Charlie's Chaplain

Two Royal chaplains are buried at the Parish church in Eversley, in Hampshire,

http://www.stmaryseversley.org.uk/

They are Alexander Ross, chaplain to Charles I, and Charles Kingsley (more famous as the novelist and social reformer), but who was chaplain to Queen Victoria, and sometime tutor to Edward VII.

I do not know if there has ever been a study of the intellectual mentors of the famous (a mixed history that might start with Seneca’s disastrously temporary hold over Nero). It is hard to imagine that Alexander Ross was anything other than a bad influence on King Charles, for Ross was a cantankerous fanatic, who struck out at any new idea that he encountered. A medieval-style Aristotelian, he attacked Thomas Hobbes, Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir Thomas Browne, William Harvey, and published a late (the last?) refutation of the crazy new (-ish) notion that the earth revolved around the sun, in The New Planet no Planet, Or, the Earth no wandering Star, Except in the wandring heads of Galileans (1646).

Ross also collected and catalogued religious heretics, and this orthodox man’s obsessive interest in what he saw as the heterodox perhaps led him to some involvement in the first English translation of the Koran. He might in fact have been the translator, the work coming into English via a French translation. The prefatory matter that he certainly did contribute (because he signed it) is a characteristic performance. He knows that the project cannot (by his own narrow principles) be justified, but he also cannot quite resist adding this prize example to his manic collection of (as he sees it) departures from the true faith.

His self-conflict is captured in this passage, from amongst his list of justifications for publishing the work:

“We cannot do better service to our Countrymen, nor offer a greater affront to the Mahometans, than to bring out to the open view of all, the blind Sampsons of their Alcoran, which have mastered so many Nations, that we may laugh at it” (sig d4).

This, of course, casts his Christian readers as the Philistines, foolishly jeering at the undaunted captive who will bring down the roof on them all. Ross cannot quite conceal from either himself or from us his unease about what he is doing. Is he, the staunchest defender of things as they are, introducing the potent force that will demolish everything?

Charles Kingsley was perhaps stranger still. His inner heretic was Darwinian, and he had suffered the full 19^th century ‘doubts’, before rallying to settle on his version of manly Christianity. He is buried outside the Church with his somewhat older wife, Fanny, beneath a white cross whose design they had jointly agreed. The inscription reads ‘Amavimus, amamus, amabimus’ (‘We loved, we love, we shall love’). It is more than a piece of Latin declension. When a young woman, Fanny had been drawn to the idea of establishing a Protestant celibate sisterhood. Charles seems to have managed to supersede this with a doctrine in which the orgasm was interpreted as a foretaste of the similar joys of heaven. The immense, almost doctrinal importance he gave to sex as an earthly manifestation of the divine might have made him (in the unlikely case of their consultations ever touching, in some remote fashion, on such matters in a Christian marriage) congenial as a Chaplain to Queen Victoria, who was frisky enough when young. A 20^th century memorial window to Kingsley depicts a couple of water babies (I think, though I cannot see that the external gills the story specifies have been included) at either side of St Elizabeth of Hungary, whose status as a married saint made her extremely important to the writer.

But Eversley church takes us back to the Koran again, in a brass memorial plaque to the remarkable Mary Kingsley (Charles Kingsley’s niece). It is a surprise to see in an Anglican Church an inscription in Arabic, even more of a surprise to find that it translates the Koran saying ‘I seek refuge in the Lord of the Daybreak, / From the evil of that which he has created, /And from the evil of the intense darkness when it comes.’ Theologically tough-minded stuff, this: I think only Isaiah 45, 7 is anywhere near as candid in allowing the Bible’s God to be responsible for the whole shooting match, good and bad. One can only suppose that Mary Kingsley was so far off-the-scale in her unconventionality (West African travels, condemner of missionaries, unflinching defender of local customs up to and including slave trading) that they felt they had to rise to the challenge.

History seems to gel, congeal, and aggregate in certain places. The final surprise in Eversley Church is to lift a trapdoor in the floor and discover a sarsen stone glistening darkly beneath the Christian fabric. Was it accidentally there, a mere freak of geology, or did the church get there because this stone had served in a previous form of worship?

http://www.stmaryseversley.org.uk/Virtual_tour.htm

Well, it smites my lyre anyway

I have been listening, over and over, to Handel’s 1707 ‘Dixit Dominus’: I’ve got a version performed wonderfully by The Sixteen Choir and Orchestra http://www.chandos.net/details05.asp?CNumber=CHAN%200517

Apart from a gruesome ‘midi’ file, I’m afraid that I cannot find an mp3 on the net. Anyway, once it had got under my skin, I wanted to know what it was about. Handel was setting the Latin text (from the Vulgate) of what became Psalm 110 in the English bible. I was aware of other settings of this psalm, notably Monteverdi’s. There’s a list at http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Psalm_110

To see what the text of this glorious music actually says is a shock. In the fifth and sixth sections, Handel is setting ‘confregit in die irae suae reges’ (‘hath broken kings in the day of His wrath’) and ‘conquassabit capita in terra multorum’ (‘He will crush heads in the land of many’ or (AV), ‘he shall wound the heads over many countries’). To ‘confregit’ and, even more markedly, ‘conquassabit’, Handel gives an exultant setting. The sopranos shriek, the tenors shout (all in their highly modified way). Violence was (surely) never celebrated with such beauty. The sentiments are those of a savage tribe, but delivered in such a way that you have to love and admire humanity: the special genius who can score such music, and the men and women who have nurtured their talent till they can perform with such intensity and precision.

Psalm 110 is power-worshipping, the kind of power that smashes enemies abroad. The version in The Book of Common Prayer enthuses: ‘He shall judge among the heathen; he shall fill the places with the dead bodies: and smite in sunder the heads over divers countries.’ It celebrates the inauguration of a king as being, simultaneously, high priest ‘for ever according to the order of Melchisedech’. For this moment of union of temporal and sacred power, Handel again supplies a canon (I think) of astonishing beauty. When Henry VIII passed the Act of Supremacy, he didn’t know it, but this was what he had in mind. And yet, and yet: because Handel sets in a Christian tradition, while there may be a residual sense of power embodied in a here-and-now mortal priest-king, as that priest-king really has to be Christ, the psalm (as set) also expresses, exuberantly, the destruction of all temporal kingship: kings as footstools, broken kings, a new reign in which ruling has been swept away.

Psalm 110 achieved its cultural prominence through a misunderstanding: ‘Dixit Dominus Domino meo’, it starts: and this was inevitably read as ‘The Lord (God) said to my Lord (Jesus)’. With that poorly-evidenced doctrine of the Trinity to shore up, here was a text with God speaking to His Son. What might have begun as a praise-song by a court poet about David, or might have been David’s own song about Solomon (or some future leader), and what was certainly a psalm that acquired a very special personal application in the reign of Simon Maccabeus, then went on to be quoted repeatedly in the New Testament. Heralding a messiah, it was inevitably recruited by Christians as being a messianic text about Jesus. This is Isaac Watts’ 1719 version (opening):

Thus the eternal Father spake
To Christ the Son, ‘Ascend and sit
At my right hand, till I shall make
Thy foes submissive at thy feet.’

