'Make the jewel which you paint seem Rich'

I am gearing up to take a party of students off to ‘Renaissance Faces’

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/renaissancefaces/default.htm

The image above is a Hilliard of an unknown lady (in the collection of the Metropolitan museum on their pleasing website here: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/liza/hd_liza.htm); but I thought I’d expound a little on one of his lost works, one that would have been the companion piece to his famous ‘Young Man Amongst Roses’. The lost portrait was commended in a sonnet by Henry Constable:

‘To Mr Hilliard, upon occasion of a picture he made of my Lady Rich’

If Michael the archpainter now did live,
Because that Michael he an angel hight,
As partial for his fellow-angels, might
To Raphael’s skill much praise and honour give.

But if in secret I his judgment shrive,
It would confess that no man knew aright
To give to stones and pearls true dye and light,
Till first your art with orient nature strive.

But think not yet you did that art devise;
Nay, thank my Ladie that such skill you have;
For often sprinckling her black sparckling eyes,
Her lips and breast, taught you the [.....]
To diamonds, rubies, pearls, the worth of which
Doth make the jewel which you paint seem Rich.

In his rather stilted first quatrain, Constable sets off on Michaelangelo having a high opinion of Raphael, product of an angel-Angelo’s bias towards another angelically-named painter. But, says Constable, if I had a living Michaelangelo’s secret opinion disclosed to me under confession, he would drop this bias, and confess to Hilliard’s superiority. The specific superiority is in representing jewels with undiminished lustre. Joan Grundy in her edition of Constable makes a very apposite citation of Hilliard’s own ‘Arte of Limning’: ‘Limning excelleth all other painting whatsoever in sundry points, in giving the true lustre to pearl and precious stone’. This shows that Constable was following Hilliard’s own opinion: the highest art is shown in rendering the most precious things.

But he was also working towards a play on ‘Rich’. He next tells Hilliard that actually he owes these skills to having painted Penelope Rich’s eyes, lips and breast: it was doing this that taught Hilliard how to render jewels. The sonnet ends with a clever commingling of Penelope Rich in the miniature (a true likeness), and the miniature painting as a piece of composite jewelry, because of her brilliant eyes, ruby lips, etc. Only by being very convincing can the precious things depicted contribute to a convincing Penelope Rich.

The gap in the manuscript leaves us three syllables short. Park in 1812, Joan Grundy noted, suggested ‘art you gave’. I thought ‘way most brave’ – the best way to learn how to depict precious stones, with a hint of the authentic 16^th century attention to getting riches for yourself from your patroness.

But, so sadly, the miniature doesn’t survive. Joan Grundy suggests that Henry Constable may have taken the miniature up to the Scottish court in 1589, when the Earl of Essex and Penelope his sister were making overtures to James VI of Scotland, indicating their future loyalties lay with him rather than Arabella Stuart. How could the greatest miniaturist’s portrait of Sidney’s Stella ever have been so undervalued as to be lost? It must have been comparable to his famous image of her brother as the young man among roses. I imagine its fate: King James subsequently gave it to Charles Blount, it passed down in that family until someone wanted to re-use the case for another portrait miniature. Lady Penelope, limned on uterine vellum wrapped round card, got placed in a drawer. A 17^th century teenage boy thought she was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen, and stole her away.

So we have to make do with a sonnet about the painting of the lady in the sonnets. Lady Penelope Rich, a dark-eyed blonde, is associated throughout ‘Astrophel and Stella’ with light, as ‘star’ and in many other imaginative ways (‘and Stella spied / Who hard by made a window send forth light’, 53 – ‘and hath she vanished by?’, 105). I imagine, then, Hilliard’s miniature as Lady Rich wearing stunning jewels, and with glittering dark eyes. The care Hilliard took in painting the pupil of an eye! Freshly made paint of the blackest black, the pigment made utterly smooth with a mounted tooth of a squirrel as a diminutive grinder, the finical care lest a mote of dandruff fall down from the artist’s head… If only we had the portrait that complemented those Sidney sonnets!

Remembering Sir Philip Sidney

I’ve been looking at verse materials published in commemoration of Sir Philip Sidney: Thomas Churchyard’s Sir Phillip Sidney, his honorable life, his valiant death, and true virtues, Angel Day’s Upon the life and death of the most worthy, and thrise renowmed knight, Sir Phillip Sidney and John Philips, The life and death of Sir Phillip Sidney, late lord governour of Flushing his funerals solemnized in Paules Churche where he lyeth interred; with the whole order of the mournfull shewe, as they marched thorowe the citie of London, on Thursday the 16 of February. 1587.

What was the cause of all this grief, asks Day’s poem rhetorically, and answers that it was the loss of:

the choice of all the powers divine:
The influence self, where Virtues erst did flow,
The very work of all the Muses nine:

The care of earth and skies, in one self twine,
The rarest Type of courtly gentleness:
Adorned erst with stem of nobleness …

None of these writers know about ‘Astrophel and Stella’, but Day knows about the prose and other poetry:

Arcadia now, where is thy sovereign guide,
who stately Pembroke erst did to thee knit,
Where be the notes, his skill did erst divide,
In sundry meters, wound from finest wit,
Which he so well in covert shapes could fit…

‘Which he so well in covert shapes could fit’: I suppose Day refers to Sidney’s use of pastoral personae. But the subject of my post here, and shown in one of the two composite images above, is the use of overt shapes in the learned elegies on Sidney’s death. It seems from the Oxford collection of neo-Latin elegies, that beyond the normal elegiac meters, concrete poetry was in fashion locally, and so we get tapering pyramids and bulging columns in Exequiae illustrissimi equitis, D. Philippi Sidnaei, gratissimae memoriae ac nomini impensae. , Oxonii : Ex officina typographica Iosephi Barnesii, anno Domini (1587).

Such picture poems did not appear in the Cambridge volume, which gets upside of its Oxford rival by including elegies in Greek, and one in Hebrew: Academiae Cantabrigiensis lachrymae tumulo nobilissimi equitis, D. Philippi Sidneij sacratae per Alexandrum Nevillum , Londini : Ex officina Ioannis Windet impensis Thomae Chardi, Anno salutis humanae, M.D.lxxxvij.

