A Visiting Professor of Melancholy Studies, 1640?

“Heartbeating, swelling of the face, want of appetite, greife, sighing, causeles teares, insatiable hunger, extreame thirst, sownings, oppressions, suffocations, continuall watchings, Headach, Melancholy, Epilepsy, Ragings, Furor uterinus, Satyriasis; and diverse other desperate Symptomes, which for the most part admit neither cure, nor mitigation…”

~ some of the dire symptoms of love melancholy, as described in Dr Jacques Ferrand’s

Erotomania or A treatise discoursing of the essence, causes, symptomes, prognosticks, and cure of love, or erotique melancholy (1640).

A worse symptom still (I suppose) is spontaneous gender-reassignment, references to which Ferrand dutifully notes, but ‘dare not believe’. If it happens, it affects women love-melancholics:

“Hippocrates seemes to attribute to passionate love the power of transforming women into men; where he sayes, that in the citty Abdera, Phaethusa, being stricken with the love of Pytheus, and not being able to enjoy him for a long time; by reason of his absence; she became a Man, and grew hairy all over her body, had a mans voyce, and a long beard on her chin. The same he affirms in the Aphorisme following to have befallen to Namysia, wife to one Gorgippus: and addes withall, that it was impossible for her to have recovered to her former womanhood againe.”

Ferrand discusses the anatomical probabilities of this, and finds that, if it does occur, Aristotle’s account of the difference of the two genders perhaps allows a mechanism:

“It may very easily then be, according to this doctrine of Aristotle, and of Galen that a woman, being enflamed with the violence of love, may put forth those her genitall parts, which are no other, then those of a man reversed, or turned inward as the same Doctour affirmes: whom not withstanding all our Modern Anatomists doe unanimously contradict: as you may see at large in the Anatomicall Quaestions of Andreas Laurentius.”

These things are amusing enough, but there’s a real mystery about this book (I use this cliché in the sense of ‘I haven’t the time or inclination to research this properly’). Whoever James or Jacques Ferrand was, his connections are all with Christ Church, Oxford. The book has the usual parade of commendatory verses, all by students of that college.

Now 1640 was the year of the death of the Christ Church author who ought to be cited throughout this work, but isn’t, Robert Burton, whose Anatomy of Melancholy treats largely of love melancholy. Maybe I will post a large section of this latter text, and a similar extract from Burton’s work up to ‘Turnitin’, and see if I can make pioneering use of that resource to detect a 17^th century plagiarist.

Ferrand’s first name appears as James or Jacques, and he refers to his own medical practice (and successes in diagnosing love melancholy) abroad. Unless someone did a translation for him, he writes a normal 17^th century learned English, with the usual polyglot smattering of Greek and Latin phrases.

I think he was ‘Visiting Professor of Melancholy Studies’ at Christchurch, drawn there by Burton’s reputation. Burton’s will survives – I must check if he left any legacy to promote continued study of his big subject.

But, to round this off, some of the many ways listed to prevent, diagnose and cure love melancholy:

Prevention:

1. “The most powerfull and effectual cause of all, and therefore the most dangerous, is, the use of hot, provocative, Flatulent and Melancholy Meats”

2. “But they must be sure to take heed of all manner of Aromaticall things, and all fried or salt meats: because that Salt, by reason of its Heat and Acrimony, provokes to lust those that use to eate it in any great quantity … And this is the reason that Fishes are more fruitfull, and multiply faster, then any other living creatures whatsoever. And we see that vessells of salt commonly produce great store of Mice: the Female conceaving without a Male, meerely by licking of the salt: if we may believe Aristotle.”

3. “It is also very good to bath the privy members in Vineger.”

Diagnosis:

1. “Valescus de Tarenta, the most famous Physitian of his Age, observes the chapping of the Lips in Women to be a signe of their Inclination to this Malady: for that it denotes the Intemperate Heat of the Matrix … Aristotle in his Lib. 2. de Gener. Animal. cap. 7. will have the Eyes also to bee very considerable in these Predictions … because, saith he, the Eye is the most Spermaticall part about the Head.”

Cure:

Ferrand offers (in what is possibly the only sensible piece of advice in the whole book), the amenable Ovid:

1. “Let each man have two Mistresses in store:

And 'twere much better, if he could have more.

Thus, whilst the mind 'twixt two it selfe doth share,

One Love will still each others force impaire.”

2. “But the most famous, and certaine Remedy of all, was the Leucadian Rocke, from the top whereof distracted Lovers would throw themselves downe headlong into the sea.”

(Ferrand does concede “the harshnesse and unpleasantnesse of this Remedy.”)

There’s a Shakespeare allusion in one of the commendatory verses, that by Richard Goodridge of Christ Church:

“Were thy story of as much direfull woe,
As that, of Iuliet and Hieronymo:
Here's that would cure you…”

He imitates the closing couplet of Romeo and Juliet, and gives us a nice pairing of Elizabethan woe-tragedies.

A General History of Whoring, 1697

I have been reading, with gratified astonishment, the anonymous publication of 1697, God's judgments against whoring. being an essay towards a general history of it, from the creation of the world to the reign of Augustulus (which according to common computation is 5190 years) and from thence down to the present year 1697: being a collection of the most remarkable instances of uncleanness that are to be found in sacred or prophane history during that time, with observations thereon.

I pointed out this simultaneously learned and ill-judged book to my colleague Blair Worden (who really knows about this period) and he noticed straight away that the printer, Richard Baldwin, was a regular printer of radical tracts. It was all intended very seriously by a late 17^th century writer immensely antagonized by what he calls “Advocates of Lechery”. He writes against libertinage, and foresees trouble – if anyone rebuked to their face the “Beaux and Debauchees of this present Age, he would run a hazard of being whipp'd through the Lungs, with a Damn him for a canting foul-mouth'd Coxcomb”.

Apart from that of being run through by an indignant rakehell, the author did see the inherent problem in his project: “the Design of the following Essay is not to minister Fuel to those Impure Flames which have consum'd so many particular Persons, Families, and Nations, but is intended as a Caveat and Warning to all those who are guilty of that reigning Sin of Uncleanness” (he begins). But he then embarks on a work which tactlessly gathers together every discreditable Bible episode, and supplies chapter and verse on every classical depravity. So, if you wanted a detailed summary of what Tiberius got up to at Capraea, here it all is. What emerges is a version of Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World (which has the same type of historical scope and sources), but focused almost entirely on fornication, history’s “remarkable instances of uncleanness”. Our pious-minded author, oblivious to his effect, runs first through Bible history, then the Jewish Historians, and on into the classical historians, pursuing his learned theme with unremitting enthusiasm (and giving the impression that humanity in general has also pursued the practical matter with unremitting enthusiasm too).

