Res Obscura

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.

A Defaced Herbal from 1710: William Salmon's Botanologia

2011-02-28T00:49:00.000-06:00

A portrait of Salmon from the frontispiece
to his Ars Chirurgica (1699).

The image above is from a copy of William Salmon's Botanologia: The English Herbal, or History of Plants (London: I. Dawks for H. Rhodes and J. Taylor, 1710) which is available for view via Villanova University's digital library. Evidently the nudity of the figure (I suppose either the sun god Helios or Apollo) bothered an early owner of the book, since he or she appears to have obliterated the poor deity's rear quarters and genitalia with a quill pen. Conversely, perhaps someone had drawn something offensive onto the scratched-out area, and the ink was merely restoring modesty? Why is a man pouring a bucket of rain on the god from a cloud anyway?

It is all a bit of a mystery. And indeed, we know little more about the life of the man who wrote the book itself. William Salmon (1644-1713) numbered among the most successful medical practitioners of Restoration-era London but was largely forgotten after his death. Though he was much maligned as a quack doctor or 'mountebank' by eighteenth-century medical authorities, Salmon appears to have won considerable success as a self-proclaimed "Doctor of Physic," apothecary and author of popular treatises on everything from home surgery to figurative drawing, landscape painting and the science of hand gestures. Salmon's practice began in a tavern. Next, displaying a characteristic commercial shrewdness, the doctor rented space immediately opposite St. Bartholemew's Hospital in London and developed a medical practice that treated patients who were rejected from that institution. His specialty was drug mixtures and pills that featured a range of bizarre and exotic ingredients, the sort of thing that would later come to be called 'patent medicines.' (See my previous entry on early modern London's drug trade for some representative remedies, including a medicinal usage of 'Cranium Humanum,' i.e. human skull!).

The full frontispiece of Botanologia.

Little is known of Salmon's life. His Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Phillip K. Wilson entry notes intriguingly,

"Contemporaries claimed that as a boy Salmon was apprenticed to a mountebank, whom he served as a ‘wachum’ or ‘zany’, and amused audiences by ‘tumbling through a hoop’ or with ‘tricks of legerdemain and slight of hand’; he also ‘made speeches and wrote Panygyricks in praise of his master's Panaceas. He wrote Almanacks to direct the taking of his medicines, and made the stars vouch for their virtue.’"

The same entry notes that "Salmon also created a cabinet of curiosities that included some items he brought back from his travels to the West Indies." Salmon himself referred in print to his travels "some years last past in the American World," noting modestly that he had "but lately returned home to perfect the whole System of Medical Learning." (See Allen Debus, ed. Medicine in Seventeenth Century England [Berkeley, 1974], 144). The nature and itinerary of these travels is still a bit of a mystery though, as far as I can tell.

I've been researching Salmon a bit recently and have noticed that he was a very prescient and effective advertiser. At least one of his books that I've consulted contains embedded advertisements for his medical practice and the 'Salmon's pills' for treatment of venereal disease available there, while a search of London newspapers circa 1660-1720 will turn up numerous notices such as the following, in The Flying Post (February 18-20, 1707):

I note in passing that this newspaper appears, most unusually, to have been published by a woman, one Ann Snowden, who resided "near Doctors-Commons."

For further reading see the discussion in Allan Debus, ed., Medicine in Seventeenth Century England (Berkeley, 1974), Craig Ashley Hanson's The English Virtuoso (Chicago, 2009).

Also worth checking out are "William Salmon, a 17th Century Renaissance Man," an essay on a rare books website by Bruce Tober that contains some interesting details I haven't seen elsewhere; and Phillip K. Wilson's Oxford Dictionary of National Biography piece, the authoritative account of his life. Caroline Rance's fabulous The Quack Doctor blog references and quotes Salmon here. Finally, Brent Elliot has written a very interesting and informative essay on the Botanologia here. I'm indebted to all of these authors for their work in uncovering the shadowy history of Salmon's interesting life.

Jahangir's Turkey: Early Modern Globalization and Exotic Animals

2011-02-22T12:59:00.004-06:00

The above image is one of my favorite examples of the bizarre cross-pollinations that early modern globalization brought about. It is a detail from a lavish watercolor painting created in 1618 by Bichitr for the Mughal emperor Jahangir (1569-1627). Here we find the strange juxtaposition of James I and VI of England and Scotland (1566-1625) alongside a self-portrait of the artist, Bichitr, holding a small panel painting that depicts him bowing deeply while surrounded by an elephant and fine horses (probably animals from Jahangir's royal menagerie). At left is an official royal portrait of King James that probably served as the basis for Bichitr's more colorful depiction. I suspect that a copy of this painting was presented to the Mughal 'Peacock Throne' by the 1615-1619 embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, one of the early English emissaries sent to establish trade relations in India, as an attempt to demonstrate the grandeur of the English state. The Mughals, however, were decidedly unimpressed. This is amply illustrated by Bichitr's full painting (see below) which depicts Jahangir turning away from both James and the Shah of Persia in order to converse with a humble Sufi holy man.
What I find most interesting about this work, however, is the painting of animals that Bichitr is holding. Why are they there?

Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings by Bichitr (act. 1615–50) India, Mughal period. Opaque watercolor, gold, and ink on paper. Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Another work, by the celebrated Mughal court painter Ustad Mansur, offers an even more intriguing depiction of an animal from Jahangir's court. Jahangir recalled this creature in the official chronicle of his reign as an "extremely strange" wonder and an object of debate among his courtly savants, who were not able to guess its name or provenance:

Ustad Mansur. India, Moghul period, 1612 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

As you may have guessed, this is none other than a common North American turkey! But what in the world is it doing in India, sitting for a formal portrait in the throne room of the Mughal emperor, one of the most powerful individuals on the planet? Here's an extract from a paper I wrote that addresses this strange episode the turkey's audience before the Peacock Throne:

To lock gazes with the turkey’s familiar visage as it peers out at us from the stylized pictorial space of a seventeenth-century Mughal watercolor is to confront a mystery. By what circuitous route did this “true original Native of America,” as Benjamin Franklin called it, come to arrive at the most glittering court of Asia? In fact, this encounter between American nature and Indian splendor was not as strange as it may at first seem. A keenly observant man with a fervent interest in natural history, Jahangir kept an extensive menagerie of exotic creatures and delighted in recording their behaviors in his journal. It was at Jahangir’s behest that the court painter Mansur, called the “Miracle of his Age” by contemporaries for the uncanny verisimilitude of his draftsmanship, produced a corpus of over one hundred natural history paintings that rival the work of any European contemporary. Indeed, two years earlier Mansur had painted a minutely detailed likeness of a Mauritian dodo that is still cited by biologists as the most accurate surviving representation of the bird. As the patron of a court culture that invested immense value in the procurement and documentation of natural curiosities, therefore, Jahangir was in some respects the author of his own wonderment.

From Wikipedia: "Painting by the Mughal artist Ustad Mansur from c 1625, which may be one of the most accurate depiction of a live dodo. Two live specimens were brought to India in the 1600s according to Peter Mundy, and the specimen depicted might have been one of these. Other birds depicted are Loriculus galgulus (upper left) Tragopan melanocephalus (upper right), Anser indicus (lower left) Pterocles indicus (lower right)." Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

The paper continues:

By the beginning of Jahangir’s reign (1605-1627), Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English ocean-going vessels were plying the spoils of American nature throughout all the major emporia of the Old World, from Senegal to Japan. Although Jahangir regarded the Portuguese and their competitors as a negligible presence in his domain, he was well aware that the people he called ‘Franks’ had access to networks of exotic circulation that were closed off to his own subjects. Indeed, Jahangir’s sole reference to Goa in his self-authored chronicle of his reign, the Jahangirnama, was to note that his turkey had been obtained along with several other exotic beasts by a servant sent to the “vice-rei” at “the port of Goa… to purchase any rarities he could get hold of there for the royal treasury.” To Jahangir, the Portuguese were mere couriers and purveyors of the natural ‘rarities’ that were the true object of his diplomacy. It was the American animal – and not the European merchant – that interested Jahangir and his court.

Jahangir was not the only Asian potentate to be fascinated by the exotic beasts carried by the Portuguese. I've written previously, for instance, about this fascinating Japanese nanban screen from the 16th century that depicts Portuguese creole traders selling animals from faraway lands in a Japanese market:

A detail showing a richly attired Portuguese trader with a shrewd-looking Indian or African monkey.

Jahangir's turkey was, ultimately, a harbinger of great changes. It had been carried to Jahangir's court in Agra by an underling Jahangir sent to purchase 'rarities' from the 'Vice-Rei at Goa' -- in other words, the Portuguese. Although the Mughals were still secure in their power in this period, with Europeans serving as little more than petty traders in the periphery of their imperial demesne, times would change: by the reign of Jahangir's grandson Aurgangzeb (1658-1707), the British, French and Dutch had made serious territorial gains and were beginning to dominate trade in the bustling emporia of the Indian Ocean, having rested control of this commerce from a diverse array of Hindu, Parsee, Muslim, Chinese, Malay, Armenian and Jewish merchant communities. The globalization of this period was often weak and attenuated, based on exotica likes gems, drugs and animals rather than everyday commodities (see the Wikipedia page on A.G. Hopkins' and C.A. Bayly's concept of 'archaic globalization'), but it had very real effects. The appearance of strange objects from unknown lands (from tobacco to turkeys) was often the first harbinger of the epochal changes that brought the New World of the Americas and the European trading empires into conflict with the vast territorial states of Asia. The balance of world power was shifting. And, in its own humble way, Jahangir's turkey had something to do with it.
The history of animals is still a very new field, so I don't believe much has been written specifically on exotic creatures and early European empires. Three exceptions I can think of are Samuel P. Wilson's The Emperor's Giraffe (2000) and Louise E. Robbins' Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots (2002). Virginia DeJohn Anderson's Creatures of Empire (2006) is a very interesting and provocative study of the role of the more prosaic (but perhaps most important) domesticated animals in the service of British imperial expansion, probably the best of the lot and highly recommended. The art blog Silver and Exact offers a more in-depth analysis of Bichitr's strange painting of Jahangir for those interested. Finally, the Smithsonian's online Collection of South Asian and Himalayan Art is a great place to start for those interested in the brilliant tradition of Mughal watercolor painting (highly underrated by art historians and the general public, in my view - some of these paintings merit comparison with the greatest Renaissance artists).

Sources:
Jahangir, The Jahangirnama (Oxford University Press, 1999), Wheeler Thackston, ed. and trans., 133-4.
Som Prakash Verma, Ustad Mansur: Mughal Painter of Flora And Fauna (Abhinav Publications, 1999).

