Boxes and Books in Early Modern England: Materiality, Metaphor, Containment 9781108831338, 1108831338

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
A Note on Texts
Introduction
Chapter 1 Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England
Objects and Affordances
The World in Boxes
Thinking Inside the Box in Early Modern England
Chapter 2 The Renaissance of the Box: Metaphors of Interpretation
Portia's Lottery
Plato's Silenus
Erasmus and the Early Modern Sileni
Curious Statues, Capricious Caskets
Chapter 3 The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book
'The booke of grace, and the box of ointment': Enclosing the Word
'All gilded on the outside': Erasmian Sacred Texts
'The booke is not my present, it is but the boxe': The Material Text in Protestant England
Chapter 4 How to Read a Reliquary
'Gods Bodye in the Box': Contested Sacraments
'As longe as it was inclosed men did not doubte thereof': Boundaries of Belief
The Book as Reliquary
Chapter 5 'Because this box we know': Embodying the Box
Living Boxes
Corpses and Coffins
Conclusion
Bibliography
Manuscripts
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index

Citation preview

BOXES AND BOOKS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

In early modern England, boxes furnished minds as readily as they furnished rooms, shaping ideas about the challenges of interpretation, and negotiations of the book as text and material object. Engaging with recent work on material culture and the history of the book, Lucy Razzall weaves together close readings of texts and objects, from wills, plays, sermons and religious polemic to chests, book-bindings, reliquaries, and coffins. She demonstrates how the material and imaginative possibilities of the box were dynamically connected in post-Reformation England, structuring modes of thought. These early modern responses to materiality offer ways in which the discipline of book history might reframe its analysis of the material text. In tracing the early modern significance of the box as matter and metaphor, this book reveals the origins of some of the enduring habits of thought with which we still respond to people, texts, and things.   has held research and teaching positions at the University of Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, and University College London. She has published essays on material texts and material culture in the early modern period, on subjects including relics, emblems, and print culture.

BOXES AND BOOKS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Materiality, Metaphor, Containment

LUCY RAZZALL

University Printing House, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Penang Road, #–/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Lucy Razzall  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements A Note on Texts

page vi viii x 

Introduction 

Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England





The Renaissance of the Box: Metaphors of Interpretation





The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book





How to Read a Reliquary





‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box



Conclusion



Bibliography Index

 

v

Figures

 Chest, Portugal or England, –  George Meriton, Nomenclatura clericalis, or The young clerk’s vocabulary in English and Latine (London: Richard Lambert, ), Rv–Rr  Johann Amos Comenius, Hoc est, Omnium fundamentalium in mundo rerum, & in vita actionum, pictura & nomenclatura (London: J. Kirton, ), Kv–Kr  Wooden box in the shape of a book, containing twelve painted trenchers, England, seventeenth century  Silver gilt binding for a  King James Bible and  Book of Common Prayer, British, c. –  Library chest of the parish of St James, Gorton,   Embroidered binding for a Bible and Book of Psalms, British, c.   Embroidered cabinet with scenes from the story of Esther, British, after   Anonymous, The Black Boxe of Roome opened (London, n.p., ), title-page  Leather case for a reliquary, French or Swiss, c. –  Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, or, Mr. Richard Baxters narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times (London: T. Parkhurst, ), frontispiece  Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, or, Mr. Richard Baxters narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times (London: T. Parkhurst, ), title-page  Book chest reputedly belonging to Hugo de Groot, Netherlands, –

vi

page             

List of Figures  Strongbox, probably German, late sixteenth or early seventeenth century  Edwarde Rainbowe, A sermon preached at Walden in Essex, May th (London: Printed W. Wilson, for Gabriel Bedell, M. M[eighen] and T. C[ollins], ), Br

vii  

Acknowledgments

The Arts and Humanities Research Council funded the doctoral research in which some of the ideas in this book first took shape. I am also grateful to Jesus College, Cambridge for financial support and a wonderful community. The Master and Fellows of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, appointed me to a Research Fellowship, which gave me three happy years to think, write, and teach among some very genial and inspiring people. I am also grateful to the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, for a short-term Fellowship to explore the collections there. Jason Scott-Warren supervised my doctoral dissertation with considerable patience, and he continues to be a generous friend and collaborator. The Centre for Material Texts at Cambridge, under his direction, provided many enriching opportunities and discussions. I was also fortunate to have two enthusiastic dissertation examiners, Alex Walsham and Bill Sherman, whose encouragement was very welcome. Writing retreats in a remote part of Lancashire with Hanna Weibye were essential to this book’s gestation, and I am ever grateful for conversations with her about all things material and metaphorical. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Alison Knight, who has read every word of the manuscript incisively, and encouraged me numerous times when I have doubted myself. Her astute criticism has improved this book no end. Conversations with the following people have challenged and encouraged me, and furnished me with yet more boxes: Patricia Boulhosa, Christopher Burlinson, Irene Galandra Cooper, Helen Hackett, Rachel Holmes, Katherine Hunt, Simon Jackson, Bonnie Lander-Johnson, Eric Langley, Mary Laven, Jonathan Law, Hester Lees-Jeffries, Robert Macfarlane, Alexander Marr, Laura Moretti, Harriet Phillips, Claire Preston, Rosie Razzall, Sophie Read, Corinna Russell, Alison Shell, Helen Smith, Adam Smyth, and Chris Stamatakis. During the course of this research, I gave papers at seminars and conferences in Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Kavala, London, New viii

Acknowledgments

ix

York, Norwich, Oxford, and York, from which I learned a tremendous amount. At Cambridge University Press I am grateful to Emily Hockley for her support, and to the two anonymous readers whose perceptive suggestions greatly improved the final version of this book. I never imagined that I would be finishing this book during a global health crisis. In these circumstances, I am indebted to the patience of Emily and her team, and I am grateful more than ever to those institutions that make highresolution images readily available for publishing. Fergus Wilde at Chetham’s Library and Tom Charlton were especially generous in allowing me to use their images when I was finalising the manuscript during the pandemic. For their love and support in all things, I am grateful to my family. In these strangest of times, Chris Trundle has, as ever, faithfully cheered me on and shared in the distracting joy of our children, John and Raphael.

A Note on Texts

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the works of William Shakespeare are taken from The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the works of Desiderius Erasmus are taken from the Collected Works,  vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, –). All references to individual volumes from this edition are abbreviated to CWE. In all direct quotations from early modern English sources, I have modernised the use of i/j and u/v, and expanded contractions wherever possible.

x

Introduction

In September , a man called Thomas Wale visited the renowned antiquary Elias Ashmole, and recounted to him a strange series of events that centred on a wooden chest. Wale, a warder in the Tower of London, rightly suspected that the contents of the chest would be of significant interest to Ashmole. The story began many years earlier, when Mrs Wale was shopping in London with her first husband, ‘one M:r Jones a Confectioner’. Shortly after they were married, Jones tooke her with him into Alde Streete among the Joyners, to buy some Household stuff, where (at the Corner house) they saw a Chest of Cedar wood, about a yard & halfe long, whose Lock & Hinges, being of extraordinary neate worke, invited them to buy it.

One day some two decades later, something quite unexpected happened: [. . .] she & her sd husband occasionally removing this Chest out of its usuall place, thought they heard some loose thing ratle in it, toward the right hand end, under the Box or Till thereof, & by shaking it, were fully satisfied it was so: Hereupon her Husband thrust a piece of Iron into a small Crevice at the bottome of the Chest, & thereupon appeared a private drawer, wch being drawne out, therein were found divers Bookes in Manuscript, & Papers, together with a litle Box, & therein a Chaplet of Olive Beades, & a Cross of the same wood, hanging at the end of them. They made no great matter of these Bookes &c: because they understood them not; wch occasioned their Servant Maide to wast about one halfe of them under Pyes & other like uses, wch when they discovered, they kept the rest more safe.

A few years after this discovery Mr Jones died, and then during London’s fire of , the chest unfortunately ‘perished in the Flames, because not easily to be removed’ (ironically, this ‘moveable’ was not so moveable when it really mattered), but the ‘Bookes &c’ were taken to safety ‘with the rest of M:rs Jones her goods’. The widowed Mrs Jones ‘tooke care to 



Introduction

preserve them’, and after her second marriage to Thomas Wale, they were eventually brought ‘with her consent’ to the attention of Ashmole, who identified them as having belonged to the Elizabethan astrologer and magician John Dee. They included a manuscript of Dee’s ‘Conference with Angells’, as well as other works of occult philosophy and ritual magic, and Ashmole added them to his library, giving Wale a book about the Order of the Garter in return. As Joad Raymond has observed, there are multiple stories at work in this narrative. The chest, a standard furnishing for a marital home in the seventeenth century, is bought by a couple who are attracted by its impressively worked lock and hinges. For many years it is literally part of the furniture, occupying its ‘usuall place’. But this seemingly quite ordinary chest turns out to be a surprise repository of mysterious hidden objects. In addition to its internal ‘Box or Till’, the chest contains a ‘private drawer’, inside which there are ‘divers Bookes in Manuscript, & Papers’ and a further ‘litle Box’ containing beads and a little cross. This chest, with its internal drawer, secret compartment, and boxes within boxes, encloses multiple mysteries. These multiple concentric containments lead to multiple revelations, and the jostling of the various objects in the story – boxes, books, beads – blurs the distinction between the material and the textual. The chest becomes a surprise meeting point for the material cultures of the household and of the book, while at the same time the now infamous detail of some of Dee’s papers being employed by the family servant ‘under Pyes & other like uses’ underlines the essential material contiguity of books with the rest of the domestic environment. One way of appreciating the multiple stories here is to recognise the various temporalities embodied in the chest. The chest, an apparently ordinary piece of furniture, is revealed to be ‘polychronic’ or ‘multitemporal’, a palimpsestic object with the capacity to ‘articulate several different organizations of time’. When it was first purchased by the Joneses, the chest already had an intriguing history – the shopkeeper told his newly wed customers that ‘it had ben parcel of the Goods of M:r John Woodall 



This account by Elias Ashmole, recorded in British Library Sloane MS , is cited by Joad Raymond at the opening of Milton’s Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. See also William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, ), p.  and passim. I borrow these terms from Jonathan Gil Harris’s discussion of Renaissance objects and their complicated relationship to history, in Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), pp. , , and passim.

Introduction



Chirurgeon’. Ashmole adds parenthetically that this man was ‘father to M:r Tho: Woodall late Sergant Chirurgeon to his now Ma:tie King Charles the d:. . . My intimate friend’, and it was ‘very probable he bought it after D:r Dee’s death, when his goods were exposed to Sale’. There are various different pockets of time in Ashmole’s account, but this is because there are multiple parcels of time enclosed in the chest itself, whose secret contents, discovered in the s but not fully understood until a decade later, point back to the Elizabethan past, and also further back to a more distant past. The cross and beads, for example, are ritual artefacts reminiscent of pre-Reformation devotional practices, and were probably used by Dee in his experiments in the summoning of angels during the s, recorded in the manuscript identified by Ashmole as Dee’s ‘Conference with Angells’. When the chest’s contents were first discovered, these historical intricacies were not fully revealed, partly because the Joneses did not understand the books and papers, though they rightly suspected that they might be worth saving from the kitchen, and from fire. The multiple stories in Ashmole’s account also weave together a network of different figures across almost a century: Ashmole himself, John Dee and his conversations with angels, Thomas Wale, his wife and her first husband and their servant, the shopkeeper who sold them the chest, and a possible previous owner of the chest, the well-connected surgeon-general of the East India Company, John Woodall. Two protagonists remain constant in this chain of events: the chest, and Mrs Wale, formerly Jones. Although it is Thomas Wale who approaches Ashmole about the books and papers, it is noted that he does so with his wife’s ‘consent’, and it is she who recounts everything to Ashmole. The chest, after all, predates Mr Wale in its relationship with Mrs Wale, and its contents move with her from one marriage to the next, after her first husband’s death. It is clear that Mrs Wale maintains at least a sense of entitlement to, or responsibility for, this moveable. Thus one of the important stories here is about gender, and the chest as a domestic object with particular significance for women, who might marry, and be widowed, and marry again, bringing valuable objects like this with them, in which their own histories are invested. The 



John Woodall was the first surgeon-general of the East India Company, whose responsibilities included supplying ships with surgeon’s chests. He wrote The surgions mate, or A treatise discovering faithfully and plainely the due contents of the surgions chest (London: Edward Griffin for Laurence Lisle, ), the first good medical textbook of its kind in English, which described the instruments and medicines of a sea-surgeon’s chest, and their uses. He would doubtless have owned many chests. This detail may be true, or perhaps it was a cunning marketing ploy by the shopkeeper. The principle of coverture would have meant that Mr Jones legally owned the chest, not his wife. He could have bequeathed it to her, or if he died intestate, Mrs Jones would have been entitled to a third



Introduction

other woman in Ashmole’s narrative, the Jones’s ‘Servant Maide’, is depicted as wasting some of the papers in the kitchen, but even as it is rather disparaging, this comment tells us something about the agency of a household’s other women in relation to places of storage and potential secret-keeping, like chests. In this case, an unnamed servant presumably has access to the chest, shares her employers’ ignorance about the literary significance of its surprise contents, but resourcefully puts some of the papers to practical uses. The Jones/Wale chest turns out to be not just one container, but a concentric collection of containers, its secret drawers and boxes hiding further mystifying contents. Even when discovered, the ‘divers Bookes in Manuscript, & Papers’ still conceal their full historical significance until brought to the expert antiquarian eye of Ashmole. Initially it is the material potential of some of these some papers that is realised: for the Jones’s servant, the chest offers a convenient source of waste paper. Ashmole’s identification of these papers as relics of John Dee shifts the focus to their intellectual content, and makes the chest into a miniature library or even a kind of bookbinding or case, which has preserved the vulnerable leaves for future readers. The material and intellectual relationship between the sheets of paper and the ‘binding’ around them is another important part of this story; the chest as container is transformed by its own magical contents, in a disorientating blurring of the distinction between book and box. In turn, the books and papers themselves are box-like, requiring the expertise of Ashmole to unlock them. While this is for Elias Ashmole a story about the chance survival of some historically significant manuscripts, it is also a narrative about the object that enabled their survival. It is the wooden chest with its lock and complex interior of secrets that is the agent of preservation, keeping safe what turn out to be significant literary discoveries, even while it is moved between different owners, marriages, and households, over a period of several decades. In the description of its ending – it ‘perished in the Flames’ of the Great Fire – the chest becomes martyr-like, an almost sacred vessel whose precious contents are miraculously saved from the same fate. The story of the chest tells us something about gender and the relationship between women and material goods, and it also reveals something about social class, for the buying of such a piece of furniture by the Joneses signals at least moderate affluence. In this story, the chest of all things. On ‘ordinary’ women and how they owned, managed, and inherited property, see Amy Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, ).

Introduction



Figure  Chest of cedar, cypress, or juniper wood, Portugal or England, c. –.      cm. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London

carries out its intended function of containment, but it is also a miraculous hiding place for things other than household necessities: mystifying books, ritual objects, secrets. Its secure wooden structure opens onto the present and various moments in the past simultaneously, merging the mundane and the magical, the everyday and the occult, the profane and the sacred, and the materialities of the kitchen and the study. Thus this chest is not merely an inert container, but an epiphanic technology or instrument, enabling many organisations of time, space, and things. When the Joneses bought this chest in the middle of the seventeenth century, they were investing in an important piece of ‘Household stuff’ – a lockable wooden box that would furnish their marital home, enabling them to store, protect, and transport their material possessions. Several details from the account in Ashmole’s manuscript suggest that this chest may have been similar to one that now survives in the Victoria & Albert Museum (Figure ). Made in the first half of the seventeenth century, the V&A example measures  cm wide (loosely comparable to the ‘yard and a halfe’ of the Jones/Wale chest),  cm high, and  cm deep. Mrs Jones/ Wale remembers that they went ‘among the Joyners’ to buy their chest, which is a significant detail here, as it tells us something about the quality of this object. Its construction must have involved the more refined techniques of joinery requiring shaped wooden joints and glue, like the



Introduction

mitred dovetails of the V&A example, in contrast with a chest made by carpenters, which would be constructed more crudely from boards held together with nails. Like the Jones/Wale chest, the V&A example has a lock and hinges securing the lid, and it is fitted with a till (similarly at ‘the right hand end’, the most convenient arrangement for the majority of people). No details of the exterior appearance of the Jones/Wale chest are given in the Ashmole manuscript, other than it being of ‘Cedar’, with lock and hinges of invitingly ‘extraordinary neate worke’, but it may have been carved or, like the V&A example, engraved on its front panels. The engraved design on this chest, enhanced with a black paste of pine resin, features the Stuart royal arms as well as some more unusual imagery, including a double-headed eagle. This style of decoration, and the fact that it is made of cedar, cypress, or juniper (these woods are not always easy to distinguish between), suggest that the V&A chest may well have been imported to England from the Mediterranean. Although Mrs Jones/ Wale remembers going ‘among the Joyners’ to choose it, it is possible that with its history of passing between multiple owners over almost a century the Jones/Wale chest, also of cedar, might well have originally been imported too. By the time that Mr Wale went to Elias Ashmole, John Evelyn had suggested that although cedar was not grown in England, ‘this precious material may be had at such tolerable rates’ from abroad that ‘our more Wealthy Citizens of London, now Building, might be encourag’d to use of it [. . .] for Shelves, Comptoires, Chests, Tables, Wainscot, &c’, pointing to the novelty of imported cedar for furniture-making in the s. (When the Jones/Wale chest was built, presumably in the latter decades of the sixteenth century, oak would have been the more usual source, if it was not imported but made in England.) One of the advantages of cedar, ‘beside the everlastingness of the wood’, is that it deters insects, so it ‘would also be a means to preserve cloth, and other Ware from Moths and corruption’. The Jones/Wale chest, now known for its miraculous 

 

If the Jones/Wale chest is ‘multitemporal’, the V&A example might be said to be ‘multilocational’. The V&A online catalogue entry for this object notes that the double-headed eagle is associated with the Holy Roman Empire, and may be a reference to James I’s daughter Elizabeth of Bohemia: www .collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O/chest-and-stand-unknown/. According to Victor Chinnery, similar examples of chests embellished with English heraldry suggest they were ordered from abroad as tourist souvenirs: see his Oak Furniture: The British Tradition (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, ; rev. ), p. . If the first owner was indeed John Woodall of the East India Company, as Ashmole’s narrative suggests, it could well have been imported. John Evelyn, Sylva, or, A discourse of forest-trees, and the propagation of timber in His Majesties dominions (London: J. Martyn and J. Allestry, ), Rv–Rr.

Introduction



preservation of John Dee’s papers, was originally intended to protect and preserve other domestic goods, especially textiles. As this brief glimpse into the life of one particular object illustrates, boxes play an important role in domestic space, offering protection, order, and convenience, as well as the possibility of privacy and secrecy. In such ways, they are essential to how people construct, inhabit, and interact with their environments. Some of the fundamental appeal of the box is articulated particularly poetically by Primo Levi at the beginning of a short essay in which he suggests that ‘[T]o fabricate a receptacle is a clue to two qualities, which, for good or evil, are exquisitely human’: The first is the ability to think about tomorrow. There certainly are animals ‘not incautious of the future’: ants, bees, squirrels, certain birds, and some of them in fact build receptacles: bees in particular, with admirable skill and economy of material, but their small hexagonal cell is only one, and their art, although at least one hundred million years old, has remained what it was, while ours, in a few millennia, has given origin to a myriad of objects. The second specifically human quality is the capacity to foresee the behaviour of matter: if we keep to the subject of receptacles, we know how to foresee what container and content ‘will do’, and how they will react to each other, at the instant of their contact and in time. A boundless jungle of subjects has sprung from these two exigencies, each endowed with its own particular development; and, consequently, an assortment of receptacles (casks, pitchers, vials, bags, suitcases, baskets, sacks, buckets, ink stands, jars, goatskins, cylinders, boxes, bowls, crates, lead capsules for radioactive elements, cages, snuff boxes, trash cans, flasks for gunpowder, cans for tomato paste, mail boxes, velvet-lined jewel cases, scabbards for swords, pyxes for hosts, needle cases, air tubes, carry-this and carry-that, gasometers as large as cathedrals, cribs, urns, and biers) so jagged as to make one want to set up a classification, as one has always tried to do with animals, plants, and rocks.

As Levi puts it, the capacity to ‘think about tomorrow’, and to ‘foresee the behaviour of matter’ are characteristics that distinguish humans from all other creatures, even from those like bees or ants whose habitats are also based around receptacles they build themselves, for the purposes of security, storage, trapping, and display. While honeycombs and anthills of course imply a sense of the future, and certainly demonstrate mastery of

 

Primo Levi, ‘A Bottle of Sunshine’, in Other People’s Trades, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Michael Joseph, ), pp. – (pp. –). Mike Hansell, Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. .



Introduction

matter, human capacity for these things is infinitely more varied, and infinitely more adaptable than in the animal domain. These two characteristics underpin some of the distinctive ways in which humans have always responded to the world, as we seek to bring order to material things we use and encounter, and to lay down resources – physical, intellectual, or spiritual – that may be needed in the future. The items in Levi’s catalogue of receptacles range from the tiny to the very large, the profane to the sacred, and from the ancient to the modern. The very specific – ‘scabbards for swords, pyxes for hosts’ – are intermingled with the rather vague – ‘carry-this and carry-that’, while the everyday – ‘cans for tomato paste’ – jostle with the less familiar – ‘flasks for gunpowder’. Threatening to overflow his parentheses, Levi’s extensive but inevitably incomplete list plays out on the page the need for a ‘classification’ system, to make further distinctions between a collection of things which, while they might all be ‘receptacles’, suggest many different shapes, sizes, materials, uses, processes, places, and contexts. They are associated, variously, with containment, temporary or permanent storage, protection, transportation, consumption, convenience, sanctification – and they signal many other ways in which we engage with our environments. ‘Box’ is the only noun to appear more than once in Levi’s expansive list, as a plural noun, but also in the more specific ‘pyxes’, ‘snuff boxes’, and ‘mail boxes’. Amidst his assemblage of receptacles, boxes represent the very general, but also the very specialised, and they are also scattered across time, emphasising a continuity – ‘snuff boxes’ evoke luxury and consumption in the past, while ‘mail boxes’ speak of the more familiar present. As these two particular examples imply, a box can be ornamental, or practical, or personal, or several of these things at once. Levi’s list demonstrates that as well as recognising the synchronic social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts of any particular box, we need to admit the temporal complexities of the box as a pervasive form of material culture. This book takes as its starting point the historical fact that boxes of many different kinds proliferated in early modern England, for numerous purposes and settings. Recent quantitative work by historians of space and consumption has highlighted the prevalence of objects we can categorise as boxes in early modern material culture. Across a broad social spectrum, these studies have revealed that boxes are among the most numerous of all of the furnishings typically listed in early modern probate inventories. Over ninety per cent of the Kent inventories examined by Mark Overton and colleagues in their study of production and consumption in

Introduction



English households across the seventeenth century mention chests, and similar inventory patterns of multiple chests, coffers, and boxes have been noted by Antony Buxton in his microhistory of the non-elite households of the market town of Thame in Oxfordshire throughout the seventeenth century. In their exploration of how ‘behaviours were located within the material environment of the household, shaping and being shaped by it’, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson have more recently focused on the middling level, emphasising that this was not a cohesive group, but included a diverse range of artisans, tradesmen, and educated professionals. Their project combined quantitative and qualitative analysis to offer a highly persuasive shift from ‘the study of “material culture” to the broader consideration of “materiality”, encompassing not just objects but the whole material world through which individuals understand their social, cultural and spiritual position’. In their list of the thirty objects most frequently listed in chambers in  inventories from Faversham, Kent in the period –, the most numerous are chests: , compared with  chairs, and  tables. As collections such as that of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Trust also attest, plenty of early modern boxes, chests, coffers, and trunks have long outlived their original contents, and in many English parish churches today, lockable chests and other boxes are often the only remaining moveable objects from before the Reformation. Paradoxically, these ‘moveables’ are often so large and heavy that they are difficult to move, hence their survival (although as the story of the Jones/Wale chest demonstrates, sometimes the immovability of things actually proves fatal). Now often empty, filled with junk, or missing their keys, they were originally important civic, bureaucratic locations, used for storing parish registers, accounts, books and other valuable objects. As the chronological range of the Kent inventories examined by Overton and colleagues illustrates, the seventeenth century saw the development of chests of drawers, cupboards, and cabinets – variations on the more basic form of the box or chest, which divide and subdivide space, manipulate size and    

Mark Overton, Jane Whittle, Darren Dean, and Andrew Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, – (New York: Routledge, ), p. . Antony Buxton, Domestic Culture in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell, ), pp. –. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, – (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), pp. , , –. Church chests have been the focus of specific studies by geographical area or diocese, such as David Sherlock’s excellent Suffolk Church Chests (Ipswich: Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, ).



Introduction

scale, and are associated with evolving practices of consumption, collection, and display. These furnishings invite specific forms of engagement, and might be much more ostentatious objects that do more than simply contain, detaining the eye and the mind and emphatically drawing attention to their own identity as more elaborate kinds of boxes. Such objects, especially early modern cabinets, have been the focus of much critical attention by scholars of the early modern interior, in both English and European contexts. Boxes and Books in Early Modern England is about the material and metaphorical importance of the box, an object as imaginatively rich as it is physically ubiquitous in this period. Drawing on a wide range of textual sources including wills, inventories, Shakespearean drama, poetry, sermons, and religious polemic, it reveals how boxes readily furnished minds as well as domestic, institutional, and sacred spaces. It explores the broad scope of what might be contained in the idea of the box, looking closely at real and imagined objects including chests, caskets, reliquaries, and books, which were frequently thought about in box-like terms. The doctrinal debates of the Reformation unsettled traditional ideas about the relationship between material things and access to the divine, and boxes inspired creative and often polemical ways of thinking about interpretation, confessional identity, and the book as both text and object. Boxes and books, real and metaphorical, could be powerful ideological focal points in the changing picture of religious culture during and after the Reformation in England. From the s, parish churches were required by royal injunction to have ‘a strong Cheste for the poore mennes boxe, and set and fastened the same, nere to the high aultar’, and clergy were supposed to have diligently called upon, exhorted and moved their parishoners, and specially when thei make their Testamentes, to geve to the saied poore mennes Boxe, and to bestowe that upon the poore Cheste, whiche thei were wont to bestowe upon pardonnes, pilgremages, trentalles, Masses satisfactory, deckyng of Images, offeryng of Candelles, gevyng to Friers, and upon other like blynde devocions. 



In addition to the studies by Mark Overton et al., Antony Buxton, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson mentioned above, see the following: Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis, eds., At Home in Renaissance Italy (London: V&A Publications, ); Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ); Peter Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France, and Holland (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ); Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant, eds., Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior Since the Renaissance (London: V&A Publications, ). Anon., Articles to be enquired of, in visitacions to bee had, within the Diocesse of Cantorbury (London: Richard Grafton, ), Biv.

Introduction



As such evidence implies, in certain contexts boxes took on confessionally charged significance, as the meanings of material things and the rituals and devotions associated with them were interrogated and rewritten during this period of major religious upheaval in England and across parts of Europe. A word about the approach to terminology in this book is necessary here. In their discussions of the prevalence of chests, coffers, trunks, and boxes in early modern probate inventories, several of the historians above refer to the seventeenth-century heraldic author Randle Holme and his brief notes on various items of furniture, such as his comment that ‘If it have a streight, and flat cover, it is called a Chest; which in all other things represents the coffer, save the want of a circular lid, or cover’. At the same time, however, Holme refers to another object as ‘a Usurers Trunke, or coffer or Trunke or Caskett’, suggesting that these various nouns are interchangeable. Holme is describing these objects for heraldic purposes, but his comments resonate with the general sense that, as furniture historian Victor Chinnery noted, ‘real life is much more confused’ than any apparently straightforward definitions might imply. Evidence from inventories and other sources suggests considerable flexibility around the words for various kinds of box, including chests, coffers, and trunks, as well as regional variations – an ‘ark’ was often a simple box for storing grain or bread, for which ‘hutch’ appears to have been an interchangeable term in southern England, for example. In this book, I follow the early modern lead in thinking flexibly about the various kinds of object that could be considered under the term ‘box’, as I explain in more detail in Chapter . The noun ‘box’ dates back to Old English. It has several possible etymological origins, entering the English language either as an alteration of the Latin ‘pyxis’, meaning a small box or casket, or from ‘box trees’ of the genus Buxus, the wood of which is highly resistant to splitting, making it suitable for carving and turning. Because of its very fine grain, ‘boxwood’ has long been used across Europe for making boxes, instruments, and other objects, including the illustrated blocks employed in the printing process. In England though, the abundant native oak was the most commonly used timber for wooden furniture of all kinds, from at least the Middle Ages onwards. The etymological origins of my other key    

Randle Holme, The academy of armory, or, A storehouse of armory and blazon (Chester: n.p., ), cited Chinnery, Oak Furniture, pp. –. Chinnery, Oak Furniture, p. . Hamling and Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England, p. . Chinnery, Oak Furniture, pp. –.



Introduction

word here, ‘book’, are also wooden, with probable Latin and Germanic roots in ‘beech’, ‘bark’, or ‘tree trunk’. In the most general sense, a box is a three-dimensional receptacle, often square or rectangular, but it might also be rounded in shape (one early modern dictionary defines the noun ‘Urne’ as ‘A box, or litle vessel’), and made from a wide range of materials, not only wood. A box usually has a lid, which might be attached by hinges or completely separate and detachable, and it might be secured with a lock and key. It may take a very simple, crude form – a block of hollowed-out wood – or be a much more elaborately crafted, decorated, multidimensional object composed of many different materials. It is not until much later, in the twentieth century, that the noun ‘box’ is used to describe a two-dimensional quadrilateral space of enclosure, like a frame, border, or square, as on a printed page. Across the social scale in early modern England, almost everyone would have owned at least one box of some kind for the storage of personal possessions, including anything from papers and books to tools, jewels, spices, medicine, linen, plate, or money. As Amanda Flather has emphasised, such objects might point to some surprising dynamics of social status and gender: even the lowliest servant would have kept keys to their own box in which they stored personal items, and married women like Mrs Jones/Wale had significant practical control over domestic space through possession of keys to rooms, chests, and coffers. As the story of Mrs Jones/Wale illustrates, boxes could move with a woman through the different stages of her life. While these objects are often very ordinary, they might also be associated with important events, such as marriage, and are frequently bequeathed in early modern wills as items of intrinsic value, in addition to the things they contain. Such chests might be carved with images or text locating them in a particular family, or at a specific moment in time. A surviving English carved oak chest in the Victoria & Albert Museum bears on its front panel the inscription ‘     ’, cementing its relationship to one particular woman, but such detail is rare, and more usual might be initials and a date. While inscribed objects like these are documentary in their very appearance, even if we cannot now identify the ownership initials, many   

J.B., An English expositor teaching the interpretation of the hardest words used in our language (London: John Leggatt, ), Pr. Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Royal Historical Society: Boydell Press, ), pp. –. Museum number -. On ownership marks and other inscriptions on furniture including chests, see Chinnery, Oak Furniture, pp. –.

Introduction



kinds of boxes might have served an archival function as secure storage places for textual and other materials. Before bookshelves and bookcases came into wider use in the seventeenth century, boxes were the standard place for storing bound and unbound books, protecting them from the threats of damp, pests, fire, and theft. In this book I propose that the box offers a valuable way to think about the interactions between material culture and the imagination in early modern England. To think about material culture in terms of specific object categories, such as Primo Levi’s category of the ‘receptacle’, is something that archaeologists, anthropologists, and ethnologists are much more familiar with. I suggest here that early modern literary scholars and historians might do well to learn from them, in order to illuminate some of the disciplinary blindspots in our engagement with material culture. For archaeologists and anthropologists, receptacles or containers have become increasingly recognised as a distinctive critical category in the study of material culture, a category that speaks to us about ‘the movement or flow of relations between people and the material world’. Containers and receptacles are important because they are associated with so many human activities, including ‘opening, closing, pouring, filling, emptying, wrapping, regulating, maintaining the envelope or the limits, removing the blockages that prevent the transit of substances, mending leaks, forming a queue’. Found universally across time and place, the receptacle or container represents one of the most fundamental human technologies, and focused attention on this category has revealed that such objects ‘are not simply vessels’, but ‘action possibilities that bring forth new forms of mediated action, agency, and material engagement’. These categories of receptacles and containers, and the multiplicity of physical and mental actions they enable, offer a way to think about material culture in terms of broader patterns of mental and imaginative actions that is useful in literary criticism as well. While the receptacle characterises ways of doing and being in the world, it also infuses ways of thinking about our embodied experience. Drawing partly on Didier Anzieu’s famous psychoanalytic study of skin, the   

Andrew Jones, Memory and Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . Jean-Pierre Warnier, ‘Inside and Outside: Surfaces and Containers’, in Chris Tilley et al., eds., Handbook of Material Culture (London: SAGE, ), pp. – (p. ). Carl Knappet, Lambros Malafouris, and Peter Tomkins, ‘Ceramics (as Containers)’, in Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. – (p. ).



Introduction

anthropologist Jean-Pierre Warnier focuses on the notion of skin as ‘the arch-container’, in an African culture that ‘diversifies and multiplies the opportunities of bodily storage and containment: drinking horns, calabashes, wooden or clay bowls for mixing oil and camwood, oil drums, bags, houses, the enclosure of the palace and the city, hedges, fences and gates of all kinds’. According to such articulations, each of us inhabits a receptacle, the body, which encloses complex systems within a bounded surface punctuated by various openings and orifices, and with which we interact in and with many other comparable receptacles. The idea of the body as a receptacle or container is a conceptually rich one across many disciplines: in psychology, philosophy, theology, and linguistics, critics have considered how our embodied experience informs how we respond imaginatively, as well as physically, to the world around us. In their influential study of metaphor, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson link our instinctive use of ‘container metaphors’ to our physical experience as bounded beings, while more recently, Juliet Fleming has reflected on early modern pots and the eloquent slippage they embody between clay and flesh, an image with biblical origins. While both the matter and form of a clay pot might remind us of the human body, and vice versa, the pot also models a particular notion of subjectivity, speaking to us as an object characterised by having its own interior, the ‘first object organized around emptiness’. Like Fleming’s, much recent work in early modern literary studies has emphasised the extent to which early modern ‘culture’ is insistently a ‘material’ culture. In the last three decades this ‘material turn’ has seen a critical shift from subjects to objects: to clothing, jewellery, household goods, and graffiti, for example. While these projects have undoubtedly enriched our understanding of, for instance, concepts of identity and fashion, the home and domestic space, the public and the private, and practices of shopping, collecting, and writing, an insistent critique of the    

Warnier, ‘Inside and Outside’, pp. –; see also Warnier, The Pot-King: The Body and Technologies of Power (Leiden and Boston: Brill, ). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, updated ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ), pp. –. Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), pp. – (p. ). Some of the most influential studies are Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, ); Fleming, Graffiti.

Introduction



nature of some of these studies has also emerged. Jonathan Gil Harris expresses concern that this intense focus on things that can be seen and held is a kind of new antiquarianism, an insufficiently theorised fetishism of material from the past. Picking up on Harris’s anxieties in his own discussion of this ‘new materialism’, Douglas Bruster warns that to the extent that it succumbs to what Harris calls the ‘allure’ of its objects without justifying its focus on them (by means, for example, of a more comprehensive theory both of objects and object-criticism), the new materialism runs the risk of being seen as tchotchke-criticism, its anthologies the belated J. Crew catalogues of the early modern era.

Bruster’s terminology implies a twofold concern that scholars may be taken in by the glossy appeal of the material without constructing a critical framework for engaging with it, and that such projects may inevitably manifest themselves as miscellanies of trivial things. Discernible in such critiques is a sense of embarrassment about the material, a fear that paying too much attention to objects might tempt scholars into a kind of fetishistic, self-indulgent consumerism that betrays the high-minded aspirations of literary criticism. These conflicts and anxieties are not confined to literary critics; they are inherently interdisciplinary, and here it is helpful to consider them in light of what anthropologist Daniel Miller has to say about our attitude to materiality in his recent manifesto for the study of material culture. The concerns articulated by the likes of Harris and Bruster are related to what Miller terms the problematic ‘depth ontology’ of Western thought, whereby we ‘presume a certain relationship between the interior and the exterior’. Through this cultural construction, we tend to think that what is on the surface is superficial, and that the truth is always hidden. Our attitude towards clothes exemplifies this, Miller suggests – we commonly think of clothing as a superficial exterior, and our true identity as hidden ‘deep’ within us. Those who pay attention to the matters of the surface, whether they are keen clothes shoppers or academics or both, are seen as ‘shallow’: there is ‘a larger denigration of material culture in our own society, where





Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture’, Shakespeare Quarterly,  (), – (p. ). See also Harris’s Untimely Matter, and his earlier article ‘The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects’, European Journal of English Studies,  (), –. Douglas Bruster, ‘The New New Materialism in Early Modern Studies’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), pp. – (p. ).



Introduction

materialism itself is viewed as superficial’. In moving away from the limiting effects of this depth ontology and its resulting provocation of embarrassment, it is productive to remember, as Miller has also reminded us, ‘the large compass of materiality, the ephemeral, the imaginary, the biological, and the theoretical; all that which would have been external to the simple definition of an artifact’. We cannot deny that we occupy a material world, and materiality’s ‘large compass’ is integral to how we behave, comprehend, and think. Scholarly responses to materiality need to be more fully engaged with the material, attending to the specific potential of material things as they interact in and with the physical and imaginary realms. At the same time, as this book explores, the tensions between interiors and exteriors and the presumptions about the relative values of each are very much alive in the early modern period. While Miller’s demystification of the depth ontology might at first appear a strange vantage point for a book about boxes – objects that in so many ways reinforce this ontology – I want to suggest that the box in the early modern period can help us to think about the origins of what Miller rightly highlights as potentially problematic. This book shows how even as the box sets up dichotomous tensions between insides and outsides, which were often very convenient imaginative models, early modern writers readily inverted, subverted, and complicated such dichotomies, demonstrating their limitations as well. In terms that echo Daniel Miller’s, the archaeologist Nicole Boivin expresses anxiety about the limitations that result from the Western tendency to dichotomise the mind and the material world, and argues that we need to recognise ‘the ways in which culture, society, and mind, the things we think of as most abstract and transcendent in our lives, are in fact more material, visceral, and sensual than most of our academic models acknowledge’. Our material surroundings have the capacity to shape our thought and behaviour, as Boivin insists: ‘the material world is not a blank slate upon which may be inscribed any old narrative, it is a physicality which resists and enables, shutting down some alternative plots, and opening up others’. The language she uses here, of resistance and    

Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, ), pp. , . Daniel Miller, ed., ‘Materiality: An Introduction’, in Materiality (Durham and London: Duke University Press, ), p. . Nicole Boivin, Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –, . Nicole Boivin, ‘Mind over Matter? Collapsing the Mind–Matter Dichotomy in Material Culture Studies’, in Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden, and Colin Renfrew, eds., Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, ), pp. –.



Introduction

enabling, and of ‘shutting down’ and ‘opening up’, implies that ‘the material world’ is multi-dimensional, a complex system of spaces that are inherently box-like, rather than flat. Boxes and Books in Early Modern England is a response to Boivin’s call for a ‘more focused analysis of how people engage with and are transformed by the materiality that surrounds them’. While I question her verb ‘surrounds’ (as I will be discussing later, the material is not merely circumstantial, but in many senses constitutes and permeates us), this book reads the ubiquitous box as an extraordinary transformative nexus in early modern England, a universal model for ways of being and thinking. Boivin places a strong emphasis on the ordinary, partly because her own ideas began with her encounters in India with soil, an archetype of ordinariness. She concludes that: [. . .] we must look beyond the extraordinary to the everyday, beyond the lofty to the near, and focus on the mundane but powerful objects and environments that surround us and that create us as we create them. We need to turn our attention to the things that go unnoticed – the pots and pans, the highways and pens, and teacups and computers, fishing hooks, doorways, building blocks, religious relics, conveyer belts, spears, carpets, parks, antennae, pendants, perfumes, appliances, museum objects [. . .] The usualness of the material world is greatly surpassed by its ubiquity. The myriad of ways in which this mass of simple things has shaped and transformed our thoughts, emotions, bodies, and societies has only just begun to be explored.

Traditionally a great deal of critical attention in early modern studies has been paid to the more immediately seductive components of material culture such as portraits, jewellery, and stage properties, but perhaps less so to more ordinary things, the ‘mundane but powerful objects and environments’ that were just as much a part of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century experience. Boivin is right to insist that attention must also be given to those things that are less literally and metaphorically shiny, the things that fade into the background, and yet that are integral elements of the environment. Historically there has been some awareness of this need in early modern scholarship; in the late s Patricia Fumerton welcomed a sea change that encouraged a turn away from elite culture towards things we might think of as common, ordinary, and familiar. Highlighting the limitations of the new historicist tradition, Fumerton advocated an approach that embraced the ordinary but that 

Boivin, Material Cultures, Material Minds, p. .



Ibid., p. .



Introduction

did not exclude the aristocracy, who had, like everyone, an everyday life populated by ordinary things. Despite Fumerton’s efforts, focusing on the ordinary still often appears easier said than done. In her study of consumer behaviour and material culture in the late seventeenth century, for example, Lorna Weatherill does not include any boxes, chests, or other containers in her selection of objects from diaries, inventories, and account books, despite the crucial roles such artefacts clearly have in shaping ‘consumer behaviour’, through the storing, protecting, and organising of ‘material culture’. One explanation for the ways in which some objects might be rendered invisible like this has been suggested by Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward in their manifesto for the study of denim, where they alert us to ‘the problems that are posed by objects that have become ubiquitous’. They argue that anthropologists should be more concerned with the ‘blindingly obvious’, that is to say, with things that are ‘so evident, so ubiquitous and taken for granted that they are indeed blinding’. In the study of the early modern period, detailed attention has been given to closets and cabinets of curiosities as more extraordinary and elite kinds of objects, but not to the general category of the ‘box’, which incorporates many other furnishings of both the early modern environment and the early modern mind. The ubiquity and diversity of the box is one such ‘blindingly obvious’ interface between literature and material culture, and in need of the kind of close attention Miller advocates. Boxes and Books in Early Modern England demonstrates that the risk of ‘fetishism’ and the problematic ‘depth ontology’ are only part of the picture when we talk about early modern materiality. Both of these critical anxieties depend on a clear-cut distinction between the material and the intellectual, and this book demonstrates that this distinction is not always a helpful one. Indeed, it is often the very opposite. It is too easy to end up ‘trapped in a discourse that opposes the mental and material’ when we talk about objects, artefacts, and things – as if subjects can exist without objects, and vice versa. In its exploration of one of the most ordinary and 

  

Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, eds., Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), ‘Introduction’, p. xx. Fumerton repeatedly evokes Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre on the ‘everyday’. Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain – (London: Routledge, ; rev. ). Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward, ‘Manifesto for a Study of Denim’, Social Anthropology,  (), – (pp. , ). Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Routledge: Abingdon, ), p. .

Introduction



yet most evocative objects we encounter, Boxes and Books reveals the inextricable relationship between the material and the mental in early modern England. Furnishing the mind as readily as it furnished rooms, the box is a crucial focal point at which the material, the intellectual, and the literary are richly and productively blurred. In other words, the imaginative possibilities of the box cannot be separated from its materiality, and vice versa. Central to Boxes and Books is the idea that its two titular objects share material and imaginative properties that are very obvious, but frequently overlooked. Thinking about these two familiar objects as similar kinds of material thing offers another way to approach the religious tensions imbricated in materiality in post-Reformation England, I suggest, in a culture that was inherently suspicious of external forms, and unseen interiors. In doing so, I am indebted to the recent work of book historians, especially James Kearney, whose volume The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England articulates brilliantly the ‘crisis of the book’ for a religiously reformed culture that placed its faith predominantly in the Word of God, and was distrustful of material forms. What sort of box was the book, and how could it contain the spiritual source of divine authority, without being problematically, dangerously material? Boxes and Books explores how books and boxes involve comparable interminglings of physical and intellectual apprehension, in ways that were often very complex, and sometimes contradictory, in early modern culture. For the influential twentieth-century historian of writing Walter J. Ong, the ‘containedness’ of print was an idea to which he repeatedly returned. The emerging sense of the abundance of knowledge in the early modern period was matched, Ong suggests, by a ‘conviction that some sort of spatial imagery – loci, topoi, receptacles, boxes – can serve as a means of controlling the profusion of concepts and/or things’. Ong describes books in this context as ‘hollow objects or receptacles with “contents” which could be charted in a “table” or ranged, now for the first time, in a “place indicator” (index locurum)’. He continues: As such receptacles, they will imperceptibly drift, to some extent, out of the world of discourse, where they had been moments in a dialogue, and become, more than ever before, objects in a world of space approached chiefly in terms of vision. In the post-Gutenberg age [. . .] the term ‘content,’ as it is applied to what is ‘in’ literary productions, acquires a 

James Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ).



Introduction status which it had never known before. In lieu of merely telling the truth, books would now in common estimation ‘contain’ truth, like boxes.