The introductory list of contents is fabulous: here are some extracts from D, F and W:

• Damocles leaps into scalding Oyl to avoid Sodomy. 211
• David's Amours with Maacha, and the Opinions of the Rabbins concerning it. 68
• David's Adultery and Punishment, and Remarks on it. 64, 65
• David's Concubines, their uncleanness and punishment. 75
• Darius's Incest and Punishment. 148, 225

• Firmus drank two Buckets of Wine at once. 273
• Fishes, the luxury and niceness of the Romans in them, mourn'd for when dead, deck'd with Jewels, Octavius's Expence about 'em. 282, 283.
• Fore-skin, why circumcis'd. 13
• Fornication, why so called. 307
• ---Schoolmens Opinion of it. 315
• Fowl, the niceness and luxury of the Romans about 'em. 283
• Furniture of Houses excessive. 292, 294
• War occasion'd at Sparta by the Lust of Chelidonis. 200
• Wenches naked wait at Table. 277
• Whores and Whoremongers, their Character by Solomon. 87

· Whoredom the cause of Apostacy, and of the Deluge. 6, 7

• ---the Judgments denounc'd against it in the New Testament. 122, &c.
• ---its Original. 1, 2, 3
• Wild Beasts, vast numbers of 'em in the Theatres. 287
• Women that kill'd themselves to avoid being defil'd. 304
• Woman taken in Adultery, the reason of our Saviour's acquitting her; what he wrote upon the Ground at that time. 109

Immensely hot under the collar though he is about adultery, ‘digamy’, polygamy, concubinage, and the ‘keeping of misses’, as you see, the author still has spare indignation about the other depravities his fornicators have indulged.

Generally, the author can keep more or less on track, as bad things happen to most of the adulterers in the Bible. However, there are episodes where due condemnation is not to be found. And there is a certain, scarcely deniable raciness to the commentary … for instance, when he gets to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. The author speculates about what drove the inhabitants to demand intercourse with the angels visiting Lot:

“This is the first Instance we meet with of Lusts arriving to such a prodigious height, as to seek after Unnatural Objects, and it would seem their Incontinence was so fierce, that they furiously sought after every opportunity, to gratifie their brutish desires, especially upon Strangers; for they had so mutually polluted one another, that it's probable their villainous pleasures that way, had lost much of their relish.”

From there, he plunges on with the continued story of Lot, and how his daughters came to seduce him. No immediate thunderbolt ensues: the author points this out himself, which is to his credit. But I was struck by his ingenious speculations on the way the behaviour of Lot’s daughters might be attributable to the adverse environmental factors of their upbringing. He has a point, but an oddly worldly one:

“The next Instance we meet with, is that of Lot's Incest with his own Daughters, or rather their Incest with him. This passage has many strange Circumstances that deserve our observation. It is not improbable that the lewd Conversation of the Sodomites had before-hand infected the minds of those Damsels, for it's a hard matter to touch pitch and not to be defiled; Divines are of different opinions concerning those Women, some believing that they had actually been married, and others, that they were only betrothed, but which soever of 'em it was, it's certain they had lost their Males; and perhaps their Fathers offer to prostitute them to save his Guests, and their having been ear witnesses at least to those unnatural villanies practis'd by the Sodomites, might possess them with extenuating thoughts of the wickedness they had in design: Yet it appears by their abominable Intrigue to Intoxicate their Father, that they durst not propound any such thing to him when he was Sober, their wickedness appears to be so much the greater, that they had but just escap'd from that storm of divine Wrath which over took the Sodomites for their Vile Lusts; That they had but a very little before seen their Mother turn'd into a Monument of God's displeasure, for having a hankering mind after that impure City, and her wicked Relations in it; That they had no doubt been often times witnesses to the vexation of their Fathers Righteous Soul at the lustful practises of the Sodomites, and yet all this was not able to restrain them from pursuing their unclean design, and commiting one sin to obtain the Commission of another. Their pretence that there was no Man left to come in unto them after the manner of all the Earth, and that therefore they were under necessity a of raising up Seed to their Father, appears to have been an ill founded suggestion of the Devil, to hide their sin from their Eyes, for they could not but know that they had left men behind them in Zoar, they might have seen from the hill, that the whole Country was not ruined, and those divine Judgments had only swallowed up the Cities of the Plain; or they might speedily have been better inform'd by their Father. Their wickedness is also aggravated by this, that as they were Sisters by Nature, they were Sisters in Iniquity, and they had no regard to their own, nor their Father's good Name, nor the scandal which by this lewd practice they gave to the Enemies of true Religion. The Scripture is silent as to any Judgments inflicted either upon their Father or themselves, but informs us plainly that the issue which they had by this Unlawfull Congress, were accursed, and their posterity like other spurious brood were mortal Enemies to the people of God, and perpetually excommunicated from the Church by Divine Command, Deut. 23. 3. And thus Lot had an eternal blemish fixt upon his Chastity, which did formerly so much distinguish him from the other Inhabitants of Sodom, and was punished by being the Author of Debauching his Daughters himself, whom he so rashly offered to be Debauched by others; so that we see raging Lust leaps over all the bounds of Law and Nature, and if not curb'd in time may rise to a surprizing and prodigious height, and bring down stupendous Judgments upon People and Persons.

In this next passage, he considers one of the odder biblical prohibitions and punishments, which he finds strongly indicates just what an overriding priority with God chastity must be:

“Chastity was so strictly enjoyned unto this select people of God, that they were not only forbid to suffer any of their Daughters to be Whores, or any of their Sons to be Whore-Masters, as some think the word which in our Translation Deut 23. 17. is Sodomites, ought to be rendered, but all manner of immodesty was strictly forbid; and therefore if any Woman seeing her Husband and another Man a Quarrelling, should be so impudent in her Fury or Passion as to take the other Man by the Secret Parts to oblige him to forbear Quarrelling with her Husband, her hand was to be cut off without any pity, tho' every Man knows that a Pressure or Gripe in those parts would quickly Force her Husband's Antagonist to quit the Fray.---And by much more reason would those Judges have Condemned Women who put their hands to those parts upon a Lustful Account.”

Unsurprisingly, he interprets circumcision as “a mark of God's displeasure at Incontinence upon the Instrument of Generation”. The author nowhere escapes the charge of knowing rather too much about the subject he is denouncing. Here, the zoophiles of his universal history of sexual misdemeanor run on into what looks dangerously like a learned joke:

“The Egyptians and Canaanites are also charged with Bestiality, their Men and Women having committed Confusion with Beasts, and thus Pasiphae is accused of having accompanied with a Bull, Polyphantes with a Bear, Semiramis with an Horse, and the Women of Mendis in Egypt with Goats.---Nay if we may believe the Fables of the Jews, the false Prophet Balaam, who was slain amongst the Midianites, was guilty of Bestiality with his Ass, which they foolishly collect from those Words of the Beast, viz. Am not I thine Ass which thou hast ridden upon?”

Once into the madder Roman emperors, the author can really enjoy himself (in whatever way it was that he was enjoying himself). But rather than any out-and-out naughty passage, I extract finally his version of the famous passage in North’s Plutarch describing Cleopatra at Cydnus. I cannot see here that he had so far weakened as to read a profane text like Antony and Cleopatra: it his independent rewrite. But anyone wanting to set a literary-critical exercise could print together North, Shakespeare, and this remarkable ‘Anon’:

“Dalleus, who carried the Message to her, had no sooner seen her admirable Beauty, but he told her, It was impossible that so beautiful a Creature could receive any ill treatment at the Hands of Antony, and therefore advis'd her to make towards him in splendid Equipage. Accordingly she embarks in the River Cydnus, the Head of her Barge did shine with inlaid Gold, the Sails were of Purple Silk, the Oars of Silver, which beat Time to the Flutes and Hautbois, she her self lay all-along under a Canopy of Cloth of Gold curiously embroider'd, dress'd as Venus is ordinarily represented, and beautiful young Boys stood on each side like Cupids, to fann her; her Maids were dress'd like Sea-Nymphs and Graces, some steering the Rudder, some working at the Ropes; the Perfumes diffus'd themselves from the Vessel to the Shore, which was all cover'd with Multitudes, the People running out of the City to see this strange Sight, left Antony alone upon the Tribunal, and a Rumor was spread abroad, That Venus was come to feast with Bacchus, for the common Good of Asia. As soon as she arriv'd, Antony sent to invite her to Supper, but she thought it more decent that Antony should come to her, who made no great Difficulty to do it; he found the Preparations very magnificent, but nothing was so admirable as the great number of Lights, which were all of a sudden let down in such a multitude of Branches, and so ingeniously dispos'd, some in Squares and some in Circles, that Fame cannot speak of a greater piece of Curiosity.”