Watts’ title for his version of the psalms was candid enough: The Psalms of David, imitated in the language of the New Testament, and applied to the Christian state and worship. He translated by choosing those interpretations of the text which were to his mind the “most evangelical and most beautiful”. Watts found the psalm so important, that he gave it three iterations, and interpolated into the text as he thought fit: “Thro' the whole earth his reign shall spread, / And crush the powers that dare rebel” – Christ as the conqueror.

Yet as Watts indulges these sanguinary but devout fantasies, he acknowledges the actual gospel narrative. The last verse of the Latin psalm is obscure (‘De torrente in via bibet: propterea shall He lift up the head’ – ‘He shall drink of the torrent in the way: therefore shall he lift up the head’). Mary Sidney (1561-1621) translated expansively, and swings deftly from the bloodily triumphant, to the Messiah being victorious in death:

Thy Realm shall many Realms contain:
Thy slaught’ed foes thick heaped lie,
With crushed head ev'n he shall die,
Who head of many Realms doth raign.
If passing on these ways
Thou taste of troubled streams:
Shall that eclipse thy shining rays?
Nay, light thy glories’ beams!

Isaac Watts pushed that ‘torrent’ still further into metaphoric paraphrase:

Tho' while he treads his glorious way,
He drink the cup of tears and blood,
The sufferings of that dreadful day
Shall but advance him near to God.

There’s a story that the birth of English Literature as a discipline had something to do with World War I: that a generation of classicists forgot their Greek while serving in the army prior to going to ‘Varsity’, and so a new subject was devised to suit their shortcomings. Looking into psalm interpretation made me think that our kind of interpretation took root after people lost faith in 19^th century forms of Bible interpretation (or that form of scholarship just became too difficult/vexed/mad). Just have a gander at Professor Hildebrandt’s footnote density!

http://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/Ted_Hildebrandt/OTeSources/19-Psalms/Text/Articles/Bateman-Ps110-BS.pdf

http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=1573

(My picture is Kind David harping, from a painting by Jan de Bray.)

"I have nothing of new to direct you in"

Imagine scholarship without the OED (if you can). Now that the power of the computer has been integrated so consummately with that dictionary’s vast resource, just what a resource it has become.

A feature of the online OED which I find irresistible is the search facility for ‘first cited author’ and ‘quotation author’. My last posting was a Charles Cotton poem, in which he is amused (I take it, because he knows that ‘chambre’ means bedroom) by the term ‘valet-de-chambre’, which sounds nicely naughty to him.

The first recorded use of ‘valet-de-chambre’ in English is in a letter from Charles I to Henrietta Maria (so it was quite a new term for Cotton). This set me off looking at Charles’ other potential contributions to the language. The readers who compiled quotations for the OED tended to spot rare words, and also to be drawn, Dr. Johnson-like, to striking quotations. But whoever read Charles I, did so attentively (and without any obvious bias towards noble utterances written by or reported from the King).

Charles had a French wife, and so certain words not recorded prior to his usage may well be very early or even actual first usages. There’s that ‘valet-de-chambre’, and his idiom ‘nothing of new’ is one that the editors suggest may stem from French usage. He adds a new usage to the surprisingly early loan word ‘vogue’ with the idiom, ‘in vogue’. ‘Apostil’ (to annotate or write marginal notes to) failed as a loan word, but is a very characteristic type of usage, for of all kings, Charles was involved (to say the least…) in politics. New political applications of words, fresh military ones, and a vocabulary for the scrutiny of documents (and the characterisation of them) all feature prominently:

A ‘cabalist’ (one who cabals), ‘engage’, ‘anti-monarchical’, ‘agitate’, ‘round-dealing’, ‘misunderstanding’, ‘illiberal’, ‘distractions’ are all entries with developed senses not recorded before Charles’s usage. For military words, ‘home-defence’, ‘enquarter’, and ‘forage’, and from Charles studying documents and attempting to characterise positions taken, words like ‘absolute’, ‘demonstrably’, ‘unconfutable’, ‘counsellable’, ‘paraphrase’, and ‘hyperbolic’ have significant quotations, illustrative of the word’s semantic development, from Charles.

The King’s characteristic usages are recorded: ‘malignant’ meaning ‘sympathetic to the Parliamentarian cause’ seems to have been habitual. His complaint about “The malignant Party which have … begot this Misunderstanding between us and our good subjects” has ‘malignant’ in new sense 1 c and ‘misunderstanding’ in new sense 2 together in one utterance. Charles, a man with a developed aesthetic sense seems (probably) to have regularly used ‘unhandsome’ to deplore something he disapproved of (“his unhansom quitting the Castell and forte of Bristol”). That he is first recorded user of ‘picture-drawing’, in a personal reference for Mytens, seems very appropriate (“Wee, having experience of the facultie and Skill of Daniel Mittens in the Art of Picture draweing…” – and doesn’t this sound exactly the note of a kiss-off reference, Charles having found Van Dyke?)

I didn’t really see Shakespearean usages crop up in this great reader of plays, but sensed that you might have a basis for claiming that Charles had spent a lot of time listening to John Donne, from whom he might have picked up ‘pre-pardon’ and ‘refractariness’.

My doctored hagiographic portrait has one of Charles’ locutions, as picked up by the dictionary. But it isn’t ‘periclitation’ that was the new word there (it seems to have had some circulation among these classically-educated men of the 17^th century for ‘nearness to danger’), but ‘necessitate’ as a verb which is the potential new usage.

Rather beguilingly, I had to search for Charles’s quotations as both ‘Charles I’ and ‘Chas I’, for the dictionary was compiled in an earlier age, and without electronically introduced internal consistency (as the search guides point out).

With his tendency to stutter, Charles I is not associated with any great moments of eloquence or outbursts, and his words may well have undergone loyal working-over. But the situation he found himself in seems to have made him a more varied linguistic performer than one might have expected from a king more famous for iconic than verbal self-projection.

http://dictionary.oed.com/

The Mistress-Master of his passion?

Charles Cotton again … I’ve always considered Orsino a character delivered in Shakespeare’s highest style of comedy. But students tend to dismiss him automatically (‘in love with being in love’ is held against him, as if this were the worst of emotional depravities). His final speech in Twelfth Night is his best moment, when he seems to contrive to marry everybody (‘A solemn combination shall be made / Of our dear souls’), moves in with Olivia at last (‘We will not part from hence’), and assigns an undiminished role for Viola, who can continue to play ‘Cesario’.

At the end of Cotton’s ‘Amoret in masquerade’, the poet puts the question that he has pondered throughout this poem to a beguilingly pretty boy who has caught his attention:

… Come, tell truth,

Are you not a cloven youth?

See, he laughs, and has confess’d,

God-a-mercy for the jest:

Monsieur Amoret let me

Your Valet de Chambre be,

I will serve with humble duty

Both your valour and your beauty,

You shall all day Master hight,

But my Mistress, Sir, at night:

Which if you will please to grant

To your humble supplicant,

Since you wear your wig so featly,

And become your clothes so neatly,

He has sworn, who thus beseeches,

You shall always wear the breeches.