Cambridge students did, though, seem to have a weakness for acrostics, and I was pleased to find a neo-Latin acrostic whose ingenious author has managed to make his first and last letters on each line spell out the latinised form of Sidney’s name.

But I will end this with John Philips’ closing stanza: in his poem, the dead man speaks from beyond the grave, and has a very simple message:

Thus from my grave I bid you all adieu.
Your Sidney’s words remember rich and poor,
Though dead, my life doth daily call to you.
Think ye how death knocks daily at life’s door,
Provide your lamps of oil prepare you store,
My tale is told, and I my race have run,
My body earth, my soul the heavens hath won.

Somehow I doubt that the neo-Latinists said anything that much better than this gauche directness.

http://roy25booth.blogspot.com/2007/02/rhomboidall-decussations.html

Books in a 17th century pornographic 'library'

Alas, I have digressed today from reading Petrarchist poetry to seventeenth century smut, in the anonymous novella, The Practical part of love. Extracted out of the extravagant and lascivious life of a fair but subtle female. (1660). The main narrative, after the author’s prologue, is entitled ‘The History of the exorbitant and Lascivious Life of Lucia and her daughter Hellena’.

This is wretched and tawdry stuff indeed, hack writing that only rarely shows any kind of engagement between writer and subject. The prologue itself has some flourishes defending the human sex drive:

“Our affections once touched by Loves Loadstone, puts the Axle-tree of our Microcosme, into a trembling motion, and never is quiet till it stands opposite to that point, where that Gulf is that Sir Francis Drake shot when he was first married. The Worlds Creator ordain’d that there should be pleasure in copulation, to the end that men might delight in procreation.”

The narrative, though, switches from ‘men’ delighting in procreation to the insatiable woman pornography seems to require. But the tale is humdrum throughout. First Lucia, and then her daughter Hellena, have an appetite for lots of sex. The would-be pornographer barely approves, and can hardly suppress his own desire for moral reprisal.

In one of his more committed pieces of writing, he gets to imagining the library at the ‘love’s academy’ the exquisite and hot blooded Hellena attends:

“This Gallery is the introductorium to the Library. Opposite to the door stands always open on a Desk Aretins postures in Folio done to the life; and just by it lies chaind Embammata amoris; by this in a Manuscript, fairly written with a Frontispeece stands a Pece called Venus undrest, likewise the Life of Mother Cunny, never yet printed, in Folio. The Anatomy of Cuckoldry, Luteners lane decipher’d, cum mille aliis. On the right hand stood Francions bawdy History, Folio, bound in Turky lether, Jovial drollery, marbled Venus and Adonis, Lusty Drollery, Venus her Cabinet unlockt, Ovids Art of Loving, Natures chief Rarities, The crafty whore reprinted in Folio, with the English bawd, and errant rogue, together with a catalogue of all the Whores in this Citty, containing thirty sheets of paper. There were likewise all sorts of books of Midwifery, as Culpepper’s Midwife, the compleat Midwife, the birth of Mankind, Child-birth, &c”

Pornography and fine books have always gone round together: but what a limited collection this is: Aretine, Ovid, and then he’s scratching around. The Emblemata Amoris I’ve seen is just not erotic: it’s here because it sounds as though it might be. Poor old Venus and Adonis gets dragged in again. Other items seem to qualify this list for ‘The Invisible Library’ (link below), the online catalogues of imaginary books mentioned in other books: so ‘Mother Cunny’ seems to have been the alias of a brothel keeper (she appears in the title The ladies champion confounding the author of The wandring whore, by Eugenius Theodidactus … Approved of by Megg. Spenser Damrose Page Priss. Fetheringham Su. Leming Betty Lawrence Mother Cunny, 1660). My writer imagines a biography of this lady. ‘Luteners Lane’ is similarly a feature of the London underworld re-imagined as a book. Prostitutes working off that street feature in Poor Robins Character of France:

“the first time I came to London, being but a young Novice, scarcely writing Man, passing through Luteners-lane, a Gentlewoman standing at the door accosted me with these words, How do you Sir, I am heartily glad to see you well, how have you done a long time? … (Sir said she) pray come in and let us discourse together: but notwithstanding her bold invitation away I went, and coming to my Lodging, relating the story, Sir, said one to me, you must have a care of such Creatures, for notwithstanding their brave Garbe, they are no other then common Strumpets.”

Returning to identifiable texts, ‘Francion’ must mean the original of The most delightfull and pleasant history of Francion wherein all the vices that usually attend youth are plainly laid open by Monsieur De Moulines Sier De Parc. ; done into English by a person of honour (1661). ‘Lusty Drollery’ is most likely the collection Sportive wit the muses merriment, a new spring of lusty drollery, joviall fancies, and a la mode lamponnes, 1656. ‘The Crafty Whore’ survives: The crafty whore or, the mistery and iniquity of bawdy houses laid open, in a dialogue between two subtle bawds, wherein, as in a mirrour, our city-curtesans may see their soul-destroying art, and crafty devices, whereby they insnare and beguile youth, pourtraied to the life, by the pensell of one of their late, (but now penitent) captives, for the benefit of all, but especially the younger sort. Whereunto is added dehortations from lust drawn from the sad and lamentable consequences it produceth, 1658.

Accessions in the ‘Library’ then have to be swelled (as the author’s imagination fails him) by books of midwifery (and indeed the writer makes pregnancy feature as the almost inevitable result of any sexual congress, though Hellena does have recourse to hopping up and down post coitally, and employs a douche).

Anyway, here’s her mother Lucia getting the biological payback for all that carnal intercourse with her first lover:

“Her nine moneths being expired, she was brought to bed of a goodly Daughter, who had all the symptoms in her of the approaching Spring of a most transcendent Beautie. Lucias comfort and hopes was solely in this pretty sweet babe, for Lovit had now taken his leave of her.