It is among the 12,500 texts which the text creation project over on EEBO has made a full text of, so it is very readily accessible. (How I wish they’d get round to doing Paul Fairfax’s English Faustbook!)

A failed early modern memory theatre

I had reason to look at the various early editions of Florio’s translation of Montaigne. I had never seen this ‘comely frontispiece’ before, and thought I’d do a brief post on it. It appeared in the 1632 edition.

It comes with a variant on those ‘the mind of the frontispiece’ sets of verses that you sometimes get in early printed books.* These are graceful and well turned, and they adroitly turn the failure of an over-ambitious plan to advantage, for they explain how the picture doesn't convey the sense of the work.

As you will see if you read my transcript of the verses below, the scheme had been to do a woodcut of a many-roomed palace to symbolise the ‘Essays’ as a totality. The decoration of the many rooms would have been a memory theatre of the notable things in Montaigne; it would have displayed a cabinet of his wonders and rarities.

That was the plan, anyway. But the verses gracefully excuse its failure: Montaigne overwhelmed the capacity of visual art to represent his variety of subjects. So, the palace was dropped for a gateway (opened to all English readers by Florio’s translation) which invites the readers to pass through to see the riches beyond.

Who was working on this? Martin Droeshout, no less, did the engraving (and, I suppose, had struggled briefly with the scheme to depict a palace stuffed with visual allusions to Montaigne’s many subjects). My guess at the poet is Francis Quarles, as he has a rather similar conception in his Argalus and Parthenia frontispiece, also in 1632, but from a different publisher (John Marriott, and the engraving by Thomas Cecill: in Quarles’s vapid poem, the engraving is of a curtained ‘argument’ with supporting figures, to get you reading on).

Mary Edmonds has a brief ODNB life of Droeshout, and her publications may include some more informed comment on this elegant failure.

To the Beholder of this Title

When first this portlike Frontispiece was wrought,

To raise a Pile compleat, it was out thought,

Whose Roomes and Galleries should have been trim’d

With Emblemes, and with Pictures, fairly lim’d,

And drawne from those neat Peeces, which do lurke

Within the Closets of this Authors worke:

So placing them, and them contriving so,

That ev’ry Reader (passing to and fro)

By casting thereupon a glauncing eye,

Might in that Model or Epitomie

(Ev’n at the first aspect) inform’d have beene,

Of ev’ry Raritie contain’d within.

But walking through that Palace of Invention,

(The better to accomplish our Intention)

Wee found unlookt for, scattred here and there,

Such Profits, and such pleasures, ev’ry where,

In such Variety, that, but to name,

Each one, would make a Volume of the same.

For, in those Angles, and among those Leaves

Whereon the rash Beholders eye perceives

No shewes or promises, of such choice things

A diligent unfolder of them brings

Concealed Fruits to light: Ev’n thus did we

In such abundance, that they prove to bee

Beyond a brief expression, and have stop’t

Our purpose in presenting what wee hop’d.

In stead of Emblemes therefore, to explaine

The scope of this great Volume, we are faine

To fixe the Authors Title, on the Gate,

Annexed to his Name, presuming that

Will give this following Treatise much more praise

Then all the Trophies which our skill can raise.

For, he that hath not heard of Mountaine yet,

Is but a novice in the schools of wit.

You that so please may enter: For, behold

The Gate stands open, and the doores unfold

Their leaves to entertaine you. That French ward

Which lately kept you forth, is now unbard,

And you may passe at pleasure ev’ry way

If you are furnish’d with an English-key.

That, wee suppose you want not: If you do,

Wee are not they, whom this was meant unto:

Pray passe along, and stare no more on that

Which is the picture of you know not what,

Yet, if it please you, Spell it, And if than

You understand not, Give them roome that can.

* Edward Sherburne’s translation of Manilius has a fine Wencelaus Hollar, with explanatory verses giving explicitly the ‘mind of the frontispiece’. Funds for The London Bully (1683) either ran short or the picture of the prodigal was saucy enough to be swiped. I feel that I will want to post soon on the illustration to the work by Cave Beck, M.A.

An early modern fart-lighting contest, and other sonic delights.

I cannot remember what I was looking for when I strayed that way, but I found myself reading through Catch that catch can, or, A choice collection of catches, rounds & canons for 3 or 4 voyces collected & published by John Hilton (1652).

These are jolly songs for drunken amateur performers – male performers, that is to say. Among my ancient vinyl, I do not have any catches from this collection performed, but have posted here

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/sincetimesokind.mp3

members of the Hilliard Ensemble doing very nicely a similar naughty song, Purcell’s catch, ‘Since time so kind to us does prove’, with Paul Hillier as the baritone, Leigh Nixon, tenor, and David James singing counter-tenor (and having great fun as the girl). All over in a minute and a half, so no wonder the lady is less enraptured than the gentleman. This was released on ‘The Merry Companions’ back in 1981.

But my life is the poorer for not having heard this splendidly bawdy catch performed, ideally at the Wigmore Hall:

“My Lady and her Mayd upon a merry pin, they made a match at farting, who should the wager win. Jone lights three Candles then and sets them bolt upright, with the first fart she blew them out, with the next she gave them light. In comes my Lady then with all her might and maine, and blew them out, and in, and out, and in, and out againe. My Lady, &c.”

I suppose that Dame Emma Kirkby is too grand these days to enact such fooleries.

Here’s another naughty one, about lovers on May Day, and it exploits the way a word can be syllabically divided in a musical setting to produce its bawdy:

“See how in gathering of their May, each Lad and Lass do kiss and play, do kiss love’s hole, & play with love’s hole, do kiss and play, do kiss and play, each thing doth smile as it would say, this is love’s hole, love’s Holiday, love’s hole doe kiss, and play with love’s hole, love’s hole, love’s Holyday, & while love’s kindly fires doe sting, hark Philomel doth sweetly sing, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, doth sweetly sing. See, &c.” William Lawes, no less, is responsible.

This one by ‘Mr. Cranford’ uses a low pun for the same joke:

“Here dwells a pretty Mayd, whose name is Sis, you may come in and kisse: Her hole, her hole, her hole, her whole estate is seventeen pence a yeare, yet you may kisse, you may kisse, you may kisse, you may kisse her, if you come but neare. Here, &c.”

But to come to a serious point, I have heard many, many versions of Shakespeare songs using the limited surviving early settings, but I have never heard anyone picking up on Hilton’s own setting of the catch in As You Like It:

“What shall he have that kill’d the Deere, his leather skin and horns to wear, take you no scorn to wear a horn, it was a crest e’re thou was born, thy father’s father bore it, and thy father wore it, the horn, the horn, the lusty horn is not a thing to laugh to scorn. What shall he, &c.”

