scholarly journals Magic as Technological Dominion: John Dee’s Hydragogy and the Draining of the Fens in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass

Neophilologus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Andrew Borlik
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Magical Thinking ◽  
Unpublished Manuscript ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Early Form ◽  
Engineering Technology ◽  
Early Modern English Drama ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The One ◽  
The Devil

AbstractThis paper explores the ambiguous role of magic in the controversy over the draining of the fens, the last bastion of wilderness in seventeenth-century England. In what now looks like an early form of environmentalist resistance to the destruction of these wetlands, opponents of the drainage accused the undertakers of invoking diabolical aid in their audacious efforts to tamper with God’s creation. Evidence of this mentality can be found in both William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass. Via a close reading of Jonson’s comedy, this paper navigates the confluence of magic, technology, and “projection” in the ideological debate surrounding the fens. Just as the traditional Vice figures (Iniquity and Pug) find themselves out-devilled by Jacobean Londoners, the play dramatizes the appropriation and displacement of a residual poetics of enchantment by the emergent discourses of economics and applied engineering. A tendency to equate magic with hydro-engineering technology may have been encouraged by John Dee’s involvement in the project. Drawing on an unpublished manuscript in the Ashmole collection at the Bodleian Library, this paper seeks to uncover the extent and impact of Dee’s role in the drainage. Advocates of the drainage, however, not only denied any supernatural involvement but also counterattacked by accusing their opponents of credulity and magical thinking. They characterized the native fen-dwellers as superstitious heathens and cast a scathing eye on local folklore depicting the fens as a demon-haunted wasteland. In pro-drainage documents, the proposed draining of the fenlands becomes tantamount to an exorcism, purging the rural backwaters of paganism and witchcraft. Wetlands management will now be conducted through applied engineering rather than magical incantations. A little known Jacobean ballad, “The Powte’s Complaint” (c. 1619) revives these animistic tropes to protest the fen’s destruction. Jonson’s play may explain why this tactic was doomed to fail and why this poem has been forgotten. As the credibility of magic eroded in the mid-seventeenth century, opponents of the drainage instead sought to stir up public resentment against the foreignness of the Dutch under-takers rather than their supposed collusion with supernatural forces. Jonson’s own projection that the drainage was an impossible con (like alchemy) would prove inaccurate. Nevertheless, The Devil is an Ass stands as the one of the most ecologically-engaged texts in the canon of early modern English drama.

Before the Stone Age Existed

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Geological Time ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The One ◽  
The Devil

What is the difference between temptation and geological time? The one is a wile of the devil and the other is a devil of a while. (Dawkins to Hughes, 17 March 1870: SMC: TMH) In the early eighteenth century, John Conyers, an apothecary and antiquary of London, discovered the body of an elephant as he was digging for gravel at Gray’s Inn Lane. Nearby lay a flint implement (Fig. 1.1). Today we might well call his elephant a ‘mammoth’ and refer the implement to the ‘Palaeolithic’ period; in 1715, however, Conyers’s beast was dated to the reign of Claudius, the Roman Emperor. This was the belief of John Bagford, an old friend of Conyers, a bookseller and one of the founder members of a tavern-based antiquarian club that was soon to become the Society of Antiquaries of London. At the time, a Roman elephant attacked by an Ancient Briton seemed a likely scenario to account for the curious occurrence of this animal in London, far from its hot and distant homeland. It would be a century and a half later when our ancestors were acknowledged as the contemporaries of such enormous animals: they would then be pictured in a newly-discovered geological world, more ancient than the time of the Romans or even the British natives described by Caesar. For Bagford and his contemporaries, the time allotted to humans, and even to the Earth itself, was not long. Their knowledge about the distant past was gathered from folklore or historical texts, and the Bible supplied a particularly important source of chronological information. Back in the seventeenth century, James Ussher (1581–1656) had famously calculated the age of the Earth and the Creation to date to 4004 BC. But Ussher did not, as is often believed, reach this date by counting back through the generations of the Bible; indeed, he could not. As John Fuller has observed, there is no fixed point from which to start counting: a vague gap divides the last of the Hebrew books from the year AD 1.