According to Ong early modern books were readily imagined in threedimensionally spatial terms, with the emphatic capacity to ‘contain’, in the manner of other receptacles. The implication of his argument, though he does not elaborate here, is that books may also have the capacity for some of the other things that boxes offer, including protection, organisation, and concealment. For Ong, the comparison extends from the book to our entire conception of communication: we ‘think of books as “containing” chapters and paragraphs, paragraphs as “containing” sentences, sentences as “containing” words, words as “containing” ideas, and finally ideas as “containing” truth. Here the whole mental world has gone hollow’. Our understanding of language itself, we might put it another way, is like a series of concentrically regressing boxes, beginning with the book as a tangible material object. Ong links the inherent boxiness of the book to the technological developments of early modern print culture, highlighting as a particular symptom the transformation of book titles in this period. Typically, he proposes, early modern book titles become ‘nouns which are not merely expressive of the form of discourse but which directly “stand for” the book’s “contents.”’ Therefore, ‘titles become labels, like those of a pharmacist. Earlier books – those of the manuscript age and of the incunabular or near-incunabular period of printing – had been typically designated by phrases which invite use not as detached labels but as part of some larger utterance’. Each book functions as a container for potentially powerful content, neatly labelled like the receptacles lining a pharmacist’s shelves – partly because they will be similarly arrayed as commodities in an early modern bookseller’s shop. Ong’s image of the book labelled like a pharmacy jar itself has its origins in early modern literary culture, as I shall later be exploring in more detail, a culture in which scripture was regularly described in terms such as ‘the booke of grace, and the boxe of ointment, out of which the sweet savour of his name is most effectively powred’. In the exterior packaging of titles and paratexts in particular, early modern print culture sometimes drew more specifically on some of the 

 

Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. . See also Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, ), especially chapter .  Ong, Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, p. . Ibid., p. . Samuel Crooke, The guide unto true blessednesse. Or, A body of the doctrine of the Scriptures, directing man to the saving knowledge of God (London: John Pindley for Nathaniel Butter, ), p. .

Introduction



very material connections between books and boxes, as objects that each have the capacity to contain and enclose, and to open and reveal. From the middle of the sixteenth century, printed texts across a range of genres were often presented on their title-pages as ‘store-houses’, ‘cabinets’, ‘closets’, or ‘caskets’, in which things might be ‘opened’, ‘displayed’, ‘revealed’, ‘unlocked’, or ‘disclosed’. The objects and places of enclosure evoked by such titles might be non-specific, or very particular, claiming a link to a real cabinet, perhaps of a well-known person. Such titles might acknowledge the capacity of the book to bring order to its content, as in a cabinet, but may equally present the book as the receptacle for a more chaotic mixture, valued for its copiousness. The subjects of such volumes vary widely, from medicine and cookery, to spiritual guidance, and political or religious controversy. Alongside such printed ‘boxes’ in an early modern bookseller’s shop, a prospective reader would not have been surprised to see a great many printed ‘keys’. Keys, including ‘the key of David’ (Revelation :), ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew :), and ‘the key of knowledge’ (Luke :) are important scriptural images, symbolising spiritual authority and the liberating potential of divine truth, and these associations underpin the vogue for printed ‘keys’ to almost every part of scripture, such as Daniel Featley’s Clavis mystica a key opening divers difficult and mysterious texts of Holy Scripture () and William Sclater’s A key to the key of Scripture: or An exposition with notes, upon the Epistle to the Romanes (), as well as spiritual guidebooks like Thomas Achelley’s The key of knowledge () and Francis Dillingham’s A golden keye opening the locke to eternall happines (), both of which contained prayers and meditations. There are also printed ‘keys’ to almost every other subject, from languages, grammar, and music, to philosophy, medicine, and history. As in printed ‘cabinets’, the conceit is usually not pursued in much detail beyond the title of such works, but such printed ‘keys’ would 



To give just a few examples: T.G., The rich cabinet furnished with varietie of excellent discriptions, exquisite charracters, witty discourses, and delightfull histories, devine and morrall (London: John Beale, ); John Partridge, The treasurie of commodious conceits, & hidden secrets and may be called, the huswives closet, of healthfull provision (London: Richard Jones, ); Kenelm Digby, The closet of the eminently learned Sir Kenelme Digby, Kt. opened whereby is discovered several ways for making of metheglin, sider, cherry-wine, &c. (London: H. Brome, ). Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet discusses medieval poetic tropes of enclosing texts in boxes in her essay ‘Fullness and Emptiness: Shortages and Storehouses of Lyric Treasure in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, Yale French Studies (), –. For discussion of some examples of early modern printed texts engaging in more detail with the idea of the book as a box, see Lucy Razzall, ‘Small Chests and Jointed Boxes: Material Texts and the Play of Resemblance in Early Modern Print’, Book ., : (), –.



Introduction

have been found near their boxy counterparts in a bookseller’s shop, each demonstrating the readiness with which print culture imaginatively transformed books into other objects – in this period, as Tessa Watt puts it, ‘books were never just books’. The print marketplace is only one of many settings in which early modern books and boxes intersect and interact. As I discuss later in more detail, books were often stored in boxes before bookcases and shelves became the norm, so when you opened a book in early modern England, you might well have had to open a chest first. William H. Sherman and Femke Molekamp have both shown what can be learned from considering how individual early modern books themselves, especially Bibles, might have been treated as a kind of archival box, or ‘matriarchive’, in which family histories, ownership annotations, and reading notes could be preserved in addition to the book’s printed ‘contents’. Ong’s emphasis on the effects of printing as ‘the commitment of discourse to space’, as well as Paul Valéry’s description of the book as ‘an open and shut thing which changes its nature completely in that simple act’, reminds us of the importance of thinking about the book as something which, like a box, involves particular manipulations of matter and form, in space and in the mind. Boxes and Books in Early Modern England argues that we need to think more carefully about both the potential and the perils of the book-as-container metaphor, and in doing so it demonstrates how literary texts offer us a direct source of early modern responses to materiality, around which the discipline of book history might increasingly frame its analysis of the material text. In the first chapter, ‘Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England’, I set the scene, drawing on wills, inventories, diaries, and literary sources to illustrate how domestic and institutional spaces in this period were characterised by a proliferation of boxes. As I have noted above, various historical studies have already demonstrated this proliferation in quantitative terms. My purpose in Chapter  is qualitative, establishing some of the key visual and material interactions of such objects with their  

 

Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; repr. ), p. . William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), chapters  and ; Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), chapters  and . Ong, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue, p. . Paul Valéry, Aesthetics, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), p. .

Introduction



environments and the people who assembled, inhabited, and experienced them. Looking into Elizabeth I’s bedchamber, discovering hiding places in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and thinking about nests of boxes in Donne’s sermons, among other literary encounters, this chapter interweaves close readings of texts and things, from wills and prayer manuals to velvet boxes and parish chests, outlining the ubiquity of the box as a place of material and mental safekeeping and organisation – an object that is as imaginatively useful as it is practically so. Chapter , ‘The Renaissance of the Box: Metaphors of Interpretation’, shows how in the particular intellectual and religious climates of postReformation England, common anxieties about the problems of interpretation coalesced around a cluster of rhetorical tropes involving boxes. A box is potentially troubling because its contents might be unknown, unexpected or dangerous, as epitomised by Portia’s three caskets in The Merchant of Venice. For each of the suitors, their fate depends on choosing the casket with the right contents, and success comes to Bassanio, the only one to realise that ‘the outward shows be least themselves’ (..). The chapter opens with a discussion of these most familiar of theatrical boxes alongside boxes working in similar ways on the early modern stage, as in The Spanish Tragedy. In these texts, the imaginative possibilities of the box point to a wider literary and philosophical culture in which words and things, like people, as Hamlet famously puts it, might have ‘that within which passes show’ (..). I then turn to the pervasive presence in early modern writing of two distinctive boxes fitting Hamlet’s description: Plato’s Silenus statue, resurrected by Desiderius Erasmus and explicitly transformed by François Rabelais into a box, and the proverbial apothecary’s painted box. These boxes each become humanist commonplaces for thinking about the potential challenges of discerning hidden truths. Repeatedly invoked in educational treatises, sermons, and theological texts from Erasmus to the King James Bible, they are favourite images for articulating moral and religious messages about the interpretative challenges of superficiality, hypocrisy, and the act of reading itself. Like Portia’s caskets, which must be literally and intellectually unlocked, the Silenus requires the reader to know that they must get beyond an offputting outside to locate hidden truths. The painted box, on the other hand, necessitates cautious negotiation of its seductive exterior, and is emblematic of dissimulation. Such proverbial ‘Apothicaries painted boxes, that have nothing within but poyson, or some deadly compound’ are usually invoked



Henry Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth: Or The High-Way to Honour (London: John Newbery, ), Hr.



Introduction

censoriously, frequently in theological disputation or confessionally charged polemic, to suggest the potential of texts to hide dangerous or deceitful content. In early modern writing, some version of these artefacts features in everyone’s mental box of useful images. The crisis of hermeneutics inherent in a box – the processes required to open it, and how to discern what might be inside – materialises assumptions about the epistemological superiority of hidden things. Tracing the literary workings of these theatrical and proverbial artefacts, this chapter reveals how the apparently simple form of the box, something with ‘that within’, instantiates the fundamental depth ontology of Western metaphysics, that can both enrich and limit patterns of thought. Thinking inside the box blurs the material and the metaphorical in especially dynamic ways in early modern writing, and in its renaissance as a persistent and versatile image, the box itself becomes as significant as what it might or might not contain. The Reformation unsettled traditional ideas about the relationship between the sacred and the material world. In the arguments of religious reformers, notions of outward appearances and inner truths could be conveniently contrasted in order to proclaim the supremacy of a faith focused on the word rather than on things. For the most extreme critics of traditional beliefs and practices, everything worldly might be a dangerous black box, containing a moral vacuum. The apparently idolatrous devotion to ‘Gods bodye in the box’ was a persistent complaint among sixteenthcentury reformers, and in texts criticising Catholic doctrines of the Eucharist, ‘box’ recurred as a popular pejorative name for the pyx or tabernacle containing consecrated bread. In response to questions about the sacraments in his famous edition of the Examination of the Protestant martyr Anne Askewe, for example, John Bale remonstrated that ‘Christ taught us to saye, wha[n] we praye [. . .] our father which art in heaven, and not our father which art in the boxe’, and well into the seventeenth century, anti-Catholic polemicists challenged what they saw as the idolatry of ‘shutting the bread in a boxe, of worshipping it, of carying about’. As these examples illustrate, the very idea of the box permeates the vocabulary 

 

John Bale, The apology of Johan Bale agaynste a ranke papyst anuswering both hym and hys doctours, that neyther their vowes nor yet their priesthode areof the Gospell, but of Antichrist (London: John Day, ), Cvv. The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe lately martyred in Smythfelde, by the Romysh popes upholders, with the elucydacyon of Johan Bale (Wesel: D. van der Straten, ), Aiiv. Edward Dering, A sparing restraint, of many lavishe untruthes, which M. Doctor Harding do the chalenge, in the first article of my Lorde of Sarisburies replie (London: Henry Denham, ), Lliv.

Introduction



and imagery of religious polemic in Reformation England. More generally, the noun ‘box’ is often associated with dishonesty in this period, as in the term ‘jack in the box’, which has early modern origins, initially referring to a thief who cheats tradesmen by substituting empty boxes for boxes full of money through distraction and sleight of hand. Thomas Dekker provides a detailed description of such a trickster in one of his most popular pamphlets, a ‘Devill in mans shape’, who manipulates silver boxes filled with coins of differing values. Classical and biblical variations on this image of the troubling box – including Pandora’s box containing all the evils of the world, the proverbial fly in the box of ointment (Ecclesiastes :), and even the Trojan horse, a vast wooden vessel concealing an imminent threat – are commonplace in early modern writing, perpetuating the idea of the box as convenient shorthand for hidden danger. While Chapter  suggests that to be box-like is often to be book-like, Chapter  and Chapter  attend to the material and imaginative implications of the reverse: to be book-like is often to be box-like in early modern England. In the context of heated debates about the ‘corporall, carnall, presence of Christ upon earth in Arkes, secret clossets, boxes, coffers, there to be eaten’, these chapters explore how two other box-like objects, the book and the reliquary, exposed materiality in complicated ways that were bound up with confessional identity and conflicting beliefs about devotion and the sacred. Chapter , ‘The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book’, focuses on holy books in England during and after the Reformation. While reformers insisted on the Word of God as the only vehicle of truth, they could not escape the fact that it had to be contained in books, unavoidably material receptacles with insides and outsides that could shape and inscribe each other. Books and boxes were found in close proximity in this period, and the physical features of bound books – wooden boards, metal clasps, leather or embroidered covers – were often contiguous with the visual, tactile, and material cultures of the box. These tangible connections between book and box play into ways of articulating the function of the codex as a container for textual riches. The gospel story of the ‘alabaster box’ of balm poured over Christ by the woman at Bethany is frequently invoked in praise of scripture by early modern writers, for example; even  

Thomas Dekker, O per se O. Or A new cryer of Lanthorne and candle-light Being an addition, or lengthening, of the Bell-mans second night-walke (London: John Busbie, ), Iv. Richard Sheldon, A survey of the miracles of the Church of Rome, proving them to be antichristian (London: Nathaniel Butter, ), Kkr.



Introduction

one short verse might contain abundant spiritual riches, like ‘Maries little Box full of sweete ointment, which being opened, the savor perfumes an whole house’. Such moments of imaginative elision between book and box play on the visual and functional similarities between the two objects, and the dual senses, spatial and bibliographical, of the word ‘volume’. Books were not only found in boxes, but they were also boxes themselves, filled with precious content. In this chapter I bring together responses to the book as object from Erasmus to early seventeenth-century English Protestants, in humanist treatises, martyrdom accounts, and portraits. In considering literary and visual encounters with the codex across these sources, the chapter focuses on the significance of external surfaces, such as gold, blackness, and embroidery, in the fashioning of these receptacles for the written word. Such enclosures were both materially and rhetorically significant, and their relationship to the textual content of a book could be continually redefined. The chapter resituates the textual and material purposes of books in the wider context of early modern material culture, expanding on recent discussions of the ways in which book ‘use’ was about more than reading, and could be confessionally determining. Protestantism distinguished itself as a religion of the book, but the real and imagined books discussed in this chapter demonstrate that the meanings of the ‘book’ were much more complex than the claim of sola scriptura might suggest. As a necessary box for the Word, the book encapsulated the paradox of Protestantism’s simultaneous avowal and disavowal of the material realm. My exploration of the book in Chapter  emphasises the complexity of attitudes towards the material world in post-Reformation England. In recent years, historians have persuasively argued that the sixteenth-century battle for control over access to the sacred was one of modification and adaptation, rather than simply an iconoclastic drive to eradicate all traces of the medieval past. Building on the work of Keith Thomas and others, Alexandra Walsham has shown that we need to pay more attention to the ways in which ‘the Protestant religion did not entirely relinquish the idea that the created world might be a vessel for supernatural grace’. 



Samuel Garey, Ientaculum iudicum: or, A breake-fast for the bench prepared, presented, and preached in two sacred services, or sermons, the morning sacrifice before the two assises: at Thetford, at Norwich:  (London: Matthew Law, ), Br. Alexandra Walsham, ‘Holywell: Contesting Sacred Space in Post-Reformation Wales’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, eds., Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. – (p. ). See also Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University

Introduction



Walsham’s image of the world as a ‘vessel’ works at both literal and metaphorical levels, and despite the physical and rhetorical force of the most extreme currents of reform, the idea that there could be earthly ‘vessels’ for the sacred was not itself rejected. For Protestant England, the relationship between the material and the spiritual grew more complicated, not less. While Chapter  is concerned with the codex as an emblem of Protestantism, the focus of Chapter , ‘How to Read a Reliquary’, is an artefact associated with the Catholic past in early modern England. As an enclosing, framing, and revealing structure, the reliquary engages intensely with its contents. For iconoclastic reformers, the murky box of the reliquary (like the frequently invoked ‘box’ containing the bread of the Eucharist) epitomised the inherent falseness of the Roman Catholic faith. These boxes had to be emptied out in rhetorical as well as literal terms, and ultimately destroyed. I start with some sixteenth-century encounters with relics, beginning again with Erasmus, a touchstone of religious moderation throughout Boxes and Books, whose attitude to relics is characterised by some of the ambiguities about the spiritual significance of the material discussed in the previous chapters. Comparing satirical and polemical responses to relics from both sides of the religious divide, the chapter considers how these boxes operated as contested sites of concealment and revelation. The second half of the chapter turns to the afterlife of the reliquary once it had been removed from the religious sphere, and locates its survival in the vocabulary of post-Reformation libraries as new kinds of shrine, and in seventeenth-century printed reliquiæ, as safer receptacles for preserving tangible traces of past lives. Even after the reliquary appeared to be emptied of its dangerous devotional significance, the very idea of the relic and the possibilities offered by this especially contentious box endured as powerful ways of thinking about the interweaving of physical and intellectual apprehension demanded by the book as material object. In George Herbert’s poem ‘Ungratefulness’, humankind’s relationship with God in the Trinity and Incarnation is figured by some of the many boxes that furnish The Temple, with their associations of spiritual intimacy, Press, ); Walsham, ‘Miracles in Post-Reformation England’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, eds., Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ), pp. –; Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.–c. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ); Margaret Aston, Broken Idols of the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).



Introduction

and interrogation of openness and closure. Herbert’s reference to man’s ‘poor cabinet of bone’ grounds the reader in the earthly ‘box’ of the incarnation that ‘we’ all ‘know’, because ‘we have all of us just such another’ (; –). Chapter , ‘“Because this box we know”: Embodying the Box’, turns to the box as a model for what it is to be human. As the previous chapters reveal in various ways, early modern boxes often imitate other objects, pointing to shared materialities and technologies: a reliquary may replicate a shrine in miniature, a book’s embroidered covers can mirror an embroidered casket, and the words on a title-page might function deceptively, like a proverbial painted box. Herbert hints at the material similarities between the boxes of the household and those ‘of bone’, in the human body. The noun ‘chest’ can refer to both, and as early modern poets recognised, there is a striking physical resemblance between the anatomy of a human chest with its enclosing bony structure of the ribcage, and the frames of iron bars that often strengthened wooden chests, literally reinforcing their enclosing function. Beginning with several moments in sermons by John Donne, this chapter follows Donne’s lead in reading the box as a productive focal point at which the bodily and the artefactual are enmeshed in complicated ways. Across a range of texts, from sermons and devotional poetry to anatomy textbooks and drama, the body is almost compulsively thought of as a box or collection of boxes, and in tracing some of these moments in more detail, the chapter reveals the ways in which early modern writing responded to the materiality – and troubling immateriality – of the body. Drawing together the material and imaginative interactions between boxes, books, and bodies elaborated throughout this volume, this chapter shows how thinking inside the box in early modern writing is a natural corollary of embodiment. In his meditation on ‘drawers, chests, and wardrobes’, a chapter in his influential discussion of ‘the poetics of space’, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard suggests that we have ‘more complete mastery’ over small chests and caskets, because they are objects that can be opened. In acts of opening, he claims, ‘[t]he outside has no more meaning [. . .] even cubic dimensions have no more meaning, for the reason that a new dimension – the dimension of intimacy – has just opened up’. For Bachelard, the  

The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, trans. Maria Jolas, with new foreword by John R. Stilgoe (Boston: Beacon Press, ), p. .

Introduction



three-dimensionality of the box is effaced even in the very tangible moment of discovering its interior. The evidence in early modern English writing is that the box actually resists such imaginative effacements – the ‘outside’ and ‘cubic dimensions’ of a box are never so readily forgotten. While a box usually exists for the service of other things – which, in being contained, may well take on greater significance than the box itself – Boxes and Books in Early Modern England reveals through close readings of early modern literature and material culture how the box testifies to its own unique possibilities, embodying as it does a distinctive blending of material and mental experience. In what follows, I show how the imagination was constrained and enfranchised by things in postReformation England, among which the box is at once an ordinary and extraordinary thing, and a key critical model for the enduring habits of thought we still employ to interpret people, things, and texts.

 

Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

Objects and Affordances ‘Anything you need you can fit in a kist’, declares Isabella, one of the noblewomen of the Scottish court in Rona Munro’s  play James I: The Key Will Keep the Lock. She continues: And it’s proper furniture. A kist has a hundred uses, a table, a shelf, a chair. You could fit two bairns and a week’s rations for a squadron of men in a kist like this. You can have all your wealth ready to carry the minute you smell smoke. And you could barricade a door with the thing. Drop it out the window and brain any bastard climbing up the castle. A cupboard is just a door in a wall. Get more kists. I’ll have the man make you up a few.

Her tribute to the chest (‘kist’) as an object with ‘a hundred uses’ including everything from the very ordinary to the outright violent, which she pronounces in a scene of quiet domesticity as a group of women sit mending clothes, is more prescient than any of the characters realise at this moment. In the play that follows in Munro’s trilogy, several central scenes feature the young James II hiding from his antagonists inside a wooden chest. ‘Stay in the box, you have to stay in the box’, his mother tells the boy king as they attempt, unsuccessfully, to escape from their house arrest after the assassination of James I. All three of Munro’s plays about successive generations of Stuart rulers of Scotland in the turbulent fifteenth century explore the dramatic potential of the dark and draughty interior spaces of Scottish castles, inside which, as Isabella emphasises, the chest is a ubiquitous and versatile piece of furniture. Chests in these plays are ordinary furnishings for noble households, but also become theatrically powerful locations, associated with the political potency of secrecy and the unseen. Indeed, the image  

Rona Munro, The James Plays (London: Nick Hern Books, ), pp. –. Ibid., pp. –; pp. –.



Objects and Affordances



of lock and key in the title of the first play could allude as much to a chest as to a castle door. The concealing of the king inside a box makes him vulnerable even as a secure hiding place is sought for him, and that he is but a child makes this claustrophobic concealment particularly disturbing to witness. In theatrical terms, Munro deploys the chest as visual shorthand for the environment her historical characters inhabit, reimagining late medieval Scotland for a twenty-first century audience, but at the same time her plays make room for the rich symbolism and dramatic potential of the chest as an object that ‘gapes’, a ‘bottomless pit of shadows’, as the stage directions in James II: Day of the Innocents put it. In her praise for the chest, Munro’s Isabella articulates a very unsettling mixture of possibilities for this object, which go beyond its most obvious function as a container. It is an everyday piece of household furniture with the versatility to be a table, shelf, or chair (and as we later see, a hiding place), but also a potentially violent tool, a hefty weapon for self-defence or physical assault. This moment in the play, brief but prophetic, seems to push at the extremes of the chest’s materiality, circumscribing the ways in which this particular object occupies space, and creates privileged space within itself. It is emphatically three-dimensional, in contrast with a ‘cupboard’, Isabella notes, which is ‘just a door in a wall’. It is an object that can be moved around, although not without considerable physical effort, but it also enables mobility of other things, including human beings. Isabella’s speech draws attention to the chest’s characteristic potential to invite a range of particular actions – what psychologist James Gibson influentially termed the ‘affordances’ of an object or environment. Gibson’s explanation that by this word he means what something ‘provides or furnishes, either for good or ill’ resonates in this theatrical depiction of the chest as a piece of furniture with multiple, and even lethal, possibilities. Since the s, scholars in psychology and archaeology especially, and in material culture studies more broadly, have gradually expanded upon and modified Gibson’s term. Thinking about the ‘affordances’ of objects has enriched our understanding of subject–object relations, and offered a   

Ibid., p. . James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, ), p. . Carl Knappett provides an overview in ‘The Affordances of Things: A Post-Gibsonian Perspective on the Relationality of Mind and Matter’, in Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden, and Colin Renfrew, eds., Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, ), pp. –.



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

way to articulate the co-dependency of mind and matter. Cognition and materiality, scholars across a wide range of disciplines now acknowledge, are far more intimately connected than has been previously recognised. This opening chapter of Boxes and Books in Early Modern England will unpack the particular affordances of the box. As I outlined in the Introduction, quantitative historical studies have demonstrated the extent to which early modern domestic space was characterised by a ‘proliferation’ of boxes, including chests, coffers, trunks, and caskets. At a time of ‘new access to a superfluity of material possessions’ this proliferation of boxes was symptomatic of increasing consumption, and the need for secure places in which to store, protect, and organise other material things. However, as Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson put it, while largescale quantitative analyses crucially underpin studies of early modern material culture, ‘domestic life is not experienced in such a way, and doing justice to it [. . .] means working at the level of individual experience’. Drawing here on qualitative evidence from wills, inventories, diaries, and literary sources, the first part of this chapter will offer a detailed picture of a range of early modern environments characterised by many different kinds of boxes, valued for their overlapping and intersecting affordances as containers, spaces, and surfaces. In his recent re-evaluation of Gibson’s term, archaeologist Carl Knappett asserts that the affordance of an object is neither ‘solely an independent property of the object itself’, nor is it ‘exclusively an intentional state within the mind of the person engaging with it’, but a relational property shared between object and agent. The situation in which object and agent engage is a dynamic one – and the information specifying where the situation can lead is not entirely within the agent’s head, but is in some way also held within the object (itself within an environment).

Knappett’s images and parenthetic phrasing suggest a particular emphasis on the inherently box-like qualities of all things: on what is ‘within’ the 

  

David Gaimster, ‘Archaeology of an Age of Print? Everyday Objects in an Age of Transition’, in Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, eds., Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and Its Meanings (Farnham: Ashgate, ), pp. – (p. ). See also Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture –, trans. Allan Cameron (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), pp. –. Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, ), p.  and passim. Hamling and Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England, p. . Knappett, ‘The Affordances of Things’, p. .

The World in Boxes



mind, ‘within’ objects, and ‘within’ environments. The second part of the chapter turns to what I want to call the ‘imaginative affordances’ of the box. Where scholars working at the interface of early modern literature and material culture might most usefully adopt the notion of the affordance is in considering how particular objects have a characteristic potential to invite certain ways of thinking and imagining. Cabinets and closets, as distinctively early modern spaces associated with distinctively early modern activities, are familiar examples of the blurring of mental and physical activity that happens inside certain kinds of elite box-like spaces, but thinking in broader terms of the category of the box illustrates in greater detail the extent of this interplay between mind and matter. Boxes are polymorphous things with the potential to enclose, conceal, protect, dignify, and furnish. They might also enable transportation, as well as classify, condense, and organise, and all of these things can happen as much in the mind as in our material surroundings. Looking more closely at some ‘dynamic’ early modern ‘situations’ (to use Knappett’s terminology) located in prayers, meditations, and sermons, in which ‘object and agent engage’, this chapter reveals that boxes are also immensely useful and versatile things with which to furnish the imagination.

The World in Boxes ‘In Whitehall are the following things worthy of observation’, wrote Paul Hentzner, a German visitor to England at the end of the sixteenth century: I. The Royal Library, well stored with Greek, Latin, Italian and French books. [. . .] All these books are bound in velvet of different colours, though chiefly red, with clasps of gold and silver; some have pearls, and precious stones, set in their bindings. II. Two little silver cabinets of exquisite work, in which the Queen keeps her paper, and which she uses for writing boxes. III. The Queen’s bed, ingeniously composed of woods of different colours, with quilts of silk, velvet, gold, silver, and embroidery. IV. A little chest ornamented all over with pearls, in which the Queen keeps her bracelets, earrings, and other things of extraordinary value.



A Journey into England, by Paul Hentzner, in the Year M.D.XC.VIII, trans. Richard Bentley, ed. Horace Walpole (London, Strawberry Hill, ), Kr–Lr.



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

Hentzner’s descriptive terms – ‘exquisite’, ‘ingeniously’, and ‘extraordinary’ – convey his sense of wonder at the magnificence of this royal setting. He also mentions a collection of portraits, some musical instruments, an elaborate clock, and other features in the palace that a visitor might like to see, but conspicuously, all of the items first in his list are objects that have a containing or enclosing function: a library, two cabinets, a bed, and a little chest. Hentzner’s observations prompt us to make visual and material connections between these artefacts, despite their variation in size and scale: the books in the library are bound in velvet, from which the quilts on the bed are made, and the bindings of the books contain pearls, which also ornament the royal jewellery chest. Both the book bindings and the bed are ‘of different colours’, and the clasps on the books are gold and silver, as are threads in the quilts; silver too are the boxes ‘in which the Queen keeps her paper’. As well as their visually rich and harmonious display of royal splendour, the appeal of these boxes and box-like objects lies in the details of what might be enclosed inside their elaborately ornamented exteriors. While the visitor will be impressed by the lavishness of this elite domestic interior, they will be further intrigued, Hentzner implies, by the knowledge that the Queen herself might read the books in the library, keep her writing papers in the two silver cabinets, sleep inside the bed with its luxurious quilts, and lock away her jewels in the little chest. The Royal Library impresses Hentzner because it contains beautifully bound books in ‘Greek, Latin, Italian, and French’. As some of the smallest objects in his list, the books function metonymically for the palace itself: an assortment of lavishly decorated surfaces and exteriors, each of which encloses precious, delightful, or exotic contents. Alongside her jewels and bedclothes, the library is another kind of ornament to the Queen and her palace, its contents witnessing to her good taste and her literacy, just as the writing boxes imply her skill with the pen. The library is ‘well stored’, a phrase that suggests sufficiency and measured plenitude in several senses; Hentzner is impressed by the external appearance of the books it contains, as well as the classical and continental content of these volumes. Within the royal palace at Whitehall, the relationship between these objects and what they contain is a sophisticated one. While they each have a practical function in demarcating a space of enclosure for something else, these various boxes, including the palace itself, are in turn ennobled by their precious contents. Their elaborately decorated surfaces outwardly project luxury, reminding the viewer that something valuable may be contained within. The little chest ‘ornamented all over with pearls’ hints

The World in Boxes



visually at the jewels it contains, presumably including more pearls, and perhaps lockets – popular items of Elizabethan jewellery, and themselves miniature receptacles. The luxurious materials on the outsides of the cabinets, bed, and books reflect literally and symbolically the richness of what they contain. The material characteristics of these objects construct a kind of tantalising transparency; although they are opaque objects whose contents are hidden, their outer surfaces are ostentatiously suggestive of the riches that are within. Hentzner’s observations reveal how objects, spaces, and rooms can work as comparable kinds of box, despite their diverse sizes and scales. His description begins with small artefacts and culminates with the palace of Whitehall as the ultimate place of containment for the monarch, a particular defined space in the landscape of London that is ‘truly Royal; inclosed on one side by the Thames, on the other by a Park, which connects it with St. J’, another royal palace’. Such encounters highlight the complex material and rhetorical constructions of privacy around the monarch in the early modern period, a time in which ‘the commodity of access became both more rare and more prized’. The social distance of the monarch from his or her subjects was physically emphasised by the arrangement and division of space within royal palaces. Consisting of intricate sequences of lobbies, galleries, rooms, chambers, and closets, the palace was a series of contained spaces of differing degrees of privacy, through which visitors were filtered according to appropriate levels of intimacy with the monarch. Hentzner’s description of the palace at Whitehall, where only the most select visitors are allowed to pass through the outer public rooms to the Queen’s private chambers and even fewer are allowed to see what she keeps in her boxes and cabinets, demonstrates how the monarch was contained within a complex sequence of boundaries that were both materially and socially constructed. This elaborate construction of boundaries around the monarch was at once personal and political. Patricia Fumerton has written about the visit of James Melville, ambassador from Mary Queen of Scots, to Elizabeth I in   

Ibid., Kr; Or–Qr. Brian Weiser, Charles II and the Politics of Access (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, ), p. . In James II: A Study in Kingship (Hove: Wayland, ) John Miller describes Whitehall as a ‘great rabbit warren of apartments, cubby holes, and corridors, maybe two thousand rooms in all’ (p. ). See also David Starkey, ‘Representation through Intimacy: A Study in the Symbolism of Monarchy and Court Office in Early-Modern England’, in Ioan Lewis, ed., Symbols and Sentiments: CrossCultural Studies in Symbolism (London: Academic Press, ), pp. –; Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life – (New Haven: Yale University Press, ).



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

. On this occasion Melville was taken by the Queen to see her collection of miniatures, each of which was ‘wrapt within paper’ and kept inside a cabinet (which Fumerton suggests could well have been one of the cabinets mentioned by Hentzner) in her bedchamber. This encounter underpins Fumerton’s influential discussion of the complex ways in which Elizabethan identity was performed. Arguing for a subjectivity consciously constructed through acts of hiding and revealing, locking and unlocking, enclosing and disclosing, she emphasises the correspondence between literary representations of subjectivity and the material manifestations of that subjectivity, in a culture obsessed with creatively hiding the self ‘behind a series of gorgeously ornate public rooms, cabinets, lockets, frames, paints, metaphors’. As visitors to royal residences discovered, ‘one moved inward, but inwardness could be reached only after running a gauntlet of public outerness’. Fumerton’s account portrays a culture filled with boxes, in which ‘bedrooms displayed closed decorative cabinets; cabinets exhibited closed ivory boxes; boxes showed off covered or encased miniatures’. Royal palaces epitomise this culture of closure through the way in which access to the monarch involved the continual penetration of different layers. And yet even as one was drawn inward through this series of concentric boxes, ‘there never was any ultimate room, cabinet, or other apartment of privacy that could be locked away from the public; only a perpetual regress of apartments’. The social construction of the early modern monarchy reveals a complex interplay between different kinds of material and rhetorical enclosures; a mobility of scale in which boxes as small as lockets and as large as palaces could be equally implicated, as well as other elite spaces of containment, such as closets and cabinets. By the mid-seventeenth century, ‘cabinet’, which had hitherto described a discrete piece of furniture, developed more abstract senses, referring in a political context, for example, not just to a room but also to the group of people who meet to conduct business within it. Rooms such as those seen by Hentzner in Whitehall could themselves become boxes of endless further boxes, in a visual and material blurring of   

Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, ), pp. , . Ibid., pp. –. Such artefacts, and the activities they permitted, have been the subject of important historical, art historical, and literary case studies: see Alan Stewart, ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations,  (), –; Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham and London: Duke University Press, ); Sean Silver, The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in EighteenthCentury Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ).

The World in Boxes



the distinction between an enclosed box-like space (especially a woodpanelled room) and what it contained. This seems to have underpinned the interchangeable nature of the very words used to describe some of these spaces and things in early modern England: the speaker in John Donne’s ‘Satyre ’, for instance, desires to be left alone with his books ‘in this standing woodden chest’, a chamber or study for which ‘closet’ would also be an appropriate noun. ‘Let me lye/ In prison, and here be coffin’d, when I dye’ (–), he pleads, emphasising the privacy afforded by this particular enclosed space, which reminds him of both a prison cell and a coffin, two more box-like spaces of physical isolation. In a similar vein, when Lady Macbeth’s lady-in-waiting reports having seen her ‘unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon’t, read it, afterwards seal it’ in her sleep (..–), the New Cambridge editor suggests that Lady Macbeth does not go to a small private room (like Gertrude’s closet in Hamlet), but opens a smaller object: ‘cabinet; lockable chest, or box for valuables’ are offered as synonyms in the editorial gloss, with Gloucester’s comment that ‘I have locked the letter in my closet’ (King Lear, ..) and Anthony’s discovery of Caesar’s will ‘in his closet’ (Julius Caesar, ..) as comparable instances. In this chapter and throughout this book, I embrace this evidently labile nature of early modern terminology for boxes and box-like objects in thinking about the interactions between their material and metaphorical affordances. As furniture historians Victor Chinnery and Penelope Eames have stressed, there is no absolute consistency in the various words used for the many kinds of box that were such a prominent feature of early modern material culture, and many terms, such as coffer, chest, and cabinet were interchangeable. The situation is further complicated by the nineteenthcentury tendency to formulate misnomers for some of these pieces of furniture that play on vague monastic, clerical, or historical ideals, such as ‘Bible boxes’, ‘coffin stools’, and ‘Armada chests’. The latter possibly represents an imaginative corruption of ‘armarium’, reflecting the   



John Donne, Complete English Poems, ed. C.A. Patrides (New York: Random House, ). William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . Victor Chinnery, ‘Names for Things’: A Description of Household Stuff, Furniture and Interiors –, ed. Jan Chinnery (Oblong: n.p., ); Penelope Eames, Furniture in England, France and the Netherlands from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (London: Furniture History Society, ). Chinnery, Oak Furniture, pp. –. Chinnery notes that although Bibles may well have been kept in boxes, the term ‘Bible box’, frequently used to describe flat-lidded boxes kept on tables or shelves, is not early modern.



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

compelling notions of security associated with this Latin word. Originally referring to a place for the storage of weapons or tools, ‘armarium’ evolved to refer also to other places or objects for storage, especially book chests. It is the etymological root of several terms in English (and in many of the Romance languages as well) for other similar places of safekeeping, including ‘armoury’, ‘armoire’, and ‘aumbry’. As we will see in later chapters, the noun ‘box’ is not only particularly versatile in its early modern usages, but offers rhetorically useful and sometimes even polemical possibilities. The slipperiness of the early modern vocabulary of the box is implicit in Lena Cowen Orlin’s discussion of the extent to which early modern English households were characterised by variations of the wooden chest, including ‘court cupboards, livery cupboards, dole cupboards, clothes presses, book desks, grain arks, and, in its most capacious variant, the closet’. Offering a useful contrast with the palace of Whitehall and the other more elite examples mentioned above, Orlin demonstrates that more modest domestic spaces also featured endless variations on the box, some of which were moveable objects, while others were architectural divisions of space that may or may not be distinguished sharply as rooms. Shakespeare shows us how this might have been experienced in a comic sequence in The Merry Wives of Windsor, when Falstaff, attempting to conceal himself in Master Ford’s house, refuses to hide in the buck-basket for a second time, asking if he can ‘creep up into the chimney’ instead. Mistress Page tells him to ‘Creep into the kiln-hole’ but Mistress Ford dismisses both of these suggestions, saying of her husband ‘He will seek there, on my word. Neither press, coffer, chest, trunk, well, vault, but he hath an abstract for the remembrance of such places and goes to them by his note. There is no hiding you in the house’. The Fords’ house contains various enclosed spaces, but in this dialogue there is no distinction between those that are moveable pieces of furniture – the ‘press’, 







For photographs of surviving seventeenth-century book chests still containing copies of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, see John N. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –, , . Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. . See also her earlier work, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), and Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). On the subdivision and greater internal segregation of ‘middling sort’ space, not just elite spaces, see also M. Johnson, ‘Rethinking the Great Rebuilding’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology,  (), –. The Merry Wives of Windsor, ..–. This is a play of multiple comic containments: see . for the buck-basket scene; also ., when Simple gets shut in the closet in which Doctor Caius keeps his papers and other artefacts including ‘un boîtier vert’, a box of ointment.

The World in Boxes



‘coffer’, ‘chest’, or ‘trunk’, and those that are part of the architectural structure of the house – the ‘chimney’, ‘kiln-hole’, ‘well’, and ‘vault’. Mistress Ford implies that her husband does not discriminate between ‘such places’, whether discrete rooms, objects, or spaces, as sites where a reprobate like Falstaff might be hiding; indeed, he has an inventory of them all to remind himself, in the form of his ‘abstract’ or ‘note’. Multiple variations on the box were a distinctive feature of ecclesiastical as well as domestic environments. After an injunction was passed by Thomas Cromwell in , parish registers for the recording of baptisms, weddings, and funerals, as well as ‘a strong Chest or box for the Almes of the poore’ were mandatory in every parish church. The parish register had to be kept inside a chest, as clergy were regularly reminded: for the safe kepyng of the same booke, the Paryshe shalbe bounde to provyde of theyr common charges one suer coffer with twoo lockes and keyes, wherof the one to remayne with the Parson, Vicar, or Curate, and thother with the Wardens of every paryshe Churche or chappell wherin the sayde booke shalbe layde up, whiche booke they shall every Sundaye take forth, and in the presens of the sayde Wardens or one of them, wryte and recorde in the same al the weddynges, chrystenynges, and buryalles made the whole weke before. And that done, to lay up the booke in the sayde coffer, as afore. And for every tyme that the same shalbe omitted, the partie that shalbe in the faulte thereof, shall forfeit to the sayd Church .iii. s. iiii. d. to be employed, the one halfe to the poore mennes boxe of that Paryshe, the other halfe towardes the repayre of the Churche.

These official directions reveal that the storing of the book inside the locked coffer was as integral a part of the institutional record-keeping as the weekly ritual of writing in the book. The two bureaucratic acts – to ‘wryte and recorde’ and to ‘lay up the booke’ – had to be observed by a church official, and so in both literal and metaphorical ways the box reinforced the textual record as a secure location for essential details of the parish and its inhabitants. Surviving parish chests often feature tills (internal boxes or drawers), and secret compartments, as well as impressive ironwork details and





Adam Squier, Articles to be enquired of, by the Church Wardens and Swornemen within the Archdeaconrie of Middlesex (London: John Wolfe, ), Av. See also William Tate, The Parish Chest: A Study of the Records of Parochial Administration in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Anon., Injunctions geven by the Quenes Majestie anno Domini MD.LIX., the fyrst yeare of the raigne of our Soveraigne Lady Quene Elizabeth (London: Richard Jugg and John Cawood, ), Aivr.



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

intricate locks. From the turn of the seventeenth century, England was an important centre for locksmithing, and many chest locks survive today even when their chests do not – themselves often very sophisticated pieces of craftsmanship, both beautiful and functional. In Cambridge, all of the University’s books and money were kept from the earliest days inside the ‘University Chest’. The six-hundred-year-old chest, protected by multiple locks, which replaced the one destroyed during an attack on the University in , survives today in the office of the University Registrary, and the budgeting process at Cambridge is still referred to metaphorically as ‘allocations from the Chest’. In a similar blurring of box and bureaucratic activity, in the early modern period the noun ‘cofferer’ described an office in the royal household (one responsible for strongboxes and their contents), or more generally, a treasurer, as well as one who makes coffers. With their visually striking bars, locks, and bolts, many of these chests and boxes leave their identity as places of safekeeping in no doubt. A humble wooden chest might, like a royal palace, be impenetrable. What these examples repeatedly illustrate is that the primary affordance of the box, in all of its many possible permutations, is containment. A box invites us to put things into it, or conversely, to look inside and see what might be taken out of it. But containment is by no means the only affordance of the box, and indeed, containment itself might be nuanced in particular ways, take different forms, and be required for a whole range of purposes. The boxes that populate early modern domestic and institutional spaces are valued for the possibilities of safekeeping, protecting, and organising that they offer (all variations on containment), but boxes might also be valued for aesthetic reasons too, as objects with multiple exterior surfaces for showcasing different materials and decorative techniques. The period – was the ‘heyday of carved wooden furniture in England’, but wooden boxes could also be decorated with inlay, parquetry, marquetry, paints, stains, or gilding. Though the containment offered by a box might appear to privilege its interior space above all else, some of the other affordances of boxes show that interiors are not necessarily more important than exteriors. We can get a sense of some of these other material affordances from early modern wills and inventories. Such texts often bear witness to the   

Sherlock, Suffolk Church Chests, passim. On the parish chest and its relationship to evolving attitudes towards the past, see Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past, chapter . ‘cofferer, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press. Chinnery, Oak Furniture, p. ; pp. –.

The World in Boxes



personal significance of the multiple boxes that furnished sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English domestic interiors, across a wider social scale. They are clearly valued for the purposes of safekeeping and organisation, as well as for what they look like, but also for more intangible significance, often defined by the personal value of their contents, or the place in which they are kept. In her will of , for example, the widow Anne Tindall bequeathed to her daughter ‘my cipresse box with tilles with such trifles as she shall finde in yt’, adding ‘And I also give her my cabinett which her Father gave me. I give her my greene velvet box with tilles and all such things as be in them at the time of my death’. Both of these boxes feature ‘tilles’ but Tindall does not specify what may be inside them, referring to the contents in vague terms as ‘trifles’ and ‘things’, which will be of significance only to her daughter. Nor does she specify any information about the size of these various boxes, identifying them only by the materials from or with which they are made or covered. Providing a rather more detailed picture of a much more substantial dwelling, the  inventory of the London townhouse of Richard Stonley, one of the four Tellers of the Exchequer of Receipt from  until his death in , depicts a household furnished with many different boxes. We learn that the contents of Stonley’s bedchamber included, alongside a large number of individually listed books, a ‘Case of Boxes of Walnuttree with a Frame’, a ‘little case of smalle boxes/In the same case in the boxe P. xj printes for pastery’, and a ‘nest of xv boxes under the Table’. Next to the bedchamber, the Gallery also contained many books, alongside other furnishings including a ‘Joyned Table With a Cupbord’, ‘a greate Case of boxes with gilt lock and keys and a frame’, a ‘Case of boxes with Iron lock and keys ungilt and a frame’, ‘Twoe smale Chestes to cary mony in’, a ‘smalle case of boxes of Joyned worke’, and a ‘case of boxes covered with black lether’. There was also ‘a great bard Flaunders Covered with tand lether’, ‘Another of the same’, a ‘Flaunders Iron Chest’, a ‘chest for lynnen covered with black lether’, a ‘waynscot little chest’, a ‘Square standing Combecase with thinges belonging to it, covered with greene velvet’, a ‘faire square standinge combecase with boxes covered with redd lether guylt, and greene velvet in a boxe covered with black lether’, a ‘greate presse for lettres’, a ‘nest of boxes of Wainscot 

Will of Anne ( November  by John upon the body Allde, ).