In the Shakespearean text, Act IV scene 2, the words with a minor variation, and indication that the original setting was a solo voice and then a chorus:

Forester
What shall he have that kill'd the deer?
His leather skin and horns to wear.
Then sing him home;
(The rest shall bear this burden)
Take thou no scorn to wear the horn;
It was a crest ere thou wast born:
Thy father's father wore it,
And thy father bore it:
The horn, the horn, the lusty horn
Is not a thing to laugh to scorn.

This is jolly too: I can imagine finding these words funny after a glass or two
“Let Simon’s beard alone, alone, let Simon’s beard alone, 'tis no disgrace to Simon’s face, for he had never one: then mock not, nor scoff not, nor jeer not, nor fleer not, but rather him bemoan. Let, &c.”

I do not think that I have sung songs in a pub since I was an undergraduate, and it seems so long ago it might as well have been the Carmina Burana.

The piety of early modern shorthand

I have been looking again recently at the religious poems of Donne and Herbert: in regard to the latter, I read for the first time The Arminian nunnery or, a briefe description and relation of the late erected monasticall place, called the Arminian nunnery at Little Gidding in Huntington-shire. Humbly recommended to the wise consideration of this present Parliament. The foundation is by a company of farrars at Gidding (1641), where a puritan reports on his snooping around at Little Gidding, and his disapproval of the practices (to his mind, ‘papist’) which he saw there.

Thinking about the spectacular piety of Herbert, and the 24 hour worshippers at Little Gidding, led me to early modern shorthand, and to Rich redivivus or Mr Jeremiah Richs short-hand improved in a more breife & easy method then hath been set forth by any heretofore. Now made publique for generall advantage by Nathaniell Stringer a quondam scholar to the said Mr Rich. [1675?].

You might loosely think that shorthand would be a secular accomplishment, useful for taking transcripts of business meetings or other important group deliberations. The book put out by Rich and his pupil Stringer brings you up short. As one of the commendatory verses says:

… Quicke as an Angell darting through the Air

When he conveys to Heaven a good man prayer

With equall pace Can this rare Art Expresse

Each quaint Oration in its native Dresse

The fluent sermons word for word wee Reach

Though utter’d faster then shee Quakers preach…

This was a system of shorthand aimed at taking exact notes in church. To the title page illustration (which shows the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments in the shorthand), I have added a composite image from the later, intricate images. It shows that, once you had absorbed the basic rules (and the promoters reckon that you would spend one hour memorizing a rule, and then another hour on the next day on the next precept, and so on), this shorthand system had a range of ‘simbolicall characters’ designed to help the user take down sermons verbatim. There are signs for each book of the Bible, for names in the Bible, and for the common phrases of pulpit oratory. Obviously, a name like 'Melchizedeck' needs a lot of writing: but how often did you hear it?!

I suppose that this was in the days when hearing a famous preacher was like going to a concert given by a major star, though to take along your recording device was allowed. Once you’d scratched away through the hour, back home to make your transcript.

Amazing, really.

How true that is!

'He that sitteth sleeping signifieth slothfulness amongst teachers, whose desire being satisfied, careth not for the charge: the children idleness, whose minds without a careful tutor, are bent to nothing but ease and vanities'

A splendid emblematic picture from:

A christall glasse of christian reformation wherein the godly maye beholde the coloured abuses vsed in this our present tyme. Collected by Stephen Bateman Minister (1569)

You make me feel like (not) dancing: early modern Salome

I was spending an idle but contented hour this last Sunday afternoon looking at YouTube clips of Rita Hayworth dancing, and singing (I mean, gosh, chaps), sometimes with Fred Astaire, sometimes solo. I do not think I have ever seen her as Salome in the 1953 film, and maybe this is one of those things that will always be better in one’s imagination, for all that inimitable Hollywood style surely turned cheesy when historical or biblical subjects were attempted.

But I was led back to the early modern versions: mainly, and predictably they disapprove mightily. Salome as a name doesn’t have its later resonance: she is generally referred to as either ‘Herodias’s daughter’, or simply as ‘Herodias’. She crops up with regularity in general dispraises of women, and stars in that most woman-hating of early modern plays, Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam. But for the early modern stage-hating Puritan (John Rainolds, and William Prynne, and to an extent in Thomas Beard) Salome is the great Bible instance of the wickedness of performance. Prynne is apoplectic (and silent about David dancing before the Lord):

“All these, with sundry others, unanimously condemne all mixt, effeminate, lascivious, amorous dancing, (the epidemicall pastime of our dancing, loytring age) as sinfull, hurtfull, unlawfull to all chaste, all sober Christians, as the reasons they alleage against it will more plainely evidence. For first, (say they) as there is no allowance, no approved example of any such dancing in the Scriptures, the Primitive Church, the Fathers, or in the lives and practice of the Saints of God in former ages, (who as appeares by the fore-quoted Councels and Fathers have alwayes censured and exploded Dancing:) (Prynne here supplies dozens of bible citations) doe either absolutely in expresse tearmes, or else by way of necessary consequence, condemne such dancing as Idolatrous, Heathenish, carnall, worldly, sensuall, and misbeseeming Christians.”

Prynne now moves on to the revelation, derived from various fathers of the church, that the girl who danced before the leering Herod was in fact the multi-talented Devil himself:

“Secondly, the very Devill himselfe (write they) who danced in the Daughter of Herodias Math. 14 6. 7. (as Chrysostome, Fulgentius, Theophylact. and others write) was the originall Author of this dancing, the onely instrument who excites men to it; the onely person that is present at it, that is honored, pleased, and delighted with it; (he being ever-more present and president where such dancing is) as Chrysostome, Basil, with the other Marginall Authors have plentifully recorded.”

I wonder in what church father or rabbinical tradition the death of Salome was first invented? Joseph Beaumont had something of a specialism in writing disapproving poems about the bible’s best dancing girl (so we can imagine he was particularly susceptible to these things). So his (for him) short poem about John the Baptist ends with a vehement account of her fate:

One Dance for Thee is still behind
By which Revenge thy Crime will find:
The Ice perfidious to Thee,
But unto Justice true shall be,
When it shall catch
Thy neck, & snatch
Its Head away,
Which there shall play
And dance a tragik Measure on
That fatall Pavement: then shall John
W^th greater glory view Thee from his Sphear,
Then Herod at his Feast beheld Thee heere.

Here we see that her command of a performance space leads to appropriate retribution: the thin moral ice on which she fandangoed was literalised into ice which broke beneath her, and as she went through, visited on her the decollation she’d inveigled out of Herod. All positions having changed, the Baptist is now the gloating spectator. Henry Vaughan has a similar poem, which also alludes to this, and here it is with his marginal note:

‘The Daughter of Herodias’

Vain, sinful Art! who first did fit
Thy lewd loath'd Motions unto sounds,
And made grave Musique like wilde wit
Erre in loose airs beyond her bounds?

What fires hath he heap'd on his head?
Since to his sins (as needs it must,)
His Art adds still (though he be dead,)
New fresh accounts of blood and lust.

Leave then yong Sorceress; the Ice*
Will those coy spirits cast asleep,
Which teach thee now to please his eyes
Who doth thy lothsome mother keep.