So shalt thou be despis'd, faire Maid,
When by the sated lover tasted;
What first he did with teares invade,
Shall afterwards with scorne be wasted;
When all thy Virgin-springs grow dry,
When no streames shall be left, but in thine eye.”

I half recognized the stanza: it’s from Thomas Carew’s ‘Good counsell to a young Maid’:

When you the Sun-burnt Pilgrim see
fainting with thirst, hast to the springs;
Marke how at first with bended knee
He courts the crystall Nimphs, and flings
His body to the earth, where He
Prostrate adores the flowing Deitie.

But when his sweaty face is drencht
In her coole waves, when from her sweet
Bosome, his burning thirst is quencht;
Then marke how with disdainfull feet
He kicks her banks, and from the place
That thus refresht him, moves with sullen pace.

So shalt thou be despis'd, faire Maid,
When by the sated lover tasted;
What first he did with teares invade,
Shall afterwards with scorne be wasted;
When all thy Virgin-springs grow dry,
When no streames shall be left, but in thine eye.

http://www.geocities.com/jameshay.geo/InvisibleLibrary.html

Tour of Britain Stage 2

A day off today to see the Tour of Britain riders tackle Reading Cycling Club's hill climb course at Streatley Ian Stannard is the solo breakaway rider, I trimmed out most of the intervening two minutes before the peloton came up after him. The professionals were pretty much universally making light of what is a pig of a climb. My awful little video then cuts to the finish at Newbury. As the Tour took a loop to the west, we made our best pace along the B4009, and cheered by schoolchildren along the way, got there twenty minutes before the Tour; and that's my glimpse of the sprint.

‘At hand quoth pickpurse’

Michael Drayton finished off the 1605 version of his sonnet sequence Idea with a set of dedicatory sonnets, ‘Certaine other Sonnets to great and worthy Personages.’ There’s one ‘To the high and mighty Prince, James king of Scots’, then one to Donne’s patroness, ‘To Lucy Countess of Bedford’; followed by ‘To the Lady Anne Harington.’, then ‘To the Lady L. S.’ The final one is the only one that has any circulation at all:

To Sir Anthony Cooke. Sonnet 64.

Vouchsafe to grace these rude unpolished rhymes,
Which but for you had slept in sable night,
And come abroad now, in these glorious times,
Can hardly brook the pureness of the light.
But sith you see their destiny is such,
That in the world their fortune they must try,
Perhaps they better shall abide the touch,
Wearing your name, their gracious livery.
Yet these mine own, I wrong not other men,
Nor traffic further then this happy clime,
Nor filch from Portes, not from Petrarch’s pen,
A fault too common in this latter time:
Divine Sir Philip, I avouch thy writ,
I am no pick-purse of another’s wit.

One of Drayton’s regular topics was his own ‘fantastic’ inventiveness, which he affects to defend so as to go on about it in a self-advertising way. Here, though, he rather oddly stakes his claim for originality (unlike others, he neither steals from Desportes nor Petrarch, he brags) by using and roundly endorsing a line from Sir Philip Sidney (‘Astrophel and Stella’, no 74). He doesn’t lift phrases from other writers!

At least one early modern writer apparently found this a strange way to profess how original you are:

Henry Parrot, Epigram 168, ‘Trahit sua quemque voluptas’ in Laquei ridiculosi: or Springes for Woodcocks (1613):

Wat wills you know how much he scorneth it,
To be a pick-purse of another’s wit:
But in a pocket, please you understand,
He hath a reaching, deep, and diving hand.

It appears to be a ‘pop’ (as we say these days) at Drayton. But the other possible reading of the epigram is that Parrot’s jest was merely that while ‘Wat’ (in this reading, just an invented epigrammatic malefactor) scorns to steal wit, ‘Wat’ is nevertheless in the literal sense an active pickpocket. This would make Parrot a secondary re-user of Sidney’s phrase about not lifting phrases.

There’s probably a Note and Query about this lofty matter, but I profess not to have read one, honestly.

Image, a detail from Adriaen van Utrecht, ‘Fishmonger's Stall’

~~

The Significations of the Seventh House

“It signifies Marriage, open Enemies, Lawsuits, Controversies, Contracts, Warres, Bargaines, Fugitives, Thefts, &c. Because the Demands which do naturally appertain to the seventh house, require more consideration, and are more difficult to judge then of any other house, I have been forced to be more large in delivering the opinions of the Ancients, as well as of some modern Practisers…”

William Lilly’s Christian Astrology of 1647 is my text, and his instructions for an astrologer to determine important things about a proposed marriage, such as:

Who shall be Master of the two…

How they shall agree after Marriage…

Whether a Man or his Wife shall dye first, and the time when

This being 17^th century England, we are soon getting to the main issue (I have expanded Lilly’s use of the common astrological signs):

“Whether she be a Maid, or Chaste, of whome the quere is.

Look if the Lord of the Ascendant [Venus] and the [Moon] be found in fixed Signs, good Planets beholding them, then say, she is a Maid, and chaste: But if in place of Fortunes there be Infortunes, say she is neither a Virgin, nor chaste; especially if [Mars] be there, and he in the house of [Venus] without Reception: Also, if [Moon] and [Sun] behold themselves and [Mars], she is no Maid; but if the Significators be in moveable Signs, Infortunes beholding them, say then she desireth a man very much, and that she refrains and restrains her concupiscence very much, and casts off her Suitors; yet it is not good to trust always to this judgment, because the nature of women is changeable.

Whether a Woman be honest to her Husband.

The Lord of the Ascendant, the [Moon] or [Venus] in fixed signs, in aspect of the Fortunes, she is chaste; these being in aspect of the Infortunes, not chaste, chiefly with [Mars]; [Sun] or [Moon] beholding [Mars], she is meretrix; [Sun] and [Moon] in no aspect, nor [Mars] with them, she is suspected a privy harlot, or rather privately wanton; but not yet come to the act.”

At this point, Lilly reminds those readers learning from him how to determine these delicate things that they will be playing with fire:

“I must charge all Sons of Art, to be sparing in delivering judgment upon these queries, rather to be silent; for as men, we may err; and so by delivering an unlucky judgment, be authors of much mischief.”

