Dynamic Matter: Transforming Renaissance Objects 9780271094120

Citation preview

Dynamic Matter

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Cultural Inquiries in English Literature, 1400–1700 Rebecca Totaro, General Editor Advisory Board: Joe Campana Rice University

Vin Nardizzi The University of British Columbia

Hillary Eklund Loyola University, New Orleans

Gail Kern Paster Folger Shakespeare Library

Katherine Eggert University of Colorado, Boulder

Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. Penn State University

Wendy Beth Hyman Oberlin College & Conservatory

Tiffany Werth University of California, Davis

Julia Reinhardt Lupton University of California, Irvine

Jessica Wolfe University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Books in the Cultural Inquiries in English Literature, 1400–1700 series acknowledge the complex relationships that link disciplines in the pre-modern period and account for the lived experience represented in literary and cultural texts of the time. Scholars in this series reconnect fields often now considered distinct, including cuisine, ecology, cartography, the occult, meteorology, physiology, drama, popular print, and poetry. Other books in the series: Emily Griffiths Jones, Right Romance: Heroic Subjectivity and Elect Community in Seventeenth- Century England

Scott Oldenburg, Labor, Household, Plague: A Weaver-Poet in Shakespeare’s London

Nancy L. Simpson-Younger and Margaret Simon, eds., Forming Sleep: Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance

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Dynamic Matter

Transforming Renaissance Objects

Edited by Jennifer Linhart Wood

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wood, Jennifer Linhart, editor. Title: Dynamic matter : transforming Renaissance objects / edited by Jennifer Linhart Wood. Other titles: Cultural inquiries in English literature, 1400–1700. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2022] | Series: Cultural inquiries in English literature, 1400–1700 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Investigates the life histories of Renaissance objects as they experience transformations, and demonstrates these objects’ dynamic potential to transform their environments and others as they journey through time and space”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021059830 | ISBN 9780271092539 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. | Material culture in literature. | Material culture—England—History. | Materialism in literature. Classification: LCC PR428.M38 D96 2022 | DDC 820.9/003—dc23/eng/20220105 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059830 Copyright © 2022 The Pennsylvania State University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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This book is dedicated to its contributors.

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Con t en ts

List of Illustrations | ix Acknowledgments | xi Introduction: Transformative Materiality and Renaissance Dynamics | 1 Jennifer Linhart Wood Part I: Objects Within / Without the Body 1. “Farre Fetched and Deare Bought”: The Global Cosmetic Exchange Between Elizabeth I, Melike Safiye Sultan, and the Kira Esperanza Malchi | 39 Josie Schoel 2. Comb Poems | 55 Erika Mary Boeckeler 3. Variable Vestments and Clothing Conversions: Piecing Out the Past in Tudor Exeter | 81 Naomi Howell Part II: Networking Objects 4. Bird-People, Utopias, Arte Plumaria: The Influence of Native American Feathers on Renaissance Literature and Culture | 109 Edward McLean Test

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5. Needlework Patterns on the Move: Traveling Toward (Re)incarnation | 133 Anna Riehl Bertolet 6. “Whose Least Part Crackt, the Whole Does Fly”: The Explosive Case of Prince Rupert’s Drops | 159 Abbie Weinberg Part III: Staging Properties 7. Traveling Music and Theatrics: Jemmy LaRoche’s “Raree Show” | 185 Sarah F. Williams 8. Protean Objects in William Percy’s The Aphrodysial or Sea-Feast | 207 Maria Shmygol 9. “I’ll Drown My Book”: Prospero’s Grimoire, Adrift | 231 Emily E. F. Philbrick Selected Bibliography | 257 List of Contributors | 261 Index | 265

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I l lust r at ions

2.1 Comb, 1400s. Image of recto: “mon ♥ aves” | 57 2.2 Portrait of Elizabeth Vernon Wriothesley, Countess of Southampton (1572[?]–1655) | 64 2.3 Triquet from George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589) | 67 2.4 Comb poem and love knot from William Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals, book 1 (London, 1613) | 70 3.1 A study of the effects of light on damask from Jan van Eyck, The Annunciation | 92 3.2 St Mary Arches Pall | 94 3.3 Centerpiece of the St Mary Arches Pall | 95 3.4 A prophet on the St Mary Arches Pall | 96 3.5 Saint Thomas the Apostle on the St Mary Arches Pall | 97 4.1 Christoph Weiditz, Mexican Indian wearing feather mantle (1529) | 116 4.2 “Feathered wild man,” from Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae (1599) | 118 4.3 Detail from John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis (1654) | 120 4.4 Diego Huanitzin, The Mass of St. Gregory, feathers on a wood panel (Mexico, 1539) | 125 5.1 Anne Lawle, sampler, detail | 134 5.2 Design for reticella lace from Federico Vinciolo, Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts | 143 5.3 Bird pattern from Giovanni Ostaus, La vera perfettione del disegno di varie sorti di recami | 151

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5.4 Bird pattern from Federico Vinciolo, Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts | 152 5.5 Whitework band sampler | 153 6.1 Robert Moray, “An Account of the Glass Drops,” in Christopher Merret, The Art of Glass | 170 6.2 Prince Rupert’s drops in Robert Hooke, Micrographia | 174 7.1 Sutton Nicholls, “Old Harry with his Rare Show, Old Harry with his Gallant Show” | 187 7.2 Pierce Tempest After Marcellus Laroon II | 189 7.3 Stephen Colledge, A Ra-ree Show | 193 7.4 Two verses from Colledge’s broadside set to the tune “I am the Duke of Norfolk” | 194 7.5 Sutton Nicholls, The Raree Show | 198 8.1 Page detail from fol. 139v of The Aphrodysial in MS HM4 | 212 8.2 Textual emendations in the 1646 transcription of The Aphrodysial | 214 8.3 Plate illustration depicting a dolphin pageant device from the 1616 Lord Mayor’s Show | 222 Please use a QR code scanner, available as a free smartphone app, or the camera functionality on your smartphone to scan this QR code to access supplementary visual and auditory content, including color images. The YouTube video can also be accessed directly at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gKeYHnago.

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Ack now l ed gm en ts

This book—like any other book, really—is an assemblage that has drawn all varieties of matter into its orbit. Perhaps the acknowledgments written for a book about objects would be expected to thank the laptops and writing tables upon which its chapters were composed; the books and articles that vitalized our thinking; our printers, pencils, pens, notebooks, writing journals, and office spaces; the internet; the food that sustained our bodies and minds as we wrote; and the clothing that kept us warm. With gratitude to all those objects, and countless others besides, I am going to do something that this book otherwise does not do, which is to foreground its human participants and express my gratitude to those people who made this book about things possible. This collection developed out of a Shakespeare Association of America seminar, “Novel and Travelling Objects,” which convened during the 2016 meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana—my home state (with special thanks to the beignets and café au lait). I am grateful to the Trustees and Program committee for greenlighting our seminar, as well as to all of the participants for their wonderful contributions and discourse that shaped this collection and its aims. The initial concept for this seminar was developed with Jessica Roberts Frazier; thanks, dear Jess, for our many discussions about objects and their journeys, which planted the seeds that germinated and blossomed into this collection. Conversations with Gail Kern Paster, Holly Dugan, and Jeffrey Cohen, colleagues whom I have the honor to call my friends, have been transformative for my ideas about this project. Because this collection explores the way that things impact and transform other things, I want to acknowledge the fact that Dynamic Matter owes a deep debt of gratitude to Jonathan Gil Harris and his Untimely Matter—a work that inspired much of our collective thinking. Gil, thank you for your profound influence that continues to traverse thresholds of time and space.

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I would also like to offer thanks to those who support my work through different networks and in myriad ways: Tawnya Azar, Jeremy Lopez, Owen Williams, Sophie Byvik, Nick Moschovakis, Amrita Sen, Don Philbrick, Leigha McReynolds, Debi Didra, Cristina Khanna, Rex Coombs, John Giusti, Gretchen Young, Annie Hall, and John and Linda Ball. I am also so grateful to Julia Berry, Mary Talley Garcia, Helen Kanovsky, Anne Maher, Maureen Miller, Cathy Shaw, Eileen Ivey Sirota, Marcie Solomon, Ellen Teller, Katherine Woodall, Carol Kranowitz, and Eileen Mason for our lively exchanges accruing around Shakespeare and his things. And I am thankful to my colleagues at George Mason University, especially Deb Shutika, Eric Eisner, Jessie Matthews, and Heidi Lawrence, and for the inclusive intellectual community fostered by GMU’s English Department. A fortuitous collision of bodies and circumstances during the 2016 World Shakespeare Congress in Stratford-upon-Avon—where I had the tremendous good fortune of literally bumping into the Cultural Inquiries in English Literature series editor, Rebecca Totaro, while waiting in line for a special exhibit at Shakespeare’s New Place—led to this collection finding its home of publication. From that chance encounter on, Rebecca has been a dear friend, and this volume has benefited immensely from her incisive editorial guidance and unwavering support. I am also grateful to our editors at Pennsylvania State University Press, Kathryn B. Yahner, Maddie Caso, and Laura Reed-Morrisson, as well as to editors Gretchen Otto and Sarah Rutledge, all of whom have been instrumental in shaping our multitude of ideas into book form. I would additionally like to express our appreciation to the anonymous readers whose thoughtful, constructive, and generous comments so greatly enriched our collective thinking about objects, their journeys, and their transformations. This book would not be what it is without its contributors. When I think about this collection and the years of research, writing, and exchanges that have transformed it into the object it has become, I am overcome by the brilliance, kindness, generosity, and enthusiasm I have been privileged to experience from each and every author. It is for these reasons, among multiplicities of others, that this collection is dedicated to them. Objects brought us together, and I am thankful that our ongoing conversations through the years have evolved into friendships. Josie helpfully guided our consideration of the blurred and permeable skin boundaries between human and nonhuman; Erika offered perceptive

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suggestions for the introduction and the most delightful email correspondence; Naomi voiced immense enthusiasm for this collection from the outset, and her kind and encouraging words materialized when I needed to hear them most; Mac, especially, expanded our collective focus to encompass a wider global sphere, reminding us of the importance of inclusivity (and good humor, too); Anya, both in her messages and during her visits to the Folger, expressed such meaningful, heartfelt support for my scholarship in general and this project in particular; Abbie, in addition to sharing a workspace and ideas with me while this project was in process, continues to share vibrant scholarly materials she finds with me, several of which invigorated the introduction; Sarah provided scintillating material readings of music and sound that enriched the trajectory of this collection, in addition to edifying conversations over dinners I enjoyed with her across the continent and through the years; and Maria so kindly and repeatedly shared delicious Swiss chocolates with me, which undoubtedly made the writing and editorial processes that much sweeter. Emily E. F. Philbrick, who so patiently, so thoughtfully conversed with me for years about dynamic matter in its various guises and manifestations, deserves infinite thanks; Em, as much as we love words, they are insufficient to convey my gratitude to you. I am especially appreciative of my conglomerated family network: thank you, Mom, Dad, Bob-the-Dog, Grandma, Chris, Aunt Lynne and Funcle Bill, Debbie, Zayda, and Mitch and Tammy, for your unwavering love and support. Besides my laptop, those who have stayed closest to me during this project have been Daisy, Willow, Holly, Juliet, and Bryan: I am eternally grateful for all of you. Juliet’s very presence in our lives has taught me most viscerally, most profoundly, about the incredible, overwhelming power of metamorphosis grounded in love; each day with her is a transforming, transformative adventure. My greatest debt is—once again—to Bryan, whose love, patience, thoughtfulness, and encouragement not only helped bring this book into being but also continue to be vital and transformative forces every day in my life.

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Introduction Transformative Materiality and Renaissance Dynamics Jennifer Linhart Wood

This book takes seriously a world in which the philosopher’s stone could transmute base metals into gold. Where divine intervention transubstantiates bread into body and wine into blood each time the Eucharist is celebrated.1 Where a portrait of Mary, the mother of Christ, changes from pigment to flesh, and a wooden panel in a church oozes healing balm.2 Where an adult woman could spontaneously sprout male genitalia, and a child could mutate in the womb if his mother beheld disturbing images while pregnant.3 Where diamonds could also grow and sexually reproduce, at least—as John Mandeville claims—if one traveled far enough away from home.4 Where travel itself incited seismic changes across the globe as European bodies incorporated East Indian spices and New World chocolate and tobacco into their diets while concurrently introducing foreign diseases and triggering mass genocides of Indigenous populations. Where animal skins became writing surfaces, bird feathers became quills, and linens—transformed from (under)garments, to “stuff,” to paper— became the pages on which the First Folio, along with a host of other texts, was printed.5 Where Ovid’s Metamorphoses—a narrative poem rife with transformations—was immensely popular.6 Where a French nobleman

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or an Italian duke becomes a werewolf (as in Marie de France’s Bisclavret and as does Webster’s Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi); Shakespeare’s Bottom is “translated” into an ass (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream); and a statue is transfigured into a human being (as is Shakespeare’s Hermione in The Winter’s Tale). Where clothing belonging to members of the nobility, along with consecrated clerical garments—“the copes and albs and amices and stoles that were the glories of medieval textile crafts”—recast the bodies of stage actors into priests, dukes, queens, and kings (and create deep anxieties for anti-theatricalists in the process).7 Where “deodands,” nonhuman objects, are defined by English common law as active agents causing injury or death to humans.8 Where “weapon-salve,” used to cure human wounds, is an ointment applied directly to the sword, rather than to the laceration it caused.9 Where wearing a witch’s dress could “infect” a new wearer, and where witches’ spells could be trapped by earthenware jugs.10 Where lodestones draw iron to themselves and transfer their magnetic properties to the other ferric matter they touch.11 Where a found jewel prompts its discoverer to write that she can “see the sparkes and shinnigs of Gods love dart out to me.”12 Where the Burwell Lute Tutor describes the synergy between a musician and her instrument: “You animate the lute as well as the lute does animate you.”13 In short, transformation was a profound aspect of Renaissance material life, experienced in both quotidian and fantastic ways. Although not every material object was believed to transform into something else, many did—and transformed other objects and humans in the process. This volume explores such dynamic and material transformations. Many recent studies of Renaissance material culture focus on objects from past times in ways analogous to those in which still photographs or modern museums present objects: as artifacts worthy of preservation, suspended in synchronic time, kept safely at a distance from the museumgoer in a glass case, and largely inaccessible except through the visual spectrum. Objections to this mode of inquiry, however, have been raised by several scholars. This volume answers the call to “begin taking sixteenth- and seventeenth-century materialist thought seriously,” as Douglas Bruster frames it, “whether the source was Aristotle, alchemical treatises, proverbs, popular songs, or utilitarian handbooks.”14 Taking early modern materialist thought seriously, the chapters in this volume encourage the reappraisal of flawed assumptions about early modern

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matter and objects. While some critical studies of Renaissance material culture tend to overlay post-Kantian and Cartesian perspectives onto earlier times, they have done so without acknowledging that the doctrines of these later schools of thought would have been unintelligible in the time period to which they are applied.15 Instead, this collection approaches its objects of study in ways that resonate with late medieval and early modern theories of matter and objects while also drawing on a range of more recent critical methodologies, including cultural materialism, material culture, object or thing studies, and new materialist studies. In addition to embracing material perspectives endemic to the Renaissance, this collection foregrounds the objects themselves, rather than partaking in the critical tendency to predominantly study how objects relate to human needs, desires, and proclivities through questions of politics, culture, and production.16 Adopting a “flat ontology” allows a corrective to this problem. Levi Bryant describes the two main tenets of flat ontology: “First, humans are not at the center of being, but are among beings. Second, objects are not a pole opposing a subject, but exist in their own right, regardless of whether any other object or human relates to them. Humans, far from constituting a category called ‘subject’ that is opposed to ‘object,’ are themselves one type of object among many.”17 Undoing the subject-object binary/hierarchy argues that nonhumans can and should be conceptualized in more substantive ways than simply screens onto which humans and cultures project their fantasies. Not only are humans one type of object among many, but they are also in the minority, making up a rather small percentage of the objects that currently inhabit the globe—and that inhabited the globe during the Renaissance. The ensuing chapters regard objects as sensory-rich things to human perception, while recognizing—as many recent studies of object-oriented ontology do—that there is always something about objects that eludes humans’ perceptual grasp. While we acknowledge that we can’t escape from an anthropocentric perspective—either ours as writers and readers, or the perspectives of people living hundreds of years ago who recorded their experiences of and interactions with objects—we couple that perception with attention to what Arjun Appadurai describes as “life histories” belonging to objects themselves as they move “through different hands, contexts, and uses.”18 Throughout these pages, the relational movements of objects are traced as they circulate in networks; are copied, consumed,

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remade, or repurposed; break; transform; drown; explode; and cause disruptions. Yet it is not simply the goal to track objects for the sake of crafting a diachronic study of what Jane Bennett intriguingly terms “vibrant matter”; instead, as is evident in the examples enumerated above and those featured in the following pages, a focus on the transformation of objects— as well as the transformations that occur throughout networks constituted by all kinds of circulating, vibrant matter—is crucial to our approach. This introduction defines the qualities of matter most pertinent to this volume: matter is dynamic, protean, sensory-laden, transformative, and network-forming. Our collection endorses “the richness of things themselves” and the larger, multiple, and changing networks in which things circulate, as well as the networks that these transformative objects form.19 Dynamic matter possesses the potential to affect bodies and other matter coming into close, sensual contact with it, and dynamic matter also has the capacity to move through time and space, creating various networks of associations. The objects that have drawn our scholarly attention bear witness to intimate proximity with humans and other objects, while at the same time possessing “afterlives” spanning several centuries, enduring well beyond the scope of the human lifespan. By arguing that matter matters, and in studying the objects presented here, this collection contributes to what might be considered an alternative history (averse to a predominantly human-centered history, that is), one that seeks to recalibrate understanding of the Renaissance’s broader ambit by deepening our engagement with many objects that called the Renaissance home. Welcome to our world.

Vital, Protean, and Transformative Matter There is no in-formation, only trans-formation. —Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social

“You animate the lute as well as the lute does animate you,” proclaims the Burwell Lute Tutor, an instructional guide for playing the lute that belonged to, and was probably partly composed by, Mary Burwell.20 A wealth of information concerning concepts of musicianship, the impetus prompting musical performance, human-object relationships, and

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communal experience abound in this pithy statement. The force of the maxim resides in the repeated verb “animate.” Deriving from the classical Latin word animare, meaning “to give life to,” “animate” is related to both anima, meaning “air, breath, life, soul,” and animus, indicating “the rational soul; mind, will, spirit.” Especially since “anima” has been defined philosophically as “soul,” or animating life force, it has been characterized as antithetical to its related word “animus,” often interpreted as the rationality of the mind (that is, distinct from “irrational” anima). While much ink has been spilled about the divergence in meaning of these two terms, the Burwell Lute Tutor identifies both the instrument and the musician as possessing the capability to “animate”—encompassing all of the word’s senses, including “enliven,” “excite,” “inspire,” “vivify,” and “to give life or spirit to.”21 In this rendering, the human musician is not the only being said to possess a vital spirit that acts upon the instrument— the instrument, a material object, also acts upon the human, moving her through the influence of its own animate, lively, life-giving properties. In addition to describing a musical instrument as having the capacity to animate others, the Burwell Lute Tutor imagines both the lute and the lutenist exerting reciprocal influence on each other and forming what we might term an assemblage. An ontological framework developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, assemblages may be defined as “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations.”22 Other terms used to describe this concept include the “rhizome” developed by Deleuze and Guattari; the “network” advanced by Actor-Network Theory (ANT); and the “mesh” or “web” theorized in object-oriented ontology (OOO). Though differing slightly, all of these approaches presume that entities are not “undermined” (reduced to demonstrating the effects or manifestations of an underlying force) or “overmined” (understood according to the assumption that there is no reality outside the mind or language), and that humans are one of many objects enmeshed in the web of relations.23 ANT describes a flat ontology in which actants (Bruno Latour’s term) can be human, object, or some combination; an actor is its relations.24 OOO also follows a flat ontology in which “all objects must be given equal attention, whether they be human, non-human, natural, cultural, real or fictional.”25 Even as both schools of thought posit a flat ontology, one important distinction between the two is that ANT focuses on

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relationality and processes of change in a network, while OOO considers objects for and as things in themselves. Concerning relationships among elements in an assemblage according to ANT, Latour explains the importance of mediation between actants, arguing that “mediators transform” and are themselves “original event[s]” prompting seismic impacts reaching temporally beyond the moment of initial translation or transformation.26 In contrast to foregrounding interactions between actants, OOO understands all objects as entities in themselves—with histories, qualities inaccessible to human perception, and even agency—that exist prior to, beyond, and outside their relationality.27 In this collection of essays, we hold the distinctions between ANT and OOO in tension, thinking carefully not only about the matter—and objects—we study but also about their relations and effects, especially transformative ones. Like Latour, we engage in tracing associations; like Deleuze and Guattari, we consider modes of being as well as impacts of affinities or becomings; following OOO, we recognize the allure of objects and their transformative acts while acknowledging that something about these objects will always remain elusive even though we share sensuous contact with them. New materialists recognize that entities are involved in a complex “multitude of interlocking systems” that thus necessitates a reconsideration of how agency is manifested in various forms.28 The flowing, dynamic, liquid model of relations bears striking similarities to the early modern concept of geohumoralism, the idea that forces outside the body (weather, temperature) could impact internal bodily states (causing one to become sanguine, choleric, melancholy, or phlegmatic), and vice versa; embodied humoral states were believed also to effect the broader environment. A musically inflected version of geohumoralism is staged in The Tempest: when the audience first encounters Ferdinand—“Weeping again the King my father’s wreck,” as he says—he describes how music performed by an invisible Ariel “crept by me upon the waters, / Allaying both their fury and my passion / With its sweet air,” calming both his emotional state (“my passion”) and the previously tempestuous “waters.”29 Mary Floyd-Wilson explains that “hidden in nature, people believed, were antipathies and sympathies that compelled both bonds and animosities among an unpredictable mix of plants, minerals, animals, and humans,” known as geohumoralism in the Renaissance but conceptualized more recently as an assemblage, network, and/or web.30 In a similar way, the

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unity represented by the lute imagery in the Burwell Lute Tutor occurs through the sympathies and vivification shared through the bidirectional act of animation. But it is not only that a woman and her lute are imagined as being linked through their reciprocal animation, the sympathetic vibrations of strings and wood, the music that is itself a product of both musical object and musical subject that blend together through the vibratory act of sound production: it is also and equally true that the instrument and human are described as impacting each other in their geohumoral assemblage. The lute gives life to the performer just as much as the performer gives life to the lute. It may seem all too easy to dismiss this concept of assemblage, correlative animation, and joint musical influence as the idealized, florid imaginings of a bored lutenist using a strategically hyperbolic analogy to instruct a pupil.31 However, the theory that material objects were animated by vital components circulated beyond the pages of the Burwell Lute Tutor. In Sylva Sylvarum, for example, Francis Bacon similarly makes an argument that musical instruments have animate spirits: “When the Sound is created betweene the Blast of the Mouth, and the Aire of the Pipe, it hath neuerthelesse some Communication with the Matter of the Sides of the Pipe, and the Spirits in them contained.” Bacon conceptualizes a pipe’s “Spirits” as “contained” within “the Matter of the Sides of the Pipe” and the air’s “Communication” with both “Spirits” and “Matter” as producing sound. Rather than dead, inert, or passive in the way that Kant understood matter, the “Matter” Bacon describes is vital. He elaborates that “Sound participateth with the Spirit in the Wood, thorow which it passeth.”32 Again, the material object is vivified with a “Spirit” that plays a critical role in the production of sound. The author(s) of the Burwell Lute Tutor would agree: more than a memorable metaphor, the idea that an object prompts vitality in, connection with, and even movement of a human body in the same way that a human body prompts vitality in, connection with, and movement of an object bears serious consideration for what it suggests about perceived relationships among matter, vitality, and agency. Bacon’s approach to matter—particularly with regard to the “Spirit in the Wood,” but also in the very title Sylva Sylvarum (meaning “wood forest”)—developed from Aristotle’s theory of matter, also centered on wood, many versions of which were propagated in late medieval and

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Renaissance England. (This ligneous approach may also be true of the Burwell Lute Tutor, as the word “lute” is an English approximation of the Arabic word for the instrument, al ûd, meaning “the wood.”)33 Hyle and eidos are the words Aristotle used to refer to matter and form, respectively, and hyle—comprising the four elements—is brought into being when eidos attaches to it, rather than existing of its own volition. Aristotle defines matter as “the primary substratum of each thing, from which it comes to be without qualification, and which persists in the result.”34 In this definition, ὕλη (hyle) is the word that Aristotle uses to refer to matter; he actually appropriates the Greek word for “wood”—particularly, the connoted meaning of wood as a material used to build structures— in order to suggest the mutable, constructive quality of matter. In this way, Aristotle etymologically designates matter as involved in the process of creation or composition rather than as a substance that merely occupies space. Relatedly, the word “matter” comes from the Latin materia, which—distinct from form—also means “tree wood” as raw building material.35 By the Renaissance, neo-Aristotelian philosophy endorsed such hylomorphism as matter-form theory, and hylomorphism “remained the primary discursive framework for the production of knowledge concerning natural bodies” throughout the seventeenth century.36 Aristotle’s deliberate choice of terminology that characterizes matter as mutable is echoed in modern schools of thought, although—perhaps ironically—OOO shies away from employing the term “matter.”37 According to recent theoretical approaches, “objects” are understood to be stable units, not reducible upward or downward, while “things” are performative conglomerations.38 While acknowledging the disjuncture between the way that material entities are primarily believed to function in ANT (as “things”) versus in OOO (as “objects”), we also posit that the matter we study in this volume slides between—or holds in tension—the categories of “things” and “objects” as ANT and OOO define them. We endorse a double-pronged approach to material entities in which we consider how matter can function in various kinds of networks (organized by and around other objects, but also cultural, global, economical, social, ambulatory, and pneumatic), while, at the same time, we are interested in these objects for their “thing-ness,” for their qualities that we are able to apprehend in sensory ways that are, nonetheless, confined to our limited human perception.39 Regarding the limitations of English-language terminology, Paula Findlen observes, “We can only sympathize with the

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editor of the Oxford English Dictionary who, after offering myriad useful statements about this slippery word, finally threw up his hands and declared that thing was, more often than not, ‘a vague definition for an object which it is difficult to denominate more exactly.’”40 From hyle to matter to object to thing, there is always something or some quality manifest in material that evades human grasp. In using hyle to designate matter, Aristotle conceives of matter as intrinsically related to process or transformation, especially relationally: for example, food is ingested and transformed, even as some aspect of the food matter persists in the consumer. On this point, Marx largely agrees with Aristotle. According to Marx, matter “should be conceived of less as a physical actuality than as a sensuous, workable potentiality that implies pasts, presents, and futures,” much like Aristotelian prime matter.41 Many studies of materiality collapse any distinction between the material and physical, or they conceptualize matter as “only in the form of the object” and thus ignore “the dynamic dimension of praxis.”42 In De anima, Aristotle again describes form as actuality and matter as potentiality—this time, as the word dynameos, from which this collection draws the word “dynamic.” The correlative Latin word is potentia, from which the English word “potential” derives; even modern quantum theory posits that matter is potentiality.43 According to this Aristotelian understanding, a thing or object includes a capacity to become something other than it is in any given current state.44 Jonathan Gil Harris amplifies this point in terms of temporality: “For Aristotle as much as for Marx, matter is both past material that has been reworked as well as present, reworkable potential that presumes a future. Materiality thus articulates temporal difference”—the very term hyle implies a future form manifesting in matter itself. As Harris argues, matter can be both polychronic— collating different moments, like Michel Serres’s metaphor of pleats in his handkerchief—and multitemporal—prompting a variety of “different understandings and experiences of temporality.”45 For the purposes of this volume, itself influenced by these passages from Harris’s Untimely Matter, the dynamic quality of matter—its capacity to become form, to re-form, to trans-form—is central to our approach. Although the readings offered here accrue around particular objects, they investigate the dynameos of matter by tracing its manifestations in particular forms: cosmetics become part of bodies to which they are applied; combs are inscribed with words and interact with human hair; Catholic vestments are unpicked

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and remade into new liturgical textiles; bird feathers are incorporated into garments and artwork on both sides of the Atlantic; needlework patterns are copied, circulated, and re-copied in various media; Prince Rupert’s drops created by glassworkers explode; musical shows travel and are re-performed; a whale becomes animated by the power of a magical bracelet; and books are drowned. In all of these instances, we recognize the potentiality matter itself possesses and that it also activates in other matter. As suggested by the animation of the lute described in the Burwell Lute Tutor, matter’s potentiality could be extrapolated to suggest that matter possesses vitality. Known as “hylozoism,” a term in which hyle is combined with zoe, meaning “life,” this philosophical view that all matter is, in some sense, alive dates back to classical antiquity.46 Several Greek philosophers, including Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus, argued that life exists in all material objects, and Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza advance forms of hylozoism in their works that postdate Bacon’s. Spinoza argues, “It is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing; it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something of itself in us,” which relocates the agency in such interactions from the human to the object.47 So, too, does Margaret Cavendish in her theory of vital materialism; she argues specifically that degrees of motion animate and activate all forms of matter, and she concludes that objects have “lively” qualities because they possess motion. Hylozoic theories were widespread in the Renaissance; Leah Marcus observes that “early modern vitalism was pervasive and took many cultural forms,” including “the ‘entelechy’ of Aristotle and vital spirits of Galen, the ‘Archeus’ or vital force of Paracelsus, the world soul of Hermetic philosophy.”48 Vital materiality is also familiar in recent materialist parlance; for example, in her work Bennett draws inspiration from Spinoza, as well as from Deleuze and Guattari, who also posit “material vitalism.”49 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost state that vitality is central to new materialism, observing that “materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.”50 And, despite the theoretical lineage outlined in this passage, it is crucial to acknowledge that vital materialism has long been advanced by Indigenous peoples living in what we now call the Occidental hemisphere, as Edward McLean Test reminds us in his contribution to this volume; not simply the product of a white (predominantly male) European intellectual

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pedigree, vital materiality instead boasts a rich multitemporal and transcultural heritage of ideas, and this collection posits that various cultural contributions to materialist philosophies should be acknowledged in current scholarship, even as our objects of study claimed the English Renaissance as their home. Though probably unaware that the material theories he writes about had been developed much earlier by Indigenous peoples across the Atlantic, Bacon repeatedly returns to the material qualities of force, vitality, and relationality throughout his writings. In his Wisdome of the Ancients (printed multiple times throughout and beyond the seventeenth century, both as a stand-alone text and appended to The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Sir Francis Bacon), Bacon uses classical myths to explain various aspects of life. Chapter 13, “Protevs, or Matter,” is particularly relevant to the concept of dynamic, transformative matter. The shape-shifting Proteus is described by Bacon as changing “into all manner of forms and wonders of nature, sometimes into a fire, sometimes into water, sometimes into the shape of beastes and the like, till at length hee were restored to his owne forme againe.” Additionally, Proteus possesses another quality that “hath an excellent agreement with the nature of Matter”: his understanding of “things to come; but euen things past aswell as present,” which again emphasizes matter’s multitemporal properties.51 In his explanation of the significance of this “Fable” to “the properties of Matter,” Bacon writes that the person of Protevs, the first Matter (which next to God is the auncientest thing) may bee represented: for Matter dwelles in the concauity of heauen as in a Caue. He is Neptunes bond-man, because the operations and dispensations of Matter are chiefly exercised in liquid bodies. His flocke or hearde seems to be nothing but the ordinarie Species of sensible creatures, plants, and mettals in which Matter seems to diff use and as it were spend it selfe, so that after the forming and perfecting of these kindes, (hauing ended as it were her taske) shee seems to sleepe and take her rest, not attempting the composition of any more Species. . . . [Matter] doth change and turne her selfe into diuers strange forms and shapes of things, so that at length (by fetching a circuit, as it were) shee comes to a period, and (if the force continue) betakes herselfe to her former being.52

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Fluid and dynamic, Proteus best emblematizes Bacon’s conceptualization of matter. Of Bacon’s theory—what Gail Kern Paster calls his “desiring” and “animated universe”—James Bono observes that Bacon’s “natural forms” are able to “metamorphose into other shapes” in ways that are “inherently active, transformative, plastic.”53 Bennett’s theory of matter also inhabits this Baconian universe; she writes that “‘materiality’ is a flow, an indivisible continuum of becomings whose protean elements are not only exquisitely imbricated in a flowing environment but also are that very flow.”54 Again, what is theoretically “new” in new materialist theories, Actor-Network Theory, and object-oriented ontology has multiple resonances with “old,” even ancient, theories. Matter is dynamic, protean, animate, vital, capable of transforming itself, and adept at inciting transformations in others. This volume focuses on three specific and interrelated postulates about matter: (1) matter— both human and nonhuman bodies—is vital, possessing anima or spirit; (2) matter is dynamic rather than an inert or ossified substance imagined as distinct from a human subject, and the related claim that matter is transformative, able to undergo transformations itself and able to inspire transformations in others; and (3) matter has the ability to form networks that can prompt such transformations, which is to say that human agency is not the only or necessarily primary impetus for transformations; rather, the vitality of matter geohumorally links human and nonhuman together through the same animation that forms networks and incites change.55 Sensory experience is the prime conduit for exchanges and transformations.

Sensing Objects, Touching the Past: Multisensory Dimensions of Matter Whereas subjects easily behave like matters of fact, material objects never do. —Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social

A portion of a white marble pillar from the ruins of Troy found its way to London in about the year 1600 via a man named Thomas Dallam. Dallam himself was journeying to deliver an important object: an organ he

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had constructed that Queen Elizabeth urgently wanted presented to Sultan Mehmed III in order to foster commercial and diplomatic alliances between England and the Ottoman Empire.56 On his way to Turkey, Dallam and his traveling companions stopped for a sightseeing adventure at “Cape Janissary,” on the Asiatic side of the entrance to the Dardanelles, the principal site of the Trojan War. Dallam records in his journal, “Thare we saw more at Large the rewins of the wales & housis in Troye, and from thence I broughte a peece of a whyte marble piller, the which I broke with my owne hands havinge a good hamer, . . . & I broughte this peece of marble to London.”57 On the previous day, Dallam “& som more of our company wente a shore, & sawe som monimentes in Troy, peecis of wales, sutchins & marble pillares,” so Dallam seems to have come prepared for this second excursion, bringing along his hammer—undoubtedly the same tool he used to fashion and repair organ pipes in Constantinople— to assist him in detaching a piece of the white marble pillar from Trojan remains and removing it with his “owne hands.”58 Dallam’s souvenir, and the relationship with it recounted in his diary, reveals several important details about early modern interactions with objects. Chipping off a chunk of marble from ancient ruins is similar to the way that holy relics were broken apart and distributed: John Mandeville writes that he received a thorn from the Crown of Thorns during his travels, and John Calvin famously observed in his Traité des reliques of 1543 that there were enough pieces of the cross held in religious houses across the known world that “yf a man woulde gather together all that hath bene founde of thys crosse, there would be inough to fraighte a great ship,” as the 1561 English translation concludes.59 Dallam’s pilfering of Trojan ruins was not peculiar to him alone but was fairly routine among English and other European travelers, reaching its zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with figures like Hester Stanhope (who destroyed her find of a Holy Land statue) and Thomas Bruce (who brought the Elgin Marbles to England).60 During the Renaissance, these types of objects were considered ideal for procurement and exhibition in a Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, “a display room, popular amongst Europeans of means in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in which were crammed marvelous objects from around the globe,” including religious relics and artifacts from classical antiquity.61 These collections were being amassed at around the same time

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Dallam was writing his account, although the practice of keeping sacred relics and treasuries of objects began centuries earlier.62 In owning such material treasures—for the sake of spirituality, novelty, or exoticism— one endowed oneself with prestige, through “ownership” of, proximity to, and relationship with these objects. Although evidence for the “afterlife” of Dallam’s piece of the Trojan ruins is elusive, this marble souvenir may have made its way into a cabinet of curiosities after arriving in London. Some scholars have observed that the “new new materialism” approach is comparable to curating a Wunderkammer of objects. This mode is problematic because of its predominantly synchronic focus, which examines objects chiefly because of their strangeness instead of considering the multitemporal possibilities inherent in an object’s “life history” beyond a singular temporal event. Yet a deeper investigation of the Wunderkammer—and particularly how humans engaged with its contents—might recuperate Wunderkammern and curiosity cabinets for the ways that they and early museums actually encouraged object-oriented ontologies, networks, and relationality rather than an ossified suspension of objects in space and time. While the modern museum distances the museumgoer from objects through glass partitions (echoing a tendency toward marginalization in materialist scholarship), curiosity cabinets and early museums invited sensory and material contact with the objects in their collections.63 Objects on display were meant to be held, touched, smelled, and investigated closely. Objects are sensory-rich things; in interactions with humans, objects impact bodies through humans’ sensory experiences—especially those proximal senses of sound, smell, taste, and touch that leave traces of objects on and within bodies. One of the first university museums in England was the Ashmolean Museum, the collections of which were built upon the curiosity cabinets belonging to the Elder and Younger John Tradescants acquired by Elias Ashmole.64 Ashmolean visitors’ accounts dating from the seventeenth century explicitly describe taking “a Cane . . . in your hands” to gauge its weight, touching the fur of taxidermic animals to compare their textures, and even touching paintings and sculptures to convince oneself that the eye was seeing a work of art rather than living beings. This tactile intimacy imparted embodied knowledge about these items; in the Renaissance, tactility was actually privileged as the sense that afforded the most accurate information. Touching was considered crucial

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to scientific study as well: Robert Hooke prescribed “manual handling” as “the most serious and diligent study of the most able and proficient in natural philosophy.”65 Concerning a sensory-laden approach, relevant today as much as in 1600, Graham Harman states, “there is no reason to assume that the intellect can make reality directly present in a way that the senses cannot.”66 Harman’s statement reworks—transforms—empiricist philosophy’s motto: Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu (Nothing exists in the mind that has not been first in the senses).67 As Constance Classen argues, “part of the attraction of museums and of the cabinets of curiosities which preceded them, in fact, seemed to be their ability to offer visitors an intimate physical encounter with rare and curious objects. In certain cases the curious character of a museum piece may have resided in a quality imperceptible to the eye.”68 Though largely foreign to our modern museum experience (although some exhibits do encourage touching specific designated objects), nonvisual senses allow intimate interactions with materials that sight alone does not. Although the sense of touch seems to have been primarily engaged in tours of curiosity cabinets and early museums, objects on display interacted with the olfactory, gustatory, and auditory senses as well. Live botanical specimens offered multiple olfactory sensations, but so too did objects from across the globe—and, thus, from different olfactory environments. In these exchanges, the scent of the object permeated the olfactor’s body, hair, and clothing at the same time that the olfactor left her/ his/their scent—residue from perfumed gloves, tobacco-laced fingers— on the item, slightly altering its aroma for the next olfacting visitor.69 One could—and records indicate that certain visitors elected to—eat some of the examples in the botanical gardens, plucking leaves and consuming them as Celia Fiennes did, reporting that she tasted a wormwood sage leaf from Oxford’s Physic Garden.70 Certain substances from foreign lands were offered to museumgoers for tasting; others, like mummy or animal parts, could have been consumed for medicinal purposes, depleting the museums’ stores in the process.71 Musical instruments were not, as Shakespeare’s Timon describes them, “hung up in cases that keep[] their sounds to themselves” (1.2.94–95) or silent, static objects sitting untouched as they are in most museums today; rather, they were played upon by museumgoers and curators so that their interesting timbres could be heard and the vibrations of another culture or time period felt through the sound waves

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collectively produced. Rather than suspending objects in synchronic time, Wunderkammern and early museums encouraged multisensory contact with their materials. In these sensory interactions, not only is particular information accessed through different sensory data, but also the object leaves its traces (strands of fur, particles of minerals, pigments, dust) on the human handling the object just as much as the human leaves its traces (strands of hair, fingerprints, impressions, oil, dirt, skin particles, microbes) on the object. Both are transformed in the process of sensory exchange. Moreover, it is not simply the subject’s desire that prompts these encounters; rather, the object creates the impetus for contact because it attracts humans through what Bennett terms its “vibrant” qualities. Ian Bogost registers a similar sentiment: “Wonder is a way objects orient.”72 Obviously, and as made abundantly evident by Dallam’s absconding with a piece of Trojan ruins in his luggage, human tactile interactions involve some destruction; by the eighteenth century, wear and tear on museum holdings became a concern, as did theft. Even so, the practice of handling Ashmolean objects continued well into the nineteenth century because “tactile access was considered of sufficient importance that it outweighed the risks to the integrity to the collection.”73 Though suffering damage and decay, collections have outlived their original curators by centuries, and many will likely endure far beyond our own lifetimes.74 Furthermore, the process of sensory exchange is not one-sided, experienced only by a sovereign human subject. The senses provide a conduit for mediation between human and object, as well as for an object’s encounters with other objects. As suggested above, each sensory interaction between a human body (itself an object) and another object involves exchange and incites transformation as the object connects to bodies and other objects in the network of the cabinet-room or museum. Classen points out that the material culture approach “can fruitfully be extended to include the sensory life of things, or the ways in which objects are experienced and imbued with meaning through diverse sensory practices.”75 The “sensory life of things” has certainly garnered recent critical attention: Harman concurs that humans and animals are not the only beings who employ or rely upon sensory modes of contact; rather, all objects encounter one another through sensual exchange. As Bogost characterizes it, “objects float in a sensual ether,” interacting across their surfaces

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through their “sensual qualities.”76 In his Five Senses, Michel Serres advances a theory of “mingled bodies,” which emphasizes mixing and adulterating through sensation—sensation that is not relegated to human experience alone. And Emily E.  F. Philbrick explains that sensuality itself is “transforming contact, whether or not it is readily registered and interpreted through normative modes of human sensory encounter.”77 Although humans apprehend the world through multiple sensory experiences, and early moderns recognized the importance of the senses in interactive exchanges—arguably through a more developed relationship with a wider spectrum of sensory experience than modern people typically do—objects also have sensory dimensions and capacities, whether or not humans acknowledge them. Even as humans and objects share sensory sensations, objects are still “withdrawn from total human access,” both palpable to human experience and also more than simply the sum of their qualities that humans can ascertain.78 That objects remain at least partially inaccessible to human perception has prompted a great deal of critical reflection in OOO studies. For example, Bogost argues that “if we take seriously the idea that all objects recede interminably into themselves, then human perception becomes just one among many ways that objects might relate”; furthermore, “objects exceed what we know or ever can know about them.”79 Harman provides a useful nautical image for this phenomenon: “Though the hull is submerged, it remains vital for the seaworthiness of the ship. By analogy, the real qualities of the sensual object can only be inferred indirectly rather than witnessed.”80 Nevertheless, the human impulse is to interpret matter through sensory experience, limited as that may be: “We just can’t know what an object is until we’ve handled it, tasted it, shot it around a particle accelerator, written a poem about it. Neither can a photon know what an object is until it [has] adjusted it in some sense. Yet even then, we do not have the object: we have our knowledge of its feel, its voltage, its flavor.”81 Although we cannot transcend what Timothy Morton calls “The Rift” between the “essence and appearance” of objects, we can utilize what sensory information we do have at our disposal to contemplate objects’ sensual qualities, proclivities, and desires.82 Once again, recent theoretical approaches postulating that objects possess a sensory dimension as well as an elusive inner “essence” are not entirely novel in their conclusions: according to Renaissance object

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theories expanding on classical precedents, objects are as much active in sensory exchanges as are human bodies. And, once again, Aristotle provides a foundation upon which many later theories were built. Aristotle contends that the senses cannot lie and are thus reliable in a way that the mind, with its powers of creativity and invention, is not; he states that humans comprehend an object by receiving its form through sensory organs.83 In the sixteenth century, the Italian philosopher and scientist Bernardino Telesio revised Aristotle’s theory of the senses outlined in De  anima and argued that accurate knowledge comes from sensory data and analogical thought.84 Although he critiques Telesio’s theories in his De Principiis atque Originibus, Francis Bacon—often revered as the founder of the scientific method—actually employed Telesio’s theories. In Novum Organum, Bacon posits that his “new” method relies on sensory perception as the method of “discovering truth.” In addition to his sensory influence on the study of phenomena, particularly his argument that the senses provide a key starting point for investigation and corroborating data during experimentation, Bacon asserts that the spirits residing in all matter are sensate as well: “The spirits are seen as active agents of phenomena; they are endowed with ‘appetition’ and ‘perception.’”85 Margaret Cavendish, another materialist philosopher whose theories anticipate major tenets of both ANT and OOO, arrives at the same conclusion that matter is “sensible.” In “Condemning Treatise of Atomes,” she argues that nature is composed of “the substance of infinite matter” and that the “forms” described by Aristotle and his followers are, in fact, matter-in-motion; she also argues for panpsychism (a cousin of hylozoism), the belief that life permeates all things in the natural world, even what humans might consider inanimate, non-sentient objects.86 She concludes that all matter is sensate, arguing, “There can be no regular motion without knowledge, sense, and reason.”87 And in Philosophical Fancies (1653) and Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), Cavendish describes how sensory experience is a phenomenon shared by human and object: rational spirits flow between the body of the perceiver and intermix with the rational spirits of the object. Furthermore, Cavendish theorizes that— similar to the assemblage, network, or mesh—“matter moves itself according to its own nature and initiates changes in its own motion via natural sympathy” with other objects.88

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Outside philosophical writings, did other pre- or early moderns imagine objects as having sensory experiences, agency, animus, even anthropomorphized feelings? The author(s) of The Dream of the Rood certainly did. Dating to at least the tenth century, when it was preserved in its fullest form in the Vercelli Book, The Dream of the Rood possesses a material history that is almost as fascinating as the poem itself. Lines from the poem were inscribed on two cruciforms: the Brussels Cross and the Ruthwell Cross. The Anglo-Saxon reliquary known as the Brussels Cross dates from the eleventh century and is engraved with a Roman-letter hierograph. Reputed to hold the largest fragments of the True Cross, the Brussels Cross has been housed at the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula since the mid-seventeenth century. Standing 18 feet high (the longest side of the Brussels Cross measures 18.3 inches), the Ruthwell Cross dates to the eighth century and is inscribed with runes. Although scholars debate whether the runes were carved during the eighth century, the etchings were transcribed around the year 1600 by Reginald Bainbrigg of Appleby before the cross was bludgeoned by Presbyterian Reformers in 1642 (the smashed pieces were later incorporated into a nineteenth-century restoration of the cross).89 Like splinters from the True Cross, the poem’s dispersed fragmentary lines migrated from their Anglo-Saxon originary points to locations outside England, as they were variously orally transmitted, copied, carved, engraved, compiled with other poems, transported, translated, transcribed, demolished, and reconstructed. The Dream of the Rood as it appears in the Vercelli Book anthropomorphizes the wooden cross upon which Christ was crucified. Perhaps it should come as no surprise given Aristotle’s terminology for matter, hyle—meaning wood used for building—that a piece of wood (albeit a rather extraordinary piece of wood) is represented as speaking, possessing a spirit, and sentient. In the dream-vision, the human speaker is visited by a glorious, jewel-encrusted tree, yet quickly notices that “beneath that gold it had begun / Bleeding on the right side.”90 The speaker then relates, “I could hear it call out to me, / The best of all wood began speaking words” (26–27). For almost the remainder of the poem, the narrative voice is no longer a human interlocutor but is instead the wood itself; at the same time, the wood’s own denomination in Anglo-Saxon shifts from “tree” to “rood” as the wood recalls its shame, pain, and grief at the

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role it was made to play in the Crucifi xion. The Rood is remarkably sensate, recounting, “I felt the surface / Of the earth trembling” (36–37); “I trembled when the man embraced me” (42); “They drove dark nails into me” (46); “I was moistened all over with blood / Shed from the man’s side after he had sent up his spirit” (48–49); “I saw the God of hosts / Direly stretched out” (51–52); “I was badly burdened with grief” and “pierced everywhere with arrows” (59, 62). But the Rood is not simply a passive participant. Instead, because of its redemptive role for humankind, the Rood becomes a healer: “On me the son of God / Suffered a time; therefore I now tower / In glory under heaven and I may heal / Any one of those in awe of me” (83–86). Furthermore, the Rood’s speech culminates by stating that the Rood itself provides access to eternal life: “On this earth each soul that longs / To exist with its savior forevermore / Must seek His kingdom through that cross” (119–21). The Rood’s impassioned, embodied response as a participant in the Crucifi xion underscores the fact that a material object played a crucial role in the most important event in Christian history. This object is imagined as verbal, rational, and passionately moved.91 Both the Brussels Cross and the Ruthwell Cross bear lines from the poem in which the Rood expresses agency and speaks from the first-person perspective: translated into modern English, these lines include “Rood is my name,” inscribed on the Brussels Cross, and “I beheld all that,” on the Ruthwell Cross. The Rood’s animation and perceptive abilities prompt an important question about anthropomorphism. Many modern theorists have cautioned against anthropocentric thinking, especially as this approach overlays human modes onto objects in a colonizing fashion that can erase the uniqueness of object-oriented experience by filling this void in human knowledge precisely with a form of human knowledge. However, the benefits of anthropomorphism may outweigh the costs, especially as “a touch of anthropomorphism,” Bennett argues, “can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations.  .  .  . Anthropomorphism can reveal isomorphisms.”92 In other words, the sensibility of anthropomorphism can lead to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “becomings”—these are not wholesale transformations into radically different forms but are, instead, affi nities with others that create transformations in perception, movements

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in the same direction. As Bennett concludes, “Maybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing . . . because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism.”93 It does so precisely through human acts of becoming-other (i.e., becoming-marble, becoming-lute, becoming-Rood). While theories of objects and sensory studies both describe the importance of close proximity, ironically, for many scholars whose work encompasses earlier time periods, our relationships with our research materials tend to be distanced and dissociated. We visit museums, collections, or structures (many that are reconstructions) to study the past. We read early texts (mostly) through modern editions or through online databases like Early English Books Online (EEBO), experiencing the printed media via a screen that allows us to manipulate the scale of the text rather than modifying our bodily orientations in relation to the object of our inquiries. We use screens and connectivities to view many objects that belong to what has come to be called premodern culture—though, again, we interact with these items almost exclusively through the visual medium. And, in the instances that we are able to be in the same physical space as a “premodern” object, it is almost always in a way that distances the observer from the object: artifacts remain partitioned behind glass, suspended in space and time so that they may be safely preserved. Yet many readers of this book will have experienced touching the past at research libraries, which can be key sites for becomings, sensory exchanges, and transformations prompted by object-human assemblages. These institutions, far more than modern museums, provide scholars one of the closest iterations of the intimate multitemporal and multisensory experiences that characterized visits to curiosity cabinets and early museums. Although I might be charged with idealism or naïveté, romanticized notions, or worse—“fetishism”—for saying so, in these instances something transformative happens when a reader encounters objects from the past in such close proximity. No longer merely a visual interaction or one entirely mediated by technology, in this exchange the reader breathes in molecules from the book’s surfaces, some of which are hundreds of years old; she touches the pages to turn them and, in doing so, touches the past. Moreover, in touching the past, she leaves a trace of her dynamic, genetic matter on the pages, stamping her time in the archive, signing it along with perhaps a few, perhaps thousands of others through time and space

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who have interacted with that textuality and materiality.94 The temporality of the interaction between book and human becomes crumpled, both polychronic and multitemporal, and will continue to be so as long as scholars continue to research in libraries in this manner.95 In the assemblage formed between book and human, each alters the other: the knowledge that the scholar gains informs and transforms her work as much as the book’s particles—dust, scent molecules, ink—adhere to her body. The object in this case is not a simulacrum, a scan, a pale reflection—it is dynamic matter, transforming its readers through the material on its pages at the same time it is being transformed through interactions with cadres of readers that this object has attracted, many of whom the object has outlived. Through the multisensory approach to their objects of study—and the multitemporal networks these objects create and through which they circulate—the essays in this collection engage with multiple sensory qualities of objects in ways that intentionally echo interactions that took place in curiosity cabinets and early museum culture. These vibrant objects leave sensory traces that the authors have followed, and these examples of dynamic matter are impacted as much as they impact humans and other matter. Rather than a modern museum or, as Bruster describes it, a “J. Crew catalogue” of “tchotchke criticism,” the following chapters argue for the multisensory, multitemporal exchange of objects between other matter and other objects in order to study how objects transform the networks by which they are produced, in which they exist, and that the objects themselves assemble.96

Dynamic Matter in Action The dynamic and transformative qualities of matter are explored in the following pages through a variety of material approaches and encompass intersemiotic literary, musical, performance, archival, and historical study. While each chapter is oriented around a particular object (or several objects) and its (or their) sensual qualities, the chapters also trace the dynamic properties of objects as they travel through different geographies, continents, human cultural/racial/religious/ethnic groups, and time periods—undergoing transformations and transforming others in the process. In fact, practically all of the objects discussed in this volume

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traverse cultural and continental divides, and many of these objects have survived to the present day, outliving their Renaissance human counterparts. In taking seriously the idea that objects go on journeys, become repurposed, and have what Appadurai calls “careers” and “life histories,” these chapters demonstrate the theoretical vitality of examining specific objects as relational—as actors participating in various networks and creating new webs of association as they move through time and space. The chapters that form the first section, “Objects Within / Without the Body,” bring readers into close contact with cosmetics, combs, and clerical vestments—objects whose dynamic properties include both the ability to alter others and to be altered themselves as they are incorporated onto the skin, detangle strands of hair, and signal clerical status. The chapters in this section focus specifically on women’s artistry in cosmetic application, arrangement of hair, and sewing of textiles. As these objects traveled among a variety of bodies, they not only imparted elements of their materiality to the wearer, but they also bore important material traces and memorial significations derived from intimate relationships to the human bodies with which they formed assemblages. Rather than privileging the human by considering these objects as merely accoutrements of or accessories to the human body, this section demonstrates not only how objects form part of a body’s assemblage—transforming and working upon human bodies with which they are in close proximity— but also how objects engage human bodies as one element among many in the networks these objects form and transform. Josie Schoel’s chapter, “‘Farre Fetched and Deare Bought’: The Global Cosmetic Exchange Between Elizabeth I, Melike Safiye Sultan, and the Kira Esperanza Malchi,” considers the transcontinental circulation of letters and cosmetics between Elizabeth I and Melike Safiye, Valide Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. By examining the women’s correspondence, Schoel exposes the ways that whiteness is constructed racially and materially through the use of—and desire for—cosmetic intervention to change the appearance of the wearer, particularly through fabricating light skin. Like other luxury items (porcelain, carpets) that originated in the East, were commercially produced in the West, and then traded back to the East, the lightening cosmetics that Safiye requested from Elizabeth were actually composed of substances imported from Eastern spaces close to Safiye’s home. Consequently, the exchange of cosmetic materials between the

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two women constitutes a cultural and corporeal hybridity—ironically— through the pursuit of whiter skin. Furthermore, Schoel interrogates the “object-subject border that’s so close to us it dissolves” as cosmetic material becomes “in-corporated” with human bodies.97 Book history, cultural poetics, critical race theory, and materialist theory come together in this chapter, which concludes with a discussion of Elizabeth’s body represented as porous in these intimate letters—a revisionist account of a light-skinned queen who embraced the motto “Semper Eadem” and stylized herself as intransigent. Erika Mary Boeckeler’s chapter, “Comb Poems,” similarly considers the materiality of objects contiguous with human bodies: hair combs inscribed with poetry. Moving from a giver to a loved one, such posy gifts offered a script that directed the recipient’s physical and emotional interactions with the comb. Entangled in webs of tresses and in networks of humans who created, gifted, used, wore, and read their inscriptions, combs demand human interaction with their intriguing material representations, requiring the wearer and/or reader to turn or flip it in order to read the entire inscription, inviting engagement with both comb and its conceit. Boeckeler teases out the tangled relationship between combs and figured poetry, like the combshaped poem appearing in William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals (1613), in order to reflect on readers’ haptic and material exchanges with combs and printed books. Contrary to the idea that an object’s identity consists of a static, seemingly objective set of properties, “Comb Poems” reveals how the combs “speak” to others who/that behold them. Boeckeler demonstrates how this easily anthropomorphized object—outfitted with teeth, sometimes worn near the ear, intimately inscribed—actually undermines anthropocentrism by becoming the driver in human-thing interactions. This section concludes with Naomi Howell’s “Variable Vestments and Clothing Conversions: Piecing Out the Past in Tudor Exeter.” Howell, like Boeckeler, is interested in embodied materialities and meanings that inhere in worn objects. Presenting a historicist treatment of the uncanny afterlives of Catholic vestments in post-Reformation Exeter, Howell traces the textile transformations of clerical robes from sacred garments worn by priestly bodies, to a “costume” appareling the body of a vicar at his hanging, to funeral palls. As late medieval “mortuary spectacles” found theatrical representation and as cloths worn by priests turned into performative garb worn by working-class actors, these signifying objects inspired

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audiences just as they had once led the faithful. Howell notes, however, that textiles served other communal functions, gathering not only spectators but also makers (embroiderers, sewers) into community. Offending images—like that of Christ—were carefully unpicked from Catholic vestments, though much of the embroidery remained in its original, preReformation splendor. Careful snipping, stitching, and patching—carried out predominantly, if not exclusively, by women—produced a new object, yet traces of “popish” images still remained visually and haptically tangible on the cloth. The broken and unbroken threads of these textiles provide material evidence that Catholic elements were by no means obliterated in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Moving from proximal intimacies to wider spheres of circulation, the second section, “Networking Objects,” highlights the assemblages formed by feathers, needlework patterns, and glass curiosities known as Prince Rupert’s drops. While certainly not neglecting the materiality of individual objects, these chapters devote particular attention to the larger webs of replication, admiration, imitation, and fascination that these objects create. While all objects arguably have the capacity to form networks, those featured in this section exemplify how human bodies and other objects are drawn to particular objects; these networked connections are perceptible through various forms of material evidence—manuscript and print accounts, artwork, woodblock printing, and needlework—created by humans but which outlive their human manufacturers. The materiality of these objects, in fact, relates metaphorically to their sensorial attraction of others to them: the interlocking barbs and barbules of a feather, the crosshatched grid of needlework patterns, and the unique molecular chains that form the glass drops are all physical manifestations of the network, assemblage, or web. As these chapters demonstrate, the networks created and transformed by bird feathers, handcraft patterns, and glass curiosities reveal becomings, as these objects generate transformations in other matter that assembles around them. In “Bird-People, Utopias, Arte Plumaria: The Influence of Native American Feathers on Renaissance Literature and Culture,” Edward McLean Test offers a fresh consideration of a semiotically overdetermined and yet inconsistently marked object: the feather. As Test points out, desirable and imported “New World” feathers had a variegated life in early modern Europe, where they adorned hats, dresses, military helmets, and tourney

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and procession horses; were collected in curiosity cabinets; were employed in theatrical productions; decorated aristocratic walls; and festooned religious vestments. By focusing on the feathers’ material agency, Indigenous origins, and religious associations, Test charts an alternative cultural history through trans-Atlantic feather networks. The New World feather provoked new associations and assemblages in European literature and art, especially as feathers were regarded as objects of religious significance for cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. While retaining their associations with divinity, albeit reconstituted in Europe, New World feathers were employed in Christian-themed feather paintings, in utopic texts penned by Thomas More, and in performances of Ben Jonson’s masques. TransAtlantic networks fashioned by “New World” feathers transformed the literary, religious, and cultural environments of the “Old World.” Networks formed by movement, reinterpretation, and transformation are central to Anna Riehl Bertolet’s “Needlework Patterns on the Move: Traveling Toward (Re)incarnation.” Bertolet’s chapter, like Test’s, features avian objects that forge networks spanning multiple geographic locations; both also investigate the transformations that objects create and undergo through human creative acts. Bertolet traces the webs woven across Europe by the replication of needlework patterns on cloth and in print. A printed book of patterns functions like a broadly dispersed pattern—itself an abstract invention or record based on an existing material object—fostering the reproductive process in which instantiations of the design are created as new material objects. Bertolet examines patterns featuring birds; as symbols of mobility and eternality, birds—even those rendered in thread—are themselves emblematic of the life histories of things. In addition to showing how the bird-patterns migrated across continents and centuries, Bertolet also delineates the complex ontologies of creation among different forms of media. The first printed embroidery pattern books appeared in Germany in the 1520s, but, given the nebulous concept of copyright, versions soon spread to Italy, France, and England. By their nature, pattern books are tied to material, visual, and haptic culture: though their content is predominantly visual, the books invite physical manipulation through touch as the patterns are replicated in various forms and in various nodes across Europe. As noted above, sensory information was essential to artistic appreciation, as well as to early scientific experimentation. It is to the latter that Abbie Weinberg turns in “‘Whose Least Part Crackt, the Whole Does Fly’:

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The Explosive Case of Prince Rupert’s Drops.” Echoing Latour in arguing for the importance of objects to the study of science, and taking as her case study Prince Rupert’s drops—tadpole-shaped glass curiosities formed by dropping molten glass into cool water—Weinberg charts the various elaborate networks of sustained human attention formed by the enigmatic drops.98 Their appellation comes from Prince Rupert of Rhine because Rupert sent examples of these drops to his cousin Charles II, who then passed them along to the Royal Society. Margaret Cavendish mentions the drops in her writing—Constantijn Huygens reportedly sent some to her—as do Samuel Butler in Hudibras and Robert Hooke in Micrographia; Weinberg concludes that Hooke’s experiments with them may even have assisted him in developing Hooke’s Law. Moreover, the fact that only recently have the drops’ unusual physical properties been deciphered and explained—the head of the drop is so strong as to be nearly impervious to crushing, even with blows from a hammer; however, if the tail is “crackt” or snapped, the entire drop explodes—is a potent reminder that objects have qualities inaccessible to human perception, though we may gain greater understanding the more we interact with such objects. “Staging Properties,” the final section of the collection, considers the role objects play in early modern performance. Inspired by the terminology inherent in the very name Actor-Network Theory, this section investigates objects as “actors” in at least two senses of that multivalent word: as theatrical stage performers and also, according to its specialized use in ANT, as human or nonhuman generators of action. This section argues that stage properties, known also as “props,” are as much actors as human performers are, and that specific objects—a multimodal traveling show box, a talking whale animated by a magical bracelet, and a book of magic spells—may actually eclipse human performers in the instances under consideration here. These chapters focus particularly on the dynamic and performative aspects of objects—their movements, their dramatic appearance as both material form and signifier in the context of their dramatic art, and their performative actions that are demonstrative of material agency. As with gifted human thespians, these captivating objects delight and surprise audiences with their expert performative abilities. An ambulatory diorama and a musical tune are the star performers in Sarah F. Williams’s “Traveling Music and Theatrics: Jemmy LaRoche’s ‘Raree Show.’” Popular in England during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and presented at markets or fairs, “rare shows” were

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multimedia performances: individuals beheld a miniature scene housed in a portable box while a showman provided musical accompaniment. Many early purveyors of these traveling shows were Savoyards—hence the “raree show” inflection, intended to approximate French pronunciation. Jemmy LaRoche, a professional singer-actor on London’s “legitimate” stage, became renowned for his song “Raree Show,” from Peter Motteux’s Europe’s Revels for the Peace of Ryswick (1698), with music by John Eccles. References to LaRoche’s song “traveled”—as did his portable stage—across genres, social classes, time, and performance venues, dissolving many of these same boundaries in the process. References to the tune “Raree Show” and its refrain appear around the turn of the eighteenth century in broadside ballads, mezzotint prints, and political tracts, creating a complex network of intertextual, social, and musical relationships. Tracing broader transcultural networks, as Schoel, Test, and Bertolet do in their chapters, Williams demonstrates how an international object foregrounds issues of cultural exchange, situating the raree show as a “disruptive object” in relation to subversive politics. As suggested by the traveling raree show, plays and props are often mobile, mutable things—a topic that Maria Shmygol explores in her chapter, “Protean Objects in William Percy’s The Aphrodysial or Sea-Feast.”99 Informed by an Ovidian understanding of textual transformation, Shmygol surveys extant manuscript copies of The Aphrodysial to explain how Percy’s play can itself be considered a transformed and transformative object; originally composed in 1602, the document contains authorial transcriptions from the 1640s that include deletions, insertions, and other peculiarities that present the text in an unfi xed state. The dynamic material properties required by The Aphrodysial—including a hypostatized offstage whale and a magical bracelet—function in a similarly protean way, making themselves known from either their position offstage (through the whale’s audible roaring) or by being figured first in verbal terms and then through artificial imitations (like the magic bracelet, which is revealed only at the end of the play). Percy’s dynamic props invite reflection on the (im)materiality of objects in transition from offstage to onstage, and on the nature and function of staged properties more broadly. Matter’s protean powers are revealed in the interconnected networks of the imaginative world of the play and of the performative world of the stage, as both are transformed by these dramatic objects.

