“After this they fell all to dancing the Hays, about three flower-pots”: welcoming the apocalypse in Berkshire, 1650.

My text is a Thomason tract. Only ‘…ber’ for the month appears in his title page dating, it was perhaps September, certainly the 20^th of the relevant month.

A most faithful relation of two wonderful passages which happened very lately (to wit, on the first and eighth days of this present September, being Lords days) in the parish of Bradfield in Berk-shire 1650.

The London writer has a preamble, in which the millenarian hopes entertained by Dr John Pordage and his wife are represented as (inevitably) the devil’s work prospering in Berkshire, just as they are prospering everywhere as never before:

“This is an Age of wonders: for I dare affirme, that since the deplorable Fall of our first Parents, at which time Sin was first ushered into the World, the ill spirit was never so busie, he never made such a harvest, or had such a latitude of power given him to ramble up and down in any part of the earth, as he hath had lately in this island; witness else in what various forms he hath appeared, and what sundry feats he hath played in Essex, Suffolk, Cambridge-shire, and other places, especially in Scotland, where thousands have been possest by him, and so brought to the Gallows: And now it seems he hath taken footing in Berk-shire, as appears by these two uncouth Examples following.”

The writer renders Pordage’s name as ‘Doctor Pordich’ (making me wonder how often you would give, in those spelling-permissive days, a subtly denigratory spelling to a person’s name – ‘poor ditch’). John Pordage, as his ODNB life makes clear, was only just holding on in the regular church. The ‘Commissioners for ejecting of Scandalous Ministers’ would finally oust him in 1655. Pordage seems to have been involved or interested in the Family of Love, was prone to denunciations of marriage, was accused of denying the Trinity, was a Behmenist; while the ‘Everet’ named here as the likely ‘conjurer’ who has directed the devil to make these possessions in Berkshire, was actually John Everard - Leveller, Grindletonian, alchemist, etc, etc.

So, what would be represented as diabolic intrusion into parish life in Berkshire was really product of Pordage’s earnest and ecstatic belief that the heavens were about to open. Marvellously, he was in his pulpit preaching when it became somehow apparent to him that the big moment had come, and he exited his church then and there, anxious to get back to where the real action was going to be:

“Doctor Pordich being preaching in the Parish-Church of Bradfield (on the eighth of this instant September, being Lords day) within a quarter of an hour he fell into a Trance, running out of the Church, and bellowing like a Bull, saying that he was called, and must be gone.”

In its small way, it is a moment with something of the significance of the famous time when Mohammed turned his followers round during worship, away from Jerusalem, and towards Mecca. The Vicar of Bradfield exits his church, to be translated into heaven from home, along with his true followers - his wife, and some of their female friends. In his case, it proved not to be so epochal.

Understandably, when he left his church at such a moment in such a state, Pordage was pursued and questioned, but only replied that he must be gone ‘home to his house’. Fortunately, William Foster (a local gentleman rich enough to own a coach) followed Pordage home and witnessed what happened when the vicar got home:

“Where being come, he going up the Stairs, found his Wife, (Mistress Pordich) Clothed all in White Lawne, from the crown of the head, to the sole of the foot, with a White Rod in her hand.”

What’s pleasing about all this is that the apocalypse seems to be egalitarian in regards to gender. Now Pordage had heterodox views about marriage, and ambiguous relations with a number of women. He probably regarded his women followers as being in a state higher than marriage anyway. But at this moment, his wife (in the eyes of the normal world) Mistress Pordage, is garbed as a prophetess, and will soon call for ‘Elijah’s mantle’. Female followers gather: “Mistress Chevill coming in fell on her knees, saying, That she was to meet with her Spouse, and her Prophetess. After this comes in Mistress Tracie, holding of her head, and making of strange noyses, that were heard within her, in a very hideous passion. After this they fell all to dancing the Hays, about three flower-pots…”

Mr Foster, who has followed from church, asks Pordage what is meant by the dancing, and learns that “It was a rejoicing, because they had overcome the Devil.” Of course, joy that you have vanquished Satan in Berkshire can easily be represented in London as Satan’s victory over you. Perhaps there is a Familist touch in Mistress Chevill arriving to meet ‘her Spouse’ – Christ? Pordage? Though being the man he was, Pordage was inclined to deny that there was very much significant difference.