Two Corrections

1942 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-224
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Tower Of London ◽  
The One

I The Abbess of Syon has very courteously called my attention to an error in my article on Fontevraud, at page 34. The last sentence of the middle paragraph should read: The order of the Most Holy Saviour (Brigittines) was founded in Sweden in 1370; it professed the Rule of St Augustine, but with its own Constitutions; it comprised in each house nuns, to the number of sixty, monks, not to exceed seventeen, and eight lay brothers. H. F. CHETTLE. II ‘With respect to the reliquaries I leave you to follow your own judgment; but as the relicts ( sic) can no longer be exposed, I should be inclined to consider it useless to be at any expense about their cases.’—Such is the conclusion of a letter of Fr Ralph Ainsworth, Provincial of Canterbury, to Fr Anselm Lorymer, Procurator of the same province, dated 28th July, 1813. It is plainly an answer to a letter of Fr Lorymer's in which he had asked the Provincial's leave to spend some money in having cases made for certain reliquaries with their relics. These were, in all reasonable probability, some of the objects which were found early last century in a box at the distillery of Mr Marmaduke Langdale in Holborn (see an article in the Downside Review for October 1934, on ‘Relics and Plate from the Rosary Chapel’). The interest of the above extract is that it puts the opening of the box and discovery of its contents considerably earlier than had previously been conjectured; for there is no contemporary written evidence as to when and under what circumstances that took place. Fr Alphonsus Morrall gives the story on the testimony of persons living at the time, but without a precise date; he conjectured ‘about 1822’, probably because in or before 1823 Fr Lorymer had the reliquary of the piece of the Holy Cross made into a monstrance which he sent to Downside for the opening of the Old Chapel in July of that year. It was a reasonable guess; but it now appears that Mr Langdale's box, which contained relics and plate from the seventeenth-century Chapel of the Rosary in London, was opened at least nine years earlier. It is a pity that Fr Lorymer's letter cannot be traced either at Downside or at Ampleforth (to which house Fr Ainsworth belonged), for it is not unlikely that it gave some particulars as to the time and circumstances of this interesting discovery. All that is now known of the matter, with identification of some of the contents of the box, may be found in the article referred to above. It may be added, however, that the Mr Sidney mentioned in one of Fr Lorymer's letters (p. 600) is now identified from old letters with William Sidney, who was at Acton Burnell from 1799 to 1801, first as a commensalis and then as a novice. He left owing to ill health, but remained on friendly terms with the Benedictines. Fr Lorymer says that Sidney ‘met with some account of a relick of the Holy Cross which I think must be the one you have’ (i.e. at Downside). It is possible that he was the author of the article in the Catholic Miscellany for 1824 (though Dr Oliver gives the author as Fr Lorymer himself), for the account there given, from Panzani, of a relic of the Holy Cross found in the Tower of London, is evidently the same as that ‘met with’ by Mr Sidney: it is really quoted word for word from Dodd's History in, p. 41. But that relic is certainly not the one from Langdale's box sent to Downside by Fr Lorymer, for this latter was believed in Weldon's time to have belonged to Queen Mary and to have been rescued from her chapel by Abbot Feckenham after her death. R.H.C.

Arthur Benjamin's Operas

Tempo ◽  
1950 ◽  
pp. 15-18
Author(s):  
Dennis Arundell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal College ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Good Work ◽  
National Opera ◽  
School Girls ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Devil ◽  
English Opera ◽  
Vaughan Williams

Ever since the seventeenth century composers of English operas have been handicapped by the snob-preference for foreign works irrespective of their merits. In Purcell's day a second-rate French composer, whose past is still shrouded in Continental mystery, was so boosted in London even by Dryden that it was only through an open-air performance by Mr. Priest's school-girls at Chelsea that Dido and Aeneas convinced both London theatre managers and eventually Dryden himself that Purcell was “equal with the best abroad.” In this century, when the usual opera favourites were established, it has been even more difficult for English opera-composers to get a showing (at one time it had not been unheard of for English operas to be translated into Italian or German for production in this country): but twenty-five years ago the Royal College of Music followed the example of Mr. Priest by producing for the first time Vaughan Williams' Hugh the Drover, which was afterwards given publicly by the British National Opera Company, and in 1931 under the auspices of the Ernest Palmer Opera Fund, introduced The Devil Take Her, the first opera by the Australian composer Arthur Benjamin. The enthusiasm of the singers, headed by Sarah Fischer and Trefor Jones, the cunning skill of the conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham and the practical knowledge of the producer, John B. Gordon, who had had so much experience at Cologne and who was at the time doing such good work for opera at the Old Vic, all combined to make the performance outstanding.