Cross-dressing masquerades do not sound plausible social occasions for the 17^th century Peak District: this is a literary piece, from a culture that has had time to assimilate Shakespeare, and all the ‘page-boys’ of Jacobean stage romances. This little fantasy of safe same-sex attraction has its charm: I like the rather unexpected way that a mid 17^th century girl has to put on a wig to make herself masculine. Of course, Cotton was unreconstructed: ‘cloven’ is his usual way of denoting specifically female anatomy, but it’s a word that has rather markedly diabolic associations, while that final line promising that she will ‘always wear the breeches’ gets its point from misogamistic discourse (Cotton has a satirical ‘Joys of Marriage’ poem). She can be, day-time, a boy wearing the breeches, as that turns him on, but she conspicuously isn’t a wife with any potential for wearing (metaphorically) the breeches in the household. Perhaps most betrayingly of all, Cotton uses for this set of verses the same heptasyllabics he deployed for Matty his pine marten. ‘Pretty’ and ‘little’, quite acceptable in a poem about a pet, become leering in a poem which miniaturises and de-genders a woman.

But that goes too far: imagining a girl as a surpassingly beautiful boy excites Cotton to a strong restatement of her hidden gender. This is earlier in the poem:

My heart tells me, to those eyes

There belongs a pair of thighs,

'Twixt whose iv’ry columns is

Th’Ebon folding door to bliss:

And this sprig, all that we see

Strut with such formality,

Huff, and strive to look so big,

Is but Pallas in a wig;

And though his count’nance he doth set

To a good pitch of counterfeit,

Yet he cannot hide the while,

Venus’ dimple in his smile…

(Beresford’s 1923 edition has ‘Ebor’ where I’ve put ‘Ebon’ (‘Ebor’ isn’t in the OED, but ‘ebon’ connotes dark, etc), and reads ‘spring’ where I’ve substituted ‘sprig’ - as a regular term for a young man).

‘Venus’ dimple’ giving the true gender of the boy away reminds me of Donne’s ‘All will spy in thy face / A blushing womanly discovering grace’ (Elegy XVI), that marvellous moment when Donne for once allows a young woman’s beauty into his poetry (before being impelled to efface it: ‘Richly clothed apes, are called apes…’).

Cotton’s more famous poem about a ‘Doubtful Gender Masculine’ is his ‘On Annel-seed Robin, the Hermophrodite’, in which he casts Robin as a henotic being (one flesh, man and wife at once). It’s again faintly Shakespearean, being like ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ this time: ‘in this Chest Entombed are, / The wonder of a single pair’. But why ‘Annel-seed’?: my guess is from ‘anil’, indigo – as purple mixes two colours, Robin mixed two sexes. Could it be something to do with aniseed?

I couldn't find a convenient image of an early modern transvestite girl, so I took the putti with a mask from a bad painting by Everdingen. Maybe someone with more courage at the internet browser can tell me where to find one.

Early Modern Advertising Again (or how not to write a Girls’ School Prospectus)

It was 1642, and Ben Agar had ambitious schemes to set up, in Kingston-on-Thames, ‘a private Schoole or Nursery, for the generall education of female youth only, at, or from the age of eight yeares, or thereabout, with all convenient and delightfull appurtenances thereunto belonging’. The curriculum will be of ‘Latine, French, and writing by Letter and Cyphers, as also for other Morrall, Civill, and Religious discipline, with the teaching of sundry sorts of Needle-work, Tent-worke, or the like, Musicall instruments, and Dancing.’

Unfortunately, the schemes of this over-sensitive gentleman were put back by his wife absconding with a man he intended to employ in the school, leaving the unhappy pedant determined to do two things in just the one pamphlet: advertise his girls’ school, and re-assert his virility. This is not an easy combination of aims. For instance, he will undertake, he says:

“To breed up and religiously educate, three dozen at least of pure Virgins, and yet turne and returne them all safe and secure to their severall indulgent Parents, after foure or five yeares exercise of their young and tender inclinations, as chast and pure, and surely more perfect and cleare, then they came or were delivered into my charge, maugre all those imputations of my frozen imbecilitie that way, cast upon me by my lustfull wife, who (after almost twentie yeares experience) declares me scarce so able for her satisfaction as an Euenuch.”

One subject at a time would have been better, wouldn’t it? He can’t quite resolve whether it would be better for his boarding school to declare himself impotent, or whether he should as a husband contradict the charge laid by his absconded wife. He ventures into metaphor, to predictably unhappy effect:

“Notwithstanding all the insultant premises of an ungracious wife; I have had by two wives, six children; though now (through lazie negligence or other accidentall impediment) I have so seldome, and timorously frequented the two-leav’d dore of my stately habitation; that my present wife hath been unwillingly constrained to run thorow the back-yard of Concupiscence behinde her husbands great house, to perswade her lusty man to perform his Masters office at home and abroad.”

Once started, Agar lets it all hang out: when it comes to not delivering on the marriage vows, he will tell the predictable husband’s tale, of a man “who hath been hitherto detained from her, and bated of her own and due benevolence, three quarters, at least, or every whole yeare, for almost twenty yeares together”.

The title page of this ill-judged publication seems to introduce the hopeless confusion of aims. He called it The Lost Sheepe is Found, but the sub-title then explains that his “imperious revolted Wife” and her paramour the “ungrateful Man-servant” had departed together “into the streights of Magellanica, or the West Indies, or some where else unknowne” – there’s a Lost Sheep that sounds to have exited fairly conclusively from the fold.

Poor old Agar! Simultaneously presenting himself as the reassuringly continent schoolmaster, and sex-denied husband, eager to advertise his scheme, but conforming to every traditional satirical hit at schoolteachers: touchy, self-absorbed, blind to reality, issuing promises to look after dozens of young women, but made to look an utter fool by just one.

I wonder how many of the couples who joined the early colonies were driven to go there, as the ex-Mrs Agar so understandably was, by the unavailability of divorce in England?

Early Modern Pets

I was thinking again about Sir Thomas More and his household: that grave company of clever adults (two or three of the young women present do seem to be pregnant, but no actual children intrude on the scene). Instead, three honorary children appear, supplying an unexpectedly frivolous shrub-layer to this forest canopy of mature intellects: the animals, two dogs, and tucked away in the right hand corner, like a marginal antic-work in an illuminated manuscript, an ape.

Early modern pets always included exotics – those delightful and faintly subversive popinjays! – but I want to post today about the wider range of native animals people kept as pets. Charles Cotton (1630-87), gentleman poet and angler, who lived on the Staffordshire side of the Peak District, had a pet pine marten, which he wrote about in a set of verses, ‘On My Pretty Marten’.

The poem seems to have a twofold purpose: a self-indulgent burbling about the merits of the animal, and an attempt to convince a woman partner that this is an acceptable animal to have around. Towards the end of the poem:

Here sweet beauty is a creature

Purposely ordained by Nature,

Both for cleanness and for shape

Worthy a fair lady’s lap;

Not her bosom would disgrace,

Nor a more beloved place.