“With that his Wife cries out for Elijah’s Mantle, and then comes up Mistress Chevill, and Mistress Pordich fell of adoring her; and then in came one Goodwife Pukerig, and bended her body, and kissed her knee; Mistress Pordich assuring her that there was a place prepared for her in heaven, to sit at the right hand of the Virgin Mary.”

‘Elijah’s mantle’ because of the second book of Kings, verse 11: “And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” Mistress Pordage is ready to ascend to heaven without death, as happened to Elijah. (“Knowest thou that the Lord will take away thy master from thy head to day?”)

But, as usual with these moments when the rapture is about to commence, there’s a snag – someone is missing, and it seems that this someone, who perhaps was important in making up the right numbers, was Foster’s own wife. Foster, having seen enough, leaves, but is urgently sent after and asked to return, bringing his wife with him. With her husband very much awake to strange goings-on, Foster’s wife gets cold feet, and simply refuses to go. In his 1655 publication, Innocencie appearing, through the dark mists of pretended guilt, Pordage over-confidently (and very conveniently) cites all the charges that were made against him, and in that work, it sounds as though Mistress Foster was rather frightened by the thought of seeing the heavens opened, as had been promised. As for Foster himself, he was probably involved at some lesser level himself. His wife having refused to answer the summons to be present at this Pang Valley ascension into heaven, Foster “tooke his Coach, and went alone: so coming into the Doctors house, he found the Doctor sitting in a Chaire all in black Velvet.” Costumes, as ever with early modern culture, were important for the show – as prophetess, Mistress Pordage has head to foot white linen, and her husband, black velvet (costly material and dye!). The mantle of Elijah itself was probably still in a wardrobe waiting to be deployed.

Asked where his wife is, Foster says she is not well, and therefore she cannot come: “Then said the Doctor, there is nothing can be done without her.” Crisis indeed! Mistress Pordage also asks the coachman, and hears confirmation that it is all going wrong. But they seem to have endeavoured to prolong the celestial window of opportunity, perhaps in hope that Mistress Foster would relent and show up just in time: “So there they keep dancing of the Hayes, and Trenchmore, and expecting when they shall be taken up to heaven every hour.”

The writer concludes with a dark imputation – Everard, as witch, was directing all this from far away: “By what means this Distraction came, is not as yet certainly known; but it is thought it was done by one Everet (a man suspected to be a Sorcerer or Witch) who much-frequented the Doctors house, and would often play with the children; and he was seen at London in a frantick posture, much about the time that these things happened.”

The little tract has ‘two wonderful passages’, however. Out of a sense of social status, the London  writer has told the story of Doctor Pordage’s folly first. He then moves on to detail what had happened the week before in the very same parish church. As this had happened to a thirteen year old youth, an illiterate member of a poor man’s large family (well, illiterate for the moment, but that all would change), it became the secondary story. The writer has relegated the one of the local signs that probably triggered Pordage to announce the apocalypse from its proper chronological place. Something of this sort would happen in Pordage’s church: on Sept 1^st, a youth of 13, “son to one Goodman Snelling”, “being in the Parish-Church of Bradfield, fell into a very strange Fit, foaming at the mouth for the space of two hours.”

Now to fall into a fit and foam at the mouth seems to me a very likely reaction to one of John Pordage’s sermons – he seems to have been a preacher worth hearing, wildly unpredictable, charismatic, full of novel doctrines, and easily misunderstood. The youth, whose sanity has probably been affected by listening to Pordage preach every Sunday,  finally emerges from his fit, and announces that he must go to London, taking his father with him. In London, they will find an old man there “living without Temple-bar, and said to be a Gold-smith”) who was “possest with two devils, and had the Root of Corruption in him.”

Exactly what you’d want to visit London to do – to locate the root of corruption. One can perhaps sense Pordage’s influence here, and a touching willingness on behalf of his young parishioner to come up with some marvel to interest his raving vicar. Exactly as foretold, they do indeed find the old man, who has been lying in a trance, from which he revives at the very instant that they arrive. This mysterious personage gives them yet more bewildering instructions: they are to go to Beacon Hill (it is just south of Newbury, close to Highclere house, aka Downton Abbey), “and there he should finde, at such a place, a crooked stick lying on the ground, and in it there should be an Inkhorn and a pen, and directions how to write and read, and to speak several Languages, and by the stick should be lying a lamb.”

