 42. Swann, “Vegetable Love,” 148. 43. Smith, The Key of Green,11–25.

❖ part

iii ❖

Vitality and Decay

Knowing the World through Rococo Ornamental Prints Michael Yonan

R

ococo art revels in complexity, sensuality, indeterminacy, and seductive surfaces, qualities that are conveyed in the decorative arts through the shell-­like rocaille shapes that give the style its name. Rococo design was more than just an art of decoration, however, and therefore more than simply one style among many in the history of art. Its forms reveal the structures that bind object, image, and the viewer’s eyes and body in complex ways, making it a kind of metastyle, one in which the ontological conditions of viewer and object are investigated. It was the German art historian Hermann Bauer who first described rococo ornament in this way; he saw it as supplemental both to art and to the observer’s physical experience of looking at art. He described ornament as a mediating element, a point that the art historian Oleg Grabar later explored in a more general study of ornament’s effects.1 This idea subsequently became the centerpiece of an important and influential article by Mimi Hellman.2 In it, Hellman argued that eighteenth-­century furniture was an active force in shaping eighteenth-­century sociability, and further that furniture’s design contributed to the creation of an elite subjectivity. For Hellman, as for Bauer and Grabar, rococo objects function as corporeal supplements that influence human behavior fundamentally. The beautiful mechanical table by Jean-­François Oeben and Roger Vandercruse Lacroix now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (figure 1) is easy to understand as a decorative object and even perhaps a shaper of human behavior in Hellman’s sense. But comprehending how its rococo ornamental elements interrogate human sensory boundaries may be more challenging for a modern

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Figure 1.  Mechanical table, Jean-­François Oeben and Roger Vandercruse Lacroix, c. 1761–63. ( Jack and Belle Linsky Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1982.60.61)

beholder to grasp. How did shells, flowers, and curlicues become a conduit for critiquing human perception in Enlightenment Europe? This essay shall attempt to answer that question by examining how rococo decorative art transformed the art/nature duality at the center of early modern European aesthetics into a critique of bodily sensation. Viewing the rococo in this way has the advantage of bypassing much twentieth-­century prejudice against ornament as something inessential and unnecessary. It also has the effect of claiming for rococo decorative arts a singular importance in the formation of modern taste. Modern viewers typically turn to paintings to understand early modern stylistic developments, since painting remains the privileged art-­historical medium for explicating art’s theoretical underpinnings. Yet for all its beauty, rococo painting is at a remove from the decorative forms found in rococo architecture and decorative arts like the Oeben-­Lacroix table. The rococo’s theoretical basis is better approached through the medium of ornamental prints. Rococo prints offered more than simple images of flourishes later reproduced in works of

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decorative art; they engage in a protoscientific examination of perception in the material world, a space of visual play in which the possibilities of art were explored. Several art historians have recognized that these prints form the theoretical basis of rococo art generally; Alastair Laing and Marianne Roland Michel have each noted that lacking an eighteenth-­century textual defense of rococo art, these prints come closest to offering a theoretical investigation of its aesthetics.3 In asking viewers to approach representation with a specific critical mindset—indeed, by creating that mindset through the representational structures employed—rococo ornamental prints invited their beholders to assume diverse stances toward art and to the broader material world. Prints enabled those stances toward the world to be examined, imagined, transformed, and embraced. To understand how rococo prints achieve this, I shall analyze a debate that took place between writers in Germany and France from 1740 to 1770, one in which the role of ornament in relation to human perception underwent scrutiny and where prints were the medium through which that discussion was articulated. We shall enter that debate through the writings of a somewhat obscure figure, the German architect Friedrich August Krubsacius (1718–1789). Krubsacius spent most of his career in the city of his birth, Dresden. In 1755, he became Hofarchitekt to the Saxon-­Polish court and in 1764 professor of architecture at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. For his hometown, he designed and built numerous noble residences, many unfortunately lost in the Allied bombings of 1945. More than for any single building, however, Krubsacius is remembered today primarily as a writer. He wrote plentifully about ancient architecture, publishing two treatises that reconstructed the appearance of Pliny the Younger’s villa at Laurentum, near Rome, which he attempted to do with archaeological accuracy.4 More frequently cited is Krubsacius’s pamphlet on ornamentation, titled Thoughts on the Origin, Growth and Decline of Ornaments in the Fine Arts, which was published in 1759.5 Art historians have long recognized this text’s role in the history of the decorative arts, describing it as the first scholarly history of art oriented around objects and not images.6 In it, Krubsacius offers a history of ornamentation but combines it with lengthy commentary on what ornament does for the ­people who create and encounter it. Let us begin by looking into how Krubsacius describes the beginnings of ornament. He claims that his goal is the redirection of German art after

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a series of regrettable mistakes. In order to illustrate how far Germany had gone astray, Krubsacius concocts a Rousseauian pastoral Eden in prose, one in which art existed harmoniously both with nature and humankind. There, art perfectly fulfilled human needs by accentuating it in exactly the correct ways. Expanding on the French theorist Marc-­Antoine Laugier (1713–1769), whose influential Essai sur L’Architecture preceded his treatise by five years, Krubsacius describes ancient shepherds and hunters living contentedly in simple dwellings made of trees, branches, and leaves. This description draws on the famous primitive hut that Laugier used to imagine architecture emerging from the proportions found in nature (figure 2). When the early shepherds moved into these simple abodes, they noticed that they were less beautiful than the untouched spaces of nature itself. To correct this, they adorned their interiors with fruits and floral blooms strung across their walls, and in doing that, ornamental decoration was born.7 Implicit in this story are several claims important for Krubsacius’s readers to notice. The first is that there is such a thing as “natural” ornament; this is an ornament that derives recognizably from natural forms and mimics their appearance. His story places the origins of ornamentation quite literally in organic supplements to human spaces. Ornament therefore has a basis in nature, and specifically in nature’s things; although it can be abstract to varying degrees, it is not automatically a nonpictorial kind of art. The second claim is that ornament is a necessary aspect of human experience. We are far indeed from the mindset of modern artists and architects who wished buildings to be streamlined to achieve a rarified functionalism. Human beings have an essential, even primeval urge to decorate their surroundings. Finally, ornament is to architecture as fruits and flowers are to trees: they adorn and beautify them, but they also play the biological role of reproduction, of creating the new. That generative component is something that Krubsacius found troubling even as it was unavoidable, as I shall show in a moment. I would add that although Krubsacius described the urge for decoration as a universal human condition, he was also quick to remark that not all societies responded to that urge with equal skill. It was the ancient Greeks who codified simple ornamental practices into written laws and from there into the classical orders, which formed the foundation for the entire subsequent history of European architecture. Most cultures outside of Europe, Krubsacius believed, never progressed beyond simple adornments in their primitive shelters.

Figure 2.  Frontispiece to Marc-­Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur L’Architecture, Charles-­Dominique-­Joseph Eisen, 1755. (Special Collections and Rare Books, University of Missouri Libraries)

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Art historians have sometimes sought to characterize Krubsacius as an antiornament crusader, which the above brief summary suggests is too simple a judgment. He was not opposed to decoration and certainly did not banish it from his own designs. Rather, Krubsacius took issue with specific kinds of ornament and more precisely with the ways those ornamental forms relate to their human viewers visually and, one might add, supplementally. Here we approach the parts of his argument that engage with the corporeal and psychological effects of ornament. Krubsacius lamented that around 1720 something occurred to cause European decorative styles to go profoundly awry.8 To blame was the force that many eighteenth-­century German writers identified as the source of aesthetic and moral degeneracy: France. Krubsacius’s ideas fit within a much broader German Enlightenment project of critiquing German art by decrying its reliance upon French precedents.9 Rococo design was created, he claims, by a small group of French artists who wished to display their powers of imagination, the rarity of their materials, and their skills at good design, and the most prominent among them was the architect and silversmith Juste-­Aurèle Meissonnier (1695–1750). Krubsacius credited Meissonnier specifically with producing objects that both possessed a beautiful appearance and showed off his creative powers.10 But Meissonnier intended his objects only for a small group of elite French women, claimed the German writer, and although he never names Madame de Pompadour explicitly, he certainly has her and women of her status in mind. Once these elite women expressed their fondness for Meissonnier’s art, it became the talk of Paris, and here Krubsacius reminds readers that this happened because the French are always slaves to fashion.11 When this Parisian-­born artistic novelty then traveled east to Germany, it met with the German predilection for copying foreign trends, with the resulting hybrid an aesthetic catastrophe. A massive and regrettable proliferation of bad Meissonnier-­inspired art spread like wildfire through Germany, declared Krubsacius. German art lovers and artists were so attracted to it that they failed to judge properly what they borrowed. They absorbed it all and in so doing made German art more French than French art itself.12 If the Germans really understood art, Krubsacius complained, they would be more selective in what they mimicked, and if that ever occurred, “foreigners and critics would not laugh at our German designs.”13 It might be tempting to dub Krubsacius yet another frustrated art critic propounding aesthetic ideals in opposition to contemporary tastes and the

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marketplace’s power. Rococo art was fashionable in eighteenth-­century Europe because it enjoyed elite patronage, was beautiful to look at, and had the cachet of the new that has come to characterize avant-­garde art ever since. It partly did this through its evocation of different artistic traditions like the Islamic and the Chinese, which it did not strictly copy, but whose ornamental effusiveness it evoked. Yet Krubsacius also locates ornament in relation to the body, and this is where he turns to ornamental prints. He recounts an imaginary conversation between himself and two people, one an earnest connoisseur and the other a slave to fashion, and he centers this dialogue on the social function of ornament. He poses the following rhetorical question: Is it necessary to decorate an object with unnatural monstrosities à la rococo? A loaded question for sure. The connoisseur asks in turn what the rococo ornaments are supposed to be. The fashion slave answers heartily with a string of terms: “Well of course it’s rocaille, grotesque, arabesque, à la chinoise, en goût barroque [sic]; in short, it’s fashionable!”14 What a terrible answer that is, laments Krubsacius, especially from a self-­proclaimed lover of art. He takes this opportunity to reveal what rococo ornament really is and not just how it looks. He appends a mock rococo print to his text, one made to his specification by the Dresden-­based printmaker Dorothea Philipp (1721–1791). It depicts a rococo cartouche (figure 3). Helpfully provided for his text’s readers is a key that corresponds to a printed list in his text. What is this represented object, exactly? Krubsacius puts it thus: “Es sey ein Mischmasch.” A mishmash of reeds and straw, bones, pottery shards, shavings, feather brooms, wilted flowers, shattered shells, rags, feathers, wood shavings, cut off bits of hair, stones, fish scales, fish bones, animal tails, and “trendy-­looking dragons, snakes, and other vermin who mostly look alike and resemble bunches of sticks.”15 Krubsacius humorously alerts us at this moment to his belief that rococo ornament consisted of a lot of nonsense. And one can understand what spurred him to arrive at that conclusion, since rococo ornamentation often includes putti, flowers, shells, and other such things that are not usually bearers of profound artistic meaning. Yet his cartouche is not simply satire. Through it Krubsacius broaches a quite serious problem about the process of knowing the world sensorially, the way in which the viewing subject engages in art as a conduit to accessing nature. The print represents an ornamental form that is beautiful in shape and composition, but is composed of garbage. It therefore attracts the eye and draws the beholder in

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Figure 3.  Frontispiece to

Friedrich August Krubsacius’s Gedanken von dem Ursprunge, Wachstume, und Verfalle der Verzierungen in den schönen Künsten, Dorothea Philipp, 1759. (Niedersächsische Staats-­und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, Germany)

but misrepresents the status of the objects it offers for view. The objects he lists are worthless, none of intrinsic interest, but their transformation into ornament makes them seem more impressive than they actually are. This is therefore an art that fools, an art of deception and dissimulation, and Krubsacius worries that without his explanation, some readers will misunderstand his intentions in printing it. “Our eyes are already so accustomed to this sort of thing,” he laments, “that we don’t even notice it; and as proof of that, won’t many people take this given example to be a new style and praise it, only thereafter to be embarrassed when they realize that they took this trash to be decoration?”16 There is a great deal of insight embedded in this moment of ornamental criticism. There are actually three points of critique at work in it. The first targets the inappropriate borrowing of French design and the naïve application of it to German art, which indicates a belief that nations should

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produce art that corresponds to their collective characters. The second is the inability of art lovers to distinguish good from bad, which Krubsacius believes is so underdeveloped that it hinders their ability to discern fine objects from junk, and not just when depicted in art. The ability to judge is presented not only in highbrow terms of aesthetic differentiation but also in the ability to distinguish value in everyday material goods, the broader material world mentioned earlier. And finally, there is the rhetoric of the trick, the work of art that looks good but is actually not. This contrasts with the more penetrating, focused, and discerning gaze of the connoisseur, who is shrewd enough to distinguish between things that are beautiful and those that are worthless. With that last point, we arrive at what Krubsacius really disliked about rococo ornament: the degree of representational and semantic autonomy it allows those who encounter it. It has become commonplace to claim that rococo art invests its viewers with an authoritative role.17 The beholder is overtly engaged in the perceptual structures of rococo design. The literature here is sophisticated, but simply put, the indeterminate forms of rococo art dislocate viewers’ perception and stimulate their imagination, placing and re-­placing them in a constantly shifting environment in which the work of art changes every time it is encountered. Those perceptual transformations can extend even to the basic apprehension of form. Achieving this effect required rococo artists to generate great visual complexity, which they did principally in two ways. One was to blend natural and artificial forms, or pictorial and nonpictorial ones, into aesthetically pleasing, beautifully crafted, but ultimately “unnatural” constructions. The other, especially prominent in Germany, was to complicate the spatial incongruities possible in rococo design. German artists especially like the idea of rococo ornament as a frame, which is why German ornamental printmakers gravitated notably toward cartouches.18 Rococo art therefore is about more than simply multiplying ornamental forms into abundance; it is about destabilizing rigid divisions between presentation and representation, as well as between the conception and perception of things. In doing this, the playful blending and optical dislocations one finds in rococo art become not just a visual game but an essential component of the aesthetic experience intended to activate the beholder’s imagination. This overt activation can be traced through nearly all rococo art, but it plays a particularly obvious role in the rococo ornamental print.

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What I would suggest is that this activation process is not simply an aesthetic one, one limited to a discrete realm of experience that falls under the rubric of “art.” It is an attempt to explore a broader understanding of all matter, one extendable to the entire material world and accessed through encounters with objects. The eighteenth century, that age of rational thought, was also an era of fascination with things both natural and manufactured. These things were sometimes so compelling that interest in them approached the irrational. Confronting nature through direct observation, categorizing newly encountered cultures, copying sculpture from the antique, or visiting the site of a miracle all involved encounters between people and the material world. It is therefore no accident that eighteenth-­ century philosophy concerned itself to a great degree with the issue of how the mind apprehends matter. Philosophers debated whether matter actually existed or if it only seemed to exist, being nothing more than the product of our mental capacity for illusion. The senses’ role in ascertaining matter was likewise scrutinized extensively. Many, following Locke, understood sense as the interface between the mind and the world, but following from that supposition grew troubling questions that addressed the fundamental nature of reality. In a world of purely sensate knowledge, what is a mind? Is there a higher force (a deity?) whose presence might explain the forms that matter took? Philosophers produced divergent answers to these questions, but in all the role of matter in our perception of the world was a nagging problem, one tantalizingly appealing but ultimately impossible to solve. Denis Diderot dubbed eighteenth-­century materialism “that most seductive philosophy,” since it broached precisely how knowledge is created out of things and teased the philosopher with the promise of a clarity that it could never actually reveal.19 That perceptual clarity of the material world is exactly what Krubsacius strove to emphasize in his analysis, but he did so against the background of actual art making in eighteenth-­century Europe that delighted in visual and semantic complexity, what one might call a perceptual nonclarity. This was exemplified by the artist he names in his critique: Meissonnier. Krubsacius and Meissonnier make for a fascinating comparison, since they are on opposite ends of the eighteenth-­century critical spectrum about ornament and its functions. Meissonnier’s imagery gleefully engages with exactly the processes that Krubsacius derides. Meissonnier published many prints in his career, but his most suggestive and cryptic appear in his Livre de legumes,

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or Book of vegetables, published in 1745.20 This is not a collection of ornamental designs, at least not in the usual sense. It contains no depictions of tureens, wall sconces, mirrored rooms, or any of the other things one finds in more typical eighteenth-­century ornamental books. Instead, Meissonnier gives us six plates that illustrate a series of random objects arranged into artful compositions. Many of the things shown are also edible, which renders the book at least obliquely about food, which hints at some of the concerns about the preparation and reuse of foodstuffs that Diane Purkiss examines in her essay for this book. In these composite comestibles, Meissonnier asks his viewers to ponder the ways in which we know the world through recognizing how we perceive things in art. To see how that happens, let us look at one of the book’s six plates, the fifth (figure 4). As with all of them, there is no explanatory text.21 Instead, we are confronted with two bunches of celery upon which rest a dead rabbit and two pigeons. To view this picture as a simple representation of objects would involve naming these components, as I have just done, and perhaps asking what is the purpose behind depicting them in this way. The rabbit and birds are the products of the hunt, no doubt, and could be combined with the celery to make a tasty lapin à la cocotte for dinner. It is that approach, identifying things and naming what they are, that critics like Krubsacius believed viewers should do when looking at works of art. But surely Meissonnier is interested in more than just the subject matter of this picture; he is equally if not more interested in the manner through which the represented objects are made apparent to us. The celery bunches have arranged themselves into an artfully balanced X, which, when looked at askance, may for some observers assume humanoid characteristics. The animals likewise let themselves be identified easily, but the more one looks, the less sure one is of their boundaries. Edges blend into each other as the birds’ feathers transform into the rabbit’s fur and from there into feathery celery leaves, blurring distinctions that in normal human experience remain apparently discrete. Look carefully and you might just see the outline of a pig, with a snout and dangling forelegs, but doing so requires you to unsee the rabbit and birds. They are all, to our modern minds, completely different things, but Meissonnier asks us to imagine them as linked materially in some mysterious way. On a more scientific level one might propose, as has James Trilling, that underlying rococo aesthetics is the presumption of a common material essence to the world and a concomitant belief in spontaneous natural transformation, a

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Figure 4.  Livre de legumes, Juste-­Aurèle Meissonnier, 1745, plate 5. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

pre-­Darwinian view of matter that imagines nature endlessly morphing into new things.22 For Meissonnier, those transformations exist not only as perceptual shifts but also material ones, and indeed the line between the object represented and the way we see it is difficult to draw. The sensitive viewer aware of the principles of art will find more to see, and more to imagine what he or she sees, as he or she looks at this image over time. In stimulating new ideas, and creating by extension new life, Meissonnier’s print suggests that dead matter can produce life, an attitude that Jayne Lewis argues was applied to John Milton’s hair by eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century writers in her contribution to this book. I would propose then that the Livre is concerned precisely with the issue of material perception. The most cryptic of its images, and in some respects the most telling, is the final one (figure 5). In this print, we find a branch from what appears to be an oak tree, with the wooded stem at bottom and the curved edges of the leaves clearly articulated. This is not an edible plant but rather a pure representation of natural materiality, a tree branch of

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Figure 5.  Livre de legumes, Juste-­Aurèle Meissonnier, 1745, plate 6. (Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

the kind that can be seen in virtually any European forest. Resting atop this branch are two birds. The curves of the birds’ necks blend into the leafy foliage beneath them, and once again the precise boundaries between plant and animal are hard to differentiate, as is the distinction between the picture’s randomness, the apparent nonchalance with which these objects appear before us, and the artistic manipulation of them required in order to make this image balanced and pleasing. Like its predecessor, this is the apparently involuntary creation of artful design through the forms of nature. I see in this image the purest statement about how viewers perceive nature in art that the eighteenth century ever produced. In looking at it, viewers are left with serious and ultimately unanswerable questions: is it Meissonnier’s manipulation of these objects into art that makes the image compelling, or is it our willingness as viewers, our power as spectators, that enables us to find artistry in these extremely basic things? These questions are never resolved, neither in Meissonnier’s Livre nor in rococo aesthetics more broadly. To resolve them would be to collapse the semantic potential

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of the rococo into straightforward pictorial terms. That is what Krubsacius wanted and what rococo artists like Meissonnier deliberately fought against. I would add that fighting against such semantic closure ensured that rococo art would operate as a creative supplement to the human body precisely through its muddling of sensory sureties. This then raises the question of how such aesthetic indeterminacy functioned when applied to actual objects, as opposed to pictures in prints. Rococo prints like Meissonnier’s were not intended to be copied literally when artists turned to make actual things.23 No eighteenth-­century commode or table displays the celery, rabbit, and bird combination from plate 5 in a one-­to-­one transfer. Instead, rococo ornamental prints are better understood as springboards for creativity in artists, opportunities for them to imagine new decorative possibilities, and they also stimulated the senses of those collectors who purchased them for the purely fanciful enjoyment that came from looking at them. Some of that visual pleasure then carried over into the creation of real things. A pair of light sconces by an unknown French artist, dating from the 1740s, supplies an example of how that transferal worked (figure 6). In them, natural forms both floral and vegetal combine with purely abstract elements, which makes pinpointing exactly which shapes correspond to which representational elements impossible.

Figure 6.  Pair of wall lights, unknown French maker, gilt bronze, 1745–49. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. (Image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program)

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They do not resemble Meissonnier’s designs exactly but capture in more general ways the associative energy found in his prints. In the context of an eighteenth-­century interior, such objects would not be studied closely as one could do with a print, nor were they observed with the careful eye of a modern museum visitor. Eighteenth-­century elites perceived them peripherally as part of the experience of being in an elaborately decorated space.24 In encountering them, different people would notice different things, and the objects’ construction is intended to allow quick associative processes to occur without closing off the potential for new and unexpected references. Hanging these sconces on a wall would do more than simply decorate a surface or illuminate an interior; they would supplement the human environment with an unresolved tension between art and nature and thereby provoke the inhabitants of that environment to sense a world beyond that perceived objectively. We can see this as well in the table with which this essay began. It was designed by Oeben, who was German-­born but active in Paris, where his atelier flourished and became one of the period’s most respected and admired cabinetmaking enterprises. Oeben died before completing the table; his nephew Lacroix oversaw its final construction in 1763. Perhaps it is noteworthy that this object emerges from combined German and French sensibilities, which parallels the broader German-­French discussion of rococo aesthetics that involved both Meissonnier and Krubsacius. Furniture similar to it filled the interior residences of Europe’s continental elites in the eighteenth century; this one was intended for none other than Madame de Pompadour herself, one of the “small group of elite women” whom Krubsacius blamed for the rococo’s regrettable popularity. The table places the art/nature tension inherent to rococo design into direct contact with an actual person, and in doing so enforces precisely the kind of embodied interaction, however peripheral or subliminal, built into domestic activities such as reading, writing, conversing, and socializing. It becomes a silent mediator of the self and its boundaries, an interlocution woven into the fabric of functional objects. It is not a stable mediator, however; the rococo ornaments on it—the gilded bronze trim and marquetry inlay—repeatedly disrupt a coherent sense of self and place for its user. Moreover, it perfectly illustrates the paradox of rococo art’s materiality that Krubsacius and Meissonnier approached from different points of view. The table is assembled from hundreds of small pieces of precious wood. In one sense these are rare

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and valuable, since most derive from tropical trees harvested in equatorial regions of the globe and shipped to Europe at great effort and expense. But in another sense, they are simply chips of wood of little inherent utility. Krubsacius would have dismissed them as shavings, part of the worthless junk that went into making his mock cartouche. The same could be said of the gilded accents added to the table’s edges and legs; they are both precious and useless at the same time. All of its components are also natural products transformed through human artistry into artful constructions that bring their owners into contact with a partially suppressed but ever-­present nature. It is only through Oeben and Lacroix’s artistry that these materials attain their full value. And it is only in choosing to recognize that artistry and appreciate it that the table’s users apprehend its full significance. The table can never escape the reality that, however beautiful it is, on a fundamental level it is assembled from bits of nothing, as is all rococo art. Seeing the value in the artful transformation of that nothing into something is part of the table’s purpose, as is conveying something beyond a one-­ dimensional engagement with it. If we imagine Madame de Pompadour writing at this table, we can think of the interactivity that existed between her body and the transformed natural materials and the representationally natural shapes found in its rococo ornament; it would have supplemented her body in decorative ways and integrated its transmuted organic elements into her epistolary practices specifically and her social identity generally. In making this claim, I follow in the footsteps of Dena Goodman, who has recognized the role of writing desks and cabinets (secrétaires) in the formation of a modern gendered sense of self for the women who owned them.25 Desks and cabinets are material metaphors for the surfaces and interiors of the self. Taking that idea a step further and approaching this relationship through the lens of interdisciplinary material culture studies, it could be said that Oeben’s table is in some capacity materially alive, that it retains some of the organic vitality of its woods and metals, but it filters that vitality through the self-­conscious artifice of rococo, which tempers and complicates it. In using it for its intended purpose, Madame de Pompadour became a bio-­organic hybrid of human, nature, and art, and it is precisely rococo aesthetics that made that possible. We can push these observations a little bit further into a broader understanding of how art relates to those who encounter it. That sense of complex interactivity is not something unique to the rococo but is a specific type

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of user/spectator engagement that has recurred in multiple manifestations across the history of art. Rococo aesthetics present an eighteenth-­century version of what the cubists would later explore through fractured points of view and what postmodern artists examine today through playful semantic bricolage: the mixing of far-­flung fragmentary things into surprising, appealing, novel, yet unstable visual experiences. That said, rococo art is not actually a mixing of dissimilar things, at least not consistently; there is a logic at play in rococo constructions that renders them more unified and balanced than either a cubist collage or a postmodern mashup. That logic is the connectivity of rococo formal language, be it purely abstract connections or in pictorial elisions. Rococo forms always connect, sometimes in their pictorial content and sometimes in formal blendings. Meissonnier’s proto-­rococo hunt mixture is actually thematically totally coherent, but the will to see that coherency and accord it meaning lies in the interrogative power of the beholder. Krubsacius critiques the rococo as an art of nonsense and pointless mixing, which is what the print by Philipp attempts to convey. We have seen that this is not what the rococo does: it is an art of perception in which the mind adjusts in relation to ever-­shifting combinations of matter. Philipp’s print seems to critique the rococo, but actually it reifies its basic qualities, since the thematic coherency of garbage holds it together. Krubsacius’s critique therefore fails: in order to mock the rococo, he and Philipp needed to engage exactly the kind of representational complexity that the style celebrates. I might add that all critiques of the rococo will likewise fail, since its pictorial vocabulary is committed precisely to evading specific meanings by generating new ideas perceptually. Rococo ornamentation invites—indeed revels in—the ruptures, discontinuities, and mixtures that challenge a simple unidirectional formula of human perception. This brings me to my conclusion, which will be to suggest that representation in general—all representation, be it in a written text, a sculpture, or a film—interacts with its observers in a rococo-­like perceptual process. All art, whatever its appearance, is encountered in changing conditions, be they changes in setting or venue or filtered through shifts in the ­observer’s psychological state over time. We experience the world as continuous and coherent but also on another level as fragmented and erratic. That is a tension not always acknowledged in European art, which often strives for coherent ideals, but rococo art attempts to keep viewers aware of how inconsistent life can be. This means that the semantic openness of rococo

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design comes closer to acknowledging our actual perception of reality than does a seemingly straightforward representational image that superficially “looks real.” Rococo art supplements our imagination by acknowledging the fragmentary yet seemingly whole experience of perceiving the world. There are major consequences to this realization. One is that taste can no longer be a quality inherent to art; it is a process of suggestion and manipulation that rococo ornament unmasks as perpetually unstable. It further brings to the surface the shaky basis upon which we can claim to know anything, be it art or not. Rococo design coheres just enough to forestall the nihilism that such a realization might provoke, the implied death borne by matter that no longer bears any meaning. It is less that we can never know the material world and more that the process of looking forever recasts and redefines that knowledge anew based on our immediate position as subjects in time and space. Knowing the material world is never completed but is brought about repetitively through perceiving and reperceiving. In that sense, rococo ornamental prints remind their viewers that knowledge is born somewhere in the interchanges among cognition, recognition, assessment, and reassessment.26 Depending on how one understands art, and one’s belief system about what makes art good or bad, those reciprocities are either to be embraced and celebrated, as did Meissonnier, or criticized and feared, as did Krubsacius. To these musings about the role of ornament as a perceptual stimulator and supplement I would add a final point. Rococo ornamental prints do not convey a single unified theory of art, one that correlates with a specific philosophical tradition, although the homologies between rococo ornament and materialist philosophy are rich, as this essay has tried to suggest. Rococo prints produce a philosophy, but by being visually articulated, its exact terms remain irreducible to a single explanatory system and are to some degree inscrutable. That is not a flaw; it is ultimately the r­ococo’s greatest strength, although it is infrequently acknowledged as such. To describe a theory of rococo in text would be to delimit it, to close off the potential of what it can do for its human interlocutors, and if anything, the lack of eighteenth-­century treatises on rococo art is partly due to the inadequacy of language to outline its characteristics. Delimiting rococo art would require claiming that its terms apply to all people. That would close off the diverse range of responses that rococo ornament enables, as well as close off the potential of rococo art to suggest new responses beyond what its makers and original admirers could have anticipated.