But thou hast pleas'd so well, he swears,
And gratifies thy sin with vows:
His shameless lust in publick wears,
And to thy soft arts strongly bows.

Skilful Inchantress and true bred!
Who out of evil can bring forth good?
Thy mothers nets in thee were spred,
She tempts to Incest, thou to blood.

*Her name was Salome; in passing over a frozen river, the ice broke under her, and chopt off her head.

My image is taken from the impressive collection assembled over in Bucharest by the owner of this weblog:

http://brechto.blogspot.com/2007/05/salome.html

It is by Guido Reni, and shows a fabulously demure Salome receiving the Baptist’s head. I chose this from Mihai’s scholarly collection of these things because I thought it was latently self-subverting. Surely, here, there is some kind of contamination from memories of David with the head of Goliath? The boy staggering under the weight of the Baptist’s severed bonce giganticises the prophet: Salome is so modest, that she becomes saintly, a Judith.

But, of course, appearances are deceptive, and I must remember that Mr Prynne has let me know that she is really the devil. All change places now.

The devil puts in an appearance: 1655 and 1663

Two supernatural ballads to the same (incongruous) tune: the full synoptic titles give the narratives. I will simply offer a rational reading of each, to show how easily we can make the devil disappear (or conversely, how easily they could write him in).

1.

The devils conquest, or, a Wish obtained: Shewing how one lately of Barnsby-Street, in Leg-Ally, in St Olaves Parish, Southwark, one that Carded Wooll for Stockings, carried home some work to her Mistris, living on Horsly-Down, who asked her how much shee owed her for; the Maid answered eight pounds; her Mistris said 'twas but six whereupon the Maid began to Swear and Curse, and wisht the Devil fetch her, if there was not eight pounds owing for; the Mistris loving quietness, paid her for eight pound: the Maid, with two of her Companions, walking over Horsly-Down, she having a Childe in her arms, one came and throwed her down, and presently took her up again, which caused her to say, Thou Rogue, dost thou fling me down and take me up again, and suddenly he vanished away, neither she, nor the two women with her, could discern which way he went, which caused them to say, it was the Devil, which for all this, nothing terrified the Maid, who went boldly home, and to bed, and the two women with her; at midnight she heard a voice, which called her by her name very often; she answered, I come, I come; but the voice still continuing, she swore she would come, and being got out of the bed, fell down upon her face, and was taken speechless, yet her body moving in most terrible manner, manifesting her inward pangs; her Mistris was sent for, who freely forgave her, and wisht God might forgive her too, and then shee departed, and her body was found as black as pitch all over; and all this was for no more than the value of eleven pence, which was done on the 6^th of this instant May, 1665. and was written for a warning to all, to avoid the like course. The tune is, Summer Time.

2.

Strange news from Westmoreland. Being a true relation of one Gabriel Harding, who coming home drunk, struck his wife a blow on the breast and killed her out right; then did he forswear the evil deed which he knew himself guilty of. Likewise how a stranger did come to the house cloathed in green, the people that were eye witnesse said it was an angel. Likewise how the stranger or angel did give sentence upon the man for killing of his wife. Also how Satan did break the mans neck that did forswear himself; and the stranger or angel did command Satan to hurt none else, and to vanish: which being done, there was a pleasant harmony of musick heard to sound: then did the stranger cloathed in green, take his leave of the people; whereof the chiefest in the parish desired it might be put in print, and have hereunto set their hands. To the tune of, In summer time.

The story about Margery Perry (in The Devil’s Conquest) gives a glimpse of the lives of a group of low income single women in a poor parish of 17^th century London. With her companions, Perry carded wool:

http://www.joyofhandspinning.com/hand-carding.shtml

The three women lodge and sleep together. The notion of ‘joy’ in their place on the bottom rung of the stocking-making process would have seemed far away. One day, Perry makes her false claim to her ‘Work Mistress’ to have carded eight pounds weight of wool, having only done six:

She wisht the Devil fetch her straight
If that she had not done eight pounds,
Ah woman! Caught with such a bait,
That came not to half a crown.

Perry was not made penitent by the warning attack on the way home, so she then succumbed to the devil at the proper hour of midnight. I suppose that Perry had a heart condition: the quarrel with her forewoman brought on her first attack as she walked home agitated, but in triumph; the AMI from which she didn’t recover came later. Yet in her extremity, she had the additional misery of believing that this was the devil come for her soul, and seems, as far as her condition allowed, to have acted as if she were complying with a supernatural summons.

Gabriel Harding was a wealthy alcoholic from Tredenton in Westmorland (the ballad says his rents came to £500 a year). The ballad tells how, in a drunken rage, he struck his wife, who died on the spot. Their children rushed into the street, and their cries alerted the neighbours. Harding was detained in his own house by his neighbours, but he denied the killing. They decided to summon the coroner. But instead, a knocking at the door heralds the arrival of a splendid angel:

His eyes like to the Stars did shine,
He was cloathed in a bright Grass green;
His cheeks was of a Crimson red
Of such a man was seldom seen…

He tells them that they should not send for the coroner, but to bring him ‘the man that did the deed / And boldly hath deny’d the same’.

The angel then gives Harding a brisk lecture. It contains a lot of local knowledge (or local ill feeling):

Thy full delight was drunkenness,
And always griping on the Poor:
Beside thou hast murdered thy Wif[e]
Alack what salve will cure thy sore.

Thy family within the house
Food thou wouldst grudge continually
O wicked man, thy self prepare!
A fearful death thou’rt sure to die…

The angel tells the neighbours not to be frightened about what will happen next: and the devil duly appears, first like ‘a brave Gentleman’, and then dancing round the hall in an ‘ugly shape’ after being given the charge to ‘Do no more then thou hast command’:

The Devil then he straight laid hold
On him that had murdered his Wife,
His neck in sunder then he brake,
And thus did end his wretched life.

The Devil then he vanished
Quite from the people in the Hall…

Yes, I am sure that is precisely what happened: a group of morally-revolted neighbours had after all been trying to deal with a drunken, angry and frightened man, aiming to keep him restrained in the hall of his own house. In the melee, they broke his neck. Afterwards they might have felt exactly as the ballad accidentally puts it – the devil had for that moment got into them. But, well, Harding was a drunk, a miser, they all hated him, and he had just killed his own wife. They just needed a story about why they hadn’t called the coroner: an angel told them not to, and that angel summoned up a devil to do his dirty work, before disappearing to a pleasant melody.

To authenticate itself, the ballad ends with a list of “the Names of some of the chiefest men that live in the Parish. Christopher Rawly, Esquire, James Fish, Gent. William Lisle, Gent. Simon Pierce, Ambrose Whir, Oliver Craft, Robert Ford, Thomas Clifford, Yeomen. George Crawly, Peter Vaux, Pilip Cook, Francis Martin, George Horton, Abraham Miles, Husbandmen.”

I surmise that among them were the men who accidentally killed the murderer Harding, and also those who concocted this spectacularly moral cover story, and maybe passed on the details to some passing Autolycus.

(I like the way that this ballad was reprinted as almost 30 years later, around 1690, but still as ‘News from Westmorland’.)

The images of the priapic devil decorate both ballads. It seems to be the same design. The later ballad probably uses the older block. For the 1663 ballad, it looks as though the old design had been stamped onto a new block, and been used as the basis of a re-cutting, so producing the crisper reversed print (devil on the left in my composite image).