Tindall, widow of Great Maplestead, Essex: National Archives, PROB / ). Anne was the wife of Sir John Tindall, whose murder in November Barterham is recounted in A true relation of a most desperate murder, committed of Sir John Tindall Knight one of the maisters of the Chancery (London: Edward



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

conteininge xiiij’, and a ‘boxe of diverse printed portraitures in paper and pastbord’. Further rooms in Stonley’s well-furnished house featured additional chests, cupboards, presses, and cases containing candles, linen, plate, glasses, and papers, and many other boxes, the contents of which are not specified. Both Stonley’s inventory and Tindall’s will pay attention to some of the specific physical properties of their multitudes of boxes – those bequeathed to Tindall’s daughter are described as ‘cipresse’ and ‘greene velvet’, and the different materials from or with which some of the boxes in Stonley’s house are made or covered are often mentioned, including iron, wood, velvet, and leather. In this respect, such objects participate in the general aesthetic of the early modern domestic interior, in which individual artefacts, furnishings, and surfaces are part of a greater visual, material whole. Decorated leather, for example, was found in abundance in Europe from at least the thirteenth century onwards, used for a multitude of covering purposes including ‘scabbards, boxes, containers and chests, belts, shoes, bookboxes, cases and bookbindings’. Embroidery, one of the great domestic arts of the seventeenth century, covered boxes, caskets, and small cabinets with elaborate designs, executed in many different kinds of stitches and techniques, and other textile arts were used for the embellishment of clothing, book covers, and many other artefacts, as well as walls and floors. Linen-fold panels – wood carved to look like creases and folds of cloth – were found on walls, beds, and chests from the fifteenth century onwards, and suggest another dynamic way in which boxes might interact visually and playfully with other objects, materials, and surfaces in early modern domestic space. The slightly earlier technique of parchment-foldcarving is also often found on chests, and was perhaps a playful echo of the

 

 

‘Wainscot’ refers to foreign timber of superior quality, often used for panelling. The fair copy of this inventory, National Archives E//, an unpaginated Exchequer Memoranda Roll, has been partly published (books only): see Leslie Hotson, ‘The Library of Elizabeth’s Embezzling Teller’, Studies in Bibliography,  (–), –. I am grateful to Jason Scott-Warren for many conversations about Richard Stonley’s inventory. Scott-Warren’s Shakespeare’s First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ) explores the material and other relationships between early modern books, people, and things, with detailed exploration of this inventory and other documents relating to Richard Stonley. Mirjam Foot, The History of Bookbinding as a Mirror of Society (London: British Library, ), pp. –. See, for example, Patricia Wardle, Guide to English Embroidery (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, ); Liz Arthur, Embroidery – at the Burrell Collection (London: John Murray, ). I discuss embroidered caskets in more detail in Chapter .

The World in Boxes



parchment sheets that might have been pasted onto wooden panels for painting, but which often peeled off over time. The inventory of Richard Stonley’s house portrays a dwelling place liberally furnished with material things, among which are a great many boxes. Some of these chests, cases, boxes, and presses are designated for the storage of particular things such as money, pastry prints, linen, combs, and letters; some do not have any specified content; and many of the itemised objects comprise sets of further consecutively nested boxes. Some of these are small, others large; some are singular items, and others come in pairs. Some stand alone, as sizeable pieces of furniture, and others are much smaller accessories. They serve as useful orientation points in the inventory, allowing material possessions (especially small objects of which there might be many at once, like books) to be conveniently gathered together, so that the sheer multiplicity of material things might be more easily navigated, both on paper and in the specific space that is being described. As such documents suggest, the possible correspondences between the geography of the home and narrative description in an early modern will or inventory allows readers the possibility of partially reconstructing the house it documents – not only a sense of its overall architecture, but also the incidental nooks and crannies that may have held special significance for its inhabitants. When the writer and biographer Izaak Walton bequeathed to his son in  ‘a trunk of linen’, he specified as well ‘a deske of prints and pickters; also a cabinet nere my beds head, in which are som littell thngs that he will valew, tho of noe great worth’. Walton’s phrasing demonstrates the necessary convenience of trunks and cabinets as a way of furnishing a room, but also how the act of storing other things within one such object might signal personal ‘valew’ even if not general ‘worth’. We are not privy to the precise details of the ‘littell thngs’ he kept by his bed, but their literal and rhetorical shutting-away inscribes their subjective importance. Such wills and inventories each offer us a picture of, as Jason Scott-Warren puts it in his discussion of early modern account books, ‘life in a box’. While in the context of a will, people implicitly or explicitly articulate the enduring value of boxes and their contents as they contemplate leaving the earthly life, boxes may often be particularly dynastic pieces of furniture    

Chinnery, Oak Furniture, p. . There are also, of course, many limitations to inventories as historical sources, not least in what they do not include, as Jason Scott-Warren discusses in Shakespeare’s First Reader, pp. –. Izaak Walton: Selected Writings, ed. Jessica Martin (Manchester: Carcanet, ), p. . Scott-Warren, Shakespeare’s First Reader, pp. –.



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

in themselves. They often seem to come into special focus at life’s beginnings and endings, as objects that are particularly rich in symbolic value. When Walton married his first wife Rachel Floud on  December , a chest was made to commemorate their union. The front panel of the chest features a carved scene of Adam and Eve fleeing the garden of Eden, with the serpent uncoiling from a branch above them (perhaps a surprising image, albeit one depicting the first biblical marriage), above and beneath which are inscribed the names of the two now ‘joined together in ye Holie Bonde of Wedlocke’, as well as a neat couplet: ‘   ,    ,/   ,    ’. Marriage chests are symbolically loaded objects, but Walton’s chest embeds its meaning even more closely in its materiality through its possible pun on ‘joined’: the couple are ‘joined’ in marriage, and have been ‘made one’, just as the chest itself is a singular object, the product of skilled joinery. Rachel Floud died in  and Walton later remarried, marking his second marriage with a similarly monumental piece of furniture, a cupboard carved with a scene of the day of judgement, which bears the name of his second wife, Anne Ken, and the date . Inscribed furnishings like these are documentary objects even without being opened, memorialising in matter a particular life event and bearing on their outsides some of the same textual evidence that appears in the formal records that may well be stored within, such as parish registers. In the most reflexive interplay between the material and bureaucratic spheres of the household, wills and other important documents might also be stored in the very boxes they themselves refer to. The dramatic potential of this is realised in Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters, where Sir Bounteous reveals that he keeps his will ‘above in an outlandish box’ (..), while in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, a marriage licence (and thus the inheritance of a significant dowry) moves through the play with appropriately comic clumsiness in a ‘black box’. In his will signed in 



For a picture of Walton’s chest and brief discussion, see Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), pp. –. Patricia Parker discusses some of the early modern literary associations between the craft of joinery and ‘joining’ in matrimony: see ‘Rude Mechanicals’, in Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. – (pp. –). Tara Hamling briefly discusses these two objects in “‘An Arelome To This Hous For Ever”: Monumental Fixtures and Furnishings in the English Domestic Interior, c. –’, in Andrew Gordon and Thomas Rist, eds., The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England: Memorial Cultures of the Post Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, ), pp. – (pp. –).

The World in Boxes



, the poet William Austin requested that ‘my Executors shall cause to be printed those my poore meditations in the black box of Chyna worke which for the exercise of my soule by Gods assistance and I hope to his glory I have writt on diverse texts of Scripture’, with details of those in his literary circle who should receive presentation copies, including Ben Jonson and John Selden. His wife subsequently published these ‘poore meditations’, located so specifically in their ‘black box’ (possibly a lacquered box), an appropriately mournful-looking reliquary for the elegies for his first wife and deceased children that were found there too. The infamous ‘Casket letters’ of Mary Queen of Scots, which were used as evidence of her involvement in the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, were so called because they were purportedly found in a silver box, which survives today. Such real and imagined households are of course relatively privileged ones in early modern England, and the boxes they feature are generally valuable objects with valuable contents. As a Teller in the Exchequer of Receipt, Richard Stonley would presumably have needed some of his chests and boxes for the storage of money and important state documents. Other wills attest to the importance of chests in humbler households, too, even those much further down the social scale. In  John Rand, a yeoman of Holton in Suffolk, bequeathed to his daughter Susan ‘One Brasse pott foure of my best peeces of pewter standing in my Parler and my best hutch in my chamber with all the goodes which shalbe therein at my deathe’. John Bugden, a weaver of Wiltshire, bequeathed in  to his daughter Helen, in addition to a bedstead with feather bolster, pillows, coverlet, and blankets, ‘my great new Chest’ and ‘the Cubbord in the hall’. Further still towards the bottom of the social scale, as Catherine Richardson and others have pointed out, even if you did not own a bed, you probably owned a box of some kind, for storing and protecting whatever other humble possessions you did have – a kind of miniature portable house.  

   

Will of William Austin, National Archives, PROB // ( May ). I am grateful to Jason Scott-Warren for this reference. For an image of the casket, now in Lennoxlove House, East Lothian, see Rosalind K. Marshall, Mary, Queen of Scots: ‘In my end is my beginning’ (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, ), p. . The original letters have not survived and their authorship has been much debated. Scott-Warren, Shakespeare’s First Reader, pp. –. Will of John Rand, Yeoman of Holton, Suffolk: National Archives, PROB// ( December ). Will of John Bugden, Woollen Weaver of Donhead St Mary, Wiltshire: National Archives, PROB / ( November ). Catherine Richardson, Shakespeare and Material Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. ; Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England, p. .



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

Figure  George Meriton, Nomenclatura clericalis, or The young clerk’s vocabulary in English and Latine (London: Richard Lambert, ), Rv–Rr. The Wellcome Library, London

In early modern England, boxes of many different kinds were important for safekeeping on small and large scales, but also as large pieces of freestanding furniture, things that filled space and provided horizontal and vertical surfaces for ornamentation and display, in both two and three dimensions. George Meriton’s  legal handbook, Nomenclatura clericalis, provides Latin terms for many different kinds of boxes under the heading ‘Of House-hold Goods, and Implements of Household-Stuff’, differentiating by appearance between ‘A Chest’, ‘A Pannel Chest’, and ‘A Little Chest’, but also by specific contents, providing different names for chests to keep books, clothes, shopkeeper’s wares, or ‘Writings’ in, as well as different names for several varieties of box, trunk, and different configurations of nested box (Figure ). According to Johann Comenius’s mid-seventeenth-century English–Latin school textbook (Figure ), a ‘Box-maker’ (‘Scrinarius’ or ‘Arcularius’) made ‘Tables’, ‘Boards’, and 

George Meriton, Nomenclatura clericalis, or The young clerk’s vocabulary in English and Latine (London: Richard Lambert, ), Rv–Rr.

The World in Boxes



Figure  Johann Amos Comenius, Hoc est, Omnium fundamentalium in mundo rerum, & in vita actionum, pictura & nomenclatura (London: J. Kirton, ), Kv–Kr. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

‘Chests’ (‘Arcas’ or ‘Cistas’), while a ‘Turner’ or ‘Tornator’, as the name suggests, produced rounded wooden objects such as ‘Bowls’ and ‘Tops’, and also small round boxes. Carpentry and joinery were historically different woodworking trades with separate guilds; the carpenters were the first to establish a guild in London, but the techniques permitted to them were restricted – only joiners were allowed to use glue and joints, whereas carpenters worked with boards and nails. Despite this distinction, box-makers (who generally made boarded boxes) were incorporated into the Joiners’ Company in London, possibly because of the high quality of carving they could also produce. Carpenters’ furniture is heavier, and has a tendency to warp and split, whereas joined objects can be made from thinner boards, joined by techniques that allow the wood to shift without changing the object’s overall structure. The material properties of different kinds of box therefore can signal not only who made them, and how, but also those who bought and used them – joined furniture was the preserve only of the wealthiest in the early sixteenth century, while the middle classes bought better-quality boarded pieces, but by the seventeenth century joined objects, including boxes, were more widely accessible. The material affordances of the box, I have shown so far, are many. The ubiquitous wooden chest might be used for sitting on, as well for storage, and a small desk or writing box provides a solid surface for writing or resting a book on, as well as a storage place for writing materials. With exteriors that can be decorated, such boxes attract, engage, and detain the eye, and seem to draw attention to themselves as boxes. The early modern period saw the development of significant elaborations on the basic form of the box. While the cupboard is now an object that shuts its contents away, it was originally a table (a ‘board’) used to display cups and other vessels; its transformation (it is now practically synonymous with ‘closet‘) was a gradual process across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The chest of drawers, a subdivided box offering more convenient and more practical kinds of storage (an ordinary chest is only accessible from the top) was a sixteenth-century invention, in a material culture of increasingly multiple containments, where people also stored things inside enclosed and enclosing nests of boxes. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson note that in the context of middling commercial activity, the capacity to divide and   

Johann Amos Comenius, Hoc est, Omnium fundamentalium in mundo rerum, & in vita actionum, pictura & nomenclatura (London: J. Kirton, ), Kv–Kr.  Chinnery, Oak Furniture, pp. –, –, –. Ibid., pp. –. In Production and Consumption, Overton et al. note an increasing number of more elaborate variations on the box, in the form of cupboards, chests of drawers, and cabinets in their range of

Thinking Inside the Box in Early Modern England



organise objects into smaller categories of thing was essential, requiring multiple containers and receptacles. As the sources I have surveyed so far in this chapter have revealed, their rich and varied affordances mean that in all of their permutations, boxes played a major part in the construction, arrangement, and utilisation of space in the material culture of the early modern period.

Thinking Inside the Box in Early Modern England This abundance of boxes readily supported not only the practical tasks of storing, organising, and displaying material things, as we have seen, but also the significant cognitive challenges of picturing and using the memory, of thinking about spiritual encounter, and of envisaging one’s place in the divinely created universe. Boxes, even when present only in the mind, afforded the imaginative possibility of bringing a sense of order and scale to the almost inconceivable. They belong to a major category of metaphor, spatial metaphors, which have since ancient times been associated with modelling the mind, and more specifically, the memory. In her study of the arts of memory, Mary Carruthers summarised the two governing types of memory metaphor in ancient and medieval thought as the flat tablet and the three-dimensional thesaurus (‘treasure-house’). Memory is consistently conceived of in the latter category as an enclosed place; if not a treasure-house or storeroom, then a cell, chest, or purse. In her influential work on artificial memory systems, Frances A. Yates examined how the classical memory techniques of impressing places and images on the mind were revisited in the Renaissance, evolving into ideas of elaborate memory theatres, which worked on principles of mental subdivision, placing things into mental boxes from which they could be easily retrieved. More generally, the enclosed space of a box is an ideal image for the mind as a private storage space – as when Shakespeare’s Ophelia tells Laertes that his advice to her about Hamlet is ‘in my memory locked’. Her further comment that ‘you yourself shall keep the key of it’ reinforces this image of a secure box that can be opened and closed (even if by someone else).

   

Kent inventories. Such items were listed in  percent of inventories in the early seventeenth century, compared with  percent by the middle of the eighteenth (p. ). Hamling and Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England, p. . Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; nd ed., ), pp. –. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), pp. – (p. ). Hamlet, ..–.



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

These vividly imagined mental storage places are often found in complex interplay with material equivalents in the early modern period, such as the cabinets of curiosities I described earlier, which allowed principles of organisation and categorisation to be explored in tangible ways, and closets, which provided concrete places of privacy inside which further mental or spiritual retreat could take place. The sixteenth-century Italian philosopher Giulio Camillo performed an ambitious materialisation of the ancient mnemonic conceit of the memory theatre, famously constructing a wooden version which, ‘full of little boxes’, purported to be a model of the mind containing all human knowledge. Mary Carruthers explores how books were drawn into this interplay between the material and the mental, reminding readers that they ‘contain matter to be laid down and called again from their memorial store-houses, shrines, fiscal pouches, chests, vases, coops, pens, cells, and bins’. She singles out the chest as the most common of these, associated with the scriptural Ark of the Covenant, as well as the chests in which books were kept in monastic libraries. One of her major case studies is the twelfth-century Hugh of St Victor (who was heavily influenced by St Augustine), for whom memory is ‘not just any strongbox or storage-chest – it is particularly one in which books are kept, a powerful portable library’. There is a crucially reflexive relationship between books and boxes in such articulations of memory: the book is one kind of container, whose contents can be transferred to an alternative storage place, the memory, which may in turn be modelled on a book, or indeed a chest filled with multiple books. Such a multiplicity of imaginary storage places is found in a prayer to be used ‘a lytle before your communion’ included by Richard Whitford in his s printed devotional manual, which contains the following supplication: Be thou (good lorde) alone the hoole booke of all my study and lernyng/ and the table of all my fode or fedyng: The bed also/ or the couche of all my rest and slepynge. And be thou (good lord) the closet/arke/chest/coffer/ and casket of all my Juels/treasure/and ryches.

God is imagined as a series of locations and sources of different kinds of sustenance: the ‘booke of all my study and lernyng’, and then a ‘table’,  

 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. . Ibid., p. , and chapter  passim. Richard Whitford, A werke of preparacion, or of ordinaunce unto communion (London: Robert Redman, ), Fiiiir–v. For Jennifer Summit’s discussion of this book as a ‘proto-Protestant’ volume, see her Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, ), p. .

Thinking Inside the Box in Early Modern England



‘bed’, or ‘couche’, each noun followed by ‘of all my’ and a corresponding verb in a repeated echo of the first image. Finally, in two emphatic lists of nouns – ‘closet/arke/chest/coffer/ and casket’ and ‘juels/treasure/and ryches’ – God is implored through a verbal piling-up of objects to become the ultimate place of security for the individual’s faith. The metaphors in this intercession are all based on familiar things from the domestic sphere, the furnishings of daily life for the propertied classes. They also condense all the essential physical, intellectual, and spiritual activities – studying, eating, sleeping, and praying – into one imagined domestic space. There is a physical and visual harmony between the material artefacts here, despite their differences in scale – a casket, bed, and table in this period were all likely to have been made from wood, and a book might have been bound between two wooden boards. An early modern bed may be enclosed in panelling or curtains, while a book might be covered in leather, boiled sheets of which were also commonly used to cover wooden chests and other boxes. Each object in Whitford’s prayer involves surfaces on or inside which other significant things, including people, might be located. The largest of these, the bed, which may have had a canopy and hangings that could be pulled around to create a completely enclosed space, is associated with intimacy and important rites of passage, while the smallest casket inside which papers might be stored may be associated with personal devotional activities of reading and writing. The Latin noun for ‘bed’, cubile, also meaning ‘lair’, ‘den’, or ‘hive’, reinforces the function of the bed as a containing, enclosing space. Whitford’s litany of images resonates with Christ’s famous instruction in Matthew :: ‘when thou prayest, entre into thy chamber, and shutt thy dore to the, and praye to thy father which ys in secret: and thy father which seith in secret, shal rewarde the openly’. The objects are all also associated with the comfort, nourishment, or satisfaction of body and mind, and in the enclosure of his prayer, the intimacy of which is further emphasised by the use of the imperative voice, Whitford collapses them together into a place for a spiritual union with God, which becomes ultimately unimaginable in its exaggerated materiality. These images are symptomatic of a religious culture increasingly marked by an emphasis on the interiority of the individual, and on spiritual encounter as something experienced privately. Whitford’s prayer anticipates the growing importance of the closet in the sixteenth century as a 

Text from Tyndale’s  New Testament; the King James Version later rendered this verse ‘enter into thy closet’.



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

locus for many private devotional activities, including reading the Bible, reciting prayers, or writing a diary. The later seventeenth century saw an emerging (mainly) Protestant literature of the closet, which explicitly emphasised the spiritual significance of such enclosed spaces. A comparable modelling of individual spiritual contemplation takes place in the  will of an Oxfordshire man named Sir Christopher Edmonde. Edmonde begins with a customary declaration of hope for redemption, and after wishing for a ‘Sermon by some learned man’ to be given at his funeral, which will encourage those present to strive towards ‘repentance and amendemente of theire lyves’, Edmonde returns again to the hope for his own redemption: throughe the Merrittes death and passion of my Lorde and Savyour Jhesus Christe I truste to be amounge the number of them that shalbe saved. To whome he will not impute theire synnes, but take them to everlastynge liefe. This my faith and hope I laye upp in my Breste, the Cheste of my mynde there to remaine and not to be opened before the daie that all fleshe shall ryse againe in the which I beleeve.

In writing a will Edmonde is able to ‘laye upp’ his ‘househould stuffe’ for his family, friends, and servants, but it is important also to ‘laye upp’ for the sake of his own soul his ‘faith and hope’. While the written document of the will legally safeguards his property, Edmonde thinks in terms of another crucial piece of ‘househould stuffe’, using the metaphor of the ‘Cheste of my mynde’ to create an equivalent locus of security for his hope in a heavenly inheritance. The will may well be stored in a real chest, but Edmonde’s ‘faith and hope’ are embodied in him, secured for the duration of his earthly life and ‘not to be opened before the daie that all fleshe shall ryse againe’. Edmonde’s anticipation of corporeal resurrection emphasises the material importance of the body: alluding to Job :–, he hopes that when



For example, Edward Wettenhall, Enter into thy Closet: or, a Method and Order for Private Devotion (London: John Martyn, ); Oliver Heywood, Closet-Prayer, a Christian Duty (London: A.M. for Thomas Parkhurst, ). See also Rambuss, Closet Devotions; Sasha Roberts, “Shakespeare creepes into the womens closets about bedtime’: Women Reading in a Room of Their Own’, in Gordon McMullan, ed., Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, – (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), pp. –; Orlin, Locating Privacy, chapter . Alan Stewart argues for the closet as ‘a politically crucial transactive space’ in which the individual was never alone, in ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations,  (), –. The landmark queer theory discussion of the closet is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ; updated with a new preface, ).

Thinking Inside the Box in Early Modern England



‘all flesh shall ryse againe’ it will be ‘with these eyes and not others I shall see my Savyour and Redeemer’. His imagery reminds us that there is a striking physical resemblance between the anatomy of a human chest with its enclosing structure formed by ribcage and breast bone, and the frames of iron bars that often strengthen and protect wooden chests. As I explore in more detail in Chapter , there is a sort of visual resemblance, too, between the human body’s tightly packed entrails, and the complicated systems of locks found inside the lids of some chests, which appear almost anatomical. The same kind of visually echoic imagery is at work in Edmund Spenser’s House of Mammon, where Sir Guyon finds an appropriately macabre, moralising juxtaposition of the two kinds of chest: there is ‘nothing to be seene’ inside but ‘huge great yron chests and coffers strong,/ All bard with double bends’ alongside ‘dead mens bones, which round about were flong’ and ‘vile carcases now left unburied’. While the origins of ‘chest’ as a noun for the thoracic cavity are early modern (around , according to the OED), the sense of ‘chest’ as a box or coffer predates this in Old English, probably from the Latin cista, by eight hundred years. When in the opening scene of Richard II, Mowbray remarks that ‘A jewel in a ten-times-barred-up chest/Is a bold spirit in a loyal breast’ (..–), Shakespeare draws on the convenient rhyming of the nouns ‘chest’ and ‘breast’, but also on the three-dimensional similarity between a human breast enclosed by ribs (and perhaps further encased in the leather and metal of protective armour) and a securely barred chest as analogous places of safety for precious things. Similar imagery occurs in his Sonnet , where the speaker anxiously compares the security of his earthly possessions with the vulnerability of the addressee, ‘best of dearest, and mine only care’ () who is ‘not locked up in any chest,/Save where thou art not, though I feel thou art,/Within the gentle closure of my breast’ (–). For Shakespeare’s various speakers, as for Christopher Edmonde, these boxes are greatly ennobled by the contents they protect. These examples illustrate the ready imaginative slippage between different kinds of literal and metaphorical box that are implied by the various senses of ‘chest’. Christopher Edmonde’s words draw on the image of security that both kinds of ‘chest’ imply to figure the transcendent durability of the soul. The spiritual archive of his ‘Breste, the Cheste of my   

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (London: Penguin, ), II.VII.. See ‘chest, n.; a and a’, OED Online, Oxford University Press. The relationship between the chest and language is especially rich in Old English poetry, as explored by Eric Jager in ‘Speech and the Chest in Old English Poetry: Orality or Pectorality?’, Speculum  (), –. I am grateful to Francesca Brooks for bringing this to my attention.



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

mynde’ is at once material and immaterial; while he hopes his soul will survive, he knows that his body will not endure in the same way that his material possessions will last for future generations, and yet at the same time he states his belief that ‘all fleshe shall ryse againe’. Both Edmonde and Whitford at first seem to offer quite straightforward images of boxes functioning as models of interiority, but in each instance, these boxes fluctuate between the tangible and the intangible, so that in the end we are not quite sure what exactly we are supposed to be imagining. Such early modern ‘chests of the mind’ are focused on the individual and the intimacy of spiritual encounter, but the kinds of chests and cabinets that allowed subdivision, organisation, and classification of the material world also offered rich imaginative affordances for thinking on a macrocosmic scale, about the ordering of the universe. Even the most solid wooden box had the flexibility to expand to contain not just the individual mind or memory, but the entirety of creation. In the mid-twentieth century, E.M.W. Tillyard asserted that it was a serious matter not a mere fancy if an Elizabethan writer compared Elizabeth to the primum mobile, the master-sphere of the physical universe, and every activity within the realm to the varied motions of the other spheres governed to the last fraction by the influence of their container.

Tillyard’s articulation of the relationship between different spheres in terms of consecutive containment is a useful reminder of the imaginative importance of resemblance (even though The Elizabethan World Picture is now seen as partly problematic for the way that it homogenises a singular view). Michel Foucault subsequently argued that in this period it was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man.

Foucault defines four essential and interconnected modes of resemblance: convenientia, whereby things are spatially close to one another – ‘their edges touch, their fringes intermingle, the extremity of the one also  

E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto & Windus, ), p. . Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, ), p. .

Thinking Inside the Box in Early Modern England



denotes the beginning of the other’; aemulatio, a mode of imitation or echo, whereby ‘things scattered across the universe can answer one another’; analogia, a mode that blends the previous two – ‘the similitudes of which it treats are not the visible, substantial ones between things themselves; they need only be the more subtle resemblances of relations’; and finally sympathia, in which things are drawn together over distance, ‘an instance of the Same so strong and so insistent that it will not rest content to be merely one of the forms of likeness; it has the dangerous power of assimilating, of rendering things identical to one another’. According to Foucault, at the turn of the seventeenth century resemblance in these terms was about to ‘relinquish its relation with knowledge and disappear, in part at least, from the sphere of cognition’. The early modern period was a time of major ontological overhaul, when the workings of resemblance in the imagination were becoming more and more complex. The Foucauldian ‘world picture’, like Tillyard’s, has its limitations. Nonetheless, what both critics richly evoke is the enduring obsession with the universal relationships between things. The early modern period witnessed revolutionary changes in the understanding of the relationships between terrestrial and celestial bodies, as natural philosophers challenged the Ptolemaic system that had placed the Earth at the centre of the cosmos. The notions of macrocosm and microcosm permeated political, religious, philosophical, and scientific thought. In this context, the box provided versatile possibilities for thinking in such terms of correspondence and resemblance, for mentally organising, arranging, and compartmentalising a universe that was ultimately only known fully by its creator. As one seventeenth-century preacher put it, in terms that evoke the inventories we saw earlier, ‘No Master of a familie is so well acquainted with every corner of his house; or can so readily fetch any Casket or Boxe he pleaseth: as the Master of the whole familie in Heaven and Earth, knowes all the Angles and Vaults of the World’.    



Ibid., pp. –. For one critique, see Ian Maclean, ‘Foucault’s Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian Counterblast’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (), –. For an overview, see Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ), chapter . There is a vast critical literature on early modern macrocosms/microcosms. See Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), especially chapter ; Don Parry Norford, ‘Microcosm and Macrocosm in SeventeenthCentury Literature’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (), –. Thomas Adams, The devills banket described in foure sermons (London: Thomas Snodham for Ralph Mab, ), Rr.



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

In the prose writing of another preacher, John Donne, we find a convenient overview of the some of the typical ways in which chests, cabinets, and boxes assist in the mental and spiritual tasks of bringing order to creation, at both an individual and universal level. Twenty-four of Donne’s surviving printed sermons feature at least one appearance of the word ‘cabinet’, employed variously as a metaphor for the human body, the soul, and divine mystery or secrecy. As objects associated with the accumulation of material riches, cabinets and chests also appear in passages that expound on covetousness and earthly greed, and the virtues of material generosity. In an undated sermon on the penitential psalms, for example, Donne proclaims He is a poor man, whose wealth can be writ in an Inventorie; That hath lockt all in such an iron Chest, in such a Cabinet, and hath sent up nothing to meet him in Heaven. As all the wealth of the wicked is but counterfeit, so is all the joy that they have in it counterfeit too.

Elaborating further on this idea in a Whitehall sermon preached in , he writes: it is truly all one, whether a covetous mans wealth do perish, or no, for so much, as he hoards up, and hides, and puts to no use; it is all one whether that thousand pound be in his chest or no, if he never see it; yet since he hath made his gold his God, he hath so much devilish Religion in him as to be loath that his God should perish. And this, that is threatned here is an absolute perishing, an absolute annihilation.

In these moments Donne negates the ultimate value of material things that can be secured in chests, even as he brings these evocative places of security to his listeners’ minds, in a rhetorical gesture that casts the proliferation of chests and boxes in early modern wills and inventories in a moralising and eschatological light. At the opening of the tenth ‘Meditation’ in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Donne demonstrates an even more expansive set of correspondences, and a further interest in the effects of ‘annihilation’: This is Natures nest of Boxes; The Heavens containe the Earth, the Earth, Cities, Cities, Men. And all these are Concentrique; the common center to them all, is decay, ruine; only that is Eccentrique, which was never made; only that place, or garment rather, which we can imagine, but not demonstrate, That light, which is the very emanation of the light of God, in which  

John Donne, LXXX sermons (London: Miles Flesher for Richard Royston, ), Ir. John Donne, XXVI sermons (London: Thomas Newcomb, ), Tr.

Thinking Inside the Box in Early Modern England



the Saints shall dwell, with which the Saints shall be appareld, only that bends not to this Center, to Ruine; that which was not made of Nothing, is not threatned with this annihilation. All other things are; even Angels, even our soules; they move upon the same poles, they bend to the same Center; and if they were not made immortall by preservation, their Nature could not keep them from sinking to this center, Annihilation. In all these (the frame of the hevens, the States upon earth, and Men in them, comprehend all) Those are the greatest mischifs, which are least discerned, the most insensible in their wayes come to bee the most sensible in their ends.

The illness experienced by Donne in  was the foundation of the Devotions, a neatly intersecting collection of meditations, expostulations, and prayers, in which he explores the physical and spiritual significance of his symptoms, and is particularly concerned about the relationship between internals and externals, and between the human and the divine. Here, his opening metaphor draws on the affordances of some of the kinds of objects we saw earlier: like the ‘nest of xv boxes under the Table’ in Richard Stonley’s bedchamber (to name just one of several similar examples from that inventory), or Paul Hentzner’s experience of Whitehall, where every box-like thing seems to contain something further, ‘Natures nest of Boxes’ fascinates, intrigues, and intensifies everything. The compactness of a ‘nest of Boxes’ contrasts dramatically with the immeasurable scale of the cosmos, yet Donne’s image of a ‘Concentrique’ nest of heavens, earth, cities, and men brings a comprehensible order to the vastness of creation. Nested boxes are the work of a skilled craftsman, and may well be small enough to fit in one hand. Margaret Cavendish, who was fascinated by the idea of atomic structures, similarly uses ‘a Nest of Boxes round’ to model the concentricity of the universe in her short poem ‘Of many Worlds in this World’: ‘So in this World, may many Worlds more be,/ Thinner, and lesse, and lesse still by degree’ (ll.–). For Donne, the image of ‘Natures nest of Boxes’ points to the careful work of God (who, after all, took human form in the family of a Nazarene carpenter) in the creation of all things. However, ‘the common center to them all, is decay, ruine’, Donne insists, undermining the neat optimism of such an ordered analogy; all that is created is ultimately as material and base as a wooden box, and will inevitably perish. The whole of creation ‘bends’ to this apocalyptic  

John Donne, Devotions upon emergent occasions, and severall steps in my sicknes (London: A.M. for Thomas Jones, ), Lv–Lr. Hamling and Richardson note that nests of boxes tend to appear in the inventories of middling sorts from the s onwards: see A Day at Home in Early Modern England, p. .



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

centre, ‘men’ are innermost and closest to corruption, while the outer spheres of the heavens are nearer to God, but still contain this void of destruction. Only ‘that which was not made of Nothing is not threatened with this annihilation’, only ‘that is Eccentrique, which was never made’. God alone was not created, and therefore cannot be fitted into the emblem of carefully crafted materiality that is the ‘nest of Boxes’. Donne draws the reader inwards through many ‘Concentrique’ boxes, to the ‘same Center’ shared by them all. The concentricity emphasises their common core, which becomes metaphysically loaded. This centre turns out to be a vacuum that explodes all material things, ‘Annihilation’, and thus challenges the apparent orderliness of the construction. Although he appears to be using the material world as but an argumentative convenience, Donne’s imbrication in the material is the very condition of his conception of the divine: God alone is ‘Eccentrique’, outside any possibility of containment in a box. While his analogy here is quite conservative, illustrating the kinds of ontologies evoked by Tillyard and Foucault, at the same time Donne demonstrates the extreme imaginative flexibility of the box as something that can render infinite concepts in finite terms. Donne’s fascination with the rhetorical possibilities of boxes within boxes is also evident in a sermon preached at Whitehall on Easter Eve /, in which he constructs the following extended metaphor: Let the whole world be in thy consideration as one house; and then consider in that, in the peacefull harmony of creatures, in the peaceful succession, and connexion of causes, and effects, the peace of Nature. Let this Kingdome, where God hath blessed thee with a being, be the Gallery, the best roome of that house, and consider in the two walls of that Gallery, the Church and the State, the peace of a royall, and a religious Wisedome; Let thine owne family be a Cabinet in this Gallery, and finde in all the boxes thereof, in the severall duties of Wife, and Children, and Servants, the peace of vertue, and of the father and mother of all vertues, active discretion, passive obedience; and then lastly, let thine owne bosome be the secret box, and reserve in this Cabinet, and find there the peace of conscience, and truelie thou hast the best Jewell in the best Cabinet, and that in the best Gallery of the best house that can be had, peace with the Creature, peace in the Church, peace in the State, peace in thy house, peace in thy heart, is a faire Modell, and a lovely designe even of the heavenly Jerusalem which is Visio pacis, where there is no object but peace.

Donne takes his listeners on a journey inwards through an imagined domestic space, beginning with ‘one house’ and moving gradually towards 

Donne, LXXX sermons, Ov.

Thinking Inside the Box in Early Modern England



the centre through its harmoniously arranged rooms, spaces, and furnishings to the ‘best Jewell’, hidden in a ‘secret box’, before moving back outwards through the ‘best Gallery of the best house that can be had’ to reveal the analogy of perfect peace as ‘a faire Modell, and a lovely designe even of the heavenly Jerusalem’. Delivering this sermon at Whitehall not long after having been made Dean of St Paul’s, Donne was almost certainly preaching in the chapel royal, where his surroundings would have resonated powerfully with the image he constructs in this passage. The chapel was situated within a series of enclosures in the palace (one of the largest and most complex palaces in seventeenth-century Europe) and the space of the chapel itself was arranged to reinforce hierarchical distinctions: members of the congregation were seated in pews according to rank, and the monarch sat above them in an enclosed gallery, known as the ‘closet’. Beneath the monarch and amidst the courtiers, the court pulpit was at ‘the very heart of political power’ and, contained within this innermost wooden box, the preacher found himself ‘in the midst of an elaborate iconographic scene of architectural, artistic, liturgical, and even living human components that made assertive claims about church, commonwealth, and monarchy’. Preaching in such a formally structured setting, Donne depicts a dwelling place of elevated social status: a richly furnished ‘Gallery’ was a fashionable feature of elite and gentry households in this period, and in an analogy appropriate for his Whitehall congregation, he compacts the social and political structures of family, church, and state into a house with all the latest furnishings. In this ‘one house’, the relationship of parts to the whole is harmonious; the consecutive containers fit neatly within one another in a model of ‘peaceful succession’ that is politically reassuring for a courtly audience. This portrayal of a perfectly subdivided creation is reminiscent of a gospel image used by Christ, speaking to the disciples: ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you’ (John :), a favourite preaching image for Donne. The divinely ordered universe is imagined in this sermon, as in the words of God’s own Son, in terms of a house in which all creation may find a ‘place’.  

Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. , , . On the development of galleries as fashionable domestic spaces in this period, see Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ).



Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England

While Donne’s house with its consecutively nested rooms and furnishings is a way of systematising earthly existence, by the end of the passage we are directed towards a ‘faire Modell, and a lovely designe’ of ‘the heavenly Jerusalem’, the city that epitomises the true peace and harmony that ultimately cannot be contained within any manmade structure. Donne’s ‘Modell’ is evocative of the wooden architectural models of buildings such as cathedrals, which survive in large numbers from this period. As scale-versions of real buildings, these models materialise a specific relationship between the large and the small. In the same way, Donne’s ‘Modell’ serves a condensing function, bringing the heavenly city down to size. A model is something that is crucially in proportion to the greater structure it represents, retaining its identity across differences of scale. Donne provides his congregation with a way to comprehend God’s universe that gives proportionate, material form to something that is incomprehensible, and ultimately beyond the bounds of the material. Donne demonstrates how a box, or a nest of boxes, might be an earthly springboard to the divine, driving through to a climactic displacement of the material even as the very metaphor itself depends on the particular material affordances of the box. As the other sources discussed in this chapter have illustrated, early modern boxes of all kinds were valued for the rich material and imaginative affordances they offered, and these two kinds of affordances were often intertwined with each other. In early modern writing, a box might enclose the material or the immaterial, or both. The material solidity of the wooden chest contrasts with its metaphorical fluidity: even the smallest casket might turn out to contain the entire universe. Such figurations expose the complex interweaving of physical and imaginative apprehension in literary engagements with the material world, and the identity of the box as a particular material and metaphorical confluence. 

For more on miniaturisation, especially of buildings, see John Mack, The Art of Small Things (London: British Museum Press, ), pp. –. On early modern models, see Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, ), chapter .

 

The Renaissance of the Box Metaphors of Interpretation

Portia’s Lottery In , James Roberts printed the first quarto of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, some three or four years after it had been staged as a new play by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The title-page announces The most excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice, with ‘the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Jewe towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh’ and ‘the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests’. The title-page of the second quarto, which also bears Roberts’s name and the date , though it was actually printed in  by William Jaggard and Thomas Pavier, similarly refers to ‘the extreme cruelty of Shylocke the Jew towards the saide Merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh’ and ‘the obtaining of Portia, by the choyse of three Caskets’. Both title-pages leave the reader in suspense about Shylock and the pound of flesh, misleadingly implying that he might actually succeed ‘in cutting’ it. This ‘cutting’ is matched by another transitive action, the ‘obtayning’ of Portia, whose significant speaking part in the play is here silenced. These typically selective title-page summaries isolate characters, objects, and actions from their dramatic context, reducing the play to the intriguing abstract nouns of ‘crueltie’ and ‘choyse’, and the concrete nouns of ‘flesh’, ‘chests’, and ‘Caskets’. Slight variations in the play’s title and in spelling aside, the change from ‘three chests’ in the first quarto to ‘three Caskets’ in the second is the only difference between the descriptions of The Merchant of Venice on these two early title-pages. Both nouns are used interchangeably in the play; in the second scene, Nerissa introduces the ‘lottery’ that Portia’s late father ‘hath devised in these three chests of gold, silver, and lead, whereof who chooses his meaning chooses you’, indicating that she and Portia are standing near them (..–), and as their discussion of the possible suitors continues, Portia refers to ‘the right casket’ and the ‘contrary casket’ (.., ). 



The Renaissance of the Box

Only one stage direction in these early quartos refers directly to the objects – ‘A Song the whilst Bassanio comments on the caskets to himself’ – and ‘casket’ is the noun preferred by Morocco, Arragon, and Bassanio in their speeches. There is a fourth ‘casket’ in the play, also linking father and unmarried daughter, which contains Shylock’s jewels and is thrown from a window by Jessica as she elopes with Lorenzo (..). In the Gesta Romanorum, Shakespeare’s main literary source for the lottery plot in The Merchant of Venice, it is the young woman who must make the right choice in order to marry the king’s son. The late sixteenthcentury English translations of these medieval stories refer to ‘thre vessels’, rather than caskets or chests: the fyrst was made of pure golde well couched wyth precyous stones wythout & within, full of deed mennes bones, and therupon was wryten thys posey. Who so choseth me shall fynde that he deserveth. The seconde vessell was made of fyne sylver, fylled wyth erth & wormds, and ye superscripcyon was thus. Who so choseth me, shall fynde that hys nature desyreth. The thyrde vessel was made of lede, full wythin of precyous stones, and therupon was wryten thys posey. Who so choseth me, shall fynde that god hath disposed for hym.

With their ‘pure’, ‘well couched’, ‘fyne’, and ‘precyous’ properties, these ‘thre vessels’ appropriately suggest the contents of a royal treasury, and in ‘posey’ each announces itself to the viewer, speaking in the first person. Portia’s father bequeaths three similar objects, also bearing inscriptions, but what matters above all for Shakespeare is the folk-tale pattern of revelation in which, one by one, the exterior of each box is found not to correspond with what it contains. Both ‘chests’ and ‘caskets’, theatrically concealed behind curtains, are suitably evocative trappings for a wealthy Italian household, as imagined on an early modern English stage. For Shakespeare these two nouns are interchangeable, partly because in his play it does not really matter what the boxes are called, as long as they serve their crucial dramatic purpose, and also because with one and two syllables respectively, the pair of words offers metrical flexibility. We may speculate that whoever composed the title-page of the first quarto was perhaps sensitive to the alliteration of ‘choyse’ and ‘chests’, and the internal  

The most excellent historie of the merchant of Venice (London: James Roberts, ), Er. Anon., Here after folows the hystorye of Gesta Romanorum (London: J. Kynge, ), nv. M.M. Mahood suggests that Shakespeare may also have had in mind the custom of drawing lots from three receptacles in elections to state offices, as illustrated in contemporary books about Venice: see her Introduction to the New Cambridge edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; updated edition ), p. .



Portia’s Lottery

rhyming of ‘flesh and chests’, whereas the second quarto’s title-page employs the noun more frequently used in the play. In both cases, however, ‘chests’ and ‘caskets’ function as isolable mnemonics, succinctly reminding the prospective reader in an early modern bookseller’s shop that one of the play’s central plots revolves around the romance trope of a lottery of three boxes. From the opening scene to the very final words, the economic, symbolic, and emotional values of material things are intensely felt in The Merchant of Venice, and frequently bound up with each other in complicated ways. While this is a play about consumption, and the corrosive potential of material wealth, the play also interrogates the meaning of value itself, and the problem of locating it. At their first encounter with Shylock, Antonio combines several proverbial expressions of anxiety about false exteriors in his aside to Bassanio, establishing a primary concern for the play – that appearances are deceptive: The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple, rotten at the heart O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath. (..–)

Such anxieties about the unreliable nature of external surfaces are often religiously inflected, and afflict everyone in this play, including Shylock, who warns Jessica not to ‘gaze on Christian fools with varnished faces’ (..). These frequently articulated difficulties of getting beyond deceptive exteriors anticipate Portia’s staging of the three caskets, in which the dramatic potential of the contrast between container and content is played out over several scenes. In a moment of frank openness at the beginning of the play, Antonio promises Bassanio that ‘My purse, my person, my extremest means/Lie all unlocked to your occasions’ (..–), introducing the tension between sexual and financial imagery that pervades The Merchant of Venice. John Drakakis notes the possible homoerotic implication of Antonio’s ‘unlocked’, suggesting that he offers Bassanio ‘his body as a kind of casket’. While Antonio’s resources are ‘unlocked’, other literal and metaphorical locks persist in the language of the play, including in the name of  

For a rich discussion of the emotional significance of objects in the play, see Richardson, Shakespeare and Material Culture, chapter . The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis (London: A & C Black, ), p. .