Strange Creatures Intermixt with a Spaniard's Voyage to the Moone, 1700

2011-02-20T13:16:00.001-06:00

Nathaniel Crouch (c. 1632 - after 1700) was an obscure but most interesting man: a London bookseller, he took the unusual step of authoring his own books on many subjects and publishing them under pseudonyms. Crouch's nom de plume of choice was "R.B." or "Richard Burton." As revealed by the research of Robert Mayer, Crouch attended meetings of the Royal Society and was regarded by contemporaries as an "ingenious man" despite his craftsman's trade and lowly birth as the son of a tailor. Although he has gone largely unstudied by modern scholars, the works of Crouch/Burton were prized by both Samuel Johnson and a young Benjamin Franklin, whose autobiography records his high regard for "Burton's books" (Mayer 393). Today I present some images I came across in a work that Crouch published under the name of R.B. entitled The English Acquisitions in Guinea and East-India (London, 1700). As the full title reveals, this was an expansive work which not only described the new colonial possessions of an expanding British Empire but also offered accounts of "Religion, Government, Trade, Marriages, Funerals, strange Customs, &c., Also the Birds, Beasts Serpents, Monsters and other strange Creatures found there. Intermixt with divers Accidents..."

The woodcut illustrations of English Acquisitions are quite compelling, as they center almost exclusively on depictions of "Monsters and other strange Creatures" that were reported by travelers in the Indian Ocean region and coastal Africa. I suspect that most or all were plagiarized from earlier accounts, a common practice of the era. Here are the images, intermixed with extracts from Crouch's accompanying text:

Creatures of "Guinea," or west Africa.

More beasts of Africa, accompanied in true early modern fashion by an extract from the Roman poet Lucan.

Crouch did not shy away from gory descriptions, and indeed these may have contributed to the popularity of his works. Here he is on the execution techniques of the "Great Mogul" of India:

And the rather frightening accompanying illustration:

As I read this book I was surprised to find that the middle section was devoted to a description of a voyage to the moon via swans! After reading a bit I realized that this was a reprint from a remarkable work of early science fiction written in manuscript by the Elizabethan bishop Francis Godwin: the Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage thither, by Domingo Gonsales (c. 1600). Here's the amazing illustration of the bird-powered contraption created by the ingenious Spaniard Gonsales:

This work is remarkable for the way in which it conflates the voyages of Columbus and otehr New World explorers with space travel. Godwin (and Crouch as well, it seems) reasoned that if 'Moderns' had been able to discover vast and previously unknown new lands across seas, then it stood to reason that similar wonders awaited those who traveled into the sky:

Here 'Gonsales' offers a bizarre description of outer space as imagined in early modern times. This land was apparently haunted by demons and "Wicked Spirits" who spoke Spanish, Dutch and Italian, as well as creatures that his Gansas (swans), could consume as food:

Strange stuff, and all the more interesting because Crouch chose to include it in a book lauding the expansion of the British empire. Was the moon next?

For more on the early modern astronaut Domingo Gonsales, read the original work: The Strange Voyage and Adventures of Domingo Gonsales, to the world in the Moone. For more on Nathaniel Crouch see Robert Mayer, "Nathaniel Crouch, Bookseller and Historian: Popular Historiography and Cultural Power in Late Seventeenth-Century England," in Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 27, No. 3 (Spring, 1994), pp. 391-419.

Some updates you may have missed

2011-02-16T12:40:00.000-06:00

Over the past month I've been updating a few of my earlier posts on Res Obscura to reflect new information or add new links and images. Since these updates don't register as new posts, I thought I'd make a handy list:

• Poorly-written poems about nature by 17th century apothecary James Petiver. These poems are written on scraps of paper in the British Library's Sloane collection, a group of documents amassed by the antiquarian, physician and Royal Society president Sir Hans Sloane (that's his stern visage at left). The February 2011 update included more info on Sloane and some extra images. The poems themselves are worth a look. I like "Of the Pine Apple" myself: "Doe not yr Palates much provoke/ With this sweete Indian Artichoke..."

• Pierre Pomet, druggist to Louis XIV, and his Compleat History of Druggs. This is one of the more interesting and best-illustrated guides to drugs and medicines produced in the eighteenth century. My favorite sections have to do with unicorn horns and the edible medicine made from Egyptian and Arabian mummies known as mumia (mummies from Yemen are apparently best for this). The January 2011 update added some new images and links to academic articles on the subject.

• Witches and their familiar animals in 17th century Europe. This is a piece on witches' familiars inspired by an account in the witch-finder Mathew Hopkins' bizarre tract A Discovery of Witches (1647). Also includes a short account of the magical war-poodle that accompanied the English Civil War cavalier Prince Rupert of the Rhine into battle. This fearsome dog was finally felled by a "Valiant Souldier, who had skill in Necromancy." The February 2011 update added some new images and links.

Happy Lupercalia

2011-02-15T11:26:00.000-06:00

Many of us in the western world celebrated (or lamented) Valentine's Day yesterday, that annual rite of socially-determined romance. You may have heard about this holiday's surprising connections to the ancient Roman holiday of Lupercalia. Yet how many know the details of how V Day began as a Bronze Age rite celebrating the primordial power of the wolf?

"Lycaon," 1589. Engraving by Hendrik Goltzius (1558-1617) for Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book I, 209 ff.