Nevertheless, he continues inexorably on, through all the permutations of temptation, resistance, inclination to frailty, extenuations of circumstance:

“Of a woman, whether she be corrupt, or hath a Lover besides her husband or Sweet-heart

Behold the Ascendant and his Lord, and the [Moon], and see if they be both in angles or fixed Signs, then say the Maid is a Virgin, and they lye of her, or what is reported is false: if the Lord of the Ascendant and [Moon] be in fixed Signs, and the angles be moveable Signs, she was tempted, but gave no credit or admittance to the Tempter. If the [Moon] be joined to [Saturn] [Jupiter] [Mars] [Sun] corporally by aspect, so that there is between them but five degrees or less, she is tempted of some one who hath the effigies of that Planet to whom she is joined; but if the [Moon] be joined to [Venus] or [Mercury], she is tempted by some woman for a man, but she makes no reckoning of the old or young Bawds words: but laughs her to scorn …

If then the [Moon] be with [the dragon’s tail], she hath formerly offended, and is still guilty, nor will she amend hereafter

The [Moon] in the last face of [Gemini], the woman seems to be corrupt, if the Ascendant be a moveable Sign, or common, or if the Lord of the Ascendant or [Moon] be in moveable or common Signs she is no Virgin; the Lord of the Ascendant combust in a moveable or common Sign, the woman hath been tempted and made a harlot by violence, or she was unwillingly drawn to lewdness.”

The astrologer’s client might want to know just where the actual or contemplated lover is: Lilly gives the rules that determine his actual distance:

“If [Mars] be with the Lord of the seventh, or with [Moon], or in one Sign in [conjunction], or with [the dragon’s tail], the woman hath a Sweet-heart in contract, not far from her house; and if they be in one degree, then he is in the house, and one of the familiars of the man that asks the question.”

He even seems to produce the signs in the sky that indicate if the woman is actually lesbian in her inclinations:

“The Lord of the seventh joined to [Venus] with Reception, with or without any aspect, or else by a [trine] or [sextile], or[square] without Reception, the Woman cares not for men, but hath friendship with women.”

And the final outcome of all this celestially vexed mating:

“Whether the Child conceived is the Son of him who is reputed is Father

Behold the Lord of the Ascendant and the [Moon], who signifie the Interrogant; then observe the Sign of the eleventh and his Lrd, these signifie the issue in Conception; if these Significators behold one another by [trine] or [sextile], with Reception or not, the Conception is legitimate

But if none of these things be, but that [Saturn] [Mars] or [Venus] behold the fifth house, or Lord thereof, there may be just suspicion that the Child is conceived in adultery, and the Mother was stuprated.”

The double standard is in its perfect form here. Lilly just cannot imagine an astrologer being consulted by a woman client about her prospective partner’s chastity. Women having so many more potential faults than men, the system seems set up to find and confirm them.

‘Christian astrology modestly treated'? The man had a nerve. Lilly thought, of course, that his art let him interpret the purposes of the largest elements in God’s creation (which always had meaning in relation to His prime creation, man): the whole sky was a divinely ordained system of influences. Lilly will always claim that his astrological predictions or readings do not entail any necessity, that repentance, or self-restraint, or resistance are always possible to the free human will. But once you read him in the full flow of confident exposition, he looks like the willing prisoner of his own system, seduced by its intricacies into describing an astral predetermination. A latently Calvinist God lurks behind all this, and maybe that’s what made Lilly think he was expounding something ‘Christian’ - rather than the arbitrary and prejudiced gim-crack assembled from all sorts of traditions, which you could charge with being mechanistic if it wasn’t so susceptible to delivering what suited the operator’s own opinions.

http://www.astrologycom.com/glosst.html

http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/index.html

The early modern dormouse

Nicolas Culpeper made me think about early modern small domestic animals again. He is reflecting on the way repugnance for snakes proves God’s curse on the serpent:

“For men though they keep beasts for their profit, and birds for their pleasure, and dormice for their ease, as to make themselves sleep, or the like: yet a man when he meets with an Adder, gives him no quarter, but is sure to die for it…”

One of the small creatures (number 9, if you can see it) in the illustration from Comenius (above) is supposed to be a dormouse, but labeled as troubling the house, rather than usefully somniferous.

Edward Topsell’s The historie of foure-footed beastes (1607) has a profusion of medical uses for dormice, but unaccountably, none of them are to do with sleep disorders:

The medicines of the Dormouse.

Dormyse being taken in meat, doe much profit against the Bulimon [word not in OED]; The powder of Dormyse mixed with oil, doth heal those which are scalded with any hot licker. A live Dormouse doth presently take away all warts being bound thereupon. Dormyse, and field-mice being burnt, and their dust mingled with honey, will profit those which desire the clearness of the eyes, if they doe take thereof some small quantitie every morning. The powder of a Dormouse, or field mouse rubbed upon the eyes helpeth the aforesaid disease. A Dormouse being flayed, roasted and anointed with oil, and salt, being given in meat, is an excellent cure for those that are short winded. The same also doth very effectually heal those that spit out filthy matter or corruption. Powder of Dormice, or field-mice, or young worms, being mixed with oil doth heal those that have kibes on their heels, or chilblains on their hands. The fatte of a Dormouse, the fatte of a hen, and the marrow of an Ox melted together, and being hot, infused into the ears, doth very much profit both the pains and deafeness thereof.

The fatte of Dormice being boiled, as also of field-mice, are delivered to be most profitable for the eschewing of the palsie. That fat of a Dormouse is also very excellent for those which are troubled with a palsie or shaking of the joints. The skin and inward parts of a Dormouse being taken forth, and boiled with honey in a new vessel, and afterwards poured into an other vessel, will very effectually heal all diseases which are incident to the ears, being anointed thereupon. The skin of a Dormouse or a silk worm being pulled off, and the inward parts thereof being boiled in a new brasen vessel with honey, from the quantitie of 27. ounces even to three, and so kept, that when there is need of a certain bathing vessel, the medicine being made warm and powred into the ears, doth help all pains, deafness, or inflammation of the ears. The fat of a Dormouse is commended to be very medicinable for the aforenamed diseases. The same is profitable for all pains, aches, or griefs in the belly. The urine of a Dormouse is an excellent remedy against the palsie, And thus much shall suffice concerning the medicinal virtues of the Dormouse.