As you see, the poem is familiar to the point of being cheeky, provoking her with the inevitable and immemorial associations of small furry animals.

Cotton commends his marten as a courtly animal, superior to other favoured pets:

Then for fashion and for mien,

Matty’s fit to court a Queen;

All his motions graceful are …

Which should ladies see, they sure

Other beasts would ne’er endure;

Then no more they would make suit

For an ugly pissing-coat

Rammish cat, nor make a pet

Of a bawdy marmoset.

Nay, the squirrel, though it is

Pretti’st creature next to this,

Would henceforward be discarded,

And in woods live unregarded.

I wonder when the squirrel ceased to be a house-pet? Did it lose that ancillary role as it lost its wild territory to the grey squirrel? Marjorie Pinchwife (‘The Country Wife’) complaining that her jealous husband has threatened ‘to kill my squirrel’ comes to mind. Pine martens themselves have long disappeared from the Peak District, to survive only in Scotland and the very north of England.

The greater part of Cotton’s poem simply commends ‘Pretty Matty’:

And for beauty, Nature too

Here would show what she can do;

Finer creature ne’er was seen,

Half so pretty, half so clean.

Eyes as round and black as sloe,

Teeth as white as morning snow;

Breath as sweet as blowing roses …

Next his feet my praise commands,

Which methinks we should call hands,

Which so finely they are shap’d,

And for any use so apt,

Nothing can so dextrous be,

Nor fine handed near as he.

These, without though black as jet,

Within are soft and supple yet

As virgin’s palm …

He somehow omits the claws, doesn't he? One senses that there was a sceptical first audience, someone who had to be persuaded of the merits of this animal, when he goes out of his way to commend its smell:

Back and belly soft as down …

And of such a rich perfume,

As, to say I dare presume,

Will out-ravish and out-wear

That of the fulsome milliner.

I’ve taken my pine marten image from this website http://www.ionalister.com/pinemarten/pmfrontdoor.htm

and, in asking permission to use the photograph, drawn attention to this post about a marten as a pet. Maybe an expert will know if a marten smells pleasant at close quarters.

If Cotton’s first reader was an acute reader of poetry and men, she might have been struck by the facility with contemporary love poetry adapts to blazoning the looks of a small mammal. In the middle of the poem, Cotton praises the masculine virtues of his ‘little Cavalier’, and these tend to be its inner merits: Matty’s courage, constancy, chastity, justice, and judgment. He is

with such virtue bless’d,

That he chooses still the best,

And wants nothing of a wit

But a tongue to utter it:

Yet with that we may dispense,

For his signs are eloquence…

It doesn’t have the power of Smart’s ‘I will consider my cat Jeffrey’, or the pathos of Marvell’s ‘Nymph Complaining’. Cotton isn’t in the league of either of those poets. As a pet, a pine marten isn’t really as odd as those pet toads that seem to crop up in witchcraft pamphlets. But ‘Star Wars Galaxies’ has just popped through the door, and my son is pressing to get it installed. I have to give way to superior force. But I wonder if Cotton persuaded the lady to take to his pet?

Public Entertainment, 1650

This gentleman was a Frenchman called Floram Marchand, who arrived in England in with an unusual and apparently popular act. The confused little pamphlet which diligently exposes how he did it (The Falacie of the Great Water-Drinker Discovered) says that it is has been ‘published for the satisfaction of many of the Nobilitie and Ladies of this nation, and many eminent Gentlemen who have offered great sums of money to have the misterie discovered. As also to undeceive many thousands, who having seen the manner of it, have been amazed at the wonder but could not discover the secret’.

In brief, Floram Marchand’s act involved drinking water on stage, and vomiting up wine: “and at his vomit render not onely the tincture but the strength and smell of severall wines”.

The pamphlet informs us that Marchand would “take all the fouleness, and slime which would otherwise make thick the water, and offend the eye of the observer” by skipping breakfast, and drinking four or five pints of luke-warm water, off-stage. And he has taken a bitter purgative “about the quantity of a hazle nut, confected with the Gall of an Heifer & wheat flower baked” as a “cleansing pill”. Just before going on stage, he drinks a dye, made by boiling 2 ounces of “Brazile” in water.

He then would go on stage, and drink 24 glasses of luke warm water. His performance would follow rather rapidly: “the first vomit he maketh, the water seemeth to be a full deep Claret”, then by degrees, “the water that comes from him will grow paler and paler”.

But his clever extra involved carefully rinsing some of the glasses he puked into in white wine vinegar, which apparently developed the paler colour into more deep coloured ‘claret’, leaving him to vomit almost instantaneously into an unprepared glass, and so apparently deliver at pretty much the same time a white wine or pale ale.

Marchand learned his trick from an Italian, who had done it so convincingly in France, that Cardinal Mazarin threatened to imprison him until he disclosed the secret; two English entrepreneurs (Thomas Peedle and Thomas Cozbie) brought his disciple Marchand to England. They are the authors of the pamphlet, which must be their final effort to cash in on their success, and their recent association with Marchand gives it its authority.

London, 1650: not the kind of public entertainment you’d expect nobility, ladies, and gentlemen to be thronging to see. But that the man who devised this stunt was interrogated by Cardinal Mazarin gives a hint, if we needed one: the trick depended for its notoriety on being a kind of carnivalesque repetition of Christ’s first miracle, turning water into wine. So it combined the desire for entertainment and wonder with a 'recirculated' - very much recirculated, in this case - religious source for its 'social energy'.

I still wouldn’t want to watch it on late night television, though.

A book that says something about someone else: Margaret Roper reads her Seneca

Rowland Lockey's copy (so attributed) of the lost Holbein, 'Sir Thomas More and his Family', in the Nostell Priory version. The Utopian household, learned and harmonious. From the left, Margaret Giggs, his adoptive daughter, and Elizabeth Dauncey, More's daughter (21). More's father John (76), then Anne Cresacre, a fifteen year old about to marry More's son John. She has wandered into this family of early modern egg-heads, and was the one who unwisely asked for a 'billement of pearls' as a wedding present. Always ready with a jest at the expense of young women and vanity, More gave her a 'billement' of dried peas. More himself, central, but deferring a kind of centrality to his father (in the approved Utopian manner) through the brilliant scarlet of the older man's robes pulling the eye left. More is 50. John More the son (19). Then Cecily Heron (20), and to continue along the front row of women, Margaret Roper (22), and Alice, Lady More (57), seated in this version of the composition, and looking aside, rather than kneeling at prayer. As More's second wife, the More children in this group are her step-children. A back row of male servants: first of them Henry Patenson or Pattison, fool to the household, the one sitter who looks out at us (he seems to grip, left-handed, the scabbard of a sword at his belt). Some would have you believe that the man in the background, more reasonably identified as Dr John Clement (tutor to the children of More, and husband to Margaret Griggs), is one of the lost Princes in the Tower, living incognito in More's Chelsea household. It is almost 11am. The clock in the picture was reputedly at Nostell until the 19th century, when it was sold to an American, and has never been seen again. As there are peonies, carnations and lilies, it is early summer 1527. More has not yet replaced Wolsey as Chancellor; trouble is three years away, he will be executed eight years later.