The story begins with the legend of King Lycaon ("The Wolfish One"). According to Ovid's Metamorphoses (translator A.S. Kline), Lycaon was a primitive lord of Arcadia in the earliest era in which humans walked the earth, "when the constellations that had been hidden for a long time in dark fog began to blaze out throughout the whole sky" (I: 68). Yet Lycaon was a king of the Iron Age, when "honour vanished" and "pernicious desires" reigned:

They set sails to the wind, though as yet the seamen had poor knowledge of their use, and the ships’ keels that once were trees standing amongst high mountains, now leaped through uncharted waves. The land that was once common to all, as the light of the sun is, and the air, was marked out to its furthest boundaries by wary surveyors. Not only did they demand the crops and the food the rich soil owed them, but they entered the bowels of the earth, and excavating brought up the wealth it had concealed in Stygian shade, wealth that incites men to crime... [I: 125-50]

Lycaon was among the worst of a bad lot. His infamous crime was to attempt to trick Zeus into eating the limbs of a dismembered child in order to test his omniscience. But Zeus was not fooled:

"No sooner were these [limbs] placed on the table than I brought the roof down on the household gods, with my avenging flames, those gods worthy of such a master. [Lycaon] himself ran in terror, and reaching the silent fields howled aloud, frustrated of speech. Foaming at the mouth, and greedy as ever for killing, he turned against the sheep, still delighting in blood. His clothes became bristling hair, his arms became legs. He was a wolf, but kept some vestige of his former shape. There were the same grey hairs, the same violent face, the same glittering eyes, the same savage image. One house has fallen, but others deserve to also. Wherever the earth extends the avenging furies rule. You would think men were sworn to crime! Let them all pay the penalty they deserve, and quickly. That is my intent." [I:210-243]

So how does this macabre tale connect to Valentine's Day? Mount Lykaion ("Wolf Mountain"), the mighty peak in Arcadia where King Lycaon was thought to have been transformed into a wolf, became the site of a secret ritual honoring the "Wolf-Zeus." According to Wikipedia, "The rituals and myths of this primitive rite of passage centered upon an ancient threat of cannibalism and the possibility of a werewolf transformation for the epheboi (adolescent males) who were the participants." Modern archeology has revealed that this mountain was a ritual site long before the name Zeus was even known in Greece: in 2008, it was announced that ritual activity dating from 3,000 B.C. was evident at the site.

A view from the ash-altar on Mount Lykaion, showing temple ruins.

The wolf-rites of Mount Lykaion appear to have been the direct inspiration for the more famous Roman holiday of Lupercalia. This festival, which spanned February 13-15, was a fertility rite intended to purify and protect the city of Rome. The rite centered around the Lupercal, which was supposedly the very cave in which the she-wolf had suckled Romulus and Remus, mythical founders of Rome (as depicted in the famous bronze statue of the 'Capitoline Wolf' below):

"Capitoline Wolf," bronze, approx. 13th century C.E., with figures added in 16th century C.E.

An Italian archeologist announced in 2007 that the remains of the Lupercal were believed to have been found directly beneath the ruins of the palace of the Emperor Augustus.

A 2007 photograph taken by an electronic probe of the lavishly decorated Roman chamber that may be the Lupercal grotto. Via National Geographic.

The priests of Lupercalia were the Luperci, or "Brothers of the Wolf," who Cicero described as "a wild association... both plainly pastoral and savage, whose rustic alliance was formed before civilization and laws" (Cael. 26). These priests were said to smear blood upon the foreheads of the noble youth of Rome and dress them in shaggy wolfskins. The youths were required to laugh, and seem to have gone into a sort of frenzy. The great historian Plutarch noted the connection with the Arcadian Wolf-Zeus ceremonies and added,

At this time many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy. [Life of Caesar, 61]

A modern depiction of Lupercalia, author unknown to me (I found it here.)

Now, at last, we approach the reasons why a Bronze Age wolf-ritual was the direct ancestor of our modern commercialized holiday of love. By the fifth century C.E., the Roman Empire was beset by external foes and had become officially Christian. Lupercalia continued to be celebrated by the populace, but it increasingly became an object of concern from the Christian authorities. Pope Gelasius I (492-496) went so far as to write an epistle mocking and condemning the rites, and was ultimately responsible for their suppression on grounds of improper behavior.

14th century French codex depicting Bishop Valentine of Terni (BN, Codex: Français 185, Fol. 210).

Yet Gelasius was not truly ending the holiday -- only changing it. In 496, the last year of his reign, he announced a new feast day of the martyrs Valentine (two existed, a priest of Rome and a bishop of Terni, of whom virtually nothing certain is known). The date of this feast, February 14, would allow it to replace the pagan holiday of Lupercalia (February 13-15) he had recently denounced.

Valentine's feast day appears not to have acquired romantic overtones until the 13th or 14th centuries, but this is only based on evidence in written texts. Did the celebration of fertility of the Luperci and Lykaon survive among the common folk, later to be revived as a pseudo-Christian holiday of love? It is impossible to say with any certainty, but given what we know about the submerged survival of 'pagan' practices in Late Antiquity and medieval Christianity, it strikes me as probable.

So happy werewolf-day, everyone.

Photochroms of the 1890s

2011-02-09T12:53:00.001-06:00

The Photochrom photographic process was developed in Zürich, Switzerland in the 1880s by the printing firm Orell Füssli (apparently still in business as a producer of "highly secure banknotes" and "identity documents" -- see link). The famous Detroit Publishing Company (née Detroit Photographic Company) purchased exclusive American rights to the process in 1897, which was highly prized prior to the advent of true color film owing to its ability to yield mass reproductions of tinted black and white photographs. Photochroms sold briskly throughout the 1890s. As you can see below, the most popular images were of exotic tourist destinations, crowded urban scenes and landscapes. Today, they fascinate because of the enormously high resolution of the photographic negatives, coupled with the color tinting of an era that we usually view in black and white. I recommend clicking on the photos to get a better of the enormous amount of detail these images contain.