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With that before us, I would offer that it is the rococo, and not the more conventional choice of later eighteenth-­century neoclassicism, that is the pictorial and ornamental style that corresponds most closely to the mindset of Enlightenment empiricist philosophy. Rococo art invites repeated testing of sensate knowledge; it is simultaneously observant and playful, earnest and satirical, insightful and improbable all at once. It is reciprocally critical of knowledge even as it seeks it, and in being that, it very much parallels the thought structures of eighteenth-­century contemporaries like Voltaire and Swift. Rococo ornament invites its viewers to ponder how to understand the flow of things in and out of our chaotic experience of the world. That mishmash is called life.

Notes This paper had its first airing at a symposium sponsored by the Caltech/Huntington Program in Materialities, Texts, and Images, in Pasadena, California. I am grateful to attendees of that event for discussion of these ideas, as I am to audiences at the 2015 International Society for Eighteenth-­Century Studies Quadrennial Congress on the Enlightenment, Rotterdam, at the University of Copenhagen, and at the University of Virginia. 1. Hermann Bauer, Rocaille: Zur Herkunft und zum Wesen eines Ornament-­ Motivs (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1962), 61–63; Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 2. Mimi Hellman, “Furniture, Sociability and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-­ Century France,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 32.4 (Summer 1999): 415–45. 3. Alastair Laing, “French Rococo Engravings and the Diffusion of the Rococo,” in Le stampe e la diffusione delle immagini e degli stili, ed. Henri Zerner (Bologna: CLUEB, 1979), 109–27; Marianne Roland Michel, Lajoüe et l’Art Rocaille (Neuilly-­sur-­Seine: Arthena, 1984), 131–36. 4. Wahrscheinlicher Entwurff von des jüngern Plinius Landhause und Garten, Laurens genannt, nach Anziege seines 17ten Briefes des II. Buchs, an den Gallus (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1760), and Des Hofbaumeisters Friedrich August Krubsacius wahrscheinlicher Entwurff von des jüngern Plinius Landhause und Garten, in der toscanischen Gegend gelegen: nach Anzeige seines 6. Briefes des 5. Buches an den Apollinaris, durch Anmerkungen und Risse erklärt (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1763). 5. Friedrich August Krubsacius, Gedanken von dem Ursprunge, Wachstume, und Verfalle der Verzierungen in den schönen Künsten, (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1759). The text was also serialized that year in three editions of the

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periodical Das Neueste aus der anmuthigsten Gelehrsamkeit, also published by Breitkopf: “Kurze Untersuchung des Ursprungs der Verzierungen” ( January 1759): 22–38; “Fortsetzung der neulich angefangenen Untersuchung vom Ursprunge der Verzierungen” (February 1759): 93–104; and “Beschluß der Untersuchung vom Ursprunge, Wachstume und Verfalle der Verzierungen” (March 1759): 175–85. 6. E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, 2nd ed. (London: Phaidon, 1994), 25–26; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Antiquarianism, the History of Objects, and the History of Art before Winckelmann,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001): 539– 40. See also Mario-­Andreas von Lüttichau, Die deutsche Ornamentkritik im 18. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Olms, 1983), 100–115. Lüttichau reprints much of the pamphlet on pp. 139–55. 7. Krubsacius, Gedanken, 14. “Denn da die Schäfer ihre Hütten von Baumstämmen, Ästen und Zweigen erbaueten, so wollten solche auch nachher auch verzieren. Die Blumen und Früchte waren das erste, wo ihnen die gütige Natur darboth.” 8. Krubsacius, Gedanken, 30. 9. Michael Yonan, “The Uncomfortable Frenchness of the German Rococo,” in Rococo Echo: Art, Theory, and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola, ed. Melissa Lee Hyde and Katie Scott (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2014), 33–51. 10. Krubsacius, Gedanken, 6: “Seine Einbildungskraft, die gute Zeichnung, die feine Ausarbeitung, und die Kostbarkeit der Metalle, gab seinen neuen Geschöpfen ein herrliches Ansehen.” 11. Krubsacius, Gedanken, 6: “Diese Neuigkeit durfte nur einigen vornehmen Frauen gefallen; so war es schon genug, daß ganz Paris sie für schön hielte. Wer diese Stadt kennet, der wird die Sklaverey der Mode so gut wissen, als ich, und mir hierinn Beyfall geben.” 12. Krubsacius, Gedanken, 6: “es möchten einige deutsche Künstler, aus Liebe zur Neuigkeit, das Französische noch französischer machen wollen.” This criticism is based on Krubsacius’s belief that the German public has not been adequately trained in matters of taste. 13. Krubsacius, Gedanken, 32–33: “Unsre Fabriken würden dadurch in bessere Aufnahme kommen, und Ausländer und Kenner würden nicht über unsre schöne Zeichnung und Erfindung lachen.” The full sentence also reveals that Krubsacius sees economic imparity as a dimension of Germany’s ornamental crisis. 14. Krubsacius, Gedanken, 35.

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15. Krubsacius, Gedanken, 36: “A) Schilf und Stroh B) Knochen C) Scherbeln D) Spänen E) Federwischen F) Verwelkten Blumen G) Zerbrochenen Muscheln H) Lappen I) Federn K) Hobelspänen L) Abgeschnittenen Haarlocken M) Steinen N) Fischschuppen O) Gräten P) Schwänzen Q ) Besenreisig, voller neumodisch Drachen, Schlangen und andern Ungeziefer, denen es am meisten ähnlich sieht.” 16. Krubsacius, Gedanken, 37: “Unsere Augen sind schon so daran gewöhnet, daß wir es nicht wahrnehmen: und zum Beweise dessen, werden viele dieses gegebene Exempel, als eine neumodische Verzierung, loben, und sich alsdann schämen, daß sie dergleichen Auskehricht für eine Zierde gehalten haben?” 17. See Bauer, Rocaille, 58–63; Marian Hobson, The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-­Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 42–61; Mary Sheriff, “Seeing Metamorphosis in Sculpture and the Decorative Arts,” in Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts, ed. Martina Droth (Los Angeles: Getty, 2009), 158–65; and for an application to French painting Jennifer Milam, Fragonard’s Playful Paintings: Visual Games in Rococo Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), chapter 2. 18. Laing, “Engravings,” 120. 19. The reference occurs in his anonymously published Pensées sur l’interpretation de la nature (1754), 76, in which he describes the philosopher Maupertuis (under his pseudonym Baumann) operating “dans l’espèce matérialisme plus séduisante.” 20. Its full title is Livre de legumes Inventées et Dessinées par J. Mer, which is a cleverer description of its contents than has often been recognized. Meissonnier is both the inventor and designer of the prints in it, but the title also implies that he is the designer of the vegetables—that is, the living forms—which they represent. See Peter Fuhring, Juste-­Aurèle Meissonnier: Un genie du rococo 1695–1750 (Turin: Allemandi, 1999), 2:321–23. 21. This is not quite the same thing as saying that the prints are text free; aside from the title page, each individual plate contains abbreviated references to Meissonnier and the printers, as well as the designation C.P.R., or cum privilegio regis, meaning with royal privilege. Yet none offers a textual key to the images’ content. This reliance on visuals alone to convey potential meaning is typical of rococo prints. See Valérie Kobi, “De la gravure d’ornement à la théorie de l’ornement. La gravure au trait et sa fonction théorique à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” in Ornamento, tra arte e design. Interpretazioni, percorsi e mutazioni nell’ottocento, ed. Ariane Varela Braga (Basel: Schwabe, 2013), 21.

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22. James Trilling, Ornament: A Modern Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 162–63. 23. Here I diverge from the analysis of the Livre’s function provided by Fuhring, Meissonnier, 2:323. My understanding is closer to that of Laing, “Engravings,” 114–15. 24. On lighting and perception in the rococo interior, see Mimi Hellman, “The Decorated Flame: Firedogs and the Tensions of the Hearth,” in Droth, Taking Shape, 176–85. 25. Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 207–44. See also Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past, ed. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1–9, 183–203. 26. Michel, Lajoüe, 131–36; Kobi, “De la gravure,” 26–27.

Fingers in the Pie Baked Meats, Adultery, and Adulteration

Diane Purkiss

I

f there is a point at which the higher realm of spirit and society must hold converse with the lumpen flesh, it is surely at weddings and funerals. It is therefore appropriate and significant that both weddings and funerals turn on the ritual of feasts; marriage was a celebration involving meat with the blood still in it, fresh meat. In Hamlet’s mordant comment, “Thrift, thrift, Horatio: the funeral baked-­meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (1. 2.179–80),1 the dynamics of good and bad feasting are exposed. The layers of puns are complicated and in places contradictory. First, Hamlet dismisses thrift, the middling virtue, as inappropriate in the queenly Gertrude. Secondly, Hamlet equates thrift with the concealment of repackaging cold meats as pies. “Baked-­meat” means pie or pastry.2 Pies are objects of early modern suspicion and frequent metaphors for the female body, contents unknown and not understood, as I will demonstrate later in this essay. What are pies? They were once material but have been so heavily acculturated that their organic origins are now obscure. Thirdly, the phrase “baked-­meats” contains a bawdy pun on woman as meat; coldness is an indication that she is both used up (old) and reused. It is only just too much to say that the pies predict the deaths of Gertrude and Ophelia, who fail either to mourn the dead or console the living. When funeral meats and marriage hymen are absent, blood must flow elsewhere. Horatio My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral. Hamlet I prithee, do not mock me, fellow student.

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I think it was to see my mother’s wedding. Horatio Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon. Hamlet Thrift, thrift, Horatio: the funeral baked-­meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. (1. 2. 175–80)

This essay is an extended footnote to this passage, which is one of those we think we know but on reflection do not fully grasp. The pies, for some, are just a joke, a crack, a thing of words; for these readers, Hamlet does not mean that any real food had been recycled.3 And it is true that for a prince, thrift itself could come to seem funny. Yet even as a joke, the line gestures at the way human corporeality—marriage, funerals—requires interactions— or further interactions—with organic matter in the form of food. The joke turns on why the conflation of the two kinds of feasts might be an ominous misreading. Why is Hamlet so troubled by the recycling of meats? Surely that ought to be a virtuous action in an era when nobles often threw away whole banquets just to show that they could afford it?4 Clearly the main point is the mordant joke that Claudius and Gertrude hurried up the wedding solely so they could reuse the funeral food. Hamlet implies just the opposite. But what else is at stake, in that little word “coldly”? The reuse of the meats menaces the significance of both funeral feast and marriage table. The funeral feast was primarily a celebration of the generosity of the individual, the dead person. It was therefore lavish, which meant founded on choice meats. Peter Brears observes that “in many households, the funeral feast was the most expensive meal ever prepared, its scale and richness being quite out of character with the usual round of economical, everyday dinners served to family and friends.”5 Part of the significance of the funeral feast lies in the idea of the deceased’s last act of generosity as salvific. Sin eaters were paid to take in the sins of the deceased by eating bread that had been laid on the coffin. At the arval—a feast for mourners at the end of the funeral—great households held a lavish feast, with best-­ quality food: cooked meats of various kinds with egg-­based dishes, washed down with ale and wine, “virtually identical in content to all the other feasts of the period.”6 Such feasts were founded on cooked meat: “Where ye Arvel dinner still prevails, the chief and chosen dish at the well-­spread board is a rich veal pie, well stored with currants and raisins, and sweet spices. The funeral pie was ate at an early period and is described as being made of ‘shrid meates.’”7

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All these inclusive materials symbolized the dead person’s hospitality.8 By contrast, the wedding feast was not about the individual but about the union of two families. Mark Dawson notes that “no expense was spared”; Lord Burghley spent twice as much on his daughter’s wedding in 1582 as he did on entertaining the French ambassadors the previous year, while even for the less affluent Willoughbys, a red deer was killed especially for the marriage of John Draycott and Alice Willoughby in June 1523.9 Of course in Hamlet it is this sense of the union of two families which is absent; rather, the family turns on itself and shares with nobody. It is, of course, this very isolation, this pathological isolation and repeated self-­insertion that Margreta de Grazia points out make Hamlet and his family appear normal and modern.10 And it is relevant to note that what ultimately joins the family corporeally is not feasting but the soil of the graveyard.11 Moreover, it compromised the funeral hospitality that could remind attendees of the munificence of the deceased by the overfrugal reuse of stale meats at the bridal feast. All this might be part of a critique of the decline in hospitality documented by Felicity Heal, which in turn was perhaps part of the decline of the old aristocracy, faced with price inflation and falling revenues.12 Am I overreading? Well, that’s what banquets were for. Francis I’s costumes at the Field of the Cloth of Gold were so overloaded with symbolism that even their chronicler Hall gave up, saying, “This was thinterpretacion made, but whether it were so in all thinges or not I may not say.”13 For such readings, food had to be seasonal, in order to represent the agrarian year itself and its generous fecundity; such generosity was akin to a magic rite: “Veal is beste in Januarye, and February, and all other times good. Lambe  .  .  . is beste between Christmas and lente, and good from Easter to Witsontide.”14 The Elizabethan farming guru Thomas Tusser thus has meat seasons, such as Easter for veal and bacon and Michaelmas for fresh herrings and fatted crones, old ewes who could not bear lambs any longer. David Cressy writes that the wedding feast was “the biggest single occasion of feasting that most people associated with the household would attend.”15 Neither funerals nor weddings were appropriate times for stinting on feasting, and the transfer of materials from one to another in Hamlet means that the funeral meats and—importantly—the individual they celebrate are tainted by the lack of generosity with which they are reused. Now we can ponder the phrase “baked-­meats.” The term does not mean roast dinner; it means a pie. In John Webster’s The White Divel, Flamineo

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says, “As if a man / Should know what foule is coffind in a bak’t meate / Afore you cut it vp” (4.2.sig.G3). Webster’s reference summarizes what lies hidden in what Hamlet says: the baked meat is that which “coffins,” a word usually used for pastry, though obviously connotative of the box in which the dead too are concealed. Moreover, Webster presents the baked meat as containing an unseen “foule,” a point to which I will return. The baked meat is already scandalous, even before it is recycled, and scandalous in a manner that suggests the concealment of a bodily sin, a foulness. This had a positive side. Sometimes the pie’s ability to conceal was the occasion for spectacular, even theatrical anagnorises. Another issue might be that Hamlet’s comment also pertains to the alternation of cold and hot courses at Renaissance banquets, and pies were often the occasion of a spectacular, which typically involved a glamorous version of the reused meat pie. Even at the great Italian feast of the Scappi, some of the pies were imported from England. Both Roy Strong and Ken Albala have drawn attention to the links between such symbolic feasting and theater: “A rampant lion disgorged lilies from his breast while simultaneously metamorphosing into an eagle” at the 1600 nuptials of Henry IV and Marie de Medici. The actual edible content of this remains unknown and unremarked.16 Marchpane (marzipan) models burst to release live birds, frogs, or rabbits. In Robert May’s 1660 cookbook, we hear of a pie containing live frogs and birds. In the latter, May describes how the live animals will hop and fly from the pie, thus putting out the candles and causing the ladies to skip and shriek: “What with the flying Birds and skipping Frogs, the one above, the other beneath, will cause much delight and pleasure to the whole company.”17 I suspect that this is an imagining, and it scarcely invites us to contemplate the manual labor involved in its creation. It may be worth noting that few early modern receipts invite such ruminations as opposed to requiring a degree of knowledge of the material that is not even implicit in their instructions. Such stagings could also be seen as supernatural. In The Late Lancashire Witches, a spirit changes a wedding pie into a bird pie: I had a pie that is not opened yet. I’ll see what’s in that—. He opens the pie and birds fly out of it. Live birds, as true as I live Look where they fly! . . . Witches! Live witches!18

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One such pie even contained a human being. Jeffrey Hudson was only eighteen inches tall at the age of nine. When the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham entertained Charles and Henrietta Maria in London, the climax of the lavish banquet was the presentation of a large pie to the queen. Jeffrey arose from it. The point of pies is to surprise, a trick they can effect because the thick crust conceals what lies within. But such tricks can become ominous very easily. Pies and trickery are predictive of the funeral/wedding substitution in Hamlet—the funeral baked meats substitute for the fresh flesh, as Gertrude’s old body substitutes for the fresh body of a virgin. The old pies signify a kind of bed trick, but one in which the older, more experienced woman deceives not her husband but herself. She mistakes herself for a young and marriageable woman rather than substituting one for her old, used body. She may paint an inch thick; she may conceal her old flesh. But the problem of the pie is that its crust conceals the contents; is it Pandora’s box or a treasure chest? Meat pies are especially troubling and bespeak a dread of meat itself, and especially of cannibalism; the seventeenth century’s “mermaid pie” is really pork, while the Scottish fried pie troubled the English. Robert May’s bride pie contains a lot of severed chunks of animal male sexuality, such as cockscombs and “lamb-­stoines,” plus broom buds and barberries, all bound with a caudle. There are later recipes such as Eliza Smith’s, from 1730. It is important to note that it was called a bride pie; here the pie is a foretaste of what lies in store for the bride; it prepares her to accept the strange male sexual body into her own. Inns, taverns, fairs, coffee shops—as Sara Pennell observes, all were places in which the consumption practices of others could be observed. Such spaces were overtly democratic;19 in Shakespeare’s plays, more often, the space of observation is clearly marked by class differentiation. For John Stow, the Eastcheap streets rang with cries that asked the customer to pay attention mostly to food, and especially to pies, in a sharp contrast to the Westcheap streets, where the cries were about clothing: “And to prooue this Eastcheape to bee a place replenished with Cookes, it may appeare by a song called London lickepennie, . . . in East cheape the Cookes cried hot ribbes of beefe rosted, pies well baked, and other victuals.”20 The pies mark out a space of hunger, beyond self-­fashioning or consumer identity. Such distinctions are ratified by the gap between stage and audience, between players and auditors, and also by the gap between illusion and reality. This particular gap is never more marked than it is in The Tempest. At the

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stage direction “Thunder and lightning. Ariel [descends] like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table, and with a quaint device the banquet vanishes” (3.3.52), editor Rory Loughnane offers the following: “The simplest effective staging is by means of a rotating table-­top with the vessels of the banquet fixed to its surface. Leg-­to-­leg planks supporting the table-­top or a hanging cloth would conceal the ‘vanished’ banquet. The harpy’s wings would hide the mechanics from the audience; clapping them would provide a visual distraction.” In another note he adds, “The clapping represents the harpy voraciously consuming the banquet, but should also have the effect of a magical illusion.”21 Rather than any evidence to allow us to reconstruct the machinery behind the event described, the stage direction is instead a series of conjectures. But then, conjecturing is what pies are all about. A feast presents as a series of conundrums that must be read; its disappearance also presents as mysterious. But its significance is clear. The harpies in Virgil’s Aeneid do not eat the feast; they spoil it. In Virgil’s source text, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, the harpies torment Phineus by snatching the food out of his hands and even out of his mouth, but worst of all they leave a foul stench on the leftovers, so that nobody dares to lift them to their lips, or even to stand near the table, because their reek is so dreadful.22 In Virgil, the harpies themselves carry a frightening and confusing doubleness: These birds have the faces of virgin girls, foulest excrement flowing from their bellies, clawed hands, and faces always thin with hunger.

Like the Apollonius harpies, they foul the feast: “snatching at the food, and fouling everything with their / filthy touch: then there’s a deadly shriek amongst the foul stench.”23 After Aeneas and his men have dispersed the harpies, their leader Celeano makes a prophecy that mingles hunger with feasting, defilement with empire-­building, in a manner that strongly implicates Prospero and his brother: You shall go to Italy, and enter her harbours freely: but you will not surround the city granted you with walls until dire hunger, and the sin of striking at us, force you to consume your very tables with devouring jaws. (3. 254–57)

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Yet such repellent messes could exude glamour if enough art was applied. Pies could be a Christmas “treat” that covers over and “uses up” baked meats: the postfeast, the waste of the feast, the fag ends of feasting when appetite needs tickling with spectacle, the very opposite of starvation. Sara Paston-­Williams sums up the principle of the trick pie: “‘Joke’ or ‘trick’ pies were made for the feasts and revels of the wealthy, especially on Twelfth Night, cut open to reveal a flock of live birds, or even a small human being; the nursery rhyme ‘Sing a song of Sixpence’ tells the story of one such pie.”24 A finger in the pie could also be a sexual pun.25 An emblem poem from the end of the fifteenth century describes the error of choosing “fading beauty” for money (“the chinke”), for which they are willing to place a hand “in the pie”: He that would loade a happie life, For vertue let him chuse his wife. Some do not care how nor with who they linke, If fading beauty please their wanton eye: Others so they be fingring of the chinke, Care not how soone their hand be in the pie.26

The emblem invites men to use their hearing to detect money rather than to use their fingers to enjoy this sensuous pleasure of “fingring of the chinke.” These suitors do not care how early it is to put their hand in the pie, so they do not care about their manners or about the dangerous heat of the pie itself. The uncomfortable experience of pie in its urban context became more widespread as London expanded to the point where far fewer people had access to an oven, or even a kitchen.27 The cookshops of Pie Corner, adjacent to the very undesirable Cock Lane, sprang up to meet demand. The unstable contents of the pie might be matched by the peripatetic movements of the pie sellers; after the great Fire of London had destroyed many fixed eating houses, their numbers expanded greatly. Among the eighteenth-­ century cries of London are at least two portraits of male hawkers collecting “broken bread and meat for the poor prisoners.”28 The English-­Scottish version of the Grimms’ story “All-­Furs,” a tale in the Cinderella group called “Cap O’Rushes,” first printed in Jacobs’s fairy tale collection but probably older, dramatizes the connection between wedding feasts, family unity, “fresh meat,” and the body of the bride. In this

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tale, the protagonist daughter is exiled by her father because when asked to describe how she loves him, she replies, “I love you as fresh meat loves salt.” Well, there was once a very rich gentleman, and he had three daughters, and he thought he’d see how fond they were of him. . . . So he says to the third, “How much do you love me, my dear?” “Why, I love you as fresh meat loves salt,” says she. Well, but he was angry. “You don’t love me at all,” says he, “and in my house you stay no more.” So he drove her out there and then, and shut the door in her face.

The honest daughter, who adopts the shameful disguise of a cap of rushes, soon wins the love of a nearby gentleman. At her wedding, the meaning of fresh meat is disclosed to her father: After they were married all the company sat down to the dinner. When they began to eat the meat, it was so tasteless they couldn’t eat it. But Cap o’ Rushes’ father tried first one dish and then another, and then he burst out crying. . . . “Oh!” says he, “I had a daughter. And I asked her how much she loved me. And she said ‘As much as fresh meat loves salt.’ And I turned her from my door, for I thought she didn’t love me. And now I see she loved me best of all. And she may be dead for aught I know.”29

The lucidity of fresh meat in this tale contrasts with adulterated pies. These pies and riddling foods, because adulterated, can become symbols of adultery. William Cartwright in his poem “A Bill of Fare” contrasts the riddle or puzzle of the pie with the plain dealing of the coarse board: Expect no strange, or puzzling Meat, no Pye Built by Confusion, or Adultery, Of forced Nature; No mysterious dish Requiring an Interpreter, no Fish Found out by modern Luxury: Our Corse Board Press’d with no spoyls of Elements, doth aford Meat, like our Hunger, without Art, each Mess Thus differing from it only, that ’tis less.