Temporality and Truth

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel W. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Continuous Variation ◽  
Pure Form ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Time Image ◽  
Positive Light

This paper examines the intersecting of the themes of temporality and truth in Deleuze's philosophy. For the ancients, truth was something eternal: what was true was true in all times and in all places. Temporality (coming to be and passing away) was the realm of the mutable, not the eternal. In the seventeenth century, change began to be seen in a positive light (progress, evolution, and so on), but this change was seen to be possible only because of the immutable laws of nature that govern change. It was not until philosophers such as Bergson, James, Whitehead – and then Deleuze – that time began to be taken seriously on its own account. On the one hand, in Deleuze, time, freed from its subordination to movement, now becomes autonomous: it is the pure form of change (continuous variation) that lies at the basis of Deleuze's metaphysics in Difference and Repetition (and is explored more thematically in The Time-Image). As a result, on the other hand, the false, freed from its subordination to the form of the true, assumes a power of its own (the power of the false), which in turn implies a new ‘analytic of the concept’ that Deleuze develops in What Is Philosophy?

Alessandro Grandi: A Case Study in the Choice of Texts for Motets

1988 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-305
Author(s):  
Jerome Roche
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way ◽  
Musical Styles

It is perhaps still true that research into sacred types of music in early seventeenth-century Italy lags behind that into madrigal, monody and opera; it is certainly the case that the textual aspects of sacred music, themselves closely bound up with liturgical questions, have not so far received the kind of study that has been taken for granted with regard to the literary texts of opera and of secular vocal music. This is hardly to be wondered at: unlike great madrigal poetry or the work of the best librettists, sacred texts do not include much that can be valued as art in its own right. Nevertheless, if we are to understand better the context of the motet – as distinct from the musical setting of liturgical entities such as Mass, Vespers or Compline – we need a clearer view of the types of text that were set, the way in which composers exercised their choice, and the way such taste was itself changing in relation to the development of musical styles. For the motet was the one form of sacred music in which an Italian composer of the early decades of the seventeenth century could combine a certain freedom of textual choice with an adventurousness of musical idiom.

Actes sexuels, horreur et sorcellerie au cinéma. La copulation avec le Diable : une perspective psychanalytique

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-133
Author(s):  
Ioan Pop-Curșeu
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Analytical Process ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Roman Polanski ◽  
The Devil

"Sexual Acts, Horror and Witchcraft in Cinema. The Copulation with the Devil: a Psychoanalytical Perspective. This paper tries to approach, taking as a starting point a Romanian painting from the 18th century, a scene with a strong phantasmatic load: the sexual act of a woman, who is considered a witch, with the devil. Several films are analyzed: Häxan by Benjamin Christensen (1922), Rosemary’s Baby by Roman Polanski (1968), L’Anticristo by Alberto de Martino (1974), Angel above, Devil below by Dominic Bolla (1975). These films share some common features, important for the analytical process: the copulation with the devil, the presence of traumatized characters who are submitted to a psychological cure, the recycling of psychoanalytical vocabulary, especially “hysteria”, the problems with parental instances. In order to interpret these films, there is a coming back to Freud’s ideas on the Devil, as expressed in the letters to Wilhelm Fliess or in the study A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis (1923). The devil as an image of unconscious impulsions or as a substitute of the father are the main Freudian intuitions used here for an optimal interpretation of the chosen films. Keywords: sex, sexual act, horror, witchcraft, psychoanalysis, Freud, cinema. "

Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama. Edited by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. x + 347 + illus. $60 cloth.

2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 162-165
Author(s):  
Paul Nelsen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Early Modern English Drama ◽  
Early Modern English

“One of modern theatre history's enduring shibboleths is that the Shakespearean stage was a bare one,” assert editors Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda in their introduction to this remarkable volume of essays.

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