Shaping Sense

While I should have spent the past few days finishing my post on Othello’s “Arabian trees” that drop “medicinable gum,” I, instead, spent the last day or so working on a new late medieval/ early modern meme experiment. The “Harlem Shake” phenomenon’s coolness has dissipated in about the amount of time it takes to watch a Harlem Shake video, but I decided to try my hand at making one anyway.

Taking the Danse Macabre as my inspiration, I present you with this:

What better way to celebrate the death of a meme, than to meme death itself?

When I started using Twitter regularly about a year ago, I was drawn to the fascinating Twitter Feeds of medievalists like @Erik_Kwakkel and @Sarah_Peverley, both of whom not only use their Twitter Feeds to discuss medieval art and literature but also post beautiful and oftentimes funny images taken of medieval manuscripts. I always looked forward to my daily dose of odd and funny illuminations, and their Tweets often inspired me to take notice of medieval texts that I might not otherwise be aware of. As a person with an interest in the early modern period, I find their feeds both amusing and informative, making me familiar with new medieval resources and otherwise unfamiliar medieval texts and illuminations. As I became more interested in their feeds, I began to look for similar Twitter accounts that did something similar with early modern images and texts. While they may still be out there for me to find, I decided to try something of my own.

One Wednesday several months ago, with Kwakkel and Peverley as inspiration, I posted the following image and caption.

A jester dining on rats from an early English printed bestiary (oddly with Dutch text). #WoodcutWednesday #earlymodern

While I provided a descriptive rather than amusing caption, I thought the image amusing in its own right. Since it was a Wednesday, I used the hashtag #WoodcutWednesday, and, thinking myself clever, posted several more images that day. A few weeks later, after discovering the beauty of the Hyperotomachia Poliphili and its scandalous woodcuts, I decided to revive #WoodcutWednesday, posting this as my first image and caption:

“Were you staring at my ass? …So was I!” #WoodcutWednesday

I started posting #WoodcutWednesdays thinking I was only amusing myself. But with early encouragement from the always hilarious @Exhaust_Fumes, and a later shout-out from @Erik_Kwakkel, I found that others enjoyed them and decided to make #WoodcutWednesday a semi-regular thing. Every week since, I have tried to Tweet #WoodcutWednesday images with silly captions. Sometimes I come up with amusing ones and oftentimes I produce joke captions that fail, but they still have become the highlight of my week.

I had hoped that other early modernist would join in the fun to provide better captions than I could, and/or that other early modernists would Tweet their own funny or bizarre #WoodcutWednesdays, but, so far, I’ve been Tweeting alone. Having for a long time thought I was speaking to a select few of weekly responders, I discovered this week that there were other people on Twitter who enjoy the #WoodcutWednesday Tweets.

Last week, when the image of a medieval manuscript with cat paw prints reemerged as a viral sensation, I thought it would be funny to superimpose the ubiquitous Grumpy Cat on the image and create a few library related Grumpy Cat memes and posted them to my blog. To my delight and horror, the Medieval MSS Grumpy Cat blog post has garnered more views and shares than my entire blog had previously. When visiting several sites that linked to my silly Blog entry, I came across one that lamented the lack of early modern memes. It certainly is true that the medievalists of Twitter are winning the Twitter image war, and we early modernists have largely refused to take up a challenge.

As a result, I issue a challenge to the early modernists of Twitter to use #WoodcutWednesday as a way to battle back against the medieval dominance of these purveyors of illuminated medieval manuscripts. Dear early modernists, we cannot allow… a Twitter image gap!

In the next week or so, I will try to repost some of my earlier #WoodcutWednesday images to my as-of-right-now-defunct-Tumblr. But challenge issued, and I hope someone will answer the call. Even if no one else wants to pick up the gauntlet, I will still amuse try to amuse myself with #WoodcutWednesday, but game on, medievalists.

With that, I leave you with a few of my #WoodcutWednesday favorites.

: The middle woman is disappointed with the “Passionate Shepherd’s Nudist Retreat” snack options. #WoodcutWednesday

: The popularity of the early modern proto-Ferris Wheel waned after some expressed safety concerns.

: Criticized as too abstract and busy, Thomas’ performance piece failed to garner his peers’ respect

: Despite his best efforts, Claus failed to get Hans to recognize the inefficiency of blowgun fishing. #WoodcutWednesday

: Having pawned his flute, the Pied Piper made do with makeshift instruments. #StillWorked

: Horrifying guests, Fritz’s overbearing mother spoiled her own funeral to wipe cake from his face. #WodcutWednesday

: Just a couple of anatomically correct and partly aroused hermaphrodites. #WoodcutWednesday

: Criticized as too risque, Abercrombie pulled this early advertisement from circulation. #WoodcutWednesday

: Ever the jokester, Chad decided to play a prank on the coat-check guy. #WoodcutWednesday

: Lenny, tapster, goes largely unrecognized for his role in creating the #earlymodern cat meme. #WoodcutWednesday

-For an update on this post and for links to information about the person who took the original manuscript photo, see this post.

Erik Kwakkel recently popularized an image of a medieval manuscript discovered by Emir O. Filipovic of the University of Sarajevo’s History Department. The manuscript contained the paw-prints of a medieval cat, left in ink, and some are now speculating that the prints were left by The Medieval Grumpy Cat.

Grumpy Cat does not approve.

Grumpy Cat Don’t Care About Your Manuscript

Grumpy Cat responds to Special Collections that require white gloves

Grumpy Cat has already written a paper on what you’re working on.

Medieval Grumpy MSS Cat responds to Montaigne

This is what Medieval Grumpy Cat thinks of your manuscript

Late Medieval Grumpy Cat Claims Responsibility for Cat-Paw Manuscript

The Noble Lyfe Leopard is not impressed.

For a more serious treatment of both the cat paw-print manuscript and the cat pee manuscript see this excellent post on Erik Kwakkel’s blog.

See my followup post for more funny images, even if they aren’t Grumpy Cat related.

And one final image before I go:

Tiger Style. Tiger Style. Tiger Style. Medieval-Cat Clan Ain’t Nuthin to Fuck Wit.

Hitherto, I have been focusing on the relationships established among the objects of the world and the objects of the mind predominantly in popular sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophy. I do so, in part, because the divisions between perception and reality, and between appearance and reality, for contemporary critical practice, are a given and are typically unreflectingly applied to earlier periods. In this post, I want to problemetize my contention by discussing an instance in which phantasms played a central role in epistemological and ontological questions generated by philosophical skepticism.

Literary critics at least since Staley Cavell have been interested in skeptical motifs in early modern literature. Cavell’s work was instrumental in developing my love of Shakespeare and in my interest in how philosophy relates to literature and cultural productions. Cavell argues that “the advent of skepticism as manifested in Descartes’s Meditations is already in full existence in Shakespeare … in the generation preceding Descartes” (Cavell 3). While insightful in his exploration of early modern philosophical skepticism as it appears in Shakespeare’s plays, he rarely uses contemporary sources outside of Shakespeare and Descartes to support his claim and never addresses the late sixteenth-century construction of the sensory system that might shape the ways in which skepticism at the time might be culturally contingent. Cavell mentions Montaigne, but only does so to position Montaigne as a skeptic trying to grapple with an “uncertain world,” whereas the skepticism he finds in Shakespeare and Descartes “is how we live at all in a groundless world. Our skepticism is a function of our now illimitable desire.”

Since Cavell and through new historicist scholarship, critics like Benjamin Bertram and Ellen Spolsky have broadened the understanding of sixteenth-century skepticism beyond Shakespeare, devoting more attention to its presence in early modern culture beyond Shakespeare and Descartes to amend the gaps. Apart from Spolsky, however, very few literary critics acknowledge the position of the sensitive soul in their analysis of early modern philosophical skepticism, and Spolsky herself typically reserves her discussion of the sensitive soul for footnotes. The same holds true for the objects of perception and of the mind known as species and phantasms. While Spolsky’s insightful analysis of a wide range of topics proves fruitful in deepening our understanding of how early modern skepticism was “satisfied,” it is my contention that by theorizing the sensitive soul and its objects we can attend to the different grounds upon which early modern skepticism is located. Stuart Clark, in his Vanities of the Eye, does the most extensive work I know of that discusses the ways in which what he calls the “derationalization” of sight intersects and converges with early modern skepticism. Clark’s exploration of changes in the accounts of early modern visual perception is incredibly rich and developed. Clark, however, in his focus on visual perception does not attend to the other senses and, aside from an incredible chapter on Macbeth, does not include many literary texts alongside the natural philosophy and optical treatises he details.

It is my contention that the Phantasy and its species or phantasms were central to skeptical dynamics in the early modern period. The faculty, the postulated theoretical point of intersection among perception and thought, the body and the soul, the world and the “selfe,”[i] waking and dreaming, and between the physical and metaphysical realms, was saddled with so many different tasks and roles, that the inherent contradictions produced uncertainty and cause for philosophical skepticism. Equally important are the objects of the Phantasy that are often represented as bridging the same divides and containing the same contradictions.

For this post, I would like to focus on an account offered of an early modern skeptical crisis in which the phantasms or species play a central role. In the early seventeenth century, theological student Joseph Mede, while pursuing a degree at the University of Cambridge, faced a crisis of sense. Mede’s crisis occurred

not long after his entrance into Philosophical studies he was for some time disquieted with Scepticism, that troublesome and restless disease of the Pyrrhonian School of old. For lighting upon a Book in a neighbour-Scholars Chamber, (whether it were Sextus Empericus, or some other upon the same Subject, is not now remembered) he began upon the perusal of it to move strange Questions to himself, and even to doubt whether the… whole Frame of things, as it appears to us, were any more than a mere Phantasm or Imagination. (Mede II of “The Author’s Life.”)

Mede’s encounter with classical philosophy unsettled his conceptual order, making it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between reality and fiction. As Richard Popkin explains in his The History of Skepticism, Joseph Mede “was at Christ’s College, Cambridge from 1602-10, and studied philology, history, mathematics, physics, botany, anatomy, astrology and even Egyptology… in spite of all this learning ‘his philosophical reading led him towards Pyrrhonism.’ But he could not accept the possibility that mind might not know reality, and might only be dealing with delusory ideas of an external world” (66). Two components of Mede’s crisis stand out. The first is that the text, most likely Sextus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism, prompted Mede’s unsettling questioning of reality. The second is that reading classical pyrrhonists prompted Mede to consider all of perceptible reality a “mere phantasm or imagination.” The belief that the world might be a “phantasm,” resulting from reading classical skepticism, produces a crisis that exposes the tenuous grasp humans have on reality.

Title Page to Joseph Mede’sWorks.

The phantasms, also called the species, played an important role in shaping the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century sense of sense, serving as the “objects” of the inner senses. The phantasms were mental images “visible” to the inner senses. In addition to explaining ordinary perception, natural philosophers also deployed the concept, especially “mere phantasms,” to explain phenomena like hallucinations, dreams, memory, and the delusions of sense. The goal of my dissertation and this blog is to reveal the complex and convoluted history and nature of the notion of the phantasms or species that, I argue, play an important role in both epistemology and skepticism. As Mede’s case shows, however, determining the difference between phantasms and reality could be a difficult affair, producing a crisis of sense.

