Res Obscura

Why Are There So Many 17th Century Paintings of Monkeys Getting Drunk?

2017-05-04T01:40:00.000-05:00

One cold Friday in 1660, Samuel Pepys encountered two unpleasant surprises. "At home found all well," he wrote in his diary, "but the monkey loose, which did anger me, and so I did strike her." Later that night, a candlemaker named Will Joyce (the good-for-nothing husband of one of Pepys's cousins) stumbled in on Pepys and his aunt while "drunk, and in a talking vapouring humour of his state, and I know not what, which did vex me cruelly." Presumably, Pepys didn't resort to blows this time around.

The two objects of Pepys' scorn that day, his disobedient pet monkey and his drunken cousin-in-law, were not as distant as one might think. Monkeys stood in for intoxicated humans on a surprisingly frequent basis in 17th century culture. In early modern paintings, tippling primates can frequently be seen in human clothing, smoking tobacco, playing cards, rolling dice, and just plain getting wasted.

Why?

One of several "monkeys in a tavern" paintings produced by the Dutch artist David Teniers (1610-1690).

The most simple answer is that these paintings are the early modern version of searching for "dog who thinks he's a human" on YouTube. They're funny. Paintings of intoxicated monkeys were actually a sub-set of a larger genre of paintings known as Singerie, which poked fun at occupations ranging from drunkard to painter by portraying the participants as frivolous simians.

There's clearly something universal about the basic idea of these works. As anyone who has read Aesop's fables or a watched a Disney movie can attest, depictions of animals with human characteristics allow us to satirize or mythologize ordinary human encounters. Thinking about animals as personalities that can recite poetry, hatch political schemes, or get drunk at a tavern allows us to see our own behavior and that of our fellow humans through a slightly off-kilter filter, as if we were aliens observing a different species.

The Crow King and his Councillors, from a 13th century manuscript of Kalila wa Dimna, the Arabic version of the Pachatantra animal stories originally from India.

In these 16th and 17th century European depictions of monkeys, however, I think there's something more specific going on.

Monkeys in these paintings are almost always shown with a tobacco pipe or wine cup close at hand, and they’re often brandishing the same types of items displayed in a popular series of images (discussed in a previous post) showing a foolish young man being cleansed of his materialistic desires via alchemical medicine: playing cards, backgammon boards, fencing swords, ostrich feather caps.

Kwakzalver [Quack] selling a patent medicine in the marketplace, by Pieter van der Borcht, ca. late 16th century.

In other images, monkeys are also shown in the guise of alchemists and drug sellers, poking fun at the pretensions of these two professions that were carving out an ever-greater economic and social role for themselves as exotic drugs from the Indies became global commodities.

So what is going on with these images showing drunken and drug-selling monkeys? I think that what we're missing when we simply see these as a form of social satire is that these are also paintings about addiction. Desire is a dominant theme in these works: monkeys are shown jealously squabbling over piles of tobacco, or even, in the example below, hoarding tulip flowers during the height of the Dutch tulipmania (they appear to be using the profits to get drunk, in the upper left).

Allegorie der Tulipomanie [Allegory of Tulip Mania], by Jan Brueghel the Younger, 1640s.

The concept of addiction had not yet taken on anything like its modern form in this period. The word existed, but it simply meant an inclination or tendency: one could be "addicted to horses" or "addicted to song," etc. But the 17th century was a world in which distilled alcoholic spirits were still a relatively new invention, and one in which such addictive substances as tobacco, coffee and opium had become available to most global consumers within living memory of the people creating and buying these paintings.

In other words, these paintings are working through the idea that newly-available psychoactive substances -- and, perhaps, material objects as well -- could dehumanize those who consumed them, reducing them to an animalistic level. Such consumers, it is implied, had moved down a step on the chain of being, having lost their powers of reason and been reduced to creatures that were "sentient" in the original sense of the word: unable to think, and content simply to feel. They had moved from the human realm to that of the "brute beasts" in the schema for hierarchically ordering nature that medieval and early modern thinkers had inherited from Aristotle.

A depiction of the "Great Chain of Being" from a 1512 edition of Ramon Lull's De ascensu & descensu intellectus (1305). The steps are labelled, in ascending order, "Stone," "Fire," "Plant," "Brute," "Human," "Heaven," "Angel," and "God."

We see this argument in some written texts of the period as well. For King James, writing in his Counterblaste to Tobacco of 1604, the fashion for imitating the foolish novelties of lands “beyond the Seas” made English tobacco smokers “like Apes, counterfeiting the manners of others, to our owne destruction.” The adoption of tobacco smoking in Europe was not simply an issue of public health, but a spiritual crisis. Because he knew that tobacco was an element in indigenous American spirituality, James believed that Europeans who consumed it risked transforming not only their bodies, but their minds and souls, too.

But there's an alternative narrative running through these paintings as well. It epitomizes the ambivalence that has long surrounded intoxicating substances, in many cultures and in many times.

These monkeys seem to be having fun.

Die tabakrauchende Affenrunde [The Tobacco Smoking Monkeys], attributed to Ferdinand van Kessel, 17th century.

Singerie with smoking pipe, David Teniers the Younger, 17th century.

Monkeys Feasting by Breughel the Younger.

Monkey soldiers taking a cat prisoner, Sebastian Vrancx, early 17th century.

You can find more images of singerie paintings in an online gallery at the Public Domain Review. Here's a particular favorite:

On the Women’s Petition Against Coffee of 1674

2017-04-08T12:05:00.001-05:00

“That Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE.”

Imagine a space where you can bet on bear fights, warm your legs by the fire, witness public dissections (human and animal), solicit prostitutes (male and female), buy and sell stocks, purchase tulips or pornographic pamphlets, observe the activities of spies, dissidents, merchants, and swindlers, and then read your mail, delivered directly to your table. The thread tying it all together is a new drug from the Muslim world—black, odiferous, frightening, bewitching—called “coffee.”

The seventeenth-century coffee shop was an experimental social space whose closest correlate in the modern world is not a place at all: it's the Internet. The main characteristic of seventeenth-century coffee houses was the diversity of experiences and activities they harbored. As Steve Shapin once put it, a visitor to an early modern coffee house could “witness the dissection of a dolphin, the display of an elephant or a rhinoceros, or an exhibition of a child with three penises and a woman with three breasts,” then proceed to take a bath, purchase life insurance, and “buy books, paintings, or whale oil at a candle auction.”

Also like the Internet, the early modern coffee shop was deeply paradoxical. It was a haven for free speech but also a target for the nascent surveillance state. It was a place where different social classes mixed but also one that enforced rigid gender rules: if they weren’t serving drinks or working as prostitutes, women typically weren’t allowed.

At the center of the paradox stood coffee itself, a drink that today seems utterly benign (and perhaps even beneficial), but which many early modern Europeans looked on with deep suspicion. For one thing, it was a drug with deep roots in the Muslim world. It was spread in large part by Jewish or Armenian immigrants from the Ottoman Empire. And it had distinctive sensory and psychoactive characteristics which many Europeans—familiar with alcohol but not such much with stimulants—found bewildering.

Perhaps the most famous objection to coffee came from an anonymous source. “The Womens Petition Against Coffee,” a pamphlet issued in London in 1674, is among the most entertaining and vividly-written historical texts that I know of. Like The School of Venus, a 1680 sex manual whose cover displays a group of women crowded around a dildo-merchant, there is something jarringly frank about the petition that I find both funny and illuminating. The basic argument is that coffee was making the men of London unable to satisfy their wives in bed. Here’s a sample of the language it uses:

We have read, how a Prince of Spain was forced to make a Law, that Men should not Repeat the Grand Kindness to their Wives, above NINE times a night; but Alas! Alas! Those forwards Days are gone… For the continual flipping of this pitiful drink is enough to bewitch Men of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpiece-points without a Charm. It renders them that use it as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel'd as Envy, or an old meager Hagg over-ridden by an Incubus. They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears.

In the end, the petition calls for a ban on coffee among men below the age of “three score” (sixty) and encourages the drinking of “lusty” beer, “Cock-Ale,” and chocolate instead of “that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE,” which, in the pamphlet’s memorable phrasing, has made London’s men “run the hazard of being Cuckol'd by Dildo's.”

To me, the “Womens Petition” is one of the representative texts of the era that historians call the Restoration, the three decades of experimentation with sex, drugs, social relations and literary forms that followed the religious fanaticism and warfare of Cromwell’s Interregnum. Among other things, this is the period when women were finally allowed to act on public theater stages (previously, as Shakespeare in Love depicts, women’s roles in plays were performed by adolescent boys in drag). It is also the period when female writers like Aphra Behn began to win widespread recognition in print, and when the earliest multinational corporations, like the English East India Company, became militarized and pseudo-governmental forces in regions like coastal India and West Africa, driving the dark side of global capitalism with their booming trade in drugs, textiles, and slaves.

In other words, it was a time not unlike our own, marked by globalization, debates about human rights, political upheaval, new drugs, new technologies, and new experiences. So we shouldn’t be too surprised that a place like the coffee house and a drink like coffee elicited some serious backlash. What is surprising, to me, is that the backlash was itself so experimental, raucous, and ultimately light-hearted. The petition (which many scholars suspect was actually written by a man, although this is impossible to prove) is basically a work of humor, even though it does present an exaggerated version of a position that many early opponents of coffee actually believed in.

In the end, the Streisand effect was in play in the 17^th century just like the 21^st: the public outcry against coffee’s “heathen” Turkish origins and its strange physical effects also served to increase public interest in it. In fact, as Brian Cowan points out, the joking tone of these pamphlets may have aided the spread of coffee: “by self-consciously exaggerating the sober warnings of contemporary medical opinion, the texts actually deflated the gravity of those concerns.”

One is reminded here of the gently mocking tone used by the natural philosopher Robert Hooke in his report to the Royal Society on the effects of a (to him) exotic drug known as bangue or Indian hemp, better known today as Cannabis indica: “there is no Cause of Fear, tho' possibly there may be of Laughter.”

But why, if both drugs were available to English consumers and both escaped outright condemnation, did coffee triumph whereas cannabis remained obscure in Europe until the 19^th century? More on that soon.

Painting of a London coffee house signed "A.S. 1668," via Wikimedia Commons.

Here's the full text of the “Women’s Petition Against Coffee”:

THE WOMENS PETITION AGAINST COFFEE

Representing to Publick Consideration the Grand Inconveniencies accruing to their Sex from the Excessive Use of that drying, Enfeebling Liquor. Presented to the Right Honorable the Keepers of the Liberty of Venus. By a Well-willer

London, Printed 1674.

To the Right Honorable the Keepers of the Liberties of Venus; The Worshipful Court of Female Assistants, &c.

The Humble Petitions and Address of Several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women, Languishing in Extremity of Want.

The Occasion of which Insufferable Disaster, after a furious Enquiry, and Discussion of the Point by the Learned of the Faculty, we can Attribute to nothing more than the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Cripple our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.

For the continual flipping of this pitiful drink is enough to bewitch Men of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpiece-points without a Charm. It renders them that use it as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel'd as Envy, or an old meager Hagg over-ridden by an Incubus. They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears: They pretend 'twill keep them Waking, but we find by scurvy Experience, they sleep quietly enough after it. A Betrothed Queen might trust her self a bed with one of them, without the nice Caution of a sword between them: nor can call all the Art we use revive them from this Lethargy, so unfit they are for Action, that like young Train-band-men when called upon Duty, their Ammunition is wanting; peradventure they Present, but cannot give Fire, or at least do but flash in the Pan, instead of doing executions.

Nor let any Doating, Superstitious Catos shake their Goatish Beards, and task us of Immodesty for this Declaration, since 'tis a publick Grievance, and cries alound for Reformation. Weight and Measure, 'tis well known, should go throughout the world, and there is no torment like Famishment. Experience witnesses our Damage, and Necessity (which easily supersedes all the Laws of Decency) justifies our complaints: For can any Woman of Sense or Spirit endure with Patience, that when priviledg'd by Legal Ceremonies, she approaches the Nuptial Bed, expecting a Man that with Sprightly Embraces, should Answer the Vigour of her Flames, she on the contrary should only meat A Bedful of Bones, and hug a meager useless Corpse rendred as sapless as a Kixe, and dryer than a Pumice-Stone, by the perpetual Fumes of Tobacco, and bewitching effects of this most pernitious COFFEE, where by Nature is Enfeebled, the Off-spring of our Mighty Ancestors Dwindled into a Succession of Apes and Pigmies: and

---The Age of Man

Now Cramp't into an Inch, that was a Span.

Nor is this (though more than enough!) All the ground of our Complaint: For besides, we have reason to apprehend and grow Jealous, That Men by frequenting these Stygian Tap-houses will usurp on our Prerogative of tattling, and soon learn to exceed us in Talkativeness: a Quality wherein our Sex has ever Claimed preheminence: For here like so many Frogs in a puddle, they sup muddy water, and murmur insignificant notes till half a dozen of them out-babble an equal number of us at a Gossipping, talking all at once in Confusion, and running from point to point as insensibly, and swiftly, as ever the Ingenous Pole-wheel could run divisions on the Base-viol; yet in all their prattle every one abounds in his own sense, as stiffly as a Quaker at the late Barbican Dispute, and submits to the Reasons of no other mortal: so that there being neither Moderator nor Rules observ'd, you mas as soon fill a Quart pot with Syllogismes, as profit by their Discourses.

Certainly our Countrymens pallates are become as Fantastical as their Brains; how ellse is't possible they should Apostatize from the good old primitve way of Ale-drinking, to run a whoring after such variety of distructive Foreign Liquors, to trifle away their time, scald their Chops, and spend their Money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking, nauseous Puddle-water: Yet (as all Witches have their Charms) so this ugly Turskish Enchantress by certain Invisible Wyres attracts both Rich and Poor; so that those that have scarece Twopence to buy their Children Bread, must spend a penny each evening in this Insipid Stuff: Nor can we send one of our Husbands to Call a Midwife, or borrow a Glister-pipe, but he must stay an hour by the way drinking his two Dishes, & two Pipes.

At these Houses (as at the Springs in Afric) meet all sorts of Animals, whence follows the production of a thousand Monster Opinions and Absurdities; yet for being dangerous to Government, we dare to be their Compurgators, as well knowing them to be too tame and too talkative to make any desperate Politicians: For though they may now and then destroy a Fleet, or kill ten thousand of the French, more than all the Confederates can do, yet this is still in their politick Capacities, for by their personal valour they are scarce fit to be of the Life-guard to a Cherry-tree: and therefore, though they frequently have hot Contests about most Important Subjects; as what colour the Red Sea is of; whether the Great Turk be a Lutheran or a Calvinist; who Cain's Father in Law was, &c., yet they never fight about them with any other save our Weapon, the Tongue.

Tom Farthing, Tom Farthing,
where has thou been, Tom Farthing?
Twelve a Clock e're you come in,
Two a clock ere you begin

Wherefore the Premises considered, and to the end that our Just Rights may be restored, and all the Ancient Priviledges of our Sex preserved inviolable; That our Husbands may give us some other Testimonial of their being Men, besides their Beards and wearing of empty Pantaloons: That they no more run the hazard of being Cuckol'd by Dildo's: But returning to the good old strengthening Liquors of our Forefathers; that Natures Exchequer may once again be replenisht, and a Race of Lusty Here's begot, able by their Atchievements, to equal the Glories of our Ancesters.

We Humbly Pray, That you our Trusty Patrons would improve your Interest, that henceforth the Drinking COFFEE may on severe penalties be forbidden to all Persons under the Age of Threescore; and that instead thereof, Lusty nappy Beer, Cock-Ale, Cordial Canaries, Restoring Malago's, and Back-recruiting Chochole be Recommended to General Use, throughout the Utopian Territories.

In hopes of which Glorious Reformation, your Petitioners shall readily Prostrate themselves, and ever Pray, &c.

FINIS.

You can read the “Men’s Response” here.

How to Write the History of Science?

2016-02-02T21:21:00.005-06:00

Metallurgist testing a new alloy from New Frontiers in Science (1964), a vintage textbook I bought from a retired science teacher in Austin, TX a few years ago.

Is the history of science fundamentally different from other kinds of history? The composition of PhD programs would seem to suggest that academia believes the answer to this is yes, because many of the world's leading universities have carved out separate, standalone departments devoted to the field. And I suspect most scientists would agree as well - after all, the desire to become a scientist is often powerfully linked to a belief in science as an historical force, as something which has shaped our present and will improve our future.

However, the question of why the history of science is different is a difficult one to agree on. Scientists themselves hold widely divergent views on the history and future of their own discipline - not just on a big-picture level, but also in regards to concrete details relating to the authorship and nature of scientific discoveries. Virtually everyone agrees that the CRISPR gene-editing technique is a breakthrough, quite possibly one destined to win a Nobel prize. But as we saw last month with the dueling articles "Heroes of CRISPR" and "The Villain of CRISPR," even some of the principal figures involved can't agree about who exactly is responsible for it, let alone what its effects and legacy will be.

Which brings me to an exchange I recently had with the historian of science David Wootton, who recently published a widely-reviewed, epic history of the Scientific Revolution called The Invention of Science. I reviewed the book alongside the physicist Steven Weinberg's To Explain the World last month for The Chronicle Review, which you can read in full here.

Although I found much to admire in both books, I also questioned some of the approaches to writing and thinking about scientific discovery on display in them. I won't rehash the review here, but I did think it would be worthwhile to link to David Wootton's lengthy and highly erudite response to my review, available here on his book's website:

"A Reply to Benjamin Breen."

...and to post what I wrote in reply to Professor Wootton (see below, lightly edited for length). Wootton and Weinberg's books have prompted an interesting and ongoing debate among historians of science in the past few months (see here, here, here, and here), and I hope that making my own thoughts public will be of interest. It is admittedly a bit inside-baseball, but I think that implicit beliefs about the history and trajectory of science in our larger culture are both more deep-seated and more influential than many realize, and that it's worth talking more about what we actually think about them.

Hugo Gernsback "Isolator" helmet, designed to allow scientists, writers and tinkerers to concentrate on their work, featured on the cover of a 1925 issue of Science and Invention magazine.

Dear David,

I appreciate you taking the time to write such a lengthy and thoughtful response. To undertake the task of writing about two 600+ page books in 2,000 words is to accept a certain level of defeat before you even begin, and I was painfully aware of how much was being glossed over as I wrote about a book that was so clearly the result of years painstaking research and careful thought. One (to me) important sentence in the review that was cut by the Chronicle's editors was something along the lines of this: “Wootton’s beliefs may not be so very different from those held by most historians of science today.”