The Photochrom process involved the transfer of black and white film negatives directly onto a series of lithographic plates, which were then inked with various colors matching the scene. Wikipedia provides some further technical info (perhaps more than you wanted to know). Below are some representative images from Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress Photochrom collection:

Mulberry Street in the Lower East Side of New York City, circa 1900.

Belgian milk peddlers, 1890s.

"Bedouin Chief of Palmyra," 1890s, from a photograph by Felix Bonfils.

Since these images are easily accesible on Wikimedia and Library of Congress sites I linked to above, I'll just restrict myself to pointing out a few neat details in larger photochroms:

A beautifully out of focus shot of two young men crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.

Tough-looking children and wagon-drivers in Mulberry Street.

A medieval-era town hall in Saxony - this almost feels like peering into a fifteenth-century city high street.

And my favorite photochrom of all, a wonderfully crisp and evocative portrait of an Irish weaver.

A sampling of more old fashioned, extremely hi-res photographs can be found on the photoblog Shorpy. I've also posted previously about an early color photographic technique that was used to document pre-Soviet Russia to great effect. More technical details on the photochrom process can be found here. Finally, the website of NYC's Museum of Modern Art has an interactive website devoted to explaining the workings of lithography, for those interested in how color images were made before the advent of color film.

Smokers and Drunkards in the Dutch Golden Age

2011-02-04T11:10:00.000-06:00

I've recently been amassing an image library of paintings by the likes of Frans Hals, Adrian Brouwer, Gerrit Dou, Gabriel Metsu and Jan Steen -- Dutch painters who were contemporaries of Rembrandt and Vermeer and, though less well known, were in my view almost as good. I suspect that Vermeer's popularity has given us a somewhat distorted view of everyday life in the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic (which peaked from the 1620s to 1670s), which, one would gather from his great works, was a place of serene repose at the writing desk and quiet contemplation alongside leaded windows. Yet the works by the artists I've mentioned above tell a different story: one of drunken tobacco-smoking in crowded pubs. Since the Dutch were, after all, famous among their British, French and Iberian contemporaries (and rivals) for their paired addictions to liquor and smoking, I suspect that this latter impression gives a more accurate view of the exuberant, wealthy and self-indulgent era when the Dutch Republic controlled world trade. Below I've cropped some images of the Hollanders enjoying their drugs of choice:

A family enjoying a feast day with a number of spiritous liquors. The corked bottle on the left may well be gin, which was invented by the Dutch in the 17th century. From: Jan Steen, ‘The way you hear it, is the way you sing it’. (detail). ca. 1665 Oil on canvas. 134 × 163 cm (52.76 × 64.17 in). The Hague, Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis.

Detail from another work by Jan Steen, Argument over a Card Game. Oil on canvas, 90 x 119 cm Staatliche Museen, Berlin

A lower social order enjoying the same vices: Adriaen van Ostade's Carousing peasants in a tavern. c. 1635, Munich.

What has really struck me from looking closely at these paintings of partying Hollanders is the frequency with which very young children are shown smoking tobacco. Evidently it was thought to be perfectly fine for a child as young as 6 or 8 to be given a pipe to smoke on special occasions! See below:

Detail from Jan Steen's The Happy Family. Would any Dutch-speakers care to translate the inscription above the smoking girl? Something about pipes, I gather.

Another detail of a smoking child from the same work.

It would appear that children were allowed to drink as well (although this doesn't surprise me nearly as much):

Detail from Jan Steen's Katzenfamille ("cat family"?). Note the kittens in the upper right corner!

Finally, here are some images of other drugs that may have been available to consumers in the Dutch Republic via apothecary shops and quack doctors or druggists. (My own research suggests that exotica such as cannabis, opium and datura were widely available in the Indian Ocean trade emporia that the Dutch dominated in this period, and quite possibly were consumed in the domestic Netherlands by those who had grown bored with pipes, cakes and ale). These first two details depict quack doctors with medicines, both by the great Jan Steen:


Finally, Adriaen Brauwer's famous painting The Bitter Draught, apparently depicting a man imbibing an odd-tasting medicinal drug.

Daily Life as a Slave

2011-01-23T17:34:00.005-06:00

Below are some vivid paintings and engravings of enslaved peoples in the colonial Americas compiled by Professor Jerome S. Handler (his personal site) and Michael L. Tuite, Jr. in a joint project funded by the University of Virginia and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Contextual details for these images are scarce, but the pictures themselves speak eloquently of the manner in which the institution of slavery was embedded into the fabric of life in colonial societies stretching from Boston to Buenos Aires. I've added occasional captions to the images, but where the text is in quotes it comes direct from the online database assembled by Handler and Tuite, entitled The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas. Many thanks for this fantastic resource.

Extracting a jigger, scene in the Brazils. Watercolor by Augustus Earle (1793-1838). Original in National Library of Australia, Canberra. "Shows a black woman extracting a chigger from the foot of a white man in what appears to be some sort of tavern; note pottery jug in left-hand corner. A tropical flea native to the Americas, the chigger (jigger, chigoe) was extremely troublesome to Europeans and Africans in many areas of the New World." William Dampier, the famed pirate and natural observer, recorded a similar removal of a chigger from his foot by an African slave in the 1690s, which he noted was accompanied by the sprinkling of tobacco leaves and the slave "mumbling some words to himself." See Dampier, A Voyage to New Holland, Vol. II, 93.