And Cartwright also offers the idea of the pie as the inadequate food of poverty; this went especially with the apple pie:

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We have not still the same, sometimes we may Eat muddy Plaise, or Wheate; perhaps next day Red, or White, Herrings, or an Apple Pye: There’s some variety in Misery. To this come Twenty Men, and though apace, We bless these Gifts, the Meal’s as short as Grace.30

In the next year he joined other students to contest the abolition of privileges traditionally enjoyed by Westminster scholars at Christ Church, the so-­called “Westminster suppers.”31 This small fact illustrates how all food consumption was tied in with ideas of inclusion and exclusion, ideas that were ably symbolized by pies. Like a social group, pies were not supposed to be all inclusive. Yet the ability of the pastry coffin to cloak and conceal its contents meant that pies were subject to immense anxiety. While pies could be exceedingly aristocratic, the piemakers’ guild was a low-­status group. Tireless attempts to make and enforce rules for cooks in earlier periods are testaments to these anxieties. Sensational tales of food poisoning exacerbated concerns about cleanliness and freshness. As one medieval ruling stated: “We command . . . that no Cook cast no maner of fylth under hur bordys, ne in the hye street, ne suffur hit ther to lye, that is to wit, fethurs, here, ne no entryls of pygges, ne of no other bestes.”32 In the streets and bakeshops of London, suspicions were often directed at the pie, and its concealing power was less a tease than a danger: “Better no pies than pies made with scabd hands.”33 Despite laws banning the sale of old, reheated pies or those filled with rotting or diseased meat, cooks of the era “were successfully indicted for all of these practices.” Shakespeare, and Hamlet too, would have known about Chaucer’s cook: For many a pastee hastow laten blood, And many a Jakke of Dovere hastow soold That hath been twies hoot and twies coold. For of many a pastry hast thou drawn out the gravy, And many a Jack of Dover [a kind of pie] hast thou sold That has been twice hot and twice cold.34

A Jack of Dover was short for do-­over, as Tom Nealon points out, so that it might be an expensive wine bottle filled with cheap wine or a pie that had been cooked more than once.35 (In a secondary sense, it came to mean

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an old story, or a hashed-­up anecdote; if we believe in the ur-­Hamlet, then Hamlet itself is a Jack of Dover.) Thomas More speaks of William Tyndale as “a Jak of Parys, an evil pye twyse baken.” Chaucer is describing a stale or reheated pasty, dressed in blood or gravy to make it appear fresh.36 Additionally, there are also accounts of gravy being drained out of pies by drilling holes in their bottoms, and this may be meant. Piemen also supplied ordinaries and inns, and since they often bought their wares from the leftovers of great houses, a pie might have passed through many hands before it reached its eventual consumer.37 This meant it was a natural metaphor for the sexual female body, passed from one customer to another, and growing more diseased all the while. In 1351, Henry Pecche and his friends had gobbled through an entire capon pie and started on the second before they realized the meat was spoiled: “He bought of the aforesaid Henry de Passelewe . . . two capons baked in a pasty; and that he and his companions, being hungry, did not perceive that one of the said two capons was putrid and stinking, until they had eaten almost the whole thereof, whereupon they opened the second capon, which he produced here in court.” On examination, the court was shocked, and “found it to be foul and stinking and an abomination to all mankind . . . to . . . the manifest peril of the life of the same Henry and his companions.”38 Importantly for Hamlet, there was no way to tell how old pies were. Food had constantly to be assessed for age. As importantly, the pie was often seen as inscrutably adulterated, and therefore as a symbol of adultery. The connection between the pie and the body of the girl or woman is made especially manifest in the girl-­in-­a-­pie story. At one banquet during the reign of King Charles V of France (1364–80), a scantily clothed “captive girl” popped out of a giant pie, accompanied by more than two dozen musicians. Yet Shakespeare turns this motif to ominousness in Romeo and Juliet, as Capulet urges, “Look to the baked meats, good Angelica. / Spare not for cost” (4. 4.5–6). Seconds later, Juliet’s body is discovered by the nurse. This too is of course deceptive, but the implication is that Juliet herself, the central “dish,” has now been disclosed as beyond her sell-­by date. The pie theme is anticipated in Mercutio’s abuse of the nurse: No hare sir, unless a hare, sir, in a Lenten pie, that is something stale and hoar ere it be spent.

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An old hare hoar And an old hare hoar Is very good meat in Lent. But a hare that is hoar Is too much for a score When it hoars ere it be spent. (2.3.105–12)

Mercutio equates a “hare in a Lenten pie” with “something stale and hoar”: “an old hare hoar” as “good meat in Lent,” a pie eaten bite by secret bite until it is moldy. The terms hare, hoar and stale are also terms for prostitutes, the ultimate in transferable female flesh. Hoar is homophonic with whore; in the Oxford English Dictionary, it means both old and whore. The lines are so rich that they might qualify as gamy; the richness partly comes from the ambiguous flesh of the hare itself, believed to be hermaphroditic and sodomitical, perverse and reeking.39 “I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room” (3.4.209): so Hamlet refers to the body of Polonius, a body that has been mistaken for another body from which it is indistinguishable, a body that has ceased to matter. Even its destination is unimportant. And the audience never sees it again. It is no coincidence that worries about pies existed alongside a new kind of anxiety about the disposal of the dead, an anxiety that is dramatized in the debate about where Ophelia should be buried. While on one hand corpses were increasingly being used as medicine in the form of mummy, on the other actual dead bodies were being evacuated from charnel houses on grounds not only of religion but also of hygiene. In his book The Reformation of Emotion in the Age of Shakespeare, Stephen Mullaney describes the removal of four hundred years of dead bodies from the ossuary in St. Paul’s Cathedral, founded in the reign of King Stephen. Taken by cartloads in the night of April 10, 1549, to a marsh outside Moorgate, the bones were meant to be forgotten. In removing them, Edward VI’s government hoped to sever the bonds between the living and the dead. In making the corpses invisible, they planned to ensure that they were no longer reasons for prayer and devotion. They planned, in fact, to make them indistinguishable from one another, anonymous dead meat.40 There is an analogy between the uncomfortable disposal of the cartloads of bones in a nameless marsh and equally unknowable meat disposed of within the coffin of a pie. It is nameless flesh, and especially

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nameless decaying flesh, that constituted a problematic abjection within the world of the early modern subject. As Philip Schwyzer points out, it is not as if the charnel house preserved individual identity in the manner of an aristocratic tomb; however, the clean bones that were deposited in it meant that the dead were still part of the church, part of the congregation. But it was often part of the hotter sort of Protestantism to show contempt for the bones of the dead, especially when they had been venerated; the bones of St. Thomas Becket, for example, were taken from the shrine and scattered.41 In the minds of Protestant satirists, masses for the dead were already entangled with ideas about food and eating: as Peter Marshall writes, Thomas Becon sneered at the thoughts passing through the minds of priests at the memento for the souls of the dead: “Ye pray for Philip and Cheny, more than a good meany, for the souls of your great grand Sir and of your old Beddlam Hurre, for the souls of father Princhard and of mother Puddingwright, for the souls of good-­man Rinsepitcher and good-­wife Pint-­pot, for the souls of Sir John Huslegoose and Sir Simon Sweetlips, and for the souls of all your benefactors, founders, patrons, friends and well-­willers, which have given you either dirige-­groats, confessional-­pence, trentals, year-­services, dinner or supper.”42 Becon’s satire turns on the idea that the dead are valuable as providers of food—so valuable that they are confused with food in names like Puddingwright, Rinsepitcher, and Pint-­pot. It is as though the officiating priest is eating the bodies of those for whom he prays. Or perhaps more accurately, it is as if the proximity of the dead to the idea of the Eucharist, to the congregation’s living bodies, to the living bodies of the priests, has become a problematic source of such pollution. One of the reasons that charnel houses were emptied was the growing sense that they were unhygienic, and we know from Mary Douglas that dirt is matter out of place.43 Food in the bedroom is dirt. And perhaps, increasingly, rotting bodies in the churchyard become dirt and all the more dirty if covered and disguised in coffins, as the dead increasingly were from the late sixteenth century.44 Can it be that the rotting pie with its unknown contents became a symbol of the newly acquired anxiety about what to do with the dead? And about what had been done with them? Part of the scandal of the churchyard is that graves in it are not permanent but subject to constant disruption in order that other graves might be

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made. “Cursed be he that moves my bones” is the last line of the epitaph under which Shakespeare himself lies. It is this process, dramatized in act 5 of Hamlet, that turns the skull that Hamlet examines into a symbol of the inscrutability and inaccessibility of death at the very moment when all the embarrassing flesh has vanished. As Thomas Laqueur writes, the churchyard was “a lumpy, untidy place. Gravediggers . . . dug in ground that had been turned over the centuries. From very near the beginning they intercut, hacked through, turned over, tossed out earlier tenants to make room for new ones, and every few hundred years also apparently levelled the ground and started again.”45 The violence of the language here is striking; the gravediggers hack through and toss out. Ultimately, it is they in their violence who conquer the conquerors. Hamlet muses: “Alexander died; Alexander was buried; Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-­ barrel?” (5.1.170–73). The flesh of every man—of everyman—eventually becomes part of food provision for another man. After this, even the innocent mug of beer is an act of cannibalism, tainted with the loam that was once Alexander the Great. Pies are terrible because they illustrate this horror in inescapable ways. Anyone who thinks pies innocent should also recall Shakespeare’s most alarming pies, the baked meats in which a terrible sin of transgressive flesh is encoded, against nature, against the bonds of kinship. Here is Titus Andronicus: Why, there they are, both bakèd in this pie, Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred. ’Tis true, ’tis true, witness my knife’s sharp point. (5.3.59–62)

The mother’s body devours the children, and she does this unknowingly. While Seneca has a similar scene, Thyestes’s cannibalism is concealed by red wine, which hides the blood of his children, but Shakespeare adds the idea of pie as a suitable container for an ominous, unknown and unknowable feast of dead meat, worm’s meat, as transgressive as rotting meat. The combination of duplicity and feasting allows the cannibal pie to become a symbol of tyranny. The governing myth might be of Lycaon, who served the roasted flesh of Lycaon’s own son Nyctimus to the god Zeus to test his

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omniscience. Lycaon himself was transformed into a wolf: “Ay me more brute then beast. / With infants sides, (Lycaons pie) to feast.”46 In the 1560 translation by Jasper Heywood, Thyestes is about not only meat and cannibalism but also torture; Heywood was a Catholic obliged to renounce his Oxford fellowship and flee to Europe because of his beliefs. As leader of the Jesuit mission, Heywood would have known of the condign measures to which his fellows in religion were subject. Since his companion Edmund Campion endlessly pointed out that in torturing and executing Catholics the regime was ripping its own ancestors apart, the generational cannibalism in Thyestes gains new meaning.47 Thyestes sparks the feud by sleeping with his brother’s wife, Aerope, stealing his golden fleece, and sneakily taking the throne of Mycenae from him. After taking back the crown, Atreus gets revenge on his brother by killing Thyestes’s sons and tricking his brother into eating the boys for dinner. This horrific crime—so terrible that the sun turns his eyes from it—causes a wave of vengeful violence that in the end leaves both brothers dead and places a violent curse on the house of Atreus, a curse inscribed in their flesh. Lycaon’s sons mix the entrails of Nyctimus into the god’s meal, to see if Zeus can detect the duplicity: But he the stryngs dothe turne in hande, and destenies beholde, And of the gutts the sygnes eche one dothe vewe not fully colde. When him the sacrifice had pleasde, his diligence he putts To dresse his brothers banquet now: and streyght a soonder cutts The bodies into quarters all, and by the stoompes anone The shoulders wide, and brawnes of armes, he strikes of euery chone. He laies abrode theyr naked lymms, and cutts away the bones: The only heds he keepes, and hands to him comitted ones. Some of the gutts are broachte, and in the fyres that burne ful sloe They droppe: the boylyng liccour some dothe tomble to and froe In moornyng cawdern: from the flesshe that ouerstands alofte The fyre dothe flie, and scatter out, and into chimney ofte Up heapt agayne, and there constraynde by force to tary yet Unwillyng burnes: the lyuer makes great noye vppon the spit.48

Both entrails and divided body parts were very much on Heywood’s mind because of the way in which Catholics who were regarded as guilty of treason were executed. Both limbs and entrails were made visible in

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order that they might be discarded as abhorrent. Convicts were fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn by horse to the place of execution, where they were hanged (almost to the point of death), castrated, disemboweled, beheaded, and quartered (chopped into four pieces: cut in half at the waist, then beheaded, and the rib cage divided down the middle, so that half the chest and one arm form a quarter). The pelvis is then divided as well, each part with a leg attached; all parts, including the head, are displayed in prominent places as a warning to others. Or are they displayed like merchandise, like butcher’s meat? The genitals were thrown into a specially prepared fire. At this point, it is relevant to note that the executioner was usually the butcher. When Heywood references the spitting noise that the liver makes when it is being roasted, this may be what he has in mind. Those still conscious at that point might have seen their own entrails roasted like meat. Part of the punishment was being forced to witness the individual death of body parts treated as though they were food. As well as food, the executed body could be magic and medicine. Like other transgressions, cannibalism can be curative of the very diseases it replicates; as Louise Noble’s work on mummy has shown, the fragmented human body became a critical commodity in early modern medicine, as well as in the residue of the Catholic Church. Freshly executed corpses were especially prized, particularly if the body was that of a young man who had—as was inevitable—died by violence.49 Obviously, the execution of traitors was meant to illustrate the state’s supreme power over the body of the individual subject, just as pies were meant to be the focus of illusion, fantasy, and magic. But like cooks, executioners often bungled; Richard White’s executioner removed his bowels piece by piece through a small hole in his belly, “the which device taking no good success, he mangled his breast with a butcher’s axe to the very chine most pitifully.”50 Gertrude’s remarriage is analogous to these much larger and more terrible transgressions because it proceeds from the unnaming of bodies; her incest is only legitimated if she, like Lord Minimus the court dwarf, is held in a pie, a coffin that covers her name and history in the carapace of pastry that is the wedding feast. As soon as the reuse of her body from funeral/ widow to marriage/spouse is revealed, she is visible as stale and unappetizing. But there is more in Hamlet’s complaint. I’ve been paying attention to the baked meats; what about “Thrift, thrift”? Hamlet is choking on his

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parents’ unsavory marriage, needing to spit out the word thrift twice, hissing it. What, though, does it mean? I thought I knew, and the editors of the Third Edition of the Arden Shakespeare do not offer even a note, though Oxford’s Hibbard points out a contrast with Shylock and suggests it is a middle-­class virtue, about saving rather than spending. But this is not at all what Shylock’s own words suggest: He hates our sacred nation, and he rails, Even there where merchants most do congregate, On me, my bargains, and my well-­won thrift, Which he calls interest. (1.3.40–43)

Thrift is not about saving, or lack of spending, in any simple way, but about, specifically, unearned double usages of that which should only be used once, even, therefore, a kind of unnatural breeding which lets us recall that Dante’s Inferno places usurers with sodomites. Such unnatural acts of forcing money to breed chime with the idea of the pie as a pregnant container of display and invention, along with the far more troubling notion of the pie as breeding rot and decay. It is thrifty of Claudius to find a way to reuse Gertrude, to serve her up as queen again to people who have been offered the dish before. This could be seen as a subset of the sense assumed by Hibbard, but Bassanio’s usage in the same play is quite different, and it represents the norm for the period: “I have a mind presages me such thrift, / That I should questionless be fortunate!” (1.1.174–75). Here, thrift means profit, livelihood: the OED’s 1c. and 2a. But conversely, Hamlet could also be referring to the idea of thrift as adulteration, the mixing of old and new or of categories of things in food, that not only allowed their reuse but also troubled their purity. This usage surfaces in The Court and Kitchin of Elizabeth Cromwell, a satire with recipes first printed in 1664, which connects thrift with tyranny: “The genuine Gusto is quite changed by this adulteration, and lost in the mixed multiplicity of other Relishes and palatable ingredients. . . . The pure results and simple innocent delights [but] they corrode their minds with the sharp sawces of Ambition, and so alter and invert their nature, that they degenerate to other things, and become such a quelque-­chose of villainy and debauchery” (B1V–B2R).51 “Pure” and “innocent” delights are contrasted with debauchery and inversion; this imagery of monstrosity is likened to the tyranny of the Roman emperors and their wickedness, which

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in turn is both caused by and the cause of the abnormal meats on which they feast, the meat of panthers and bears. Pies contained the unknown, and the Roman tyrants contained a brutality that exploded out of their bodies in their cruel actions. The pies on the Danish marriage table are synecdochal of the marriage itself, holding inside themselves all its tyranny and also all its body-­driven lust. Once fresh, and now troublingly resurrected, the baked meats comically and worryingly recall the cannibalistic pies of the other, better-­known plays discussed above (Titus Andronicus and Thyestes), and presciently predict the bloodletting that follows. Marriage was a celebration involving fresh meat, meat with the blood still in it, in a distant but important echo of the sacrifice of the virgin bride’s hymen. Ancient tragedy carries in itself the remembrance of the ancient Greek sparge, or throat-­cutting blood spurt, where female characters such as Iphigeneia, Medea, Antigone, and Phaedra trade bridal beds for funeral corteges just as Gertrude and Ophelia do in Hamlet.52 It is only just too much to say that the cold pies predict the deaths of Gertrude and Ophelia. Gertrude’s older body is a stale pie, and the sacrifice of marriage is absent. Because both the hymen and the meats that symbolize it are absent, blood must flow elsewhere. We almost want it to flow as a guarantee that something new is at stake, or even as proof that we matter enough to break out the better banqueting stuff. Recycling is a problem for a play itself so recycled. As Michael O’Neill has argued, specifically in relation to death, Hamlet is among other things a rewriting of Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy.53 The ur-­Hamlet, Q1, Q2, and the songs sung by mad Ophelia, are tiny pieces of narrative and desire that cannot be assembled into a whole and single interpretation, not even as an identification for the true love buried in the marked grave with a stone at his heels. He too is already recycled. There is any amount of other recycling going on—players doubling parts, props reused. Everything is reheated. So it makes sense in this context to ask if a queen can be recycled too. Can anyone handed between men avoid being understood as an adulteress? If her materiality, her meat, is to be shared, if more than one man’s hand is in the pie, then she is stale, as unclean and transgressive as incest or cannibalism. So it is that the “thrift” of the baked meat and its reuse works to compress into itself all the lives lived by Claudius and Gertrude; the pies are literally the ghosts, the burst cerements, of King Hamlet, and it is as if he is

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the dwarf novelty that explodes from them, the knowledge of dead “guts” that will not go away or lie still.

Notes 1. All Shakespeare citations are from The New Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2. The OED actually cites these lines from Hamlet as part of its definition of bake meat or baked meats as pies or pastries; it also cites “1612 J. W ­ ebster White Divel sig. G3. “As if a man Should know what foule is coffind in a bak’t meate Afore you cut it vp,” a reference which summarizes the topic of this essay. 3. When I presented this essay as a talk in Berlin, commentators on the paper were troubled by the idea of the baked meats as material pies, as real pies, as was an anonymous reviewer of the panel submission for the Renaissance Society of America conference in Venice; she or he simply couldn’t stomach the idea of pies with a referent. 4. Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain (London: HarperCollins 2006). On pies in general, see Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History (London: Reaktion, 2000), chapter 7. 5. Peter Brears, “Arvals, Wakes, and Month’s Minds: Food for Funerals,” in Food and the Rites of Passage, ed. Laura Mason (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2002): 87–113, 99. 6. Brears, “Arvals, Wakes,” 93. 7. Brears, “Arvals, Wakes,” 98, citing Michael Aislabie Denham, The Denham Tracts: A Collection of Folklore (London: Nutt, 1892–95), 40. 8. Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1984); Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). 9. Mark Dawson, Plenti and Grase: Food and Drink in a Sixteenth-­Century Household (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2009), 227. 10. Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 27. 11. Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 12. Heal, Hospitality. 13. Edward Hall, Hall’s Chronicle (London: J. Johnson, 1809), 614. 14. A Proper Newe Booke of Cokerye (1545).

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15. David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-­Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 16. Roy Strong, Feast: A History of Grand Eating (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 188; Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 17. Robert May, The Accomplished Cook (1660), 1; see Sara Pennell, “Deciphering Culinary Allusion and Illusion in Robert May’s ‘ExtraOrdinary Pye,’” in Look and Feel: Studies in Texture, Appearance and Incidental Characteristics of Food: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food, ed. Harlan Walker (Totnes: Prospect Books, 1994): 128–40. 18. Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), 413–14, ed. Helen Ostovich, https://​www​.dhi​.ac​.uk​/ brome​/viewOriginal​ .jsp​?play​=​LW​&​type​=​TEXT. 19. Sara Pennell, “The Material Culture of Food in Early Modern England c. 1650–1750,” in The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Late Historical Britain, ed. Sarah Tarlow and Susie West (London: Routledge, 1999): 35–50, 46. 20. A Survey of London (1603), (reprinted Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), 216–23. 21. Marginal notes 3.3.52.3 and 3.3.52.2, Rory Loughnane, ed., New Oxford Shakespeare, 3111. 22. Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and the Argonauts, trans. Aaron Poochigian (London: Penguin, 2014), 2.189 (240–45), 59–60. 23. Virgil, Aeneid, 3.210ff., trans. A. S. Kline, https://​ www​ .poetryintransla tion​.com​/PITBR​/Latin​/ VirgilAeneidIII​.php: “Strophades Graio stant nomine dictae, / insulae Ionio in magno, quas dira Celaeno / Harpyiaeque colunt aliae, Phineia postquam / clausa domus, mensasque metu liquere priores. / Tristius haud illis monstrum, nec saevior ulla / pestis et ira deum Stygiis sese extulit undis. / Virginei volucrum voltus, foedissima ventris / proluvies, uncaeque manus, et pallida semper / ora fame.” P. Vergilius Maro, Aeneid, http://​www​.perseus​.tufts​.edu​/hopper​/text​?doc​=​Verg.​+A.​ +3​.200​&​fromdoc​=​Perseus​%3Atext​%3A1999​.02​.0055. 24. Sara Paston-­Williams, The Art of Dining: A History of Cooking and Eating (London: National Trust, 2012), 112. 25. See also the Beatles’ “fish and finger pie” in “Penny Lane,” understood as a sly allusion to the female genitals. 26. Guillaume de La Perrière, The theater of fine devices, trans. Thomas Combe (1614), embleme XCIII. 27. Sara Pennell, “‘Great Quantities of Gooseberry Pye and Baked Clod of Beef ’: Victualling and Eating Out in Early Modern London,” in Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London,

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ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000): 228–49, 230. 28. Pennell, “Great Quantities,” 235, 243. 29. Joseph Jacobs, “Cap O’Rushes,” in English Fairy Tales (London: Nutt, 1890), http://​www​.sacred​-­­texts​.com​/neu​/eng​/eft​/index​.htm. 30. William Cartwright, “A Bill of Fare,” in Poems (1651). 31. G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), 11. 32. The Coventry Leet Book, ed. Mary Dormer Harris, Early English Texts Society, OS 134–35 (London, 1907–8), 26, cited in Bridget Henisch, The Medieval Cook (Cambridge: Boydell, 2000), 87. 33. Randle Cotgrave, A dictionarie of the French and English tongues (1611); Henisch, Medieval Cook, 87. 34. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Cook’s Prologue, 4346–48, https://​chaucer​.fas​ .harvard​.edu​/pages​/cooks​-­­prologue​-­­and​-­­tale. 35. Tom Nealon, Food Fights and Culture Wars: A Secret History of Taste (London: British Library, 2016). 36. Thomas More, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963– 97), 8.2:705; commentary on line 4347, The Oxford Companion to Chaucer, ed. Douglas Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 37. Pennell, “Great Quantities,” 237. 38. “Letterbook of Edward III,” f. 194, cited in Memorials of London and London Life in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, ed. H. T. Riley (London: Longmans Green, 1868), 268–69, British History Online, http://​www​ .british​-­­history​.ac​.uk​/no​-­­series​/memorials​-­­london​-­­life​/pp266​-­­269. 39. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 306–9. 40. Stephen Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotion in the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–4; Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 4, 110–50. 41. Schwyzer, Archaeologies, 110; Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 93–123; and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 412. 42. Thomas Becon, Prayers and Other Pieces, ed. John Ayre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), 276.

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43. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2003). 44. Schwyzer, Archaeologies, 111. 45. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 137. 46. John Higgins, The Falles of vnfortunate princes (1620), 419–20. As the title implies, a series of de casibus narratives. 47. Richard Simpson, Edmund Campion: A Biography (London: John Hodges, 1896); Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 203. 48. Jasper Heywood, Thyestes (Cambridge: Chadwyck-­Healey, 1994). 49. Louise Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3–4. I am grateful to Miriam Jacobson for this reference. See also Susan Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005); Elizabeth Hurren, Dissecting the Criminal Corpse: Staging Post-­Execution Punishment in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Richard Ward, A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 50. Ian Mortimer, “Why Do We Say ‘Hanged, Drawn and Quartered?’” (2010), http://​www​.ianmortimer​.com​/essays​/drawing​.pdf; J. Bridgewater, Concertatio Ecclesiæ Catholicæ, 3rd ed. (1589), ff. 172b–203a. 51. Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 119–21; Katherine Gillespie, “Elizabeth Cromwell’s Kitchen Court: Republicanism and the Consort,” Genders 33 (2001), http://​www​.colorado​.edu​/genders archive1998​ -­­2 013​ /2001​ /01​ /10​ /elizabeth​ -­­c romwells​ -­­k itchen​ -­­c ourt​ -­­republicanism​-­­and​-­­consort. 52. On sparge, see Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Helene P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 53. Michael O’Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 217–18.