I suspect this to be the case, and hence I agree with your closing remark about the need to make distinctions to clarify exactly "where we agree and where we disagree." To that end, I thought I'd begin by mentioning the numerous other things that I suspect we agree about:

We agree that scientific and medical progress exists and that this can and should be studied by historians.
We agree that the term "Whig" is showing its age and has come to mean several different things.
We agree that the history of science and medicine is in a state of flux, and that no clear consensus seems to exist among practitioners in the field.
We agree that something which (leaving aside debates about terminology) may be reasonably called the Scientific Revolution took place between the 16th and 18th centuries, and that this was a transformative epoch in human history.
We agree that the innovations from this period bettered the human condition in many important respects and expanded the scope of human knowledge.
We agree that there should be more "big" histories of science, medicine and technology which take a temporally and thematically ambitious approach, and that more people should read them both inside and outside the academy.
We agree that “Hobbes was right,” though cute, was perhaps an overly flippant and simplistic way to end Leviathan and the Air Pump.
We agree that The Invention of Science is an impressive achievement that deserves to be widely read (in fact I just put it on my class syllabus for next year).

My core disagreement with Invention centers on the question of where (and how deeply) we draw the line between between different perspectives on the history of science. Like Patricia Fara, I believe that the historiographic sections of the book construct an unnecessarily rigid binary between a host of purported relativists/Strong Programme advocates/postmodernists on one side and David Wootton on the other. This tendency toward binaries is apparent throughout your response to my review, where I found myself being lumped in with Shapin’s “side” and also taken the task for not pursuing total ideological conformity with Herbert Butterfield even though I’m “on Butterfield’s side,” while ultimately discovering that I was unwittingly “on [your] side of the divide, not Shapin’s” all along. This sort of thing is exactly what I objected to in the book. It’s possible to share someviews with another thinker and yet to be capable of disagreeing with them in other respects. This does not make you irrational or confused; it does not mean you automatically lose an argument.

Many of the historiographic portions of Inventionseemed to me to show an unwillingness to read supposedly opposing arguments in good faith. The most jarring example to me was the way that Shapin and Schaffer were repeatedly trotted out as exemplars of points of view that I rather strongly suspect they don’t actually adhere to. The most unfair example is on pg. 584 where Shapin is made to “insist” that “there was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution,” full stop. Of course, there’s a famous second half to this sentence that completely changes the meaning (and, in my reading at least, basically announces it to be a witticism rather than a statement to be inveighed against at great length).

To me it typified the major flaw of the book’s rhetorical style: a tendency to declare victory in battles which it was by no means clear to me that the other side was even trying to wage. Hence why I mentioned Shapin’s line about the reality of medical progress. It certainly seemed to me that he both acknowledges medical and scientific progress and considers it open to historical inquiry, but that he took issue with the particular form of historical inquiry on display in Bad Medicine.

But I don’t know the man and can’t speak for him (and rather than trying to perform an exegesis on his texts, I think it would make more sense to just ask him what he thinks). For my own part, I do think that one of the tasks of the history of science and medicine is to chart the trajectory of progress (however we choose to define it) in an open-minded and expansive way that tries as far as possible to avoid writing a history that celebrates the “winners” and elides the “losers,” even as it acknowledges that some concepts and methods have a basis in reality and others don’t. In part because being too quick to distribute laurels and dunce caps can lead us into unjustified and overly hasty binaries. Not all pre-1800 physicians were astrologers or quacks; not all who quote Shapin or Butterfield are ardent proponents of the Strong Programme.

I make no excuses for mistrusting celebratory narratives in history, and I also maintain that Invention is largely written in a celebratory mode. Now, as I said above, I think we actually agree that science has on the whole been a good thing for the human species. It’s hard to be an historian of medicine and not acknowledge that, deep down – more than once I myself have been frustrated by historians who espouse a kneejerk distrust of the concept of medical progress, yet who surely would prefer the doctor’s prescription of amoxicillin for their strep throat rather than bleeding until syncope. Especially in respect to epidemiology and sanitation, it’s undeniable (to me, at least) that the past three centuries have witnessed nothing less than a triumphant advance on the past, something that we really should applaud. We’re literally talking about ideas and methods that have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of lives by this point.

As you rightly pointed out, of course, not all aspects of scientific and medical innovation have been good things. The atom bomb tends to be the perennial example here. I think that Inventionrepeatedly avoided another that was a bit closer at hand, namely the slave trade. As a number of recent studies have shown, the Atlantic slave trade was closely entangled with the Scientific Revolution, not just in terms of economics (Boyle and Locke holding share in the Royal Africa Company, etc) but at a far more visceral level – the testing of poisons on slave’s bodies, the dissection of slaves, the use of slave labor to produce medical drugs and other objects of scientific inquiry. This is not incidental to the stories in Invention, particularly the passages dealing with Columbus and voyages of discovery– it’s central to them.

Perhaps it’s futile to wonder whether the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions could have taken place without the advent of Atlantic slavery and the colonial system that enslaved labor made possible, but I do think that raising the question is useful, insofar as it reminds us once again that the famous names in books like Invention and Weinberg’s Discovery didn’t exist in an historical vacuum. The same institutions and many of the same individuals were implicated in a world outside Europe that depended in concrete ways upon violence, slavery and yes, religious fanaticism.

From this does it necessarily follow that the individuals implicated in all of this were wrong on an empirical level? Not at all. And despite what I wrote above, I also don’t think that the historian’s overarching goal should be to render moral judgments. But I do think that it is relevant information that Columbus and many other early modern European mariners were indeed slave traders, that they did kill people, that they were motivated by millenarian religious views. I mentioned this not to retroactively condemn them as bad people, but to point to the issues inherent in any celebratory historical narrative. To say Columbus was a murderer is not a moral judgment; it’s just a statement of fact. Certainly, as you note, to argue that Columbus’s actions set in motion a series of intellectual changes and discoveries is not to say that these later events were directly guided by Columbus, or that the people involved shared his outlook.

But when Inventioncredited the activities of Columbus and Diogo Cão to a new “celebration of innovation,” it gave me pause. That the book’s readers – many of whom may well see themselves as contemporary participants in that very same tradition of innovation – would see this as a good thing seems like a relatively uncontroversial statement to me. As I said above, in the context of things like sanitation, the emergence of a new concept of discovery and innovation clearly was a good thing (and note that here I agree with your reading of the Portuguese “descobrir/descobrimiento” as representing a new conception of innovation). But when we draw such a wide circle around this nebulous new culture of “innovation” that it is is made to include everything from arguments for geocentric orbits to medical statistics to attempts to establish slave entrepôts at the mouth of the Congo, it seems to me that the term’s utility breaks down. And that it becomes problematic to celebrate it. If you want to dismiss that argument as “some sort of political point” and not grapple with its implications, then I think we really do have a real disagreement there.

It seems to me that historians of science of my generation, which is to say people who finished grad school in the 2010s, are eager to move beyond 1990s style debates about relativism and postmodernism and combative mentality these debates engendered. For what it’s worth, if I'd been asked to write a review of a hypothetical new history of science written by David Bloor, I'd have been at least as critical as I was with Invention (almost certainly more, in fact). So having said that, what do I actually think? Like you, I believe that the history of science needs to be more ambitious and expansive. But the ambitious works in the history of science that I’ve personally found to be the most compelling don’t appear in Invention: Neil Safier, Carla Nappi, Jorge Cañizares, Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Matthew Crawford, Susan Scott Parish,Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, James Delbourgo, Jennifer Rampling, Elaine Leong, Pamela Smith (who I noticed in the bibliography but saw little engagement with her ideas or work), Harold Cook, etc.

That’s because (it seems to me) these scholars write about science outside of northwestern Europe and/or their work straddles the traditional divide between medicine and magic, or chemistry and alchemy, or the female cook’s work and the male apothecary’s work. To me, at least, these works collectively represent a clear path forward in the historiography of science. They don’t advocate for a single point of view, and they cover a bewildering array of geographic regions and languages, but I don’t see that as a negative in the least. These works (from my reading, at least) don’t argue that the Scientific Revolution didn’t take place, nor do they mount relativist arguments. But they don’t seem to fit into Invention, and I think that’s because they try to expand not just the temporal but the geographic and social limits of what we mean by scientific discovery and investigation.

In fact, taken collectively, these works seem to me not just to broaden the concept of scientific discovery, but to call into question its utility as a frame of historical analysis. Taking an example from my own research, because I know it best, let’s follow the historical pathway of what would be eventually identified as the anti-malarial alkaloid quinine (arguably one of the most significant scientific discoveries of all time if we use “number of lives saved” as our litmus). When was quinine discovered? Was it…

When indigenous healers in the Peruvian Amazon first realized that the bark of the cinchona tree was an unusually effective treatment for fevers?
When a new generation of healers, contending with the introduction of malaria into the New World via the slave trade, realized that cinchona bark was also effective in the treatment of this hitherto unknown disease?
When a Jesuit priest seeking to convert said healers realized this too?
When the Jesuits carried cinchona bark to Europe?
When Iberian and Italian licensed physicians began experimenting with preparations of the bark (such as extraction in alcohol) that more effectively concentrated what we now know to be its active alkaloid?
When an Englishman named Robert Tabor published the first account of the tincture of the bark’s antimalarial properties in English?
When a Luso-Brazilian surgeon named Bernardino Antonio Gomes first isolated what we now call quinine in 1811 and named it cinchonin, but didn’t publish his findings?
When two French doctors, working in 1820, developed a similar method for isolating the alkaloid and named this alkaloid quinine, the “discovery” of which was recorded in scientific journals?

Now, traditional narratives have tended to say that the final step marks the discovery of quinine. Social historians of medicine have tended toward the first step. But after thinking carefully about this trajectory of quinine through history, I’m increasingly convinced that the concept of discovery doesn’t even have value as a category of analysis here. Every step arguably marked a discovery, but no one step was decisively different from the others. Picking the “real” moment of discovery seems, to me at least, to be necessarily a political judgment, and an arbitrary one at that. Likewise with policing the boundary of what steps on that chain count as science and what don’t.

Granted, I’m aware that pg. 567 of Invention indeed notes that “concepts such as discovery are problematic,” but I think I disagree with the implication of the conclusion of that paragraph, that “we cannot understand science without studying the history of these foundational [and problematic] concepts.” Certainly it’s true that the notion of discovery has long been central to debates about the history of science, but doesn’t that actually create an opening to try to attempt something entirely new by trying to move beyond those debates?

That at least is the direction my own research is leading me – I fully acknowledge that this isn’t a particularly well articulated or coherent position, and it’s one that is in flux and will probably change in a year or two, but perhaps that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. At the very least, I think that it’s important to acknowledge not only what we already agree on, but also to be open to changing our minds and to avoid hewing to dogmatic camps. And with that I’ll simply add that I’m very glad to have had the chance to have such a substantive dialogue.

The Alchemy of Madness: Understanding a Seventeenth-Century "Brain Scan"

2015-12-17T10:48:00.001-06:00

The image above is a detail from a remarkable 1620 engraving I first came across this past summer. It shows a man sliding another figure into what looks like an old-fashioned oven - but instead of smoke, images of the man's thoughts billow out of the oven's top. The "baker" is in fact an apothecary, the "oven" is a distillation apparatus, and the man whose thoughts are boiling out of his head is someone being treated (metaphorically) for madness.

The full image is even stranger. Two well-dressed figures stand before a wall of shelves stocked with drug jarsbearing labels like Modestie, Raison, and Memoire. One is pouring a potion marked Sagesse (wisdom) into the opened mouth of a seated figure who grips the pourer’s arm uneasily. Below, court jesters wearing fool’s caps tumble into a bedpan.

"Le Médecin guérissant Phantasie," Mattheus Greuter, 1620 (Bibliothèque nationale de France).

To the right of these two— leaning in front of a distillation apparatus, a mortar and pestle, and a lengthy medical receipt pinned to the shelf—is an apothecary pushing a man on a long board into a distillation furnace. Above, the fantasies that had filled this man’s head emerge as the rarified quintessences of distillation: horses, backgammon boards, armor, pantaloons, women, swords, theater masks, flowers, hunting dogs, and, unaccountably, a monkey brandishing a walking stick.

I think that it's one of the most memorable and mysterious depictions of early modern science and medicine I've ever seen, and I thought I'd try to figure out a bit more about it here.

The most obvious place to start is with the French caption which accompanies the image. Here's the original French:

Aprochez vous qu'avez la teste pleine
de phantasie, qui vous met en grande peine
assurez vous de ce Maistre sçavant,
quil voz humeurs seicherat tellemant,
dedans ce four, qu'aurez en peu de temps,
grand allegeance de beaucoup de torments,
aussi serez purge per ses brevages
qu'incontinant deviendrez du tout sages.

And here's my attempt to render it in something resembling the couplet rhyme scheme of the original:

You, come here! Your head is filled
With fantasies, that make you ill
Of this learned Master, be assured
That he will have your humours cured
In no time at all, within this furnace—
Great allegiance of many torments—
So too, he’ll purge with healing potions
That can make the foolish cogent.

Even after the cursory research that I did when I first encountered the image, it became clear that this was a pretty popular motif. The basic imagery of a cloud of "phantasies" being distilled from a fool's head by a physician-alchemist appears in at least seven variants that I've been able to find: the French-language version shown above, apparently created by a printer named Mattheus Greuter in 1620; a German-language original from 1596 along with several later copies; a much-altered English versions; and, fascinatingly, a full-color French painting that was seemingly based on the engraving rather than the other way around.

The earliest iteration of the image would seem to be from a book of emblems created by the Belgian engraver and printer Theodor de Bry (1528-1598) which was published two years before his death. This included a picture of a "Narrendoktor" (Fool Doctor) distilling the madness or folly out of a man's head using an alchemical still, while his associate opens a spigot in a man's stomach to purge him of his foolish humors. Interestingly, this version shows a closer attention to the actual technology of distillation, as it also shows a solid distillate falling to the ground in the form of mice. The Latin caption can be translated to something like "My art can be all knowledge--except wisdom."

Engraving of the "De Narrendoktor" from Theodor de Bry's Emblemata Secularia (Frankfurt, 1596).

an accompanying Latin epigram pokes fun at the boasts of Paracelsan physicians, who achieve

Quod non Hippocrates,
no noverat ante Galenas,
Arte mea cerebri
fatuos incido meatus.

What neither Hippocrates
nor Galen ever attained:
with my art I retrain
the paths of fools’ brains.

Another German version, from 1648, offered an expanded caption in the voice of one Doctor Wurmbrandt (Wormburner), who implores, “trust me to bring you back to your right mind” when you suffer from “wild imaginings as when... having become quite drunk... you are conscious of nothing, whether you are a man or woman.” His cure is effected by the new chemical arts: a still worn over the head produces a kind of cognitive vapor—bat, dagger, backgammon set, a woman, dueling pistols—that sublimates into the air and leaves the patient freed from psychological distress.

It’s an image that would have had an obvious metaphorical resonance for early modern Europeans who saw the human body as a microcosm. If illnesses are indeed caused by fermentations of the blood, poisonsous corpuscles, or malignant humors, then why not move from distilling drugs to practicing medical chemistry directly on the human body itself?

The English version of this print veered into political territory, presenting the "Fool Doctor" in the midst of a far more elaborate allegorical scene referencing the political upheavals that preceded the English Civil War:

According to the British Printed Images to 1700 project, this version was refigured as "a satire of universal folly in which a tripartite division of the realm into Cuntry, Citty & the Court is symbolised, respectively, by rude 'Rusticall' being purged by the doctor on the close-stool, 'spruce master Cittyzsinne' standing behind the Doctor, and the Gallant (i.e courtier) whose head is just entering the subliming furnace." The print also appears to be demonstrating a new wariness about female sexuality and the perceived masculinity of women in positions of power, as the caption adjoining the female figure in the print reads:

Once (faire) I knew the tongues Phlebotomie
Had powre to Cure your Sexes Maladie
But now youre manly humors boile so high
That you must in the Gallants Furnace lye.

It reminds me a lot of the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, with its complex medical and alchemical references ("the tongues Phlebotomie" is a reference to the common practice of medical blood-letting or phlebotomy, but seems to be suggesting that previous generations of women could be cured by speech, whereas now, because of their "manly humors," they required new alchemical technologies like "the Gallants Furnace").

In short, variants on this image seem to have circulated very widely indeed and fulfilled different functions of social commentary and satire in doing so, as evidenced by the fact that the original print also inspired at least one painting that may in fact have advertised an apothecary's services:

Anonymous painting in the Musée Rolin, Autun, France, mid to late 17th century.

I'm still trying to get to the bottom of this series of interrelated images, but I suspect that their popularity had to do with an emerging awareness of what we would now call mental illness in seventeenth-century Europe. As new drugs and therapies began to reach Europe via colonial networks that brought physicians into contact with non-European healing traditions, some began to wonder if the new medical practices of the seventeenth century could cure madness or folly in the same way that cinchona bark could cure fevers.

Natural philosophers like Robert Boyle also became interested in the possibility of what we would call psychedelics or smart drugs: in Boyle's remarkable list of "desiderata" for future inventions, he included "Potent Druggs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions" as well as "Freedom from Necessity of much Sleeping exemplify’d by the Operations of Tea and what happens in Mad-Men." Likewise, when Robert Hooke experimented with cannabis in 1689, he concluded that it might "be of considerable Use for Lunaticks."

In short, these images point to an emerging interest in the brain and in the scientific alteration of mental states. When I first shared the French version of the image on Twitter, several people remarked that it seemed almost to be a seventeenth-century prefiguration of an fMRI. And indeed, I believe that in some ways they were - that these images were part of an emerging interest in cognition and mental illness that, in its convergence with alchemy, points the way toward a new approach to understanding the brain as a material structure that can be studied and manipulated in the same way that a chemist induces chemical reactions.

Why Did Seventeenth-Century Europeans Eat Mummies?

2015-12-05T01:33:00.000-06:00

Brazilian BBQ from Theodor de Bry, America Tertiae Pars (1592).

In a previous post, I touched on the phenomenon of "cannibal medicine" in early modern Europe. It turns out that it was surprisingly common for medical patients in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to be prescribed drugs that contained human remains. These included everything from powdered human skull to more byzantine preparations like Oswald Croll's infamous 1608 remedy which invites the reader to "take the fresh corpse of a redhaired, uninjured, unblemished man," and "leave it one day and one night in the light of the sun and the moon, then cut into strips."

Although historians like Richard Sugg have already written perceptively about medical cannibalism, the special role played by mummies in this story has always seemed intriguing and rather under explored to me. I spoke a bit about this at Yale's History of Medicine colloquium last month, and thought I'd adapt some of my thoughts into a post.

First off, it's worth stressing that, historically speaking, there is nothing particularly bizarre about eating people. Perusing one of my favorite early modern drug manuals, John Jacob Berlu's The Treasury of Drugs Unlock'd (London, 1690) makes it plain that a certain form of cannibalism was widely tolerated in Europe. Berlu's guide to drugs is not at all exotic or show off-y - on the contrary, it's a practical handbook aimed at working drugs merchants who needed to know basic facts about the wares they sold. Most of its entries involve relatively prosaic substances like tamarind, sassafras, cinnamon and elk antlers. But there are a few entries, like the one for "Cranium Humanum" shown below, which stand out to a modern eye:

Remember, this is a practical guide to consumable drugs. There's no trace of Swiftian satire or exoticizing hyperbole here. Berlu really does appear to be recommending, in a matter-of-fact way, that drug merchants should rove Ireland looking for moss-covered criminal's skulls, then sell them to apothecaries so they can be ground into powder and drunk by sick English people.