The Renaissance of the Box

its Jewish protagonist. Shylock’s name is surprisingly English-sounding in the Venetian setting, and its integral ‘lock’ hints at his frugality and usury, and at his paranoia about the literal and spiritual safety of his house and household – ‘Lock up my doors [. . .] stop my house’s ears – I mean my casements’ (..–). At the centre of the play are the three caskets, which are also locked: Portia tells Bassanio, ‘I am locked in one of them/If you do love me, you will find me out’ (..–), and we see the first two suitors each taking a key from her in order to open their chosen casket. This detail is not arbitrary; they are, after all, depicted as valuable objects, akin to jewellery boxes. The sexual implications of these ‘locked’ caskets, as analogous to Portia’s body, are obvious too. In dramaturgical terms, the necessity of unlocking increases the suspense in the casket scenes, and emphasises the value of what the suitors hope to find inside. Thus the three caskets are central to the action of one of the main plots, but they also emblematise many of the play’s concerns about the inherent value of material things, people, and words, as well as the pervasive fear that ‘falsehood’ may be hidden by ‘a goodly outside’. They materialise these concerns in emphatically three-dimensional terms, as visually striking furnishings for Portia’s house, and for the stage. Their locks are part of this insistent three-dimensionality: we are not faced with flat surfaces in this play, but with unknown interiors, epitomised by three locked boxes, and all the material and metaphorical affordances that such objects represent. The three suitors approach the challenge of the caskets in different ways. The first, Morocco, focuses on the value of the metals; choosing the most precious gold casket as the only one worthy of containing Portia’s ‘heavenly picture’, he is convinced that ‘here, an angel in a golden bed/Lies all within’ (.., –). Instead he finds ‘A carrion death, within whose empty eye/There is a written scroll’ (–). There is a persistent sense of inwardness in this scene; the caskets bear inscriptions, and the eye socket 





In the Introduction to his edition, Drakakis cites a late sixteenth-century Puritan sermon that likens usury to the proverbial ‘Butlers box’, a box (presumably locked) into which players put a portion of their winnings at Christmas, for the butler: ‘for as all the counters at last come to the Butler, so all the money at last commeth to the Vsurer’ (ibid., p. ). Farah Karim-Cooper has emphasised their similarity to jewellery boxes: see ‘“Deceived with ornament”: Shakespeare’s Venice’, in Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ). According to Freud, caskets such as Portia’s function as ‘women, symbols of what is essential in woman, and therefore of a woman herself – like coffers, boxes, cases, baskets, and so on’: see ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, ), XII, pp. – (p. ).

Portia’s Lottery



of the skull inside the golden casket contains a further inscription, which in turn must be read. These consecutive containments, and the repeating vocabulary of ‘in’ – ‘within’, ‘infold’, and ‘inscrolled’ – reinforce the casket as an enclosing form with a significant interior, in which Morocco will discover his fate. In contrast, Arragon sets himself apart from ‘the fool multitude that choose by show,/Not learning more than the fond eye doth teach,/Which pries not to th’interior’ (..–), instead choosing the ‘silver treasure house’. Although his speech dwells on the assumed importance of exteriors – ‘Let none presume/To wear an undeserved dignity’ (–) – he too finds inside what he least expected, ‘The portrait of a blinking idiot/ Presenting me a schedule’ (–). As he stands before the caskets, Bassanio devotes his homily to the fundamental problem that exteriors might be misleading, summed up in his opening lines: ‘So may the outward shows be least themselves,/The world is still deceived with ornament’ (..–). Rejecting the gold and silver caskets as epitomes of ornamental exteriors inevitably concealing some falsehood, he chooses ‘meagre lead,/Which rather threaten’st than dost promise aught’ (–). The beautiful image of Portia inside is, he finds, a ‘shadow’, which ‘Doth limp behind the substance’ (–). Ironically, Bassanio rejects the exteriors of two of the caskets as examples of the deceptive nature of exteriors more generally, yet chooses to rely on the exterior of the lead casket – in its unpromising external appearance, it becomes the most promising of all of them. As for the other caskets, a scroll is inside: ‘The continent and summary of my fortune’ (). The caskets are precious boxes fitting of Belmont’s luxury, but they are also emphatically textual objects, inscribed without, and containing further text within. In a play richly embellished with proverbs and classical and biblical allusions, the caskets and their visual and textual contents fit into a bigger picture of consecutive containments – they both contain and are contained within textual matter, in a series of words and things to be unlocked and opened. The theatrical staging of the casket scenes and the words of the suitors allude to other kinds of box, too, in terms evocatively freighted with religious vocabulary. Morocco imagines the many who ‘come/To kiss this shrine, this mortal breathing saint’ (..), meaning the golden casket and Portia herself, while he dismisses the lead casket with the thought that ‘it were too gross/To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave’ (–). Arragon refers to ‘the golden chest’ and ‘silver treasure house’ (.., ), but it is Bassanio’s speech that is most immersed in the language of tombs and relics. The ‘crisped snaky golden locks’ of ‘supposed fairness’



The Renaissance of the Box

are ‘often known/To be the dowry of a second head,/The skull that bred them in the sepulchre’ (..–) he claims, drawing out an unsettling tension in conventional ideals of physical beauty. And yet he finds the image of Portia contained within the lead casket to be a ‘demigod [. . .] so near creation’, which he dissects in a hyperbolic encomium, from her eyes, which seem ‘in motion’, to her lips, ‘Parted with sugar breath’, and her hair, ‘A golden mesh t’entrap the hearts of men’ (–). The leaden casket transforms into a shrine or reliquary, enclosing an image that hovers between nature and artifice, between life and death. Even as they lock away their specific contents in the context of the lottery plot, all three of Portia’s caskets open up other precious, magical, or superstitious boxes in the language of the play. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare resurrected a narrative motif from medieval romance, transforming it into both plot device and necessary set of stage properties. We have no surviving evidence, beyond the descriptions in the play itself, of what the caskets may have looked like on the early modern stage, but their theatrical renaissance illuminates the rich imaginative possibilities of the box, as something that can enclose, hide, reveal, and surprise. While Portia’s lottery involves three elaborate ‘chests’ or ‘caskets’, elsewhere on the early modern stage, other more anonymous boxes perform similar functions, as often unassuming but theatrically versatile objects. In Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, one of the most enduringly popular plays in early modern England, small stage props take on highly symbolic meanings as they move between characters, including the scarf that becomes a bloody relic, a glove, swords and daggers, a rope, letters, a book, and a small box. This box, purporting to contain a pardon, is sent by Lorenzo to Pedringano via a Page, who is forbidden to look inside it. Unable to resist temptation, the Page opens it, finding ‘nothing but the bare empty box!’ (..). In the following scene of execution, only the Page and the audience are aware that the box is empty; to his very final words, Pedringano believes that ‘in that box is balm’ for both the body and the soul, ‘my pardon from the King’ (.., ). This empty box becomes prophetic of a coffin awaiting a body, and even Pedringano’s image of ‘balm’ ironically evokes embalming, in a play that will be littered with corpses. As it threatens to reveal its fatal emptiness, the box becomes a token of power and a focus of suspense, embodying in miniature the play’s concerns about betrayal, deception, and what goes unseen. Although The Spanish Tragedy and The Merchant of Venice outline specific dramatic purposes for such objects, chests, trunks, and small boxes must have featured more anonymously in many other plays, and, as today,

Portia’s Lottery



would have been among the most useful properties that a theatre company owned. In the Royal Shakespeare Company’s  production of Richard II, there was ‘a coffin-shaped wooden box which held the weapons for the duel, represented the looking-glass, became an upright coffin-cum-torture chamber for Richard in prison, then his coffin, and finally both throne and crown were mounted on it as Bullingbrook took possession of them’. The infant Perdita in The Winter’s Tale is discovered by the shepherds with a ‘box’ containing ‘such Secrets’, which ‘none must know but the King’ (..–). In Kenneth Branagh’s  production, Antigonus gently rested the baby’s head on a little box containing ‘her character’ (.., meaning her ‘story’), as he prepared to leave her, while in the  Shakespeare’s Globe production, the baby was wrapped up in blankets and placed inside a small lidded crate. In Pericles, the body of Thaisa washes ashore at Ephesus inside a ‘wondrous heavy’ chest, ‘like a coffin’, after it is thought she has died in childbirth, and she is revived by Cerimon when the chest is opened on the stage (scene ) – beautifully described by Patricia Phillippy as ‘a chest of resurrection and genesis; a box containing a world, traversing the waters of a providential sea’. Thus, early modern drama recognises that boxes can be mysterious, literally and metaphorically freighted objects, or very functional things, ultimately less important than their contents – or, both of these at the same time. A box remains a box whether it is on or off the stage, in the world of the play or the world of the playhouse, and in the early modern theatre boxes of many sizes must have doubled as both versatile props and functional objects behind the scenes, for storing and transporting costumes and stage properties. It was in the early seventeenth century that ‘box’ started to be used to describe seats in theatres that were partitioned off, creating a privileged, enclosed space for certain members of the audience. Shakespeare’s ‘choyse of three chests’ or ‘choyse of three Caskets’ in The Merchant of Venice is one of the most familiar theatrical moments of the renaissance of the box in early modern literature. In Portia’s lottery, crucial ideas about appearance and reality are literally boxed up in objects resurrected from the literary past. These three boxes, whether they are chests or caskets, materialise a preoccupation with interiority, and the potentially 

 

Robyn Bolam, ‘Richard II and the Languages of the Stage’, in Michael Hattaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. – (p. ). Patricia Phillippy, Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . ‘box, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press.



The Renaissance of the Box

hidden nature of truth, that pervades far beyond the imagined world of The Merchant of Venice. Katharine Eisaman Maus articulates an urgent concern for writers in this period: What is at issue – ethically, politically, epistemologically, theologically – when someone in early modern England appeals to a difference between external show and form internal, or between outer and inner man? How are the boundaries drawn that separate what counts as ‘inside’ from what counts as ‘outside’? How does the existence of such categories help shape thought and behaviour?

The imaginative possibilities of the box are related to the wider literary and philosophical picture that Maus paints, of a culture in which as Hamlet famously puts it, people and words might have ‘that within which passes show’ (..). As a ubiquitous and versatile object in the theatre, the box epitomises how this fear can be provoked by, or centred on, material things. On the stage and beyond in early modern writing, the box models tangible ways of thinking about this problem, in situations that can be serious or playful, literal or metaphorical. This chapter will explore how the box, with its potentially troubling dynamic between inside and outside, offered a way to think about the fundamental readerly challenges of access and interpretation.

Plato’s Silenus In The Merchant of Venice, people and artefacts are placed under comparable scrutiny. ‘Mislike me not for my complexion’ (..), Morocco begins, as he is introduced to Portia’s challenge, which will ultimately invite him to judge each of the caskets by its appearance, its ‘complexion’. Venice, the city of masques and masks, is characterised by potentially deceptive exteriors, and the casket scenes in Shakespeare’s play form a crucial pivot around which the drama’s wider concerns about interpreting the possible disjunctions between the exteriors and interiors of people and things coalesce. The focus of this chapter is how the imaginative possibilities of early modern boxes like Shakespeare’s caskets – objects that prompt us to think about the dynamic relationships between insides and outsides of things, people, and words – can be traced back to one particular ancient literary analogue. As critics and editors of early modern drama have occasionally noted, a box that turns out to contain something unexpected 

Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ), p. .

Plato’s Silenus



finds an important parallel with an object described by Plato in the Symposium: the Silenus statue, which conceals a beautiful interior within an offputtingly ugly exterior. The Silenus statue had widespread appeal for early modern writers, because of its ready capacity to illustrate humanist ideas about the challenges of interpretation. Although Plato visualises a statue, not a box, what follows in this chapter will reveal the extent to which his object underpinned pervasive patterns of engaging closely with the creative potential of the dynamic between container and contained in early modern writing, and was eventually transformed from a statue into a box for these purposes. Plato invokes the Silenus towards the end of the Symposium, when the philosophical mood is disrupted by the arrival of the drunken politician Alcibiades who bursts in with a group of revellers, and persuades everyone to drink more wine. In response to Socrates’s disapproval, Alcibiades announces that he intends to eulogise Socrates, explaining ‘the way I shall take, gentlemen, in my praise of Socrates, is by similitudes. Probably he will think I do this for derision; but I choose my similitude for the sake of truth, not of ridicule’. In one of the most famous images of his tribute, Alcibiades likens Socrates to ‘the Silenus-figures that sit in the statuaries’ shops; those, I mean, which our craftsmen make with pipes or flutes in their hands: when their two halves are pulled open, they are found to contain images of gods’. The contrast between the rustic external appearance of these statues and the glory of the divine images they contain mirrors the person of Socrates, whose manner gives the impression of one who is ‘utterly stupid and ignorant’. However, Alcibiades explains, this behaviour is ‘an outward casing he wears, similarly to the sculptured Silenus’: if ‘you opened his inside, you cannot imagine how full he is, good companions, of sobriety’. Socrates spends his whole life ‘in chaffing and making game of his fellow-men’, and Alcibiades speaks at length about the frustrated attraction he feels towards this elusive character, turning the Silenus simile into a fullblown metaphor: ‘Whether anyone else has caught him in a serious moment and opened him, and seen the images inside, I know not; but I saw them one day, and thought them so divine and golden, so perfectly 



Frank Ardolino, ‘The Hangman’s Noose and the Empty Box: Kyd’s Use of Dramatic and Mythological Sources in The Spanish Tragedy (III.iv–vii)’, Renaissance Quarterly,  (), –; Barbara Baines, ‘Kyd’s Silenus Box and the Limits of Perception’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies,  (), –. Plato, Symposium, trans. W.R.M. Lamb (London: William Heinemann, ; reprinted ), a–b, e.



The Renaissance of the Box

fair and wondrous, that I simply had to do as Socrates bade me’. The effectiveness of the Silenus statue depends on the visual contrast between container and content to provoke surprise and delight, but at the same time this contrast also emphasises the value of what is within, which seems all the more wondrous because of the disparity with what is without. It is not just Socrates himself who must be ‘opened up’ in order to be fully understood. Alcibiades returns to the Sileni at the end of his speech, saying of Socrates: [. . .] his talk most of all resembles the Silenuses that are made to open. If you chose to listen to Socrates’ discourses you would feel them at first to be quite ridiculous; on the outside they are clothed with such absurd words and phrases – all, of course, the hide of a mocking satyr. His talk is of packasses, smiths, cobblers, and tanners, and he seems always to be using the same terms for the same things; so that anyone inexpert and thoughtless might laugh his speeches to scorn. But when these are opened, and you obtain a fresh view of them by getting inside, first of all you will discover that they are the only speeches which have any sense in them; and secondly, that none are so divine, so rich in images of virtue, so largely – nay, so completely – intent on all things proper for the study of such as would attain both grace and worth.

This famous passage establishes the Silenus statue as a model for the interpretation of ‘discourses’, and ‘speeches’, as well as the appearance and behaviour of individuals. While Socrates’s choice of ‘absurd words and phrases’ and subjects of ‘talk’ might seem ‘quite ridiculous’, worthy of ‘scorn’, they too represent the deceptive exterior of something that must be ‘opened’. The listener should be active in their intellectual curiosity, seeking to discover the ‘fresh view’ that is ‘inside’ what is being said. Socrates exemplifies the crucial slippage between the interpretation of personhood and the interpretation of language: while his ugly exterior and exasperating behaviour conceal a beautiful soul, his teachings also hide their ‘sense’ and ‘images of virtue’ inside a base, comic exterior, portrayed in the material, bodily terms of clothing and skin, ‘the hide of a mocking satyr’. The Symposium is one of Plato’s most theatrical works, and forces the reader to think inside the box in several ways. The Athenian symposium took place in a square room, with the furniture arranged around the edges to encourage reciprocal conversation. The room often lacked windows, and thus the physical setting was a sealed space in which the male guests 

Ibid., d, a.



Ibid., d–a.

Plato’s Silenus



focused on each other and their enjoyment of the sensual experiences of food, drink, music, and speeches. The arrival of Alcibiades is a social intrusion into this privileged box, but also an intellectual intrusion, for he speaks not in praise of love, like the others, but directly of his love for Socrates. Furthermore, in its dialogic form Plato’s text is itself an elaborate structure of consecutive narrative frames, by which each dialogue is nested within another, like a successive series of boxes to be opened. There are many effects of this formal feature of the text, among which is the powerful sense it evokes of the tantalising attraction of the search for hidden truths, epitomised by Socrates himself. Alcibiades’s particular use of similitudes tells us something about what boxes can do in the redrawing of categories – in this instance, showing us how an indecorous comparison is actually a true one, and a flattering one. Plato’s Silenus belongs to a long-established tradition of sacred figures that have a hollow, essentially box-like form. Since antiquity, the anthropomorphic statue or sculpture that can be opened to reveal something inside has been widespread in representations of divinity across many different cultures. The anthropologist Alfred Gell compares Plato’s Sileni to a contemporary Polynesian idol with an exterior covered in little figures of gods, containing further images within, and also to medieval ‘vierges ouvrantes’, statues of the Virgin Mary that opened to reveal the image of Christ, or the whole Church gathered under her protection. Sometimes used as tabernacles for consecrated hosts, these representations of Mary as ‘a box, a physical container that opened and closed like a winged altarpiece’ materialise the mother of God as the ultimate embodiment of a sacred vessel. As a human container for the divine, Mary’s body is enriched by the body within her, but at the same time, her humanity is essential to Christ’s identity as the Word made Flesh. In such objects, the interplay between a box and its content is invested with specific theological meaning, challenging our tendency to think of boxes as ‘less significant than their contents’.



  

Deborah Tarn Steiner, Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), chapter . See also Steiner, ‘For Love of a Statue: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium a–b’, Ramus,  (), –. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. –. Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), pp. – (p. ). Gell, Art and Agency, p. .



The Renaissance of the Box

The Polynesian idol and the ‘vierge ouvrante’ are both anthropomorphic statues, but Gell stresses that the spatial configuration of one thing inside something else can be enough to establish imputed agency. A stone inside a box can be seen as a locus of mind-like agency, for example, protected in a body-like way by the receptacle. Explicit anthropomorphism is not necessary, ‘so long as the crucial feature of concentricity and “containment” is preserved’. Idols are often found inside elaborately constructed sacred spaces, or a series of concentric boxes such as caskets, arks, and shrines, emphasising their interiority, and rituals may further accentuate the idol’s identity as both container and contained, and the mysterious inaccessibility of the divine. The hidden content draws the faithful continually inward, and the desire to see what is within signifies the desire for the kind of revelation that Alcibiades had when he saw that what was inside the ‘opened’ Socrates was ‘so divine and golden, so perfectly fair and wondrous’. Thus box-like forms provide a way of locating, materialising, and imagining divine agency, but if agency is more generally about having, as Gell puts it, a ‘significant interior’, boxes also model what it is to be human or pseudo-human. As an object that is designed to be, as Alcibiades says, ‘pulled open’ to reveal inner glories, the Silenus statue illustrates in the most material terms the need to think inside the box. It is a tactile object that invites the viewer to enact with their own hands the process of interpretation as one of ‘opening’. The glory of this content is belied by the object’s ugly outward appearance, and thus the Silenus statue epitomises the fundamental epistemological problem of the divergence between hidden interiors and visible exteriors. In the Symposium, the challenges of how to interpret a person and how to interpret words coalesce in Socrates. With the metaphor of the Silenus, Alcibiades articulates the dichotomy between what we comprehend and what is hidden, whether the outward forms are those of a person or their discourse. The Silenus embodies a crucial temporal dimension, too: as something that does not reach its full symbolic potential until it has been literally ‘pulled open’, it tells us that truth is not necessarily immediately accessible. The great irony of the Silenus statue as material object, though, is that it exists only in textual form. Although there have been plenty of visual representations of the rustic figure of Silenus, there are no extant examples of the statues Plato describes, and it is assumed that he does not refer to real objects (though similar statues containing intricate mechanisms, used 

Ibid., pp. , , . See also Steiner, Images in Mind, pp. –.

Erasmus and the Early Modern Sileni



for drinking games, do survive), but invents them for the purposes of Alcibiades’s speech. Plato embodies the problems of interpretation in a material object apparently found in ‘the statuaries’ shops’, making them tangible. However, this material object is one that must also be imagined: the reader must think through something tangible in order to understand the intangible, but this object, the metaphor of the Silenus statue, is in the end something that exists only in the imaginary realm. Ultimately it is this absence of the material artefact, however, that licenses the freedom of the imagination. The Silenus presents us with an instance not of the material world shaping human thought, but of thought creating and manipulating the material forms that it needs to model its own processes.

Erasmus and the Early Modern Sileni In early modern writing, the Silenus is resurrected as a commonplace model for thinking about how to discern truth from deceptive exteriors, whether of people, things, or texts, and it exemplifies many of the ways in which the technology of the box operates in the early modern imagination. Plato’s image is explicitly associated with Socrates, but the early modern Silenus proves adaptable to many different contexts. While the Silenus of the Symposium has a specific origin in ‘statuaries’ shops’, in the early modern period nobody is quite sure what this mysterious object looks like, what it is made from, or what exactly it contains. The box-like form of the object is always retained, but the material properties of the early modern Silenus have many variations. An object that exists only in the realm of the imagination, the Silenus is at once specific and labile. In its early modern reimaginings, its distinctiveness as a unique kind of box with a single textual origin becomes slippery, and often impossible to pin down in exact terms. The earliest known textual reference in Renaissance Europe to Alcibiades’s praise of Socrates is in a letter of  from the humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola to Ermolao Barbaro, in which he defends the writing style of the scholastics, whose ‘barbaric’ words contain hidden wisdom. While Plato’s vivid image may seem to offer much potential for  

François Lissarrague, The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet: Images of Wine and Ritual, trans. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), p. . Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Opera Omnia,  vols (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, ), I, p. . The passage from this letter is cited in translation by Edith Wyss, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas in the Art of the Italian Renaissance: An Enquiry into the Meaning of Images (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, ), p. . See also pp. –, –.



The Renaissance of the Box

visual representation, there are very few pictorial illustrations of the ‘sculptured Silenus’. This failure of the Silenus figure to inspire visual representations, even though there are many images of the original Silenus and his drunken followers, may be attributed partly to the fact that the artefact Plato describes is not an inert object. It derives its power from the very act of being opened to reveal its inner glories, and so the flat, static nature of the painting or drawing does not allow the Silenus figure to work to its full potential. Instead, it is the textual arena that provides the temporal dimension necessary for the Silenus figure to operate, and the most sustained textual engagement in the sixteenth century comes from Erasmus. While Erasmus frequently refers to the Sileni as useful images, it is in the Adages, his monumental handbook of commentaries on thousands of Greek and Latin quotations, that he dwells upon them at greatest length. Plato’s memorable Silenus figure has an obvious place in this compendium of numerous discrete rhetorical exercises, each of which is concerned with revealing the wisdom hidden in ancient literature. Erasmus continually expanded the Adages until his death, and Sileni Alcibiades is one of his longest entries; consisting in  of just a few sentences, by  it had been reworked and extended to hundreds of times its original length, with a few more additions in / and . After his opening claim that the Silenus ‘seems to have passed into a proverb among educated people’, Erasmus’s description summarises their key material properties: [they are] said to have been a kind of small figure of carved wood, so made that they could be divided and opened. Thus, though when closed they looked like a caricature of a hideous flute-player, when opened they suddenly displayed a deity, so that this humorous surprise made the carver’s skill all the more admirable.

These objects exist as a kind of rumour – we know only what they are ‘said to have been’, and so they are mysterious things of the distant past. Erasmus claims that they were made of ‘carved wood’, a detail that is not given by Plato, who specifies only that they are found in ‘statuaries’ shops’, which might well suggest other materials such as clay or stone. Erasmus’s reference to ‘carved wood’ gives particularity to these 



For further discussion of the early modern visual culture of the Silenus statue, see Lucy Razzall, ‘Non intus ut extra: The Emblematic Silenus in Early Modern Literature’, Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies,  (), –. Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works [hereafter CWE],  vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, –), , p. .

Erasmus and the Early Modern Sileni



half-forgotten antique objects, bringing them more sharply into focus and emphasising their box-like materiality. Finally, this passage draws attention to these objects as things of ‘humorous surprise’, which show off the ‘skill’ of their maker when they ‘suddenly’ reveal an inside that contrasts dramatically with their ‘hideous’ external appearance. Again, Plato’s description does not explicitly mention the suddenness of the Silenus’s revelation, and so this is another elaboration from Erasmus, who turns the Silenus into something entertaining, like a sort of jack-in-the-box, as well as instructive. While Alcibiades explains that Socrates had a laughable exterior but a serious interior, for Erasmus it is, crucially, the very act of revealing what is inside that prompts enjoyment. The Silenus figure originally offered a model for explaining the person and discourses of Socrates, but in Sileni Alcibiades, having explained the basic principles of the object, Erasmus argues for its universality. The pagan Silenus simile is applicable to numerous other individuals from the classical past, but also to biblical protagonists such as John the Baptist, a humble man of the desert ‘clothed in camelhair with a leather girdle round his loins’, who in his actions ‘far surpassed kings with their purple and their precious stones’. Many saints are notable for their asceticism, but the figure of John the Baptist is particularly iconic, and with long hair, a beard, and ragged clothing, his appearance is not entirely dissimilar to illustrations of the wild followers of Silenus, or even of Socrates himself. The iconography of John the Baptist would have been familiar in sixteenth-century Europe from visual representations including devotional statues, and thus while Erasmus says that the Silenus figure provides one way of thinking about this saint, we might wonder whether traditional representations of John the Baptist influenced how Erasmus imagines the Silenus, a comparable ‘small figure of carved wood’. Furthermore, it is significant here, although Erasmus does not explicitly make this point, that John the Baptist is a prophet. As a man whose purpose is to unfold what is to come (he is often depicted pointing away from himself with his index finger, signalling the imminent arrival of Christ), John the Baptist’s role is one of temporal significance. He thus embodies another important feature of the Silenus as a box with mysterious content, the full revelation of which is contingent on time itself.



For a detailed study of carved wooden statues in the early sixteenth century, including John the Baptist, see Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, ).



The Renaissance of the Box

For Erasmus, the ultimate example is Christ, ‘a marvellous Silenus’, and the earliest event at which we might see ‘this Silenus, open’ is the Epiphany – the visit of the wise men to Bethlehem. In his Paraphrase on Matthew Erasmus meditates on this occasion at some length, describing how a ‘marvellous star’ led the visitors to ‘the very hut, plain and lowly, and on this account difficult to find’. Following this ‘celestial guide’, they saw as the palace of the new king a mean and paltry cottage, a mere stable. Their sincere godliness was not at all shaken by this. They entered. They found the infant looking like any other; they found the mother exhibiting no sign of how extraordinary she was. All their furnishings attested to their poverty and simplicity. The Magi, who had not worshipped Herod, a man who exalted himself with royal pomp as he sat on his throne, prostrated themselves at the cradle of the crying child, and bending low worshipped one who could not yet speak.

Erasmus makes much of the lowliness of the building in which they find the ‘new king’, emphasising its ‘mean and paltry’ nature with multiple nouns for this ‘palace’: Christ is found in a ‘hut’, a ‘cottage’, a ‘stable’. The Magi are not dissuaded by the humbleness of the dwelling – their ‘sincere godliness was not at all shaken’ – and Erasmus dramatically isolates the very moment of their ingress with a sentence of just two words: ‘they entered’. The mother and child show no sign of their glory; indeed, like the building in which they are discovered, their ‘furnishings’ are poor and simple. At the centre of this epiphanic scene is a king who is not on a ‘throne’, like the evil Herod, but contained in a ‘cradle’. The entire picture is a concentric collection of exemplary Sileni, and a series of boxes: the divine Saviour of the world is embodied in a helpless child, lying in a manger, in ‘a mere stable’, in an obscure town. In the Epiphany narrative, which appears only in Matthew’s gospel, the evangelist dramatises the presentation of gifts to Christ by the Magi: ‘When they saw the starre, they were marveylously gladd, And entred into the house, and found the childe with Mary hys mother, and kneled doune and worshipped hym, and opened there treaseures, and offred unto hym gyftes, gold, franckynscence, and myr’ (:). With particular precision, the evangelist draws attention to the moment at which, after they had knelt in front of the child, the Magi ‘opened there treaseures’ – a phrase used not just in Tyndale’s translation, quoted here, but in all English 

CWE , pp. –.

Erasmus and the Early Modern Sileni



versions of the passage. The revelation of Christ to the world is mirrored by another act of opening, whereby the gifts from the Magi reveal contents that in turn symbolically reveal important things about the child. In his Paraphrase Erasmus cannot resist this multiplicity of revelations, adding another imaginary opening: ‘Not satisfied with this act of piety, they took from their bags the gifts intended for the child’. With these gifts, he explains, the Magi consecrated Christ as theirs and dedicated themselves in turn to him, offering a new sacrifice in three kinds of things, already as though through a riddle professing that ineffable Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – and at the same time recognizing in one man mortality, priesthood, and kingship. For gold suits a king, frankincense a priest, and myrrh one who is going to die.

A ‘riddle’ is a neat verbal conceit which, like the Silenus, hides something inside itself. In this riddle, the ‘three kinds of things’ – gold, frankincense, and myrrh – are the outward material signs of the glory of the Trinity, and of this child’s ‘mortality, priesthood, and kingship’. These luxurious materials express the glories that cannot be seen outwardly in the humility of the stable scene, and they also foreshadow things that are yet to be revealed. The gifts have been on a geographical journey from the East in order to be physically and symbolically ‘opened’, but their eschatological purpose means that they also travel through time. Their opening, or epiphany, is ongoing; a continuous, unending process. The ‘Adoration of the Magi’ was a favourite subject in visual art from at least the fourteenth century, and in depictions of this scene the gifts brought by the visitors from the East are usually very prominent. Sometimes they are richly decorated boxes that lie open to reveal their treasures, and sometimes they are depicted in the hands of the visitors at the very moment of opening – an iconographical detail that seems to pick up on Matthew’s very particular phrasing. The infant in Albrecht Du¨rer’s ‘Adoration of the Magi’ (–), for example, leans forward from his mother’s lap to open the box of gold with his right hand, while one of the visitors pulls more gifts from a bag around his waist. In the ‘Adoration of the Magi’ (c. ) by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, a jewelled box lies open in the foreground of the painting, mirroring the box-like manger  

Ibid., p. . For an excellent discussion of representations of the vessels for the gifts brought by the Magi, see Allison Stielau, ‘The Case of the Case for Early Modern Objects and Images’, Kritische Berichte, ., – (pp. –).



The Renaissance of the Box

containing the Christ-child. The iconography of such scenes means we cannot fail to witness that truths are being ‘opened’ for us by the guiding hands of others, and sometimes even by the hand of Christ himself. The New Testament Paraphrases, with which Erasmus promises to explain God’s plan, so ‘secret and inscrutable to human minds’, have a comparable function to these paintings. In bringing the events of the gospel to life in vivid detail, they offer to ‘open’ the scriptures, allowing a glimpse of the glory they contain. As an exercise that aims to reveal hidden meaning in a text, it is the exposition or exegesis, of all literary forms, that may most readily be compared with the opening of a Silenus. Although the Silenus works as an example of the ‘darke conceit’ of allegory more generally, in which truth is disguised or ‘clowdily enwrapped’, it seems a particularly relevant image in the context of scriptural exegesis, where what is under scrutiny is the dynamic between the profanity of the written word and the hidden glory of God. Erasmus explains in Sileni Alcibiades, for example, that although some of the stories in the Old Testament seem completely repugnant, ‘yet under these wrappings, in heaven’s name, how splendid is the wisdom that lies hidden!’ The ‘wrappings’ of scriptural Sileni may be as off-putting as the rough clothing and skin of Socrates, but like the outer casings of the great philosopher, they actually conceal glorious ‘wisdom’. At the same time, however, it is during Erasmus’s discussions of scriptural exegesis that we see the Silenus metaphor at its most blurry and inconsistent, jostling with other metaphors with alternative imaginative nuances. Unwrapping something is similar to, yet not necessarily the same as, opening a box but Erasmus uses both of these images in his conception of the Silenus. ‘Pause at the surface’, he urges the reader in the same passage of Sileni Alcibiades, and ‘what you see is sometimes ridiculous; were you to pierce to the heart of the allegory you would venerate the divine wisdom’. Here the process of accessing ‘divine wisdom’ does not require the reader to open or unwrap, but to ‘pierce’ a surface in order to get to the ‘heart’, the epitome of innermost things. The surface is ‘ridiculous’, and conceals something of much greater quality, but it must be penetrated, a metaphor that invokes yet further associations.

  

CWE , p. . These oft-cited terms are taken from Edmund Spenser’s letter to Raleigh in The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (London: Penguin, ), pp. –.  CWE , p. . Ibid.

Erasmus and the Early Modern Sileni



Thus the Erasmian Silenus cannot be disentangled from a collection of metaphors that envisage the relationship between reader and text in particularly material ways. Erasmus wrote his exposition of Psalm  (Enarratio psalmi ) in – for the prince-bishop of Wu¨rzburg, a great patron of scholars, and informs his recipient in an accompanying letter: in order not to detain your most reverend highness with a futile letter containing nothing but the ordinary courtesy of a greeting, I have added a recent small work of mine, a psalm which I have expounded, so that it may serve not only to remind you of your dependant, but can also be stored like a gift and drawn from at will [. . .] or be of some use when you turn your attention from outward affairs to spiritual matters.

The exposition is modestly presented as ‘a recent small work’, and so is another kind of Silenus, something that is unassuming on the outside, but richer within. This ‘gift’ can be ‘drawn from’, like a well, implying that it is a source of much life-giving sustenance, and so it is paradoxically at once ‘small’ and potentially bottomless. While the exposition is clearly lengthy, Erasmus describes it as a ‘small work’, his words resonating with Seneca’s claim that gifts that are ‘large in bulk and in appearance’ are not necessarily better than little things: ‘a gift given with a ready hand is much more appreciated than one given with a generous hand’. Indeed, Erasmus offers a gift that will help the reader to focus on ‘spiritual matters’ rather than ‘outward affairs’, and thus is it is the best kind of offering; in Seneca’s words, it is a gift for which ‘the business is carried out with one’s mind’. While the image of the Silenus is only implicit in his dedicatory letter, Erasmus brings it directly into the main text. After providing an account of the life of David, he pauses to address the reader directly: So far I know you think that you have not heard anything important. This is not surprising, since I have shown you only the shell of the nut, you have tasted only the husk of the grain, and I have been showing you, till now, a closed Silenus. If the Lord will deign to be present with us, then as we crack open the nut, as we grind fine flour, as we open the Silenus, your minds will be delighted with spiritual dainties and fed with health-giving food, and will be astonished in the contemplation of divine wisdom.

In this passage the images of the ‘shell of the nut’, ‘the husk of the grain’, and the ‘closed Silenus’ are intermingled to the point that the reader does   

CWE , p. . Seneca, On Benefits, trans. Miriam Griffin and Brad Inwood (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, ), pp. , . CWE , pp. –.



The Renaissance of the Box

not know exactly what they are to imagine. We know that Erasmus supposes the Sileni to have been made from wood, and these three things – Silenus, husk, and nutshell – all invoke a similarly hard, box-like exterior. The mixture of different processes associated with accessing the hidden nourishment adds to the confusion in this passage, however. The nut must be cracked open, suggesting applied force and suddenness, but the ‘grain’ inside the ‘husk’ must be ground for ‘fine flour’ to be produced, an image that suggests sustained labour, not an immediate revelation. The ‘closed Silenus’ is something we have to ‘open’, but Erasmus does not offer any more elaboration on this, only that these processes will result in the overwhelming combination of being ‘delighted with spiritual dainties’, ‘fed with health-giving food’, and finally ‘astonished in the contemplation of divine wisdom’. After all these promises of immediate rapture and gradual sustenance, it is almost disappointing when Erasmus confirms that for Psalm , ‘if we open the Silenus, we shall see that in that human David there is hidden another, more sublime, David, and in Saul another and more dangerous tyrant’. David and Saul were not what they seemed, but inside they turn out to be intensified versions of themselves, demonstrated by images that are ‘more sublime’ and ‘more dangerous’, respectively. The hermeneutic image of the kernel was made famous by St Augustine: Those things, again, whether only sayings or actual deeds, which appear to the inexperienced to be sinful, and which are ascribed to God, or to men whose holiness is put before us as an example, are wholly figurative, and the hidden kernel of meaning they contain is to be picked out as food for the nourishment of charity.

The ‘hidden kernel of meaning’ has widespread metaphorical potential, especially in scriptural exegesis, and Erasmus uses it to explain that the gospels feature many Sileni in the form of parables, which: if you judge them by their outward shell, would be thought, surely, by everyone to be the work of an ignoramus. Crack the nutshell and of course you will find that hidden wisdom which is truly divine, something in truth very like Christ Himself.

  

Ibid., p. . Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, ), p. . CWE , p. .

Erasmus and the Early Modern Sileni



As literary forms that disguise glorious secrets inside deceptive external matter, the parables are exemplary Sileni. At the same time, the wooden Silenus is itself like the very stuff of parables, which make use of homely materials like seeds and wheat to reveal the glory of the divine. The parables demonstrate how we should approach the holy scriptures more generally; as Erasmus explains in his Handbook of the Christian Soldier (Enchiridion militis Christiani), ‘If one touches only the surface or the husk, so to speak, of Scripture, what is harder or more unpleasant to the touch? [. . .] Search out the spiritual meaning, and you will find nothing more sweet or succulent’. His explanations reveal the difficulty of pinning down interpretation in sensual terms that stray from the largely visual effect of Plato’s Silenus: scripture has a hard shell, which is ‘unpleasant to the touch’ and must be opened with the hands, like the rough Silenus statue, but what is inside is ‘sweet or succulent’, something to be tasted and ingested. The placing of the ‘sweet and succulent’ content of scripture inside an ‘unpleasant’ exterior is as deliberate as the construction of the statues Plato imagines sitting on the shelves of the ‘statuaries’ shops’. ‘What happened did not happen accidentally but through God’s particular dispensation’, Erasmus tells the reader in the exposition of Psalm . However, as the exposition progresses, the Silenus gives way to other, more complex containing structures. Making another direct comment about his own role as exegete, Erasmus writes: ‘I have opened the doors, but before we can enter this holy of holies we must bow our heads; otherwise, if we carry them high, we shall injure ourselves. The doorway is low, but within is revealed the greatness of what is heavenly’. By now, the process of scriptural interpretation has become a much grander one of opening doors (note the plural noun – there are multiple entrances, rather than just one shell to be cracked), drawing on Christ’s own imagery of the ‘strait’ gate and ‘narrow’ way to salvation in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew :–). While the ‘doorway’ to the ‘holy of holies’ Erasmus depicts is similarly ‘low’, the image is nonetheless more spacious than the Silenus, and encourages the reader to imagine entering a building, rather than opening a small object with their hands. Like the Silenus, this architectural metaphor gives the text a three-dimensional form, at the heart of which lies something of ‘greatness’, but the temple-like structure is a box that opens onto yet further boxes, in a much more elaborate imagining of the non-physical in terms of physical experience. 

CWE , p. .



CWE , p. .



The Renaissance of the Box

Erasmus’s depiction of the process of interpretation insists on a key role for the exegete: in order to get inside the Silenus and access the treasures it contains, an intermediary becomes necessary, whether to crack the nutshell or to open multiple doors. This is justified by Christ himself in the gospels, who intervenes for the disciples, Erasmus reminds us: ‘[he] opened the Scriptures to them, beginning with Moses and all the prophets’. Erasmus borrows these words from Luke’s description of the encounter on the road to Emmaus (:–), when the disciples did not recognise the risen Christ as he walked alongside them. Again, the opening of this Silenus is gradual, not immediate, for the disciples fail to identify the mysterious stranger (‘their eyes were holden, that they coulde nott knowe hym’, :) until they reach Emmaus and have shared a meal with him, even though he has spent the duration of the journey explaining the prophecies concerning himself. Erasmus turns his attention directly to the transitive verb, which occurs several times in the gospels: ‘What is the meaning of “opened”? It means he showed them the allegory hidden in the history’. In opening the scriptures for the disciples, Christ ‘showed’ them what was contained within, and thus he is the epitome of the scriptural exegete. One of Erasmus’s more extended examples of Christ as exegete concerns the Old Testament story of Jonah and the whale. This can be read as an historical narrative of one man’s remarkable escape from death, Erasmus writes, but Christ taught us to consider whether it might show us anything further: The prophet Jonah was swallowed by a whale and on the third day spewed out again alive. This is not a fiction: what is told really happened. But is there nothing else it represents to us? We could believe that nothing else is concealed if Christ had not stooped to open the mystery, saying, ‘A sign will not be given to them except the sign of Jonah the prophet: as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth’. Do you see what power and holiness is enclosed within that Silenus?

Citing the response given by Christ to the scribes and the Pharisees in Matthew :– when they ask him for a ‘sign’ that will prove what he says is to come, Erasmus cannot resist this paradigm of Christian typology, which brings together two episodes of literal containment, of Jonah in the ‘belly of the whale’ and Christ in ‘the heart of the earth’. Many other examples from the gospels would work here to illustrate Christ ‘opening’ 

Ibid.



Ibid., p. .

Erasmus and the Early Modern Sileni



the scriptures, but Erasmus appears particularly drawn to this one because the images involved, concerned as they are with physical enclosure, seem especially efficacious in the context of the Silenus. His parallel phrasing emphasises that in the typological framework, the ‘belly of the whale’ and the ‘heart of the earth’ are spatially and temporally equivalent, each enclosing for ‘three days and three nights’ a figure of great importance in the story of mankind. The metaphorical ‘opening’ of the divine mystery is underpinned by two iconic narratives of individuals conquering death by breaking out of enclosed spaces. The typological relationship between Jonah in the ‘belly of the whale’ and Christ in the ‘heart of the earth’ is further reinforced by the length of time – three days – that each man spends inside this space of containment. Not only are the spatial structures doubled, but the temporal structures too. The juxtaposition of these narratives thus underlines the crucial temporal dimension of the Silenus, as something that defers the moment of revelation. Jonah is a prophet, a man whose words contain a truth that has yet to be fulfilled; like the Silenus, a prophecy is contingent on temporality for its inner meaning to be brought to light. ‘The whole of Scripture has a mystical meaning’, Erasmus emphasises, and Christ himself ‘stooped to open the mystery’ by explaining that his own death was prefigured in the story of Jonah and the whale. Thus the temporal dimension of the Silenus exists, ironically, outside chronological order, as shown by the way that Christ looked back to the Old Testament in order to ‘open the mystery’ of the present. In its explanation of Christ’s interpretative endeavours, Erasmus’s text doubles the exegesis again, reiterating Christ’s act of opening, and permitting its author to articulate an indispensable role for the sixteenth-century humanist as textual midwife, guide, or gatekeeper. The central message that the reader takes away from the exposition of Psalm  is that the opening of scripture can rarely be achieved without some kind of assistance, human or divine. Ultimately, Erasmus argues, the successful opening of scripture depends on a combination of personal wisdom and faith in God: ‘If we cannot find the mystery, we should recognize that we are slow of wit or unworthy and not blame Scripture; we should try to acquire more learning and repeatedly ask the Lord to open  

Ibid., p. . On the humanist as teacher, see Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ); Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).



The Renaissance of the Box

the hidden treasure for us’. ‘It is in fact the same in nature and in the mysteries of religion’, he clarifies in Sileni Alcibiades: ‘the more excellent a thing is, the more deeply it is hidden, and far removed from uninitiated eyes’. There is a hierarchy of hiddenness, then: while all excellent things are hidden, some things are more excellent than others, and so are ‘more deeply’ hidden. While this evaluation of the world in which the highest forms of things are those that cannot be accessed through physical sensations is appropriately Platonic, it also suggests the complexities of the Silenus in its Erasmian incarnation. The opening of the Silenus is not necessarily something that may be done easily or quickly – it may require a considerable amount of effort, especially for those with ‘uninitiated eyes’. Even when it is opened, discovery is not immediately guaranteed, because the more valuable things are ‘more deeply’ concealed within the interior. With the Silenus and related metaphors, Erasmus sets up an echoic structure in which the perception of depth (or hidden content) in the text is evidence of the reader’s own intellectual and spiritual depth, a way to distinguish between different calibres of interpreter, or between the good Christian and the ‘worldly man’. The reader’s skill as an exegete reflects the depth of his own intellect, but also, more dangerously, his chance of salvation. This brings us to one of the most highly charged issues of Erasmus’s religious context: while his writings on the holy scriptures allow for (and often prescribe) the assistance of a mediatory force to ‘open’ them, one of the central claims of contemporary reformers was that the Bible needed no interpretative effort, because its meanings were unambiguous, and its inherent clarity did not need external manipulation. Reformers were suspicious of allegorical forms and attendant claims about the need to find hidden meaning: if the Word of God was not understood, they argued, it was because it was not being read correctly by the individual. Writing on the brink of the Reformation, Erasmus offers a scriptural hermeneutic that eludes confessional distinction. While he embraces the metaphorical potential of the Silenus and other box-like forms such as the nutshell or the ‘holy of holies’, praising the humanist exegete who opens them, it is clear that it is ultimately the responsibility of the individual to

 



 CWE , p. . CWE , p. . For a recent critical overview of this hermeneutic tradition, see Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious’, Representations,  (), –; and in the same journal issue, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, –. CWE , pp. –.

Erasmus and the Early Modern Sileni



interpret scripture, whether or not this involves invoking another force, human or divine. For Erasmus, the Silenus figure presents an object infinitely more flexible than the statue on the shelf in Plato’s imagined shop. Of all his writings, it is the paradoxical Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium, ) that most epitomises the slipperiness of the Silenus. Presented as a learned but entertaining joke, it is an endlessly elusive work of multiple layers, which continually hide and reveal wisdom. This is despite Folly’s opening claim that I’ve no use for cosmetics, my face doesn’t pretend to be anything different from my innermost feelings. I am myself wherever I am, and no one can pretend I’m not – especially those who lay special claim to be called the personification of wisdom, even though they strut about like apes in purple and asses in lion-skins.