As Susan Foister points out in her Holbein and England (2004), the picture has a quality of stillness. Holbein assembling the 11 sitters from solo drawings, so interaction was not easily caught. But to the point of this post: Margaret Roper is reading Seneca. My memory failed me in my earlier post: it is a text of Oedipus, which I once deciphered by standing contorted in front of the painting. The passage which she points out is line 882 onwards, the Chorus at the end of Act IV: 'Fata si liceat mihi / fingere arbitrio meo...':

'Had I the chance, to shape my fate / To my desire, then I would trim my sail / To gentle winds, not fight against the gale / Till timbers trembled at its weight. / Not buffeted from side to side, / But borne by the light breeze's gentle force / On a safe middle course / My ship of life would ride.'

The Chorus goes on to repeat the tale of Icarus, and its final sentiment is: 'Wherever man exceeds the mean, / He stands upon the brink of danger.'

Not Holbein being amazingly prescient, but his later copyist's way of epitomising the daughter's view of her father's fate, the inability to compromise that doomed him. More's wife was incredulous at his folly: 'You have at Chelsea a right fair house, your library, your books, your gallery, your garden, your orchard, and all other necessaries so handsome about you, where you might in the company of me your wife, your children, and household be merry. I muse what a God's name you mean here still thus fondly to tarry.' By the quotation singled out for her, some of that incredulity has been transferred to More's more comprehending daughter.

A book that says something about you

I was interested by this http://earmarks.org/archives/2006/04/19/91 posting on the 'Earmarks in early modern culture' blog. Off at a bit of a tangent, but these images (Andrea del Sarto, 'Lady with the Petrarchino', Bronzino's portrait of Laura Battiferri, and Jean Clouet's man reading) all advertise the importance of a particular book, and use Petrarch to say something about the sitter. Both lady sitters clearly invite the reader to locate a particular poem. There must be many more portraits like this, where a culturally prestigious text is hoisted into view. Not quite the same thing, but the Rowland Lockey copy of Sir Thomas More and his Family at Nostell Priory I have seen close up, where his daughter Margaret Roper points at a text of Seneca's (then attributed) 'Octavia' - a chorus about shaping your sails to gentle winds. At a cursory search, there's no good web image around of that painting, so I might scan my own reproduction as a future post. The Van Dyck portrait of Sir John Suckling with his copy of the Shakespeare folio daringly flaunts such a modern allegiance. Ahead of his time, was Sir John!

A Cock Fighting Man, 1607

“So it would incite, and cause them to say unto themselves, wee are induced and perswaded, nay, in a manner we are even compelled, and as it were inforced to love our husbands Cockes, and to make much of them…”

No, I have not found an early modern sex-therapist. This is, rather, George Wilson, The Commendation of Cockes, and Cock-fighting; Wherein is shewed, that Cocke-fighting was before the coming of Christ (1607), and a moment when the author’s obsession leaves him prey to total loss of his sense of humour. His conspicuous concern to put a positive spin for wives on having husbands who follow the sport (“they [i.e. cocks] doe shew unto them a good and a perswasive example, how they should love, regard, defend, and cherish us”) suggests to me that there was a Mistress George Wilson who was rather less than enraptured with her partner’s preoccupation.

Which is complete: Wilson’s little book is like one of those witty mock-commendations of a trifling activity or artefact that the Renaissance specialised in, but with the ‘witty’ and the ‘mock’ both omitted. He really means it, intensely, and may stand ancestral to generations of obsessive male hobbyists women have found ways of coping with ever since (“Now, therefore, for our owne parts, we will doe this from henceforth, we will rather want meate our selves, then the Cockes shall: and by this meanes, we shall allure our husbands to manifest their love towards us”).

Wilson, as his sub-title shows, sets out as a man of his age would, to commend cock-fighting by reference to antiquity. You can read between the lines his intense disappointment and chagrin that there is no gospel account of Christ and the disciples recreating themselves with their cocks-of-the-game, with intense side-betting on the outcome. Instead, he has to make do with a claim to a general ‘before the coming of Christ’ antiquity, and an honorary mention for the cock that crowed at St Peter’s denial: “the voice of the Cocke was (by Christs institution) ordained (like the voice of the Preacher) to call Peter to repentance”).

Having established the best possible Biblical role for the cock, after commending it as the best example of courage (especially for husbands), and after worrying whether the phoenix might have a claim to being a superior kind of bird (he thinks it isn’t, of course), Wilson arrives at the present “delectable pleasures” offered by ownership of game-cocks, and the latter part of his pamphlet consists of sanguinary anecdotes, where fighting cocks, blinded and broken, experience some trigger from the reptile cortex that stimulates them to vanquish at the last their apparently victorious opponent. He gives dates and places for some of his best fighting birds, and their names: ‘Jipsey’, victorious at Bury St Edmunds, his image put onto a painted cloth, with a quatrain of verse, then paraded round town with a volley of shot set off in his honour, and commends the cock Tarleton, named after the Elizabethan clown famous for his pipe and tabour (“because he always came to the fight like a Drummer, making a thundering noise with his wings”) for somehow killing his last opponent when blinded, beakless, and unspurred (Norwich, May 4^th, 1602).

For my own part, I have always thought that the pro-hunting lobby should be asked why their blood-sport should survive, when the more proletarian forms have been banned. As for cock-fighting itself, a latterday Wilson might say that, as mammals, we can feel that birds have it coming to them, as reprisal for the prehistoric aeons in which birds were therapods, and either ate or suppressed our lineage (while turning mammal against mammal in the fox hunt is unnatural).

George Wilson does his best, but in his enthusiasm does reveal that what excited him so intensely was in actuality a barbaric spectacle.

But, from amongst his anecdotes, an early modern death-bed scene, one that makes you reflect how elastic piety can be:

“a man of good worship credibly informed me, that hee knew a Gentleman, that had many good Cockes of the game that he loved marvailously well, and wherein he took great felicitie and delight all his life time; and at the last falling into a grievous sicknesse, and lying upon his death-bed, he requested his kinred and friends which were about him, to place his Cockes with their Coopes so neere unto his beds head as possibly they could doe, which being performed according to his request, he heard them crowe; whereat he sayd, now have I obtained that which I desired; for these delectable voices shalbe my sweete-sounding trumpets, to admonish and put me in minde of my immortal, and celestiall Judge.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockfighting

Oh my Africa, my new-found land?

This is a very offensive image, and I curtail my parody of Donne before I make things worse. The artist is Christiaen van Couwenbergh, and the date 1632. What was going on in his little head when he painted this?

Rape has always been a subject for art, in its most imperially sanctioned form in the various handlings of the Rape of the Sabine women. Lucrece next, and you can add all the mythological victims – Proserpina, Europa, Dejanira, the daughters of Leucippus, Helen, the struggles of the Lapiths and Centaurs. The handling tends towards the queasily sumptuous, even sometimes, with Lucrece, to the tragic.