West India Washer Women, a painting by Agustino Brunias, 1760s. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, Kingston. Brunias, "a painter born in Italy in 1730, came to England in 1758 where he became acquainted with William Young. Young had been appointed to a high governmental post in West Indian territories acquired by Britain from France, and in late 1764 Brunias accompanied Young to the Caribbean as his personal artist."

"Ile de France: Palanquin." Engraving from Louis de Freycinet, Voyage Autour du Monde... Atlas Historique. Plate 10. The Atlas Historique, a book of lavishly colored engravings documenting a French geographical expedition in the 1810s, offers a goldmine of information about enslaved peoples to historians. This image differs a bit from others I've seen from the Atlas in that it depicts daily life in Mauritius, an island near Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, as opposed to the Americas. Note the barber-surgeon at right, an important medical practitioner among enslaved and free black populations throughout the colonial era.

An archival image of a mulatto house slave of Peru, 1780s. "This and hundreds of other drawings were done by unidentifed Indians during the 1780s and were commissioned by the Spanish Bishop Baltazar Jaime Martinez Companon during his pastoral visit to the region of Trujillo in northern Peru. The drawings, spread over nine volumes, are of Spaniards, Indians, plants and animals, as well plans and maps of the region." Source: Biblioteca del Palacio Real de Madrid.

A companion image from the same series, depicting a mulatta woman.

Painting by an unknown artist; from post card issued by the Virginia Museum of Fine
Arts, Richmond. "Unidentified black nurse with grandchildren of Virginia's Governor Spotswood, 1790-1800."

Collectible cards were often issued by British tobacconists - many featured depictions of African slaves smoking. This one was issued in Devon, England, and is courtesy of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia; image C1980-866.

And finally, an evocative scene devoid of people, but with some vivid details of daily life in a colonial Jamaican village: "Watercolor, showing rural house yard. Drawn from life by William Berryman, an English artist who lived in Jamaica for eight years in the early 19th century. He produced over 300 pencil and watercolor drawings of the island's people, landscape, settlements, and flora, with the intention of producing a series of engravings--never realized because of his death." Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs.

Taken together, the images from this site can tell you things that books never can. I recommend that interested readers peruse it themselves. Below are links to some subject areas:

Pre-Colonial Africa: Society, Polity, Culture

Slave Ships and the Atlantic Crossing

New World Agriculture and Plantation Labor

Music, Dance and Recreation

Religion and Mortuary Practices

Image of the Week: The Defeat of the Spanish Armada

2011-01-19T22:41:00.000-06:00

This painting, by an anonymous English artist, depicts in remarkable detail the Spanish Armada's confrontation with English vessels, probably at the momentous Battle of Gravelines. From Wikipedia:

English losses stood at 50-100 dead and 400 wounded, and none of their ships had been sunk. But after the victory, typhus, dysentery and hunger killed many sailors and troops (estimated at 6,000–8,000) as they were discharged without pay: a demoralising dispute occasioned by the government's fiscal shortfalls left many of the English defenders unpaid for months, which was in contrast to the assistance given by the Spanish government to its surviving men.
Although the English fleet was unable to prevent the regrouping of the Armada at the Battle of Gravelines, requiring it to remain on duty even as thousands of its sailors died, the outcome vindicated the strategy adopted, resulting in a revolution in naval warfare with the promotion of gunnery, which until then had played a supporting role to the tasks of ramming and boarding. The battle of Gravelines is regarded by some specialists in military history as reflecting a lasting shift in the naval balance in favour of the English, in part because of the gap in naval technology and armament it confirmed between the two nations, which continued into the next century. In the words of Geoffrey Parker, by 1588 'the capital ships of the Elizabethan navy constituted the most powerful battlefleet afloat anywhere in the world.'^[22]

As with many early modern paintings, the charm of this one is in the details: note the tiny figure (painted in red) clinging to the broken mast of the sinking vessel in the detail I've picked out above. Below is the full painting, along with two more details of direct cannon fire.

The Baron and the 'Savages': Lahontan in North America

2011-01-16T22:46:00.003-06:00

An early French edition of Lahontan's travelogue.

I've spent the last week in UT Austin's Harry Ransom Center reading a book that was once sensationally famous but has since fallen into obscurity: the Baron de Lahontan's Nouveux Voyages dans L'Amerique Septentrionale, published in English as New Voyages to North America (London, 1703). After reading less than half, I can safely say that this is an extraordinary book, sparkling with unusual details, spectacular engraved illustrations and a unique narrative voice. Indeed, there's almost something post-modern about the moral ambiguity of Lahontan as narrator - on the surface he appears to scorn the "silly" ways of the "Savages," but the work is also suffused with concealed admiration for what Lahontan calls the "most Natural of Natural Philosophers" who populated the vast North American forests, and the book concludes with a dialogue between the Baron and a semi-imaginary Huron Indian chief (Lahontan calls him 'the Rat') which paints European Christians and their money-driven ethos in a distinctly unfavorable light.

The English title page.