Thomas Lupton in his A thousand notable things, of sundry sortes Wherof some are wonderfull, some straunge, some pleasant, diuers necessary, a great sort profitable and many very precious (1579) goes the more obvious route: the dormouse obviously promotes what it is notably good at itself, sleeping: “The soles of the feete annoynted with the fatte of a Dormouse, doth procure sleepe. As Actius doth saye.”

John Swan notes that the dormouse has, despite its drowsy image, been taken as having a very positive spiritual symbolism: “the Dormouse is a beast which endeth his old age every winter, and when summer cometh, reviveth again: which some have therefore made an emblem of the resurrection. They are exceeding sleepie, and fatted with it. Their hair is short, and in colour variable, only their bellie is always white: and for mine own part, I ever thought them to be no bigger then an ordinary mouse, but in Gesner and Topsell they are said to be greater in quantitie then a squirrel”. Speculum mundi· Or A glasse representing the face of the world shewing both that it did begin, and must also end (1635)

Jean Baptiste van Helmont believed that dormice and rabbits could mate and produce young (no surprise when he also believed he had evidence a man and a pig could produce ‘a sodomitical monster’). He thought transgenic animals were all: “more like the Mother than the Father. So of a sheep the mother, and a He goat the Father, a Lamb comes forth, which besides Wool and tail, hath his other parts like a sheep. So a Mule, his Father being an Ass, and his Mother a Mare. And so a Horse of a Bull and a Mare. Lastly, in seven Coneys, from their Father a Dormouse, and their mother a Coney, nothing besides their tail was like unto the latter

Robert Mandevill modestly disagreed with him: “And as for those Creatures whose producers are of two different sorts, as a Mule bred of an Ass and a Horse, and another Creature bred of a Cony and a Dormouse; all which your Author thinks do take more after their mother then their father, more after the breeder then the begetter; I will not eagerly affirm the contrary, although it seems to me more probable: But this I can say, that I have observed by experience, that Fauns and Foals have taken more after the Male then after the Female; for amongst many several colour’d Deer, I have seen but one milk white Doe; and she never brought forth a white Faun, when as I have seen a white Buck beget white and speckled Fauns of black and several coloured Does. (Timothies taske: or a Christian sea-card guiding through the coastes of a peaceable conscience to a peace constant, and a crowne immortall, 1619).

The Duchess of Newcastle was clearly very interested in this debate about whether inter-species offspring more resembled their mother or their father. In one of her typical anti-feminine moments, she sees the father as dominant.

Bishop Joseph Hall meditated on the dormouse (he is interested in the idea that dormice woke from their long sleep fatter than they began it, and so must be living and thriving on air, like chameleons):

Upon the sight of a Dormouse.

At how easy a rate doe these Creatures live that are fed with rest; So the Bear and the Hedge-hog (they say) spend their whole winter in sleep, and rise up fatter then they lay down; How oft have I envied the thriving drowsiness of these Beasts; When the toil of thoughts hath bereaved me of but one hours sleep; and left me languishing to a new task; and yet, when I have well digested the comparison of both these conditions, I must needs say, I had rather waste with work, then batten with ease; & would rather choose a life profitably painful, then uselessly dull and delicate. I cannot tell whether I should say those Creatures live, which doth nothing; since we are wont ever to notifie life by motion; Sure I am their life is not vital; For me, Let me rather complain of a mind that will not let me be idle, then of a body that will not let me work.
Occasionall meditations by Ios. Exon ; set forth by R.H. (1631)

http://roy25booth.blogspot.com/2006/09/comenius-in-english.html

http://roy25booth.blogspot.com/2006/05/early-modern-pets.html

Investigating an early modern plagiary

I have been trying to pull together a discussion of the various tracts and parodies prompted by William Lilly’s failed astrological punt on the forthcoming terrors of the ‘Black Monday’ eclipse of 29^th March, 1652.

My reading around this led me to a pamphlet attributed on EEBO to Isabel Yeamans, The year of wonders: or, the glorious rising of the fifth monarch (1652), and I was (for such is the way of the academic world) heartened to have a female author, one of those much prized ‘early modern Englishwomen’ apparently on my roster.

Further reading exploded this: the pamphlet attributed to Yeamans is plagiarized from Nicholas Culpepper’s apocalyptic treatise on the same set of eclipses, Catastrophe magnatum, or, The fall of monarchie a caveat to magistrates, deduced from the eclipse of the sunne, March 29, 1652, with a probable conjecture of the determination of the effects.

Maybe ‘plagiary’ is too harsh a word: perhaps the material published as The year of wonders began as a set of extracts from Culpepper’s longer work, cutting out the rather self-important account of what eclipses are and why they are so influential, and getting immediately to his prognostications.

Who compiled these extracts I do not know. Isabel Yeamans herself seems highly unlikely. Until her marriage in 1664 there was no such person: in 1652 she was Isabel Fell. Rather bafflingly, there is in fact no actual indication of authorship in The year of wonders. I will have to try to trace how this attribution - which gave a woman author’s married name to a work compiled prior to her marriage - began, and when.

Could the attribution have any truth to it? Even as a girl of 15 (as she would have been in 1652), Isabel would probably not have lacked the basic ability to make the extracts: she would go on to be a preacher in the Society of Friends, a close ally of George Fox, and an emissary for the Quakers to Germany when they hoped to recruit Princess Elizabeth of the Palatinate to their sect. Her indubitable production is An invitation of love, to all who hunger and thirst after righteousness, to come and take of the water of life freely without money and without price with a word of advice to such as are asking the way to Sion (and are weeping) with their faces thither-ward : together with a faithful warning to the inhabitants of Babylon, to come out of her, lest (partaking of her sins) ye also come to partake of her plagues (1679), and she might have had a hand in A Lively Testimony to the Living Truth Given forth by Robert Jeckell upon his Death-bed (1676). That main surviving work speaks of ‘hoping the ponderous Reader … may not be distasted at the simplicity of the style’ – the amusing usage aside, the style is 17^th century Bible-speak.