The eagerness to attain literacy, by hook or by crook, is commendable. Off they trudge out to the west. Arrived at the hill, first of all they see the lamb, then they find the crooked stick, and “therein an Inkhorn and pen: and the boy taking up the stick, the Lamb vanished.” Then the visionary experiences start: they hear “strange voices in the air; and they saw the King with his head off, and then again they saw him with his head on, and a Crown upon it: also they saw Wallingford on fire, and the Governours head off.”

Emotional perturbation indeed, a perfect 17^th century mixture of political and religious anxieties: the King, a troubling beheaded phantom, and then re-headed. Heaven’s anger striking Wallingford (which had been the last royalist stronghold to hold out in 1646, but finally failed the king’s cause) and its Parliamentarian governor (Colonel Arthur Evelyn, it would have been). The father and son take the bad news to Wallingford, and seem to have been received in a level-headed way: “Whereupon, this Goodman Snelling and his son went to the Governour of Wallingford, and told him of it; who answered, that he hoped no such thing would come to pass.”

No great outcome at Wallingford, which would not burn down till 1675, and they are left with the suddenly literate younger Snelling, who also does his best to manifest the languages he has supernaturally acquired:

“This Goodman Snelling hath a great family, and they are all in a very strange frantick condition. he is a pot-ash-maker; and when his Fit is over, he is as sensible as any one; and he hath told his neighbours that he would give all that he has in the world, so that he were free of this business. And he saith that his son did bring him to such a hill, as right as though he had been there a thousand times before. And the boy can now write very well, which before he could not. Also, there are strange confused sound of Languages heard within him, but he does not speak them distinctly.”

Our writer concludes: “These things are certainly true, and avouched by a cloud of witnesses, young and old, who are the people of the best reputation in that County. My Conclusion shall be with this short prayer, which never was more seasonable then now: God deliver us from the Devil and all his shifts.”

As I said, Pordage somehow kept his job in the church until he was ejected in 1655 after hearings in1654. There’s nothing at the church in Bradfield that remains from his time: the Victorians made a thoroughgoing and very heavy-handed restoration of the building in 1848.

Pordage himself features pricelessly in A Collection of modern relations of matter of fact concerning witches & witchcraft upon the persons of people (1693), which has an account of the quite staggering manifestations taking place in the Pordage’s house in 1649. The fun here is that it starts as Pordage’s defence of himself from charges of conjuration. He too takes the line that Satan is empowered as never before:

“How then can Bradfield, or any other Place, be exempted from his Appearing when God permits? And may not all this be for the manifesting of his Glory, Goodness and Power? And who can tell whose Family may be next exposed by God’s permission, to be tryed and proved by the Representation of Satan? And I desire you seriously to consider how any such Apparitions raised by the Devil, and permitted by God for his own Glory, argue me either Ignorant, Scandalous, or Insufficient …”

But, whenever he was in a hole, which (unsurprisingly in view of his beliefs), was often, and seriously, Pordage could not resist enlarging and improving the hole to suit his own fancy. He can’t hold back from telling how, yes, the spirit of Everard appeared nocturnally in his bedchamber in August 1649, how then he saw a terrifying giant, then a dragon.

Pordage sounds off (as was his wont) largely about the different spiritual worlds, and then produces this undeniably striking witness to the activities of the evil side of the spirit world: “the Spirits made some wonderful Impressions upon visible Bodies without, as Figures of Men and Beasts upon the Glass Windows and the Ceilings of the House, some of which yet remain. But what was most remarkable was the whole visible World represented by the Spirits upon the Bricks of a Chimney, in the form of two half Globes, as in the Maps. After which, upon other Bricks of the same Chimney, was Figured a Coach and four Horses, with Persons in it, and a Footman attending, all seeming to be in Motion, with many other such Images, which were wonderful exactly done. Now, fearing lest there might be any Danger in these Images, through unknown Conjuration and false Magic, we endeavoured to wash them out with wet Cloths, but could not, finding them engraven in the substance of the Bricks, which indeed might have continued till this day, had not our fear and suspicion of Witch-craft, and some evil design of the Devil against us in it, caused us to deface and obliterate them with Hammers. Now, what the Devil’s End in the former Apparitions, and those figurative Representations was, the Lord knows: But it was certainly Evil.”