Milton’s Hair Jayne Lewis

From observing the growth of a hair, can we learn anything concerning the generation of a man? Would the manner of a leaf ’s blowing, even though perfectly known, afford us any instruction concerning the vegetation of a tree? —DAVID HUME, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779)

P

icture a lock of hair. To do so is to picture an exemplary organic supplement—a strand of biomaterial that actively supports any number of symbolic activities, from remembrance, fetishization, and relic worship to self-­display and commerce. Eighteenth-­century cultural actors stretched this spectrum of possibilities when they systematically detached hair from the human body, styling it into wigs that encoded social status and marked personal identity, working the tresses of the departed into brooches that served as tangible props to memory, exploiting hair as object, technology, and metaphor in scientific investigations of the natural world, and mobilizing the curl as a satiric salvo against the foibles of the modern woman.1 A decades-­long vogue for “high hair” steadily supplied such campaigns with fresh content. By midcentury, newly professionalized hairdressers were raking women’s hair into miniature gardens and interweaving it with feathers, fruit, and flowers. Many went on to publish whole treatises on “the Hair,” their literary handiwork at once an extension of their practical art and a new vantage from which to survey their subject’s

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richly varied, thickly planted, densely interwoven social, aesthetic, moral, and physical landscape.2 To view a lock of hair through the lens of such symbolic practices is, however, to find those practices as ironic as they were novel. As David Hume’s rhetorical question concerning “the generation of a man” archly implies, hair reified identity only when it was abstracted from its defining source, the body, and subjected to emergent patterns of symbolic interchange that disputed identity’s very specificity. Perhaps hair’s most vital charge over the long eighteenth century was thus to separate persons living in a skeptical and materialist present from a very different past. Hair’s traditional “magical” and spiritual value as sacred relic, charismatic trophy, malevolent or beneficent charm was thereby transformed into the “social” one so frequently critiqued by present-­day feminist and critical race theorists.3 The result can be deadening, leaving hair a mere “prosthesis” that is at once “corporeal and a mere lifeless extension.”4 Yet as the editors of this volume propose, organic supplements are not prostheses. Just so, hair’s transit through, between, and across bodies made it a means whereby individuated and autonomous modern life achieved its ideational form—and hence its spiritual identity—as modern, as individuated, as autonomous, and indeed as life. For a dynamic illustration of this point, we can look to “a quantity of hair” stripped from the skull of a long dead English poet in the summer of 1790. According to the Inner Temple barrister Philip Neve’s 1790 Narrative of the Disinterment of Milton’s Coffin, in August 1790, a body likely to be John Milton’s was exhumed from its traditional resting place in the church of St. Giles without Cripplegate. A major clue to the corpse’s identity appeared to be its hair, which—miraculously—lay “perfectly straight and even” despite decades underground.5 Locks were severed and distributed among the assembled company; one, attached to “a bit of the skin of the skull,” ended up in Neve’s own hands, one of which immediately set to writing about it. As it multiplied in the marketplace, Milton’s hair inspired poems, periodical pieces, and pamphlets that alternately debated its authenticity, bemoaned the savagery with which it had been hacked, and—as in John Keats’s 1818 “Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair”—revered it as a stimulant to imaginative contact with “the Chief of organic Numbers” himself.6 On all of these occasions, picturing “Milton’s hair” in language was inseparable from the act of physically

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touching it, and both of these processes were sustained in the immaterial spaces between physical bodies. This particular supplement was, in other words, as ideational as it was organic. The senses that conspired to bring it to life had already returned the favor. Such reciprocity—and the organic ideation that it enables—makes hair a more elusive correlative to Michael Yonan’s rococo ornament. Hair’s not-­ quite-­bodily wave also reveals something not yet seen in the “material interchanges between human bodies and non-­human natures” that recent feminist thinkers such as Stacy Alaimo and Jane Bennett have identified as a condition of life.7 When we add reflexive communication—a necessary component of “conception” itself—into Alaimo’s “conception of trans-­corporeality,” we revive a sense of the “organic” that would have been familiar to Milton himself. Milton’s lexicographer nephew Edward Phillips’s New World of English Words defines “organical” as “belonging to, or consisting of Organes,” with the latter further specified as “instruments, also the substantial parts, or Members of the body.”8 Milton’s own work had developed this sense of the organic as an instrument of communication. His 1644 treatise Of Education promotes those “organic arts which enable men to read or write,” his Christian Doctrine celebrates the “inspiration of some divine virtue . . . infused into the organic body,” and Paradise Lost endows Satan with “Serpent Tongue / Organic, or Impulse of vocal Air” (PL 9.529–30).9 From this perspective, it is natural not only that Milton’s hair should have been inseparable from the verbal image and idea of it but that it should have shown up in the first place as a tangible, visible substance only after his body’s death, as a supplement to a century of posthumous speculation about its color, torque, and length. Such speculation mirrors a broader idiosyncrasy in enlightened imaginings of hair itself. As Margaret Powell and Joseph Roach point out in the introduction to a volume that finally gives hair “in the age of Enlightenment” its due, in the eighteenth century, “empirical experimentation” and “instrumental reason” pinned hair down as a quantifiable and classifiable organic substance.10 Yet it is also true that new technologies of vision and emergent standards of consensual validation revealed no such substance but rather a ubiquitous and mysteriously independent life form that grew on bodies even after death. Similar to the no less planted early modern corpses that elsewhere in this volume Diane Purkiss finds to be infinitely confusable, with one another and with food— and evoking too the “botanical enthrallment” that Miriam Jacobson traces

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through earlier modern poetry—hair was an “animal Vegetable” that also defied categorical distinctions between male and female, human and animal, objects and representations, even life and death.11 Recent scholarship has found such crossings to erase distinctions between individual bodies and classes thereof, exposing the arbitrariness and artificiality of the boundaries that strain to hold the line against what boils down to death. But eighteenth-­century sport with the tangles of Milton’s hair tells a different story. Here, threats to categorical stability look suspiciously like creative mediations among free agents, while assertions of symbolic mastery dissolve into recursive yet open-­ended play. Like all play, however, this was also a form of reality testing. As such, even as it crowned his popular image, Milton’s hair advanced an understanding of organic life not as an ultimately morbid property or propensity of bodies but rather as the vibrant epiphenomenon of notional transaction among human beings. When it records the passage of Milton’s hair “into my hands,” Neve’s “Narrative” of his coffin’s “Disinterment” supplies a case in point. If the verbal surface of that account distracts and even repels with its truck of sensational details—“sludge,” skin that stubbornly “adhere[s]”—its first function was to transform what had been “told” to the writer into a literary form that could be seen, touched, and then interpreted in ways that bred new interpretations, new literary representations, new and unrestricted ideations like those of Keats that could be felt in the temples or on the very fingertips. Such fertility often left “the great Milton” looking more like a woman than a man—a fate the delicate-­featured “Lady of Christ’s” might have predicted. It also disrupted the serious business of making Milton matter as a major English author, leaving the impression that he could not have mattered less. In order to show how enlivening and indeed generative that impression could be, this essay braids anecdote, material evidence, and concept. The resulting methodological twist complements eighteenth-­century treatments of “Milton’s hair,” thereby in itself extending that hair into the present time.

“Light Browne” What color was Milton’s hair? In William Faithorne’s canonical pastel portrait of the poet, circa 1670, it appears to be light brown; even black-­ and-­white redactions (figure 1) tempt the modern viewer to call it auburn, though to say so in 1670 would have meant something closer to blonde, the

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Figure 1.  Portrait of John

Milton, William Faithorne, c. 1670. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Louise Bechtel, 1958)

word auburn having only later assumed its present connotation of ruddy light. Of course, the pastel crayon in which Faithorne’s image was rendered might have faded over the centuries, or the artist could have gilded the graying tresses of a reputedly vain subject who would have been over sixty at the time of the sitting. The twentieth-­century art historian Leo Miller found this color drawing atypically “mechanical and lifeless” in Faithorne’s corpus and speculated that it was copied by some anonymous hand from a print Faithorne had furnished for the front of Milton’s 1670 History of Britain.12 Before we would rely on an apparently mimetic image, even one as venerable as Faithorne’s, we therefore might turn to what was said about Milton’s hair if we wish it to show its true colors. That is exactly what Milton’s first biographers were inclined to do. In the early 1680s, the Oxford antiquarian John Aubrey was charged by his colleague Anthony Wood with the task of collecting and consolidating what was known of Milton’s life. Aubrey consulted several persons who had laid eyes on the poet, including his widow, Elizabeth Minshull. As a result of these investigations, Aubrey’s scribbled Minutes of the Life of Mr John Milton recorded the detail that Mr. Milton’s hair was “light browne.”13 But at some point Aubrey inserted the word “abroun” into the space above “light browne,” thereby setting a stable linguistic marker spinning. Wood

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seems to have arrested it, taking only “light browne” from Aubrey’s handwritten Minutes when he published the first of many printed memoirs of Milton’s life in 1681.14 Milton’s hair stays “light brown” in virtually every biography of the author that appeared in Wood’s wake, from the freethinker John Toland to the conformist Edward Phillips, the Whig Elijah Fenton, the apolitical aesthete Jonathan Richardson, and the Tories Samuel Johnson, Thomas Birch, Francis Peck, Thomas Newton, and Henry Todd.15 Indeed, so durably and invariably “light brown” is Milton’s hair that these entwined and yet opposing adjectives—“light” and “brown”—do something besides secure our sense of one part of a human body. They also register a point of transference, verbatim, from one book concerning that body to the next. Such persistence unified, even nascently consolidated a biographical culture in which a shared sense of life writing as material embodiment helped consciously modern biographers transcend the distorting ideological differences of the past—differences that the once-­reviled republican Milton had often seemed to magnify. To this end, the new art of biography summoned the features of notable bodies through a freight of substantive detail. But does hair amount to such a detail? Should it be counted as a body part in the first place? Surely hair is too lightweight to be such a thing: too alienable, too superficial, too liable to darken, whiten, or gray over time. Nothing more than keratin and dead skin cells, it is also too uncertainly alive, not to mention too imbued with intangible sociocultural meanings. Hence hair may be most accurately described not as a body part but rather as an inherently transient aspect of a body’s appearance. Yet this does not make it any less substantial. As witness the rise of the mourning brooch—a morbid extension of the earlier modern exchange of locks as love tokens— enlightened modernity saw hair’s transformation into a personal artifact that at once recalled the inevitable disappearance of every solid body and raised the sentimental possibility of any such body’s figurative persistence in memory.16 In those—typically women—who rarely wore wigs, hair’s oscillation between evanescence and solid state, adjective and noun, was visibly interwoven with the processes of growth and autonomous movement and, in William Hogarth’s influential view, ultimately with “fluctuating ideas” themselves, especially as these might be temporarily “fix[ed]” in print. Hogarth visually (and famously) satirized men’s wigs as manmade commodities (figure 2), but in his writing he took his influential line of beauty from the turn

Figure 2.  The Five Orders of Periwigs, William Hogarth, 1761. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932)

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of a curl, finding in women’s hair “a very obvious example” of “the beauty of a composed intricacy of form.”17 Of such instances, “the most amiable in itself is the flowing curl; and the many waving and contrasted turns of naturally intermingling locks ravish the eye, especially when they are put into motion by a gentle breeze.” Hogarth offered no visual image of these evocative fluctuations in his 1753 Analysis of Beauty, but as Abigail Zitin proposes, his writing’s “intertwist[ing]” of such effects formed an intricate plait of allusion to the “wanton” tresses of Milton’s Eve.18 Visual artists would later look to female heads when, in a rococo mood, they wished to fuse hair’s vitality with its ideality, its capacity for communication with its luster as an object. But Hogarth’s example suggests that hair’s suspense between material and immaterial—“fix[ed]” and kinetic—modes of being also identifies it both with writing as writing and with a volatile and still self-­determining print culture. Here tangible, visible letters not only trafficked with the invisible as they always had but now mysteriously dispersed through ever-­transforming interpretive communities. Exemplified in Britain’s late-­century bumper crop of belletristic hairdressers, hair’s affinity with the plant-­based and hide-­bound ephemera of public writing casts new light on the question of how Milton came to matter to modernizing letters. In the case of John Aubrey’s own writing of Milton’s hair, the insertion of the word abroun between the lines of his scribbled Minutes turned “light browne” from a term of reference into a fleeting impression, one that implicated the perceiver, along with the traces of his hand, in what he perceived. Yet impressions can mysteriously persist even when those who have formed them are gone, and in the twentieth century, the Estonian linguist Heinrich Mutschmann revived Aubrey’s “abroun” in his analysis of “the evidence of the locks of [Milton’s] hair handed down to posterity.”19 Mutschmann repudiated the eighteenth-­century biographers who in his view had only repeated one another when they ruled Milton’s hair “light brown.” Had they seen the hair itself ? No. Mutschmann pointed to two “locks alleged to be Milton’s which have been known to exist.”20 These had “belonged” successively to a series of English writers that included Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Leigh Hunt, and the Brownings before being auctioned at ­Sotheby’s in the early twentieth century. On the resulting evidence, Mutschmann took Aubrey’s “abroun” to mean “auburn” but traced the word’s root to the Latin alburnus, meaning “whitish, flaxen.’”21 “The secret” of Milton’s blindness, Mutschmann decided, must therefore have been his albinism.

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But Mutschmann himself never saw the locks in question. He drew his own conclusions from a 1921 Outlook article by the antiquarian and art historian G. C. Williamson, who ruled that “both these locks . . . may be termed light brown hair, certainly on the whitish side and by no means a deep brown.”22 Mutschmann also quotes Keats’s “Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” where at least one of those locks is “bright and fair.” Keats, we are assured, “would never have called a ‘brown’ lock ‘bright’ and ‘fair.’”23 Keats’s 1818 “Lines,” however, depicts Milton’s hair only as “bright”—never “fair”—and Williamson plainly had no idea what he was seeing; his Outlook article mulls fruitlessly over eighteenth-­century collectors and reproducers of Milton’s portrait who variously represented his hair as “dark brown,” “chestnut,” and “red.” It is tempting to brush Mutschmann aside. We shouldn’t. What appears to be his interpretive error grows out of an intricate linguistic coil that had been plaited in the eighteenth century. Here, in the conspicuously intervening hands of living readers and writers, a fickle, linguistically complicated quality of Milton’s hair—its color—perpetually engenders newly comprehensible bodies for those qualities to characterize. To answer the skeptical question that Hume raised in his 1779 Dialogues concerning Natural Religion: yes, we can “from observing the growth of a hair, learn [something] concerning the generation of a man.”24

“A Small Quantity of Hair” Realized only temporarily through transactions between readers and writers, the signature quality of Milton’s “light brown” hair conditioned that hair’s 1790 appearance as a visible and tangible substance. Philip Neve’s Narrative of the Disinterment reports what seems to be the rape of the poet’s locks. The minute the lid of the St. Giles coffin was up and the body within exposed to view, one man “poked his stick against the head, and brought some of the hair over the forehead.” Others broke away the teeth and scurried off to sell them: “several thousands” were soon in circulation, one newspaper wryly reported.25 And what of the hair? “Scissors not being needed”—Milton’s hair had evidently detached itself from its scalp—one man “took up the hair, as it [lay] on the forehead, and carried it home.”26 Others took advantage of the (female) sexton’s decision to show the body for sixpence and carried locks away as souvenirs. Unlike Milton’s molars,

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these were not necessarily purchase items. Indeed, as Neve charts the passage of “a small Quantity of Hair” into his own “hands,” to which adhered “a bit of the skin of the skull, of about the size of a shilling,” the shilling serves only to help the reader picture the “quantity” of hair Neve holds in his hand. Like that of Milton’s left one in his awkward prose writing, that hand’s oblique but effortful presence can be sensed in Neve’s tangled clauses. It supplements, if it does not supplant, “the small Quantity” of Milton’s hair as a stimulant to readerly sensation, in the process evoking the conjoined labors of artists and dressers of female hair. Neve, significantly, was not actually present at the disinterment: having “read in the Public Advertiser . . . that Milton’s coffin . . . was . . . to be seen,” he headed to St. Giles to find “the information untrue,” what was left of the body already reburied.27 The hair that made its way into Neve’s hands thus became his only assurance “with respect to the identity of the person” who’d been dug up.28 Yes, there were also obscure “parish traditions” that defied a nearby monument to the family of the seventeenth-­century antiquarian Richard Smyth. “But,” Neve maintains, “the strongest of all confirmations is the hair, both in its length and color” (28). How so? “Behold old Faithorne’s quarto-­print of Milton,” Neve invites, “taken ad vivum. . . . Observe the short locks . . . towards the forehead, and the long ones flowing from the same place down the sides of the face.”29 Neve measured the lock now flowing through his own fingers—“six inches and an half by a rule” when it was cut, but now “only two inches and a half.”30 Still, it is the more labile and subjective quality of color that settles the matter of identity, if only by unsettling it. For, Neve announces, Milton’s seventeenth-­century biographer Anthony “Wood says, Milton had light brown hair; the very description of that which we possess.”31 The sense that “we” can “observ[e]” Milton’s hair as his thus arises from the dynamic fusion of literary “description” and (textually cited) visual image, a fusion actively and visibly accomplished by Neve’s hand. Hair appears as an organic substance only when we first sense the presence of this hand, and when, accordingly, we attribute generative power to the media community that makes bodies appear—an attribution Neve’s title models when it references the “Disinterment” not of Milton’s body but of the “Coffin” that contains and conveys it. Recent students of this incident have been riveted on the body. Michael Lieb reads Milton’s disinterment as an allegory of Western culture’s fear of dismemberment, evidence of its ongoing investment in sparagmos, the

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potential of torn and scattered limbs to turn bodily destruction into cultural profit. Aaron Santesso invokes contemporary cults of authorship that fetishized author’s birthplaces and burial sites, while Joseph Crawford identifies the reappearance of Milton’s physical body with his polemically useful revival as a republican icon during the French Revolution.32 Yet something in Neve’s Narrative resists the assumption that organic bodies both predate their role as supplements to human representations and fall victim to it. What pushes back isn’t Milton’s inert body but his hair. In its looseness on the scalp (“scissors not being needed”), it had already practically cut itself; once free of its decayed host, it proved strangely resilient, even resistant: “What may seem extraordinary,” Neve wrote, “it is yet so strong, that [one person], to cleanse it from its clotted state, let the cistern-­cock run in it for near a minute, and then rubbed it between his fingers without injury.”33 Is it the fingers that “escaped injury” or the hair itself ? No matter. Visibly upheld in Neve’s syntax, an unresolved suspense between subject and object not only sustains wonder but binds Milton’s “strong” hair almost magically to the media that convey it: to the fingers that scrubbed it and to the writing that now styles it anew. As Carol Barton has documented, the grisly goings-­on at St. Giles bred pages upon pages of printed matter.34 Newspapers and pamphlets rushed to profit from the sensational proceedings, while in their pages literary critics, surgeons, barristers, and university dons took turns asserting and doubting the authenticity of the body in question. Milton’s hair springs eternal in all of this material, converting both skeptical and credulous preoccupations with dead matter into signs of life. For example, earnestly indignant elegists, including William Cowper, had the hard matter of Milton’s bones pleading for restitution, then sinking with a defeated sigh back into the crypt.35 But in many a newspaper article Milton’s hair seemed to grow and even change color as it passed from hand to hand, suddenly vibrant, tensile, savage with irony. So much roved abroad, the English Chronicle sardonically remarked, that “the head of the poet must have vegetated a great variety of hair, and of various colors, as the Public are alternately presented in the streets with grey, black, red, and auburn hair, each of which they are solemnly assured is real and genuine.”36 Here, “real[ity]” doesn’t inhere in objects. It’s an impression that has “vegetated”—in the Latinate sense of growth that Milton would have heard—in any transaction between an object’s qualities and their perceiver. Indeed, as Edward J. Geisweidt has richly demonstrated, in

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the science of the earlier part of Milton’s seventeenth century, hair’s “vegetable” properties were exactly the ones that identified it with organic life.37 In the eighteenth century, such vegetal impressions were often facetious. But this did not mean that they could not be further developed in lexical form. What was left of the contested corpse was reburied a few days after its disinterment. But such was the pitch of media controversy that two weeks later it was exhumed a second time, examined by two surgeons, and only then reburied, this time for good. Neve thereupon issued a new edition of his Narrative, “with Additions,” and a postscript recorded these last proceedings, presumably so as to bolster Neve’s claim that the corpse in question was Milton’s. But the testimony of the surgeons did not necessarily comport with such a claim, for the corpse’s hair—some of it miraculously still there— appeared instead to have changed. “Of all those who saw the body” the first time around there was “not one person, who discovered a single hair of any other color than light brown.” Now, however, “it appears that the hair on the back of the head, was of dark brown, nearly approaching to black, although the front hair remaining was of the same light brown as that taken on the fourth.” Neve decides that “it does not belong to me to account for or to prove this fact.” Instead, he gives the second surgeon, one Mr. Dyson, the last word: “On a paper, which he shewed me, enclosing a bit of the hair, he had written, Milton’s hair.”38 Here, “Milton’s hair” provides both oblique evidence of Dyson’s personal conviction and a sentimental token to pass between like-­minded brethren, Neve and Dyson. But, more immediately, the written words “Milton’s hair” make letters as humans interact through them in time at once the object and the generative medium of experience. This is unsurprising; Neve’s only other published work had been one of literary criticism—a set of Cursory Remarks on Some of the Ancient English Poets, chiefly Milton (1789)—and his retrieval of Milton’s hair was of a piece with the ways Milton’s eighteenth-­century editors and critics handled hair’s appearance throughout the vast and ungainly body of his work.

“Pittoresque” Prompt We come here to the question of what role Milton himself might have played in styling his hair as an organic supplement to his own memory. It replays the tension between spiritual integrity and emergent materialism that Rebecca Laroche finds pertinent not only to early modern oils and

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unguents but to the written recipes that conveyed their properties, relationships, and potentialities. In life, Milton’s hair was as enigmatic as it was decisively his, since he had inexplicably maintained a full set of Cavalier lovelocks even as he wrote regicide polemic for the Roundheads.39 Misty Anderson, however, points out that these oppositions were far from fixed, since Puritans also defied Archbishop Laud’s seventeenth-­century directive that clergy wear their hair short, and Cromwell himself eventually grew his out. The “ups and downs” of Puritan hair betokened not just volatile political rhetoric but ambivalence about hair’s place on the cusp between sensual and spiritual life, eroticism and death.40 This ambivalence inevitably seeped into the sphere of eighteenth-­century literary culture, even as that culture sought to obscure its ties to the sectarian writing of the last age. Precisely because of the multivalence that allowed uncertainty to persist in a creative and even communally constructive form, Milton’s coiffure provides an opportunity for literary scholars and biographers to assimilate and develop one another’s impressions of his hair—increasingly citational impressions that, over time, made up a perceptible and ever-­changing person. For example, the Lambeth Palace librarian Henry Todd remarked that Milton’s first tutor, Thomas Young, had (according to Aubrey) been “a Puritan in Essex who cut his haire short.” Warton had supposed that Young was the source of Milton’s political ideology. But on the strength of what Aubrey had noticed about his hair, Todd found that “if Milton imbibed from his instructor, as Mr. Warton supposes, the ­principles of puritanism, it may be curious to remark that he never adopted from him the outward symbol of the sects.”41 In rejecting hair as both “outward symbol” and imitative form, Milton turned his own “clustering locks” into a generative medium for marking the very curiosity that they stimulated, synthesizing objective form with pluripotent figures, prolific conjecture, and dynamic, transtemporal exchange among literary minds. Hair is no less lively in Milton’s own compositions as they sport with (or, as the manuscript of Lycidas puts it, “in”) Naera’s tangles, Adam’s hyacinthine locks, Eve’s disheveled tresses, Eden’s “bush with frizzled hair implicit,” or even Samson’s “puissant hair,” so disastrously shorn in Samson Agonistes but in Milton’s anticlerical prose resurgent in the form of multiple “illustrious and sunny locks . . . waving and curling about his godlike shoulders.”42 For eighteenth-­century readers whose work was to write about them, such textual tangles were not references to be explicated in the manner of, say, the

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leaves of Vallambrosa; nor were they admirable examples of Milton’s sublimity; nor, as in the case of Samson, were they even necessarily oblique autobiographical asides. Instead, hair’s appearance in Milton’s lines sparked novel associations that traveled, sometimes backward, across minds and times. Annotating, hence, the river nymph Sabrina’s “amber-­dropping hair” in Milton’s 1634 masque Comus, Warton not only explained that “Sabrina’s hair drops amber, because in the poet’s idea, her stream was supposed to be transparent” but grafted amber’s recently discovered electric properties onto it: “Amber, when applied to water, nears clearness, when to hair, a bright yellow.”43 Patrick Hume amended Eden’s “shaggy sides” to “hairy” ones and added that “Leaves, by a frequent Metaphor, are called the Honour, and the Hair of the Trees,” thereby planting hair even in places where Milton had not.44 To these spontaneous alchemies Eve’s “unadorned golden tresses” seemed especially salient.45 In Paradise Lost itself, her “wanton ringlets wav[ing] / As the Vine curls her tendrils” (PL 4.306–7) are dynamically entangled with the vegetable body of Milton’s verdant Paradise—a body at once autonomous and responsive to human hands as both perpetually etherealize into the communicative medium of air. When Thomas Newton found Eve’s hair to be “like the young shoots or tendrils of the vine,” the analogy seemed to deprive wave and curl of their capacity to behave as verbs as well as nouns. But in fact it simply transfers that activity into Newton’s own visual response to a moving form.46 All the same, hair’s anamorphic dynamism never kept it from also counting as a material object. That is because Milton’s “hair”—or “tresses” or “tangles” or “locks”—was technically identical with the graphic forms that made it perceptible to eighteenth-­century editors. In their aliveness to this fact, eighteenth-­century editors thus seized the hair that Milton gave to both human and nonhuman beings as a chance to reflect on the ways visible words interact with their readers. For instance, when the artist and Milton aficionado Jonathan Richardson the Elder and his eponymous son produced their voluminous Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Paradise Lost (1734), they were captivated by the “hyancinthin locks” that “round from Adam’s parted forelocks manly hung / Clust’ring” [PL 4.302–4]). What mental image was “hyacinthin” meant to conjure? Dutifully, the Richardsons offered a few technical terms for what this adjective might be. For example, it could be an allusion or cross-­reference (“hyacinthin” tied Adam’s hair to Homer and to Milton’s own Lycidas and

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Comus). It could also be what the Richardsons termed a “semblance,” clusters of “black turning to purple,” that in turn recalled “grapes—which Adam’s hair on each side somewhat resembled.”47 But far more interesting was the question of how “hyacinthin” struck its reader: here, its signature quality was best rendered as “pittoresque.” In the “pittoresque” modality, adjectives assume stable lexical form so as to tell us “what Images [are] Intended to be set before us.”48 So when we read that Adam (as the Richardsons put it) “had bright, black Hair, [Eve] Yellow; Both Curl’d, tho His parted A-­top,” such textual prompts, or “Helps to Conceive,” guarantee that “a lively Pittoresque Imagination with Poetical Good Sense will furnish the Possessors of these Qualities with Something.”49 Significantly, the “Qualities” to be “possess[ed]” belong no more to Adam than they do to the idiosyncratic “Pittoresque Imagination” that will always come up with “something.” And it was through those qualities that Milton’s own body might take shape at the corner of the mind’s eye. Adam’s hair naturally sparked the mental image of what grew on his maker’s own head. The Richardsons wondered why Milton made his Adam beardless and speculated that this is “because Hair, hanging down to the shoulders, and which [Milton] thought was a Beauty (he wore his Own so) would not Look well with more on his Upper Lip and Chin.”50 Newton read the Richardsons’ commentary on Adam’s hair and further unfurled the notion that that hair elicited, supposing that since Adam’s hair “hung ‘clustring’ or like bunches of grapes,” it was “most probable . . . that [Milton] drew the portrait of Adam not without regard to his own person, of which he had no mean opinion.”51 Newton found little difference between Adam’s locks and those of Milton himself. When it came time to describe Milton’s appearance in his life of the author, Newton thus seized the impression of Adam that Milton leaves in Paradise Lost, then looped it through the Richardson’s “Pittoresque” to render Milton’s own hair as “light brown, and parted on the foretop, in curls waving upon his shoulders.”52 So from the growth of a hairdo we learn how a man is generated. Or is one? Although he is regenerated from (Newton’s reading of ) Adam, the abundant tresses dynamically “waving upon his shoulders” put Newton’s Milton on the verge of becoming another Eve. Certainly, as we saw in Reynolds’s example, it was eighteenth-­century women whose hair was expected, if not taught, to behave like his. Indeed, when Milton’s own hair resurfaced in the 1790s, the doubters of its authenticity insisted that

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it belonged to a woman, most likely the daughter of Milton’s contemporary the antiquarian Richard Smyth, who was buried near his supposed grave at St. Giles, Cripplegate. Todd echoed the notorious hoaxer George Steevens in his verdict that “the disinterred corpse was supposed to be that of a female, and that the minutest examination of the fragments could not disprove, if it did not confirm the supposition.”53 In 1806, Charles Symmons was still opining that “the skeleton was subjected to a very accurate inspection, and proved to be that of a female; a fact, which, showing that the coffin of Milton was yet unviolated, relieved the uneasiness of his admirers.”54 Scots Magazine likewise determined that “there is reason to believe, far from being Milton’s, were the Bones of a Person not of the same Age or Sex.”55 Meanwhile, the English Chronicle and the Universal Evening Post observed that “a morning paper says, the body of Milton proved at last to be that of a lady; but luckily the mistake was not discovered, till the numerous tribes of writers, both in prose and verse, had exerted their genius on the occasion.”56 While the “indecent Liberties taken on [his] Body” may have feminized Milton in one way—toward women’s traditional identification with mortality and helplessness—his hair did so in a very different one, invoking the generative and imaginative power of his own prelapsarian Eve.57 In a manner quite different from the one implied in the “indecent Liberties” that were “taken on [his] Body,” Milton’s hair thus made him, in effect, female.