The crisis of sense Mede suffered from shows the “groundless world” possible in the generation before Descartes as Cavell suggests, but, as it precedes the broad acceptance of Kepler’s revolution in optical theory, it does not operate on quite the same ground. I contend that Kepler’s retinal image, of which Descartes too was aware, fundamentally shifted the ground of philosophical skepticism by more radically separating sensation from perception and the objects of the world from the objects in the mind. Once broadly accepted, the theory of the retinal image, combined with a shifting of the faculties of the sensitive soul, in Descartes case at least, to the far side of the pineal gland, produced a situation in which the mediating space of the sensitive soul was recast as a part of a mind that remained distinct from the body and transformed the embodied brain into something much more mechanical. This mind-body dualism, voiding the mediation of the sensitive soul and its objects, generated skeptical problems that resemble but do not perfectly copy the skeptical problems apparent in the sixteenth century.

One difference, as we find in the description of Mede’s crisis, concerns the phantasms and the imagination or Phantasy. For Mede, the possibility that the entire perceived world might only be composed of phantasms generated from his own brain rather than being the traces left in the mind by the mental objects of the external world unsettled him, leading him to doubt the very fabric of reality.

Whereas, in what I call the paramaterial Phantasy, the senses, the sensitive soul, and their objects expressed continuity and interconnection with the external world, with Mede’s case, we see a profound perimateriality. Rather than retaining connections to and with the world, Mede finds himself, with the encouragement of rediscovered classical skepticism, postulating a world radically closed off from the mind. The mental objects, the phantasms or the species, do not retain a mimetic relationship to their external world which are generated from outside the perceiving subject, but, instead, might be produced from inside the perceiving subject.

The skeptical disposition typically reinforces and reifies the boundaries between world and selfe, between objects and subjects. In the most extreme forms of paramateriality found most often in discourses of magic and witchcraft, there is a profound openness and interactivity between selfe and world. In the most extreme forms of philosophical skepticism, however, the self is radically closed off from the world to the point where the only thing that might exist is the subject. Such a gap, I contend, became increasingly wide following the discovery and popularization of the retinal image, but even prior to the retinal image cases like Mede’s could emerge from earlier models of mind.

The epistemological quandary Mede faces resembles the thought experiment Rene Descartes engages in with what is today known as the Cartesian demon. After arguing that all knowledge comes through the senses, Descartes famously posits a demon which could manufacture the illusion of reality by manipulating the senses. As Clark discusses and as I will discuss in other posts, Descartes builds upon questions of demonic manipulations of sense current in witchcraft discourses.

In many of these earlier discourses, while a devil or demon could manipulate the sensitive soul and its objects, Descartes extends the possibility of deception to the whole of sensible reality. But in Mede’s case, a similar world devouring skepticism emerges not from an externally postulated demon but rather from the solipsistic possibility that the world might be the product of Mede’s own mind.

In order to defeat his evil demon, Descartes turns to arguing that an omnipotent and benevolent God would not allow the type of all encompassing powers of delusion he attributed to the deluding devil. Similarly, the passage of Mede’s biography shifts from recounting Mede’s crisis of sense towards his life of religious study and writing. As the passage continues,

The Emprovement of this Conceit (as he would profess) rendered all things so unpleasant to him, that his Life became uncomfortable. He was then but young, and therefore the more capable of being abus’d by those perplex’d Notions by which Pyrrho had industriously studied to represent the Habitation of Truth as inaccessible: But by the mercy of God he quickly made his way out of these troublesome Labyrinths, and gave an early proof that he was design’d for profound Contemplations, by falling so soon upon the consideration of subjects so subtil and curious.

The “perplexed Notions” of Pyrrho lead to a crippling melancholy after the young Mede was “abused” by their representation of the inaccessibility of truth. The scholarly melancholy of Mede’s university days, the biographer assures us, gives way to “profound Contemplations” that drive him towards God and religious truths. Instead of Descartes’ arguments for the existence of God, Mede is led from the labyrinth of philosophical skeptical ideas by God’s “mercy,” but, through the implication, Mede turns towards God to recover from his uncertainty and melancholy.

Montaigne, too, makes such a move towards the conclusion of his “An Apologie for Raymond Sebond” where, after having taking Pyrrhonian doubt to its limit by undermining epistemology and faith in the senses, he takes issue with the sentiment “Oh what a vile and abject thing is man … unlesse he raise himselfe above humanity!” (325). Montaigne objects to this “absurd” statement by pointing out that man cannot rise above his humanity, explaining,

For to make the handful greater then the hand, and the embraced greater then the arme; and to hope to straddle more then our legs length; is impossible and monstrous: nor that man should mount over and above himselfe or humanity; for, he cannot see but with his owne eyes, nor take hold but with his owne armes. He shall raise himselfe up, if it please God extraordinarily to lend him his helping hand. He may elevate himselfe by forsaking and renouncing his owne meanes, and suffering himself to be elevated and raised by meere heavenly meanes. (325-326).

For Montaigne, only heavenly means can allow for a transformation where one rises above humanity even if one can help, through pyrrhonian skepticism, by voiding the faith in one’s senses and abilities.

The move, characteristic of many mid- to late sixteenth-century skeptical treatises, uses pyrrhonian tropes to reinforce a subjection to God, and can, at times, resemble the negative theology offered by thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa. In both Montaigne and in the description of Mede’s crisis of sense, God becomes the point beyond skepticism and remains unchallenged, but Descartes feels compelled to defend the existence of God through argument. While such skeptical questions were rarely (at least openly) deployed against belief in God, the philosophical skepticism they found in recovered and popularized texts like Sextus Emipricus’ Outlines certainly deployed similar arguments against belief in the gods. In Mede’s case, we see that the effects of skeptical questions and method could challenge all beliefs and knowledge, leaving them in a “groundless world” in the generations before Descartes.

The sense of urgency, anxiety and melancholy found in the report of Mede’s encounter with classical skepticism presents something not found in Sextus himself. For classical pyrrhonists, skeptical methods were used not to increase anxiety about ontology and epistemology, but rather as a way to achieve ataraxia (“tranquility”) by suspending judgment on dogmatic beliefs. For Mede, however, Sextus produces feelings of melancholy and profound anxiety that the world might not exist. The anxiety apparent in his doubt that “the… whole Frame of things, as it appears to us, were any more than a mere Phantasm or Imagination” leads to anything but tranquility as his melancholy makes things and life “unpleasant” for him.

I mention melancholy because it too plays a very important role in the skeptical arguments of both Sextus and Descartes, both use the delusions of madmen and melancholics to challenge the reliability of ordinary perception and judgments. In this too, Descartes plays into a tradition available at least a generation before him. While the psychophysiological models of the mind might not have resulted in exactly the same type of mind-body dualism found in Descartes, the paramaterial model of the mind, its sensitive soul, and their objects still gave occasion for an extreme philosophical skepticism.

At the same time, however, many of the philosophical skeptics’ arguments, even while questioning the reliability of the senses and suspending judgment on all matters, often depend upon a Galenic understanding of the mind, its faculties, and their objects. I will talk about this further in a later post on an expurgated translation of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines often attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh. Even as late sixteenth-century philosophical skeptics reified the borders of the body, possibly speculating, as Mede does, that all of sensible reality was a delusion, the terms in which they expressed such thoughts were linked, in some respects, to a model of mind that was slowly coming to be seen as outdated.

Sixteenth-century philosophers, natural philosophers and the skeptics inherited models of the mind shaped through Galen, Aristotle, the Stoics, Scholasticism, Avicenna, Averroes and the intervening commentary on those authorities. The models derived from classical thought and shaped during the medieval period typically become the tools deployed by skeptics against dogmatic belief and against epistemology. Many sixteenth-century philosophical skeptics, like the classical skeptics before them, do not often turn their own methods against the authorities on or the dogmatism of the models of perception and mind from which they draw the explanatory models to challenge the certitude of perception. Instead, they deploy those models to raise ontological and epistemological questions, challenging the nature of other beliefs and practices.

In the brief description of Joseph Mede’s crisis of sense, we discover that the phantasms and the possibility that the phantasms might be internally generated rather than externally derived stand at the center of the epistemological questions occasioned by philosophical skepticism. As I will discuss in further posts, the phantasms or species and the related faculty of the Phantasy which retained or produced them stood at the center of sixteenth-century ontology and epistemology. Additionally, representations of those objects and their faculty expose the tensions between two competing models of the selfe that either expressed an extreme openness and interconnectivity with the world in a model that I am calling paramaterial and one, offered by skeptics, that radically, and perhaps solipsistically, closed the selfe from the world in a model that I am calling perimaterial.

Bibliography

Bertram, Benjamin. “The time is out of joint:” Skepticism in Shakespeare’s England. University of Delaware Press, 2004.

Clark, Stuart. Vanities of the Eye. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Mede, Joseph. The Works of the Pious and Profoundly-Learned Joseph Mede. London: Roger Norton, 1672.

Montaigne, Michel de. Essays: Volume Two. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1942.

Popkin, Richard H. The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1979.

Reiss, Timothy J.. Mirages of the Selfe: Patters of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe. Stanford UP, 2003.

Spolsky, Ellen. Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World. Aldershot, Burlington, Singapore, and Sydney: Ashgate, 2001.

[i] Here and elsewhere, I opt to follow Timothy J. Reiss’ use of the term “selfe” as he describes in his incredibly insightful Mirages of the Selfe, saying that he chose to use the early modern spelling of “selfe” because of its “defamiliarizing effect” since “It just named whatever interior nature it was that made a person a human and no other kind of being” (25). In other posts, I also refer to “perceivers” to avoid using the modern spelling and notion of “the self” where appropriate.

A few years ago, Gordon Braden introduced me to the peculiar sonnet from Barnabe Barnes’ Parthenophil and Parthenophe. At that time, I remember finding the pairing of Jove’s “golden shower” with the speaker’s desire to become the urine of his beloved both hilarious and intriguing. I wondered whether this was the first instance in English history where the term “golden shower” was used and if the valences I read into the poem were historically accurate.

Barnes’ Sonnet 63 reads as follows:

Jove for Europaes love tooke shape of Bull,
And for Calisto playde Dianaes parte
And in a golden shower, he filled full
The lappe of Danae with coelestiall arte.
Would I were chang’d but to my mistresse gloves,
That those white lovely fingers I might hide,
That I might kisse those hands, which mine hart loves
Or else that cheane of pearle, her neckes vaine pride,
Made proude with her neckes vaines, that I might folde
About that lovely necke, and her pappes tickle,
Or her to compasse like a belt of golde,
Or that sweet wine which downe her throate doth trickle,
To kisse her lippes, and lye next at her hart,
Runne through her vaynes, and passe by pleasures part. (Barnes 43).

Returning to it now, however, after studying early modern representations of the external and internal senses, I rediscover a poem that bears meaning beyond my previous laughter. I still do not know if the poem constitutes the first reference to watersports, and, sophomorically, it still makes me laugh, but Barnes’ poem also reveals a culturally contingent understanding of the body. Attending to that model of the body additionally reveals the extent to which Barnes exceeds the colonization of the female body found in the typical early modern blazon. While his speaker goes on a descriptive tour of his beloved’s external body, what he craves is to penetrate that body. The desire for penetration, here, exceeds the boundaries of sexual penetration, as Parthenophil imaginatively penetrates and invades her entire body.