In contrast to her own apparently completely transparent identity, Folly tells us, it’s well known that all human affairs are like the figures of Silenus described by Alcibiades and have two completely opposite faces, so that what is death at first sight, as they say, is life if you look within, and vice versa, life is death. The same applies to beauty and ugliness, riches and poverty, obscurity and fame, learning and ignorance, strength and weakness, the noble and the baseborn, happy and sad, good and bad fortune, friend and foe, healthy and harmful – in fact you’ll find everything suddenly reversed if you open the Silenus [. . .].

According to Folly, all aspects of human existence and experience can be thought of in terms of Plato’s Silenus figure, in a relationship of opposites between inside and outside, or container and contained. The pagan Silenus is assimilated into Erasmian thought as a neat way to synthesise Christian and humanist moral codes, by which earthly poverty is linked to heavenly riches, and true virtue comes from learning, not from nobility of birth, for example. The figure of Folly, the wise fool, is like Christ and Socrates in her speech, explaining both Christian and pagan truths even as she seems completely elusive. In the Symposium, Alcibiades describes Socrates’s speech as full of ‘packasses, smiths, cobblers, and tanners’, subjects that invoke a strong, visceral sense of the material: of physical labour, but also of skilled craftsmanship and the manipulation of materials to produce useful, necessary things. The Silenus statue fits readily into such a frame, as a tactile box, which has been 

CWE , pp. –.



Ibid., pp. –.



The Renaissance of the Box

artfully constructed by human hands, depends on human hands to be opened, and serves an instructive as well as entertaining purpose. For Erasmus, as for Plato, the Silenus is something that consistently applies to the interpretation of both people and texts. The additional irony of the Erasmian Silenus is that this rough, pagan metaphor turns out to contain the wisdom necessary for scriptural exegesis, and through this ancient object, the faithful are brought closer to true Christian understanding. Indeed, the embracing of the Silenus metaphor is part of Erasmus’s broader humanist defence of classical texts as rich sources of wisdom. The usefulness of the Silenus is symptomatic of the versatility of antiquity more generally, an illustration of how ‘multivalence enhances the practical utility of an authority supposedly grounded in another kind of priority’. To recognise the value of the Silenus image is to participate in the universal unfolding of the Christian narrative, and even to imitate Christ himself, the greatest of all Sileni. The temporal structure of revelation encoded in the Silenus is central to Christian understanding, both in its intermittent epiphanies or revelations of divine will, and in the apocalyptic shape of history as continually being opened. For Erasmus, the strengths of the Silenus as a metaphor are those involving its capacity to inspire wonder, marvel, and curiosity; in other words, the irrational desires that underpin religious faith. Although he was explicitly suspicious of some of the material artefacts associated with traditional Catholic devotion (I will return to this in later chapters), Erasmus recognised the potential of the material realm to draw the faithful closer to the spiritual. His extensive engagement with the Silenus represents one way of negotiating between these difficulties, because it involves a statue that is pagan, not Christian, and moreover, an object that probably never actually existed. The ever-shifting identity of the Silenus in Erasmus’s writing means that it remains unclear what exactly we are supposed to imagine when we are told to think of this object. Like the Praise of Folly, the Erasmian Silenus embodies a paradox of simultaneous specificity and non-specificity. We can be certain that it contains something of significance, but the process of accessing what is within is infinitely variable. The Silenus statue is always being made to work as a metaphor, an imagined material object, but as its appearances in Erasmus’s writing demonstrate, this ironically results in a repudiation of materiality, as the metaphor effaces the container on which it itself depends for effect. Plato’s Silenus figure turns out to be, in its 

Mary Jane Barnett, ‘Erasmus and the Hermeneutics of Linguistic Praxis’, Renaissance Quarterly,  (), – (p. ).

Curious Statues, Capricious Caskets



sixteenth-century literary renaissance, something capable of quite dramatic metamorphosis, epitomising how boxes are good to think with, especially when they have the malleability of the imaginary.

Curious Statues, Capricious Caskets Beyond Erasmus, the Silenus endures in sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury English writing as something neat, concrete, and quotable, but it remains the case more widely that no one is quite sure exactly what the material artefact underpinning this commonplace looked like, or what it contained. The early modern imagination gave material form to an object that did not exist, and which had probably never existed, but whose affordances – specifically, an embodied relationship of opposition between container and content – have rich metaphorical potential. Thus the Silenus is also part of the lively Renaissance tradition of paradoxes, adages, proverbs, sententiae, and emblems, readily occupying a place in the period’s virtual commonplace book. The Dutch poet Jacob Cats gave the title Silenus Alcibiadis, sive Proteus to what would become one of his most popular emblem books. While this title embraces the emblematic potency of the Silenus, there are no visual representations of the Silenus statue among the many illustrations in the volume. One clue to this absence is found in the book’s title, which also refers to the Greek figure of Proteus, the sea god who could assume any shape. With this unexpected link between two ancient figures, Cats reminds us of the protean nature of the Silenus, which has a flexible immateriality for early modern writers. As it became absorbed in particular into the rhetoric of religious polemic in post-Reformation England, the fate of the early modern Silenus was to lose its specific identity as a hollow statue, and to be transformed into other kinds of boxes whose relationship to what they contained was potentially highly charged. In early modern English texts the Silenus is most frequently found, appropriately, among the prefatory matter. One of the purposes of the prologues, letters, and other preambles that may occupy the first few pages of a printed work is to direct the reader’s approach to what is contained within, explaining ‘this is why and this is how you should read this book’.  

Jacob Cats, Silenus Alcibiadis, sive Proteus, Vitae humanae ideam, Emblemate trifariam variato, oculis subijciens (Middelburg: Johannis Hellenij, ). Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .



The Renaissance of the Box

As an object that demonstrates the art of interpretation, Plato’s Silenus is a fitting metaphor to be employed in the pages that set themselves apart as a literal and intellectual outside, a box with richer content inside. In the epistle dedicatory to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in Robert Peterson’s late sixteenth-century translation of Giovanni della Casa’s manual of social conduct, for instance, the translator praises the dedicatee for his ‘so singular demeanour’, for being ‘so civil, so courteous, as maketh you renouned abrode, and honored at home: coveted of the Noblest, & wonderful of the learnedst’. Peterson follows his unequivocal praise of his famous dedicatee with a reminder of the less conventional way in which Alcibiades praised Socrates in the Symposium. The readers of his translation ‘shal herein see no lesse commoditie, then was in Alcibiades Sileni (whereunto Socrates was compared) whiche though they bare not, in the front, any shewe of singularitie: yet within, bare they pictures of excellent wit & delight’. Peterson’s description of ‘Alcibiades Sileni’ makes them sound as if they were themselves books: containing ‘pictures of excellent wit & delight’, they could be volumes of emblems. As the reader holds Peterson’s book in their hands, they are directed to look for the ‘excellent wit & delight’ it contains, even if it appears superficially unpromising. Peterson’s phrasing also demonstrates how, as in Erasmus’s Adages, the early modern Sileni are almost always referred to as the ‘Sileni of Alcibiades’, rather than ‘of Plato’, or ‘of Plato’s Symposium’. Although Peterson parenthetically reminds the reader that the Sileni were originally used in connection with Socrates, this link is not always made explicit by early modern writers. This detachment of the Sileni from Plato and Plato’s text, and the emphasis on their identity as things ‘of Alcibiades’, unfixes them from a potentially controversial author and makes them into a more generalised, versatile classicism. Sometimes the Silenus is invoked in very vague terms, without any tangible material characteristics. In a posthumously published defence of the study of theology by a young Protestant named Nathaniel Pownall, the Sileni appear after a discussion of the famous competition held between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius to see ‘which had the masterie in his art’. Parrhasius, who deceived his fellow painter with ‘his figured artificiall vaile’ and was deemed to have won the contest, produced ‘the true emblem of Judicious silence’. Pownall criticises those students of theology who have too much to say for themselves: like ‘superficiall Artizans’, such men 

Robert Peterson, Treatise of the manners and behaviour, it behoveth a man to use and eschewe in his familiar conversation (London: Henry Middleton for Raufe Newbery, ), Aiiv–Aiiir.

Curious Statues, Capricious Caskets



believe that there is ‘nothing at all covered under the vaile of judicious silence’. ‘Whereas indeede’, he argues: as in the auncie[n]t Sileni (curious statues so cunningly contrived, that while they were closed, they seemed rough hewne and deformed, but unjoyned appeared most curious) there is much beautie within, though at first little shewe without. So that in the end all will with the Orator, prefer the discreete silence of the one, before the others fond babling.

Pownall is fascinated by the idea of the ‘auncie[n]t Sileni’, but seems at a loss as to how to depict them, describing them as ‘curious statues’ when ‘closed’ but also ‘most curious’ when ‘unjoyned’. Though we are told that they were ‘cunningly contrived’, Pownall does not give a specific description of what they looked like. Apart from saying that they ‘seemed rough hewne and deformed’, he leaves the ideas of the ‘cunning’ and the ‘curious’ to suffice in their useful imprecision. Inside these Sileni there is ‘much beautie’, but Pownall is again vague, not elaborating on this abstract noun. Although his rhetorical point turns on the contrast between ‘within’ and ‘without’, his picture is devoid of any concrete details: an emblematic image paradoxically almost without any substance. In their indistinctness, Nathaniel Pownall’s Sileni are similar to those of Francis Meres, who includes them in his book of similes, describing them as ‘unpolished without, but curiously and with great Art wrought within’. In this context they are used to illustrate virtue, which ‘outwardly seemeth rough, when inwardly it is full of beautie’. It may well be that Pownall drew directly from Meres’s volume, a popular commonplace book for the ornamentation of speech. While Meres catalogues the Silenus as one among many ways of emblematising virtue, Pownall employs this metaphor to justify the more specific virtue of ‘discreete silence’, referring to Cicero (‘the Orator’), who, as early moderns were aware, had praised the eloquence of silence. Although Pownall does not make explicit reference to Socrates, his ‘fond babling’ echoes Alcibiades’s commentary on the philosopher’s ‘absurd words and phrases’, speech that seems insubstantial. In this appropriation of the Silenus, however, ‘fond babling’ is found to contain nothing, and it is instead nothingness – ‘the vaile of judicious   

Nathaniel Pownall, The young divines apologie for his continuance in the Universitie with certaine meditations (London: Cantrell Legge, ), p. . Francis Meres, Palladis tamia, Wits Treasury being the second part of Wits common wealth (London: P. Short for Cuthbert Burbie, ), p. . See for example, Francis Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (VIII, i) in Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath,  vols (London: Longman and Co., –), IX.



The Renaissance of the Box

silence’ – that contains the most. Through this transformation of Plato’s image, and apparent word-play on ‘Silenus’ and ‘silence’, Pownall illustrates the way in which its materiality can collapse under the weight of its metaphorical potential. The trope is crucially dependent on the material affordances of the Silenus, but even as it carries out its rhetorical purpose, this materiality is replaced by the ultimate non-materiality of ‘discreete silence’. Sometimes, however, early modern writers do have a more specific conception of the material form of the Silenus, and what was contained inside it. In his mythological poem The third part of the countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch, Abraham Fraunce brings the Sileni into a passage of commentary on the similarities between poets and painters, a standard concern for early modern writers. Each Ovidian episode in the poem is followed by a lengthy reflection in prose, by an old shepherd called Elpinus. In his first gloss, Elpinus explains the commonplace idea that in poetry profound mysteries are hidden beneath ‘an amyable figure and delightsome veyle’. He elaborates as the learned Indians, Æthiopians, and Ægyptians kept their doctrine religiously secret for fear of prophanation, so the Grecians by their example, have wrapped up in tales such sweete inventions, as of the learned unfolder may well be deemed wonderfull, though to a vulgar conceit, they seeme but frivolous imaginations.

This physical imagery of wrapping and unfolding emphasises the processual aspects of both writing and interpreting in tactile terms, and makes the text into a sacred object, which hides its riches in the profane exterior of language. It is then an easy step from pagan texts to the JudaeoChristian scriptures: Yea that song of the most wise Salomon, called for the excellencie thereof the song of songs, is altogether mysticall and allegoricall [. . .] which may well bee compared to sweete grapes covered with leaves and bra[n]ches, or to the old Sileni, which being but ridiculous in shew, did yet inwardly conteine the sacred image of some God.

The ‘sacred image’ contained in such a Silenus is something appropriately religious, but ‘some God’ is also deliberately generalised, and more closely reminiscent of Plato’s figures which are ‘found to contain images of gods’.



Abraham Fraunce, The third part of the countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch Entituled Amintas Dale (London: Thomas Orwyn for Thomas Woodcocke, ), Bv.

Curious Statues, Capricious Caskets



While Fraunce’s depiction allows the Silenus a certain specificity – a representation of divinity within an exterior ‘ridiculous in shew’ – it also retains a vagueness, which establishes it as something from the ancient past. This vagueness allows it to fit in with the hermeneutic programme of a text that is explicitly concerned on its title-page with the framing and unfolding of ‘the most conceited tales of the Pagan Gods [. . .] together with their auncient descriptions and Philosophicall explications’, but which also invites the reader to think about the Christian scriptures too. For these post-Reformation writers, the vagueness of the original Silenus as something that contained the image of a god becomes essential to their use of the metaphor. By skipping over its precise contents, or leaving them sufficiently indistinct, writers in the seventeenth century deliberately ignore the potentially troubling resonances of the Silenus as something that takes the form of an ancient god (like a pagan idol) on the outside, and contains further images of divinity (akin to Catholic icons) within it. It is not only in poetics that the Silenus presents an attractive metaphor for thinking about the complexities of language as a deceptive exterior, however. William Fulbecke writes in his  legal handbook The wordes of the law may be compared to certaine Images called Sileni Alcibiadis, whose outward feature was deformed & ouglie, but within they were full of jewels & precious stones, so the wordes of the Law, though they be rude in sound, yet are they preignant in sense.

Fulbecke likens the terms of the law to the Sileni, which are here imagined to have contained not divine images, but rather more mercenary treasures of ‘jewels & precious stones’, like a jewellery box. The speeches of the lawyer may be ‘rude in sound’ (like those of Socrates), but Fulbecke establishes this as only the ‘outward feature’, his phrase ‘preignant in sense’ underlining his insistence that the lawyer’s words contain something lively hidden within, which is but waiting to emerge. Fulbecke is concerned, however, that the plainness of good legal style is often misinterpreted: some perhaps will say mine eares cannot tolerate such an unpleasant sound and so confused a style, O delicate fellow, when you go to the Theater or dauncing Schoole repose your selfe wholy in your eares, but when you come to heare matters of weight handled & discussed, rest not upon your senses, but upon your mind & understanding. Alcibiades was more moved 

William Fulbecke, A direction or preparative to the study of the lawe (London: Thomas Wight, ), Dv.



The Renaissance of the Box by the naked speech of Socrates, then by the laboured eloquence of Pericles [. . .] many things there be to which if you should adde any other thing, you should take away their grace and beawtie. They be of their own nature in so good estate, that you can not change them, but you must needs make them worse: A Tombe or pillar of marble, if it should be painted with any colour, should lose the former grace, & be a great deale worse: & a beawtifull face is often disgraced, by a needles ointment, & so it is of other things which of them selves are fayre & comely: the thing which is added hydeth that which it findeth, & sheweth that which it bringeth: & these thinges which ar handled in the law are not obscured by it. And it is not convenie[n]t in such a serious matter to dally with tropes & figures, not to riot with superabunda [n]ce of words, nor to florish with eloque[n]ce & diaperd phrases.

Here Fulbecke reminds the reader of the importance of the ‘mind & understanding’, which are better instruments of interpretation than the superficial ‘senses’. The lawyer has a creative responsibility to avoid dressing up the ‘grace and beawtie’ of their argument with coverings that are as unnecessary as paint to marble, or ointment to a beautiful face, and which spoil the raw, inherent value of things that are ‘of their own nature in so good estate’. Such external coverings are not just unnecessary, but they actively conceal meaning: ‘the thing which is added hydeth that which it findeth, & sheweth that which it bringeth’. Fulbecke dwells on exteriority as a fundamental illustration of how we should think about the art of interpretation. Lawyers, like the ancient philosophers, are figures whose speech may be particularly influential. Just as Socrates spoke in words and phrases that seemed ridiculous, the lawyer must not ‘dally with tropes & figures’ but make the crude exterior of his speech the index of its substantiality, a kind of deep depthlessness. In being free from the superfluous ornamentation of ‘superabunda[n]ce’ and ‘diaperd phrases’, the arguments of the lawyer may be more readily opened. While they offer varying ideas about what was contained within the Sileni, none of these texts pays much detailed attention to the external materiality of these artefacts, other than to stress the crucial contrast with what is contained within. A much more sustained encounter with the Sileni is found, famously, in the prologue to the first book of Gargantua (–), where François Rabelais explicitly transforms Plato’s hollow  

Ibid., Dv–Dr. See Richard L. Regosin, ‘The Ins(ides) and Outs(ides) of Reading: Plural Discourse and the Question of Interpretation in Rabelais’, and Raymond C. La Charité, ‘Rabelais and the Silenic Text: The Prologue to Gargantua’, in Raymond C. La Charité, ed., Rabelais’s Incomparable Book (Lexington, KY: French Forum, ), pp. – and pp. –, respectively.

Curious Statues, Capricious Caskets



statues into ‘little boxes’. After a reminder of Alcibiades’s drunken entrance in the Symposium, the narrator, Alcofribas, goes on to explain that: Silenes of old were little boxes, like those we now may see in the shops of Apothecaries, painted on the outside with wanton toyish figures, as Harpyes, Satyrs, bridled Geese, horned Hares, saddled Ducks, flying Goats, Thiller [i.e. bridled, like work-horses] Harts and other such like counterfeted pictures at discretion, to excite people unto laughter, as Silenus himself, who was the foster-father of good Bacchus, was wont to do; but within those capricious caskets were carefully preserved and kept many rich jewels, and fine drugs, such as Balme, Ambergreece, Amamon, Musk, Civet, with several kindes of precious stones, and other things of great price.

The Sileni are associated with an unspecific past – ‘of old’ – and the artefacts Plato said were found in ‘statuaries’ shops’ are now ‘little boxes’ (‘petites boites’) found in ‘the shops of Apothecaries’ (‘les bouticques des apothecaries’). While Plato’s Sileni were anthropomorphic in shape, similar to the ugly, ill-kempt Socrates, they are here transformed into boxes that have all manner of fantastical creatures ‘painted on the outside’ (‘pinctes au dessus’). These ‘wanton toyish figures’ (like Silenus and his drunken followers), make up a riotous array of mythical beings and animals rendered tame by bridles and saddles, like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Breugel, perhaps. Designed ‘to excite people to laughter’, they form a pleasurably distracting wild goose chase on the outside of the box, replicated in the text as a list. The chase or hunt is a classic motif of desire, and thus the box’s exterior imbricates the entire object in a whimsical quest. The second list in this passage reveals the contents of ‘those capricious caskets’, including many exotic, luxurious substances: ‘rich jewels’, ‘fine drugs’, ‘precious stones’, and ‘other things of great price’. The list form is an important characteristic of Rabelaisian satire; there are a great many lists in Gargantua and Pantagruel, where they are essential to the self-consciously carnivalesque atmosphere of the text. With their abundant lists of painted images on the outside and of treasures inside, these ‘little boxes’ or ‘capricious caskets’ appear like miniature cornucopia, or miniaturised motifs of the work as a whole.

  

François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux, with Introduction by Terence Cave (London: Random House, ), p. . French text: Gargantua, texte établi par Ruth Calder, avec introduction, commentaries, tables, et glossaire par M.A. Screech (Genève: Librairie Droz, ), pp. –. On copia and the cornucopia in Rabelais, see Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ).



The Renaissance of the Box

With another list, this time a dramatically cumulative one, the narrator reminds the reader how Socrates was wholly unattractive in his physical appearance, and also in his behaviour: ‘alwayes laughing, tipling, and merrily carousing to every one, with continual gybes and jeeres’. However, he continues, echoing the structure of Alcibiades’s speech in the Symposium, now opening this boxe [‘ouvrans ceste boite’] you would have found within it a heavenly and inestimable drug, a more then [sic] humane understanding, an admirable vertue, matchlesse learning, invincible courage, unimitable sobriety, certaine contentment of minde, perfect assurance, and an incredible misregard of all that, for which men commonly do so much watch, run, saile, fight, travel, toyle and turmoile themselves.

The list becomes hyperbolic, and through this hyperbole the opened Silenus is metaphorised out of existence, the inventory of adjectives contained in ‘this boxe’ turning it into something that surpasses the limits of the imagination, in a characteristically Rabelaisian metamorphosis. The ultimate purpose of the discussion of the Silenus in the prologue to Gargantua is to illustrate how the reader should approach the book that follows. ‘Whereunto (in your opinion) doth this little flourish of a preamble tend?’, Alcofribas asks, continuing without pause: For so much as you, my good disciples, and some other jolly fooles of ease and leasure, reading the pleasant titles of some books of our invention, as Gargantua, Pantagruel, Whippot, the dignity of Cod-peeces, of Peas and Bacon with a Commentary, etc., are too ready to judge, that there is nothing in them but jests, mockeries, lascivious discourse, and recreative lies; because the outside (which is the title) is usually (without any farther enquiry) entertained with scoffing and derision: but truly it is very unbeseeming to make so light account of the works of men, seeing your selves avouch that it is not the habit makes the Monk, many being Monasterially accoutred, who inwardly are nothing less than monachal, and that there are of those that weare Spanish caps, who have but little of the valour of Spaniards in them. Therefore is it, that you must open the book, and seriously consider of the matter treated in it, then you shall finde that it containeth things of farre higher value then the boxe did promise; that is to say, that the subject thereof is not so foolish, as by the Title at the first sight it would appear to be.

Offering another list, this time of the books he has authored, the narrator clarifies that the ‘outside’ of a book is ‘the title’, which often falls victim to 

Gargantua, pp. –.



Ibid., p. .

Curious Statues, Capricious Caskets



those who are ‘too ready to judge’ what it says about the book’s content. Like Socrates, while these books give the outward impression of being concerned only with ‘jests, mockeries, lascivious discourse, and recreative lies’, they actually disguise their own valuable content. The examples of titles given here, however, refer to a mixture of actual books (‘Gargantua’, ‘Pantagruel’) and fictional books (‘the dignity of Cod-peeces’), which like the Silenus figure have never actually existed, and thus are themselves a kind of ‘recreative lie’. The title of a book forms a crucial interface between the textual and the material: it is an intellectual exterior, but as something also literally found on the outside of a printed text, it also marks the physical exterior of the book. In terms that closely echo Plato’s comparison between the Silenus figure and Socrates, the narrator explains: ‘you must open the book [‘ouvrir le livre’], and seriously consider of the matter treated in it, then you shall finde that it containeth things of farre higher value then the boxe did promise’. The book must be physically pulled open with the hands, like a Silenus statue, or any ‘little boxe’, but it must also be intellectually opened, like the speeches of Socrates. Double meanings are central to Rabelaisian satire, and here the dual implications of ‘opening’ have a purpose which is, typically, both entertaining and serious. The titles of the books in the list resonate with the comic visceral matter of Rabelaisian grotesque, and the act of reading is portrayed in appropriately bodily, physical terms of accessing something that is concealed within something else: did you ever pick the lock of a cupboard to steal a bottle of wine out of it? [. . .] or, did you ever see a Dog with a marrow-bone in his mouth, (the beast of all other, saies Plato, lib. , de Republica, the most Philosophical). If you have seene him, you might have remarked with what devotion and circumspectnesse he wards and watcheth it; with what care he keeps it: how fervently he holds it: how prudently he gobbets it: with what affection he breaks it: and with what diligence he sucks it.

Like the dog, the ‘most Philosophical’ of all animals, the reader should take care ‘to be wise, to smell, feele and have in estimation these faire goodly books, stuffed with high conceptions, which though seemingly easie in the pursuit, are in the cope and encounter somewhat difficult’. In the Platonic tradition, Rabelais turns to the trope of the intellectual banquet  

On the early history of title-pages, see Margaret Smith, The Title-Page: its early development, – (London: British Library, ). Ibid. Neil Rhodes observes that ‘vessels, of all sorts, because they can be stuffed with strange matter and thus violate the integrity of things, are a favourite grotesque device’; see Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), pp. –.



The Renaissance of the Box

that satisfies a thirst or hunger for knowledge. Even though the bone contains just a little marrow, this concentrated richness is ‘more savoury and delicious’ than meat. Indeed, the speaker continues, in the perusal of this Treatise, you shall finde another kinde of taste, and a doctrine of a more profound and abstruse consideration, which will disclose unto you the most glorious Sacraments, and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth your Religion, as matters of the publike State, and Life œconomical.

In mock-religious language, the speaker turns his own book into something that contains all human mysteries, a sacred vessel for ‘the most glorious Sacraments’. The initial transformation of Plato’s Silenus figures into the ‘little boxes’ of an apothecary licenses the speaker to change the metaphor again and again into other containers to be ‘stuffed with high conceptions’ – later a ‘kettle’, and ‘the wrapper of a foul and filthy oile-vessel’. The image of the apothecary’s painted box is widespread in early modern English writing, where it is particularly associated, as in Gargantua, with books themselves as textual and material objects. With a beautiful, enticing exterior concealing potentially dangerous substances, it offers a sort of reverse Silenus. Etymologically, ‘apothecary’ has its origins in the Greek for ‘storehouse’ or ‘shop’, and in the verb ‘to lay away’. The Rabelaisian metamorphosis of the Silenus figures into the boxes of apothecaries plays into a visual tradition in which the apothecary is associated with the inscrutability of a shop filled with many boxes, each containing potentially dangerous substances. The attraction of the apothecary’s box is that no-one except the apothecary properly understands its contents, but the promise of powerful, exotic drugs is very seductive. The art of the apothecary is extremely specialised, and a layperson’s misreading of such boxes could have very dangerous consequences. In the Gargantua prologue, the emphasis on the titles of books as external signs of what is within stresses their function as labels, like the mysterious inscriptions on an apothecary’s boxes. There is something comparably intimidating about the labels of both books and such boxes; in a twoway emphasis of these objects’ containment function, their labels not only define what is purportedly inside, but they also keep the ignorant out.

 

 Gargantua, p. . Ibid., pp. –. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, for discussion of the apothecary’s shop as a metaphor for the memory (pp. –).

Curious Statues, Capricious Caskets



Plato’s Silenus is not the only artefact from ancient Greece to be transformed into a box in its early modern reincarnation. The container given to Pandora in Hesiod’s Works and Days, which was filled with all the evils of the world, was originally a ‘jar’, and it was Erasmus’s rendition of the story in his Adages that transformed this ‘jar’ into the now ubiquitous ‘Pandora’s box’, a very common emblem of danger in early modern writing, and a neat parallel with the image of Psyche opening her box from the underworld. When Christ is anointed by the woman at Bethany in the gospels, the perfume is always in an ‘alabaster box’, according to early modern English translations, drawing on the ‘alabastrum’ of the Vulgate text. This woman is sometimes conflated with Mary Magdalene, iconographically informing visual depictions of the latter, which often show her holding a small jar or pot, like Pandora and Psyche. Of course, it makes more sense for precious ointment to be poured from a jar with a narrow neck, rather than from a box, but there is evidently an imaginative flexibility around the word ‘box’ here, as with Pandora. Indeed, this flexibility around terminology seems to have its roots in ancient Greece, where an alabastrum was a small jar for oil, made of glass or pottery, based on alabaster vessels from ancient Egypt. Today, surviving artefacts from the ancient Greek world include small round, lidded pottery boxes, which are very similar to what we might now call a ‘jar’, and so the linguistic slipperiness between ‘jar’ and ‘box’ is probably less significant that we might at first assume. The particular affordances of the boxes belonging to the apothecary give rise to an especially powerful, widely used metaphor in early modern writing. While the anthropomorphic Silenus figure containing godly images might bring with it worrying associations of idolatry, the apothecary’s box is a safer kind of image in the Reformation context. Early modern metaphors of remedy, antidote, and poison as ways of thinking about the relationship between reader and text are humanist educational commonplaces. St Basil’s comparison of scripture to an apothecary’s shop containing a cure for every soul was often cited by theological writers, 



See CWE , p. . On Erasmus’s translation, see Dora Panofsky and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), pp. –. On the Greek literary tradition of statues filled with dangerous drugs, see Steiner, Images in Mind, pp. –. John L. Lepage discusses many of ‘the urns, tubs, wells, caves, and other containers of the antique world’ revived in early modern literature in The Revival of Antique Philosophy in the Renaissance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), p. x and passim. See Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), pp. , –.



The Renaissance of the Box

including Miles Smith in his preface to the King James Bible, where scripture is described as ‘a Physions-shop [. . .] of preservatives against poisoned heresies’. In the same passage, other metaphors compare scripture in comparably box-like terms to a ‘whole armorie of weapons’, and ‘treasurie of most costly jewels’. The image of scripture as a box of curatives offered many possibilities for elaboration; in her  translation of Calvin’s sermons on Ezekiel, for example, Anne Vaughan Locke dedicates the work to a fellow Genevan exile, reassuring her dedicatee of its purpose, to show ‘whereby health both of body and mynde is preserved, & whereby sicknes and commone miseries continuyng shall not have so muche power to trouble a man as to make him sicke, or miserable’. Locke synthesises the relationships between the text’s divine and human agents into one neat metaphor: ‘This receipte God the heavenly Physitian hath taught, his most excelle[n]t Apothecarie master John Calvine hath compounded, & I your graces most bounden & humble have put into an Englishe box, & do present unto you’. Her act of translation packages up the valuable mixture already ‘compounded’ by Calvin as God’s ‘Apothecarie’, into the book now held by the reader – an ‘Englishe box’, and now convenient source of spiritual remedy. However, much more frequently, the apothecary’s box is invoked negatively in early modern writing, as a trope not of remedy, but of emptiness, suspicion, or danger. In Romeo and Juliet, the apothecary’s shop has ‘A beggarly account of empty boxes [. . .] thinly scattered, to make up a show’ (..–), and such a picture of misleading ‘show’ concealing emptiness often underpins the rhetorical effects of this popular image. For Thomas Nashe, for example, the attractive box that turns out to be empty is a useful illustration of intellectual superficiality: there is no extremitie either in active or contemplative life, more outragious the[n] the excessive studies of delight, wherwith young Students are so besotted, that they forsake sounder Artes, to followe smoother eloquence, not unlike to him that had rather have a newe painted boxe, though there 



Miles Smith and others, ‘The Translators to the Reader’, The Holy Bible conteyning the Old Testament, and the new (London: Robert Barker, ), Av. A likely influence on the popularity of this reference to St Basil is John Jewel, the prominent Elizabethan bishop and reformer, who used it in a sermon in , printed as A Treatise of the Holy Scriptures (London: R. Newberie and H. Bynneman, ). Sermons of John Calvin, Upon the Songe that Ezechias made after he had bene sicke, and afflicted by the hand of God, conteyned in the . Chapiter of Esay, trans. Anne Vaughan Locke (London: John Day, ), Ar. Helen Smith discusses this moment of gendered gift exchange in ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), emphasising that Locke ‘does not denigrate her “boxe” as poor or wooden’ (pp. –).

Curious Statues, Capricious Caskets



be nothing but a halter in it, then an olde bard hutch with treasur invaluable.

Above all, the image of the apothecary’s box became a favourite censorious trope in early seventeenth-century religious polemic. In an extended dispute between the Protestant clergyman Anthony Wotton and the Jesuit John Percy (alias Fisher), for example, the former responded to a pseudonymously published pamphlet in which Percy carried out a sustained attack on reformed religion with the declaration that ‘this Title is like the Apothecaries boxes & pots, which promise goodly matters by the inscriptions, but within have either nothing, or some ordinarie drugs’. With this simile Wotton attempts to undermine the outward assurance of Percy’s volume that it will reveal definitive religious truths; rather, he implies, it contains nothing much worth considering, and certainly nothing life-changing. In terms that emphasise the more complex dangers of his opponents’ apparent contamination of textual sources, the leading Protestant cleric Thomas Morton, known for his skilful disputation in print with Catholics, criticised their bookes which have bene corrupted by hereticks [. . .] so that the unexpert scholer is no otherwise occupied in turning over the Fathers, then an ignorant man who is conversant in an Apothecaries shop, where without warie circumspection he may sucke his bane out of boxes, which carrie the title of an Antidote.

Another vehemently anti-Catholic writer, Thomas Beard, attacked traditional teachings on purgatory by Robert Bellarmine and others, claiming to see straight through their deceptive exteriors: ‘These bee plaine speeches, and shew what their meaning is: so that howsoever they gloze over the matter with goodly words, yet it is nothing but poyson in a painted boxe, wherewith the ignorant may be infected, but the skilfull are able to discerne their fraud’. In the minds of such polemicists, the  





Thomas Nashe, The anatomie of absurditie contayning a breefe confutation of the slender imputed prayses to feminine perfection (London: I. Charlewood for Thomas Hacket, ), Ciiiv. Anthony Wotton, A trial of the Romish clergies title to the Church (London: Richard Field for Elizabeth Burby, ), Br. The ‘Title’ condemned by Wotton, published under the pseudonym ‘A.D.’, is A treatise of faith wherin is briefely, and planly shewed, a direct way, by which every man may resolve, and settle his minde, in all doubtes, questions, or controversies, concerning matters of faith (St Omer: English College Press, ). Thomas Morton, A catholike appeale for Protestants, out of the confessions of the Romane doctors particularly answering the mis-named Catholike apologie for the Romane faith, out of the Protestants (London: Richard Field, ), Iir. Thomas Beard, A retractive from the Romish religion contayning thirteene forcible motives, disswading from the communion with the Church of Rome (London: William Featherstone, ), Ir.



The Renaissance of the Box

painted box of poison offers a convenient and versatile shorthand for the various ways in which books might operate as similarly deceptive and potentially dangerous receptacles. This rhetorical obsession with the book as box that turns out to be empty, or to conceal deadly poison that might be unwittingly consumed by the ignorant reader, is symptomatic of the broader Protestant fixation with the inherently problematic nature of painted exteriors in postReformation England. In an early seventeenth-century treatise on virtue and moral conduct, Henry Crosse offers a catalogue of the ways in which ‘by the disguised craft of this age, vice and hypocrisie may be concealed: yet by Tyme (the trial of truth) it is most plainly revealed’. Material wealth is ‘like poyson in a golden cuppe, and commonly where it aboundeth most, there Vertue is set by least’, Crosse argues; it is dangerously easy to be taken in by the outward trappings of prosperity. The sin of hypocrisy is everywhere: this idle shewe and false appearance, o how dangerous it is to the truth! being possessed with nought but treacherie and cosonage, a capitall plague, it is for the wicked to make shewe of goodnesses, and may fitly be sorted to the Apothicaries painted boxes, that have nothing within but poyson, or some deadly compound.

A man to whom ‘glorious titles’ are given, but who does not match these with a virtuous character, is like ‘a rotten carkasse with a painted skin’, but as Crosse warns, ‘the all-seeing eye of heaven, to whom darknesse is light, perspicuously observeth all their deeds, and will bring them forth even as they are naked and uncovered’. In this conventional Protestant polemic, God alone remains undeceived by the earthly coverings of dress or behaviour, and ‘the trial of truth’ is, as epitomised by the Silenus figure, ‘Tyme’ itself. While the ‘all-seeing eye of heaven’ is not deceived by the apothecary’s box, mortals are easily led astray by earthly things, among which are ‘vaine, idle, wanton Pamphlets and lascivious love-books’. Crosse protests, doo they not labour in vaine cunning to infect and poison delicate youth? are not there idle Poems of carnall love, lust, and unchaste arguments? the 

 

For an overview of metaphors of concealment in anti-Catholic polemic, see Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Henry Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth: Or the High-Way to Honour (London: John Newbery, ), Ar. Ibid., Dr, Hv–Hr.

Curious Statues, Capricious Caskets



very nurses of abuse, by which the minde is drawne to many pestilent wishes. For when as young folkes have licked in the sweete juice of these stinking bookes, their conversation and manners are so tainted and spotted with Vice, that they can never be so cleane washed, but some filthy dregges will remaine behinde. I may liken them to fawning curres, that never barke till they bite: or a gaye painted coffer, full of toades and venemous beasts: So in like manner many of these bookes have glorious outsides, and goodly titles: as if when a man tooke them in hand, he were about to read some angelicall discourse: but within, full of strong venome, tempered with sweete honey: now while the minde is occupied in reading such toyes, the common enemie of man is not idle, but doth secretly insnare the soule in securitie [. . .].

While there are men with ‘glorious titles’ that are not matched by inner virtue, so too are there books with ‘glorious outsides, and goodly titles’ that ‘infect and poison delicate youth’. In this passage Crosse exploits the aptness of poison as a metaphor for the way in which books affect their readers in unseen, insidious ways, like the potentially dangerous contents of an apothecary’s box. The ‘glorious outsides, and goodly titles’ of a book are both material and intellectual surfaces, and when readers take the book ‘in hand’, literally and mentally, they must be wary of how they interpret these external surfaces, in case the volume turns out to contain ‘strong venome’ rather than the ‘angelicall discourse’ it promises. Crosse’s tirade involves fairly predictable criticisms of unsuitable texts, but his juxtaposition of the book and the ‘gaye painted coffer’ also illustrates the need for us to think more deeply about how the materiality of the book informs responses to its intellectual content. The material affordances of the book have much in common with those of the box, coffer, or casket – each might have a label or title, and each must be physically opened with the hands – and so Crosse’s comparison draws on more than just the rhetorical effectiveness of the poison motif. As James Kearney reminds us, from the earliest centuries Christianity was associated more closely with the new technology of the codex than with the scroll. The scroll and the codex have very different physical affordances; the latter, as Kearney puts it, is ‘a form that invites metaphors of container and contained, kernel and shell’. In other words, as Crosse shows us, the specific material affordances of the book shape the way in which we think  

Ibid., Nv. Kearney, The Incarnate Text, pp. –; . See also Peter Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible’, in Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), pp. –.



The Renaissance of the Box

about both its practical and intellectual functions. Like Plato’s Silenus figure, or the proverbial apothecary’s box, the book must be physically opened to reveal its contents, and it is this physical operation that underpins our understanding of the intellectual process of interpretation. The book is the ultimate manifestation of the properties evoked by the Silenus metaphor and its various early modern reincarnations: it is a tactile object that functions as a material invitation to its own discovery, an inner sanctum enclosed within a potentially deceptive exterior, and a box which operates across the material, temporal, and imaginary dimensions, often involving radical shifts between these spheres. In early modern writing, the Silenus, or some variation of it, is found in everyone’s mental box of useful images. The object Plato imagined privileges the interior over the exterior, but in its early modern literary reincarnations, the Silenus becomes a much more dynamic kind of object, embodying even more complex surfaces, contents, and technologies. As the reader of the image, metaphor, or book negotiates these greater imaginative and material complexities, the box itself becomes as significant as what it might or might not contain, and the relationship between inside and outside becomes far less straightforward.

 

The Word in a Box Reforming the Book

‘The booke of grace, and the box of ointment’: Enclosing the Word In  Henry Foulis, Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and religious controversialist, published a lengthy attack on Presbyterians in England and Scotland, in which he compared their rise with that of the Jesuits, tracing their ‘wickedness’ from the reign of Elizabeth onwards. In his systematic exposure of what he saw as the hypocrisy of Presbyterian ‘counterfeit Holiness’, Foulis brought together many anecdotes to illustrate his argument, including one of ‘the old Wife at Venice’, who caus’d two great Books to be made, both of equal bigness and like fashion, whereof the one was a real Bible, but the other hollow within, like a Chest, made in all points like a Book with Clasps and all; which she fill’d with flat Bottels of Malmsey, and with good fine Marchpanes, which she her self made of the Brawn of Capons and Partridges, with Sugar and Almonds, and then with-drew her self into a pretty Cell with these two Books, and there sat prunking and tarrying all alone in her devout Contemplations, sometimes five or six dayes together, Praying and Reading full devoutly till the Bible was quite empty, not eating or drinking anything else all that while.

This carnivalesque portrait was not of Foulis’s own invention – a printed marginal note signals that he lifted this passage almost word for word from another polemical treatise printed a century earlier, The bee hive of the Romishe Church. This bitter anti-Catholic satire by Philips van Marnix was originally published in Dutch in , and subsequently rendered into English by George Gilpin, alongside French and German translations. For 



Henry Foulis, The history of the wicked plots and conspiracies of our pretended saints representing the beginning, constitution, and designs of the Jesuite: with the conspiracies, rebellions, schisms, hypocrisie, perjury, sacriledge, seditions, and vilefying humour of some Presbyterians (London: E. Cotes for A. Seile, ), Eer. Philips van Marnix, The bee hive of the Romishe Church, trans. George Gilpin (London: Thomas Dawson for John Stell, ), Dr–v.





The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

both polemicists, this humorous picture of false piety centres on the protagonist’s comically convincing prop – ‘a subtil fashion of a Bible’, as a printed note in Gilpin’s translation puts it – which is ‘made in all points like a Book with Clasps and all’, but filled with treats for the body, rather than the soul. ‘Praying and Reading full devoutly’ become purely carnal rather than spiritual activities, and this chest-like ‘Bible’ is one that can eventually be emptied by such ‘devout Contemplations’. The confessionally charged metaphors about the dangerous sweet juices contained in certain kinds of books, seen in the previous chapter, are here materialised. For Foulis, the apocryphal figure of ‘the old Wife at Venice’ serves as one of several analogies in his argument about how the Presbyterians ‘gain more by jugling than by fair play’ – their writings are ‘seeming honest’, he says, but ‘when well look’d into’, are ‘full of craft’. In this text and in its original location, where van Marnix satirises the proliferation of Roman Catholic religious orders, this passage is both polemical and playful, pushing confessionally charged ideas about insides and outsides, and fullness and emptiness, to the extreme. Whether for the critique of sixteenth-century Roman Catholics on the continent, or seventeenth-century Presbyterians in England and Scotland, this cartoonish ‘subtil fashion of a Bible’ stuffed with gluttonous treats reduces a monument of divine authority to a comically base material object, containing only the most profane and ultimately exhaustible forms of sustenance, while its foil, the ‘real Bible’, is cast aside, not mentioned again after its initial appearance in the passage. In the material culture of early modern Europe there is plenty of evidence that people responded in less polemical but equally playful ways to the imaginative potential of the book as a three-dimensional, fundamentally box-like object. We might think of the glazed earthenware ‘books’, made in Italy and beyond from the late fifteenth century onwards, which functioned as flasks, hand-warmers, or flower vases, and were glazed in bright colours, often with entertaining or improving mottos. ‘             ’ says the ‘cover’ of one such hollow ‘book’, made in England in  and now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Visually, this object exploits the capacity of the book to communicate with words, while at the same time articulating a moralising lesson with its own usually speechless matter, earth. Also in the Ashmolean is a watch in the shape of a book made in  

Foulis, The history of the wicked plots, Eer. Ashmolean Museum Accession Number WA...

‘The booke of grace, and the box of ointment’



Munich in the late sixteenth century, in gilded brass. When unclasped, its covers open to reveal an intricate collection of mechanical parts, nestled together like pages, including a calendar, compass, and sundial. Objects like these embrace the material form of the book as a potentially copious receptacle and a discovery space, while simultaneously subverting expectations of it, for entertaining, and often virtuosic effect. Other early modern artefacts more explicitly invite visual and intellectual comparisons between the book and the box. A small wooden box in the shape of a book, made in England in the early seventeenth century and now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, contains a set of twelve sycamore trenchers (Figure ). Each of these brightly coloured and gilded trenchers is decorated with floral patterns and verses from scripture, gathered into various moralising themes in the manner of a commonplace book – including covetousness, almsgiving, repentance, and mortality. The wooden box provides a convenient storage system for these entertaining dinner table accessories, but as a ‘book’ it also materialises the humanist ideas inherent in these trenchers, as objects that encourage the consumption of pithy, morally improving texts alongside the other pleasures of a feast. Artefacts that speak of a characteristically Protestant domestic environment, in which scripture might be found on walls and other surfaces and objects, as well as in books, these trenchers and their container teasingly blur the distinction between book and box as vessels for the Word. The wooden box is a necessary, functional container, but also a source of scriptural wisdom whose contents, like those of a real Bible or commonplace book, can be consumed in a sociable setting. The illusory effect of this ‘book’ of scriptural wisdom also plays more generally on the material contiguities between books and other furnishings of the early modern home. Books are multi-dimensional artefacts that play an integral part in the construction and experience of space. Their many surfaces, involving perhaps wood, metal, leather, or textiles, such as velvet, silk, and embroidery, might be mirrored by other objects, in a visual and tactile interplay between books and their surroundings. It is the implications of this distinctive material resonance between book and box that   

Ashmolean Museum Accession Number WA... Metropolitan Museum of Art Accession Numbers ..–a, b. Andrew Morrall discusses these trenchers briefly in ‘Inscriptional Wisdom and the Domestic Arts in Early Modern Northern Europe’, in Natalia Filatkina et al., eds., Konstruktion, Manifestation und Dynamik der Formelhaftigkeit in Text und Bild: Historische Perspektiven und moderne Technologien (Beiträge zu Historischen Kulturwissenschaften: Universität Trier, ), pp. – (pp. –). On speaking objects, see Fleming, Graffiti, passim; on inscribed objects and religious identity, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘Domesticating the Reformation: Material Culture, Memory, and Confessional Identity in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, . (), –.