In Innocencie appearing, through the dark mists of pretended guilt, Pordage obligingly lists all the charges made against him locally, and something of the same kind of optical hallucination appears: “in Dr Pordage’s house in Bradfield, lately the new Jerusalem hath been seen to come down from heaven, all of precious stones; and in the new Jerusalem was a Globe, which Globe was eternity”.

I wonder what was going off. Were these things products of Pordage’s heated imagination? He was capable of seeing a lot, indeed, seeing infinity, in almost anything, as his wild commentary on very basic images of circles and dots in Theologia mystica shows. But his house seems to have become notorious, and to have had all kinds of people turning up there. Everard was an experimenter: could he have done devised some method of projecting or etching the pictures?

I cycled over to what had been his church earlier today. The church as an institution expelled Pordage, and the over-sized and frowsty Victorian pile, which seems in part to have been used for services attended by boys from Bradfield College, testifies to the enduring dull power of that church. Pordage is listed in a manuscript list of previous incumbents as one who ‘intruded’ on the proper pastoral succession: Elias Ashmole is down as his patron to the living. The Victorians in their re-build obliterated any chance of finding a church with a furtive alchemical emblem or Rosicrucian enigma.

Richard Carpenter, Bastille prisoner, apostate, dramatist

I have been reading, with bemused gratification, some of the writings of Richard Carpenter. What a discovery he is! There are, after all, not many 17^th century Englishmen who could publish a book with an image incorporated into their frontispiece of the author being ordained priest by the Pope, but there it is in Carpenter. And the author of the ODNB life says that the other title page illustrated here includes an inset image of Carpenter engaged in a vomiting contest with the devil. (I have waded as far as I can bear in The anabaptist, washt and washt, and shrunk in the washing, or, A scolasticall discussion on the much-agitated controversie concerning infant baptism (1653), and can’t actually confirm that it is meant to be him, though the other writings overflow with images of purging, vomiting and excreting.)

So many of these mid 17^th century men seem deranged, equipped with a learning that gave them no useful purchase upon their experience, rather running them into the confusion of having their convictions founded on ferociously argued interpretations of the Bible, which could so easily collide with contrary fanaticisms based on that same endlessly re-interpretable text. Carpenter swapped sides between Catholic and Protestant over and over again, alternating spells of vitriolic anti-Catholicism with acceptance of Rome and its teachings. He tries to represent his course as having some consistency (“I may have misplac’d and miscenter’d an Action, but in the substance I have been quadrate with Truth”, as he all too typically puts it), while shouting down opponents he had stood shoulder to shoulder with no great time beforehand. He readily associates his enemies with diabolic possession (both his Protestant independent antagonist Tombs, in the preface to The Anabaptist washt and washt, and the Jesuits in his autobiographical play, A new play call'd The Pragmatical Jesuit new-leven'd a comedy, while himself manifesting (at least in his writings) a delirium of pukings, contortions, revilings and glossolalic learning.

Reading him can be astonishing, and it’s all the more interesting because in what is possibly the one sympathetic moment in the writings (at least, as far as I have found), Carpenter gives a remarkable account of what happened to his mind. It’s in his play, where he represents himself as ‘Aristotle Junior’. Carpenter, then Catholic, had fallen out with the English Benedictines and Jesuits in Paris, and they threw him into the Bastille. The first of the paragraphs cited below describes what this did to his body, the second what happened to his mind:

“O Torment! The pangs of Death cannot be more grievous: and my pangs are notoriously more grievous to me than the pangs of Death, because mine are continual. The whole Fabrick of my body is so stifned and benum’d with cold, so bruis’d and sor’d with the hardnesse of the rocky ground, that I cannot use a limb without excessive pain, and shaking of the whole frame. They have detain’d me here in the Bastille the space of fifteen Weeks, without Bed, Covering, Cap, Wastcoate, Shirt, or other Linnen, (the French, my Executioners, rob’d me of all,) without Chair, Stoole, Table, Fire, Candle, Water, Knife, Spoone; without any succour for the necessities of nature, further than the floor of this close and dark Dungeon or Cave where I lye: and by a little peeping-hole I have discover’d a Sentinel continually standing with his Musket, to receive me, if I should appear in the least part of me. Dare these blessed-nam’d Benedictines ever professe, that they are flesh and blood?