In the early 17^th century poetry of England, interracial love poems (of sorts) get written, they develop a popular motif of dissimilar or unequal lovers (more commonly love across the generations). Cleveland has ‘A faire nymph scorning a black boy courting her’. This is Henry Reynolds turning a lyric:

Stay lovely Boy, why fly'st thou mee
That languish in these flames for thee?
I'm black 'tis true: why so is Night,
And Love doth in dark Shades delight.
The whole World, do but close thine eye,
Will seem to thee as black as I;
Or op't, and see what a black shade
Is by thine own fair body made,
That follows thee where e're thou go;
(O who allow'd would not do so?)
Let me for ever dwell so nigh,
And thou shalt need no other shade than I.

Such poems go into the song books of Henry Lawes, with answer poems of the same kind. Rather more substantially, this is John Collop, ‘On an Ethiopian beauty’, in Poesis Rediviva (1656)

Black specks for beauty spots white faces need:
How fair are you whose face is black indeed?
See how in hoods and masks some faces hide,
As if asham'd the white should be espi'd.
View how a blacker veil o'respreads the skies,
And a black scarf on earth's rich bosome lies.
When worth is dead, all do their blacks put on,
As if they would revive the worth that's gone.
Surely in black Divinity doth dwell;
By th' black garb only we Divines can tell.
Devils ne're take this shape, but shapes of light;
Devils which mankind hurt, appear in white,
When Natures riches in one masse was hurl'd,
Thus black was th' face of all the infant world.
What th' world calls fair is foolish, 'tis allow'd,
That you who are so black, be justly proud.

It was the mention of black patches that set me off on this train of thought. Collop’s poem perhaps develops all the poetry about (native English) women who had the non-regulation black hair, with perhaps a touch of ‘The Song of Songs’ stirring in the writer’s memory.

But Couwenbergh’s painting! I do not think that he was a Dutch Goya, recording horror. He is at best a lumpen type of dauber. The Web Gallery of Art offers his aggressive and beefy Adonis with Frau Venus, and a bad costume drama ‘Samson and Delilah’. His mythological and biblical subjects all look so stereotypically Dutch that he might as well have given them clogs. If he had any aesthetic intention here, it was perhaps a desire to contrast black skin and white, and if this were the case, then he failed his own challenge. Maybe the painting is damaged and overpainted, but the modeling on the black girl fails completely, large parts of her are two dimensional. Her upper body writhes in a horrified attempt to escape, her lower body sits inert. The younger man who has (perhaps) betrayed her to this attack gazes slavishly for approval at the older man, who gloats on behalf of the viewer. The clothed man at the rear is there, it seems, to emphasise that her Nubian or Nigerian blackness is at once funny, and shocking.

The Dutch were building an empire, and this is what empire means: human beings to degrade in play. She is, I take it, a servant (I think she is wearing a maid’s cap). Her unheeded cry of distress will be in the pidgin she has learned to use when meeting other Africans or Asians when out on her errands, a funny Portuguese-Dutch that also makes her suitable for this maltreatment, this palaver.

Who owned this painting, and where did they hang it? How could it have survived so long after its pornographic moment?

It is in the Strasbourg Musee des Beaux Arts, though their website does not draw any attention to it. One of my favourite pictures hangs there: http://www.musees-strasbourg.org/F/musees/bbaa/beauxarts_oc2.html
Nicolas de Largillière, La Belle Strasbourgeoise (1703). Only a small image, there is a better one at:
http://artyzm.com/e_obraz.php?id=950

I will not live to regret that gooseberry fool…

2. By eating a pound of Red Cherries upon a wager

11. By eating a Cucumber

12. By a Melon

13. By Redishes

14. By Drinking Water

23. By a dinner of Soales in Fish Street

26. By a Codling Tart and Cream

27. By a dish of French beanes

28. By Cabbages

29. By Turneps and Carrets

30. By eating the Fat near the Rump of a Loyne of Mutton

41. By an immoderate eating of Caveare and Anchovies

42. By a gooseberry fool

43. By a rotten Shoulder of Mutton

44. By a dish of Eels

49. By dead Beer

51. By eating Pork and Bacon

57. By the crudities of plentiful meals

60. By eating of Quinces

62. By Pompions, Musmillions, and Cucumbers…

Have you got it yet? I have culled from the complete list the dietary causes to which sufferers assigned their miserable condition. Others, however, blamed a variety of animals:

18. By a Cat in Catter wouling

19. By a Spaniel

17. By drying of Cloathes before the door

52. By Tame Pigeons that flew up and down an Alley…

With what we would consider greater plausibility, human agents were seen by some as involved in the etiology of their problem, both individuals, and groups held under some social prejudice:

15. By a Tanker bearer

16. By a Chair woman

47. By idle Beggars who wandered from place to place

54. By the Rakers or Ragg women…

Others were categorical about place:

8. By an infected Hackney Coach

9. By an infected Sedan

10. By an infected Cushion whereon the Waterman confessed there sate a woman that within two houres after died suddenly

37. By wetting the Feet in a slip out of a Boat by the Water side

We are in the year 1665: and there were some who were self-critical enough to place the blame for their woe on their own moral failings as Christians:

46. By an undue and immoderate venery

48. By frequenting scurvy Tipling houses and Bowling allies

A large group of sufferers followed a medical orthodoxy, and blamed various forms of bad air, mal aria:

4. By a Sink shut up by reason of the Waters not running in their backside

5. By the opening of a vault that had been many years shut

39. By a house of Office near a Man’s Window

40. By close Chambers nastily kept, and looking southward

53. By the fumes of Church Vaults, slaughter houses, and shallow graves

64. By conversing with a man of stinking breath

67. By standing fasting before an infected house

73. By an Eastern Window

Others saw the contagion as having spread to them on some other medical basis:

22. By opening the pores, and excessive sweat in walking

32. By a Cold which turned first into a putrid Fever, and last into the Plague

33. By si(t)ting up too late, and so drying and inflaming the Blood, and weakening Nature

35. By neglecting to let blood at the usual time

56. By the stopping of the monthly courses

68. By a letter received from an infected person

63. By festered Wounds and Sores

70. By an infected Pair of gloves…

And one or two made guesses about their misery that perhaps had more than a little truth, as the fatal vector of the disease got close to their bodies:

3. By a coat one bought of a Broker behind St Clements Church

38. By a burden of Linnen carried from St Giles to Chelsey

55. By entertaining all sorts of comers, as brokers, and particularly by buying bed clothes and hangings.

These are all taken from The shutting up of houses as it is practised in England soberly debated (1665), a tract like the exactly contemporary Golgotha …with an humble witness against the Cruel Advice and Practice of Shutting-up, arguing against the forcible incarceration of everyone in any household that had been ‘visited’ by the plague. The anonymous author reports this survey, taken from the reports of any surviving witnesses, of what the plague-stricken assigned their infection to: and none of these causes are there to be debunked, rather their variety is there to show that the means of transmission are so various, that the standard means of preventing the spread of plague has no merit. He rather proposes that the practice of shutting up is counter-productive: fastening people in their homes with the sick and dying promotes melancholy, which leads to fever, and then triggers the plague itself.