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

Figure  Wooden box in the shape of a book, containing twelve painted trenchers of sycamore, England, seventeenth century.   . cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

I will be exploring in more detail in this chapter. In early modern writing, the box-like ways in which books took their place in space frequently inflected articulations of the experience of the book, in which both the mental and the physical were intricately enfolded together. Jeffrey Todd Knight has drawn attention to a distinctive manuscript miscellany in the British Library containing everything from household accounts to a significant copy of Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. ‘With its covered wooden boards and large brass clasps’, this book seems, Knight says, ‘(to many who have consulted it) rather more closely to resemble a chest’. His comment might aptly describe encounters with many other 

Jeffrey Todd Knight, ‘Furnished for Action: Renaissance Books as Furniture’, Book History,  (), – (p. ).

‘The booke of grace, and the box of ointment’



early modern books. Like a sturdy wooden chest covered in leather, a bound book such as Knight’s has a hard exterior made up of multiple foursided surfaces, possibly also covered in leather, and like his example, it might feature metal ornamentation, bosses, clasps, and locks for decoration and protection. Figure  shows the unusual silver-gilt binding for a  King James Bible and  Book of Common Prayer – a delicately worked metal case for these pages of sacred text, forming a contiguous whole, which hovers vibrantly between the categories of book and box. Metal additions to the leather binding of a book, added to strengthen it, are often termed ‘book furniture’ – and so while a book is something that furnishes a room, it is also something that is itself ‘furnished’. Clasps or ribbons might also visually emphasise the book’s identity as an object that can be opened and closed; a protective, secure container. A bound book opens along its spine, and so too might a box of similar dimensions open along a hinged edge. Before bookshelves came into wider use, chests were the most obvious place to store books, in domestic and institutional settings, and so when you opened a book in early modern England, you might well have had to open a chest first. The Gorton chest at Chetham’s Library, dating from , is just one of many surviving examples of medieval and early modern book chests, inside which books were often chained (Figure ), and which were often the nascent core of much larger libraries. In institutions like parish churches, the security provided by a chest was particularly important, but early modern individuals also kept their books and papers in boxes and chests, as the wills and inventories I discussed in Chapter  demonstrated. Victor Chinnery notes a rare example of an early modern Bible that survives with its own box: a  edition of the King James Bible, inside a polychrome painted and carved box of oak boards, bearing the initials ‘I.M.’ and the same date, . In a further material intersection between the two objects, wooden boxes were often lined with paper, and specifically, paper recycled from the book-making process. Surviving examples reveal that patterned lining papers were often made from printers’ waste, as in an inlaid elm box made in London in the early  



On books and their material interactions with their surroundings, especially furniture and clothing, see Scott-Warren, Shakespeare’s First Reader, passim. On book chests, see Thornton, The Scholar in His Study, pp. –; King, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and Early Modern Print Culture, pp. , ; Neil Ker, ed., A Directory of the Parochial Libraries of the Church of England and the Church in Wales; rev. ed. Michael Perkin (London: The Bibliographical Society, ). Chinnery, Oak Furniture, p. .



Figure 

The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

Silver gilt binding for a  King James Bible and  Book of Common Prayer, British, c. –. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

‘The booke of grace, and the box of ointment’

Figure 



Library chest of the parish of St James, Gorton, . Chetham’s Library

seventeenth century, which is lined with proof copies of William Camden’s Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine, printed on the reverse with flowers. Although in all likelihood this represents simply the practical reuse of available paper, with Camden’s text deployed entirely serendipitously, there is a pleasing irony in his literary Remaines being repurposed as entirely material ‘remains’. Some of the physical similarities between book and box are also implied by the practical terms associated with the making and maintaining of each kind of object, as in the nineteenth-century ‘remboîtage’, used to describe the rebinding of a book, from the French emboîter, ‘to enclose in a box’. Before the eighteenth century, divisions between branches of similar crafts were not necessarily distinct: Mirjam Foot points out that those who finished the bindings on books would also have ‘tooled boxes, containers, covers and cases for telescopes and other instruments, and furniture, in the same way as cut-leather artists applied themselves not only to the decoration of chests and instrument cases, but also from time to time book



Victoria & Albert Museum, Museum Number W.:-. See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

covers’. Evoking some of the very material labour involved in the care of both books and their environment, in  Thomas Bodley wrote to Thomas James, first librarian of the newly refurbished library in Oxford, that ‘within this fortnight, I trust, I shall have ended with my carpenters, joiners, carvers, glasiers, and all that idle rabble: and then I goe in hand, with making up my barres, lockes, hasps, grates, cheines, and other gimmoes of iron, belonging to the fastning and rivetting of the bookes’. His depiction of a ‘rabble’ of craftsmen, presumably making cases and shelves, and of his own efforts at ‘fastning and rivetting’ his books with a weighty list of the metal paraphernalia required, blurs the distinction between books and library, between container and contained. While Bodley is concerned in the most material terms with the book as something that might be shut and bolted away, securely contained within a library, early modern printed texts reveal the readiness with which book and box were juxtaposed in often more nuanced ways. In Abraham Fleming’s English translation of Claudius Aelianus’s A Regystre of Hystories, for example, the preliminary epistles, epigrams, and poems conclude with the following note to the reader from the translator: This booke replenished with varietie & chaunge, (Courteous Reader) may be compared to a greate & stately building, which is not altogether outwardly voide of beuty, but inwardly also, gaily decked & finely furnished With all sightly and sumptuous impleme[n]ts. yt is lyke unto an inestimable Juell, or precious pearle, which although yt be inclosed in a homly wodde[n] box, and shut up in a simple casket, litle or nothing worthe in comparison, yet is it never a whit the lesse in vallue notwithstanding, but reserveth his price undiminished. Wherfore (Courteous Reader) in consideration of thine owne profit, and vauntage, pleasure, and harts ease, enter into this princely pallace, view every roome circumspectly, behold eache severall chamber and lodging advisedly, and use the benefite of every thing liberally, to thine owne contentation. Open this base boxe, and lifte up the lydd of this course casket, wherin so riche and costly a Juell is inclosed, wey yt, and weare it, the commodity issuing from the same is singular, so is the delight redundant [in this sense, copious or ‘abundant’] and plentifull. Take all, and possesse all, thy title is substantiall, and thine interest sufficient.   

‘Introduction’, in Mirjam Foot, ed., Eloquent Witnesses: Bookbindings and Their History (London: Bibliographical Society, ), p. . G.W. Wheeler, ed., Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James (Oxford: Bodleian Library, ), p. . Claudius Aelianus, A registre of hystories conteining martiall exploites of worthy warriours, politique practises of civil magistrates, wise sentences of famous philosophers, and other matters manifolde and memorable, trans. Abraham Fleming (London: Thomas Woodcocke, ), }iiiv.

‘The booke of grace, and the box of ointment’



At first, Fleming writes in comparative terms, invoking a box as one of several similes – this text is ‘lyke’ something of great value contained in a humbler receptacle such as ‘a homly wodde[n] box’ or ‘simple casket’, which retains its worth despite its unassuming container. The simile of the humble box offers a way of thinking about language and the act of translation from Greek into the vernacular – of taking something precious, and presenting it in a different kind of container (as we also saw in Anne Vaughan Locke’s description of her translation of Calvin’s sermons, in the previous chapter). Yet in the second half of the paragraph, Fleming moves from simile to metaphor, inviting the reader to ‘enter into this princely pallace’, and ‘view every roome’, but also to ‘Open this base boxe, and lifte up the lydd of this course casket’. His series of box-like spaces progresses concentrically inwards to ‘so riche and costly a Juell’ – also no longer just a simile, but a metaphor. In doing so, Fleming widens the focus from the text to the book as material artefact. The book is an object that has to be engaged with literally and mentally; like a box with a lid it has to be physically opened with the hands, perhaps involving the lifting of a sturdy binding, to reveal its valuable contents, but it also has to be mentally opened, entered, and explored. Other early modern printed texts demonstrate the imaginative usefulness of the box for packaging the most precious of all texts, holy scripture. In his mid-seventeenth-century Protestant catechism A body of divinitie, for example, the Irish bishop James Ussher explains the ‘Memorials’ of God, which are firstly, ‘the works and actions of God; as the Creation and government of the world, Psal. . but especially, the worke of redemption, Psalme ’ and secondly, ‘the things that belong unto God; as his Worship, Word, Sacraments and disclipine [sic]; but especially his Word, Psalme . . & . &c. which is the booke of grace, and the boxe of ointment, out of which the sweet savour of his name is most effectually powred, Cant. . , ’. The Word of God is understood as both book and box; the curative properties of its ‘grace’ are comparable with ‘ointment’, which must be necessarily contained in a receptacle, but one from which it can be liberally poured out. Ussher’s juxtaposition of book and box draws on the popular gospel story of the woman at Bethany who poured an alabaster box of costly ointment over Christ just before his arrest, to the 

James Ussher, A body of divinitie, or, The summe and substance of Christian religion catechistically propounded, and explained, by way of question and answer (London: Printed by M.F. for Tho. Downes and Geo. Badger, ), Hhr–v. In this passage, the volume draws heavily on Samuel Crooke’s The guide unto true blessednesse (London: John Pindley for Nathaniel Butter, ).



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

disapproval of the disciples. This box is frequently alluded to by early modern writers, usually in articulations of the rich healing possibilities offered by scripture or other spiritually nourishing texts. ‘Come reade this booke that freely bringes, a boxe of balme full swete,/ An oyle to noynt the brused partes, of everye heavye spriete’, Thomas Churchyard wrote in a prefatory poem accompanying Thomas Bedingfield’s English translation of Girolamo Cardanus’s spiritual handbook, Comforte. Books like this one ‘freely’ offer their ‘full’ contents as spiritual refreshment, just as the box of precious ointment was a lavish, literally overflowing sign of Christ’s identity in the gospels. Puritan clergyman Robert Horne offers yet another kind of comparison between scriptural book and box in his early seventeenth-century spiritual guide The Christian governour, based on Psalm , where in his dedicatory epistle he reflects that ‘no Psalme, as it were pearle, in this Booke of Psalmes, or boxe of pearles can justly displease’. Yet, he continues, for some purposes, one Psalme may be fitter, that is, more excellent then another [. . .] as when the Prophet gave his mind to the preparing of those things that might serve for the building of the materiall temple, He disposed in his minde to what use this or that Jewell or waight of gold and silver, and a number of other things should be applied: so for these Psalmes (most of which were penned by this sweet singer of Israel) the Prophet having stored and layd them up, as the ornaments of Gods Church, in his Sanctuary, for publike use, and as precious stuffe for the building of a spirituall Temple to God.

The images above of a box of ‘ointment’ or ‘balme full swete’ emphasise scripture’s abundant richness, and so too does Horne’s neat, almost doubly alliterative parallel between ‘this Booke of Psalmes’ and ‘boxe of pearles’. In comparing the psalms to pearls, Horne emphasises both their individual preciousness, and their collective effect, transforming them into tangible treasures that must be preserved in a proper receptacle. In poetic terms the psalms are particularly ornamental, and distinctively sequential, like a string of pearls. From their beginnings, they were ‘stored’ and ‘layd [. . .] up’, as ‘ornaments’ and ‘precious stuffe’, and now each individual Christian may similarly use them to adorn their own ‘spirituall Temple’.

  

Matthew :, Mark :, Luke :. Girolamo Cardano, Cardanus comforte translated into Englishe [by Thomas Bedingfield] (London: Thomas Marsh, ), Ar. Robert Horne, The Christian governour, in the common-wealth, and private families described by David, in his . Psalme (London: T. Snodham for Francis Burton, ), Avi–Ar.

‘The booke of grace, and the box of ointment’



Horne’s epistle illustrates a persistent tendency to think about the psalms in very material terms. As a later work of spiritual counsel urged, ‘If thou wouldst have Prayers for thy particular wants, for several occasions, Go to holy David’s box of precious Balsam’. For Horne, Psalm  is not only a pearl in a box, but ‘the Text of it’, he says, ‘(short as it is) is like to Tapestrie, which (being foulded up) sheweth but a part of that which is wrought, and (being laid open) sheweth plainely to the eye all the worke that is in it’. His depictions of the psalms – as, collectively, a box of pearls, or individually, a piece of delicately worked tapestry to be unfolded – hint at a three-dimensionality not just of the book, but of the text itself. The book of psalms is a receptacle for spiritual riches, and as such is readily imagined in the tangible terms of a box to be opened, in which one might find healing balsam, or rich jewels, or an elaborate tapestry that must be further unfolded before it can be fully appreciated. These ways of visualising scripture blur the distinction between the book or box as material object, and the text as intellectual experience, all of which ‘contain’ something to be discovered within. There is also a reflexive interaction here with the contemporary embroidered bindings made for printed books of psalms and prayer books, which often feature precious metals and seed pearls, stitched in elaborate designs that make the book an especially tactile, multi-dimensional object. Just one example is shown in Figure , an embroidered binding for a Bible and book of psalms depicting Elijah and the widow of Zarapeth ( Kings :–) on the front cover, and Elijah fed by ravens ( Kings :–) on the back – two episodes in the life of the prophet when God sent life-saving sustenance. The contents of this book, the reader learns through sight and touch before they even open it, will offer similar vital nourishment. For contemporary book historians, distinctions between the book as material object and intellectual experience are often much more clear-cut than in these early modern articulations. Describing books as ‘the containers, the hardware, the conduits which have been so essential to take the texts from authors to consumers, and to preserve those texts for posterity’, for example, David Pearson has emphasised a need to pay more attention to ‘the ways in which they matter instead as objects, and as historical artefacts, beyond their initial purposes as containers and conveyers of

 

William Denny, Pelecanicidium, or, The Christian adviser against self-murder together with a guide and the pilgrims passe to the land of the living (London: Thomas Hucklescott, ), Kr. Horne, The Christian governour, Ar.



Figure 

The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

Embroidered binding for a Bible and Book of Psalms, British, c. . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

texts’. His comments reflect the common critical distinction between the physical book as a mere convenience that permits the circulation of text, and the book as an object that has meaning and significance in its own 

David Pearson, Books as History: The Importance of Books Beyond Their Text (London: British Library and Oak Knoll Press, ), pp. –.

‘The booke of grace, and the box of ointment’



right. His choice of vocabulary – books are ‘containers’, ‘hardware’, ‘conduits’ – emphasises their materiality, but also reinforces the notion that the function of containment and transfer is only the ‘initial’ purpose of the book, rather than something that is integral to our experience of it, from start to finish. In a similar vein, in her recent work on the ways in which books were employed for many other purposes than reading in the nineteenth century, Leah Price frequently distinguishes between the physical form of the book and its intellectual substance, using the terms ‘container’ and ‘content’ respectively. Even as scholars urge us to pay more attention to the materiality of the book, the word ‘container’ is often used as dismissive shorthand for the physical book as a necessary medium, rather than a starting point for thinking about how material and intellectual experiences of the book might be interconnected. ‘When is a binding merely a container for text, and when is it an object of taste and fashion?’ Pearson asks, implying again that a distinction can be made between the practical and the ornamental when we approach the book as object. These distinctions prevent us, ironically, from seeing their inextricability. Remarking that ‘over the last  years [. . .] the technology of the book has become so seemingly inevitable that we fail to see it as a mediation. It seems to contain the text as naturally as skin on a human body’, David Scott Kastan similarly demonstrates how the function of the book as a ‘container’ has been taken for granted, to the extent that we do not stop to consider its implications or its complexities. The rest of this chapter will unpack the box-like qualities of holy books – psalters, gospels, Bibles, prayer books – in England during and after the Reformation. As Chapter  explored, questions of outward appearance and inner truth were often central to the arguments of Protestant reformers, and the relationship between visible exteriors and concealed interiors could be highly troubling and problematic. Considering encounters with imaginary and real books as material objects, in sources including dialogues, letters, and portraits, I consider here how the material identity of the book as a receptacle for textual matter involved complex kinds of interplay between container and contained, which were often theologically or morally nuanced. After reviewing sixteenth-century humanist ideas about the   

Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), pp. , , . Pearson, Books as History, p. . David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .

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The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

relationship between the material and the spiritual realms, explored through the function of the outside of holy books in some of Erasmus’s dialogues, I then turn to Protestant attitudes towards books as material artefacts in post-Reformation England, and to the ever-more-complicated questions surrounding the book as receptacle for sacred text. One reference point that emerges repeatedly is St Matthew’s gospel. The sources gathered here revert to particular stories, words, and phrases unique to this book of the New Testament, which was then believed to be the earliest of the four gospels and therefore had the privileged position of being the first Christian text. I reveal the extent to which the insistent contrast in Matthew between earthly and heavenly treasure underpinned many early modern debates about the relationship between the material and spiritual, played out here in complex ideas about the rhetorical significance of the book as the unavoidably material container for the Word of God.

‘All gilded on the outside’: Erasmian Sacred Texts From the earliest days of Christianity, James Kearney reminds us in his exploration of ‘the ways in which the book was imagined during a crisis in representation, a crisis that was sparked by the Reformation’, the codex was ‘often revered as both the material vessel of sacred text and one of the central symbols of a religion that defined itself by its relation to texts’. The idea that the spiritual richness of scripture should be matched by the material splendour of the ‘material vessel’ in which it is contained is also evident from a relatively early stage. In his directions for the management of a scriptorium, the Roman theologian Cassiodorus (AD –) instructs his monks that the covers of biblical manuscripts should reflect the magnificence of what they contain: I have also brought in men who are skilled in bookbinding with the object of covering the loveliness of sacred letters with external beauty. In this we imitate to some extent that example of the parable of the lord who dressed in wedding garments those whom he thought he should invite to dinner in 



The materiality of reading in Protestant culture is increasingly incorporated into scholarship on the Reformation, for example, Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. Andrew Cambers organises his discussion of ‘godly reading’ by the places in which books might be found, from the closet to the coffee shop: see Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Kearney, The Incarnate Text, p. .

‘All gilded on the outside’: Erasmian Sacred Texts



the glory of the heavenly banquet. I have displayed, nicely I hope, many types and patterns of bindings for books in one volume so that the interested reader himself can choose the form of cover he prefers.

With this suggestion that the ‘loveliness’ of scripture ought to be matched by the ‘external beauty’ of a binding, Cassiodorus renders the spiritual and physical qualities of the Bible as textual object at once distinct and semantically blurred. ‘Loveliness’ and ‘beauty’ can imply different critical and aesthetic concepts when applied to the cover of a book and to the words written within it, but here Cassiodorus treats the literary content and the physical external cover as directly comparable. He reinforces his instructions with a reference to the parable of the wedding banquet found in Matthew , where the guest who did not dress appropriately is thrown out of the celebrations. The failure of the guest to wear ‘wedding garments’ upsets the host because his appearance does not match the prestige of the occasion, and thus appears a disrespectful response to his invitation. Similarly, the external appearance of the book as physical object should appropriately reflect the ‘loveliness’ of the ‘sacred letters’ it contains. Cassiodorus promises the ‘interested reader’ the opportunity to ‘choose the form of cover he prefers’, and so suggests that the careful selection of a beautiful binding for a Bible can become an act of devotion in itself. Books like the ones Cassiodorus describes were sacred objects in the late medieval church: ‘the Gospel, receptacle of Christ’s words, was the symbol of the Saviour; its entry at mass comparable to the entry of the Redeemer; and its placing on the altar (the most sacrosanct part of the consecrated building) mutually reinforced the divine presence in holy book and holy table’. Mary Carruthers (among others) has commented on how the precious binding of a gospel book literalised the volume’s function as a sacred container, transforming it into a ‘scrinium [literally, ‘shrine’] for its contents’. Some books of Hours feature trompe l’oeil jewels painted directly  



Cassiodorus, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, trans. James W. Halporn (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, ), p. . Although there is no evidence that the ‘types and patterns’ mentioned here have survived, Carl Nordenfalk suggests that another of Cassiodorus’s designs may exist in an early eighth-century codex from the Benedictine monastery of Corbie, France: see ‘Corbie and Cassiodorus’, in Studies in the History of Book Illumination (London: Pindar Press, ), pp. –. Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, ), p. . For further discussion of the book as sacred object, see also Margaret Aston, ‘Lap Books and Lectern Books: The Revelatory Book in the Reformation’, in R.N. Swanson, ed., The Church and the Book (Boydell Press: Woodbridge, ), pp. –; Michael Clanchy, ‘Images of Ladies with Prayer Books: What Do They Signify?’ in The Church and the Book, pp. –.



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

on their pages, a further allusion to their function as ‘memorial shrines and thesauri’ in which the inside of the book visually imitates in two dimensions an outside that might be literally encrusted with treasure, or emulates such a cover even in its absence. Eamon Duffy and Alexandra Walsham have revealed how prayer books and Bibles were often used in ways that had little to do with actual reading, to the extent that they might even be seen as ‘channels of supernatural energy independent of the texts they encompassed’. Walsham describes how ‘placed on the altar in close proximity to the consecrated host, such books were receptacles of numinous power’. Medieval Bibles with richly decorated covers were integral to liturgy, sometimes being kissed, like relics, alongside the other instruments of the mass, and Walsham notes that Books of Hours were believed to have miraculous power: ‘no less than phials of holy water, wax tablets of the agnus dei, and objects which had come into contact with special hallowed places, they might be seen as sacramentals’. Helen Smith suggests that these kinds of objects ‘through their elaborate covering and prominent place in the church, became transformed from text to monument, furniture, or storehouse of wealth, as the extravagant apparel of the book usurped the signifying power of the text’. For Bibles and other holy books, the relationship between a volume’s physical exterior and its sacred contents had the potential to be richly symbolic, but also, as the Reformation spread throughout Europe and with it an increasingly confessionally charged emphasis on the unique authority of the Word, ever more problematic. As my examination of the Silenus figure in the previous chapter suggested, the writings of Erasmus offer a rich source for assessing the complexities of beliefs about the relationship  





Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. -, . See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen: Religious Books as Artefacts in Late Medieval and Early Modern England’, in The Church and the Book, pp. – and passim. See also Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. , –; Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory: – (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ), passim. Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen’, pp. –. For further discussion of Bibles used in nonliterary ways as talismans and superstitious objects, see Aston, ‘Lap Books and Lectern Books’, passim; Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. –; David Cressy, ‘Books as Totems in SeventeenthCentury England and New England’, The Journal of Library History,  (), –. Helen Smith, ‘“This one poore blacke gowne lined with white”: The Clothing of the SixteenthCentury English Book’, in Catherine Richardson, ed., Clothing Culture, – (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), pp. – (p. ). See also Foot, The History of Bookbinding, p. ; and Kathryn M. Rudy and Barbara Baert, eds., Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and Their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, ) for essays on the use of textiles in medieval iconography, including sacred manuscript illustrations. For discussion of textiles sewn into books, concealing both images and the word of God as ‘sanctum sanctorum’, see Christine Sciacca’s essay in this volume: ‘Raising the Curtain on the Use of Textiles in Manuscripts’, pp. –.

‘All gilded on the outside’: Erasmian Sacred Texts



between the material and the spiritual at the dawn of the Reformation. The following part of this chapter will attend to several of his Colloquia, in which Erasmus crafts occasions of dialogue and sociability where sacred books frequently change hands, and become the focus of conversation. In such exchanges, the Christian reader is repeatedly invited to consider the dynamic relationship between textual content and the materiality of the book as a receptacle for it. In The Godly Feast () the host, Eusebius, asks one of his guests ‘what’s that little book you take from your bag? It looks very fine, for it’s all gilded on the outside’. The guest, Eulalius, replies ‘But it’s more precious on the inside. These are Paul’s letters, which I always carry with me as my favourite delights’. Eulalius then embarks on a long speech about the difficulties of interpreting Pauline teachings on lawfulness. Eusebius’s observation about the book’s attractive exterior leads to an explanation and demonstration of its ‘more precious’ contents. In just a couple of sentences, Erasmus illustrates the dynamic slippage between the physical and rhetorical properties of a book as at once text and object. Eulalius’s explanation complicates the expectation set up by Eusebius that there is a correlation between a ‘gilded’ exterior and the interior of a book. There is a significant relationship, but it is, the conversation suggests, not as straightforward as we might think. The ‘precious’ content of the book does not simply mirror its ‘fine’ exterior, but at once amplifies it, and to some extent nullifies it. In raising the question of why the exterior of the book should be so ‘very fine’ if it is only to be rendered irrelevant by its content, Eulalius’s comment betrays a vexed attitude towards the material. The material identity of the book – a ‘gilded’ exterior, no less – has a highly symbolic function, but only until it is displaced by the superior immaterial value of its textual content. Later on in this colloquy Erasmus returns to these questions when Eusebius presents all of his guests with gifts, among which are a book of Solomon’s proverbs, which ‘teaches wisdom, and is decorated with gold because gold symbolizes wisdom’ and a copy of St Matthew’s gospel, which is ‘worthy of a jewelled cover were it not that no bookcase or cover is dearer to it than a man’s heart’. Here Erasmus introduces two more specific scriptural texts, one of which is gilded ‘because gold symbolizes  

CWE , p. . Ibid., pp. –. Uniquely among the gospels, Matthew contains significant allusions to the Apocryphal book of the Wisdom of Solomon – perhaps this informed Erasmus’s decision to juxtapose these two particular texts here.



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

wisdom’, and it is wisdom that is contained in this book, so its outer appearance has a direct symbolic relationship with the nature and value of its contents. Even before the age of the codex, gold had long been associated with sacred texts, in a relationship based on straightforward parallels between material and spiritual worth. It has always been an important material in book decoration, used in leaf form for ornamental tooling on leather bindings and for gilding and illuminating pages, and in cloth of gold fabric bindings, for example – adding literal and symbolic value to the written word in both manuscript and print. Indeed, the comparison between the value of gold and the spiritual or intellectual worth of a book’s content is a longstanding literary commonplace. We need only look at William Caxton’s prologue to the second and subsequent early editions of his translation of The Golden Legend, for instance: ‘Here begynneth the legend in latyn legenda aurea that is to saye in Englysshe the golden legend. For lyke as passeth golde in valewe all other metallys. so this legende excelleth all other books’. Etymologically, ‘legend’ means ‘something to be read’, so just as gold surpasses ‘in valewe all other metallys’, this book is one that must be read above all other books. The ‘goldenness’ of this book is linked decisively to its religious content; the spiritual value of the stories of the saints’ lives this book contains is compared with the most precious of metals, and the title itself becomes a textual point of transformation from material to spiritual value. In the incident from The Godly Feast, however, Erasmus challenges this traditional system of valuation with his claim that gold ‘symbolizes wisdom’. The verbal contents of Solomon’s book transform the evaluative function of the gold on the outside into something intellectual and therefore more reputable, moving the symbolic emphasis away from 

 

On the development of the use of gold on bindings, see Giles Barber, ‘The Advent of Gold Tooling in English Bookbinding and the Intermediary Role of Thomas Linacre’, in David Pearson, ed., ‘For the Love of Binding’: Studies in Bookbinding History Presented to Mirjam Foot (London: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, ), pp. –; Anthony Hobson, Humanists and Bookbinders: The Origins and Diffusion of the Humanistic Bookbinding – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), passim; Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, – (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), pp. –; Howard M. Nixon, Sixteenth-Century Gold-Tooled Bookbindings in the Pierpont Morgan Library (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, ). Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, trans. William Caxton (Westminster: Wynken de Worde, ). This claim was substantiated by its immediate popularity in the marketplace: more copies of The Golden Legend were printed before  than of the Bible. For further discussion, see Sherry L. Reames, The Legenda Aurea: A Reexamination of Its Paradoxical History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ).

‘All gilded on the outside’: Erasmian Sacred Texts



material riches to the riches of the mind. The result is that container and content mutually reinforce the value of each other in the eyes of the reader. The second book in this Erasmian exchange, Matthew’s gospel, is so precious that not even a ‘jewelled cover’ could fully attest to its value, and we are left to infer that this book, in contrast, bears no external markers of its internal significance. The most appropriate ‘cover’ for Matthew’s gospel is rhetorical rather than material – this book should be metaphorically treasured away in the hidden devotional space of ‘a man’s heart‘, which through this action is itself transformed into a ‘bookcase or cover’ (‘scrinium aut theca’). So precious are the contents of such a book that they transcend the materiality of the object and seek a further site of enclosure, the hidden place of the human heart. Erasmus may well have been thinking here of the phrase from Matthew :, frequently commonplaced in sixteenth-century emblems and moralising mottos: ‘for whearesoever youre treasure ys, there are youre hertes also’. The gospel of Matthew, the tax-collector evangelist, to a greater extent than the other three gospels frequently expounds the contrast between the base materiality of earthly treasure and the transcendence of heavenly treasure. The value of earthly treasure is repeatedly challenged by Matthew; in Tyndale’s version, Christ warns ‘Wo be unto you blynd gides, for ye saye: whosoever sweare by the temple, yt ys nothinge: but whosoever sweare by the golde of the temple, he is detter. ye foles and blinde? whether is greater, the golde, or the temple, that sanctifyeth the golde’ (:–). The scribes and the Pharisees are accused of suggesting that the temple is nothing without the golden treasures it contains. Rather, it is emphasised, the temple itself ‘sanctifyeth the golde’, modelling a relationship between container and content in which the inherent sanctity of the temple makes its contents holy, not vice versa, as one might be tempted to believe. As the repeated interrogation of gold in Matthew’s gospel suggests, its attributes are ultimately ambiguous: while on the one hand it might remind the faithful of the splendour of the heavenly Jerusalem, on the other, it is the token of avarice, lucre, and vanity. These latent ambiguities became more overtly troubling in the middle of the sixteenth century, when gold in churches was targeted by iconoclasts and condemned by   

Latin text of Erasmus from the Opera Omnia,  vols (London: Gregg Press,  [facsimile reprint of the  Leiden ed.]), I, p. . Text from Tyndale’s translation; this detail from the Sermon on the Mount is also mentioned by Luke (:–). In the King James translation there are eight instances of the word ‘treasure’ in Matthew, compared with five in Luke, one in Mark, and none in John.



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

theologians in arguments about the worshipping of idols and images, which were often supported with scriptural evidence such as the story of the Golden Calf in Exodus . Beyond religious polemic, however, exploiting ambiguities and twisting traditional expectations were popular tricks for sixteenth-century humanist writers. Thomas More’s Utopia is a work of myriad forms of such intellectual playfulness, including a vividly moralising inversion of the value attached to gold; in Utopia it is used to make only ‘chamber pottes and other like vessels, that serve for most vile uses’, in order that the citizens will not be seduced by it. Despite this attempt to revalue gold for the moral good of the Utopians, however, More’s original Latin text of  was first titled Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus – ‘A truly golden little book, no less beneficial than entertaining’ – apparently conforming to the traditional troping of gold as a metaphor for something that is desirable. It is a more than apposite quirk then, for a text in which the literal and metaphorical value of gold is continually questioned, that its first English translator, Ralph Robinson, was apprenticed to a prominent member of the Goldsmiths’ Company, his status proclaimed on the title-page of the first edition of  as ‘citizein and goldsmythe of London’. Gold is not the only material that plays on these and other anxieties about representation when it comes to the troubling materiality of the book in Erasmus’s dialogues. He makes similar questions the foundation of another dialogue, Cyclops, or the Gospel Bearer (), in which two soldiers, Polyphemus and Cannius, have a debate about the gospel book carried by Polyphemus. The physical appearance of the book’s exterior is mentioned by both men; Polyphemus notes ‘I’ve painted this book not only in saffron but bright red and blue, too’, and Cannius observes that it ‘seems to be a soldierly book, for it’s protected by bosses, plates, and brass clips’. This gospel book is ‘soldierly’ in its literally armoured appearance, and so at one level its outward physicality serves as a symbolic reminder of its purpose in assisting the valiant Christian in his spiritual battle. In a materialisation of the scriptural (chiefly Pauline) image of putting on the   

See Margaret Aston, Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion – (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, ), chapter . Thomas More, A fruteful and pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson (London: Abraham Wele, ), kviir. For Robinson’s civic background, see Jennifer Bishop, ‘Utopia and Civic Politics in Mid-SixteenthCentury London’, The Historical Journal,  (), – (pp. –). For more on Robinson and the ‘paratexts’ of More’s work, see Terence Cave, ed., Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, ), chapter .

‘All gilded on the outside’: Erasmian Sacred Texts



armour of Christ, the armour this book wears visually represents the way in which its inner content will protect against the evils of the world. With its ‘bosses, plates, and brass clips’, this book is sturdy and reinforced, like a strongbox. Characteristically, however, Erasmus’s discussion resists straightforwardness, and in the rest of the dialogue the two soldiers try to outwit each other in their explanations of the relationship between the volume’s outward appearance and the message it contains. In itself this implies that nothing material can be taken for granted, and points to a desire to contest traditional understandings of the reflective nature of the material stuff of books. Polyphemus claims that ‘this very book of Gospels teaches us not to judge by appearances. Just as a haughty spirit often lurks under an ashcoloured cowl, so a cropped head, curled beard, stern brow, wild eyes, plumed cap, military cloak, and slashed breeches sometimes cover a true Christian heart’, while Cannius retorts that ‘it would be well if, as you’ve decorated the Gospels with various ornaments, the Gospels in turn adorned you. You’ve decorated them with colours; I wish they might embellish you with good morals’, for ‘the true gospel-bearer, then, is one who carries it in hands and mouth and heart’. Polyphemus argues that the armoured appearance of the book bears no symbolic relationship to its divine contents. Its exterior is accidental, and as such should not be taken at face value, because it may well be deceptive, and it is only what is contained within that matters: ‘this very book of Gospels teaches us not to judge by appearances’. In contrast, Cannius complicates the significance of the book’s physicality by relating its visual decoration to the process of spiritual embellishment that its contents should enact on the reader: while the book is decorated with ‘various ornaments’ and ‘colours’, it in turn will ‘embellish’ the reader with ‘good morals’. The word ‘ornament’ derives from the Latin ‘ornare’, meaning ‘to fit out, equip, adorn’, often with a militaristic aim, and so the ‘various ornaments’ that decorate this book are a material reminder of its role as a rhetorical, spiritual weapon. Again, Erasmus presents us with an inversion of the outwardly decorated and the inwardly decorating: the exterior of this book is important, but only to the extent to which it signifies a more significant interior. Ultimately, the materiality of the book, even when it is armed like a soldier and locked shut like a box, becomes subservient to the rhetorical and spiritual functions performed by its content. 

See  Corinthians :; Ephesians :–.



CWE , pp. –.



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

To this end, according to Cannius, the gospel book should find its place in the ‘heart’, as well as the ‘hands’ and ‘mouth’ of the faithful Christian. In a similar vein, one of the speakers in Erasmus’s Ciceronianus asserts that ‘Any young candidate for eloquence must always have Cicero in his pocket – and in his heart’. The author is represented metonymically by his text, imagined as a physical object found ‘in’ both the pocket and the heart. In size, shape, and intimate hiddenness, heart and pocket are comparable physical sites, and the juxtaposition of the two emphasises the need to carry influential texts both literally and metaphorically. What exactly was the early modern reader supposed to imagine, though, when presented with such descriptions of the book in the heart? ‘Heart’ can refer to both the physical and the mental, and also imply a pre-Cartesian incomplete separation between the two. In both Catholic and reformed devotion, the heart occupies an integral place for private communication with the Almighty. The godly heart may be conceived in more specific terms as a writing surface, as in St Paul’s image of the holy spirit writing ‘not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart’ ( Corinthians :), but also as a storage place, not necessarily imagined in materially or textually exact terms: ‘Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart’ (Luke :). In his discussion of the ‘language’ of the heart, Robert A. Erickson’s comment that it is ‘an easy step from the image of the written heart to the image of the heart as an open book, as a treasury of verbal impressions, a storehouse of memories and life impressions’ plays into this slippage between the heart as writing surface and the heart as a ‘storehouse’, a uniquely special box. Both hearts and books can in turn be found in the security of a ‘chest’, and early modern writers do not overlook the poetic and metaphorical potential of these comparable images of bodily and artefactual furnishing and containment. In the lavishly decorated folio volume of the first edition of his Orlando Furioso in English Historical Verse (), dedicated to ‘the right vertuous and his kynde Mother in law, the Ladie Jane Rogers’ in     

CWE , p. . On the pocket as a potent literary and material site of privacy, secrecy, and intimacy, see Lucy Razzall, ‘The Pockets of Henry Fielding’s Writing’, The Cambridge Quarterly,  (), –. See William E. Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), passim. See also the Psalms, which provide a rich and varied language of the heart, often associated with images of books and writing. Robert A. Erickson, The Language of the Heart, – (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), p. . See also Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, ), passim.

‘All gilded on the outside’: Erasmian Sacred Texts



December , John Harington concludes his dedicatory epistle: ‘And so wishing you to lock me up as safe in your love, as I know you will lay up this booke safe in your Chest. I commend me to you’. This dedication draws attention to the book’s physicality as something to be locked away safely, and which is asked to stand in synecdochically for Harington himself. Through the images of locking things up safely ‘in your love’ as ‘in your Chest’, Harington makes an analogy between himself and his gift, desiring to become, like his book, property to be treasured by his wife’s mother. Here, as in the discussion of books ‘in’ hearts in the Erasmian dialogues, the ‘love’ of the dedicatee, as an imagined place of containment, is transformed into a three-dimensional piece of book-furniture, and the giver becomes, to some extent, conflated with the book. At the same time, like the heart, the book becomes a nodal point between the material and the spiritual, at once a physical thing and a metaphor, to the extent that we do not know exactly what it is that we are supposed to visualise. This tension between the material and the spiritual or immaterial is a key theological concern for Erasmus, who explains his view of the essentially internal nature of Christian faith most fully in the fifth rule of the Handbook of the Christian Soldier (Enchiridion militis Christiani). Etymologically, the ‘enchiridion’ of the Latin title can mean either a dagger or a handbook, two different kinds of physical ‘signs or supports’ for the ‘Christian Soldier’ who must ultimately seek to transcend them, advancing ‘from the body to the spirit’. ‘Perfect piety’, Erasmus writes, is ‘the attempt to progress always from visible things, which are usually imperfect or indifferent, to invisible’. A true Christian will witness and experience the material world, but should always be looking beyond it to the spiritual realm, which cannot be seen or touched. The material world can provide ‘signs or supports of piety’ but it should not be the focus of worship; rather, the appreciation of material things should be an earthly model for spiritual responses: ‘whatever attracts or repels the senses in material things must be all the more intensely loved or hated by the spirit in the realm of the spirit’. In his conclusion Erasmus urges the reader raise yourself as on the steps of Jacob’s ladder from the body to the spirit, from the visible to the invisible, from the letter to the mystery, from sensible things to intelligible things, from composite things to simple things 

Jason Scott-Warren sets this volume (Cambridge University Library Adv.b..) and the dedicatory epistle in the context of Harington’s very material interest in his mother-in-law’s affection and in the contents of her chests; see Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), chapter .



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book [. . .] if you will attempt to the limit of your powers to rise out of your moral darkness and the tumult of the senses, he will obligingly come forth to meet you from his inaccessible light and that unimagined silence, in which not only all the tumult of the senses, but also the forms of all intelligible things fall silent.

The material world should be used as a pathway to the greater, immaterial, intangible glory of God, which lies beyond the ‘tumult of the senses’ and ‘all intelligible things’. The question of the potentially problematic nature of the outward appearance of material things recurs throughout much of Erasmus’s writing. The guests in The Godly Feast marvel at the copious visual banquet of the painted walls in the gardens, courtyards, library, and chapel in Eusebius’s house, but later their host, echoing St Bernard of Clairvaux, speaks out against those who ‘adorn monasteries or churches at excessive cost, when meanwhile so many of Christ’s living temples are in danger of starvation, shiver in their nakedness’. St Jerome too famously denounced the hypocrisy of spending large amounts of money adorning the material objects and places of religion while the poor are neglected, and was particularly concerned about the decoration of Bibles: ‘parchment is stained with purple dye, gold is melted to form letters, books are studded with gems, and Christ dies in nakedness before their doors’. These warnings resonate in Erasmus’s text; whereas there is much entertainment and educational value to be had from the images that adorn the walls of Eusebius’s house, we are also reminded of the Christian moral dangers of superfluity and excess, arguments that were repeated by many sixteenthcentury reformers in their protests against the material practices of traditional religion. At the heart of The Godly Feast are the conversations about scriptural interpretation, and where and how Christian truth may be found. The appearance of external surfaces is not necessarily straightforward, Eusebius’s guests realise, apprehending ultimately that all forms of visual 





CWE , pp. –. Kearney also discusses this in The Incarnate Text, pp. –. For further discussion of the Enchiridion and Erasmus’s ‘strident transcendentalism’, see Carlos M.N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –, –. CWE , p. . See Bernard of Clairvaux, Apologia –: ‘The Church is radiant in its walls and destitute in its poor. It dresses its stones in gold and it abandons its children naked. It serves the eyes of the rich, at the expense of the poor’, in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux (Shannon: Irish University Press, ). ‘Letter to Eustochium’, cited Kearney, The Incarnate Text, p. . Erasmus repeats this argument in ‘A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake’ (), CWE .

‘All gilded on the outside’: Erasmian Sacred Texts



and verbal representation are potentially problematic. Terence Cave uses this text as a central exemplar in his discussion of interpretation in The Cornucopian Text, observing that Eusebius’s house serves as a metaphor for the entire dialogic text, with ‘layer upon layer of moving surfaces endlessly pointing towards new and unexpected significations’. Not only must the reader, like the guests, be constantly alert to the relationship between the visible or legible surface before them and the corresponding hidden content, but he or she must also realise that these surfaces are manylayered, and require different kinds of interpretative response. The discussions of texts and objects in The Godly Feast demonstrate a blurring of interpretative boundaries between material and textual surfaces. The interpretation of the physical surroundings foregrounds the surface–depth relations that are so important in scriptural interpretation, and this Erasmian model of explanation is epitomised in the conversations that revolve around the books as box-like artefacts. Erasmus’s various holy books remind the reader of the constructive rhetorical possibilities of scripture’s physical exterior in relation to its textual contents. His dialogues illustrate how the material features of a book as a vessel for holy scripture can emphasise its theological value and suggest how we might interpret it – according to The Godly Feast, we know that the contents of the book of Wisdom are valuable even before we read it, because we see a literally golden exterior – but at the same time he also articulates an insistent concern about these kinds of relationships between the spiritual and the material. Ultimately, the Word of God transcends earthly measures of value and there is no material form that can do justice to the beauty of scripture. But in expressing this dilemma, Erasmus repeatedly returns to metaphors and images that are grounded in the very materials and systems of representation that he attempts to undermine, conceding the necessity of the artefactual identity of the book. This inevitable return to the materiality of the book in Erasmus’s writing is related to his pedagogical desire to provide concrete examples, emulating Christ in the parables in his attempt to lead fallible readers from the material to the spiritual, but also to his own intensely self-conscious involvement in textual culture. Erasmus loved to send and receive books himself, valuing them as personal gifts, and he also fully embraced the potential of the medium of print for advancing his own career. The  

Cave, The Cornucopian Text, p. . The authoritative volume on Erasmus and the marketplace is Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

‘peculiar blend of iconoclasm and logolatry’ in Erasmus’s response to books, especially holy books, foreshadowed the vexations that characterised reformed attitudes towards the book as necessary receptacle for the Word in early modern England.

‘The booke is not my present, it is but the boxe’: The Material Text in Protestant England In , Matthew Kellison, exiled Roman Catholic priest and professor at the university of Rheims, published A Survey of the New Religion with a dedication to James I, in which he appealed for a relaxation of the penal laws against Catholics and hoped to convince the King of the truth of the Catholic faith. He wrote in his epistle: I would not have your Majestie to esteeme of this my booke, only as of a bare bundel of papers; bicause I present you withall, that hu[m]ble harte, and sincere affection, which a subjecte can beare, or owe unto his Soveraigne, and with my affection, I offer my selfe as your Majesties most lowly & faithfull servaunte [. . .] Nether is my prese[n]t it selfe to bee misprised, nether can it of such a Prince, bicause the booke is not my present, it is but the boxe, the present is that which it conteineth. And if your Majestie demaund of me what that is? I answere; not gold, nor Ivorie of India, not ritch, and orient pearle, for with such treasures your England, like an India aboundeth; but it is that which is more worth, and which your India only wanteth; and what is that? It is religion? the worship of God, the Salvation of your soule, the safetie of your Subjectes, the health of the body of the Realme of which you are the Heade, the strength of your Kingdome, the peace of your people, and the ritchest pearle of your crowne. This is the subject of my discourse, these are the contentes of my booke, and this is my guifte and present.

In this direct plea to the king, Kellison is sensitive to the materiality of his printed text: it is ‘a booke of Paper ill printed, because in a straunge Countrie’, he says defensively, but he hopes it will be recognised as more than ‘a bare bundel of papers’. Even as he defends the humble appearance of the book, he sets up a distinction between its base materiality, and what it contains: ‘the booke is not my present, it is but the boxe, the present is that which it conteineth’. The book as object is an essential receptacle, not   

Kearney, The Incarnate Text, p. . Matthew Kellison, A survey of the new religion detecting manie grosse absurdities which it implieth (Douai: Lawrence Kellam, ), Aiiiiv–Avr. Ibid., Aiiiv.