Thus it shouldn't necessarily surprise us to find Egyptian mummies also appearing in lists of popular drugs and medical guides in the seventeenth century. As I mentioned in a previous post, Pierre Pomet, the apothecary of King Louis XIV, wrote extensively about the medical virtues of la mumie, even commissioning a detailed and not exactly accurate engraving of how he imagined mummies were prepared for burial:

Engraving of mummies from the English translation of Pomet's drug manual (Pierre Pomet, A Compleat History of Druggs published in London, 1712).

Pomet, like Berlu, seems completely at home with the idea of eating mummy, and his main advice to the reader involves tips on how to avoid getting cheated by unscrupulous mummy merchants:

As I am not able to stop the Abuses committed by those who sell this Commodity, I shall only advise such as buy, to chuse what is of a fine shining Black, not full of Bones or Dirt, of a good Smell... This is reckoned proper for Contusions and to hinder Blood from coagulating in the Body; it is also given in Epilepsies, Vertigoes, and Palsies. The Dose is two Drams in Powder.

Pomet's discussion of eating mummy leads into a larger digression on various other forms of medical cannibalism such as "human Fat or Grease, which is brought us from several Parts, but, as every Body knows in Paris, the public Executioner sells it to those that want it." He even takes a moment to allude to the same moss-covered Irish skulls that Berlu had mentioned:

The English druggists, especially those of London, sell the heads or skulls of the dead... The English Druggists generally bring these Heads from Ireland, where they frequently let the Bodies of Criminals hang n the Gibbets til they fall to Pieces. You may see in the Druggists Shops of London, some of these Heads entirely covere'd with Moss.

On the other hand, it's hard not to think that there'd be something distinctive about eating an Egyptian mummy rather than just some anonymous unburied criminal's skull (which, given the enormous amount of violence in the seventeenth century, would've been pretty easy to find). After all, we're talking about consuming human remains which are thousands of years old. It's not as if seventeenth century Europeans weren't aware of the rarity and age of what they were dealing with - on the contrary, many of them thought that these remains were far older. Herodotus, the ur-authority on Egyptian history for most Renaissance scholars, had claimed that the Egyptian priests possessed documents demonstrating an unbroken line of kingship stretching back 11,340 years.

In other words, from the perspective of a seventeenth-century European, the Egyptian mummies being sold by apothecaries could conceivably have been thirteen thousand years old.

I think it's reasonable, then, to conjecture that the early modern people who prescribed and consumed mummies valued them partially because of their reputed origins in a distant, Biblical antiquity. And, connected to this, their association with a great and mysterious civilization, a non-Christian society that rivaled any European empire.

Diagram of an Ancient Egyptian labyrinth imagined by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher in his Oedipus Aegyptiacus [Egyptian Oedipus] (Rome, 1653).

Talking to the Peruvianist Christopher Heaney about this sort of thing led us to wonder whether any early modern doctors believed that Andean Inca mummies shared the same medical virtues as Egyptian ones. It's still an open question, this being a fairly new line of research. But it does seem that at least some physicians and apothecaries did believe that Inca mummies were medically powerful in the same manner. In 1720, for instance, Johann Crüger’s De Mundi Creatione alluded to the drug "mumia" as having a potential origin in Peru. Crüger’s Latin text is intentionally obscure (since he was basically an alchemist) but nonetheless makes the identification plain: “Wine,” he writes, “has the form of a vitriolic sulphur, not being a type of immature balsam of the Moon; and from thence [it can be found] in the fragrant white balsams of the liquid resins of Egyptian, Peruvian, or Copaici [?] mummies, whether an immature balsam, or a specific oil of the Moon.”

While researching this topic, I stumbled across a wonderfully strange piece of writing by the seventeenth-century physician Thomas Browne: his "Fragment on Mummies." I think Virginia Woolf was spot on when she compared reading Browne to wandering through a cabinet of curiosities - his style is baroque, intricate and mysterious in a way that I find fascinating. It would seem that Browne was opposed to the fashion for such "cannibal mixtures," but he couldn't deny its fascination:

That mummy is medicinal, the Arabian Doctor Haly delivereth and divers confirm; but of the particular uses thereof, there is much discrepancy of opinion. While Hofmannus prescribes the same to epileptics, Johan de Muralto commends the use thereof to gouty persons; Bacon likewise extols it as a stiptic: and Junkenius considers it of efficacy to resolve coagulated blood. Meanwhile, we hardly applaud Francis the First, of France, who always carried Mummia with him as a panacea against all disorders; and were the efficacy thereof more clearly made out, scarce conceive the use thereof allowable in physic, exceeding the barbarities of Cambyses, and turning old heroes unto unworthy potions.

Shall Egypt lend out her ancients unto chirurgeons and apothecaries, and Cheops and Psammiticus be weighed unto us for drugs? Shall we eat of Chamnes and Amosis in electuaries and pills, and be cured by cannibal mixtures? Surely such diet is dismal vampirism; and exceeds in horror the black banquet of Domitian, not to be paralleled except in those Arabian feasts, wherein Ghoules feed horribly.

Introducing the Res Obscura Newsletter

2014-10-24T11:03:00.000-05:00

Hand-colored daguerrotype, c. 1850, "Three Lively Women."

After putting Res Obscura on hiatus for over a year so I could work on The Appendix, I've decided to resurrect it as an email newsletter and occasional blog. You can sign up for the weekly newsletter over here, and I'll also be posting weekly updates here which are gleaned from the newsletter's collection of links to interesting historical articles and archives.

Preventing “Monkey Business”: Fettered Apes in the Middle Ages. "A monkey destroyed a charter at the court of Robert, Duke of Burgundy in the year 1288. The chancery of the Duke had to copy some original letters of his ancestor Eudes, dated from the beginning of the 12th century, because Robert’s monkey had torn the documents." [Medieval Animal Data Network]
Cooking an eighteenth-century recipe for "Italian Cheese." [Cooking in the Archives]
Tramadol is fed to cattle in Cameroon to such an extent that it has soaked into root systems. "The farmers apparently take the drug themselves, at pretty high dosages, saying that it allows them to work without getting tired." [Corante]
Rebecca Onion on marriage advice before feminism. "The column’s very existence in a magazine for educated women sends a powerful message. Men’s magazines – the closest parallels to the women’s service titles – don’t tend to write about marital troubles, preferring to focus on sex." [Aeon]
"It sounded like we were an ancient people and that we didn’t exist anymore.” Francie Diep on how museum dioramas of American Indians can institutionalize a perception of indigenous cultures as frozen in time and defunct. [The Appendix]
Over one hundred high resolution eighteenth-century images of costumes and fashions created by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur. [Wikimedia Commons]
The Slaver’s Objectivity. "The Economist’s controversial review of Edward Baptist’s new book ends on a feverish crescendo of denial about the fundamentals of American slavery: that slaves were slaves and masters, masters — with all the brutality, coercion, and punishment that relationship entails. Accordingly, the publication has retracted the piece and issued an apology, but the loss of credibility will probably be lasting. The irony is that their indictment of Baptist’s exhaustive book decries its lack of objectivity. To this end, tucked away in the last paragraphs of the review is a surprising and somewhat obscure reference to Hugh Thomas’s 1997 book, The Slave Trade." [Jacobin]
Sexual Curiosities?: Aphrodisiacs in Early Modern England. "Jacques Ferrand’s 1610 book on erotic melancholy argued that ‘salt things doe cause a kind of Itching or Tickling in those parts that serve for Generation.'" [Notches]
The Literature of Laughing Gas. A short essay I wrote for The Paris Review about William James' delightfully unhinged nitrous oxide writings:
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it’s pure onsense!
Thought much deeper than speech … !
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL!
What the 17th Century Can Teach Us About Vaginas by Lili Loofbourow. "Early modern England saw conception as more drawing-room drama than fantasy epic; basically, sperm are shy and retiring and likely to glumly depart unless they’re actively made to feel at home." [The Cut]
The Passing of the Indians Behind Glass. "Shannon Martin, who is also Anishinabe, explains how she felt as a kid, when she saw American Indian exhibits in natural history museums: “It sounded like we were an ancient people and that we didn’t exist anymore.” [The Appendix]

"Why Does 'S' Look Like 'F'?": A Beginner's Guide to Reading Early Modern Texts

2013-07-29T23:07:00.001-05:00

Last month, I came across a recently digitized book from 1680 with the innocuous-sounding title The School of Venus. After browsing it for a few moments, however, I realized I'd stumbled onto something truly interesting. It was a sex manual, and a rather free-spirited one at that, as the frontispiece engraving suggests:

It occurred to me that this was the sort of thing that would appeal to people outside of my specialist field of early modern history, and I began writing a blog post about it for the journal I co-edit, The Appendix. Reading over my draft, my co-editor Chris brought up something that I'd taken for granted: like any 17th century book, the text employed what's called the 'long' or 'descending' S.

"If this has the reach I think it might," he said, "you need to explain that." I initially thought the suggestion was slightly condescending to my readers: doesn't everyone know about the old-timey S? Its right there in the first line of the Bill of Rights, after all:

Then I snapped out of it and realized that I was falling into the myopia typical of anyone who spends a long time in a specialist field. Like a biologist assuming that laypeople would know what hemoglobin is, I was forgetting that not everyone spends their days reading early modern texts. I put in an explanation of the S/F distinction, and the post got picked up by Slate and Jezebel - where a significant proportion of the comments were about how hard it was to read the old-fashioned writing.

So I write today to give an accessible overview of how to read books and manuscripts from the early modern era - what scholars call the period spanning the early Renaissance to the French, American and Industrial Revolutions. To tackle the S first: the long S dates back to the old Roman cursive handwriting, and survived as an artifact in the earliest printed book fonts, which were modeled on various medieval handwriting forms. The key thing to understand about the long S is that it occurs only in the middle of words, never at the beginning or end. Thus the title of School of Venus would not feature a long S in either its first or final letters, but words like 'Castle' or 'Lost' would appear as 'Caſtle' and 'Loſt.'

So far so good. Things get trickier, however, when we try to read the earliest books printed in English, which typically featured variants of the German blackletter font. Here's a two page spread from one of the earliest English medical texts, Thomas Elyot's The Castell of Helth (1536):

A variant of the long S is in full effect here, but so are a number of other features that look unusual to modern readers: capital letters like 'T' or 'H' take elaborate forms, and lowercase 'd' and 'r' retain the look of Carolingian miniscule or Gothic blacklister, the handwritings of choice of medieval monks. The top of the second page is intended to help with diagnosing sexual trouble, and reads:

Heares [i.e. hairs] none or fewe
The genitories colde and drye { Littel apetite or none to lechery.
Littel puiſſance to do it.

And so forth. I remember being a bit taken aback the first few times I tried to read books in this font, but it ends up registering in the brain as just that: a different font, but the same alphabet. Reading early modern manuscripts (the practice of which is called 'paleography') can be a different matter, however. To start us off easy, here's a lovely script from the late 17th century written by a clerk or secretary at the Royal Society of London:

"Mr Hawksbee shewed the following Experiment, viz: Placing two small Birds in two Glasses, & exhausting the Air from one, & injecting it into the other, that Bird which was plac'd in the Glass from which the Air was withdrawn, died in about 30 seconds of time, after his beginning to take away the Air. The other Bird which remain'd in the Glass, whereinto, by the same Operation, the Air was convey'd, was affected with Convulsions, but not unto Death." (Via the Royal Society)

The script and language here is not all that different from modern English. The key differences are in the punctuation (early modern English, like modern German, tended to capitalize proper nouns), and also in certain contractions which are unused today, like "convey'd." As a side note, I kept this snippet on hand because it contains a rare reference to an impostor named George Psalmanazar, who I just published an article about.

Moving backwards in time to the early 17th century pen of none other than the great poet John Donne, we find things a little more unfamiliar:

John Donne's handwritten draft of his great poem "The Triple Fool." Via the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Donne's 'E's are typical of his period in that they resembled reversed '3's, and his uppercase 'I' looks like an F or J. The most difficult difference in this script - or at least the one that tripped me the most when I was learning it - is the variation in the 'S' shapes. In the second line, Donne writes "saying soe" using a form with a looping tail, but in "fools," he uses something like a modern cursive lowercase s. Finally, we find in the last line a very common 17th century abbreviation: 'yt' for 'that.' What appears to be a 'y' here is actually the descendant of the obsolete Old English letter thorn (Þ), which also appears in the classic construction "Ye Olde Shoppe." (The 'Ye' would actually have been pronounced like 'the'). You can see Donne using 'Ye' there in the middle: "Then as the Earths inward narrowe lanes..." As an interesting note, this draft of the poem differs from the final version - in the print edition, Donne substituted 'crooked' for 'narrowe.'

Now lets move on to some truly difficult paleography. This is a photograph I took of a book at the John Carter Brown Library called The Sea Surgeon, or the Guinea-Mans Vade Mecum (1729). The inside flaps of this copy of the book feature some fascinating notes by an actual practicing marine surgeon who was trying out various cures for scurvy, plague and fevers found in the book. He used a handwriting that was marked by his profession, featuring a number of abbreviations that it took me some time to puzzle out. I'd say this is fairly advanced-level paleography - although I should add that compared to my colleagues who work on things like sixteenth-century French or Scottish witchcraft trials, reading this is absolute child's play.

Inscriptions in the John Carter Brown Library's copy of John Aubrey's The Sea Surgeon (1729).

At upper right, we find the heading "Rubarb given wt. ye Bark," which is to say "Rhubarb given with the [Peruvian] Bark." (Known primarily to modern eaters for its famed pie-partnership with strawberries, rhubarb was actually a highly prized and expensive medicine in this period.) Below the heading we find a list of ingredients supplied to a sick sailor, beginning with the still-familiar "Rx" prescription symbol: "[Prescription] of Bark Peru[viana] Powder lix [59] drams." The surgeon then lists "Salt of Wormwood, Salt of Centaury, Salt of Carduus Benedict[us], of Each Half a Dram."

Of the ingredients of this witches brew, the most familiar to modern readers is probably wormwood, the possibly intoxicating herb which makes absinthe so infamous. There's a good amount of shorthand being used here, of the sort that a doctor or apothecary would use in jotting notes to others in the field. But in fact this is a fairly easy to read example of how early modern apothecaries wrote - I've seen much, much worse, and there are countless pages of documents which even after five years of training, I'm still unable to read. With practice and patience, though, virtually anything is readable.

At any rate, I hope this brief and idiosyncratic overview to reading early modern texts has been helpful, and above all, I hope it spurs some further interest in the fascinating works out there, waiting for readers. Not everything from the 17th and 18th centuries is as immediately engaging as The School of Venus, but there are a lot of untapped riches out there.

Early Modern Drugs and Medicinal Cannibalism

2012-12-27T17:27:00.001-06:00

18th century container for medicinal mummy, Germany. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

This is the first Res Obscura post after another rather lengthy break, but I plan to start updating more regularly in the new year. I've cannibalized portions of this post from a piece I wrote for the new online journal I helped co-found, The Appendix, the other week: "Ravens-Scull & a Handfull of Fennel."

I spent much of the past year in Lisbon, Portugal, researching the development of the global trade in medicinal drugs during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While there, I was struck by how extraordinarily different Portuguese pharmacies appeared from their United States counterparts. To be sure, many bore definite similarities to the type of American pharmacies I grew up regarding as normal: modern-looking edifices bathed in fluorescent light and painted a sterile white designed to set off the colorful packaging of the drugs for sale.

Others, however, (like the Farmácia Andrade, which I walked by nearly every day) looked more like this well-preserved pharmacy in Stockholm:

The Apoteket Storken (Stork Pharmacy) in Stockholm, Sweden, 2009, All images via Wikimedia Commons unless otherwise noted.

What is striking about these displays is how pre-modern they are. The same basic design (ceramic jars of herbs, minerals and animal products lined on wooden shelves along with the occasional specimen of exotica) can be seen in engravings and paintings from the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries:

Pietro Longhi, The Apothecary, Italian, 1752.

An apothecary shop as depicted in Wolfgang Helmhard Hohberg, Georgica curiosa aucta (Nuremberg: 1697).

Yet what did these jars actually contain? Are there links beyond the purely aesthetic between early modern drugs and their modern counterparts? Trying to actually learn the craft of early modern pharmacy is a difficult process: the apothecary was a member of a guild who held closely-guarded secrets, and apothecary manuals were frequently written in Latin and employed a host of specialist symbols and words like "drachm" and "scruple."

To make matters even more difficult, early modern drug lore predated the widespread adoption of Linnaean classification, so a plant called "Dragon's blood" in Italian might be totally different from a plant with the same name in English. What emerges when one overcomes these various obstacles and actually gets to the bottom of what was being prescribed, however, is a fascinating picture. It turns out early modern Europeans were prescribing some very familiar items -- things found in herb teas sold in grocery stores today, like chamomile, fennel, licorice, and cardamom -- alongside some utterly bizarre ones, like powdered crab's eyes, Egyptian mummies, and human skull, or "cranium humanum."

Late 17th or early 18th century medicine jars that once contained human fat -- one of several gruesome "cannibal medicine" remedies now forgotten by all except collectors of antique jars and historians of early modern medicine.

In the sister post to this one, on The Appendix's blog, I listed a few intriguing medical recipes for things like "Snaill water" that I found in archives in Portugal and Philadelphia -- you can read them here. But while I was revisiting these sources today, I was struck by the degree to which they take for granted something that I suspect most people in the contemporary world would find revolting: the consumption of human bodies as medicinal drugs.

As the picture above hints, substances like human fat or powdered mummy were once so common that hundreds or perhaps even thousands of antique ceramic jars purpose-built to contain them still exist in antique shops, museums and private collections. This is no secret, but it remains more or less the domain of specialists in early modern history and (judging by the reactions of friends and dinner guests I have broached the subject with!) appears to not be widely known to the general public.

One good popular resource on the subject is this May 2012 Smithsonian article by Maria Dolan, which quotes the authors of two recent academic works on the subject: Louise Noble's Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern Literature and Culture and Richard Sugg's Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. As the Smithsonian Magazine article notes, it was a relatively common sight in early modern France and Germany to witness relatives of sick people collecting blood from recently executed criminals to use in medical preparations:

"The executioner was considered a big healer in Germanic countries,” says Sugg. “He was a social leper with almost magical powers.” For those who preferred their blood cooked, a 1679 recipe from a Franciscan apothecary describes how to make it into marmalade...