The tract is voiced for the afflicted, denied ‘the freedom of the Ayre’ and the visits from genuinely skilful doctors and concerned and kind family (the author inveighs against the nurses appointed by the city authorities as the ‘off-scouring of the City’ and ‘dirty, ugly and unwholesome Haggs’, who watched for the moment to ransack the houses).

Both of these tracts recommend the practices of the Dutch authorities, who allowed the sick out at appointed times (wearing marks to identify their condition), though the author of Golgotha strongly commends the healthful properties of tobacco smoke.

My colleague, Professor Justin Champion, mentioned this 17^th century vox pop. survey in passing, while lamenting the fact that he is called on a weekly basis by the media to supply a quote or a context every time the word ‘plague’ comes up.

http://www.history.ac.uk/cmh/epipre.html

http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/plague/findout.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/voices

The Proposition: and a woman's reply

As we are interested in the notion of women using art to reply to a male exponent of the art form, this painting by Judith Leyster of 1631, ‘The Proposition’. It took me a while to re-find it on the invaluable Web Gallery of Art, and all I know (and vaguely remembered) about it and how it has been interpreted comes from there, where it says (with my italics):

“An intriguing painting … offers a view of an old man displaying coins to a dramatically lit young woman sewing by lamplight. His hand resting on her shoulder suggests that he is not offering payment for her labour as a seamstress. Is he making a proposition for sex which she virtuously ignores? This interpretation has been offered, and with good reason. The theme had been used by northern artists since the Renaissance … To be sure, Leyster's young woman has nothing in common with the readily seductable recipients of offers of purchased love depicted by earlier artists. Leyster's young woman steadfastly remains occupied with her sewing, a model of domestic virtue. If this reading of the subject is accepted, the painting can be viewed as Leyster's critical response to the salacious treatment of the subject by male artists who demean woman by representing them as sex objects exploited by men. It also would qualify the picture as Leyster's only painting that treats a feminist issue.”

It is an interesting painting, its slightly off-balanced quality helping to make it feel to the viewer (too) that the man simply should not be there. He comes from behind her, black to her white, and encroaches. His effrontery is captured in his intrusive stance, the suggestion of his forced smile, his raised eyebrows: he will chink those coins to get her to look at them, a good handful too, he thinks. She has gone rigid, and tries to keep her focus on her work, but into the light of that very naked flame he puts what he thinks will buy her. You can read her tension, her resentment. If she looks at the coins, she is close to the flame; for her virtuous labours are not well paid.

A dear friend of mine told me that once, when she was dancing at a disco, a moneyed fellow student, scarcely known to her, approached her with, as she put it, ‘a straight cash offer’. Of course, I asked her how much it was, but this she was not willing to disclose, whether for fear of creating a bidding war, or because the sum was ultimately unimpressive (for she was a vibrant young woman) I don’t know. Dare I guess that any woman in the position of this eminently respectable, neatly coiffed and immaculate girl will have at least some curiosity as to just what has been offered for her ultimate favours? That is why she must not even look at his hand, for then she is on the way to putting a value on herself, and she knows that she is beyond price. She can smell the drink on his breath. Go away, greasy man!

http://www.wga.hu/art/t/terborch/3/soldier.jpg
on the Web Gallery of Art gives Gerard Terborch doing the same kind of theme: though in his picture, the girl is assessing the money offered.

Piety and patches

‘These are the ears which have hearkned to so many base, scurrilous, profane, lust provoking songs’.

A stray comment on my blog repeated the quite frequently made point that it would be interesting to have women’s replies to certain notorious poems by Donne. I was still reflecting on the impossibility of any woman writer in the early 17^th century sparring with Donne on his Ovidian home turf (it took Aphra Behn to come along and expose in female-authored Ovidian poetry sexual inadequacies in the male) when I came across William Tipping addressing young women in 1647. He is imagining how the general run of young women will feel on the day of judgment, having listened to sinful poetry and music. And as for their eyes, these women will on that last day say to themselves, ‘These are the eyes which shot forth so many envious, amorous, lascivious glaunces’. All the senses they abused will present to them at the Day of Judgement, Tipping affirms, knowledge of the ‘everlasting woe and sorrow’ they face. It all goes together: poetry provokes lust, and hell beckons for the young woman who listens to it.

Tipping, a Puritan, has been describing, in contrast, an exemplary life and death, that of Apollina Hall, a young widow, who died at the age of just 21. (The Remarkable life and death of the Lady Apollina Hall Widdow, deceased in the 21st year of her age, 1647). Mis-educated by her evidently non-Puritan Grandmother, Apollina lacked proper religious fervour till she was 18. She cannot have had much to repent of, but at that age, repent she did (acknowledging your sins was the required Puritan formula), and she fell into habits of the strictest Protestant observance, writing up her spiritual balance sheet at the end of every day. I think I have seen cited before somewhere her particular triumph of austerity and emotional self-denial, as faithfully recorded by Tipping:

‘She was exceeding solicitous and fearfull over her self, least any created comforts (the Danaes of corrupt men) should creep into, and take possession of her heart, as appeared by this; that being moved by a certain person about her, to send for her childe, in which she was much delighted; she durst not, she answered, trust her deceitfull heart, lest it should be immoderately let out upon her childe, as formerly it had been upon her dear husband.’

In her mortal illness, she fell into what Tipping can stretch to oxymoron to term ‘holy repining’ at the medical fees she has had to pay, the money being merely ‘cost and charge … upon a rotten carcass (that was her own expression)’ - even Tipping blenches a little at this, and has to make it clear in his parenthesis that he is just reporting her words. The money she has spent on herself, she said, ‘might have comforted many a poor christian’.

She duly died with a number of appropriate utterances, which Tipping has to record: ‘finding death to approach; this is the joyfullest day (saith she) that ever mine eyes beheld.’ She comes through a bout of ‘extream convulsions’, and of course regrets survival: ‘I had I thought I should have been with my Saviour before this time’ she says.

‘My joyes are unspeakable’, she says, as death comes close. ‘In this her last and extream struggling with death, she often cried out, Come Lord, come Lord, when Lord, how long Lord’.

Not all of this is to our taste, of course: refusing to indulge your carnal nature by seeing your own child makes the Puritan lady set on meeting her saviour look entirely self-focussed; her faith has circumscribed her emotional life. Yet for a very young woman to die with such acceptance is impressive in its own way.

After this painful account, Tipping then turns to admonish other young women, who are in the main racketing along the way to hell-fire and damnation. As usual with a seventeenth century man, the effort of praising one individual woman will be compensated for by an eloquent attack on women in general. Suddenly, he sounds like Tertullian, and his particular bugbear happens to be face patches:

‘Away with your base and lustfull baits, those black and infamous patches in your faces, which render you odious and scandalous in the world, and in every wise mans eye disfigure you’. He offers the piously sarcastic thought: ‘Should the Lord in the naturall composure of their faces, have ingraven such black spots in them, as now their fancies adde, surely they would have looked on themselves as monsters.’ I doubt whether any woman could have replied that if the Lord had thought fit to engrave her face with the pits left by smallpox, and she reserved the right to make the best of things.