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The collection concludes with Emily E. F. Philbrick’s meditation on The Tempest’s magical and quasi-anthropomorphized book in “‘I’ll Drown My Book’: Prospero’s Grimoire, Adrift.” Prospero’s famous book—like the whale of Percy’s Aphrodysial—may exist only as an offstage property, called into being through Prospero’s and Caliban’s vocalized references to it. Yet Philbrick’s object-oriented approach asks what a play might be like when a magical object takes center stage in a production, decentering other human and nonhuman actors. A magical grimoire may possess its own agency—an ability to move, to act upon others. Prospero promises to drown his book; the word “drown” signals death, the loss of sentience and agency. But for a book, drowning may instead be submersion in an element of drift, entrance into a sea of transformation. Prospero’s grimoire, too, can be interpreted in multiple ways: as an agentive, potentially dangerous, and/or magical object. Philbrick proposes a reading of the relationship among Prospero, book, and magic as a vibrant, dynamic assemblage that invites reflection upon the nature of material objects, especially those tied to the imaginative work of humans—both writing and magic-making. The drowned grimoire also reminds us that as objects journey beyond realms of human knowledge, they continue creative processes of transformation.

Notes Please note that the use of “consult” throughout this volume is a deliberate choice intended to foster inclusivity in a way that the conventional “see”—which cavalierly privileges the sense of sight and marginalizes those with different sensory abilities—does not. Please consult “Sensing Objects, Touching the Past: Multisensory Dimensions of Matter” in this introduction about the importance of various modes of sensory perception. 1. Though alchemy and transubstantiation seem to derive from disparate traditions, Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 57–70, demonstrates how they were mutually informing concepts in

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Renaissance thought. Transubstantiation was a frequent event: Thomas Cranmer recommended that Holy Communion be given every Sunday and holy day, and the 1559 Prayer Book required congregants to receive it at least three times a year. Albert Charles Hamilton, The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 102. 2. John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (London: Penguin, 1983), 99–100. Josie Schoel’s chapter in this collection also discusses the boundaries between object and subject that are blurred when cosmetic substances, like balms, are applied to the skin. 3. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

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(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 123; Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 4. Mandeville, Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 118. Consult also Jessica Roberts Frazier, “Reorienting the Diamond” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2014). 5. About the paper used for the First Folio, consult Carter Hailey, “The Best Crown Paper,” in Foliomania! Stories Behind Shakespeare’s Most Important Book, ed. Owen Williams (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2015), 8–14; Shakespeare’s Jack Cade laments “that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment.” 2 Henry VI in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 4.2.73–74. Citations to Shakespeare’s works are from this edition unless otherwise noted. 6. Delia Garratt and Tara Hamling, eds., Shakespeare and the Stuff of Life: Treasures from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 32–33. 7. Quotation from Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 112. Consult also Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 175–206; and Naomi Howell’s chapter in this collection. 8. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 9. 9. Consult Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 19–20, 153. 10. Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 16; Garratt and Hamling, Shakespeare and the Stuff of Life, 72–73. 11. Sidney’s Dorus admires the “seeming insensible loadstone [sic]” that draws another “hard-hearted thing unto it.”

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Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 165. 12. This example comes from Katherine Austen’s “Upon My Jewel,” a seventeenth-century prose work brilliantly discussed in Pamela S. Hammons, Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 1–4, esp. 2. Hammons notes that for Austen, “the jewel’s sparkle does not merely represent but actually is God’s love for her: In its materiality, she encounters the divine” (2). 13. Cited in Thurston Dart, “Miss Mary Burwell’s Instruction Book for the Lute,” Galpin Society Journal 11 (1958): 3–62, esp. 23. 14. Quotation from Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 204. Refer also to Jonathan Gil Harris, “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects,” European Journal of English Studies 4.2 (2000): 111–23; Harris, “Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.4 (Winter 2001): 479–91; Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Curtis Perry, ed., Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), x. 15. In Graham Harman’s words, “What is truly characteristic of Kant’s position is that the human-world relation takes priority over all others.” The Quadruple Object (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011), 45. 16. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 3. Michel Serres, Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, trans. Randolph Burks (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 118, takes this assertion one step further: “The subject is born of the object.”

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T r a n sfor m at i v e M at e r i a l i t y a n d R e na i s s a nc e Dy na m ic s 17. Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011), 248. 18. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63, esp. 11, 34. 19. Quotation from Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 119. 20. Cited in Dart, “Mary Burwell’s Instruction Book for the Lute,” 23. Refer to Sarah F. Williams’s chapter in this collection for a discussion of the materiality of sounds performed alongside “animated” and ambulatory rare shows. 21. “Animate,” v., I; I.2; II; II.6; II.7; II.9, OED Online. “Animate” is associated with both breath and spirit, a connection that comes from the Latin spiritus and the Greek pneuma (spirit, air, breath, wind). Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 9. 22. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23–24. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 128. 23. As Harman, Quadruple Object, 112, explains, “To reduce the hammer to its outward relations would overmine it, reducing it to a Husserlian phenomenon or Latourian actor that exists only in relation with other things. Conversely, to call the hammer nothing but a nickname for its sum total of pieces would undermine it, reducing it to nothing more than an epiphenomenon of its material ancestry.” 24. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 75. Consult also Harman, Prince of Networks, 17.

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25. Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican Books, 2018), 9. 26. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3, 78; and Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39. 27. Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016), 42–43. 28. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 9. 29. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 1.2.391, 392–94. Consult also Emily E. F. Philbrick’s chapter in this collection. 30. Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 1. Refer also to the introduction to Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–13; and Everett Mendelsohn, Heat and Life: The Development of the Theory of Animal Heat (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 31. According to OOO, however, metaphor itself is a relational act; consult Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, 86–89, and Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 80. 32. Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London, 1627), 50, 44. 33. Consult Helen S. Lang, Aristotle’s Physics and Its Medieval Varieties (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Charles Schmitt, The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984); and Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983). About the lute, consult Douglas Alton Smith, A History of the Lute from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Lexington,

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VA: Lute Society of America, 2002), 9; and Matthew Spring, The Lute in Britain: A History of the Instrument and Its Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1–2. 34. Aristotle, Physics 1.9.192a32. Consult also Eggert, Disknowledge, 59. 35. Michel Serres, Statues, 51, states that “Latin calls matter ‘tree wood’ because it produces offshoots like a womb.” Consult also Thomas Ainsworth, “Form vs. Matter,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016), https://plato .stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries /form-matter/. 36. Henry S. Turner, “Nashe’s Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599),” ELH 68 (2001): 529–61, esp. 539–40. Consult also Antonio Perez-Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); and Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 37. Harman, Immaterialism, argues that “interest in objects is often confused with interest in ‘materialism,’” an approach that simultaneously undermines and overmines objects (Quadruple Object, 13–14). The essays in this collection are guilty of this charge in certain ways: we use particular dynamic, transforming, transformative objects to make larger arguments about the dynamic properties of matter. Consult also Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 150. For a recuperation of the term “matter,” consult Serres, Statues, 51. 38. Consult Harman, Prince of Networks, 137–38, for a discussion of this terminology and Heidegger’s theory of things and objects. Bill Brown also draws careful distinctions between “objects” and “things,” although these classifications function inversely to the way these terms are discussed above. Brown, “Th ing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (Autumn 2001): 1–22, esp. 4.

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39. Latour makes a similar argument about this elusiveness in “Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?,” Isis 98.1 (March 2007): 138–42. 40. Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 2013), 11. 41. Morton, Hyperobjects, 113, also notes the similarities between Aristotle and Marx on this point. In Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2013), 81, Morton observes that “matter, then, is always relational—it’s matter-for.” Consult also Turner, “Nashe’s Red Herring,” 547. 42. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 7, citing Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Writings of the Young Karl Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 400–402, 400. Consult Harris and Natasha Korda, Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17. 43. “Each object should be regarded as something containing only incompletely defined potentialities that are developed when an object interacts with an appropriate system.” David Bohm, Quantum Theory (New York: Dover, 1989), 139. 44. Harman, Prince of Networks, 128, states, “For Aristotle, a thing is always more than what it is right now.” Consult also Bryant, Democracy of Objects, 123, who notes that objects may “unleash[] potentials” through relationality. 45. Harris, Untimely Matter, 7–8, 4. 46. Hylozoism is similar to but distinct from animism; the latter is an anthropological term often applied to the belief systems of populations that attribute a spiritual essence to objects, places, and creatures; thus, it is sometimes categorized as a religion, while hylozoism is considered a philosophy—an uncomfortable, marginalizing distinction. 47. Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise II, 16, 5, cited in Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza:

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T r a n sfor m at i v e M at e r i a l i t y a n d R e na i s s a nc e Dy na m ic s Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 81. Consult also Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 2; and Bryant, Democracy of Objects, 117. John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1908), viii. Bacon diverged from Aristotle in positing that matter could be animate, likely following theories of Bernardino Telesio, Strato of Lampsacus, Paracelsus, Cardanus, and Giordano Bruno. 48. Leah S. Marcus, “King Lear and the Death of the World,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 421–36, esp. 424. Consult also Kevin Curran, “What Was Personhood?,” in Renaissance Personhood: Materiality, Taxonomy, Process, ed. Curran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 1–17. 49. Bennett’s concept of “Thing-Power” refers to “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.” Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 6; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 251–423. 50. Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 9. 51. Bacon, The Wisedome of the Ancients (London, 1619), 67, 70, 66. Consult also Jenny C. Mann and Debapriya Sarkar, “Introduction: ‘Capturing Proteus,’” Philological Quarterly 98.1–2 (2019): 1–21, esp. 6–11, for a reconceptualization of form as more fluid and ontological, particularly in its applicability to both language arts and natural philosophy, through the figure of Bacon’s Proteus; and Maria Shmygol’s chapter in this collection. 52. Bacon, Wisedome, 67–69. Consult Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 137. 53. Paster, Humoring the Body, 33; James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine, Ficino to Descartes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 1:184.

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54. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 92. 55. For a discussion of the nebulous nature of human agency, consult Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 34. 56. Consult Jennifer Linhart Wood, Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel: Uncanny Vibrations in the English Archive (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 167–203, for a discussion of the transformations endured and caused by Dallam’s organ. Consult also Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Lawrence Danson, “The Sultan’s Organ: Presents and Self-Presentation in Thomas Dallam’s Diary,” Renaissance Studies 23.5 (2009): 639–58. 57. Dallam, A brefe Relation of my Travell from the Royall Cittie of London towardes The Straites of Mariemediteranum and what hapened by the waye, BL Add MS 17480, sig. 43r. 58. Dallam, A brefe Relation, sig. 41r. 59. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 48. A Very profitable treatise, made by M. Ihon Caluyne, trans. Steven Wythers (London, 1561), sig. C2r–C2v. Consult also Caroline Walker Bynum’s scholarship, especially Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2020); relics were imbued with “the presence of the holy itself” (29). 60. Taking pieces of historically significant objects continued for centuries, for example, with items from the Shakespeare houses, and continues today with chunks of the Berlin Wall or wreckage from the Twin Towers commodified for sale; consult Cathryn Enis and Tara Hamling, “Shakespeare’s Lost Domesticity: Material Responses to Absence in Stratford-upon-Avon,” Shakespeare Quarterly 70.1 (Spring 2019): 52–83; and Constance Classen, “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum,” Journal of Social History 40.4 (Summer 2007): 895–914, esp. 902. 61. Harris, “Wunderkammer of Objects,” 115.

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62. Consult Patrick Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 50. 63. Fiona Candlin, Art, Museums and Touch (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010). Consult also Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); R. F. Ovenell, The Ashmolean Museum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosities, 134; Michelle Henning, Museums, Media, and Cultural Theory (London: McGraw-Hill, 2005); Ken Arnold, Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005); and Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 64. Arthur MacGregor, The Ashmolean Museum: A Brief History of the Museum and Its Collections (London: Ashmolean Museum & Jonathan Horne Publications, 2001). Consult also Mea Allan, The Tradescants: Their Plants, Gardens and Museum, 1570–1662 (London: Michael Joseph, 1964); MacGregor, ed., Tradescant’s Rarities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosities, 141–43. 65. Records from the Royal Society dating to the seventeenth century describe members eating and drinking some of the materials they used to conduct their experiments. Consult Abbie Weinberg’s chapter in this collection, as well as Classen, “Museum Manners,” 906. 66. Harman, Quadruple Object, 28. 67. Cited in Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008), 5. 68. Classen, “Museum Manners,” 896–97. Consult also Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

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69. Regarding the transmission of scents, consult Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 70. Classen, “Museum Manners,” 897–98. 71. Classen, “Museum Manners,” 905. As Tanya Pollard notes in “Spelling the Body,” in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 171–86, esp. 173, certain spells required ingestion or writing on the body to be effective. 72. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 124. 73. Classen, “Museum Manners,” 899–900. Consult also David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 326. 74. These materials share the quality of “very large finitude” with what Morton, Hyperobjects, 60, terms “hyperobjects”: “a Styrofoam cup will outlive me by over four hundred years.” 75. Classen, “Museum Manners,” 896. 76. Graham Harman, Prince of Networks, 201. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 66, and Morton, Realist Magic, 20, also note the “sensual ether.” Consult also Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, 9: “Real objects exist whether or not they currently affect anything else, while sensual objects exist only in relation to some real object”; as Harman later discusses, there is always a “rift” between a “real object” and its “sensual qualities” (149). 77. Emily E. F. Philbrick (Russell), “Spectral Enmeshments: Speculative Phantasms in Three English Chronicles of the 12th and 13th Centuries” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2018), 108. 78. Harman, Quadruple Object, 73; and Morton, Realist Magic, 68. Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, 7, also states that “withdrawal or withholding of things from direct access is the central principle

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T r a n sfor m at i v e M at e r i a l i t y a n d R e na i s s a nc e Dy na m ic s of OOO.” On the limits of human sensory perception, refer to Morton, Hyperobjects, 172; and Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 67. 79. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 9, 30. 80. Harman, Quadruple Object, 29–30. 81. Morton, Realist Magic, 215; and Bryant, Democracy of Objects, 18, 83. 82. Morton, Realist Magic, 56. 83. Aristotle, On the Soul, 424a19. 84. Bernardino Telesio, De Rerum Natura Iuxta Propria Principa Libri IX (Naples, 1586). 85. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in The Works, ed. James Spedding (London: Longman and Co., 1901), 50; and Bacon, Historia Vitae et Mortis, in The Works 1:320–21. A similar conclusion about sensing objects was reached through a different intellectual lineage that began with Leucippus’s and Democritus’s theories of atomism in the fi ft h century BCE, was channeled through Epicurus, and was codified by Lucretius in his De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). Like Bacon, Lucretius concludes that sensory data is the clearest pathway to knowledge. Ben Jonson owned a copy of De rerum natura, and the first English translation seems to have been executed by Lucy Hutchinson and completed in the 1640s or 1650s. Consult Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); and Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 86. Cavendish, in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London, 1655). 87. Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (London, 1666), 129; and Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673),” by Eugene Marshall, https://www.iep.utm .edu/cavend-m/#SH2a. 88. Marshall, “Margaret Cavendish.” Consult also David Cunning, “Cavendish on the Intelligibility of the Prospect of Thinking Matter,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 23.2 (2006): 117–36; and

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chapter 46 of Cavendish’s Philosophical Fancies (1653), in which she argues that all matter is able to sense—an unacknowledged precursor to Harman’s “sensual object” and his “quadruple object” model. 89. Consult Michael Alexander, The Earliest English Poems (London: Penguin, 1992), 121–27; Michael Swanton, ed., The Dream of the Rood (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 1970), esp. 1–38; Seeta Chaganti, “Vestigial Signs: Inscription, Performance, and The Dream of the Rood,” PMLA 125 (2010): 48–72; and Erika Mary Boeckeler’s chapter in this volume, for a discussion of the Rood crosses and other objects inscribed with writing. 90. Citations are from Eight Old English Poems, ed. John C. Pope, 3rd ed., revised by R. D. Fulk (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), lines 19–20. Remaining lines will be cited intralineally. 91. For other examples of sensing and/ or anthropomorphized matter, particularly early modern literary automata, consult Wendy Beth Hyman, ed., The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011). 92. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 99. 93. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, esp. 233–309; and Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 120. 94. This biocodicology passage is informed by Michael Witmore’s presentation “What Else Is in Our Books?” (Shakespeare Association of America, New Orleans, LA, March 25, 2016). 95. Morton, in Realist Magic, 48, observes that “objects don’t sit in a spatiotemporal box. It’s the other way around: space and time emanate from objects.” Consult also Anna Riehl Bertolet’s chapter in this collection for a discussion of how the timescale of needlework patterns also becomes “crumpled” as these designs are “(re)incarnated” in various handmade media across centuries, drastically outliving their producers. 96. Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture, 203. 97. Serres, Statues, 94.

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98. Consult Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 64, for a discussion of the relationship of science to “the object-world” in the Renaissance.

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99. Consult Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

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Part I

Objects Within / Without the Body

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Chapter 1

“Farre Fetched and Deare Bought” The Global Cosmetic Exchange Between Elizabeth I, Melike Safiye Sultan, and the Kira Esperanza Malchi Josie Schoel

On November 29, 1599, Elizabeth I received a letter from Melike Safiye Sultan’s kira, or Jewish intermediary, Esperanza Malchi. Melike Safiye Sultan, the principal consort to Murad III, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and Elizabeth I had been exchanging letters and gifts since October of 1593 as a means to maintain trade routes and to establish what Safiye describes as “pure mutual confidence and abundance of amity” between the two nations.1 The relationship between the sultana and Elizabeth I, however, far exceeded the bounds of traditional diplomacy. Intended to cement political ties between the two trading nations, the letter and gifts marked the beginning of a notably intimate relationship between the women and fostered a positive relationship between Elizabeth and the harem. In this final known letter in the series, Esperanza Malchi, who mediated the sultana’s interactions between the enclosed space of the harem and the outside world, attempts to procure skin-whitening cosmetics from the English queen. While relational letter exchange and gift-giving were regularly practiced throughout the early modern period between political entities working to establish trade networks, the relationship between Safiye and Elizabeth is unique in that it is the only known transaction among

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an English queen, a foreign sovereign, and a nonaristocratic liaison to include the exchange of cosmetic goods.2 Malchi’s letter, which announces the importance of imported beautifying materials to the occupants of the harem, places English cosmetics on par with the most luxurious goods in the known world. By examining the correspondence and the ingredients most likely transferred between Elizabeth, Malchi, and the sultana, I reveal the ways in which cosmetic materiality and exchange, particularly face-whitening washes and paints, contributed to the consolidation of Englishness and whiteness.3 Moreover, an investigation into the ingredients of cosmetics, many of which derived from a multiplicity of sources—both “foreign” and “domestic”—also suggests that the formation of English whiteness, a kind of transferable “property,” to borrow Arthur L. Little Jr.’s useful term, was in fact a hybrid construct from the beginning. One of the primary aims of this chapter, then, is to reveal how the project of “making up” the English was, in fact, reliant on the transcultural exchange of cosmetic substances and ideas.4 The 1581 treaty between Elizabeth I and Sultan Murad III opened and solidified trade relations between the English and the Ottoman Empire, one result of which was England’s increased appetite for “foreign” luxury goods. In addition to this sudden influx of such exotic goods, England also experienced an increase in raw materials originating from the East that were then used for items commercially produced in the West, only to be ultimately traded back to the East. Elizabeth’s trade in and production of gunpowder, for example, participated in this circular mode of commerce as a means, in part, to circumvent embargoes from Catholic countries. Although England had multiple powder mills, gunpowder’s most important ingredient, saltpeter, or potassium nitrate, was imported from the Barbary Coast of Morocco.5 In fact, saltpeter, which England was unable to produce, can also be found in a number of cosmetic and medicinal recipes: The Secrets of Alexis Piemont, a collection of recipes, for example, features a concoction to “make yellow abernhaire, without standing long or nothing in the sun,” that includes “halfe a pound of Antimonium” and “nine ounces of Saltpeter.”6 Cosmetics and the raw goods for cosmetics were a comparatively small, and thus often overlooked, part of this East-West network of exchange. As with gunpowder, many of the elements used to create cosmetics were imported from the East by English

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merchants of the Turkey Company, though the finished goods were then sold back to the East after being commercially manufactured in England. I draw upon a variety of compatible theoretical methodologies, including cultural materialism and postcolonial and critical race theories, to examine the formation of English cultural identities in relation to the foreign material properties of face paint. My conception of the cultural and symbolic value of whiteness, as well as its emergence as a constructed ideal for western Europe, draws from critics such as Arthur L. Little Jr., Peter Erickson, Kim Hall, Ania Loomba, and Geraldine Heng.7 As Heng writes, the fictions of race are “a structural relationship for the articulation and management of difference rather than substantive content.”8 Moreover, as Little has discussed, whiteness in the early modern period can be considered a “form of racial property” that is both “geoexpansive” and “intimate.” He further elaborates that it is “white people— the whiteness of white people—who are being fashioned” racially during the early modern period.9 In this chapter, I argue that this fashioning of whiteness was in part dependent on the burgeoning cosmetics trade, a trade that helped to establish the emerging idea of white supremacy. The trade of cosmetics between Elizabeth I and the sultana aided in the construction and maintenance of this fiction. Moreover, my examination of the epistolary exchange reveals the ways in which early modern women actively engaged in the construction, transmission, and enculturation of cosmetic knowledge. By reading the letters alongside Elizabeth’s beautifying face-whitening recipes, I reveal some of the ways in which cosmetic material constitutes a kind of fluid and open subjectivity. That is to say, while Elizabeth’s beautifying practices included the application of skin-whitening ingredients and mixtures such as alum, camphor, and mercury, the materiality of cosmetic self-fashioning both resists and creates pluralistic and multicultural identities that abjure long-standing dualities of subject/object, self/other, and domestic/foreign. While cosmetics aided in the construction of whiteness, the letters circulated among Elizabeth I, the sultana, and Esperanza Malchi allow us to perceive the ways in which their exchange also constitutes a productive cultural and corporeal hybridity. Safiye’s privileged position must be understood within the Ottoman institutional power structure in order to fully comprehend the significance of the epistolary and material interchange between the women.

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“More like a queen than a royal concubine,” Bernadette Andrea writes, Safiye “occupied a gendered role deemed particularly well suited for initiating a correspondence with the sovereign queen of England.”10 Underscoring this observation, Jerry Brotton notes that Murad allowed Safiye to “exercise unprecedented political power from within the protected space of fabled harem.”11 The cultural and political significance of the harem within Ottoman society is an intrinsic component to understanding and conveying the import of the gift-giving that took place between the sultana and Elizabeth. In her study, which serves as a corrective to Western assumptions about the seraglio as a state-supported repressive mechanism of female subjugation, Leslie Peirce argues that, due to Ottoman expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the women of the imperial harem were allotted considerably more agency than in earlier eras.12 By addressing the ways in which women were increasingly participating in politics and diplomacy, Peirce undoes the false notion that power was consolidated solely by and in the sultan. However, these dual studies give considerably less attention to the fact that, in addition to being a locus of power, the harem was also sustained by the ongoing consumption of foreign luxury goods. While Peirce and Andrea have both contributed important information about the formation of early modern Anglo-Ottoman relations, any close attention to the materiality intrinsic to the exchange is lacking. This chapter attempts to address this lacuna by rematerializing cosmetic ingredients, including alum, borax, and poppy, to consider their role in larger systems of global commerce.

Cosmetic Materiality and Permeable Boundaries During the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England witnessed an outpouring of discourse centered on cosmetics, much of it concerned with skin-whitening practices. As exotic ingredients became more accessible to all echelons of English society, instructional manuals seeking to manage and standardize beauty ideals proliferated. Offering readers information and advice about ingredients that smooth, polish, scrape, lighten, and mask mottled imperfections, early modern beauty manuals sustain and promulgate the beauty standards of the day, which included a smooth white face, ivory breasts, ruby lips, and rosy cheeks.13 Faces mottled with spots, freckles, pox, or pimples could be exfoliated, peeled,

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and whitened with beautifying cosmetic waters and paints. Recipes for evening out and lightening hyperpigmentation and skin tone appear throughout Hugh Plat’s tract Delightes for Ladies, for example, which offers advice to “help a face that is red or pimpled” and beautifying mixtures “to take away the freckles of the face.”14 Likewise, the popular household manual The Secrets of Alexis Piemont, a set of recipes for cosmetics, fragrances, and medicine transcribed and edited by Girolamo Ruscelli, features multiple recipes for beautifying water to “make the flesh white and welcoloured.”15 When exfoliation proved insufficient to the cause, as the manual notes, paint could be applied to cover any remaining spots, creating a pristine white surface. Reprinted more than one hundred times before the nineteenth century, as William Eamon has observed, Piemont’s recipes became “common currency” during the period.16 This interest in the construction of such cosmetic surfaces, as evidenced by the popularity of Piemont’s text, extends beyond mere superficiality. Becoming a kind of transferable “property,” whiteness, or the white facial surface, has the power to both signify and advertise emerging constructs built around racial meaning and difference. The word-cluster surrounding the term “cosmetic” helps to illustrate this relationship among superficial surfaces (or outward show), inward self, and nascent ideas about taxonomy and order. First coined by Francis Bacon as “artificial decoration,” the term “cosmetic” derives from the Greek word kosmētikos, meaning “skilled in adornment,” and from kosmein—“to arrange or adorn”—which in turn comes from the ancient Greek term kosmos, signifying “order.”17 The Oxford English Dictionary first defines “cosmetic” as “having power to adorn, embellish, or beautify.”18 “Cosmetic,” the subsequent definition states, “affects appearance only, [is] superficial; intended merely to improve appearances.”19 While these definitions are concerned with “superficial” appearances, the etymological root connecting cosmetics to cosmos suggests that paint and other beautifying unguents, tinctures, or waters can also be used to visually create a system—one that, like the cosmos itself, is purported to be ordered and harmonious. Before Bacon introduced the term “cosmetic” to the early modern lexicon, beauty manuals and anti-cosmetic invectives regularly referred to painted visages as “complexions.” For example, anti-cosmetic moralist and preacher Thomas Tuke, whose tract A Discourse Against Painting and

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Tincturing of Women amplifies the cultural and pervasive anxiety about women manipulating the surface of their skin and thus creating an artificial appearance that does not align with the inward self, writes, “A virtuous woman needs no borrowed, no bought complexion, none of these poisons.”20 As Edith Snook has previously observed, contrary to the definition of cosmetics as affecting only the appearance of something instead of its substance, the early modern sense of complexion was associated with both the artificial color applied to the face as well as the mixtures and combinations of elements—or humors—that made up the inward “nature of the body.”21 Thus, while the more recent term “make-up” was not yet part of the English lexicon, the use of paint and other beautifying concoctions as simultaneously a means to rectify any aesthetic lack and to constitute, or “make,” the wearer, was emergent in the Renaissance imaginary. Similarly, in their discussion of clothing and early modern identity formation, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass note that the term “fashion” derives from the Latin facere, meaning “to make.”22 Rather than disregard the fashion of cosmetic adornment as an artificially embellished surface defined in opposition to the subject residing beneath a superfluous layer, cosmesis, then, has the power to transform, constitute, and order identities.23 While clothes and cosmetics are both worn on the body, they differ in at least one important way: make-up penetrates rather than merely covers the skin. Like food, liquor, or tobacco, cosmetic material is “made to vanish”; that is, it merges with the body onto which it is applied. Substances that mingle with a body alter it in ways that differ from simply covering it: “What distinguishes consumption from exchange,” Arjun Appadurai argues, “is not that consumption has a physiological dimension that exchange lacks, but that consumption involves the incorporation of the consumed item into the personal and social identity of the consumer.”24 As an ephemeral object, we might then consider make-up as a kind of luxury comestible, consumed via the pores on the surface of the skin rather than through the mouth. Indeed, early modern face paint and beautifying waters often included foodstuffs such as breadcrumbs and eggs: The Secrets of Alexis Piemont contained a recipe for subtracting years off an aging face that consisted of “a pound of rice, two pounds of fresh butter, and the whites of new laid eggs.”25 These introjections between subject and object via the surface of the skin, in turn, extend beyond the individual body and into the social sphere, as the permeated skin opens to other

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subjects and objects. As Terence Turner writes in The Social Skin, the surface of the body is “not only the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but the frontier of the social self as well.”26 As an ephemeral consumable that is worn on—and seeps into—the skin and is understood as the contested boundary line separating the self from the world, cosmetic materiality breaks down divisions between self and other, disrupting the emerging differentiation between objects and subjects, especially when cosmetic materials are sourced from “other” places, even when “other” places may, in fact, be closer to home than initially presumed.

Anglo-Ottoman Epistolary and Cosmetic Exchange The correspondence between Elizabeth I and Melike Safiye Sultan began in October 1593, when the English queen sent a “very fine case of glass bottles silver & gilt,” “ten garments of cloth of gold,” and a portrait miniature to the Ottoman harem. The sultana composed an enthusiastic response to Elizabeth’s letter and initial gifts of the portrait miniature, described as a “jewel of her majesties picture, set with some rubies and diamants,” and other personal luxury items. The sultana’s letter was printed in the 1598– 1600 edition of The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, Richard Hakluyt’s compilation of English travel narratives, shipping inventories, chronicles, and multilingual diplomatic epistles.27 The multi-generic polyglot compendium, punctuated by Hakluyt’s mediating commentary, “conveys,” as Kim Hall observes, “a rigorous and self-conscious sense of order and method.”28 A celebration of England’s expansionist movement, the cultural work produced by the three volumes of The Principal Navigations extends beyond merely recording and disseminating narratives and shipping inventories related to overseas voyages. Hakluyt’s tome, as Richard Helgerson contends, also worked to “reinvent both England and the world to make them fit one another.”29 Hakluyt’s organizational system, compartmentalization, and commentary worked to tame and domesticate any errant foreign signifiers found in the collected documents, as a means of promoting English economic and territorial expansionism.30 The sultana’s letter, as it appears in the collection, is emblematic of Hakluyt’s proto-imperialist agenda. Translated from Arabic into both English and Italian, the letter, which was accompanied by a gold-and-silver

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gown and a “girdle of Turkie worke, rich and faire,” for the English queen, is stripped of its Eastern signifiers.31 The use of Roman type combined with black letter—also known as English letter (perhaps an ironic name for a typeface associated with a culture that valued and commodified whiteness)—suggests an explicit agenda of incorporating the sultana’s letter into England’s imperialist project. As was increasingly common during the late sixteenth century, the introduction, the table of contents, and the various headings throughout the text are set in roman type, yet for the body of each reproduced document Hakluyt’s typesetter uses black letter, a typeface that by the sixteenth century was fading in popularity.32 While Hakluyt employs textual and visual rhetoric to absorb the sultana’s letter into his larger commercial enterprise, the cosmetic materiality of the original letter, combined with the linguistic cosmetic signifiers, resists attempts to domesticate its foreignness. Safiye recounts Elizabeth’s initial letter as written on “rose scented” paper that was “more fragrant than pure camphor and ambergris, and its ink than finest musk, notifying indescribable and immeasurable consideration and love towards me Her well-wisher”; the sultana goes on to describe the letter—sealed with a jewel-studded ornament—as “full of marvels.”33 On parchment inter woven with gold flakes and in ornate calligraphic script alternating between blue, black, crimson, gold, and scarlet ink, Safiye’s original letter uses multiple cosmetic signifiers and materials. Interestingly, the harem’s request for such personal items as cosmetics came in response to one of Elizabeth’s more extravagant—and thus public—gifts, almost six years after she first made contact with the sultana. After the death of Sultan Murad III in 1595, the English queen needed to secure trade relations and cement the Anglo-Ottoman alliance with the new sultan, Murad’s son, Mehmed III. Commemorating (albeit a bit late) Mehmed III’s rise to power, Elizabeth sent an organ to the new sultan and a gilded coach to his mother, Safiye, who was by then the Valide Sultan, or legal mother, of the Ottoman Empire. Although organs were exchanged between trading nations throughout the period, the Dallam organ, “a necessary element in a complex set of diplomatic protocols that enabled the English Levant Company to maintain a commercial relationship with the Ottoman Empire,” Jennifer Linhart Wood notes, was “the first organ sent to the Ottoman Empire by an English trading company.”34 While the organ and coach were both publicly displayed and appreciated, the sultana seemed to be interested in procuring gifts far less ostentatious: cosmetics.

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Safiye’s following letter, penned after the receipt of the organ, is significantly less ornate than her previous epistle, although it expresses appreciation for the gifts and confirms that she will urge her son to “act according to the treaty” signed in 1581. She concludes the letter by apologizing for the comparatively modest gift of a ruby-and-diamond-encrusted crown, which was to be delivered by her kira, Esperanza Malchi. Accompanying Safiye’s thank-you note was an additional letter, written by Malchi, in which the kira expresses gratitude for the organ and the coach, both of which were received publicly and with much aplomb. After Malchi acknowledges the rather grandiose gifts, the letter undergoes a marked transformation, shifting from the formal tone of a subordinate addressing a foreign queen to language that is surprisingly intimate. “On account of Your Majesty being a woman,” she writes, “I can without any embarrassment employ you with this notice.” She then entreats Elizabeth to send cosmetics, which would be “held more dear than any Jewel whatsoever your majesty might send her.” She requests “rare distilled waters of every kind for the face” and “odiferous oils for the hands” that are to be “found in your kingdom.”35 Esperanza Malchi’s interest in procuring cosmetics for the sultana was by no means anomalous. Kiras, who served as medical advisers and business agents for the sultana, were also known to purchase and transport luxury goods such as jewels and cosmetics to the Ottoman harem. “Certain Jewes women,” the Venetian diplomat Ottaviano Bon writes in his description of the seraglio, “may at any time come into the Serraglio unto them . . . to shew them the art of making waters, oyles an painting for their faces.”36 Malchi’s desire to have the gifts sent directly to her could thus derive from an interest in solidifying and maintaining her position as intermediary. What is more interesting for my purposes, however, is the Ottoman kira’s odd use of the descriptor “rare.” Because the letter was written more than ten years after England and the Ottoman Empire signed the agreement opening channels of trade, we can assume that these “rare” beautifying emollient washes, as well as the recipes used to make the cosmetics, were most likely imported from the East. I will leave the question of how, exactly, word of Elizabeth’s extensive face-painting rituals reached Ottoman shores for future investigations so as to focus on how these cosmetics came to be known as “rare.” Elizabeth’s affinity for heavy white fucuses and paints, which she began using after two cases of smallpox left her skin pitted and ravaged, is

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well known. What has been given considerably less attention, however, is the queen’s more innocuous use of exfoliating washes and tinctures. Associated with health rather than vanity, the art of exfoliating and washing the skin with various imported concoctions, a practice otherwise known as “beautifying physic,” largely escaped moralists’ claims of infection and artificiality. The “beautifying part of physic,” Snook observes, was related to humoral balance, health, and outward beauty: “A woman’s concern for the appearance of her face,” she continues, can “be a way of caring for her body as a whole and constituting identity, not just performatively or theatrically, as facilitated by paint, but inwardly and physiologically.”37 Elizabeth, we might therefore conclude, may have covertly advertised her use of skin-whitening washes as a means of solidifying and telegraphing the emerging relation between Englishness, whiteness, purity, and health. England’s increased contact with cultural others fostered, as Loomba contends, a “growing obsession with defining the white English self.”38 Hall has previously observed that the social and imaginative construction of the white English self can be defined only in opposition to Blackness. She explains that Elizabeth’s rule was consolidated in part by creating a system of signs where “whiteness is melded onto a project of national solidarity and superiority that portends such future associations.”39 Cosmesis, therefore, contributed to the iconic force scholars since Roy Strong have attributed to Elizabeth—an iconicity equated with pure, virginal, and unadulterated Englishness. Although the association between whiteness, Englishness, and virtue is not unique to the early modern period and even appears in such medieval poems as the anonymous thirteenth-century allegorical dream-vision Pearl, Elizabeth’s extensive use of white face paint helped to stabilize that connection by developing the idea of whiteness as an identity. Noting Elizabeth’s “emblematic facial whiteness” telegraphed through her portraits, Peter Erickson argues that “the cult of Elizabeth is a cult of whiteness.”40 Through the use of white and red paint, both on her skin and on painters’ canvases capturing her image, Elizabeth created a symbolic system in which fairness (i.e., light skin color), virtue, class, and Englishness were inextricably linked. Moreover, the proliferation and dissemination of representations of the English queen’s portraits, as seen in the overseas circulation of miniatures, maps, and Elizabeth’s white fucus, means that the courtly fashion was imitated beyond just those who could afford

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to have their portraits painted.41 Yet the materiality of Elizabeth’s whiteness, manufactured from a combination of domestic staples and foreign imports, reveals the hybridity that was always a component of the construct of Englishness. Promoting a relationship between individual containment and national strength, Elizabeth’s portraits, which exemplify her motto, Semper Eadem, or “Always the Same,” seek to consolidate a static and hermetic representation of English subjectivity. The royal image, which Strong has termed Elizabeth’s “Mask of Youth,” fosters, as Louis Montrose states, a fusing of the “moral virtue of constancy with a personal exemption from time’s depredations.” Montrose also argues that the “iconic strategy” is one that paradoxically embodies a “collective assertion of national strength and imperial ambition in the Queen’s virginal self-containment.”42 Stallybrass interprets Elizabeth’s image as a contradiction of elements, representing both her motto and the hortus conclusus (enclosed garden).43 Yet Elizabeth’s cosmeticized image is one that also emblematizes porousness. While supporting the consolidation of constancy, whiteness, and power, her hybrid body also challenges the notion of Semper Eadem. Rather than being “always the same,” her appearance was, in fact, always changing through and with the application of foreign fashions and cosmetic materiality. Many of the ingredients that constituted the cosmetics Elizabeth used were imported from the East. The odiferous oils would most likely contain amber and civet, both of which were found in Turkish marketplaces. It seems, then, that Elizabeth’s English cosmetics were not that English after all. Among Elizabeth’s arsenal of substances to achieve “beautifying physic” was an early modern form of a chemical peel that “whitens, smoothes, and softens the skin,” which was also made from a mixture of domestic foodstuffs and exotic luxury ingredients; many of these— such as the alum, borax, and poppy—would have been imported from the East. The beautifying concoction, which was mixed together “that it be like milk,” contained “two new laid eggs with their shells, burnt alum, powdered sugar, borax, and poppy seeds beaten up very finely.”44 A highly sought-after transparent medium used to fi x dyes and paints, alum changes color and form when it comes in contact with various materials, and thus serves as a metaphor for the interpenetration and mutually transformative relationship between cosmetic objects and painting

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subjects. While we do not yet know exactly what kind of cosmetic waters Elizabeth I sent to Malchi—if in fact she sent any at all—it is safe to assume that the preparation would have contained alum. The compound, a lucrative import to England used primarily as a mordant in the dye process of cloth production, was a particularly contested and coveted commodity. The long history of the alum trade is emblematic of the transculturality of early modern cosmetics culture, as well as the West’s attempt to monopolize and erase foreign contributions to English culture—and to constructions of whiteness. Alum, the name of which invokes the Latin ad lumine, meaning “the light,” features prominently in a wide variety of self-beautification recipes, including face physic, paint, whitening pastes for the hands, and dye for the hair. In fact, one might go so far as to claim that England’s burgeoning beauty industry was, at least in part, dependent on the fluctuations of the alum market. After the Anglo-Ottoman trade agreements of the 1580s, white transparent mineral salt was primarily imported to England from Turkey and the Barbary Coast. Back in 1460, however, the Venetian Giovanni da Castro, the nephew of Pope Pius II, had located alum deposits in Tolfa, Italy, a discovery that led to a monopolization of the mineral that lasted more than a quarter of a century. This papal alum, as it was then called, was considered by the pope to be a “divine gift” that would “bring victory over the Turk” and whose profits would be “devoted to the defense of Christendom with a further crusade against the Turks.”45 The price for alum was set so high, however, that England turned to Turkey for the valuable material, a decision that brought with it the threat of excommunication. And so, the quest for alum deposits on English soil commenced. Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations includes advice to merchants traveling to Constantinople, and “other places in Turkie,” “to learne to know all earths and minerals forren used in dying, and their natural places, for possible the like my here be found upon sight.”46 After the discovery of alum mines in Yorkshire in the seventeenth century, James I issued a proclamation against the importation of the mineral so as to support domestic industry. Elizabeth’s exchange of cosmetics, then, occurred during a unique period when the mineral, essential for the cosmetics trade, could be transferred back and forth across cultural and geographic borders, transforming in form and use from raw material to ephemeral luxury item.

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“Making Up the English” as Cultural Hybridity While the exchange among Elizabeth, Safiye, and Esperanza occurred during a period when cosmetics were used by a relatively small portion of the population, it nonetheless reveals the kind of transnational exchange of ideas and goods England’s beauty industry would later both foster and exploit, by highlighting—and, at times, obscuring—foreign input and influences. Furthermore, due to this increased traffic in imported luxury goods and the proliferation of printed household manuals, practices of personal adornment were becoming increasingly accessible to the growing “middling class.” Reading the letters as a zone of transcultural contact offers insight into how early modern beauty culture formed through a multidirectional exchange of goods and ideas flowing back and forth across the boundaries between the general poles of Christian West and Islamic East. The letters thus reveal information about the ways in which the East and West trafficked in material goods and cultural knowledge, fashioning a kind of proto-cosmopolitanism. Moreover, by examining the correspondence between Queen Elizabeth and the Valide Sultan, much of it laden with linguistic and material cosmetic signifiers, I have recovered some of the ways in which women contributed to, and shaped, the early modern beauty industry. The letters emblematize the transcultural—yet conflicting—migration of elements, including raw materials like alum, beauty secrets, recipes, and ready-made beautifying unguents, tinctures, washes, and paints, that helped constitute England’s early modern beauty industry. Early modern cosmetics culture became an industry through complex and often contradictory processes in which the dialogic exchange of ideas fostering mutual constitution of knowledge about rituals of beautification and adornment eventually intersected with the appropriation and erasure of foreign ingredients and practices. While foreign knowledge sources had been suppressed by the seventeenth century, traces of these networks of relationships can be found in textual fragments from the majority of beauty manuals that were also published in the period. By patching together discordant fragments in the records, we may recognize that “making up the English” was in fact dependent upon the enculturation and transmission of cosmetics between women from different cultures. From raw ingredient to commodity, the cosmetic material enters the gift-giving economy, transforming both symbolically and materially as it

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comes in contact with the other subjects and objects that interact in these overlapping networks of exchange. Attention to the material properties of paint undermines the connections between whiteness and Englishness and replaces the hermetically closed body of the monarch with one that is porous. The queen, like others who came into contact with cosmetic material, was constituted by foreign properties. In considering this cultural artifact of nascent Anglo-Ottoman trade relations, we are invited to imagine the two women, Turkish sultana and English queen, marveling over the gifted objects, and to imagine Elizabeth wearing her Turkish girdle and the sultana applying the “rare” beautifying waters from England. These images, representing small moments in the foundation of England’s emergence onto the international stage, are emblems of openness, fluidity, and cultural hybridity.

Notes 1. All translations from the original Turkish to English are by Susan Skilliter, “Three Letters from the Ottoman ‘Sultana’ Safiye to Queen Elizabeth I,” in Documents from Islamic Chanceries: Series 1, ed. S. M. Stern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 119–57, esp. 150. British Museum, Cotton MS Nero B. viii, ff. 61–63. 2. Elizabeth’s epistolarity was an instrumental component of England’s diplomatic strategy. The English queen maintained a number of correspondences with overseas rulers, most of which engaged the requisite ritual of gift exchange as tribute. Indeed, as Rayne Allison observes, “Elizabeth sent more letters into more distant kingdoms than any other monarch had before,” reflecting a “significant development in how Western diplomacy was conceived and practiced during the sixteenth century.” Rayne Allison, A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), xii. 3. Jerry Brotton has previously dismissed the “temerity” of Malchi’s letter. For Brotton, the apparent absence of

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Elizabeth’s response translates to a lack of exchange. However, although evidence of an exchange of beautifying material has yet to be recovered from the historical record, the written request is nonetheless worthy of more sustained attention. Jerry Brotton, The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 222. 4. For discussions about face whitening and the construction of racial meaning and identity in the English imagination, consult Kimberly Poitevin, “Inventing Whiteness: Cosmetics, Race, and Women in Early Modern England,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11.1 (Winter 2011): 59–89. On cosmetics and emerging notions of race, consult also Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. 85–91; and Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 2005), esp. 75–95. 5. David Cressy, Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 52.

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T h e G l o b a l C o s m e t ic E xc h a n g e 6. Girolamo Ruscelli, The Secrets of the Reuerend Maister Alexis of Piemont, trans. William Ward (London, 1595), 64. 7. Arthur L. Little Jr., “Re-historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (2016): 84–103; Peter Erickson, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance,” Criticism 35.4 (1993): 499–526; Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England; Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 8. Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race,” Literature Compass 8.5 (2011): 315–50, esp. 319. 9. Little Jr., “Re-historicizing Race,” 84–103, esp. 88. 10. Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 24. 11. Brotton, The Sultan and the Queen, 4. 12. Peirce argues that after the Ottoman state reached its limits geographically, it was forced to turn inward, becoming a sedentary sultanate rather than a nomadic one. This, in turn, gave women more power and influence over domestic and international affairs. No longer sent to distant locations with their sons, the women of the harem stayed closer to the center of power, allowing them to establish influential networks and associations. Leslie P. Peirce, Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 24. 13. For a description of the Tudor “adoption” of Aristotle’s defi nition of beauty as form, balance, and symmetry, consult Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 7.

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14. Hugh Plat, Delightes for ladies to adorn their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories: With beauties, banquets, perfumes and waters (London, 1608), sigs. G4r–v, H2r, H3r. 15. Ruscelli, Alexis Piemont, 64. 16. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 251. 17. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2001), 110. 18. OED Online, “Cosmetic,” adj., 1. Oxford University Press. 19. OED Online, “Cosmetic,” adj., 2. Oxford University Press. 20. Thomas Tuke, A Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing of Women (London: Imprinted for Edward Merchant, 1616), 14. 21. Edith Snook, Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist Literary History (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 27. 22. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2. 23. “Cosmesis” is Frances Dolan’s term, describing how early modern women used face paint to establish agency. Dolan, “Taking the Pencil out of God’s Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England,” PMLA 108.2 (Spring 1993): 224–39, esp. 224. 24. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 112. 25. Like many household manuals, The Secrets of Alexis Piemont collected a variety of different kinds of recipes, including cosmetic, culinary, and medical, further reinforcing the connection between inner and outer substances on the body. Ruscelli, The Secrets of Alexis Piemont: Containing Many Excellent Remedies Against Divers Diseases (London, 1615), 65.

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26. Terence S. Turner, “The Social Skin,” in Not Work Alone: A Cross-cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival, ed. Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin (London: Temple Smith, 1980), 112. 27. The letter appears in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1598), 1:311–12. 28. Consult Hall, Things of Darkness, 44. 29. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 29. 30. To describe his text, Hakluyt uses the metaphor of a fragmented body made whole: “To incorporate into one body the torne and scattered limes of our ancient and late Navigations by Sea, our voyages by land, and traffiques of merchandise by both: and having . . . restored ech particular member, being before displaced, to their true joints and ligaments” (The Principal Navigations, 1:19). Hall notes that the body metaphor is connected to the “aggrandizing body of state, putting both in their proper order” (Things of Darkness, 45). This can also be read in relation to the above discussion of the cosmos/cosmetic as relating to a well-ordered system, one that can be displayed through, and advertised by, the English body. 31. Richard Wrag traveled to Turkey aboard the Ascension and documented the gift exchange in his journal, which was later published in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations. Consult “A Description of a Voiage to Constantinople and Syria,” in The Principal Navigations (London, 1598), 2:303–7. 32. This use of black letter, a type associated with traditional English culture, rather than the more cosmopolitan roman typeface, frequently suggests an interest in promoting a nostalgic vision of Englishness. In Hakluyt, the translation of language and type, from the Arabic calligraphic script of the original letter to black-letter face, engages a kind of “Englishing.”

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33. Skilliter, “Three Letters,” 132. 34. Jennifer Linhart Wood, “An Organ’s Metamorphosis: Thomas Dallam’s Sonic Transformations in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 15.4 (2015): 81–105, esp. 90. Consult also the introduction to this volume. 35. Skilliter, “Three Letters,” 142. 36. Ottaviano Bon, The Sultan’s Seraglio: An Intimate Portrait of Life at the Ottoman Court, ed. Robert Withers (London: Saqi Books, 1996), 56. 37. Snook, Women, Beauty and Power, 28. 38. Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, 10. 39. Hall, Things of Darkness, 69. 40. Erickson, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness,” 517. 41. Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Pimlico, 1999), 55. 42. Louis Adrian Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 222 and 145. 43. Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123–44, esp. 129. 44. Neville Williams, Powder and Paint: A History of the Englishwoman’s Toilet, Elizabeth I–Elizabeth II (London: Longmans, Green, 1957), 28. 45. On the discovery of papal alum, consult Lisa Jardine, who attributes a large portion of the Medicis’ wealth to this discovery. In 1465, the Medici bank and the papacy signed a contract giving the bank complete control over the mines, including distribution, which, Jardine argues, helped give rise to Florence as a center for the arts. Jardine, Worldly Goods (London: Macmillan, 1996), 116–17. 46. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 2:160.

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Chapter 2

Comb Poems Erika Mary Boeckeler

Combs—like many other early modern domestic objects—love to talk. Often gifted by lovers, combs can speak out passionately, punningly, pleadingly, and “personally” in their first-person inscriptions, a sampling of which reads as follows: vive celle // que / jayme (May the one I love live!) aies / de moy // souve / nance (Have memory of me!) mi a / mor // vos / sols (You alone [are] my love!) prenes / en gre // ce petit don (Take / with pleasure // this little / gift!) mon ♥ aves // pour bien (Take care of my heart!)1 But unlike most other objects, combs have the anatomy to speak: teeth.2 Inscriptions physically appear between the two rows of a comb’s teeth, as if they came from a mouth. Combs intimately whisper their posies into the ears of the beloved as they run their teeth through hair on a head. Visual depictions of combing typically show the object near the ear. A comb’s ability to anatomically “speak” is one of two reasons why this chapter focuses on inscribed combs, or “comb poems”: the metaphor

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of teeth evokes poetics, voice, and bodily interaction with texts and objects. This chapter examines how the dynamic interaction between text and object guides users’ physical, emotional, and intellectual relationship to that object. My overarching claim is that inscribed objects offer up their own rhetorical forms, grounded in the haptic experience of those mobile objects. Combs are meant to move—locally through hair (although they may also be physically static and decorative in dressed hair), and geographically between a lover and the beloved. Comb poems are also intended to “move” the beloved—male or female—to remembrance, affection, love, maybe even sex.3 More practically, these H-shaped combs are designed to be flipped according to one’s grooming needs, with closely spaced tines running along one side and more widely spaced tines along the other.4 The posies upon these combs physically activate the reader, forcing her or him to flip the comb in a specific way and recruiting the structures of verse in order to do so. Since the combs have inscriptions on both sides, the reader must turn over the object to complete the rhyme or phrase, as with the fifteenth-century French comb in Figure 2.1. The other reason for my focus on combs is that early modern pastoral romance picks up a lover’s gift-comb and reconfigures it as a comb-shaped poem. This textualized lover’s token in William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals (1613) presents a telling moment of inversion between object and text, combing through entangled early modern textual-material exchanges and demonstrating how readerly haptics carry over into the printed book. Like combs, books manipulate readerly bodies, also in a physical form that measures words with those bodies. Guiding my inquiry are critical approaches to materiality that stress how the interactions between humans and their material world regulate what human societies are capable of understanding about objects. Johanna Drucker argues that our sense of materiality is prompted by “a dynamic relation” between an object’s characteristics and the social practices and aesthetic or conceptual regimes that interpret them.5 “Performative materiality” shifts our focus from what something is to how it is used at a given period in time. This is not to disregard the inherent material qualities of the object, but rather to point to how different aesthetic and cultural practices shape which features—of countless potential material aspects—become foregrounded or are seized upon as defining by a specific group of users. Certainly many people in the twenty-first

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Figure 2.1. Comb, 1400s. Image of recto: “mon ♥ aves.” Verso not depicted: “pour bien.” Posy translated by Touba Ghadessi as “Take care of my heart.” France, Gothic period, fi fteenth century. Boxwood; overall: 11.5 × 16.1 cm (4½ × 65⁄16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund, 1951.452.

century still use combs, and in certain aspects some contemporary combs resemble early modern combs—such as a row of thinner tines and one of larger, farther-apart tines—and they are put to some of the same uses, like detangling, removing lice, and distributing substances through the hair. But modern combs are no longer typically almost the size of a human head, nor given as lovers’ gifts, nor inscribed with romantic rhymes; nor is Western literature frequently invested in pointing out the specific material from which a comb is made whenever a comb is mentioned. These last details emerge from a different comb value system. But how might we access this earlier value system? Robin Bernstein’s “scriptive things” clarifies Drucker’s sweeping approach by focusing attention on the bodily performance cues, or “scripts,” offered by objects found in the archive: “The method of reading material things as scripts aims to discover not what any individual actually did but rather what a thing invited its users to do.”6 How do objects shape

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human behavior? What kinds of cultural practices, physical movements, and thought processes does an early modern comb invite its users to perform? While our entire material world shapes our daily behavior, Bernstein is particularly invested in emotionally charged or cherished objects with which people have (or at one time had) regular, intimate encounters. With a rubber doll that invites children to cuddle but also abuse it, or a handkerchief printed with a sad song that invites sentimental tears, Bernstein points to how these scripted things “are citational in that they arrange and propel bodies in recognizable ways, thought paths of evocative movement that have been traveled before.”7 Bernstein links repetitive paths of movement in combination with objects to the production of not-quite-conscious thought, although it is important to note that objects always offer multiple scripts, some more dominant than others, and some that may even be in direct contradiction to one another. The notion that similar haptic movement with intimate objects can prompt similar thoughts across a group of users within the same cultural group is hardly new, as nuns and monks writing out cherished sacred texts in twelft h-century scriptoria might have suggested. But what is relatively new is the recent attention given in the cognitive science field to the idea of “embodied” or “grounded” cognition. Lawrence Barsalou’s laboratory experiments and literature reviews of the subject indicate that particular bodily states in human subjects can produce distinctive affective states, although none to the level of specificity that Bernstein outlines.8 Results are described vaguely as “positive feelings” or “negative feelings.” Barsalou emphasizes that first-time experiences are particularly formative: “When an event is experienced originally, the underlying sensory, motor, and introspective states are partially stored. . . . Remembering an event arises from partially simulating the sensory, motor, and introspective states active at the time.”9 Used repetitively in an intimate and sensual setting close to the body, a lover’s comb certainly seeks to regularly evoke positive physical and psychological feelings about the beloved. Combs were often given to a lover at a betrothal, linking the object with what one hopes was a positive experience. The word “sense” conflates haptic experience with both an intellectual response as well as a more intuitive reaction; this comingling is crucial to my emphasis on the textual—and especially poetic—element as it guides user interaction with the tactile. Early modern poetry has a strong stake

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in sensuality, and particularly its own sensuality as generated through objectness: that is, its form, its visual setting on the page or other writing surface, and its rhyme. The rhymed verse on the combs compels users to flip over the combs to complete the rhyme. There are multiple varieties of form at work here: a kind of primary material form, like the boxwood or ivory out of which the comb is made, and a secondary material form expressed in design that relies on and conveys itself through the primary material form, such as the shape of the comb and the shapes and positions of letters, and/or the literary form of rhyme.10 I argue that the comb pattern poem and the love-knot poem of (imagined) hair following it in William Browne’s printed book Britannia’s Pastorals draw upon the comb poem tradition in order to attract attention to the haptic and sensual experiences of books.

Materiality of Letters, Love Tokens, and Readerly Orientations A wooden comb exhibits a productive tension between its material qualities and the way human technologies such as carving, writing, and rhyming have worked upon them in order to create an object that “scripts” certain uses. Caroline Levine recruits the architectural term “affordance” to convey the synergistic relationships between poetic and material forms: “‘affordance’ designates the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs,” but each kind of form has a limited range of associations restricted by its material instantiations.11 For example, enclosures afford containment and security in their segregations, which demarcate an inside and an outside. With a similar insistence on form, rhyme provokes repetition, anticipation, and memorization. These are fundamental features of enclosures and rhyme, although not all material manifestations of the two will evoke all of their features, and—with Drucker’s point about cultural visibility in mind—users may not even be aware of the full range of features. Affordance captures the constant movement between the primary materials of construction and the secondary materiality of design, and the negotiation between different forms that results in the expression of a particular set of traits, uses, or actions. The affordances for each inscribed object are different: combs may afford a “flip” script, while rings and bells demand a “turn” script. A

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common posy inscription on late medieval and early modern French boxcombs recalls the act of gift-giving and the giver, with the words “De bon ♥” on one side, and “ je le done” (“I give this with a good ♥ [heart],” or “Of a good ♥ [heart] I give this”). The rhyme bon-done plays along with the “flip,” suspending itself aurally until the reader turns the comb over and finishes the rhyme. The rhymed couplet participates in the “coupling” goal of a love token. And the suspense of rhyme pushes toward particular engagements with the object. It brings the recto and the verso into conversation with each other, rendering the other present while physically out of view. This is the “script,” to recall Bernstein’s term, of the boxwood comb. The wordless ivory counterparts to inscribed boxwood combs even rely on this “flip script,” using carved pictures. In one example, users engaged in grooming are encouraged to link the two sides of a French comb (dated 1530–50) that on one side depicts a biblical scene, David’s message to Bathsheba, and on the other depicts the Judgment of Paris.12 Even the protective leather comb cases could encourage a “flip”; one case’s lid tools “de boen” on one side and “amore” on the other (“With good love”).13 Comb poems can also capture verbal linguistic movement across a barrier in another way, namely by breaking up individual words with a central panel or image. In these poems, words do not end at natural semantic breaks but are internally disrupted in unexpected places and so foreground the materiality of letters.14 An example of investment in the visuals of the verbal, the “De bon ♥” comb emphasizes the rhyme by stacking the rhyming parts of the words (b-on / d-one) on top of each other, ignoring the rebus-word coeur, which would frustrate the neatness of a rhymed couplet. As they engage and direct our interactions with the material object’s properties, inscriptional verses on combs and other objects tend to sop up the material into the linguistic. Indeed, rebus-writing is a rather common practice applied to combs and other love tokens.15 Comb poems are linked with the broader category of posies and love tokens, in which object use can be directly related to its poetic inscription. Following the lead of George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), Malcolm Jones classifies the umbrella genre as including inscriptions like love tokens and comb poems as “trencher poetry,” although this association with serving platters obscures the myriad and diverse objects, locations, and social situations for such rhymed couplets; perhaps the better-known version is the ring posy, with its snappy single

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couplet.16 Other common objects for such inscriptions include knives (both handles and blades), bracelets, jugs, handbells, mirrors, and textiles like gloves, handkerchiefs, scarves, and ribbons.17 They may be painted, sewn, engraved, or written and pinned. Inscriptions can be generic and broadly applicable to many objects, although some are materially and formally specific.18 They may also appear to be broadly applicable but, through tradition, linked to a specific material form, such as the classic comb rhyme “De bon ♥ // je le done.” Formally specific poesies reference the object’s properties, picking them up into symbolic love discourse. One such poesy is “engraven about a Iewell”: “There is no Jewell I can see / Like love that’s sent in constancie.” Ring posies include “By this Ring of gold / Take me to have and hold” and “Like to a circle round, no end in love is found / Take me with it, for both are fit.”19 As with comb posies, ring posies require movement for decipherment, and any interior inscription remains private and hidden from view while on the wearer’s finger.

Comb-Body Assemblages and Sensory Exchanges Unlike ring posies, comb poems do not commonly refer to the implement’s material qualities, but a comb’s physical composition was of deep interest to early modern writers and is frequently referred to when combs are mentioned. Extant early medieval combs were made of antler, bone, or ivory, though boxwood replaced these materials gradually in the fifteenth century, particularly in England.20 Combs also shifted from a luxury item owned exclusively by the elite and the ecclesiastical to a possession attainable by less wealthy people. Eighty-two combs—eighty of them boxwood—were recently recovered from the Tudor shipwreck of the Mary Rose, making these the most common personal item found on board.21 Other materials from which combs were constructed include horn, which some sources indicate would have been black and polished to a high shine, and black lead.22 At the discursive level, accounts of fantasy combs often exaggerate and enhance material qualities: in Comus, John Milton refers to the golden comb of a siren/mermaid, with a potential comb pun on the antagonist’s name.23 The tines of Gargantua’s nine-hundred-footlong comb in Rabelais’s work are real “teeth”—whole elephant tusks.24 An imagined comb in the popular Reynard the Fox tales, which date to the twelft h century, is made from the shoulder bone of the beast close to

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paradise (pantherus), in addition to being highly polished and extremely lightweight, with silver teeth. It has a scent that cures illnesses and lures “beasts” and contains carved figures inlaid with gold.25 As that last example of magic scent suggests, combs are a site of bidirectional material exchange with bodies. Oil from boxwood was said to cure venereal diseases, and black lead combs supposedly leave a dark residue that can color over gray or white hair.26 In return, human secretions transfer onto the object, most obviously hair or the natural oil (sebum) found in hair, as one effect of combing is the even distribution of sebum throughout the length of the hair. One Protestant traveler recalls being presented with a dirty tooth from a saint’s boxwood comb to kiss in veneration; when he took out his handkerchief to clean it, his hostess cried that he “was going to take away the best part of the Relick, which was the Sweat of the Saint.”27 Combs may also act as bearers of other materials to and away from human hair, as in the case of lice. Use in liturgical and quotidian practice involved combing oil and other materials like honeyscented or rosemary-infused water into the hair to sanctify, clean, or grow it. The poisonous combs common in German fairy tales (most notably the Brothers Grimm’s Snow White) do not appear to be abundant, but in practice the arsenic from the paints used on combs could be fatal.28 Some early moderns believed that hair possessed a great power, evocative of the biblical Samson and Delilah story in which the cutting of Samson’s hair reduced his great strength. Combs draw out and make present the latent “fiery power,” now known as static electricity, of human hair.29 Humans meld with the comb through an exchange of material and through a shared first-person voice in the comb poem. While first-person inscriptions abound among Renaissance household objects, the case of the comb is an advantageous conflation: the lover desires such intimate proximity with the beloved. Taking this human-as-comb identity further, Edward Herbert of Cherbury reworks the Petrarchan sonnet trope of the lover as a little ship tossed at sea in the short poem “A Vision,” published in his Occasional Verses. A lover caught in the oscillations of love is “a bark of ivory” (comb) that finds itself on a baffling set of changing courses “within an open curled Sea of Gold” (hair).30 Visually remarkable and unique among Herbert’s other poems, glosses explaining the metaphors appear in italics within the poem’s margins: the comb’s teeth are oars, warts are rocks, lice are monsters, and hairs in the comb are waves that

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enter the ship. After four stanzas describing the comb’s movement, the lady completes her updo and “Earth’s fairest Creature” emerges, at which time the metaphor seems to bleed into the marginal comment “Comb cast away.” In a Hero and Leander parody, Leander’s teeth and hair are likened to combs of various materials that he uses as a barber’s apprentice: So pickt, so wash’t his Combs of Ivory, Unless his teeth their whiteness nought came nigh, With others that were made of horn, or box, He often wou’d compare his golden locks.31 With horn- or boxwood-like hair framing his face and ivory-white teeth, Leander morphs into a single-sided comb. And the text implies that he is a comber of both hair and thoughts, as he “cou’d dive into the channels of your brain.”32 This burlesque description takes the substance exchange between humans and combs to an extreme. While combs themselves move among makers and sellers and consumers, between lovers, and among hands, hair, and resting places, combs also can have movable parts, be ornately carved, and be covered in bright colors. Boxwood combs sometimes contain small storage compartments, presumably for cosmetics.33 Sometimes combs held decorative mirrors. At least one extant comb hinges two H-shaped combs together.34 Ivory and boxwood combs could be brightly painted and contain colored silk panels, and the ivory could be inlaid with gold. Both sides of the comb could be painted and/or carved, encouraging users to handle and examine the comb for aesthetic reasons. Combs could be had in a full range of price points, depending on their ornateness. A traveler describes Italian peddlers selling combs with “all kindes and prices,” from the extremely affordable up to a boxwood treasure that was more expensive than ten pistols because “it was of vast bigness and most curiously carved.”35 The “nit combs” of the Mary Rose shipwreck are more functional; some have lice still preserved in them. But combs could be surprisingly large: one belonging to Margaret III, Countess of Flanders (1350–1405), is 15.9 cm high and 20.4 cm long (~6.25 × 8 in.).36 The suggestive comparison of Leander’s head with a comb is exaggerated but not radically so. A stunning example of a large French-speaking comb appears in an unusual full-length portrait (Figure 2.2), from around 1600, of Elizabeth

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Figure 2.2. Portrait of Elizabeth Vernon Wriothesley, Countess of Southampton (1572[?]–1655), full-length, ca. 1600, owned and displayed by Buccleuch Living Heritage Trust, Boughton House, Kettering, England. On the comb is written “Menez moi doucement” (Take/lead me gently). 53¾ × 35 in., in a carved and gilded frame, English School. By kind permission of the Duke of Buccleuch & Queensberry KBE.