[T]hese medicines may have been incidentally helpful—even though they worked by magical thinking, one more clumsy search for answers to the question of how to treat ailments at a time when even the circulation of blood was not yet understood. However, consuming human remains fit with the leading medical theories of the day. “It emerged from homeopathic ideas,” says Noble. “It’s 'like cures like.' So you eat ground-up skull for pains in the head.” Or drink blood for diseases of the blood.

What is striking to me about such stories is not that merely that they occured -- there are lots of similar oddities in the history of science and medicine -- but that they appear to have been so strikingly commonplace.

Monrava y Roca, Breve curso de nueva
cirurgia, (Lisbon, 1728). An interesting
engraving illustrating a physician's
medicine chest containing "mumia."

In my own research I've probably come across dozens of references to eating human remains at this point, and they're all delivered in a matter-of-fact, almost laconic tone. It is interesting to reflect that this was precisely the era -- the 16th through 18th centuries -- when Europeans were virtually obsessed with the supposed cruelties of cannibalism in a New World that was thought to be ruled by Satan. It seems to me that Montaigne was (characteristically) alone in noting this irony, in his famously brilliant essay "On Cannibals":

I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts [of cannibalism by indigenous Americans], but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretext of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he is dead.

Even here, though, Montaigne was equating New World cannibalism with the inhumane cruelty of the French Wars of Religion -- which involved extensive torture of civilians and atrocities like the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre -- and not with the medicinal cannibalism that was going on all around him. Strangely, even the shrewd and gifted Montaigne seems to miss the obvious equivalences to be drawn between ritualistic cannibalism of the sort practiced in Mesoamerica and early modern European's consumption of human bodies as part of their medical beliefs, which were intimately tied up with religious and astrological theories of the body.

In such discussions, the specificity of what medicinal cannibalism entailed often gets lost. So I wanted to close by transcribing some "recipes" for early modern medicinal drug preparations that include humans. The following is from a 1676 manuscript called "Viridiarum Regale" that I consulted at the Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. I'd like to thank the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science and the Rare Books staff at the Van Pelt for making this research possible. This manuscript is written in a combination of Latin and Italian, which I've translated sloppily. The anonymous author promises his reader a list of "simple remedies gathered from diverse and celebrated authorities," but on page 591 we encounter a gruesome remedy that is anything but simple:

The regenerated mummy or microcosmic tincture:

Take the body of a mummy with its own form and substance, whether it be a discrete limb, or the entire body, and allow this to putrefy in conserve of violets for a month, so that it becomes a mutillagenous blood. Then strain the putrefied matter and conserve this material… From this 'embrionic' mummy material you can separate a tincture.

A 1629 German edition of Croll's Basilica,
via the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

The alchemist Oswald Crull's Basilica chymica (1608) gets even more specific, and macabre:

Take the fresh corpse of a redhaired, uninjured, unblemished man, 24 years old and killed no more than one day before, preferably by hanging, breaking on the wheel or impaling… Leave it one day and one night in the light of the sun and the moon, then cut into strips. Sprinkle on a little powder of myrrh to prevent it from being too bitter. Steep in spirit of wine for several days. As the foulness of it causes an intolerable humidity in the stomach, it is a good idea to macerate the mummy with oil.

God knows how Croll expected his reader to successfully obtain a redhaired man of the exact age of 24 years who had died one day before. Imagining early modern physicians even attempting such a thing -- let alone prescribing the bizarre "drug" of myrrh-coated human jerky that Croll's recipe describes -- is a bit mind-boggling for me. Indeed, I wonder to what degree these recipes actually were carried out in practice -- were such elaborate descriptions of medicinal cannibalism more theoretical than practical?

The complex references to a "spiritual mummy" in the writings of Paracelsus, famously described in Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, seem to me to point to a widespread metaphorical use of "mummy" to refer not to actual human bodies but to a theory of how illness and cures operate on the body. On the other hand, it is hard to get around the material evidence from apothecary jars, and the resolutely specific and tactile descriptions of dismembering and consuming human bodies in texts like Crull and Viridiarum Regale.

As my friend Rachel Herrmann put it in her research into cannibalism and starvation in colonial Jamestown -- in the early modern era, humans truly were "the other, other white meat."

Further reading:
Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (Routledge, 2011)
Louise Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Pallgrave, 2011)
The Chirurgeon's Apprentice on "corpse medicine in early modern England."
Rachel Herrmann, "The "tragicall historie": Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown"
Karen Gordon-Grube, "Evidence of Medicinal Cannibalism in Puritan New England"

A Spaniard in Samarkand, 1404

2012-10-23T13:22:00.000-05:00

Special note: an earlier version of this post appeared on a new blog I helped develop in partnership with Not Even Past of the University of Texas at Austin and Origins (Ohio State University). Check it out here: historymilestones.tumblr.com

On September 8, 1404, the Castilian diplomat Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo reached the Silk Road city of Samarkand. He had travelled over five thousand miles by foot, sail, horse and camel; passed through steppe, deserts, seas and mountains.

Now he had reached his destination: the capital of a vast new empire created by a military genius, mass murderer and patron of the arts named Timur (meaning “iron” in Persian). De Clavijo’s lord, King Henry III of Castile, had dispatched him to learn more about the man who Europeans called Tamurlane. If possible, he was to forge a peace treaty with the world-conqueror, whose sack of Baghdad alone caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

Clavijo recorded his entrance to the capital in great detail, noting the stores of “silks, satins, musk, rubies, diamonds, pearls, and rhubarb” carried from China, the painted elephants, vast tent pavilions with fluttering jeweled banners, and the frenzied pace of construction. He noted that work on the largest mosque in the city had been completed just before his arrival, but Timur ordered its gate to be torn down again because it lacked grandeur.

An orientalist nineteenth century Russian view of Samarkand in the time of Timur. Oil on canvas, Vasily Vereshchagin, 1842. [All images via Wikimedia Commons.]

The arrival of Clavijo and the party of other ambassadors who he accompanied to the cosmopolitan city provoked mild interest, but mainly on account of their strange clothes and quaint customs. Medieval Castilians, it seems, were regarded as rather backward and provincial in the world of the Silk Road. Upon their entry to the city, he recorded, the party passed through a “plain covered with gardens, and houses, and markets where they sold many things.” They came to the gates of the city after several hours travel through this lush hinterland, being greeted by “ six elephants, with wooden castles on their backs”:

The [Samarkand] ambassadors went forward, and found the [Spanish] men, who had the presents well arranged on their arms, and they advanced with them in company with the two knights, who held them by the armpits, and the ambassador whom Timour Beg [Tamerlane] had sent to the king of Castille was with them; and those who saw him, laughed at him, because he was dressed in the costume and fashion of Castille. [Source]

De Clavijo referred here to Hajji Muhammad al-Qazi, a Chagatai courtier who had visited the court of Castile in Toledo several years earlier. Al-Qazi had been sent by Timur to offer gifts and letters to the Iberian monarch – Clavijo was now in Samarkand to return the favor.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky's photograph of a Rabbi instructing Jewish youths in Samarkand circa 1911 offers a vivid glimpse at the costumes of Samarkand's citizens prior to the introduction of Western clothing. Via the Library of Congress photograph collection.

Why was a small Christian country on the farthest western fringe of Europe interacting with a Muslim emperor of central Asia in the first place? The era of Timur marked a high-point in what has been called the "archaic" or "early modern globalization" of the world, a period when travelers from the Christian, Muslim and Chinese worlds (like Clavijo's rough contemporaries Ibn Battuta and the Chinese admiral Zheng He) successfully travelled vast distances across Eurasia by land and sea.

As the Oxford historian John Darwin noted in his book After Tamerlane, Timur was a figure of crucial importance in world history because he was the last great nomadic warlord. Like the armies of Attila the Hun and Ghengis Khan, Timur’s forces were multi-ethnic conglomerations of Turkic, Mongol, Chagatai, Persian and north Indian peoples who were united under a common banner by the sheer charisma and military skill of a single man. His empire was not a state in the traditional sense, but a pan-tribal confederacy held together by military force.

A rare surviving letter from Tamerlane to King
Charles VI of France, written in Persian circa
1402. Archives Nationales, Paris.

Timur’s tactics were highly sophisticated, requiring years of planning and complex organization.
Yet in fundamental ways they were pre-modern: like Genghis Khan, Timur and his commanders relied upon the mobility of massed mounted archers who could repeatedly gallop toward opponents, launch a volley of arrows and hasten away. His horseback archers, fighting at the dawn of the advent of gunpowder weaponry, were the last nomad army that could threaten the settled, urbanized states of China, south Asia, the Arab world and Europe.

By contrast, the “gunpowder empires” that succeeded Timur – the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British and French in Europe, the Mughals (who were themselves an offshoot of Timur’s dynasty) in India, the Qing in China – all relied on conscripted armies, state finances, and ‘hi-tech’ devices like musket rifles, cannons and sailing ships. The triumph of these more modern approaches to conquest and empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries marked an epochal transformation. Ever since agricultural city-states emerged in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 4th millennium BCE, human societies had been divided between hunter-gatherer or pastoralist nomads and settled cultivators. The threat of invasions by nomads from the vast steppes of Eurasia had instilled terror in town-dwellers from the earliest written records in Sumeria to the Middle Ages. After Timur, the agricultural, urban model of human society decisively won out over that of nomadism. The winners modeled ‘civilization’ in their own image.

Yet although Timur was famous for his cruelty – in one grisly episode, he supposedly murdered all 70,000 inhabitants of the Persian city of Isfahan for resisting his occupation – he was by no means a barbarian. Indeed, Clavijo was clearly overawed by the society he encountered in a region that is today regarded as a desert backwater. He was impressed by the gardens surrounding Timur’s palace, by the enormous variety of goods that the Silk Road yielded, and by the splendid feasts that Timur’s men enjoyed:

When the lord called for meat, the people dragged it to him on pieces of leather, so great was its weight; and as soon as it was within twenty paces of him, the carvers came, who cut it up, kneeling on the leather… When the roast and boiled meats were done with, they brought meats dressed in various other ways, and balls of forced meat; and after that, there came fruit, melons, grapes, and nectarines; and they gave them drink out of silver and golden jugs, particularly sugar and cream, a pleasant beverage, which they make in the summer time [Source].

"The Defeat by Timur of the Sultan of Delhi, Nasir Al-Din Mahmum
Tughluq, in the winter of 1397-1398." Watercolor painting by
Zafarnama, from India circa 1600.

Clavijo seemed particularly eager to note the favor that Timur showed to the King of Castile. When he was presented to the world-conqueror, Clavijo was surprised to find that “he was sitting on the ground.” Timur sat cross-legged before a fountain “which threw up the water very high,” wearing a silk robe and a hat studded with rubies and pearls. The Castilian proudly related that when he entered his presence, “Timour Beg turned to the knights who had seated around him… and said, ‘Behold! here are the ambassadors sent by my son the king of Spain, who is the greatest king of the Franks, and lives at the end of the world.’”

Clavijo’s mission – to forge a treaty with Timur in order to fight their common enemy, the Ottoman sultans of Turkey – ultimately failed. Nonetheless, his account gives us a fascinating glimpse into a now-vanished world (as do the entrancingly vivid memoirs of Timur's direct descendant, emperor Jahangir of the Mughal empire). Timur was the final manifestation of a mighty world-historical force: the nomadic empire. Turkic and other central Asian warlords would continue to control the Russian steppe and the Silk Road cities for centuries, but never again would a leader from the center of what some called “the World Island” of Asia cast fear into the hearts of Chinese emperors and Christian kings alike.

Less than two hundred years later, Christopher Marlowe – the celebrated Elizabethan playwright known for his brilliance, homosexuality and violent death in a tavern brawl – would write his most celebrated play, the full title of which gives insight into the mixture of wonder and fear that surrounded Timur’s legacy: Tamburlaine the Great, who, from a Scythian Shephearde, by his rare and wonderfull Conquests, became a most puissant and mightye Monarque. And (for his tyranny and terrour in Warre) was tearmed, the Scourge of God (London, 1590).

Already by Marlowe's time, Timur and his Silk Road world of nomads and warriors had become the stuff of legend. The balance of power had now shifted from nomadic tribes to emerging nation-states. Charismatic warlords had been supplanted by maritime monarchs like Phillip II of Spain – the descendant of Clavijo’s Castilian king— or controllers of vast state bureaucracies like the Qing emperors of China. Yet for Marlowe, Timur’s legacy remained:

Then shall my native city, Samarqand…

Be famous through the furthest continents,

For there my palace-royal shall be placed,

Whose shining turrets shall dismay the heavens...

Some more photographs of Samarkand by Sergei Prokudin-Gorski, who I posted about back in 2010:

From Quacks to Quaaludes: Three Centuries of Drug Advertising

2012-06-11T18:59:00.003-05:00

Eli Lilly Amphedroxyn (methamphetamine) advertisement, 1951. New York
State Journal of Medicine, Vol. 51, No. 1. (Via the Bonkers Institute).

Portuguese physician João Curvo Semedo, 1707, sporting
the extravagant locks typical of his era. Image via
the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.

In his book Polyanthea Medicinal (Lisbon, 1697), a Portuguese doctor and seller of remedios secretos ("secret remedies") named João Curvo Semedo listed hundreds of early modern drug recipes. Semedo rather resembled the British drug seller and author William Salmon (who I wrote about in a previous post) in his readiness to experiment with both remedies from the New World and alchemical preparations being developed by acolytes of Paracelsus. The substances listed as medicinal drugs in Polyanthea Medicinal run the gamut from dog feces to powdered pearls, and from ordinary table salt to mysterious stones "found on the beach of Casomdama in the Kingdom of Angola," which, "after being put in wounds caused by any venomous beast, will draw out the venom." The unusual range of Semedo's pharmacy led one nineteenth century Portuguese medical student to remark in his doctoral thesis that he believed the book would "nauseate" any modern reader. Later generations tended to view Semedo as a physician in the "quack doctor" tradition of mountebanks and snake-oil salesman. Interestingly, he actually acknowledged this criticism in his own work, beginning his book with the following "plea to the Readers." (The below is a rough paraphrase from the rather more Baroque Portuguese original):

In the Parisian Court, and in many other parts of the world, there are those who knowing some singular remedy, affix papers at the most traficked roads, proclaiming to all who live in these areas that they have a panacea useful for all illnesses. These fellows distribute their papers to people they encounter in the street, so that all may know where to go to find such a remedy.

Such men gain such profit from this that they desire to do the same in Portugal, and give notice of secret medicines... However I have long suppressed my wish to follow suit, knowing that these days there is no labor that escapes the malice of others. Now however, the criticisms that have been made about my aim are not able to ignite the fire of choler in my heart, because my anger has been reduced to little more than ashes. Thus I resolve to speak of the medicines which I myself possess.

The ensuing list of what Semedo called "the Remedies that I prepare in my house" included his eponymous preparation "Bezoartico Curviano," an "Agua Lusitana" (Portuguese water), and a "powder which cures the involuntary flux of semen."

Similar advertisements for specially prepared drug formulations began to appear in medical texts throughout Europe in the late seventeenth century. Readers of English language newspapers in the era of Newton and Locke, for instance, began to encounter notices such as the following, from the newspaper Domestick Intelligence or News both from City and Country (12 Sept 1679, originally plucked out of obscurity by Carolyn Rance at the Quack Doctor):

This sort of thing might not quite have the same form or content as the 1950s advertisement for methamphetamine that begins this post, but it was the beginning of a long tradition that wed drug marketing with global capitalism and print culture. The fruits of this alliance are very much still with us -- whenever you see an advertisement for Lipitor or Adderall in a magazine or on a billboard, or your physician offers you a free sample of a drug given to him by a pharmaceutical sales rep, you're unwittingly taking part in a tradition that dates back to the first era of entrepreneurial drug merchants in the second half of the seventeenth century. Indeed, pharmaceutical giant Merck dates its founding to an apothecary named Friedrick Jacob Merck who opened his drug shop in precisely this early modern era of global commercial expansion and medical experimentation -- 1668, to be precise.

The following advertisements bring the story forward to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some of the things here -- like the popularity of cocaine as an energy tonic and ingredient in Coca-Cola around the turn of the twentieth century -- will probably be familiar. Others, like the fact that methamphetamine (under the trade name Desoxyn) is still approved by the FDA as a weight loss drug, might be less well known. Most of the images below were collected by Ben Hansen of the Bonkers Institute, and I direct interested readers to his unusual and rather fascinating site for more where these came from.

Following the public praise of opium preparations by the leading physician of the late seventeenth century, Thomas Sydenham, opium and laudanum became the celebrated "wonder drug" of eighteenth century medicine. George Wolfgang Wedel's Opiologia (First edition 1682) featured an engraving of a Turkish man harvesting poppy pods on its title page, offering a hint of the entanglement between the drug and the eighteenth century interest in exotic locales and distant cultures. This would later play a role in the Romantic-era fascination with laudanum as well.

The Victorians made opium-based remedies into a global industry. This 1885 ad (originally sourced from the Quack Doctor blog) championed Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, a morphine-based preparation for infants. This particular preparation was first formulated in the 1840s, during the apex of British imperial power.

"The exact ingredients of Wolcott's Instant Pain Annihilator (c. 1863) are unknown. But ethyl alcohol and opium figured prominently in the mix."

Many late-19th century drugs of this type failed to specify their active ingredients. Boasts of curing "nervous fatigue" or, as this label for "Brain Salt" puts it, "Over Brainwork," often pointed to the inclusion of a sedative or opiate, but consumers were largely unaware of what precisely they were imbibing. A parallel with the present-day gray market of internet-bought research chemicals might be made.

As is well known, Coca-Cola originally began its life as a medicinal tonic that boasted the stimulating alkaloids found in both cocaine and the cola nut. Early advertising, such as this ad from the late 1880s, marketed the drink as a health tonic that relieved exhaustion and nervous strain - as it surely did. Interestingly, the note at left shows how it was also marketed as a "temperance drink." Cocaine had not yet gained infamy as an illicit drug at this point. Indeed, it was being championed by Sigmund Freud in precisely the same period.

The invention of heroin -- here portrayed as a "sedative for coughs" comparable to aspirin in this circa 1900 advertisement by Bayer -- did not immediately produce outcries from law enforcement and anti-drug crusaders. It was initially a legal and fairly widely prescribed medicine; indeed the very name "Heroin" is in fact a trademark held under copyright by the Bayer Corporation.

Benzedrine advertisements, 1943 & 1944. Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 123, No. 10; Vol. 124, No. 12.

With the marketing of Benzedrine (amphetamine) as a bronchodilator starting in 1928, amphetamines became widely popular among drug consumers, especially World War II pilots and others who needed to stay awake for long periods. It wasn't long before the euphoric properties of Benzedrine inhalers became well known, and even commemorated in popular music. "Who Put the Ovaltine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?" was the memorable title of a 1944 hit single released by Harry "the Hipster" Gibson:

Drug advertisements in the 1950s and 1960s increasingly began to cater to women, particularly housewives. However, in true 1950s fashion, the ads seem to be targeting the husbands of housewives rather than the women themselves. This advertisement for Mornidine is from the Canadian Medical Association Journal, 1959, Vol. 81, No. 1, p. 59.