I couldn’t exactly locate Margery Perry’s address on it, but I did find the promising new online Map of Early Modern London that is in development:

http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/index_site.php

I might have to volunteer myself to help fill up their information boxes.

A talk with Mr Mazda

Off to another 'Rock, Gem and Mineral Fair', and here's my prime acquisition, from my favourite dealer, Mr R D Mazda.

These are little turrets of pale green chalcedony, mingled with pale pink quartz and a single bright green chrystal of apophyllite. The source (Mr Mazda is punctiliously correct about provenance) is a place called Jalgaon, which is in Mahavashtva state, a day's drive north east of Bombay.

My photograph has lost much of the beauty of the piece: the chalcedony is in the subtlest of grey-greens. It reminded me of the 'Rain Flower Pebbles' and other landscape stones the Chinese avidly collected (and I am sorry that so aesthetically and intellectually enriching a blog as 'misteraitch' has run is now brought to an end):
http://www.spamula.net/blog/2007/04/hard_stones_and_rain_flower_pe.html

I bought other smaller things, including a dangerous lump of native cinnabar - sealed in a plastic box. I acquired this late acquisitiveness around 2002. As these objects pile up in the house, I tell myself that having an enjoyment of ownership is one thing that distinguishes us from animals...

But, speaking of enriching people, I had a long talk with Mr Mazda, who collects books by the poets of the 1890's. We talked about Swinburne, and Dowson, back to Tennyson, and on to Masefield. And he recited for me a poem by Masefield which I did not know, 'A Creed', and politely indicated that its forthright account of reincarnation was more or less what he himself believed. He also said that Masefield's first line was toned down, under pressure, to the faintly absurd 'I held that' (which would undermine the very title - if you have renounced the idea, it hardly qualifies as much of a creed, does it?). The version on LION does indeed have that diluted past tense. I read David Gervais's life of Masefield on ODNB, which has no indication about Masefield's leaning to Buddhism. Here, Masefield seems so happy with Samsara, that it comes across as a kind of Buddhist Browning, all heartiness and vigour. But here it is, as a thanks to my educator and purveyor of fine rocks:

'A creed'

I hold that when a person dies

His soul returns again to earth;

Arrayed in some new flesh-disguise

Another mother gives him birth.

With sturdier limbs and brighter brain

The old soul takes the road again.

Such is my own belief and trust;

This hand, this hand that holds the pen,

Has many a hundred times been dust

And turned, as dust, to dust again;

These eyes of mine have blinked and shown

In Thebes, in Troy, in Babylon.

All that I rightly think or do,

Or make, or spoil, or bless, or blast,

Is curse or blessing justly due

For sloth or effort in the past.

My life's a statement of the sum

Of vice indulged, or overcome.

I know that in my lives to be

My sorry heart will ache and burn,

And worship, unavailingly,

The woman whom I used to spurn,

And shake to see another have

The love I spurned, the love she gave.

And I shall know, in angry words,

In gibes, and mocks, and many a tear,

A carrion flock of homing-birds,

The gibes and scorns I uttered here.

The brave word that I failed to speak

Will brand me dastard on the cheek.

And as I wander on the roads

I shall be helped and healed and blessed;

Dear words shall cheer and be as goads

To urge to heights before unguessed.

My road shall be the road I made;

All that I gave shall be repaid.

So shall I fight, so shall I tread,

In this long war beneath the stars;

So shall a glory wreathe my head,

So shall I faint and show the scars,

Until this case, this clogging mould,

Be smithied all to kingly gold.

'The Steem of Mad Doggs': Renfrewshire, 1698.

I am working rather too hard for the extra investigations required by the tangential investigations of this blog. But my ‘Witchcraft and Drama’ course has come round again, spurring me to read some of those pamphlets I have previously missed. My latest has been that by Sir Francis Grant, Lord Cullen, about the Renfrewshire witch scare:

A true narrative of the sufferings and relief of a young girle; strangely molested, by evil spirits and their instruments, in the west collected from authentick testimonies there-anent. With a preface and post-script containing reflections on what is most material or curious; either in the history, or trial of the seven witches who were condemn'd to be execute in that countrey. This comes in as late as 1698, and its interest made me reflect that we tend to read earlier works, and so miss out on highly evolved demonological discourses from the very end of that lamentable tradition. It also prompts me to consider that, in scholarship about the witchcraft panic, the general focus is awry, and should always be on the accusers, not the accused.

Grant is fascinating. He was a very devout lawyer, an intelligent and informed man who will deploy the discoveries of the dawning Enlightenment to reinforce the assertions of Enlightenment’s very opposite:

“there needs not so much Metaphysicks to unriddle the Appearance of Witches as Beasts, and the like: Since their reall persons may be covered with a Vehicle; which by dispersal of the Rays coming therefrom, may fascinate the Eyes by the same Impressions that come from the true sight of such”.

Grant is not a man to give any ground at all – all demonology is true, with no concessions. Thus, though he admires “our Famous K. Ja. 6^th” (King James) as an unimpeachable author, it clearly bothered him that James had given some ground to scepticism in the Daemonologie. Addressing the transvection of witches, James had produced a canny limitation on this power: in his view, witches can fly, “but in this violent forme they cannot be carried, but a shorte boundes, agreeing with the space that they may reteine their breath: for if it were longer, their breath could not remaine unextinguished, their bodie being carried in such a violent & forcible maner”. King James backs this up with the amazing assertion that when people fall from very high places, they are asphyxiated before they hit the ground: “as is oft seen by experience”. Grant will have none of this: “As it’s easy for [the devil] to Condense a part of the Vechicle: which may protect the Breathing and yet cutt the Air, like the Fence of Dyvers, & beak of a Sloop”. Again, the quasi-scientific language, deployed to argue that the devil contrives face masks for his aerial passengers. So the King was right, but wrong, as satan had a way round the brathing problem. When arguing that Satan can also create a ‘Vehicle’ of condensed air behind which the real form of the witch is hidden, and a “dispersal of Rays” to deceive the eye, Grant was also silently correcting the King’s theories: James did not think that witches could take the form of smaller animals: it would be just too painful to be so compacted. Grant has a particular need to establish this point, for his eleven year old informant lets it be known at one point that “M.M. … had appeared to her, and pincht her leg in the likeness of a Bumbee”.

The afflicted child that Grant found so convincing that he was among those who had seven people hanged as a consequence of her accusations was Christian Shaw, of Bargarran House, a “smart lively Girl”, who snitched to her mother that the housemaid Catherine Campbell was illicitly drinking the household milk, and got the fiery response from ‘Katie’: “The Devil harle your soul thorow Hell”. Campbell was unlucky: I suppose that the kindest construction on what followed is that Christian Shaw then succumbed to a mild attack of tetanus -

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

(“her Body was often bent & rigid, as she stood like a Bow on her Feet and Neck at once” – just look at that 1809 painting of a sufferer). But Christian had an available range of metaphysical explanations for her distressing symptoms: she was, of course, bewitched. At some point, her subsiding symptoms would have been overtaken by the necessity to sustain the accusations she had made, and she became an adept and dangerously manipulative fraud (for the best possible motives, of course). In her later life, she would make a major advance in the spinning of fine linen yarn:

http://www.electricscotland.com/history/domestic/vol3ch4g.htm

This clever girl could therefore contrive such staggering proofs as her glove, dropped in public view as she attended Kirk, levitating back to her hand. I suspect a minor magic trick involving a very fine thread. Christian was embarked on a course she had to see through. Her piety sustained her, as she effectively set about purging the parish of everyone that she had heard spoken ill of by those adults she respected. The number of her persecutors increased alarmingly, as the intrepid Christian fingered anyone with a bad local reputation. Those who cursed were a particular target, she also named a local crippled man, and of course swept up anyone previously suspected of witchcraft. But she is a child, and can be alarmingly arbitrary: an “Old Highland fellow” unluckily arrived at the house, weary from journeying, and sought shelter. Christian took an instant dislike to him, and he joined her other victims.