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Vernon Wriothesley, Countess of Southampton, maid of honor at Elizabeth I’s court.37 Vernon Wriothesley is best known today as the wife of William Shakespeare’s patron Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, who was the dedicatee of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and possibly also the Sonnets, in addition to works by many other authors. Some speculate that Vernon Wriothesley may have played the “Dark Lady” to Wriothesley’s “Fair Youth” in the Sonnets’ famed salacious love triangle. The countess prominently displays, just in front of her ear—almost like a telephone receiver—an enormous inscribed comb more than half the length of her head.38 The comb is a focal point of the painting. Its large white ivory rivals the whiteness of Vernon Wriothesley’s face and exposed skin. The awkwardness of her grasp draws attention to the comb. The long fingers of both her hands appear in formal conversation with it: her left hand grips a lock of hair in a sensual combing gesture, and her right index finger points up as it rests upon the tines in the same direction and plane as the painted inscription. This gesture emphasizes the comb as an extension of the human body, namely the hand, and represents a technological improvement over simply combing with the fingers.39 The pointing finger draws attention to the speaking comb’s line: “menez moi doucement” (Take/lead me gently). This is a boudoir portrait intended for the countess’s husband, and she is referencing a well-known emblem of Renaissance sensuality—the mermaid or siren with a comb, the same iconography invoked by Milton in Comus.40 The double entendre of the comb’s inscription certainly would not have been lost on her literarily inclined husband.41

Entwining Verbal and Material Forms: George Puttenham’s Figured Poems, and William Browne’s Comb Poem and Love-Knot Poem Love tokens inscribed with poesies appear in The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham’s book on rhetoric and poetic composition. Here, the mere shapes of poems provide particular rhetorical as well as physical positions: a roundel, or sphere poem, affords poetry about geometrically similar objects (e.g., the world); movement (especially if rotational); infinite entities, like the divine, without beginning or end; and abstract ideas of encompassing, like the queen’s magnetism and protection, that draw her subjects to her.42 As with the comb poems, these shapes correlate with poetic sound and line length.43 Puttenham typically offers a

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syllable range for each shape; for example, the “lozange” or “rombus” may not contain more than thirteen, fifteen, or twenty-one feet in its longest line. He prints most of his examples without words and disconnected to a primary material base, although the shape names (“egg,” “pyramid,” etc.) and Puttenham himself suggest material origins for some of them. That said, he explicitly notes that certain examples of this figured poetry are intended for love tokens: “They will vtter any pretie conceit, they reduce it into metricall feet, and put it in forme of a Lozange or square, or such other figure, and so engrauen in gold, siluer or iuorie, and sometimes with letters of ametist, rubie, emerald or topas curiousely cemented and peeced together, they sende them in chaines, bracelets, collars and girdles to their mistresses to weare for a remembrance.”44 These forms, along with their primary material instantiations, afford expressions of love. Eschewing known Greek and Latin models or the bejeweled marquetry of English embroidered forms, Puttenham seems to have invented an exotic origin for these poems that evokes in the early modern English imagination the sensuality, ornamental writing, and textile geometries associated with the Middle East.45 For the first four of the eight printed pattern poem examples, Puttenham claims to have translated and reprinted the bejeweled exchanges between one Lady Kermesine and her beloved Temir Cutzclewe (Tamerlane), and between the Persian Sultan Ribuska and the Lady Selamour. The poems are responsive to one another in form and content, and physically responsive to the wearers’ bodies upon which Puttenham likely imagines them to be worn, as jewels were considered to have medicinal (or poisonous) effects. Kermesine expresses her admiration for Tamerlane’s conquests in rubies and diamonds, which visually recall the battle scene of blood and skulls mentioned just after the longest line (which begins “The strength . . .”) of the “lozange” form: . . . The strength of his braue right arme, Cleauing hard downe vnto the eyes The raw skulles of his enemies . . . Tamerlane responds by way of a bejeweled “fuzie,” writing in emeralds and amethysts. Puttenham describes the relationship of this form to Kermesine’s “lozange” as “of the same nature but that he is sharper and

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Figure 2.3. The Triquet Displayed (left), bejeweled pattern poem exchange. The Spire/Taper/ Pyramis (right), celebratory poems for Queen Elizabeth I, read from bottom to top and then in reverse. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), 78–79. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, 1589 PUTT.

slenderer.”46 Tamerlane’s elongated diamond-shaped poem is “of the same nature” in content by initially celebrating his victories, before extending the conceit to acknowledge that Kermesine is his greatest conquest.47 These, and the next set of courtship poems, highlight the ways entwined verbal and material forms respond to one another. With blue sapphire and topaz stones constituting each letter, the Sultan and his Lady extravagantly negotiate the terms of their relationship across four poems, two of which appear in Puttenham’s book. The Sultan expresses his interest in the form of a downward-pointing triangle, and the Lady replies with her condition—that she, Selamour, be his “sole amour”—in an upwardly responsive triangle form to complete the shape Puttenham calls “the tricquet displayed” (Figure 2.3). To signal her interest, she rhymes his last

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word (“houre”) with her first word (“Power”) to create a single-word “couplet,” extending her own triangle poem downward from there. These mobile poems generate emotional circuits of sympathy grounded in wearable objects. While their poetics are hardly remarkable, the forms visualize affective human response to structure. Puttenham’s images remind us not only of the period’s commitment to visual form but also of the way verse plunges into the material as it moves between people and through space. Moreover, they highlight the ways entwined verbal and material forms respond to one another. Puttenham places his own book within the migration of these forms across international and cultural borders. His etiology for the poems is a product of his own (real or fabulated) travels and translation. He describes “being in Italie conuersant with a certaine gentleman, who had long trauailed the Orientall parts of the world, and seene the Courts of the great Princes of China an Tatarie,” elaborating that “some fewe measures composed in this sort this gentleman gaue me, which I translated word for word and as neere as I could followed both the phrase and the figure.”48 The last four of Puttenham’s examples of pattern poems exhibit his own formal responsiveness to, and perhaps anxieties about, these “exotic” forms, as the poems’ topical foci are explicitly English concerns: Queen Elizabeth, the blessings of the Christian God, and a lost romance presumably authored by Puttenham himself.49 If inscribed objects offer up their own rhetorical forms that are grounded in haptic experiences, then such objects must also include the physical book. A comb-shaped poem appearing in an early modern printed book or manuscript makes readers aware of the way books, or sheets of parchment or paper, force humans to handle these inscribed objects. Pattern poetry, figured poetry, concrete poetry, shape poetry, calligrammes, carmina figurata, Bilder-Reime, technopaegnia: despite the unsettled name of the genre—which reflects a genuine lack of systematic critical attention—it has a long history. While critics tend to focus on the genre’s continuity between material form and verbal content, they often also unreflectively cite ancient Greek precursors as its link to material culture and objects.50 Early modern print examples do often pull away from specific objects, as with the geometric shapes of Puttenham (who also, incorrectly, cites one Greek forerunner), but shape poems are ubiquitous for those whose daily interactions are suff used with textualized

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objects—from dressing and combing to eating and drinking to sleeping to walking into any room of the house.51 Although not extremely common, pattern poems on paper and on objects have a long history in English poetry. The earliest one is also one of the first recorded poems in Old English, The Dream of the Rood. Versions of this poem appear on an eighth-century stone cross, on an eleventh-century metal-plated cross, and—the longest early version—in a tenth-century manuscript (although not in cross form).52 Nonetheless, the pattern poem genre typically receives attention among early modernists only through the two frequently anthologized pattern poems by George Herbert: “The Altar” and “Easter Wings,” both of which appear in The Temple.53 However, my focus here is on the pattern poetry that presents itself as posy objects in William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals (1613). This work consists of a long narrative poem in which, at the end of book 1’s song 3, twelve swains present their ladies with classic lover’s gifts accompanied by posy verse, including a jewel ring, gloves, a girdle, a love knot possibly made of hair, and—yes—a comb. What is the relationship between the inky outline of an H-comb with lines of poetry following its form and the page of a printed and engraved book? How do these dynamics script particular physical human interactions with the book? The swains’ twelve gifts demonstrate an increasingly visual program unique to the book in which the linguistic approaches the visual. Gifts one through seven follow the same layout, with a heading describing the gift, located above ornate rectangular borders surrounding accompanying rhymed-couplet posies. The first three gifts are a “dogge,” a pipe, and gloves; gifts five through seven are “a ring, with a Picture in a Iewell on it,” “a Nosegay of Roses, with a Nettle in it,” and a girdle—a multisensory cadre of offerings. The odd one out here is the fourth gift, an anagram (MAIDEN / AID MEN), which lacks the tangibility of the other gifts but still contains the thematically appropriate posy within the ornate border, as if the “thingyness” of language that it foregrounds were as tangible as a stinging nettle. The borders transform into the more directly pictorial with the last five gifts, all appearing in a single opening, at which point the descriptive headings disappear (Figure 2.4). These gifts encompass a scroll with an image of a heart as a heading, a shepherd’s “Hooke” (crook), and the

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Figure 2.4. The last five gifts, including the comb poem and love knot. William Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals, bk. 1 (London, 1613), 60–61. Engraving in letterpress-printed book. By courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison, #Thordarson T 436.

more obvious shape poems of the comb and the love-knot. The series culminates with the twelft h swain’s “gift”: an image of Cupid that is not a pattern poem but which includes a posy verse directly below it. The suggestion of posies on these objects seems to have opened the floodgates to featuring the visuality and materiality of verse, beginning with the anagram. In this way, the text moves through objects into pictorial verse and ultimately into the purely pictorial. Although it formally occupies the same category as the “dogge,” the image of Cupid—like the anagram— defies tangibility. The practical question of how the swains presented these items is sidestepped as the text slowly drops its plot fiction and succumbs to the metafiction of the presentation of language—specifically, language as image.

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Transcriptions: COMB: Right side: L ovelie maiden best of any O f our plaines though thrice as many V aile to loue, and leaue denyeing, E ndless knotts lett fates lie tyeing S uch a face so fyne a feature (K indest fairest sweetest creature) N euer yet was found but louing O then let my plaints be mouing T rust a shepheard thou the meanest T ruth is best when shee is plainest. I love, not, with vowes contesting F ayth is faith without protesting T ime it all thinges doth inhereitt R enders each desert his merritt I f yt, faile in me, as noe man D oubtles tyme nere wonne a woeman. Left side (upside down): M aidens still should be relenting A nd once flinty, still preventing. Y outh with youth is best combined E ach one with his like is twyned B eauty should haue beauteous meani’g E uer it hope easeth playninge V nto you whome Nature dresses N eeds no combe to smoothe yor tresses T his way yt may doe his dutie I n yor locks to shade your beautie. D oe soe, and to loue be turning. E lce each hart it will be burning. LOVE KNOT: This is loue and worth commending, Still beginning neuer ending,

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Like a wilie net insnaring, In a round shuts up all squaring, In and out, whose euerie angle[] More and more doth still intangle, Keepes a measure still in mouing, And is neuer light but louinge, Twyning armes exchanging kisses, Each partaking others blisses, Laughing weepinge still togeather, Blisse in one is myrth in either, Neuer breaking euer bending, This is loue & worth com[m]ending[.] This final page spread draws our attention to the material, manipulable quality of the book itself and the mechanical processes underlying its production. Self-aware, as all shape poems are, the text forces readers to “comb through” its language by manipulating the physical book. The comb poem prints the left set of tines upside down, causing readers to “use” both sets of teeth in a rotation somewhat reminiscent of the inscribed boxwood combs’ flips. The concluding couplet of the poem itself incorporates the upcoming act of re-righting the book, “Do soe, and to loue be turning / Elce each hart it will be burning.” Emphasizing its multidirectional reading practices, the comb poem also contains an acrostic verse that closes with another “combing”: in this case, rotating the book to read the left-side tines, which proclaim, “Loves Knott If Trid / Maye Be Vntide.” This also is a kind of metrical metapoesy: this quick couplet is the final product of metrical distillation, from the main narrative’s pentameter through the gift poesies’ tetrameter down to these two dimeter strands. As with other poesies discussed in this chapter, the verse demands humans’ physical interaction to render it intelligible; in this, Browne’s figured poems function like “interface objects,” “objects [that] become constituted through moments of encounter.”54 In this context, the “object” constituted through our moment of encounter is not as much the material object as it is the posy verse. But rather than untie and untangle, the movement of the comb instead generates additional hairy entanglements: gift eleven—the love-knot— appears next as the imaginative direct result of twisting and turning the

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book. Love-knots were often twisted out of a beloved’s hair and could be worn about the body, as a bracelet, for example. Browne’s comb poem imaginatively sheds itself into the wearer’s physical hair to lodge there, as if poetic language were another artistic element of her hairstyle.55 The comb poem both exhorts its reader not to worry about knots (“Endless knotts lett fates lie tyeing” and “You whome Nature dresses / Needs no combe to smoothe yor tresses”), even as its final acrostic couplet (“Loves Knott If Trid / Maye Be Vntide”) invites some speculation about what happens when the phrase “loves knot” itself unties—that is, turns into “not love.”56 Some boxwood combs tap into this paradox by including a decorative knot in their carvings.57 Browne’s textual love-knot makes special two-dimensional effort to imagine itself as a physical gift, using shadow when its bands overlap and breaking up words just like the disjointed words appearing on hair combs. Figured poetry often marks itself as such through self-reflexivity, weaving an accord between form and content. As a racy, entangled sonnet (of fourteen lines!) about entangled bodies, Browne’s love-knot poem certainly achieves this. In manipulating the reader into twisting the book, these haptics may be attempting to recruit some of the erotic and sensual energy potential in hair knots. Printed vertically, the poem disorients the reader, who must rotate the book in order to locate the “first line” in this infinity poem. One meta-poetic line in particular stands out as emblematic of my argument that rhetorical forms are grounded in the haptic experience of inscribed objects: “Keepes a measure still in mouing.” However poor in quality the love-knot’s couplets are as poetry, their prosody (“measure”) and poetic success—even their basic legibility—all rely on a reader’s haptic experience of the graphic figure linked with the physical book.58 The comb poem and love-knot’s movements not only play with the content of verse, the book’s physicality, and the act of reading as a sensory experience, but they also visually manifest the imbrications of sound in meter and rhyme. The visualization of rhyme scheme and meter is a feature central to Puttenham’s understanding of poetry. He calls the end rhymes in a rhyme scheme “concords,” which are either “plaine” and “not intangled” or “enterweauing one with another by knots, or as it were by band.”59 Scholars tend to interpret Puttenham’s images as static diagrams. However, linking inscribed objects in motion to pattern poetry instead

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encourages us to identify them equally as visual expressions of mobility within early modern poetics. Puttenham’s descriptions use the language of movement: rhymes “do passe speedily away and so often return agayne, as their tunes are neuer lost, nor out of the eare” and “Third distaunce is, when your rime falleth vpon the first and fourth verse ouerleaping two.”60 In this formulation, there is a continual presentness to the forms of rhymes that does not fade after we’ve spoken or seen them—they continue to move with us as we progress through a poem. Malcolm Jones asserts that posy objects have been critically neglected, and Dick Higgins notes the same about shaped poems.61 In order to evaluate the contributions of these rhetorical and material forms, I argue that we need to take a different aesthetic approach to their poetic experiences. This requires accounting for the ways in which the material and the linguistic are locked in a chiasmic state of dependency. For me, such an aesthetic approach has meant thinking about how sound—for example, rhyme—propels us to handle the material object in specific ways. Or, put another way, rhyme forces our bodies into particular positions to engage with the material world. And if we touch by sound, we have always been reading by touch; long before electronic tablets and cell phones, and even long before the early modern period, humans have been turning, handling, and holding physical objects with texts on them, like combs or rings or tablets—the original stone kind, that is. This mode of inquiry also means thinking about how the literary absorbs the material up into itself. Visual language patterns our experience of the material, as book historians and typographers constantly remind us. This occurs even as the quotidian mundaneness of it can disengage us from the poetics of form and the letterature of literature, just as the gimmickyness of pattern poems and posy objects can prevent us from combing out their fullest implications as literary expressions.

Notes 1. Because the physical locations of the inscriptions’ letters are important to my argument, I use a forward slash (/) to indicate a significant separation between and within words, and a double forward slash (//) to indicate words on the flip side

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of the comb. Combs tend to speak French because French luxury combs were generally the only available option in England before 1635, when the English Guild of Comb-Makers first received its charter. The inscriptions are from the following sources:

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C om b P oe m s a. “vive celle // que / jayme,” 1500–1600, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Boxwood, 11 × 16.8 cm, France. http:// collections.vam.ac.uk /item/O176875 /comb-unknown/. b. “aies / de moy // souve / nance,” ca. 1500, Musée de Cluny–Musée National du Moyen Âge, Paris. Boxwood and ivory, 18.8 × 14.3 cm, France. Recto: https://www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/06 -527603-2C6NU0P98XP7.html; verso: https://www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/06 -527602-2C6NU0P98WO4.html. c. “mi a / mor // vos / sols,” ca. 1500, Musée de Cluny–Musée National du Moyen Âge, Paris. Boxwood, 12.8 × 15.8 cm, France. Recto: https://www .photo.rmn.fr/archive/10-533241 -2C6NU0YBV3PQ.html; verso: https:// www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/10-533242 -2C6NU0YBVNQ5.html. d. “prenes / en gre // ce petit don,” sixteenth century, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Carved boxwood, with ivory or bone over silk, 12 × 17 cm. http://collections.vam.ac.uk /item /O125617/comb-unknown/?print=1. e. “mon ♥ aves // pour bien,” (literally, “Have my heart with goodness,” translation by Touba Ghadessi via personal correspondence). The comb has been transcribed improperly as simply “mon avis // pour bien” and subsequently mistranslated by the holding museum. 1400s, the Cleveland Museum, USA. Boxwood, 11.4 × 16 cm, France. http://www.clevelandart.org /art/1951.452?fbclid=IwAR 1x XOAcp VOMQ7IgLSSn4YehLKEi30u1zJK3 -FlaVABU8Iy1HE7l6TG9oeI. Consult also Figure 2.1. 2. Musical instruments are another less metaphorically vocal category of early modern inscribed objects that bear strong links between the first-person inscription and the object’s ability to voice the line(s). A handbell described by Flora Dennis bears the inscription “With my ring I call your servants, o Lippomano”

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(original: “PVLV MEO SERV[O]S VOCO LIP MANO TVOS”); note that one must rotate the bell in order to read the inscription. Cited by Flora Dennis, “Resurrecting Forgotten Sound: Fans and Handbells in Early Modern Italy,” in Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and Its Meanings, ed. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010): 191–210, esp. 199. 3. Consult Denise Wolft hal, “The Sexuality of the Medieval Comb,” in Exploring the Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture, ed. Elina Gertsman and Jill Stevenson (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2012): 176–94; and Wolft hal, In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe (London: Yale University Press, 2010). For a concrete example of early modern English gift culture in which a gift fails to persuade, consult Catherine Richardson, “‘A Very Fit Hat’: Personal Objects and Early Modern Affection,” in Hamling and Richardson, Everyday Objects, 289–98. Michael Camille stresses that both women and men gave and received combs, although he concludes, after his examination of the visual record, that combs and mirrors were “powerfully gendered” female, at least in the medieval period. Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1998), 57. That said, early modern literature contains numerous references to men using combs. Thomas Killigrew’s mid-seventeenthcentury play The Parson’s Wedding sets up, near the start of the first act, parallel scenes of combing separated by gender; the first combing scene occurs with a woman at her toilet likely being coiffed by her servant (act 1, scene 2), followed by a second scene of men with the stage direction “they comb their heads, and talk” (act 1, scene 3). Consult Thomas Killigrew, The Parson’s Wedding, in Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1664), 80. 4. The H-shaped comb is a very old form, reaching into antiquity.

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76 | Obj e c t s W i t h i n / W i t hou t t h e B ody 5. Johanna Drucker, “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface,” DHQ 7.1 (2013): http://www .digitalhumanities.org /dhq/vol/7/1/000143 /000143.html. Consult in particular sections 4, 9, 11, and 15–17. 6. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 11. 7. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 73–74. 8. Lawrence W. Barsalou et al., “Social Embodiment,” Psychology of Learning and Motivation 43 (2003): 43–92. Consult also Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008): 617–45. 9. Barsalou, “Social Embodiment,” 44. 10. Consult Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); and Erika Boeckeler, Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 12. Kirschenbaum’s terms are “forensic” and “formal” materiality. Drucker resists Kirschenbaum’s distinction between forensic and design-based material features (what I call “primary” and “secondary” materiality) because she finds that they presuppose a kind of fi xed notion of materiality; however, those distinctions can provide useful insight when localized in this specific way. 11. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6. 12. Perhaps this is a cautionary comb about female seductiveness? 1530–50, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Elephant ivory, 12 × 16.2 cm, France. http:// collections.vam.ac.uk /item/O166401 /david-and-bathsheba-and-the-comb -unknown/. Medieval and early modern ivory combs might be carved or painted or have painted carvings; they may depict mythological, biblical, hagiographic, courtly, and romance narratives or merely decorative scenes. Like boxwood combs, these can be humorous: one comb has painted insects on the finer tines in which

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lice would have been caught. Consider also this example: Fifteenth–sixteenth century, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA. Ivory, 8.8 × 12.9 cm, France or Italy. https://www.metmuseum.org /art /collection/search/464245?searchField=All &sortBy=relevance&when=A.D .+1400-1600&what=Ivory&ft= comb&offset=0&rpp=20& ;pos=1. 13. “De boen // amore,” 1400–1500, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Tooled (boiled), carved, and stamped leather, 12 × 12 × 3 cm, Italy. https://collections .vam.ac.uk /item/O128018/comb-case -and-unknown/. In the Gothic period, combs, mirrors and mirror cases, and gravoirs (hair parters) formed a typical set included in an upper-class bride’s trousseau. 14. One comb places the full posy on a single side, separating letters within words by a central panel: “De b/on ♥ // le d/one.” 1500–1600, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Boxwood, 12.5 × 16.8 cm, France. http://collections.vam .ac.uk /item/O125619/comb-unknown/. 15. The heart fl ickers into and out of rebus status across combs, as the most common iconography to appear on the combs is a heart image in the instrument’s geometric center, often pierced with an arrow (sometimes wielded by a disembodied hand and arm). The uncertain status of this image has led to critical misinterpretation, as in the case of Figure 2.1, among others. The central heart further anthropomorphizes the comb. 16. Malcolm Jones, “‘Such Pretty Things Would Soon Be Gone’: The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse, 1480–1650,” in A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 2, 359–81, esp. 365. Victoria Yeoman discusses how the entwined physical and artistic properties of trencher plates and trencher sets were rooted in a set of social dining practices; she also traces the visual, textual, and formal sources for the plates across Renaissance artistic modes.

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C om b P oe m s Yeoman, “Speaking Plates: Text, Performance, and Banqueting Trenchers in Early Modern Europe,” Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies 31.5 (2017): 755–79. Arguing for the need to attend to “non-paper” poetry, Tiffany Stern outlines the research challenges she encountered in tracking trencher poetry, citing cataloguing practices, restricted image permissions, and limited access at museums. Stern, “Trencher Poetry: Non-Paper Literature, How It Means, and Why It’s Lost,” English Literary Renaissance 50.1 (2020): 153–60. 17. Actually, any surface is fair game; I am particularly interested in small, mobile gift objects. 18. These appear in posy lists and literature, such as Loues garland or, Posies for rings, hand-kerchers, and [g]loues and such pretty tokens that louers sent their loues (London, 1624); Cupid’s Posies (London, 1642); and John Mennes and James Smith, Recreation for ingenious headpeeces (1st ed. London, 1645; 2nd ed., 1663, includes the same couplets but with a note, “Posies for Rings,” sig. R3r and v). 19. Both in Cupid’s Posies (1642), sig. B3v and A4v. 20. Boxwood is a tree prized by artists across a range of artistic endeavors. John Evelyn describes that it is used by “the Turner, Ingraver, Carver, MathematicalInstrument, Comb and Pipe-makers,” among others. John Evelyn, Sylva, or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees (London, 1664), 65. On the archaeological record of European combs with an emphasis on London, consult Geoff Egan and Frances Pritchard, Dress Accessories, c. 1150–1450 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2002), 366–76. The ivory was typically sourced from either elephant or walrus. 21. The Mary Rose was excavated and raised in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 22. Robert Boyle reports conducting an experiment using highly polished black horn from a broken comb. Robert Boyle, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (London, 1664). A single Mary Rose comb was made of alder tree, and the

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other non-boxwood comb made of ivory. Egan and Pritchard, in Dress Accessories, cite a St. Paul’s inventory from 1245 that contained a silver liturgical comb with gilding (376). 23. John Milton, A maske presented at Ludlow Castle (London, 1637), 3, 30, sig. E3v. A song by Henry Purcell puns incessantly on “comb” and “come” in its refrain, conflating the instrument of beautifying with the allure of the siren: “Both our Sea-green Locks have comb’d for yee; come, come, come, come Bathe with us an Hour or two, come, comb’d for yee.” Henry Purcell, Orpheus Britannicus (London, 1698), 35–37. 24. François Rabelais, The first [second] book of the works of Mr. Francis Rabelais, Doctor in Physick, containing five books of the lives, heroick deeds, and sayings of Gargantua, and his sonne Pantagruel, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart (London, 1653), 166. 25. The carved figures in ivory inlaid with gold are likely not fantasy. The English text appeared in print beginning with William Caxton’s late-fi fteenthcentury press, and Reynard stories were printed throughout the early modern period. 26. On boxwood oil as a cure for sexually transmitted diseases, consult Evelyn, Sylva, 65. Using a lead comb to color gray hair—and thus appear younger—is the subject of some humor: Doll, a prostitute in Thomas Dekker and John Webster’s play Northward Ho!, jokes, “Pree the comb thy beard with a comb of black leade, it may be I shall affect thee” (London, 1607), act 3, scene 1. 27. Antonio Gavin, Observations on a Journy to Naples (London, 1691), 103. The material of the comb is highlighted through italics, appearing in the text as “Box-comb.” 28. Consult Egan and Pritchard, Dress Accessories, 376. Dirty combs were seen as unsanitary, as in this accusation from Margaret Cavendish’s play The Matrimonial Trouble: “You will poyson all the House: for in one place I find a piece of

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78 | Obj e c t s W i t h i n / W i t hou t t h e B ody butter, and a greasie comb, full of nitty hairs lying by it.” Margaret Cavendish, The Matrimonial Trouble, in Playes (London, 1662), 424. 29. Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, The Paradoxal Discourses of F. M. Van Helmont Concerning the Macrocosm and Microcosm . . . (London, 1685), 89. 30. Edward Herbert of Cherbury, Occasional Verses (London, 1665), 24–25. This was a posthumous publication, as Herbert died in 1648. The poem retains some of the typical friction involved in conflating lover with comb in inscriptions; he himself is not quite the bark—he merely sees it—and the vessel is referred to by the typical female pronoun. In addition to this poem, the volume contains two more poems dedicated to a woman’s hair, “Upon Combing Her Hair” and “To Her Hair.” 31. William Wycherley, Hero and Leander in Burlesque (London, 1669), 5–6. 32. Wycherley, Hero and Leander, 6. 33. For a discussion of cosmetics in Renaissance England and their international importance, consult Josie Schoel’s chapter in this volume. 34. 1500–1600, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Boxwood, 9.3 × 11.7 cm, France. http://collections.vam.ac.uk /item /O125618/comb-unknown/. 35. Andrew Balfour, Letters write [sic] to a friend by the learned and judicious Sir Andrew Balfour (Edinburgh, 1700), 65. 36. Ca. 1400, Musée de Cluny–Musée National du Moyen Âge, Paris. Boxwood, used in Flanders, origin uncertain. https://www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/96 -008170-2C6NU0N6XGK3.html. 37. She was maid of honor until scandal broke as the result of her pregnancy and secret marriage to Henry Wriothesley. 38. This comb is not extraordinarily outsized; other contemporary images show similarly large combs, and physical combs I have measured in collections appear to be about 11–13 cm (4–5 in.) long. 39. The anatomy of the hand, particularly the four bones above the palm called the metacarpals, has been likened

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to a comb. Alexander Barclay and Robert Copland, The Shepheards Kalender (London, 1656), sig. L1v. 40. The most common iconography is of a mermaid with a comb in one hand and a “glasse,” or mirror, in the other. 41. Wolft hal, Marital Bed, 51. 42. Yeoman, “Speaking Plates,” 770, links Puttenham’s description of turning roundels to the turning over of trencher plates to read their verse and view their images after consuming the sweets. Stained-glass roundels, like some trencher sets, often contained cyclical themes, like “Labors of the Months.” Yeoman, “Speaking Plates,” 769. 43. Square and rectangular poems are the unmarked shapes, and Puttenham does not provide illustrations for these shapes. Juliet Fleming points out that modern readers tend to consider an early modern poem’s shape as “the inconsequential result of poetry’s more properlyaural dimensions.” But her reading of Puttenham insists that the eye and the ear are equally “accorded an affective and cognitive consequence.” Consult Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 18–19. 44. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), 75. Consult Anna Riehl Bertolet’s essay in this collection on the complex nexus of primary and secondary material exchanges between textiles and the printed book. 45. Of interest is the writing that appears in portraiture featuring noblemen wearing embroidered garters to signify their membership in the prestigious Order of the Garter. Multiple jewels make up the letters of the Order’s motto. The Order’s ceremonial origins date to 1348, with mythical roots in the romance tradition of a woman offering a garter to a suitor as a love token. Miriam Jacobson reads this Ottoman sensuality through its links to the popular, geometrically shaped virtuosic sugar confectionaries that integrate crushed jewels and include poetic inscriptions. Miriam Jacobson, Barbarous

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C om b P oe m s Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 54–83. Berta Cano-Echevarría argues that Puttenham devises the poems’ origins based on English travel writing and the geometric patterns on carpets and textile imports from Persia and Tartary, in “Puttenham’s Failed Design: The Fake Genealogy of English Pattern Poetry,” Cahiers élisabéthains 94.1 (2017): 57–73, esp. 68. 46. Puttenham, English Poesie, 76. 47. Writing in diamonds and topaz that speaks in the first person appears around the collar of a hunted doe’s neck in Francesco Petrarch’s Sonnet 190: “‘Nessun mi tocchi,’ al bel collo d’intorno / Scritto avea di daimanti et di topazi. ‘Libera farmi al mio Cesare parve.’” (“‘Let no one touch me,’ she bore written with diamonds and topazes round her lovely neck. ‘It has pleased my Caesar to make me free.’”) Robert M. Durling, trans., Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 336–37. One of many sixteenth-century English translations, themselves often based on French translations, is Sir Thomas Wyatt’s, which, in removing the topaz, opens the possibility for this as a pattern poem. “And, graven with Diamonds, in letters plain: / There is written, her faier neck rounde abowte” (1530s, Edgerton MS 2711, f7v, http://www .bl.uk /manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref= Egerton _MS _2711). Read simultaneously as a “love token” collar from Caesar and as a necklace willingly put on by a woman bound only to the will of God, the object offers a contradictory sense of female agency while speaking as if from the animal’s/person’s throat. For a discussion of female agency and the poetic agency of early English sonnet translations reflected in this poem, consult Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 94–97. 48. Puttenham, English Poesie, 74–75. 49. On a larger scale, Puttenham’s book is responding to what he claims are not

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Latin or Greek poetic traditions but are instead Moroccan, Egyptian, Persian, Hebrew, Spanish, Arab, Hebrew, Chaldean, “Peruvian,” and Native American traditions. Consult Jacobson, Barbarous Antiquity, 81. 50. Transmitted only by manuscript, these include the wing, egg, and axe poems of Simmias of Rhodes, the Shepherd’s Pipe poem of Theocritus, and the two altar poems of Dosidas (Disiadas) of Crete. For more on these and their visual traditions, consult Ulrich Ernst, Carmen Figuratum: Geschichte des Figurengedichts von den antiken Ursprũngen vis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters (Cologne: Böhlau, 1991), 54–94. 51. In addition to Loues Garland and Cupid’s Posies, consult also Thomas Tusser, Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (London, 1576), appendix, and William Fiston (Phiston), The Welspring of Wittie Conceites (London, 1584), the last page of text before the final table of contents. 52. For a materialist reading of The Dream of the Rood, consult Seeta Chaganti, “Vestigial Signs: Inscription, Performance; and The Dream of the Rood,” PMLA 125 (2010): 48–72; and also the Introduction to this volume. 53. The critical response has been invested mostly in questions of identification and categorization. Consult Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), in which Higgins here and elsewhere updates Margaret Church, “The First English Pattern Poems,” PMLA 61.3 (1946): 636–50; Jeffrey Adler, “Technopaigneia, Carmina Figurata, and Bilder-Reime: SeventeenthCentury Figured Poetry in Historical Perspective,” Comparative Criticism 4 (1982): 107–47; and Ulrich Ernst, “The Figured Poem: Towards a Definition of Genre,” Visible Language 20.1 (1986): 8–26. Ernst’s monograph, Carmen figuratum, does not extend to the early modern period. 54. Objects and Materials, ed. Penny Harvey et al. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 15.

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80 | Obj e c t s W i t h i n / W i t hou t t h e B ody 55. Some combs from the period depicted images on their tines. This one, a woman’s comb from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, shows a winged insect, either imaginatively combed out of or into hair: https://www .metmuseum.org /art/collection/search /464245. 56. This implication already echoes within the phrase as it stands: “love not.” 57. A comb at the Musée de Cluny, in Paris, contains an elaborate knot carving in its central panel, https:// www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/09-505100 -2C6NU09SISIS.html. One book of “Fancies and Fantastiks” prints the entwinings of a love knot as heart-shaped, including a heart rebus within one couplet (consult

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Mennes and Smith, Recreation, “Fancies and Fantastiks”). 58. The Britannia’s Pastorals page visibly betrays the circumstances of its unique production and points to ways in which it has been twisted and turned. Other than the frontispiece, it is the only part to use engraving rather than type or woodcut. Its lettering is less regular than type and in a different “font” than the rest of the headings. Several mismatches make readers aware of the (mis)placement of the engraved plates and misalignment of the page as it underwent a separate printing process for engraving. 59. Puttenham, English Poesie, 72. 60. Puttenham, English Poesie, 71. 61. Higgins, Pattern Poetry, 4.

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Chapter 3

Variable Vestments and Clothing Conversions Piecing Out the Past in Tudor Exeter Naomi Howell

In the decades following the Reformation, Catholic clerical vestments became traveling objects, repurposed and recycled in various material instantiations. Though most were destroyed, many items of clerical dress were repurposed—or “(re)incarnated,” to use Anna Riehl Bertolet’s term—when they were sold, rented out, or refashioned for a variety of uses, including as costumes on the public stage.1 This chapter will focus on early examples of the reuse and refashioning of clerical vestments in the city of Exeter. I argue that even in the early post-Reformation period, particularly in the decades following the wide-scale confiscation of vestments during the course of the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–40, though this practice had begun even earlier), such reuse was already imbued with theatricality and spectacle. Historical accounts and surviving fragments of vestments testify to their potential as complex signifiers throughout this period, their ambiguous or multivalent potentials sometimes proving convenient and sometimes fraught with danger.2 In particular, banished vestments found new life as properties in the theater of death. In Edwardian Exeter, Catholic vestments were employed as an ambivalently signifying costume in a public execution. In at least two other cases in Exeter,

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vestments that could no longer be worn in holy services were repurposed as funeral palls to cover the dead. By examining the broken and unbroken threads of these medieval textiles, as well as the ruptures and continuities they embody, this chapter explores different modes and metaphors regarding the materials of memory in their explicit, oblique, erased, and vestigial forms.

An Exeter Tragedy In the final days of the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, the Lord of the Privy Seal, John Russell (later Earl of Bedford), remained in Exeter for twelve days, from Tuesday, August 6, to Sunday, August 18; this was long enough, according to John Hooker, to dispense justice, “rewarding the good & punishing the euill.”3 Yet Hooker, an Exeter native whose eyewitness account in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) provides the most detailed record of the rebellion, resists the binary vision such a phrase might suggest. Cruel and honorable characters are described on both sides of the conflict. On the side of the rewarded “good” was William Herbert (“after earle of Penbroke” [sic]), who arrived with a thousand Welshmen. As Hooker observes, “they came too late to the fraie; yet soon enough to the plaie,” and again, in the margin, “too late to the fight, but soon inough to the spoile.”4 Hooker further specifies that a large proportion of the rewards bestowed took the form of prisoners, “both bodies, goods, and lands,” a phrase that enfolds both the riches gained and the personal disasters suffered during the victorious resolution of this conflict, and in which living bodies and lifeless objects could approximate and collapse into one another. Bodies and goods, their metonymic appurtenances, and the harrowing effects of such literalizing metonymy, continue to be themes of Hooker’s description of the punishments meted out; his account of the execution of one rebel in particular merits further scrutiny. After relating John Russell’s arrival in Exeter, Hooker writes, he “commanded forches and gallowes to be set vp in sundrie places, as well within the citie as also in the countrie; and did command and cause manie to be executed and put to death.”5 At this point, Hooker pauses to closely examine the fate of the highly respected vicar of St Thomas, Robert Welsh. Hooker notes that Welsh had been granted that benefice by the aforementioned Lord Russell,

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but he does not tell us if it is for that reason that his execution was placed in the hands of the zealous Barnard Duffield. The description of Robert Welsh is vivid. A strong-willed, energetic, compact man, the vicar was an excellent shot with a longbow, a crossbow, and a handgun, in addition to being a great wrestler and a very good woodsman.6 He was also “of a courteous and gentle behauiour.” Courtly and engaging, he was an excellent companion “in anie exercises of actiuitie.” A southwesterner, like Hooker, he was born in Penryn, Cornwall, “of good honest parentage.” Nevertheless, he was an “archcapteine” of the rebellion and “a principall dooer,” depicted by Hooker as “one as would not giue his head for the polling nor his beard for the washing.” This peculiar phrase, suggesting a firm, decisive, and unbiddable character, contrasts rather strikingly with the conventions of anticlerical and anti-Catholic satire, like the tonsured, self-indulgent, ineffectual clerics of Piers Plowman and the “lecherous polleshorne masse-mongering priestes” insatiable for “copes of silke or velwet” and “vestmentes, broudred with golde” that John Old describes.7 Instead, Hooker’s words recall Henry VIII’s pronouncement, on May 8, 1535, that “al about hys Courte .  .  . poll their heades, and to giue them example, hée caused hys own head to be polled, and from thence forth his bearde to be notted, and no more shauen.”8 Coming just four days after a group of (tonsured) Carthusian “Charterhouse” monks were publicly dismembered and displayed in London for noncompliance, and hardly more than three weeks before twenty-five Protestants from Holland were sentenced to be burned at the stake, Henry’s apparently frivolous commands suggest a determination to assert absolute and arbitrary authority in all matters, from true religion to the care of hair and beard. Hooker’s use of this phrase thus captures Welsh’s steadfastness as well as the ideological scope of his rebellion, both of which are differentiated from the changeable, fashion-conscious crown and its pampered, servile followers.9 Before describing the vicar’s execution, Hooker inserts an anecdote— perhaps in the interest of a just characterization—relating how the vicar prevented the burning of the city of Exeter and spared all of its inhabitants. Discovering the plan (which developed under the supervision of a “stranger and an alien”: a gunner, skilled in explosives), the vicar assembled what people he could and approached the company where the fire was to be kindled:

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[Welsh] was so hot and earnest against their attempts, that he would in no wise suffer so lewd an act and wicked a thing to be doone. For (saith he) doo you what you can by policie, force, or dint of sword to take the citie, I will ioine with you, and doo my best: but to burne a citie which shall be hurtfull to all men and good to no man, I will neuer consent therevnto, but will here stand with all my power against you. And so stout he was in this matter, that he stopped them from their further enterprising of so wicked a fact.10 Hooker draws a complex portrait of an engaged and—in many ways— exemplary leader. Welsh’s talents would seem to bridge the very divisions that threatened the country: a devout priest, he vigorously engaged in secular activities and was skilled in forms of combat associated with archaic, residual, and emergent temporalities, embracing ancient practice (wrestling), medieval conquest (the longbow), and modern warfare (the gun).11 Additionally, Welsh advocated the position of Exeter’s community in a manner “courteous and gentle,” evocative of ancient chivalry (“by dint of sword”). And, in this brief account, Hooker repeatedly juxtaposes metaphor with materiality and embodiment.12 The very real fire is prevented by the “hot and earnest” persuasion of the vicar. The strength of his moral conviction—“so stout he was in this matter”—recalls an earlier description of him as a man “of no great stature, but well set and mightilie compact,” even as the word “stout” adds force to the alliterative “stopped.” In the context of the Exeter rebellion and the role Welsh played in it, the physique of the vicar will be brought to mind once more in the vicar’s final moments as he is hoisted onto the gibbet. Hooker rouses himself to relate these events and shows how this adept handler of objects and people himself becomes a manhandled object: But to the matter. The execution of this man was committed to Barnard Duffeld, who being nothing slacke to follow his commission, caused a paire of gallowes to be made, and to be set vp vpon the top of the tower of the said vicars parish church of S. Thomas: and all things being readie and the stage perfected for this tragedie, the vicar was brought to the place, and by a rope about his middle drawne vp to the top of the tower: and there in chains

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hanged in his popish apparell, and had a holie water bucket and sprinkle, a sacring bell, a paire of beads, & such other like popish trash hanged about him, and there he with the same about him remained a long time. He made a verie small or no confession, but verie patientlie tooke his death, he had beene a good member in his common-wealth, had not the weeds ouergrowne the good corne, and his foule vices ouercommed his vertues.13 In the margin, this passage is glossed: “The vicar is hanged in chaines vpon the top of the tower with his popish trash and ornaments about him.”14 The vicar remained there, in full sham regalia, until Mary came to the throne four years later. By that time the body might well have skeletonized—shedding its flesh and vestments in an extended performance of decomposition designed to provide the spectacular “confession” Welsh had declined to offer in life.15 Duffield clearly felt that it was worth overcoming the significant challenges posed by the construction of a durable, fully functional scaffold on the top of a church tower and the task of hauling up Welsh’s solid body, the dead weight of the still-living vicar.16 Drawn up to the top of the tower by a rope about his middle, the vicar is “hanged in chains,” almost as if his own body were another piece of “such other like popish trash hanged about him.” The final words devoted to Welsh, in which the vicar’s vices are compared to “weeds” that have “ouergrowne the good corne” of his virtues, evoke the gardening metaphor frequently employed in Reformation discourse.17 But are they also intended to remind us of the liturgical clothes—which in that period were also termed “weeds”—covering his body? In the haunting image of Welsh wearing his final vestments—from one perspective, an extension of his chains; from another, of his body; and from yet another, of his character—we find a figure that uncomfortably straddles a number of different spheres.18 In this, he resembles the very vestments he wears and those that I am considering in this chapter. Hooker’s language points to the theatrical aspect of the execution, highlighting the double meaning of his earlier observation that the victors came “late to the fraie; yet soon enough to the plaie.” Duffield was truly “nothing slacke” in creating a spectacle of the execution. This proceeds, as we are told, once “the stage [has been] perfected for this tragedie.” With what may be a conscious echo of Thomas More’s acerbic reference to

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“kings games, as it were stage-playes, and for the more part played upon scaffolds,” Hooker has indeed characterized Welsh in a way befitting the protagonist of a tragedy.19 For many observers, the spectacle of his execution must inevitably (if perhaps unintentionally) have recalled a very particular tragedy: the Crucifi xion as it would have been staged and performed in the Corpus Christi cycles. In this Exeter tragedy, as in the York Crucifi xion, clothing plays a central role; yet, whereas in the mystery play Christ is separated from his cloak (for which the executioners draw lots), Welsh remained encased in and ambiguously identified with his clothing, even for years after his death. Within a few decades of the events just described, liturgical vestments found their way into the public theaters. Peter Stallybrass and others have explored the multivalent qualities of old vestments in this new theatrical context, while scholars such as Jennifer Woodward have considered the conspicuous theatricality of funeral ceremonies in the early modern period.20 The seeds of both of these cultural developments that circulated between the church and the theater can be seen in the reuse of vestments in the midst and during the immediate aftermath of the Reformation. In the death of Robert Welsh and the ritual clothing he was forced to don, we find a very early instance of the public staging of a mortuary spectacle. Here, at the height of the Edwardian Reformation, Catholic clerical vestments were repurposed as costumes in the theater of death. Yet, as I argue in the following section, Welsh’s “tragedy” was not only a foretaste of things to come but an event inflected by medieval perspectives on vestments, which were more complex and persistent than early modernists sometimes suppose.

English Treasures / Papal Trash The vestments included among the “popish trash” bedecking the unfortunate Vicar Welsh were not, of course, the first English vestments to be associated with Roman decadence, carnality, and corruption. Three hundred years before, Matthew Paris had linked clerical vestments with exactly these “popish” tendencies in describing an embassy of English prelates to Rome: On the same day (in 1246) the Lord Pope, having noticed that the ecclesiastical ornaments of certain English priests, such as

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choral copes and mitres, were embroidered in gold thread after a most desirable fashion (aurifrisia concupiscibilia), asked where they had been made. He was told, “From England,” at which he declared, “Truly England is for us a garden of delights, truly an inexhaustible well; and from where so many things abound, many may be extorted (extorqueri).” Thereupon this same Lord Pope, enticed by the desire (concupiscentia) of the eye, sent letters, blessed and sealed, to nearly all the Abbots of the Cistercian order in England, desiring that they should be sent to him without delay, these embroideries of gold which he preferred above all others, and with which he wished to decorate his chasubles and choral copes, as if these acquisitions would cost him nothing. This [order] did not displease the London merchants who traded in these embroideries and [now] sold them at their own price, but many abhorred this flagrant avarice (manifestam avaritiam) of the Roman Church.21 Vatican records do indeed testify to the acquisition of a large supply of English vestments (opus anglicanum) in this period.22 In relating this anecdote, Paris perhaps intended readers to recall the Venerable Bede’s well-known account of an earlier papal encounter with England’s beautiful, far-traveled “merchandise”: on a visit to the forum, the Roman marketplace, Pope Gregory I notices some beautiful boys “with fair complexions, handsome faces, and lovely hair. On seeing them he asked, so it is said, from what region or land they had been brought. He was told that they came from the island of Britain, whose inhabitants were like that in appearance.”23 In both narratives, there is a conversation between the questioning pope—who admires the extraordinary shining, gilded, celestial, and/or prelapsarian beauty of what he beholds—and the unknown interlocutor who succinctly answers his question by responding “Angli” or “Anglia.” All the more striking, then, is the contrast Paris sets up between Saint Gregory, who is inspired to send Saint Augustine to Britain to convert the English, and Innocent IV, who avariciously wishes to acquire the desirable vestments, pleasing only himself and the merchants who gleefully profit from his voracity by asking whatever exorbitant price they please. In Paris’s account, the vestments are described as quintessentially English, blameless marvels of English craftsmanship coveted by papal

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concupiscence. Paris’s language—his references to papal “concupiscence of the eye,” “flagrant avarice,” and extortion, as well as the marginal paratext pointing to the provision within the passage of “manifest evidence of the avarice of the Roman court” (Manifestum argumentum de avaritia Romanae curiae)—resoundingly condemns this pope. The head of the Roman Church is cast as greedy, self-indulgent, corrupt, and tyrannical. Unashamedly extorting embroideries and other riches for his own personal gain, the pope sees England as his own inexhaustible Garden of Delights to be plundered (hortus noster deliciarum . . . multa possunt extorqueri). He has the embroideries sent personally to him to decorate his own robes, notably without any reference to the medieval theological arguments that justified beautiful ornaments as a means of glorifying God or leading the faithful to Him through precious objects as signs.24 In Paris’s account, papal greed is a force that works in tandem with an increasingly secular, mercantile economy. At the same time, Paris characterizes Innocent IV in terms that would have evoked more ancient and familiar tales in the minds of his readers. Hagiographies of late antique martyrs, especially the immensely popular tales of virgin martyrs, frequently emphasize the concupiscence of the pagan potentate. As in the York Crucifi xion, where the mostly silent body of Christ as he is crucified conveys meaning more powerfully than the chattering soldiers/pinners, the often female martyr in these stories is positioned as an object—of the tyrant’s gaze, desires, and cruelty—an object that he seeks to humiliate and rend. Yet, as scholars have observed, the martyr’s serene virtue proves unwavering and has endowed her with divinely irradiated agency and unassailable subjectivity, utterly repudiating her status as object. The persecutor is confounded and is both determined and damned by bodily desires he cannot or will not control. Possessing a tendency that continues among certain political leaders today, the tyrant is spectacularly incapable of mastering his own impulses.25 Yet the virgin martyr inverts subject-object dynamics and subverts apparent power relations. Could it also be said that the copes and mitres in Paris’s account take on some of the agency and humanity that the pope himself so recklessly relinquishes? Matthew Paris’s multiple hostile anecdotes regarding medieval popes were well known to sixteenth-century reformers. The Chronica Majora was printed by Archbishop Matthew Parker in 1571, and John Foxe made

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frequent use of the text in his history of Catholic abuses, the Actes and Monuments. Yet the fact that this particular story centers on the pope’s desire for lavishly embroidered clerical vestments may have made Protestant historians ill at ease. To the extent that the story condemns papal concupiscence, it simultaneously upholds golden vestments as quintessentially English. To the extent that it makes the pope an object of contempt, it likewise makes liturgical objects worthy of admiration and sympathy. It is hardly surprising, then, that when Francis Bunny retold the story in a treatise on papal arrogance in 1595, he left out the matter of the vestments entirely, making the pope’s description of England as “a well that can neuer be drawne drie”—a broader reference to the nation’s resources generally.26

Vestments and Memory For many English Protestants, liturgical vestments represented everything that was sacrilegious and self-serving about the Catholic Church. Their lavish colors, sensuous textures, and high cost seemed to epitomize the decadence and self-enrichment of the clergy. The importance of wearing such vestments during the Eucharist emphasized the role of the priest as a (blasphemous) representative of Christ, who was proclaimed both priest and sacrificial victim in the liturgy; allegorized reflections on the Mass, such as John Lydgate’s version of the Lay Folk’s Mass Book and William Caxton’s Noble History and Exposition of the Mass, suggest that priestly vestments should recall the passion of Christ in the faithful, with the chasuble particularly evoking the garment worn by Christ when he was mocked.27 Such ideas seemed to confirm suspicions that emphasis on this sacrament had more to do with inflating clerical importance than reflecting theological truth. The vast majority of liturgical textiles did not ultimately survive the Reformation. This in spite of the efforts—even the deceptions—practiced by such respectable and perhaps foolhardy people such as the vicar of Morebath (some twenty miles north of Exeter), who was called to Exeter a number of times and questioned before reluctantly admitting in 1552 that his parish was in possession of a number of cloths, curtains, towels, and vestments for use in the liturgy.28 A surprising number of such textiles resurfaced during the reign of Mary, suggesting that many parishes

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had been more successful than Morebath in such subterfuge.29 Vestments did indeed, as Reformers suspected, amplify the importance of priestly roles, especially in relation to the sacraments. But they served an array of other social, spiritual, and mnemonic functions. Some of those that do survive—such as the two funeral palls in Exeter, to which I will turn shortly—are a testament to their importance in the community. Before the Reformation, vestments and liturgical textiles could be provided to the church by those wishing to establish or advance their position in the community. A significant number of donors were gentry, but a large number were merchants, such as John Sharp of Bristol. In this instance, it was actually John’s wife, Elizabeth, who, after a bitter dispute between her husband and the parish church of St Ewen, sealed the eventual reconciliation with the donation of an embroidered towel that was to be used on Easter Sundays.30 The donation of textiles was, in fact, a very attractive mode of memorialization, one that, though costly, was available to more people than the massively expensive monumental tombs.31 Though less permanent than stone monuments, textiles would be seen and perhaps touched by large numbers of parishioners. Those who knew where to look might be able to find the embroidered names or initials of those memorialized. So it was not unfitting for vestments such as these to be used in services for the dead. The St Petrock’s Pall, now in the Exeter Cathedral Library, has the initials “BW” along the top edge, just above a figure wearing a shroud. If these letters are someone’s initials, they could belong to either the person who first embroidered the figure, the person who helped stitch it into a pall, or to someone else in whose memory these labors were performed. A few vestments have survived via the private ownership of families that acquired abbeys during the Reformation. A few, such as those at Exeter, survived because the women of the parish were able to quietly repurpose them, sometimes with astonishing skill and sensitivity. While vestments were perceived by many reformers to emphasize the distance and superiority of the clergy over laypeople, many in the community of the faithful—women in particular—considered vestments to be among their chief means of participation in the Mass. Embroidery and weaving were among the rare activities that could be practiced by amateur and professional men and women alike.32 Indeed, a number of church officials

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expressed concern that nuns were allowing their textile work to keep them from other devotional activities and stipulated that they should not miss Mass because of it. Textiles were rich in generating communal gatherings before they ever covered the bodies or moved into the hands of priests or other congregants, and textile work was an activity that could be eminently social: a number of people could gather to work on a single object. The group could converse or be accompanied by music as they congregated around their sewing projects.33 Pliable, transportable textiles are much more fragile than wood or stone. They are at least as flammable and subject to wear as parchment; they are perhaps more likely to be exposed to sunlight and certainly to come in contact with the human body. Due to their comparatively ephemeral qualities, textiles and their (often gendered) modes of production are sometimes neglected objects of study in favor of their more lasting counterparts. In this respect, they are comparable to the cosmetics and combs discussed by Josie Schoel and Erika Mary Boeckeler in the preceding chapters. And, as Anya Riehl Bertolet observes in this volume, needlework features in Nagel and Wood’s Anachronic Renaissance—not as a form of enduring art but rather as a metaphor for the journeys more durable “artifacts and monuments” undertake through time.34 Engaging with textiles is a multisensory project; this contemplative practice almost always means imagining the feel of fabric on the skin: stiff, prickly, soft, silky, velvety, rich, or rough. Textiles appear different in sunlight or candlelight, especially damask and cloth of gold, both of which change dramatically with light and movement (Figure 3.1). They are constructed with ideas about the degree to which they should be supple or strong, transparent or opaque. How should light and touch interact with them? To what degree should they move in the breeze or—crisp with starch or stiff with brocade—resist movement? To what degree will they interact with a variety of human senses: touch, hearing, smell, and sight? Garments were often scented with herbs and resins, and would also retain a range of unintended aromas picked up from liturgical incense, wood smoke, and cooking, as well as the human body they covered. Fabrics would stretch, shrink, and wear according to the shape and habits of the bodies they dressed. They would rustle or muffle sound to varying degrees. Colors and light could change and be manipulated with different

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Figure 3.1. A study of the effects of light on damask. Jan van Eyck, The Annunciation, 1434/ 36. Oil on canvas transferred from panel. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1937.1.39 (detail).

methods of weaving and dyeing. The touch of textiles could be heavy or light; silken, velvet, or rough; hot or cool; insulating and protective or slight and intimate; revealing and/or concealing. While some clerical vestments were recycled for domestic purposes after the Reformation as cushions, wall hangings, or tablecloths, a smaller number were transformed in a manner that allowed them to remain in liturgical use.35 There are some half a dozen surviving examples of vestments that were repurposed for use as altar frontals, such as the one at St John’s College, Oxford, or the one from Wool Church, now in the Dorset

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County Museum, in Dorchester. Fewer still are the surviving number that appear to have been turned into funeral palls.36 The splendid “Buckland Cope” in Buckland, Gloucester, has served as both a pall and an altar frontal, though it would seem better suited to the former purpose; at Littledean, in the same county, a pair of fi fteenth-century tunicles was refashioned as a hearse cloth.37 The “Lyng Table Carpet,” in Lyng, Norfolk, seems designed as a pall but appears rather to have served as a cover for a Communion table; in the seventeenth century, it was called “an ancient carpet.”38 There are two other textiles of note in the diocese of Exeter—in Brixham and Culmstock—that may have served as palls.39 The two palls in Exeter, the St Mary Arches Pall, now in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, and the St Petrock’s Pall, now in the Exeter Cathedral Library, have several features in common. They are both made of strips of medieval English pillar orphreys, beautifully embroidered with varied subtle colors and gold thread. The embroidered panels are stitched to costly—now much worn—sixteenth-century silk damask from Italy: gold and green in the case of the St Mary Arches Pall; gold and blue in the case of the St Petrock’s Pall. Both palls contain depictions of saints and prophets. Saints Margaret and Dorothy can be identified on the St Petrock’s Pall, along with Saint Paul and at least one crowned royal saint. The St Mary Arches Pall has three strips of pillar orphreys (Figure 3.2). In the middle of the central strip, the Crucifi xion of Christ is depicted, with the Holy Spirit hovering overhead and two angels on either side (Figure 3.3). The crucified Christ and the Holy Spirit over him have been carefully unpicked, though their figural outlines are still visible on the fabric. The angels are intact, but the chalices they once held have been removed. The chalices, which had been added on top of the background embroidery, were easy to remove, but Christ’s blood, issuing from his wounds into the cups, proved more difficult. Its traces are still detectible in the almost-imperceptible repairs. In total, there are seventeen whole or partial human figures on the pall (visible in Figures 3.4 and 3.5), not including Christ and the angels. Four of the ten saints represented have been unpicked but can still be discerned by the outline of their halos. The faces of four of the seven prophets have also been unpicked but are still outlined by the head coverings they are wearing. The intact prophets, all bearded and richly dressed, with highly expressive faces, would have once been recognizable by the script

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Figure 3.2. St Mary Arches Pall. Medieval orphreys with sixteenth-century green and gold, large-patterned, Italian “pomegranate” damask. © Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter City Council.

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Figure 3.3. The centerpiece of the St Mary Arches Pall is the cruciform orphrey depicting the Crucifi xion of Christ with two angels. The angels would once have held chalices to collect the blood of Christ, recalling the Eucharistic wine and the role the priestly wearer played in its transubstantiation. The Holy Spirit overhead has also been unpicked. © Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter City Council.

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Figure 3.4. A prophet. The prophets on the St Mary Arches Pall carry scrolls on which identifying names or passages of scripture would once have been legible. The prophets sport highly varied clothing—including footwear and fashionable hats. Th is prophet wears an ermine-trimmed cap. The deep, rich folds of his fur-lined robes are depicted with detailed attention to the weight, color, and textures of the cloth. His energetic stance, as if he is poised to speak, is emphasized by the curves of the garments enfolding his body and the once-legible scroll he holds. © Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter City Council.

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Figure 3.5. Saint Thomas the Apostle. Like the other saints on the St Mary Arches Pall, Saint Thomas wears a halo and is distinguished by recognizable attributes. Here, he holds a book and a spear, the instrument of his martyrdom. Saint Thomas was associated with textiles due to the Virgin’s miraculous gift of her girdle to him—after her Assumption—while he was in India. Thomas’s early association with India and China would have further linked his memory with the routes traveled by the materials, patterns, and technologies that were also adapted and materialized in these, the textiles that depict him here. © Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter City Council.

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painted on their scrolls. Since this has worn away, their identities could be postulated only if the original typological arrangement could be determined—which has not yet been possible. On both palls, many sacred figures—though not all—have been carefully unpicked, leaving only their ghostly outlines.40 This action, along with the repurposing of the orphreys, speaks to the pressures and new realities of the Reformation. Yet this was not simply pragmatic recycling of objects that were no longer valued in the same ways that they once were. On the St Mary Arches Pall, the delicacy of the stitching, designed to preserve and leave visible as much of the material as possible, suggests that these orphreys were still held in a kind of reverence, or at least owed a duty of care. Like the silhouettes left in church marble where monumental brasses have been torn away, the vestiges left by the unpicked figures present signifying voids that seem to invite a mode of apophatic contemplation dating back to the early church.41 The attitude to the “old religion” of those who so carefully reworked banned vestments into a new and acceptable form cannot easily be discerned. Nor can we know the responses of those who saw them displayed in the churches where they were once worn—no longer in the context of the Holy Mass but as part of the spectacle of mourning. Like the display of liturgical vestments as costumes on the public stage later in the sixteenth century, the appearance of the familiar orphreys shrouding the coffins of the dead undoubtedly provoked a wide range of reactions and memories. The empty outlines of bodies where familiar images had been unpicked might seem to echo the body or bodies covered by the pall, now themselves evacuated of life and agency. Like the artwork Nagel and Wood discuss in Anachronic Renaissance, these palls “resist anchoring in time,” referring the viewer to the past and to “another, absent work.”42 Yet, whereas for Nagel and Wood the anachronic object is produced through repeated acts of substitution so that there is no material continuity between the past and the present, the repurposing of the Exeter vestments made new meanings out of old matter. Such reworking recalls the “untimeliness” of objects explored by Jonathan Gil Harris, yet the palls do not fit squarely into any one of the three modes of multitemporality (supersession, explosion, and conjunction) in Harris’s taxonomy. Rather, different observers might have perceived in the palls exemplifications of all three modes: supersession (Protestantism

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demonstrating its triumph over Catholic superstition), explosion (Catholic memories erupting into the Protestant present), and conjunction (the past and present coexisting in dialogue within a single object).43 The capacity of these objects to conform their visual presentation to greet or evade the desires of the beholder is arguably a form of adaptive camouflage, or, as Boeckeler discusses in this volume, “performative materiality,” shaping which of their manifold aspects “become visible or are seized upon as defining for a specific group of users.”44 By way of conclusion, I would like to offer, and to repurpose, the following observations on grief by Wendy Wheeler: What every historical maneuver discovers . . . is that however historically contingent the re-invented self, there can be no contingency between the symbolic forms and the life that is lived. In other words, for successful mourning to take place, there must be ties which bind. Not only must there be the poetic coherence between the painfully altered “living” and the elegiacally transformed “dead” but there must also be a personal poetic; a coherence between what is thought and said on the one hand, and what is done on the other. This is not, and cannot be, an injunction to continue investments in something which can no longer be had. It is an injunction to find something good—and thus consoling— in the fact of shattering, loss and transformation itself. The “sign” which substitutes for the “thing” must, in other words, have sufficient integrity to bear the dead weight it carries.45 Although she is not writing about the Reformation, Wheeler’s observations are clearly relevant to the preservation and transformation of clerical vestments after this historical rupture, and usefully help explain their repeated emergence in relation to spectacles of death, particularly those practiced in the wake of the Reformation. The story of Robert Welsh, the vicar of St Thomas, hanged in his vestments from his own church tower, offers one model of how these objects were made to bear the dead weight of the past. But his story is not the only one. The people who refashioned vestments into funeral palls at St Petrock’s and St Mary Arches were not (or not necessarily) clinging to an investment in the Catholic past that could no longer be had. Yet the continued presence of the vestments in

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new roles offered a perhaps consoling coherence in the face of radical change. At once things-in-themselves and signs substituting for a lost thing, these refashioned items maintained their integrity as bearers of the inescapable weight of the past.

Notes 1. On “(re)incarnation,” consult Anna Riehl Bertolet’s chapter, “Needlework Patterns on the Move: Traveling Toward (Re)incarnation,” in this volume. On the destruction and confiscation of vestments under Edward VI, consult D. E. Hoak, The King’s Council in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 213–14; Robert Whiting, The Reformation of the English Parish Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 79; and Margaret Aston, Broken Idols of the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 179–80. 2. In Holinshed’s account of Kett’s Rebellion (1549), the herald sent by the king is almost lynched by the rebels who suspect him as an imposter, “made out by the Gentlemen in such a gay coate, patched togither of Vestmentes and Churche stuffe, beeing sente only to deceyue them, in offering them pardon, which woulde proue noughte else but halters”; Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles (London, 1577), 1669. For the complex, contradictory ways in which vestments can (still) signify legitimacy, empowerment, and authority, and potentiate their radical subversion, consult Jill Peterfeso, Womanpriest: Tradition and Transgression in the Contemporary Roman Catholic Church (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 105–23, 80–96, 147– 155, and 160. For the perils of “sacrilised [Anglo-Catholic] ambiguity” (in spite of its acknowledged “theological and spiritual reality”) in a world of veiled and explicit far-right agendas, consult Martyn Percy, “Can the Church of England Still Afford Nuance or Ambiguity?,” Christian Today, September 29, 2017, https://www

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.christiantoday.com/reporter/martyn -percy. 3. John Vowell (alias Hooker), “The description of the citie of Excester, and of the sundrie assaults giuen to the same,” in Holinshed et al., The Third Volume of Chronicles (London, 1587), 1025. 4. Hooker, “The description,” 1025. Lord Russell was also “later earle,” after Edward VI made him the First Earl of Bedford in January 1550 in acknowledgment of his services in 1549. 5. Hooker, “The description,” 1025. 6. Hooker, “The description,” 1025. Subsequent quotations describing Welsh in this paragraph also come from Hooker, “The description,” 1025–26. 7. William Langland, Piers Plowman, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud misc. 581, fol. 2r, line 88; John Old and Rudolf Gwalther, Antichrist (Southwarke [Emden], 1556), 144, 138b, 146b. 8. John Stowe, The Chronicles of England (London, 1580), 1004. 9. The ideological distinctions emerge in strikingly gendered terms. For a discussion of the Freudian and ideological implications of Henry’s royal beard (as well as its parallels with clothing), consult Mark Albert Johnston, “Playing with the Beard: Courtly and Commercial Economies in Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pithias and John Lyly’s Midas,” ELH 72.1 (2005): 79–103. For pre-Reformation anticlerical violence displaying performative attacks on clerical clothing and hair (including Exeter and Cornwall in 1273 and adjacent Crediton in 1384), consult Andrew G. Miller, “To ‘Frock’ a Cleric: The Gendered Implications of Mutilating Ecclesiastical Vestments in Medieval England,” Gender & History 24.2 (August 2012): 271–91.