Milton’s Hair in Motion As it happens, it was a living female body that generated a point of reference for the visual images of Milton that proliferated over the eighteenth century. Discrepancies among the portraits made from the life bothered many an empirically minded biographer, connoisseur, engraver, and textual editor. Aubrey had complained that “the Pictures before his bookes are not at all like him.”58 But such “dissimilitude” (as Warton called it) also became a source of transpersonal life sustained through literary language. In this context, Faithorne’s crayon drawing ad vivum was less established than actively experienced as the authority that Neve would later take it to be: the most lifelike of several possible images of Milton. We seem to have Richardson the Elder to thank for this. He used Faithorne’s image as the basis of the engraving of Milton that fronts the title

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page of the Richardsons’ Remarks on Paradise Lost. This, Richardson insists, is a “picture for which I have reason to believe [Milton] Sate for not long before his Death.”59 The “picture” was then in Richardson’s possession; he had acquired it from George Vertue, who had recently engraved from it a print for yet another new edition of Paradise Lost. But what reason had Richardson to believe that Faithorne’s picture captured Milton’s true appearance? The reason seems to have been supplied not by Aubrey’s diffident remarks on the subject but rather by Milton’s youngest daughter Debora (now) Clarke. Debora (d. 1727), her father’s onetime amanuensis, was one of the last living bearers of Milton’s memory. While Vertue was preparing his engraving, he had asked her to corroborate several pictures of her father, including Faithorne’s. In that context, she had remarked that “her father was of a fair complexion, a little red in his cheeks, and light brown lanck hair.”60 But Richardson saw Debora herself as much more than an eyewitness or authenticator. He also remembered her as a physical extension of her father, one whose body had been visibly implicated in the making of literary meaning. Hence in Vertue’s original account of his visit to her, Faithorne drawing in hand, Debora simply verifies that her father had “light brown lanck hair.” Onto this anecdote, however, Richardson grafts a more speaking “Instance of [Debora’s] Tender Remembrance” of her father: “The Picture in Crayons I have of him was shown her After several others, which were pretended to be His; when Those were shown, and She was Ask’d if She could recollect if She had ever seen a Face. No, No. but when this was Produc’d, in a Transport,—’tis my Father, ’tis my Dear Father! I see him! ’tis Him! And then She put her Hands to several Parts of Her Face, ’tis the very Man! Here, here—.”61 “Here,” the image of “the very Man” is confirmed at once in Debora’s “Face” and in the gesture she performs as she “put her Hands to Several Parts” of it. Richardson then energetically extends that performance into his “own” impression of this incident. Nor was this the end of it. Richardson’s impression of Debora’s alleged epiphany resurfaces in Francis Blackburne’s 1780 biography of the republican Thomas Hollis. “About the year 1725,” writes Blackburne, Mr. George Vertue, a worthy and eminent British Antiquary, went on purpose to see Mrs. Deborah Clark, Milton’s youngest and favourite daughter, and some time his amanuensis. . . . [He] took this drawing with him, and divers paintings said to be of Milton; all of which were

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brought into the room, by his contrivance, as by accident, whilst he conversed with her. She took no notice of the paintings; but when she perceived the drawing, she cried out, “O Lord! That is the picture of my father; how came you by it?” and stroaking the hair of her forehead, added, “Just so my father wore his hair.” This daughter resembled Milton greatly.62

Milton’s hair, absent in Richardson, here appears out of nowhere; or rather it grows out of an ultimately empty citational gesture traced in Debora’s “stroaking” of her forehead “just so.” The gesture redoubles in Thomas Warton’s commentary on Milton’s 1645 Poems, which Warton edited in 1782—not, it seems, without consulting Blackburne, along with the more predictable suspects, Richardson and Vertue. Thus Warton: “At seeing the drawing, taking no notice of the rest, [Debora] suddenly cried out in great surprise, O Lord that’s the picture of my Father; how came you by it? And stroking down the Hair of her forehead, added, ‘just so my father wore his hair.’ She was very like Milton.”63 How is it that Warton saw something that simply wasn’t there in his sources? Just where did he think Milton’s hair came from? “Out of thin air” seems too flip an answer, but it does figure the tenuous interactions among reading writers that here seem to have extended Milton’s hair through time. Milton’s hair grows through this anecdotal chain of semblances into two entwined formations. On one hand, it generates an intimate, playful involvement with literary material that underwrites—even motivates— empiricist methodology. On the other, it dynamically recapitulates the ideational matrix through which the person we call Milton took shape as a source if not an object of experience in the present. Nowhere is this matrix more explicit than in Richardson the Elder’s life of Milton, which precedes the commentary on Paradise Lost that he published with his son; the two men appear simply as “J. Richardson” on the resulting book’s title page. The elder Richardson glosses this ambiguity with reference to Milton’s daughters, pitied since Edward Phillips’s biography of his uncle for their thankless labor as their blind father’s amanuenses. Richardson saw nothing to pity. Milton’s daughters were, in his view, simply parts of a single, immanent, and transpersonal body to which the person we call Milton also belonged. Richardson points out that he himself knows no more Greek or Latin than Milton’s daughters did. And yet, he holds,

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I Have the Greek and Latin Tongues, I have them because a part of me Possesses them to Whom I can recur at pleasure, just as I have a Hand when I would Write or Paint, Feet to Walk, and Eyes to See. My Son is my Learning, as I am That to Him which He has not: We make One Man; and Such a Compound Man (what Sort of one Soever he is whom We make) May Probably, produce what no Single Man Can. When therefore, I, in my Own Person, talk of Things which in my Separate Capacity I am known to be a Stranger to, let me be understood as the Complicated Richardson.64

It is to this dynamic, transpersonal stranger—“the Complicated Richardson”—that we may attribute the “Print Prefix’d” to the Richardson’s book on Milton. The image transfers Milton’s hair from Faithorne’s crayon picture to the page. But in contrast to Faithorne’s picture, in Richardson’s “Print” a laurel wreath has suddenly appeared in Milton’s hair. Or not so suddenly; it has also done so through interaction with an ideational community. Alluding to a caption drawn from Milton’s own tribute Mansus, Richardson declares that “the two Lines under it are my Reason for putting [the foliage] There.” But this is only fitting, since “all the World has given it him long since.”65 If the laurel wreath grows, vegetally, from Milton’s own writing, it is also planted there by others’ notional hands long after these lines were written. Nor can it be disentangled from Milton’s hair, which, if it is to be his, needs the wreath so obviously transferred to the page by Richardson’s hand. That point of transference, at once figured and effected by a hairpiece, makes Milton’s hair that of “the Complicated Richardson” as well. Indeed, in a well-­ known self-­portrait (figure 3), the hair of both Richardsons is tucked out of sight, presumably (in the great age of the wig) to prepare their heads for the reception of somebody else’s hair. Why could that hair not be Milton’s own? In Richardson’s copy of Faithorne’s portrait, he has plenty to spare, and all three men share a single medium; their dynamic connection thus is insinuated by a wavering, hairlike vine at lower left. A popular lampoon, often attributed to Hogarth, soon completed the act, as it seemed to transfer Milton’s hair to the heads of “the Complicated Richardson” (figure 4). In turn, when the “Complicated Richardson[s]” themselves had set out to capture what they called the air of their own contemporary Alexander

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Figure 3.  The Artist and His Son John, in the Presence of Milton, Jonathan Richardson, c. 1740. (Courtauld Gallery, London)

Pope, they grafted the poet’s head onto Milton’s (figure 5). The result is a singular being who is both Pope and Milton, without quite being either. Indeed, the evocative indeterminacy of his flowing locks recalls that of Pope’s own Belinda, herself an extension of Milton’s Eve. As for the Pope of Richardson’s fanciful portrait, he is the complicated Milton, we might say, or, as accurately, the complicated Pope. Through the visible agency of Richardson’s hand, the part that is Milton’s is, paradoxically, the same part that moves this image outside the boundaries of both personal and historical specificity. That part is, of course, the hair. As Milton’s rippling locks frame Pope’s head, they distance the later poet from the known, malformed body that dogged him through contemporary print culture.66 In its place, Pope acquires a transpersonal poetic aura and Milton gains a living body, all courtesy of the complicated Richardson’s just-­perceptible hand. This organic dynamism persisted well into the nineteenth century, when

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Figure 4.  The Complicated Richardson, William Hogarth (att.), c. 1740. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932)

the poet and radical journalist Leigh Hunt acquired a lock of Milton’s hair. Upon doing so, Hunt not only wrote three sonnets on the topic but fashioned that surprisingly slender wisp into a bright circle and glued it to a sheet of paper (figure 6). Here it crowns no head, a magic ring waiting to be rubbed by the ideations and imaginings of future readers.67 This essay has been such a rubbing. Or so one hopes.

Figure 5.  A. Pope as Milton, Jonathan Richardson, 1738. (Cornell University Library)

Figure 6.  Collection of hair formed by J. H. Leigh Hunt, folio, ca 1820–60. (Ransom Center, University of Texas)

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Notes 1. See Barbara Benedict, “Death and the Object: The Abuse of Things in The Rape of the Lock,” in Anniversary Essays on Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” ed. Donald Nichol and J. Paul Hunter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 131–49; and Sean Silver, The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 248–54. Lynn Festa definitively analyzes the psychosocial ironies of eighteenth-­century wig culture in “Personal Effects: Wigs and Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 29 (2005): 47–90. See also Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-­Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 107–40; Richard Corson, Fashions in Hair: The First Five Thousand Years (London; Peter Owen, 2001), 261–397; Christiane Holm, “Sentimental Cuts; Eighteenth-­ Century Mourning Jewelry with Hair,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 38 (2004): 139–43. 2. See for example William Barker, Treatise on the Principles of Hair-­dressing (London, 1785); David Ritchie, A Treatise on the Hair: Shewing its Generation, Means of its Preservation, Causes of its Decay. How to recover it when lost (London, 1770); and James Stewart, Plocacosmos; or the Whole Art of Hairdressing (London, 1782). See also Georgine de Courttais, Women’s Headdress and Hairstyles in England from AD 600 to the Present Day (London: Batsford, 1986). 3. E. R. Leach, “Magical Hair,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 88 (1958): 147–64. On eighteenth-­century “social hair,” see Margaret K. Powell and Joseph Roach, “Big Hair,” Eighteenth-­ Century Studies 38 (2004): 83. On hair’s place in feminist and critical race theory, see Paulette M. Caldwell, “A Hair Piece: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Gender,” in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 276–85. 4. Angela Rosenthal, “Raising Hair,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 38 (2004): 2. 5. Philip Neve, A Narrative of the Disinterment of Milton’s Coffin (London: Egerton, 1790), 17. 6. John Keats, “Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” in John Keats: The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 167. 7. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.

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8. Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words (London, 1558), n.p. (see under “Organical”). 9. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 390. Subsequent references to Paradise Lost are to this edition and are cited by line number in the text. Milton, Of Education, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, 636; De Doctrina Christina [Christian Doctrine], Complete Poems and Major Prose, 980. 10. Margaret K. Powell and Joseph Roach, introduction to A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Enlightenment, eds. Powell and Roach, 6 vols. (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 4:3. 11. Robert Hooke found hair to be “a kind of Vegetable growing on an Animal” in Micrographia; or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (1665), 158. 12. Leo Miller, “Milton’s Portraits: An Impartial Inquiry into Their Authentication,” Milton Quarterly special issue (1976): 76. 13. John Aubrey, Minutes of the Life of Mr. John Milton (c. 1681), in The Early Lives of Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Constable, 1965), 3. 14. Anthony Wood, Fasti Oxonienses (1691), in Early Lives, 47. 15. Edward Phillips, Account of his Life (1694); John Toland, Life of the Author (1698/1699); Jonathan Richardson, “The Life of Milton,” in Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1734); Thomas Birch “An Historical and Critical Account of the Life and Writings of Milton,” in The Works of Milton, ed. Thomas Birch (1738); Elijah Fenton, “The Life of John Milton” (1725), reprint in W. H. Hume, Two Early Lives of John Milton (1924); Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Milton” in Lives of the English Poets (London, 1779); Henry John Todd, Some Account of the Life and Writings of John Milton (London, 1809); Thomas Newton, ed., Paradise Lost . . . with the Life of John Milton ([1749]; London, 1763); Francis Peck, New Memoirs of the Life and Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton (London, 1740). 16. Holm, “Sentimental Cuts,” and Ariane Fennetaux, “Fashioning Death / Gendering Sentimental Mourning Jewelry in Britain in the Eighteenth Century,” in Women and the Cultural Material of Death, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 239–50. 17. Malcolm Baker, “‘No Cap or Wig but a Thin Cut upon It’: Hair and the Male Portrait Bust in England around 1750,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 38 (2004): 63–77; Tita Chico, “Couplets and Curls: A Theory of Form,” Philological Quarterly 86 (2007): 251–68. 18. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a view to fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste (London, 1753), 28. See Abigail Zitin, “Wantonness: Milton, Hogarth, and The Analysis of Beauty,” differences 27 (2016): 25–47.

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19. Heinrich Mutschmann, The Secret of John Milton (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft, 1925), 12. 20. Mutschmann, The Secret of John Milton, 13. 21. Mutschmann, The Secret of John Milton, 13. 22. G. C. Williamson, Outlook, April 15, 1922, 299. 23. Mutschmann, The Secret of John Milton, 12. 24. David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (London, 1779), 32. 25. Quoted in Bess Lovejoy, Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 71. 26. Neve, Narrative, 22. 27. Neve, Narrative, 3. 28. Neve, Narrative, 23. 29. Neve, Narrative, 28. 30. Neve, Narrative, 28. 31. Neve, Narrative, 29. 32. Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Aaron Santesso. “The Birth of the Birth Place: Bread Street and Literary Tourism before Stratford,” English Literary History 71 (2004): 377–403; Joseph Crawford, Raising Milton’s Ghost: John Milton and the Sublime of Terror in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). See also A. C. Howell. “Milton’s Mortal Remains and Their Literary Echoes,” Ball State University Forum 4 (1963): 17–30. 33. Neve, Narrative, 25. 34. Carol Barton, “‘Ill Fared the Hands That Heaved the Stones’: John Milton, a Preliminary Thanatography,” Milton Studies 43 (2004): 198–260. 35. William Cowper, “Stanzas on the late indecent Liberties taken with the Remains of the great Milton,” in Milton 1732–1801, ed. John T. Shawcross (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 362. 36. The Chronicle, September 1790, no. 1801, 7–9. 37. Edward J. Geisweidt, “Horticulture of the Head: The Vegetable Life of Hair in Early Modern English Thought,” Early Modern Literary Studies 19 (2009): 6.1–24. 38. Philip Neve, A Narrative of the Disinterment of Milton’s Coffin, 2nd ed. (London, 1790), 46. 39. Stephen Dobranski, “Clustering and Curling Locks: The Matter of Hair in Paradise Lost,” PMLA 125 (2010): 337–53. 40. Misty Anderson, “Religion and Ritualized Belief: Evangelical Hair,” in Powell and Roach, Cultural History of Hair, 20.

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41. Henry John Todd, Some Account of the Life and Writings of John Milton (London: Law and Gilbert, 1809), 5. 42. John Milton, The Reason of Church Government Urged against Prelaty (1641), in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, 688. 43. Thomas Warton, note in Milton, Poems upon Several Occasions, ed. Warton (London, 1785), 237–38. 44. Patrick Hume, Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost (London, 1695), 133. 45. For a suggestive and learned treatment of Eve’s hair’s meaning within the spiritualized materialisms of the seventeenth century, see Dobranski, “Clustering and Curling Locks,” 345–53. 46. Thomas Newton, ed., Paradise Lost  .  .  . with the Life of John Milton (1749) (London, 1763), 315. 47. Jonathan Richardson, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost (London, 1734), 154. 48. Richardson, Explanatory Notes, 156. 49. Richardson, Explanatory Notes, 156, 158. 50. Richardson, Explanatory Notes, 158. 51. Newton, Paradise Lost, 315. 52. Newton, “Life of John Milton,” in Paradise Lost, liv. 53. George Steevens, “Milton. Reasons Why It is Improbable that  .  .  . the Coffin that was Lately Dug up Should Contain the Reliques of Milton,” in St. James’s Chronicle or British Evening Post, September 4, 1790. 54. Charles Symmons, “The Life of Milton,” in The Prose Works of John Milton; with a Life of the Author, Interspersed with Translations and Critical Remarks, 7 vols. (London, 1806), 1:503. 55. Scots Magazine 52 (1790). 56. The English Chronicle and Universal Evening Post, September 18–21, 1790. 57. Cowper, “Stanzas,” 362. 58. Aubrey, Minutes, 3. 59. Richardson, “The Life of Milton,” ii. 60. George Vertue to Charles Christian, August 12, 1721, in J. M. French, Life Records of John Milton (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 314–15. See also Miller, “Milton’s Portraits,” 4. 61. Richardson, “The Life of Milton,” 36. 62. Francis Blackburne, Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq. F.R. and A.S.S., 2 vols. (London, 1780), 2:620. 63. Warton, in Poems, ed. Warton, 546. 64. Richardson, “The Life of Milton,” cxli.

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65. Richardson, “The Life of Milton,” iii. 66. See Richard Wendorf, The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait Painting in Stuart and Georgian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 26; and Blair Hoxby, “‘In the Dun Air Sublime’: Milton, the Richardsons, and the Invention of Aesthetic Categories,” in Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Hoxby and Ann Baines Coiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 69–70. 67. Hunt was an inveterate hair collector and owned locks that once belonged to Swift, Johnson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, Shelley, and Keats himself. His collection is held today in the aptly named Ransom Center at the University of Texas.

Afterword Virtuous Properties of the Organic Supplement

Julia Reinhard Lupton

In performing this part of penmanship, in either taste, the center of motion is in the shoulder; therefore, you must lift your hand and arm entirely off the Table; and letting it swing light and easy, in the air, with courage try to sweep a single round, or ovaler. —JOSEPH CHAMPION, Penmanship: Or the Art of Fair Writing,

T

he word courage, appearing in this passage on penmanship cited by Julie Park in her essay for this volume, attracted my attention as soon as I saw it. We think we know what it means to be a courageous writer: communicate your convictions, even when such expression poses a risk to reputation, livelihood, or life. But to perform penmanship with courage? What could this mean? Penmanship, as Park discloses in “Feather, Flourish, and Flow,” engages hand, eye, shoulder, desk, paper, and quill in a total posture of writerly energy. In this setting, courage, derived from coeur, implies spirit, feeling, and liveliness, a willingness to pour oneself into the entrancing choreographics of the looping pen. Courage, then, urges a mindful embodiment and open intentionality, a presence in action in which some relaxing of internal oversight itself depends on practice, judgment, and skill. In drawing on, and with, the word courage, author and artisan Joseph Champion is participating in a broad virtue discourse that encompassed artisanal and kinesthetic forms of being in the world, a

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discourse that was narrowing in the eighteenth century to the more interior and moralizing senses of virtue that mark modern usage.1 As the contributors to this volume well know, virtue, like courage, once enjoyed a broad and dynamic set of meanings that flowed around concepts of power, strength, ability, validity, and worth. In these pages, you have learned from Rebecca Laroche that the mysterious Flos Unguentorum was thought to have “many virtues,” from healing wounds to soothing hemorrhoids (69).2 Indeed, this mysterious cure-­all is a kind of condensation and distillation of virtue as such, in its sense of the physical or divine powers or properties resident in a particular substance or thing.3 You have also learned from Lynn Festa that gloves made from the skins of dogs and chickens were thought to have the “virtue” of whitening and softening the hands they encased (143), and from Jessica Wolfe that stone and minerals were held to have a “lapidifical spirit” and “molding faculty” imbued with creative potential (119). Scientific dictionaries of the seventeenth century attest to the broad scope of virtue, reflecting much earlier practices in herbals and natural histories. A Physical Dictionary (1657) defines a “specifical virtue” as the “proper essential virtue peculiar to one particular simple, and no other.”4 In another Physical Dictionary from 1684, Steven Blankaart supplements such “peculiar virtues” with virtue as a general power animating the cosmos: the alchemists’ archeus is the “hidden Vertue of Nature common to all things . . . sustained by the Divine Vertue itself.”5 In An English dictionary explaining the difficult terms that are used in divinity, husbandry, physick, phylosophy, law, navigation, mathematicks, and other arts and sciences, Elisha Coles defines “efficacy” as “virtue, force, power,”6 and a French and English dictionary from 1571 translates “vertu & force” as “strength and might.”7 These physical senses of virtue, ranging from the particular property or power (affordance) of a plant, mineral, or other efficacious substance in a specific scene of use to the liveliness and ensoulment of the universe itself, existed in concert with moral renderings of virtue as the excellence achieved and expressed by persons as marks of their good character. What unifies the physical and the ethical senses of virtue is Aristotle’s multidimensional account of causality, which tabulates formal and final factors alongside material and efficient ones, at once infusing the natural world with intentionality and meaning and enlivening cognitive and ideational functions with a dynamic material energy. Although this thick causality belongs to the prescientific Aristotelianism of Aquinas rejected so forcefully

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by Francis Bacon and the new science, aspects of ancient philosophy continue to inform later philosophical and natural-­historical movements. In the “Pygmalion moment” framed by Kevin Lambert in this volume, philosophes disillusioned with Cartesian mechanics considered whether “matter might have properties beyond extension and motion including aversion, desire and memory” (79). The wide-­ranging virtues of ancient philosophy, whether Aristotelian, Epicurean, or Stoic, were both superseded by modern science and morality, as Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, and remain as active resources for alternative modes of cultivating human and nonhuman capacity, as explored by Martha Nussbaum.8 What, then, are the virtuous properties of organic supplements? That is, what does the organic supplement as set forth in this volume reveal about the diverse operations of virtue in the early modern world? And what affordances for interpretation does the organic supplement make possible in our critical discourse now, not only as an approach to agents, objects, and environments in the past but as a reframing of the potential uses and ends of literary education and humanistic scholarship today? Although editors Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park associate this volume with object-­oriented enterprises of all kinds, they also pay attention to the intentionality of human agents and evolving concepts of personhood from 1600 to 1800. Social networks among the transmitters of recipes (Rebecca Laroche), new alliances between musicians and critics (Kevin Lambert), or the epistolary communications supported by schools of penmanship ( Julie Park) compose some of the social and discursive settings in which human-­object intimacies take place, make sense, and enter the human record. To grasp the congeries of human and nonhuman actions and interfaces that make up the semantic and practical field of virtue in the early modern world, I am developing the idea of a virtue ecology: the whole environment—cognitive, affective, social, and physical—in which human agents develop their person-­affirming capacities by skillfully engaging with the affordances of things and processes in the world. A virtue ecology includes several key components, including human actors trained up in particular communities of practice, a set of powers or capacities organized and actualized in new works, and an environment for action that includes physical and social components. In addition, pointing to what is incipiently moral or ethical in the practice of such arts, virtues are motivated by a sense of telos, a goal or end that reaches beyond the immediate aim of an action toward

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a greater good that is shared with others. These participatory teleologies distinguish virtue ecologies from merely instrumental manipulations of the natural world, preserving a place for humanistic and ethical valuation and capacity building in object-­oriented work. In the remaining pages of this afterword, I sketch these four elements of a virtue ecology in response to the essays of this volume.

Soul/Psyche Virtue ethics and virtue epistemology begin with the human agent or actor. Although my concept of a virtue ecology is designed to situate that agent and distribute her agency in a lived setting, the human actor remains the radiating point of action in the virtue framework.9 Julie Park discovers in epistolary literature and in the physical techniques of letter writing an intimate “contact between souls” that is facilitated by the “direct lines of connection and interaction between the writing on the page, the quill pen and the writer’s body and mind, connecting natural materials with the human user” (42). Soul, like virtue, is not a term that many academics use casually, yet the word beautifully captures the full dimensionality of personhood that letter writing constellates.10 Soul includes the mind that discovers itself in words, the abounding desire for communion with another person, and the ordinary wonder of hand-­eye coordination that allows the flow of the ink on the landscape of the page to record and facilitate the flow of words and ideas in (and out of ) the mind. Aristotle defines eudaimonia (happiness, human flourishing) as “a certain sort of activity of soul (psyche) in accord with virtue (arête).”11 The soul for Aristotle is simultaneously cognitive, affective, and somatic, indicating the animating, motivating ensemble of capacities that give form to a living being rather than the detachable substance or interiorized homunculus that we have come to associate with the soul in Christianity. And even in the Christian tradition, the soul continues to retain its Aristotelian link to capacities; thus in The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois defines the soul as a “marvelous universe,” “a reservoir of experience, knowledge, beauty, love, and deed.”12 According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aristotle’s psyche is “a system of abilities possessed and manifested by animate bodies of suitable structure.”13 As such, soul, like virtue, belongs to beings other than human: in this volume, Jessica Wolfe shows how Aristotle’s

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attribution of souls to animals and plants rippled through the early modern science of mineralization, while Miriam Jacobson explores the search by seventeenth-­century poets to undergo the meandering transformations of “vegetable love.” Reason in Aristotle’s science distinguishes the human psyche from these other forms of ensoulment: “The work of a human being is an activity of soul in accord with reason.”14 Soul is subjective infrastructure, the architecture of capacities from which personhood will be shaped and articulated through the range of arts and other practices that engage a particular body and mind with other souls and kinds of soul in various settings of concerted activity. Aristotle’s virtue ecologies at once map a cosmos of interconnected powers and identify human beings with a set of mental capacities that build a second nature through art (technē) and science or knowledge (epistēmē).15 Psyche, I submit, names the subjective anchoring point, itself a composite of capacities, within a virtue ecology. Ensoulment flags the presence of thinking, breathing persons within scenes of use while advertising their colloquy with other life forms through their sensitive seizure by passion and perception.