O dear England! I have been so long watching and waking, that neither my fancy nor eyes perform faithfull service to my understanding. It seems to me, that I see strange things, Pigmies, Giants, strange Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, Monsters. All extraordinary stories that I have read or heard of, shew themselves to me, besides portents and prodigies. I hear whatsoever my fancy delivers to be said. I dream that I sleep, sometimes bedded in Snow, sometimes in the Waters, in the Field sometimes, where I am pelted with hail.”

Suffering sensory deprivation, all Carpenter’s prior reading came back to him as hallucinations. This is the writer of his subsequent works, where you never know what will press next into his mind, and seem to it portentous and relevant: how angels teach one another, how to clean pearls by getting a dove to swallow and then void them, the problems of uprooting ‘devil’s bit’ (scabious), a magician who ate (Faustus-like) a cart full of hay, but then the cart, and the horses, how alchemists transform things, all about the cardinal’s parrot which could recite the Latin creed, how Cardinal Borromeo always and only read scripture when kneeling.

All these oddities occur in a context where not longer being a Catholic enables him to say more for the Catholics than he could say when he was one: ‘Rome, I honour thee in thy truths’, ‘Many millions of Papists are saved’ (and, he avers, this is ‘generally believed in England’). ‘I never was a Jesuit’, he interpolates anxiously – a man has to draw a line somewhere, after all.

Carpenter found himself in 1657 giving to the Learned Society of Astrologers their annual sermon. It’s the kind of divide-straddling position Carpenter would end up in (most clergymen opposed astrology). But his rhetoric betrays his radical instability: in a flourish taken from the Song of Songs, and carried away, Carpenter urges the ‘learned Children of Seth’: “Wound ye the heart of Christ day and night, with your excellent works”. Surely they must have heard that with some surprise and uneasiness? (‘Which side is he on?’, they might have whispered to one another).

So, in 1665, Carpenter published an autobiographical play, in the manner of Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso (with its gallant reminiscences of exiled cavaliers slashing the faces of Spanish prostitutes). Are there any more of these things, I wonder? Closet dramas deployed for autobiography, before autobiography itself came along?

It starts with great promise: an actor enters to speak the Prologue, bearing a urinal:

This I freely say,
The Poet’s Water 'tis that made the Play…

It ends with Lucifer, who has spent most of the play disguised as the ‘pragmatical Jesuit’, vomiting up and voiding a little Jesuit and a little monk: “Noise of straining” says the climatic stage direction. The uneven course it pursues in between sets off as quite like an allegorical play, but it runs increasingly into personal diatribes, and the naming of historically real people as his enemies and tormentors.

Cornelius Agrippa, the mage, opens the play, compelling Lucifer to “Discover here theatrically, the most deepbottom’d and profound contrivances, by which thou dost amuse, imperil, ensnare the world, and involve it in thy dragonish tayl.” At the end of the action, Lucifer fails to claim Agrippa’s soul, but rather inconsistently succumbs to an exorcism which purges him in the dramatic way I have just mentioned.

Carpenter puts his own awful experiences into the play, with a fervent word of warning:

“O ye Scholars of our most renowned Universities, set bounds to your feet, and limits to your Thoughts: I was my Fathers eldest Son, and Heir to a comfortable Estate of Houses and Lands; and I threw all behinde me, to be cheated, most religiously cheated by secular Priests, Jesuites, Monks, Friers…”

He depicts himself as drawn abroad by his early religious convictions, but finding only “the beggery of Spain, the buggery of Italy, Spain, and France”. As for the Catholic faith which drew him abroad, he compulsively picks holes in the miracles to which he is connivingly exposed. A purported feather from an archangel’s wing he confidently identifies as “a Feather from a West-Indian Bird”. An image that speaks to him (“Image. ‘Chrissime fili mi, Crede.’) he discovers to be hollow, this astuteness so impressing the Jesuit operator, that the total falsity of diabolic possessions is willingly laid bare to him (while the higher cause served by these contrivances still remains valid). Later, his particular bête noire is seen coaching two purported diabolics:

“Father Robert. Ye are both apt Scholars. But you, Boy, must learn to open your mouth wider, when the fit's upon you.