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Va r i a bl e V e s t m e n t s a n d C l o t h i n g C on v e r s io n s Miller shows how complex the gendering of these assaults can be. Often, the aggressors had “derisively re-frocked the clerics and subsequently returned the transgressors to their properly feminized state— from the laity’s point of view—as men of the church” (282). 10. Hooker, “The description,” 1026. 11. As Hooker affirms, “this man had manie good things in him,” counting these skills among them. On the archaic, residual and emergent, consult Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), particularly chapter 8. Though superseded by gunpowder and ballistic weaponry, the longbow had been important at Flodden (1513) and continued to be considered a peculiarly English achievement of military skill and engineering throughout the sixteenth century. In 1590, Sir John Smythe exhorted his readers, “by many reasons & examples, ancient and modern . . . to acknowledge the sufficiencie & excellencie of that weapon,” which he repeatedly refers to as “our Long-bowe” (emphasis added). Smythe observes that “it is further euident by all forren Histories that haue made any mention of the differences of Bowes, vsed by many Nations, as also by such as haue trauailed in many parts of Europe, Aff ricke, or Asia, that our English Bowes, arrowes and Archers do exceed and excell al other Bowes vsed by all forren Nations not only in substance & strength, but also in the length & bignes of the arrows.” John Smythe, Certain Discourses . . . Concerning the formes and effects of diuers sorts of weapons (London, 1590), sig. 38v–39r. For further detail and discussion, consult Clifford J. Rogers, “The Development of the Longbow in Late Medieval England and ‘Technological Determinism,’” Journal of Medieval History 37.3 (2011): 321–41, esp. 323–34. 12. Consult also Emily E. F. Philbrick’s chapter in this collection, “‘I’ll Drown My Book’: Prospero’s Grimoire, Adrift,” which discusses how metaphor relates to materiality.

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13. Hooker, “The description,” 1026. 14. The marginal note, highlighting the link between Welsh’s fate and his “popish trash,” while omitting reference to his good qualities, is probably the work of Abraham Fleming, who oversaw the production of the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles and who specialized in such moralizing commentary. On Fleming’s and Hooker’s contributions, consult Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 26–29. 15. Such was the case with the rebel Robert Kett, hung in chains from Norwich Castle in the same year “for a continuall memorie of so great villanie, untill that unhappy and heavy body (through putrifaction consuming) shall fall downe at length.” Alexander Neville, Norfolkes Furies, or a View of Ketts Campe (London, 1615), sig. K4v. The location of Welsh’s execution on the tower of his own parish church is also notable. John Weever’s discussion of the methods and purposes of such spectacular public executions and peri-mortem displays conjures a Dantesque lex talionis for those who commit “that crying sinne of murther,” observing that in these cases, the criminal “is vsually hanged vp in chaines, so to continue vntill his bodie be consumed, at or neare the place where the fact was perpetrated.” Weever, Ancient and Funerall Monuments with in the united Monarchie of Great Britaine, Ireland and the Islands adjacent (London: Thomas Harper, 1631), 22. It is all too easy to imagine how law and scripture could be construed to justify this particular performance. For blasphemy and false witness as capital crimes associated with murder, consult Leviticus 24:16–20 and Deuteronomy 19:18–21, respectively. 16. On the considerable effort and expense involved in gibbeting and why, in spite of these, it was practiced, consult Sarah Tarlow, The Golden and Ghoulish Age of the Gibbet in Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 19, 101–4. Costly specifications deemed essential to these

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punishments included elevation, visibility, durability, and—perhaps surprisingly— mobility. The displayed body, “swaying, swinging, or turning in the wind, all created an uncanny and paradoxical impression of ‘life.’” Consult Tarlow and Emma Battell Lowman, Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse (London: Palgrave, 2018), 163. Exposed to the wind, the vicar’s flowing garments would have intensified this lifelike motion, fluttering in empty gestures around the helpless, chastened body they adorned, and whose gradual disintegration they shared and signaled. 17. Prior to the rebellion, Edward’s council proclaimed its intent to “plant true religion” in England. Hoak, The King’s Council, 214. 18. The display of a corpse in “popish” vestments like those discussed later in this chapter would have featured the very depictions of Christ and his saints, which Protestants declared “dead images.” Binding the human body—whose death was beyond doubt—with the disputed images metonymically manifests this declaration. However, as Jennifer Waldron has observed, the very embodied, literalizing substantiation of this message generates and emerges from overcharged, unruly sacramental moments and materials. Consult Waldron, Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater (London: Palgrave, 2013), 40–44. The metonymic/synecdochic identification of priestly father and sacrificial victim, Christ and mortal, would, of course, have been as palpable to viewers as the lifeless “dead images” on display. 19. This ominous observation occurs in the concluding sentence of More’s account of the brief reign of Edward V, part of his History of King Richard III, in Holinshed, Third Volume, 732. On the comparison between the stage and the scaffold, consult Andreas Höfele, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 20. Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance

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Stage,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 289–320; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 245– 68. Consult also Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Su-kyung Hwang, “From Priests’ to Actors’ Wardrobe: Controversial, Commercial, and Costumized Vestments,” Studies in Philology 113.2 (Spring 2016): 282–305; and Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1997). 21. “Eisdemque diebus, dominus Papa videns in aliquorum Anglicorum ornamentis ecclesiasticis, utpote in capis choralibus et infulis, aurifrisia concupiscibilia, interrogavit ubinam facta fuissent. Cui responsum est, ‘In Anglia.’ At ipse, “Vere hortus noster deliciarum est Anglia. Vere puteus inexhaustus est; et ubi multa abundant, de multis multa possunt extorqueri.’ Unde idem dominus Papa, concupiscentia illectus oculorum, literas suas bullatas sacras misit ad omnes fere Cisterciensis ordinis abbates in Anglia commorantes, quorum orationibus se nuper in capitulo Cisterciensi commendaverat, ut ipsi aurifrisia, ac si pro nihilo ipsa possent adquirire, mittere non different praelecta, ad planctas et capas suas chorales adornandas. Quod mercannariis Londoniae qui ea venalia habebant non discplicuit, ad placitum vedentibus; unde multi manifestam avaritiam Romanae ecclesiae detestabantur.” [In the margin:] “Manifestum argumentum de avaritia Romanae curiae” (Manifest evidence of the avarice of the Roman court). Latin from Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard (London, 1827), 4:546–47; translation modified from A. G. I. Christie, English Medieval Embroidery (Oxford, 1938), 2; with reference to John Allen Giles, ed. and trans.,

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Va r i a bl e V e s t m e n t s a n d C l o t h i n g C on v e r s io n s Matthew Paris’s English History: From the Year 1235–1273 (London, 1852). 22. Christie, English Medieval Embroidery; Julian Gardner, “Papal Exactions, Royal Gifts, and Fashionable Cardinals: The Curial Clientele for Opus Anglicanum c. 1300–70,” in The Age of Opus Anglicanum, ed. M. A. Michael (London: Brepols, 2016), 22–35. 23. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1969), II.i, 132. 24. Ann Raftery Meyer, Medieval Allegory and the Building of the New Jerusalem (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2003), 69–72; Conrad Rudolph, “Inventing the Gothic Portal: Suger, Hugh of Saint Victor, and the Construction of a New Public Art at Saint-Denis,” Art History 33.4 (June 2010): 568–95. 25. As Kathryn Gravdal notes, “For some medieval audiences virginity was a positive sexual category. It represented the choice to remain outside male desire and the refusal to circulate as an object of male possession”; consult Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 27. On virgin martyrs, agency, and self-determination, consult Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Saints’ Lives and the Female Reader,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 27.4 (October 1991): 314–32, esp. 323; Wogan-Browne, “The Virgin’s Tale,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), 172–80, esp. 180; Karen Anne Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 60–63, esp. 68. For Saint Margaret as the object of desire, consult Julie E. Fromer, “Spectators of Martyrdom: Corporeality and Sexuality in the Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Margarete,” in Intersections of Sexuality and

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the Divine in Medieval Culture: The Word Made Flesh, ed. Susannah Chewning (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 89–106. 26. Francis Bunny, A suruey of the Popes supremacie (London, 1595), 196. 27. Eamon Duff y, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 118–19; cf. the York Corpus Christi play of The Second Trial Before Pilate, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2011), lines 348–95. 28. Eamon Duff y, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 126–27. 29. Whiting, The English Parish Church, 79. 30. Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 1. 31. Alexandra Walsham, “Recycling the Sacred: Material Culture and Cultural Memory After the English Reformation,” Church History 86.4 (December 2017): 1121–54, esp. 1130–31. 32. Margaret Wade Labarge, “Stitches in Time: Medieval Embroidery in Its Social Setting,” Florilegium 16 (1999): 77–96. 33. An early example of such collaboration of the genders is that of Æthelwynn and Saint Dunstan. Æthelwynn was a tenth-century noblewoman who was skilled in embroidery. She was beginning work on a liturgical stole when Saint Dunstan paid her a visit. She asked him to help her design figures and patterns for it. Saint Dunstan hung up his lyre or harp, and it miraculously played beautiful music to entertain them as they worked (Cithara coelitus dat sonum). Osbernus Cantuariensis, Vita S. Dunstani, Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1853), cols. 421C–422A; cf. Eadmer of Canterbury, Lives and Miracles of Saints Oda, Dunstan, and Oswald, ed. Bernard J. Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 60–61.

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34. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 32. 35. On such secular repurposing, including the “best cope” of St Peter’s, Exeter, which provided material for a bed canopy, consult Walsham, “Recycling the Sacred,” 1132–34. 36. Consult Colum Hourihane, “The Development of the Medieval English Pall,” in The Age of Opus Anglicanum (London: Brepols, 2016), 146–85, especially his “Handlist of [Surviving] Late Medieval English Palls,” 167. Hourihane lists twenty-one extant palls, although he is not aware of the two Exeter palls and does not include them. He also does not observe the degree to which the palls might be multitemporal or repurposed objects. 37. John Charles Cox and Alfred Harvey, English Church Furniture (London: Methuen, 1908), 346. 38. Consult Allan Barton, “The Lyng Table Carpet,” Medieval Art, https:// medievalart.co.uk /2012/06/27/the-lyng -table-carpet. 39. Consult Whiting, The English Parish Church, 81. A pall said to have been made in 1774 from the cope of Richard Whiting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury, executed on Glastonbury Tor in 1539, was long displayed on the medieval “Joseph of Arimathea” tomb, which was moved from the crypt of Glastonbury Abbey during the Reformation. It was moved to the abbey museum in 2019. Consult Hourihane, “The English Medieval Pall,” 184. The altar cloth at St Peter’s, Winchcombe, sewn out of fourteenth-century vestments, may also have been used as a pall, though the tradition positing that it was sewn by Catherine of Aragon is dubious: https://trc-leiden .nl/trc-needles/individual-textiles-and -textile-types/religious-vestments-and -other-textiles/winchcombe-st-peters -church-altar-frontal. Conversely, some late medieval palls were converted for other purposes after the Reformation. The funeral cloth of Henry VII, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, was repurposed

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as (or at least renamed) “Queen Elizabeth’s canopy” (Hourihane, “The Medieval English Pall,” 156, 168); the coffi n cloth of Robert Thornton, Abbot of Jervaulx (d. 1533), now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, was repurposed as a chasuble for requiem masses in the early seventeenth century (http://collections.vam.ac .uk /item/O118444/chasuble-unknown/). The frequency with which these recycled vestments have changed in their use, their description, their locations, their accession numbers, and their names—making these linguistic signifiers seem as mutable as the material itself—contributes to the fascination, as well as the difficulty, of surveying the field. 40. Similar examples of unpicked figures are found on the desk cloth or altar cloth at All Saints, Sutton Benger, and on the “Pockthorpe Cope,” from St James Pockthorpe, Norwich, now in Norwich Castle Museum (consult Allan Barton, “Late Medieval English Vestments,” Liturgical Arts Journal (October 8, 2018): https://www.liturgicalartsjournal.com /2018/10/late-medieval-english-vestments .html). Offending images could also be covered over with patches, as in the case of the “Saddler’s Pall,” on which depictions of the Assumption of the Virgin were concealed by overlays bearing the IHS monogram (Hourihane, “The Medieval English Pall,” 156–57). 41. On silhouettes in stone, consult Philip Schwyzer, “Fallen Idols, Broken Noses: Defacement and Memory After the Reformation,” Memory Studies 11.1 (January 2018): 21–35. Schwyzer’s article and this chapter both emerge from discussions within the collaborative research projects “Speaking with the Dead: Histories of Memory in Sacred Space” (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) and “The Past in Its Place” (funded by the European Research Council). On the contemplation of absence, consult Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” Art Bulletin 88.4 (2006): 631–55. 42. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 7, 11.

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Va r i a bl e V e s t m e n t s a n d C l o t h i n g C on v e r s io n s 43. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 15–17. 44. In terms of animal camouflage, the particular strategies adopted by the Exeter palls would include disruptive coloration and motion dazzle, evident in the undulation of the repeated griccia pattern of the St Mary Arches Pall, distracting viewers’ eyes away from the vulnerable loci of agency (for the animal, the head, the pall, the holy figures both picked and unpicked). Consult Sami Merilaita, Nicholas E. Scott-Samuel, and Innes C. Cuthill, “How Camouflage Works,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

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B 372, 20160341 (2017): http://dx.doi.org /10.1098/rstb.2016.0341. For “performative materiality,” consult Johanna Drucker, “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface,” DHQ 7.1 (2013); and Boeckeler, this volume. 45. Wendy Wheeler, “After Grief? What Kinds of Inhuman Selves?,” New Formations 25 (1995): 77–95, esp. 90. Consult also the discussion of this passage in Sarah Beckwith, “The Present of Past Things,” in her book Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 19.

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Part II

Networking Objects

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Chapter 4

Bird-People, Utopias, Arte Plumaria The Influence of Native American Feathers on Renaissance Literature and Culture Edward McLean Test

Since Columbus’s first encounter with Native Americans, the feather has become one of the predominant descriptive features of American Indigenous peoples and was incorporated into European culture throughout the Renaissance. Imported New World feathers adorned hats, dresses, military helmets, and tourney and procession horses; feathers were collected in curiosity cabinets, headdresses were used in theatrical productions, Mexican feather paintings decorated aristocratic walls, and Catholic bishops in Europe wore Indigenous-made feather miters. Like tea from Asia and tobacco from the Americas, the foreign feathers quickly became a local and established part of European life, a New World object that transformed the Old World. “From the earliest moments of European/Native contact in the Americas,” Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver notes, “native resources, ideas, and peoples themselves traveled the Atlantic with regularity and became among the most basic defining components of Atlantic cultural exchange.”1 This chapter charts a trans-Atlantic cultural history that explores how the New World feather defined new associations and assemblages in European literature and art.

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The New World feather became a participant in the development of the early modern world—a material thing with agency, if you will. It is not the agency one might associate with consciousness; rather, it is a material agency that makes things happen. Recent Western scholarship on posthumanism, thing theory, Actor-Network Theory, and vital materialism, among others, all elevates ideas of material agency.2 Indigenous scholars also examine material agency. Vanessa Watts, a member of the Bear Clan of the Mohawk and Anishinaabe Nations, observes, “Euro-western thought is beginning to embrace the contributions of the non-human world; however, the controversial element of agency is often redesigned when applied to non-humans, thereby keeping this epistemological-ontological divide intact.”3 Zoe Todd, a Métis anthropologist, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, a scholar of African diasporic literature, remind “scholars of the continuing need to decentre the Eurocentric, heteropatriarchal focus that posthumanist studies ironically perpetuates within the ‘order of rationality’ that shapes Euro-Western institutions.”4 This essay attempts to bridge that scholarly and material realm where Indigenous and European cultures and thought meet in European arts and literature. Material things from the Americas—tobacco, gold, silver, feathers—shaped global history. The looted American wealth created new habits and new associations in Europe, and it also resulted in the demise, destruction, and subjugation of the First Peoples of the Americas, the topic of much postcolonial and Indigenous scholarship. Rather than examine the horrors of colonization, this chapter seeks to locate textual and artistic evidence of Native Americans and their material culture, showing how these peoples and materials “were central to the fashioning of a global and transnational colonial world,” as Native American scholar Coll Thrush describes it in his book Indigenous London.5 Alfred Gell, one of the first Western scholars to discuss the agency of things, writes, “Social agency can be exercised relative to ‘things’ and social agency can be exercised by ‘things.’”6 In this manner, New World feathers are nonhuman actants with a material agency that activates others. In the language of Jane Bennett, “an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces. A lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed

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not as autonomous but as vital materialities.”7 New World feathers go beyond mere representation to become vital things that actively create new associations among humans who interact with them. This rather new posthumanist approach to materialism does have a history in Western culture going back to the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, who believed that everything was composed of the same basic building blocks of matter-energy, a theory known as atomism. The Indigenous approach to vital materialism, however, has always existed, as Chickasaw poet and scholar Linda Hogan recognizes: “This is a time of what I call the reanimation of the natural world by white men, as they are newly discovering an old understanding, that everything on earth is alive and that the relationship between all these lives makes for the whole living planet. While native people have been ridiculed for these views, James Lovelock has been hailed as a genius for his return to old Indian ways of thinking and knowing, for originating what he has called the Gaia hypothesis.”8 In this sense, the scholarly endeavor to recognize vital materialism is not so much one of discovery as it is one aimed at the recovery of Indigenous “ways of thinking and knowing” the world and the many vital elements present in it.

Wearing Divinity Feathers appear in countless travel narratives about the Americas, and there probably wasn’t a single ship that returned to European harbors without some kind of feathered item. Despite their popularity, England’s King James I mocks the adoption of Native American feathers in his commentary on another item imported from the Americas: tobacco. In A Counterblaste to Tobacco, James questions the habits of the English by asking, “Why doe we not as well imitate [Native Americans] . . . in preferring glasses, feathers, and such toyes, to golde?”9 When collected in Europe, feathers become vehicles of their own culture and meaning, actively changing the Old World to resemble the New World. As Mary Baine Campbell argues, “Americanizing changes in clothing and ornament . . . did not simply ‘improve the quality of life’ in the metropole, they altered it, and altered the people.”10 In Mesoamerica, feathers were among the most valued and religiously significant of natural resources: they were symbols of fertility, riches, nobility, martial strength, and divine power.

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Margaret Ferguson notes the sacred importance of feathers in Europe, citing “the ornamentation of humans with feathers, ‘clothes’ appropriated, as it were, from creatures of another species. That species was enormously admired, both in American and European cultures; in many of the cultures homogenized by the very terms ‘Amerindian’ and ‘European,’ birds were often associated with the divine or superhuman.”11 The divine nature of a thing made of Mesoamerican feathers notably appears in French poet Guillaume de Saluste Sieur Du Bartas’s 1584 Christian epic La Sepmaine, ou Creation du monde—or Divine Weeks, as Joshua Sylvester’s 1605 translation is known in English.12 Du Bartas’s French epic rewrites biblical history and inspired many passages in English poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and while Milton arguably alludes to the Americas in his epic, Du Bartas is far more direct in placing Mesoamerica in the same tableau with Christianity. Du Bartas was known as a “divine poet.” He celebrates a natural philosophy through scripture, creating what the natural philosopher Sir Francis Bacon disparages as “this unwholesome mixture of things human and divine [from which] arises not only a fantastic philosophy but also a heretical religion.”13 Du Bartas is identified with a type of natural philosophy called Christian philosophy, which uses the Bible, particularly Genesis, as the source and “book of nature” for all natural world inquiry.14 Unlike most Christian philosophers, however, Du Bartas extends his allegorical reading of Genesis beyond the Bible to incorporate Native American cosmologies and the material environment of the New World, particularly Mesoamerica. From a proto-ethnological standpoint, Du Bartas’s Divine Weeks is a marvel in its originality, astounding the reader with a straightforward embrace of extra-European cultures. Du Bartas rewrites scripture to include the Mesoamerican environment in such a manner that his recontextualization extends far beyond the popular speculations that the Native Americans are the lost tribe of Jews, the source of King Solomon’s golden Ophir, or descendants of Noah dropped off the ark to form a colony. For Du Bartas, Mesoamericans were not the exception to but rather part of the Biblical story; not different from but part of Christianity.15 The Garden of Eden in Du Bartas, for instance, contains Mesoamerican maize, metl (the Nahuatl spelling for maguey, or agave plant), and cochineal (a crimson dye, also solely found in Mexico). After the Fall, Eve weaves together a Mesoamerican feather mantle and places it upon Adam’s shoulders:

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But, while that Adam (waxen diligent) Wearies his limbs for mutuall nourishment: While craggy Mountains, Rocks, and thorny Plains, And bristly Woods be witness of his pains: Eue, walking forth about the Forrests, gathers Speights, Parrots, Peacocks, Estrich scattered feathers, And then with wax the smaller plumes she sears, And sowes the greater with a white horse hairs, (For they as yet did serue her in the steed Of Hemp, and Towe, and Flax, and Silk, and Threed) And thereof makes a medly coat so rare That it resembles Nature’s Mantle fair, When in the Sunne, in pomp all glistering, She seems with smiles to woo the gawdie Spring.16 The artisanal process mentioned in this passage is identical to descriptions of the feather mantles made by the Mexica.17 The conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, for instance, writes that “at the house of great Montezuma, all the nobleman’s daughters whom he kept to be his mistresses wove wondrous garments, and many other commoner’s daughters, all of so decorous a bearing that one might take them to be nuns, also wove, all from feathers.”18 According to Diego Durán, the “main idolatry [of the Mexica] was founded on the adorations of . . . feathers, which they called ‘the shade of the gods.’” Durán also compares the Mexican god of war, Huitzilopochtli (“left-winged hummingbird”), to the Roman god Mars through Mars’s feathered helmet, which, to Durán, resembled the feathers that crowned Huitzilopochtli’s head.19 Notably, the Mexican god of war was conceived immaculately when a ball of feathers landed upon the belly of his mother, Coatlicue. From birth to death, even in the everlasting hereafter, as Bernardino de Sahagún notes in the Florentine Codex (ca. 1580), birds were religiously important: “Those killed in battle go to heaven. . . . The souls of these dead were transformed into all sorts of birds with gorgeous, radiant plumage. They fed from the flowers in heaven as they had done on earth, like hummingbirds.”20 The etymology of “bird” in Nahuatl (tototl) reveals an astounding array of words fundamentally linked to its root meaning. Alonso de Molina’s 1571 bilingual Nahuatl dictionary includes such words as totochiquiuitl, meaning a bird’s nest; totoltetl, denoting a bird’s egg; totomiquiliztli, signifying male

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impotence; and, most significantly, totonal, meaning the sign of something born with soul or spirit. It is worth noting that this last word is quite unlike the abstract notion of the Christian “soul” and its separation from the physical body. Watts proposes the idea of “Indigenous Place Thought” as a way of approaching this material-cosmological linkage. She suggests, “if we think of agency as being tied to spirit, and spirit exists in all things, then all things possess agency.”21 Conversely, Western thought posits disjunction, as Bruno Latour recognizes: “Somewhere in our societies, and in ours alone, an unheard-of transcendence has manifested itself: Nature as it is, ahuman, sometimes inhuman, always extrahuman. Since this event occurred . . . there has been a total asymmetry between the cultures that took Nature into account and those that took into account only their own culture. . . . Nature and Society, signs and things, are virtually coextensive. For [Westerners] they should never be.”22 While Christianity can be considered an incarnational religion that looks to the resurrection of the body, the Mexica refer to the “soul” as something material, emphasizing the organic union of body and spirit, much like the monism espoused by Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the “vital vertue” of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.23 The feather, then, was an integral part of Mexica religion and society, and an appropriate symbol for Eve to adopt, given Du Bartas’s appreciation for Native American cosmology. The divine feather mantle appears in sixteenth-century European fiction as well. In Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the sacred element of Native American feathers and their cosmological significance speaks through another example of hybrid Christian–Native American vestments. Scholars tend to examine More’s Utopia (and early modern utopias in general) as strictly a Western project promoting the ideal European state (following Plato); as Walter Cohen suggests, “It is easier to conflate More’s imaginary island with England than America . . . [however,] it may draw obliquely on accounts of America.”24 The statement answers a logical question: Why would a European humanist and devout Catholic write directly about Native American culture? However, the “recent critical consensus,” writes Campbell, “has challenged the older assumption that the impact of the New World was relatively slight on the daily life of European people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”25 Although Indigenous writers do not appear as authors of these, their participatory mark is clear, and their mythic, religious, and cultural signs are present—and, indeed, celebrated beyond oblique references. “Paying attention to the webs of relationships

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that you are enmeshed in,” notes Papaschase Cree scholar Dwayne Donald, “gives us life, all the things that we depend on, as well as all the other entities that we relate to, including human beings.”26 While European utopias certainly “imagine,” often fantastically, a perfect society, they are grounded in very real experiences of encounter with American cultures and societies. The description of More’s Utopia comes through the mouth of the adventurous intellectual Hythloday (“the speaker of nonsense”), who was a fictional passenger aboard Amerigo Vespucci’s New World voyages in the early 1500s. On the fourth voyage, Hythloday decides to remain in the Americas and, after traveling through a savage wilderness, comes to the fabled island of Utopia. Upon his return to Europe, he relates his tale. While Utopia is clearly indebted to Plato’s Republic, it is also undoubtedly influenced by encounters with New World populations. The alternative societies across the Atlantic presented Europe with a possibility of another way of life, of a “better” world. Given More’s religious zeal, one would expect a strict and orthodox Catholic presence in Utopia. Priests in More’s “better” world, however, do not wear the clerical vestments of Europe; rather, they adorn themselves with feather mantles.27 The cultural signs of Mesoamerican divinity are present and, indeed, celebrated. The priests of More’s Utopia are dressed in a similar fashion as certain Indigenous peoples of the New World: The Priest is cloathed in changeable colours, which in workmanship be excellent, but in stuffe not very precious. For their vestments be neither imbrodered with gold, nor set with precious stones. But they be wrought so finely and cunningly with divers feathers of fowles, that the estimation of no earthly stuffe is able to countervaile the price of the work. Furthermore, in these birds feathers, and in the due order of them, which is observed in their setting; they say, is contained certaine divine mysteries. The interpretation whereof knowne, which is diligently taught by the Priests, they be out in remembrance of the bountifull benefits of God toward them, and of the loue and honour which of their behalfe is due to God: and also of their duties one toward another.28 Notable in this often overlooked passage is the craftsmanship (superb), divinity (blessings from God), occult (“divine mysteries” and hieroglyphs),

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Figure 4.1. Christoph Weiditz, Mexican Indian wearing feather mantle (1529). By permission of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.

and material value (“the estimation of no earthly stuffe is able to countervaile the price of the work”). These various attributes point to Indigenous—not English—religion and art, and suggest that More understood and appreciated Indigenous cosmology and its spiritual affi liations. The priests wear feather robes similar to descriptions of feathered garments from Mexico (Figure 4.1) and similar to Du Bartas’s feather mantle. Examples of Native American feather robes still exist as material objects and can be seen today in museum collections held in Basel, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Florence, and Paris.29 To read the highly religious passage as mere imagination, fantasy, or an oblique reference to the Americas— instead of recognizing the myriad contributions of Indigenous peoples, as More and other authors discussed here did—commits an act of doublecolonization: it silences the Indigenous voice in texts, just as colonization sought to erase Indigenous society and culture.

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Human-Nonhuman Hybrids The Bolognan naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi published an image (Figure 4.2) of the Hominis sylvestris plumario, roughly translated as a “feathered wild man,” in Ornithologiae (1599). Significantly, the image does not include a feathered headdress; rather, literal plumes grow from the feathered man’s head in lieu of hair. While the hybrid bird-man seems entirely mythical, he is included in a proto-scientific text about ornithology. Inspired by a potpourri of empirical evidence, Europeans often conflated the mythical with the natural in early scientific texts: the farther one travels from home, the more fantastic and monstrous people and creatures become. What is unique about Aldrovandi and the feathered New World hybrids, however, is the physical and material presence of Native Americans in Europe during the Renaissance. The imaginary world of words was a material reality in seventeenth-century London, as Thrush observes: “The physical presence of Indigenous people in the streets, courts, and guildhalls of London entangled center and periphery—or rather, multiple centers, some English and other Indigenous—and their knowledge mattered to the creation of the thing now known as English colonialism,” as well as the fact that “in myriad places at the heart of London society—the Shakespearean stage, guild pageants, tobacco shops, and even the royal court—the presence of Indigenous people and the material evidence of their territories shaped urban discourses.”30 Native Americans adorned in feathers were observed on the streets of London and in the forests of the Americas.31 In the chronicles of discovery and the proto-ethnographic texts, observation still led to fantastic notions, and the bird-people of the Americas were no exception. Aldrovandi’s “feathered wild man” appears onstage in English masques just as the form and genre were reaching a peak in the early seventeenth century. Masques involved pageantry and celebration of royalty, and what could be more royal and more emblematic of England’s (supposed) new empire than a representative display of peoples from across the Atlantic? In the works of dynamic duo Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, King James’s power is aesthetically represented by a new English myth of feathered people of the Americas. Jones produced a sketch of a bird-man, which Erica Fudge examines in her book Animal, noting that we might see a “contiguity that is terrifying” between animal and human in this image.32 In

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Figure 4.2. “Feathered wild man,” from Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae (1599). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, QL673.A36.

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Ben Jonson’s News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, audiences encounter bird-people on the “Isle of Epicoene,” a not-so-subtle reference to Jonson’s earlier play Epicoene (1609). Tellingly, Epicoene offers a reference to an actual—not fictive—Native American living in London: “Yes, sir, of Nomentack when he was here, and of the Prince of Moldavia, and of his mistress, mistress Epicoene.”33 (Jonson also refers to Pocahontas by name in his 1625 play The Staple of News.) Namontack was no ordinary Native American either: he had assisted the first Jamestown colonists in their explorations of Tsenacomoco, to the extent that they even named a mine after him.34 He was an emissary to England, sent by the Powhatan chief Wahunsenacawh (known to the English as “Chief Powhatan”) to study London and the English people. Yet the knowledge-gathering of encounter was not a one-way street. Indeed, Wahunsenacawh, who sent several Powhatans to London, was equally ambitious and cunning in his scouting of Europe across the Atlantic. And, to be sure, he owned feathers too.35 The bird-people who inhabit Jonson’s “Isle of Epicoene” are called Volatees. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong compare these anti-masquers to the Floridian Native in Cesare Vecellio’s volume on the clothing of various peoples throughout the world. Regarding the remarkable featherwork of Amerindians, Vecellio writes that they are “extremely beautiful, wellwoven garments, divided into sections of feathers of different birds, skillfully and artfully made, in such a variety of well-matched colors that for this reason and for their rarity, they can be considered the most delicate and sumptuous clothing to be found anywhere. And these are worn by the Indians of America and in other places very far from our country.”36 Jonson, however, refers to Volatees as more than simply Native Americans ornamented with feathers; he instead describes a hybrid bird-people: “a race of creatures like men, but are indeed a sort of fowl, in part covered with feathers.” The shape-shifting of a human into a hybrid bird-person notably separates Aldrovandi’s bird-person from Vecellio’s depiction. Even more apropos is John Bulwer’s depiction of therianthropic birdpeople hybrids in Anthropometamorphosis (1654) (Figure 4.3), in which the bird-man is covered from head to foot in feathers.37 The appearance of Jonson’s Volatees onstage is not mere exotica; rather, the Volatees suggest the religious attributes of Native American bird-people and their form of worship. The conception and birth of Jonson’s bird-people is described in detail:

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Figure 4.3. Detail from John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis (1654). Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB 113592.

2nd Herald: And when they ha’ tasted the springs of pleasure enough, and billed and kissed, and are ready to come away, the shes only lay certain eggs (for they are never with child there) and of those eggs are disclosed a race of creatures like men, but are indeed a sort of fowl, in part covered with feathers (they call ’em Volatees), that hop from island to island. You shall see a covey of ’em if you please presently.”38 While Jonson’s tone is one of parody, it touches on (and is similar to) contemporary accounts of religious ceremonies performed by Native Americans. The passage above is reminiscent of History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578), written by Jean de Léry, the French missionary

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and contemporary of Michel de Montaigne; both de Léry and Montaigne consider Native American culture as a mirror reflecting their own society across the Atlantic. For example, de Léry describes Brazilian Tupinambá ritual preparation as follows: “Having first rubbed themselves with a certain gum that they keep for this purpose, they cover themselves with these, so that they are feathered all over: their bodies, arms, and legs all bedecked; in this condition they seem to be all downy, like pigeons or other birds newly hatched.”39 While the actors in masques probably didn’t follow this practice, they certainly wore Occidental feathers—if not actual feather robes from the Americas, which were collected in many European curiosity cabinets. Tellingly, catalogues often list the feather mantles as “things for the masquerade,” as Lia Markey observes, which “might have been used in court spectacles and may have even been worn at certain events.”40 Wearing Native American clothing was more than mere ornamentation or theatrical representation because European as well as American cultures equated birds with “divine and superhuman” manifestations.41 Jonson’s Volatees visit King James I from the Moon (a location that is synonymous, we could say, with the New World) to receive his “divine light,” shaking off icicles as they descend from the cold regions. They are “dazzled with the light” of King James I: “Now look and see in yonder throne, / How all beams are cast from one!”42 Certainly, a regal sun has its roots in Western civilization, from the Egyptians to the Greeks to the Romans, and the sun was also prevalent in pagan cultures of Europe; in the Renaissance, as Christopher Pye notes, “the conception of the monarch as a seeing sun was commonplace.”43 The light of the English king also carries a racial weight when compared to the “tawny colored” Americans, thus reflecting what Kim Hall identifies as “a more powerful heliocentric language . . . which glorifies the king and his country.”44 Another reading of the sun in this masque is in relationship to Native American cosmology: King James is transformed into an Indigenous idol of sun worship, and in this manner he becomes, in essence, a Native American god.

“Nature’s Mystic Book”: Feather Painting Out of these scatter’d Sibyls Leaves Strange Prophecies my Phancy weaves: And in one History consumes, Like Mexique-Paintings, all the Plumes.

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What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said I in this light Mosaick read. Thrice happy he who, not mistook, Hath read in Natures mystick Book. —Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House”

When conquistadores entered the great palace of Moctezuma in 1519, they marveled at the king’s aviary—and especially the quetzal bird, which Bernal Díaz del Castillo describes: “Here were also to be seen those birds from which the Mexicans take the green-coloured feathers of which they manufacture their beautiful feathered stuffs . . . called by the Indians quezales.”45 Nothing in Europe could compare to the elaborate care Moctezuma applied to his prized aviary. Seeking more than a zoological menagerie, Moctezuma housed birds for religious reasons as well. The long green plumes of the quezales embodied the Mexica god Quetzalcoatl, or “Plumed Serpent,” and some forty years after the Spanish conquest, the Christian notion of the Holy Spirit was repeatedly conflated with various indigenous birds in Nahuatl song.46 Indeed, according to almost all Native American tribal beliefs, birds are inherently spiritual beings—they fly through the cosmos—so wearing feathers meant wearing a part of the heavens. European explorers and colonists “noted a special link between birds and religious specialists such as priests, shamans, and curers, especially in feathered regalia like mantles and feathers in the hair.”47 Surprisingly, the Catholic Church did not balk at priests who, like Thomas More’s holy men of Utopia, wore pagan symbols of holiness and shamanistic magic such as Mexica feather miters. Indeed, feathered bishop miters created in New Spain still exist today as material objects in museums in Florence and Vienna.48 Typically, Westerners (specifically, white Europeans and non-Hispanic Americans) believe, as Latour states, “that they differ radically, absolutely [from other cultures], to the extent that Westerners can be lined up on one side and all the other cultures on the other, since the latter all have in common the fact that they are precisely cultures among others. In Westerner’s eyes the West, and the West alone, is not a culture, not merely a culture.”49 Du Bartas, More, and Jonson think otherwise, at least in part. Their writings consider the West as one of the many, rather than the exception. Their texts decenter the traditional Eurocentric belief that technology and

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knowledge move unilaterally outward from the European metropole. This conception of the West as one of many cultures also dissolves the binary of core/periphery into a cohesive world-network where one culture is not privileged over another. Like the very presence of Native Americans in early modern London that Thrush examines, these texts reflect an “entangled center and periphery—or rather, multiple centers, some English and other Indigenous.”50 In his criticism of contemporary anthropologists, Neil Whitehead states, “It is plausible to claim that anthropology is hopelessly contaminated by its colonial origins, continually conceptualising others according to a set of categories originally generated by the exigencies of colonial conquest. In consequence the discipline of anthropology is seen as wedded to an exotic presentation of others.”51 Much the same can be said of cultural and literary analysis if these intellectual approaches do not recognize the Western world as only one of many players in the development of the early modern global world. The “other” is not merely an exotic. There are multiple metropoles and multiple peripheries. By considering how the New World feather retains a vestige of its original American meaning of divinity, albeit one reconstituted in Europe, we are able to recognize one of many examples of how the Americas altered European culture and art. In Andrew Marvell’s poem cited above, one of the objects to decorate Lord Fairfax’s country house is a Mexica feather painting, or what was known in New Spain as arte plumaria. Fairfax’s decorative art may be categorized along the same lines as traditional aristocratic collections, such as those seen in Wunderkammern, or curiosity cabinets, which predate the modern museum. In the Renaissance, cabinets of wonder grouped together objects from diverse cultures, placing them in seemingly haphazard categories. Difference and variety were the goals; firm logical and scientific categories, though they were developed and deployed later, were not.52 Marvell uses “Mosaick” to describe Mexica feather painting because the remarkably vibrant and iridescent feathers shine like the enameled tiles of Byzantine mosaics. Marvell suggests that the Mexica feather painting retains something of the mystical union of humans and the natural world in “Natures Mystick Book,” suggesting an equivalence between European and Mesoamerican sacred and religious elements. The Europeans who first viewed Mexica arte plumaria marveled at its technical accomplishments. The feathers were attached together by agave threads or “glued” on with a substance from orchid bulbs. While the brilliant colors

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of feathers from hummingbirds and tropical birds were frequently used without further embellishment, dyes (such as the brilliant red cochineal) were sometimes added. Upon seeing the latest gifts shipped from MexicoTenochtitlan by Hernán Cortés in 1525, Gasparo Contarini, the Venetian ambassador to Spain, noted that he had “never seen more exquisite and delicate embroidery than in certain examples of [feather] work.”53 José de Acosta similarly describes the remarkable paintings: Some Indians, good artists, copy perfectly with feathers what they have seen drawn and do it as well as any painters in Europe. . . . There is another, larger picture that shows Saint Francis gladly receiving sainthood from Pope Sixtus V, and when [King Philip] was told that the Indians had made it he tried to test it by brushing his fingers lightly over the picture to see if it was indeed made of feathers; he thought it marvelous that it was so well done that the eyes could not tell whether they were natural colors of feathers or artificial colors painted with a brush.54 Undoubtedly, this experience of a European “touching” another culture was not limited to the king of Spain. The cross-cultural connection between Europe and the New World was, in many ways, a physical and material encounter: consider the introduction of European disease to Occidental populations, the European consumption of foodstuffs from the New World, or all the people ingesting tobacco from the Americas, imitating “these beastly Indians,” as King James of England descried in 1604.55 The oldest surviving piece of Mexican-Christian featherwork, which depicts Saint Gregory’s Mass (1539), was presented to Pope Paul III in Mexico and was created by Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin, governor of Tenochtitlan, grandson of Axayácatl, and brother-in-law of Cuauhtémoc, the son of Moctezuma (Figure 4.4). Like the feather painting, the governor also represents colonial hybridity, as he is an Indian noble accorded a ruling position by the Spanish after the conquest. The theme of the painting revolves around the Mystery of the Eucharist, in which Saint Gregory had sought to explain the true presence of the Host. Unlike European religious paintings, the material itself—Mesoamerican plumage—creates a spiritual mixing, or religious mestizaje (the term for the mixing of European

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Figure 4.4. Diego Huanitzin, The Mass of St. Gregory, feathers on a wood panel (Mexico, 1539). Th is is the oldest example of Christian amanteca art in America. By kind permission of the Musée des Amériques, Auch, France.

and Amerindian races). “The image does not represent the gods,” writes Alfredo López Austin, “nor are the symbols for the gods: they are ‘vessels for the divine essence,’ earthly containers for the emanation of the gods.”56 These Christian paintings are commonly considered a mode of delivering pertinent messages for converting Native peoples; Jesus is

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surrounded by symbols of the Passion. The three pineapples on the altar at Christ’s left elbow, however, exhibit a syncretism of Indigenous and European culture. Indeed, the mestizo featherwork transforms and Indigenizes European religious iconography through an art form that retains the Indigenous religious-layered medium. The material object manipulates the subject. The Mexica amanteca, or feather artisans, who produced some of the most remarkable featherwork, were not only valued as craftsmen but were also intricately linked to religious practice. In Indigenous Mexico, as Mexican scholar Teresa Yturbide writes, “art and religion were certainly one and the same thing, or rather, barely differentiated expressions of the same feeling, of the same way of feeling one’s being on the earth.”57 While Mexica feather artisans clearly connect feathers to their gods, scholars traditionally view the mixture of Christian symbolism with Mesoamerican religion as an example of the evangelization of Mexico, the transformation of its pagan religion into Christian iconography, which began soon after the missionaries arrived. For instance, the Mexica “made their first figures of Christ from cornstalks wrapped in a cloth made from maguey fiber and covered with feathers. . . . During Good Friday processions, the Christs wore cloths . . . whose feathers changed colors as they moved under the sunlight, shifting from green, to blue, red, brown, and every other color.”58 (One can imagine the mantles of More’s utopic priests operating in a similar fashion.) In this description, the appearance of Christ is secondary to the marvelously colored feathers. The normative critical view of any Mexican use of feathers in the context of a Christian theme does “not value the labor of art production as much as it values an object’s final appearance,” as Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn suggest.59 When the importance of the artwork is placed on its appearance rather than its labor, the novoHispanic handiwork is made invisible, occluding its Indigenous meaning. Two questions thus come to mind: Are feather paintings an example of Indigenous art transformed into a Christian European form, or the reverse—are they Christian art turned Indigenous? And how is the nonhuman shaping the world of the human? In a generalized animistic view, the essence of God is contained within every substance: plants, animals, humans, and feathers. In the history of Western thought, animism might be identified as the theory of vital materialism espoused by writers like John Milton and Baruch

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Spinoza, whereby everything and everyone is composed of the same basic building blocks of matter-energy—an idea going back to Lucretius, who wrote about “primordia,” an atom-like substance, in his De rerum natura. In current scholarship, Bennett refers to such “vibrant matter” by way of actants, a term that highlights the collaborative nature of multiple entities and forces operating at once, and locates agency in both nonhumans (themselves actors) and humans (themselves “vital materialities”).60 In Bennett’s view, feathers and humans are made of the same vital material and are equally active in creating networks of associations. According to Bennett, we—human and nonhuman—are equally responsible for each and every association made between us. There is no subject/object dialectic. Latour recognizes the overlap between vital materialism and Indigenous cosmologies, stating that “the dualism in which [the anthropologist] lives—humans on one side, nonhumans on the other, signs over here, things over there—is intolerable” to Indigenous peoples.61 Given Latour’s estimation of this worldview, Native Americans were always already posthumanists: everything and everyone, to paraphrase Shakespeare, are merely actors upon the world stage. Suggesting that all elements contain the same “vital fluid” was anathema to the burgeoning capitalist pursuits of early modern merchants. Indeed, vital materialism can be associated with Native American tribes and the pagans of Europe’s remote past, as Carolyn Merchant explains in The Death of Nature: “The removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature—the most far-reaching effect of the Scientific Revolutions. Because nature was now viewed as a system of dead, inert particles moved by external, rather than inherent[,] forces, the mechanical framework itself could legitimate the manipulation of nature. Moreover, as a conceptual framework, the mechanical order had associated with it a framework of values based on power, fully compatible with the directions taken by commercial capitalism.”62 The aim of this chapter is to explore how various geographic/religious/ethnic/cultural human networks accruing around New World feathers unexpectedly revive vital materialism: nature is not dead or inert but instead full of active life. Nature lives through the encounter and entanglement with Native American cultures. In English literature, Indigenous cultures not only count but also help determine textual narratives. “Indigenous cultures, epistemes, and practices have survived to this day despite the

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brutality of European colonialism,” write Silver Moon and Michael Ennis about the resilience of conquered cultures in their study of the altepetl, the Nahua city-state.63 The operative word in that sentence is “despite”— despite the efforts of colonialism to erase cultural practices of the Americas from historical memory, and despite the overwhelming process of exploitation of natural resources, we can still identify vestiges of these cultural markers in the texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The task for scholars is to listen for—and recognize—their voices. The literary and artistic engagement with the natural world and Native American art forms realigns the European narrative with a new global age of the mestizaje, or mixing of cultures. In this manner, these European authors affirm and acknowledge a rapidly hybridizing world, which today continues to grow and dominate economies, politics, and societies. The encounter and conquest of the New World gave rise to a truly modern world of mixed races and cultures, a form of racial globalization that runs counter to and threatens (according to nationalistic thinkers) the more homogenous cultures of Europe and the United States. Significantly, Native American religions were inseparable from the natural world, as the Sioux shaman Black Elk notes: “Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.”64 Watts similarly explains, “If we accept the idea that all living things contain spirit, then this extends beyond complex structures within an ecosystem. It means that non-human beings choose how they reside, interact and develop relationships with other nonhumans. So, all elements of nature possess agency, and this agency is not limited to innate action or casual relationships.”65 Although Europeans celebrated the Native American religiosity of the natural world, the emergence of the Atlantic network of cultural and material exchange had—and still has—profound consequences for the environment of the Americas: the “Golden Age must have an iron ending,” as John Fletcher and Philip Massinger write in The Sea Voyage. From this perspective, conquest was inevitable. The “Golden Age” innocence of the Americas had to be crushed by an iron fist. The modern world of the West manifested and depended upon it. The cultural blending of religious, cultural, scientific, and environmental beliefs described in this chapter reveals how the feather is one of many enduring New World “things” that visibly, tangibly, and physically altered European society.

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Notes 1. Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 17. Because one aim of this chapter is to recognize Indigenous influence on early modern European culture, I likewise acknowledge contemporary Native American / Indigenous / First Nations scholars and scholarship throughout. 2. Consult Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 3. Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous PlaceThought and Agency Amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European Tour!),” DIES: Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and Society 2.1 (2013): 20–34, esp. 28. 4. Zoe Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 245. Consult also Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: NYU Press, 2020). 5. Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 6. Gell, Art and Agency, 17–18. 7. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 21. 8. Linda Hogan, “Department of the Interior,” in Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul, ed. Patricia Foster (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 159– 74, esp. 166.

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9. James I, King of England, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, ed. Edmund Goldsmid (Edinburgh, 1884), 13. 10. Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 227. 11. Margaret W. Ferguson, “Feather and Flies: Aphra Behn and the SeventeenthCentury Exotica,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 235–59, esp. 250. 12. For a more detailed discussion of Du Bartas, consult Edward McLean Test, “Amerindian Eden: The Divine Weekes of Du Bartas,” in Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Ken Hiltner, Stephanie LeMenager, and Teresa Shewry (New York: Routledge, 2011). 13. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (London, 1624), aphorism 65. It is worth noting that even though Bacon labels it heresy, he likewise mixes the biblical and scientific in odd ways throughout the New Atlantis. 14. Ann Blair, “Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy in the Late Renaissance,” Isis 91.1 (2000): 32–58, esp. 33. 15. While medieval scholars will point out that the mixing of Christianity with pagan religions occurred in medieval Europe (where religious systems interacted and blended together over several centuries), the Renaissance discovery of the New World provided a completely foreign, new, unknown, and nonlocal paganism with which Christianity assimilated—and with new vigor. The transition and confrontation was immediate. Du Bartas reflects one of the more syncretic approaches toward Indigenous peoples by incorporating these beliefs, as opposed to supplanting them. 16. Du Bartas, “First Week, the Seventh Day, Handicrafts,” lines 141–54. In

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Guillaume de Saluste Sieur Du Bartas, The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas, ed. Susan Snyder, trans. Josuah Sylvester (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1979). 17. For various historical descriptions of Mesoamerican feather art, consult Teresa Castelló Yturbide, The Art of Featherwork in Mexico (Houston: Wetmore and Company Press, 1993). 18. Yturbide, Art of Featherwork, 80; Fray Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias, in Book of the Gods and Rites and Ancient Calendar, trans. Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 2:206. 19. Alessandra Russo, “Plumes of Sacrifice: Transformations in SixteenthCentury Mexican Feather Art,” Res Anthropology and Aesthetics 42 (2002): 228–50, esp. 237. 20. Bernardino de Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain: Florentine Codex (ca. 1580), trans. from the Nahuatl with notes by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982). 21. Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought,” 30. 22. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 98–100. 23. Spinoza believes that one infinite substance (whether that is God or Nature) is the only substance that exists; consult part 1 of the Ethics for his argument for this type of monism. Milton refers to the “vital vertue,” or a singular fluid that infuses everything, in book 7 of Paradise Lost, lines 233–42. 24. Walter Cohen, “The Literature of Empire in the Renaissance,” Modern Philology 102.1 (August 2004): 1–34, esp. 10. 25. Campbell, Wonder and Science, 155. 26. Dwayne Donald, “On What Terms Can We Speak?,” lecture, University of Lethbridge, 2010, Lethbridge, AB, video, www.vimeo.com/15264558. 27. Refer to Naomi Howell’s chapter in this collection for information about the

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vestments worn by Catholic priests and the transformations they experienced in the wake of the Reformation. 28. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 124. 29. For details on museum collections that have feather cloaks, consult Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. Jay Levenson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). 30. Thrush, Indigenous London, 43 and 46. 31. For another examination of Native Americans in England, consult Alden Vaughan’s Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1470–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 32. Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 65. 33. Ben Jonson, Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (London: H. Wills, 1609), 5.1.2.9–21. 34. Coll Thrush, “‘Meere Strangers’: Indigenous and Urban Performances in Algonquian London,” in Urban Identity and the Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Fay and Leonard Von Morzé (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 195–213. 35. Feathers are mentioned in virtually every narrative about Native Americans living in the Jamestown vicinity. Consult Edward Wright Haile, ed., Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony; The First Decade; 1607– 1617 (Champlain, VA: Round House, 1998). 36. Cesare Vecellio, The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas: Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni, essay and translation by Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 57. 37. John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or the Artificial Changeling. Historically presented, in the mad and cruel Gallantry, foolish Bravery, ridiculous Beauty, filthy Fineness, and loathesome Loveliness of most Nations,

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T h e I n f lu e nc e of Nat i v e A m e r ic a n F e at h e r s fashioning & altering their Bodies from the Mould intended by Nature. With a Vindication of the Regular Beauty and Honesty of Nature, and an Appendix of the Pedigree of the English Gallant (London: J. Hardesty, 1650). 38. Ben Jonson, News from the New World in the Moon, in The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Francis Cunningham and William Gifford (London: Bickers and Son, 1875), 3:134–39, esp. 138. 39. Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 59. 40. Lia Markey and Jessica Keating, “‘Indian’ Objects in Medici and AustrianHabsburg Inventories: A Case-Study of the Sixteenth-Century Term,” Journal of the History of Collections 23.2 (2011): 283– 300, esp. 289. 41. Ferguson, “Feather and Flies,” 250. 42. Jonson, News from the New World, 138. 43. Christopher Pye, “The Sovereign, the Theater, and the Kingdome of Darknesse: Hobbes and the Spectacle of Power,” in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 294. 44. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 135. 45. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, ed. David Carrasco (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 232. 46. Consult the various examples collected in Cantares Mexicanos: Song of the Aztecs, trans. John Bierhorst (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985). 47. Shepard Krech, Spirits of the Air: Birds & American Indians in the South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 133. 48. The Museo degli Argenti, Palazzo Pitti, in Florence, and the Weltmuseum

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Wien, in Vienna, both have a feather miter in their collections. For more details on extant featherwork miters in museums, consult Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, ed. Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fane (Chicago: Hirmer Publishers and University of Chicago Press, 2016). 49. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 97. 50. Thrush, Indigenous London, 43. 51. Neil Whitehead, “The Discoverie as Ethnological Text,” in The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, by Sir Walter Raleigh, transcribed, annotated, and introduced by Neil Whitehead (Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 60–116, esp. 70. 52. For more information about curiosity cabinets in England, and specifically their multisensory dimensions, refer to the introduction to this collection. 53. Yturbide, Art of Featherwork, 46. 54. José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Managan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 237. 55. James I, Counterblaste to Tobacco, 13. 56. Cited in Russo, “Plumes of Sacrifice,” 234. 57. Yturbide, Art of Featherwork, 48. 58. Yturbide, Art of Featherwork, 145. 59. Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12.1 (2010): 5–35, esp. 17. 60. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 21. 61. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 101. 62. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 193. 63. Silver Moon and Michael Ennis, “The View of the Empire from the Altepetl: Nahua Historical and Global Imagination,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial

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Difference in the Renaissance Empires, ed. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 150–66, esp. 150.

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64. John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 121. 65. Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought,” 23.

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Chapter 5

Needlework Patterns on the Move Traveling Toward (Re)incarnation Anna Riehl Bertolet

Migratory Threadwork Birds At the very top of a mid-seventeenth-century sampler worked by Anne Lawle, there is an upside-down pair of birds made by the cutwork and drawn-thread work method, with needle-lace filling (Figure 5.1).1 Almost perfectly symmetrical, the birds are surrounded by stylized flowers pleasantly filling the space between and behind them. Where do these delicate birds come from? Why, from other birds, of course! These birds, made of thread, likely did not take their shape as a result of Anne Lawle stitching as she watched a pair of doves cooing amidst carnations in a garden patch—although if she wished to design her own stylized feathered creatures, she probably could have done so. For Lawle already had a design at hand: either a printed pattern or an image previously executed in a material other than ink on paper, likely another embroidered piece. She may have created an exact copy of the birds worked by her great-grandmother or modeled by her teacher. Or perhaps she borrowed a sampler or a personal linen item, such as a shift embellished with a needle-lace insert featuring these birds. If Lawle’s model was worked in counted stitch rather

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Figure 5.1. Pictorial band sampler. Anne Lawle, maker, England, possibly 1655 to 1665. Embroidered with polychrome silks in cross, Montenegrin cross, double running, satin, split, trellis, and detached buttonhole stitch. Linen thread is worked in the hem and double running, counted satin and eye stitch with needle weaving, and drawn and cutwork with needle-lace fi lling stitches make up the top band of the sampler. Th ree edges are hemmed, and there is a selvage at the top. Length 74.5 cm, width 24.5 cm. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK, T.15-1928.

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than needle lace, she would have translated the stitches into another technique, creating a lacy background for her birds and switching to a monochromatic scheme (in this case whitework) if she worked from a polychrome sample. If Lawle worked from a printed pattern, it was likely a pattern for lacis (square netting) that was published for the first time in sixteenth-century Italy and France. The page she used may have been torn out of a book or preserved intact within the original volume. If the latter was the case, perhaps Lawle was fortunate enough to get hold of one of the many editions of Federico Vinciolo’s wildly popular pattern book Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts. She could have been working from one of the early editions (1587) or the last known edition to contain the pattern of these birds (1612).2 Lawle could have also consulted an even older page leaf, by then nearly a century old: the exact same birds perched in La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorti di recami, a pattern book by Giovanni Ostaus published in Venice as early as 1561.3 Whatever the case, if Lawle’s birds sprang from a printed source, it was a continental edition. Few pattern books were published in England by the mid-seventeenth century, and while the image of these birds could migrate over the English Channel, they had not yet materialized in English print. In fact, the first English pattern book, Adrian Poyntz’s New and Singular Patternes & Workes of Linnen (1591), is essentially a repackaged collection of Vinciolo’s designs but without the bird pattern. It is unlikely, though not impossible, that one of Vinciolo’s pattern books or an even more rare copy of Ostaus’s pattern made it into Lawle’s hands unscathed in the 1650s or 1660s. These books were not treated as collectibles; rather, they became worn with use, disintegrating as they were handled and damaged in the process as users manufactured new items engendered by the patterns. It is, then, more probable that instead of a continental pattern book, Lawle used another piece of needlework as her guide. Whatever the immediate source of Anne Lawle’s birds of thread, the fact is that they have a history. Their material existence as an object via the precise form of linen thread that Lawle gave them is a part of a network of (re)incarnated objects and patterns. The chain-links in this network, their number, and their exact configuration are unknown and unknowable, but information about their production and reproduction can be surmised from what we know about printing and the material production

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of needlework in the early modern period. Even before these birds became part of an inked paper leaf, they were a carving on a woodblock whose raised lines followed a drawn image. Chances are that the drawing, too, had a material source such as a carving or textile, woven or embroidered, and that the draftsman copied and perhaps modified the design from an object featuring the birds. As the birds were imprinted on book pages, new woodblocks, too, were (re-)created in the image of their worn-out predecessors or (re)incarnated at a new location through a reverse design made from the imprints. A cursory linear sequence of objects that includes Lawle’s birds may be (but does not necessarily need to be) as follows: needlework → drawing → woodblock → print → needlework → Lawle’s sampler. Repetitions, reversals, and offshoots are likely to form additional links in this simplified chain. In other words, a piece of needlework is as likely to be the origin of a printed pattern as of Lawle’s embroidered creation. Wherever it starts, this sequence includes objects in various media: thread, ink, wood, paper. What holds the sequence together is not only the image of the birds but also a peculiar dynamism within each of these objects that propels the sequence toward self-perpetuation, and the objects within the chain toward incarnation—and (re)incarnation—which I will explore in this chapter. In this argument, I use the term “(re)incarnation” in a very specific sense that blends its spiritual and material meanings, which are discussed in the next section. We can speak of incarnation anytime an abstract pattern generates a material object: an abstract idea becomes physically manifested. But if we trace the history of the pattern itself, we may discover that what we have termed “incarnation” is, more precisely, “(re)incarnation.” Such is the case for objects based on patterns that themselves were based on materialities—other objects or images since lost or perished. The memory of these lost links—perhaps even anchors—of the sequences, such as the hypothetical lineage of Lawle’s birds, may still linger in the conscious memory; for example, when Bianca copies a pattern of the strawberries from Othello’s handkerchief, the needlework is (re)incarnated, even when the handkerchief itself may no longer exist. In other cases, the memory of the past object may be lost to the observer (but not necessarily to the maker). Thus, (re)incarnation may or may not be intentional, but we must make an effort to trace the sequence and consider the

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possibilities of what Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass call “material mnemonics,” which can spring to life at some point in a sequence.4 I thus use the term “(re)incarnation” to indicate these possibilities. At the center of my project are needlework pattern books and, more specifically, the objects that function as links in the chain of (re)incarnation, which include the pattern books. This chain reaches back to the past, before the pattern books begin their material existence, and into the future, where the never-ceasing potential for (re)incarnation continues to call more objects into the physical realm of manifestation. The needlework pattern books I will discuss are representative of other networks and other chains whose examination through the lens of inner dynamism would yield similar conclusions. These books belong to a category of particularly charged objects. As with any other blueprint, manual, or instruction booklet, these objects possess an intrinsic dynamism that spurs the work of (re)incarnation, an impetus for their readers to engage with other objects—such as needle and thread—and make new objects. This inner dynamism leads to many forms of (re)incarnation, and, in the case of the pattern books under discussion, the concepts of authorship, nationhood, gender, agency, and style are an integral part of the process. Understanding these objects—and, as I shall discuss, sometimes even the books themselves—as the products of (re)incarnation allows us to approach them in a way that accounts for the dynamic mode of invention and re-creation that these objects both elicit and possess.

A Theory of (Re)incarnation Insofar as we are dealing with a chain of objects that came into being (and fell out of it) over a period of linear time, it is logical to define the relationship between the chain-links as repetition, reproduction, or replication. But the elements of the chain do not bond neatly in a linear fashion; the linkages often turn into substitutions, creating a local or even global circularity (e.g., needlework → drawing → woodblock → print → needlework). For that reason, I propose that (re)incarnation is a more precise term that designates the instances where a substitution occurs. In the sequence above, the earlier piece of needlework is (re)incarnated in the later one. Repetition is a fairly good descriptor of the process of creation, for instance, of multiple pages imprinted with the same woodblock

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pattern of paired-up birds. Reproduction is perhaps an apt term for making a second woodblock identical to and modeled on the one already in existence. But making (by reverse engineering) a new woodblock based on a printed image of the birds so as to impress a similar image on new pages is an act of (re)incarnation. In this sense, a (re)incarnation is a replacement, a substitution, that captures the intrinsic nature of its source. In its most fundamental sense, the concept of (re)incarnation suggests the interchangeability of matter and preservation of immaterial essence. To perceive distinctly separate objects through the lens of (re)incarnation may seem to go against reason, both because the possible coexistence of two or more “bodies” is at odds with the concept of being “reborn” in a new container, and because inanimate objects are not normally granted a nonmaterial essence. The concept of (re)incarnation, for the purposes of this chapter, is understood not through its possible misalignment with the ideas of repetition, reproduction, and replication but rather through its alignment with the notions of re-creation, replacement, and substitution. As Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood explain in Anachronic Renaissance, the substitutional paradigm is one of two early modern conceptual models of creative production (the other one being the authorial model). The substitutional model of thinking about artifacts “proposed the perfect interchangeability of one image or work for another. Under this model, the work did not merely repeat the prior work, for repetition proposes difference, an altering interval. Rather, the work simply is its own predecessor, such that the prior is no longer prior but present. This model of perfect commutativity among works across time and space flies in the face of the empirical fact that works of art are created by specific people at specific times and then replaced for various reasons.”5 Nagel and Wood also discuss the relationship between artifacts and temporality as non-singular: “To perceive an artifact in substitutional terms was to understand it as belonging to more than one historical moment simultaneously. The artifact was connected to its unknowable point of origin by an unreconstructible chain of replicas. . . . Under the substitutional theory different objects stack up one on top of another without recession and without alteration. The dominant metaphor is that of the impress or the cast, allowing for repetition without difference, even across heterogeneous objects and materials.”6 While Nagel and Wood do not use the term “(re)incarnation,” their observations about the substitutional model of

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early modern thinking are similar to what I propose here. These scholars are not concerned with drawing distinctions between substitution and repetition, or substitution and interchangeability. Nevertheless, the point of their description concerns the early modern tendency to identify various objects in the same creative chain, despite the difference in the medium—each of them firmly connected (and perceived as identical) to the original. While Nagel and Wood’s study focuses on sacred objects of art, many of their conclusions are applicable to my case study, in which the objects in the network are also products of creative human energies. Moreover, these objects themselves carry the seeds and impetus to creativity that would (re)incarnate the proximal or far-removed links of the same chain. (Re)incarnation, then, flies in the face of linearity; as we have seen, the chain of objects is linear only in a very general, imprecise sense: (re)incarnations bend the chain backward, loop it by fastening themselves to far-removed links in the sequence, much like a network—or even the production of lacework itself. Furthermore, as Nagel and Wood remind us, it is the non-linearity of time itself that allows for the possibility of substitution and (re)incarnation. To explain this concept, they use the metaphor of stitching, an image especially striking in its implications for the philosophical and phenomenological significance of the very method of production of some of the objects in the chain leading to Anne Lawle’s birds. “Artifacts and monuments,” they explain, were “stitched through time, pulling two points on the chronological timeline together until they met. Through artifacts the past participated in the present. A primary function of art under the substitutional system was precisely to effect a disruption of chronological time, to collapse temporal distance.”7 Nagel and Wood’s theory describes the peculiar perception of time in the early modern period. In contrast to linear time, the authors remind us, the early moderns were familiar with the “ramification, the doubling, the immobilization of time: in the naming of planets and seasons; in the promise of reincarnation; in narratives of the rise and fall of worldly empires understood in cyclical terms.” This temporality extended to the typological readings of scripture so prominent in the period: “Such contrivances mirror the sensation, familiar to everyone, of time folding over on itself, the doubling of the fabric of experience that creates continuity and flow; creates meaning where there was none; creates and encourages the desire

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to start over, to renew, to reform, to recover.”8 The chain of objects leading to Anne Lawle’s birds is such a sequence of substitutions, and it is this exact impetus—the inner dynamism toward renewal and re-creation— that has brought these birds into a material existence via Lawle’s hands and, even to this day, calls for the birds’ (re)incarnation.

Stitches from Venice to Paris In addition to being a story of “folded” temporality, the story of early modern pattern books is one of movement. Over 150 pattern collections for needlework, weaving, and lacemaking were created in Europe before 1700. Domestically produced embroidery and lace were en vogue, and needlecrafters were hungering for these kinds of designs. First, printed books of patterns appeared in Germany in the 1520s, moving from Augsburg to Cologne and other areas, and then migrating to Italy, France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and England. And transformations also occurred in the process of movement, including repeating and modifying the patterns, introducing new designs, experimenting with graphic representation, and creating a plethora of images whose origins and authorship were quickly obscured, misrepresented, reimagined, or simply omitted. These little books, typically quarto volumes, materialized and traveled all over Europe because they fulfilled one of the most dynamic human needs: the need to create. The very purpose of any pattern presupposes movement. A pattern— an abstract, imagined invention or a record based on an existing material object—is carried to a new place, where it becomes the model for creation or re-creation of the design. A printed book of patterns serves the same purpose: to facilitate the process by which new material objects may be created, often at a great geographical distance from the place of the pattern’s origins. In the early modern era, with its nebulous concept of copyright, a printed book itself can be (re)incarnated at a new location, in a new context, with or without the involvement of its first author or compiler. For example, woodblocks could be reverse engineered from the printed pages, thereby reincarnating the woodblocks used in the past— and a new book of the old patterns could thus be created for the new audiences. The patterns themselves could not tell their stories of origin and movement; rather, it was up to the paratexts to frame, identify, invent, or omit the links that came before.