Dynamis and Energeia If psyche names for Aristotle the locus of passionate and rational intentionality from which virtuous action issues, the issuing itself is both dynamic and energetic, that is, welling up from dynamis or potentiality, in the form of energeia, actualizing activity. Moving out of a latency that becomes visible as such through its realization in a concrete effort or action, virtue’s motility and plasticity along with virtue’s hermeneutic recovery of what is nascent and futural is everywhere evident throughout this volume.16 The skilled technique and embodied flow of the penmanship maestro Thomas Tomkins; the virtuosity of rococo designer Juste-­Aurèle Meissonnier; the experimental enterprises of natural philosopher Thomas Browne and opera composer Jean-­Philipe Rameau; the kitchen knowledge and garden gnosis of pharmacists, pie makers, and botanist-­poets; the glove-­maker’s intimate command of leather goods and human anatomy: each of these knowledges develops the capacities of makers, the affordances of materials, and the power of users. The arts of the organic supplement build muscle memory, train the senses, and refine the passions in haptic feedback loops that join

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makers, users, and objects in responsive circuits of behavior and beholdenness that arouse latent capacities in the service of building a shared world. Recipe collections, penmanship manuals, and pattern books train readers to actualize their own capacities in concert with the affordances of tools and materials while also achieving a second level of actualization by leaving instructions that reflect and contribute to an ongoing social reality. The interplay between dynamis and energeia, moving out of latency and into actuality but also always retroactively reframing and reorganizing an originating capacity, is endlessly generative of new skills, tacit knowledges, and meaning-­making enterprises. As Lynn Festa demonstrates in this volume, the glove is an ergon or work that convenes, organizes, and interprets multiple possibilities for being, beginning with the glove’s complex creation out of animal skins and extending into its many showings in the theater of life. The glove embodies an effort of hermeneutic as well as technical capture, by drawing dormant tendencies and inchoate imaginings into the order of physical transformation, worldly meaning, social etiquette, and artisanal transmission. Shakespeare was the son of a glove maker: one wonders how his exposure to the craftsman’s knowledge shaped his understanding of theatrical artistry, with its own molding of multiple capacities into new works. Glove making is an “organic supplement” to theater as an art of human speech, gesture, and movement, two orders of knowledge and two orchestrations of capacity that touch each other in the life of Shakespeare. When Romeo imagines himself as a glove on Juliet’s cheek, he is handling a set of dormant meanings and technical processes in an erotic fantasy that is also a stage cue to Juliet and a means of refocusing the attention of the audience. Juliet’s glove is both image and index, a thing to think with. Some capacities, such as seeing, hearing, or simple reasoning, are hardwired into the ensemble of perceptual and rational equipment that constitute the psyche. Other capacities are only brought into being through training in a particular art. In Aristotle’s formulation, we come to have “the virtues by engaging in the activities first, as is the case with the arts as well”.17 Aristotle keeps returning to the analogy between learning a skill and acquiring a virtue: both develop preexisting capacities in order to construct brand-­new ones, and both share the fertile domain of habit (ethos) and practice (praxis). The virtues themselves exhibit different relationships to the second nature cultivated by habit. Courage remains closely tied to bodily vitality, instinctual responsiveness, and the passions and is not so much learned as shaped,

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cued, and directed, as I noted in Champion’s courageous lines of ink. Prudence or phronesis is a rational capacity that comes into being only through practice: phronesis is the exercise of reason over time, in multiple situations and in response to a range of cases. In order to grasp their different orientations toward embodiment and rationality, philosophers sometimes class courage as a moral virtue and phronesis as an intellectual virtue, each representing the core of their respective zones of excellence.18 Yet virtue for Aristotle is ultimately a unity, and the individual virtues are simply facets or manifestations of a more complete human excellence: true courage requires judgment, and true judgment involves courage. The unity of virtue is part of the concept’s ecological grounding, which winds through the somatic and the psychic like one of Herrick’s wanton vines, tracing a provisional order within a tangle of tendencies. Whereas most virtue ethicists focus on the unity of virtue for the individual human actor, Epicurean and Paracelsian vitalisms identify virtue with a capital V with the dynamism and energy of the cosmos itself.

Environment Capacities are exercised and actualized in specific settings. Park and Jacobson make a case for retaining the word environment to describe these scenes of cohabitation, work, and dependence: “the environment is a vital locus of agentive drives and properties that not only act on humans but interact with them. And the term, tied to the physical state of being enclosed or ‘environed,’ insists on the spatial and embodied conditions in which humans and natures interrelate with each other” (12). Aristotle’s interest in developing an architecture of causes that could be shared by the human and natural sciences expresses a kind of environmentalism, as James J. Gibson affirmed in his return to Aristotelian ways of mapping the potentialities of the world for its many ambulatory perceivers.19 In this volume, “environment” takes several forms: from the natural settings of garden and grotto to domestic spaces like the rococo parlor, to performance spaces like the opera house, to the minimal “landscape” of the blank page. Organic, Park and Jacobson remind us, is linked to organizational, evoking what architect-­urbanist Keller Easterling calls organization space, which involves an infrastructure of “simple components that gain complexity by their relative position to each other.”20 A virtue ecology brings a strong spatial dimension to the

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consideration of meaningful behavior: in their built, unbuilt, and institutional affordances, the school, the kitchen, the garden, and the theater nurture and retard a menu of actions for a plurality of actors. Organization can also refer to the act of assembling persons into a community of action, at once pooling strengths, building capacities, and restraining impulses. The political organizing undertaken by W. E. B. Du Bois aimed to create “a vibrant, complex black social and political space”; “in the process of organizing itself, [this work] provided an opportunity for the realization of human capacities” while “restraining the desire for justice to flow immediately.”21 Whether we are talking about a page of type or an English department, an organization is a virtue ecology, a strategic spatial structuring of neighboring potentialities.22 In this volume, the eighteenth-­century opera house provides a fascinating example of a virtue ecology. The word opera means work, from Latin opus, oper-­, and reaches back to the Greek ergon, the end result of energeia as activity and actualization.23 Energeia is “the state of being engaged in an act or the carrying out of a deed” (ergon).24 Opera thus takes its very name from the Aristotelian zone of a practiced, energized, and performed virtue. Kevin Lambert demonstrates how both Rameau and Diderot elaborated “the interconnectedness of the social and physical world” through their knowledge of “vibrating strings” (80). In a world of social networks abuzz with new acoustic research and materialist philosophizing, the Paris opera became a laboratory for testing, and thematizing, music’s somatic and emotional effects on audiences. On Rameau’s stage, Pygmalion is a kind of libertine virtue ethicist, “an artist-­philosopher who practices a way of living that combines solitary meditation, intellectual culture, conviviality, and sexual pleasure” (86). Diderot associates the passions with virtue and the prompting of “the soul” to “great things”: without the passions, Diderot wrote, “the fine arts return to infancy, and virtue becomes petty” (quoted 87). Opera is the art of grand passions and grander virtues; it is also the art that refuses to separate the media of music, song, theater, dance, and design in the service of cultivating affective climates. Opera is the virtuoso actualization (energeia) of potentiality (dynamis) into an opus, ergon, or work, performed in an environment of assembled persons and sonically sensitive surfaces and volumes that are “played” by the work and called to resonate with it. Indeed, there is something inherently and iconically virtuous in the enterprise of opera, and something operatic about the reach and range of

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virtue, in the broad sense of virtue that I am developing here. Aristotle compares the virtuous person to a cithara player: “And if the work of a human being is an activity of soul in accord with reason, or not without reason, and we assert that the work of a given person is the same in kind as that of a serious person, just as it would be in the case of a cithara player and a serious cithara player . . . for it belongs to a cithara player to play the cithara, but to a serious one to do so well.”25 The figure of the serious cithara player reflects the close link between art and arête in Aristotle’s thinking. Each requires not only extensive practice but also the embodied commitment of the soul or whole person to the activity at hand as an end in itself. Opera employs serious instrumentalists, vocal artists, composers, librettists, and designers; opera exemplifies a virtuous ecology because of its total enlisting of place, person, and passion in a musical harmonization and orchestration of multiple capacities and sensitivities. Something similar is at work in rococo ornaments, which, Michael Yonan argues, “remind their viewers that knowledge is born somewhere in the interchanges among cognition, recognition, assessment, and reassessment” (194). Like the serious player’s cithara, virtue vibrates with these circuits of knowledge, at once located in particular settings and dislocated among different mental functions that supplement and reroute each other. This infinitely resonant movement in place is what I am calling a virtue ecology.

Flourish Contemporary virtue ethicists debate the extent to which virtues and skills are truly comparable. Some ethicists claim that skills are merely technical and instrumental, whereas virtue implies aspirational actions that transcend technique. Others reply that a skill worthy of the name also reaches beyond the task at hand toward some vision of the good.26 The end or telos of human action according to Aristotle is eudaimonia: happiness or human flourishing. Eudaimonia for Aristotle involves material conditions such as health and wealth27 and eudaimonia involves households and even polities, not just individual actors.28 Both these dimensions contribute to the ecological character of virtue as an exercise of capacities that occurs within lived worlds shaped by physical realities, institutions, social status, and the presence of other people. Although eudaimonia can be threatened by poverty, illness, loss, or low social standing, Aristotle suggests that virtue

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can also help protect the actor from suffering the full force of such privation. This insight was developed to its logical extreme by the Stoics, who rejected any material conditions at all for true happiness; in the process they limited virtue’s “ecological” dimensions, its embeddedness in social and biological settings.29 This is a vast topic; I would like to end my remarks by simply pointing to the recurrence of images of flourishing in this volume. Julie Park’s essay is called “Feather, Flourish, and Flow.” The flourish she has in mind takes shape in the calligraphic tracings of the great writing masters—skills rather than virtues, if we want to distinguish them. Yet flourish for Park communicates not only the mark on the page but the pleasure in making the mark well, so that “the letters and words on the page ‘flourish’—blossom—and dance with vital movement in their function as supplements for bodily presence” (4). The writing master’s flourish, like the wanton tendrils of Herrick’s vines or Milton’s hair, describes no simple linear telos, since it circles back on itself in a design of loops and curls. We might think of each flowing circlet as a virtuous action producing the surplus grace of its own immediate pleasure and the resulting pattern as the picture of a life whose path meanders and doubles back in search of meaning. In a recent essay, Jeffrey Dolven turns to Charles Taylor in order to reclaim both virtue and telos for literary study. Taylor “argues that ‘it belongs to human agency to exist in a space of questions about strongly valued goods, prior to all choice or adventitious cultural change.’ Those goods define what Taylor calls a moral space, within which narrative is possible. He maintains that ‘[t]o understand our predicament in terms of finding or losing orientation in moral space is to take the space as . . . ontologically basic.’”30 Moral space frames the way in which the settings for human action are always preprogrammed by a sense of direction and value, that is, of telos. Aristotle completes his definition of the human good as “an activity of soul in accord with virtue” with a coda: “But, in addition, a complete life. For one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day. And in this way, one day or a short time does not make someone blessed or happy either.”31 According to Aristotle and his modern readers, including Taylor, MacIntyre, and Nussbaum, human beings conduct virtuous actions in response to immediate goals but also with the aim of contributing to that larger narrative that is called a life. As Julie Park writes, Richard Sennett’s reading of prehension discovers a similar dynamic within the circle of skill:

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“‘Mental understanding’ is directly linked to ‘physical action’ through prehension, defined as ‘movements in which the body anticipates and acts in advance of sense data.’ Prehension’s anticipatory mode of ‘looking ahead’ is an expression not so much of formulaic or mechanical response as of a creative force that generates narrative” (50). Skill and virtue are narratological and hermeneutical insofar as they move toward something whose achievement will make new sense of their originating movements and motives. The flourish that winds its way through so many pages of this volume is an expressive trace of hope and yearning as well as creative flow. Eudaimonia itself, literally “good daemon” or “good spirit,” implies the supplementary relationship between the useful and lovely things of this world, subject to happenstance and inequitable distribution yet created through human work and skill and invested with their own lively affordances, and the subjective state and social ambience of well-­being and contentment toward which virtuous action aims. In exploring the logic of the organic supplement, the authors gathered here use the skills of close reading and scholarship to affirm their participation in a creaturely community, in shared vibrancies, or in circles of intellectual friendship in which recipes and knowledges are exchanged, traditions transmitted, and dependencies acknowledged. In these scenes, virtue is both physical and moral, both singular and plural, both a vital force belonging to all creatures and even the cosmos and a distinguishing project of human beings as ethical and rational agents possessed by moral projects that confer meaning on lives. Such virtue both is and is not a skill, since virtue’s yearning for happiness both reaches beyond skill as technique and belongs to skill as a prehensive and inherently narrative dynamic. Working these paradoxes, sounding them for their assurances and reserves, and above all handling them as resources for thought and life is good work for humanists.

Notes 1. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 2. All parenthetical citations refer to the essays published in this volume. 3. OED online, s.v. “virtue (n., II).” 4. A Physical Dictionary, or, An Interpretation of such crabbed words and terms of arts, as are deriv’d from the Greek or Latin, and used in physick, anatomy,

258   Julia Reinhard Lupton

chirurgery, and chymistry (Cornhill: John Garfield at the Rolling Press, 1657), no page number. 5. Steven Blankaart, A Physical Dictionary in which all the terms relating either to anatomy, chirurgery, pharmacy, or chymistry are very accurately explain’d (London: sold by John Gellibrand, 1684), 28. He refers to “Medicines which have a peculiar Virtue against some one disease” (265). 6. Elisha Coles, An English dictionary explaining the difficult terms that are used in divinity, husbandry, physick, phylosophy, law, navigation, mathematicks, and other arts and sciences (Cornhill: printed for Peter Parker, 1677). 7. A Dictionarie of French and English (1571). 8. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and other works. 9. On the importance of the agent in virtue ethics and virtue epistemology, see for example Linda Trinkhaus Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 10. For an innovative reading of the soul in the Renaissance state, see Donovan Sherman, Second Death: Theatricalities of the Soul in Shakespeare’s Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 11. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1099b.25, trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 18. 12. W. E. B. Du Bois, quoted in Vincent Lloyd, Black Natural Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 63. Life in this scheme is “the rhythmic workings of the physical and social world that can be understood through the human capacity to reason” (63). 13. Hendrik Lorenz, “Ancient Theories of Soul,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://​plato​ .stanford​.edu​/archives​/sum2009​/entries​/ancient​-­­soul/. 14. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a, 13. 15. The Nicomachean Ethics begins: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action as well as choice, is held to aim at some good.” 1094a, 1. 16. On latency in the period, see Anselm Haverkamp, Shakespearean Genealogies of Power: A Whispering of Nothing in Hamlet, Richard II, Julius Caesar, and The Winter’s Tale (London: Routledge, 2011). Haverkamp identifies latency with “invisible schemata governing visible forms” and “performative potential” (2). 17. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a31, 26.

Afterword   259

18. Jason Baer, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 9. 19. In response to atomism, Gibson writes that Aristotle “insisted that there was an actual genesis of things in the world and a passing away of them. At the ecological level Aristotle was right.” James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press/Taylor and Francis, 1986), 99. On Aristotle and ecology, see for example Laura Westra, ed., The Greeks and the Environment (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997). 20. Keller Easterling, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 2. 21. Quoted in Lloyd, Black Natural Law, 83. 22. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 23. See OED, s.v. “opera” and “opus.” 24. Bartlett and Collins, eds., Nicomachean Ethics, 316, 305. 25. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a,13. 26. Julia Annas, “Skilled and Virtuous Action,” in Intelligent Virtue. 27. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1099b, 18. 28. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1097b, 11. 29. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness. 30. Jeffrey Dolven, quoting Charles Taylor, “Besides Good and Evil,” Studies in English Literature 57.1 (Winter 2017): 6. 31. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a, 13.

Contributors

Lynn Festa is professor of English at Rutgers University and author of Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) and Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Miriam Jacobson is associate professor of English at the University of Georgia.

She is the author of Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and coeditor, with Sujata Iyengar and Christy Desmet, of The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (Routledge, 2019). She is currently writing a book about living artifacts, necromancy, and the undead in early modern literature.

Kevin Lambert is a historian of science and a professor in the Liberal Stud-

ies Department at California State University, Fullerton. His research interests include late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century French and British sciences. He recently completed a manuscript for a book, Symbols and Things, about the material culture of nineteenth-­century British mathematics. He is a former Dibner Research Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library.

Rebecca Laroche is a professor of English at the University of Colorado,

Colorado Springs. During spring term 2019, she was a Before “Farm-­to-­Table” Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has published books and articles on Shakespeare, ecofeminist theory, early modern women, print herbal texts, and manuscript recipe collections. She was a founding steering committee member of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective.

262   Contributors

Jayne Lewis is professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author or coeditor of numerous books, essay collections, and articles on eighteenth-­century literature and culture. Recent long studies are Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794 (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and the anthology Religion in Enlightenment England (Baylor University Press, 2016). Julia Reinhard Lupton is professor of English at the University of Califor-

nia, Irvine, where she has taught since 1989. She is the author or coauthor of five books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (University of Chicago Press, 2011). She is coeditor with David Goldstein of Shakespeare and Hospitality (Routledge, 2016) and coeditor with Matthew J. Smith of Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama (Oxford University Press, 2019). She is a former Guggenheim Fellow and the codirector of the UCI Shakespeare Center.

Julie Park is Assistant Curator and Faculty Fellow at the Special Collections

Center of Bobst Library and Visiting Faculty in the English Department of New York University. She is the author of The Self and It (Stanford University Press, 2010) and editor of special issues for several journals. She is writing My Dark Room: Spaces of the Inner Self, a monograph that takes the camera obscura as a conceptual model for understanding designs and experiences of interiority in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century England’s built environments. She is a former long-­term fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library as well as the Huntington Library. Diane Purkiss is professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford

and fellow of Keble College. Her book English Food: A People’s History is forthcoming from William Collins. Her edited essay collection (with Naomi Miller) Literary Cultures and the Child: Medieval and Early Modern has just been published by Palgrave, and she is editing a special edition of Marvell Studies on Marvell in print and manuscript. She is also working on the writing process and its discontents, from Homer to David Foster Wallace, and writing about witches who believe they do magic.

Jessica Wolfe is the Marcel Bataillon Professor of English and Comparative

Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and articles editor of Renaissance Quarterly. The author of Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004), her current

Contributors   263

projects include an edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica and a biography of the poet, playwright, and translator George Chapman. Michael Yonan is professor of art history at the University of California,

Davis. His recent publications include Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History (Routledge, 2018), Eighteenth-­ Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art, edited with Stacey Sloboda (Bloomsbury, 2019), and articles on eighteenth-­century porcelain, on rococo ornamentation, and on the theory and practice of material culture studies. In 2019–20 he is visiting guest professor in the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, Sweden.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abbadie, Jacques, 12–13 Academy of Music, 79, 81 Academy of Sciences, 79, 80, 86, 95n7 Account of His Life (Phillips), 237 actes de ballets, 82 Adams, Thomas, 124n18 Addison, Joseph, 227 Adorno, Theodor, 141–42, 151n63 adultery: Gertrude as adulteress, 215; pies associated with, 206, 208 Aeneid (Virgil), 204–5 Aesop, 131, 146n10 ætite (eaglestone), 117 affordances: interacting with environmental, 11; as invariant, 8; of materials, 251; as model of intersubjectivity, 8; organic supplements and, 249; virtue as, 20 agency: of grapevines, 159, 160; human, 17, 156, 256; letter writing and ideology of, 57n13; nonhuman, 16, 17, 156, 167; organic supplements as approach to, 249; pen given agentive identity, 38; of vegetable love, 156; in virtue ecology, 250 Alaimo, Stacy, 62, 74n2, 124n17, 222 Albala, Ken, 202 Albertus Magnus, 119

alchemy, 119, 121 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’: Encyclopédie, 93, 136; on Rameau’s Mémoire, 95n7; on Rameau’s music theory, 78, 83 “All Furs” (Brothers Grimm), 205 Alpers, Svetlana, 58n18 amber: Browne on, 109, 111, 124n20; insects preserved in, 103, 107, 123n8; Pliny on, 124n20 Anacreon, 158, 159–60 Analysis of Beauty (Hogarth), 227 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton), 156 Ancilla Calligraphiae (Weston), 33 Anderson, Misty, 232 animals: Aristotle on souls of, 251; Benjamin on humans and, 139, 140; boundary between minerals and, 106; capacity to assimilate minerals, 113–14; concretions, 106–7, 109, 110, 112; Enlightenment thinkers on distinguishing humans from, 129–30; fossils as, 107; gloves made from skins of, 129, 130, 132, 135, 142–43, 252; hair as animal vegetable, 223; insects preserved in amber, 103, 107, 123n8; Lot’s wife turning to salt, 109–11; Mandeville on humans making clothing from, 128–29; myths of transformation

266   Index

animals (continued) between minerals and, 109; necessary differences between humans and other, 145; pies containing live, 202, 205; transmutability of animal and mineral bodies, 103, 109; zoophytes, 103. See also meat Anthropocene age, 15–16 anthropocentrism, 117, 138 Apollo, 162, 168, 172n23 Apollonius of Rhodes, 204 apple pie, 206–7 architecture, ornament in, 180 Argonautica (Apollonius of Rhodes), 204 Aristotle: as alternative to modern science and morality, 249; on causality, 248, 253; on cithara player and virtuous person, 255; on coming into being and passing away, 259n19; on energeia, 254; on eudaimonia, 250, 255–56; on the good, 256; on mineral formation, 119; organon of, 36; on soul (psyche), 250–51; on vegetative soul, 118, 155, 156; on virtue, 252, 253, 255–56 art: Aristotle on virtue and, 255; interaction with those who encounter it, 192–93; nature and, 14, 19, 110, 118, 129, 178, 191, 192, 251; representation in, 193; taste, 194. See also opera; ornament; painting Artist and His Son, in the Presence of Milton, The (Richardson), 238, 239 Art of Knowing One-­Self, The (Abbadie), 12 Art of Writing In It’s Theory and Practice (Snell), 37–38, 48, 51, 57n9 Arundel, Anne Dacre Howard, Countess of, 69 arvals, 200 asteria, star-­struck (Lapis stellaris), 116, 118 atomism, 14 Aubrey, John, 224–25, 227, 232, 235, 236

audience: gap between stage and, 203–4; harmony’s effect on, 78, 82–83; opera requires, 80; Rameau attempts to take control of his, 80, 82–83, 87 Auerbach, Erich, 106 Augustine, St., 114, 125n28 authorship, cults of, 230 Ayres, John, 52 Bacchus, 158–59, 160, 172n19 Bacchus (Goltzius), 158–59, 159 Bacon, Francis: on alchemy, 121; Aristotelian causality rejected by, 249; on conformable instances, 112; De Sapientia Veterum, 121; on figuration, 108; on induration, 112–13; Instauratio Magna, 108; on magnalia naturae, 103; on mental and manual tools, 36; on misapprehension of names, 117; on myth, 121; on natural philosophy, 108, 109; on nature and humans as opposed, 13; Novum Organum, 36; on the organic, 36; plants and inanimate bodies distinguished by, 118; on presumption of order, 116; on subduing nature, 14, 19; Sylva Sylvarum, 112–13, 118 Bailey, Nathan, 12 baked meats: in Hamlet, 199–200, 202, 203, 208, 215, 216n2; pies for using up, 205; in Romeo and Juliet, 208–9; in Titus Andronicus, 211; in Webster’s The White Divel, 201–2, 216n2 Bales, Peter, 31 Ballot de Sauvot, Sylvain, 88–89, 98n40 Barton, Carol, 230 Bauer, Hermann, 177 Becket, Andrew, 136 Becket, St. Thomas, 210 Becon, Thomas, 210 bed tricks, 203 Behn, Aphra, 31, 33–34, 39 Bell, John, 145

Index   267

Bellamy, George Anne, 143 Bellobonus, Galenus, 123n8 Benjamin, Walter, 66, 139, 140, 150n52 Bennett, Jane, 15, 16–17, 26n66, 94n4, 222 Bergson, Henri, 14–15 bezoar, 103, 125n23 Bickham, George, 32, 33, 45–46, 53 Billingsley, Nicholas, 171n11 “Bill of Fare, The” (Cartwright), 206–7 Birch, Thomas, 225 Blackburne, Francis, 236–37 Blankaart, Steven, 248 bodies: celestial, 13; flexibility of, 4–5; permeability of, 140. See also bodily organs; corps sonore; human body; transcorporeality bodily organs: “organic” used for, 3; in Phillips’s definition of organical, 222. See also hair; hands; skin Boerhaave, Herman, 140 Booke of soueraigne approued medicines and remedies (1577), 63–64, 65, 67, 69, 71 Bottonus, Albertinus, 123n8 Boureau-­Deslandes, André-­François, 79, 83, 84–87, 97nn28–29 Boyle, Robert, 70, 112, 119, 127n43, 140, 141 Boyle, Sarah, 70 Brears, Peter, 200 bride pie, 203 British Youth’s Instructor (Bickham), 53 Broome, Charlotte Ann Burney Francis, 134–35 Browne, Thomas, 103–27; on amphibious and mixt intentions of nature, 105–6, 114, 131; on animal concretions, 106–7, 112; on doctrine of signatures, 117; as experimental, 251; on figuration, 106, 107–9, 117–18, 121; on fossils as supplementary, 107; The Garden

of Cyrus, 118; on induration, 112–13; on insects preserved in amber, 107, 123n8; on kidney stones, 111; on lapidification, 118–20; on Lot’s wife turning to salt, 109–11, 119; on metaphor, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 114, 116, 121; on minerals as alive, 113, 114; on minerals as divinely created, 113; on misapprehension of names, 117; on mutability of minerals, 8; on potable gold, 113; on real correspondences, 116–17; Religio Medici, 109; on seminal faculty in minerals, 115, 126n30; on seminalities, 113, 114, 118; on transmigration of souls, 109; on transmutability of matter, 105; on unicorn horn, 112, 125n23; Urn-­ Buriall, 110, 117. See also Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Browne) bryony, 157–58, 167 Buckingham, Duke and Duchess of, 203 Buffon, Georges-­L ouis Leclerc, Comte de, 3, 129 Bulwer, John, 23n42 “Bunch of Grapes, The” (Herbert), 157 Burgess, Geoffrey, 95n5 Burghley, Lord, 201 Burton, Robert, 156 Butler, Tobias, 44 Campana, Joseph, 17, 26n65 Campion, Edmund, 212 cannibalism, 203, 211–12, 213, 215 Canzonière (Petrarch), 162 “Cap O’ Rushes” (fairy tale), 205–6 Cardano, Girolamo, 115 Cartesian mechanics, 79, 93, 248 cartouches, 9, 10, 19, 183, 184, 185 Cartwright, William: “The Bill of Fare,” 206–7; “On the Circumcision,” 164, 172n28 Catherine de Medici, 133 Catholics, execution of, 212–13

268   Index

celestial bodies, 13 Chamberlen, Paul, 150n60 Chambers, Ephraim, 132 Champion, John, 30, 32–33, 44–45, 54, 247, 253 Charles I (king of England), 203 Charles V (king of France), 208 Charleton, Walter, 119 charnel houses, 209, 210 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 207–8 chirography, 42 “Chloe’s Glove” (Theobald), 136–37 Christensen, Thomas, 95n5 Christian Doctrine (Milton), 222 churchyards, 210–11 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 142 Clanchy, M. T., 56n1 Clark, Andy, 5–7, 17 Clark, John: on command of hand, 46–47, 52; on head, hand, and pen, 41; on “holding” the pen, 57n8; The Penman’s Diversion, 32, 52; on round hand, 53; on striking, 43, 44; Writing Improved, or Penmanship Made Easy, 32 Clarke, Debora, 236–37 Cleland, John, 148n35 clothing: from animal products, 128–29; persists uncoupled from the body, 135. See also gloves Cocker, Edward, 47, 47–48, 51, 52, 56–57nn8–9 coffins: for the dead, 200, 210; of Milton, 228, 229, 235; for pastry, 202, 207, 209 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 16, 23n37, 25n61, 122n1, 126n34 Coleman, Edward, 144, 151n72 Coles, Elisha, 248 Collier, Edvard, 34 commerce (trade): in gloves, 132, 133; in hair, 220; penmanship manuals in advancement of, 32–33; round hand in, 53; writing’s influence on, 33

