Serendipities

Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007) had been waiting for me on my bookshelf for a while, and this week I finally got round to it. It was a great read. Vanities of the Eye is a wonderfully erudite book, teeming with information and original ideas about the changing perception of the sense of vision in early modern culture.

The book argues that contrary to what theories of the rationalization of sight and the invention of perspective suggests, vision came to be characterized by unreliability and uncertainty in the early modern period. As Stuart Clark puts it with a pun: “It is as though European intellectuals lost their optical nerve.” Read the rest of this entry »

I just came across a great website on early modern culture — Appositions: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture. It just hosted the ‘first-ever, fully electronic conference in the field of Renaissance and early modern literary and cultural studies.’ As far as I understand, this electronic conference will result in an online journal later this year. The editor is W. Scott Howard, the editorial advisor is Matthew Steggle, of EMLS fame.

The papers of the conference are online now, and among them I found one on early modern translations of classical literary texts about vindictive women (a subject I also looked at in my PhD thesis): Katherine Heavey’s “Translating Medea into the Sixteenth Century“(scroll down the page for the article).

Heavey shows that the figure of Medea attracted and inspired many early modern authors, but their fascination holds a paradox. As a woman, a witch and a pagan with little regard for partriarchal institutions, Medea evoked anxieties. In a lucid analysis, Heavey demonstrates how the sixteenth-century translators Richard Robinson, Arthur Studley [that should be John], George Whetstone, Arthur Golding and George Turberville all attempt to contain the subversive powers of this powerful female figure:

Male authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries deal with her threat by undermining her autonomy, making her more personally vulnerable, penitent or subject to the consequences of her actions. In doing so, they highlight, intentionally or unintentionally, the frictions and conflicts that the Renaissance Medea engenders frictions between male and female, society and the ‘other’, and between classical rendering and Renaissance rewriting.

Also interesting in Appositions (besides many more papers) is Event B: a wiki of “Renaissance /early modern keywords that undergo significant shifts in meaning during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” I think this is an interesting idea — especially if the entries became less OED-based than they are now, and more like short articles.

On a different note: Inkhorn read all of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and lived to tell the tale. Congratulations!

…is an early modern edition, and it is now up at Mercurius Politicus!

Roy Booth at Early Modern Whale wrote a fascinating post on pamphlets about the demolition of the Eleanor Cross in Cheapside in 1643 (or was it 1642? May 1643 according to this pamphlet). Interestingly, in accordance with the conventions what Roy calls the “minor genre of the speaking statue” (made me think of The Winter’s Tale…) the Cross tells the reader its own story in these pamphlets. Here is a wonderful quotation in which it remembers how all kinds of Protestants used to behave in its presence:

the Brownists spit at me and throw stones at me as they come along the street, the Familists hide their eyes with their fingers, the Annabaptists wish me to be knockt in pieces, the sisters of the Fraternity wil not come near me, but go about by Watling street and come in againe by Soaper-lane to buy their provisions of the Market-folkes… It is the Crosse that stands upon my head which is a moate in their eyes.

Update: Mercurius Politicus was inspired by Roy Booth’s post, and went in search of more images of the cross in EEBO.

I was browsing through Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1586), and came across this emblem on reading. The motto: Usus libri, non lectio prudentes facit — “it is the use of books, not reading that makes wise men.” I have no wise thoughts on the emblem, but it does give a glimpse into early modern reading practices (see also earlier posts here, here, and here).

The volumes great, who so doth still peruse,
And dailie turnes, and gazeth on the same,
If that the fruicte thereof, he do not use,
He reapes but toile, and never gaineth fame:
Firste reade, then marke, then practise that is good,
For without use, we drinke but LETHE flood.

Of practise longe, experience doth proceede;
And wisedome then, doth evermore ensue:
Then printe in minde, what wee in printe do reade,
Els loose wee time, and bookes in vaine do vewe:
Wee maie not haste, our talent to bestowe,
Nor hide it up, whereby no good shall growe.

The concept of reading is expressed in the emblem’s subscriptio (the text below the image) in terms of memory and forgetting. One who reads passively might just as well drink from the river Lethe, which induces a state of sleepy forgetfulness. If you read actively, however, you remember what you learned because your brain is (paradoxically?) like a book: “Then printe in minde, what wee in printe do reade.” Ready access to the volumes of the brain ensures that a wise person puts his knowledge to virtuous use, so that he practices “that is good.”

I thought that the man on the left, assuming he is left-handed, might be writing things down in a little commonplace book, while the man on the right only reads large volumes to forget what he read. But after enlarging the image, I am not so sure the man on the left is writing. Also, perhaps the forgetful reader would have been depicted sitting, rather than standing — or is that too modern an association? The image may even have been re-used from another book, and perhaps should not be interpreted too literally.