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Paratexts make it possible, in some instances, to identify the very first element in a tangled web: such is the case with Federico Vinciolo’s book of patterns. Vinciolo’s first collection of exquisite designs, Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, was published in three editions in Paris in 1587. The title announced its contents as “The unusual and new designs, by Signor Federico Vinciolo, Venetian, for all sorts of needlework. / Dedicated to the Dowager Queen of France.”9 The words “newly invented” featured on the title page of the first edition. The paratexts of the subsequent 1587 editions pointed to their past and future (re)incarnations, referring to the previous edition, highlighting the augmentation, and promising additional patterns in the future. Building on the apparently enthusiastic initial reception, these books shaped the concept of the patterns as charged objects that generated the pleasure of viewing, moving, and making for their audience. By means of the paratexts, Vinciolo and his publisher, Jean Le Clerc, imbue the book and the patterns it contains with a dynamic history. Some of that dynamism arises directly from the difference between the place of the book’s publication (France) and the author’s national origins (Italy). The title ostensibly points to the designer’s foreignness: he is a Venetian who is able to offer the French audience “something never before seen or invented.”10 To be sure, Vinciolo’s Venetian origins signal to the audience that his artistic credentials are of the highest order: Venice, as Elisa Ricci puts it, “was the Queen of fashion,” and “all Europe acknowledged the supremacy of Venetian treatment in all things pertaining to Art and Beautiful.”11 In sixteenth-century Europe, Vinciolo’s Venetian nationality is akin to an impressive calling card for those unfamiliar with his excellence as a designer. In fact, what little is known about Vinciolo’s biography suggests that his experience and performance as a maker and designer of laces was highly valued at the French court.12 With careful brushstrokes on the title page and in his preface, “Vinciolo, Venitian” endows his patterns with a story of origin and migration. The evocation of Venice links Vinciolo’s designs to Venetian culture and thus associates them with exquisite beauty; moreover, his origins tie the designs to the birthplace of Queen Catherine de Medici, a key point of prestige to members of his French audience. Lest these connections to Venetian history and Italian geography imply that the number of designs are exhaustible, the paratexts continue to assure the audience, one edition after another, that Vinciolo brings with him a generative gift for

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invention and innovation. Not only do his designs supply an opportunity for his audience to (re)incarnate authentic Venetian beauty, but Vinciolo also promises to create more of this beauty in Paris by inventing new designs—and, consequently, putting Venetian authenticity at the service of the French nation. If highlighting the link to Venice is a winning marketing strategy, it is the exquisite elegance and variety of Vinciolo’s designs that account for the popularity of Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts across Europe over the following three decades. There is a strong probability that this success was enabled by Vinciolo’s intimate knowledge of both the visual and material complexity of reticella lace, enabling him not only to record his patterns accurately but also to make them easy to follow in the lacemaking process. The delicacy and intricacy of his design is evident in the way Vinciolo renders the birds, whose stance echoes that of Lawle’s birds (Figure 5.2). While these lacy birds may not be directly related to the ones on the counted grid, they demonstrate the range of Vinciolo’s interests and showcase his virtuoso work. Furthermore, this design illustrates Vinciolo’s two major graphic innovations: his lace patterns are shown in white against a dark background, and, as the title of the third edition announces, his “designs for network with counted stitches” include the “number of meshes, something never before seen or invented.”13 These innovations indicate the artist’s familiarity with the material and intellectual process of making needlework and threadwork. Indeed, Vinciolo assures his audience that he “spent a long time in the invention of this work, and in investigation and careful rendering of all the stitches of each design.”14 From Vinciolo’s reference to “sewing laces” in his preface, Arthur Lotz surmises that Vinciolo is the rare premier pattern designer who is also well versed in the process of production of needlework objects.15 This practical knowledge of production was likely the reason Vinciolo received an exclusive right to manufacture lace ruffs in France. But even more important, his intimate participation in creating the physical objects (both the lace ruffs and hand-drawn designs for laces), first in Venice and later in Paris, adds a significant material component to the usability—and thus dynamism—of his patterns. As Lotz notes, earlier pattern books offer visually appealing designs that are difficult or impossible to execute in reticella lace.16 Vinciolo’s designs for another style, net or mesh embroidery, are also oriented toward usability. While we know

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Figure 5.2. Design for reticella lace. Federico Vinciolo, Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, Paris, 1588, 19r. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1918. Public domain.

that Vinciolo’s birds (re)incarnated in Anne Lawle’s sampler may not be his original invention, the specific way of presenting them in the pattern is his own. They are both old and reborn into a new arrangement, and, as we shall see, the code of their logical structure is retained with maximum precision. The beauty and usability of Vinciolo’s patterns were a large part of their inner dynamism, propelling their dissemination across Europe

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and in the lively cycle of (re)incarnation of objects in the media of print, wood, and thread. A multifaceted creator and maker, Vinciolo thus possessed powerful rhetorical tools that ensured the success of his pattern books. Summoning verbal, visual, and sensory stimuli, Vinciolo infuses his little books with ingenuity, giving his audience the impetus to invent and create—a desire for and assurance of the abundance evoked and promised by the very titles that continued to announce innovations, additions, and augmentations. These patterns, he maintained, belonged to the ladies now, theirs for the making of more beautiful objects, perpetuating the abundance through (re)incarnation of the printed images in a new medium, though for a new purpose: still to admire but now also to wear as a ruff or a lace insert, display on an elegant tablecloth, and always command attention visually and tactilely.17 But the call of these pattern books, first and foremost, is an invitation to movement: gathering the tools and materials, manipulating the pattern, beginning the sensory and sensual process of creation, joining the needle and thread, rubbing and pressing them to each other and to the skin of the maker. It is a call to experience delight—irresistible and familiar to a maker—to derive, as Vinciolo puts it, an “uncommon pleasure in imitating these designs.”18 It is a call to (re)incarnation.

Ownership, Authorship, and Authority Vinciolo’s powerful pattern books are a product of collaboration. However beautiful and precise each of Vinciolo’s drawings might have been, however careful the “rendering of all the stitches of each design,” they would have lost their elegance in print unless the woodblocks were cut with refined and exacting skill. While contributing to the marketability of the volume by highlighting the contributions of its makers, the paratexts subtly draw attention to the variety of objects and processes involved in its creation. The apparent absence of conflict in the paratexts’ contradictory claims about the patterns’ origins and authorship may seem odd to a modern eye, yet it is indicative of what Nagel and Wood describe as the substitutional model of thinking about creative endeavors. As noted by Sarah Randles and other scholars, the authorship of the printed patterns is “often obscure, since the majority of the publishers at the time plagiarized the work of others, sometimes modifying it, but often

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not, and sometimes merely adding a new title page, sometimes in another language, to an existing work”; moreover, the names offered by title pages of early modern pattern books often refer to the printers rather than the designers.19 In other words, the assumed or explicit credit of authorship habitually floats among the designers, compilers, appropriators, and publishers. One would expect that at least the early editions of a pattern book would exhibit some clarity of authorial control. Yet this is not the case with Vinciolo’s Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, in which one finds a curious disjunction in the internal claims of authorial ownership both by the designer of the patterns and the printer who prepares them for consumption and dissemination. The title page tacitly corrects this disjunction: the “unusual and new designs” are “by” Vinciolo, and the book is published in Paris “for Jean Le Clerc.” These indications are completely conventional; somewhat less so is Le Clerc’s prominent declaration, in his dedication to the queen, of sole ownership of the designs contained in the book. Throughout the dedication, Le Clerc repeatedly weaves together his claims to the patterns and the benefits of his sharing them on behalf of his royal patron. However, he omits any mention of Vinciolo’s involvement. The collection is apparently his own to gift and to publish: Le Clerc explains that he is doing so after “having brought back from Italy some rare and unusual patterns and designs for needlework, and having invented some others, as far as my small knowledge permitted.” France, he assures the queen, “will be chiefly indebted to you for this, because I have prepared them for your inspection and in order to satisfy your eyes.”20 Le Clerc unfolds the dedication using the conventional diction of patronage, presenting himself as an initiator and sole agent not only of dedicating the work to the queen, but also of gathering and designing the patterns in the book. Even more emphatically than Vinciolo, Le Clerc gestures to the value of Italian patterns for the French audience. Le Clerc explicitly plays up the importance of the patterns’ foreign origins: “Madame, the man who can bring back something new from foreign countries considers himself happy to present it to some great personage, knowing that by so doing he affords him more pleasure than if he gave him something common, even if it were of great price and value.”21 Le Clerc appropriates the capital of novelty and rarity inherent in traveling objects whose value he describes

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in the opening sentence of his dedication quoted above. An object brought from another land, he maintains, is a more welcome gift than a “common” (i.e., mundane) thing, no matter how expensive. It is implied that by the very act of traveling, an object may become “rare and unusual” upon arrival in a new location. Thus, Le Clerc begins his dedication with an emphasis on the exotic value of his “gift,” authenticated by his assurance that he “brought back from Italy some rare and unusual patterns and designs for needlework.”22 This assertion stands in silent tension with Vinciolo’s foreign origins announced on the title page, in which his name is joined to his nationality: “Signor Federico Vinciolo, Venetian.” Even though Vinciolo has relocated to France, he remains a Venetian, according to the text. Le Clerc is French, and by laying claim to bringing the patterns from Italy, he creates an invisible demarcation between Vinciolo’s foreign gift of his Venetian knowledge and hands-on talent for designing lace patterns, and Le Clerc’s own French gift of picking up ready-made Italian designs from a foreign land. Furthermore, while Le Clerc tells the story of physically moving the patterns from Italy to France, Vinciolo’s story implies an intellectual movement: he himself embodies the movable Venetian culture that produces beauty by design. The paratexts, then, present two conflicting stories of origin, acquisition, and authorship. Vinciolo mentions a previous edition of his patterns, the result of a “great and painstaking task [he] earlier undertook to depict and publish the large number of excellent needlework patterns.”23 He mentions how meticulously he investigated and rendered the stitches that form his designs. In the meantime, Le Clerc tells us, he acquired some patterns in Italy and “invented some others.”24 To reconcile the two accounts, Lotz suggests that the preparatory drawings originated with Vinciolo and were then rendered as woodcuts by Le Clerc.25 Yet their division of labor does not completely explain their stories of single authorship—and ownership—in reference to a collection that, like most printed matter, required collaboration. Nagel and Wood’s discussion of the competing early modern conceptual models concerning the creation of artifacts helps to make some sense of this contradiction. The substitutional paradigm allows for interchangeability of the works of art and provides access to the “strange and multiple temporality of the artwork,” while the authorial or performative paradigm, “for the first time institutionalized” in the Renaissance, views creative production as an act of artistic authorship and thus of individualized

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performance.26 In Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, Vinciolo and Le Clerc narrate the contradictory histories of the patterns through an emerging authorial paradigm. In their pieces, each of the authors in turn draws attention to his own craft: Vinciolo points out his painstaking study and rendition of the stitches, while Le Clerc takes pride in his woodcuts, which surpass “less perfect and more crudely sketched” examples popular in France. Together, these texts construct the technical and aesthetic description of the patterns, built on the foundation of their foreign origin—a story of the movements that resulted in their present material state at the new location. While the individual Venetian authorship supplied by Vinciolo is supplemented by Le Clerc’s vouching for the patterns’ general Italian authenticity, the conjunction of collection and invention in their stories obscures the histories of individual patterns. Some of them receive their first incarnation in Vinciolo’s drawings. Others, (re)incarnations of his earlier Italian publication, receive new, French bodies. Still others, collected in Italy, may be Le Clerc’s sketches of existing needlework that will perhaps (re)incarnate one day in the hands of a French lady. Vinciolo’s skill and intimate knowledge of lace and lacemaking is brought to the public by Le Clerc, who (re)incarnates Vinciolo’s drawings first as woodblocks and then as imprinted pages. In turn, Vinciolo refers—perhaps metaphorically—to sewing on additional patterns to augment an earlier edition of the book. In fact, the title page itself (re)incarnates: it reappears in the middle of the volume, possibly marking the expansion and designating a shift in style from needle lace to net embroidery.27 It is to these pages that Anne Lawle’s birds trace their history. Whether or not Vinciolo speaks figuratively when he mentions sewing on new patterns to the book, he signals the extent to which he sees his book as a dynamic object capable of growing and becoming more capacious. Like the patterns within it, the book possesses an invitation to movement even before it leaves the hands of its maker. Le Clerc, as a Frenchman, provides the foreign Vinciolo with publicity and assists him with the dissemination of his patterns while also advertising Le Clerc’s own woodcutting skills. While Vinciolo is connected most intimately to the needlework objects that inspire or will be inspired by the designs he offers, Le Clerc facilitates the link for the (re)incarnation of the objects in new places. These objects include both the patterns now

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printed and ready for travel, as well as the needle lace, embroidery, and even woodblocks that would be created in the new place. As the pattern books and woodblocks find their way across Europe, they are put to use by needleworkers and re-created or reissued by publishers. Italian needlework objects thus become (re)incarnated in France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, England, and back in Italy. Le Clerc continues to issue new editions of Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts in Paris; other versions turn up in Turin, Liège, Basel, and Lyon.28 The last known edition dates from 1623, yet needlework based on Vinciolo’s patterns continues to be produced even to this day. In particular, traces of the birds’ history continue to appear in samplers in the same generally stylized form as in the printed pattern, though some elements of the composition have been rearranged. We may see them, for example, in a Dutch sampler by B.C.B. (1821), immediately recognizable, with the familiar flowers planted between them (Vinciolo’s triple flowers behind the birds are now at the center of the composition).29 We also see a close approximation of Vinciolo’s birds, separated by flowers now filling a vase, in a sampler worked by eleven-year-old Hariet Craven (1825).30 A similar example was worked by another eleven-year-old, Mercy Hall (1846).31 Modern designers continue to use this motif.32

Stitches from Paris to London Le Clerc’s Parisian editions of Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts appear as reprints whose authorized existence stands in stark contrast to the pirated (re)incarnations of the book, such as the one introduced in London in 1591 by Adrian Poyntz under an anglicized title: New and Singular Patternes & workes of Linnen. Seruing for Paternes to make all sortes of Lace, Edginges, and Cut-Workes. Newly inuented for the profite & contentment of Ladies, Gentilwomen, & others, that are desirous of this Arte.33 Though touted as “New” and “Newly inuented,” most of the designs in this book are drawn from Vinciolo’s collection, likely through the process of reverse engineering the woodblocks. Poyntz omits Vinciolo’s name and erases the national origin of the patterns. Instead, he vaguely explains his somewhat casual decision to publish the patterns due to his “chance . . . to lighten upon certain patterns of cutworks, and others brought out of foreign countries, which have been greatly accepted by divers Ladies and Gentlewomen of sundry nations,

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and consequently of the common-people.”34 Poyntz’s cavalier presentation of the patterns as encountered by chance detracts from the value and, thus, dynamic potential of his collection, a potential that depends on capturing the reader’s interest and invoking an urge to put the patterns to use. Perhaps Poyntz was unaware of the designs’ Italian and French origins. He may have “lighted upon” the patterns separated from the paratexts of Vinciolo’s editions: pattern books were habitually taken apart in order to trace the designs on canvas and linen, or were used as guides for creating lace. Yet Poyntz’s title suggests that he at least had access to Vinciolo’s title page, which bore the name of the designer, so the erasure of any national specificity was likely intentional.35 Instead, Poyntz seeks to interest his female audience by praising the patterns, whose value comes not only from their vague foreign origins but also from the acclaim conferred on them in other places. It remains unclear whether the patterns have traveled to “sundry nations” before Poyntz puts them at the disposal of Englishwomen, or if the patterns come from different countries where they were created and admired. Their dynamic circulating nature is highlighted, as is their success across the social strata. These claims to the designs’ established popularity do not align with their titular description as “Newly inuented,” a remnant of Vinciolo’s original. In other words, however beautiful the patterns offered to his audience, Poyntz’s edition erases much of their dynamic history. This Englished object materialized in an unreceptive climate. Scholars have searched in vain for any English pieces of needlework from the years following the publication of Poyntz’s book based on the patterns he offered.36 Kathleen A. Epstein suggests that the reason for this failure of impact lies in the lack of popularity of cutwork embroidery in England until well into the seventeenth century. This explanation certainly makes sense, to the extent that such an absolute absence can be significant given the perishability, and therefore low survival rate among textiles from the period—besides, the counted patterns such as the one materialized in Lawle’s birds could be rendered in techniques other than cutwork. Instead, the reason why this book’s potential did not seem to cause abundant materialization, unlike its Parisian prototype in 1587, is because it was clumsily managed—thus, its dynamic potential was not fully realized. The lack of realization is evident not only in the thoroughly domesticated nature of the paratexts and the unconvincing references to the patterns’ foreign origins. John Wolfe and Edward White, the two printers of

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Poyntz’s pattern book, did not have access to the plate of Vinciolo’s title page and apparently reused a woodblock they had in stock, presenting Venus and Mars instead of images of people engaged in materializing the patterns in textile form. Nor does the title itself signal the dynamic history of the book’s contents. Instead of an intriguing attribution such as “by Federico Vinciolo, [a] Venetian,” the patterns become anonymous, left to speak for themselves. Thus, the rhetorical choices in this publication undercut the dynamism of the patterns it contains.37

Conclusion: Whose Birds? (Redux) The two major models for thinking about created objects in the early modern period, described by Nagel and Wood, still endure in our own attempts to understand the material culture of the early modern world— and so persists the rivalry between those two models: authorial and substitutional. My argument about the impetus toward (re)incarnation is not an exception to the competition between linearity and interchangeability, the timelessness of creation and individual refashioning touches. For this chapter, too, created a deceptively linear chain to lime Anne Lawle’s delicate birds. Even though I hinted in my introduction that Vinciolo’s authorship of the birds is suspect, my argument proceeded to follow the links of (re)incarnation through Vinciolo’s pattern book as if it would somehow lead to Lawle’s sampler—even given the absence of Vinciolo’s bird design in Poyntz’s English pattern book that repeated the Venetian’s designs. Yet, while these birds are attributed to Vinciolo, this design appears in Giovanni Ostaus’s pattern book published two decades earlier, in a slightly different configuration (Figure 5.3). Whose birds did Anne Lawle (re)incarnate? Vinciolo (Figure 5.4) places two pairs of birds in a square, whereas Ostaus lines up a row of birds in a repeating pattern of pairs. It is evident that Lawle follows Ostaus’s arrangement of a linear repetition: the tail of the next bird appears at the right edge of the sampler. Importantly for this discussion of linearity and interchangeability, if Lawle has worked from Ostaus’s pattern, her birds are a part of a different chain of objects than those described in this chapter. She is stitching her birds to the link of Ostaus’s first publication of the pattern—or, perhaps, to the stitched birds Ostaus himself encountered and recorded in his book. Arthur Lotz notes five editions of Ostaus’s La

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Figure 5.3. Giovanni Ostaus, La vera perfettione del disegno di varie sorti di recami, Venice, 1567, 35v. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1928. Public domain.

vera perfettione, spanning 1557 to 1591; the book was very popular, though not as ubiquitous as Vinciolo’s Les singuliers, which appeared in three editions in its first year alone. But the origins of Lawle’s birds remain obscure. Although Vinciolo arranged Ostaus’s birds in a pleasingly contained square, all the information needed for a linear repetition in a band is preserved in this new arrangement; thus, Lawle could easily convert the square into a narrow band. The birds are shown facing both ways, complete with the single and triple alternating florals. In other words, if Lawle worked with a printed pattern, its specific origin is impossible to determine. In addition, as mentioned before, the likelihood that she copied her birds from another textile is also slightly higher because of the low survival rate of the pattern books. In fact, an almost identical band with two birds is featured at the center of an anonymous seventeenth-century whitework sampler, also held in the Fitzwilliam Museum collection (Figure 5.5). The only difference is the width of the bands. While this sampler’s date and relation to Lawle’s sampler (marked February 1655 or 1665) are unknown, the pairs of

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Figure 5.4. Federico Vinciolo, Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, Paris, 1588, 44r. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1918. Public domain.

birds in the samplers are clearly links in the same lineage. In short, they are birds of a feather. To use Nagel and Wood’s description, Lawle’s sampler is one of the artifacts that has “stitched through time, pulling two points on the chronological timeline together.”38 The same forces of temporal stacking and merging continue to exert their influence over our own imaginations. A charted pattern of Anne Lawle’s entire sampler, for example, is readily available for any skillful stitcher to re-create the familiar motif of the cutwork birds, along with the other charming elements of Lawle’s stitchwork.39 The birds may be lifted from the digitalized pages of Ostaus’s or Vinciolo’s books to appear on a tablecloth, wall hanging, or reproduced sampler; they may be executed in cutwork or surface embroidery or even

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painting.40 In any case, for me, these birds will still be (re)incarnations of Vinciolo’s/Ostaus’s birds. For someone looking at the birds in a modern stitcher’s home, their threaded shapes may be just an echo of the past, a (re)incarnation of an unavailable, unknown object whose essence is stylistically materialized in the new object of the stitcher’s own creation. Yet the forces that bring the birds into existence always originate in one object that summons the creative energy of another. An early modern pattern book invites interaction with the body and entices it to movement. The designs are meant to stimulate visual and intellectual pleasure, but they ultimately exist for physical engagement. While any audience may consume and evaluate the patterns for their aesthetic value, the intended audience of these books includes those who are able to usher the patterns from their schematic two-dimensional existence on paper to a fully materialized, three-dimensional object made of thread—embroidery or

Figure 5.5. Whitework band sampler. Unknown maker, England, after 1601 / before 1700. Horizontal bands of repeat patterns are divided by rows of double hemstitches. The sampler features pulled and drawn work, needle weaving and needle-lace stitches in double running, stem, and long-armed cross-stitch. Linen, embroidered with linen thread and a small amount of faded pink/red silk thread. There is a selvage at the top and bottom, and the sides are turned under and stitched. Length 38¾ in., width 8½ in. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK, T.8-1938.

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lace more durable than the traces of ink on paper (though perhaps only marginally so). It is this intended audience of makers who would judge a pattern’s suitability for the reader’s particular purpose and skill. Upon selecting an image, the crafter would start the production process with the first, paradoxical, physical act of destruction: in order to follow the pattern and create an object made of thread, the book itself had to be assaulted.41 Some embroiderers would need to prick the lines of the pattern, studding it with a multitude of pinholes, rubbing the pounce powder into the pattern in order to leave marks on the textile placed underneath, thereby transferring the design onto fabric. Other embroiderers would trace the pattern by placing light behind it. Lacemakers would pin the pattern to a stable surface and follow its lines as a guide for forming the delicate lineaments of the growing (re)incarnation of the printed lines in thread. The patterns then serve as intermediators between an idea and its incarnation, or between an object and its (re)incarnation. Most of these methods require that the paper bearing the pattern be easily manipulated and held in place perfectly flat, which means that the pages of a pattern book must be torn out of the bound book. Because these books were destined for destruction, their producers frequently made allowances by leaving the backs of the pages blank (sometimes they offered a grid on the verso for readers to attempt their own designs).42 Moreover, unlike the books meant for language-based reading, pattern books are ostensibly light on verbiage: one rarely comes across short titles accompanying the patterns; for some charted patterns, such as the ones in Vinciolo’s Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, one may find an additional indication of width and length. Beyond the title page, there may be no verbiage at all, though dedications are quite common. In some cases, one may even find some verses preceding the main section of the book featuring the patterns. The scarcity of paratexts makes them especially valuable for gaining insights into the machinations of ownership and power behind each pattern book. Authorship, audience, patronage, and other issues familiar to scholars of early modern print culture appear in new and peculiar ways because pattern books are rooted in and serve material culture. Most books are material objects that are “bigger on the inside” and serve as physical portals into metaphysical realms. Pattern books may gesture toward a narrative in some designs (such as mythological or biblical imagery). But the main purpose of these books is to aid one’s engagement

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with and augmentation of materiality by creating embroidery and lace: generating more objects that may serve new or old purposes. These new purposes may include displaying one’s skill, creating an embellishment to delight and distinguish oneself and one’s family, increasing the prestige and/or strengthening social bonds through gift-giving, or allowing the stitcher to make a living. Even when serving a new end, the incarnated object would still share with its pattern the purpose of aesthetic enjoyment. Moreover, this novel object would carry some of the inner dynamism as the previous link in the sequence. Thus, every (re)incarnated thing may itself serve as a pattern, a type of sample for another maker to imitate; or the object may become an inspiration to record, if not preserve, the pattern in the schematic medium of ink and paper. A pattern book’s inner dynamism is therefore an innate function of its very purpose. A pattern book is an invitation to a human mind and body to interact with it visually, haptically, and intellectually. The grid invites the readers/stitchers to draw their own patterns. The patterns invite the readers to rip out the pages and start a project. A pattern book’s dynamic potential is just that: a start, a creative call directed not just at humans and their physical objects (tools and materials) but also at the imagined objects that the book calls into existence. When the patterns are collected from extant embroideries, the book also carries the dynamism of (re)incarnation. In the newly created objects, the older embroideries shine brighter, though the scale and skill may not be the same and the colors may be completely new. Every pattern that travels away from its source, whether material (such as a piece of lace or embroidery) or immaterial (like the artistic concept fueled by imagination as much as by the memory of executed needlework, textiles, or even natural forms), is an invitation toward (re)incarnation of what may have been destroyed, or what may have never existed in the material world.43 For someone working from a chart issued by the modern needlework company Scarlet Letter and unaware of the chain leading to Italy and France of the sixteenth century, these new birds would be pulling the fabric of time close to a more recent link—Anne Lawle’s birds of seventeenth-century England. And while my knowledge reaches a little further into the past and anchors in Italy, a viewer whose expertise spans the global history of design may move the needle to early modern Turkey, where perhaps Anne Lawle’s birds truly incarnated for the first time.

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Notes 1. “Sampler,” from the Fitzwilliam Museum, accessed February 9, 2021, https://collection.beta.fitz.ms/id/object /110562. These birds are upside down in relation to the rest of the sampler, whose main orientation for display is dictated by the human figures and inscription. Lawle turned the fabric around to work the birds band—possibly to make cutting and drawing threads more convenient. For more on upside-down samplers, consult Anna Riehl Bertolet, “‘Like Two Artificial Gods’: Needlework and Female Bonding in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Medieval Clothing and Textiles 11 (2015): 159–77, esp. 163–64. 2. According to Helen Hough, this charted bird pattern appears in twelve of the fi fteen known editions of Vinciolo’s patterns. Consult Helen Hough, with James J. Collins and Amber Houghstow, Vinciolo—36 Years: 1587–1623, Charted Embroidery Patterns of the Renaissance series (PDF online, 2016), 57, https://www .researchgate.net/publication/303347269 _Vinciolo_-_36_Years _1587-1623_Series _Charted _Embroidery_Patterns _of _the _Renaissance. The latest edition containing this pattern dates from 1612. Hough does not include the sixteenth edition (Paris, 1613, held at the British Library), which omits this pattern. In her preface to the 1909 facsimile of the 1606 edition, Elisa Ricci omits the 1592 Paris edition (now at the Folger Shakespeare Library) and erroneously lists the last early modern edition of Vinciolo as the one published in Turin by Eleazar Thomyssi in 1658, the same publisher that issued a Turin edition in 1589. Elisa Ricci, “Editor’s Preface,” in Federico Vinciolo, Renaissance Patterns for Lace, Embroidery, and Needlepoint: An unabridged facsimile of the “Singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts” of 1587 (New York, 1971; repr. of 1909 edition), v–vii, esp. v. A 1658 edition does not exist; this date was an error in the description of the 1589 Turin edition. Consult Bury Palliser, A History of Lace

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(London: S. Low, Son & Marston, 1865), item 71. 3. This pattern appears in the 1561 edition of Ostaus as one of the four bands (p. LXX). The first edition of Ostaus’s pattern book (1557) may also have contained this pattern, although I did not have an opportunity to examine that edition. 4. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14. The point I am making is in part an extension of Jones and Stallybrass’s argument about the lingering nature of multifaceted memories that permeate clothing. 5. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 11. 6. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 30. 7. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 32. Refer also to Naomi Howell’s chapter in this collection for a discussion of how Catholic clerical textiles gather, or “pleat,” multiple temporalities together as they are unpicked and restitched during the Reformation. 8. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 9. 9. Arthur Lotz, Bibliographie der Modelbücher (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1963), 110a, 110b, 110c. The titles of the three editions differed mainly in announcing the additions in the second and third augmented editions. 10. All subsequent references are to the third edition (Paris, 1587). 11. Ricci finds it probable that Vinciolo was brought to France by Catherine de Medici, “who was the first to teach France the art of fine Italian lacemaking” and who granted Vinciolo a monopoly on manufacturing lace ruffs. Elisa Ricci, Old Italian Lace (London: William Heinemann, 1913), 20. 12. Ricci, Renaissance Patterns, vi. Scholars tend to follow Ricci in assuming

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N e e dl e wor k Pat t e r ns on t h e Mov e that Vinciolo was summoned by Catherine de Medici. There is no direct evidence of their interaction, but the publication of Vinciolo’s pattern book and the grant of the monopoly make it quite likely that Catherine sought and appreciated his services. 13. Margaret Abegg, Apropos Patterns for Embroidery, Lace and Woven Textiles (Bern: Abegg-Stiftung, 1978), 79. Vinciolo, Singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, title page; translation from Ricci, Renaissance Patterns, xi. The numeric reference to squares (or meshes) begins at sig. Sr. 14. Vinciolo, Singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, sig. Aiir; translation from Ricci, Renaissance Patterns, xii. 15. Lotz, Bibliographie der Modelbücher, “Einleitung,” 23. 16. Lotz, Bibliographie der Modelbücher, 23. 17. Discussion of the early modern gendering of pattern books and needlework more generally is excluded from this essay but is the central topic of my current book project, Written in Thread: Needlework and Gender in Early Modern England and on the Continent. 18. Translated in Ricci, Renaissance Patterns, xii. 19. Sarah Randles, “‘The Pattern of All Patience’: Gender, Agency, and Emotions in Embroidery and Pattern Books in Early Modern England,” in Authority, Gender, and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Susan Broomhall (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 150–67, esp. 153. 20. Vinciolo, Singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, sig. Aiiir; Ricci, Renaissance Patterns, xiii. 21. Vinciolo, Singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, sig. Aiiir; Ricci, Renaissance Patterns, xiii. 22. Vinciolo, Singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, sig. Aiiir; Ricci, Renaissance Patterns, xiii. 23. Vinciolo, Singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, sig. Aiir; Ricci, Renaissance Patterns, xii.

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24. Vinciolo, Singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, sig. Aiiir; Ricci, Renaissance Patterns, xiii. 25. Lotz, Bibliographie, 23. 26. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 16. 27. Vinciolo, Singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, sig. Lr. 28. Since all these editions are in French, some scholars, such as L. Alvin, consider the non-Parisian editions to be pirated, while other scholars, such as Ricci, disagree with this view. Consult Ricci, “Editor’s Preface,” v; and L. Alvin, Les anciens patrons de broderie, de dentelle et de guipure (Brussels, 1863). 29. Consult Lot 18, “Diane Pelham Burn’s 47 Sampler Lots for Auction @ Dreweatts, Donnington Priory * 30 August 2013,” accessed November 23, 2018, http://needleprint.blogspot.com /2013/08/diane-pelham-burns-47-sampler -lots-for.html. 30. “Embroidered Needlework Sampler—1825, English or American,” Ruby Lane, accessed November 23, 2018, https:// www.rubylane.com/item/972018-SC01675 /Sampler-1825-flowers-birds-very-colorful. 31. “Embroidered Needlework Sampler Birds Eye Maple Frame—1846, English or American,” Ruby Lane, accessed November 23, 2018, https://www.rubylane.com /item/260004-2923/Needlework-Sampler -Birds-Eye-Maple-Frame. 32. Some examples include “Birds of a Feather Flock Together,” by Long Dog Samplers; “Antique Bird Sampler,” by Elizabeth’s Needlework Designs; and “Birds Sampler,” by Brenda Keyes. 33. Consult Ricci, Renaissance Patterns, vi, for a description of another pirated edition, by Jean de Glen, who omits Vinciolo’s name and changes the dedication of the sonnet from “To the Ladies and Young Misses” to one addressed to a specific person, Loyse Perez. 34. Adrian Poyntz, New and Singular Patternes & workes of Linnen. Seruing for Paternes to make all sortes of Lace, Edginges, and Cut-Workes. Newly inuented for the profite & contentment of Ladies,

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158 | N e t wor k i n g Obj e c t s Gentilwomen, & others, that are desirous of this Arte. Imprinted by J. Wolfe and Ed. White (London, 1591), sig. A3v. 35. Such complete erasure was not the rule in Englishing the books printed on the continent. William Barley, the publisher of the second pattern book to appear in England—A Book of Curious and strange Inuentions, called the first part of Needleworkes (1596)—recorded that it was first printed in Venice. Likewise, on the continent, even pirated editions often preserved the attribution. One of the editions of Vinciolo’s Singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts, for example, appeared in Basel in 1599 without the paratext but with a shortened title that nevertheless retained the reference to “du Seigneur Federic de Vinciolo Venitien” (title page, British Library, C31 H2). 36. Consult Kathleen A. Epstein, “Needleworks and Pattern Books: An Examination of the Relationship Between Stuart Domestic Embroidery and English Pattern Books,” Ars Textrina 12 (1989): 51–63, esp. 59–60. 37. The title-page woodblock of Vinciolo’s pattern book must have traveled to England later or been re-created by the English publishers. It is used in at least two English publications, John Chrysostom (1610) and Aristotle (1619), printed matter that is at odds with Vinciolo’s title page, which features elegant ladies making reticella lace. The English publisher made some alterations, replacing the French queen’s coat of arms with a Tudor rose and replacing the cartouche in the center of the bottom border. What is puzzling is that Vinciolo’s needlework-centered title-page compartment travels to England only to be put to use

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in printing books that have no relation to needlework. This incongruous reuse of the traveled object removes it from its intended context so decisively as to make it truly foreign. Consult R. B. McKerrow and F. S. Ferguson, Title-Page Borders Used in England and Scotland, 1480–1640 (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), fig. 252. 38. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 32. 39. The Scarlet Letter reproduction chart is available at https://scarlet-letter .com/product/ann-lawle/. 40. One can access Vinciolo patterns with ease, as various editions of his book have been digitalized. Helen Hough has collected all of Vinciolo’s patterns in an online publication, Vinciolo—36 Years: 1587–1623. Hough’s publication also contains hyperlinks to many digitalized editions. 41. Lotz describes the treatment that pattern books received at the hands of women as “in no way bibliophilic” (Bibliographie, 3). 42. An example of a reader trying their hand at designing is the pattern drawn in Hans Schönsperger’s pattern book (discussed by Sarah Randles, “The Pattern of All Patience,” 155). There is evidence that embroiderers were more careful with books that featured images not directly meant to be patterns, such as garden books containing images of flowers. Pages in some extant books of this nature are still attached, even though the image is carefully pricked. 43. For a discussion of another object that disintegrated through use, refer to Abbie Weinberg’s chapter about Prince Rupert’s drops in this collection.

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Chapter 6

“Whose Least Part Crackt, the Whole Does Fly” The Explosive Case of Prince Rupert’s Drops Abbie Weinberg

Honor is like that glassy Bubble That finds Philosophers such trouble, Whose least part crackt, the whole does fly, And Wits are crack’d to find out why. —Samuel Butler, Hudibras

The four lines quoted above, from the second part of Samuel Butler’s satirical poem Hudibras, published in 1664, reference a phenomenon that has perplexed materials scientists for over 350 years and that is only now becoming fully understood.1 On the surface, a reference to glass that breaks apart does not seem particularly remarkable. However, several key phrases in Butler’s verse make it clear that he is not referring to just any piece of glass. The phrase “glassy Bubble” suggests a particular shape of the glass, while the third line—“Whose least part crackt, the whole does fly”—implies more than simple shattering. And the second and fourth lines suggest that these “glassy Bubbles” have already been actively investigated by natural philosophers. Indeed, Butler is referencing the scientific

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curiosity known as glass drops; while there are many glass objects that could be referred to as “glass drops,” Butler had in mind one very specific type—today, they are commonly referred to as Prince Rupert’s drops. These glass drops are formed by dripping a small amount of molten glass (often termed “metal” in early texts) into a bucket of cool water. The glass cools and forms a teardrop or tadpole shape with a long tail. If formed correctly, these drops exhibit some remarkable physical characteristics when cooled: the head of the drop is so strong as to be nearly impervious to crushing, even with blows from a hammer, but if the tail is snapped, the entire drop explodes with great force.2 By the mid-1660s, these glass drops were known both to the community of natural philosophers and to London society at large. They appear in the minutes of the Royal Society meetings; in John Evelyn’s diary, where, in an entry dated 6 March 1660/1, he records—in both words and image—seeing the glass drops demonstrated; and they were associated (in print) with Prince Rupert through Christopher Merret’s introduction to Robert Moray’s “Account of the Glass Drops.”3 They also are mentioned in less scientifically oriented writing, such as in Butler’s poem quoted above and in Samuel Pepys’s diary—Pepys encountered them as an after-dinner party trick.4 That these drops entered the public consciousness to the extent that they were invoked in a satirical poem or presented as an entertainment suggests that the objects of scientific experimentation were less confined to laboratories and operating theaters than is often assumed; rather, it evinces the various networks that these curious drops formed and exemplifies how alluring objects reorient and reorganize human attention. After all, the history of science is a history of things. As Bruno Latour, the noted philosopher and anthropologist of science, argues, “we witness the intervention of a new actor” in the early days of scientific experimentation, which includes “inert bodies, incapable of will and bias but capable of showing, signing, writing, and scribbling on laboratory instruments before trustworthy witnesses.”5 That is, both the “inert bodies” (the objects used in experimentation) and the “laboratory instruments” (the objects used for experimentation) are integral to telling the story of science, and perhaps both classes of objects exercise a bit more agency than has hitherto been acknowledged. Scientific experimentation, as performed by members of the Royal Society and other natural philosophers of the

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mid-seventeenth century, required physical objects. From the telescopes and microscopes through which these scientific investigators observed the world to the very specimens (both organic and inorganic) that they were studying, these tangible objects were vital and necessary to those who were examining the world around them. Indeed, in a fundamental way, this is what set these investigators apart from their predecessors; rather than engaging only in theoretical thought experiments (although they certainly practiced their share of that as well), practitioners now had the means to actively seek out the results of what would happen in various material scenarios. Writing about these objects, too, changed and developed how the members of the Royal Society conceived of scientific objects and the experiments they performed with them. Credibility for these experiments, Latour notes, came in the guise of “a parajuridical metaphor: credible, trustworthy, well-to-do witnesses gathered at the scene of the action can attest to the existence of a fact, the matter of fact, even if they do not know its true nature.”6 That credibility, then, had to extend to written descriptions of those experiments; here, too, Latour argues that the objects themselves lent their own form of credibility to the writing: “endowed with their new semiotic powers, the [objects] contribute to a new form of text, the experimental science article.”7 Using the glass drops as a case study, this chapter will examine the written discussions of the physical objects required for scientific study by Robert Hooke and others, as well as the relationship between object and text in the broader world of natural philosophy and early science. Glass drops were (and still are) a curiosity, with little practical or commercial value; as expected, therefore, seventeenth-century accounts of them are largely free of any theoretical or commercial agenda and can be read with the purpose of examining the evolving genre of what Latour calls “the experimental science article.”8 Like the combs Erika Mary Boeckeler discusses in her chapter of this volume, object and text are inextricably linked; however, unlike the combs, which are (relatively) permanent objects, the glass drops are transient, one-and-done items whose destruction is—ironically—part of their attraction. Therefore, the written record survives the drops as a stand-in for both physical object and sensory experience of that object.

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Glassworking and Networking: History, Nomenclature, and Margaret Cavendish The glass drops assimilated various networks of Royal Society members, poets, philosophers, partygoers, and glassmakers, who studied, observed, transported, destroyed, wrote about, and manufactured the drops. Glassworking is an ancient profession, and the glass drops, with their particular properties that so enchanted the members of the Royal Society, have probably been around nearly as long. However, the exact properties of these drops, as well as their method of creation, seem to have been something of a trade secret. Indeed, even before the days of the Royal Society, “glass-making in England was recognized as a craft with its own technological secrets,” although glass-blowers “staged experiments” and “techniques for the public” in proto-scientific ways, explains Mary Floyd-Wilson.9 The record of European glassmaking seems to be similarly silent on the subject. According to Laurel Brodsley, Charles Frank, and John W. Steeds, who conducted a comprehensive search into the history of these drops, the “earliest date for the existence of the drops [in Europe] places them in Mecklenburg [Germany], before 1625.”10 But the evidence they present for these early seventeenth-century European encounters with the drops is all secondhand: the 1625 Mecklenburg date is from a 1695 thesis; a reference to the drops in Hamburg in 1637 is from a 1725 treatise; a nineteenth-century encyclopedia cites an event that supposedly happened in 1656.11 What Brodsley, Frank, and Steeds do establish is the plausibility that the physical drops could be found in northern Europe by the 1650s, with most being made in Germany or Holland, and that they were known as Prussian, Dutch, Holland, or Bavarian tears (lacrymae Batavicae in Latin). Today they are known as “Prince Rupert’s drops,” after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, cousin to Charles II. Rupert’s name was attached to the drops some thirty years after they made their first recorded appearance in London, in an advert in the London Gazette (which also referred to the drop as a “Philosophical toy”), because he was said to be instrumental in getting them to Charles II, who in turn had them conveyed to the Royal Society for study in 1661.12 In fact, before the eminent natural philosophers at Gresham College got their hands on these drops in the early 1660s, another Briton had the

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chance to examine them nearly five years earlier—Margaret Cavendish. As known Royalists, the Cavendish family spent much of the Interregnum on the continent, primarily in Antwerp. While there, Margaret Cavendish began a correspondence and friendship with the noted Dutch secretary, diplomat, and philosopher (and polyglot—a critical fact, as Margaret spoke only English) Constantijn Huygens.13 Huygens is primarily known today as the father of the more famous astronomer, Christiaan, but he shared with his son a keen interest in natural philosophy. Both father and son apparently got along well with Cavendish, and Constantijn even joined her in her chemistry laboratory to run experiments: at one point in their correspondence, Constantijn notes that Cavendish’s work in her lab “did cost you many a white petticoat a week.”14 After one such visit, in the spring of 1657, Huygens sent Cavendish a number of the glass drops, asking her “to instruct me about the natural reason of these wonderfull glasses, which, as I told you, Madam, will fly into powder, if one breakes but the least top of their tailes.”15 Both this request and Huygens’s subsequent reply make it clear that he had access to a ready supply of these glass drops, enough that he was willing to risk a batch by dispatching them to Cavendish. Transporting the drops must have been a logistical challenge, given the fragile nature of the tails; Christiaan Huygens certainly encountered problems with the same task a few years later, although the distances over which he was attempting to transport them were much greater. Apparently, several glass drops that the younger Huygens tried to send to a friend in England in 1662 all broke in transit, and in 1665 he had to delay sending drops to another colleague in Paris because he was waiting to commission a careful courier.16 Whatever logistical challenges there might have been, Constantijn overcame them, and the glass drops obviously found their way, unbroken, to Cavendish. She replied that, in her opinion, “these glasses doe appeare to have on the head, body or belly a liquid and oyly substance, which may be the oyly spirrits or essences of sulpher; alsoe the glasses doe appeare to my senses like the nature or arte of gunns and the spirrit of sulpher as the powder; where although they are charged, yet untill they bee discharged, give no report or sound.” Huygens wrote back that he did not find any liquid in the drops that he worked with, and Cavendish reiterated that there was something combustible within them but conceded that it might just be compressed air.17

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While Cavendish was not quite correct about the underlying causes of the explosive nature of the drops, her approach to uncovering “the natural reason of these wonderfull glasses,” as Huygens requested, is reminiscent of activities practiced by most of her natural-philosopher peers: she examined, observed, and then theorized based on how her knowledge coincided with what she observed. Although she arrives at different conclusions, the description of her scientific observations is similar to the later accounts of these glass drops recorded by Robert Moray and Robert Hooke, in that they all invoke multiple senses when describing their interactions with the drops. Cavendish’s account is the least detailed, simply invoking “my senses,” positing that the liquid is of an “oyly” consistency (signaling touch and possibly taste), and mentioning the eventual sound (hearing) when the drops break. Cavendish’s reticence likely has a twofold explanation. First, she knew that her correspondent had himself handled the glass drops and was well aware of the physical experience of working with them; thus, her written account did not have to stand full proxy for human sensory experiences of the glass drops but merely had to evoke reminders of Huygens’s experience. Second, her purpose for writing was to explicate the reasons behind the behaviors of the drops rather than to describe in detail her observations of them. But even in her theorizing, she cannot help but invoke her senses. Something about the properties of the glass drops seems to have regularly elicited an embodied response from those who investigated them. The temporary nature of the drops—which exist only until such time as their tail is broken—requires that the multisensory experience be captured in words, a far more permanent (and transportable) medium. And texts are less likely to explode in general. These kinds of embodied responses are evident also in the first two English publications concerning the glass drops. Robert Moray’s “An Account of the Glass Drops” appeared in print, appended to Christopher Merret’s translation of Antonio Neri’s treatise The Art of Glass in 1662, and Robert Hooke devoted a section of Micrographia to them in 1665. The investigations into these curiosities came as the Royal Society was finding its footing and drawing up guidelines as to how experimental philosophy ought to be both practiced and written about, particularly with regard to object-oriented experiments and observable phenomena.

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The “King’s Bubbles,” the Royal Society, and Moray’s Multisensory Account Although the glass drops have shorter “life histories” than some of the other objects discussed in this volume, their dynamic—literally explosive—properties drew humans to them, creating networks through the transportation of, experimentation with, and recording of the drops in the process. Like so much else about these elusive, explosive glass drops, how the gathering of natural philosophers at Gresham College got their hands on some has an air of mystery about it. According to Thomas Birch’s History of the Royal Society, on March 4, 1660/1, Charles II sent five “little glass bubbles, two with liquor in them, and the other three solid,” to the Royal Society for examination. Shortly thereafter, several of their members were sent off to a Woolwich glasshouse to inquire about ways to experiment with them. By July of 1661, the Society had commissioned more of these drops made for experiments that Moray was to conduct himself. On August 14, 1661, the Society received Moray’s report.18 Clearly, there are some gaps in this story that would be nice to fill in. How exactly were the glass drops sent to England? Where were they acquired, and who physically transported them (or arranged for their transport)? Who knew how to make them (remember, at this time, it was still not a well-known process)? Why was Moray chosen to do the initial experiments on the glass drops? The arrival of the glass drops on March 4, 1660/1, is recorded in the minutes of the Society: “The King sent by Sir Paul Neile five little glass bubbles, two with liquor in them, and the other three solid, to have the judgement of the society concerning them.”19 Despite the drops’ later association with Prince Rupert, Brodsley, Frank, and Steeds argue that Rupert could not have sent the glass drops directly to the Society. The March 4 entry does not mention the prince by either name or title, nor do any of the subsequent entries regarding the glass drops. By contrast, the first entry that does explicitly mention Rupert is from January 15, 1661/2: “Prince Rupert sent the society a description, in High Dutch, of the method of making good gun-powder; which Mr. Oldenburg was desired to translate, and Sir Robert Moray to return their thanks to his highness.”20 Brodsley, Frank, and Steeds note that “the tone, language and style of this entry are

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so different from that on the glass drops, the Prince could not have sent them directly to the Society.”21 By 1661, Paul Neile was already well known to his fellow members of the Royal Society. In the 1650s he had helped acquire and set up a large telescope for Wadham College, Oxford, through which Christopher Wren observed the rings of Saturn; that telescope was demonstrated for the newly returned Charles II in October 1660 and subsequently moved to the garden at Whitehall Palace. Neile then procured other, smaller telescopes at the king’s request for diplomatic and royal gifts.22 Neile clearly had an association with both the Royal Society and the royal family regarding the procurement of scientific objects in general—and glass in particular. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Neile was chosen to convey the glass drops to the Royal Society. But whether he knew of their ultimate origin is unclear, though certainly plausible. In addition to the question of the origin of the drops sent to the Society in March 1661, there is also the question of who knew how to make them in order to provide Society members additional samples with which they could experiment. According to Birch’s History, on March 6, 1661, just two days after the original drops arrived and were initially examined, “the amanuensis having provided the glass-bubbles, which he had been ordered to prepare, they succeeded in the same manner with those sent by the king.”23 Obviously, someone connected to the Royal Society had discovered the trick to making the glass drops—or, perhaps more likely, found a glassmaker willing to admit to knowing how to make them. Curiously, that same March 6 entry continues: “Some of these [glass drops] made for the society were ordered to be carried to the king by Sir Paul Neile; and that gentleman, the lord viscount Brounker, Mr Slingesby, and Mr Bruce, were appointed a committee to go to the glass-house at Woolwich, in order to inquire into the experiment of those solid bubbles sent by his majesty.”24 “Experiment” here likely takes the sense of a “practical proof; a specimen, an example,” so this entry into the minutes would seem to imply that four members of the Society were heading out to the Woolwich glassworks, possibly to show an expert the original samples sent by the king, and probably to learn more about them.25 The order of events, then, is somewhat confusing: first, the original examples of the glass drops were delivered from the king by Neile; second, the amanuensis was ordered to produce more glass drops and somehow

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managed to do so (though it is unclear whether by making them himself or procuring them) within two days; third, a group of Society members were dispatched to a known glassmaker’s workshop to find out more about the bubbles. Why the trip out to Woolwich, some ten miles distant from Gresham College? To add yet another wrinkle to this already convoluted chain of events, there is an additional entry in the minutes of the Society related to the glass drops that is not mentioned in Brodsley, Frank, and Steeds’s overview: on March 18, 1660/1, two consecutive entries read “Sir Paul Neile brought in some solid glass balls” and “The experiment of the king’s bubbles was deferred till Mr. Lewin could set a pot of metal in a hotter fire than that in the Minories.”26 Once again, Neile acted as the purveyor— or at least conveyor—of glass objects for experimentation; in this case, one has to wonder if these balls were the result of the expedition to Woolwich that had been ordered ten days previously. It is hard to say what the “solid glass balls” (something akin to marbles, perhaps?) might have been used for, and the record is frustratingly silent on the matter. It is possible, however, that these were not the explosive glass drops that the Society members were sent to inquire about: in every entry in March 1660/1 (including this one for March 18), the drops are referred to as “bubbles” rather than “balls.” Even here, in the minutes of the Royal Society, the transient nature of the glass drops is highlighted: bubbles are not exactly known for their permanence. The second part of the March 18 entry is equally frustrating. Once again, we can read into it the implication that this note was a direct result of the visit to Woolwich. Glassworking does require very high temperatures to properly melt glass into the molten “metal,” so it is certainly plausible that one of the takeaways from the visit to the Woolwich glasshouse was that the consistent creation of the glass drops required higher temperatures than had thus far been achieved. But “Mr. Lewin’s” identity remains a mystery—was he possibly the amanuensis who had by chance managed to produce (or acquire) the glass drops earlier in the month? Unfortunately for our modern curiosity, he is not mentioned elsewhere in Birch’s History or in the membership records of the Society itself. Which brings us back around again to the question of where the original drops came from and why they were later associated with Prince Rupert. The only contemporary reference we have for the association

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of these glass drops with the prince comes from Christopher Merret in 1662. In his introduction to Robert Moray’s “Account of the Glass Drops,” which was appended to his translation of Antonio Neri’s De Arte Vitraria, he writes, “These Drops were first brought into England by His Highness Prince Rupert out of Germany, and shewed to his Majesty, who communicated them to His Society at Gresham College.”27 The silence in the rest of the written record about these glass drops is puzzling: if it was well known that Rupert had brought the glass drops from the continent, why doesn’t the record of the Royal Society acknowledge that? Why does neither Moray nor Hooke reference the prince? And if he did not have a hand in bringing the glass drops to England, why would Merret, who was already in good favor with both the throne and the Royal Society, mention this fact? Additionally, Brodsley, Frank, and Steeds make a strong case that Rupert would have had the opportunity, interest, and knowledge to acquire and transport the glass drops to the Royal Society—or at least to England. In reconstructing Rupert’s itinerary in the late 1650s and early 1660s, they note that the prince spent much of the summer of 1660 in Mecklenburg, which, as mentioned above, was the location for one of the earliest references to the glass drops: “Because Rupert was there for about three months and was noted for his scientific curiosity, he may have picked some up and later brought them to England. . . . At the time of acquiring the specimens he brought to England he might well have picked up some technical information about them as well, and he would certainly have been able to understand it. If so, he would probably have passed it on privately to Moray.”28 It certainly seems plausible that Prince Rupert was the source of the glass drops sent from Charles II to the Royal Society in March of 1660/1, although the contrast between the assumed knowledge of the event and the written record is lingeringly troublesome, another layer of mystery surrounding these curious networking objects. The humancreated paper trail provides an incomplete picture of the international assemblages that the drops created. Yet those who experimented with the drops and wrote up their accounts took great pains to convey to their readers the multisensory properties of the drops, if not clear details about their transmission and travels. Robert Moray’s involvement with the glass drops, as the first member of the Royal Society to systematically examine them, is one of the few

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points of (near) clarity in this whole narrative. From his correspondence with fellow Scotsman Alexander Bruce, we know that Moray had practical, real-world experience in a glasshouse, making objects he needed in his scientific experiments, and seems to have been one of the few founding Society members who did so.29 But even here, the minutes of the Society are frustratingly vague: after the March 18 entry, the next mention of the glass drops appears on July 17, 1661: “It was ordered, that glass-drops be made in aqua fortis and in oil of terebinthine.”30 This is the first time in the minutes that the terminology shifted from “bubbles” to “drops,” but Moray is not named in the record. However, these are two of the substances explicitly mentioned in Moray’s later report, so the hindsight implication is clear. It is not until the following month that Moray’s connection is made explicit, though. The August 7 entry notes, “It was ordered . . . that copies be made of the account of glass-drops,” and then, finally, Moray’s name is listed in the following entry, on August 14: “Sir Robert Moray brought in glass-drops, with cement about them; of which the following account is registered.” This, too, is one of the experiments that Moray describes in his report. What follows in Birch’s History, then, is three pages of excerpts from Moray’s account, which I discuss in further detail below.31 Since the Society did not have a mechanism yet in place for publishing accounts produced by Society members, it would be another fifteen months before Moray’s account of the glass drops would appear in print. An entry on October 8, 1662, notes that “it was ordered, that the thanks of the society be given to Dr. Merret, for his pains in translating the Italian discourse De Arte Vitraria, upon the motion and desire of the society.”32 It was to this translation that Merret appended a copy of Moray’s account. For all that the records of the physical transport and acquisition of the glass drops are frustratingly vague, the reports of experimentation with the specimens are remarkably detailed. Moray’s account of the glass drops is comprehensive and rigorous, perhaps attempting to set an example as one of the first reports submitted to the Society. He was, effectively, helping to invent a new genre of writing: one in which words could stand as proxy for physical actions and experiences. The reactions of the glass drops to various stimuli certainly lent themselves to—perhaps even demanded—such a style of writing, and Moray obliged. His report opens with the single illustration in

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Figure 6.1. Robert Moray, “An Account of the Glass Drops,” in Christopher Merret, The Art of Glass. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 354 (Aa1v), Sh15 0162.

the account, a simple image of a glass drop, with three points labeled: “AB the thread, BC the body, B the neck, A the point or end of the thread” (Figure 6.1).33 Interestingly, in the account that was submitted directly to the Royal Society, there is no such illustration; Moray, like Margaret Cavendish in her correspondence with Huygens, assumed with confidence that his fellow members of the Society would be familiar with the drops, having seen the various experiments that were demonstrated at their meetings.34 Therefore, he did not need to provide an illustrated guide to the drops in his report. However, in the printed text, that assumption could not be made, and the inclusion of the illustration makes it clear that Moray (or at least Merret—it is unclear at whose instigation the illustration was included) wanted his readers to have a solid visualization of the drop before reading the descriptive account. Throughout his description, Moray references sound, touch, and even taste, in addition to his visual observations. The report begins with the method of creating the glass drops—a secret no longer. “The best way of making them, is to take up some of the Metall out of the pot upon the

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end of an Iron rod, and immediately let it drop into cold water, and there lye till it cool,” Moray explains. But even this is a chancy prospect: “If the Metall be too hot when it drops into the water, the Glass drop certainly frosts and cracks all over, and falls to pieces in the water.” He notes that even expert glassmakers “know not the just temper of the heat, that is requisite” and so only one out of every three or four attempts will succeed.35 Sound becomes an important aspect of Moray’s description of the ways in which the glass drops can fail: “Others break into pieces before the red heat be quite over, and with a small noise; others soon after the red heat is over, and with a great noise. . . . Others keep whole whilest they are in the water, and fly to pieces of themselves with a smart noise as soon as they are taken out of the water.”36 A “small noise,” a “great noise,” a “smart noise”: sound becomes a distinguishing marker for Moray to classify the different degrees of force by which the drops might break apart. It is not enough that they make a noise—the quality of the noise is important to furthering his understanding of what he has witnessed. These references to sound continue throughout the rest of the account as well. The creation of the glass drops is marked by “a little hissing noise” when they enter the water.37 Breaking the tip of the tail causes the drop to “fly immediately into very minute parts with a smart force, and noise,” while deliberately breaking them under water causes “a more brisk noise than in the air.”38 When experimenting with encasing the drops, Moray notes that it “being fastened into a cement all but a part of the neck, and then the tip of it broken off, it made a pretty smart noise, but not so great as those use to do that are broken in the hand.”39 Once again, sound functions as a classifying characteristic of the explosion of the drops. Even when relating the creation of drops in a clear beaker, so that he could see what was happening as they cooled, Moray cannot divorce sound from his ocular-centric description: “Red sparks were shot forth from the drops into the water, and that at the instant of the eruption of those particles, and of the bubbles which manifestly break out of it into the water, it not only cracks and sometimes with considerable noise, but the body moves and leaps,” incorporating somewhat animate motion of the drop’s “body” to the senses of sight and sound.40 Moray tried to create the glass drops in a variety of liquids besides water, and in several of those instances, sound was an important comparative marker. Those that he attempted to cool in “Sallet Oyl” (likely

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olive oil) would fly apart but “not in so small parts, nor with so smart a force and noise as those made in water,” while for those cooled in vinegar, “the noise of falling in is more hissing than in water.” In milk, Moray found they simply “make no noise.”41 The efforts at creation in “spirit of wine” (likely distilled wine or possibly brandy), water in which niter or sal ammoniac was dissolved, as well as turpentine and mercury, elicited no auditory feedback of which Moray took note. Tactile sensations, too, are incorporated into Moray’s account. He describes the feel of a cooled drop, saying that the outside is “close and smooth like other Glass” and that “almost all of those that are made in water have a little proturberance or knob a little above the largest part of the body,” while those that are cooled in oil “are smooth all over, and want those little knobs that the others have.”42 The sensation of how the drops feel when they are broken in one’s hand is repeatedly described as a “smart force”—both when they shatter in air and in water (“more smartly” underwater, apparently). Moray even invokes his sense of taste, in one of those moments that prompt a present-day reader to wonder how the early experimental philosophers ever survived long enough to write down their findings. When describing his attempts to cool drops in “spirit of wine,” Moray notes that “by the time five or six are dropt into the spirit of wine, it will be set on flame: but receive no particular taste from them.”43 In Moray’s brief account of these drops (which is only about two thousand words), four of the five senses dominate, with only the olfactory sensation lacking. It was not sufficient for Moray to simply provide a basic recitation of the formation and properties of the glass drops; he believed it was important to include how they sounded, felt, and even tasted, in addition to how they looked. In the same way that Cavendish was compelled to invoke various senses when postulating her explanation to Huygens, so too was Moray compelled to convey a detailed embodied experience of investigating the glass drops to his fellows in the Royal Society. For those who were present for the demonstrated experiments with the drops, Moray’s descriptions would have reinforced what their own senses perceived in the brief moment of the explosion; for those who did not encounter the drops in person, the encompassing descriptions captured the embodied experience of these experiments. Sensory-laden writing thus acts as a substitute for the drops themselves, and, as these accounts were

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disseminated, they expanded the networks of humans drawn to the study of the enigmatic drops and their explosive properties.

Micrographia: Hooke’s Observations of Prince Rupert’s Drops Some three years after Moray’s account of the glass drops was made available in print, Robert Hooke produced his own report about them in his Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses. With Observations and Inquiries thereupon.44 In many ways, Hooke’s tract is an ode to experimental philosophy and the objects of science, and his description of the glass drops is—like Moray’s—a tribute to the evocative power of those objects. Also like Moray, Hooke does not simply rely on visual descriptions or images of the glass drops (Figure 6.2) but incorporates the aural and tactile sensations as well. While Moray chose to describe both sounds and sensations of the glass drops as “smart” (suggesting the “short and sharp” connotation), Hooke’s preferred adjective seems to have been “brisk.” The drops broke apart with “a very brisk noise” when their tails were snapped in Hooke’s hand, and they performed similarly while under water: “Like the former, [it] flew all to pieces with as brisk a noise, and as strong a motion.” When he tried to grind away the head of a drop, “it [would] not fly to pieces, but now and then some small rings of it would snap and fly off, not without a brisk noise and quick motion,” while he noted of another that “the whole drop flew with a brisk crack into sand or small dust.”45 Of the seven uses of the word “brisk” to describe the sound and motion of the drops, four occur in the first page of the eleven-page treatise. Tactile sensations, too, are described in a similar manner. To investigate the nature of the glass, Hooke examined not only the drops whole but the pieces after explosion as well. He observed that the drops broke “into multitudes of small pieces, some of which were as small as dust, though in some there were remaining pieces pretty large, without any flaw at all, and others very much flaw’d, which by rubbing between ones fingers was easily reduced to dust; these dispersed every way so violently, that some of them pierced my skin.”46 In an effort to understand the exact nature of the explosive properties, Hooke dipped some of his drops in fish glue

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Figure 6.2. Robert Hooke, Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses. With Observations and Inquiries thereupon (London: printed by Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, printers to the Royal Society, and are to be sold at their Shop at the Bell in St Paul’s Church-yard, MDCLXV [1665]). General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Upk43 662n, Schem. IV, between pp. 10 and 11.

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(“Icthycolla”), hung them to dry, and “then wrapp[ed] all the body of the drop (leaving out only the very tip) in fine supple Kids-leather very closely.” When he snapped them, “the drop gave a crack like the rest, and gave my hand a pretty brisk impulse.”47 Part of the exploded-but-heldtogether drop is then described as “more spungy then the rest.”48 Upon reheating the drops “red hot in the fire, and then suffered them to cool by degrees,” Hooke found that they “have quite lost all their fulminating or flying quality, as also their hard, brittle and springy texture.”49 As did Moray, Hooke describes the feel of a drop: “All the surface of them was very smooth and polisht, and for the most part round” with “one or more little Hillocks or Prominences.”50 Hooke then proceeds to do what Moray did not: theorize as to the cause of the violent explosion of the glass drops. While this theorizing was somewhat at odds with the stated rules of the Royal Society (for which Hooke apologizes in his preface), Hooke must have felt that it was a necessary extension of his multisensorial observations. He notes that “the Parts of the Glass being by the excessive heat of the fire kept off and separated one from another, and thereby put into a kind of sluggish fluid consistence, are suffered to drop off with that heat or agitation remaining in them, into cold Water,” which causes “the outsides of the drop [to be] presently cool’d and crusted,” while the inner parts, “retaining still much of their former heat and agitations, remain of a loose texture.”51 This contrast between the cooled outer part of the drop and the still-warm inner part causes “the contraction [to be] performed very unequally and irregularly, and thereby the Particles of the Glass are bent, some one way, and some another, yet so as that most of them draw towards the Pith or middle . . . or rather from that outward: so that they cannot extricate or unbend themselves, till some part . . . be broken and loosened, for all the parts about that are placed in the manner of an Arch.”52 Essentially, Hooke postulates that the differences in cooling speeds between the outside and inside of the drops set up a delicately balanced tension in the drop, akin to the pressures that keep an arch locked in place: remove the keystone or snap the tail of the drop, and the whole thing falls apart. And although he did not have the mathematical equations to support his theory, Hooke was essentially correct—and, centuries later, the mathematical equations finally caught up to Hooke’s postulation.53

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But for all this theorizing, Hooke never loses sight of the fact that he is dealing with physical, tangible, and temporary objects. After presenting his possible explanation for the behavior of the glass drops, Hooke breaks his argument down into seven “assertions,” each of which is grounded in the physical reality of the drops, some of which include describing the drops at formation as having a “hard, springing, and rarified texture” and “that the sudden flying asunder of the parts proceeds from their springiness.”54 Not only does each assertion concern a physical, observable aspect of the drops, but many of them incorporate multisensory observations. Further, in his defense of each of these assertions, Hooke once again invokes multiple senses, particularly that of hearing. In giving examples to support his claim that hotter things take up more room than cold things, he notes that “air included in a vessel, by being heated will burst it to pieces. Thus have I broke a Bladder held over the fire in my hand, with such a violence and noise, that it almost made me deaf for the present, and much surpassed the noise of a Musket.”55 In supporting the claim that the glass drops were held in tension like an arch, Hooke observes that “Small Glass-balls . . . would, upon rubbing or scratching the inward Surface, fly all insunder, with a pretty brisk noise.”56 Throughout the discourse around the glass drops, Hooke invokes the embodied experience of working with the objects and relies not merely on visual descriptions but on multisensory ones.