Complicated Richardson, The (Hogarth), 238, 240 Comus (Milton), 233, 234 concretions: animal, 106–7, 109, 110, 112; Bacon on, 112–13; bezoar as, 103, 125n23; crystals as, 118, 119; Gorgon and, 119, 127n43; in kidney and bladder stones, 111; mineral, 111, 112, 119; Sennert on, 123n14; vegetable, 111 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 78 Confessions, The (Rousseau), 5 convicts, execution of, 213 Cook’s Prologue, The (Chaucer), 207–8 copybooks, 31–32, 42, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56 coral, 120 corpses, 153, 209–11, 213 corps sonore: Grimm affected by, 80, 81, 90, 93; in Rameau’s music theory, 79; in Rameau’s Pygmalion, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 87–88, 90, 92, 93 correlationism, 16 Correspondence littéraire (review), 92 Cort, Cornelis, 162, 163 cosmos: attains its modern meaning in English, 13, 23n42; integrated, 13–14; quasi-­material spirit infusing, 115; virtue animating, 248, 253 Coulet, Henri, 86, 96n23 courage, 45, 247, 252–53 Court and Kitchin of Elizabeth Cromwell, The (1664), 214–15 Cowper, William, 230 Craven, Elizabeth, 144 Crawford, Joseph, 230 Cressy, David, 201 Crompton, Hugh, 164, 172n26 Cromwell, Oliver, 232 Cronon, William, 16 crucigerous stones, 118 crystals, 114, 116, 117–18, 119, 120 cubism, 193 Cudworth, Ralph, 115, 126n29 Cumming, Valerie, 132

Index   269

Cursory Remarks on Some of the Ancient English Poets, chiefly Milton (Neve), 231 Cyclopedia (Chambers), 132 Cyparissus, 162, 163, 172n23. See also Metamorphoses (Ovid) Daphne, 162, 163, 168, 172n23. See also Metamorphoses (Ovid) Davys, Mary, 31, 34–35 Dawson, Mark, 201 dead: corpses, 153, 209–11, 213; disposal of, 209–11 De Boodt, Anselm Boetius, 104, 115–16, 118–19, 124n20, 127n39 decomposition: flourishing and, 20; of human bodies, 210; in mumia (mummy), 154, 209 De Grazia, Margreta, 201 Deleuze, Gilles, 17 De Mineralibus (Albertus Magnus), 119 De Plastica seminis facultate (Schegk), 115 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 129, 135 De Sapientia Veterum (Bacon), 121 Descartes, René, 2, 13, 79, 93, 173n30, 249 Destouches, André Cardinal, 81, 89 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 141–42, 151n63 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 131 Diderot, Denis: on cultural shock waves, 81; on discussing materialism, 87; on dissonances in social harmony, 77; Encyclopédie, 93, 136; Grimm and, 80, 81, 87; helps Rameau write a memoir, 80, 95n7; on materialism, 186; on passions and virtue, 87, 254; Philosophic Thoughts (Pensées philosophique), 87, 92, 97n35; Pygmalion, or the Living Statue read by, 83; Rameau’s music affects, 83; Rameau’s Nephew, 81, 92–93, 95n14; Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, 80, 92, 93, 197n19; on vibrating strings, 80, 254

Digby, Elizabeth, 69–70, 73 DiMeo, Michelle, 63 Discourse of Naturall Bathes ( Jorden), 104 dismemberment, 153, 213, 229–30 Dolven, Jeffrey, 256 Donne, John, 170 Douglas, Aileen, 52, 54 Douglas, Mary, 210 Downame, John, 110–11, 124n18 Downing, Elizabeth, 70 Downing, Thomas, 82 Draycott, John, 201 Driesch, Hans, 14 Dryden, John, 132 Du Bois, W. E. B., 250, 254 Duckert, Lowell, 23n37 Dugan, Holly, 62 dynamis, 251–53, 254 eaglestone (ætite), 117 Easterling, Keller, 253 ecocritism, 15–16, 23n37, 117 ecofeminism, 17, 26n66, 62 ecology: environment versus, 12. See also virtue ecology Edward VI (king of England), 209 Eisen, Charles-­Dominique-­Joseph, 181 Elizabeth I (Queen of England), 133 “Ellinda’s Glove” (Lovelace), 136 Eloisa to Abelard (Pope), 35 Encyclopédie (Diderot and d’Alembert), 93, 136 energeia, 251–53, 254 Engels, Friedrich, 131 English dictionary, An (Coles), 248 engraving, 52 enharmonic genre, 82 Enlightenment: critique of human perception in, 178; cultural changes in French, 93; as culture of affect, 87–89; on distinguishing humans from animals, 129–30; empiricist philosophy of, 195, 222; German, 182; on humans

270   Index

Enlightenment (continued) superseding their creaturely limits, 131; Ovid’s Metamorphoses and preoccupations of, 84; public criticism in, 80; on vitalism, 14 enslavement, 21n2 environment, 253–55; Bailey’s dictionary on, 12; criticism of term, 11–12, 23n37; forms of, 253; humans as inseparable from, 62; indissoluble connection between its spatial components, 9; interaction with humans, 12; interactivity in, 8; Johnson’s dictionary on, 12; as medium, 8, 11; natural, 7, 16, 18; nature as environing agent, 12; occurs and unfolds, 10; organic supplements as approach to, 249; rococo cartouche as supplemental, 10; root verb of, 23n37; theater as, 12; in virtue ecology, 249. See also ecology Epicureanism, 14, 84, 86, 87, 249, 253 epistolary fiction: Behn’s Love-­Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, 33–34, 39, 57n16; Davys’s Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady, 34; flourishing handwriting in, 4; interiority represented in, 40; organic lines of narrative in, 55–56; print technology in, 31; tacit materiality in, 30–31, 33–36, 55–56 ergon, 252, 254 Essai sur L’Architecture (Laugier), 180, 181 Essex, Lady, 136 Ethics (Spinoza), 14 Eucharist, 210 eudaimonia, 250, 255–56, 257 execution, 212–13 Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Paradise Lost (Richardson and Richardson), 233, 236, 237, 243n15

Faerie Queene (Spenser), 64, 65, 71 Faithorne, William, 223–24, 224, 229, 235–36, 238 Fall, the, 169 Fallopius, Gabriele, 104 Familiar Letters (Letters Written to and for Particular Friends on the Most Important Occasions) (Richardson), 56 Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady (Davys), 34 feasts: funeral, 199, 200–201; pies for using up the leftovers, 205; as series of conundrums, 204; the theater and, 202; wedding, 199, 201, 213. See also food Fenton, Elijah, 225, 243n15 Festa, Lynn, 17, 19, 66, 112, 248, 252 fiction: fictional aspect of letter-­writing, 56; found manuscript convention in Gothic, 34; penmanship as medium of, 48; verisimilitude of eighteenth-­ century, 30. See also novel, the figuration, 105; additional meanings of figure, 106; Bacon on, 108; Browne on, 106, 107–9, 117–18, 121; in nature, 105–6, 108–9 Fisher, Zachary, 156 Five Orders of Periwigs, The (Hogarth), 226 Flos Unguentorum, 61–76; as “Angel Salve,” 61, 69; biblical associations of, 70–71; circulation of recipes of, 63, 68, 73; as “flower” of ointments, 67, 75n13; frankincense in, 61, 65, 70–71; gloves compared with, 143; ingredients of, 65, 70; Jesus Christ associated with, 61, 69, 70–71; literary ointments compared with, 64–65; mythic origins of, 61, 62, 70, 72–73; permeability in application of, 66–67; recipes for, 63–64, 68–73; religio-­ mystical associations of, 18, 61, 62, 67,

Index   271

68; transcorporeality of, 62, 70, 73; in transmission of textual knowledge, 18, 62; transubstantiation and making of, 72; as ur-­and uber-­ointment, 67; virtues of, 69, 70, 248 flourishing, 255–57; decomposition and, 20; of Milton’s hair, 256; in penmanship, 4, 32, 42–52, 44, 46, 49, 256 Floyd-­Wilson, Mary, 62, 66 Fludd, Robert, 13 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 77–78, 86, 87, 88 food: assessing for age, 208; human body requires interaction with, 200; inclusion and exclusion associated with, 207; masses for the dead associated with, 210; in Meissonnier’s Livre de legumes, 187; seasonal, 201. See also meat; recipes foppishness, 136 forest ground, as environmental substrate, 14 fossils, 107, 116 Francis I (king of France), 201 French opera: audience required in, 80; Grimm’s celebration of, 89–90; historical development of, 81–82; importance as eighteenth-­century cultural resource, 79; music for creating feeling of dread in, 82; origins of, 81; Rameau as leading composer of, 78; as virtue ecology, 79. See also Paris Opéra; Pygmalion (Rameau) Freud, Sigmund, 142 fried pie, 203 Fudge, Erica, 130, 142 funeral feasts, 199, 200–201 Galen, 119 gall stones, 107, 111, 118 “Garden, The” (Marvell), 155, 168–70, 173n40

Garden of Cyrus, The (Browne), 118 Geisweidt, Edward J., 157, 230–31 Gerard, John, 153, 157–58 Gibson, James J., 8, 9, 20, 253, 259n19 gloves, 128–52; adages and maxims that refer to, 131–32; “L‘amitié passe le gant,” 134; animal skins in making of, 129, 130, 132, 135, 142–43, 252; as barrier between hand and outside world, 130, 139, 140, 142; bawdy plays on, 136; that bear the impress of the body, 135; Benjamin on, 139, 140; come in pairs, 135; cotton, 133; cultural anxieties about insides of bodies and, 138; diminishing importance of, 134; disease transmitted by, 140, 150n56; of dog-­and chicken-­ skin, 143, 248; dropping of a glove, 148n26; as ergon, 252; etiquette of, 134; etymologies of word, 136; figurative life of, 131–32; glovers’ guild, 133, 147n19; “hand and glove,” 131, 132; hands’ labor and, 131; hands that take on appearance of, 144, 152n73; hands transform, 17, 19, 129, 130; human mastery and dependency proclaimed by, 145–46; as human-­scaled, 132; as hybrid entities, 135; mass production of, 133; as organic supplements, 129, 130, 138, 141, 142, 252; in poetry, 136–37; rhetorical transformation of self into, 137–38; riddles about, 137–39; ritual functions of, 133; scent of, 130, 133, 141, 142, 150n60; separated from its mate, 135, 148n35; as signifier of refinement, 134–35; stamp duty on, 132; stitching of, 132–33; style changes in, 133–34; in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, 144; in Swift’s A Modest Proposal, 145; touch and, 137, 139, 142; trade in, 132, 133; transformative powers attributed to, 142–45; uncanniness of, 129; virginity associated with, 136; as virtual avatar, 137

272   Index

gold, potable, 113 Goldberg, Jonathan, 31 Goltzius, Hendrik, 158–59 Goodman, Dena, 192 Goodorus, William, 157 goose quills, 30, 36–37 Gorgon, 119, 127n43 Grabar, Oleg, 177 grafting, 165–66 grapevines: Bacchus associated with, 158–59, 159, 160; escape their containers, 160; in Herrick’s “The Vine,” 160–67; in Herrick’s “The Vision (Anacreon),” 158, 159–60; in Milton’s Paradise Lost, 160; as organic supplement, 159, 160, 165; vine meaning principally, 156, 157 Great Chain of Being, 13, 14 green man, 166 Grimm, Brothers, 205 Grimm, Friedrich: on aesthetic of nature, 90; corps sonore affects, 80, 81, 83, 93; Diderot and, 80, 81, 87; on discussing materialism, 87; as leading cultural critic, 80, 81, 89, 91–92; La Lettre sur Omphale, 87, 89–91, 98n52; as organic supplement, 80, 89–91, 93, 94; Pygmalion, or the Living Statue and, 83; Rameau championed by, 89, 90; Rameau’s Pygmalion affects, 80, 81, 83, 87, 89–91, 93; Rousseau as teacher of, 89; sensitive body of, 15, 80, 87, 89, 90–91, 93 grotesques, ornamental, 166, 167, 173n34 Guattari, Felix, 17 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 144 Gysbrechts, Cornelis Norbertus, 34, 35 hair, 220–46; anamorphic dynamism of, 233; as animal vegetable, 223; corruption resisted by, 40; grapevines and, 159, 160; “high,” 220; identity and, 221; magical and spiritual value

of, 221; between material and immaterial, 227; as material object, 233; in Milton’s works, 232–34; as organic, 222, 229; as organic supplement, 220, 221, 222, 231; plant parts compared with, 155, 157, 164; of Puritans, 232; as transient, 225; vitality and ideality of, 227. See also Milton’s hair Hall, Edward, 201 Hall-­Stevenson, John, 136 Hamlet (Shakespeare): baked meats at wedding feast in, 199–200, 202, 203, 208, 215, 216nn2–3; cold pies predict deaths in, 100, 215; food from funeral feast used at wedding feast in, 201; Gertrude’s reuse in, 213; graveyard scene in, 211; as Jack of Dover, 208; Polonius’s body in, 209; as recycled, 215–16; songs of mad Ophelia in, 215; “thrift” in, 199, 200, 213–14; ur-­Hamlet, 208, 215; wedding as not union of two families, 201; wedding feast in, 199, 213; on where Ophelia should be buried, 209 hands: as artifacts, 131; Bacon on mental and manual tools, 36; Buffon on, 129; come in pairs, 135; “command of the hand” in writing, 29; in eighteenth-­ century classifications, 146n4; erect posture and, 142; and eye in writing, 50; gloves as barrier between outside world and, 130, 139, 140, 142; gloves transform, 17, 19, 129, 130; “hand and glove,” 131, 132; Heidegger on, 129; interaction with quill pens in writing, 30; that take on appearance of gloves, 144, 152n73 harmony: attention shifts to melody from, 93; audience affected by, 78, 82–83; harmonic overtones, 77; as natural, 77–78, 83; Rameau’s theory of, 78, 83 Hayles, N. Katherine, 26n64

Index   273

Heal, Felicity, 201 Heidegger, Martin, 129 Heliades, 109, 111, 162 Hellman, Mimi, 177 Helmont, Jan Baptist van, 104 Henrietta Maria (queen of England), 203 Henry, Prince, 136 Henry IV (king of France), 202 Herball, or a Generall Historie of Plantes (Gerard), 153, 157–58 Hermaphroditus, 166 Herrick, Robert: Hesperides, 158, 172n26; Ovid’s Metamorphoses read by, 172n23; “The Vine,” 155, 156, 158, 160–67, 168, 170, 172n19, 173n29; “The Vision,” 171n16; “The Vision (Anacreon),” 155, 158, 159–60, 161, 172n19 Hesiod, 122 Hesperides (Herrick), 158, 172n26 Heywood, Jasper, 212–13 Hibbard, G. R., 214 Hippolyte et Aricie (Rameau), 82 History of Britain (Milton), 224 Hogarth, William: Analysis of Beauty, 227; The Complicated Richardson, 238, 240; The Five Orders of Periwigs, 226; on idea for Corinthian column, 11, 113; on women’s hair, 225, 227 Hollis, Thomas, 236–37 Hooker, Richard, 157 Horkheimer, Max, 141–42, 151n63 Houdar de La Motte, Antoine, 88, 97n40, 97n44 Howard, Aletheia Talbot, 69 Hudson, Jeffrey, 203 human body: as biotechnological hybrid, 6; boundary between plants and, 154; Browne on corruption of, 110; calculi in, 119; in Cartesian dualism, 13; corpses, 153, 209–11, 213; cultural anxieties about insides of, 138; decomposition of, 210; Diderot on, 92, 93; dismemberment of, 153, 213, 229–30;

erect posture, 142; escaping fleshly limitations of, 168; execution of, 213; fictional transformations into plants of, 162–63; gall stones, 107, 111, 118; harmony’s effect on, 78; interaction with food required by, 200; kidney stones, 103, 104, 111, 117; Krubsacius on ornament and, 183; leatherworking terms applied to, 145; meat pies ingested by, 7; organic supplements’ relationship with, 1–2; and pen in writing, 40–42; pies as metaphor for female, 199, 208; plants compared with, 153, 155, 157, 164–65; plays require, 39; reciprocal relationships with nature, 16, 18; suppleness of, 4, 21n10; writer’s embodied status, 40–42. See also bodily organs Hume, David, 2, 220, 221, 228 Hume, Patrick, 233 Hunt, Leigh, 227, 240, 241, 246 hylozoism, 115 Imperato, Ferrante, 104 Indes galantes, Les (Rameau), 82 individual, the: comes into sharper definition in early modern period, 2; Montaigne’s essays as beginning of, 13. See also self, the induration, 110, 112–13 Ingold, Tim, 9, 12, 50, 105 ink, 30, 37, 55 insects preserved in amber, 103, 107, 123n8 Instauratio Magna (Bacon), 108 interactivity: between art and those who encounter it, 192–93; between components of nature, 9; of environmental objects, 8; environment interacts with humans, 12; between hands and quill pens in writing, 30; between human body and food, 200; between humans and nature, 1, 3, 5, 12, 13, 15, 222; interacting with affordances of the

274   Index

interactivity (continued) environment, 11; representation and, 193; with rococo ornament, 191, 192; vitalism on, 15 intersubjectivity, affordance as model of, 8 Jacob, Elizabeth, 72, 73 Jacobs, Joseph, 205 Jacobson, Miriam, 11, 17, 19, 105, 136, 222, 249, 251, 253 James, Elinor, 58n19 Jélyotte, 91, 91 John 15:1–5, 157 Johnson, Samuel, 12, 225, 227, 243n15 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 133, 135, 137 Jonson, Ben, 169 Jorden, Edward, 104, 105 Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (Craven), 144 Juengel, Scott, 139 Keats, John, 221, 223, 228 Kerrigan, William, 163 kidney stones, 103, 104, 111, 117 Kircher, Athansius, 107, 108, 123n9 Krubsacius, Friedrich August: on fashionable women and rococo ornament, 182, 191; on history of ornament, 179– 80; Meissonnier contrasted with, 186; on rococo ornament, 9–10, 182–85, 192, 193, 194; semantic closure desired by, 190; Thoughts on the Origin, Growth and Decline of Ornaments in the Fine Arts, 179, 184, 195n5 Kyd, Thomas, 215 La Barre, Michel de, 88–89 Lacroix, Roger Vandercruse, 177, 178, 191–92 Laing, Alastair, 179 Lambert, Kevin, 15, 18, 40, 66, 248, 254 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 3, 79

lapidification, 118–20 Lapis stellaris (star-­struck asteria), 116, 118 Laqueur, Thomas, 211 Laroche, Rebecca, 17–18, 140, 143, 231, 247, 249 Late Lancaster Witches, The (Heywood and Brome), 202 Laugier, Marc-­Antoine, 180, 181 Layfield, Anne, 70, 73 Lee, Nathaniel, 132 Leekey, William, 46 letters: fictional aspect of, 56; increased cultural significance of, 33, 57n13; letter-­writing manuals, 56; as made and given life, 29; as objects of verisimilitude in epistolary fiction, 34–36; open-­endedness of, 55; penmanship in personal, 33; touch in eighteenth-­ century, 30; in trompe l’oeil letter rack paintings, 34, 35; valuation of receiving and writing, 38–39. See also epistolary fiction Lettre sur Omphale, La (Grimm), 87, 89–91, 98n52 Lewis, Jayne, 7, 17, 20, 112, 134, 154–55, 157, 188 Libavius, Andreas, 119 Lieb, Michael, 229 “Life of Milton” (Richardson), 225, 237–38 light sconces, 190, 190–91 “Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair” (Keats), 221, 228 lithophytes, 103 Livre de legumes (Meissonnier), 186–90, 188, 189, 191, 193, 197nn20–21 Locke, John, 2, 93, 186 Lot’s wife, 109–11, 119, 124n18 Loughnane, Rory, 204 love: gloves as tokens of, 133, 135; love-­ token poems, 136; natural, 156; in Pygmalion myth, 77, 85, 88; vegetable love, 155, 156, 251

Index   275

“Love-­Joy” (Herbert), 157 Lovejoy, A. O., 14 Lovelace, Richard, 136 Love-­Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (Behn), 33–34, 39, 57n16 Love’s Labor’s Lost (Shakespeare), 67 love-­token poems, 136 Lucretius, 14 Lully, Jean-­Baptiste, 73, 82, 89 Lupton, Julia, 12, 20, 79 Lycaon, 211–12 Lycidas (Milton), 232, 233–34 lyric tragedy (tragédie en musique), 81 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 24n47 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 249, 256 magnalia naturae, 103 Maisano, Scott, 17, 26n65 Man a Machine (La Mettrie), 79 Mandeville, Bernard, 128–29 mandrake root, 115, 116 Mansus (Milton), 238 Man with a Ripped Glove (Titian), 135 Marie de Medici, 202 Marlowe, Christopher, 62, 64–66, 75n11 Marshall, Peter, 210 Marvell, Andrew: “The Garden,” 155, 168–70, 173n40; “The Mower against Gardens,” 165–66; Ovid’s Metamorphoses read by, 172n23; “To His Coy Mistress,” 155–56, 161–62 masses for the dead, 210 Masson, Paul-­Marie, 89–90 materialism: in Deslandes’s Pygmalion, or the Living Statue, 84–86; Diderot on, 186; discussing, 86–87, 94; growing vitality of, 94; Milton’s hair and emergent, 231; new, 15, 81; Paris Opéra and, 254; Rameau’s music theory and mid-­eighteenth-­century, 79; Rameau’s Pygmalion’s materialist implications, 83; rococo ornament and materialist philosophy, 194; vitalist, 93

material things (objects): capacity to be imbued with aromas, 140; hair as, 233; humans’ relations to other creatures mediated by, 145; as instruments, 3; mental comprehension of, 10; metaphorical life taken on by, 131; natural materials in, 1; nature’s relationship with, 3; rhetorical lives of, 132; supplements as, 5 matter: Browne on primordial, 118; corps sonore and speculations about, 83; eighteenth-­century philosophy on mind and, 186; embeddedness in, 17–18; epistolary fiction’s tacit materiality, 30–31, 33–36, 55–56; hair as between material and immaterial, 227; hylozoism, 115; living, 3, 14, 15, 37, 38, 80, 188, 192; in Meissonnier’s Livre de legumes, 188; ointments as material and figurative, 67; pens give material reality to abstract ideas, 38; rococo ornament and knowledge of material world, 194; sensibility attributed to, 79, 80, 249; transmutability of, 105; vibrant, 15, 17, 18. See also materialism; material things (objects); natural materials; organic matter (material) May, Robert, 202, 203 meat: cannibalism, 203, 211–12, 213, 215; dread of, 203; “fresh meat” in “Cap O’ Rushes” fairy tale, 205–6; fresh meat at a wedding, 215; for funeral feasts, 200; rotting, 207, 211; seasons, 201. See also baked meats; meat pies meat pies, 199–219; ability to conceal of, 202–3, 207; adulterated, 206, 208; adultery associated with, 206, 208; as Christmas treat, 205; and conjecture, 204; disposal of the dead and, 209–11; in Eastcheap streets, 203; “a finger in the pie,” 205; for funeral feasts, 200; girl-­in-­a-­pie story, 208; gravy drained out of, 208; as metaphor for female

276   Index

meat pies (continued) bodies, 199, 208; as not supposed to be all inclusive, 207; piemakers’ guild, 207; as pregnant containers, 214; resurfacings of, 7, 207–8; as surprising, 203; trick pies, 205; the unknown contained in, 215. See also baked meats mechanical table, 177–78, 178, 191–92 medicine: bryony as, 157; equivocation and bad, 117; executed bodies for, 213; mumia (mummy) as, 153, 209, 213; sympathetic, 62, 66. See also ointments Medusa, 109, 119, 120 Meillassoux, Quentin, 16 Meissonnier, Juste-­Aurèle: Krubsacius contrasted with, 186; Livre de legumes, 186–90, 188, 189, 191, 193, 197nn20–21; rococo ornament attributed to, 182; virtuosity of, 251 Melichio (Melich), Giorgio, 123n8 Mémoire où l’on expose les fondemens du système de musique théorique et pratique (Rameau), 95n7 Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Cleland), 148n35 Mercure de France (periodical), 88, 89, 91, 97n40 mermaid pie, 203 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 83–84, 119, 120, 162, 166, 168, 172n23 metaphor: Browne on, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 114, 116, 121; Flos Unguentorum as, 75n11; hair as, 220; in Marvell’s “The Garden,” 170; material objects take on metaphorical life, 131; pies as, 199, 208; vines as, 161, 164; writing desks as, 192; writing gives metaphorical life to human faculty, 38 Michel, Marianne Roland, 179 Miller, Leo, 224 Miller, Mary, 69, 70 Milton, John: biographers of, 224–25; blindness of, 227; Christian Doctrine,

222; Comus, 233, 234; daughters of, 237; disinterment of, 221, 228–31; Faithorne’s Portrait of John Milton, 223–24, 224, 229, 235–36, 238; History of Britain, 224; as Lady of Christ’s, 223; Lycidas, 232, 233–34; Mansus, 238; Of Education, 222; Paradise Lost, 160, 222, 233–34; Poems, 237; as republican, 225, 230; Richardson’s depiction of Pope as, 238–39, 241; in Richardson’s The Artist and His Son, in the Presence of Milton, 238, 239; Samson Agonistes, 232–33. See also Milton’s hair Milton’s hair: Adam’s hair in Paradise Lost compared with, 234; color of, 222, 223–25, 227–28, 236; configured in botanical terms, 155, 230, 231; daughter Debora on, 236–37; empiricism and, 222, 237; in Faithorne’s Portrait of John Milton, 223–24, 229, 238; flourish of, 256; in Hogarth’s The Complicated Richardson, 238, 240; Hunt’s lock of, 227, 240, 241; in life, 231–32; newspaper accounts of, 230–31, 235; poetic energy of, 17; posthumous speculation about, 222; removal from Milton’s corpse, 221, 228–29, 230; in Richardson’s The Artist and His Son, in the Presence of Milton, 238, 239; seen as woman’s hair, 234–35 minerals: animal capacity to assimilate, 113–14; in animal concretions, 106–7; boundary between animals and, 106; concretions, 111, 112, 119; coral, 120; crystals, 114, 116, 117–18, 119, 120; debates over aliveness of, 105, 112, 114–15; as divinely created, 113; fossils figured as stones, 107; gall stones, 107, 111, 118; hardening of, 116; kidney stones, 103, 104, 111, 117; lapidification, 118–20; lithophytes, 103; Lot’s wife turning to salt, 109–11; petrification,

Index   277

110, 119; plants associated with, 116– 17; seminal faculty in, 115–16, 126n30; seventeenth-­century mineralogy, 104; transmutability of animal and mineral bodies, 103, 109; vegetative souls attributed to, 104 Minutes of the Life of Mr John Milton (Aubrey), 224–25, 227 mishmash: as rococo ornament, 14, 183; as life, 195 Modest Proposal, A (Swift), 145 Montaigne, Michel de, 13 moral space, 256 More, Henry, 115 More, Thomas, 208 Motteux, Peter, 38, 51 mourning brooches, 225 “Mower against Gardens, The” (Marvell), 165–66 Mulcaster, Richard, 31 Mullaney, Stephen, 209 mumia (mummy), 153–54, 154, 209, 213 Mundus Subterraneus (Kircher), 108, 123n9 Munroe, Jennifer, 26n66, 63, 74n2 muscle memory, 43, 251–52 Mutschmann, Heinrich, 227–28 myths: Bacon on, 121; Browne on facts and, 114, 115, 120–22, 131; Browne on figuration and, 107, 108; Browne on Lot’s wife and, 109–10; Browne on nature imitating, 121; genuine hybridity versus, 106; for lapidification, 119; and natural philosophy as supplementary, 109; supplement natural facts, 105; of transformation, 109 Nardizzi, Vin, 23n37 narrative: discovering affordances as, 11; moral space for, 256; prehension generates, 50; virtue and, 257. See also fiction Narrative of the Disinterment of Milton’s Coffin (Neve), 221, 223, 228–29, 230, 231