"Adorable then... deplorable now" was the remarkably judgmental tagline of the new weight-loss drug Ambar - a mixture of methamphetamine and phenorbarbital, shown here in a 1964 advertisement in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Vol. 1, No. 5385).

Predictably, drug advertising became more "feel-good" and consumer-focused in the 1970s. This 1971 ad for Quaaludes (Methaqualone) bears a basic resemblance to contemporary drug advertising with its glossy portrayal of a happy family scene and its side effects relegated to a small-print facing page. In an interesting side note, the history of Quaaludes offers a glimpse of how the pharmaceutical business, and global capitalism in general, was changing in the twentieth century. Like methamphetamine, which was synthesized by the Japanese chemist Nagai Nagayoshi in 1893, Methaqualone was invented in the non-Western world: it was synthesized in India by Indra Kishore Kacker and Syed Hussain Zaheer in 1951.

This contemporary (mid-2000s) ad for Adderall continues the story up to the present day.

One common theme of these drug advertisements is the manner in which they use branding, particularly naming practices, to differentiate what is actually a surprisingly small core group of consumer drugs. Adderall, for instance, is simply a trade name for a mixture of amphetamine salts - of which one quarter is d,l racemic amphetamine, i.e. our old friend Benzedrine. This is a story that goes back to the era of João Curvo Semedo, William Salmon and Thomas Sydenham. Rather than marketing one's "remedio secreto" as nothing more than a tincture of opium in wine, early modern drug sellers seized on the idea of selling these preparations under catchy names -- "Sydenham's Drops," for instance -- and obscuring their source ingredients. This marked, arguably, the beginning of the massive pharmaceutical branding industry.

Those wishing to find more vintage drug advertisements merely need to type that phrase into Google in order to find a true treasure trove of images (although many are sadly lacking identifying info). Two particular riches sources can be found here and here. (For the culture of contemporary drugs more generally, I've also been enjoying Hamilton Morris's Hamilton's Pharmacopeia series). The history of drug advertising in the pre-modern world is much more lacking in documentation and analysis. One approach can be found in this interesting paper on "Exotic drugs and English medicine" by Patrick Wallis of the London School of Economics, which is available online.

Images of a New World: the Watercolors of John White

2012-04-30T12:55:00.001-05:00

This is a cross-posting from a piece I recently wrote for the Public Domain Review. For this version of the post, I've supplemented the original with quite a few more images which are sourced from the British Museum and are reproduced here under its fair use agreement. As a side note, I've been remiss in updating Res Obscura lately because I've been in the thick of my dissertation research, and have also been traveling. But I'm working on a couple new posts at the moment so I expect to start updating more regularly again. - BB

“As lucklesse to many, as sinister to myselfe.” Such was the Elizabethan colonist John White’s gloomy assessment of his tenure as the first governor of Britain’s fledgling colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia. As White lived out his final days on an Irish plantation in 1593, he struggled to come to terms with his ambivalent legacy in the “Newe found Worlde.”

Anonymous portrait of Sir Richard Grenville
from the National Portrait Gallery.

Just eight years earlier, White had set out for North America as part of an expedition lead by a fiery-tempered courtier named Sir Richard Grenville. This voyage was not without its challenges – White recalled laconically that in a battle with Spanish mariners he was “wounded twise in the head, once with a sword, and another time with a pike, and hurt also in the side of the buttoke with a shot.” Yet in this time White also witnessed natural marvels, helped build a new colony, and even celebrated the birth of his now-famous granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first child of English/Christian parentage to be born on American soil. Ultimately, however, White’s ambitions ended in catastrophe, with the mysterious disappearance of the ninety men, seventeen women, and eleven children who comprised the Roanoke colony – a group that included his daughter and granddaughter.

In the centuries since White’s death, his story has diverged in an interesting way. Generations of schoolchildren raised in the United States can probably recall reading about the “Lost Colony” at Roanoke in textbooks. In these simplified accounts, White and his fellow colonists typically figure as doomed but visionary pioneers in a larger narrative of British-American exceptionalism. Among professional historians, White is equally famous, but for rather different reasons. In recent histories of colonial British America, it is John White the artist, rather than John White the colonial governor, who takes center stage. This is because White was a watercolor painter of extraordinary talent whose works number among the most remarkable depictions of early modern indigenous Americans ever created.

'The Flyer', a Secotan Indian holy man or "conjuror" (as the British often called them) painted by John White in 1585. British Museum, London.

To be sure, many other European contemporaries of White offered up visual depictions of native Americans. Readers of André Thevet’s early account of Brazil, Les singularitez de la France antarctique (Paris, 1557), for instance, could expect to be treated to renderings of Tupí Indians harvesting fruit, singing songs (complete with musical notation recorded by Thevet) and even munching casually on barbequed human thighs and buttocks.

Yet White’s illustrations stood out among those of his peers. Rather than working via woodblock printing or engraving, White produced paintings in vivid watercolors. This allowed him to achieve a level of lifelike detail which printed illustrations couldn’t hope to match. One of the most striking examples of White’s eye for detail is found in his tender depiction of an Algonquian Indian mother with her daughter.

John White, "A cheife Herowans wyfe of Pomeoc and her daughter of the age of 8 or 10 years." (1585) British Museum, London.

In 1585, one of White’s companions in Virginia, the natural philosopher and inventor Thomas Harriot, remarked that the indigenous children he encountered in America “greatlye delighted with puppets and babes which are broughte oute of England.” White’s painting actually offers a direct visual proof of this observation: in the hands of the woman’s child, one can spot a tiny female doll wearing Elizabethan dress.

As the historian Joyce Chaplin notes in her book Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Harvard University Press, 2003), this image was later recreated by the Dutch printmaker Theodore de Bry, who used White’s watercolors to create engravings for Thomas Hariot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590). De Bry’s depiction shows the Indian girl holding not only “an English doll in Elizabethan clothing,” but “an armillary sphere,” which served as “an instructional and decorative representation of the globe and heavens” (Chaplin 36).

Engraving by Theodore de Bry after John White's watercolour, from Thomas Hariot’s
A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590)

Remarkably, according to the British Museum, this engraving served as the inspiration for a Mughal Indian watercolor painting in the 1630s! This copy-of-a-copy wonderfully illustrates the globalization that was beginning to occur in this period. I took the liberty of arranging the three variations end to end so the resemblance could be seen (the Mughal painting is at the far right).

White also had a remarkable ability for “zooming out” from a scene to create an imagined isometric perspective. His painting of an Algonquian village stands out as one of the most detailed depictions of indigenous American village life to survive from the sixteenth century.

Village of the Secotan Indians in North Carolina, by John White in 1585. British Museum, London.

As the detail of the dancing circle in the lower right of this image suggests, White seems to have had a particular interest in Algonquian religious ceremonies. Another painting by White along similar lines gives a precious glimpse of pre-contact American Indian religious practice and daily life:

Ceremony of Secotan warriors in North Carolina. Watercolour painted by John White in 1585. British Museum, London.

What, then, was White’s final legacy? In a narrative first printed in Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages, White described his return to Virginia in 1590 in search of the colonists he had left at Roanoke (he had returned to England three years earlier in efforts to obtain “supplies, and other necessities”). His account evokes the haunted landscape of a ghost story, and its eerie details have made it part of American folklore ever since. On the 17th of August, White recalled, three ships under his command reached Roanoke, where they “found no man, nor signe of any that had been there lately.” The next evening, one of White’s sailors spied “a fire through the woods” and the men “sounded a Trumpet, but no answer could we heare.” The light of the next daybreak revealed that this was “nothing but the grasse, and some rotten trees burning.”

Finally, however, White found evidence of the colonists’ wherabouts. In a tree, he discovered “three faire Roman Letters carved C. R. O.”: this was a pre-arranged maker which White understood “to signifie the place where I should find them”: Croatan. White’s suspicion was confirmed with the discovery of a scene that is now almost mythical:

We found no signe of distresse; then we went to a place where they were left in sundry houses, but we found them all taken downe, and the place strongly inclosed with a high Palizado [i.e. a palisade of wooden stakes], very Fortlike; and in one of the chiefe Posts carved in fayre capitall Letters C R O A T A N, without any signe of distresse, and many barres of Iron… and such like heavie things throwne here and there, overgrowne with grass and weeds…

Interestingly, White’s account here connects his two identities as governor and painter. He remarks that his men “found diverse Chests which had been hidden and digged up againe” surrounding the palisade. Among these chests, White was surprised to find objects which he knew “to be my owne”: “books” and “pictures” he had created in the years before, now “scattered up and downe…[and] spoyled.”In the end, White was unable to follow up on these strange clues: storms forced the expedition’s ships to turn back before reaching Croatan, and he returned to Britain with the mystery unresolved. The ultimate fate of the Roanoke colonists continues to be debated. Some have conjectured that White’s fellow colonists may have opted to join a local Algonquian Indian tribe and adapt themselves to the very different (and rather more effective) Amerindian methods of contending with the harsh American landscape.

It is unlikely that we’ll ever know what happened – but if White’s daughter and granddaughter really did become incorporated into an Indian tribe, it would have made a strange sort of sense. Few sixteenth century Europeans looked upon indigenous Americans with anything other than a jaundiced and prejudiced eye. Yet White’s sensitive and humane portrayals of daily life among the Algonquians tell a different story, and suggest that his own stance toward the native peoples he encountered in the New World was rather more complex. In White’s sensitive depiction of the Algonquian woman and her child holding a European doll, perhaps we can discern a foreshadowing of the hybrid Euro-American fate of his own daughter and grandchild. The intertwined tales of the failed colony White governed, the family he raised, and the artworks he created offer one of the earliest examples of the mingling of cultures that would define the history of the Americas in the centuries to come.

I'd like to close by sharing some further illustrations, which have been traditionally associated with White. According to the British Museum, the traditional attribution of these works as copies after lost originals by John White is debatable. However, even if White was not directly involved in their production, they seemingly still were produced in the Roanoke colony, perhaps by an assistant of Thomas Harriot:

In his will, Harriot mentioned his long-time servant Christopher Kellett, a ‘Lymning paynter’, and it is just feasible that these are his work, though his name is not recorded in the list of Lane colonists for 1585–6. It would be natural for a set of these to end up in White’s volume if they did eventually intend to publish them.

Interestingly, the famed editor Richard Hakluyt ultimately came into possession of the paintings and provided them to none other than Edward Topsell, a writer on animals whose Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes was the subject of the very first Res Obscura post. All of the following images are owned by the British Museum. See here for a further discussion of their provenance and here for the complete collection of 117 paintings.

Altered and adorned: an interview with Suzanne Karr Schmidt

2012-02-28T10:15:00.001-06:00

Message box with hand-painted print, Germany, 1490s. Featured in
Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Kimberly Nichols, Altered and Adorned.

Today I'm pleased to offer up Res Obscura's very first guest post: an interview conducted by Hasan Niyazi of the popular art history blog Three Pipe Problem. I've been a big fan of this blog since discovering it last year and really enjoy its commitment to unravelling the various mysteries of Renaissance and Baroque visual art. The following is an interview that Hasan of 3PP conducted with the art historian Suzanne Karr Schmidt, who received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2006 and served as the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Schmidt recently co-authored an exhibition catalogue called Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life (Yale University Press, 2011) which examines "how prints were used to create sewing patterns, affixed on walls, glued into albums and books, and in some instances even annotated, handcoloured, or cut apart."

Frontispiece, Hortus Sanitatis, 1491.

On a personal level, I've been fascinated by this topic ever since I examined an exceptional 15th century book (these oldest of all printed works are called incunabula) held by the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin called the Hortus Sanitatis or "Garden of Health." This 1491 bestiary and herbal was printed by none other than the right-hand man of Gutenberg himself and features (in the HRC copy, at least) incredibly beautiful hand-painted prints. The Harvard copy, which also features hand-painted illustrations, is available online here. Just holding such an ancient and rare object in my hands was a remarkable experience. I noted on the first page of this particular copy that it had been signed by an owner from 1577 named Thomas Lasse, and found that this owner had annotated the work throughout with elaborate quotes and the occasional manicule. As I turned to the section on sea creatures, I was stunned to find that this Elizabethan owner had gone one step further - he had actually replaced a page of the book relating to mer-folk with his own careful drawing of a mermaid! No scan of the HRC edition exists online, but this is the original page that Thomas Lasse replaced with a hand-drawn version:

(As an aside, observant readers might note that the Hortus Sanitatis mermaid appears to be the direct ancestor of the Starbucks logo - which was famously toned down from the slightly risque early modern original in the 1980s and '90s.)

What does all of this have to do with Suzanne Karr Schmidt's book, you might ask? After pondering the case of the missing mer-creatures for an hour or two, it occurred to me that there might be a surprisingly mundane reason why this particular page had been torn from the book at some point prior to 1577: someone wanted to put a mermaid on their wall. Early printed books were very expensive, but prints and woodcuts in the early modern period were not treated with nearly the degree of museum-instilled reverence we give them today. Prints were portable decorations which became part of everyday life: they were frequently torn from books and broadsheets and pasted on walls of taverns, workplaces and homes. This is something you can see quite clearly in details of Dutch paintings -- for instance in the paintings of the domestic life of alchemists I highlighted in an earlier post:

In essence, then, the mermaid from this virtually priceless book may once have been the sixteenth century version of a poster on a teenagers wall.

So with no further adieu, I'm happy to present the following interview between Hasan Niyazi (HN) and Suzanne Karr Schmidt (SKS).

In December 2011, 3PP posted a review of Altered and Adorned - an exhibition catalogue by Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Kimberly Nichols. Inspired by the visually rich and accessible volume, 3PP sought to interview its author and delve a bit more deeply into the fascinating world of Renaissance prints. Suzanne Karr Schmidt is a US based artist and art historian. In 2008 she was appointed as the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) - which resulted in the aforementioned exhibition and catalogue publication distributed by Yale University Press. 3PP's full review can be read here. -HN

HN: What sparked your personal interest in Renaissance prints - both as an artist and as an art historian?

SKS: I've always loved books, with a children's author (my mother, Kathleen Karr) in the family. I was a double major in art history and studio art as an undergraduate at Brown University, which included a fantastic etching class. I initially decided to work on Renaissance art, specifically from Northern Europe, when I went to graduate school at Yale University. I settled on prints instead of paintings or other media when a seminar paper that would become my doctoral dissertation on early modern paper engineering (read: the Renaissance Pop-Up Book) allowed me to spend time going through boxes and boxes of nearly unseen prints throughout Europe. The fact that there are still unknown prints out there was and remains very important. Prints are the last art-historical frontier, where there are discoveries still to be made.

HN: You were appointed Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the AIC in 2008 - what does this role involve?

SKS: This three-year position is one of two at the Art Institute of Chicago generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The program (which is also active at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other U.S. art museums) is intended to interest postdoctoral scholars in museum work rather than just university positions. The fellows assume the duties of assistant curators in departments museum-wide, usually complete a culminating project (in my case the Altered and Adorned exhibition and catalogue), and are actively engaged in all aspects of building, exhibiting, publishing, and maintaining the collection. All in all, it's a fantastic opportunity for scholars who prefer hands-on engagement with objects and exhibitions to teaching, and the museums get a recent Ph.D as a fully-funded new member of their staff.

HN: How accessible were Renaissance Prints to different levels of society? Is it mainly through collectors that they have survived?

SKS: I research a wide variety of Renaissance prints--from fine engravings that would certainly have been more expensive and kept relatively safe by collectors--to more ephemeral wall hangings and broadsides sporting texts about current events and cruder woodcuts. The cheaper ones were probably printed in the greatest numbers, but are now the rarest. Many were collected almost accidentally (as bookmarks, for instance), though there have thankfully been early modern collectors of broadsides as well. Their stark attrition initially stemmed from their size and purpose--to be posted where the literate could read the texts for the illiterate (who could also enjoy the pictures). Not every print would have been accessible to every level of society, but there are plenty of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of 'Twelfth Night' parties where farmers or middle-class revelers gather for the Epiphany feast to crown a king with a printed paper hat, and some uncut sheets still survive.

HN: Can you explain anything of the provenance of the mysterious "messenger box" acquired by the AIC - and why it remains so well preserved?

SKS: The "messenger box" was sold at auction in 2007 from the collection of a prominent Paris bookseller, who had amassed some 25 of these boxes with prints in them over his long career in the book trade. Prior to that owner, very little is known, though art historians begin to discuss these hybrid artworks in the early 20th century. Before then, they were evidently ignored as decorative but not necessarily fine-art objects. They have also sometimes been interpreted as boxes for missals and other religious books, which could explain why a book dealer came across so many.

HN: Do you see parallels with the explosion in the distribution of knowledge via Renaissance prints with our own information age?

SKS: I absolutely do. The change from a manuscript culture to a printed one didn't mean there were suddenly multiple copies of books where there had previously been none, just that the speed of replication was much faster. Literacy eventually improved as well. Even with images, copying was rampant, and printed images could go viral, as in the many, many versions of Dürer's portrait of a rhinoceros he'd never seen, but which became the unshakable image of what such a beast should, theoretically, look like. Not all visual information was necessarily trustworthy, even if it was in print before the days of Photoshop. On a more specific level, printed scientific instruments offered replaceable gadgetry that was relatively cutting edge. (These appear in greater numbers in another exhibition I've worked on recently, Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, at Northwestern University's Block Museum, until April 8.) The folding pocket sundials (some with cheap printed veneers) are like an early modern iPhone, and could tell time among other calculating bells and whistles. Some had maps on their back with built-in latitude charts (essential for telling local time).

HN: Artists like Dürer, Raphael and Titian embraced the use of prints - producing unique designs in printed media alone. Can they be viewed as multimedia pioneers - or was their utilisation of printed media typical for artists of the era?

SKS: These artists were absolutely pioneers, with an explicit intention to disseminate their works via prints. Dürer in fact lamented that he had not diversified with prints sooner, as painting was a much more painstaking process with a limited amount of exposure, especially if the commission were for a private owner rather than for display in a church or town hall. Dürer is still considered to have engraved his own intaglio prints (though not cut his own woodblocks) however, which is slightly different than the workshop effect of Raphael and Titian where others translated the designs into print. The Dürer-Marcantonio Raimondi (the main artist who engraved Raphael's work) lawsuit in Venice, in which Raimondi was fined for using Dürer's monogram, but not for copying his images, shows some of the growing pains of the new media.