With these young accusers, there is always the possibility that an adult was colluding with or directing the ‘demoniack’ or child witness, as happened with Anne Gunter, or Edmund Robinson. I don’t think this was the case here. ‘M.M.’, who wickedly took the shape of a bumble bee to sting Christian, was a local gentlewoman. My illustration is the final page of this pamphlet, where the author complains about ‘M.M.’ having used legal redress against his pamphlet, reducing her name to the initials. Galling for the lawyer author to have the law turned against him, and this avenue of escape was not available to the seven who were found guilty of the persecution of Christian Shaw, and hanged. But that anyone can use the law as a positive defence is a sign of better times to come – in cases like that of the Throckmorton children, those accused seem to have no notion of any legal assistance, of habeas corpus, nothing: they are helpless as doom engulfs them.

Christian duly recovered after a satisfactory number of deaths, her case won by her fantastic ingenuity and persistence in her visitations, and her occasional spectaculars (she could move along without her feet seeming to touch the floor, I think especially when there was a stair hand rail to help things along). She was also backed up by three who had the wit and unscrupulousness to turn ‘confessing witch’, and escape the gallows by collaborating the child’s story against their fellow accused.

My post title comes from Grant’s heated argument that “The confederated Devil may, upon the Witches desire, infuse poisonous Humours, extracted from Herbs, of the same invisible Operation with the Steem of Madd dogs, or the Pestilence” to inflict such awful sufferings on his victims.

I will next read Grant’s Sadducimus debellatus: or, a true narrative of the sorceries and witchcrafts exercis'd by the devil and his instruments upon Mrs. Christian Shaw, daughter of Mr. John Shaw, of Bargarran in the County of Renfrew in the West of Scotland, from Aug. 1696 to Apr. 1697. I expect more of the same, meanwhile, the case has a book about it now:

http://thegrimsaypress.co.uk/biblio/1845300343.htm

The Kirk, Satan and Salem: A History of the Witches of Renfrewshire, by Hugh V. McLachlan, which I will have bought into my college library. But while the title, as I imply, may help the book find its audience, the real focus ought to be on the perpetrator, the self-fancied demoniack, young Christian Shaw.

Mooning the moon in early modern Brazil

Because I have a postgraduate student working in this area, I have been reading a racy piece of serio-comic writing, the undeniably learned wit of George Rogers’ The horn exalted or Roome for cuckolds. Being a treatise concerning the reason and original of the word cuckold, and why such are said to wear horns. Very proper for these times, when men are butting, and pushing, and goring, and horning one another. Also an appendix concerning women and jealousie, [1660].

George Rogers was a 17^th century medical man ambitious enough to have trained in Padua. He then went into practice in London, and eventually became the president of the College of Physicians. To celebrate the restoration of the monarchy (and in an act of remarkable prescience about what would notoriously prove to be one of the major preoccupations of that new anti-puritan era, he sent to the press this disquisition on a horny issue, seeing ‘the general verge of the people to merryment’, and expressing the hope that ‘this piece of drollery’ might therefore prove ‘acceptable’

The account of the mysterious origins of the ‘cuckold’ and of his imaginary horns is appropriately gamey: Rogers writes with an amused tolerance about erring wives, and urges any offended husbands to keep quiet - they should never blow their own horn and so draw attention to it. Rogers delivers a staggering range of arcane lore, much of it collected from (it seems) an array of Italian sources theorizing about cuckoldry and horns (‘these pleasant Seignieurs’, he calls them).

He outlines all the relevant cuckoo lore, and then gets onto the cuckold’s imputed horns, and their possible origins: Seignieur Trifone (apparently) alleged that it was because, of all male animals, only the billy-goat never shows signs of jealousy (an opinion conclusively refuted with a garish anecdote about a he-goat with a very particular reason for fatally attacking a man). Seignieur Cesario, Rogers tells us, derived Beccho from the horned Bacchus (and drunkards do get to be cuckolds), Seignieur Raineri argued the relevance of the horns of the moon, while Signieur Marmitta referred the fabulous horns of the cuckold to a story that, among Indian women, custom held that ‘when any lover presented their Mistress with an Elephant, she might permit him the joyes of her beauty’. There’s a pleasant side argument touched upon on whether an elephant has horns or just big teeth.

Other sources help Rogers range over the cornucopia, ‘the horn of plenty and abundance, which kind dames bring their husbands’, and an astronomical reason for the cuckold’s horns, obscurely based on which side of their wife a husband ought to lie when they are in bed together. The constellation of the Ram is on the right side of the sun, while women ‘would have their husbands still to lie on the left side, as being more dextrous for embraces’. So those that sullenly insist on lying on the right of their wives, making themselves less available for their marital embraces by doing so, ‘they call rams’.

All this is agreeably knock-about: Laurence Sterne would have loved it. Or rather, Laurence Sterne would have plundered it. To the latterday pedant, Rogers offers the stuff of a hundred footnotes. Here, in a single sentence, we get a possible light on the proper costuming of Edgar when he impersonates ‘Poor Tom’ in King Lear, and a splendid menstruation-ritual from Brazil which involved mooning the Moon:

“Lunacy for certain comes and goes with the Syzigy

[syzygy, that perfect word for the game of Scrabble, means coupling or conjunction]

of the star; from the Moon sure enough we become horn-mad, and hence our Tom-a-bedlams wear horns about them, perhaps by way of jeer and reproach to her, just as the women in Braseile at Monomatopa go up to the mountains at a new moon, and turn up their half-moons or backsides in defiance of her, because the causer of their monethly tribute.”

In this next extract, he skitters from consideration of the meaning present in the precise ordering of the Ten Commandments, into a consideration whether it ought to be the adulterer that gets the horns, and then leaps on to considering the devil’s horns:

“Adultery is both murder and theft, and therefore 'tis placed in the Ten Commandements twixt both: for as that steals the pleasures of another mans property, so (as Chaucer speaks) it Kerves in two and breaks asunder those that were one flesh. Well do then adulterers deserve horns: for since like pampered horses they run neighing after others wives and lye at rack and manger with them, 'tis fit they should have the bitter cup, and be drenched with the horn. The devil too is pictured with horns. He was the old serpent 'tis true, but whether Cerastes or the horn-snake, 'tis unknown. The Women they’l say he is horned, because he beats his dame when rain and sunshine meet together; so in revenge she turns succuba to others, just as he uses to lye with Witches and impure persons in dreams by creeping into their bodie.”

‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen’, is Macbeth’s enigmatic first line: I have now seen two 17^th century sources that indicate a belief existed that if the sun was shining while it rained, the devil and his dam were falling out. Diabolic marital disputes! Now, who has written on the weather in Shakespeare?