Sanctioning his desire for otherwise debasing transformations, Pathenophil begins with a list of gods willing to transform in pursuit of their desires. Notably, his first reference to Jove’s becoming a bull implies a threat of or a desire to rape. The Jove and Europa myth detail Jove’s abduction of and non-consenual sexual encounter with Europa while he was in the shape of a bull. The theme of transformation in pursuit of sexual violence continues in his second reference to the Callisto myth. Jove, lusting after one of Diana’s nymphs, took Diana’s form to seduce Callisto. Once he has her in his arms, he reveals himself and rapes her. His third reference, takes a slightly different frame as he refers to Danaë. Imprisoned by her father in a tower for fear that her child will kill him, Jove comes to her in the form of a shower of gold. While Jove is not the offending male figure in this myth, the father’s actions again reveals and conceals the threatening nature of Parthenophil’s desire.

Danae impregnated by Jove in the form of a “golden shower”

From the first two classical references that imply the threat of sexual violence, Parthenophil turns towards the metamorphoses he desires to get closer to Parthenophe. Rather than engage in the typical blazon, systematically dismantling his beloved’s integrity by splitting her into parts, the speaker proceeds to imagine himself as a variety of objects connected to her body. He begins with her gloves, then her pearl necklace, and then her belt. Each object, as magnified through his description, serves to surround and envelop her body. The gloves wholly conceal the hand, the necklace folds around her neck, the belt encompasses her waist.

While on one hand imagining his control over her external body, his imagined metamorphoses also carry the suggestion of his own feminization. He becomes the one penetrated, as he becomes the glove, the necklace and the belt. In each imagined scenario, he becomes filled with her body. The would be penetrator becomes the penetrated; the subject becomes a series of imagined objects. As his imagined objects become containers for her body, his beloved becomes the phallus to his glove. Whereas Petrarch fetishized Laura’s glove, which symbolically and metonymically represents her vagina, the speaker of Barnes’ poem desires to become a glove, to become the vagina filled by his beloved. Like Jove who metamorphosed into Diana for Callisto, Parthenophil seems willing to adopt a type of gender-bending to attain the object of his desire. The gender-bending dynamic does, however, meet its limit in the full description of her pearl necklace. As the necklace, the speaker hopes to “tickle” Parthenope’s breasts, moving from an object that folds around her neck to actively touching her.

Barnes ends the sonnet with Pathenophil imagining his expulsion from her body. He, becomes excremental in order to access places otherwise denied. Instead of a scene of penetration, the sonnet ends with an expulsion. He, in effect, becomes another form of golden shower. Thomas Nashe, like unlike my own initial reaction to Barnes’ sonnet, mocked Barnes’ overwrought metaphor. In his dialogue Have with you to Saffron-walden, an unnamed responder mentions this poem while discussing Barnes, saying, “In one place of his Parthenophill and Perthenope, wishing no other thing of Heaven, but that hee might bee transformed to the Wine his Mistres drinks, and so passe through her” (Nashe Q2 verso). In response, Bentivole, one of the interlocutors, quips, “Therein hee was verie ill advisde, for so the next time his Mistres made water, he was in danger to be cast out of her favour.”

While certainly amusing, the dynamics of his move at the conclusion of this sonnet give us pause. Parthenophil finishes his thought experiment by expelling him from her body, but only after he has imaginatively explored her entire body from the inside, fully filling her with his presence. The parallel with the Danaë reference earlier metamorphoses him not only into excrement but also into a god. Although he leaves the beloved’s lap rather than falling into it, his taking this form of “golden shower” renders him an excremental deity.

The end of the sonnet cycles back towards the violence suggested in the first quatrain. Moving back from the penetrated objects in the previous, Parthenophil imagines himself as the wine she drinks. It is this move that alters the series of metaphors from attention to the external form of his beloved to her bodily interior. As wine, the speaker imagines entering her mouth and penetrating her throat, but this is where the metaphor becomes even more interesting. As a liquid his beloved drinks, the fantasy of penetration is taken to an extreme. He fantasies that this will allow him to lie near her heart and run through her veins. With the first half of the last line, Parthenope imagines a complete penetration of Parthenophil’s body, insinuating himself into her vital spirits and, therefore, becoming dispersed throughout her entire body.

As Nashe’s mockery shows, the metaphor might be overwrought, but Nashe also plays on an interesting pun that reveals an additional layer to the dynamic in Barnes’ poem. The responder says that Parthenophil wants to “passe through” his mistress. While Bentivole turns this towards the metamorphosis into piss, the quip also reveals that the central conceit involves fully infiltrating and penetrating Parthenophe. I will return to this thread below, but first want to turn my attention towards the culminating poem of Barnes’ Parthenophil and Parthenophe.

Title page of Barnabe Barnes’ Parthenophil and Parthenophe

The sequence ends with the equally peculiar “Sestine 5” in which Parthenophil employs the assistance of Hecate to achieve his desires. While unclear whether this poem reveals a narrative event or if it is supposed to be taken as an imagined event, the poem’s real or imagined event unleashes a sexual violence. Driven to the depths of despair and love-melancholy for Parthenophe, Parthenophil turns to the dark arts to summon her naked where he rapes her.

Then, first with lockes disheveled, and bare,
Straite guirded, in a chearefull calmie night :
Having a fier made of greene Cypresse woode,
And with male frankincense on alter kindled
I call on threefould Hecate with teares,
And here (with loude voice) invocate the furies :
For their assistance, to me with their furies :
Whilst snowye steedes in coach bright Phoebe bare.
Ay me Parthenophe smiles at my teares,
I neither take my rest by day, or night :
Her cruell loves in me such heate have kindled.
Hence goate and bring her to me raging woode :
Hecate tell which way she comes through the woode.
This wine aboute this aulter, to the furies
I sprinkle, whiles the Cypresse bowes be kindled,
This brimstone earth within her bowelles bare,
And this blew incense sacred to the night.
This hand (perforce) from this bay his braunche teares.
So be she brought which pittied not my teares.
And as it burneth with the Cypresse woode
So burne she with desier by day and night.
You goddes of vengeance, and avenge-full furies
Revenge, to whom I bende on my knees bare.
Hence goate, and bring her with loves outrage kindled.
Hecate make signes if she with love come kindled.
Thinke on my Passions Hec’ate, and my teares :
This Rosemariene (whose braunche she cheefely bare
And loved best) I cut both barke and woode,
Broke with this brasen Axe, and, in loves furies
I treade on it, rejoicing in this night :
And saying, let her feele such woundes this night.
About this alter, and rich incense kindled
This lace and Vervine to loves bitter furies
I binde, and strewe, and with sadde sighes and teares
About I beare her Image raging woode.
Hence goate and bring her from her bedding bare :
Hecate reveale if she like passions bare.
I knitte three true lovers knottes (this is loves night)
Of three discolour’d silkes, to make her woode,
But she scornes Venus till her loves be kindled,
And till she finde the greefe of sighes and teares :
Sweet Queene of loves for mine unpittied furies,
A like torment her with such scaulding furies :
And this turtle (when the losse she bare
Of her deare make) in her kinde did shed teares,
And mourning did seeke him all day, and night :
Let such lament in her for me be kindled,
And mourne she still, till she runne raging woode :
Hence goate and bring her to me raging woode
These letter’s, and these verses to the furies
(Which she did write) all in this flame be kindled :
Me (with these papers) in vayne hope she bare
That she to day would turne mine hopelesse night,
These as I rent, and burne, so furie teares.
Her hardned hart, which pittied not my teares.
The winde shaked trees make murmure in the woode,
The waters roare at this thrise sacred night,
The windes come whisking shrill to note her furies :
Trees, woodes, and windes, a part in my plaintes bare,
And knew my woes, now joy to see her kindled :
See whence she comes with loves enrag’d and kindled !
The pitchy cloudes (in droppes) send downe there teares,
Owles scritche, Dogges barke to see her carried bare
Wolves yowle, and cry : Bulles bellow through the wood,
Ravens croape, now, now, I feele loves fiercest furies :
See’st’e thou that blacke goate, brought this silent night
Through emptie cloudes by’th daughters of the night ?
See how on him she sittes, with love rage kindled,
Hether perforce brought with avenge-full furies ?
Now I waxe drousie, now cease all my teares,
Whilst I take rest and slumber neare this woode :
Ah me ! Parthenophe naked and bare,
Come blessed goate, that my sweet Lady bare :
Where hast thou beene (Parthenophe) this night ?
What could ? sleepe by this fier of Cypresse woode
Which I much longing for thy sake have kindled,
Weepe not, come loves and wipe away her teares :
At length yet, wilt thou take away my furies ?
Ay me, embrace me, see those ouglye furies.
Come to my bed, least they behold thee bare
And beare thee hence the[y] will not pittie teares,
And these still dwell in everlasting night :
Ah loves, sweet love, sweet fiers for us hath kindled.
But not inflam’d, with franckinsense, or woode,
The furies, they shall hence into the woode,
Whiles Cupid shall make calmer his hot furies,
And stand appeased at our fier’s kindled.
Joyne joyne (Parthenophe) thy selfe unbare,
None can perceive us in the silent night,
Now will I cease from sighes, lamentes, and teares,
And cease (Parthenophe) sweet cease thy teares :
Beare golden Apples thornes in every woode,
Joyne heavens, for we conjoyne this heavenly night :
Let Alder trees beare Apricockes (dye furies)
And Thistles Peares, which prickles lately bare.
Now both in one with equall flame be kindled :
Dye magicke bowes, now dye, which late were kindled :
Here is mine heaven : loves droppe insteede of teares.
It joynes, it joynes, ah both embracing bare :
Let Nettles bring forth Roses in each woode,
Last ever verdant woodes : hence former furies.
O dye, live, joye : what ? last continuall night,
Sleepe Phoebus still with Thetis : rule still night.
I melt in love, loves marrow-flame is kindled :
Here will I be consum’d in loves sweet furies.
I melt, I melt, watche Cupid my love-teares :
If these be furies, oh let me be woode !
If all the fierie element I bare
Tis now acquitted : cease your former teares,
For as she once with rage my bodie kindled,
So in hers am I buried this night. (Barnes 143-146).

The turn towards sexual violence and threats of violence in the first quatrain of Barnes’ Sonnet 63 return in this final poem with a vengeance. Violently breaking from the Petrarchan conventions that served as the model for many of the poems in the sequence, Barnes’ Parthenophil metamorphoses from unrequited lover into a demon summoning rapist.

Externalizing the uncontrollable internal forces of passions and love-melancholy, the power Parhthenophil exerts over Pathenophe’s body here enacts a wish-fulfillment but also displaces his own feelings of powerlessness in the presence of her into an imagined scenario where her presence lies under his complete control. The uncontrolled and uncontrollable passions and thoughts within himself are given an imaginary solution whereby the external world acts at his command.

The fantasy of control on display in Barnes’ concluding poem reverses the processes internal to the speaking subject throughout the sequence. Love, it was thought, entered through the senses and, often, through the eyes. The beloved enters the body of the lover through the external senses, typically through vision. The sensible forms enter through the external senses and impress themselves upon the spirits of the mind and the internal senses. With love-melancholy, the attention to this mental object increases its power, and the species or phantasm can have a special control over the body.