Boy. I open it as wide as I can, good Father.

Rob. Take this Apple, and extend your mouth to the wideness of the Apple: 'Tis of a fit bigness. And you, Woman, when you act the possest person, do not stare enough: your eyes must always be rounded into a larger Circle, but then especially. And if any be immodest towards you, you must not take notice of it, at such a time, but rather shew willingness, because the Devil, under whose power you are then conceiv'd to groan and lie gravell'd, is delighted with wantonness.”

Aristotle Junior’s (Carpenter’s) two years in the Bastille are recounted, in full detail: “In two years I had not the benefit of a fresh Shirt …Another French Prisoner wearied me oftentimes, with desiring me that he might use my body Sodomitically.” There follows his escape: he got himself released from the Bastille by seeming to come over to his captors’ way of seeing things, took flight to Dieppe, and just got away across the channel with some timely local assistance:

“I consented in the lip: Afterwards pleading that my Body was greatly disorder’d in respect of health, desir’d a few dayes wherein to physick it (I meant with a better Air;) and in that little Tract of Time wherein it was supposed I took Physick, hasted privately to Diep, a Port-Town in France …the Hugonots of Diep past me over the night following.”

With his dodgy past, Carpenter set out to recommend himself in England with large stories of the fearsome scope of Jesuit activities and resources: he asserts that they have transport, money, and safe houses:

“we of the English Society, have a Ship that trades betwixt London and Flanders; in the which we continually receive and return the best Goods at the best advantage: and we in these parts, receive ten thousand Pounds in ready coyn every year out of England.

Lucifer: In this Tropick of things, I have seated the Provincial of our Society here with his Council, in a Noble House near to London-Wall; whence they dispatch every day the most nimble-witted Members of our Society, into the Conventicles, and Army. When the people are pull'd up by the root from Religion, they must needs fall back upon ours.”

The threat to England, is (of course) urgent: the Jesuits are all here, and hard at work: “In all their Houses in those transmarine parts, there are none left but boyes and old Men; hither they are all come.”

That, despite all this, Anthony Wood reported that Carpenter died apparently reconciled to Rome seems all of a piece: “an impudent, fantastical man that changed his mind with his cloaths” and a “theological mountebank”.

“The understanding being a most subtile fire”: the 'virtuosi of France' talk

I have been reading A general collection of discourses of the virtuosi of France, upon questions of all sorts of philosophy, and other natural knowledg made in the assembly of the Beaux Esprits at Paris, by the most ingenious persons of that nation, render'd into English by G. Havers, Gent. (1664). (Usual early modern title: inviting a coffee break after reading it all, only 500-odd pages to go…)

The introduction, which explains that the ‘virtuosi of France’ demanded anonymity in the record made of their debates, is signed ‘Eusebius Renaudot’, so a very little poking around discovers that the original compiler was Théophraste Renaudot (c.1586-1653). I assume it was his son who ushered the English translation into print. As the brief Wikipedia entry says of the very considerable figure of Théophraste: “French physician, philanthropist, and journalist”. Renaudot invented the recruitment agency (the ‘bureau d'adresse et de rencontre’), published the first weekly newspaper in France, and, the Wikipedia entry says, ‘starting in 1633, he organized weekly public conferences on subjects of interest and published the proceedings; the conferences were discontinued in 1642, when Richelieu died. About 240 conference proceedings were translated into English and published in London in 1664 and 1665’.

The translation’s other introductory material briefly points out the merits of the work: the original penseurs were committed to the vernacular language for their discussion, and, seeking brevity, omitted all parading of authorities. And (most politely), these ‘French Gentlemen’ have left “the Determination of each Question to the judgement of the Reader, who is made the Arbiter of the Dispute, and may, in the grateful Variety of Opinions, freely give his suffrage to That which shall seem to him founded upon the most convincing Reasons; or else having them all before him, establish a better of his own.”

So we have here the discussions of an earlier and more public (French) Royal Society, ranging over all kinds of topics, expressing viewpoints that fluctuate unpredictably between the Cartesian and the credulous, and generally opening out the kunstkammer of the early modern mind.