Set my fancy on a fire!

I always welcome (I suppose) all Hollywood revisits to the 16th century, in the faint hope that things Elizabethan might suddenly seem modish to my students. I am told by those same students that The Golden Age opens here today. So here is Cate Blanchett in a publicity still giving it her maximum Gloriana, while Clive Owen is her 'Sweet Sir Walter'. Ratings over on the IMDB are good:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414055/
I suppose I am looking forward, with temperate expectation, to seeing it.

The same kind of conversation led me to mentioning a piece of Elizabethan Petrarchising to a student who knows the originals far, far better than I ever will, and who is (astonishing though it may seem that such people exist) a latterday member of the Petrarchisti, keen to keep Petrarch's wreath of laurel, bay and myrtle in a suitably flourishing state.

The poem I had in mind was a sonnet published in The Phoenix Nest, 1593. Here it is:

Those eyes which set my fancy on a fire,
Those crisped hairs which hold my heart in chains,
Those dainty hands which conquered my desire,
That wit which of my thoughts doth hold the reins!
Those eyes, for clearness do the stars surpass,
Those hairs obscure the brightness of the sun,
Those hands, more white than ever ivory was,
That wit, even to the skies hath glory won!
O eyes that pierce our hearts without remorse,
O hairs of right that wear a royal crown,
O hands that conquer more than Caesar's force,
O wit that turns huge kingdoms upside down!
Then Love be judge, what heart may thee withstand,
Such eyes, such hair, such wit, and such a hand.

The thing that has always struck me about this sonnet is way we react as we read through it. The octave grinds through the conventional rota of compliments in a way that triggers instant impatience. ('Oh, good grief, not another one.') And, as we drag our weary eyes down into the sestet, we stir back awake, even though that tiresome correlative structure is still unfolding. It is addressed to someone that wears a royal crown by right, whose wit 'turns huge kingdoms upside down'. There's only one person fits the bill, and there's Cate Blanchett above impersonating her.

Agnes Latham, editing Ralegh, saw this as a Ralegh-circle poem. He might have had it ghosted, for it is more mechanical than Ralegh's usual wavering line. But more likely, he wrote it himself. Emrys Jones doesn't discount the possibility in his brief note on the poem in his Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse.

Suddenly the cardboard petrarchisms shift aside, and we half glimpse no less a man than Ralegh addressing Elizabeth I. The conventional lover's deference in the poem is the court favourite to the woman whose favour lifted him from being an obscure gentleman-swordsman, hardened in vicious campaigning in Ireland, to what he became ('the best-hated man in England', and other attendant benefits).

So the amusement of it all is, can we possibly imagine a more fantastically boring poem being transacted between two more fantastically interesting people?

Plague prediction from the behaviour of children, and coffee as a remedy, 1665

In sprucing up a lecture I came across the little pamphlet The prophecie of one of His Maiesties chaplains, concerning the plague and black-patches with Mr. Gadburies happy and joyful predictions, for the decrease of the plague both in the city and suburbs; the time when; the manner how; by God's permission, and according to natural causes; the effects and motion of the planets, and what every week may produce for the thrice-happy and welcome abatement of this sad and dismal pestilence; and the city of London to be wholly acquit thereof about (or before) Christmas (1665).

This ill-founded announcement of hopeful news ( the pamphlet gives both the astrological reasons for the outbreak, and repeats the hopes Gadbury had raised for an amelioration in August when ‘the fortunate Planet Venus … may so happily contemper the fury of it’ by entering into ‘a Trine of the Sun’ – no such luck, of course) brings together several oddities. Taking me back to some of my earliest postings on the fashion for black face patches, the pamphlet mentions a royal chaplain denouncing them as connected to, and in some sense responsible for, outbreaks of plague:

“And 'tis worthy of serious consideration, that about 20 years ago, one of the Chaplains of his late Majesty King Charles the First of ever blessed memory, did preach at Bristol upon this Text out of Gen 4.15 (‘And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him’) And in his Sermon did speak often against black patches and beauty-spots; and, among other things, said they were Fore runners of other Spots, and Marks of the Plague; and presently, within a very little while after, the Plague broke out among them, and all those persons that did wear them, fled the Town.”

If fashion can be connected to the plague, so can all kinds of behaviours. Arguing rather unconvincingly that God in His infinite mercy (!) sends warning signs (but the plague nevertheless tends to arrive ‘unawares’), the author runs through a few of the bad signs to look out for:

“Though the Plague cometh unawares, and seizeth upon a man on a suddain, yet such is the infinite mercy of God, and the providence of Nature, that it giveth always warning enough to any one that will diligently observe it …

… First the Reader may be pleased to observe, the Signs immanent and approaching of great Mortality; Mr Kelway in the third Chapter of his Treatise of the Plague printed at London 1593 hath these words: When we see young Children flocke them selues together in companyes, and then will faine some one of their company to be dead amongst them and so will solemnize the buriall in a mournefull sorte, this is a token which hath bene well obserued in our age, to foreshew great mortallitie at hand.

The allusion is to Simon Kellwaye’s A defensatiue against the plague contayning two partes or treatises: the first, shewing the meanes how to preserue vs from the dangerous contagion thereof: the second, how to cure those that are infected therewith. I in fact had to fill out the faintly-inked quotation in the 1665 text from the 1593 source.

So, it’s a bad sign if you see the children out playing at funerals. I find this interesting, and, I must confess, to have a faint possibility of plausibility, like those stories of animals predicting disasters. William Lilly, in his manuscript ‘History of his Life and Times’ (I read the 1822 printing of this fascinating work) firmly believed in this indication of bad times ahead. (I concede that Lilly firmly believed in all kinds of indications of bad times ahead – that was his stock-in-trade.) But here he is on the 1625 outbreak (and, at first, on what has to be a smaller outbreak from his earlier London years, 1620 onwards):

“I will relate what I observed the spring before it broke forth. Against our house every night there would come down, about five or six of the Clock, some hundred or more boys, some playing, others as if in serious discourse, and just as it grew dark would all be gone home; many succeeding years there was no such, or any concourse, usually no more than four or five in a company. In the spring of 1625, the boys and youths of several parishes in like number appeared again, which I beheld, called Thomas Sanders, my landlord, and told him, that the youth and young boys of several parishes did in that nature assemble and play, in the beginning of the year 1625 ‘God bless us’, quoth I, ‘from a plague this year’.

Was there some unrecorded lore among 17^th century children, some observation they had made? Boys were perhaps close observers of the behaviour of rats, as a source of sport. Had they noticed (as used to be the case with local tribes when the plague was still confined to the steppes) that the population of rodents was diminishing? Before the plague got out of central Asia, the people there knew that if the marmots were sick, you stayed well away. I read somewhere that the Chagatai horde led by Timur-i-Leng (Tamburlaine) swept through, knowing nothing of this, and freed the bacillus into circulation across the hemisphere.

The 1665 pamphlet offers the usual desperate remedies – wood fires, dosing yourself with vinegar, and coffee. Yes, coffee.

“Kindle a wood-fire in the Chimney, to consume and destroy all the infectious vapours… Venice-Treacle, Vinegar is a most excellent Antidote against the Plague, and to drink 2 or 3 Spoonfuls in a Morning is very good … Coffee is commended against the Contagion.”

What a pitiable life they led!