‘The booke is not my present, it is but the boxe’



for gold and jewels, but for the ‘guifte and present’ of this ‘discourse’ on ‘religion’. Kellison’s rhetorical comparison between book and box resonates with some of the complexities of the material text exposed in the Erasmian dialogues. Here, as for Erasmus, the materiality of the book does matter, even as it is argued that it does not – if only to serve as a necessary ‘boxe’ for intellectual or spiritual contents that are implicitly less material, though they too must of course be experienced in visual, tangible ways. Kellison, a Catholic writer, contrasts container and content for persuasive rhetorical effect, but the nature of the relationship between material things and access to the sacred was a fundamental concern of the Reformation. While one of the messages emphasised by Erasmus, often humorously, is that what can be seen from the outside is not always reliable, in Protestant England the relationship between faith and the senses was often seen as more wholly problematic. The final section of this chapter will turn to the sacred book in post-Reformation England, as a box-like object caught up in broader ideological, confessionally charged anxieties about the material world and the relationship between exteriors and interiors. In the early seventeenth century the Calvinist preacher George Hakewill produced a tract, The Vanitie of the Eye, apparently for someone who had gone blind. This polemical treatise contrasts the limitations of human eyesight with the clarity of scripture, and attacks Roman Catholicism as a religion that founds truths on superficialities. ‘Idolatry hath a kinde of necessary dependence upon the eye’, Hakewill argues, and because ‘the popish religion consists more in eie service then the reformed’, it is treacherous and dangerous. The central problem for Hakewill is that generally the sight is not capable, but of corporall, accidentall, particular things; and in them onely of their crust, and surface, and that only in direct objects, and by the helpe of the light: whereas the hearing apprehends all manner of sounds, from all differences of places, as well from behind as from before [. . .].

Seeing is a very limited way of experiencing the world because it allows appreciation of only the ‘crust, and surface’ of ‘corporall, accidentall, particular’ things. Hakewill’s implication is that without the ‘helpe’ of appropriate ‘light’, human sight cannot penetrate the externals of the material world to perceive what dangerous truths might lie hidden and  

George Hakewill, The Vanitie of the Eye (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, ), Ar, Ar. Ibid., Ev–Er.



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

unseen. Stuart Clark’s work on early modern vision reminds us that such religious judgements on sight in this period, through which the evidence of the eyes is never permitted to be straightforward, betray ‘Christianity’s virtually perennial unease over its relationship to the senses’. For David Norbrook, Hakewill shares the Reformation conviction that the transformation of the outward practices of religion should be ‘accompanied by a destruction of mental idols, an apocalyptic purification of the mind, unveiling the previously hidden truths of nature’. Inward and outward vision each need correction, a problem with significant reverberations for the book as an object requiring both kinds of interpretation. In one of his most vivid passages, Hakewill declares: For the smooth and cunning deportment of hypocrits, and dissemblers, I need not goe farther then common experience, to shew that their speciall skill consists in casting a mist before the eye of the world: which the Cynicke, no doubt, well understood when hee cryed out that the grave beard, and the long cloake he saw, but the Philosopher he saw not. Whence it is that these kind of men are ever painted forth unto us by the resemblance of things which most deceive our sight; as of wolves masked under sheep skinnes, of tombes and monuments, which on the outside are whited over, and sometimes set out with curious works, in mettals and carved stones, of divers colours, but within are full of rottennes, and dead mens bones: of Apothecaries boxes which without are fairely painted, but within are full of poisons: of tragedy books which without have covers of velvet, with strings of silke, and claspes of silver, but within are full of perjuries, and murders, and incests [. . .].

This series of material objects from ‘common experience’ which deceive by their outward appearance augments and elaborates upon the polemical attacks on the teachings of the Jewish authorities in Matthew . Drawing on the evangelist’s repeated metaphors of blindness, Hakewill makes the contrast between container and contained even more extreme in the context of the ideological arguments of his own times; the whited sepulchres mentioned in the gospel are here also decorated with ‘curious works, in mettals and carved stones, of divers colours’, and yet still ‘within are full of rottennes’. Hakewill adopts the gospel imagery of religious impurity in formulating a response to what he sees as the dangerously tainted and   

Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. . David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. . Hakewill, The Vanitie of the Eye, Dv–Dr.

‘The booke is not my present, it is but the boxe’



tainting nature of the ‘popish religion’. Matthew’s whited sepulchres had a particular resonance as a popular emblem of hypocrisy in postReformation England, when whitewash had a widespread presence in churches, as evidence of attempts to hide offending traces of the old religion. This iconoclastic whitewash had its own further troubling ambiguities, however; it covered things over, rather than removing them completely, and thus there was always the danger that what was hidden might be once again revealed. The cups and platters of extortion and excess in Matthew  are transformed by Hakewill into proverbial painted ‘Apothecaries boxes’ that are ‘full of poison’, before he turns to some bibliographical examples: ‘tragedy books’, which should not be decorated with fine materials because ‘covers of velvet, [. . .] strings of silke, and claspes of silver’ are not fitting for the ‘perjuries, and murders, and incests’ such books contain. This passage draws on Christ’s description of the hypocritical scribes and Pharisees, in Tyndale’s rendition: ‘All there workes they do, for to be sene of men. They sett abroade there philateris, and make large borders on there garmenttes’. The gospel provides scriptural justification here for the rejection of the ostentatious display of holy texts and for the denunciation of excessively elaborate clothing. The phylactery, a small leather-bound container for the Jewish scriptures worn about the person, was a ‘byword for hypocritical displays of piety in Reformation England’, frequently compared with the medieval girdle book in anti-Catholic propaganda. ‘We may take occasion to condemne the superstition of certaine women, whiche weare aboute their neckes certaine shorte sentences of the Gospell, and the signe of the crosse, whe[n] as in dede they are altogether ignorante of the force of the Gospell’, wrote another Calvinist commentator in the late sixteenth century, contrasting such outward material signs of faith with the superior knowledge of the true ‘force’ of the gospel. The message from Hakewill, a polemical writer in the extreme, is that moral, spiritual, and intellectual dangers are inherent in the material world. Beautiful boxes do not necessarily have beautiful contents; indeed, it 



On early modern whitewash and memory, see Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, chapter ; on whitewash and sixteenth-century iconoclasm, see Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. –. Augustine Marlorate, A Catholike and Ecclesiasticall exposition of the holy Gospell after S. Mathewe, trans. Thomas Tymme (London: Thomas Marshe, ), Yv. For further discussion of the phylactery as controversial emblem, and also the ambiguities of the girdle book in Reformation England, see Kearney, The Incarnate Text, pp. –, , . See also Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen’, pp. –; Foot, History of Bookbinding, p. .



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

should be assumed that attractive exteriors hide something quite the opposite, and perhaps more – that everything worldly is potentially a dangerous box, opening onto a moral vacuum. Hakewill’s simile of ‘tragedy books’ with inappropriately beautiful covers isolates the book as one artefact among many in the wider postReformation landscape of potentially troublesome material things. Variations on this particular image, which originates in a second-century oration by Lucian, are an early modern literary commonplace, across a wide range of texts. ‘Was ever book containing such vile matter/So fairly bound?’ exclaims Shakespeare’s Juliet when she learns that Romeo has killed Tybalt (Romeo and Juliet, ..–), while an unrepentant sinner is ‘like a man who hath broken bones under a beautifull sute of apparell; disjoynted fingers under a golden glove; like a book of direfull Tragedies, bound up with a gilded fair cover; or (as some body once said) like Newgate, having a comely outside structure, but within nothing but howling, chains, dungeons, and blacknesse’, according to one particularly exercised seventeenth-century preacher. The disjunction between a book’s outer appearance and the nature of its contents (usually worryingly dark or tragic) offers a convenient shorthand for hypocrisy or deceit. Such rhetorical tropes blur the distinction between a book’s material and literary qualities, and imply that the book as material object can be fitted neatly into a reformed general suspicion of externals, in which boxes and their contents can never be trusted. A closer look at some real books and other objects, however, reveals a much messier, more complicated reality in Protestant England. An Epistle of the Ladye Jane, a righte virtuous woman is a modest printed pamphlet containing an address by Lady Jane Grey to an unidentified man whom she implores at length to recant his recent conversion to ‘the Romish religion’. It also contains transcripts of Grey’s interrogation in the Tower of London by John Feckenham (the Dean of St Paul’s), her last words on the scaffold, and some text titled ‘An Exortation written by the Lady Jane the night before she suffered, in the ende of the New Testament in Greke, whiche she sent to her sister, Lady Katerine’. This publication is typical in its gathering of textual fragments associated with the executed woman,   

For the relevant passage, see Jasper Mayne, Part of Lucian made English from the original (London: H. Hall for R. Davies, ), Nr. William Jenkin, An exposition of the epistle of Jude, together with many large and usefull deductions (London: Thomas Maxey for Samuel Gellibrand, ), Cr–v. Lady Jane Grey, An Epistle of the Ladye Jane, a righte vertuous woman, to a learned man of late falne from the truth of Gods most holy word (London: John Day[?], ), Aiiiv.

‘The booke is not my present, it is but the boxe’



printed not long after her death in February , and John N. King suggests that it is the first martyrological text of Mary’s reign, produced by a fugitive Protestant press. It records that on the night before she died, Grey, renowned for her piety and dedication to reformed learning, wrote in a copy of the New Testament she left to her fourteen-year-old sister: ‘I Have here sent you good sister Katerine, a booke: which although it be not outwardly trimmed with gold, yet inwardli it is more worth the[n] precious stones. It is the boke (deare sister) of the Lawe of the Lorde’. This book will ‘teache you to live and learne you to dye’, Grey promises and, paraphrasing Matthew :–, she expands the treasure metaphor to emphasise the redemptive message the book contains: ‘if you appli diligently this boke, seeking to direct your life after it, you shalbe an inheritour of sutche riches, as neither the covetous shal withdraw from you, neither the theife shal steale, neither yet the mothes corrupte’. Grey’s inscription in her sister’s book makes a comparison between the valuable gold binding it does not have and the greater ‘worth’ of what it ‘inwardli’ contains, the written ‘Lawe of the Lorde’. The ‘riches’ to be had from this book are ultimately immaterial, found in heaven rather than on earth, but it is through metaphors of costly ‘gold’ and ‘precious stones’, even in their material absence, that the value of the book she bequeaths is articulated. Grey’s inscription resonates with a sentence from the opening of Erasmus’s Paraphrase on Matthew, which in turn appears to draw on the evangelist’s own repeated contrast between earthly and heavenly riches: ‘This book does not promise human prosperity, a thing that soon passes away; rather it teaches heavenly philosophy, which was given to the race of mortals by the heavenly teacher Jesus Christ’, Erasmus emphasises. Like Erasmus, Grey appears particularly taken with the passage from Matthew  about heavenly treasure, alluding to it also in her letter to the apostate that makes up the larger part of the pamphlet. Christ’s elevation of metaphorical treasure in heaven above the temporal material treasures on earth becomes a reflexive literary model for her own articulation of faith in relation to her New Testament as material object with superior spiritual content. The various texts collected in the pamphlet are all related in some 

  

John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), pp. –. The letter is also included in Acts and Monuments, and the STC suggests that the pamphlet, like Foxe’s project, was printed by John Day. An Epistle of the Lady Jane, Bvir–v. I have found nothing in any of the biographical and bibliographical literature on Grey to suggest that this volume still exists. CWE , p. .



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

way to Grey’s death; the pamphlet is at pains to point out that she wrote her exhortation ‘the night before she suffered’, and these associations make the pamphlet into a kind of textual relic, like the martyrological narratives in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, among which an account of Grey’s death features. A relic, as I discuss in more detail in the following chapter, is something that in its fragmentary materiality retains the essence of a person, even in their absence. In the same way, as Grey’s inscription in her sister’s New Testament demonstrates, it can just as well be through the conspicuous absence or deliberate rejection of an ostentatiously golden exterior that gold is intellectually interrogated and exploited to emphasise the worth of a book’s content. The bibliographical encounters of both Erasmus and Grey demonstrate that the condemnation of the elaborately decorated exterior of the book could often be an ostentatious act – an ostentatious rejection of ostentation. However, it was not at all the case that books with lavish exteriors were automatically condemned in iconoclastic terms in post-Reformation England. One surviving book noted by Alexandra Walsham embodies some of the contradictions that characterise the religious culture of this period. The volume consists of a golden girdle book cover made in England in the early sixteenth century, featuring enamelled and jewelled images of the Judgement of Solomon; like King Solomon himself, the book is richly dressed. Inside is the sole surviving copy of the  edition of Morning and Evening Prayers compiled by Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit, governess to the princess Elizabeth, which is likely to have displaced an earlier more traditional devotional text. In the exchange of gifts in The Godly Feast discussed above, the book of the Wisdom of Solomon is literally golden, and Erasmus insists on a symbolic relationship between the golden cover and the nature of its contents. Here, however, a lavish golden cover contains the prayers of a religion that denied the importance of the material and, as demonstrated by Lady Jane Grey’s inscription in her New Testament, placed more emphasis on the rhetorical function of gold as something inferior to heavenly riches. As a textual and material artefact, this book is emblematic of the complicated material identity of religious books in post-Reformation England. Post-Reformation attitudes towards the book as a vessel for the sacred Word of God thus reveal an intellectual and practical engagement with the  

The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online,  ed. (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, ), www.johnfoxe.org, pp. –. Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen’, pp. –.

‘The booke is not my present, it is but the boxe’



materiality of the book that grew more nuanced, even as it grew more controversial. While the books Erasmus depicts in his dialogues are exceptional gift objects, the material reality of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Protestant libraries, even the most elite ones, was that the majority of bound books would have had relatively simple exteriors of blindstamped leather, not the jewelled velvet bindings of Elizabeth I’s library that so impressed visitors to Whitehall (see Chapter ). The visual appearance of a library involved diverse matters of taste, fashion, and practicality, just as much as intellectual, theological, and denominational convictions. Nonetheless, the exterior of the sacred or devotional book was frequently a significant site in post-Reformation England. Protestants remained acutely sensitive to the material and imaginative affordances of an object that had an inside and an outside, a three-dimensional object that had to be literally opened and closed in order to be used. The early modern period saw the increased popularity of embroidered covers for Bibles, psalters, prayer books and other small devotional volumes, made by both professional and amateur embroiderers. The skilled production of covers for these kinds of books can be seen in itself as an individual act of devotion, and such book covers tell us much about gender, class, ownership, gift exchange, and private prayer. Katherine Parr and the young princess Elizabeth both showed a keen interest in making them, and the surviving examples of their work reveal a predominance of initials, coats of arms, geometric patterns, or images with symbolic importance, such as plants, flowers, and animals. As monarch, Elizabeth in turn became the recipient of books with lavish velvet and embroidered bindings such as these. The frequently heraldic nature of  



See, for example, David G. Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer (Oxford Bibliographical Society: Bodleian Library, ), pp. xxxv, , . See Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen’, for photographs of many examples of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bindings. For some other examples, see David Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, –: A Handbook (London: British Library, ), pp. –; Cyril Davenport, ‘Embroidered Bindings of Bibles in the Possession of the British and Foreign Bible Society’, The Burlington Magazine, .XII (), –; Giles Barber, Textile and Embroidered Bindings (Oxford: Bodleian Library, ); Myfanwy Moore, ‘English Embroidered Bookbindings’, unpublished doctoral thesis (Royal School of Needlework, ); Mirjam Foot and Howard M. Nixon, The History of Decorated Bookbinding in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), chapter . For details of the embroidered books made and received by Elizabeth, see Lisa M. Klein, ‘Your Humble Handmaid: Gifts of Elizabethan Needlework’, Renaissance Quarterly,  (), –. There is a significant body of critical literature on the historical and social issues surrounding women and needlework more generally; among the most recent, see Bianca F.C. Calabresi, “‘you sow, Ile read”: Letters and Literacy in Early Modern Samplers’, in Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly, eds., Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World,



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

sixteenth-century bookbindings speaks to us of elite social and political networks, and relationships and exchanges in which books were important, enduring symbols. All gifts of needlework, including bookbindings, derive their value to a large extent from the hours of personal effort spent by the maker in devotion to the recipient. It was in the early seventeenth century that embroidered book covers became more and more popular, and were increasingly imbued with a specifically religious significance. One manifestation of this increasingly religious – or more specifically, scriptural – investment in embroidered book bindings was that in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, they became increasingly pictorial. Stories from the Old Testament, as in Figure  discussed above, as well as classical mythology provided popular inspiration for the art of needlework more generally in this period. The  embroidered cover of a  Geneva Bible, which bears the inscription ‘        ’, for example, depicts the sacrifice of Isaac on the front, and Jonah and the whale on the back, inside a luscious border of flowers, fruit, and insects. Illingworth’s initials feature on the front cover, and the date on the back cover, asserting a particular ownership of the binding, which matches the inscription on the pages contained within. This early seventeenthcentury binding, worked with silk threads on fine linen, is typical of its kind as the work of a skilled amateur. Metallic threads, sequins, and seed pearls were also frequently used as embellishments on textile bindings, framing and ornamenting the book in ways that are comparable with the much more expensive golden and bejewelled covers associated with medieval Books of Hours. With their brightly coloured images of stories from scripture or allegorical figures of faith, these objects are one of the places where we can see the persistence of religious images after the iconoclasm of the Reformation. What is more, these images are in close proximity with the scripture that reformers insisted upon as the self-revealing site of truth, suggesting perhaps ‘a freedom on the outside that was not deemed appropriate within the text itself’.

 

– (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), pp. –; Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ); Jones and Stallybrass, ‘The Needle and the Pen: Needlework and the Appropriation of Printed Texts’, in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory; Michele Osherow, ‘Mary Sidney’s Embroidered Psalms’, Renaissance Studies,  (), –. For brief discussion of this binding in the context of ‘surrogate images’, see Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household, p. . Margaret Aston, ‘Introduction’, in The Church and the Book, p. xvi.

‘The booke is not my present, it is but the boxe’



Theological connections between an embroidered book cover and the text it contained could be made more explicit than this. The very act of making such a cover might be seen as a devotional activity akin to reading or praying. Acknowledging the gift of a copy of the New Testament with an embroidered binding, Robert Hegge wrote in the s to the mother of his pupil, Henry Oxinden, that the book being so arrayed in a vesture of gold and needle work, seems to challenge such reverence as to touch it without devotion were a sinne against the covering, as well as against the booke. Suche a booke is able to make a young man (as my selfe) to turne a divine a yeare before his time, if it were but to shew it over a pulpit. I must needs say thus much of it, that it is the best commentaire that I ever saw writ with a womans needle, upon the text.

Hegge’s expression of gratitude focuses on the effects of the outer ‘covering’, which as well as the ‘booke’ is imbued with something that moves him to ‘reverence’ and ‘devotion’. His response is a hybrid of reformed and unreformed ideas about materiality and holiness – to ‘touch’ this beautifully bound copy of the New Testament is an act of ‘devotion’, like stroking a relic, and he suggests that the very ‘shew’ of it ‘over a pulpit’ could inspire greater devotion in those who just see it, let alone read it. In this respect Hegge’s response resonates with pre-Reformation religious beliefs in the spiritual efficacy of the very materiality of certain objects when they are touched or glimpsed. At the same time, he figures the needlework as a ‘commentaire [. . .] upon the text’, his conflation of the tools of needle and pen suggesting the kind of close personal engagement with vernacular scripture favoured by reformers. This ‘commentaire’ is, nonetheless, manifested in inescapably material terms, which reinforce the importance of the book’s external casing as a tactile and visual surface embodying valid meaning in relation to what it contains. It would be easy to suggest that an explanation for the popularity of lavish embroidered pictorial bindings for religious books in the early seventeenth century can be found in the contemporaneous rise in the Laudian ideals of the ‘beauty of holiness’. However, such a narrative would overlook the complexities of reformed attitudes towards these  

Cited Henry R. Plomer, ‘The Oxinden Letters’, The Library (), – (pp. –). On Laudianism and the Counter-Reformation, see Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, –c. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Graham Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, ).



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

objects and their relationship to what they contain. Even though Grey’s New Testament has no outward decoration, its exterior is still rhetorically significant, and while Robert Hegge praises the beauty of his embroidered binding, he emphasises its function as a ‘commentaire [. . .] writ with a womans needle, upon the text’. As a ‘commentaire’ this binding is not symbolic in itself alone, but through the way in which its beauty draws out the significance of the text it contains. Reformed religion did not reject the exterior of the book as an important visual surface and interface; rather, the verbal and visual rhetoric of external appearance became imbued with an altered theological significance. Such objects resonate with Tara Hamling’s recent work on the decoration of the household in Protestant Britain, an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship that argues that the Reformation did not bring about an immediate or complete rejection of the visual and artistic traditions of the medieval past. Hamling’s evidence demonstrates the extent to which domestic space in postReformation Britain featured religious imagery on painted, plastered, and carved walls, ceilings, and fireplaces, as well as on furniture, textiles, and ceramics. This covering of surfaces with visual reminders of the spiritual represents considerable continuity with the pre-Reformation past, but also reveals how visual culture could be modified to ‘express and support specifically Protestant habits of thought and behaviour’. Another example of this continuity is the persistence of the practice of wrapping and enclosing sacred books, noted by Walsham; while medieval primers were kept in special bags and laid out on cushions, sixteenthcentury Protestant Bibles and prayer books might similarly be ‘carefully preserved in bed chambers, closets, and boxes’, which she suggests we might compare with Jewish phylacteries. Alec Ryrie cites the Suffolk nonconformist Richard Blackerby, who insisted that Bibles ought to be treated with respect as objects: ‘there ought a negative Reverence to be given to the out-sides of such sacred Oracles’. There are many surviving examples of early seventeenth-century books with embroidered covers and accompanying matching bags, such as BL c..a. at the British Library,  



Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household, p. . Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen’, p. . See also Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, – (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), pp. – for examples of medieval prayer books with their own protective ‘chemises’; and Alexandra Gillespie’s discussion of medieval chemise bindings and the visual tradition of wrapping sacred texts: ‘Bookbinding’, in Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin, eds., The Production of Books in England – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. – (pp. –). Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, p. .

‘The booke is not my present, it is but the boxe’



a popular metrical translation of the psalms with a binding elaborately decorated with silver threads, which comes enclosed in a silk-lined bag, also embroidered, another copy of which at the Folger Shakespeare Library has an embroidered floral binding with sturdy cloth ties. There is a definite continuity between such distinctively Protestant containers for sacred texts and earlier, pre-Reformation boxes made for the same purposes, such as wooden or leather missal cases. The gentry as well as the aristocracy of the early seventeenth century ‘clothed their households with needleworked cloth’, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass remind us, emphasising the importance of public or semi-public display for needlework, much as it might be associated with private or semi-private activity: ‘any clear distinction between public and private, inner and outer spaces, was undone in material ways by English needlewomen’, as they created things and covered surfaces that were meant to be seen by others. Jones and Stallybrass draw attention in particular to small boxes with embroidered satin covers as another ‘frequent site for Biblical figures’. The exteriors of these caskets featured rich scenes, usually worked by the needles of girls and young women in separate panels, which were then put together around the box. With elaborate, colourful work covering all four sides as well as the lid, embroidered boxes epitomise the needle’s potential to explore and embrace three-dimensional space. Their typical contents – writing utensils, jewellery, and cosmetics – are things associated with other kinds of material decoration, and so these artefacts embody a self-conscious celebration of outward ornamentation, both in their own containing form and in what they contain. Figure  shows one example bearing scenes from the life of Esther on the outside panels, which opens to reveal a compartment panelled with tiny mirrors around a landscape drawing. Continually distorting its interior space, this object manipulates our experience of its many surfaces. Embroidered bindings for prayer books, Bibles, and books of psalms suggest that in Protestant England sacred text is still seen as something to be treasured in emphatically material ways, through wrapping and enclosing, both to protect and to emphasise the beauty of what is contained 

 

Other examples in the British Library include BL c..m., a Bible from  with embroidered cover and matching embroidered bag, and BL c..c., a book of psalms with embroidered binding from  accompanied by a matching bag and gloves. On Protestant Bibles and embroidered bindings, see Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England, pp. –. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, pp. , . Ibid.; see pp. – for discussion and photographs of further examples of embroidered caskets.



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

Figure  Cabinet with scenes from the story of Esther, British, after . .  .  . cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

within. The idea that textual content must be literally protected in physical terms is a popular way of expressing the value of a text in this period; the gloss by ‘E.K’ for ‘October’ in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar includes a reference to the legendary story of how Alexander the Great, when he came to ransacking of King Darius coffers, whom he lately had overthrowen, he founde in a little coffer of silver the two bookes of Homers workes, as layd up there for speciall jewells and richesse, which he taking thence, put one of them dayly in his bosome, and thother every night layde under his pillowe. Such honor have Poetes alwayes found in the sight of princes and noble men.

As material artefacts, Homer’s works are treasured like ‘speciall jewells’ inside two kinds of chest – ‘a little coffer of silver’, and Alexander’s ‘bosome’ – literalising the way in which great poets are given ‘honor’ in ‘the sight of princes and noble men’. This proverbial image conveys the 

The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser: Spenser’s Minor Poems, ed. Ernest de Sélincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. –. In George Puttenham mentions this apocryphal anecdote in his

‘The booke is not my present, it is but the boxe’



sense that something can be drawn from texts even when they are not being read; they transmit an intangible kind of efficacy just through their physical presence, and thus must be carefully preserved next to the body among the bed clothes, or carried securely in jewel coffers that are symbolically worthy of the intellectual riches they contain. In Book  of The Faerie Queene, another Spenserian juxtaposition of book and box takes place in the following exchange of gifts between Prince Arthur and Redcrosse: Prince Arthur gave a boxe of Diamond sure, Embowed with gold and gorgeous ornament, Wherein were closd few drops of liquor pure, Of wondrous worth, and virtue excellent, That any wound could heale incontinent: Which to requite, the Redcrosse knight him gave A booke, wherein his Saveours testament Was writ with golden letters rich and brave; A worke of wondrous grace, and able soules to save. (.ix.)

Arthur’s gift heals wounds, while the Redcrosse Knight’s saves souls, and their complementary properties are matched by a shared materiality. Both box and book are containers made from precious substances that reinforce the value of their respective contents. James Kearney opposes the two objects in his reading of this moment, reducing the box to mere allegory, while in contrast the book ‘almost seems to become a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional space, somehow heavier, denser, more fully realized or rendered than the things around it’. It is not an oversimplification, I suggest, to read this Spenserian exchange as a deliberate mirroring of two objects that are inherently similar in material terms, and thus to think about the box of healing liquor (with its whiff of Catholic superstition) and the book of the New Testament (a safer Protestant source of grace) as more obviously analogous in this moment: rich receptacles for even richer content. The box-like qualities of Redcrosse’s book emphasise its identity as a gift, as something carefully packaged. Here, in terms that resonate with the Homer anecdote in The Shepheardes Calendar, the appropriate enclosing of text suggests not dangerous idolatry, but proper Protestant respect for the Word.



discussion of poetic reputation; see Gavin Alexander, ed., Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, ), p. . Kearney, Incarnate Text, pp. – (p. ).



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

However, this emphasis on outsides, whether book bindings or special caskets, had to be carefully negotiated by a religious culture constantly alert to the dangers and temptations of exteriors. This is particularly seen in discourses of clothing; as the Cambridge Calvinist William Perkins insisted, ‘our care for apparel, and the ornaments of our bodies, must be very moderate [. . .] the garments that we make to cover our bodies, must be such as may express the virtues of our minds; specially the virtues of Modesty, Frugality, Shame-fastness’. This sentiment is not wholly a rejection of the significance of the exterior, ironically, because it still serves to communicate something about the internal. In the eighteenth century the historian John Strype claimed that Lady Jane Grey had on one occasion rejected a gift of a rich gown of tinsel cloth of gold on velvet, saying she aspired instead to the plain style of dress adopted by the princess Elizabeth and other fiercely Protestant women in the s. This story, although quite possibly apocryphal, nonetheless conveys another kind of ostentatious rejection of ostentation with its own historical complexities. A portrait thought by some to be the only surviving contemporary painting of Grey, identified by fine art dealer Christopher Foley in a house in Streatham, London, shows her dressed in a bejewelled red and gold dress and holding a small black book in her left hand. Her fingers are placed inside the book, holding it slightly open, as if to suggest that the painter had interrupted her devotions. This image presents us with a finely costumed woman who does not fit with Strype’s account of Grey’s preferred plainness of attire. The juxtaposition of these two purported representations of Grey reminds us that while verbal rejections of excess and ostentation are not necessarily matched by material practice, or by the conventions of visual representation, they may still be very much part of a Protestant identity and a claim to the moral and spiritual high ground. The sitter in the purported Grey portrait wears a brightly coloured dress, but the book she holds is dressed in a black binding. Its pages are clearly gilt-edged, and there is a subtle suggestion of further ornamentation, perhaps gold tooling, on the binding. The book thus embodies some of the ambiguities and complexities of Protestant attitudes towards externals.   

William Perkins, The whole treatise of the cases of conscience (Cambridge: John Legat, ), pp. , . Cited Alison Plowden, ‘Grey, Lady Jane (–)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/. Charlotte Higgins, ‘Is This the True Face of Lady Jane?’, The Guardian,  January , www .guardian.co.uk/uk//jan//arts.research. Until the discovery of this painting, it was thought that no contemporary likeness of Jane Dudley existed.

‘The booke is not my present, it is but the boxe’



While the book’s gold decoration matches the sitter’s expensive clothes, the blackness of its binding contrasts with her brightly coloured dress and jewels. Like the plainer styles of dress that John Strype says were favoured by the more fervent sort of Protestant woman in the mid-sixteenth century, this black binding is a similar kind of ostentatious absence, emphasising outwardly the book’s grave and solemn content. This apparent rejection of the exterior as a surface to be decorated in more showy fashion is another kind of visual performance, a reinforcement of the communicative significance of the outside of the book, as well as the inside. A colour that exists by the absence of colour, black embodies a very ostentatious kind of absence. For all that it might be associated with austerity and humility, black was one of the most expensive dyes for cloth. Early modern portraits suggest the power of black satins and velvets, and so black clothes could be far from simple, humble garments. Hamlet’s reflections on his ‘inky cloak’ and ‘customary suits of solemn black’ remind us of the highly performative associations of black clothing: ‘But I have that within which passes show/These but the trappings and the suits of woe’ (..–). Although his ‘customary suits of solemn black’ are a conventional outward sign of mourning, Hamlet reveals that they also at the same time disguise something ‘within which passes show’, and thus do not have a straightforwardly symbolic relationship with what they contain. The symbolic functions of black clothing were appropriated not just by the more puritanical followers of reformed religion, but also by some of the most significant Roman Catholic religious orders, notably the Society of Jesus, founded during the Counter-Reformation. These overlapping visual and verbal discourses of containing the body and the book reveal how wrong it would be to assign any kind of homogeneity to the public face of early modern Protestantism. The reformed tradition was not about dismissing the relevance of the outward appearance of religion – seventeenth-century preachers, for example, frequently wore long beards and large ruffs to give the impression of great learning and wisdom. No matter how much its significance might be denied, the outward appearance of people and things remained as important as what was contained (or purported to be contained) within. Early modern Protestants, as Ulinka Rublack explains, ‘had to acknowledge that the material could never become immaterial nor easily be separated from spiritual meanings’. 

For more detailed discussion of the history of black clothing, see John Harvey, Men in Black (London: Reaktion Books, ), especially chapter ; Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), p. .



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

Even the early modern wardrobe became a repository of complex organic relationships between reformed and pre-Reformation aesthetic and spiritual values. As well as its black binding, the slightly open position of the book, which gives the merest glimpse at its interior in the purported portrait of Grey, invites questions about some other iconographical traditions of portrait painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Books make very frequent appearances in Tudor and Jacobean portraits, whether in the hands of the sitter, or arranged on furniture in the foreground or background of the scene. Earlier depictions of St Jerome in his study or of the Virgin Mary at prayer establish certain conventions for the symbolic display and function of books in visual art more generally. The first known portrait of Elizabeth I as a princess (formerly attributed to William Scrots, c. –) is strikingly similar in composition to the painting of Grey; wearing a red and gold gown, the young Elizabeth holds a book with both hands in her lap at the very centre of the painting, and another book lies open on a shelf just behind her. Like Grey, she is not just casually posing with the book in her lap, but appears to be marking a particular point inside it, holding the pages very slightly apart with one finger. In his catalogue of Tudor and Jacobean portraits, Roy Strong usually notes when a subject is shown with a book or books: in a portrait by an unknown artist, the martyred Bishop of London (and great supporter of Lady Jane Grey) Nicholas Ridley is depicted with his ‘left hand clasping a book before him’, and in a portrait believed to be of John King, another Bishop of London, the subject appears with ‘his right hand holding a book’. What Strong does not say is that in both cases, the book is being held open in the same manner as in the Grey portrait, one or more fingers of the subject inserted between the pages, drawing the viewer’s eye beyond the surface of the painting and the general scene of the sitter, to the inside of the book. Portraits of other major Protestant divines including Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and John Foxe also feature books being held open in a similar fashion. The half-hidden fingers pointing to the concealed interior of the book imply that there is more to the painting than can be perceived by the eye.   

Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –; see also chapter , ‘The Look of Religion’. For discussion of the iconographical tradition of people reading, see Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ). Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits,  vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, ).

‘The booke is not my present, it is but the boxe’



In all of these images the book is emphasised as something which, although we see only the outside, has a significant inside, and moreover, an inside that is potentially more important because it remains hidden. The book becomes an intimate receptacle that hides its content from the casual viewer, and hints at what else might be seen and yet not seen in such images; Valerie Traub, in drawing out the possible erotic features of the painting of the young princess Elizabeth, argues that the fingers inside the book on her lap have a ‘directional siting to the maiden’s hidden genital interior’ in a ‘simultaneous covering and indexing of the genital area’. Marked by the secretive fingertips of the sitters, the inside of the book becomes an intriguing and tantalising kind of vanishing point in a visual, manual emphasis on interiority. The hands of these sitters behave rather like the manicules drawn in margins of books, which point inwards to particular sections of text; as William H. Sherman emphasises, the manicule reminds us that ‘reading was a self-consciously embodied practice [. . .] readers picked up their books with an acute awareness of the symbolic and instrumental power of the hand’. While the hand performs a literal physical opening of the book, parting the covers and lifting the pages, it also signals a metaphorical opening. The index finger is iconographically associated with knowledge and truth, and in such portraits, the hand performs a gesture of piety, signifying individual close engagement with the truth of scripture or other religious writings. It conveys an insistence on inwardness, pointing beyond the visible surface of the painting to the hidden content of the book. This insistence on inwardness equates to an insistence on active use of the book’s content. ‘The painting you see here is an external representation’, the sitters seem to be saying, ‘but ultimately what is most important to me is what is beyond this painting, contained inside this book, with which I engage privately and devoutly’. To suggest that this is a distinctively Protestant iconographical trope would be an exaggeration; one of the many portraits of Mary, Queen of Scots produced after her death, for example, depicts her in a black dress holding a crucifix in one hand and a book   

Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . Sherman, Used Books, pp. – (p. ). Compare also the iconic woodcut in Acts and Monuments of Thomas Cranmer at the stake, holding the hand with which he signed his recantation first into the flames: ‘stretchyng out his arme, he put his right hand in to the flame: which he held so stedfast & immoveable (saving that once with the same hand he wiped his face) that all men might see his hand burned before his body was touched’. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online,  ed. (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, ), www.johnfoxe.org, p. .



The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book

slightly open in the other in the same fashion. There are many other portraits from this period in which the book is similarly depicted: as Claire Richter Sherman neatly puts it, the hand is ever ‘a meeting place of matter, mind, and spirit’, and the hands in these paintings emphasise both the intellectual and material complexities of the early modern book as another kind of ‘meeting place’. Protestantism distinguished itself as a religion of the book, but the real and imaginary books discussed in this chapter have illustrated how in early modern England, the ‘book’ was much more complex than the polemical cry of sola scriptura suggested. Even as reformed readers and writers expressed a theologically informed and often polemical distaste for material things, they could not escape or deny the powerful rhetorical possibilities of externals and the material world in which the book must be experienced. ‘If you like real cleanliness, clean first what is internal, and then, if you are so inclined, clean the things that are external: body, clothes, pitchers, cups, plates, seats, and other household things’, wrote Erasmus, paraphrasing Matthew :. Post-Reformation England, rather than rejecting the material world altogether, was in general characterised by the kind of careful compromise between the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’ that Erasmus emphasises here. Books occupy a place among what Erasmus describes as ‘the things that are external [. . .] and other household things’: they are inevitably material objects, taking their place alongside all manner of other receptacles, and their materiality must be accordingly recognised and embraced in all its troubling ambiguities by the early modern reader. For contemporary scholars, as for early modern writers, there is a tempting aural resonance between the monosyllabic nouns ‘book’ and ‘box’, whose similarly wooden etymologies – from ‘beech’ and ‘box-tree’ respectively – are another reminder of some of their shared material and imaginative affordances. The editors of a recent collection of essays on early modern manuscript miscellanies begin their introduction with the observation that ‘early modern books carried miscellaneous contents as regularly as bags and boxes did. Yet books have done a better job of keeping their diverse contents intact than have most containers’.    



See Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, I, plate ; II, plate . Claire Richter Sherman, Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, ), p. . CWE , p. . The end of the seventeenth century saw the emergence of European ‘xylotheques’, libraries of book-shaped boxes made from wood samples, each containing specimens of the relevant tree. Such collections materialise the shared etymology of book and box particularly vividly. Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, ‘Introduction: The Emergence of the English Miscellany’, Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, ), p. .

‘The booke is not my present, it is but the boxe’



Their explicit comparison between book and box draws attention to these two objects’ shared capacity to contain, protect, and transport matter – but also reminds us that in the long term, a bound book might be a better ‘box’ than an actual box, in terms of preserving its contents. As this chapter has shown, however, the shared material and imaginative affordances of both objects allow much more than containment, and keeping things intact. Books and boxes each embody dynamic interactions between container and content, which constantly shape and reshape each other.

 

How to Read a Reliquary

‘Gods Bodye in the Box’: Contested Sacraments According to the famous Reformation propagandist John Bale, in the first interrogation of the young Protestant martyr Anne Askewe in , questions about the Eucharist were at the forefront of her crossexamination. ‘First Christofer dare examyned me at Sadlers hall, beynge one of the quest, and asked yf. I ded not beleve that the sacrament hangynge over the aultre was the verye bodye of Christ realye’, Askewe recalls in Bale’s edition of her interrogation, to which Bale adds one of his characteristic, verbose interruptions: the perfyght beleve of Steven, Actorum vii. of Paule Act. . and of Salomon, . Regum . et . Parali. . was, that God dwelleth not in temples made with handes. Agreable vnto thys was the faythe of thys godlye woman, whych neyther coulde beleve that he dwelleth in the boxe. God sayth, Esaie vi. Heaven is my seate, not the boxe. David sayth, Psalm.  oure God is in heaven, not in the pixt. Christ taught us to saye, wha[n] we praye, Matth. . Luce , our father which art in heaven, and not our father which art in the boxe. Now discerne and judge.

The interrogation begins with a specific question centred on a confessionally divisive material object: what exactly is it that hangs ‘over the aultre’? Bale seizes on this image of ‘the boxe’, a Eucharistic pyx, densely surrounding it with textual evidence from Old and New Testament sources including the Lord’s prayer, to argue that there is absolutely no scriptural  

The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe lately martyred in Smythfelde, by the Romysh popes upholders, with the elucydacyon of Johan Bale (Wesel: D. van der Straten, ), Aiv–Aiiv. This question, of what happens to the bread and wine in the Eucharist, has been much discussed: see Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England’, in de Grazia et al., eds., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, pp. –. As the editors point out, ‘Hoc est corpus meum’ is perhaps the most problematic sentence in the history of Christianity (p. ). See also David Aers, ‘New Historicism and the Eucharist’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies,  (), –.



‘Gods Bodye in the Box’: Contested Sacraments



authority for transubstantiation. Such a ‘boxe’, as he derisively refers to it, cannot possibly contain the body of Christ, for God dwells only in heaven. When the subject is returned to later in the interrogation, as Askewe reveals – ‘Then he layed unto me, that I shuld saye, that the sacrament remaynynge in the pixte, was but breade’ – Bale reacts forcefully, again invoking scriptural authority: Whoever redde in the scripture or autorysed Chronycle, that breade in a boxe shuld be Christes bodye? Where or wha[n] commaunded he hys most holye bodye, so to be bestowed? What have ye to laye for thys doctryne of yours? Are ye not yet ashamed of your unreverent and blasphemouse beastlynesse? wyll ye styll plucke our Christen beleve from the ryght hande of God the eternall father, and sende it to a boxe of your braynysh devysynge?

From the early days of the Church, Bale elaborates further, ‘was it neyter boxed nor pixed, honoured nor sensed unyversallye’, but ‘what an horrible worke here is now, for the boxinge therof, and what a great heresie it is to beleve that Christ dwell not therin, contrarye both to hys owne and to hys Apostles doctryne’. The word ‘box’ and variations on it (‘boxed’, ‘boxinge’) echo plosively throughout Bale’s editorial interventions, with the effect that his own impassioned rant almost drowns out the already heated voices of the interrogation. His contemptuous rail against boxes is matched by the book’s printed apparatus: the table of contents directs readers to where they might find ‘Boxers of their God’, ‘Breade in a Box’, and ‘God in the boxe’, underlining the thorough contempt for ‘thys doctryne of yours’ that runs throughout the entire text. For John Bale, the closed pyx becomes a motif of all that is false about traditional Eucharistic doctrines, beliefs, and practices. This is in stark contrast with the transparent authority of scripture, in which the faithful Anne Askewe is depicted through her own words and Bale’s elaborations to believe completely. These fundamental doctrinal questions are given more systematic treatment by Thomas Cranmer in , who refutes at length the Roman church’s teachings on transubstantiation and Eucharistic presence in his first major published work, A defence of the true and catholike doctrine of the sacrament of the body and bloud of our saviour Christ. In a passage invoking Matthew , where Christ warns the disciples about false prophets and signs, Cranmer explains: our Saviour Christe (lyke a moste lovynge pastour and savioure of our soules) hath gyven us warnyng before hande, of the perylles and daungers 

The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe, Div–Diiiiv.



Ibid., *iiv–*iiir; Diiiiv.



How to Read a Reliquary that were to come, and to bee wise and ware, that we shoulde not geve credite unto suche teachers, as woulde perswade us to worshyppe a peece of breade, to kneele to it, to knocke to it, to creepe to it, to folowe it in Procession, to lyfte up our handes to it, to offer to it, to lyght candels to it, to shut it up in a cheste or boxe, to dooe all other honoure unto it, more than we dooe unto God: havynge alwaye this pretence or excuse for our Idolatrie, Beholde, here is Christe.

The teachings of the Roman church have led to idolatrous beliefs about the earthly presence of Christ, according to Cranmer, epitomised here by the typical treatment of ‘a peece of breade’. His cynical, lengthy list of some of the devotional practices associated with traditional understandings of sacramental presence in the bread of the Eucharist culminates with the act of ‘shut[ting] it up in a cheste or boxe’, which might then be honoured more than even God. This image became a common motif among antiCatholic preachers in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in similarly derisive critiques of ‘a God lockt in a Box, in the middest of your Idolatrie’. In  the polemicist and convert from Roman Catholicism, Richard Sheldon, also drew on Matthew  in A survey of the miracles of the Church of Rome, accusing ‘papists’ of misreading the text, and teaching Christ to be amongst them; either as a spirituall food and victual, in their tabernacles, amperes, hutches; or as a mysterie in their lockt closets private Chappells; or as a treasurie laide up in boxes, borne in pixes. carried about them as most rich ornaments and treasures [. . .] a corporall, carnall, presence of Christ upon earth in Arkes, secret clossets, boxes, coffers.

With their hyperbolic lists, such attacks on traditional religion display intense anxiety about the materiality of devotional practices, an anxiety that often becomes rhetorically preoccupied with the boxes in which the Eucharistic bread is contained, rather than the bread itself. Sheldon’s lists of boxes and box-like objects, like Cranmer’s earlier description of shutting the bread of the Eucharist away in ‘a cheste or boxe’, embellish the perception that the Roman Catholic church is secretive and deceptive, falsely leading people to wrong beliefs about where they might find access to the divine. The boxes that populate Catholic places of worship are not merely symptomatic of the doctrine of transubstantiation – they   

Thomas Cranmer, A defence of the true and catholike doctrine of the sacrament of the body and bloud of our sauiour Christ (London: Reginald Wolfe, ), Cciiir–v. Thomas Knell, A declaration of such tempestious, and outragious fluddes, as hath been in divers places of England (London: William How, ), Ciir. Richard Sheldon, A survey of the miracles of the Church of Rome, proving them to be antichristian (London: Edward Griffin, ), Kkr.