But in 1652, the young Isabel Fell was at her family home up in Lancashire, Swarthmore Hall, near Ulverston (image of the hall above from the second website at end of this piece). This was the year that George Fox visited the family (in June), and converted her mother, Isabel and her sisters to Quakerism (ODNB). The year of wonders is dated by Thomason to March 21^st, 1652, just eight days before the foreboding eclipse. I suppose that Culpeper’s earlier treatise could conceivably have found its way to Lancashire, and a bright 17^th century fifteen year old (who we might imagine as already interested in the ideas of those who believed that the prophet Daniel’s Fifth Monarchy was arriving) have summarized it, and her extracts got back down to London in the hands of a traveling Quaker. But that’s quite a long train of possibilities, and it is far more obvious, from the emphasis of the full title, that The year of wonders: or, the glorious rising of the fifth monarch, was compiled in London from Culpeper to encourage those would had recently (from c.1648) been persuaded that the ‘Fifth Monarchy’ was about to begin on earth.

The plagiary (or excerpting) runs in seriatim order:

‘Yeamans’ page 4 is assembled from pages 12 and 18 in Culpeper; page 5 from pages 20 and 24, page 6 from 36 and 37; page 7 extracts Culpeper page 47; 8 from 48; page 9 then picks up Culpeper on page 68; page 10 seems to be part original, and partly from page 70 of Culpeper; 11 is from 70; 12 is 71; 13 comes from page 72, as does 14, and page 15 is page 74 of the original. The final page breaks with this progression, being taken from page 65 of the source (the extract-maker looked back for a passable ending).

The person who assembled The year of wonders does occasionally write their own material: the introductory half page, and part of page10 do not seem to be in Culpeper. If it was a merely fraudulent product, alterations for the first page are what you would expect. One tenuous sign of something like Quaker sensitivities (specifically about equality between the sexes) might be seen in the omission of Culpeper’s brisk urging of Sweden to extirpate its witches (p. 73) as a way of heading off the worst effects of the eclipse (and God’s wrath).

The gender of the author is not apparent (unlike Yeaman’s undoubted work, where she is repeatedly anxious to show the biblical authority for women preachers, writing very much in the spirit of her mother, author herself of Women’s Speaking Justified of 1666). When Culpeper predicts the dire effects of the forthcoming eclipse on pregnant women, he can add “(let them make use of my DIRECTORY for MIDWIVES to prevent it)”, which the plagiarist reduces to a bare prophecy, ‘such of them as are with child shall be too subject to misery’. This probably discounts Culpeper as having been paid to make his own extracts from his longer work.

Extracts from Nicholas Culpeper, then, with a London printing house cashing in on the anxiety about the 1652 eclipse - and pitching also at the Fifth Monarchists. How did it ever get attached to Isabel Yeamans? And why don’t any of these astrologers, doom-mongering about eclipses, admit that when you get a solar eclipse, you always get two lunar eclipses, because that’s just how the heavenly bodies are going to be aligned – three eclipses in a year is normal, and no reason to panic. But that’s another question still.

http://www.strecorsoc.org/maps/mapprest.html

http://www.manannan.co.uk/aosa/nostalgia/swarthmoor_hall_01.htm

2,800 miles of America

The holiday in America was rewarding and demanding. We (this means me and my son Timothy) drove 2,856 miles, in a Pontiac Grand Prix – a great lump of a car, but amazingly less spacious inside than my own Ford Focus. On ‘drive’, this would grind up the passes at 1,500 rpm, you had to select 3 or 2 to get any response from it – a basic incompatibility with my soft-footed driving style. On the freeways, it came into its own if you overtook past the speed limit, with a great throaty roar.

We 'did' the Rockies (over the highest paved road in America) – lots of marmots and pikas, and a breathless attempt at a walk. Then Mount Rushmore, the Black Hills, Devil’s Tower, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Dinosaur National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Arches National Park, and the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings.

Yellowstone is so big – you couldn’t fit it twice into the whole of Yorkshire. We had a day and a half. We saw Old Faithful and lots more of the geothermal stuff, and swam in the Firehole River. A wildfire prevented us from doing the full central loop, which was almost a relief.

I think that I enjoyed the Arches National Park the best. The hike up to Delicate Arch was phenomenal, but on the way to Landscape Arch subsequently, you just had to acknowledge that after this one, the heat and the altitude meant that this was your limit for the day. Instead of mountain bikes on the Slick Rock Trail, it was back to the motel for air-con and a pool.

The Mesa Verde made a thrilling visit, going up the ladders to Balcony House. I’d no idea that the people there were living so high up anyway – it’s at about 7,500 feet; or that their lasting legacy was for them a desperate expedient which they only lived in for 80-odd years before they had to abandon the Mesa completely.

On the final morning, we both loved a visit down the Mollie Kathleen gold mine at Cripple Creek (round the back of Pike's Peak). Geology is quite a theme in this holiday route. Dinosaur bones have been found all over the region, and sometimes the road will have signs naming the formations you are driving by: the drive up the Big Horn Mountains at the start of day 7 takes you through six major geological periods.

We saw humming birds, marmots, ground squirrels, a moose, prairie dogs, and a buffalo; but no bears.

My image is of Lewis Lake, going south out of Yellowstone towards the Grand Tetons. I shall now suffer from a lack of a daily overload of big scenery.

Vacation time

I am fluttering away from my keyboard for a holiday in and around the Rockies (thus squandering more than another year of carbon credit from frantic pedaling).

I hope in the meantime ‘Blogger’ might put itself back to aesthetic rights, as it is looking sub-basic at the moment, and I can’t be bothered for now fishing about in the HTML tags to try to put things right.