The example I just sketched includes an intromissive theory of vision, but similar effects were offered in extrmissive accounts. As I will discuss in a later post, love beams, in particular, were one example of extramission theory that seems to survive popularly into the seventeenth century. In theories of extramissive love-beams, the eyes shoot forth beams that include the visual spirit that is a form of or is infused with the beloved’s blood. As such, those beams, when they enter through the eyes of the lover, insinuate, or, perhaps, insanguate, themselves in the lover’s own spirits, blood, and body.

While the private Phantasy shaped such objects, it should not be forgotten that those objects and forms constitute a type of penetrating, invading, and usurping force. While the fantastic image within the lover might be shaped, perverted and reconstructed though the private fantasy, the object-subject separation partially collapses in such explanations of love’s effects.

The seemingly uncontrollable internal forces and the uncontrollable world which, internally, the speaker is unable to control through his will become the occasion for an externalized fantasy of an all-powerful will in which the world conforms to his will. Subject to her power over him in his state of unrequited love, Parthenophil turns to a fantasy of immense power over her and the world. In the sonnet immediately preceding the culminating “Sestine 5,” Parthenophil claims that Parthenophe’s hard-heart and lack of pity unleashes “ten thousand furies” in his mind which “chaung[e] the tenour of [his] lovely dittie” (Sonnet 105, line 12). He turns from poetry that he hoped would affect Parthenophe’s heart and mind, to “enchaunting sawes, and magicke spell” (13). Rather than persuade her “hard indurate hart” through verse, he will use the dark arts to “compell.” His control over her, however, only extends as far as her body, her will resisting. In this scenario, the world, significantly apart from her will, becomes an extension of his own will; the unruly passions within him become controlled through his agency.

Woodcut of a woman riding a goat from Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum (1608)

Through psychoanalytical lenses, we can understand the conclusion of Barnes’ sequence as wish-fulfillment where fantasies of control step in to counteract the speaker’s feelings of powerlessness and impotence. If we take into account contemporary beliefs about the body, of sense perception, and of love, however, we can see precisely how this drama unfolds in a culturally contingent way.

For those Lacanian minded, one might consider the ways in which Petrarchan conventions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries present the power of the fantasy in feelings of love. As Zizek constantly reminds us, love and sex are imprecated in narcissism, and sex is merely masturbation with a partner present. As Zizek puts it in The Parallax View, “in a strictly symmetrical way, ‘real sex’ has the structure of masturbation with a real partner–in effect, I use the flesh-and-blood partner as a masturbatory prop for enacting my fantasies … sex always-already was ‘virtual,’ with flesh-and-blood persons used as masturbatory props for dwelling in our fantasies” (191). The fantastic surplus drives desire, since sexual attraction is driven by the fantastical construction of the object.

Such insights remain valid when investigating early modern love lyric, but one should also acknowledge that the separation of the external world and the world of objects does not remain entirely distinct from the objects of the mind quite as radically. While the phantasms are shaped through the sensitive soul and by the private Phantasy, they also retain some relationship to and with their external originals in a way that modern optical theories and theorists foreclose. The Phantasy certainly shaped those objects, but the theories of the senses as popularly expressed also granted those mental objects a real quasi-material connection to their external originals.

As I mentioned earlier, some pre- to early modern theories of love and love-beams challenge our contemporary notions of a subject with closed off borders and boundaries, of a subject removed from and isolated from the world. In the systems of perception I have been mapping, there is more emphasis on the porousness and permeability of a perceiver. The beloved, despite the shaping power of the Phantasy, exerted a force on and power over the lover. Whether it the form, the species, or the blood, the material body of the beloved enters and becomes part of the lover’s body and mind.

While such theories expose the permeability of the sensory system and a perceiver, many also, like Helkiah Crooke in his Microcosmographia, recommend the policing of the borders of the body. While such arguments reveal that those theories also presumed a somewhat stable self that needed protection from the external world, the sensory apparatus needed to be rigorously patrolled and protected even more given the quasi-material interactions that were thought to occur in the sensory system.

The shocking and unsettling violence at the conclusion of Barnes’ sequence certainly breaks with Petrarchan conventions, but it also reveals the sexual violence often sublimated within the Petrarchan conventions themselves. The concluding poem also brings the imagined violence of his earlier sonnet into relief. In his fantasy of becoming Parthenophe’s “golden shower,” the violence of the culminating “Sestine 5” is already apparent in that earlier poem.

In that earlier poem, Parthenophil wants to “runne through her veins,” implying, as I argued previously, that he would fully penetrate her body by insinuating himself in her blood and possibly her spirits. He wishes to fill her, penetrating her entire body and filling her with his presence. This violent act resembles the violence of the concluding poem. It also, however, resembles the represented violence inherent in theories of love and love-beams. Just as he imagines running through her veins and spirits in the form of digested wine, her form “runs” through his veins and spirits as the object of his obsession.

I do not mean to suggest that the affecting potential of a beloved upon a lover directly parallels the violence of rape, but I do think, at the level of natural philosophical theorizing, such a similarity can be drawn. The power and agency attributed not only to human but also to objects in and of the world show the interrelation and interconnection of the world and perceiver. As such, when we encounter moments that resemble the mle gaze in early modern literature and culture, we should be aware that the pre- and early modern gaze is not a one sided affair, and that power is not solidified on the behalf of the male gazer. Instead, the gaze becomes a play of agency between the looker and the looked at. The looked at maintains an influence over the gazer on a psychophysiological level.

The material effects generated within a perceiver and the objects’ ability to interface with the material world, the spiritual world and the soul has led me to call the faculties, spirits, and objects of the sensitive soul and mind paramaterial, and the agency conferred upon a beloved extends in many respects to the world of objects at large. Just as the external beloved could shape the interior of a perceiver both materially and spiritually, objects too, especially religious objects threatened to shape a devotees’ mind and body.

Barnes, Barnabe. The Poems of Barnabe Barnes. Ed. Alexander B. Grosart. Manchester: Charles Simms, 1875.

Nashe, Thomas. Have with you to Saffron-walden. London: John Danter, 1596.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Earlier this week, a study of the bones found buried beneath a Leicester car park rocked conventional Shakespeare scholarship. The DNA tests performed by the University of Leicester confirmed every early modernist’s darkest fears that Richard III was, indeed, the hunchback William Shakespeare depicted. As Randal Overtree, professor of early modern literature at the University of North-North-West New Hampshire State puts it, “I’m absolutely shocked. Dumbfounded, really. For years I’ve taught my students that Shakespeare promoted an unrealistic caricature of Richard, popularizing Tutor propaganda. What do I tell them now?” Dr. Overtree is not alone in his woes as a majority of English literature faculty had offered students the narrative that Shakespeare followed fictionalized accounts that helped legitimize and prop up the Tudor monarchy.

Now, while scholars still reel from the news about Richard, early modernists must brace themselves for new archeological news, this time out of Dover. As it turns out, Richard III’s are not the only freshly discovered bones with the potential to have paradigm shattering consequences for Bardolaters and Shakespeare scholars. Just about the time The Richard III Society’s Phillipa Langley was getting “strange sensations” in a Leicester car park, Jack Swink, Dover backhoe operator, was having strange sensations of his own.

As Swink recalls, “There I was, right, trenching the sewage ditch for the new Starbucks, and I had to have a wee. So I hop down and I figure, ‘It’s a sewage ditch after all.’” It is a fortunate thing he did since Jack’s micturition led to a startling discovery. Two unusual looking skulls emerged from the dirt at the power of his evacuation. As Swink explained, “there was the biggest, darkest pool of piss formed, and there was this tempest. It really was like some Shakespearean scene. The tempest ended as the bones appeared.” Swink, thinking he had discovered a murdered body, engaged the help of his foreman and best mate, Henry Boil. Swink remembers that his first words to Boil as they looked down into the trench were “looks like a couple of birds.”

As the recently released photos, taken by Swink and Boil before archeologists arrived, reveal, Jack was not simply being misogynist with his initial outburst, even if it was later determined that he had discovered the bodies of two women.

Jack Swink’s discovery near Dover. Could they be the bones of Regan and Goneril?

Clearing the dirt from the bodies discovered two skeletons with combined human and animal features. When asked why he and Boil took it upon themselves to clear away the dirt without waiting for trained archeologists, a fiery Swink scolded, “you don’t think you can trust me with bones, but you want to trust some Cambridge or Oxford student with a mattock and spade? That’s how egghead skulls are split open.” The perfectly intact and properly extracted and preserved skulls Swink uncovered both have beak-like protrusions, and the upper torsos of both human skeletons are attached to what resembles the body and the legs of a horse.

The fully excavated skeletons discovered by Swink. Almost certainly Regan and Goneril.

Initial reports by forensic investigators reveal that Jack was more correct with his outburst than he intended. The forensic team declared the pair biological sisters, and local amateur paleontologist, Sarah Westlake, identified the facial protrusions as resembling the beaks of the modern pelican’s dinosaur ancestors. Reginald Highbrow, a professor of mythological forensics, has identified the lover half of the skeleton as that of a horse. In a statement released this morning, Highbrow declared, “from the waist down they are all centaurs.” When asked to clarify his comments, since if the bodies are horses from the waist down they would be all centaur, Highbrow declined.

These recent developments in Dover have given already embattled Shakespeare scholars yet another cause for alarm. Two sisters, with pelican-like beaked faces, and horse bodies sounds, to some, alarmingly reminiscent of historical figures from yet another of Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear. The eldest daughters of the kingdom-splitting monarch, Lear, Shakespeare’s Lear describes his eldest daughters with animalistic imagery, significantly calling them both “pelican daughters” and claiming “Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above.”

Close-up of one of the skulls uncovered near Dover. Is it Regan? Is it Goneril?

For decades, Shakespeare critics have lectured about and argued that Lear’s outbursts reveal his misogyny. Psychoanalytic and feminist critics often stress Shakespeare’s absent mothers and Lear’s demonization of women partially through the verbal lashings he gives them. As it turns out, however, Swink’s discovery reveals how Shakespeare downplayed the deformities of Lear’s two eldest daughters. Far from mischaracterizing them through language, Lear merely described their appearance as they were historically. No one knew, however, that Shakespeare meant those words to be taken literally until now.

Dr. Overtree expressed his concerns about these recent revelations, saying,

“Christ, man. At least before I only had to rewrite two or three minutes of my Richard the Third lecture, but this. This presents a real problem for my three lectures on Lear. It’s going to mean a complete overhaul! I don’t even want to begin thinking about what this will do to my Teaching Assistants. They typically spend ninety-five percent of the time in section discussing the play’s representation of women. This is a fucking catastrophe!”

Other professors who only agreed to speak with us on condition of anonymity expressed similar concerns, and several worried, “Now that one can turn to science to understand the truly great mysteries of literature, who needs literary and cultural studies?” One thing is certain, Shakespeare scholarship will never be the same.