Conclusions: “Of the Use of Glass” While the reports of the glass drops by Hooke and Moray are focused on one particular object of scientific experiment, they are indicative of the ways in which such objects were written about by the community of natural philosophers—and the broader networks that writing prompted by such objects created. The paratextual materials on both Hooke’s Micrographia and Merret’s Art of Glass further show how the natural philosophers situated and understood the objects they wrote about. While Robert Moray did not contribute any paratextual material directly, Christopher Merret did—both in his paratexts to his translation of Antonio Neri’s treatise and in a short introduction to Moray’s report. In Merret’s dedication to Robert Boyle, he notes that one of the many reasons the translation is dedicated to Boyle is because “I doubt not but You will much

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promote by Your practice the Art it’s self, there being scarcely anything contained in it, but You have already judiciously had experience in.” It is not enough that Boyle encouraged the translation or that his “vast desire of communicating knowledge to others” spurred Merret to complete it; Boyle’s hands-on experience with glassmaking made him properly suited to evaluate and appreciate the translation.57 It is another instance where the written account of experimentation approximates the actual embodied experience, and thus must be judged by one who has also had that experience. In Merret’s “Observations on the Epistle to the Reader,” Merret’s commentary and explanatory text on Neri’s “To the Curious Reader,” which follows the translation of the whole volume, he remains focused on the practical, physical uses of glass in experimental philosophy.58 Much of the section titled “Of the Use of Glass” is focused on scientific applications: “in Physick,” eyeglasses give sight to the old, the visually impaired, and those who do close work like jewelers and engravers; “in Magnifying, to make artificial eyes”; “in Astronomie, what strange wonders and discoveries have those Telescopes wrought”; and studies of reflection and refraction are called out alongside “experiments of a vacuum with Mercury.”59 For Merret, understanding the principles and methodologies behind making glass seems to be only the first step, and he makes it clear throughout the text that his translation should be put to practical, real-world use.60 The idea of the written text being a proxy for embodied experimentation comes through in Merret’s brief introduction to Moray’s report on the glass drops as well. He notes that Moray’s report to the Royal Society was “registered in their Book appointed for that purpose” and then transcribed and printed with permission.61 He expresses a hope that “this might be a pattern for experiments to be made in any kinde whatsoever, as being done with exceeding exactness.”62 Not only should Moray’s report serve as a model for how scientific experiments should be conducted, Merret seems to argue, but it should serve as a model for how they should be written about as well. Hooke’s prefatory material for Micrographia demonstrates a similar penchant for “exactness.” Running thirty-two pages, it is at once justification, philosophical premise, and explanation for the text that follows. In the opening of the preface, Hooke declares that the largest impediment to an accurate understanding of the way the world works is “infirmities

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of the Senses [which] arise from a double cause, either from the disproportion of the Object to the Organ, whereby an infinite number of things can never enter into them, or else from error in the Perception, that many things, which come within their reach, are not received in a right manner.”63 The remedy for the latter, he argues, “can only proceed from the real, the mechanical, the experimental Philosophy,” while the fi x for the former, “in respect of the Senses, is a supplying of their infirmities with Instruments, and, as it were, the adding of artificial Organs to the natural.”64 This reasoning underpins Hooke’s whole approach to natural philosophy, and he goes on to extol a whole litany of “artificial organs” that have helped others with their investigations into the natural order of the world: telescopes and microscopes are set alongside “Wheels, and Engines, and Springs.”65 Later in the preface, he notes that “as Glasses have highly promoted our seeing, so ’tis not improbable, but that there may be found many Mechanical Inventions to improve our other Senses, of hearing, smelling, tasting, touching.”66 Once again, Hooke acknowledges the utility and importance of all senses in scientific experimentation, and his writing reflects that sensory awareness. While it has been argued that “the most significant shared commitment employed by the Royal Society Fellows was a determination to attend to ‘things’ rather than ‘words,’” words nonetheless remained one of the Royal Society’s primary modes of recording and disseminating their observations of those “things.”67 Instead of conceptualizing “things” and “words” as pitted against each other, Moray’s and Hooke’s early writings about glass drops make it clear that the two cohabited alongside each other in harmony, with words standing proxy for those who could not—due to time, geographical limitations, or material accessibility restrictions— participate in the embodied experimental experience. The “(re)incarnation” cycle that Anna Riehl Bertolet puts forth in her chapter in this volume applies just as much to these glass drops (and all materials of early scientific investigation) as it does to needlework and handcraft patterns. With the glass drops, that cycle might have even been twofold. First, there is the intersemiotic cycle of experimentation → written account → experimentation.68 Second, it is possible that there is a more literal reincarnation through the transformation of material form: some of the glass used in these experiments could be melted down again to form subsequent drops or other glass pieces, which in turn could be used for additional

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experiments. The science of objects led to the theories for which so many of the early natural philosophers are known today. But it was the objects of science—even ones with little practical value, like the glass drops— that shaped the way that scientists wrote about experimental philosophy.

Notes 1. Samuel Butler, Hudibras. The Second Part (London, 1664), part 2, canto 2, lines 385–89, p. 95 (sig. G8r). Folger B6309. 2. A video demonstrating the formation and properties of these glass drops may be found from Purdue University’s College of Engineering on YouTube. “Prince Rupert’s Drops: 400 Year Old Mystery Revealed,” Purdue Engineering, May 10, 2017, YouTube video, https:// youtu.be/lt-zvsGvtqg. 3. E. S. de Beer, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn: Now Printed in Full from the Manuscripts Belonging to John Evelyn (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1955), 3:272; Robert Moray, “Account of the Glass Drops,” in Christopher Merret, Art of Glass (London, 1662), 353 (sig. Aa1r). 4. Samuel Pepys, “Monday 13 January 1661/2,” Diary of Samuel Pepys online, https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1662 /01/13/. 5. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 23. 6. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 18. Consult also Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. 22–79 and 283–331. 7. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 23. 8. While the observable properties of the glass drops probably contributed to the formation of Hooke’s Law of spring tension—and further research on them did, some two hundred years later, lead to the development of tempered glass—the glass drops themselves were of little commercial value.

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9. Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 117. 10. Laurel Brodsley, Charles Frank, and John W. Steeds, “Prince Rupert’s Drops,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 41.11 (October 1986): 1–26, esp. 5. 11. Brodsley, Frank, and Steeds, “Prince Rupert’s Drops,” 5–6. 12. Brodsley, Frank, and Steeds, “Prince Rupert’s Drops,” 5 and corresponding note on 18. 13. For more on the importance of Huygens’s multilingualism, particularly to Cavendish’s work, consult Christopher Joby, The Multilingualism of Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 137–76. 14. Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 200. 15. As quoted in Jardine, Going Dutch, 200–201. 16. Brodsley, Frank, and Steeds, “Prince Rupert’s Drops,” 7. 17. Correspondence quoted in Jardine, Going Dutch, 201. 18. Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge from Its First Rise [. . .] (London: A. Millar, 1756), 17–18 (sig. D1r– v), 34 (sig. F1v), 37 (sig. F3r). Folger Q41.L7 B6 Cage. 19. Birch, History of the Royal Society, 17 (sig. D1r). 20. Birch, History of the Royal Society, 69 (sig. K3r). 21. Brodsley, Frank, and Steeds, “Prince Rupert’s Drops,” 11.

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22. A. D. C. Simpson, “Neile, Sir Paul (bap. 1613, d. 1682x6), Courtier and Patron of Science,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, October 8, 2009, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093 /ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb -9780198614128-e-37803. 23. Birch, History of the Royal Society, 17 (sig. D1r). While traditionally “amanuensis” simply refers to a scribe or secretary, the Royal Society seems to have quickly expanded that role beyond the traditional note-taking and into the realm of procuring the materials for various experiments; it is not, however, clear who this person was. 24. Birch, History of the Royal Society, 18 (sig. D1v). 25. OED Online, s.v., “experiment,” n. 6, Oxford University Press. 26. Birch, History of the Royal Society, 18–19 (sig. D1v–D2r). 27. Christopher Merret, Art of Glass (London: Printed by A. W. for Octavian Pulleyn, at the Sign of the Rose in St Pauls Church-yard, MDCLXII [1662]), 353 (sig. Aa1r). Yale University Library copy via EEBO. 28. Brodsley, Frank, and Steeds, “Prince Rupert’s Drops,” 10. 29. Brodsley, Frank, and Steeds make an even stronger claim: that Moray was the only member who had practical glasshouse experience (“Prince Rupert’s Drops,” 9). Obviously, this claim elides the work of the anonymous amanuensis, who somehow produced the second iteration of drops for the Society, as well as discounting Merret’s claims in the preface to Art of Glass that Robert Boyle had experience in glassworks, and the implications from Merret’s own nuanced commentary that he himself had firsthand knowledge. 30. Birch, History of the Royal Society, 34 (sig. F1v). 31. Birch, History of the Royal Society, 37–41 (sigs. F3r–G1r). 32. Birch, History of the Royal Society, 115 (sig. Q2r).

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33. Robert Moray, “An Account of the Glass Drops,” in Merret, Art of Glass, 353 (sig. Aa1v). 34. Moray’s account submitted to the Royal Society is now held in the Royal Society Library, shelfmark Cl.P/3i/57. 35. Moray, “Glass Drops,” 355 (sig. Aa2r). 36. Moray, “Glass Drops,” 355–56 (sig. Aa2r–v). 37. Moray, “Glass Drops,” 356 (sig. Aa2v). 38. Moray, “Glass Drops,” 360 (sig. Aa4v) and 361 (sig. Aa5r). 39. Moray, “Glass Drops,” 361–62 (sig. Aa5r–v). 40. Moray, “Glass Drops,” 360 (sig. Aa4v). 41. Moray, “Glass Drops,” 358 (sig. Aa3v). 42. Moray, “Glass Drops,” 357–58 (sig. Aa3r–v). 43. Moray, “Glass Drops,” 359 (sig. Aa4r). 44. Robert Hooke, Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses. With Observations and Inquiries thereupon (London, 1665). Library of Congress copy via EEBO. 45. Hooke, Micrographia, 33 (sig. G1r). 46. Hooke, Micrographia, 33 (sig. G1r). 47. Hooke, Micrographia, 33–34 (sig. G1r–v). 48. Hooke, Micrographia, 34 (sig. G1v). 49. Hooke, Micrographia, 35 (sig. G2r). 50. Hooke, Micrographia, 35 (sig. G2r). 51. Hooke, Micrographia, 35–36 (sig. G2r–v). 52. Hooke, Micrographia, 36 (sig. G2v). 53. Hooke’s own law of spring tension, plus 250 years of advances in mathematics and physics finally allowed another Fellow of the Royal Society, A. A. Griffith, in 1920, to express mathematically what Hooke attempts to express here in prose. Consult Brodsley, Frank, and Steeds, “Prince Rupert’s Drops,” 2. 54. Hooke, Micrographia, 37 (sig. G3r). 55. Hooke, Micrographia, 37 (sig. G3r).

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T h e E x pl o s i v e C a se of Pr i nc e Ru pe rt ’s Drop s 56. Hooke, Micrographia, 42 (sig. H1v). 57. Merret, Art of Glass, [p. 14] (sig. A5v). 58. Merret’s “Observations on the Epistle to the Reader” can be found in Merret, Art of Glass, 205–38 (sigs. O7r–Q7v), while Neri’s “To the Curious Reader” is translated in Merret, Art of Glass, [pp. 5–12] (sig. A1r–A4v). 59. Merret, Art of Glass, 226–28 (sig. Q1v–Q2v). 60. For more on Merret’s own probable experiences in a glasshouse, consult Albert J. Koinm, “Christopher Merret’s Use of Experiment,” in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 54.1 (January 2000): 23–32, esp. 27–28. 61. Merret, Art of Glass, 353 (sig. Aa1r). Merret was not elected a Fellow of the Royal Society until about six months after this book was published, hence his reference to “their” book, rather than “our” book. 62. Merret, Art of Glass, 353–54 (sig. Aa1r–v). 63. Hooke, Micrographia, [p. 6] (sig. a1v).

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64. Hooke, Micrographia, [p. 7] (sig. a2r). 65. Hooke, Micrographia, [p. 8] (sig. a2v). 66. Hooke, Micrographia, [p. 12] (sig. b2v). 67. William T. Lynch, Solomon’s Child: Method in the Early Royal Society of London (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 21. 68. This also falls squarely within the idea of intersemiotic translation—that is, the translation of an idea/story/concept from one medium to another—in this case, from physical experiment to the written account thereof and into physical experiment again. Th is idea was first proposed by Roman Jakobson (1959), who gave it an alternate term very appropriate to a discussion of early modern natural philosophy: transmutation. For a further discussion of intersemiotic translation/transmutation, consult Umberto Eco, Experiences in Translation, trans. Alastair McEwen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).

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Part III

Staging Properties

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Chapter 7

Traveling Music and Theatrics Jemmy LaRoche’s “Raree Show” Sarah F. Williams

Around the turn of the eighteenth century, the English printmaker Sutton Nicholls published an engraving of the successful and aged showman “Old Harry.” His depiction of the popular street performer is accompanied by a poetic inscription that reads, in part, as follows: Reader behold the Efigie of one Wrinckled by age Decrepit and Forelorne . . . His tinckling bell doth you togather call, To see his Rary Show Spectators all, That will be pleas’d before you by him pass, To pay a Farthing and Look through his Glass, Where every Object that it doth present Will please your fancy, yeild your Mind content! Objects as Strange in Nature as in Number, Such a vast Many as will make you wonder, That when you do look trough his glass you’d Swear, That by one small sight you view’d a whole Fare

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Of Monsters stranger than can be express’d, There’s Nippotate lies among the rest.1 Transporting his mobile curiosities in a box on his back and accompanied by a taxidermic version of his pet hedgehog Nippotate, Old Harry offered a form of street entertainment that grew in popularity toward the end of the seventeenth century in London and the surrounding areas. For a farthing, “you” can “look through” Old Harry’s glass where “every object” will “please your fancy, y[ie]ld your Mind content.” These objects are “as Strange in Nature as in Number,” and in looking through his glass “you’d swear, / That by one small sight you’d view’d a whole Fare.” More specifically, according to the inscription, Harry’s objects include “the louse, the flea, and spangled snake,” in addition to his beloved Nippotate, laid out on a lap table in front of him; Harry also wears a bib of exotic coins around his neck. Nicholls’s detailed illustration matches the written description of Old Harry—seated, presenting his show for us to behold (Figure 7.1). Old Harry presents a “Rary Show.” Popular between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in England, traveling rare shows took many physical forms, but most that are visually documented were portable displays containing a collection of unusual curiosities presented in public gathering spaces. The rare show was akin to the early peep show, the difference being that a peep show was a more private experience in which a single viewer at a time would peer through a peephole—much like a camera obscura—to witness a small tableau or miniature figures.2 Both entertainments could be accompanied by a musical performance or, in Old Harry’s case, a “gallant show.”3 Many purveyors of these traveling “intermedia” performative experiences at the time were Savoyards from northern Italy and southern France; hence the arguably derisive designation “raree show,” spelled in this way to approximate a foreign-sounding enunciation of the phrase.4 Toward the end of the century, Jemmy (James) LaRoche, a professional singer/actor on London’s “legitimate” stage, began working as a rare-showman; in later literature, he is often mentioned alongside descriptions of Old Harry. LaRoche began his stage career as a boy when he played Cupid in Peter Motteux’s play The Loves of Mars and Venus (1696) at Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields.5 He then became well known beyond the theater for his song “The Raree Show,” from Motteux’s English version of a French ballet des nations, Europe’s Revels for the Peace of Ryswick (1698),

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Figure 7.1. Sutton Nicholls, “Old Harry with his Rare Show, Old Harry with his Gallant Show,” (ca. 1700–1729). © The Trustees of the British Museum, 1851, 0308.336.

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with music by John Eccles. Shortly thereafter, apparently, LaRoche literally took his show on the road, performing with his own rare-show box, in the form of a portable cabinet with “motions,” or moving puppet figures, singing the tune from the ballet for which he achieved fame (Figure 7.2).6 While the political implications of Europe’s Revels and its music have been examined, the mechanisms through which LaRoche’s performances and Eccles’s music achieved far-reaching cultural impact beyond the court and theatergoing audiences have attracted little notice.7 References to LaRoche’s song and performances “traveled”—much as he did with his portable stage—across genres, social class, time, and performance venues. In this way, both music and portable stage function as dynamic matter moving through space and time; Jonathan Gil Harris notes that understanding matter only in the form of the synchronic or stable object “ignores the dynamic dimensions” of that object.8 LaRoche’s traveling rare-show box was more than a static object—it was a performative space where the boundaries of venue, time, and genre began to dissolve.9 References to the tune “Raree Show” and its refrain, in fact, appear around the turn of the eighteenth century in broadside ballads, mezzotint prints, and political tracts. Its strains were in the air, unbounded by the walls of a playhouse or the court, and the rare-show box traveled with it. This dynamic object was unhindered by the boundaries of court, markets, fairs, and even the walls of London. Far from an ostensibly “low” and ephemeral entertainment, LaRoche’s performance, with his box, migrated from stage to street and, eventually, from harmless parody to criminal libel. Harris’s applications of the Aristotelian theory of dynameos, or matter as potentiality, as well as Gina Bloom’s recent scholarship on the materiality of the voice, are useful tools with which to consider the cultural impact of “ephemera” such as music, popular culture, and performance. In this particular case, these ideas allow us to better understand the complex network of intertextual, social, and musical relationships that “The Raree Show” and its performative venue created for listeners and viewers. In a larger sense, the persistence and constant evolution of the music for “The Raree Show” demonstrate that Protestant distrust of Frenchspeaking Catholics continued well after the “Peace” of Ryswick. This chapter considers the relationships between the various iterations of rare shows as tangible objects and LaRoche’s tune “Raree Show” around the

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Figure 7.2. Pierce Tempest After Marcellus Laroon II, from The Cryes of the City of London Drawne After the Life (1688). © The Trustees of the British Museum, 1972, U.370.33.

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turn of the eighteenth century. It also considers how music mediated the spaces between time, place, materiality, and ephemerality.

Portable Rare Shows and Peep Shows Initially appearing in the seventeenth century and growing in popularity throughout the eighteenth, rare shows and peep shows were portable boxes that could be carried upon the backs of their purveyors or conveyed in donkey carts. In one of the early references to the entertainments, the diarist John Evelyn wrote on February 5, 1656, that he was shown “a pretty Perspective & well represented in a triangular Box, the greate Church at Harlem in Holland, to be seene thro a small hole at one of the Corners, & contrived into an handsome Cabinet: it was so rarely don, that all the Artists & Painters in Towne, came flocking to see & admire it.”10 The demarcations between the two entertainments were not entirely distinct in the seventeenth century, since some rare shows, like the one LaRoche peddled, could be transported in boxes like peep shows, while displays like the ones compiled by Old Harry were more often collections of objects such as coins and preserved animal carcasses. Both offered the viewer something novel and unique, however. On a trip to Paris, Evelyn stumbled upon a shop purveying these unique types of physical objects one might purchase for and include in such a rare show. The shop, “called Noah’s Arke . . . sold all curiosities, naturall or artificial, Indian or European, for luxury or use, as cabinets, shells, ivory, porselan, dried fishes, insects, birds, pictures, and a thousand exotic extravagances.”11 While these entertainments were always portable, the construction of the box itself varied and could include anything from a kind of curiocabinet arrangement of miniature figures to more developed contrivances later on, such as moving automata powered by clockwork mechanisms, candlelit scenes viewed through a peephole, mirrors used to enhance the perspective, and cloth transparencies.12 One description of the boxes comes from a later source, but the author appeals to his readers’ sense of nostalgia when describing the popular entertainment: “Some of your elderly readers may yet remember these ‘raree show boxes,’ and the little folks standing in our streets with their boxes in their hands, and bawling out for customers, ‘Gie’s a preen, to see the sicht o’ a raree, raree, show, show, show.’ How amusing it was to see the sleeves of the left arms of

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these urchins stuck full of pins, with the profits arising from the exhibition of their raree shows!”13 As with seventeenth-century descriptions of ballad-sellers, this writer maintains a distance (and disdain) for the showmen here, describing their singing as “bawling” and referring to them as “urchins.” There also seems to be a connection drawn at some point between rare-show figures and popular puppet entertainments at the time—or, as one writer reported with scorn, “I presume that [Punch] will not be tolerated, either upon the Stage, or even in a Raree-shew Box.”14 Indeed, the anonymous author of A new dictionary of the canting crew in its several tribes of gypsies, beggers, thieves, cheats &c. (1699) defines “Raree-show-men” as “poor Savoyards strolling up and down with portable Boxes of Puppet-shews at their Backs; in short, Pedlars of Puppets.”15 Edward Ward likened the movements of highly trained coach horses to these puppets when he remarked that the animals “mov’d cross the Room to their Places, as Formal, and as Stiff, as Figures in a Raree-show.”16 Whatever the formation—a tiny scene viewed through a peephole or a cabinet of puppetlike figures—rare shows were mobile, and mobility was crucial to the entertainment. A showman “wanders up and down” and has his box “where e’re about [he goes],” usually “upon his Back” and sometimes accompanied by a “Pipe and Drum.”17 In fact, Jemmy LaRoche was Old Harry’s greatest competition because LaRoche “made his progress through town and country, laying every neighborhood under heavy contributions, in return for the compliment of his occasional visits; while Old Harry, with a modesty quite his own, was content with the patronage and support he experienced in his own immediate vicinity of Moorfields, seldom straying beyond the boundaries of Hoxton and Islington, and very rarely was known to travel westward beyond Temple-bar.”18 It seems that in LaRoche’s case in particular, the success of a rare-showman hinged not only upon mobility but also on the strength of his musicaltheatrical offerings. Indeed, Pierce Tempest’s image in Figure 7.2 depicts a rare-showman in motion, stepping forward with his mouth open as if singing. Old Harry, on the other hand, was an entertainer who offered merely taxidermic animals and jangling coins around his neck as accompaniments, whereas LaRoche was a widely traveled singer and actor with experience on London’s professional stage. Eventually, and inevitably, the term “raree show” began to refer to any lurid or populist spectacle, and finally it was employed as a tool for

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political dissent. One description of the 1684 Frost Fair describes the Thames as a “kind of raree-show,” while another writer derisively refers to an onerous event as “such a Raree show, but I find every Man thinks himself Happy in what he likes Best.”19 This dismissive treatment was lavished upon any new form of visual or other portable entertainments so en vogue at the turn of the eighteenth century. To refer to anything as a “raree show,” utilizing a misspelling intended to lambaste its FrancoItalian purveyors, was to devalue that endeavor. While simple versions of rare shows could also be found as toys for domestic use, it seems their public appearances were considered by some to be another unwanted performative nuisance.20 This kind of learned derision paved the way for the object, the term, and any performative manifestations of rare shows to be used as political tools and satire. The political co-optation of not only the term “raree show” but also any person or music associated with it occurred during the last two decades of the seventeenth century. With the return of Charles II from France after the civil wars, England saw an increase in anti-Catholic sentiment and xenophobia, as well as high-profile cases of sedition and treason. The term “raree show” itself inspired several libelous pamphlets and broadsides. Since the first waves of rare-showmen were Savoyards and, presumably, Catholic, the entertainers’ likenesses and references to them were used in Protestant tracts to satirize and protest Catholic rule. In one particularly incendiary case, the pro-exclusion Whig Stephen Colledge was tried, convicted, and executed for his 1681 ballad and alleged cartoon “A Ra-ree Show to the tune of I am a senceless thing,” in which he portrays King Charles II as a two-faced—half Protestant, half papist—rare-showman traveling to dissolve the Oxford Parliament (Figure 7.3). Scrolls emanate from both of the king’s mouths, depicting his duplicity and vocality.21 The ballad text is a dialogue between Topham (the Sergeant-at-Arms of the Commons) and Leviathan (Charles II), and their conversation reveals Charles as a “monstrous Foul Beast” and popish autocrat whose “successor [James II] has the Clap.”22 Composed during the Exclusion Crisis, this ballad was damning to Colledge; indeed, the Huntington Library copy of Colledge’s broadside and illustration contains a “subheading” scrawled under the title that reads, “A most scandalous libell ag[ainst] ye Government, for wch Stephen Colledge was iustly Executed.”23 A witness at the trial claimed he heard Colledge sing the

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Figure 7.3. Stephen Colledge, A Ra-ree Show, 1681. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB 135850.

ballad at “Lord Lovelace’s” in Oxfordshire and Oxford Town, after which, he states, Mr. Colledge explained the cartoon: “That which hath the Pack on the back of it, he described to be the King; those that follow him were Topham, Cooper, Hughs, and Snow; and that company of men there [in the show box] is the House of Commons.”24 The image shows the king crossing the bridge on his journey “west-ward hoy” to Oxford while his political “puppets” topple out of his rare-show box. The tune to which Colledge’s ballad verses should be sung is indicated under the title as “I am a senceless thing.” The king was subject to many virulent satires around this time, and this tune was also used for a different ballad, titled “Another base songe,” which included the burden, or refrain, “With a hey tronny nonny no.”25 Most likely predating these examples, another ballad featuring the same refrain—“With a hey tronny nonny no”—that also satirized Charles was titled “A new ballad, To an old tune, call’d, I am the Duke of Norfolk, &c.,” which contains the first line “I am a senceless thing” (Figure 7.4).26 This kind of tunetitle “cross-association” was common in popular song literature, and balladeers could use these intertextual references strategically to comment upon current events or publish subversive satires with relative impunity.27 While the melody itself remained largely unchanged over several decades, tune titles would often adopt alternate titles from, perhaps, the first line of a particularly memorable or commercially successful ballad; the titles and melodies would thus resonate with different eras as they gathered new meanings and cultural relevance with each set of verses with which they

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Figure 7.4. Two verses from Colledge’s broadside set to the tune “I am the Duke of Norfolk,” or “Paul’s Steeple.” Basic melodic structure transcribed from Ross Duffi n, Some Other Note: The Lost Songs of English Renaissance Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 346.

were paired. Even Colledge’s choice of tunes to which his libelous verses should be sung was a political act. Colledge’s case affected other Protestant ballad publishers. For instance, a 1684 “good night” ballad—verses penned in the voice of the condemned speaking from the gallows or the Tower—chronicles the imprisonment of one L——gley C——s (the Ludgate Hill printer Langley Curtis) for publishing sedition and treason, specifically in the ballad “The Lord Russell’s Ghost.”28 Jane Curtis, Langley’s wife, was also tried in 1680 for publishing a libel on the king, “A Satire upon Injustice, or Scroggs upon Scroggs.”29 Langley Curtis was a Colledge sympathizer, and though he didn’t meet the same fate at the gallows, he was sentenced to a fine of 500 pounds sterling as well as time in the pillory, and he was in danger of losing his ears.30 Curtis’s ballad lamentation contains eight stanzas, each with a refrain naming “Colledge the martyr” and others jailed for their political views. The ballad also provides evidence that the rare-show trope carried at least the connotations of visual spectacle, if not political dissent, even before Motteux’s ballet. In stanza three, Curtis laments that when his “head peepth thorough [the pillory], the Tories will hollow, / At poor L——gley C——is’ cry O Raree Show.”31 However, what distinguished Colledge from Curtis was, in part, the inflammatory cartoon accompanying his ballad. Colledge’s fate, and his fashioning of the king as a traveling rare-showman, leaves us with many questions: Why would this image of the monarch be particularly

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incendiary? What were the social—and musical—mechanisms that allowed this ballad and its implications to circulate? How could music and the memory of particular performances “travel” like the rare-showmen so popular at the turn of the century?

Europe’s Revels and Its Traveling Music Staged to celebrate a peace treaty wherein Louis XIV ceased aid and support for the exiled James II and conceded William’s claim to the English throne, Europe’s Revels for the Peace of Ryswick (1697) was an English version of the seventeenth-century French ballet des nations genre—a representation of national characters through music and dance. With text by Peter (Pierre) Motteux and music by court and theater composer John Eccles, the entertainment features comic solo songs, musical dialogues, dance sequences, and large-scale numbers for soloists, chorus, and orchestra.32 Owing much to the English masque and French comedieballet genres as models, Europe’s Revels was staged around 1713 at the theater in Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields but was probably first performed at court toward the end of the seventeenth century.33 The characterizations of the “peoples of Europe” in this entertainment—an “English Country man,” a “French Officer,” a “Dutch Boor,” an “Irish Raparee,” and a “Savoyard with a Raree Show,” for example—combine theatrical stereotypes with contemporary political and economic situations, including, of course, the rampant anti-Catholic sentiment and intrigue that plagued the reigns of Charles II and James II.34 Europe’s Revels inspired several imitators—tributes that cross many class and genre boundaries—primarily due to the refrain of a popular number performed by Jemmy LaRoche. LaRoche plays “a Savoyard” and sings a fiddle tune called “The Raree Show” set to a text whose lyrics are meant to represent a French accent. Eccles’s music is simple and idiomatic to the violin—that is, it alternates between notes that are open strings on the instrument.35 The structure of the music also resembles a broadside ballad in that it is several stanzas of text sung to the same tune. The refrain of the tune is “O Raree Show, O brave Show, O pretty Show, who see my fine a show.” Motteux’s text of course uses the “Franglais” corrupt spelling for LaRoche’s song, a practice not uncommon even in theatrical music around the turn of the century. For instance, a passage from the epilogue

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to Thomas Durfey’s comedy The Campaigners (1698) references a rare show with the indication that the performer “mimicks the French singers here”: Me vill to please you do one odor ting, Not dance en Francois, but en Francois sing, Such time, such graces, and such Raree-shew, Dat you sall tinke you are at Fontainbleau.36 In the 1697 printed libretto of the ballet, the Savoyard’s song not only satirizes the French accent but includes a stage direction for the showman to turn “the Motion at every Burthen.”37 In other words, LaRoche was to turn the puppet figures, or “Motions,” in his rare-show box during each refrain. This detail allows us to envision the performative implications of LaRoche’s song both within and outside Motteux’s ballet. From around the turn of the eighteenth century, puppet or motion shows appear frequently in visual art as “satirical weapons,” most notably in William Hogarth’s work lampooning contemporary theatrical tastes.38 Puppet metaphors are also used in Restoration anti-Catholic literature and political satire to indicate anyone who does not act of their own accord but rather is manipulated by another, unseen interest. Chronicling the reign of Henry VII, Francis Bacon wrote that Edward “Plantagenet was indeed but a puppit, or a Counterfeit.”39 To seventeenth-century learned writers, puppet plays were “the very ignorance of Nature and Sensible things,” a “Dream,” and a “Childish stir about meer [sic] Words.”40 Likewise, suspicions against the French were rampant in the 1680s, during which time one writer, describing the Popish Plot (1678–81), observed that “upon bringing the Plot to light all the little French men with their Marionetts, and Puppit-Showes, vanished, which gave Suspicion, they were Agents for the Faction.”41 The fact that Motteux’s script stipulates that LaRoche use a curiosity cabinet with “Motions”—the moving figures— adds new depth to the political implications of an actor’s portrayal of a Savoyard. Seeing a French-speaking Savoyard as a rare-showman onstage manipulating puppets would have recalled a host of extra-theatrical connotations for Motteux and Eccles’s audience, from Hogarth’s popular prints and vitriolic sermonizing to popish satire. Kathryn Lowerre has written about the combination of theatrical stereotypes with current political realities in Europe’s Revels. She suggests that the character of

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the Savoyard could represent “Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy [who] had been one of William’s allies, but broke away from the alliance early and signed a separate peace with Louis XIV.”42 It is important to note, coincidentally, that the Savoyard in Europe’s Revels also does not “participate in the central, unifying dance sequence with the Spanish, Dutch and French.”43 While Lowerre discusses the representations of these nations through dance, and thus how the cultural conceptions of difference and an orderly “resolution” to an international conflict were communicated to Motteux’s audience, this preliminary investigation into a politically significant entertainment such as Europe’s Revels does not account for LaRoche’s fame beyond the stage and the proliferation of other performative works indebted to his theatrical persona. Two broadsides published in 1698 indicate a familiarity with the text of LaRoche’s song from Europe’s Revels. One published by Edward Ward and titled “O Raree Show, O pritee Show. Will you see my Fine Show” uses this same phrase as Motteux’s refrain, repeated in subsequent stanzas as “O Raree Show, &c.”44 Ward’s broadside does not contain musical notation or a tune indication; it is, however, structurally and metrically similar enough to Eccles’s extremely adaptable musical setting that it would not be difficult to sing Ward’s verses to Eccles’s music. The other anonymous broadside from the same year, printed to commemorate the Lord Mayor’s Day celebration, bears the title “O Raree-Show, O Pretty-Show: or, The City Feast” but, ironically, includes no refrain of its own. Another 1712 broadside with extremely similar verses to the 1698 Ward broadside—and some additional stanzas—uses the refrain “O rare show o var pretty show who see my fine dainty show,” clearly also quite close to LaRoche’s original refrain.45 Finally, Sutton Nicholls’s multimedia mezzotint of a rareshowman singing his song and displaying his cabinet appears around 1713 (Figure 7.5). Again, the performer, costumed similarly to the figure in Pierce Tempest’s print, sings to his young audience—and, ostensibly, to those of us aligned with the audience in viewing the show—while displaying the tiny figurines (motions) and scenes within his box. This stunning image not only captures the sonic experience of a rare-show performance in a visual medium, but it also connects a depiction of a generic, if popular, street entertainment to a specific courtly entertainment. The musical notation for Eccles’s original tune from Europe’s Revels is included at the bottom of the print with the same nine stanzas of text from Motteux’s

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Figure 7.5. Sutton Nicholls, The Raree Show (1713). © The Trustees of the British Museum, 1860, 0623.53.

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script.46 The text here satirizes the results of a peace treaty, probably the Peace of Utrecht. What appears to be happening in the decades after Europe’s Revels at court and in the public theaters is a kind of collective memory formation around this popular refrain, much like the process through which satirists like Stephen Colledge used tune titles and crossreferences to communicate their displeasure with current political situations. A simple explanation might be that LaRoche’s performances were so popular that others wanted to capitalize on them, hoping to increase the sales of their own publications. However, the reach of LaRoche’s performance extends beyond print genres to include not only seditious pamphlets or broadsides but also the cultivated and popular genre of ballad opera beginning in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Musically, this is confirmed by the fact that several broadsides include the “O Raree Show, O Pritee Show” refrain but no tune indication or musical notation, suggesting that a listener or performer would have been familiar enough with LaRoche’s performance to sing that tune to the new verses. The transmission of LaRoche’s theatrical character, his trademark song, and the historical rare-showmen figures blended together almost imperceptibly. Details from the court production of Europe’s Revels are transmitted across disparate classes, media, and venues. As we have observed, the phrase “O raree show, O pretty show” is featured in later libelous broadsides without any obvious reference to Europe’s Revels; rare-showmen, however, become almost exclusively associated with Savoyards in the early eighteenth century, and almost always satirically.47 For instance, a 1739 ballad opera by Joseph Peterson called The Raree Show: or, The Fox Trap’t, first performed in York, features the character “Smart,” who at one point is disguised as a Savoyard. In an effort to trick a father into signing a document releasing his daughter from the obligation of marriage, Smart adopts a “Franglais” accent and sings a refrain akin to LaRoche’s: “O my Raree Show! My gallantee Show!”48 Perhaps the political connotations of the original performance, commentary on the events that inspired it, or its generic roots in French entertainment were being transmitted and transformed in the process of co-opting LaRoche’s popular refrain.

Object, Performance, and Memory The complex web of cross-citations and associations at play in both specific and general rare show references around the turn of the eighteenth

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century could perhaps be teased out by examining the rare-show box itself as a memory object. Rare shows are unique objects in that, by nature, they literally do not remain fi xed or static and require some sort of interpretation or performative enticement for consumption. Harris has challenged structuralist and linear views of material history, suggesting instead a “polychronic” approach to matter, a theory that is particularly apt in its applicability to rare shows and their materiality.49 Regarding the rare show as a palimpsest—that is, an object upon which multiple traces of, in this case, not only time but also music and performance are encoded—can shed light upon the complex nature of tune-title metamorphoses in contemporaneous popular song, phenomena that are notoriously difficult to assign a diachronic history. Research on cross-references in seventeenthcentury broadside ballads has demonstrated that ballad tunes “converse with each other.”50 LaRoche’s court and Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields performances are likewise “palimpsested” onto his mobile performances in marketplaces and fairs, creating a kind of “dialogic temporality.” Certainly, the political implications of Europe’s Revels, through its various performances by LaRoche, are encoded upon the broadsides whereon his refrain “O raree show, O pretty show” appears. The publication of satirical ballads and songs containing this refrain that mocks the peace treaties of Ryswick and Utrecht hints at the lingering suspicions against outsiders and Catholic sympathizers. Rare-showmen like LaRoche and Old Harry, whose trades were considered “low” entertainments, were eventually “memorialized” in mezzotints and engravings themselves as objects intended to be held and collected. In her important study on voice and agency in early modern England, Gina Bloom challenges the definition of “the material” as visible and tangible by theorizing the relationship between voice, theatrical performance, gender, and agency: “Invisible yet substantial, ephemeral yet transferable, voice destabilizes any easy assumptions about the category of matter.”51 Bloom contends that the voice “has a history of production, ownership, and exchange” as rich and as problematic as those of material objects. The voice and performance, like seemingly “tangible” objects such as play-texts or stage props, can also be unmanageable and unpredictable, especially when located in the body of a prepubescent boy actor.52 Bloom’s theories on the materiality of the immaterial (voice and performance) and Harris’s theories on matter as potentiality may

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usefully be combined with early modern theories on memory and its cultural contradictions. When applied to the realm of theater and performance, this amalgamated theoretical approach yields fascinating insights into the influence of itinerant performance across class boundaries and the co-optation of these performances and texts by political dissidents. The tensions between fi xity and impermanence create more questions than answers; the near obliterations of these categories, however, can be seen in forms of itinerant performance and popular music long ignored by twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars. The early modern memory arts, or artes memoriae, are similarly conflicted in their attempt to categorize and contain information and ephemera through seemingly “fi xed” objects. To aid in taxonomy, storage, organization, and recollection of knowledge, most memory schemes were built around the mental practice of converting ideas into specific, fi xed material objects such as pictures and architectural spaces, with the “memory theater,” ironically, being one of the most popular mnemonic devices.53 The fi xed, didactic nature of the ars memoriae, however, is complicated when translated to the realm of performance, its associated objects, and even the image of a theater itself. We can view LaRoche’s rare-show box as a kind of memory theater or palimpsest for performances past, present, and future. It acts as a monument—another term borrowed from the ars memoriae. LaRoche’s cabinet recalls his theatrical performances, inspires future broadsides, and comments upon present political situations. The rare-show box is a resonator for subversive political discourses, as well as the interests and delights of those presumed to be poor and indigent. The box resonated with the disdain of learned society for these popular entertainments, even as they co-opted them for political satire. Yet, at the same time, the rare-show box, its purveyors, and its music were heard by a larger audience, facilitating the exchange of ideas across class boundaries, complex international relations, and problematic peace treaties. It is a material object, but its value as a thing was dependent upon ephemeral experiences, theatrical and itinerant performance, and the memories thereof.54 LaRoche’s notoriety, as well as Eccles’s music, “traveled” without the rare-show box object. After the publication of the 1712 “raree show” broadside, any consumer could purchase the penny sheet and sing the song themselves at home—a far less expensive way to enjoy a performance by Motteux and Eccles. It could be pasted to the walls of a tavern and sung in

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gleeful chorus by a group, with each participant joining in on the recurring refrain. Again, as a resonator, the rare-show box amplifies the sounds of the music associated with its staging, reaching much farther than a traveling showman could ever traipse. Ultimately, the rare-show box is a disruptive object. Constantly evolving, the object is dynameos, or potentiality—that is, it is both past material that has been reworked and present material that is reworkable.55 Its image and references are connected to other performances, current events, and the personas of the actors associated with its display. The refrain “O Raree Show, O pretty show” is also a kind of performative material with potential of its own. The refrain “traveled” through intertextual relationships and disparate song genres. It relied on collective memory in service of satire and political subversion. The rare show’s influence as an object and a musical performance, along with its cultural usage, became polychronic and multitemporal, existing in the past and the present and, in the case of those who dared to produce libels, the future. It is impossible to know if Motteux and Eccles could have predicted that their tune and lyrics would resonate with audiences and political dissenters in such a way; it is, however, no surprise that any control they could have had over the music and its cultural and political usage was relinquished when LaRoche began to travel beyond the London court and stage with his portable theatrical box.

Notes 1. Sutton Nicholls, “Old Harry with his Rare Show, Old Harry with his Gallant Show,” (ca. 1700–1729), British Museum, 1851, 0308.336. Consult also Robert Malcolm, Curiosities of Biography (London: R. Griffi n, 1860), 80; Bentley’s Miscellany (New York: Jemima M. Mason, 1841), 8:252. Old Harry is said to have died in 1710. 2. I would not, however, align peep shows and rare shows with curiosity cabinets too closely; peep shows and rare shows are mobile entertainments and usually accompanied by some sort of aural performance. Curiosity cabinets have been described by modern scholars as physical manifestations of the nobility’s conspicuous consumption. There are similarities, of course. While curiosity

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cabinets were private collections or rooms designed to reflect the knowledge and power of their owners, both these rooms and portable rare shows displayed oddities and exotic objects that were unusual and “rare.” For more information on curiosity cabinets, consult the introduction and Edward McLean Test’s chapter in this volume, as well as Michelle Henning, Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (London: McGraw-Hill, 2005); Ken Arnold, Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005); and Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

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J e m m y L a Ro c h e’s “R a r e e Show ” 3. A gallant show meant a visually spectacular display or a demonstration of gallantry, bravery, or nobleness. Consult OED Online, s.v., “gallant (adj. and n.),” accessed June 2018. 4. As opposed to “multimedia,” which implies a model in which individual media (visual, acoustic, theatrical) are understood to be discrete categories, “intermedia” implies a fuller sense of overlap and transformation across various media. Consult Eric Vos, “The Eternal Network: Mail Art, Intermedia Semiotics, Interarts Studies,” in Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media, ed. Ulla Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); David Fischlin, “Introduction” to Outerspears: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), esp. 3–4; and Gavin Alexander, “On the Reuse of Poetic Form,” in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 123–43. 5. Kathryn Lowerre, ed., The Lively Arts of the London Stage, 1675–1725 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 22; Sidney Lee, ed., Dictionary of National Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1892), 32:153. I am grateful to Estelle Murphy for her guidance on matters pertaining to LaRoche’s early career. 6. The figure in this image may or may not have been modeled after LaRoche himself, but the depiction of the portable cabinet fits the description of his entertainment. The inscription below is in English, French, and Italian, and reads, “Oh Raree Show / Rare chose a voir [A rare thing to see] / Chi vuol veder meraviglie [Who wants to see wonders].” The polylingualism is another reference to the fact that many rare-showmen were Savoyards, as was LaRoche’s stage character. The singer in Figure 7.2 was long thought to be Jemmy LaRoche as well; however, the Sutton Nicholls print (ca. 1713) is a copy of an Isaac Beckett mezzotint.

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Beckett died in 1688, around the time Jemmy LaRoche was born. Consult Folger Shakespeare Library US-Ws ART 267-038. 7. Consult Kathryn Lowerre, “A ballet des nations for English audiences: Europe’s Revels for the Peace of Ryswick (1697),” Early Music 35 (2007): 419–34. 8. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 7. Consult also Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xvii–xx. 9. For an account of a traveling object with similar musical and performative implications in the sixteenth century, consult Jennifer Linhart Wood, “An Organ’s Metamorphosis: Thomas Dallam’s Sonic Transformations in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 15.4 (Fall 2015): 81–105. 10. John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn (London: Bickers and Son, 1906), 2:81. 11. Evelyn, Diary, 1:51. 12. Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 56–57. 13. Senex [Robert Reid], Glasgow Past and Present (Glasgow: David Robertson, 1856), 3:388. 14. The London Magazine, June 324/2 (1737). 15. B. E., A new dictionary of the canting crew (London, 1699), sig. K3r. 16. Edward Ward, The dancing-school with adventures of the Easter holy-days (London, 1700), 4. 17. The Anti-weesils (London, 1691), 14; Stephen Colledge, Ra-ree show (London, 1681); and Thomas Brown, A Satyr upon the French King, on the conclusion of the Peace at Reswick in Works (London, 1707), I.i.93. 18. James Caulfield, Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters, of Remarkable Persons (London: H. R. Young, 1819), 1:115. 19. An argument, proving that a small number of regulated forces established during the pleasure of Parliament cannot

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damage our present happy establishment (London, 1698), 17. 20. Altick, The Shows of London, 56. 21. Stephen Colledge, A Ra-ree Show (1681), RB 135850, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. B. J. Rahn, “A Raree-Show—A Rare Cartoon: Revolution Propaganda in the Trial of Stephen College,” in Studies in Change and Revolution, ed. Paul J. Korshin (New York: Scholar Press, 1972), 77–98. 22. Rahn, “A Raree-Show,” 82. 23. Colledge, A Ra-ree Show. 24. The arraignment, tryal, and condemnation of Stephen Colledge for hightreason (London, 1681), 20. 25. Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth- Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 212. 26. Poems on Affairs of State: From 1640 to this present year 1704 (London, 1702), 3:62. Consult also James Woodfall Ebsworth, ed., The Bagford Ballads: Illustrating the Last Years of the Stuarts (Herford, UK: Stephen Austin and Sons, 1874), 2:744. For more on the “Duke of Norfolk” tune, consult William Chappell, Popular Music of Olden Time (London: Cramer, Bealk, and Chappell, 1855), 1:117–20. Consult also “The Duke of Norfolk” basic tune structure transcribed in Claude Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 332. 27. Consult Sarah F. Williams, Damnable Practises: Music, Witches, and Dangerous Women in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 49–87. 28. L——gley C——s His Lamentation in New-Gate (London, 1684). 29. Thomas Jones Howell, David Jardine, and William Cobbett, eds., A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings (London: Hansard, 1811), 7:959. 30. John Wade, British History Chronologically Arranged (London: Bohn, 1843), 244.

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31. L——gley C——s. 32. Peter Motteux, Europe’s Revels for the Peace (London, 1697); This dialogue between Mrs. Willis and Mr. Wiltshire, and the two following songs in the musical interlude for the peace, performed at the theatre in Little Lincolns-Inn-Fields. Set by Mr. John Eccles (London, 1690). 33. Lowerre, “A ballet des nations,” 421–22. 34. Motteux, Europe’s Revels, sig. [A4v]. Consult, for example, Matthew Jenkinson, Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010), 158–59. 35. The music, matching the tune in Figure 7.4, is printed in a 1690 song sheet: This dialogue between Mrs. Willis and Mr. Wiltshire, and the two following songs in the musical interlude for the peace, performed at the theatre in Little Lincolns-Inn-Fields. Set by Mr. John Eccles, (London: Henry Playford, 1690), Harvard University Library, Mus 9713.692f[30] [8], [1] pp. 330–31. 36. Thomas Durfey, The campaigners (London, 1698), sig. A4v. 37. Motteux, Europe’s Revels, 11. 38. Consult Jeremy Barlow, The Enraged Musician (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 67, 92, 179. Consult Hogarth’s works Southwark Fair, The Beggars Opera Burlesqued, and A Just View of the British Stage, for instance. 39. Francis Bacon, The historie of the reigne of King Henry the Seventh (London, 1629), 25. 40. Richard Baxter, Richard Baxter’s dying thoughts upon Phil. I, 23 (London, 1683), 288. 41. B. W., An additional discovery of Mr. Roger L’Estrange his further discovery of the Popish plot (London, 1680), 13. 42. Lowerre, “A ballet des nations,” 426. 43. Lowerre, “A ballet des nations,” 426. 44. Edward Ward, O raree show (London, 1698). Harvard University Library, Wing 752. 45. O raree show (London, 1712). Because the texts are so similar, this could also be a reprint.

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J e m m y L a Ro c h e’s “R a r e e Show ” 46. Consult Abbie Weinberg’s chapter in this volume for an exploration of how sensory accounts written by the Royal Society stand in for the experiments with Prince Rupert’s drops. 47. Consult Brown, A Satyr upon the French King, I.i.93; Henry Fielding, Tom Thumb (London, 1737), iii.iv.43. 48. Joseph Peterson, The Raree Show: or, The Fox Trap’t (York, 1739), 27. 49. Harris, Untimely Matter, 10–15. 50. Consult Sarah F. Williams, “‘A Swearing and Blaspheming Wretch’: Representing Witchcraft and Excess in Early Modern English Broadside Balladry and Popular Song,” Journal of Musicological Research 30.4 (2011): 309–56; Williams, “Witches, Lamenting Women, and Cautionary Tales: Tracing ‘The Ladies Fall’ Through Early Modern English Broadside Balladry and Popular Song,” in Gender and Song in Early Modern England, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 31–46; and Williams, “‘Lasting-Pasted Monuments’: Memory, Music, Theater, and the Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballad,” in Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England, ed. Linda P. Austern, Candace Bailey, and Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 96–113. Consult also Harris, Untimely Matter, 15–16. 51. Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 6. Consult also Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–13. 52. Consult Bloom, Voice in Motion, 6, 17. 53. For more on early modern memory studies, consult Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Erin Minear, Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton: Language, Memory, and Musical Representation (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011);

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Pierre Iselin, “Myth, Music, and Memory in Richard II, Hamlet, and Othello,” in Reclamations of Shakespeare, ed. A. J. Hoenselaars (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 173–86; David Cressy, “National Memory in Early Modern England,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 61–73; Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams, Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–17; Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Carruthers, The Craft of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7–59; Lina Bolzoni, “The Play of Images: The Art of Memory from Its Origins to the Seventeenth Century,” in The Enchanted Loom: Chapters in the History of Neuroscience, ed. Pietro Corsi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 16–65, and Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, trans. Jeremy Parzen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 236–59; Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 197–230; William Engel, Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 1–11, and Engel, Death and Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 389–93; Andrew Hiscock, Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–36; and Lina Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theater: Recollection, Properties, and Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 10–13, 24–58. 54. Consult Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (New York: Routledge, 1998), 183–207. 55. Harris, Untimely Matter, 7.

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Chapter 8

Protean Objects in William Percy’s The Aphrodysial or Sea-Feast Maria Shmygol

The focus of this chapter is an unpublished manuscript play by William Percy (ca. 1570–1648), The Aphrodysial or Sea-Feast. Originally composed in 1602, The Aphrodysial was subsequently revised and is extant, along with Percy’s other plays, in authorial transcriptions dating from the 1640s.1 Despite the fact that Percy’s plays have generally been dismissed as amateur works of little merit, more recent criticism has revealed the value of attending seriously to his oeuvre.2 This chapter demonstrates the fruitful contributions that The Aphrodysial can make to this volume’s investigation of dynamic matter in the Renaissance by considering the material state of the extant manuscripts and exploring the protean nature of two objects that figure prominently in the play: a magic bracelet and a prodigious talking whale. The play is deeply concerned with protean transformations and disjunctions between form and matter as they operate both in the context of dramatic action and at the level of creative process. Percy adapts myths and dramatizes characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and invokes many other familiar literary sources in order to construct an underwater play-world filled with characters that disguise or

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transform themselves in order to pursue their amatory desires.3 This type of creative reconfiguration of literary material in itself embodies what Jonathan Bate and others have identified as an essentially Ovidian process of literary transformation.4 Ovid’s influence on early modern writers is well documented, particularly in studies that focus on drama and “theatrical Ovidianism.”5 And yet, despite the fact that The Aphrodysial participates directly—and meaningfully—in similar processes of imitation, it has remained untouched by scholars interested in classical reception and textual afterlives. Particularly relevant to the present volume’s collective thinking about dynamic matter is the fact that the play dramatizes the figure of Proteus, who was often invoked by early modern writers as a metaphor for mutability and deceptive appearances.6 In classical literature, Proteus was associated with prophetic ability; he was also a shapeshifter who could transform himself into various animate and inanimate objects, yielding up his true form only when caught and compelled.7 One of the most frequently discussed early modern uses of the Proteus metaphor is perhaps that of Francis Bacon in his work on the new scientific method, in which the sea god’s elusive shapeshifting illustrates the problems of relying on visual appraisals of outward form as an indication of a thing’s true essence, a topic also discussed in the introduction to this volume.8 Literary scholars such as David Hawkes and Lauren Weindling have productively put Bacon’s uses of Proteus into conversation with early modern drama and theatricality, revealing how the epistemological anxieties about form and matter that are foundational to Bacon’s thinking are also a concern for dramatists; for example, Weindling explains how visually identical forms—represented by two sets of twins in The Comedy of Errors—illuminate how drama can draw attention to the dangers of relying on visual form as an indication of true matter.9 This chapter will demonstrate that The Aphrodysial also explores the problems of form, matter, and metamorphosis, doing so not chiefly through the figure of Proteus himself but through the play’s enchanted objects, which take on protean qualities and highlight the limits and dangers of privileging the visual as a primary means of understanding a form’s true nature. Although The Aphrodysial was most likely never performed professionally, it is nevertheless a rich example of theatrical Ovidianism, one that yields valuable insight into how an aspiring writer engaged with and transformed familiar literary material

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into something new, largely by centering much of the adaptation around notions of uncertain materiality and transformation.

William Percy’s Protean Drama Percy’s play follows the events leading up to the “Aphrodysial,” a “SeaFeast” at the court of Oceanus, where Cytherea (better known as Venus or Aphrodite) presides over the festivities.10 Unsurprisingly, many of the play’s central concerns pertain to romantic pursuits, including Vulcan’s failed attempts to woo two sisters who evade his advances by means of metamorphosis. The play also features a novel adaptation of the Hero and Leander myth in which the lovers are pursued by Oceanus and a sea nymph, yet are able to rebuff their admirers and remain together. In a similar vein, both Neptune (disguised as Talus, the ingenious engineer apprenticed to Daedalus) and Jupiter (disguised as Arion) try to win the hand of Thetis. The sea goddess vows to marry the suitor who can find her lost magic bracelet, which in this play is referred to as a “ceston,” but neither Neptune/Talus nor Jupiter/Arion is able to locate it, deciding instead to counterfeit the ceston in order to trick Thetis. One of the counterfeits is forged by Vulcan, and another is obtained from Proteus.11 Proteus plays an important function in both the main plot, which is concerned with festivities and romantic pursuits, and the subplot, in which he leads a group of hapless fishermen in their attempts to capture a prodigious talking whale. As the final section of this chapter will argue, we ought to imagine that the whale materializes onstage sonically rather than visually, remaining hidden from the audience’s sight for the entirety of the play, even after the creature is “caught” and brought to Oceanus’s court as a gift for Cytherea. The underwater court is baffled by the whale’s apparent ability to speak, and Oceanus calls for it to be dissected in order to see whether anatomical investigation will provide answers. Much to everyone’s astonishment, during the dissection, an apprentice boy named Coüs is found inside the whale, having been swallowed by the creature. After this revelation, Cytherea presides as judge over a trial involving Thetis and her suitors, inviting Neptune/Talus and Jupiter/Arion to present their respective cestons so that she can test the bracelets’ veracity. Despite the cestons’ outward form—which replicates the physical shape of Thetis’s long-lost ceston—neither of the counterfeit copies possesses the magical

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or supernatural potency of the original. At this point, Coüs reveals that he has been in possession of the real ceston all along, having found it inside the whale. Thus, it becomes evident that the bracelet had granted him prophetic abilities and enabled him to speak from inside the whale, leading the fishermen to believe that the whale was a supernatural being. In this way, the prodigious whale is revealed to be an assemblage, which in its revelation to the fishermen and audience becomes deconstructed into several different parts: animal, human, and magic ceston. This unexpected metamorphosis of the prophetic whale into multiple constituent components is one of a larger series of resolutions that take place at the end of the play, where love suits are variously granted or denied, and order is thereby restored before Cytherea departs. This overview of the play demonstrates Percy’s interest in the literary and theatrical processes of metamorphosis. Percy reworks familiar mythological and literary material, and he centers the theatrical action around characters and objects whose true nature and identities are complicated by various types of shapeshifting. Percy’s Proteus retains some of his mythological characteristics, such as the power to prophesy and perform conjurations, but unlike the Proteus myths in Ovid and Virgil, he does not shapeshift or transform.12 Instead, these characteristics are projected onto the play’s central objects—the ceston and the whale—which metamorphose in visual and imaginative terms. Material transformations characterize not only the substance of the play but also the material state of the extant play manuscripts, in which multiple levels of revisions reveal that more than forty years after composing the play, Percy was still making authorial emendations to The Aphrodysial. Some of these revisions include determining the most appropriate descriptors for his play’s enchanted objects, which are discussed in further detail below. Critical work on early modern dramatic manuscripts by Grace Ioppolo, Paul Werstine, James Purkis, and others has demonstrated the inherently dynamic nature of playhouse manuscripts and documents of performance, attending to the collaborative nature and layered revisions of different agents that are often found on their pages.13 Likewise, recent work on “amateur” manuscript drama has attended to the layered processes of authorial revisions in texts that might never have been performed professionally but which nevertheless considered issues of staging and performance.14 Although Percy originally composed his first five

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plays between 1601 and 1603 and wrote a sixth in 1632, most likely for private performance, the earlier plays were probably revised not long after their initial composition, with a view to professional performance by the Children of St Paul’s and adult actors; these revisions, which envisage a live production, are evident in the copious stage directions, which offer alternative ways of performing the action depending on the company.15 Although there is no evidence that the plays were ever performed professionally, Percy’s careful attention to the presentation of stage action reveals a heightened engagement with staging and the possibilities of theatrical performance.16 For this reason, in my discussion of the play I use “audience” rather than “readers” because in his manuscripts Percy is thinking specifically about how the action should translate into live performance.17 Percy’s plays are extant in three authorial transcriptions: Alnwick Castle MSS 508 (1644) and 509 (1646) and Huntington Library MS HM4 (1647).18 The Aphrodysial is present in Alnwick 509 and HM4 only. In both copies, the play’s title page reproduces the year of original composition (1602) and preserves stage directions intended for the Children of St Paul’s, even though the company had long since ceased to perform.19 Like both manuscripts’ other plays, The Aphrodysial bears marks of authorial revision that further complicate the temporal trajectory of the play-text. Although both versions bear evidence of at least two stages of revision— namely, deletions, insertions, and emendations, the final readings of the play in Alnwick 509 and HM4 substantially agree with each other. These stages of revision are manifested differently in each manuscript: Alnwick 509 is the more “experimental” and visually noisy text, with cramped interlineations and copious cancellations signaled by crossing out; HM4 is more of a fair copy, in which care is taken to introduce the final substantial emendations via pasted-on slips of paper (Figure 8.1). The protean residue visible in the extant copies demonstrates that the play itself is dynamic matter. There is a temporal slipperiness in the disjunction between the date of composition and the date of the later transcription that calls attention to, or even undermines, the work as a “1602” play. The multiple layers of further authorial revision in both manuscripts highlight the dynamic nature of Percy’s play both as a polychronic material object and as distinct layers of a creative process. In this sense, the play-text resembles the Archimedes palimpsest, which Jonathan Gil Harris identifies as a key example of “untimely matter” on

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Figure 8.1. Page detail from fol. 139v of The Aphrodysial in MS HM4 (1647). Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

account of the manuscript’s physical state: it was a parchment upon which two of Archimedes’s treatises were inscribed in the fift h century, and it was later washed and scraped so that a Greek Orthodox liturgical text could be overwritten onto the same surface.20 Although Percy does not scrape away previous iterations of text in a manner characteristic of a conventional palimpsest, his manuscripts involve similar instances of these kinds of suppressions, intrusions, and conjunctions that bear witness to the layering of time and cycles of creative transformation. Such cycles of authorial and non-authorial transformations figure prominently in

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scholarship on early modern manuscript drama and textual editing, particularly in considerations of how digital editing can help make sense of the “untimeliness” and “intricate stratifications” found in so many dramatic manuscripts.21 The physical state of The Aphrodysial in Alnwick 509 and HM4, replete with stratifications and transformations, foregrounds the slippery, protean nature of key material objects and bodies in the play that are similarly prone to physical and imaginative alternation, replication, and transformation.

