Early Modern Literature and Food in Britain

Early modern literature about food is found in a range of genres that have traditionally appealed to literary critics, such as drama and poetry, as well as writings that can be less neatly categorized as literary but that tend to have a literary dimension, such as religious sermons, cookery books, and dietary literature, also known as regimens. Food in early modern literature often signals a complex relationship between the body, a sense of self, and the sociopolitical structures that regulated food’s production and consumption in the period. Writers mentioning food may thereby convey details of narrative, characterization, and motivation but also signal broader social concerns such as the role of women, religious obligations, treatment of the poor, and the status of foreigners. Ordinary staple foods such as bread feature heavily, but so too do exotic foods newly imported into England such as apricots and other fruits that were hard to grow. There is also a fascination with perverse consumption, such as cannibalism (sometimes metaphorical and sometimes literal), which functions as an indication of various modes of alterity. The consumption of food in early modern literature is often grounded in the period in which it was written. A common recurrence is the way in which patterns of consumption signal social and moral responsibility, so that eating and drinking to excess, or taking too much pleasure in them, is considered sinful. Also evident is the shift from medieval communal dining and a sense of feudal obligation and hospitality to strangers to a growing early modern sense of privacy and individualism. Food functions as a complex marker of national, religious, and cultural identity whereby certain foods signify Catholicism or Englishness and other foods, or their preparation, will signify strangeness. Yet food can also be a shorthand way to address issues such as hunger, desire, and disgust.

The City of Brass and Alexander’s Narrow Grave: Translation and Commentary of Kafas added to Manuscript M7709 (Part 1)

The 17th-century manuscript M7709 (held in the Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia) includes an Armenian copy of the History of the City of Brass, to which an unknown scribe has added short poems about Alexander the Great. The first of three articles that together present the Alexander poems of M7709 in full, with English translation, for the first time, this article introduces the manuscript and considers the first six poems: the seduction of Olympias, and Alexander’s encounter with plant-men at the edge of the world. It adds commentary on the poems’ relationship to the corresponding part of the History of the City of Brass on each page, proposing textual reasons why the scribe added the poems where he did. Across the three articles, this commentary delves into textual relationships beyond the pages of M7709, linking the Armenian History of the City of Brass, Alexander Romance and other texts and traditions, to show how this manuscript is situated amid wider networks of circulating literature. As a microhistorical study, it seeks to provide illumination into the macrohistory of medieval and early modern literature in and beyond the Caucasus.

Harnessing Anger and Shame: Emotional Diplomacy in Early Modern Context

Emotions were, in early modern literature on diplomacy, described as a parasitic and even dangerous manifestation, and this view has endured until today. A series of recent books and articles published in the field of the history of emotions lays however the groundwork to question this traditional analysis. This article thus aims to examine the possibility of a broader and more strategic use of emotions in early modern diplomacy than is often acknowledged, and therefore the possibility of what can be called an early modern emotional diplomacy. I will first provide a summary of what the honnête homme culture of Europe’s ruling class meant for an ambassador in terms of emotion control. I will then show, through a few examples from diplomatic occurrences during Charles ii of England’s late reign, some of the possible uses of emotion in early modern diplomacy. Thirdly, I will study through one very memorable display of emotion from the English king the way such a display could be prepared and staged in order to achieve full effectiveness. Lastly, I will put these one-time emotional displays in the perspective of Charles ii’s international policy, arguing that they were not conceived as isolated occurrences but as parts of a real diplomatic strategy in which emotion played a crucial role, in other words an emotional diplomacy.

Early Modern Literature of Crime and Criminals

The literature of crime and criminals in early modern England takes several forms. The main form is the printed pamphlet, typically a short quarto publication of eight to sixteen pages, costing a few pence. Another form is the broadside ballad, usually anonymous, printed on one side of a single sheet and accompanied by an image and an indication of the music to be used. A selection of plays about real-life domestic crime, including the well-known Arden of Faversham, attributed variously in recent years to Shakespeare and Kyd, have also survived. While they are few in number, and less topical than the pamphlets, they have attracted more critical attention than the other forms. The crimes featured in this writing—often involving murder but also including witchcraft, and disproportionally focused on women—were chosen for their sensational value and were in no way representative of the reality of crime in the period. While some pamphlet writers made claims for the truth of their accounts, and rival accounts of the more notable crimes using differing details did appear, the aims and social functions of this writing had less to do with providing information than with reinforcing the authority of the state, its laws, and its Protestant religion. Hence, many accounts of crimes, particularly in the earlier part of the period, are shaped by the need to demonstrate the role of providence in bringing about the discovery of the perpetrators. Crime, conflated with sin, was conceptualized as a moral rather than a social problem; criminals were often regarded as acting under the irresistible compulsion of the devil and once found guilty of a single lapse proceeding inevitably toward actions that damned them to hell. The idea of crime as a secular problem in which social and economic forces had a role to play was beginning to develop and becomes more evident in writing of the later 17th century. Certain crimes emerged as iconic in the period, particularly involving women who killed, and featured in a number of different print forms, for example, the murders by their wives of Arden of Faversham, Page of Plymouth, and George Sanders. The law differentiated by gender in cases of spousal murder; husband-murder was categorized as petty treason, hence punishable by burning at the stake for the wife, while wife-killing (much commoner in actuality but less prominent in literature) was simply homicide. Early modern crime writing largely reflects the structures of power in the society that produced it; evidence of questioning or challenging accepted attitudes toward issues of criminal responsibility does exist, but the era of pioneering journalism was a long way ahead.

Passion’s Fictions

The final chapter consolidates the implications of the foregoing argument for the interpretation of early modern literature, in part by returning to the start of the story, in Shakespeare; but it approaches Shakespeare by way of an eighteenth-century phenomenon: the rise of works of “character criticism” represented for example by William Richardson’s essays. Eighteenth-century character criticism has long been seen as a new way of reading Shakespeare, even the intrusion of something foreign to Shakespeare’s plays. The word for that foreign element is often “psychology,” especially as allied to reading practices associated with the novel. This chapter argues that the real roots of character criticism lie in much older theories of the passions. The psychology at work is not nearly as new as has been claimed, as can be seen by contrasting Richardson’s essays with one of the books he cites: Edmund Burke’s treatise on the sublime and beautiful. The chapter then circles back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, arguing that Shakespeare’s plays already contain the elements of a psychology: an externalist psychology grounded in rhetoric and its account of the circumstantial mimesis of actions as an instrument of the knowledge of the passions. Shakespeare’s plays could become the material for a science of the passions because in some sense they already were: instances of a circumstantial knowledge of the passions produced according to principles first theorized by rhetoric, which themselves shaped the new sciences of the mind that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.