When asked by media why Swink’s discovery has not been more widely reported and why it has not had the fanfare associated with the discovery of Richard III’s body, lead researcher on the Regan and Goneril Discovery Project (RGDP) bluntly and somewhat sharply fired back,

“Well, the bloody Channel 4 film crews were already engaged with that Richard business, and we’re still raising funds to hold press conferences and to make documentaries. And although we lack funding currently, we also want to finish the lifelike full-sized animatronic replicas of the sisters before we release the full details. We also need a few costumed actors to perform during the photo-op. I’ve been told that medieval knights aren’t historically accurate. I don’t know. Maybe we’ll get some people dressed as Celts. You know, so that we could divulge our findings with the gravity and seriousness that it deserves.”

I, for one, hope they receive ample funding soon.

While Shakespeareans may be shaking at the emerging details about this find, they are not the only ones who feel like they have taken a spear to the heart. Pricilla Mountebank, head of the Society of Regan and Gonerilists (SRG), an organization dedicated combating what they argue are Shakespeare’s distortions of Lear’s eldest daughters, tellingly responded to my request for an interview with a terse, “Oh, fuck off. I, Pricilla Mountebank, am a Regan and Gonerilist.”

This story deserves more attention and time, but it looks like I’m now off to Bermuda where locals report having found the body of a half-man, half-fish.

William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat remains shrouded in mystery. The bulk of the short fiction supposedly recreates an oration given by Gregory Streamer on December 28^th of the preceding year. Streamer’s fantastic tale concerns an “experiment” he performed that allowed him to hear the language of cats. Streamer’s oration, split into three by the character and “reporter” of the tale, G. B., consists of a first part that details the occasion and origin of his quest to access the language of cats while lodging at a printing-house, a second part revealing his method of constructing a “philter” to allow him to hear their language, and a third part that records what he experiences of a feline congregation assembled outside the printing-house in which he lodged.

Although typically taken as a framing game in which Baldwin provides a fictional context with specificity and detail to provide a realistic narrative frame through which to offer his fantastic fiction, the year in question remains open for debate. William Ringler, in the introduction to his modern edition, sets December 28, 1552 as the date for Streamer’s fictional oration (Baldwin xvi). The meta-fictional elements that frame Baldwin’s satire have received a lot of critical attention recently. Most critics read Baldwin’s satire as both engaging with the complexities of fiction-making and as a satire of Catholicism. The odd piece of fiction, in its blending of genres and forms leaves many interpretive possibilities and mysteries yet to be explored.

One mystery surrounding the text is when it was first published. The earliest extant edition of Beware the Cat dates from 1570, published by William Griffith in London, and only exists in fragment. A second version of Baldwin’s fiction was published in the same year by John Allde. A later edition, printed by Edward Allde, John Allde’s son, appeared in 1584. Some contend, like Trudy Ko, that enough evidence for the existence of the 1561 edition exists that the issue should be reconsidered, arguing that its existence has been largely ignored by post-Ringler critics.

The whole of Beware the Cat remains as enigmatic as the woodcut that appears on the verso of the 1570 Griffith edition’s title page.

From the title-page verso of Griffith’s 1570 edition of William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat

The 1570 William Griffith (Wylliam Gryffith) edition is the only known edition that includes this woodcut. There is no indication that the possible preceding edition of 1561, the John Allde edition of 1570, or the Edward Allde edition of 1584 featured the same.

In criticism of Beware the Cat criticism, only Edward T. Bonahue, Jr notes its significance, saying,

The largest and fiercest of this beastly trio crouches at the top, menacing the viewer with sharp fangs and claws, indicating its ability (and impending willingness) to inflict pain. The second, considerably smaller and differently proportioned, scurries to the left with captured prey clenched in its teeth. The third, similarly small but more docile, heads in the opposite direction with a wry smile and the fur along its spine ruffled in excitement. While the title page invites the assumption that all three creatures are cats, these portraits are sufficiently ambiguous to allow other identifications, and the variations among them might even suggest creation by different artists. (Bonahue 283).

Bonahue’s argues how the “framing” or “caging” of these three animals reflect the way “the ‘text’ of Beware the Cat is constituted by a multeity of subordinate components, varying in size, appearance, personality, and narrative origin, but inhering within the integrated artifact of the physical book” (Bonahue 285) in its “play of textual frames.” While the woodcut does play a part in Baldwin’s elaborate framing that “mediate[s] between fictional space and the actual world, or, in terms of narratology, to provide a transitional link between two or more distinct discursive fields” (Bonahue 285-286), it also builds an intertextual bridge between Baldwin’s fictional space and other fields of discourse.

While Bonahue might be correct to argue that the three animals were the creation of three different artists and that, within the context of Griffith’s edition, they might invite “the assumption that all three are cats,” I believe I have found the source from which these images were taken. The three animals coexisting within the same border in the Griffith edition of Beware the Cat can be found separated into two different woodcuts in Laurence Andrewe’s The Noble Lyfe and Natures of Man printed in Antwerp around 1521 and reprinted around 1527. While Griffith’s cuts might be copies of images from the Doesburg originals, I believe I can prove definitively that Griffith possessed at least a partial set of copies of The Noble Lyfe woodcuts if not the originals and included them in his edition of William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat.

Here are the woodcuts as found in The Noble Lyfe.

: The “Leopardus or the leoparde” from Doesburg’s The Noble Lyfe & Natures of Man, p. 52

: The “Ermyne” and the “chirogrillus & erinatius… all one” from Doesburg’s The Noble Lyfe & Natures of Man, p. 43

As you can see, the woodcuts from The Noble Lyfe resemble those found in Griffith’s edition of Beware the Cat. The only major difference is the absence of the original borders surrounding the originals and the construction of a new border around all three. While the three figures might remain as ambiguous in the context of Griffith’s edition as Bonahue suggests, the originals in The Noble Lyfe are supposed to be of a leopard in the first block, and an “Ermyne” at the top and a “Cirogrillus & Erinacius [that] is all one” paired in the second. I will return to the significance of the three animals later in this post.

The cuts from The Noble Lyfe certainly look similar to the ones found in Griffith’s Beware the Cat, but the three figures found there are split between two separate woodcuts in The Noble Lyfe whereas in Beware the Cat they are combined into one. There is evidence, however, that original separate borders around the cuts used to make the Beware the Cat impressions might have been removed. Look, for example, at the way the leopard’s tail and the head and the back of the ermine in Beware the Cat have flattened and straighter lines than one might expect of a new cut.

As I discussed in a previous post, The Noble Lyfe, printed by Jan van Doesburg in Antwerp for the first time around 1521, was an English translation of Der Dieren Palleys, printed by Doesburg in Antwerp the year before. Both of van Doesburg’s editions derive, in part, from the a Latin edition of the Hortus Sanitatis, and while the woodcuts from the Antwerp editions follow the cruder editions of the Hortus over more detailed editions, the woodcuts in Doesburg’s editions were almost certainly modeled after rather than produced from the same blocks used to produce the Hortus Sanitatus. Here are the three figures as they appear in a 1497 edition:

: The “Leopardus” in the 1497 Hortus Sanitatis, De Animalibus Capitulum lxxxi

: The “Crimacius & Ermineus” in the 1497 Hortus Sanitatis, De Animalibus Capitulum lviii

The Doesburg cuts were modeled after the cuts from the Hortus, but even a cursory examination of the scans available on Early English Books Online (EEBO) and on Google Books that Doesburg’s copies do not follow their Hortus Sanitatus originals exactly. The woodcut found in Beware the Cat, with the exception of the border, almost duplicates the woodcuts from The Noble Lyfe and Der Dieren Palleys.

While I have yet to examine physical copies or obtain higher quality scans, I think I can say definitively that the woodcuts found on the verso of the Griffith edition title page of William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, at the very least, copied blocks used in Doesburg’s editions of The Noble Lyfe and Der Dieren Palleys. It might even be possible, if I get the opportunity to inspect the physical copies of each text, to argue that Griffith was in possession of the same blocks.

The Griffith edition of Beware the Cat might have used the same woodcuts that produced Der Dieren Palleys and The Noble Lyfe. I would not make such a suggestion if another of Griffith’s publications did not also include yet another block modeled after or taken from the series of woodcuts used to illustrate The Noble Lyfe. Griffith must have been in possession of part of the series used for, or at least copied from, The Noble Lyfe, since he used the “Gryphon” from the same series in his 1570 edition of Stephanus Bodonius’ The Fortresse of Fayth.

: “Grippes” from the Hortus Sanitatis, De Animalibus, Capitulum lvi

: The “grype” from The Noble Lyfe, p. 103

: The gryphon from the final page of Gryffith’s 1570 edition of The Fortresse of Fayth, colophon

Despite the more elaborate printer’s device featuring a gryphon, Griffith opts for a second woodcut of a gryphon resembling that from Doesburg’s books. To me, this proves at the very least that Griffith was in possession of at least a partial set from or copied from The Noble Lyfe and/or Der Dieren Palleys around 1570. Until I get a chance to inspect the physical copies to determine the exact sizes and wear patterns, I do not feel comfortable suggesting the same blocks were used, but I am comfortable saying that Griffith at least possessed a partial set copied from those others.

Despite the gryphon at the end of the Fortresse, the title pages of The Fortresse of Fayth and Beware the Cat, both printed in 1570, both feature a printer’s device with a gryphon.

: Beware the Cat, Title Page

: The Fortresse of Fayth, Title Page

As we only have a fragment of Griffith’s edition of Beware the Cat, we cannot be sure whether it too included the second gryphon at the end or if it included other woodcuts throughout the text. At the same time, the second gryphon in the edition of the Fortresse links Griffith to another block modeled after or taken from Doesburg’s editions.

I should note, too, that I have found a second printer’s device used by Griffith featuring a gryphon, again distinct from both the printer’s device and the gryphon woodcut featured in his edition of The Fortresse of Fayth. Cruder than that found on the title page of The Fortresse, Griffith used another image of a gryphon as a printer’s device on his 1565 edition of The Tragedie of Gorboduc.

William Griffith’s 1565 edition of The Tragedie of Gorboduc

Here, we see an earlier and cruder printer’s device again featuring a gryphon. This example shows us that William Griffith was in possession of three different gryphon blocks, and still included those similar to The Noble Lyfe woodcut in his edition of The Fortresse of Fayth.

The fact that Griffith included The Noble Lyfe’s gryphon at the end of his edition of the Fortresse might simply mean that, in an attempt to increase demand for his books by adding as many illustrations as possible, he simply added woodcuts to make William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat more marketable. These woodcuts might not have been included at Baldwin’s behest or even with his knowledge, but it is curious that Griffith chooses two woodcuts that intimately relate to the content of Beware the Cat. At the same time, the question remains why he would include all three figures rather than simply the one of the leopard since that cut, in this context, most relates to Baldwin’s fiction. This is especially significant if I am correct to think the blocks were altered in order to fit all three within a single frame. One might ask why all three were included rather than simply printing the leopard in isolation.

The three figures might have been chosen for their resemblance to cats, as Bonahue suggests, but I disagree. Certainly the top figure might, in this context, be taken for a cat rather than as a leopard, but the other two are less likely to be so mistaken. The second, if one ignores the shape of the head and the ears could have been taken for a cat, but the last in the series, with its quills and tail almost certainly could not. Still, it might be possible that Griffith chose both woodcuts because the leopard and the ermine might be seen as cats in the context of his edition of Baldwin’s fiction. The third figure, however, remains a mystery. In the Hortus Sanitatus and in Doesburg’s two bestiaries, the figure represents both the hyrax and the hedgehog.