A foldout print from the Altered and Adorned exhibit: Lucas Kilian's Third Vision (Eve),
anatomical flap print from Mirrors of the Microcosm, 1613

Early Modern Alchemy: Heinrich Khunrath's "Amphitheater of Eternal Knowledge"

2012-01-23T06:17:00.001-06:00

"While these Discontents continued, severall Letters past between Queene Elizabeth and Doctor Dee, whereby perhaps he might promise to returne; At length it so fell out, that he left Trebona and took his Iourney for England. The ninth of Aprill he came to Breame… Here that famous Hermetique Philosopher, Dr Henricus Khunrath of Hamburgh came to visit him." - Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum, (London, 1652), cited in Frances Yates' The Rosicrucian Enlightenment

I'M a bit obsessed with the Elizabethan occult author John Dee (even wrote a good chunk of his Wikipedia page), but I know very little about the man who the famed historian Frances Yates considered to be the critical link between Dee and the Continental tradition of European alchemy, Heinrich Khunrath. Last year I came across some of the book plates from Khunrath's occult work Ampitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Hamburg, 1595), or "The Amphitheater of Eternal Knowledge," and was floored by their complexity and beauty. Remarkably, only three copies of the first edition of this work are known to exist. The University of Wisconsin Library has been good enough to scan the images of its copy and make them available online along with an excellent critical history of the book (here). The same site also offers a good overview of the little that is known about Khunrath's biography.

"The Cosmic Rose"

"The Hermaphrodite."

"The Alchemist's Laboratory." Each object bears a Latin motto offering advice
for the alchemical adept. For instance, the still reads FESTINA LENTE
("hasten slowly"), the personal motto of Emperor Augustus.

"The Four, the Three, the Two, the One."

Remarkably these already exceptionally detailed images originally appeared surrounded by cryptic Latin text. Take "The Hermaphrodite" image displayed above, for example:

Click image for a much larger version. Transcription of the text here.

A detail from the same image:

Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica
(London, 1564), frotispiece.

Here we get a sense of the bafflingly complex nature of these images. The figure of the hermaphrodite as a metaphor for the dualistic nature of the universe and the human body is a common one in alchemical imagery. Likewise, the sun and moon are frequently used to symbolize the male and female natures inherent in different elements (the sun is gold/male, the moon female/silver, etc.) The black peacock labelled "AZOTH" leads us deeper into Hermetic territory. Azoth was the hypothesized universal solvent, the "ultimate substance" which could transform all elements. Here it seems to be used to convey the union of male and female (and of all elements) which would allow the corporeal human form to transcend to a divine plane (note the symbol of the trinity above the peacock feathers, which resemble diagrams of the celestial spheres). To top it all off, the "O" in "Azoth" made out of John Dee's "hieroglyphic monad"!

So what are we to make of all this? Quite a few scholars have examined Khunrath's Ampitheatre. In her book The Alchemy of Light, Urszula Szulakowska, for instance, argues that the engravings in Khunrath's texts

are intended to excite the imagination of the viewer so that a mystic alchemy can take place through the act of visual contemplation… Khunrath's theatre of images, like a mirror, catoptrically reflects the celestial spheres to the human mind, awakening the empathetic faculty of the human spirit which unites, through the imagination, with the heavenly realms. Thus, the visual imagery of Khunrath's treatises has become the alchemical quintessence, the spiritualized matter of the philosopher's stone (9).

A 17th century portrait engraving of
Khunrath.

The images, in other words, invite the viewer to engage in a meditation on the nature of the universe and on the links between the earthly and the divine, the corporeal and the spiritual. Of course, such a statement would be equally true of many other instances of early modern alchemical and Hermetic symbolism. I suspect that a lot of the meaning in these images and the text that accompanies them has actually been lost, due to the fact that alchemical practice depended upon face-to-face interactions (like the one between John Dee and Khunrath) which were never recorded. And this was precisely what was intended - the true secrets of early modern alchemy were intended for a small number of the "elect" and were elaborately concealed in complex and often inscrutable language when they were allowed into printed works.

On the other hand, the visual interest of these magnificent images is arguably all the greater owing to the unknowable mysteries that now surround their creation and meaning.

American Monsters: Images of Brazilian Nature from Early Modern Europe

2012-01-10T09:17:00.001-06:00

"The most disgusting and nauseating thing which man ever saw."
-Spanish chronicler Andres Bernaldez on Christopher Columbus' first impression of Caribbean iguanas, 1513.

IN HIS BOOK Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Harvard literature professor Stephen Greenblatt argues that "the production of a sense of the marvelous in the New World is at the very center of virtually all of Columbus's writings about his discoveries, though the meaning of that sense shifts over the years." Greenblatt thinks that Columbus emphasized wonders and marvels "because marvels are inseparably bound up in rhetorical and pictorial tradition with voyages to the Indies. To affirm the 'marvelous' nature of the discoveries is, even without the lucrative shipments yet on board, to make good on the claim to have reached the fabled realms of gold and spices." Yet Greenblatt doesn't devote much space in his book to the flip side of the "marvelous": the monstrous.

As Iberian voyages of "discovery" segued into expeditions of conquest and settlement over the course of the sixteenth century, Europeans increasingly visualized the New World as a land of bizarre torments, freakish monsters and outlandish civilizations in thrall to the devil.

Map of Brasil, Dieppe School, 1547. Click to see
much larger version.

Spanish interpretations of the religious practices they encountered in the lands of the Aztec Triple Alliance have attracted the majority of historians interested in how Europeans expressed fear, apprehension and disgust -- as well as wonder -- toward the Americas (see below for some recommendations). The pictures below show that monsters and the monstrous were also depicted in the context of Portuguese Brazil. I'm particularly interested in how the incredible biodiversity of Amazonia was initially interpreted by European observers who had seen nothing to rival it in their temperate homelands. Although comparisons to the Garden of Eden were frequent, these images also reveal a profound anxiety about the abundance of nature in the Neotropics.

The Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry's vision of Brazil mingles outlandish sea creatures with
flying devils who torment the Tupí Indian villagers at lower right. Theodor de Bry, Americae
tertia pars (Frankfurt, 1592)

Birds of paradise feature in this detail from the 1547 Dieppe map of Brazil linked above.

Tupí Indians hunt leonine creatures, probably reflecting early accounts of jaguars. Another detail.

In the same pictorial field, villagers lounge while two tortoises amble by.

During the Dutch occupation of parts of Brazil in the 1640-60 period, a number of highly
skilled painters visited the new colony to record their impressions of its flora and fauna.
In this 1665 painting by Albert Eckhout, two dueling tortoises recall the pair in the detail
from the Dieppe map above.

Despite their skill in visual representation, however, Dutch artists were often at least as fanciful in their depictions of South American monsters as their French and Iberian peers. The engravings below, selected from the Dutch author Arnoldus Montanus' 1671 De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld (The New and Unknown World), offer a positively bizarre take on American animals and peoples.

The "draco" (dragon) in this one bears a passing resemblance to the "Jenny Hanivers" and
"Sea Monks" of early modern sailors' lore.

Europeans were also fascinated and fearful of the "monstrous" forms of indigenous Brazilians themselves. Although most accounts remarked upon the good health, longevity and physique of Tupí Indians and other indigenous societies in Brazil (probably a reflection more of the poor health and diet of the European mariners than anything else), others focused on their tendency toward body-modification. The most entertaining and strange European take on piercing and tattooing I have been able to find is John Bulwer's fantastically titled Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or the Artificial Changeling. Historically presented, in the mad and cruel Gallantry, foolish Bravery, ridiculous Beauty, filthy Fineness, and loathesome Loveliness of most Nations, fashioning & altering their Bodies from the Mould intended by Nature. With a Vindication of the Regular Beauty and Honesty of Nature, and an Appendix of the Pedigree of the English Gallant. (London: J. Hardesty, 1650). (I wrote about this a bit in an earlier post). Below he describes how "the Brasileans... are pricked within the flesh" with paint.

Bulwer's title page takes this a step further, showing an Amerindian figure sporting some truly remarkable tattoos! The European woman with facial tattoos to the figure's left highlights Bulwer's concern that this "barbarous" custom would become fashionable with his own countrymen (he was right, but it would take another three hundred years or so to really catch on, and the whole "face on a butt" tattoo fad seems to still lie in the future).

Readers wanting to learn more about the role of the devil and the monstrous in European interpretations of Amerindian societies might want to start with Fernando Cervantes' The Devil in the New World and Jorge Canizares-Esguerra's Puritan Conquistadors. Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions, quoted above, is a great study of how the fantastical and marvelous figured into colonization, while Joyce Chaplin's Subject Matter: Technology, the Body and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, revises and critiques his claims in various interesting ways. Those interested in New World nature and particularly animals should check out A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America Miguel de Asua and Roger French, a fun, learned and highly-entertaining book (from which I stole the quote on iguanas that opens this post).

The Art of Fooling the Eye

2011-10-19T11:52:00.000-05:00

PARRHASIUS, it is said, entered into a pictorial contest with Zeuxis, who represented some grapes, painted so naturally that the birds flew towards the spot where the picture was exhibited. Parrhasius, on the other hand, exhibited a curtain, drawn with such singular truthfulness, that Zeuxis, elated with the judgment which had been passed upon his work by the birds, haughtily demanded that the curtain should be drawn aside to let the picture be seen. Upon finding his mistake, with a great degree of ingenuous candour he admitted that he had been surpassed, for that whereas he himself had only deceived the birds, Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist. - Pliny the Elder, The Natural History (circa 77 CE), Book 35, Chapter 36.

Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time detail, (c. 1545).

THE ability to trompe-l'œil ("deceive the eye" in French) was among the most highly prized artistic skills of Pliny's day, as evidenced by the many tales of Greek and Roman painters who boasted that their works were capable of fooling both man and beast. Although most figurative paintings offer an illusionistic "window" into a false reality to some degree, trompe-l'œil works take such verisimilitude to the level of optical illusion. The technique has been called a "triumph of the gaze over the eye."

My favorite examples of trompe-l'œil come from the Renaissance and Baroque periods (roughly speaking c. 1500 to c. 1700). European culture of this era displayed a strong fascination with the interplay between the beautiful and the hideous, the secret and the visible, and the concept of truth. In the arts, these preoccupations were expressed through masks, stage plays (whose actors often functioned as a metaphor for life in seventeenth-century poetry), and the mask-like, mysterious figures of Mannerist painters, most famously exemplified in the brilliant and vaguely creepy works of Agnolo Bronzino.

It is not surprising, then, that paintings which expressly sought to fool the eye (and the mind) by experimenting with the boundaries between the artificial and the real enjoyed a high level of popularity throughout the 1500 through 1700 period -- nor that these works could function as profound reflections on the nature of visible reality rather than as clever but gimmicky visual tricks, which is how we tend to approach trompe-l'œil today. Below are some of my favorite examples.

Domenico Remps, A Cabinet of Curiosity, 1690s.

I included this painting in an earlier post on curiosity cabinets, but wanted to revisit it here to show Remps' incredible ability to evoke illusionistic details. Notice, for instance, the reflection of the mirror in the upper left part of the cabinet, which, much like Jan van Eyck's famous Arnolfini Wedding, reveals the room in which it was painted:

Even as Remps points out the artificial nature of the painting by revealing the site of its creation, however, he also creates the illusion that an actual curiosity cabinet (rather than its mere representation on canvas) stands before us. This photo-realistic effect is achieved by clever touches such as the broken glass on the right hand cabinet window.

Portraying paintings within a painting, as Remps does here, was an extremely popular approach -- I suppose because it highlighted the painter's skill in multiple genres while also maximizing the visual delight of the viewer by offering several vistas and scenes at once (modern tastes tend to be more minimalist, but the seventeenth century was all about maximalism). The ultimate example of this that I have seen is David Tenier's incredibly over-the-top depiction of Archduke Leopold Wilhem's gallery:

David Teniers the Younger, ca. 1650, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Gallery in Brussels, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Another typical approach of the period which I find to be in many ways more interesting was that of including written texts in paintings. This technique is actually visible in a surprisingly large number of famous works (for instance, in Hans Holbein's famous portrait of a German merchant). It reached an extreme form, however, in paintings such as the following:

Jean-François de Le Motte, c. 1670, Still Life, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon.

A detail of the texts, which include a letter to the artist, a printed pamphlet and what appears to be an accounting
notebook.

Cornelius Gijsbrechts (c.1630 - 1675), Trompe l'oeil, Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Gent, Belgium.

Edward (or Edvart) Collier, Trompe l'Oeil of Newspapers, Letters and Writing Implements
on a Wooden Board (1699)

Incidentally, this last work offers a fascinating glimpse into the origins of the modern newspaper. One of the early "intelligencers" depicted here, the Apollo Anglicanus, can be previewed on Google Books. (Check out the blog Merciurius Politicus for more along these lines).
One interesting example of a painting of an illuminated manuscript can be found on Palazo Strozzi's online exhibit of trompe l'œil works:

Detail showing early sheet music of a psalm.

Finally, there is the related style of "quadratura," or painting architectural objects in an illusionistic manner. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Andrea Mantegna's playful and highly original ceiling fresco for the the Ducal Palace in Mantua, Italy, a detail from which heads this post:

Andrea Mantegna, fresco, Camera degli Sposi, Ducal Palace, Mantua, c. 1470.

An even more interesting off-shoot is anamorphosis, which employs distorted perspective to create coded images that only become understandable when viewed from the right angle. The most famous example of anamorphosis is to be found in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (one of my favorite paintings), where a strange blur at the bottom of the painting...

...revolves into a skull when viewed from the right angle, designed to remind the viewer of the ever-presence of death:

I'll stop there. For those interested in learning more, the Palazzo Strozzi museum in Florence has an online exhibit on trompe l'œil with many beautiful images and some interesting thoughts on the subject.

A Renaissance Merchant's Life in Clothing

2011-07-25T10:33:00.006-05:00

I've just finished reading Ulinka Rublack's Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2010) and came away from it with a newfound appreciation for how truly odd early modern clothing was -- and how important these clothes were in people's daily lives. Rublack, a Cambridge history professor, is very shrewd in noting that obsolete sartorial choices like codpieces, corsets or tight-fitting doublets were about more than adornment: they helped to structure the limits of physical movement while also expressing personal allegiances, social groupings, nationalities, and religious faith. What is more, early modern clothing offered a window into the inner emotional states of the wearer in a world that was far less receptive to that sort of thing than our own.

Matthäus Schwarz depicted by the painter Christoph Amberger in 1542.
This, his wedding portrait, displays Schwarz's prosperity while also
including his horoscope, visible above the wine glass.

To me, by far the most striking piece of evidence Rublack analyzes in her book is a vellum manuscript of some one hundred and sixty five watercolor illustrations from sixteenth-century Germany. Each one depicts the same man: Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg (1497-1574), a successful merchant who worked as an accountant for the powerful Fugger banking house. What makes this book extraordinary is that it depicts Schwarz and his clothing in every stage of his life, from what he called his “first dress in the world” as a days-old infant to the somber robes he donned as an ailing man of sixty-seven. Schwarz began to commission the illustrations from local Augsburg painters starting when he was twenty-seven, and in its pages we see a man's life as if in a film: the small child in its early pages grows to become a proud 15-year-old riding a horse, then a young man wearing elaborate Italian suits of red silk. When Augsburg is threatened by attack, an older Schwarz is depicted in a suit of gilded armor protecting his city. When his employer Anton Fugger is married we see Schwarz as a handsome man of thirty attending the wedding in rich velvet with a dueling sword at his side; when Fugger dies, Schwarz is a sixty-three wearing black robes and a wintry white beard. Schwarz even had himself depicted naked (front and back!) for reasons that scholars are still debating. Simply put, this is one of the most extraordinary early modern historical sources that I've ever seen. Rublack's publishers do a good job of including numerous color illustrations from what Schwarz called his Klaidungsbüchlein, or “Book of Clothes,” but a printed book can't possibly include all of them. Below I've selected some more that stood out to me.

The opening pages of Schwarz's Klaidungsbüchlein, showing him as a twenty-three-year old.

Schwarz as a new-born infant. Note the five-pointed star on his cradle! Perhaps a charm against evil?

At five years and four months old, a pious child.

Riding in the back of a wagon with his parents at eight and a half years old.

Hawking in the countryside with a friend, nine years and four months old.

Schwarz trampling on his schoolbooks as a fourteen-year-old.

Proudly riding his horse at fifteen.

Hawking at nineteen and seven months in a fashionable suit with codpiece, sword at side.

A month later, working as a clerk to Jakob Fugger, one of the richest men of his era, and perhaps of any era.

Practicing at sword fighting, twenty-one and two thirds. Some bold color choices in this suit!

At an archery contest at twenty-two years of age, wearing a similar suit and a foppish ruffled hat.

A fop no more: Matthäus mourns the death of his father. All four figures in this picture depict Schwarz wearing
different varieties of mourning dress.

This is a particular favorite of mine. Here Schwarz is a businessman of twenty-six visiting Nuremburg, and looking
a little put out by the stray dog peeing at his right! Note the money-sacks at his belt and the fashionable cloak with arm holes.

Stark naked at twenty-nine. Schwarz noted in relation to this picture, "I had become fat and large."

Schwarz at forty-one displaying the new cloak he bought to celebrate his pending nuptials.

Wearing plate armor and bearing halberd in preparation for the attack of Emperor Charles V, age forty-six.

Now middle-aged and bearded at forty-eight, Schwarz walks with his squire (and perhaps son? I can't read the caption).

An old man: Schwarz suffered a stroke at fifty-two. He is shown here in recovery at home. I would guess that he suffers from partial paralysis of the left side in this picture, given the sling and staff.

The final portrait of Schwarz in the album. Wearing formal black in the "Spanish style" that would later evolve into
the modern business suit, a sixty-three-year-old Schwarz attends the funeral of his employer, Jacob Fugger.

Amazingly, these incredible images actually appear to be sub-par copies of the original paintings - as I was writing this post I realized that the images in Rublack's book are slightly different, with a greater level of detail and brighter colors. I'd urge anyone who found this post interesting to pick up Rublack's Dressing Up - I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. It's one of the best-illustrated history books I've ever read, and it is also one of the most boldly-argued and insightful interpretations of early modern European culture to appear in the last few years, I think. As for the attribution of these images, I'm actually unable to say with any certainty. I found them as a result of a Google search for "Matthaus Schwarz" that turned up this mediafire upload of a complete scan of his book. I noticed that this German book blog posted images from what would appear to be the same copy (given the watermark). If readers have any information about who scanned the images or where they are held, please let me know [edit: thanks to John Overholt for pointing out that the original manuscript is owned by the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig, Germany]. As ever, I invite comments!

Le Monde Aquatique

2011-06-15T14:15:00.005-05:00

The images below are hand-colored details from two lavishly illustrated atlases of the world's oceans produced by the workshops of Pieter Goos (d. 1670) and Johannes van Keulen (1654-1715). Goos' L'Atlas de la Mer, ou Monde Aquaticque ("Atlas of the Sea, or the Watery World") the title page of which is visible at left, was published in Amsterdam in 1670. It would appear that van Keulen capitalized on the success of this work by reprinting the maps of Goos in slightly revised versions after his death in his Grand Nouvel Atlas de la Mer, ou Monde Aquatique (Amsterdam, 1696). Both Goos and Van Keulen shrewdly commercialized their knowledge of important commercial shipping lanes (which had once been proprietary to the Dutch trading companies) by publishing marine atlases in multiple languages, contributing to the hybridizations of knowledge and peoples that were a defining feature of the cosmopolitan late seventeenth-century.