Natura Exenterata, or Nature Unbowelled (1655), 69, 72 natural materials: in early modern tools, 1; in handwriting, 42, 54; human ability to instrumentalize, 129; limitations of, 1; in Meissonnier’s Livre de legumes, 188–89; in organic supplements, 2; recipes’ intimacy with, 73; in rococo art, 192. See also organic matter (material) natural philosophy: aspects of ancient philosophy in, 249; Bacon on, 108, 109; Browne on myth and, 121; on concretion, 109; conformable instances in, 112; debates over aliveness of minerals in, 105, 114–15; false correspondences in, 115; figuration in, 105; on figuration in nature, 106; on hardening of minerals, 116; on hylozoism, 115; on magnalia naturae, 103; on music theory as scientific, 83; and myth as supplementary, 109; on organisms with plant, animal, and mineral characteristics, 103, 105; on plants and the senses, 165; Renaissance naturalists, 103; on seminal faculty in minerals, 115; on transcorporation and monstrosity, 121; on vegetative soul, 154 Natural Writing in all the Hands (Shelley), 52 nature: art and, 14, 19, 110, 118, 129, 178, 191, 192, 251; boundary with unnatural, 16; Browne on “correspondencies” in, 118; Browne on it imitating myth, 121; Browne’s physico-­theological interpretation of, 113; Cartesian mechanics for understanding, 79, 93; celestial bodies and earthly, 13; civilized body’s distance from its creaturely, 146; contradiction in concept of, 14; Diderot’s wholistic view of, 92; disruption of, 36; eighteenth-­century

278   Index

nature (continued) investigations of, 186; as environing agent, 12; figuration in, 105–6, 108–9; harmony seen as natural, 77–78, 83; human interaction with, 1, 3, 5, 12, 13, 15, 222; interactivity between components of, 9; material things’ relationships with, 3; natural love, 156; natural ornament, 180; natura naturans, 14; occurs and unfolds, 10; penmanship as natural act, 55; Rameau’s aesthetic of, 90; reciprocal relationships with human bodies, 16, 18; scale of, 103; seen as mere background, 62; sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­century indices for, 14; subduing, 14, 19; writing as natural, 52; writing unsettles, 5. See also natural materials; natural philosophy; organic, the Naunton, Robert, 155–56 Nealon, Tom, 207 neoclassicism, 195 Neve, Philip, 221, 223, 228–29, 230, 231, 235 New Bath Guide, The (1766), 143 Newton, Thomas, 225, 233, 234, 243n15 New World of English Words (Phillips), 222 Niobe, 109, 110 Noble, Louise, 213 novel, the: rise of, 33, 79. See also epistolary fiction Novum Organum (Bacon), 36 Nussbaum, Martha, 249, 256 nutrition, 114, 118 object-­oriented ontology, 16, 17, 250 odors, 130, 133, 140, 141–42 Oeben, Jean-­François, 177, 178, 191–92 Oedipus (Dryden and Lee), 132 Of Education (Milton), 222 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 5 Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (Hooker), 157

ointments: anxieties regarding, 66; dictionary definition of, 67; lack of separation exploited by, 65; in literary texts, 64–65; as material and figurative, 67; as organic supplements, 61; permeability in application of, 66, 140; sources for, 65. See also Flos Unguentorum Ollyffe, Thomas, 32 Omphale (Destouches), 81, 89 O’Neill, Michael, 215 “One-­Way Street” (Benjamin), 139 Ong, Walter, 40, 42 “On His Mistress” (Donne), 170 “On the Circumcision” (Cartwright), 164, 172n28 opera: audience required in, 80; as iconically virtuous, 254–55; as virtuous ecology, 79, 255. See also French opera opera ballet, 81–82 O’Reilly, Caitriona, 173n40 organic, the: Bacon on, 36; boundary between the inorganic and, 112; connections made with other entities, 7–8; evolution of the word, 3; hair as organic, 222, 229; hand’s relationship to the writing as organic, 41–42; the inorganic mistaken for, 145; instrumental view of, 36, 37; as instrument or member of the body, 7, 222; link to the technical, 36; organization and, 253; penmanship as organic, 43, 45–46, 48, 52; Phillips’s definition of organical, 222; in rococo ornament, 10. See also organic matter (material); organic supplements organic matter (material): on forest ground, 9; Marvell’s “The Garden” on abstracting from, 168; in meat pies, 7, 199; in mumia (mummy), 153; relationships with humans, 15, 20, 200; transformations of, 19, 20, 29, 30; in

Index   279

writing materials, 18, 29, 30, 250. See also natural materials organic supplements: when absorbed into the body, 61; artistic creations as, 15; as both material and living, 3; clothing as, 128–29; as dynamic, 17, 18; as enhancements, 2, 5; function as affiliative organisms, 16; gloves as, 129, 130, 138, 141, 142, 252; grapevines as, 159, 160, 165; Grimm as, 80, 89–91, 93, 94; hair as, 220, 221, 222, 231; humans’ relations to other creatures mediated by, 145; as janiform, 2; Marvell’s “The Garden” and, 169, 170; meaning in this collection, 2; muscle memory built by, 251–52; natural materials in, 2; ointments as, 61; ornament as, 180; plants as, 155; posthumanism and, 17; quill pens as, 30, 37, 38, 51; in refashioning the senses, 142; relationship with human body, 1–2; suppleness of, 5; virtuous properties of, 249; vitalism and historical background of, 14; writing as, 53 organization space, 253–54 organon, 36 organs: early modern use of “organ,” 3–4; as organized physical structures, 36; Snell on writing substituting for unavailable, 38. See also bodily organs ornament: Krubsacius on history of, 179– 80; natural, 180; as organic supplement, 180. See also rococo ornament Ovid: on Cyparissus, 162, 163, 172n23; on Daphne, 162, 163, 168, 172n23; deities of, 14; on Heliades, 111, 162; on Medusa, 119, 120; Metamorphoses, 83–84, 119, 120, 162, 166, 168, 172n23; on Niobe, 110; Pygmalion story from, 83–84 painting: rococo, 178; trompe l’oeil letter rack paintings, 34, 35

Pamela (Richardson), 31, 56 Paracelsus, 104, 117, 253 Paradise Lost (Milton), 160, 222, 233–34 Paris Opéra: as assemblage of sensitive persons and resonant surfaces, 93; Omphale restaged at, 89; as vibrating body, 15, 77, 80; as virtue ecology, 79, 93, 254. See also Pygmalion (Rameau) Park, Julie, 4, 18, 80, 113, 130, 247, 249, 250, 253, 256 Parkinson, John, 153–54, 154 Parsons, Thomas, 38 Paston-­Williams, Sara, 205 Pecche, Henry, 208 Peck, Francis, 225, 243n15 “Pen, The” (Motteux), 38, 51 Penman’s Companion, The (Shelley), 32 Penman’s Diversion, The (Clark), 32, 52 penmanship: “command of the hand” in, 29, 43, 45, 46–52; contradictory principles of, 48–49; copybooks for, 31–32, 42, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56; courageous, 45, 247; eighteenth-­century instruction in, 31–32; flourishing, 4, 32, 42–52, 44, 46, 49, 256; flow in, 52–56; hand’s relationship to the writing as organic, 41–42; as intellectual and natural act, 55; line in, 43; manuals, 29, 32–33, 40, 41–42, 43, 53, 56, 252; as metamorphosis and transformation, 48; as organic, 43, 45–46, 48, 52; in personal letters, 33; poems to, 38, 42; striking, 43–45, 50–51; writer as “penman,” 32. See also quill pens Penmanship; Or the Art of Fair Writing (Champion), 44–45, 247 Penmanship Illustrated (Champion), 32–33, 54 Penman’s Magazine, The (Sedden), 54–55 Pennell, Sara, 63, 203 pens. See quill pens perception. See senses (perception)

280   Index

personhood: early modern defining of, 2; organic supplements as approach to, 249; persons, animals, and things distinguished, 3, 21n2; soul in, 250, 251. See also self, the Peter 1:16–22, 71–72 Petrarch, 162, 163, 169 petrification, 110, 119 Philipp, Dorothea, 183, 184, 193 Phillips, Edward, 222, 225, 237, 243n15 Philosophical Essay upon the Celebrated Anodyne Necklace, A (Chamberlen), 150n60 Philosophic Thoughts (Pensées philosophique) (Diderot), 87, 92, 97n35 phronesis, 253 Physical Dictionary (Blankaart), 248 Physical Dictionary (1657), 248 Pie Corner (London), 205 pies. See meat pies Pitt, William, 132 pittoresque, the, 234 Place, Conyers, 151n62 plants: Bacon distinguishes inanimate bodies from, 118; boundary between humans and, 154; classification of, 153; in early modern poetry, 153–74; fictional transformations of humans into, 162–63; fossils as, 107; grafting, 165–66; hair as animal vegetable, 223; human body compared with, 153, 155, 157, 164–65; hylozoism, 115, 126n29; lithophytes, 103; Milton’s hair configured in botanical terms, 155, 230, 231; minerals associated with, 116–17; mumia (mummy), 153–54, 154, 209, 213; as organic supplements, 155; in ornamental grotesques, 166; vegetable concretions, 111; vegetable love, 155, 156, 251; vegetative soul, 104, 118, 154, 155–56; zoophytes, 103. See also vines Pliny the Elder, 107, 111, 118, 124n20 Pliny the Younger, 179

Plumwood, Val, 62 Poems (Milton), 237 Poiret, Abbé, 144 Pompadour, Madame de, 182, 191, 192 Pope, Alexander, 35, 148n35, 238–39, 241 “Porosity of Bodies, The” (Boyle), 140 Porter, Jane, 38–39 Portrait of John Milton (Faithorne), 223–24, 224, 229, 235–36, 238 posthumanism, 17, 26nn64–65 postmodern mashups, 193 Powell, Margaret, 222 Practical Penman, The (Ollyffe), 32 practice, 49, 50 prehension, 50, 256–57 print: in epistolary fiction, 31; hair and, 227; handwriting as specter in, 36; handwriting compared with, 41, 42–43; ornamental grotesques in, 166, 167; rococo prints, 178–79, 183, 185, 190, 194; round hand and, 53 Prodromus (Steno), 116 Psalm 80, 157 Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Browne): on animal capacity to assimilate minerals, 113–14; on animal concretions, 112; Bacon’s Instauratio Magna aligned with, 108; “Bodies Electrical” chapter, 111; on coral, 120; on correspondencies in nature, 118; on crystals, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120; on fallacy of Aequivocation, 117; on false correspondences, 114–16; figure in, 117; on Lot’s wife, 109–11; on myths concerning metamorphosis, 121–22; on nature imitating myth, 121; on nutrition, 114; Ovidian fable in, 120; on real correspondences, 116–17; on toadstones, 125n23; on unicorn horn, 112 public critics, 80, 91–93 Purkiss, Diane, 7, 19–20, 112, 138, 187, 222 Pygmalion (Rameau), 77–99; as acte de ballet, 82; corps sonore in, 77, 78, 79,

Index   281

80, 81, 83, 87–88, 90, 92, 93; Grimm affected by, 80, 81, 83, 87, 89–91, 93; libretto criticized, 88; materialist implications of, 83; Pygmalion as virtue ethicist, 254; the Pygmalion moment, 79, 80, 81, 87–89, 92, 93, 94, 95n5, 248; score of, 78; statue comes to life in, 77, 78, 80, 81, 87, 90; as success, 88, 89, 91; writing of, 88 Pygmalion, or the Living Statue (Boureau-­ Deslandes), 79, 83, 84, 84–87, 96n23, 97nn28–29 Quarles, Francis, 171n11 Querelle de Lullistes et Ramistes, 82, 89 Querelle des Bouffons, 93 quill pens: agentive identity given to, 38; gloves compared with, 130; and human body in writing, 40–42; interaction with hands in writing, 30; as made out of organic material, 29, 30, 250; mind of the writer extended by, 29; as organic supplement, 30, 37, 38, 51; skill required for, 56n1; in trompe l’oeil letter rack paintings, 34, 35 Quinault, Philippe, 81 Rameau, Jean-­Philippe: aesthetic of nature of, 90; attempts to take control of his audience, 80, 82–83, 87; Diderot helps him write a memoir, 80, 95n7; as experimental, 251; Grimm as champion of, 89, 90; on harmony, 78, 83; Hippolyte et Aricie, 82; Les Indes galantes, 82; interconnection of social and physical worlds in work of, 254; as master of actes de ballets, 82; Mémoire où l’on expose les fondemens du système de musique théorique et pratique, 95n7; music theory of, 78, 79, 80, 83; Querelle de Lullistes et Ramistes, 82, 89; social alliances with key intellectuals, 15; status of, 78, 80. See also Pygmalion (Rameau)

Rameau’s Nephew (Diderot), 81, 92–93, 95n14 Rape of the Lock (Pope), 148n35 recipes: as changing entities, 73; collections of, 252; in The Court and Kitchin of Elizabeth Cromwell, 214; as dynamic, 68–69; exchanging, 257; for Flos Unguentorum, 63–64, 68–73; for meat pies, 202, 203; as texts, 62–63 Reformation of Emotion in the Age of Shakespeare, The (Mullaney), 209 Reill, Peter, 15 Religio Medici (Browne), 109 Renaissance: alchemy, 119; banquets, 202; debates over aliveness of minerals in, 105; gloves of, 133, 142; handwriting of, 52; meat pies in, 7; on Niobe and Lot’s wife, 110; on virtue, 20 representation, 193 Reynolds, Joshua, 147n24 Richardson, Jonathan: on Adam’s hair in Paradise Lost, 233–34; The Artist and His Son, in the Presence of Milton, 238, 239; engraving of Milton by, 235–36; Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Paradise Lost, 233, 236, 237, 243n15; “Life of Milton,” 225, 237–38; on Milton’s hair, 225; Pope depicted as Milton by, 238–39, 241 Richardson, Samuel, 31, 35, 56 Roach, Joseph, 222 Roberts, Jennifer, 58n20 rococo ornament, 177–98; art/nature tension in, 191; complexity in, 177, 185, 193; connectivity in, 193; contradictory aspects of, 195; cubism and postmodernism compared with, 193; as fashionable, 183; as a frame, 185; hair compared with, 222; indeterminacy in, 177, 190; Krubsacius on, 9–10, 182–85, 192, 193, 194; light sconces, 190, 190–91; logic at play in, 193; materialist philosophy and, 194; as metastyle, 177;

282   Index

rococo ornament (continued) as mishmash to Krubsacius, 9, 183; Oeben-­Lacroix mechanical table, 177–78, 178, 191–92; qualities of, 177; in rococo prints, 178–79, 183, 185, 190, 194; seen as French invention, 182, 184; the self and, 191, 192; self-­ consciousness of, 192; semantic potential of, 189–90, 193–94; the senses and, 177–78, 185, 190, 191, 193–94; spontaneous natural transformation in, 187–88; as supplementary, 10, 177, 182, 192, 194; as virtue ecology, 255 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 137, 208–9, 252 round: environ as an encompassing, 12; in the, 12, 20. See also environment; surround round hand, 52–55, 54 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 5, 89, 180 salves: dictionary definition of, 67; in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, 67. See also Flos Unguentorum Samson Agonistes (Milton), 232–33 Santesso, Aaron, 230 Santorio, Santorio, 119 Sauveur, Joseph, 77 Scappi, Bartolomeo, 202 Schegk, Jacob, 115–16 Schwyzer, Philip, 210 seahorses, 115, 117 Sedden, John, 54–55 self, the: early modern philosophical notions of, 2; Enlightenment concern with, 84; and other, 19, 138, 142; rhetorical transformation of self into glove, 137–38; rococo ornament and, 191, 192; soft selves, 6–7. See also personhood seminalities, 113, 114, 118, 127n39 Seneca, 211–12, 215

Sennert, Daniel, 104, 115–16, 118, 123n14, 256–57 Sennett, Richard, 50 senses (perception): eighteenth-­century philosophy on matter and, 186; gloves and, 130; organic supplements in refashioning the, 142; perceptual nonclarity, 186; plants and, 165; rococo ornament and, 177–78, 185, 190, 191, 193–94. See also smell; touch sensibility: attributed to matter, 79, 80, 249; Locke on sense perception, 93; “man of feeling,” 80, 92; sensationalist French philosophy, 94 sensitivity: Grimm’s sensitive body, 15, 80, 87, 89, 90–91, 93; in opera, 255; sensitive body and external world, 40; the sensitive public critic, 91–93 Sentimental Journey, A (Sterne), 136 Serres, Michel, 11 Sévigné, Madame de, 134 sexual freedom, 85, 87 Shakespeare, William: Chaucer’s cook known by, 207; epitaph of, 211; food-­consumption spaces in plays of, 203; as glove-­maker’s son, 252; Love’s Labor’s Lost, 67; Macbeth, 24n47; Romeo and Juliet, 137, 208–9, 252; Sonnet 20, 24n48; The Tempest, 203–4; Titus Andronicus, 211, 215; Twelfth Night, 24n48. See also Hamlet (Shakespeare) Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory (Laroche and Munroe), 74n2 Shakespeare Dwelling (Lupton), 12 Shelley, George, 32, 48, 52, 55 signatures, doctrine of, 117 Silver, Sean, 11 sin eaters, 200 Skilful Physician, The (1656), 71 skill: for using quill pen, 56n1; virtue versus, 255, 257. See also technique

Index   283

skin: of animals for gloves, 129, 130, 132, 135, 142–43, 252; leather from human, 144–45; permeability of, 140 smell: “bad,” 151n63; expressiveness of, 141–42; scent of gloves, 130, 133, 141, 142, 150n60; subvisible particles in, 140–41 Smith, Bruce, 155, 169 Smith, Eliza, 203 Smith, John, 4 Smyth, Richard, 229, 235 Snell, Charles, 43, 48, 51, 57nn8–9 Song of Solomon, 75n21, 157 soul, 250–51; Aristotle on, 250–51; in Herrick’s “The Vine,” 165; in Marvell’s “The Garden,” 169; transmigration of, 109; vegetative, 104, 118, 154, 155–56; writing makes contact between souls, 42, 250 Souls of Black Folks, The (Du Bois), 250 Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd), 215 sparge, 215 Spenser, Edmund, 62, 64, 65, 71 Spinoza, Baruch, 13–14, 17 Spiritus Gorgonicus (Charleton), 119 Stallybrass, Peter, 133, 135, 137 Standard Rules of the Round and Round-­ Text Hands, Mathematically Demonstrated (Snell), 43 Steevens, George, 235 Steno, Nicolaus, 116 Sterne, Laurence, 136 Stewart, Susan, 142 Stoichita, Victor I., 99n58 Stoics, 249, 256 Stow, John, 203 striking, 43–45, 50–51 Strong, Roy, 202 Stubbes, Philip, 4 Sturt, John, 52 supplement: Browne on fossils and supplementarity, 107; for cognitive

processes, 5–6; Derrida on, 5; early modern uses of, 4; flexibility associated with, 4–5, 21n10; mineral bodies supplement animal bodies, 103; natural philosophy and myth as supplementary, 109; rococo ornament as supplementary, 10, 177, 182, 192, 194; tools as, 5–6, 7. See also organic supplements surgeons’ manuals, 145 surround: definition for environ, 12; body and natural worlds, 12–13; audience and stage in theatre design, 12. See also environment; round sutures, 145 Swann, Marjorie, 157, 168, 169, 173n37 Swift, Jonathan, 56n4, 144, 145, 195 Sylva Sylvarum (Bacon), 112–13, 118 Symmons, Charles, 235 sympathies: between humans and natural objects, 18; integrated, 13; sympathetic medicine, 62, 66; sympathetic universe, 13, 14 Syrinx, 162, 168 Tamburlaine the Great (Marlowe), 64–66, 75n11 taste, 194 Tate, Nahum, 54–55 Taylor, Charles, 256 technique: the organic’s link to, 36; virtue versus, 255, 257; writing as, 29, 31, 39, 40–42, 43, 45, 52, 251 Telesio, Bernardo, 115 telos, 249–50, 255, 256 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 203–4 Thadani, Simran, 53 theater: as environment, 12; feasts and, 202; gap between stage and audience in, 203–4; glove-­making and, 252 Theatrum Botanicum (Parkinson), 153–54, 154

284   Index

Theobald, John, 136–37 Thorne, John, 49, 50 Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature (Diderot), 80, 92, 93, 197n19 Thoughts on the Origin, Growth and Decline of Ornaments in the Fine Arts (Krubsacius), 179, 184, 195n5 Thyestes (Seneca), 211–12, 215 Tiffany, Daniel, 138 Tigner, Amy, 76n25 Titian, 135, 172n19 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 211, 215 toadstones, 103, 125n23 “To Caelia, in the Fields” (Crompton), 164, 172n26 Todd, Henry John, 225, 232, 235, 243n15 “To His Coy Mistress” (Marvell), 155–56, 161–62 Toland, John, 225, 243n15 Tomkins, Thomas, 46, 49, 251 tools: Bacon on manual and mental, 36; early modern, 1; for engraving, 51, 52; interiorization of, 55; organon, 36; penmanship manuals and copybooks as, 32; quill pens as, 29, 30, 37, 38, 50; as supplements, 5–6, 7; for training vines, 11, 160; for writing, 31, 40, 52 “To Penhurst” ( Jonson), 169 touch: gloves and, 137, 139, 142; of harpies in Virgil’s Aeneid, 204–5; in Herrick’s “The Vine,” 165; pens and, 18, 30, 31, 41; trompe l’oeil paintings create expectation of, 34 trade. See commerce (trade) tragédie en musique (lyric tragedy), 81 transcorporeality, 62; anxieties around, 62; Browne and, 121, 124n17; entanglement and dependencies of, 62; Flos Unguentorum as example of, 62, 70, 73; reflexive communication and, 222 transubstantiation, 72, 157, 161 Traub, Valerie, 163, 164 Travels through Barbary (Poiret), 144

Treatise on the Venereal Disease (Boerhaave), 140 Trevor, Douglas, 156 Trilling, James, 187 Triomphe des Arts, Le (1701), 82, 87 Trip to Holland, A (Becket), 136 trompe l’oeil letter rack paintings, 34, 35 Trumble, Angus, 147n24 Truth in Painting, The (Derrida), 135 Turner, Daniel, 150n56 Tusser, Thomas, 201 Tutor to Penmanship (Ayres), 52 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 24n48 Tyndale, William, 208 unguents: dictionary definition of, 67. See also Flos Unguentorum unicorn horn, 112, 125n23 Universal Magazine, The, 143 Universal Penman, The (Bickham), 32 “Upon This Performance of Penmanship” (Tate), 54–55 Urn-­Buriall (Browne), 110, 117 vegetation. See plants venter, 164 Vertue, George, 236–37 “Vine, The” (Herrick), 155, 156, 158, 160–67, 168, 170, 172n19, 173n29 vines: as affordances, 11; aliveness of, 156; bryony, 157–58, 167; in early modern English imagination, 153; Eve’s hair in Paradise Lost as, 233; flourish of, 256; metamorphosis to, 155, 165, 166–67; as metaphors, 161, 164; Milton’s hair as, 155; in Richardson’s The Artist and His Son, in the Presence of Milton, 238, 239; varieties of, 156, 157. See also grapevines Virgil, 204–5 virtue, 247–59; as an affordance, 20; Aristotle on, 252, 253, 255–56; broad scope of term, 248; Champion in

Index   285

discourse of, 247–48; Diderot on the passions and, 87, 254; moralizing sense of, 248; of organic supplements, 249; Pygmalion as virtue ethicist, 254; skill versus, 255, 257; thrift as middle-­ class, 214; unity of, 248–49, 253, 257. See also virtue ecology virtue ecology, 249–50; of Aristotle, 251; ecological character of virtue, 255–56; essays in this collection as, 20; opera as, 255; Paris Opéra as, 79, 93, 254; rococo ornament as, 255; spatial dimension of, 253–54 “Vision, The” (Herrick), 171n16 “Vision (Anacreon), The” (Herrick), 155, 158, 159–60, 161, 172n19 vitalism, 14–15; on “cooperation of forces,” 11; interconnectivity as central to, 15; of Paracelsus’s Archeus, 104; on virtue, 253; vital force, 14; vitalist materialism, 93 Voltaire, 195 Wall, Wendy, 63 Walpole, Horace, 134 Warren, Richard, 143 Warton, Thomas, 232, 233, 235, 237 Watkins, Roland, 171n11 “weather world,” 9 Webster, John, 201–2, 216n2 wedding feasts, 199, 201, 213 Wellcome Manuscript, 70, 73 Westminster suppers, 207 Weston, Thomas, 33 White, Richard, 213 White Divel, The (Webster), 201–2, 216n2 wigs: age of, 238; Hogarth on, 225, 226; human hair made into, 220; as situated janiform, 2 Willet, Andrew, 110, 124n18 Williamson, G. C., 228 Willoughby, Alice, 201 Wither, George, 171n11

Wolfe, Jessica, 8, 19, 143–44, 248, 250–51 women: bride pie, 203; glove stitching by, 132; hair and, 220, 225, 227, 234–35; identified with mortality and helplessness, 235; in Pygmalion myth, 83; rococo ornament and, 182, 191; salons hosted by, 85; writing desks of, 192 Wood, Anthony, 224–25, 229 writing: changing technologies of, 31; contact between souls in, 42, 250; copybook handwriting, 32; courageous, 247; desks, 192; eighteenth-­century instruction in, 31–32; engraving contrasted with, 52; hair and, 227; handwriting as specter in print, 36; head and hand in, 41, 46, 51–52; ink, 30, 37, 55; interiority expressed by, 37, 40; masters, 31, 32, 41, 47, 53, 256; mystical nature attributed to, 38; as natural, 52; as organic supplement, 53; poems about, 38, 42; print and handwriting compared, 41, 42–43; spatial element in, 42; as supplemental, 5; t­ actile dimension of, 30–31; as technique, 29, 31, 39, 40–42, 43, 45, 52, 251; as technology, 29; trade influenced by, 33; transformation of organic material in, 30; translates speech into thinking, 55; writer’s embodied status, 40–42; writer’s voice heard through, 30. See also letters; penmanship Writing Improved, or Penmanship Made Easy (Clark), 32 Yonan, Michael, 10, 19, 222 Yorick’s Sentimental Journey, Continued (Hall-­Stevenson), 136 Young, Thomas, 232 Young Clerke’s Assistant: or Penmanship Made Easy (1787), 42 Zitin, Abigail, 227 zoophytes, 103