He indignantly adds that ‘ the very Indians (amongst whom the Lord hath lately vouchsafed some dawning of the Gospel) do so abhor the naked brests of women, and hair hanging loose, or cut as mens hair is, that they have made some Laws against them. Oh that our English Ladies should grow so bold, as to practice that which Indians abhor, which miserable heathens count their shame.’

In part, the author can be excused by historical circumstance: he regularly refers to the recent civil war, and clearly feels that everyone should be as self-mortifying as poor Apollina Hall had been.

As with earlier Protestants like Phillip Stubbes, the denunciation tends to betray his horrified fascination, an obsessiveness. Look at that expression about ‘created comforts’: ‘the Danaes of corrupt men’. The classical allusion shouldn’t really be there, and it doesn’t fit his argument. Danae was seduced by gold, rather than being a seducer. But Tipping is so very over alert to female allurement. By the end of his account, he is thundering damnation, but he does at least imagine and formulate a reply, making the girls in their wicked face patches sound like one of the more jaunty passages of the Bible:

'Now if any of this sex to whom I direct this discourse shall reply and say, I will walk in the wayes of my heart, and light of my eyes; I will rejoice in my youth, and my heart shall clear me in my youth: I will say no more but this; Thou that art filthy, be thou filthy still; thou that art profane, be profane still … but take the close, hear thy doom, know thou assuredly, that for all these things God will bring thee to judgement.’

The rather charming assemblage of lore republished on the web at

http://www.thebookofdays.com/months/nov/19.htm

asserts that the earliest mention of face patches is in ‘Bulwer’s Artificial Changeling’, of 1653.

This reference is to the splendidly titled Anthropometamorphosis, man transform'd, or, The artificial changeling historically presented in the mad and cruel gallantry, foolish bravery, ridiculous beauty, filthy finenesse, and loathsome lovelinesse of most nations, 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 / by J.B.

This was John Bulwer’s suitably demented account of the way humankind has decorated (or mutilated) bodies (“the eye-browes abused contary to nature”, etc), and from that source I take his image of face decorations. It is interesting that, like the Puritan Tipping, Bulwer uses native cultures as a form of perspective on his own, though Tipping makes his native people into moralists, Bulwer merely has them as equally mad.

But as for the mention of face patches, the Puritan beats the ethnographer-satirist by a matter of some years, Puritans being such devout followers of fashion.

http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/cosmetics.htm

gives a picture of a surviving contemporary box used to keep your face patches in (the Pitts Rivers Museum, Oxford).

Thomas Nashe learns to read fortunes in faces

I had forgotten, in posting last about Richard Saunders and his systematic account of foretelling fortunes from the face, this passage in Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, where Nashe talks about some of the superstitions that he heard as a child. He would have been a wildly imaginative vicar's son in Norfolk:

I have heard aged mumping beldams as they sat warming their knees over a coal scratch over the argument very curiously, and they would bid young folks beware on what day they pared their nails, tell what luck everyone should have by the day of the week he was born on; show how many years a man should live by the number of wrinkles on his forehead, and stand descanting not a little of the difference in fortune when they are turned upward and when they are bent downward; 'him that had a wart on his chin', they would confidently ascertain he should 'have no need of any of his kin'; marry, they would likewise distinguish between the standing of the wart on the right side and on the left. When I was a little child, I was a great auditor of theirs, and had all their witchcrafts at my fingers' ends, as perfect as good-morrow and good-even.

That Nashe didn't have autobiography as a form in which to work is one of the great regrets in 16th century English Literature (if only we had his account of his acquaintance and co-author, Marlowe!). Here, the stray reminiscence makes it clear that a book like the one Saunders wrote just adds astrology to existing superstitions - presumably Saunders had heard this type of thing himself. What does anyone know about Shakespeare's Grandmother?

To find the mind's construction in the face

Richard Saunders was one of those astrologers who published an annual almanac, and I suppose that back in those days of almanac buying, you found a style of almanac that suited you, in the range between the dryly factual and the apocalyptic, and stuck with the writer, or his ghost writers, year after year.
Saunders had a side line in palmistry and physiognomy (metoposcopy is his favoured term for what he does), and between 1663 and 1676, his major work in this area acquired increasing numbers of illustrations. I have grouped seven of them into the two jpegs above. The semiotics of the face can read simplistically: straight lines across the forehead meaning plain and honest, oblique lines in an asymmetrical countenance, bad behaviour. If you have wavy lines, fear death by drowning, and a cross in your forehead gives you the Tyburn mark, and your destiny is to be hanged. Others are quite capricious and opaque - a line with a wart predicting dangerous falls (plural!) from high places.
My puzzle for anyone looking at this posting, is who was the man at the bottom right? Here, Saunders shifts from invention of typical faces to including the face of a real man: 'an excellent man' but 'mightily tost on the waves of misfortune' 'When by the Divine Grace and favour, he seemed to arrive safe at his haven of rest ... he was beyond expectation, by the contrary tempest of adverse fortune, again hurried into the depth of perplexities'. Clicking on the image gives a larger jpeg, of course.
Saunders added 'A Treatise of the moles of the body of man and woman', offering 'Rational Judgements by the moles of the body'. The discussion begins with a facial chart, for Saunders asserts that (something like acupuncture or reflexology), a mole in a particular part of the face will always have a corresponding mole on some part of the body. According to the places, Saunders lets his reader know which star governs the person so marked; while the shape and colours of the mole add levels of meaning. As ever, men have more forms of destiny open to them, while the female destiny often comes down to her marriage, chastity, and the like. Thus, a mole in the middle of the forehead under the lines of the sun (formula 18) 'shews a man to have a great voice, to be a good Oratour, yet luxurious and addicted to gluttony' while in a woman the same mole 'denotes a woman given to lust and lascivious courses'. As with any fortune-telling, predictions of wealth and status are important. A mole on the right side on the end of the line of Mars 'prenotes a man to thrive by Playes' - unless it happens to be black, when 'let him avoid Playes'. Nothing so complicated for women: 'it signifies Inheritance from Parents.'
All bizarre and arbitrary, but I can imagine his system being revived tomorrow. All this talk of moles reminds me of Donne, in Elegy 18:

her Chin

Ore past; and the streight Hellespont betweene

The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts,

(Not of two lovers, but two loves the nests)

Succeeds a boundless sea, but yet thine eye

Some Island moles may scattered there descry...

No amount of anguishing about woman as territory, reification and the rest, will ever quite get me to relinquish these lines as true to erotic experience. Saunders sticks chastely to the face, and simply says that a mole on the body will be present if there is one in some part of the face. Where would romance plots have been without these 'blots of Nature's hand', which individuate and indentify people as securely as fingerprints. Iachimo spies Innogen's 'mole cinque-spotted', and tortures Posthumus with the lie that 'By my life, / I kiss'd it', as the little mark of melanin hovers between embellishment and blemish. But I am wandering from my subject.