The tail and the cloven feet should also make it difficult to consider the originals found in the Hortus Sanitatus, Der Dieren Palleys, and The Noble Lyfe as both a hyrax and as a hedgehog. The Noble Lyfe uses what would eventually become the bottommost figure on the Beware the Cat woodcut to illustrate the section on hedgehogs. Andrewe’s translation describes, “it is a lytelle beste lyke a pigge & his skynne is rownde about full of sharp pinnes save only onder his bely that no man may come nygh hym & it is moche lyke an urchin but whan it is layde in luke warme water than it is so glad that it stretcheth hym selfe a broade” (Andrewe 43). While the original conflates the hyrax with the hedgehog, and while Andrewe, the English translator of The Noble Lyfe, says that it is “moche lyke an urchin” the textual description of the image still refers to it as a “Cirogrillus & Erinacius [that] is all one,” and the image is used to represent both.

As I see it, we are left with two possible scenarios. The first is that both woodcuts from Doesburg were chosen for their resemblance to cats, but only because the top figure in the second block resembled one. The lower figure included in Griffith’s Beware the Cat was included only because it was already on the block as paired with the topmost figure, and, thus, is incidental to the decision to include both cat-like figures. Such is Bonahue’s stance on the woodcut.

The second possibility, however, depends even more upon the text of William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat itself. The first and second figures can be taken for cats, but the third figure is supposed to be taken as a hedgehog despite the fact that the figure only somewhat resembles one. In the process of assembling the parts necessary for his “philter,” Gregory Streamer hunts and ultimately dissects a hedgehog. I will return to the significance of the hedgehog later, but first want to explore the significance of the first figure.

The Griffith edition’s first figure, described as a leopard in Doesburg’s books, depicts that large cat with a human-like face. The leopard in The Noble Lyfe is one of many instances in the same text where animals resemble if not directly contain parts of men. As I discussed in an earlier post, bestiaries like The Noble Lyfe that purportedly uphold the superiority of man over animals are constantly strained by not only their resemblance to man but also in the ways that man could use them. In this example, having the face of a human on the body of a cat-like creature exposes the blending and obfuscation of such a boundary. The tale of cats offered as an oration by Gregory Streamer frames its feline subjects through the experience of a human speaker. With the edition of the woodcut in the Griffith edition, however, the reader encounters the forms of animals immediately after reading the title page. Streamer’s oration, framing his felines through his own speech as he does, is, through this woodcut, first framed through depictions of non-human animals.

The same blurring of the boundaries between human and non-human animals occurs within William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat itself. As Streamer affirms “birds and beasts had reason as men… and in some points more” (Beware 6), hierarchical arrangement which separated man from beasts based on man as a rational animal could collapse and render them on an equal or even in some cases inferior footing. The “leopard” from The Noble Lyfe has the face of a man and the body of a beast and, over the course of Streamer’s oration, Baldwin challenges human presumption by creating an assembly of cats that have more rational order than Streamer’s own. I also contend, though I will not argue it here, that Streamer’s experiment “reduces” him to the level of beasts, and that the whole of Beware the Cat make the cats appear more “human” than its men, and man more beast-like than its cats.

Now I want to briefly return to the significance of the final figure in Griffith’s edition of Baldwin’s short fiction. As I mentioned previously, while there may be problems identifying that figure as a hedgehog, a hedgehog plays an important role in the course of Streamer’s oration. As we discover in the second part of Streamer’s narrative in Beware the Cat, a hedgehog becomes a main ingredient in Streamer’s “philter” concocted to allow him to hear the language of cats.

As Streamer begins to desire to “learn and understand” cats, he reports, “And calling to my mind that I had read in Albertus Magnus’ works a way how to be able to understand birds’ voices, I made no more to do, but sought in my library for the little book entitled De Virtutibus Animalium, etc., and greedily read it over” (Baldwin 24). Streamer consults the textual authority of Albertus Magnus, “when I came to ‘Si vis voces avium intelligere, etc.,’ Lord how glad I was. And when I had thoroughly marked the description of the medicine, and considered with myself the nature and power of everything therein and how and upon what it wrought, I devised thereby how, with part of those things and additions of other of like virtue and operation, to make a philter for to serve my purpose” (Baldwin 24).

Within the fiction, Streamer translates Albertus’ recipe, and then systematically manipulates the textual authority through “conjectures” to concoct a purgative meal, ear pillows, and “presciencial pills.” Working from the very textual authority that authorized both the narrator’s and Streamer’s initial interest in the possibility of the language and reason of cats, Steamer directly consults a recipe from Albertus Magnus’ Boke of Secretes, translating it in full within his oration, “If thou wilt understand… the voices of birds or of beasts, take two in thy company, and upon Simon and Jude’s day early in the morning, get thee with hounds into a certain wood, and the first beast that thou meetest take, and prepare with the heart of a fox, and thou shalt have they purpose; and whosoever thou kissest shall understand them as well as thyself” (Baldwin 25)[i]. After translating Albertus in full, Streamer proceeds to reveal how he manipulated textual authority in pursuit of his experiment.

Streamer does not rely solely upon textual authority as says,

But conjecturing that the beast which they should take was an hedgehog (which at that time of year goeth most abroad), and knowing by reason of the flesh thereof was by nature full of natural heat—and therefore, the principal parts being eaten, must needs expulse gross matters and subtile the brain (as by the like powder it engendereth fine blood and helpeth much both against the gout and the cramp. (Baldwin 25-26)[ii].

I will leave discussing this for a later post, but Streamer’s “conjecture” serves as an important interpretive crux in Streamer’s quest and in Baldwin’s fiction. Streamer’s attempt to “expulse gross matters and subtile the brain” ultimately work within the world of Baldwin’s fiction, but the text also reveals the connections and tensions inherent in what I call the paramaterial construction of the mind. For now, I simply want to suggest that the hedgehog plays a key role in Streamer’s experiment and in Baldwin’s fiction. By placing a hedgehog on the verso of the title page, the Griffith edition might key its reader in to a significant detail in the following fiction.

Nearly every critic of Beware the Cat glosses over its second part in favor of the meta-fictional game Baldwin plays frame his narrative in the first part and/ or the collection of beast fables offered in the third and the anti-Catholic sentiments revealed throughout. I contend, although I will need to argue this in a separate post, that the second part of Streamer’s oration plays a complicated game in its deployment and satire of contemporary natural philosophy, and that Baldwin’s Beware the Cat uses contemporary natural philosophy to build in at least two competing explanations of why Streamer’s “experiment” works within the world of Baldwin’s fiction. The hedgehog stands at the center of Streamer’s philter, becoming a main ingredient in his concoction that will puncture the tympanum separating human and non-human worlds.

The conflicted status of the hedgehog in the “philter” Streamer partially constructs from it helps to expose how Beware the Cat complicates the boundary between beast and human as it reveals, in Michel de Montaigne’s terms, “human intellectual pretentions” as frauds. Despite the fact that we will receive a text primarily delivered from the mouth of a central human character, the woodcut underscores that despite the learned human discourse contained within, it, and the human pretention that constructs it, places those discourses at the level of beasts. Even if the third figure is not included because it was supposed to be taken as a hedgehog, the woodcut frames what turns out to be a human oration through the figures of non-human animals.

Again, while the convoluted transmission and circulation of woodcuts proves neither that they had any intended relation to the content of Beware the Cat nor that their inclusion was authorized by Baldwin, examining their relation to the tradition of the bestiary, especially one as peculiar as The Noble Lyfe, exposes the tensions inherent in a tradition that was beginning to feel the need to shore up the hierarchy separating man from beast as well as the problems of authority both of which are central to Beware the Cat.

Regardless of the meaning behind Griffith’s addition of these three figures to Baldwin’s short fiction, I do think there is enough evidence to assert definitively that the figures Griffith prints on the verso of the title page to his edition of Beware the Cat derive from Jan von Doesburg’s editions of Der Dieren Palleys and The Noble Lyfe. While it might just be a way for Griffith to increase the marketability of his edition, their inclusion construct an intertextual bridge between Baldwin’s satire and the discourses of natural philosophy in general and of bestiaries in particular.

Bibliography

Andrewe, Laurence. An Early English Version of Hortus Sanitatis. London: Bernard Quaritch Ltd., 1954.

Baldwin, William. Beware the Cat: The First English Novel. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1995.

A Marvelous Hystory intitulede, Beware the Cat. London: Wylliam Gryffith, 1570.

Bodonius, Stephanus. The Fortresse of Fayth. Trans. Edward Crane. London: Wylliam Griffith, 1570

Bonahue, Edward T. “”I Know the Place and the Persons”: The Play of Textual Frames in Baldwin’s “Beware the Cat”.” Studies in Philology (Summer, 1994): 283-300.

Ko, Trudy. “Backdating the First Edition of William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat Nine Years.” Notes and Queries (2009) 56(1): 33-34.

Montagnana, Bartolomeo. Hortus sanitatis, vel Tractatus de herbis et plantis, de animalibus omnibus et de lapidibus: Tractatus de urinis ac earum speciebus. Johannes Pruess, 1497.

[i] Streamer accurately translates the passage from the Latin edition of Albertus’ Liber Secretorum de Virtutibus Herbarum, Lapidum et Animalium of 1486 rather than the English translation of The Boke of Secretes.

[ii] According to William Bullein’s Bulwarke of Defence, Streamer would probably be incorrect about the “natural heat” of the hedgehog, since “Tese beastes be of cold nature, better for medicine than meate” (Bullein lxxx verso), but they are prescribed for cramps by Pliny, “In contractions of the sinews, it is good to eat the flesh of stock-doves, especially if the same hath bin poudered and kept in salt. The flesh likewise of an Hedgehog is as good for crampes and spasms: as also the ashes of a Weazil” (Holland and Pliny 392). I will return to the significance of the hedgehog in a later post on the natural science of Beware the Cat, but for now want to stress that in general, Streamer’s understanding that “hot things purge the heat” does follow contemporary natural philosophy, and that he does ultimately combine his hedgehog with many other ingredients including many herbs and other ingredients that are “hot.” Despite Streamer’s misguided “conjectures” he does work from a textual authority as the basis of his “experiment” and ultimately produces a “philter” that works. I will return to two different reasons why Baldwin includes this tension in a separate post.

While writing my last post on Ambroise Paré’s monstrous Phantasy, I came across a reference to Genesis 30 that captured my own imagination. Having researched and written before on the passages from Paré and Montaigne I discussed there, I somehow overlooked the bizarre Biblical reference that appeared in each. In previously thinking about representations of the imagination, I never really considered their dual references to Genesis 30. This time through, however, I decided to turn to the Bible to decipher the references, and, in doing so, exposed myself to the fascinating madness of that chapter. Reading Genesis 30 provides me with a new response tothe religious right’s objections to gay marriage in service of “defending traditional marriage.”