My image is a composite from Thomas Marent’s Butterfly: A Photographic Portrait, which has been delighting me recently. These are Colombian eighty-eights and eighty nines (Diaethria clymena) – ‘this our life, exempt from public haunt / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything’.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Butterfly-Photographic-Portrait-Dk-Reference/dp/1405325402/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216719908&sr=1-1

As I gad off enjoying myself, I will not forget my late companion Anthony Maynard, whose funeral was yesterday:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7518329.stm

Paul III as Volpone in Barton Holyday's 'Survey'

The morale of the harpooner at Early Modern Whale has been boosted by the blog here managing to make the cut in Ralph E Luker’s selection of blogs ‘without which, history education on the internet would be seriously impoverished.’ (Can he really mean me?)

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/52237.html

My incidental reading for this week has been A survey of the world in ten books by the royal chaplain and archdeacon in Oxford, Barten Holyday (1661). I was intrigued to see by what means our pious author shrank such a large subject into 118 pages. He did it by following one of the few contemporary verse writers he admires, who happened (alas!) to be Thomas Tusser. Holyday writes his ‘survey’ in exactly 1,000 distiches, neatly dividing them hundred by hundred into the ten books, which cover these topics:

“Of inanimate Creatures; Of living Creatures; Of Nations; Of Languages and Arts; Of Philosophers and Historians; Of Physicians; Of Lawyers; Of Kings and Other Worthies; Of Politicians; Of Divines”.

The result is a series of moralised reflections (he calls them meditations) on everything that seems to him important. He can do a survey of the world because he lives within such a simple intellectual framework: the world, of course, is coeval with man; and everything in it was made for man. Everything exists in a divinely ordained order – order is life, he tells us:

Relations must be Own’d: Husband and Wife;

Father, Sonne; Master, Servant: Order’s Life.

Each section works in general from the past to the present, from Bible history, through classical, and so down to contemporaries, to the effect that the work also becomes a kind of mad bibliography, in which Holyday mentions all the writers he approves of – writers on the law and divinity mainly. Part of the out-of-the-way charm of the book is to see Holyday backing all the wrong horses: if only he could have written a couplet on Shakespeare or Donne, he’d have been quoted, and known to specialists. He does allude to two of Ben Jonson’s creations, but only for a satirical jibe at a pope and a famous cardinal:

Paul the Third and Morone (they so compact)

At Rome and Trent, Volpone and Mosca act.

There aren’t enough of these asperities, where Holyday’s distiches become epigrammatic.

Generally, he chooses to praise an array of names that could have come from Tristram Shandy.

Holyday does not always warm to new ideas: so he generally disapproves of astronomy – Copernicus having the sun stand still to escape doubts, has merely made new doubts; others dare to see spots blotting the sun itself – in the end, ‘the Art of starres who knows, but He that made them?’ (‘Copernicus does erre with great pretence / Of Art: but Galileus erres by sense’ is distich 389, returning to this general disapproval.) In each book, Holyday starts with the big things in creation, and works down. Book 1 starts with the heavenly bodies, and more or less ends with garlic. Similarly Book 2 (on animals) starts with some distiches about early modern whales, which are undeniably large in his account of them:

To see Nine hundred foote of Whale, may make

One think, Iland for Fish hee does mistake

But Holyday sometimes gets a quirkier observation than the time-honoured tale of whales being mistaken for islands:

The Whale’s Mouth’s a Portcullis, but Inverted!

Th’under jaw’s teeth into Holes above inserted.

My own little menagerie made me notice how he moralises the parrot:

A Parrot learn’d the Creed: may not such, greeve,

As can not say’t, or can not it Beleeve?

How anyone ever got the idea that camels particularly hate incest I cannot imagine, but here it is:

Much’t is the Afrique Camels Long can fast:

More, that they Incest hate, admir’dly chast!

‘Of nations’ critiques the English for love of two characteristic vanities:

Fashions and Prophesies are England’s staine:

Lets not bee Mad too, though wee have been vaine.

‘Of physicians’ shows Holyday at his most receptive to a new idea: William Harvey is another Columbus in the magnitude of his discovery:

Blood Circles from the Heart unto the Heart:

Man’s New America speakes Harvie’s Art

Elsewhere in the list of physicians, Holyday again shows his prejudices when he denounces the doctor and anti-demonologist Johan Weyer for not believing in witchcraft:

From Physique did Wierus runne to Evil?

Shall wee begin in Art, and End in Devil?

‘Kings and other worthies’ includes a couplet in appreciation of Charles V’s renunciation of his empire:

Charles the Fift scorn’d Glory, Pleasure, Pelfe:

Turn’d Court-Monke and the Emp’rour of Himselfe.

Among the English monarchs, Holyday makes only this cryptic remark about Henry VIII:

Henry, Our Eight, few Painters have well made:

Some give him too much Light, some too much shade.

I suppose that he might be implying that Henry VIII is either portrayed as better, or worse, than he actually was.

His take on Philip II is as a connoisseur and arch-plotter:

How Philip in his Gallery views his Mappes!

Consults! Intents in Mystery hee wrappes!

Among his politicians, Holyday was excited by Machiavelli, and actually pauses over him for several couplets; though his attitude is a predictable one:

In sadnesse Macchiavel thou didst not well

To helpe the World to runne faster to hell!

So, some of the 1,000 couplets are reasonably lively. Just occasionally, he can sound like an early modern version of Hilaire Belloc. Here he is on one of his theologians (I assume St Bernard):

Bernard so happily imploi’d his thought,

Hee scarce had time to thinke of what was nought.

Ah, that is so like me, also so happily employing my thought I scarce have time to think of what is nought. But next week, I disappear off on holiday, once again to America, a tour in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah.

Bringing bobbing and hey ho to meet

I was attracted by this woodcut (quite unfamiliar to me) to read Heywood’s play to find out what is going on in the picture.