What I find most interesting about these maps are the decorative, scroll-like 'cartouches' that ornament their corners, displaying a remarkable wealth of ethnographic and natural detail. These details, of course, were frequently wildly inaccurate, being based on second-hand information and long-held iconographies of the exotic and foreign (parasols, for instance, had a complex history in European depictions of Asians and Africans). Yet even these misperceptions are of interest, since, like the bizarre fabricated ethnographic sketches of Taiwan produced by the impostor George Psalmanazar, they offer insights into a vanished mental universe in which the boundaries of the known world were still shifting, uncertain and hazy, and when maps still contained huge swathes of blank space filled only by sea monsters and speculation.

All images are screenshots from hi-def scans of the works of Van Keullen and Goos that are accessible via a new online archive created by the French government relating to the Compagnie des Indes.

Detail from the title page of Goos' Atlas de la Mer evidently depicting Urania, the muse of astronomy.

Another detail featuring beautiful depictions of an armillary sphere and various mapping devices.

Title page of Van Keulen's atlas apparently depicting Europe (the woman with the torch) illuminating
the continents and oceans of the earth. Note the parasol, a popular iconographic marker of the exotic.

Cartouche for a map of Gabon in West Africa featuring an African writing and, oddly, what would appear to be a
Tupí Indian from coastal Brazil with a parrot-like bird.

A detailed painting of Fort Nassau near Moree, Ghana, a center of slave-trading.

A figure reckons the altitude of the sun using a cross-staff.

Another cartouche mingling African and South American iconographies.

The cartouche for a map of the River Gambia in West Africa apparently depicts a monkey preventing
a man from killing serpents with an axe -- I'd be curious if anyone reading this could explain this image.

Several excellent recent works of history have also considered the political, economic and scientific implications of seventeenth-century world maps, and the larger world of cosmopolitanism, travel and early modern globalization in which they were embedded. I would especially recommend Alison Games'Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion (Oxford, 2008), Benjamin Schmidt's Innocence Abroad: the Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670 (Cambridge, 2001) and Harold Cook's Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale, 2008).

Carnivalesque 74

2011-05-22T21:08:00.005-05:00

What follows are my selections for this month's Early Modern Carnivalesque, the seventy-fourth in an ongoing series of blog post compendia, or "carnivals," curated by the web's doyenne of early modern history, Sharon Howard. Thanks to Sharon and to all the authors of the posts cited below for making such rich stores of information freely available.

• The blog of the Dittrick Museum of Medical History presents scans from a macabre and rather hilarious rare book in its library: Le Livre sans Titre [The Book without a Title]. This 1830 work relates the "perils of self-abuse, or onanism," i.e. masturbation, but bears no title because "merely speaking the word in polite company invited rebuke in the nineteenth century," writes Jim Edmonson. It features some striking illustrations depicting the adverse health effects of "corrupting" oneself. A sample:

Before: "He was young, handsome and the hope of his mother." After: "He is corrupted! Soon
he carries the pain of his fault, old before his time... His back is bent...

• The Readex Blog presents a guest post by Elizabeth Hopwood, a graduate student in English at Northeastern, on "Avoiding Errors, Fopperies and Follies: How to be a Good Wife." This post offers extracts from a piece published in the New-England Weekly Journal in 1731 called "A Letter to a Lady on her Marriage." The author inveighs strongly against showing "the least degree of Fondness to your Husband before any Witness whatsoever, even before your nearest Relations, or the very Maids of your Chamber." PDA didn't go over well in colonial New England, it would appear.

• The wonderful Powered by Osteons blog offers up "Artifacts... in Space!" The English warship Mary Rose sank in battle with French ships in 1545. What can the bones of its sailors and the remains of the ship itself tell us about its fate? The author, Kristina Killgrove, is a biological anthropologist at UNC Chapel Hill, so she is able to offer some interesting insights in regards to the sailor's skeletal remains. A 2008 isotope analysis of the sailors' bones found that part of the crew was non-English, thus occasioning the theory that the ship "may have sunk because a language barrier among the sailors caused poor communication leading to operator error"! This strikes me as a bit of a stretch, and it seems to have been debunked by a more recent study. Killgrove also writes about the reconstruction of a sailor's face (seen at right) and the fact that a bead from the Mary Rose was recently sent into space aboard the Shuttle Endeavor. Quite a fascinating post.

• A food history blog called The Old Foodie posts about one of my favorite Englishmen of all time: the radical vegetarian and author Thomas Tryon (1634-1703). When I first stumbled upon Tryon's works in a rare books library I was amazed at how modern Tryon's advocacy of a healthy diet sounded (he loves salads and hates meat) and fascinated by the religious associations that he brought to bear in his polemics (he wrote an invented dialogue between a Frenchman and a "Brahmin" philosopher from "the Indies" advocating a form of deism). This post offers one of the best overviews of Tryon I've seen online. It also features a typically grim-sounding recipe he created: artichoke soup. The first ingredient: "blanched water." Vegan cooking has come a long way since the 1600s.

• On Not Even Past, a new website created by the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin (full disclosure - I'm the assistant editor), my friend and graduate school colleague Maria Jose Afanador Llach writes about "Naming and Picturing New World Nature: The Codice de la Cruz-Badiano." The Codice de la Cruz-Badiano, or Badianus manuscript, was the "first illustrated survey of Mexican nature produced in the New World." Fascinatingly, it was a joint product of indigenous Mesoamerican and European medical knowledge, and was produced by Nahua-speaking artisans and physicians. The illustrations (an example is posted below) are beautiful and evocative, with an eye-popping neon color scheme that varies strongly from traditional European botanical illustrations. This incredibly valuable work is currently housed in the Vatican archives.

• The Renaissance Mathematicus blog examines a mathematical text written by a painter - Albrecht Dürer, to be precise.

• Elizabeth Roberts of Brain Blogger writes informatively about the oft-forgotten but crucially important barber-surgeons of the early modern era - one of my own favorite historical topics. "From Haircuts to Hangnails - the Barber-Surgeon" gives a broad overview of the topic, showing how the arts of hair-cutting has been intermingled in history with quite a few of the jobs we moderns associate with medical professionals, from lancing and blood-letting to surgery and amputation. At right, an engraving from 1524 by the Flemish painter Lucas van Leyden shows a barber-surgeon performing some dicey-looking maneuvers to a man's ear region. "In the ancient Mayan civilization," Roberts writes, "they were called upon to create ritual tattoos and scars. The ancient Chinese used them to castrate eunuchs. They gelded animals and assisted midwives, and performed circumcisions. Their accessibility and skill with precise instruments often made them the obvious choice for surgical procedures." It all puts me in mind of my friend Chris, who once expressed the desire to write a history of the craft in Latin America called "Barberism and Civilization." I hope he does it someday. (By the way, the earlier Res Obscura post "A Pirate Surgeon in Panama" sheds some light on the barber-surgeon's sea-going compatriots.)

• The art history blog 3 Pipe Problem seems to keep getting better and better. This month saw a typically rich and well thought out post on "The elusive truth of art historical inquiry - a Raphael case study." The author, H. Niyazi, takes to task what I've long regarded as the most obnoxious element in the field of art history -- namely, the view that certain experts have quasi-supernatural gifts of discerning authorship in works of art. The author offers up the term "shamanistic connoisseurship" to describe such a view. I have to say I'm glad to see this ahistorical and snobby practice falling by the wayside. This post offers an interesting introduction to the contours of the debate, which has also been discussed in a fascinating recent piece on Jackson Pollocks in the New Yorker called "The Mark of a Masterpiece."

• Finally, the ever-reliable BibliOdyssey, which was the direct inspiration for my own blog, offers up a selection of writing blanks. These were "were single sheets printed from copper or wood engravings, issued by print sellers (and, later, children's booksellers), and sold to children across a broad socio-economic spectrum" in the period between 1650 and 1850, or thereabouts. Students would use the blank space in the center to show off their best hand-writing. The pictorial themes of the borders are quite varied, from the voyages of Captain Cook to the rather more prosaic topic of "Craneing Goods on Shore" (see below). Whether these reflect the interests of early modern school-children accurately or not is hard to say, but they are useful as scraps of evidence about what pre-modern kids were interested in, thus shedding light on highly elusive but fascinating topic of the history of childhood.

That's all for now - I will probably update this to add new posts as I find them. Thanks to all whose blogs I have sampled!

The Key of Hell: an Eighteenth-Century Sorcery Manual [Updated]

2011-05-09T11:38:00.002-05:00

Astrological talisman from an 1801 grimoire.

I found these amazing illustrations on Wellcome Images, a useful online database devoted to images related to the history of medicine from ancient times to the present. It is a small part of the larger Wellcome Trust archives. According to the image captions supplied by the Wellcome, all of the images below come from an eighteenth century German magical text known as the Clavis Inferni sive magia alba et nigra approbata Metatrona -- which translates as "The Key of Hell with white and black magic proven [or approved] by Metatron."

Cyprien et le démon, French, 14th century.

According to its catalogue entry, this mysterious manuscript was purchased from Sotheby's on March 29, 1912. Although the title-page inscription seems to date it to 1717, the catalogue notes that "the script seems to be of the late 18th century." As for the text's origins, the Wellcome's caption writes that it

is also known as the Black Book, and is the textbook of the Black School at Wittenburg, the book from which a witch or sorcerer gets his spells. The Black School at Wittenburg was purportedly a place in Germany where one went to learn the black arts.

I was somewhat dubious of this Harry Potter-esque claim so I researched the title a bit more and found that the attributed author, one Cyprianus, probably refers to St. Cyprian of Antioch (d. 304 CE): a very common apocryphal attribution for medieval magical texts, since Cyprian was reputed to have been a powerful magician and demon-summoner before converting to Christianity (see also the Iberian grimoire The Great Book of Saint Cyprian).

The martyrdom of Cyprian and Justina, medieval
Portuguese, oil on panel.

I also found that this very manuscript has actually been published by something called the Avalonia Press, which appears to be one of several such boutique presses devoted to occultism and attempts to revive 'black magic' as a religion or way of life. (I find that these folks usually do more harm than good by spreading poorly-researched information which hinders actual historical research into the history of magic and alchemy, but I am glad that they put texts like this into print).

An interesting-seeming book by a professor of Norwegian literature named Kathleen Stokker (Remedies and Rituals: Folk Medicine in Norway and the New Land) offers a different take on the reputed identity of Cyprianus (pp. 100-101). Stokker writes:

The identity of the mysterious figure Cyprianus varied wildly. People in Holstein, Denmark, imagined Cyprianus to be a fellow Dane so evil during his lifetime that when he died the devil threw him out of Hell. This act so enraged Cyprianus that he dedicated himself to writing the nine Books of Black Arts that underlie all subsequent Scandinavian black books.

Next comes a surprising twist:

In stark contrast, the Cyprianus of Oldtidens Sortebog [a Norwegian grimoire] is a ravishingly beautiful, irrestistibly seductive, prodigiously knowledgeable, pious Mexican nun. The nun's gory story, dated 1351, details her mistreatment by a debauched cleric whose advances she steadfastly refused.

It goes unexplained how a Mexican nun could have even existed in 1351! Perhaps the identity of Cyprianus, and of the Wellcome manuscript attributed to him, will never be known with much certainty owing to the profusion of misinformation that seems to surround all things related to black magic. The images, however, are incredibly evocative and mysterious, and tell a fascinating story in themselves.

The work's title page. Note the date, provided in curly Roman numerals toward the bottom of the page, and the cipher script above it. "Metratona" refers to the angel mentioned as God's courier and scribe in the Talmud and Judaic lore. [Update 5/11] Also note the two lines at the bottom made up of Greek, Latin and a few symbols. The anonymous poster in the Comments section below has kindly translated these lines to something like "You hang it above the pentacle, you bring together the earth from a known thread." With 'thread' (filo) having connotations of the thread measured out by the Fates. Still fairly opaque.

Cyprianus, Clavis Inferni sive magia alba et nigra approbata Metratona. German, 18th century, ink and watercolor. The script is a cipher. According to the Wellcome's caption, this image depicts "Maymon - a black bird - as King of the South; and Egyn - a black bear-like animal with a short tail - as King of the North."

Cyprianus, Clavis Inferni sive magia alba et nigra approbata Metratona. German, 18th century, ink and watercolor. "Uricus - a red-crowned and winged serpent - as King of the East" and "Paymon - a black cat-like animal with horns, long whiskers and tail - as King of the West."

Cyprianus, Clavis Inferni sive magia alba et nigra approbata Metratona. German, 18th century, ink and watercolor. A crowned dragon consumes a lizard, arching over a snake-wrapped cross with skull and cross-bones. The sword and branch probably refer to the common iconography of God's twinned powers to create destruction or peace. The Latin text reads Qui facis mirabilia magna solus finis coronat opus. I translate this to something like "You who act alone with great miracles [or miraculous things], the end shall crown the work." But my Latin is quite rusty.

Cyprianus, Clavis Inferni sive magia alba et nigra approbata Metratona. German, 18th century, ink and watercolor. The archangel Metatron with allegorical objects. I have no idea what to make of this one. The text is in Kabbalistic Hebrew and cipher, with Greek alpha and omega symbols.

The final page. Note the symbol, which looks strangely like the emblem of the Society of Jesus to me. [Update 5/11] The same Anonymous in the comments section has also contributed a rough translation of this passage: "I truly, from the law of that Majesty, do receive and take the treasure requested by you in the sent proclamation. Go away now most calmly to your place, without murmor [assuming rumore instead of umore] and commotion, and without harm to us and to the circle of other men. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, AMEN." Sounds like a spell or prayer to return a summoned being to its place of origin, perhaps.

These magical texts can make you feel a bit crazy if you spend too much time researching them (I was recently told as a bit of historian gossip that a prominent early researcher of John Dee went mad from precisely this cause, and I wasn't surprised). So I'll stop there.

As a side note, I'm hosting this month's early modern Carnivalesque (a round-up of recent blog posts on early modern history) so please send submissions to resobscura@gmail.com!

The World's Tallest Statues

2011-04-25T16:56:00.000-05:00

As to boldness of design, the examples are innumerable; for we see designed, statues of enormous bulk, known as colossal statues and equal to towers in size.
- Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE), Natural History, Book 34, Chapter 9.

Wikipedia has its critics (some justified, some not), but I personally love the odd ways that it organizes information -- especially the list-making tendencies of its members (I'm a longstanding fan of the List of Unusual Deaths). These lists are somewhat silly, to be sure, but not much more silly than the methods of famous figures such as Pliny the Elder. Pliny's encyclopedic Natural History, written circa 71 AD, is essentially a running tally of natural phenomena which often deviates from 'rational' methods of organization: Book XIII, for example, tabulates "trees, papyrus and other aquatic plants," but, in the words of James Eason, actually devolves into a "tirade on luxury, masquerading as a description of fancy tables."

All of this is meant to introduce an interesting Wikipedia list I recently came across that orders the world's statues by height. What I love about this list is that virtually every statue on it was unknown to me: the vast majority are from the non-Western world, and nine out of the top ten turn out to be depictions of the Buddha. Many of these statues were created by authoritarian regimes in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, but not all: one 88 foot tall Buddha in a Chinese monastery dates from 430 CE! Below are some of my favorite images of statues from the list, accompanied by the country they inhabit and the date of their creation.

The Spring Temple Buddha in Lushan, China -- the world's largest statue at 420 feet. Constructed in 2002.

The Ushiku Daibutsu in Ushiku, Japan -- significantly shorter at 361 feet, but in my view more imposing.

Rodina-Mat' Zovyot! (Mother Motherland Calls), the tallest non-religious and non-Buddha statue on the list. Created in 1967 in Volgograd, Russia, the statue is a paragon of the socialist realist style and the most monumental work of nationalist propoganda ever created. At 279 feet, it is almost five times taller than the figures on Mount Rushmore. Changes to the ground water surrounding the base of this concrete colossus means that it may not survive the century - the statue has begun to tilt.

This 233 foot tall giant Buddha in Leshan, China, is far older than the others: construction initially began in 713 and was completed in 803, making it a contemporary of Charlemagne and the so-called 'Dark Ages' in Europe (for a refutation of the concept of the Dark Ages, by the way, see Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity). I like this one quite a bit because it seems more integrated into the natural landscape than other colossal statues. It belongs to the style of sculpture that involves excavating soft stone outcrops to create figures -- the 6th century CE Afghan Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 strike me as very similar in construction and style to this one.

The 332 foot tall Mother Motherland statue created in Kiev, Ukraine in 1981 -- a counterpoint to the larger Volgograd statue above. It is made entirely of steel. This one scares me.

Statue of Lord Shiva, Kathamandu, Nepal. At 143 feet, it is the world's largest depiction of a Hindu deity. It is also the newest statue on the list, having reached completion in 2010.

Another steel one - the Genghis Khan Equestrian Statue in Tuv Province, Mongolia. It stands 132 feet tall and was completed in 2007. This is surely the most remote colossal statue on the list, and probably in the world.

The ancient Colossus of Rhodes, remarkably, was probably around the same size as these last two giants, standing around 107 feet high. According to classical accounts, including that of Pliny, it was partially cast from the bronze and iron weapons left behind by a Hellenistic king who attempted to lay siege to the port city circa 300 BCE. The Rhodians were said to have used a vast siege engine left behind by the king's retreating forces as scaffolding for the statue.

"For they are very expert and skillful in Diabolical Conjurations": Lionel Wafer in Central America, 1681

2011-04-20T13:58:00.001-05:00

"I sat awhile, cringing upon my Hams among the Indians, after their Fashion, painted as they were, and all naked but only about the Waist, and with my Nose-piece… hanging over my mouth. … 'Twas the better part of an Hour before one of the Crew, looking more narrowly upon me, cried out, Here's our Doctor; and immediately they all congratulated my Arrival among them. I did what I could presently to wash off my Paint, but 'twas near a Month before I could get tolerably rid of it." - Lionel Wafer on his 'rescue' by fellow buccaneers off the coast of Panama, 1681

Title page of Wafer's New Voyage.

The pirate-surgeon Lionel Wafer (1640-1705?) has won some modest attention from historians and those interested in pirate lore owing to his participation in the South Seas voyages of more famous buccaneers such as William Dampier and Bartholomew Sharp and his later role as an advisor to the disastrous Darién settlement scheme (I've also posted about him previously here). But the most interesting aspects of his story -- which hinges on a period of four months during which Wafer lived with the Kuna people of Panama while recuperating from a leg wound -- have gone without much notice. With that in mind, the remainder of this post is adapted from a conference paper on Wafer that I presented in Seattle last week. The theme is Wafer and his relation to science, demonology and indigenous spirituality. All images are from the Archive of Early American Images database of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, a wonderful online image resource.