The references in Paré and Montaigne pointed me to the second half of Genesis 30 where Jacob uses a little pre-modern genetic engineering to both separate his own flock from Laban’s and increase his stock. Jacob takes the striped cattle and sheep as his own to separate his flock from Laban’s and increases and strengthens his flock by creating white streaked rods which he sets before the stronger cattle and sheep. As I discussed in my last post, this supposedly occurred because an image set before a human or animal affected its imagination, stamping the influence of the perceived object upon the fetus in the womb.

While Jacob’s system of makeshift genetic engineering has some interesting consequences for my study of the Phantasy, I became even more intrigued by what I found in the first half of this chapter with its unconventional marriages and the mention of Reuben’s mandrakes. While I knew the Bible was full of polygamy and weird sexual relationships, and, while I remembered pausing when combing through medieval and early modern herbals to laugh at the woodcuts and engravings of mandrakes, I wasn’t quite prepared for the weird-ass way they converge in Genesis 30.

Jacob, married to two sisters (who, incidentally, are his cousins), Leah and Rachel, can conceive children with the elder, Leah, but not with the younger, Rachel. As a result, Rachel envies her sister’s fruitfulness and the relationship with her husband the ability to produce children entails. Out of frustration, Rachel offers Jacob one of her maids as a surrogate, and the maid gives Jacob children. As a result, Leah is apparently on the outs with her husband, as Jacob, presumably, is too busy getting it on with Rachel’s maid to pay her any mind, but here is where the marital relations take an even more bizarre turn. Leah’s son, Reuben, goes to a field where he finds a bunch of mandrakes.

: Hortus Sanitatis’ female mandrake

: Hortus Sanitatis’ male mandrake

In herbals, the mysterious mandrake accumulated all types of miraculous properties and stories. In early texts, the mandrake, which came in male and female varieties, supposedly had a human form, grew from the matter of dead bodies under gallows, and screamed when pulled from the ground. At least by the sixteenth century, herbals began to debunk such myths. Even these mandrake skeptics continued to assert, however, both the mandrake’s poisonous nature as well as its use to promote women’s fertility.The mandrake’s supposed boost to the fertility system helps explain why they attain such significance in the sexual drama that unfolds in Jacob’s houses. After Reuben picks the mandrakes and returns them to his mother, Rachel sees the mandrakes and desires them. Leah, understandably upset that Rachel already has her man and now wants her son’s mandrakes, tells her no. As Rachel has a bad case of mandrake envy, she offers a night with Jacob in exchange for Reuben’s irresistible mandrakes, and Leah, missing her husband, agrees to the deal. Rachel, once Jacob returns home, tells him of the arrangement, and, as a result, Jacob once again shacks up with Leah, producing yet another child.

The mandrake’s link to fertility probably helps explain why such intra-familial tensions emerge regarding Reuben’s find. Of Reuben’s mandrakes, William Turner argues,

…the sede of Mandrag taken in drynk/ clengeth the mother/ and… it appereth that Rachel knowyng the nature of the fruyte of Mandrag…/ for thys intent/ desyred to have the fruyte of Mandrag/ that she might clenge her mother therewith/ and thereby myght be made the fitter te conceyve chylde herselfe as well as Lia her syster/ and Silfa her mayd dyd. (47).

The mandrake’s seed, Turner contends, purges and cleans the womb. While Turner explains that the mandrake’s properties underlie Rachel’s desire for them, he does not address the way in which they become a commodity traded for sex within Genesis 30.

This example of intra-marital prostitution, with Rachel pimping out Jacob for a bundle of mandrakes, made me wonder about the religious right’s push to “defend traditional marriage” and the outcries that gay marriage will “destroy the sanctity of marriage.” I’m left wondering what type of Biblical “marriage” they’re talking about in addition to what their definition of “sanctity” really is. In this one chapter, we find incest (Leah and Rachel are Jacob’s uncle’s daughters), we find polygamy (Jacob is married to Leah, Rachel, and an assortment of maids), and we find intra-marital prostitution (Leah pays for a night with Jacob in mandrakes). God might have made Adam and Eve, but Genesis continues with some very, by the religious right’s standards, unconventional and “untraditional” marriages.

People have a long history of shaping the Bible and objects in accordance with their understanding of the world. As Katharine Maus reminded me, Shakespeare’s Shylock deploys Jacob’s sheep to defend the practice of usury in The Merchant of Venice 1.3.. Shylock justifies his practice by comparing his own practice to Jacob’s; twisting scripture to suit his own interests and defend the forbidden practice. Like the critics of same-sex marriage, he pulls one example from the Bible while ignoring the rest of the text. The practice resembles the “idle drones” who John Gerard claims spend their time

carving the rootes of Brionie, forming them to the shape of men & women; which falsifying practice hath confirmed the errour amongst the simple and unlearned people, who have taken them upon their report to be true Mandrakes. (281).

Just as Shylock perverts scripture and just as shysters fashioned other plants into mandrake-people, some who claim to take a Biblical stance on marriage carve Genesis in a way to confirm their own biases. Fashioning their own scriptural “Brionie” into the shape of “traditional marriage,” they pass off and report them as “true [Biblical] Mandrakes,” only because they find themselves uncomfortable with a Man[ in ]drag.

If Genesis provides the model for what marriage looks like, then perhaps we should turn to the later chapters to reveal what “traditional marriage” really means. Until I hear the argument from an incestuous polygamist who breeds striped sheep using magic rods, I am inclined to question their “literal” understanding of the Bible and their understanding of Biblical marriage. Sure, proponents of taking a Biblical stance on marriage might dismiss Genesis 30’s incest, polygamy, maid swapping, and mandrake funded prostitution as part of the old law overturned by the appearance of Christ, but when I hear people “defending marriage” against the gay menace by referring to the “sanctity of marriage,” my response will simply be, “remember Reuben’s mandrakes!”

…Then again, they will probably respond to me as Antonio did Shylock: “the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” (Merchantof Venice I.iii. 94), but, yet again, I suppose I could do the same since

An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath! (I.iii. 95-98).

Bibliography

Gerard, John. The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. London: John Norton, 1597.

Montagnana, Bartolomeo. Hortus sanitatis, vel Tractatus de herbis et plantis, de animalibus omnibus et de lapidibus: Tractatus de urinis ac earum speciebus. Johannes Pruess, 1497.

Shakespeare, William, and Stephen Greenblatt. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition. Norton, 1997.

Turner, William. The First and Seconde Partes of the Herbal of William Turner. Collen: [The heirs of] Arnold Birckman, 1568.

I have been discussing the paramaterial objects of the medieval and early modern mind as if they paradoxically took part in both the material nature of external objects and the immaterial abstraction of the soul. I will have more to say about the strange positioning and representation of those objects in later posts, but here I want to discuss a few specific peculiar examples from early modern natural philosophy and anatomy that exposes the force those objects supposedly possess. The examples I have chosen for today’s post mainly come from a chapter of Ambroise Paré’s “Of Monsters and Prodigies” devoted to “monsters which take their cause and shape by imagination” (Paré 978). In his examples in this section, Paré explores the relationship of the Phantasy to the womb and details several examples in which he thought external objects affect the development of the fetus in utero.

Paré warns of the dangers to the formation of a fetus within women who possess a powerful Phantasy, attributing some forms of physical deformity in children to the mother’s perception and/or imagination during conception. The first example, pulled from Heliodorus, is of Persina, “Queene of Aethiopia,” who, married to a fellow Ethiopian,

had a daughter of a white complexion, because in the embraces of her husband, by which she proved with childe, she earnestly fixed her eye and mind upon the picture of the faire Andromeda standing opposite to her. (978).

Paré explains Persina’s “daughter of white complexion” as a result of the mother’s “earnestly fix[ing] her eye and mind” upon a “picture of the faire Andromeda.” The image of Andromeda, while Persina is in the “embraces of her husband,” prints its influence upon the fetus formed in the womb.

Of special note, the woodcut accompanying this portion of Paré’s “Of Monsters” includes, not the white child born to Ethiopian royalty, but rather a black child. The error might simply result from copying a similar block from another text, but, in a book and chapter devoted to monstrous forms and deformities, its inclusion here casts the woodcut in a particularly racist light. It would seem that doing so associates skin-color with monstrosity. While one should not ignore the racist undertones of an account that seems to contrast the “fair Andromeda” to the “Aethiopian” parents or the misogyny which underlies the impulse to blame a child’s deformity upon the mother, one should also attend to the implications of such an account upon our understanding of popular representations of the Phantasy and its objects.

So what does this example mean for the representation of perception? Persina’s case implies that visual phenomena in conjunction with a strong Phantasy can alter the physical body. External objects or images, finding their way through the external senses, not only shape the mother’s Phantasy, but also, in a strong imagination, can shape the form of the unborn. As Paré explains earlier,

the force of the imagination… bee so powerfull in us…it may alter the body of them that imagine, [the ancients] soon persuaded themselves that the faculty which formeth the infant may be led and governed by the firme and strong cogitation of the Parents begetting them (often deluded by nocturnall and deceitfull apparitions) or by the mother conceiving them, and so that which is strongly conceived in the mind, imprints the force into the infant conceived in the wombe. (978).

While Paré displaces the ideas about these phenomena onto the “ancients,” he also reiterates their conception of the Phantasy’s relationship to the womb and to a developing fetus by providing multiple examples without ever questioning their reliability.

In Thomas Johnson’s translation at least, something strongly imagined can “imprint” its image onto the conceived “infant.” Just as the visible species was thought to “imprint” or “impress” itself on the crystalline humour, the species or phantasm in the Phantasy was thought to “imprint” itself on the form of the unborn. In Paré, looking at an image, even an artificial image, affects the material body in a corporeal way. The strong Phantasy, so taken by the image it receives, allows that image to penetrate and then permeate the body to such an extent that it alters the form of the developing fetus. In this instance, Paré focuses on the external form, but would also involve altering the humoral temperament involved, according to some sixteenth-century Galenists, in producing “blackness.” The image shapes not only Persina’s Phantasy, producing physical changes within her, but also shapes the external and internal form during conception.

Paré draws another example from “Damascene [who] reports that he saw a maide hairy like a Beare, which had that deformity by no other cause or occasion than that her mother earnestly beheld, in the very instant of receiving and conceiving the seed, the image of St. John covered with a camells skinne” (978). Probably born with what today’s science would diagnose as hypertrichosis, the child Damascene mentions grew into a hairy woman as depicted in the woodcut accompanying the text. Like the previous example, an image produces the deformity in a child through its power on an affective Phantasy. Whereas with in the previous example, Andromeda’s whiteness passes through the Phantasy and imprints upon the child, here, St. John the Baptist’s “camells skinne” coverings generates a hairy maid.

In both examples, an artificial image, mediated through a mother’s strong Phantasy, alters the body of the unborn, but, in order to bring the external form of the child into line with the perceived or imagined object, it must also alter the unseen aspects of the fetus. The artificial image, a painting or statue, is enough for the Phantasy to work from, but to produce its results, early modern natural philosophers could have explained how those external forms affect the inner body. While Paré does not go into such explanations, Galenic humoralism could be deployed to explain such miraculous internal effects that led to changes in external form.

While Paré registers some hesitation in this chapter, noting that he has “read” or “heard” such stories, he concludes by countering some who think the infant can only be affected early in pregnancy, recommending that pregnant women avoid such images until they are brought to term.