I suppose there must be discussion of the play in McLuskie’s book. Certain plays by Heywood are getting lots of critical attention (always A Woman Killed with Kindness, The Late Lancashire Witches, while The Fair Maid of the West has had a good run of late because of Bess’s travels to the eastern end of the Mediterranean). But A Mayden-head Well Lost, which no-one seems to have devoted an article to, has plenty to be said for it. Heywood had written in his Golden-Silver-Brazen-Iron Ages sequence the raunchiest dramas of the early English stage. But there he had the excuse of classical antiquity. This play’s bold title shows that the old boy was up to his old tricks.

In the picture the chaps sitting round the dinner table have just had an illegitimate baby served in them in a covered serving dish (though the artist - to use the term loosely - has made it look like a portrait picture with hinged side-panels). The mother of this baby, Princess Julia of Milan ought to be at the table with her father and his followers. The father is for the moment off-stage; in the right hand-panel is a mild illustration of the kind of hanky-panky that leads to these little moments of family embarrassment. On the right of the main group, in his motley coat, is the play’s clown (and he’s not a bad example of the type). The Duke of Milan had been unable to have his errant daughter killed when she confessed to him that she was pregnant, but the baby boy had been abandoned by a roadside (where it was instantly taken up by its father the Prince of Parma, who has bedded Julia on the usual grounds of verbal agreement to marry afterwards. Julia reminds him “Yet ere I yielded, we were man and wife, / Saving the Churches outward Ceremony”).

Urged on by the villain of the piece, Sforsa, the Duke of Milan presses his errant daughter into an urgent match with the Prince of Florence. But this potential bridegroom has heard enough about Julia (for Parma writes to him anonymously) to make threatening stipulations that she must prove to be an intact virgin. He is anyway in love with the other girl in the play, Lauretta, but she is only the daughter of a general who has died of grief at Milan’s ingratitude in regard to his greatest victory.

The inevitable bed-trick has to be played (Heywood seems to have been following Middleton closely). Sforza has learned where Lauretta and her mother are in impoverished exile, and he has 500 gold pieces for her if she agrees to act as the substitute bride.

So, here’s the central melodrama. Lauretta is in love with the Prince of Florence, and he loves her, though he faces the dynastic marriage to her morally doubtful rival. Along comes Sforsa to persuade her to go to bed with the man she loves:

Sforsa Ever rejoice faire Virgin, for I bring you
Gold, and Enlargement; with a recovery
Of all your former loss, and dignity,
But for a two hours labour: Nay, that no labour
Nor toil, but a mere pleasure.

Lauretta hears what the conditions are, and hangs tough:

Lauretta.
Doe you not blush, when you deliver this
Pray tell the Duke, all Women are not Julia ,
And though wee bee dejected, thus much tell him,
Wee hold our honour at too high a price,
For Gold to buy.

Her Mother backs up her apparently firm resolution: “If thou consentest to this abhorred fact, / Thy Mothers curse will seize on thee for ever”. Sforsa, like Vindice, is not abashed, and continues his argument, and in one of those special Heywood moments, Lucetta performs a complete volte-face:

Lauretta.
Sir bee answered,
If Julia bee disloyal: Let her be found
So by the Prince she weds: Let her be branded
With the vile name of strumpet: She disgrac’d
Me, that ne’re thought her harms; publicly struck me,
Nay in the Court: And after that, procur’d
My banishment: These Injuries I reap’t
By her alone, then let it light on her.

Sforsa.
Now see your error,
What better; safer, or more sweet revenge,
Then with the Husband? what more could woman ask?

Lauretta.
My blood rebels against my reason, and
I no way can withstand it: 'Tis not the Gold
Moves me, but that dear love I bear the Prince,
Makes me neglect the credit and the honour
Of my dear Fathers house: Sir, what the Duke desires
I am resolved to doe his utmost will.

Mother.
Oh my dear daughter.

Lauretta, like Shakespeare’s Helena, will get from the Prince of Florence an array of tokens (rings, the indenture for Julia’s marriage dowry). The Prince of Florence will discover that he has been in bed with the woman he really loves; and Lucetta can explain that she did it only to save him from marrying the unchaste Julia:

“Only the love I ever bare your honour,
Made me not prize my own. No lustful appetite
Made me attempt such an ambitious practice,
As to aspire unto your bed my Lord.”

And so through to the final couplet of the play: “And let succeeding Ages, thus much say: / Never was Maiden-head better given away.” Lauretta skates through to a complete victory, Julia and Parma settle down together, and the villain is left to reflect on the error of his ways: “Who would strive, / To bee a villain, when the good thus thrive?”

So, a pleasingly racy play (for its time). The clown is occasionally allowed to point out what underlies the fine sentiments:

Lauretta.
Oh let me lie
As prostrate at your foot in Vassallage,
As I was at your pleasure.
Prince
Sweete arise.
Clown.

Your Lordship hath bin up already, when she was down: I hope if the thing you wot of go no worse forward then it hath begun…

Reading the play made me wonder if there was any connection between two ‘faults written on the body’ sentiments. In early modern plays, no man, no matter how inexperienced with women, can be deceived about her virginity; the knowledge is inescapable. And if he discovers that his new bride is not a virgin, he acquires cuckold’s horns, the invisible signs that all men can somehow see.

I took a quick read through of a set of maidenhead ballads too. This was my favourite:

The loyal maids good counsel to all her fellow-maids. To be careful of wanton young men, They'll promise they love you again and again: But if they get their will of you before you are wed You may look a new sweetheart and a new maiden-head: And believe no false young men that will dissemble and lye, Lest they send you away with salt tears in your eye. To the tune of, Come hither my own sweet duck 1685-1688.

It is a warning about the lies men will tell so as “to bring bobbing and hey ho to meet”. The final stanza is very strange: it professes to be a personal testimony by the author, a woman, about chastity till marriage as the best course in life:

“She was a Maid that did set out this Song,

she was thirty before she was Wed,

She had great care of every one,

to save her Maiden-head

At last their came an honest Man

and made her his own dear Wife

If she had yielded to some that came before

she had been undone all the days of her life.”

Was this meant seriously? To persuade? Till thirty?