A bit more information about the somewhat mysterious Loius Armand, Baron of Lahontan (9 June 1666 – c. 1716) can be garnered from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, where an informative entry by David M. Hayne tells us that he was born to a noble French family in the environs of the town of Pau, on the border near the Pyrenes. Lahontan came to French Canada at a young age, around 17, and moved throughout New France for ten years as a soldier, translator and traveler. Upon return to France he seems to have been deprived of his large inheritance, but he won fame for his writings and maintained a friendship with the great Liebniz (and also, it would seem, with Sir Hans Sloane, the botanist, founder of the British Museum and co-inventor of hot chocolate -- on whom more in a later post). Lahontan's Voyages, Hayne notes,

were based on personal observation of events and practices in New France, of Indian customs, and of flora and fauna. They included an impressive wealth of detail and, except for some exaggeration in the numbers of persons involved, were remarkably accurate in their information. The infrequent occasions on which Lahontan retailed hearsay – for example in his jesting page on the marriageable girls sent out to New France, or in his tale of the Long River – have drawn refutations which by their violence bear witness to his relative veracity elsewhere.

The cartographer Hermann Mole's depiction of the mythical 'Longue River' linking the Great Lakes with the Pacific, seemingly invented by Lahontan along with details of cultures and ecosystems that lay along it.

Hayne continues:

Quite apart from the information and opinions they communicated about North America, moreover, Lahontan’s works were a compendium of early 18th-century “philosophic” ideas about the folly of superstitions, the vices of European society, the illogicalities of Christian dogma and the virtues of the “noble savage.” The same ideas, better expressed, would be found in the writings of major 18th-century authors: in the fourth book of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in Rousseau’s Discours sur les origines de l’inégalité . . . (1755), in Voltaire’s L’Ingénu (1767), or in Diderot’s posthumously published Supplément au voyage de Bougainville...

Below are a random sampling of quotations from the English translation of Lahontan's Voyages, with two engraved plates from the French edition. These are some of the earliest written accounts of the native tribes -- Ottawa, Huron, Iroquois, Illinois, and many more -- that populated New France, and the haunting sense of a vanished world and culture is palpable here.

On property and inequality: "They think it unnaccountable that one Man should have more than another, and that the Rich should have more Respect than the Poor. In short, they say, the name of Savages which we bestow upon them would fit our selves better, since there is nothing in our Actions that bears an Appearance of Wisdom... They brand us for Slaves, and call us miserable Souls, whose Life is not worth having, alledging, That we degrade our selves in Subjecting our selves to one Man who possesses the whole Power..." (421).
On food: "Their Victuals are either Boild or roasted, and they lap great quantities of the Broath, both of Meat and of Fish: They cannot bear the taste of Salt or Spices, and wonder that we are able to live so long as Thirty Years, considering our Wines, our Spices, and our Immoderate Use of Women." (422)

"The Ceremony of Marriage": a bride and groom prepare to marry, and lovers courting by visiting one another's houses, "accompanied by parents" and without. In the detail at lower right, a suitor visits a young woman bearing a candle - if she blows the candle out, they will sleep together.

A similar illustration from the English edition, with more details.

On widows: "When the Husband or Wife comes to dye, the Widowhood does not last above six Months ; and if in that space of time the Widow or Widower dreams of their deceas'd Bedfellow, they Poyson themselves in cold Blood with all the Contentment imaginable ; and at the same time sing a sort of tune that one may safely say proceeds from the Heart." (459)
On men who 'go in a Woman's Habit': "Among the Illinese there are several Hermaphrodites, who go in a Woman's Habit, but frequent the Company of both Sexes. These Illinese are strangely given to Sodomy, as well as the other Savages that live near the River Missisipi." (462)

"Savages going to the hunt," an "infant attached to a branch of a tree," and a "female savage carrying her child."

And one of my favorite passages, on 'Hunting Women' who 'will not hear of a Husband': "To justify their Conduct, they alledge that they find themselves to be of too indifferent a temper to brook the Conjugal yoak, to be too careless for the bringing up of Children, and too impatient to bear the passing of the whole Winter in the Villages... Their Parents or Relations dare not censure their Vicious Conduct; on the contrary they seem to approve of it, in declaring, as I said before, that their Daughters have the command of their own Bodies and may dispose of their Persons as they think fit... The Jesuits do their utmost to prevent the Lewd Practices of these Whores, by preaching to their parents that their Indulgence is very disagreeable to the Great Spirit, that they must answer before God for not confineing their Children to the measures of Continency and Chastity, and that a Fire is Kindled in the other World to Torment 'em for ever, unless they take more care to correct Vice. To such Remonstances the Men reply, That's Admirable; and the Woman usually tell the Good Fathers in a deriding way, That if their Threats be well grounded, the Mountains of the other World must consist of the Ashes of souls." (464)

An excellent answer from the women, in my opinion! (And we must be careful not to take Lahontan too much at his word in his own censure of these practices - the Baron seems often to tacitly approve of the un-Christian yet spirited and clever responses of his native interlocutors, though he can never admit it outright.) These passage raise some profound questions about gender in North American indigenous societies -- Lahontan's 'Hunting Women' and 'Hermaphrodites' are fascinating and almost entirely unstudied, based on what I've read -- but sadly the documentation for these practices is so fragmentary that they may never be fully understood by historians.

A detail from the 1707 French edition showing what is probably the earliest European depiction of the bison hunts of the Plains Indians - early French travelers like Lahontan called them 'boeufs sauvages,' or wild cows.

Lahonta's Voyages are on Amazon and can also be found on Archive.org. Those interested in the larger context of Indian, French and British interaction in the colonial American frontier would be wise to start with Richard White's famous work The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (1991), which is the authoritative work on the subject and an amazing piece of scholarship, if at times a bit daunting. Maps and engravings from Lahontan's works, which by and large were extremely well-illustrated, can be found on auction sites throughout the web, but the best site to browse is probably Early Images of Canada, which has over one hundred images from different editions of Lahontan's travels online in a searchable database.