There are some who thinke the infant once formed in the wombe, which is done at the utmost within two & forty dayes after the conception, is in no danger of the mothers imagination, neither of the seed of the father which is cast into the womb; because when it hath got a perfect figure, it cannot be altered with any external form of things; which whether it be true, or no, is not here to be enquired of: truly I think it best to keep the woman, all the time she goeth with childe, from the sight of such shapes and figures. (979).

So, even if he appears to take a skeptical stance towards his sources earlier in the chapter, he continues to stress the importance of keeping pregnant women from such pictures and images.

In his essay, “The Force of the Imagination,” Michel de Montaigne also refers to similar examples even if he attributes them to different details, locales, and time periods.

Magitians are but ill respondents for me. So it is, that by experience wee see women to transferre divers markers of their fantasies, unto children they beare in their wombs: witnes she that brought forth a Blacke-a-more. There was also presented unto Charles king of Bohemia, an Emperour, a young girle, borne about Pisa, all shagd and hairy over and over, which her mother said, to have beene conceived so, by reason of an image of Saint John Baptist, that was so painted, and hung over her bed. That the like is in beasts, is witnessed by Jacobs sheepe, and also by partridges and hares, that grow white by the snow upon mountaines. (Montaigne 102).

While Montaigne goes on later to complicate the citing of examples in his essays, he contrasts these accounts with those of “magitians.” Whereas Paré called it an “imprint[ing],” Montaigne refers to the process as a “transferr[ing] of diverse markers” from the Phantasy to the fetus.

Paré, like Montaigne, also makes reference to Jacob’s sheep from Genesis 30 to provide scriptural proof of the imagination’s influence on the generation of animals. As Paré has it:

which thing many thinke to be confirmed by Moses, because he tells that Jacob encreased and bettered the part of the sheepe granted to him by Laban, his wives father, by putting roddes, having the barke in part pulled off, finely stroaked with white and greene, in the places where they used to drinke, especially at the time they engendered, that the representation apprehended in the conception, should be presently impressed in the young; for the force of imagination hath so much power over the infant, that it sets upon it the notes or characters of the thing conceived. (Paré 978).

While the reference provides some scriptural sanction of the ideas offered in each text, the passage also once again exposes the way in which the Phantasy challenged the distinction between human and non-human animals. As Jacob’s sheep grew to resemble the striped rods which he placed before them, the corporeal component of human Phantasy caused human fetuses to resemble perceived or imagined objects.

Additionally, the description “of monsters and prodigies” offered by Paré, Montaigne, and their classical sources blur the line between animal and human by combining the form of the human with the forms of animals. Throughout Paré’s book, for example, he provides descriptions and images of calf-men, dog-men, pig-men, goat-men, colts with a man’s face, and women who give birth to snakes or dogs. One wonders, with an explanatory system dependent upon reserving reason or an intellectual soul for non-human animals, where these “monsters” fall with respect to their rationality. While the cases in the chapter on deformities caused by the imagination or the chapter on deformities caused by too much or too little seed might imply that the prodigies described there were mostly human with aspects of another form, the images of human and non-human animal hybrids muddy the waters. It is never clear whether these hybrid creatures are supposedly limited to the imagination of non-human animals or if their minds extend beyond it.

Paré’s last example in this chapter of “Of Monsters and Prodigies” concerns “an infant with a face like a Frog,” turning from ancient testimony to testimony from the early sixteenth century:

Anno Dom. 1517. in the parish of Kings-wood, in the forrest Biera, in the way to Fontain-Bleau, there was a monster borne, with the face of a Frog, being seen by John Bellanger, Chirurgian to the Kings Engineers, before the Justices of the towne of Harmoy; principally John Bribon the Kings procurator in that place. The fathers name was Amadaeus the Little, his mothers, Magdalene Sarbucata, who troubled with a feaver, by a womans perswasion, held a quicke frogge in her hand untill it died, she came thus to bed with her husband and conceived; Bellanger, a man of an acute wit, thought this was the cause of the monstrous deformity of the childe.

This example differs from the previous examples in that the woman “held a quicke frogge in her hand until it died” rather than looking upon a picture, image, or object. While not discussed in the main body of the chapter’s text, it is still included within the chapter proper, but the separation might underscore its reliability as opposed to the stories of ancients. Paré is also in a position to provide more specificity and detail. With the sketchy details of the previous examples, Paré overloads this description with dates, locations, names, and relationships.

The explanation, given credibility through these details and through the diagnosis of a reliable physician, shows that the species and its influence was not solely limited to the visual. Here, touching the frog during the act of generation purportedly “imprints” its form upon the fetus in a similar fashion. As I have suggested elsewhere, because the discrete sense impressions and species were reassembled by the Phantasy, the mimetic object produced within the spirits of the brain retained all of their aspects. In this case, the touch itself produces tactile as well as a visible transformation in the fetus.

The resulting “infant with a face like a Frog” shows evidence of the transferability of properties and the fluidity among the impressions offered by the five external senses with respect to the species or phantasm. Perceiving and strongly conceiving of an object, because the phantasm retained information from all of the senses, could produce effects beyond the visual, the tactile, the auditory, the odor, and the gustatory discretely. Instead, the resulting infant, stamped with the form, looks like a frog even though the mother only touched a frog during conception.

The question remains how these “monsters” fit within a hierarchical system designed to maintain human superiority over non-human animals. While they become human-like or beast-like, it is never really addressed whether these “monsters” operate with a human animal’s capacity for reason or not. Despite the fact that I have not found an example describing the sensitive soul of such reported “monsters,” their hybrid natures call into question the rigid demarcation continually stressed between human and non-human animals.

Additionally, such examples link women more thoroughly to corporeality through the Phantasy’s power over the formation of children. While Paré acknowledges that a strong conceit in men as well as in women, his examples typically account for deformities and “monsters” through the woman’s Phantasy. By associating women with the Phantasy and its objects, such examples, by extension, associate women with animals whose internal life was dominated by the imagination rather than remaining under the strict control and guidance of human reason.

The explanation for such events was attributed to the special “sympathy” between the brain and the “matrix,” but the implication is that the materials of the brain, the species or phantasms they contained, retained some “tast of the matter” (more on this in a separate post) that when considered in an overactive imagination could alter matter itself within the womb. While others have discussed the gendered implications of such phenomena, especially Montaigne’s suggestion that the Phantasy could contribute to spontaneous sex changes, less emphasis has been placed on what those effects mean for the understanding of mental concepts and their relation to the external world. That the species of a particular entity could exert such an influence on the paramaterial spirits suggest that the contents of mind were more than merely and incorporeal mental phenomenon when charged with an overactive imagination. The same holds true for images purportedly found in the hearts of the particularly devout, where images were found in the heart of God, Christ, or the name of God. An image graven on the material surface of the heart could show that spiritual matters were so consistently on the mind that the spirits of the devout could physically manifest those images within the very matter of the heart.

The species and phantasms can also be transported to and have an influence on other parts of the body since they are “stamped” within the spirits and the Phantasy, and can dwell in the heart and “imprint” or “transferre diverse markers” upon a fetus within the womb. The potential of images within the brain to generate material effects on the body, underscore not only the fact that the mind and body were considered more interconnected, coextensive, and coexpressive, but also reveal that the products of the mind were granted a paramaterial force; their “forms” could influence and “shape” matter generated within the body. A species or phantasm in a powerful Phantasy could potentially inform and stamp its influence on the matter forming in the womb just as much as those species could be stamped within the matter of the brain.

Bibliography

Montaigne, Michel de. Essays: Volume One. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1942.

Paré, Ambroise. The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey. London: Th[omas] Cotes and R[obert] Young, 1634.

In his Microcosmographia, Helkiah Crooke, drawing upon and adapting Placentinus, takes issue with the traditional hierarchy of the external senses in the opening gambit of book eight’s “Dilucidation or Exposition of the Controuersies belonging to the Senses.” Whereas it was common practice in early modern anatomy and natural philosophy to account vision the “noblest sense,” Crooke reverses the standard hierarchy and declare the superiority of touch. I will have more to say about Crooke’s rearrangement of the hierarchy and of his description of the external and internal senses later, but wanted to share an unusual passage from the description of the sense of smell. While the position of the sense of smell does not change in Crooke’s reversed hierarchy, it is the only sense which is provided with extended examples or histories to explain its position within the hierarchy.

The nose and eye in Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia.

In a passage marginally noted as “The nose doth much beautifie the face,” Crooke includes the following odd anecdote:

The beauty that is added to the face of man by this organ of smelling (wee meane the Nose) is very great, I will giue you a pregnant instance therof in an example or two worth our remembrance. First, of a yong man who being adiudged to be hanged and the executioner at hand, a certaine maide suborned by his friends and quaintly dressed and set out, goes vnto the Iudges and makes supplication for his life, requiring him for her husband, well; she ouercame the Iudges: This done, the guilty yong man being set at liberty and coming from the gallowes vnto the maide attired and dressed in such costly ornaments, he presently cast his eye vppon her Nose which indeed was very deformed, and instantly cries out that he had rather haue beene hanged then freed vppon condition of vndergoing so deformed a choyce in his Matrimony. (650).

The joke hinges upon the fact that death is superior to marriage to a woman with a deformed nose, no matter how costly her attire, but one wonders (from within the logic of the joke) whether the judges released the man not because of the maid’s supplication, but rather for the fact that marriage to one with such a deformed nose proved a punishment. The attention to both the dress and to the shape of the maid’s nose genders the importance Crooke grants to the olfactory organ.

The gendered implications become more apparent with Crooke’s second extended example. While the section briefly mentions other examples found in Horace and Virgil, Crooke’s second extended “history” reads:

It also a very memorable example, (for we may mingle things thus holy with prophane) which we reade in our English Chronicles concerning one Ebba an Abbesse in a certaine Nunry, who cut of her own Nose & the Noses of her Nuns, that being so deformed they might auoyd the hateful lust of the Danes; taking it for granted that the Nose was the chief ornament of the face.

As with the previous example, the nose gains significance in a gendered way since female beauty and desirability depends upon a well shaped or, at the very least, existing nose. Through Crooke’s emphasis, the “chief ornament of the face” appears chiefly important to the ornamentation of the female face.

Crooke additionally notes that

hence it was that in antient time, when they would put any man to great disgrace and ignominy, or disappoint them of all hope of attaining to any degree of honour, or the gouernement of a State; they cut off their Eares and Noses. Yea those which had such deformed Noses were neither admitted to any Priestly function nor Imperiall office.

While he does turn towards the importance of a man’s nose, his specific extended examples focus their attention on the beauty of women and the offices held by men. Women’s bodies are used to describe the importance of the nose a chief ornament of beauty, whereas, for men, the loss of a nose signifies and displays a loss of honor.

Two things stand out in Crooke’s description of the nose’s importance. The first is that, in this section at least, only the nose’s position within the hierarchy requires support through extended examples, and, second, that those extended examples and histories are gendered. Needless to say, something is rotten in Crooke’s gendered representation of the olfactory organ.

Crooke, Helkiah. Mikrokosmographia a Description of the Body of Man. [London]: Printed by William Iaggard. 1615. Early English Books Online.

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