“To the Wonderment of All”: A Tale of Three Cestons Thetis’s ceston is an enchanted object that plays an integral role in The Aphrodysial, uniting two seemingly unconnected strands of the plot: the dual love suits of “Talus” and “Arion” and the prodigious whale. The physical form of the original ceston is replicated and counterfeited, meaning that three visually identical props are called for in the play. This proliferation of identical forms culminates in a “semiotic crisis” that highlights the dangers of privileging the visual as a means of understanding the essential nature of an object.22 This “crisis” occurs at the end of the play, when all three identical props are simultaneously present onstage, in order to demonstrate to the characters that they are not identical at all because their physical form is not a viable indication of their true matter. The three props, however, remain very much identical in the eyes of the audience, drawing viewers’ attention to the persuasive protean replicability and deceptive nature of physical form. While Thetis’s description of the “real” ceston links it with the realm of the visual, she also enumerates its dynamic capabilities: I had now many yeares agone A Ceston for my wrests, which long I held As pretious as my eyes, with this I quelld The waues, with this the waues I lykewise raised, When at any tyme I swom the Maine, Raisd lykwise with this th’Affections of loue. (fol. 126v)23 The enchanted ceston has the power to precipitate change in the natural world, both elementally and in the hearts of would-be lovers.24 The term “Ceston” derives from the Latin cestus, a type of girdle commonly

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Figure 8.2. Textual emendations in the 1646 transcription of The Aphrodysial. Archives of the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle, DNP: MS 509, fol. 131v. From the Collection of the Duke of Northumberland.

associated with Venus/Aphrodite/Cytherea, and consequently with love and marriage more generally.25 Although in the play the ceston belongs to Thetis rather than to Cytherea, it appropriately appears in the larger context of the “Aphrodysial” festivities in honor of the goddess of love. The Venus-figure and her ceston are often mentioned together in early modern literature; the item usually designates a decorative girdle worn around the waist. For example, in George Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris, Venus swears an oath on, among other things, “Vulcan’s gifte, my Ceston.”26 Robert Allott’s commonplace book England’s Parnassus contains an entry for “Ceston” that is largely adapted from the second edition of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (particularly book 4, canto 5, verse 6); Allott notes that Vulcan crafted the belt for Venus in order to ensure her fidelity to him. While both texts use the word “girdle” to describe the object in question, Spenser writes, “That goodly belt was Cestas hight by name,” and in England’s Parnassus Allott adapts this line: “This goodly Belt, was Ceston call’d by name.”27 Departing from this conventional use, Percy appropriates the name of Venus’s girdle in The Aphrodysial, in which the “ceston” becomes an ornament worn around the wrist, thus taking a largely familiar mythological object and adapting it to the needs of his play. The evolution of Percy’s thinking about the most appropriate means of describing this wrist ornament is evident in the layers of emendation in his manuscripts (see Figure 8.2, in which all three variants are visible on a page from the earlier of the two manuscripts). The initial rejected term, “Loue-rolle,” could

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designate either a girdle or a bracelet. The second rejected term, “Bracelet,” gestures more clearly toward an item worn on the wrist. The final term, “Ceston,” may be less direct in describing an ornament worn around the wrist than “Loue-rolle” or “Bracelet,” but it links the magical object more explicitly to classical iconography. The textual signifiers in the manuscripts thus reveal a degree of indeterminacy regarding this object. Coincidentally, there are three textual “variants” of the object, just as there are three cestons that are supposed to materialize in the play as props. Despite knowing that Thetis’s ceston possesses magical properties, her suitors decide to counterfeit its outward form to fool the goddess. Neptune/Talus visits his “father,” Vulcan, and asks him to forge a ceston using his metallurgical skills: The Busts of Iupiter be made you know Of Scalding Austers [heat], of Freezing Aquiloes [cold], Of Fyre, of Hayle and Rayne, Now of same stuff If you might work lyke Ceston vnder gold Enameld to bleare her sight I would not Doubt but t’obteyne the fruite of my long suite. (fol. 134v) Neptune/Talus’s plea invokes the mimetic reproduction of Jupiter’s image in metal, which foregrounds the transformation of a numinous being into an engineered “counterfeit,” calling to mind the wider literary associations of Vulcan as a builder of enchanted statues and automata.28 Talus wishes to “bleare,” or blur, Thetis’s sight, which may allude to simply deceiving her eyes or to a process of literally overpowering her vision. The process of visual deception envisaged here in relation to the mimetic mechanical reproduction of a dynamic object speaks to wider early modern cultural and literary interests in mechanical marvels and automata.29 Thus, the first of the two counterfeits is aligned with metallurgical and mechanical arts, created by the collusion of two mythological characters associated with marvels of engineering. By contrast, Jupiter/Arion utilizes the power of his orpharion to charm Proteus into helping him acquire an imitation of Thetis’s ceston: They say, there dwelles, in parcell of these Seas, A God, that hath a Dreame for euery Thing (He that dreames Thetis shall haue a Sonne more

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Greate then the Gods, if she but wed with them) Him will I trye, And (As Orpheus moued Grim Dis of Hell) once trye my Art, and see, I may obteyne a Dreame vnto this Ceston. (fol. 139r)30 The juxtaposition of “Dreame,” used here as a concrete noun (in the sense of “illusion”) and “dreames” as a verb (in the sense of “prophesy”) disrupts a clear distinction between the tangible and intangible materialization of visions and illusions.31 Percy offers two possible ways of staging the revelation of Proteus’s “Dreames,” which are inanimate physical objects that represent in visual terms the shapeshifting of the mythological sea god: “The Hall opening, was seene a summer Noone day couch of Sand cullour, with a Sort of dreames Animate and Inanimate of diuers cullours hanging by Inuisible or on Ash cullour Threds of Sylk ouer bolster of the Couch (it bolt and erect) being but bigge as Pawns of chesse. Or Proteus with sundry such in a Mawnd about his neck” (fol. 139r, stage direction). The “dreams” are conceived of as trinket-like objects resembling a monkey, cat, and mongrel; a jackanapes; and “a Bracelet of gold, The Rolles writhen enterchangeablye the one Rolle black the other of diuers cullours enameld” (fol. 139v, stage direction).32 Proteus’s fabled transformational ability inflects the supposed physical presence of these objects with an unsteady sense of materiality, rendering the true substance of his “Dreame” ceston uncertain. The ceston as a material property is replicated throughout the play; multiple copies of its physical form are propagated in ways that call attention to the deceptive nature of physical form, highlighting the difference between the outward form of an object and its true essence. Vulcan produces one counterfeit by means of metallurgy, which involves the creation of new matter generated by changing states—liquid and solid—of different substances, which are then further manipulated by the artisan. Proteus’s counterfeit “Dreame” ceston may arise from a process invested in magic, which yields an object with a potentially uncertain physicality. In this sense, both counterfeits result from transformational processes aided by mechanical and numinous forces. At the end of the play, Cytherea adjudicates over the would-be lovers’ suits to Thetis, who each present their cestons and claim that “Myne it is [real] th’Experience will showe” (fol. 148v). Cytherea’s initial visual appraisal leaves her stunned:

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What doe these my Immortall eyes behold? The Rolles be one, the Figures be alyke, The Gold, the shape, the weight, the workmanship, Now if in Properties they also meet Cytheræa shall not tell what to weet. (fol. 148v) Cytherea is unable to decide which of the cestons is authentic based on her normative visual examination of their physical appearance, which prompts Thetis to reveal a secret, nonvisual characteristic of her ceston: “by this, / Alone, I also trewly Prophesyde, / Expounded dreames, and vttered Oracles, / To the wonderment of all that hearde mee” (fol. 149r). This revelation aligns her ceston with a chief protean characteristic—the power of prophecy—which then becomes a test of the object’s inherent “Properties.” Unsurprisingly, the suitors’ counterfeits cannot replicate the oracular abilities of the original—yet Coüs, the apprentice boy recently released from inside the whale’s belly, produces the real ceston, which can. The discovery of the authentic ceston is thus undermined by the farcical circumstances of the revelation: the enchanted object is reclaimed by the lowliest character in the play, who had profited from the object’s powers while trapped inside the whale. Percy’s magic ceston is at once a theatrical prop in a larger network of physically identical theatrical props and an extraordinary object in the play-world that affirms “matter’s imminent vitality,” to borrow a phrase from Diana Coole and Samantha Frost.33 Coole and Frost’s work attempts to redress the “opposition between mechanistic and vitalist understandings of (dead versus lively) matter,” and Percy’s three cestons offer an interesting case study in how theatrical objects and props can be utilized to draw distinctions between different categories of “matter,” even when they appear in a play that was likely never performed professionally.34 The Aphrodysial is fertile ground for exploring the imaginative workings of an “enchanted materialism,” in which the agency exerted by the magic ceston threatens to collapse the boundaries between living/dead matter and the binaries of object/subject, particularly when it is bound up with Coüs in the whale’s belly.35 Coüs’s admission, “I found him [the ceston] in the Fishes belly, And / for the same I am Canonized sure” (fol. 149r), reveals that what the fishermen thought was a “Monstrum Horrendum” was an incidental construct

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arising from the assemblage of the ceston and Coüs within its anatomical framework rather than a supernatural being in its own right, even though the play had earlier suggested this possibility.36 Coüs’s mention of “canonization” (in the sense of being deified or glorified) refers to the piscatory feast he received from the fishermen while inside the creature, “where I had such honour done vnto mee, / As neuer Prince the lyke, Moreouer spake / Greeke, Latin, French, Nay vttered oracles” (fol. 148r).37 Thus, it emerges that forasmuch as Coüs was ventriloquizing the whale by projecting his voice from within its body, he himself was being ventriloquized by the ceston, which demonstrates the power of the object as a prosthetic conduit of supernatural knowledge that—true to Thetis’s earlier description of it—has the power to animate and transform. The ceston exists in a plurality of forms that are at once visually identical and essentially different. The enchanted object raises taxonomic questions as it passes through multiple iterations: miraculous (as the preserver of Coüs’s life and agent of his “canonization”); supernatural (as intimated by Proteus’s “Dreame”); and mechanical (as intimated by Vulcan’s metallurgical arts). It is an object that functions as a type of “quasisubject” because it has a discernible degree of agency and vitality that is most effectively demonstrated when the onstage characters and the audience alike realize that the prophetic whale was, in fact, an embedded network animated by the power of the ceston.38

“Monstrum Horrendum”: Unlikely Transformations and Sonic Materiality Whales hold a notable place in early modern theatrical culture: they were repeatedly invoked as metaphors for excessive size and appetite on the playhouse stage, and they sometimes materialized physically as pageant devices and painted scenery in civic festivities and court masques. While Dan Brayton has demonstrated the prevalence of cetacean verbal metaphors in early modern drama, The Aphrodysial is exceptional in actually “staging” a whale as a speaking character.39 I argue here that the talking whale is performed sonically through the voice of a human actor rather than via visual materialization by means of a prop-object.40 In The StageLife of Props, Andrew Sofer proposes that “actor and prop are dynamic sign-vehicles that move up and down the subject-object continuum as

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they acquire and shed action force in the course of a given performance”; I would posit that Percy’s whale, which does not necessarily materialize as a prop, nevertheless fluctuates on this subject-object continuum by other means, inviting reflection about the limits of apprehending matter on visual terms alone.41 Although Martin Wiggins suggests that The Aphrodysial calls for a whale prop large enough to contain a boy actor and that this prop be opened up onstage at the end of the play, I contend that Percy intended for the whale to remain unseen by the audience, given the absence of evidence for this possibility in the play.42 Scholarship on Percy’s plays highlights the detailed nature of his copious stage directions, which typically describe costumes and staged properties, yet no such details or physical descriptions are included for the whale. The dramatis personae simply lists “A Balene [whale], otherwise Coüs” (fol. 120v). In a description of the play’s chief “Properties,” which precedes the play, Percy calls for “The Balenes Den” to be placed in “a corner of the stage” (fol. 120v), and no further reference is made to a whale property here or in later directions. The likelihood that the whale is visible to the stage characters but hidden from the audience is supported by the fact that the action of the whale subplot focuses on the fishermen’s futile efforts to extract the creature from its den.43 The decision to deny the whale’s visual presence onstage by confining it to its den might have been shaped by Percy’s practical concerns with what he thought could plausibly be staged by either the children’s or the adults’ companies. However, this denial of the visual makes the whale a more dynamic type of “object,” since giving the creature a concrete, visible form by means of a prop would limit the scope of the imaginative visualizations invited by the dialogue. The hidden physical form of the whale can thus remain a site of imaginative possibility. Whereas the ceston is repeatedly handled and linked with the visual and haptic senses, sound is given preference over sight for the audience as far as the material representation of the whale is concerned. Although onstage characters utter many remarks about the whale’s physical appearance, its material presence onstage is manifested chiefly through the voice of the actor who plays Coüs. Although this might constitute the whale as a “failed” visual object, given that it does not materialize in the expected way, its sonic materialization nevertheless renders it “physically” present. Gina Bloom’s work has demonstrated that “the human voice possesses

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a number of attributes we might readily associate with material substances,” and both Sarah F. Williams’s and Emily E. F. Philbrick’s chapters in this collection similarly invite us to consider the material properties of sound.44 I would suggest that the materialization of the whale in Percy’s play through sound rather than sight emerges as a useful example of how encounters with materiality and form do not necessarily need to be confined to the realm of the visual, indicating that matter can be manifested and apprehended through other means.45 Gina Bloom questions the tendency of literary scholars to “limit ‘matter’ to visible and tangible realms” and makes the case for thinking of the voice as a material presence.46 She notes that “materiality of the voice [is]: durable, substantial, and potent, yet at the same time transient, disembodied, and ephemeral,” and her argument that “voice destabilizes any easy assumptions about the category of matter” is crucial for understanding the whale as an ambiguous, protean subject/object in the play.47 The whale, together with the three cestons, can be read as part of the play’s larger comments about the limits of verisimilitude and the supposed “failure” of physical objects when approached only on visual terms. Having the whale materialize sonically by means of a human voice undermines the visual “thingness” of the creature—all the more so when Coüs emerges onto the stage once the whale is dissected. In this way, the whale’s limitations according to the visual spectrum are compounded by its eventual collapse into the emergence of a human actor whose voice had hitherto materialized the creature as a rich site of material possibilities. The whale’s body, even if it remains unseen, makes imaginative demands of the audience. The fishermen’s various descriptions of the creature render the whale as a protean entity that metamorphoses through different interpretive categories: it is variously cast as an economic commodity to be caught and sold, a “Monstrum Horrendum” (fol. 124r), and an oracle. These imaginative shifts mirror the play’s wider preoccupation with disguises, metamorphoses, and uncertain or indecipherable visual forms. Percy’s whale invites us to grapple with different kinds of materiality—visual, physical, and sonic—and, in so doing, also collapses the subject/object binary. The hidden body of the whale becomes a surplus of accumulated meanings that place the creature in a network of different material possibilities. The imagined body of Percy’s whale is a protean entity; it metamorphoses through competing verbal descriptions,

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evading firm placement into any category and continually shifting and forestalling its adherence to a fi xed state, because the play shrinks away from allowing the creature to embody any one of the interpretive categories applied to it by the play’s characters. Instead, Percy plays a trick on the audience by having the whale materialize visually at the end not as a denizen of the underwater world but rather as the human actor who plays the role of Coüs. The whale is first introduced in the context of fishing, when the fishermen seek help from Proteus to “quell the rage of yond leviathan” (fol. 124r). The fishermen’s first detailed description of the whale invites the audience to visualize an unnatural, monstrous body: “It is a Thing Absonaunt in Nature, see what Fegaries the villaine will fetch. He roareth lyke Thirty Barril of gunpowder, He springeth at a spring Three Acres, of water, He squirteth Fyre not onely before but also behind” (fol. 124r). The “Fegaries” (pranks or tricks) performed by the creature involve material emanations from its body. The whale’s roars are likened to the sounds made by exploding barrels of gunpowder, which figure its voice—the means by which the creature “materializes” onstage—in terms of a volatile material substance, the dynamic power of which is unleashed when it is transformed by the addition of fire. The description of the whale as “a thing Absonant in Nature” is particularly provocative because it implies that the creature is “unreasonable, unnatural; incongruous or inconsistent with” the order of nature.48 On the one hand, this portrayal refers to the creature’s uncertain ontological status, but the terms used to describe the whale’s body here conjure a mechanical device rather than an organic, natural body. The whale is figured as inanimate matter artificially brought to life. This description clearly calls to mind the kinds of artificial whales and dolphins that featured in civic pageantry, particularly in water shows devised for royal celebrations and the annual Lord Mayor’s Day processions on the river Thames.49 Such devices, often designed to be peripatetic, could be carried by concealed porters on land or operated from within when waterborne, with the potential to use hydraulics and pyrotechnics for shooting water and fireworks. For instance, records from the Ironmongers’ Company indicate that such a device was used in its 1609 Lord Mayor’s Show: a whale “rounded close without sight of the boate and to row with ffins / open for ffireworkes at the mouth and water vented at the head.”50 Although contemporary illustrations of such devices are rare,

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Figure 8.3. Plate illustration depicting a dolphin pageant device used in the 1616 Lord Mayor’s Show, from John Gough Nichols, The Fishmongers’ Pageant, on Lord Mayor’s Day, 1616: Chrysanaleia, The Golden Fishing. Collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library, DA681. N4 (flat). Photograph by Maria Shmygol.

a manuscript drawing of a piscatory pageant used in the 1616 mayoral show is extant in the records of the Fishmongers’ Company (Figure 8.3). Michael Witmore has argued that these types of pageant devices can be thought of as types of automata on account of their capacity for apparent self-propulsion.51 The wonder and delight prompted by the seemingly “artificial” movements and animation of such larger-than-life animal pageant devices align their intended effects with those of actual mechanical automata, which do not rely on hidden human agents for movement. Percy was no doubt familiar with civic pageants from the time he spent in London as a young man, and the invitation for his imagined playhouse audience to envisage the whale as a hydraulic-pyrotechnic device is unsurprising, given that it would be a culturally familiar point of reference for London’s theatergoing audiences.52 This conceptualization of the whale as a mechanical prop might also have been influenced by Percy’s familiarity with masque texts, which often described elaborate mechanical devices, beasts, and sea creatures.53 In The Aphrodysial, the fishermen’s description of the whale’s body invites the audience to imagine familiar pageantry and automata that represent the likenesses of living creatures using wood, plaster, cloth, metal,

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hydraulics, and pyrotechnics. If Percy had intended for the whale to materialize visually onstage for the audience, it would have done so precisely in these terms, which would reduce the creature visually to a nonorganic prop-object, rather than the dynamic subject that it is in the play. Keeping the whale out of sight would enable Percy to offer the audience competing verbal descriptions that perpetuate a broader range of material possibilities for the prodigious creature’s body. Forasmuch as the fishermen in The Aphrodysial wish to apprehend the whale as an object to be caught, their plans are foiled by its subjectivity. The whale evades both straightforward physical capture as well as apprehension through definite categorization on an ontological level.

Conclusion: Protean and Multisensory Materiality The whale’s unsettling subjectivity leads the fishermen to commodify the creature not in terms of its blubber and other marketable elements but rather as an object that carries an entirely different kind of currency: they wish “to present him, this now Aphrodysiall, to Cytheræa, for a Prodigie” (fol. 143r). The whale’s unnatural prophetic and linguistic abilities make it an ideal gift, echoing the wider cultural interest in collecting and displaying marvels.54 Once the whale is caught, the fishermen make a raucous entrance, heaving and pulling cables attached to the net that holds the creature. While it is possible at this point in the play that some sort of prop might be brought onstage, as Wiggins suggests, I would argue that the whale is still intended to remain hidden from the audience’s sight. The fishermen and other characters are imagined as crowding around the creature, and Cytherea commands them to “Waft asyde but, wee may consyder him” (fol. 147v). Significantly, no stage direction is provided to accompany the fishermen’s entrance or presentation of their catch, which is contrary to Percy’s preference for detailed stage directions throughout the play. Only after Oceanus orders the fishermen to “rippe ope his belly and see” (fol. 147v) whether the creature is harboring some numinous force does Coüs emerge as a visual representation of the erstwhile “Monstrum Horrendum” in this protean revelation of the whale’s “true” matter.55 Percy’s whale is intensely protean, metamorphosing across different interpretive categories imposed upon it by the stage characters. The

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fishermen’s visual appraisals of the creature figure it as a piscatory commodity, a monster, and a prodigy, but only by capturing and physically investigating the whale is its “true” nature revealed, as per the Proteus myth. The whale’s metamorphoses illustrate the Aristotelian “opposition between ‘form’ and ‘matter,’ according to which form is actuality and matter potentiality,” as well as the Aristotelian understanding of materiality as “dynamic process.”56 In The Aphrodysial, the whale embodies this type of dynamic process whereby its function and hybrid identity as a subject/object are constantly changing throughout the play. It is subjected to a range of competing descriptions and appraisals that arise from continually shifting interpretive frameworks: it is identified as a “Monstrum Horrendum” whose monstrosity lies partly in the fact that it evades straightforward categorization; it is physically worked upon by the fishermen, who attempt to lure it out of its den; and its body is a site for an accumulation of identities caused by the introduction of new objects and subjects into its anatomical framework. Ultimately, empirical investigation through dissection reveals the total meaning of the “Monstrum Horrendum” as an assemblage of formerly related objects and bodies: the carcass of the creature, the apprentice boy, and the magic ceston. Igor Kopytoff proposes that the “biography” of an object is a culturally constructed identity endowed with culturally specific meanings and classified into culturally constructed categories.57 Percy’s protean “Monstrum Horrendum” is an object that both participates in and defies this idea of “biography.” The onstage characters attempt to appropriate it into culturally constructed categories, but the creature resists and evades straightforward categorization. Percy draws on a range of familiar culturally constructed meanings relating to pageant properties, iconography, monster theory, and real, performed, and artificial wonder, in order to create a creature that embodies an excess of meanings. The protean whale evades and exceeds the limits of interpretation and physical representation, remaining instead as a hidden surplus—so much so that its material presence onstage and manifestation as a visual “prop” is ultimately denied, instead collapsed into the body of a human actor. The Aphrodysial is a largely overlooked play, but it nevertheless offers a valuable set of insights about different types of dynamic matter, particularly the processes of material and imaginative accumulation and metamorphosis. As this chapter has demonstrated, the protean nature of the play’s cestons and the prodigious whale draws attention to the dangers

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of relying solely on visual apprehensions of physical form for an understanding of its true nature. Percy’s adaptation of Ovidian material and other retellings of classical myths predicated on metamorphoses shapes his conception of these multivalent objects and their functions in the play. The eventual revelation of the cestons’ and whale’s true natures in The Aphrodysial highlights the dangers of investing too much authority in visual manifestations of physical form, in ways that have much in common with uses of the Proteus myth in early modern thinking about form, matter, and modes of empirical investigation. Percy’s preoccupation with materiality and metamorphosis in The Aphrodysial thus contributes productively to Dynamic Matter’s collective thinking about materiality and transformations, inviting us to reflect on how sonic and haptic perception, as well as other modes of engagement, can offer alternative ways of apprehending physicality and matter beyond merely human visuality. Rather, the magical bracelet and its copies, the prodigious whale, and even the manuscript versions of The Aphrodysial itself demonstrate the protean, multitemporal, and multisensory properties inherent in all matter.

Notes 1. William was the younger brother of Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland. He matriculated at Oxford and was part of a literary coterie of poets there. After spending time in London as a young man, he returned to Oxford, where he lived out the rest of his life in obscurity. Consult Reavley Gair, “Percy, William (1574–1648),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, https://doi.org /10.1093/ref:odnb/21962; and Harold N. Hillebrand, “William Percy: An Elizabethan Amateur,” Huntington Library Quarterly 1.4 (1938): 391–416. The Aphrodysial is accessible in unpublished thesis editions: Robert Denzel Fenn, “William Percy’s Aphrodysial: An Old Spelling Edition” (master’s thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 1990), http://hdl.handle.net/10388 /6062. A modern-spelling edition of the play is also available in Caroline Carpenter, “Through a Masque Darkly: William Percy’s Necromantes and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605” (PhD dissertation, Claremont Graduate University, 2015). I am currently preparing a scholarly edition of

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the play for Digital Renaissance Editions and a semi-diplomatic edition for the Malone Society. 2. In particular, consult Matthew Dimmock, ed., William Percy’s Mahomet and His Heaven: A Critical Edition (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), and Matteo Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 128–39. Madeleine Hope Dodds produced numerous articles on Percy’s life and works but frequently lamented the quality of his writing; consult “William Percy’s Aphrodysial,” Notes and Queries 161.14 (1931): 237–40 and “William Percy’s Epigrams,” 161.15 (1931): 257–61; “A Forrest Tragaedye in Vacunium,” Modern Language Review 40.4 (1945): 246–58. Hillebrand, “Elizabethan Amateur,” 409, offered a harsh assessment of the plays: “Dramatically and artistically they are wretched.” 3. Percy adapts material from classical texts like Virgil’s Georgics and Pliny’s Historia naturalis, as well as sixteenthcentury poems such as Christopher

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Marlowe and George Chapman’s Hero and Leander (London, 1598), Thomas Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis (London, 1589), and Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas’s La sepmaine, ou Création du monde (Paris, 1578). 4. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1–15; Richard Tarrant, “Ovid and Ancient Literary History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 13–33; and Colin Burrow, “Re-embodying Ovid,” in Cambridge Companion, 301–19. 5. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 15. Consult also Lisa S. Starks, “Ovidian Appropriations, Metamorphic Illusion, and Theatrical Practice on the Shakespearean Stage,” in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson (London: Routledge, 2019), 398–408; Lisa S. Starks, ed., Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Sean Keilen, “Shakespeare and Ovid,” in A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, ed. John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2014), 232–45; Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor, eds., Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 6. On Proteus in early modern literature, consult A. Bartlett Giamatti, “Proteus Unbound: Some Versions of the Sea God in the Renaissance,” in Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 115–50. 7. Consult Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004), 8.728–37 and 11.221–23; and Virgil, Virgil’s Georgics: A New Verse Translation, trans. Janet Lembke (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 4:387– 529. Consult also Peter Pesic, “Shapes of Proteus in Renaissance Art,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73.1 (2010): 57–82. 8. Consult Jenny C. Mann and Debapriya Sarkar, “Introduction:

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Capturing Proteus,” Philological Quarterly 98.1–2 (2019): 1–22; Peter Pesic, “Wrestling with Proteus: Francis Bacon and the ‘Torture’ of Nature,” Isis 90.1 (1999): 81–94; and William E. Burns, “‘A Proverb of Versatile Mutability’: Proteus and Natural Knowledge in Early Modern Britain,” Sixteenth Century Journal 32.4 (2001): 969–80. 9. David Hawkes, “Proteus Agonistes: Shakespeare, Bacon, and the ‘Torture’ of Nature,” in Embodied Cognition in Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern MindBody, ed. Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble (New York: Routledge, 2014), 13–26; Lauren Weindling, “Empirical Errors: The Comedy of Errors and ‘Knowing’ Metamorphosing Forms,” Philological Quarterly 98.1 (2019): 73–92. 10. George Abbot’s A Briefe Description of the Whole Worlde (London, 1599) notes, “Betweene Creta and Peloponnesus lieth Cythera, where was the fine Temple of Venus: who thereof by the Poets, is called Cytherea” (sig. G2r). On the origins of “Cytherea,” consult Gareth Morgan, “Aphrodite Cytherea,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 108 (1978): 115–20. The name “Cytherea” was used alongside “Venus” in Latin editions of the Metamorphoses, such as P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoseon libri XV (London, 1582), although Arthur Golding’s oft-reprinted translation (1st ed. London, 1567) uses “Venus” throughout. “Cytherea” is also used in English works such as T.W.’s The Tears of Fancie. Or, Loue Disdained (London, 1593), Christopher Marlowe’s Dido Queene of Carthage (London, 1594), The Passionate Pilgrime (London, 1599), and Robert Greene’s Alphonsus, King of Aragon (London, 1599). 11. Percy’s “Talus” conflates two different myths: “Talos,” or “Talon,” a bronze automaton made by Hephaestus (Vulcan) and gifted to King Minos of Crete, and “Talos” the inventor, otherwise known as “Perdix” (in the play Talus says Vulcan is his father, but his life story is nearly identical to Ovid’s account of

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W i l l i a m P e rc y ’s T h e A ph rody s i a l Perdix [Metamorphoses, 8.239–55]). On Talos myths, consult Lynsey McCul loch, “Antique Myth, Early Modern Mechanism: The Secret History of Spenser’s Iron Man,” in The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Wendy Beth Hyman (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 61–76; and Adrienne Mayor, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), esp. chapter 1, “The Robot and the Witch: Talos and Medea,” 7–32. Percy reproduces Arion’s story in his own translation of the fi ft h day of Du Bartas’s La sepmaine (Paris, 1578). 12. Proteus was also dramatized in The Masque of Proteus, performed in 1595, in which he supposedly metamorphosed into “a beautiful lady, a serpent, a casket of jewels, and a wounded friend.” Consult Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533–1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3: 1590–1597 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3:279. 13. Grace Ioppolo, Dramatists and Their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006); Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); James Purkis, Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration and Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Laura Estill and Tamara Atkin, eds., Early English Drama in Manuscript (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019). 14. Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers, chapters 2 and 3. 15. Their titles (as they appear in Huntington MS HM4) are as follows: The Cuck-queanes And Cuckolds Errants or The Bearing down the Inne (1601), Arabia Sitiens or A Dreame of a Drye Yeare (1601), The Faery Pastorall or Forrest of Elues (1603), A Forrest Tragædye in Vacunium or Cupids Sacrifice (1602), The Aphrodysial or Sea-Feast (1602), and Necromantes or the Two Supposed Heds (1632). On private

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performance, consult Dodds, “Aphrodysial,” 237; and “William Percy and James I,” Notes and Queries 161.1 (1931): 13–15. 16. On Percy’s stage directions, consult Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers, 128– 39; and Mary C. Erler, ed., Ecclesiastical London, Records of Early English Drama (London: British Library; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 278–91. 17. Dimmock, Mahomet, 41, suggests that the plays can be thought of as “readerly,” but consult Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers, 137–38, on the enduring importance of stage action in Percy’s manuscripts. 18. Alnwick Castle 508 breaks off partway through Vacunium and is missing The Aphrodysial and Necromantes. Percy possibly made earlier transcriptions of his plays in the 1630s (after composing his final play in 1632), because the extant manuscripts preserve supplementary songs dated 1636. 19. Consult Erler, Ecclesiastical London, 278–79. 20. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 13–19. 21. Elena Pierazzo, “Digital Genetic Editions: The Encoding of Time in Manuscript Transcription,” in Text Editing, Print and the Digital World, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 169–86, esp. 171. Consult also Matteo Pangallo, “Unseen Things Seen: Digital Editing and Early Modern Manuscript Plays,” in Early English Drama, ed. Estill and Atkin, 329– 44; and Michael Best, “Mutability and Variation: A Digital Response to Complex Texts,” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, vol. 5: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society 2007–2010, ed. Michael Denbo (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2014), 91–112. 22. Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), viii. 23. I quote the fi nal accepted readings of the text as it appears in HM4 (1647);

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citations will appear parenthetically in the running text. Cancellations are not reproduced here. 24. Enchanted or magical objects in early modern drama are discussed in Magical Transformations on the English Stage, ed. Lisa Hopkins and Helen Ostovich (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). On portable magic objects, consult also Mark Dahlquist, “Love and Technological Iconoclasm in Robert Greene’s ‘Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,’” ELH 78.1 (2011): 51–77; Jenny Sager, Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Emily E. F. Philbrick’s chapter in this volume. 25. Many early modern texts mention the “ceston” in relation to Venus, but there are instances in which “Cytherea” is used, as in Robert Herrick, Hesperides (London, 1648), sig. N7v. 26. George Peele, The Arraignment of Paris (London, 1584), sig. E2v. 27. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1596), sig. 2E2v; Robert Allott, England’s Parnassus (London, 1600), sig. 2K7v. 28. Alexander Marr, “Gentille curiosité: Wonder-working and the Culture of Automata in the Late Renaissance,” in Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. J. W. Evans and Marr (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 149–70, esp. 155. Consult also Mayor, Gods and Robots, especially chapters 5, 7, and 9. 29. For instance, consult Hyman, The Automaton; Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007); and Peter G. Platt, ed., Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture (Newark: Delaware University Press, 1999). 30. On music and enchantment, consult Linda Phyllis Austern, “‘Art to Enchant’: Musical Magic and Its Practitioners in English Renaissance Drama,” Journal of

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the Royal Musical Association 115.2 (1990): 191–206. On the figure of Arion, consult Jennifer Linhart Wood, “Arion’s Harp, Apollo’s Lute: The Instrumental Sounds of London’s Lord Mayor’s Shows,” in Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London, ed. J. Caitlin Finlayson and Amrita Sen (New York: Routledge, 2020), 116–37. 31. Consult OED Online, s.v., “dream,” n. 2, 2a. 32. The phrase “Rolles writhen” may allude to interlocking metal links. Alternatively, it may refer to a cable band bracelet, where two “rolls” are twisted together; consult Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533–1642: A Catalogue, vol. 4: 1598–1602 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 420. 33. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 9. 34. Coole and Frost advance a theory of materialism that is attracted to forms of vitalism that refuse the distinction between mechanical inorganic matter and organic systems. The blurring of the boundaries between organic and inorganic matter are explored in a Renaissance context by the essays in Hyman, The Automaton, in relation to “literary fantasies of animation” (3) and “vivified literary objects” (4). Consult also Marr, “Gentille curiosité,” and Mayor, Gods and Robots. 35. Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 9. This is a phrase cited by the authors from Jane Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), in which Bennett proposes “enchanted materialism” as a means of ascribing agency to inorganic phenomena. 36. In early modern English usage, “him” and “it” sometimes continued to be used interchangeably for the thirdperson singular nonpersonal pronoun, which for present-day readers of The Aphrodysial might serve to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman,

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W i l l i a m P e rc y ’s T h e A ph rody s i a l even if this was not a deliberate choice on Percy’s part. Consult Terttu Nevalainen, An Introduction to Early Modern English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 77, 80. 37. Consult OED Online, s.v., “canonize,” v. 2, 3. 38. Bruno Latour uses the terms “quasiobject” and “quasi-subject” to describe phenomena that are not “properly on the object side or on the subject side” in We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 50. Latour’s use of these terms comes in the context of discussing hybrid situations and entities that exist between nature and culture. 39. Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene’s biblical drama A Looking Glass for London and England (ca. 1589, published London, 1594) calls for a hell mouth property to represent a “Leviathan” that swallows Jonah and later casts him back out onto the stage, which might have been an influence for Percy; consult Sager, Aesthetics of Spectacle, 53–69. 40. Dan Brayton, “Royal Fish: Shakespeare’s Princely Whales,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, ed. Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 47–65. 41. Sofer, Stage Life of Props, 9. 42. Wiggins, British Drama, 4:420. Dodds, “Aphrodysial,” 260, suggests that even at this point the whale remains unseen by the audience. 43. Some of the stage directions indicate that the whale communicates from “within”: for example, “The Balene whisteld the Spanish Pauon to them / From within” (fol. 136v–137r). 44. Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 2. 45. A familiar example of a “material” voice is Echo, whose story is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (3.339–510), and who had an interesting afterlife in Renaissance performance. Consult Susan L. Anderson, Echo and Meaning on Early Modern

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English Stages (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 46. Bloom, Voice in Motion, 5. 47. Bloom, Voice in Motion, 2, 6. 48. Consult OED Online, s.v., “absonant,” adj. 1. 49. Consult Tracey Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011), 155–60; Roy Strong, Splendour at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and Illusion (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 130– 33 and 136–67; and Wood, “Arion’s Harp, Apollo’s Lute.” 50. Jean Robertson and D. J. Gordon, eds., A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, 1485–1640, Malone Society Collections 3 (Oxford, UK: Malone Society, 1954), 73. 51. Michael Witmore, “Arrow, Acrobat and Phoenix: On Sense and Motion in English Civic Pageantry,” in The Automaton, ed. Hyman, 109–26. 52. On Percy’s time in London, consult Madeleine Hope Dodds, “The Financial Affairs of a Jacobean Gentleman,” Archaeologica Aeliana 22 (1944): 91–109. 53. For Percy’s engagements with the conventions of masque texts, consult Hillebrand, “Elizabethan Amateur,” 407. Percy was friends with Thomas Campion, who devised masques at the Jacobean court and whose work Percy no doubt read. Several Elizabethan entertainments call for sea monsters that might have been represented through costume and scenery: Perseus and Andromeda (London, 1574, lost) and The Tilt Entertainment of Venturous Knights (London, 1581). In the Royal Entertainment at Elvetham (London, 1591), a giant pyrotechnic sea monster is changed into a snail. Sea creatures are used as props in Jacobean entertainments like Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (London, 1605) and Munday’s London’s Love Prince Henry (London, 1610). There is the possibility that this particular description of the whale was added sometime between the play’s original composition,

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in 1602, and the date of the earliest surviving manuscript, 1646. 54. Consult Evans and Marr, Curiosity and Wonder; Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); and Ken Arnold, Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). 55. The massed header names all characters that enter or are present in the scene; instead of “Balene,” which is listed in the scenes in which the creature speaks, “Coüs” is listed here because he visibly appears onstage for the first time. Consult Abbie Weinberg’s chapter in this volume for a related discussion of how

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textual accounts of multisensory objects stand in for the absent objects themselves. 56. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, eds., Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17. Harris and Korda also posit that “Aristotle thus understood materiality as a synonym not for physical presence, but for dynamic process; matter, in his analysis, is always worked upon” (17). 57. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 64–91.

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Chapter 9

“I’ll Drown My Book” Prospero’s Grimoire, Adrift Emily E. F. Philbrick

And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. Solemn Music. —SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest, 5.1.56–57

With these lines, Prospero declares an end to his role as the all-powerful magician and ruler of myriad spirits. Once rightful order is restored in the final act, there will no longer be a need to further sound his book, to speak it and exercise its potential. By claiming that he will drown his grimoire, the magic book from which he derives much of his power, Prospero forecloses the potential for wielding such power upon his return to Italy. Many of Prospero’s remaining lines focus on this divestment of power in its various forms and consequences: his staff is broken, Ariel is released, and Prospero relinquishes control of the island. This marks the end of the story for Prospero the magus—he will “retire” to Milan, “where / Every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.311–12).1 But what does this mean for the book?

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I propose that the very same act stripping Prospero of his magical potential simultaneously unlocks such magical potential for the tobe-drowned book. In fact, this book is an object of almost complete potential—a prop that, in many productions, never actually appears or materializes onstage.2 It is something we must imagine. All too often, it flickers out of being. In fact, the grimoire all but disappears in scholarship concerning the play.3 In this chapter, I bring this grimoire onto the stage, metaphorically speaking, and speculate about what this object might do, sense, and say if it were acknowledged as an actor. Inspired by Debapriya Sarkar’s theory of speculative poiesis, this chapter foregrounds object potentiality in The Tempest. Sarkar explores moments in the play in which subjugated characters speculate or imagine possibilities that, rather than move the plot forward, create spaces of potential—challenging the master plot and the master plotter, Prospero. I propose that Prospero’s library contains objects of potential—especially his grimoire—that, similar to speculative utterances, illuminate possibilities and challenge not only Prospero’s narrative of control but also anthropocentric narratives about human agency.4 In the introduction to this collection, Jennifer Linhart Wood asserts that there is much to be gained by delving into the world of objects, not only for what objects can teach us about human cultures of the past and our current historical moment but also for how such an endeavor can reframe our thinking about our existence within a world that is peopled with, well, quite a bit more than just people. Wood explains that challenging an anthropocentric view of the world leads to a breakdown in the binary construction of “subject” and “object,” allowing objects to become the subject of serious inquiry; by undoing this binary, nonhumans can be appreciated in more substantive ways than simply as screens onto which humans and cultures project their fantasies.5 As I will argue, focusing on the nonhuman actors in The Tempest allows us to explore complex systems of agency that are always more than human. In particular, I am interested in how these systems shape human acts of creativity, especially narrativity. Adjusting our perspective to consider a broader field of actors brings into clearer focus the potentialities that glimmer just outside our anthropocentric narratives. Many of the chapters in this book consider specific historical objects, things that had or still have a physical existence in the world. This chapter

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instead features a speculative object, a thing that appears—or, rather, does not appear—in a Renaissance play.6 I’m drawn to the grimoire in The Tempest in part because I assert, along with object-oriented ontologists like Graham Harman and Levi Bryant, that there is something essentially speculative about objects. We can imagine what a thing is only when it exists absent of human interaction. Instead of attempting to escape this conundrum, I want to embrace it and use it as an opportunity to think differently about imagination, speculation, and storytelling. Through a speculative object—one we must imagine—this chapter invites exploration of the essential objectness of our human imaginings, our desires, our songs, and our stories. The to-be-drowned book in Shakespeare’s Tempest is especially suited to my purposes for several reasons. First, it is magical. It is a grimoire, and while it is not historically singular because there is not one specific grimoire to which the play refers, there are plenty of actual grimoires that can help us imagine it.7 These books are repositories for occult knowledge, but that knowledge is recorded using nonhuman materials like vellum and ink. What is more, the magic practices described therein require practitioners to partner with other things—such as stories, sonic vibrations, and water—to accomplish their goals, perhaps engaging magicians in inhuman narratives and bending them to inhuman wills.8 Prospero’s grimoire similarly entangles him in an array of thing-relationships. With his book, he is a magician, but he is also a storyteller, and in fact his “magic arts” and his ability to tell a tale are often one and the same. The play, then, on some level is about the potency of narrative. As such, it provides an opportunity to consider questions about the inhuman that resides in human stories.9 The medium of this particular story—a play—is also appropriate because it resonates with some helpful metaphors employed by ActorNetwork Theory. Drawing on the metaphor of the theater to explain a non-anthropocentric model of agency, Bruno Latour explains that actors can quite literally be anything and (echoing Shakespeare) that the whole world is their stage.10 Acting is the condition of being, of vitality and existence. Everything that exists is an actor. Significantly, actors are never solo performers: they are always accompanied by other actors, other doers, in a vast network of emergent performance.11 The word “emergent” is important here because it highlights the potentialities inherent in performance.

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It is only in the narrative, the story told after the fact, that causality is normalized or naturalized, though in the midst of action there are many possibilities. Due to the emergent nature of action, and because stories, regardless of the teller or intent, are always made up of many actors, Prospero is never really in control of the stories that unfold in The Tempest. The play, as well as the sea storm, is bursting with potentialities that are always just about to overtake him. Indeed, the more Prospero protests that he is the source of his own power, the clearer it becomes that he is not. Considering Prospero’s use of magic to control others, Denise Albanese asserts that his authority “depends on . . . the discursive status of his knowledge—the fact that it is contained in books, in objects full of words.”12 Prospero knows the importance of telling, and performing, a good story. He narrates himself in a way that reduces the work of many to a solo act. But, as Albanese notes, part of this performance relies on his books, “objects full of words.” Their objectness matters. It is an essential part of their discursive power and their magic. To render visible again what Prospero has attempted to conceal, we need to dive into a world where humans are moved by “sweet airs,” where spectacle and speculation hold real power, and where causality is never as simple as it may seem. This chapter is divided into two main parts. In the first section, I consider the similarities between early modern ideas of magic and contemporary object-oriented theories of agency and meaning-making, using both to think about how our relationships with objects and stories—and especially with the objects that we employ to tell our stories—shape us. In the second part of this chapter, I apply this theoretical framework specifically to the grimoire in The Tempest, attempting to attune us to its book-story.

Metaphors and Magic Performed little more than a decade after the publication of King James I’s Daemonologie (first edition, 1597), The Tempest stages popular beliefs about magic in an enchanted world that would in many ways be quite familiar to an early modern audience.13 Richard Kieckhefer notes that the term “magic” has a certain degree of ambiguity built into it, originating as a way to describe the practices of a magus, or Zoroastrian priest, which were not well understood and consequently exoticized by the Greeks and

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Romans.14 The Christian tradition broadened the designation to include pagan practices, initially labeling magic as inherently demonic in nature. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, ideas began to change as distinct categories of “natural magic” and “demonic magic” emerged. Demonic magic continued to be associated with the occult and perverse, while natural magic—a label that often referred to aspects of nature not yet understood—began to develop into what we now call the sciences.15 A popular type of natural magic known as “sympathetic magic” was based on the idea that shared characteristics or roles allowed for agentive connection: “Sympathetic magic in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance identified the belief that effects could be created on a remote being by performing them on another object representative of that being.”16 Two points are of particular importance here. First, this type of magic relies on a stand-in, something similar (sympathetic) enough to the intended “being” to allow for vicarious transaction. Second, sympathetic magic allows us to think about causality, even agency, in ways that are not necessarily clear-cut; it may not be easy or even possible to trace a cause-effect relationship across actants. What is more, this kind of magic repudiates the subject/object binary; it can connect humans and animals, but it can also form connections between objects and even speech-acts or texts. The early modern concept of sympathetic magic shares significant similarities with theories of object-oriented ontology. What object-stories might take center stage if we regard the magic in The Tempest seriously, and how might those object-stories change the way we understand human stories, and even the way humans/characters tell and utilize story in the play?17 As Barbara Mowat explains, recent scholarship has tended to treat the magical elements of The Tempest as symbolic or metaphorical.18 While this approach has certainly led to some insightful theoretical work, I agree with Mowat that there is much to be gained from taking the text at its word and encountering its magical elements as magical. I contend, however, that one need not choose between these two frameworks; the enchantment of The Tempest can operate on a metaphorical level while at the same time retaining its magic. After all, there’s quite a bit of magic, and certainly magical thinking, required by metaphor. More than a figure of speech, metaphor forms connections between two unlike things. This isn’t a simple task: before the connection can be made, a similarity, a sympathy, must exist. Something of the other must

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already reside in these separate things. Crucially, some object-oriented ontologists, such as Ian Bogost, take metaphor out of the realm of human communication—more specifically, they assert that metaphor is not merely a special function of human language. Bogost explains that metaphor is the way two unlike things—what he terms “alien” things—are able to sense and perceive each other. It is through some shared characteristic (that nonetheless does not negate the alienness of a thing) that we can speculate about the perspective of another, whether that other be animal (human or otherwise), vegetable, or mineral. Metaphorizing, the act of making these connections, functions similarly to sympathetic magic. It can help us practice a magical way of thinking that is more congruous with the time period in which The Tempest staged its magic. This is a kind of magical thinking that challenges the way we commonly understand agency and causality. Although humans tend to edit the randomness out of causality, Timothy Morton argues that causation is not linear in practice. The closer we trace causality, the more it begins to look startlingly like magic: “A theory of cause and effect shows you how the magic trick is done. But what if something crucial about causality resides at the level of the magic trick?”19 Locating causality in what he calls “the aesthetic dimension”—the sensual dimension, the realm of the senses—Morton describes a world in which everything has the ability to sense.20 No, this is not a world of toasters that smell the bread they toast or balloons that hear themselves pop, though perhaps the world Morton describes is no less strange. We humans cannot know how a toaster senses bread, and it won’t get us very far to apply our own conventional five-sense model to nonhuman objects. Instead, we need to expand the way we think about sensing, about how one thing can experience contact with another. We need to imagine a world in which every object, regardless of its form and degree of material substantiality, can and does experience contact. This is how metaphor works outside human speech, as a sensual interaction between two unlike things, but it reveals something vital about how metaphor functions within human language as well. Throughout this chapter, I use the verb “speculate” to discuss how we create meaning and also how we might access nonhuman perspectives. Object-oriented thinking, like sympathetic thinking, requires speculation: a necessity reflected in the term speculative realism, which is used by many object-oriented theorists to describe their ontological perspective. Containing the root

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spec, speculation is etymologically tied to the sense of sight. I also frequently employ “imagine” and “sound” in similar ways. These sensoryladen verbs acknowledge an important aspect of human communication; namely, that we rely on sensory experience, on contact with a vast array of things, to make and convey meaning. Our language, then, is deeply metaphorical. It relies on our ability to sense, to sympathize with, an inhuman world. Sympathy, however, does not grant us complete knowledge of what it is like to be something else. It is a vicarious contact, one that retains difference even as it seeks out similarity. Because my purpose is to tell an objectstory, it is worth considering whether a human can imagine what it is like to be anything else. Although Bogost observes that “anthropomorphism is unavoidable, at least for us humans,” the need for meta/morphing, for trans/forming—for moving across forms and the perspectives of those forms—is itself an ontological payoff.21 It makes palpable our conglomerate nature; in order to speak of other things, we speak in and through those things. A book, then, is a particularly apt object with which to partner when exploring the alien in human stories because it makes material our entangled state. Our writings are multispecies, conglomerate. They are inhabited by other materials—animal, vegetable, mineral—necessary to the act of inscription but, at the same time, distinctly nonhuman and thus not fully accessible to us. Our understanding of what it means to be human might change if we learn to acknowledge those nonhuman others in human stories.22 For Prospero, this entanglement is compounded as he relies on his library, and his grimoire in particular, to perform his power on the island. He must look like, act like, and sound like a ruler in order to exert control over those he rules. Prospero uses story to bend other characters, other actors (for the play plays with this distinction between character and actor), to his will. It is a necessity for a colonizer—one who usurps, supplants. He must delegitimize other narratives because they make clear that his rule was neither just nor inevitable. This is the case not only for the human and humanlike characters he relies on; throughout the play, Prospero both identifies and disavows his book as the source of his powers. Perhaps at times he feels the need for it too keenly. Perhaps in those moments he can sense the power that the grimoire has over him.

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But what does the book sense, or what will it sense when it is set adrift in its journey away from Prospero? Unsounded by human senses, what does it become? My goal in asking this question is not to arrive at a solution but rather to speculate, to drift alongside the book as it performs— forms and transforms—relationships, acts, and actions. I invite us to attend to the aesthetic dimension by becoming more attuned to bookness. This kind of drifting is tumultuous, and we may even experience a certain degree of seasickness as our perspective shifts. We are, after all, traveling in a tempest, and not just the one Prospero claims to conjure. Steve Mentz draws on a watery metaphor to explain the experience of living within a world crowded with the nonhuman: “Human meaningmaking systems cannot encompass this oceanic chaos.” But, he notes, we might do well to follow Miranda’s lead in our reaction, arguing that “the only human response is sympathy: ‘O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!’”23 This adds another sensory verb to our metaphorizing vocabulary: attuning. To be attuned to something is to be aware of it, and even—if we want to consider the sonic consequences of the metaphor—to vibrate with it. Attuning is not, Mentz cautions, a way to control or even understand the chaos of an inhuman world in which we are quite small and quite adrift.24 What is the benefit, then, of attuning, of drifting within this crowded sea of being? Simply put, we cannot change where we are or what we are, but we can change our perspective. Acknowledging the nonhuman actors in human stories, the other bodies in the crowded sea, challenges anthropocentric narratives of control. It even challenges our narratives about what it means to be human. We are not the tamers or the colonizers of this vast world, though we may fancy ourselves as such. Fighting this reality causes us to remain in a state of seasickness. If we embrace it, though, we might not only survive the storm; we might flourish.25 I suggest that attuning ourselves to the inhuman stories that already occupy our own narratives gives us a more accurate picture of what it really means to be human. Drifting in this stormy space is fraught with dangers and risks. We may be enchanted at times, caught in sweet and solemn airs, tempted and lulled as Caliban, Ferdinand, and others are. We may meet with alluring possibilities, sharing with Antonio a desire to claim power and, alongside Gonzalo, dream up utopias. We may be dazzled by some objects, calculating riches, as Stephano and Trinculo do. We are touched by, pulled by,

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and swept up into a tempest. Following drifting objects requires us to realize that we, too, are adrift, which means that what attracts us, what tugs at our imagination and desires, alters our journey as well as our destination. We are not the sole shapers of this storm-story. Drifting alongside a grimoire can help us explore what Julian Yates calls “agentive drift,” “a way of representing agency as a dispersed or distributed process in which we [humans] participate rather than as a property which we are said to own.”26 Agentive drift is a model of agency and causality that embraces magical thinking; it often utilizes watery or airy metaphors in which agency becomes something that can move with, or as, a fluid element. But Yates also employs the metaphor of the parasite, a term he borrows from Michel Serres. Parasites are the nonhuman things that necessarily inhabit our spaces, sharing and shaping our actions to their own ends. They are why we cannot achieve the human-oriented ideal of complete control, even over ourselves.27 Parasites exist alongside/with/ within us, sometimes in symbiotic ways, sometimes as forces of destruction.28 Lest we imagine only those creatures we typically associate with the term “parasite”—insects, rodents, viruses—Yates chooses to explore agentive drift primarily through the narrative of John Gerard’s escape from the Tower of London in 1597, in which oranges, not insects, are the parasites.29 For Gerard, a religious prisoner, agency belongs only to the Catholic God who orchestrates the situation for the purpose of saving his devoted follower. If, however, we take into account the medium through which Gerard is able to communicate with his sympathizers both within and outside the Tower, as Yates prompts us to do, things become more complicated. Oranges provide the ink with which Gerard writes his secret messages. They also help Gerard form a bond with a guard who unwittingly enables his escape. These are a few of the roles oranges play in this story. Piecing together a parasitic story from evidence in prison records and Gerard’s own writings, Yates asserts that oranges are the things around which events unfold and through which the narrative progresses; they are necessary agents. They have value to Gerard, but that is in part because he is willing to become attuned to their various properties. In so doing, he might even be a vehicle through which oranges enact a very different kind of story, one about which we can only speculate. Like Gerard, Prospero is adrift in a world full of inhuman agents. His actions rely on the doings of others, but to maintain his narrative of control, he renders those others invisible as best he can. He is a potentate

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only in retrospect. Only after the performance, the acting of many actors, is his role clearly defined. That is because performance is emergent; with each act, with each doing, there is a translation, a transformation. Prospero is attuned to some of these transformations, and he attends to his studies because he understands the diligence that magic takes. It requires vast networks of knowledge and the cultivation of parasitic partnerships. If we drift alongside one of these agents—the magic book—and reimagine the story of this tempest, perhaps we can begin to perceive this vast sea of alien others. The grimoire, both with and without Prospero, engages in myriad modes of mattering and ways of storying. It is drowning in possibilities. In what follows, I cast the grimoire in a starring role as I retell some sections of The Tempest. In doing so, I employ the many metaphors highlighted thus far, perhaps at times stretching them to their limits. This is not just a stylistic preference; it is crucial to the story I want to tell. In my choice of verbiage, I aim to highlight the sensual and inherently inhuman in human language through words like “imagine,” “speculate,” and “sound.” At times, I also attempt to set this story vibrating with sonic resonances via the echoic nature of alliteration, highlighting the inherently uncanny in language and drawing attention to another sensual dimension of communication.

A Story of Possession, Soundings, and Sea-Changes Before the grimoire drowns, it drifts. It moves along with water, speech, air, ambition. But it is not passive; it has a pull, an allure. By his own admission, Prospero values his books more than he valued his ducal duties. He has neglected his responsibilities as Duke of Milan because he cannot resist the attraction of these objects and the ideas inscribed in them. His occult studies make him a stranger to his people and his position. He grows in his strangeness, “transported / And rapt” in his speculative explorations before he is set out to sea (1.2.76–77). It is only after his self-estranging activities that his brother acts against him, making manifest Prospero’s transformation from statesman to secluded scholar. Prospero proclaims, “Me, poor man, my library / Was dukedom large enough” (1.2.109–10). He is seduced, drawn away from human politics and toward the realm of occult objects by their alien allure. His attachments are touching, connecting, transforming in the realm of metaphor and

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sensual sympathy. They are also consequential, causal. As Graham Harman explains, “Causation is alluring.” It is a thing, not a result or explanation, and it attracts other things to it. It is also vicarious, meaning it does not happen when things bump into one another but rather takes place in an in-between, through a mediation. Causation, as a thing, is that mediation.30 Prospero does not choose his books over his dukedom. Neither do the books choose Prospero. It is more complicated than that. The attraction between Prospero and books is its own entity, and that entity pulls one to the other in sensual sympathetic connection. There is magic here, but it is not the sole property of the grimoire or the magician. Instead, it is what binds book and bibliophile, making them a multispecies writing machine, which is to say a storyteller.31 It is at once difficult and alluring to imagine nonhuman book encounters. What is it like for a book to speculate about seaweed, to become somehow attuned to it? It is, quite simply, impossible to know. However, it is important to engage in the act of imagining such alien sensing and sense-making because stories themselves are agentive: points of friction, they are agency itself.32 Eileen Joy builds on this idea, asserting that stories are agentive objects. They are alluring movers, pulling others to themselves and shaping through their interactions. In other words, the way we story encounters with books has consequences. Our engagement with them is transformative. And if we allow ourselves to speculate about book narratives, we may discover ways that both books and narratives partner with and use us. As Joy suggests, “the experience of narrative is also a rapprochement with a ‘persisting object’ that uses humans as an activation device, an on-switch.”33 Through this frame, it is the narrative, not the narrator, that is highlighted as the actor or primary source of agency. The human narrator is the tool for telling but not the sole originator of the tale. This is not to assert that humans are subservient in the meaning-making process, or rather, not that they (we) are more subservient than any other actor; instead, we are invited to recognize the essential in-betweenness of that process and of those who participate in it. Narrative is a place where actor and action mingle. Our book-oriented speculations, then, can provide insight into the ways our encounters with books form and transform us. When charged with the task of sending the deposed duke out to sea, Gonzalo, a Prospero sympathizer, wants to mitigate the punitive price for his friend by attempting to provide for his needs. Prospero and little

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Miranda will need food and clothing. But that is not all: the magician will also need his beloved books, the favorites of his library. Gonzalo’s benevolent act of provision still endears him to Prospero over a decade later, even in the midst of his revenge on the other Italians. He explains to Miranda: “so of his gentleness, / Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me / From mine own library with volumes that / I prize above my dukedom” (1.2.165–68). It is this sympathetic act of friendship, bringing together “lover-of-books” and “beloved-books,” that precipitates this sea adventure. But Gonzalo the mediator may have envisioned a very different use-value for the books, perhaps anticipating that these objects could be sold or exchanged for necessities and creature comforts. By enabling the partnership, he opens up possibilities, but he has no control over where they might lead. Prospero’s desire for his library first pulls him from his duties and then moves him away from his homeland. Drift winds carry him to an island, introducing him into a new (political) environment. Perhaps his ambitions have not been entirely negated, for he quickly seizes power, transforming from deposed into deposer and forcing servitude on Ariel and Caliban along with the other “spirits of the isle.” Later, in an unsuccessful act of usurpation, Caliban instructs Stephano and Trinculo to strike at the heart of Prospero’s power: Remember First to possess his books, for without them He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not One spirit to command. They all do hate him As rootedly as I. Burn but his books. (3.2.91–95) Caliban believes that Prospero’s power resides in his books. Take them, and the great magician is rendered harmless. The books, he insists, must be possessed. This is an especially potent directive when one considers that it is people, not objects, who are typically described as being “possessed” in the play. For example, when Prospero challenges Ferdinand after first seeing him with Miranda, he observes that Ferdinand’s “conscience / Is so possessed with guilt” (1.2.471–72); later, Sebastian wonders at the somnolence brought on by Ariel that possesses Alonso, Gonzalo, Adrian, and Francisco: “What a strange drowsiness possesses them!”

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(2.1.199).34 In these instances, possession means something more than taking ownership; it is closer to inhabiting. Possession is parasitic. Guilt and drowsiness alter their hosts. The books have already possessed Prospero, enabling his power. Caliban wants Stephano and Trinculo to perform an exorcism, and once they possess the books, they must destroy them. Perhaps Caliban is aware of the books’ allure and wishes to forestall other potential possessive partnerships that could lead to new despots. So he imagines another parasitic partner for the books—fire. An incendiary mediator, fire would transform books to ashes, a less alluring partner for those who seek power. But this potentiality is never realized. It remains a moment of speculative poiesis, what Sarkar describes as “a mode of creation that never brings a moment into actuality but is predicated on thought’s power to exist only as potentiality.”35 Despite Caliban’s intentions, the books retain their powers to possess and to enable possessors. And from a narrative point of view, both “magical fiction” and colonialist narrative inform The Tempest, as Albanese asserts: “The sign of that fiction, and of magic both, is Prospero’s books. They are the source of Prospero’s knowledge and authority, the basis of his control over the spirits of the island and over Caliban, its more material inhabitant, and ultimately, too, over Miranda, his daughter.”36 With these books, Prospero can construct narratives that enable him to perform his power. Narrative is the tool he most often uses to enforce Ariel’s bonds, reminding the spirit repeatedly—“Once in a month”—of how he set Ariel free from the prison in which the spirit was placed by Sycorax (1.2.262). When Prospero pronounces that it is only by his “art” that he rules the island (1.2.428), he discounts some of his most powerful partners. Stories, according to Latour, are mediators, modes of commerce, of translation, between two things.37 To use Bogost’s term, they metaphorize; for Harman, they are sites of vicarious causation.38 And in The Tempest, they are magic. Regardless of the term we choose to use, the fact remains that Prospero’s power, his ability to story, is never completely his own. He is at best a co-author. Noting the assimilative power of narrative, Stephen Greenblatt points out that narratives enabling political power or asserting some type of hierarchy necessarily have a counterpart: the unofficial stories that he terms anecdotes. Master narratives—colonizer narratives, like the ones Prospero tells to Ariel—are infested with might-have-been’s and might-still-be’s.

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Anecdotes, akin to what Latour calls “servant narratives,” are those unofficial versions of events that are not exactly history; they are not easily integrated into larger narratives.39 Anecdotes challenge official colonial history. Servant narratives challenge a type of official colonial history too, one in which the human exists as a superior being unto itself, an unpossessed possessor.40 But perhaps Prospero has some inkling about the different kind of relationship he shared with his grimoire. After all, grimoires are valuable objects, both for what they mean to their human users and for the extravagance of the materials that compose such a book. Mowat explains that users of grimoires were often also the creators or co-creators of these texts for two reasons. First, there is a necessity for secrecy concerning the content of such a book; practitioners guard these secrets, sharing them only with other practitioners. And second, in many instances, a task of the magus is to write out his own grimoire. His book is part of what makes him a sorcerer.41 The relationship between magician and manuscript book is an intimate one, filled with transformative contact that would likely have made someone like Prospero more aware of a grimoire’s other material existences—first as an animal hide, with its unique markings attesting to its life, and then as vellum, where some of these life-markings would presumably remain. But there are inky, mineral, vegetal lives in these ornate objects as well.42 Each grimoire is unique. The magic manifested by book and magician is also singular, but it is not isolated. It must be alluring, collecting to itself other collaborators. One such sympathetic symbiont is sound, particularly song. Song dominates the soundscape of The Tempest’s island, enticing both the characters and the audience through its enchanting allure. Produced by magical means, sung by the spirit Ariel, and performed in a heightened form of language, as all spells are, this sensual encounter may be as close as we come to direct contact with Prospero’s books.43 As much material as—if not more so than—Prospero’s hidden grimoire, sounds and songs on this island are also sites of speculative poiesis; they, too, draw us into their imaginative stories.44 In The Tempest, story and magic often move through sound and as sound, disorienting and reorienting people as well as other objects in the world of the play.45 The titular tempest and its accompanying sounds are sensual sites of agentive friction, pushing against human-centric modes

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of narrative agency. Ferdinand is quickly attuned as Ariel uses song to direct him, prompting him both to grief (by encouraging him to imagine his father drowned) and to love (by leading him to a place where he sees Miranda for the first time). Upon seeing Miranda, he assumes she must be “the goddess / On whom these airs attend!” (1.2.422–23). But what is the nature of these “airs”? Are they musical ayres? Spirits? Wind and breeze? Perhaps they are all of these things at once—sonic vibration, resounding as it touches spirit, singer, song, and listener, as well as everything in between.46 As one early modern writer described it, “Sound is presently receiued of the inbred Ayre, which it carryeth through the windowes of the stony bone . . . into the winding burroughs and so the Labyrinth, after into the Snail-shell, and lastly into the Auditory Nerue which conueyeth it thence vnto the common Sense as vnto his Censor and Iudge.”47 Ariel’s “Full fathom five” still sounding in his ear, Ferdinand experiences an airy agency as song carried on the “inbred Ayre” by, or perhaps as, spirits capable of attending a goddess. These airs are the very substance that carries these attentive spirits and their song “through the windowes of the stony bone” and reaches all the way to the “Auditory Nerue.” These airs do not only urge to action, they are action itself.48 Sound—like narrative, metaphor, and magic—is a mediator, both an object and an action. Sound sounds: it moves through/across/within what it touches, trans-vibrating as it trans-forms.49 Ferdinand is not the only one to comment on these airs in ways that hint at their complex and agentive nature. Caliban remarks that The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming, The clouds, methought, would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again. (3.2.135–43) These “sounds and sweet airs” become the medium through which Caliban can imagine himself in a different, far kinder story. For Caliban, sound bridges—and confuses—states of dreaming and wakefulness. He

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often hears these “sweet airs” as he awakes and, upon hearing them, is lulled back to sleep. He dreams stories in which he is rich, not orphaned and enslaved, where he may speculate about potential futures. These sounds offer him a different version of his story, a confusion between what is and what might be. But once this sweet sound-saturated sleep has passed, waking becomes painful; it shuts down possibilities as he is forced to engage with a world more attuned to the likes of Prospero. Caliban was once heir apparent on this isle: “This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother” (1.2.332). By the time we meet Caliban, he has been usurped by Prospero, but this shift was not instantaneous.50 Caliban speaks of a peaceful period in which he exchanged with Prospero knowledge for knowledge, story for story: When thou cam’st first Thou strok’st me and made much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries in’t, and teach me how To name the bigger light and how the less That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee And showed thee all the qualities o’th’isle: The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile. (1.2.333–39) But when Prospero asserted power over Caliban, making him an unwilling subject, Caliban’s narrative transforms into an anecdote, a servant narrative, a story attesting to the presence of other possibilities in Prospero’s history of the island. Caliban’s narrative is a challenge in more ways than one. His speech switches between prose and the iambic pentameter of blank verse, the dominant meter of the play, a difference that registers sonically and signals that he is a being in-between. Through his speech patterns, he can align himself with this other history, one in which he was not fated to be enslaved. The island seems to reciprocate through its soundscape, which helps him connect further with this other self. It is significant that Caliban cannot point to one singer or one source for the soothing music. It is the island’s song. But the island does not sing in quite the same way to everyone. For Ferdinand, awakening to find himself alone as he makes his first appearance in the play, sounds offer another kind of story. A song, sung by an unseen singer—the spirit Ariel—relates to Ferdinand the tale of a

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dead father. Ferdinand assumes that the sound is the song of mourning, connecting him to his father’s imagined death and Ferdinand to his own grief. The isle’s inhabitants, he imagines, feel the loss of his king-father as sharply as he does. He assumes they sing for this reason. Ferdinand wonders Where should this music be? I’th’ air or th’earth? It sounds no more, and sure it waits upon Some god o’th’ island. Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the King my father’s wreck, This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air. Thence I have followed it (Or it hath drawn me rather) but ’tis gone. No, it begins again. (1.2.387–96) For Ferdinand, the song must sound out his own concern. It is there to give voice to grief, felt universally, though here particular to himself. It seems to him that the singer acts on his behalf, using the sounds to calm the waters and keep Ferdinand safe. He imagines that the island sympathizes with him, but the song inverts this supposition, enacting its own sympathetic magic as Alonso becomes transformed. The tune becomes dark, foreboding. It no longer sings what the prince wants to hear: Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes, Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell. Ding dong. Hark, now I hear them. Ding dong bell. (1.2.397–405) With this next sounding, Ferdinand’s imaginings morph, and his father becomes something else, several other things: coral, pearl, a song of sea nymphs, a “ding dong” death knell. This is not one sea-change but many.