The Domestic Life of Alchemists

2011-01-12T21:22:00.001-06:00

Philadelphia's Chemical Heritage Foundation maintains a wonderful Flickr page of images relating to the history of chemistry, pharmacy and alchemy. While perusing their image banks, I came across this collection of 17th and 18th-century paintings of alchemists practicing their occult art -- paintings which include some revealing glimpses into the private life of those who searched for the fabled lapis philosophorum. Credit for the images and quoted text below goes to the Chemical Heritage Foundation, "a non-profit library, museum, and center for scholars that's dedicated to the history of chemistry." Some of these images are very large - I highly encourage readers to click to see the fabulous details (I've picked out a few below).

Alchemist. Thomas Wijck (Beverwijck 1616–1677 Haarlem), Holland, 17th Century, Oil on panel. From the CHF: "A dark study illuminated by single leaded glass window at left; in middle ground a seated man behind cluttered desk faces slightly left; open and closed books, papers, jars and jugs scattered on floor; at right a seated woman in white cap, collar and cuff, bends over a lacemaker; at left a glowing furnace, above that on wall a portrait of a man." Fisher Collection; Gift of Fisher Scientific International. Photo by Will Brown.

The Alchemist. Francois-Marius Granet. Oil on canvas, 18th century. A bit more spare on detail, but this painting captures the moody contemplation of early modern occultists very well, I think. Also a great use of shadow.

An Alchemist in His Study. Egbert van Heemskerk I. Oil on canvas, 17th century. Fisher Collection, CHF Collections. Photo by Will Brown.
Note the birdcages in both this painting and the Thomas Wijck.

Interior of a Laboratory with an Alchemist. David Teniers II. Oil on canvas, 17th Century Eddleman Collection, CHF.

And my favorite of all, a painting which has been wrongly attributed as a depiction of an alchemist, but which actually depicts an unlucky physician:

Trouble Comes to the Alchemist. Dutch School, 17th-century. Oil on canvas mounted on board. From the CHF: "Although the title suggests this is an image of an alchemist, the scene is one of a physician conducting a uroscopy for a female patient. The confusion may be due to the similarity in objects used in both relative practices. These include a mortar and pestle, a variety of flasks and containers, a human skull, an hourglass, a celestial globe, and books. The overt hilarity of the old woman deliberately emptying her piss pot on the physician's head would have been instantly appreciated by any contemporary viewer of this work. Musical motifs, such as the cello in this painting, were traditionally a symbol of love and warning about sexual promiscuity. The poem on the table, attributed to Socrates, implies that the furious woman above is like Xanthippe, the Greek philosopher's famously shrewish wife. It reads: I knew well woman, it's no wonder, it would rain, after this thunder."

What's most interesting to me about all these paintings is the insight they give into the domestic spaces in which alchemy took place -- science was still, in the early modern era, practiced in spare rooms or 'closets' of houses rather than in institutions, so it is little wonder to find sleeping cats and dogs, servants, wives and lovers, tobacco pipes and other signs of domesticity in these paintings. Yet when we compare these charming vignettes to the forbidding and rather pretentious tone that alchemical texts of the 17th century assumed, it makes for a revealing contrast: sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. Some details:

A pipe and birdcage, apparent mainstays of the alchemist's quarters. This is a painting of the Dutch Golden Age, so that blurry image in the background could potentially be a woodblock print from China or Japan.

The detritus of a scholarly life.

A surreal flourish in the Tenier painting: crocodilians were commonly hung in the shops of apothecaries and other early modern drug-makers. They represented the natural wonders of the tropics, or 'Indies,' from which many such drugs hailed.

A sleeping dog, blissfully unaware of the pot of urine being poured on his master's head.

Those interested in alchemy and the occult might want to start with the works of Frances Yates, the doyenne of early modern magic and alchemical studies, and go from there. Personally, though, I've always found Yates to be a bit too speculative. A personal favorite work on alchemy and the occult in the early modern era is Deborah Harkness' masterful John Dee's Conversations with Angels, which contains some great details about Dee's home life and his relationship with his wife. For readers with JSTOR access, Harkness' journal article "Managing an Experimental Household: the Dees of Mortlake and the Practice of Natural Philosophy" contains further insights. Finally, The Alchemy Website has been an internet mainstay for primary source texts and images relating to alchemy for many years.

Thanks, Readers!

2011-01-08T13:52:00.000-06:00

Having reached the milestone of 50,000 visitors today, I thought I'd write to say thank you to all who have read, commented on and shared this site. Its been rewarding for me to find that members of the general public are actually interested in the arcane oddities of historical research -- the nature of the historical discipline means that its sometimes easy to forget this. RES OBSCURA is still only around seven months old and is thus very much a work in progress, so I welcome any comments, suggestions and criticisms. Please comment on this post to let me know what you think and what might be improved! Also, here are my two most-viewed posts of 2010: Waterboarding in the Seventeenth Century and Color Photographs of Vanished Russia. One of my favorites, despite not getting many views, is Scurvy, Shipwreck and Spaniards in the Indies, which was based on some archival research I did in London this summer. These cropped images, by the way, come from an beautiful painting by Lorenzo Lotto which is usually called 'The Allegory of Virtue and Vice.' Look for a post on Lotto's enigmatic works in the near future!