Here are discussions of women, the soul, sorcerers, the senses, the arts, codes, sleep-walking, fossilia, and all kinds of matters medical. As ever, the incidentals amaze: the early 17^th century apparently saw the first self-winding watch (they are discussing – what else? - perpetual motion): “his Invention who exactly fastned a Girdle to his skin, which rising and falling as he took his breath, serv'd for a perpetual spring to a Watch that hung at it, (which by that means needed not winding up) was not the Perpetual Motion which we mean...”

Or here, in a discussion of feigned diseases, one of the most hazardous ways of earning a living in early modern showbiz I have ever come across:

“One of the hardest cheats to be discover'd was that of a Jugler of Flanders, who every morning, having first stopp'd his fundament very exactly, swallow'd down half a pound of Butter and some Quicksilver after it: which put him into such hideous motions and gestures, that every one judg'd him possest. At night he unstop'd himself, and voided his Devil backwards.”

I can’t think that the performer would have lasted long, but his trick seems to have been feigning a very convincing diabolic possession by inducing symptoms he simply couldn’t control. A pair of Siamese twins (revealingly discussed as just a singular ‘monster’) whose speciality act was singing are remembered as: “mention'd by Buchanan in the fifteenth Book of his History, born in Northumberland with two heads, four armes, two breasts, and onely two leggs; It was instructed in Musick, so that each head sung its part melodiously, and discours'd together pertinently.” This made me think of Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban.

Perhaps appropriately, considering the nationality of these thinkers, the sections on eating and fasting are good. Here are two terms very familiar to our culture, which I did not expect to see in an early 17^th century text:

“Amongst which we should speed ill if we look'd for abstinence in those who have a Boulimie, or Canine Hunger, proceeding either from the too great suction of the Mesaraick Veins, of which the Stomack is made sensible by the Nerves of the sixth Conjugation; or because the Melancholy humour design'd to stimulate the stomack, and provoke Appetite by its acrimony, continually flows thither, and not after the concoction is perfected: The cure of which Malady consists in eating, and chiefly in drinking pure Wine, which is distributed more speedily then any nourishment. But when those Mesaraick Veins suck no more Chyle, either because their passages are stop'd, or for that the above mentioned acide liquor is diverted elsewhere, then ariseth a disease call'd Anorexie, or Nausea, whereunto the abstinence of those must be referr'd who have continu'd some weeks, yea moneths, and years, without eating and drinking.”

But I was, as ever, ignorant, and find that both are named disorders well before this date. Here are the OED’s earliest entries:

1398 TREVISA Barth. de. P.R. VII. xlv. (1495) 258 Bolismus is inmoderate and vnmesurable as it were an houndes appetyte. Ibid. XVIII. xxvii. 786 Houndes haue contynuall Bolisme, that is inmoderat appetyte. 1598 SYLVESTER Du Bartas (1608) 210 One while the boulime, then the anorexie…rage with monstrous ryot. 1651 FULLER Abel Rediv. (1867) I. 222 He fell into a most devouring and unsatiable bulimy. 1661 LOVELL Hist. Anim. & Min. 365 The boulimos and dog like appetite.

1598 SYLVESTER Furies 450 (D.) Then the Anorexie, Then the Dog-hunger or the Bradypepsie. 1650 BAXTER Saints Rest IV. vi, These are sick of the anorexia, and apepsy, they have neither appetite nor digestion.

And, oh dear, this naturally sent me off to Joseph Sylvester’s translation of du Bartas, and the grim relish of his account of ‘The Furies’ who assail Adam after the fall of man. Unsurprisingly (considering the nature of the sin he committed) Adam and his descendents get afflicted by eating disorders:

Now, the third Regiment with stormy stours
Sets-on the Squadron of our Naturall Powers,
Which happily maintain us (duly) both
With needfull food, and with sufficient growth.
One-while the Boulime, then the Anorexie,
Then the Dog-hunger, or the Bradypepsie,
And childe-great Pica (of prodigious diet)
In straightest stomacks rage with monstrous ryot…

Close to this passage, either Du Bartus or his translator interjects a personal note about the horror of fever, and the effect of fours years of illness on his mental capacities. But I have no time to pursue that secondary question, my subject here was ‘the virtuosi of France’, and this informal and yet highly committed book, one that makes them look like proto-bloggers.

My image is Annibale Carracci's astonishingly modern 'The Bean Eater'. Not exactly 'the Dog-hunger', but a marvellous picture.