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It is as if, in the underwater world, such distinctions—animal and mineral, sound and object—dissolve. Of course, we audience members know that there exists an Alonso that is not coral and pearl, nymph song and bell-knell. His character persists in a state of potential, drowned and undrowned both, at least in this moment. Speculative specter Alonso has been caught up in two of the play’s most common types of transformations: drowning and imagining. Drowning is mentioned twenty times in The Tempest. It is often associated in some way with sound: Ariel’s “Full fathom five” (1.2.397–405), “noise” (1.1.43–45), “sound” (5.1.56–57), speech (3.3.9–10), and even the inability to speak due to inebriation, as when Stephano states, “My man-monster hath drowned his tongue in sack” (3.2.11–12). To imagine what it is like to drown, to be encompassed by water, we must be able to compare it with an encompassing experience we know: sound. Sound surrounds us, enfolds us, as it does the actors in the play. Ferdinand, enfolded, is carried and soon runs adrift of another entity. Not an island this time, but Miranda. A love. These two will witness a spectacular performance in act 4 meant to help them sound their love and their fidelity. With the help of his books, Prospero conjures Iris, Ceres, and Juno to act out an imagined encounter and, in so doing, perform a symbolic marriage blessing. “Harmoniously charming,” as Ferdinand describes it, the performance is musical, but it also involves another kind of sounding, which is equally important in this tempest (4.1.119). The narrator uses his art to sound, or search out, Ferdinand’s intentions, as well as attune him to Prospero’s will, warning the lovers against taking shortcuts during the courting process. Alonso also collapses these two meanings of sound. Just as Ferdinand imagined a watery grave for his father, Alonso imagines the same for his son: O, it is monstrous, monstrous! Methought the billows spoke and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder— That deep and dreadful organ pipe—pronounced The name of Prosper. It did bass my trespass. Therefore my son i’th’ ooze is bedded, and I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded, And with him there lie mudded. (3.3.95–102)

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The narrative told to Alonso by winds and thunder frightens him, prompting him to imagine a revenge meant for him enacted instead upon his son, casting Ferdinand into the sea. Alonso imagines himself as the plumb line, sounding the depths of the sea, seeking his son. His search, he suspects, will leave him encased in a muddy bed, mixing his own substances with earth and water, oddly echoing Ariel’s description of his seachange in “Full fathom five.” Alonso’s willingness to be engulfed by the sea sounds his relationship with his son: he is found loyal unto drowning. But this is not Alonso’s end, nor is it Ferdinand’s. Although they conjure imaginary graves for each other, neither finally succumbs to the sea in the world of this play. Instead, the sea for them is the setting, the medium, within which and through which they sound speculative losses. Their sinking stories drift in other directions as each eventually learns of the survival of the other. The grimoire, however, follows a different course. Prospero’s “And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book,” in act 5, echoes Alonso’s “I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded” (5.1.56–57). In these lines, sound is both a phenomenological and an ontological experience. It connects sound-maker and hearer through sensual vibrations, and it also engages both in a meaningmaking exchange. Alonso and the book both go deeper than ever a plummet sounded—farther than the depths of what human instruments can sense, measure, and know. Severed from these human sensory and sensemaking encounters, Alonso must become something else. No longer in a human economy, he transforms. Something similar happens to the book. Drowned, its own story cannot sound or be sounded, at least not by human ears or plumb lines. Depending on one’s perspective, Prospero’s promise to his book takes the form of a threat if one does not consider the medium of its impending drowning—water. Unlike the flames to which Caliban recommends the book be subjected, through which and with which a book may transform into so many ashes, fragments, and particles, water tends to transform through connection. In water, separations—pullings and driftings—often lead to new and different connections. Sounding the grimoire, speaking it and making meaning with it, creates the titular tempest. But the grimoire must partner with water to do so. Symbiotic sound and water move with waves, as waves, creating a transformative—magical—space in which characters, objects, and stories collide. While Prospero may claim this tempest as his own, Mentz reminds

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us that we are never completely in control, especially not where water is concerned.51 The tempest washes ashore, quite discriminately, the characters of the play—carrying them to their roles, positioning them, and keeping them until the grand magician orders their release. Water in The Tempest, as much as it may seem a disorienting force to the Neapolitans, is careful, musically and magically transporting each to his proper destination. It brings retribution to some; union, reunion, and reconciliation to others; but water, like story, is not known for being easily commanded and contained. It has a way of changing the things with which it comes into contact. Everyone but Prospero seems to be aware of this, and they cannot help but imagine the various tragedies the tempest might enact. But Prospero’s independence is a fiction. He relies on the water as a co-conspirator in his plot to confront Alonso, but in order to form this partnership, he has to give himself over to the agentive element. In fact, none of his machinations would come to much of anything without it. Prospero without the sea cannot be set adrift to find his enchanted isle. Prospero without the sea cannot bring Alonso and the others to himself. Prospero without the sea cannot leave the island at the end of the play. Prospero without the sea cannot drown his book. Water is an agent of cominglings, but it is also an agent of separations. This has been a drifting story wherein we may allow ourselves to get caught up in the eddies of narrative agency. But Prospero does not imagine his book adrift, riding on currents, to be caught up by another storyteller, another co-author. He imagines it drowned deep, out of the reach of sounding. Drowning is a deep dwelling with water. A drowned book, like a drowned Alonso, acquires new features that take it farther away from its human co-actors. If the grimoire does find itself in soundless depths, it becomes an object unattached to human relationships. One can imagine the material book untethered from those narratives that made it meaningful to the humans with which it once dwelled. It would then reside entirely in a nonhuman world of story: Fish story. Coral story. Water story. For as much as Prospero possessively calls it “my book,” the grimoire’s ability to story in these alien ways belies that it was his in any exclusive sense. Like the human actors, it has an afterlife—more accurately, an object-life. Instead of a pearl-eyed father-corpse, imagine an entwined and torn manuscript, a vellum volume, now part seaweed and a dark harbor for fish. It

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is an alien way to envision a book, taken into the depths and used so differently. The grimoire has meaning and value beyond what it can do for Prospero or any other reader, speaker, or performer. In our more imaginative narratives, magical objects possess the capacity for agency. But if we reframe the way we understand our relationships with objects, if we apply some elements of magical thinking to our everyday interactions with them, they prompt us to consider a special kind of relationship, one that confuses agencies (cause and effect) and actors (real and imagined). They must be sounded differently, understood and measured differently. Experienced differently. The power, then, of considering a drifting story—one in which agency is shared by teller, medium, and audience—is, simply put, that it facilitates a sympathetic kind of relating, one that may have made quite a bit of sense to an early modern audience that would have been attuned to such magical thinking. We are like the water, like sound, vibrating with and as meaning for alien others. Attuning, storying, drifting, sounding—these transformative connections that explain metaphor itself—connect thing to thing and, in so doing, connect fate to fate. Prospero’s trajectory, his potentiality, will change when he is no longer with his grimoire. And the grimoire will change too.

Epilogue: Recognizing the Actors The Tempest ends with a memorable epilogue spoken by Prospero. Now liminally both character and actor, he asks for understanding, for a favor. He asks for sympathy: Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true, I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands.

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Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. (Epilogue 1–20) Prospero ends the story of the play by revealing the pretense. He stands before the audience, addressing them in his roles as both actor and character. He echoes lines from the Lord’s Prayer (“And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors”) in his concluding couplet: “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free.”52 The speech challenges the notion of agency. Who is in charge as a story is told? The teller? The author? The listener? The story itself? In this moment, Prospero claims that agency belongs to the audience. They can retain or release him as they please with a simple sounding of their hands. They are the magicians, the ones who cast and control the spell. Prospero is powerless—except, of course, that he isn’t. He is the one speaking in predominantly catalectic tetrameter and rhyming couplets suggestive of a grimoire’s “charm” or “spell,” and while he asks for the audience to act, they—we—remain in, and as, a suspended potential. When Prospero implicates the audience, he is acknowledging the other actors who have taken part in the performance, even if he does this in a way that stalls the story. His acknowledgment, however, is parceled with his request to relinquish his role in the play and leave the stage. Contrary to Prospero’s request to be released, this chapter has invited more entanglement and welcomed a piling on of uncertainties, possibilities, collaborations, agentive drifts, and, of course, drownings. Books are story-objects that hold our narratives and challenge them at the same time. We think we are the magicians, performing tricks, in control. But we live in a world of magic, of speculation and potential. It is a realization that might at times make us uneasy. Too often, we move quickly beyond our object sympathies and sentimentalities, perhaps

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because we are made anxious by a nagging feeling that we might be, if only fleetingly, participating in magical thinking should we acknowledge the objects’ allure. We might laugh at ourselves when we consider the sentimental nature with which we may regard that well-worn paperback by our bedside. However, if we shift our thinking to consider how much we drift and drown with things real and imagined, animate and not, we can also consider how these things help form the way we understand ourselves and engage with a more-than-human world. Matter matters because it is the stuff through which we make and are made. We can pray, like Prospero, to be released by our co-tellers, holding our breath, looking toward the ship just offshore. Or we can acknowledge that we live enmeshed in seas teeming with transformations.

Notes I am indebted to Jennifer Linhart Wood, whose advice and continued support were instrumental in the development of this chapter. 1. Citations to Shakespeare’s Tempest are from the Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), and will be cited parenthetically. 2. Although Prospero’s library never materializes on the stage, some directors choose to show it in fi lm adaptations of the play, most notably in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991). 3. For an insightful explanation of this omission, consult Barbara Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (Spring 2001): 1–33, esp. 3–8. 4. As I discuss below, I perceive connections between Debapriya Sarkar’s theory of speculative poiesis and the way I want to think about object potentiality. Sarkar is interested in the speech acts within the play that hint at the potential for events to unfold in ways other than how they do, highlighting the fact that the master narrative or plot is not a foregone conclusion but rather something that must be continually created and maintained. Similarly, a speculative object, one

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that we must continually speculate about, can help us access the co-actors in the plot that could overtake it. Consult Sarkar, “The Tempest’s Other Plots,” Shakespeare Studies 45 (2017): 203–30. 5. Jennifer Linhart Wood, ed., introduction to Dynamic Matter: Transforming Renaissance Objects, Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies Series (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022). 6. This is similar to what Maria Shmygol discusses in this volume about William Percy’s whale in The Aphrodysial as a property that does not materialize but is sensory-laden and called into being nonetheless. 7. Prospero’s book is never actually called a “grimoire” in the play. It should also be noted that in some instances, there seems to be one book (“I’ll drown my book”), while at other times, multiple books are mentioned (“Burn but his books”). Barbara Mowat addresses these concerns, explaining that the plural/singular distinction may simply have to do with the perspective of the character speaking about the books. Prospero generally refers to a singular book, while other characters mention multiple books. This is one piece of evidence that suggests

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254 | S tag i n g Prop e rt i e s that while Prospero may have several books, he relies primarily on one special book. Mowat argues that this would be consistent with the practices of early modern magicians. It was common for such conjurers to have a grimoire in their library. Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” 1–3. 8. In book 1, chapter 3 of Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogue, King James I makes the case that while magicians may think they are in control of the demons they summon through magic, they are really afforded only a small degree of power, in order to lure them into servitude to the devil. Th is is not what I mean by “inhuman wills,” but I do find it worth noting that there seems to be a concern over agency and control in many treatises on magic. 9. In this chapter, “inhuman” signifies hybridity that has some human component, while “nonhuman” means a thing that is not human. In making this distinction, I am drawing on Ian Bogost’s definition of inhuman as “one of the many names for the meeting point between things.” Bogost, “Inhuman,” in Inhuman Nature, ed. Jeff rey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2014), 133– 44, esp. 139. As you may notice as you read this chapter, the distinction between the inhuman and the nonhuman is at times difficult to maintain, but that is part of the point. How does one accurately identify a singularity (human or nonhuman) in a world of hybridity? 10. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 46. 11. Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency & Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Pickering explains that action is temporally emergent—it happens in “real time”—and so “the contours of material agency are never decisively known in advance” (14). 12. Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 66.

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13. Mowat, “Prospero’s Book.” 14. Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Canto edition 2000), 10. 15. For example, the healing properties of some plants seemed mysterious and thus fell under the purview of natural magic. Kieckhefer, Magic, 11–13. 16. Kent Cartwright, “Language, Magic, the Dromios, and The Comedy of Errors,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 47.2 (Spring 2007): 331–54, esp. 332. 17. Building on the work of Tim Ingold and Eileen Joy, I argue that stories are agentive objects: they are both tools we use and things that use us in return. Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description (London: Routledge, 2011); Eileen Joy, “You Are Here: A Manifesto,” Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), 153–72. 18. Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” 3–4. 19. Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2013), 17. 20. Morton, Realist Magic, 18. 21. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 64. 22. This passage is informed by Julian Yates, “Impression,” in Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 11. 23. Steve Mentz, “Shipwreck,” in Inhuman Nature, ed. Jeff rey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2014), 1–15, esp. 7. 24. Mentz does not refer to this as drowning, perhaps because he is interested in focusing not on the human experience of shipwreck but on the event itself. I see a parallel, however, between the way he discusses shipwreck as a state of chaos, of dis- and re-orientation, and the way I mean to suggest drowning functions in the play. 25. Mentz, “Shipwreck,” 7.

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Pro spe ro’s Gr i moi r e , A dr i f t 26. Julian Yates, “Towards a Theory of Agentive Drift; Or, A Particular Fondness for Oranges circa 1597,” Parallax 8.1 (2002): 47–58, esp. 48. 27. Yates draws on Michel Serres’s Parasite to explain how agentive drift can help us break free of the dream of ultimate control—and why we should do so. Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Scheher (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 28. Yates, Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast, 19–20. 29. Yates’s account of John Gerard’s escape is what Bruno Latour calls a “servant narrative,” a narrative that follows actants rather than attempting to impose a preconceived causal pattern or historical understanding upon an event. Latour, “A Collection of Humans and Nonhumans: Following Daedalus’s Labyrinth,” in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 174–215, esp. 212. 30. Harman writes that since objects meet only through sensing one another, contact is always mediated, not direct. “Substantial forms (or objects) do not make direct contact with each other. They can only be linked indirectly, or to use my new favorite English word—vicariously, by way of some vicar or deputy. Causation can only be vicarious.” Graham Harman, “Object Oriented Philosophy,” in Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 151–228, esp. 220–21. 31. Yates is careful to note that “writing” encompasses many forms of communication, human and nonhuman. “Human-oriented writing,” he states, is only one type of coding among many (Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast, 15). 32. Ingold, Being Alive, 17. 33. Joy, “You Are Here,” 165. Joy quotes from Aranye Fradenburg’s plenary lecture at the 2010 New Chaucer Society meeting titled “Living Chaucer.” It was published in 2011 under the same name in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 41–64.

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34. While we don’t witness demonic possession in this play, it is worth noting that for an early modern audience, there may have been some echo of the idea in these lines. As Cartwright notes in “Language, Magic, the Dromios,” demonic possession and bewitchment were real concerns during this period. 35. Sarkar, “The Tempest’s Other Plots,” 204. 36. Albanese, New Science, New World, 66. 37. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 214–16. 38. Bogost is building on Harman’s theory of causation when he asks the question “What if we deployed metaphor itself as a way to grasp alien objects’ perceptions of one another” (Alien Phenomenology, 67). The process of doing this is metaphorizing. 39. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 3. 40. Latour, “Following Daedalus’s Labyrinth,” 212. 41. Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” 5–6. 42. Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” 6–8. 43. Penelope Gouk discusses the relationship between music and magic in Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth- Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 44. For a discussion of sound, particularly the human voice, as material, consult Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), as well as Sarah F. Williams’s and Maria Shmygol’s chapters in this collection. 45. Cartwright notes the early modern interest in types of magic that have a sonic element: “spells, charms, incantations, and prayers.” These kinds of magic “inspired opposing judgements in contemporary rhetorical treatises and also on the stage.” He goes on to explain that “many Elizabethan rhetoricians were suspicious of word magic, given the attack by

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256 | S tag i n g Prop e rt i e s Protestants on what they considered the witchcraft of the Catholic Mass.” Cartwright, “Language, Magic, the Dromios,” 333. 46. For an exploration of how sonic vibration works as a contact zone, consult Jennifer Linhart Wood, Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel: Uncanny Vibrations in the English Archive (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). In her introduction, she explains: “In contact zones of foreign lands and in the sonic laboratory of the early modern theater, sounds impact bodies present at sonic events, calibrating them to the same frequencies through vibration and forming networks of connection about them” (2). 47. Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia (London, 1615), 696. 48. Bogost is interested in imagining what it is like to be inhuman. He explains, “‘Inhuman’ isn’t a characteristic of humans or creatures, but one of the many names for the meeting point between things, of the passageways between entities withdrawn, real being and their sensual encounter with others” (“Inhuman,” 139). He draws heavily on Harman’s theory of object sensuality, or the way one object senses—interacts with and thus understands—another. The term “inhuman” seems a particularly apt designation for the (sometimes) sweet sounds of the isle because it highlights their hybrid and unknowable nature. They are a point of ontological friction—From whom or what do they originate? What do they mean or intend?—as well as sensual friction, sound wave upon (human?) eardrum.

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49. Wood writes, “‘Sounding’ is a process. It is a vibrational action that undoes the boundaries between a listening subject and a sound-producing object or other, between sensor and sensation. . . . At the same time, ‘sounding’ can refer also to the act of or attempt at sensemaking” (Sounding Otherness, 8). 50. Sarkar argues that Caliban is one of several marginalized characters who evoke other possible plots through utterances like this one. She points out, however, that since the audience first hears from Prospero about Caliban’s failed attempt to rape Miranda, before the audience hears Caliban share any of his own desires, the audience is not encouraged to sympathize with him and does not hope for his “other plots” to come to fruition the way plots sometimes do with other characters, such as Miranda. The play, Sarkar states, “uses Caliban’s failed counter-narrative of change to highlight the dangerous logic of plotmaking as an enterprise” (“The Tempest’s Other Plots,” 211–12). 51. Mentz, “Shipwreck.” Mentz is using a shipwreck metaphor to think about the experience of recognizing that we live in “oceanic chaos,” or a world teeming— swirling, even—with the inhuman. His assertions apply to more than just life at sea, but he finds this setting particularly apt because it can be especially disorienting and dislocating for humans. 52. Biblical quotation from Matthew 6:12, The 1599 Geneva Bible (Dallas, GA: Tolle Lege Press, 2015).

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Sel ect ed Bi bl io gr a ph y

Albanese, Denise. New Science, New World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Bacon, Francis. Sylva Sylvarum. London, 1627. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Bloom, Gina. Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Brown, Bill, ed. Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Brown, Bill. “Th ing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22. Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone Books, 2020. Campbell, Mary Baine. Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.

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Cavendish, Margaret. Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. London, 1666. ———. Philosophical and Physical Opinions. London, 1655. ———. Philosophical Fancies. London, 1653. Classen, Constance. “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum.” Journal of Social History 40, no. 4 (2007): 895–914. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Crooke, Helkiah. Microcosmographia. London, 1615. Curran, Kevin. “What Was Personhood?” In Renaissance Personhood: Materiality, Taxonomy, Process, edited by Kevin Curran, 1–17. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Drucker, Johanna. “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface.” DHQ 7, no. 1 (2013): http://www.digitalhumanities.org /dhq/vol/7/1/000143/000143.html. Duff y, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Dugan, Holly. The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

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258 | S e l e c t e d Bi bl io g r a p h y Eggert, Katherine. Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Erickson, Peter. “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance.” Criticism 35, no. 4 (1993): 499–526. Evelyn, John. The Diary of John Evelyn. London: Bicker and Son, 1906. ———. Sylva, or, A Discourse of ForestTrees. London, 1664. Findlen, Paula, ed. Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500– 1800. London: Routledge, 2013. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Garratt, Delia, and Tara Hamling, eds. Shakespeare and the Stuff of Life: Treasures from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Hakluyt, Richard. The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. 3 volumes. London, 1598–1600. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. UK: Pelican Books, 2018. ———. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re. press, 2009. ———. The Quadruple Object. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011. Harris, Jonathan Gil. “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects.” European Journal of English Studies 4, no. 2 (2000): 111–23. ———. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. Philadelphia:

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University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Hyman, Wendy Beth, ed. The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011. Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge, 2011. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press, 2020. Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods. London: Macmillan, 1996. Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Little, Arthur L., Jr. “Re-Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2016): 84–103. Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific

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S e l e c t e d Bi bl io g r a p h y Revolution. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ———. Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2013. Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher S. Wood. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by David Raeburn. London: Penguin, 2004. Perry, Curtis, ed. Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Belgium: Brepols, 2001. Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. Translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley. London: Continuum, 2008. ———. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence R. Scheher. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. 3rd ed. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Sherlock, Peter. Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Sofer, Andrew. The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Stallybrass, Peter. “Marx’s Coat.” In Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, edited by Patricia Spyer, 183–207. New York: Routledge, 1998.

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Con t r i bu tor s

Anna “Anya” Riehl Bertolet is professor of English at Auburn University and the author of many articles and book chapters on early modern literature and visual and material culture. She is the author of The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I (Palgrave, 2010); co-editor, with Carole Levin and Jo Eldridge Carney, of A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen 1500–1650: Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts (Routledge, 2016); coeditor, with Thomas Betteridge, of Tudor Court Culture (Susquehanna University Press, 2010); and the editor of Queens Matter in Early Modern Studies (Palgrave, 2018). Anya also co-edited, with Carole Levin, an essay collection on using creative projects in teaching, titled Creating the Premodern in the Postmodern Classroom: Creativity in Early English Literature and History Courses (ACMRS Press, 2018). Anya’s current book project interrogates the gendering of needlework in early modern England and on the continent; she is also editing an anthology of early modern writings about needlework. Erika Mary Boeckeler is associate professor of English at Northeastern University. Her work lies at the intersection of literary, visual, and material cultures. Her first book, Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics (University of Iowa Press, 2017), argues that the new media culture generated by the early press offers a methodology for grappling with the insistent crumbling of text into alphabetic letters. Other publications examine widowed printers’ use of printers’ devices, the poetic typography of the first printed Hamlet, painted writing in German portraiture, and the first architectural alphabet, among other topics. She is currently working on two monographs, one on eco-materialist haptic reading, related to her chapter in the present volume, and another shaped by feminist and anti-racist bibliography on the poetics of typography and the visual features in early modern print. Naomi Howell is lecturer in medieval studies in the Department of English, University of Exeter. Her research explores the relationship between matter, memory, and identity in the Global Middle Ages. She is currently writing a book on tombs as sites of cultural encounter and exchange in medieval romance. Emily E. F. Philbrick teaches at George Mason University, Carroll Community College, and Howard Community College. Her first monograph, “Spectral

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Intimacies” (manuscript in preparation), discusses folk traditions in medieval English and Welsh chronicles, focusing particularly on ecocritical and materialist approaches to stories that are grounded in locality and community. She is the co-author of “Empowering Novicehood Through Digital Composition,” forthcoming in The Nor’easter. Emily is especially interested in exploring material ways to connect with and think about literature and is considering new ways to incorporate sensory elements into literary experiences. Josie Schoel teaches English literature and composition at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts. Her work, which has appeared in Slice Magazine and SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, explores intersections between cosmetic beautifying materials and practices and emerging notions of cultural difference and race. Her current research examines the relationship between the symbolic value of whiteness, cosmetic materiality, and the early modern stage. Maria Shmygol is the assistant editor of The Complete Works of John Marston (under contract with Oxford University Press). Maria’s next project, based at the University of Ireland, Galway, and supported by a Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship, will focus on “foreign” geographies in early modern drama. She is the co-editor, with Lukas Erne, of Tito Andronico (1620) (forthcoming from Arden Shakespeare) and a Trustee of the British Shakespeare Association. Maria’s research focuses on early modern drama, textual editing, book history, and travel literature, as well as material and visual culture more broadly. Edward “Mac” McLean Test is professor of English at Boise State University. He has published several essays on Mesoamerican culture in English literature. His book Sacred Seeds: New World Plants in Early Modern English Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) explores the mythic and cultural influence of four specific objects from the natural environment of the Americas: amaranth, guaiacum, tobacco, and the nopal cactus, which was a finalist for the British Society of Science and Literature annual book prize. Mac is the recipient of several grants and fellowships: the Idaho Humanities Council, NEH Summer Seminar, Boise State University research grants, and fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Huntington Library, and John Carter Brown Library. He is also a poet and translator of Spanish. Mac is currently working on a book translation of Ciudades de agua, by the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, and a translation of the 1626 Spanish play La monja alférez (The Lieutenant Nun). Abbie Weinberg is the research and reference librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library and managing editor of The Collation blog. When she is not assisting others with their research, she can be found exploring book history, the history of science, theatrical history, and the interesting ways all of those things smash together sometimes. Sarah F. Williams is associate professor of music history at the University of South Carolina School of Music. She is the author of Damnable Practises: Witches,

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Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads (Ashgate, 2015) and articles on female transgression, the supernatural in early modern English theater, and popular music; her work has appeared in the Journal for Musicological Research, the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, and several essay collections. Her current research explores the role of memory in the circulation of popular song in seventeenth-century England. Jennifer Linhart Wood teaches at George Mason University and is a member of the editorial staff of Shakespeare Quarterly at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel: Uncanny Vibrations in the English Archive (Palgrave, 2019), which won the 2021 MRDS David Bevington Award for Best New Book and was recognized as a finalist for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book award. Her scholarship is situated at the nexus of literature, performance, and music in the early modern period, and she has been published in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Shakespeare Studies, and various edited collections. Her current book project examines aural cues for music and sound effects embedded in early modern dramatic texts, and she is co-editing a collection with Amrita Sen, titled Reconceptualizing Renaissance Performance: Beyond the Public Stage.

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I n de x

Abbot, George, 226 Abegg, Margaret, 157 actants, 5, 6, 110, 127, 235, 255 Actor-Network Theory, 5, 6, 8, 12, 18, 27, 31, 254 Adler, Jeff rey, 79 affordance, 59 agentive objects, 29, 241, 254 Ainsworth, Thomas, 32 Albanese, Denise, 36, 234, 243, 254–55 alchemy, 2, 29 Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 117–19 Ornithologiae, 117 Alexander, Gavin, 203 Alexander, Michael, 35 alien, 83, 236–37, 240–41, 250–51, 255 Allison, Rayne, 52 Allott, Robert, England’s Parnassus, 214, 228 altar frontals, 92–93, 103–4, 126 Altick, Richard, 203–4 alum, 41, 42, 49, 50, 51, 54 amber, 46, 49 Anaximenes, 10 Anderson, Susan L., 229 Andrea, Bernadette, 42, 53 anima, 5, 12, 18 animate, 2, 7, 12, 19, 27, 33, 126, 171, 218, 253 definition of, 4, 5, 31 and Margaret Cavendish, 10 and Proteus, 208, 216 animation, 7, 10, 12, 20, 111, 222, 228 anthropocentric, 3, 20, 232–33, 238 anthropomorphism, 19–21, 24, 29, 35, 76, 119–20, 130, 237 Appadurai, Arjun, 3, 23, 31, 44, 53, 230 Archimedes palimpsest, 211–12 Aristotle, 2, 7–10, 18, 19, 31–33, 35, 53, 158, 188, 224, 230 De Anima, 9, 18

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Arnold, Ken, 34, 202, 230 ars memoriae, 201 arsenic, 62 arte plumaria (feather painting), 25–26, 109, 121, 123–24, 126 Ashmole, Elias, 14 Ashmolean Museum, 14, 16, 34 assemblage, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 109, 168 definition of, 5–7 and embodiment, 23, 61 theorized by Margaret Cavendish, 18 formed by Percy’s whale, 210, 218, 224 Consult also mesh, network, web Aston, Margaret, 100 Atkin, Tamara, 227 Atlantic, 10, 11, 26, 109, 115, 117, 119, 121, 128–30 atomism, 35, 111 auditory, 15, 172, 245 Austen, Katherine, 30 Austern, Linda Phyllis, 205, 228 Austin, Alfredo López, 125 automaton, 35, 190, 215, 222, 226–29 Bacon, Francis, 10–11, 12, 31, 32, 53, 112, 129, 196, 204 description of animation, 7, 33 defines cosmetic, 43 The essays of counsels, civil and moral, of Sir Francis Bacon, 11 Novum Organum, 18, 35, 129 De Principiis atque Originibus, 18 description of Proteus, 11, 33, 208, 226 and sensory theory, 18 Sylva Sylvarum, 7, 31, 35 The Wisedome of the Ancients, 33 Bainbrigg, Reginald, of Appleby, 19 Balfour, Andrew, 78 ballad, 28, 188, 192–95, 199, 200, 204–5 Consult also broadside ballad

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I n de x

ballad-sellers, 191, 193–94 ballet des nations, 186, 195, 203–4 Barbary Coast, 40, 50 Barley, William, 158 Barsalou, Lawrence, 58, 76 Bate, Jonathan, 208, 226 Baxter, Richard, 204 Bear Clan of the Mohawk and Anishinaabe Nations, 110 becoming, 6, 12, 20, 21, 24–25, 43, 51, 53, 129, 147, 159, 238 bells, 59, 61, 75, 85, 174, 185, 247–48 Bennett, Jane, 16, 30, 31, 35, 127, 129, 131 defines actants, 110 benefits of anthropomorphism, 20– 21 and enchanted materialism, 228 and Proteus, 12 and Spinoza 10 defines Thing-Power, 33 Vibrant Matter, 4, 30, 31, 33, 35, 127, 129, 131 Bernstein, Robin, 57, 58, 60, 76 Best, Michael, 227 Bible, 112 biocodicology, 35 Birch, Thomas, 165–67, 169, 179, 180 The History of the Royal Society, 165, 179–80 bird-people, 25, 119 Black, Blackness, 48, 53, 54, 129, 229 Black Elk, 128, 132 black letter typeface, 46, 54 Bloom, Gina, 188, 200, 205, 219–20, 229, 255 Boeckeler, Erika Mary, 76 Bogost, Ian, 16, 17, 30, 31, 34, 35, 236, 237, 243, 254, 255, 256 Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, 30–31, 34–35, 254, 255 Bohm, David, 32 Bolzoni, Lina, 205 Bon, Ottaviano, 47, 54 Bono, James, 33 boxwood, 57, 59–63, 72, 73, 75–78 Boyle, Robert, 77, 176–77, 179–80 bracelet, 10, 27, 28, 61, 66, 73, 207, 209, 210, 215–16, 225, 228 Consult also ceston Brayton, Dan, 218, 229

Wood-final.indb 266

broadside ballad, 28, 188, 192, 194–95, 197, 199–201, 204–5, 263 Consult also ballad Brodsley, Laurel, Charles Frank, and John W. Steeds, “Prince Rupert’s Drops,” 162, 165, 167, 168, 179, 180 Brotton, Jerry, 42, 52, 53 Brown, Bill, 32, 129 Thing Theory, 32 Things, 129 Brown, Thomas, 203, 205 Browne, William, 24, 56, 59, 65, 69, 70, 72, 73 Britannia’s Pastorals, 24, 56, 59, 69, 70, 80 Bruce, Alexander, 169 Bruce, Thomas, 13 Brussels Cross, 19, 20 Bruster, Douglas, 2, 22, 30, 35 Bryant, Levi, 3, 31, 32, 33, 35, 233 The Democracy of Objects, 31, 32, 33, 35 Bulwer, John, Anthropometamorphosis, 119, 120, 130 Burns, Williams E., 226 Burrow, Colin, 226 Burwell Lute Tutor, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8 Burwell, Mary, 4, 30, 31 Butler, Samuel, 159, 160, 179 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 33 Callaghan, Dympna, 52 Calvin, John, 13 A Very profitable treatise, made by M. Ihon Caluyne, 33 Camille, Michael, 75 Campbell, Mary Baine, 111, 114, 129, 130 Candlin, Fiona, 34 Cano-Echevarria, Berta, 79 Cantares Mexicanos: Song of the Aztecs, 131 Carruthers, Mary, 205 Cartwright, Kent, 254 Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula, 19 Catholic Church, 24, 83, 99, 100, 109, 114, 122, 188, 192, 195, 196, 200, 239, 256 and clerical vestments, 24, 25, 40, 81, 86–89, 130, 156 and Thomas More, 115 Caulfield, James, 203

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I n de x Cavendish, Margaret, 10, 27, 35, 77–78 The Matrimonial Trouble, 77–78 Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 35 Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 18, 35 Philosophical Fancies, 18, 35 and Prince Rupert’s drops, 162–64, 170, 172, 179 and vital materialism, 10, 18 Caxton, William, 77, 89 ceston (magical bracelet), 27, 209, 210, 213– 20, 224–25, 228 Consult also bracelet Chapman, George, 226 Chappell, William, 204 Charles II, 27, 162, 165, 166, 168, 192, 195, 204 Cherokee, 109 Chickasaw, 111 Children of St Paul’s, 211 Christ, 19, 86, 88–89, 93, 95, 102, 126 Christianity, 20, 26, 51, 68, 100, 112, 114, 122, 124–26, 129, 235 Chrysostom, John, 158 Church, Margaret, 79 Church of England, 100 civet, 49 Classen, Constance, 15, 16, 33, 34 cloth of gold, 45, 91 cochineal, 112, 124 Cohen, Jeff rey Jerome, 254 Cohen, Walter, 114, 130 Colledge, Stephen, 192, 193–94, 199, 203–4 Columbus, Christopher, 109 comb, 9, 23, 24, 55–80, 91, 161 Constantinople, 13, 50, 54 Contarini, Gasparo, 124 Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, 10, 31, 33, 217, 228 Cope, Buckland, 93 Cornwall, 83, 100 Corpus Christi cycle, 86, 103 Cortés, Hernan, 124 cosmesis, 44, 53 cosmetic(s), 9, 23, 24, 29, 39–54, 63, 78, 91 Cranmer, Thomas, 29 Crawford, Julie, 30 Cressy, David, 52, 205 Crooke, Helkiah, Microcosmographia, 256

Wood-final.indb 267

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267

Crown of Thorns, 13 crucifi xion, 19, 20, 86, 88, 93, 95 cultural materialism, 3, 30, 41 Cupid’s Posies, 77, 79 curiosity cabinet, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21–22, 26, 34, 109, 121, 123, 131, 196, 202, 230 Consult also Wunderkammer Curran, Kevin, 33 Curtis, Jane, 194 Curtis, Langley, 194 Dahlquist, Mark, 228 Dallam organ, 12, 33, 46, 54, 203 Dallam, Thomas, 12–14, 16, 33, 54, 203 damask, 91–94 dance, 195–97 Danson, Lawrence, 33 Dardanelles, 13 Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park, 230 de Acosta, José, 131 de Alvarado Huanitzan, Diego, 124 de Glen, Jean, 157 de Grazia, Margreta, 102, 129 de Léry, Jean, 120, 121, 131 History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, 120, 131 de Medici, Catherine, 141, 156–57 de Montaigne, Michel, 121 de Sahagun, Bernardino, General History of the Things of New Spain: Florentine Codex, 130 Dean, Carolyn and Dana Leibsohn, 126, 131 Dekker, Thomas and John Webster, Northward Ho!, 77 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, 5, 6, 10, 20, 31, 33, 35 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 31, 33, 35 Dennis, Flora, 75 deodand, 2 diamond, 1, 30, 47, 66, 67, 79 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 113, 122, 131 Dimmock, Matthew, 225, 227 dissolution of the Monasteries, 81 Dodds, Madeleine Hope, 225 Dolan, Frances, 53 Donald, Dwayne, 115, 130 The Dream of the Rood, 19, 35, 69, 79 Drucker, Johanna, 56, 57, 59, 76, 105

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268 |

I n de x

Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste Sieur, 112, 114, 116, 122, 129, 130, 227 La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde (The Divine Weeks), 112, 130, 227 Dubrow, Heather, 79 Duffield, Barnard, 83 Dugan, Holly, 34 Durán, Diego, 113, 130 Durfey, Thomas, 196, 204 dynameos, 9, 188, 202 dynamism, 2, 21–23, 27–29, 32, 69, 117, 136, 137, 140–43, 149–50, 155, 165, 207– 8, 210–11, 213, 215, 218–19, 221, 223– 25, 230 definition of, 9 and power, 221 as a property of matter, 4, 147, 188 and Proteus, 11, 12, 88 and relationality, 6, 29, 56 Eamon, William, 43, 53, 103 Ebsworth, James Woodfall, 204 Eccles, John, 28, 188, 195–97, 201–2, 204 Eco, Umberto, 181 Edward VI, 100 Edwardian Reformation, 81 Egan, Geoff and Frances Pritchard, Dress Accessories, 77 Eggert, Katherine, Disknowledge, 29, 32 eidos, 8 Elgin Marbles, 13 Elizabeth I, 13, 23, 24, 39–54, 63–65, 67–68, 90, 104 embroiderers, 25, 154, 158 embroidery, 25, 26, 90, 93, 102, 103, 124, 140, 142, 147–49, 152, 153, 155–58 Consult also stitching Engel, William, 205 England, 8, 14, 27, 30, 31, 34, 42, 45, 50, 52, 53, 54, 74, 78, 79, 100, 101, 103, 114, 131, 168, 179, 192, 205, 229, 255 clerical vestments from, 87–89 embroidery from, 135, 149, 157, 158 and imperialism, 46, 117 Prince Rupert’s drops sent to, 162–63, 165, 168 raree shows in, 186 relationship with the Ottoman Empire, 13, 40, 47 English identity, 40, 48–49, 52, 54 English Reformation, 100, 103

Wood-final.indb 268

Enis, Cathryn and Tara Hamling, 33 Epstein, Kathleen A., 149, 158 Erickson, Peter, 41, 48, 53, 54 Erler, Mary C., 227 Estill, Laura, 227 Eucharist, 1, 89, 95, 124 Evelyn, John, 77, 160, 179, 190, 203 Sylva, 77 Exclusion Crisis, 192 execution, 81–86, 101 Exeter, 24, 81–84, 86, 89, 90, 93–98, 100, 104–5 experiment, 18, 26, 27, 34, 35, 58, 77, 140, 159–81, 205, 211 face-whitening, 40, 41, 47, 48, 53 Consult also whiteness Fair Youth, 65 fashion, 41, 44, 48–49, 81, 83, 87, 96, 99, 103, 131, 141 feather, 1, 10, 25, 133 New World feather, 25, 26, 109–32 feather mantles, 112–16, 121 feathered wild man, 117, 118 Ferguson, Margaret, 54, 112, 129, 131 Fielding, Henry, 205 figured poems, 65 Findlen, Paula, 8, 32 First Folio, 1 Fischlin, David, 203 Fishmongers’ Company, 222 Fiston, William, 79 Fitzwilliam Museum, 104, 134, 151, 153, 156 flat ontology, 3, 5 Fleming, Juliet, 78 Fletcher, John, and Philip Massinger, The Sea Voyage, 128 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 6, 30, 31, 34, 162, 179 Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments, 88, 89 France, 26, 135, 140–42, 145–48, 155–56, 186, 192 Fudge, Erica, 117, 130 funeral palls, 24, 82, 90, 93, 99 Gair, Reavley, 225 Galen, 10 Garratt, Delia and Tara Hamling, 30 Gavin, Antonio, Observations on a Journey to Naples, 77 Gell, Alfred, 110, 129

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I n de x gender(ed), 29, 30, 42, 52–54, 75, 91, 100– 101, 103, 131, 135, 137, 157, 179, 200, 205, 229, 255 Genesis, biblical, 112 geohumoral, geohumoralism, 6, 7, 12 Gerard, John, 239, 255 Germany, 26, 140, 162, 168 Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 226 gift giving, 42, 45–47, 51, 60, 75, 77, 97, 103, 124, 155, 166, 209, 214, 223, 226 of combs, 24, 54–57, 60 exchange between Elizabeth and Melike Safiye Sultan, 39, 42, 45–47, 52 of needlework patterns, 145–46 in William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals, 69, 70, 72–73 Gillis, John R., 205 glass drops, 25, 159–81 Consult also Prince Rupert’s drops glassworking, 10, 162, 165–67, 169, 180–81 gloves, 15, 61, 69 gold, 1, 19, 45, 46, 61–63, 66, 77, 83, 87, 89, 93–94, 110–12, 115, 215–17, 222 Golding, Arthur, 226 Gouk, Penelope, 255 Greenaway, Peter, Prospero’s Books, 253 Greenblatt, Stephen, 30, 35, 131, 243 Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, 255 Shakespearean Negotiations, 30 Greene, Robert, 226 Gregory I, Pope, 87, 124–25 Gresham College, 162, 165, 167–68 grief, 19, 20, 99, 105, 245, 247 grimoire, 29, 101, 231–56 gunpowder, 40, 52, 101, 221 gustatory, 15 Hakluyt, Richard, 45, 46, 50, 54 The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 45, 50, 54 Hall, Kim F., Things of Darkness, 52, 54, 131 Hall, Mercy, 148 Hamilton, Albert Charles, The Spenser Encyclopedia, 29 Hamling, Tara and Catherine Richardson, 75 Hammons, Pamela S., 30

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269

haptic, 24, 25, 26, 56, 58, 59, 68, 73, 155, 219, 225 harem, 39, 40, 42, 45–47, 53 Harman, Graham, 15–17, 30–32, 34–35, 233, 241, 243, 255–56 Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory, 31, 32 Object- Oriented- Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, 31, 34 Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, 31–32, 34, 255 Quadruple Object, 30–31, 34–35 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 9, 30, 33, 98, 105, 188, 200, 203, 205, 211, 227 “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects,” 30, 33 “Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture,” 30 Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, 9, 32, 105, 203, 205, 227 Harris, Jonathan Gil, and Natasha Korda, Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, 32, 230 Harvey, Penny, 79 healing, 1, 254 Heidegger, 32 Helgerson, Richard, 45, 54 Heng, Geraldine, 41, 53 Henry VII, 104, 196 Henry VIII, 83 Heraclitus, 10 Herbert, Edward, of Cherbury, Occasional Verses, 62, 78 Herbert, George, The Temple, 69 Herbert, William, 82 Hermetic philosophy, 10 Herrick, Robert, 228 Higgins, Dick, 74 Hill, Tracey, 229 Hillebrand, Harold N., 225 Hiscock, Andrew, 205 Hoak, D. E., 100, 102 Hobbes, Thomas, 10, 131, 179 Hogan, Linda, 111, 129 Hogarth, William, 196, 204 Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 82, 100, 101, 102 holy relic, 13 Consult also relic Holy Spirit, 93, 95, 122

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270

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I n de x

Hooke, Robert, 15, 27, 161, 164, 168, 173–78, 180–81 Micrographia, 27, 173–78, 180, 181 Hooke’s Law, 27, 179 Hooker, John (also known as Vowell), 82–86, 100–101 “The description of the citie of Excester,” 100 Hopkins, Lisa, 228 Hough, Helen, 156, 158 Howell, Thomas Jones, David Jardine, William Cobbett, 204 Huitzilopochtli, 113 humors, 44 Hutchinson, Lucy, 35 Huygens, Constantijn, 27, 163, 164, 170, 172, 179 hybridity, 24, 41, 49, 51, 52, 124, 128, 131, 254 hyle, 8–10, 19 hylomorphism, 8 hylozoism, 10, 18, 32 Hyman, Wendy Beth, 35 “I am the Duke of Norfolk” (tune), 193, 204 idols, 100, 104 Indigenous Peoples, 1, 10, 11, 26, 109–32 Ingold, Tim, 254, 255 inhuman, 105, 114, 233, 237–40, 254, 256 Innocent IV, Pope, 87, 88 intermedia, 186, 203 Interregnum, 163, 192 Ioppolo, Grace, 210, 227 Ironmongers’ Company, 221 Iselin, Pierre, 205 Islam, 51–53 Italy, 2, 18, 45, 63, 75–76, 93–94, 192, 203, 231, 242 and alum deposits, 50 and embroidery patterns, 26, 135, 140– 41, 145–49, 155–56, 169 Savoyards from, 186 Ivic, Christopher, and Grant Williams, 205 ivory, 42, 59–63, 65, 75–77, 190 Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman, 110, 129 Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, 129 Jacobson, Miriam, 226

Wood-final.indb 270

Jakobson, Roman, 181 James I, 50, 111, 121, 129, 131, 227, 234, 254 A Counterblaste to Tobacco, 111, 129, 131 Daemonologie, 234, 254 James II, 192, 195 Jamestown, Virginia, 119, 130 Jardine, Lisa, 32, 54, 179 Jenkinson, Matthew, 204 jewel(s), 1, 2, 19, 30, 42, 45–47, 61, 66–67, 69, 78–79, 177, 227 Joby, Christopher, 179 Johnston, Mark Albert, 100 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 30, 44, 53, 102, 130, 137, 156 Jones, Inigo, 117 Jones, Malcolm, 60, 74, 76 Jonson, Ben, 26, 35, 117, 119–22, 130–31, 229 Epicoene or, the Silent Woman, 119, 130 Masque of Blackness, 229 News from the New World in the Moon, 119, 131 The Staple of News, 119 Joy, Eileen, 241, 254, 255 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 7, 30 Karim-Cooper, Farah, 53 Keilen, Sean, 226 Kett’s Rebellion, 100, 101 Kieckhefer, Richard, 234, 254 Killigrew, Thomas, 75 Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 76 Kopytoff, Igor, 224, 230 Krech, Shepard, 131 lacework, 139, 140, 142, 147, 156 lacis, 135 Lang, Helen S., 31 Langland, William, Piers Plowman, 100 Laqueur, Thomas, 29 La Roche, Jemmy, 27, 28, 185–206 Latour, Bruno, 4–6, 12, 27, 31–32, 129, 130, 131, 179, 229, 254, 255 actants, 4, 233 anthropology of science, 160–61 Indigenous cosmologies, 127 mediators, 6, 243–44 Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, 255 The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, 31

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I n de x Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, 4, 12, 31, 129, 254, 255 We Have Never Been Modern, 31, 130– 31, 179, 229 western culture, 114, 122 Lawle, Anne, 133–58 birds, 135–36, 140, 142–43, 147, 149, 151, 155 Lawle’s sampler, 136, 143, 150–52 Le Clerc, Jean, 141, 145–48 lead, 61, 62, 77 Levine, Caroline, 59, 76 “life histories” of objects, 3, 14, 23, 26, 165 Little Jr., Arthur L., 40–41, 53 Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 186, 195, 200, 204 liturgical garments, 2, 24, 102 Consult also vestments lodestones, 2 Lodge, Thomas, 226, 229 Loomba, Ania, 41, 48, 53–54 Lord Mayor’s Show, 197, 221–22, 228–29 Lotz, Arthur, 142, 146, 150, 156–58 Louis XIV, 195 Love, Harold, 204 love knot, 69–73, 80 love token(s), 78 Lovelock, James, 111 Lowerre, Kathryn, 196–97, 203–4 Lucretius, 35, 111, 127 De rerum natura, 35, 127 lute, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 30–32, 228, 229 Lydgate, John, Lay Folk’s Mass Book, 89 Lyly, John, 100 Lynch, William T., 181 Lyng Tablet Carpet, 93, 104 MacGregor, Arthur, 34 MacLean, Gerald, 33 magic, 27, 32, 34–35, 122, 216, 231–56 combs, 62 grimoire, 29, 231–56 magical ceston, 10, 28, 207, 209, 215, 217, 224, 228 Malchi, Esperanza, 23, 39–41, 47, 50, 52 Malcolm, Robert, 202 Mandeville, John, 1, 13, 29, 30, 33 The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 29, 30, 33 Mann, Jenny C., 33, 226

Wood-final.indb 271

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271

Marcus, Leah S., 10, 33 Margaret III, Countess of Flanders, 63 Marie de France, 2 Markey, Lia, 121 Markey, Lia, and Jessica Keating, 131 Marlowe, Christopher, 226 Hero and Leander, 63, 78 Marr, Alexander, 228, 230 Martindale, Charles, 226 Marvell, Andrew, 122, 123 Marx, Karl, 9, 32, 101, 205 Mary Rose, 63, 77 masques, 26, 117, 121, 218, 229 Mass, 89–91, 98, 104, 124–25, 256 material vitalism, 10 Consult also vital materialism matter, 6–12, 22, 25, 28–33, 35, 98, 105, 129, 131, 138, 146, 158, 203, 205, 213, 216, 217, 227, 228, 230, 253 Aristotle’s theory of, 8, 21, 223–25 Bacon’s theory of, 7 and dynameos, 188, 200 early modern theories of, 2–4 as hyle, 8–10 Lucretius’s theory of, 111, 127 and Proteus, 11–12, 207, 208, 211, 225 and sensory properties, 12, 17–19, 219–21 Mauriès, Patrick, 34 Mayor, Adrienne, 227, 228 McCulloch, Lynsey, 227 McKerrow, R. B., and F. S. Ferguson, 158 mediator, 6, 154, 242, 243, 245 Medici family, 54, 131 Mehmed III, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, 13, 46 memory, 30, 53, 55, 82, 89, 90, 97, 102, 103, 104, 128, 136, 155, 156, 195, 199–202, 205 Mendelsohn, Everett, 31 Mentz, Steve, 238, 249, 254, 256 Merchant, Carolyn, 127, 131 Mercurius van Helmont, Franciscus, 78 Merret, Christopher, 160, 164, 168, 169, 170, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181 mesh, 5, 18, 34, 115, 142, 157, 253 Consult also assemblage, network, web Mesoamerica, 111, 112, 115, 123, 124, 126, 130 mestizaje, 124

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272

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I n de x

metamorphosis, metamorphoses, 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 99, 126, 140, 178, 200, 203, 208–12, 220, 223–29, 240, 248, 253 Consult also transform, transformative metaphor, 7, 9, 25, 31, 49, 54, 55, 62, 63, 75, 82, 84, 85, 91, 101, 138, 139, 147, 161, 196, 208, 218, 231–56 Métis, 110 Mexica/Mexican, 109, 113, 114, 116, 122–24, 126, 130 microscopes, 161, 178 Miller, Andrew G., 100, 101 Milton, John, 61, 65, 77, 112, 114, 126, 130, 205 Comus, 61, 65, 77 Paradise Lost, 112, 114, 130 Minear, Erin, 205 mirror, 61, 63, 75, 76, 78, 190 Moctezuma, 113, 122 Montrose, Louis, 49, 54 Moray, Robert, 160, 164–80 More, Thomas, Utopia, 114, 115, 122, 130 Consult also utopia Morgan, Gareth, 226 Morocco, 40 Morton, Timothy, 17, 32, 34, 35, 236, 254 Hyperobjects, 32, 34, 35 Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, 34, 35, 254 mortuary spectacles, 24, 86 Motteux, Peter, 28, 186, 194–97, 201, 202, 204 Europe’s revels for the peace of Ryswick, 28, 186, 195, 196, 197, 204 mourning, 98, 99, 247 Consult also grief Mowat, Barbara, 235, 244, 253–55 Mullaney, Steven, 34 multisensory, 12, 16, 21–22, 29, 69, 91, 131, 164–65, 168, 176, 223, 225, 230 multitemporal, 9, 11, 14, 21, 22, 98, 104, 202, 225 Consult also polychronic Murad III, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, 39 museum, 2, 14–16, 21, 22, 33, 34, 52, 75–78, 80, 93, 104, 116, 122, 123, 130, 131, 151, 156, 202, 230 music, 2, 4–7, 10, 15, 22, 27, 28, 32, 75, 91, 103, 185–206, 228, 231, 245–47, 250, 255

Wood-final.indb 272

Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher S. Wood, 91, 98, 104, 138, 139, 144, 146, 150, 152, 156, 157, 158 Anachronic Renaissance, 91, 98, 104, 138, 156, 157, 158 Nahua, 112, 113, 122, 128, 130, 131 narrative, 1, 19, 45, 69, 72, 76, 87, 111, 127, 128, 130, 139, 154, 169, 232–34, 237–56 Natural Philosophy, 15, 33, 112, 129, 159–63, 165, 176, 179 nature, 6, 11, 18, 31, 33, 53, 71, 73, 112–14, 121–23, 127, 128, 130, 131, 221, 226, 229, 230 needlework, 25, 91, 133–58 needlework pattern books, 10, 25, 26, 35, 100, 133–58, 178 Neihardt, John G., 132 Neile, Sir Paul, 165–67, 180 Neri, Antonio, 164, 168, 176, 177 The Art of Glass, 164, 181 De Arte Vitraria, 168 network, 3–6, 8, 12, 14, 16, 18, 22–28, 31, 32, 34, 39, 40, 51–53, 76, 107–81, 188, 203, 217, 218, 220, 233, 240, 254–56 Consult also assemblage, mesh, web new materialism, 3, 6, 10, 12, 14, 31, 33, 228 New World, 1, 25, 26, 36, 109–32, 255 Nicholls, Sutton, 185, 186, 187, 197, 198, 202, 203 Nomentack, 119 nonhuman, 2, 3, 12, 27, 29, 110, 117, 126– 28, 228, 232, 233, 236–39, 241, 250, 254, 255 object-oriented ontology (OOO), 3, 5, 6, 8, 12, 14, 17, 18, 20, 29, 31, 34, 35, 164 Old Harry, 185–87, 190, 191, 200, 202 olfactory, 15, 172 oranges, 239, 254, 255 Order of the Garter, 78 organ, body part, 18, 178 organ, musical, 12, 13, 33, 46, 47, 54, 203, 248 Orgel, Stephen, 119 ornithology, 117 orpharion, 215 orphreys, 93, 94, 95, 98 Ostaus, Giovanni, 135, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156 La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varisorta di recami, 135, 150, 151

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I n de x Ostovich, Helen, 228 Othello’s handkerchief, 136 Ottoman Empire, 13, 23, 33, 39, 40, 46, 47, 53, 54, 203 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1, 28, 207, 208, 225– 27, 229 Oxford’s Physic Garden, 15 pageant, 54, 117, 218, 221, 222, 224, 228, 229 Palliser, Bury, 156 palls, 24, 82, 90, 93, 98, 99, 104, 105 Consult also funeral palls Pangallo, Matteo, 225 Papaschase Cree, 115 Paracelsus, 10, 33 Parasite, 239, 240, 243, 255 Consult also Serres, Michel, Parasite paratexts, 88, 140, 141, 144, 146, 149, 154, 158, 176 parchment, 30, 46, 68, 91, 212 Paris, 80, 116, 140, 141, 142, 145, 148, 149, 156, 163, 190 Paris, Matthew, 86–88, 102, 103 Chronica Majora, 88, 102 Parker, Matthew, 88 Paster, Gail Kern, 12, 31, 33 pastoral romance, 56 Paul III, Pope, 124 Peace of Ryswick, 28, 186, 188, 195, 200, 203 Pearl, 48 pearl, oyster, 247, 248, 250 Peele, George, The Arraignment at Paris, 214, 228 Peirce, Leslie, 42, 53 Pepys, Samuel, 160, 179 Percy, Martyn, 100 Percy, William, 28, 29, 207–30, 253 Alnwick Castle MSS 508 and 509, 211, 213, 214 The Aphrodysial or Sea-Feast, 28, 29, 207–30, 253 Huntington Library MS HM4, 211 Perez-Ramos, Antonio, 32 performative materiality, 56, 99, 105, 202 Perry, Curtis, 30 Pesic, Peter, 226 Peterfeso, Jill, 100 Peterson, Joseph, 199, 205 Petrarch, Francesco, 62, 79

Wood-final.indb 273

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273

philosopher’s stone, 1 Pickering, Andrew, 254 Piemont, Alexis, The Secrets of Alexis Piemont, 40, 43, 44, 53 Pierazzo, Elena, 227 pipe and drum, 191 Plat, Hugh, 43, 53 Plato, 114, 115 Republic, 115 Platt, Peter G., 228 Pliny, 225 Pocahontas, 119 poesies, 60, 61, 65, 67, 72, 78–80 Poitevin, Kimberly, 52 polychronic, 9, 22, 200, 202, 211 Consult also multitemporal Popish Plot, 196, 204 porcelain, 23 portrait miniature, 45 postcolonialism, 41, 110 posthumanism, 110 post-Reformation, 24, 30 posy verse, posies, 55, 56, 60, 61, 69, 70, 72, 77, 79 potentia (potentiality), 9, 10, 188, 200, 202, 224, 232, 243, 251, 253 Powhatan, 119 Poyntz, Adrian, 135, 148–50, 157 Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, 82 Prince Rupert of Rhine, 27, 168 Prince Rupert’s drops, 27, 159–205 props, stage properties, 27–29, 36, 102, 200, 213, 215, 217–19, 227, 229, 253 Protestant, 30, 62, 83, 89, 98, 99, 102, 188, 192, 194, 256 Protestant Reformation, 25, 88 Proteus, protean, 4, 11, 12, 28, 33, 207–11, 213, 215–18, 220, 221, 223–27 puppet, 188, 191, 193, 196 Purcell, Henry, Orpheus Britannicus, 77 Purkis, James, 210, 227 Puttenham, George, 60, 65–68, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80 The Arte of English Poesie, 60, 65, 67, 78, 79, 80 Pye, Christopher, 121, 131 quasi-object, 229 quasi-subject, 218, 229 Quetzal bird, 122 Quetzalcoatl, 122

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274 | I n de x Quezales, 122 Quilligan, Maureen, 102, 129, 132 Rabelais, François, 61, 77 race, 23, 24, 41, 52–54, 76, 120, 121, 125, 128, 131 Rahn, B. J., 204 Raleigh, Walter, 131 Randles, Sarah, 144, 157, 158 raree show, rare show, 27, 28, 185–205 raree showmen, rare showmen, 191, 192, 195, 199, 200, 203 Reid, Robert (alias Senex), 203 (re)incarnation, 26, 35, 81, 100, 133–55, 178 relic, 13, 14, 33, 62 Consult also holy relic Reynard the Fox, 61 rhizome, 5 Ricci, Elisa, 141, 156, 157 “The Rift,” 17, 34 ring, 59, 69, 77 Robertson, Jean, and D. J. Gordon, 229 Rogers, Clifford J., 101 Rood, 20, 21, 35 Royal Albert Memorial Museum, 94–97 Royal Society, 27, 34, 105, 160–81 Ruscelli, Girolamo, 43, 53 Russell, John, 82 Russo, Alessandra, 130, 131 Ruthwell Cross, 19, 20 Safiye Sultan, Melike Safiye Sultan, 23, 39, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52 Sager, Jenny, 228, 229 Saint Augustine, 87 Saint Dorothy, 93 Saint Francis, 124 Saint Gregory Mass, 87, 124 Saint Margaret, 93 Saint Thomas, 97 saltpeter, 40, 52 sampler, 133, 134, 136, 143, 148, 150–53, 156, 157 Sarkar, Debapriya, 33, 226, 232, 243, 253, 255, 256 Savoyards, 28 Sawday, Jonathan, 228 scaffold, 85, 86, 102 Schmitt, Charles, 31 science, 15, 18, 26, 27, 30–33, 36, 53, 58, 117, 123, 127–31, 159–62, 164, 166, 168, 169, 173, 176–80, 208, 235, 254, 255

Wood-final.indb 274

scientific method, 18, 208 Scripture, 96, 101, 112, 139 Semper Eadem, 49 Senex (also known as Robert Reid), 203 sensory experience, 4, 5, 12, 14–22, 25, 26, 29, 33, 35, 61, 73, 144, 176, 205, 219, 230, 249, 253, 255, 256 human, 3, 8, 14–16, 58 multisensory, 21–22, 69, 91, 131, 176, 223, 225 non-human, 16–17, 236–38 and scientific experiments, 161, 164, 165, 168, 171, 172, 175, 178 sensual, sensual experience, 4, 16, 17, 22, 34, 35, 58, 59, 65, 66, 73, 78, 144, 236, 240, 241, 244, 249, 256 Serres, Michel, 9, 17, 30, 32, 34, 35, 239, 255 Five Senses, 17, 34 Parasite, 255 Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, 30, 32, 35 Shakespeare, William, 2, 15, 30–33, 35, 52–54, 65, 102, 105, 117, 127, 179, 203, 205, 225–27, 229, 231, 233, 253 2 Henry VI, 30 The Comedy of Errors, 208, 226, 254 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2, 156 The Rape of Lucrece, 65 The Sonnets, 65 The Tempest, 6, 29, 31, 231–56 Timon of Athens, 15 Venus and Adonis, 65 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 30 Sharp, John and Elizabeth, of Bristol, 90 shells, 49, 190, 245 Sherlock, Peter, 205 Sidney, Philip, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, 30 silk, 63, 75, 83, 92, 93, 113, 134, 153 silver, 45, 62, 77, 110 Silver Moon and Michael Ennis, 128, 131 Simpson, Claude, 204 Sixtus V, Pope, 124 Skilliter, Susan, 52, 54 skin-whitening, 40, 41, 47, 48, 53 Smith, Douglas Alton, 31 Smythe, Sir John, 101 Snook, Edith, 44, 48, 53, 54 Sofer, Andrew, 36, 102, 218, 227, 229 sonnet, 62, 65, 73, 79, 157 speculative poiesis, 232, 243, 244, 253 speculative realism, 236

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I n de x Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, 214, 228 Spinoza, Baruch, 10, 32, 114, 127, 130 spirit, 5, 7, 10, 12, 18–20, 31, 114, 128, 172, 231, 242–46, 252 Spring, Matthew, 32 Stallybrass, Peter, 30, 44, 49, 54, 86, 102, 129, 137, 156, 205 Stanhope, Hester, 13 Starks, Lisa S., 226 Stern, Tiffany, 77 stitching, 25, 98, 133, 139, 150 Consult also embroidery St John’s College, Oxford, 92 St Mary Arches Pall, 93–99, 105 Stowe, John, The Chronicles of England, 100 St Paul’s Cathedral, 77, 174, 180, 194, 211 St Petrock’s Pall, 90, 93, 99 Strato of Lampsacus, 33 Strong, Roy, 48, 49, 54, 119, 229 Sullivan, Jr., Garret A., 31, 34 Swann, Marjorie, 34, 202 Sylvester, Josuah, 112, 130 tactility, 14 Tarrant, Richard, 226 tea, 109 telescope, 161, 166, 177 Telesio, Bernardino, 18, 33, 35 Tempest, Pierce, 189, 191, 197 temporality, 9, 22, 84, 98, 138–40, 146, 156, 200 Consult also time Tenochtitlan, 124 Test, Edward McLean, 129 textiles, 2, 10, 23–25, 61, 66, 78, 79, 82, 89–93, 97, 104, 136, 149–51, 154–57 Thames, 221 thing, 3, 4, 8–11, 30–34, 71, 84, 141, 146, 192, 193, 203, 221, 245, 253, 254 and ANT, 8 and life histories, 26 and loss, 100 and Margaret Cavendish, 18 and mediation, 241, 243 and memory, 201 and metaphor, 235–37, 251 and New World feathers, 110–12, 114, 115, 121, 128 and objective agency, 128 and OOO, 6

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275

and parasites, 239 and performative materiality, 56–58, 201 and Proteus, 11, 14, 208 and (re)incarnation, 155 and scientific study, 160, 175, 176, 178 and sensory experience, 3–4, 16 as speculative object, 232–33 and Spinoza, 10 and stage properties, 28 and transformation, 100, 247, 250 Thing-Power, 33 thing theory, 110 Consult also Brown, Bill Thrush, Coll, Indigenous London, 110, 129, 130 time, 2–4, 9, 14–16, 20–23, 28, 29, 32, 35, 49, 56, 91, 98, 103, 105, 137–39, 152, 155, 178, 188, 190, 200, 203, 205, 211–13, 227, 236, 254 Consult also temporality tobacco, 1, 15, 44, 109, 110, 111, 117, 124, 129, 131 Todd, Zoe, 110, 129 token, 56, 59, 60, 65, 66, 77–79 touch, 2, 12, 14–15, 20, 21, 26, 29, 34, 74, 77, 79, 90–92, 120, 124, 150, 164, 170, 178, 238, 240, 245 trace, 3, 14, 16, 21–26, 51, 76, 93, 136, 147– 49, 154, 200, 235, 236 Tradescants, Elder and Younger John, 14, 34 Traité des reliques, 13 transcultural, 11, 28, 40, 50, 51 transform, transformative, 1–36, 47, 54, 69, 99, 109, 113, 121, 130, 199, 221, 225, 228, 238, 240–53 and cestons, 212, 213, 215, 218 and clerical vestments, 92, 99, 130 and cosmesis, 44, 49–51 as drowning, 248–51 and feathers, 126 and glass, 178 and hyle, 9 and materiality, 2 and needlework patterns, 140 and objects, 4 and Proteus, 11, 203, 207–10, 216 Consult also metamorphosis, metamorphoses transubstantiate, transubstantiation, 1, 29, 95 trencher, 60, 76–78

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276 | I n de x Trojan War, 13 True Cross, 19 Tsenacomoco, 119 Tuke, Thomas, 43, 53 Tupinamba, 121 Turkey, 13, 50, 54, 155 Turkey Company, 41 Turner, Henry S., 32 Turner, Terence S., 45, 54 Tusser, Thomas, 79 utopia, 25, 109, 114, 115, 126, 238 Consult also More, Thomas, Utopia Vaughan, Alden, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 31 Vaughan, Virginia Mason, and Alden T. Vaughan, 29, 253 Vecellio, Cesare, 119, 130 Venice, 47, 50, 124, 135, 140–42, 146, 147, 150, 151, 158 Venus (Aphrodite, Cytherea), 209, 214, 226, 228 Vercilli Book, 19 Vespucci, Amerigo, 115 vestments, 9, 23–26, 81–105, 114, 115, 130 Consult also liturgical garments vibrant, 4, 5, 16, 22, 29–31, 33, 35, 123, 127, 129, 131 Vinciolo, Federico, 135, 141–58 Les singuliers et Nouveaux Pourtraicts, 135, 141–58 Virgil, 210, 225, 226 Virgin Martyrs, 88, 103 vital materialism, 10, 11, 110, 111, 126, 127 Consult also material vitalism vital spirit, 5, 10 Vos, Eric, 203 Vowell, John (alias Hooker), 82–86, 100–101 Consult also Hooker, John Wade, John, 204 Wadham College, Oxford, 166 Wahunsenacawh, 119 Ward, Edward, 191, 197, 203, 204 Watts, Vanessa, 110, 114, 128, 129, 130, 132 Weaver, Jace, 109, 129 web, 5, 6, 23–26, 114, 141, 199 Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi, 2 Weindling, Lauren, 208, 226 Welsh, Robert, 82–86, 99–101

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Werstine, Paul, 210, 227 whale, 10, 27–29, 207, 209, 210, 213, 217, 225, 229 Wheeler, Wendy, 99, 105 Whitehall Palace, 166 Whitehead, Neil, 123, 131 whiteness, 40, 41, 47, 48, 53 Consult also face-whitening Whiting, Robert, 100, 103, 104 Wiggins, Martin, 219, 223, 227–29 Wilder, Lina Perkins, Shakespeare’s Memory, 205 Williams, Neville, 54 Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature, 101 Williams, Sarah F., 204, 205 witch, 2, 204, 205, 227, 256 Witmore, Michael, 35, 222, 229 Wolfe, Jessica, 228 Wolft hal, Denise, 75, 78 women, 23–25, 39, 41, 42, 44, 47, 51–54, 75, 90, 103, 129, 131, 148, 149, 158, 204, 205 Wood, Jennifer Linhart, 33, 46, 54, 203, 228, 256 Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel, 33, 256 woodblock, 25, 136–38, 140, 144, 147, 148, 150, 158 Woodward, Jennifer, 86, 102 Wool Church, 92 Woolwich, 165–67 Wrag, Richard, 54 Wriothesley, Elizabeth Vernon, Countess of Southampton, 64, 65, 78 Wriothesley, Henry, third Earl of Southampton, 65, 78 Wunderkammer, 14, 16, 30, 33, 123 Consult also curiosity cabinet Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 79 Wycherley, William, 78 Yates, Frances, 205 Yates, Julian, 30, 203, 239, 254, 255 Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance, 30, 203 Yeoman, Victoria, 76–78 York Crucifi xion, 88 Yturbide, Teresa Castelló, 126, 130, 131 The Art of Featherwork in Mexico, 130, 131

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