When Lionel Wafer published his New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, he was working as a surgeon in London, and he probably remained in England until his death. But if we go back to the fall of 1681, we find Wafer living not as an Englishman, but as a Kuna Indian of the Panamanian coast. In the four months he spent in the Darién, Wafer had been adopted into a Kuna community under the leadership of a king named Lacenta. He had seen a gruesome leg wound sustained during his travles cured by means of indigenous herbal knowledge. He had learned the Kuna language, traveled in a royal hunting party, and gained knowledge of local plants and medicines. He had used his surgical skills – specifically, his practice of phlebotomy, or blood-letting – to “save the life” of one of Lacenta’s wives.

And he had witnessed the work of shamans who had predicted the circumstances of his own return to the Christian world with uncanny accuracy. They had done so, Wafer claimed, by summoning the devil.

Lacenta, family and attendants. From Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America
(London, 1699), 140.

Illustration of the Kuna method of blood-letting, performed on one of Lacenta's wives.
Wafer, A New Voyage and Description, 28.

“The Indians in their Robes in Councel, and Smoaking tobacco after their way.”
Wafer, New Voyage and Description, 102.

Pedro de Cieza de León, La chronica de Peru (Seville, 1553), xxii

Wafer’s account of the devil in the New World was hardly new – on the contrary, Spanish and Portuguese chronicles of American conquest described indigenous Americans who wielded the power of Satan to make prognostications, place curses or effect cures. Yet Wafer’s account raised unsettling questions about the potentially supernatural (and Satanic) origin of traveler’s knowledge in a specific time and place – Britain in the Scientific Revolution – when such knowledge had never been more valuable, or more fraught with controversy. As David Livingstone, Simon Schaffer and Harold Cook have shown, traveler’s accounts provided the first-hand reporting of phenomena that fueled the development of the natural sciences. But who was an acceptable source for this data?

Tupi Indians in Brazil tormented by devils (detail). Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars (Frankfurt, 1592), 223.

By the close of the seventeenth century, what Anna Neil has called ‘buccaneer ethnographers’ such as Lionel Wafer’s travel partner William Dampier had demonstrated that even criminals and pirates could collect empirical data about the world’s ethnography and geography. Yet the personal histories of such individuals, who frequently resided among non-Christian indigenous peoples for extended periods, put them in the complex position of serving as mediators between the practices of scientific travel and indigenous spirituality.

Wafer stood squarely in between these two worlds. As Britain’s preeminent firsthand witness of the Panama region, he was a key figure in early attempts to understand the American tropics -- and in efforts to make use of its resources. Indeed, in July of 1687 Wafer had been interviewed regarding the Darién’s colonization potential by none other than John Locke. Wafer’s account had also been printed and bound together with an account of Darien written by an unspecified “member of the Royal Society,” suggesting close links between Wafer and that institution.

How did this new generation of hybrid, cosmopolitan traveler navigate the boundaries between the scientific and the supernatural -- and what can these negotiations tell us about the transformations of both the natural sciences and the British Empire at the dawn of the eighteenth century?

Wafer’s connection to the geographic and cultural space of the American tropics put him in a unique position to complicate understandings of Satan, science and the supernatural. He served as a courier of knowledge about a tropical world that was still largely unknown to European science. But Wafer’s time in this space had bestowed on him a form of indigeneity that, while offering insights into the workings of nature in the New World, perhaps also rendered his testimony unreliable and epistemologically suspect. Wafer’s adoption of Kuna dress and ceremonial body paint, in particular, raised concerns about his trustworthiness that were tied to larger debates about the role of the devil in both European and non-European societies. John Bulwer’s 1656 frontispiece to Anthropometamorphosis, or the Artificial Changeling, for instance, shows a European woman, a hair-covered man and a South American Indian with full body paint standing side by side. They are being judged by Nature, Adam and Eve and a body of disapproving magistrates (including the ghost of Galen) for transforming their bodies, while the devil flies above them laughing and saying, “In the image of God created he them! But I have new-molded them to my likeness.”

Details showing Europeans and indigenous Americans being judged by Nature for modifying their bodies.
John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis (London, 1656), frontispiece.

Wafer had written that his Kuna body paint eventually rubbed off, often with the “peeling away of flesh and all,” to reveal a European underneath– but did his time in the world of the Kuna leave traces of the indigenous that took longer to disappear? In the preface to the second edition to the New Voyage and Description, printed in 1694, Wafer attempted to reaffirm his status as a credible Christian observer, writing that he wished to “vindicat[e] my self to the World” regarding his previous account of “the Indian way of Conjuring,” which, he explained vaguely, had “very much startled… several of the most eminent Men of the Nation.” In this preface Wafer continued to maintain that the Kuna shamans practiced Satanism, and he buttressed his authority by citing parallel accounts produced by Scottish settlers in the Darién. He pointedly refrained, however, from defending his earlier claims about the accurate predictions this method produced.

As the geographer David N. Livingstone notes in his book Putting Science in its Place, “To ask what role specific locations have in the making of scientific knowledge and to try to figure out how local experience is transformed into shared generalization is, I believe, to ask fundamentally geographical questions.” Wafer’s account affirms the truth of this claim. Yet it also opens up new questions about the entwined geographies of scientific and supernatural knowledge-- for religion is, after all, the other pre-eminent tool by which “local experience is transformed into shared generalization.” Would Wafer have requested and affirmed the truth of "Satanic conjurations" if he were in Europe and not Panama? Or did these powers exist in relation to the spaces that harbored them, and did long-distance travel and the exigencies of print and place transform perception of them in some fundamental way? Wafer’s account leaves the question open.

You can read Wafer's New Voyage and Description free of charge on Google books here. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz's The Door to the Sea and the Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién, 1640-1750 is the best account of the region's colonial history that I have found - it comes highly recommended, and is available free as a Gutenberg e-book via Columbia University Press. The University of Ohio library has a great blog post on its copy of Bulwer's Anthropometamorphosis with accompanying scans here. Finally, for those interested in the larger questions surrounding exploration, indigenous-European interaction and science, I highly recommend William Hasty's recent essay "Piracy and the Production of Knowledge in the Travels of William Dampier" and the works of Schaffer, Livingstone, Cook and Safier, which are hyperlinked above.

History on the Web Roundup, Mk. 1

2011-04-05T11:06:00.007-05:00

One of the things I've enjoyed about starting this site is that its made me aware of many other blogs devoted to history and visual culture. Popular sites like BibliOdyssey and 50 Watts (née A Journey Round My Skull) will probably be familiar to many of my readers, but others are less well known. With that in mind, here's the first entry in what I hope will be a semi-regular compendium of recent history-related content posted to the web (with a marked slant toward my interests in the 1500-1800 period, global history and visual and print culture). All posts are from circa March 2011.

Joris Hoefnagel (artist), Mira calligraphiae monumenta,
Flemish, illumination 1591-1596, script 1561-1562.
Getty, MS 20, fol. 37v. Image here.

1. From Duke Ph.D. student Whitney Trettien's Diapsalmata blog, a post on manuscript trompe l'oeil illustrations entitled "Dragonfly Wings & Other Bookish Things":

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Rudolf II commissioned Hoefnagel to illustrate the Mira calligraphiae monumenta, produced by the calligrapher Georg Bocskay twenty years earlier. Because Bocskay's calligraphic flourish crossed the entire page, Hoefnagel nestled the flower stem into a "slit" in the parchment. The shadows on both the flower and the mussel preserve the illusion... There's a thin, sometimes obscure line between the page as a medium bearing representations -- images and text that draw you away from its materiality -- and the page as an archival platform in itself.

Lavinia Fontana, Self-Portrait at the Spinet, oil, 1577

2. At Three Pipe Problem, a fantastic blog devoted to art history, guest-blogger Monica Bowen offers an interesting piece on the female self-portrait in the Renaissance:

Catherine King points out that in terms of self-portraiture, “the act of showing oneself to another was very different for a young woman than it was for a young man.” Hence, female artists needed to be careful in how they presented themselves in portraits. Fontana visually manifests this care by not only stressing her virginity, but by appearing in modest red dress that suggests marriage (red was the traditional color for wedding dresses in Bologna).

At the same site, also check out this fascinating discussion of Titian and mirrors and a post on the deep history of the virgo lactans motif in Western art.

A New Zealend native drawn by Jean Pirone, 1790s.

3. From peacay, the proprietor of BibliOdyssey, another typically well-crafted post on the Count de Lapérouse (1741-1788?), a French mariner whose ship disappeared in the Pacific in 1788. The writings and drawings of the ethnography and ecology of the Pacific Islands that his expedition produced largely survived, however, and were published in the following years along with related sketches produced by search and rescue missions:

In 1785 Louis XVI appointed La Pérouse to lead an expedition to the Pacific to complete Cook's unfinished work. His ships were the Astrolabe and the Boussole, both 500 tons. They were store-ships, reclassified as frigates for the occasion and his 114-person crew included ten scientists from different disciplines.

4. At Got Medieval, a nicely-illustrated post on fools in the Middle Ages:

The late-medieval/early-Renaissance fool hat is kind of a combination of two previous types of hats. The first, usually without bells, had a single curly-pointed peak... The other hat had two peaks and bells, but was flat across the top.

And see this sample chapter from Beatrice K. Otto's book Fools are Everywhere: the Court Jester around the World for more on the true history of this cliched stock figure. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Press, one of the best academic presses when it comes to making content available online.

Ben Jonson's copy of Martial's Epigrams, with marginal
annotations in Latin.

5. Sarah Werner at Wynken de Worde takes a look at an example of Ben Jonson's marginalia. The playwright appears to have been even more devoted to marking up his work than most early moderns, whose pointy hands, underlines, asterisks and doodles put today's undergraduates to shame.

I've been looking at another book that a student was working on. It's unprepossessing on the outside, just a small, worn brown leather binding, with the remains of ties that have long since disappeared. But the book is much more interesting on the inside...

The Old Library of Ilha de Moçambique.

6. [Update] I almost forgot to mention a promising very new blog: Macuti. This blog "on slums, museums and popular architecture in Ilha de Moçambique" was started in February by Silje, a Ph.D. candidate at Cophenhagen's Royal Academy School of Architecture. The posts offer a highly observant and nuanced look at the Island of Mozambique, a world heritage site thanks to its 16th century Portuguese structures (the island's chapel is the oldest still standing European-made structure in the Southern Hemisphere).

The library actually is in perfect order with book rows on heavy wooden shelves filled with information about modern agricultural production in Mozambique in the 1950s, French classics and a whole shelf of Hindi books...

For more history blog postings, see the Early Modern Carnivalesque for March 2011 on the Contemporary Jacobean Society blog and the links at right. [Update] While researching this post I came some other blogs of note: the newly-launched Big Map Blog, which features an excellent intuitive design and a huge array of digitized maps arranged by category, and Academitron, a blog on digital humanities. Finally, those with an interest in drug policy and history should check out Points: the Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

Also, please leave your own suggestions in the comments!

Playing Cards of the South Sea Bubble, 1720

2011-03-22T12:42:00.008-06:00

I lay it down as a foundation, that whosoever, sailing over the South Seas... shall never fail to discover new worlds, new nations, and new inexhaustible funds of wealth and commerce, such as never were yet known to the merchants of Europe.

- Daniel Defoe, A New Voyage Round the World, by a Course Never Sailed Before (London, 1724)

South Sea Bubble by Edward Matthew Ward (1846).

So much has been written about the South Sea Bubble of 1720 (see here, here, here and here) that I'm not going to reiterate the story of this huge financial collapse, which seems to be revisited and reinterpreted at each moment that the cycle of boom and bust repeats itself. Amidst all the economic analysis it is easy to loose sight of the (to me) far more interesting underlying geopolitical motive behind the stock speculation. This was the recognition that the Spanish Empire's control over the Pacific Ocean was weakening, and that other commercial powers might be able to assert themselves in this vast and largely unknown 'South' Sea -- which, Defoe proposed, should actually be the 'American Sea' because it gave access to the rich ports of Spanish America. Spanish treasure fleets and the occasional Portuguese carrack had been warily traversing this vast maritime world since the first decade of the sixteenth century, but it still held many surprises in store. Hawaii and New Zealand, for instance, were as yet unknown to Westerners, as was much of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia. British observers had been aware of the potential for trade in this region since the time of Drake, and the South Sea Company represented the fulfillment of these hopes.

Famously, however, things did not work out as planned. A roughly ten-fold decrease in the price of South Sea stock between 1720 and 1721 ruined countless families and sent shockwaves through the popular culture of Western Europe. No less a personage than Isaac Newton was reported to have lost the huge sum of roughly £20,000 (millions in the US dollar of today). Perhaps apocryphally, the astronomer remarked that he could "calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men."

As I said above, historians and economists have shed a lot of ink on this subject. But the popular culture of the South Sea Bubble strikes me as less well covered. For instance, I was interested to discover that playing cards seem to have been a popular means of commemorating the financial failure. Perhaps the juxtaposition of economic catastrophe with the small-scale world of gambling was a form of sly social commentary? Below are some images of 'Bubble Cards' and other printed ephemera from the 1720-21 period.

The caption to this card, the Jack of Hearts, shows how the fortunes of the Company could impact the world of courtship:

Here's a complete set of South Sea playing cards via BibliOdyssey.

And a broadside that cleverly gathers together (we would say plagiarizes) some of the most popular images of the collapse. Note the Bubble Card posted above in the bottom left corner, for instance:

The sheer number of Bubble Cards held by libraries to this day attests to their popularity. I suppose it is a testament to the entrepeneurial character of the age that even a disastrous financial collapse could be used to sell merchandise. And it seems fitting that this merchandise consisted of ink on paper, since so many of the schemes associated with the South Sea Bubble (and, indeed, European trading companies in general) amounted to little else.

The Scottish author Charles Mackay discussed the Bubble in his famous work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds (1841). A sample of this chapter is available online here. For more images, I highly recommend BibliOdyssey's post on the subject. The Baker Library of the Harvard University Business School has digitized a different set of South Sea Bubble cards which are viewable in their entirety here.

Res Obscura Miscellany, Part One

2011-03-17T15:58:00.000-06:00

A medical alchemist, or 'iatrochemist,' examines a jar of urine in seventeenth-century Holland.

Well, I try to avoid posting decontextualized grab-bags of images (one of the drawbacks of Tumblr and its ilk, in my opinion), but I'm on vacation and busy with research, so this week I'm going to take the easy route and do just that. Below are some images that at one time or another I filed away as appropriate for Res Obscura, but which got lost in the shuffle for some reason or other. I've tried my best to add identifying details and short descriptions of their historical context.

A detail from Hans Memling's Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation, c.1485, Oil on oak panel, Strasbourg,
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg. Thanks to Morbid Anatomy for reminding me of this beautiful, haunting painting.
I believe the scroll that Satan is holding at right reads, "There is no redemption in Hell." Frightening.

Tatars in Kazan, 1885

Temptation of Saint Anthony. Unfortunately I have no other identifying details for this bizarre work.
I suspect it hails from mid-19th century Iberia, or possibly Britain.

Jan van der Straet's illustration of Canto 34 of Dante's Inferno, circa 1585.
"Now came I (and with fear I bid my strain
Record the marvel) where the souls were all
Whelm'd underneath, transparent, as through glass...
That emperor, who sways
The realm of sorrow, at mid breast from the ice
Stood forth..."

A remarkably vast apothecary's shop. Iberian, 18th century. Unfortunately I have no further details.

Alchemist filling wet drug jars, Italian, 17th century. Via the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

Franz Christophe Janneck, Medical alchemist, oil on copper, 18th century.
Also via the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

A harrowing vision of hell, featuring monks being boiled for their sins -- a typical pictorial jab at the
much-resented clergy of the Reformation era. Portuguese, c. 1530.

Auto-da-Fé, 1495

2011-03-05T17:39:00.003-06:00

After the earthquake had destroyed three-fourths of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to prevent utter ruin than to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fé; for it had been decided by the University of Coimbra, that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking...

Eight days after they were dressed in san-benitos and their heads ornamented with paper mitres. The mitre and san-benito belonging to Candide were painted with reversed flames and with devils that had neither tails nor claws; but Pangloss’s devils had claws and tails and the flames were upright. They marched in procession thus habited and heard a very pathetic sermon, followed by fine church music. Candide was whipped in cadence while they were singing; the Biscayner, and the two men who had refused to eat bacon, were burnt; and Pangloss was hanged, though that was not the custom.

-Voltaire, Candide, Chapter Six.

Goya, The Tribunal of the Inquisition (1812, detail)

The Portuguese auto da fé (or auto de fe in Spanish) was not meant strictly as a punishment - it was an "act of faith" intended to atone for the imagined sins of those prosecuted in the courts of the Inquisition via a series of religious rituals. This included a public procession, prayers, a formal reading of the legal charges leveled against the accused, and various forms of 'atonement' ranging from a mere public shaming to banishment or death. As the detail above shows, Voltaire's description, though bitterly sardonic in intent, was pretty accurate in its visual details: the penitents here are shown wearing the same tunic-like garments known as san benitos and pointed paper 'mitres' as Voltaire's hero Candide.

Pedro Berruguete, self-portrait c. 1490.
Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid.

What is remarkable about this is that Voltaire wrote Candide in 1759, and the painting above is from circa 1495! The remarkable longevity of the Inquisition may, I think, have something to do with the public and ritualized nature of these rites. One reoccurring feature of the early modern world, after all, is that everyone -- from children to the aged, peasants to lords -- seemed to adore watching the brutal punishment of sinners and criminals. (The continuity and apparent universality of this popular affection for public execution is just one of the many unappetizing insights into human nature afforded by the study of history).

The full painting from which I've picked out the detail above is by the Spanish painter and sculptor Pedro Berruguete (1450-1504). I had never heard of him until I came across this work on Wikipedia, but I'm quite taken by the mixture of brilliantly observed pictorial detail (the shadows are particularly beautiful) and sensitive psychological insight on display here. The complete painting is below (click to see the original image size), along with a few more details that struck me.

Pedro Berruguete, Saint Dominic presiding over an Auto-da-fe, circa 1496, Prado Museum, Madrid.

Some details:

Faces in the crowd.

Phallic overtones.

Praying or asleep?

There is a huge literature on the Iberian Inquisitions which I am far from an expert in, but I can heartily recommend Henry Kamen's The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (1999) for those seeking a fresh approach to the subject. This book was one of the more mind-bending revisions I encountered as an undergraduate new to early modern history -- in essence, Kamen argues that the prosecutors of the Iberian Inquisition were actually in some respects more humane, skeptical and sensitive to the plight of the accused than the secular courts of the era. It is an interesting argument (which I'm sure I have butchered here with my half-remembered recollections) that Kamen backs up with a vast amount of archival evidence.