‘Gods Bodye in the Box’: Contested Sacraments



actually play a part in enacting this doctrine, literally outlining the belief that what they contain is divine, and therefore worthy of devotion. They do not passively contain, but actively mystify their contents. Moreover, the doctrine of transubstantiation requires believers to look at the material accidents of bread and wine and behold something else. For Protestant reformers, however, inside itself, the bread hides nothing. Enclosing a piece of bread in a box turns it into something that is idolatrously worshipped, because it cannot be transformed into anything other than its material reality as a piece of bread, nothing but a symbolic memorial of the Lord’s Supper. From such a perspective, the real identity of the bread has been both literally hidden away inside the material paraphernalia of traditional religious practices, and ideologically obscured by traditional teachings. The box simultaneously signals the humble materiality of the bread and disguises it, at once presenting the host as sacred and concealing its ordinariness. The pejorative references to the worshipping of bread in a box, which resound so frantically throughout English Protestant polemic over a sustained period from the earliest agitations of the sixteenth century to well into the seventeenth, draw the material objects of traditional religious practice and devotion into a broader critique of secrecy, obfuscation, and deception. At their most extreme, such critiques verge on political caricature, as in an anonymous pamphlet from , The Black Box of Roome [Rome] opened, which claims to expose Jesuit murder plots. The pamphlet begins with a description of how Jesuit plotters participate in a superstitious ritual to sanctify the weapon before they embark on a murder: they kneele all down [. . .] and put before the intended Traitor, a knife folded up in a scarfe; shut up in a little Box, covered with an Agnus Dei, written about with black letters of perfumes, odorifirous Characters: and when they draw it out themselves, they cast or sprinckle some drops of holy water upon it, and which done, they hang at the hafte of the said knife, five or sixe graines of Corrall, which are blessed by them.

The ‘black box’ of the pamphlet’s title turns out to be both a dangerous material object (illustrated in the midst of such a ritual, on the title-page) and a seductive metaphor for the sinister operations of the ‘infernall firebrands’ (Figure ). The Eucharistic pyx, a small box whose contents became such an intense focus of religious division as John Bale and others demonstrate, 

Anon., The Black Box of Roome opened from whence are revealed, the damnable bloody plots, practices, and behaviour of Jesuites, priests, papists, and other recusants in general (London: no publisher, ), Av.



Figure 

How to Read a Reliquary

Anonymous, The Black Box of Roome opened (London, n.p., ), title-page. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

‘Gods Bodye in the Box’: Contested Sacraments



belongs to the ‘proliferating families’ of other devotional boxes and box-like objects that meant different things for Catholics and Protestants in this period, including ciboria, tabernacles, aumbreys, shrines, and confessionals. Such objects do much more than simply contain: they display, reveal, and conceal, articulating crucial boundaries between the earthly and the divine, and the sacred and profane. They have an ancient heritage as holy spaces in the Jewish and Christian faiths, not least in the scriptural precursor of the Ark of the Covenant, the wooden chest, gilded and veiled, which contained the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, whose construction is described in detail in the book of Exodus. Since the earliest days, one early modern scriptural commentator observed, ‘they had also in the Synagogue an Arke (or Coffer) wherein the Booke of the Law (the Bible) was kept’. The focus of this chapter is another sacred box in the literary and religious cultures of early modern England, the reliquary. A reliquary is a box intended to contain a relic – an object associated with a particular person, usually a bodily fragment, such as a piece of bone or flesh, or a tooth, hair, or fingernail, but other material remains like pieces of clothing can become relics too. The transformation of such material remains into holy relics worthy of veneration does not happen automatically, but has to be brought about by the ‘beliefs and practices that surround them’, that is, by the particular social and cultural contexts in which they exist. Enclosure inside a reliquary is often a crucial part of this process of imbuing sacred status upon something otherwise very ordinary. A bare bone is anonymous, silent, and possibly even repellent, but when placed inside a reliquary it becomes a holy fragment, through which people might be brought closer to the divine. The function of the reliquary as a receptacle is not only to articulate the sanctity of a material fragment, however: the hundreds of examples extant today in cathedrals and churches across Europe reveal the ways in which these containers are still required to ‘protect, hide, temporarily reveal, draw attention to,



 

Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. . Their discussion reveals a persistent interest in ‘enveloping objects’ (p. ). See also Megan Holmes’s discussion of ‘enshrinement structures’ or ‘enclosures and containers of the sacred’, in The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), pp. , . Henry Ainsworth, Annotations upon the five bookes of Moses, the booke of the Psalmes, and the Song of Songs, or, Canticles (London: John Bellamie, ), p. . Alexandra Walsham, ‘Introduction: Relics and Remains’, Past & Present, Supplement  (), – (p. ). I am also indebted in this chapter to her article in the same publication: ‘Skeletons in the Cupboard: Relics after the English Reformation’, –.



How to Read a Reliquary

explain, assert ownership of, or make more visually exciting their often desiccated contents’. Although not many medieval English reliquaries survive, early modern sources tell of some of the treasures that were integral to the life of religious institutions until the Reformation. At Durham cathedral, according to a late sixteenth-century description of the monastic foundation before its dissolution in , the glorious shrine of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Cuthbert, one of the northern patron saints, contained ‘almeryes of fine wenscote, being varnished and finelye painted and gilted finely over with little images verye seemly and beautifull to behould, for the reliques belonginge to St Cuthbert to lye in’. Like these ‘almeryes’, or the ‘Loddon Reliquary’, a . cm-high hinged box of pear-wood from England around , with carved images of St John the Evangelist and St James the Great, many reliquaries were simple box-shaped receptacles, but they could also take the form of a locket or pendant, a Eucharistic monstrance, a folding diptych or triptych, or a container for multiple relics, each enclosed in their own tiny compartment. They were also often elaborate architectural forms, which emphasised their own identity as a shrine, a cathedral in miniature. While the reliquaries for St Cuthbert’s remains were made from ‘fine wenscote’, other materials that could be used in the construction of such receptacles include bone, ivory, metal, glass, crystal, and marble. As well as being ‘varnished and finelye painted and gilted’, reliquaries could also be encrusted with enamelled images, metalwork, and precious stones, and thus were some of the most valuable religious objects in material as well as spiritual terms. Enclosed in reliquaries, tombs, and shrines, relics could provide access to the sacred in ways that were physically realised, through generous outpourings of oil, blood, water, scent, or heat. There is even a specific term, ‘myroblyte’, for a saint whose remains exude miracle-working liquids. By the later Middle Ages, as scholars such as Caroline Walker 



  

Joanna Cannon, ‘Afterword’, in Sally J. Cornelison and Scott B. Montgomery, eds., Images, Relics, and Devotional Practices in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Tempe: Arizona State University Press, ), p. . Anon., Rites of Durham, Being a Description or Brief Declaration of all the Ancient Monuments, Rites, & Customs Belonging or Being within the Monastical Church of Durham before the Suppression (Durham: Andrews & Co., ), p. . This object is in the British Museum: no. ,. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, – (New York: Columbia University Press, ), pp. –. Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. , n. .

‘Gods Bodye in the Box’: Contested Sacraments

Figure 



Shoe reliquary case, French or Swiss, c. –, leather and iron. .  .  . cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Bynum have discussed, reliquaries increasingly exposed and explored materiality in complicated ways. For one thing, the relationship between the container and its content could be more explicitly one of physical, visual correspondence. This period saw the rise of a distinctive type of reliquary, which took the shape of a human body part, such as a head, arm, or foot, constructed to glorify the corporeal portion it purported to contain by reconstructing it in the finest possible materials, while still recognising its fragmentary nature. Reliquaries could outwardly engage with their contents in other visually striking ways, too. Bynum discusses a twelfthcentury casket for some of Thomas Becket’s blood, which conceals the relic matter within, but externally points to its contents with a red rock crystal on the top of the box. Others have examined the emergence of the ‘ostensory’, a reliquary that particularly emphasised its own displaying function, often featuring hosts of angels who thrust the relic towards the worshippers. Figure  shows a fourteenth-century French or Swiss  

 

Bynum, Christian Materiality, p. . See also Cynthia Hahn, The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object (London: Reaktion, ). Cynthia Hahn, ‘The Voices of the Saints: Speaking Reliquaries’, Gesta,  (), –; Caroline Walker Bynum and Paula Gerson, ‘Body-Part Reliquaries and Body Parts in the Middle Ages’, Gesta,  (), –. Bynum, Christian Materiality, pp. –. Victor Schmidt, ‘Curtains, Revelatio, and Pictorial Reality in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy’, in Rudy and Baert, eds., Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing, pp. – (pp. –).



How to Read a Reliquary

leather shoe-shaped case, probably intended to hold a reliquary of precious metals. It is decorated with images from the life of St Margaret, who burst free from the stomach of a dragon after it swallowed her. As a hinged leather case for a reliquary, which visually commemorates the miraculous escape of the fourth-century saint, this is an object intensely concerned with the concentric containment of skin, bodies, and body parts (St Margaret is a patron saint of women in childbirth, and this object may have hung above an expectant woman’s bed). Such examples illustrate just a few of the many variations that could be played upon the basic box form of the reliquary. The relic itself is inherently paradoxical, being fragmentary and yet also complete, a full manifestation of divine presence in a small scrap of profane material. While the relic is something very humble, the beauty of the reliquary that encloses it insists that it is something beyond earthly value. The reliquary may enable a dead saint to move across great distances, as opposed to being permanently immured at one site, and also to be present in several places simultaneously. The temporal aspect of the relic is crucial too; in being preserved inside the reliquary, the fragment of the saint is set in motion, potentially perpetually so, resisting decay in a journey through time. In this material denial of putrefaction, the reliquary plays a crucial role in establishing the relic as part of the timeless glory of heaven. The reliquary is therefore one of the most tangible and formal manifestations of the convictions that determine where the sacred can be found. In light of my discussion in Chapter , we might think of the reliquary as a kind of reverse Silenus: whereas the latter conceals treasures inside a rough exterior, the former encloses something that might look insignificant within an external shell possibly encrusted with costly gold and jewels. The reliquary, like the Silenus, is ultimately more precious on the inside, but it requires the splendour of earthly riches to signal what the unassuming fragment it contains cannot say on its own. The relic is a metonym – a part of a body standing in for the whole body, and an earthly fragment standing in for the greater glory of the divine – but the reliquary itself is, as Seeta Chaganti puts it, ‘both a metaphor for its means of conveying meaning, and the instrument that makes this possible’. The relic–reliquary dynamic produces a ‘complex effect whereby contained and containing are interchangeable, and the borders between them are indeterminate even as the containing act continues to articulate itself in the object’s physical features’. While the Silenus metaphor turns out to be based, ironically, 

Seeta Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), p. .

‘Gods Bodye in the Box’: Contested Sacraments



on an object that may have never existed, the reliquary’s metaphorical importance stems from the visible, tangible affordances of its elaborate materiality. In signalling symbolically what it hides within, or showing its contents directly through glass panels, the reliquary suggests that its contents need to be seen to be believed, even as their efficacy depends on their being believed to be there. As a box, the reliquary functions in many distinctive and often apparently contradictory ways, manipulating matter and the apprehension of matter. Reliquaries demonstrate particularly vividly how a box might be not only a container, but a complex instrument or technology with which people negotiate the relationship between the material and the spiritual. The body of critical literature on Christian relics and reliquaries is vast, and ranges widely across time, place, and cultures. Central to European religious practices for many centuries, relics have provided a stimulating concern for scholars across many disciplines, as objects around which many important questions about devotion, cult, and art coalesce. Alexandra Walsham’s detailed introduction to the special issue of the journal Past & Present on ‘Relics and Remains’ (cited above) provides an invaluable overview of the multiple intersecting concerns provoked by these phenomena, and their longstanding presence in critical discussions. In England, the sixteenth century was one of the most traumatic, transformative periods in the history of the relic; as Philip Schwyzer writes, ‘the Reformation, with its deep scepticism regarding relics and prayer for departed souls, radically transformed the spiritual status of human remains. No longer could fragmented body parts serve as the conduits through which spiritual aid flowed between the dead and the living’. James Kearney considers what exactly it was about the relic that made it so problematic, pointing out that ‘the holiness of the relic is a function of its contiguity with the world and the flesh [. . .] Its materiality is not incidental to its meaning, but essential to it. Relics even more than images have the potential to lead to a misunderstanding of the sacred’. During the most violent periods of the Reformation, relics were removed and destroyed, alongside many other traditional receptacles for the sacred – shrines, instruments of the Mass, contentious books – in a denial of their sacramental capacity to provide access to the divine. This literal desecration was matched by a rhetorical offensive against traditional ideologies, in an attempt metaphorically to empty, shatter, or expose as false the ‘vessels’ of  

Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature, p. . Kearney, The Incarnate Text, p. .



How to Read a Reliquary

Catholic doctrine. In post-Reformation England, the contentious question of what exactly was contained within the reliquary was intricately bound up with some of the most central anxieties about the significance of materiality itself. This chapter examines early modern literary responses to the reliquary, and explores how the material affordances of this holy box were continually emphasised and reinforced, even as the cult of the relic was denounced. While reliquaries and their contents largely disappeared from churches and Protestant devotional practices, these distinctive boxes persisted as powerful ways of thinking about the interweaving of material, spiritual, and intellectual apprehension in early modern writing.

‘As longe as it was inclosed men did not doubte thereof’: Boundaries of Belief From as early as the second and third centuries, relics of Christ and the saints provided essential points of contact between earth and heaven. The consecration of a medieval church required holy remains to be installed inside it, usually in the altar, meaning that the entire building was sanctified by the relic it contained, and so became a kind of macrocosmic reliquary. While the relic served as a bridge between the material and the spiritual, and concentrated the two together within the enclosed space of the reliquary, it also transcended the bounds of the reliquary to sanctify the whole building. The architectural structure of the church pointed outwards and upwards to heaven as well as inwards to what the building contained, acknowledging the ultimate source of the sacred, but also inscribing sacred presence within itself. Relics could be the focus of private prayer as well as public liturgies, rituals, and ceremonies, and pilgrimage to places that honoured especially significant relics was essential to the Christian life. While Jerusalem was the most important pilgrimage destination, the faithful were drawn to many other locations associated with the relics of particular saints, where they sought physical or spiritual relief, or other divine favours. At these sites, the relic was usually located at the heart of various concentric layers – enclosed inside a richly jewelled reliquary, which might be protected by another container such as a chest, which in 

On sacred space and the incorporation of relics, see Gell, Art and Agency, p. ; David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ), pp. –. On the construction of sacred space more generally, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, ), pp. –. The essays in Coster and Spicer, eds., Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, provide a valuable outline of the major historical work in this field.

‘As longe as it was inclosed men did not doubte’



turn was contained in a sanctuary, shrine, or chapel, which was part of the larger architectural structure of a church or cathedral. At the end of a long journey, the pilgrim’s gradual progression through these increasingly hidden spaces increased the momentousness of his or her eventual encounter with the relic. In his foundational work on saints in early Christianity, Peter Brown describes how ‘the art of the shrine’ was ‘an art of closed surfaces’. Behind these surfaces, he explains, ‘the holy lay, either totally hidden or glimpsed through narrow apertures. The opacity of the surfaces heightened an awareness of the ultimate unattainability in this life of the person they had travelled over such wide spaces to touch’. The multiple layers surrounding the relic had an essential theological function, articulating its identity as a material fragment of the sacred. This theological function was inextricably bound up with the other purposes of these containers. Obviously, the reliquary protected the relic from damage or exposure to the elements, and both the relic and the reliquary needed to be protected against theft. Robyn Malo points out that the material layers enclosing the medieval relic also signified the complicated issue of access to the holy, for ‘the business of displaying and accessing relics was diverse and complex’. Pilgrims embarked on their journey to a shrine with the hope that they would be able to gaze upon or possibly even make direct bodily contact with the relic it contained. While physical proximity to the relic was desirable, the relationship between the individual pilgrim and the relic was typically defined by a tension between closeness and distance, which Malo describes as a ‘strategy of material occlusion’. The displaying of the relic was paradoxically often as much about emphatic enclosure and concealment, keeping the faithful at a distance, as it was about exposure. The reliquary sanctified and protected the relic, but also enabled access to the relic to be carefully controlled. This ‘occlusion’ of the relic was not only material, however: the relic could also be surrounded by powerfully obfuscating social rituals, which reinforced the boundaries of access and control. In early modern England, both those attacking and those defending the veneration of relics acknowledged and engaged with the physical and rhetorical boundaries that enclosed them, albeit for differing 

 

Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ), p. . See also Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, pp. –. Robyn Malo, ‘The Pardoner’s Relics (and Why They Matter the Most)’, The Chaucer Review,  (), – (p. ). Ibid., p. .



How to Read a Reliquary

theological and polemical purposes. The reliquary itself materialised a crucial boundary of belief. Surviving accounts of relics in England from around the time of the Reformation are often satirical, or combative, or both, and as such our understanding of relic devotion from these sources is almost always ‘refracted through the distorting lens and rhetorical conventions of confessional polemic’. I am not concerned so much with the historical question of the reliability of these texts as documentary accounts, but rather with what they reveal about responses to the reliquary as an especially contentious kind of box in early modern England. Erasmus has been a useful focal point in the preceding two chapters, and I now turn to him here also, partly because he is often cited as a key witness to the cult of relics in sixteenth-century England, but also because his response to relics is characterised by the ambiguities towards the material world that I have been emphasising. Guided more likely by the spirit of curiosity than by authentic devotion, Erasmus visited the Marian shrine at Walsingham, Norfolk (second only to Canterbury as an English pilgrimage destination) in . His satirical dialogue A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake, based on his experiences there and at other major European pilgrimage sites, was first published in , and subsequently translated and published widely. This text was written before any ideas of religious reform had received approval in England, but in his entertaining portrait of the relic as devotional object, as in his other satirical responses to popular devotion, Erasmus anticipates some of the main arguments later used to justify its suppression. One of the two speakers in the dialogue, Ogygius, has returned from visits to the famous shrines at Compostela, Canterbury, and Walsingham, and he describes the scene at the latter to his friend Menedemus. He mentions that some of the Virgin Mary’s breast milk is displayed ‘on the high altar’, and their discussion continues thus: MENEDEMUS OGYGIUS MENEDEMUS OGYGIUS

 

So it’s in plain sight Enclosed in crystal, that is. Therefore liquid. What do you mean, liquid, when it flowed fifteen hundred years ago? It’s hard: you’d say powdered chalk, tempered with white of egg.

Walsham, ‘Skeletons in the Cupboard’, p. . For further Erasmian satire of popular devotion to relics, saints, and shrines, see his other colloquies The Godly Feast, The Shipwreck, and Exorcism, or the Spectre. See also Eire, War against the Idols, passim.

‘As longe as it was inclosed men did not doubte’ MENEDEMUS OGYGIUS



Why don’t they display it exposed? To save the virginal milk from being defiled by the kisses of men.

While Erasmus bases this account on his own visit to Walsingham, the use of the dialogue form allows him room to voice his own cynicism, chiefly through the questions Menedemus asks, which make some of these cynical notions implicit. The apparently straightforward exchange takes us straight to some of the most crucial paradoxes of the relic. We learn first that the relic of Mary’s milk is not displayed ‘in plain sight’, but ‘enclosed in crystal’. The enclosure of relics within vessels made from precious materials such as crystal links them in material terms to the scriptural portrayals of the heavenly Jerusalem (as in Revelation  for example), and Erasmus is here referring to a practice standard throughout medieval Christendom. At the same time, he manages to insinuate, in just a few lines, the way in which this enclosure might be suspicious. The ‘crystal’ is used to obscure the material truth of what it contains (Ogygius admits that the milk looks like ‘powdered chalk, tempered with white of egg’ – i.e., the kinds of substances with which one would concoct fake ‘milk’), rather than to sanctify it. Menedemus’s apparently innocent questions are met with responses that seem appropriate at first, but also leave an irreverent aftertaste: it is revealed that the milk is not fully ‘exposed’ because it must be protected, but this is expressed in the discomfiting terms of the ‘virginal milk’ being ‘defiled by the kisses of men’. Ogygius also recounts how he obtained his own secondary relic, a piece of wood on which Mary ‘was seen to stand’, which he treasured away in his purse, planning to ‘set it in gold, but so that it shines through crystal’. Not one but two luxurious materials are invoked as desirable coverings here, and their juxtaposition with the scrap of wood again betrays Erasmus’s sense of the ridiculousness of this material excess. This wooden fragment is made to seem more insignificant by its merely adventitious relationship with Mary, in contrast with the True Cross, a very common relic. Throughout the dialogue there are repeated references to the multiple 

CWE , pp. –. This relic was at Walsingham from around  until the destruction of the shrine. Along with the blood of Christ and pieces of the True Cross, the milk of the Virgin remained one of the most popular and desirable relics throughout Christendom, partly because of the belief that Mary’s body was taken directly to Heaven, leaving no earthly remains. Miri Rubin notes that it was the story of St Bernard of Clairvaux, who in the twelfth century experienced a miraculous expression of milk from a statue of Mary, which ‘provided the frame for cults around drops of Mary’s milk kept in precious vials’: see Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), pp. , . For further discussion of Marian piety in England, see Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. –.



How to Read a Reliquary

boundaries that separate relics and other holy objects from the visitors. At Walsingham, there is ‘very little light: only what comes from tapers’, and in the crypt at Canterbury ‘the Virgin Mother has a residence, but a somewhat dark one, twice enclosed by iron screens’. Sacred objects are kept in the dark, or in the more hidden parts of the buildings, and the ‘Virgin Mother’ is not once but ‘twice’ enclosed by heavy gates. While he never explicitly says that these multiple enclosures are part of the inherently deceptive nature of the cult of relics, Erasmus emphasises them just enough to make them seem suspicious, or ludicrous, or both. The physical distance between the relic and the faithful pilgrim is also reinforced by protocols of access in the shrines. Ogygius reveals that only favoured visitors are allowed to get close to the most precious treasures at Canterbury and Walsingham, and even fewer are allowed to touch the contents of certain coffers. The opening of the reliquaries is closely controlled, and may be dramatically staged to orchestrate particular responses. At the tomb of Thomas Becket, Ogygius reports, ‘a wooden chest conceals a golden chest’, which in turn contains gold and jewels. He was privileged to see this opened: ‘when the cover was removed, we all adored’. Similarly, in the cathedral sacristy he was allowed a glimpse of some rags used by Becket to wash himself: ‘a chest with a black leather cover was brought out, placed on the table, and opened. Immediately everyone worshipped on bended knee’. These rituals of opening the reliquary to display its contents are clearly crucial in emphasising the sanctity of the relic, but with his sensationalised account of devotion to Becket’s facecloth, Erasmus leaves the reader with a distinct sense of scepticism about the melodramatic performances in which relics are caught up. Patrick Geary outlines the three principal interconnected beliefs that had to be held communally for the acceptance of a particular relic in medieval culture: that the person was a genuine saint; that their earthly remains should be venerated; and that the remains being venerated were those of the person in question. The latter question of authenticity could be tested through examination of the tomb or reliquary for documentary evidence of some kind, and confirmed by the intervention of the saint in the performance of miracles via his or her remains. In A Pilgrimage for  

 CWE , pp. , . Ibid., pp. –. Patrick Geary, ‘Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics’, in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. See also Peter Pels, ‘The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy’, in Patricia Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Places (New York: Routledge, ), pp. –.

‘As longe as it was inclosed men did not doubte’



Religion’s Sake Erasmus exploits this traditional trust in documentary evidence, again in order to undermine it. Ogygius recalls asking the guide at Walsingham ‘what proof he had that this was the Virgin’s milk’, explaining that he wanted to know this ‘clearly for the pious purpose of stopping the mouths of certain unbelievers who are accustomed to laugh at all these matters’. In response, the guide, as if possessed, gazed at us in astonishment, and as though horrified by such blasphemous speech, said, ‘What need is there to inquire to that when you have an authentic record?’ And it looked very much as if he would throw us out as heretics, except that we calmed the fellow’s wrath with a bit of money.

Ogygius and his interpreter search out this ‘authentic record’, finding it ‘hung so high it could not be read by just any eyes’, and thus literally elevated so it cannot be seen clearly, like the relic it claims to verify. The document relates the biography of the relic in great detail, and after reading it Ogygius ‘was ashamed of having doubted, so clearly was the whole thing set before my eyes – the name, the place, the story, told in order. In a word, nothing was omitted’. The comprehensive ‘authentic record’ confirms his belief in the veracity of the reliquary’s contents. However, for Erasmus, the need for documentary evidence to certify the relic points to writing itself as another kind of obfuscating layer that surrounds the relic. On a reliquary, ‘inscription counted itself as an important enshrining sign’; in other words, the faithful believed that the relic inside was that of a particular saint simply because the external label said it was so. The implication of Erasmus’s description is that those who readily believe that such inscriptions identify what is within the reliquary are like those who do not realise that the ugly exterior of the Silenus is deceptive, or that the attractively painted apothecary’s box contains poison. The traditional cult of the relic was in many ways a cult of the box, or rather, of multiple proliferating boxes. Visitors to medieval shrines wanted proof that they had seen or touched holy relics, and this demand for souvenirs nurtured pilgrimage industries. At Walsingham, souvenirs for sale included a miniature monstrance enclosing a replica of the vial of milk, labelled lac Marie. Small vials that could be filled with water from holy springs or wells, or other holy liquids were the predominant type of pilgrim souvenir in England between the sixth and fourteenth centuries, before they began to be replaced by badges. Usually cast in tin or lead, they could be decorated with inscriptions or depictions of the saint’s martyrdom, or formed in the shape of 

CWE , pp. –.



Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary, p.  and passim.



How to Read a Reliquary

a miniature church, or a pilgrim’s scallop shell. These ampullae were made in a range of sizes to suit all budgets, suggesting also that the dimensions of the smallest served to emphasise the preciousness of their thaumaturgic contents. At Canterbury, ampullae had a particularly long-lasting popularity because, as legend had it, the monks collected Becket’s blood in small vials immediately after his death. A drop of this blood mixed with water, to make ‘Canterbury water’, was said to have miraculous healing properties. The provision of ampullae enabled tiny volumes of this liquid to be conveniently carried away from the shrine for the cure of many. The treatment of these miniature vials in the cult of Becket’s blood illustrates the fascination with the dynamic relationship between container and contents inherent in the reliquary. Brian Spencer describes how ampullae that were believed to have unaccountably lost or rejected Canterbury water were suspended over the martyr’s tomb. The sight of these, and the belief that Canterbury water had the power to bubble and, as it were, boil over, probably accounted for the very positive way in which most ampullae were sealed.

Hester Lees-Jeffries’s depiction of ampullae as a ‘formalized (and fetishized)’ way of carrying liquid from a shrine further emphasises their contiguity with reliquaries as receptacles for the sacred. On the continent, the anecdote of the reliquary that performed miraculous transformations within itself continued well into the early modern period. The seventeenth-century Irish Jesuit Richard Archdekin describes a church in the city of Naples that has a perpetuall miracle at the sepulchre of the glorious Martyr S. Januarius, where a parte of his blood these many hundred years is kept in a viole, hard and drie, without any motion; but as soone as it is placed in the presence of the Reliques of his sacred Corps it beginneth presently to move, and boile up, as if it had been shed the same day.

Somewhere in France, he also muses, there is perpetually extant the sacred and admirable Viole of S. Mary Magdalen, where is preserved the pretious Blood gathered by her at the passion of our Saviour, which blood yeerely on the very day that our Saviour suffered, after the reading of the passion, boyleth up within the glasse, to the perpetuall 

 

Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges (London: Stationery Office, ), pp. , . See also J.C. Dickinson, The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) for photographs of surviving ampullae. Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, p. . Hester Lees-Jeffries, England’s Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. .

‘As longe as it was inclosed men did not doubte’



astonishment of many thousands who yearly beholdeth with tender devotion this evident miracle.

These little vials not only serve the practical function of preserving the precious drops of blood, but they are also integral to the physical framing of their miraculous, supernatural properties. In the latter example, it is the ‘reading of the passion’ that appears to provoke ‘within the glasse’ the wondrous stimulation of the ‘pretious Blood’. The implication is that the gospel and the ‘sacred and admirable Viole’ energise each other as animated and animating memorials of Christ’s suffering. Blood relics like these, as well as statues that miraculously exude blood, represent an especially popular category of religious objects, not least because of their tangible association with the crucifixion. Even in England in , Keith Thomas notes, an Oxford recusant called John Allyn had a quantity of ‘Christ’s blood’, which he sold for twenty pounds per drop as protection from bodily harm. However, the behaviour of such substances inside their vessels could often be particularly troubling, and the starting point for the denunciation of particular relics. The renowned blood relic at Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire was condemned as a fake by the bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, who inspected it for the royal commissioners. Latimer reported in a letter of  to Thomas Cromwell that it was wonderously closely and craftily inclosed and stopped up, for taking of care. And it cleaveth fast to the bottom of the little glass that it is in [. . .] It hath a certain unctuous moistness, and though it seem somewhat like blood when it is in the glass, yet when any parcel of the same is taken out, it turneth to a yellowness, and is cleaving like glue.

Efforts to expose the falsehood of ‘closely and craftily inclosed’ relics often focused on revealing that the content of the reliquary was not the substance it claimed to be. In this instance, while the ‘little glass’ is integral to the sanctification of the relic for believers, it becomes for iconoclasts the crucial medium of deception. At the moment when ‘any parcel of the same 

 

Richard Archdekin, A Treatise of Miracles Together with New Miracles And Benefits Obtained By the Sacred Reliques of S. Francis Xaverius Exposed in the Church of the Soc. of Jesus at Mechlin (Louvain: Andreae Bouveti, ), Er–v, Ev. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Redwood Press, ), p. . Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer, Sometime Bishop of Worcester, Martyr, , ed. George Corrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. Latimer also preached about this relic in a sermon of : see Certayn Godly Sermons Made Uppon the Lords Prayer (London: John Day, ), Miiir.



How to Read a Reliquary

is taken out’, the contents are visibly revealed to be not blood, but something as profane as ‘glue’, and so the relic’s literal, physical exposure also becomes its ontological exposure as a fake. After its exposure the blood of Hailes was enclosed in red wax under the seals of the investigators, and placed in a locked coffer, in which it was brought to London and paraded as a successfully discredited relic. Its decriers do not seem to notice the irony that even as a fake, this relic still had to be parcelled away inside a special box, a locked one no less, to expose its identity. While A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake alerts the reader to the ambiguities of relics in the humorous, elusive style so characteristic of Erasmus, the concerns hinted at in that dialogue are made much more explicit in later direct attacks on relics. Like Latimer’s denunciation of the blood of Hailes, such evangelical attacks were part of the bigger reforming agenda. In  John Calvin launched a ferocious assault in a treatise on relics (translated into English in ), which highlighted what he saw as many of the problematic aspects of these objects. In particular, their falseness is betrayed by the way in which they are stored and displayed; in the case of Mary’s milk, for example, their is not so littell a towne, nor so wicked a convent be it of monckes or be it of Nones, wher some percell therof is not showed some more, some lesse not that they were not ashamed to bost the[m]selves to have had holle potte fulls, but for asmuche as thei thought that their lie shuld be the more covered. They have therefore Invented to shewe onely asmuch therof as might be kept in a glasse to the ende men might examen it no nearer.

Calvin points to the troubling contradiction between the boastful claims of religious communities to have ‘holle potte fulls’ of Marian milk, and the practice of showing ‘onely asmuch therof as might be kept in a glasse’. The diminutive size of these shameful ‘Invented’ reliquaries undermines any claims about abundance, he insists, yet there is a kind of incoherence in his own argument that these people ‘were not ashamed to bost’ but also made sure that ‘their lie shuld be the more covered’, by enclosing the relic in a small vessel and restricting viewings. Another key thrust of Calvin’s attack is targeted at the sheer implausibility of numbers. An improbably long rollcall of places claims to have reserves of Christ’s blood, for instance: ‘In one place certain droppes, as at Rochell in Poitou the which Nicodemus (as  

Aston, Broken Idols of the English Reformation, pp. –. John Calvin, A Very Profitable Treatise, made by M. Jhon Calvyne, declarynge what great profit might come to al christendome, yf there were a regester made of all Sainctes bodies and other reliques, trans. Stephen Wythers (London: Rowland Hall, ), Ciiiiv–Cvr.

‘As longe as it was inclosed men did not doubte’



they saye) dyd gather in his glove. In other places violes full, as at Mantone and elsewhere, in other places goblets ful as at Rome, at Sainct Eustace’. The sardonic escalation from ‘certain droppes’, to ‘violes full’, to ‘goblets ful’ in this passage conveys Calvin’s scorn for the entire material culture of the relic and its constantly multiplying reliquaries. The concealing function of the reliquary is for Calvin intrinsically bound up with the way in which religious dogma masks the truth. While he believes that the concept of the relic is essentially false, it is additionally problematic that those who worship relics do so without realising that they might be worshipping the ‘false and counterfeyte bones of some certain Murtherer or thefe, or els of an asse, or of a dog, or of a horsse’, and so such individuals are ‘double begyled and deceyved’. In one town, Calvin notes, thei had (as men say) in times passed, an arme of S. Anthony the which when it was inclosed in a glasse they kissed and worshipped: but at such time as it was taken out & shewed forth, it was found to be the member of an Hart: there was also on the high aulter hangyng the braine of Sainct Peter as longe as it was inclosed men did not doubte thereof. For it had bene blasphemous not to beleve the superscription [. . .].

Like Erasmus’s Walsingham dialogue, Calvin’s account exposes a crucial tension in the reliquary: enclosing a relic in a special vessel is a practical necessity, which also inscribes its sanctity for believers, yet it is because it is enclosed so secretively that one might well suspect the relic of not being what it claims. The further irony, as they both recognise, is that even if the bones are more openly displayed, it is impossible to identify whether they are human or animal, let alone from which individual or part of the body they originate. For reformers, the truth about relics is obscured not only by the box they are displayed in, but by doctrinal rhetoric, symbolised and articulated by the ‘superscription’ on the reliquary, which as Calvin observes, it is blasphemy ‘not to beleve’. The relationship between container and contained is also often emphasised and interrogated by the complex rituals in which relics are implicated. In post-Reformation England, several of the typical suspicions about these rituals were voiced by the English playwright and translator, Anthony Munday, who documented ‘some of the Romish Reliques’ in the churches frequented by English students living at the English College in Rome. First published in , when Munday had returned to England after spending 

Ibid., Biiiv–Bivr.



Ibid., Hviiir, Avir.



Ibid., Avir–Bir.



How to Read a Reliquary

time in Italy, his treatise The English Romayne Lyfe describes the relics he saw in the seven main churches of Rome, objects ‘honoured and worshipped, as if they were God him selfe’. At the church of St John Lateran, Munday relates, the purported relics include some of Mary’s breast milk, Christ’s first shirt, a portion of the crown of thorns, and ‘a glasse vial, which is full as they say, of the blood of our Saviour, that ran out of his precious side hanging on ye Crosse’. When this vial is shown to the people they ‘take their hands, & hold the palmes of the[m] toward the glasse, and then rub all their face with their hands, with the great holines they receive from the Glasse’. Such descriptions illustrate the importance of glass as a material medium in reliquaries, as a substance that uniquely ‘privileges sight and subdues the haptic (in which sight realises itself as touch)’. The recurrence of transparency or partial transparency in such descriptions of reliquaries illustrates how ‘faithful understanding depends on the visual sense perception of a physically proximate and verifiable object, and the proper interpretation of that matter’. For Munday’s believers, the glass container is not just the practical means of storing and displaying the relic, but the point of transmission between the human and the divine that happens through seeing, even when it is not touched directly. This visual efficacy of the relic, permitted through the glass of the reliquary, works like an ocular communion for worshippers accustomed to primarily visual encounters with the mass – for most ordinary people, the consecrated elements were seen at the altar from afar, not consumed. According to Munday’s account, however, gesturing in this way towards the object often seemed insufficient – ultimately, closer physical contact with the sacred container was desired. Even so, this could often be achieved only by proxy, not by the faithful directly. Munday describes how the Friar in St Peter’s



 



Anthony Munday, The English Romayne Lyfe (London: John Charlewood, ), Hir. Munday’s religious motivations are complicated: some scholars believe him to have been a counter-Catholic spy, others a Catholic convert because of his connections with the printers John Charlewood and John Allde. Yet on his return to England he published several other anti-Catholic tracts in addition to The English Romayne Lyfe, and was involved in searching for recusants. See Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, pp. –; Donna B. Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics, – (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), passim. Munday, The English Romayne Lyfe, Fiir. Gillian Beer, ‘Windows: Looking In, Looking Out, Breaking Through’, in Subha Mukherji, ed., Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces (London: Anthem Press, ), pp. – (p. ). Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, ), p. .

‘As longe as it was inclosed men did not doubte’



[. . .] taketh everie bodies Beades, that layes them on the Aultar, and then he wipes them along a great proportioned thing of Christall and Golde, wherein are a number of rotten bones, which they make the people credite to be the bones of Saintes: so wiping them along the outside of this Tabernacle, the Beades steale a terrible deale of holynesse out of those bones, and God knows, the people thinke they doo God good service in it: Oh monstrous blindnesse [. . .].

Munday is reproachful of the way in which the ‘great proportioned thing of Christall and Golde’ is established as an apparently porous boundary between the material and spiritual. While the priest’s actions make it seem as though the visitors’ beads ‘steale a terrible deale of holynesse out of those bones’, a printed marginal note picks up on the negative implications of ‘steale’, protesting that this is ‘a craftie kinde of cosonage, whereby the ignorant people are beguiled’. Munday portrays this ritual performance in terms that point to its deceptive, illusory nature. The faithful are physically distanced from the contents of the relic at multiple removes: they must leave their beads on the altar to be taken by a priest who then touches them against the ‘outside’ of the ‘thing’ on their behalf. These multiple tactile interfaces lead only, Munday claims, to ‘monstrous blindnesse’ – a complete veiling of sight. Munday’s description of the crucial role played by the priest in establishing the sanctity of the relic resonates with Alfred Gell’s observations of religious rituals in Tahitian communities, in which statues of gods are ceremonially wrapped so that they cannot be seen by the worshippers. The most important statues are placed in special boxes, and only the priests are allowed to see inside these containers. In both contexts, the enclosure of the core material is integral to its identity as a sacred artefact. For Munday, however, this secretive enclosure is inherently suspicious: they tell the people, this is the Reliques of such a Saint, and this is such a holy and blessed thing: but they be either covered with Gold, Silver, or Christall, so that we can not tell whether there be any thing within or no, except it bee sometime in a broade Christall Tabernacle, and there you shall see a company of rotten bones, God knows of what they be [. . .].

In his attempt to demystify the relic, Munday goes as far as accounting for different types of reliquary – there are some that conceal their contents completely, and this presents the troubling question of whether they are in fact literally empty. Others, even if they are transparent or translucent, like  

Munday, The English Romayne Lyfe, Eiiir. Munday, The English Romayne Lyfe, Fiiv.



Gell, Art and Agency, pp. –.



How to Read a Reliquary

those made of ‘Christall’, still conceal the truth, because only God can know the identity of ‘a company of rotten bones’. While Munday reports from abroad, Protestant writers in England were anxious about the possibility of relics being smuggled into the country by those with counter-Reformation ambitions. The author of a  antiCatholic text, A Newyeares Gifte, dedicated to the Popes Holinesse, and all Catholikes addicted to the Sea of Rome, worries about ‘our English fugitive, runnagate Papistes, whiche are beyond the Seas’ who ‘sende into this Realme of Englande, Bulles, Pardons, Beades, Latin Primers, Papisticall Books, Superaltares, Pictures of Sainctes, hallowed Graynes, Crosses, Agnus Dei, wyth Sainct Johns Gospell in them’. Many of these dangerous objects are small and easily hidden, thus enabling Catholic devotional practices to take place illicitly, such as ‘superaltares’, or portable altars, which ‘serve to say Masse on in any secrete place’. Also mentioned is a pendant bearing the IHS monogram, with a ‘charme written and inclosed within the same’, and an ‘Agnus Dei which is hollow, & hath the gospell of S. John written in fine paper, and placed in the concavitie of the said Jewell, & worketh wonders in the defence of such as weareth them: in somuch, as it defendeth them from all perills whatsoever’. Such objects not only make their way in secretly, thanks to their size, but they are also objects that reinforce secrecy in their very physical forms, containing and concealing further devotional materials within themselves, like clusters of tiny little boxes. For those alert to dangerous forms of superstition, the enclosure of even scriptural text such as ‘the gospell of S. John’ within a traditional Roman Catholic devotional object associated with the Mass, an Agnus Dei, might be a controversial act of concealment. The persuasive potential of the rhetoric of secrecy is exploited by those writing in defence of relics as well as those denouncing them, however. In a Jesuit treatise published later in the seventeenth century, John Barclay defended ‘Reliques we either deposite under the Altars, or lay up in Beautified Coffers’, explaining how ‘we diligently and devoutly apply our Handkerchiefs and Garments to the Coffin, or Bier, in or on which these Sacred Bones are laid, that secret Blessings may flow upon us’. The ‘secret’ way in which blessings ‘flow upon’ the faithful out of such containers is not controversial for Barclay, but simply a fact of the   

B.G., A Newyeares Gifte, dedicated to the Popes Holinesse, and all Catholikes addicted to the Sea of Rome (London: Henry Bynneman, ), }iiiv–}ivr. Ibid., Hiir–v. John Barclay His Vindication of the Intercession of Saints, The Veneration of Relicks and Miracles, Against the Sectaries of the Times (London: Mary Thompson, ), Cr, Br.

‘As longe as it was inclosed men did not doubte’



mysterious operation of the divine. Barclay argues that the Church should continue to recognise miracles performed through relics, as it did in its early years, and he laments their rhetorical and physical desecration: nor are you contented only to take away all Honour from the Souls of the Blessed, but you make war also on their Bodies. I tremble to relate how many Reliques of Saints you have scatter’d in the wind, thrown into the water, consum’d with Fire; how often you have in scorn pluckt their sacred Limbs out of the Gold, and Gems, in which they were inclos’d, to expose them to Contempt. Posterity will lament their loss, we are asham’d for the Infamy of our Age.

Barclay compares the literal exposure of ‘sacred Limbs’ when they are ‘pluckt’ from their jewelled reliquaries with their rhetorical exposure to ‘Contempt’. His prose is also engaged in reconstituting the bodies of the saints in the face of this desecration. The reference to ‘their sacred Limbs’ acknowledges the inherently fragmentary nature of relics, but for Barclay it is also a synecdoche, reminding us that it is the whole saint who is being sacrilegiously ejected from these golden vessels. Barclay’s words, as well as those lambasting relic worship, reveal how closely the material form of the reliquary informs the entire discourse of relics. While both sides of the debate argue that the materiality of the reliquary is fixed in what it signifies, the reliquary turns out to be a surprisingly versatile object, as those in favour of relics and those against them can equally turn the boxes that contain them to their own rhetorical ends. While defences of relics such as Barclay’s emphasise the importance of ‘diligently and devoutly’ seeking physical contact with the relic via the reliquary, those who denounce the veneration of relics return repeatedly to the metaphor of blindness, in an insistence on the inability of worshippers to see the truth. As Calvin protests, closing one’s eyes in prayer before a reliquary prevents one seeing beyond the glass to the falsehood of its contents: ‘For many beholding a relique shut their eyes through superstition to the ende, that they seing shoulde see nothing at all: that is to say that they dare not looke in good earnest to consider what the thing is’. In Protestant polemic, the act of closing one’s eyes is transformed from a sign of piety into evidence of unwillingness to look, literally and spiritually, at the truth of what is contained in the reliquary. The metaphorical weight of the sight/blindness contrast is part of the broader rhetoric of light and darkness that permeated many aspects of the 

Ibid., Bv.



Calvin, A Very Profitable Treatise, Bir.



How to Read a Reliquary

programme of reform in England, especially with reference to print, held up by many Protestants as having enlightened the pre-Reformation darkness. William Tyndale addressed one of the  editions of his vernacular New Testament to ‘those that have now at this time our eyes opened again through the tender mercy of God’, and John Foxe proclaimed that ‘the pope, and all hys Colledge of Cardinals, must this understa[n]d, that through the light of printing, the worlde beginneth nowe to have eyes to see, and heades to judge’. In similar terms, a Dutch theologian derisively declared that relics were worshipped ‘during the night of their ignorance, & the thicke darknesse of their idolatries’. Such voices criticise or pity those who are unable to see the truth beyond both the murky glass of a reliquary and the shadowy rhetoric of Roman Catholic doctrine, often contrasting this literal and metaphorical opacity with the transparency of the vernacular Bible. Sixteenth-century humanists stressed the importance of returning ad fontes to recover the purest text possible, and so a box of bones displayed as a focus for religious devotion represented the very antithesis of proper biblical scholarship. While the dramatic binary of blindness and sight had an obvious attraction for Protestant polemicists, this language was at the same time very slippery; as Stuart Clark has argued, ‘multiple transfers’ were possible with ‘every item in the lexicon of vision, and nowhere more obviously than with blindness, illusion, trickery, or deceit’. Protestants argued that while clarity of outward and inner vision was the key to wisdom, visual perception was vulnerable – and unreliable. For Catholics, however, truth lay beyond the sensory, although sense perception was often crucial in directing a path towards the sacred. In their emphasis on darkness and blindness, sixteenth-century reformers insisted that reliquaries were deceitful constructions that concealed truth, or were empty of meaning. Reformed religion, in its rejection of the reliquary and supposed agenda of transparency, claimed to mask no tricks for the eye of the believer.  

 

‘W.T. unto the Reader’, in David Daniell, ed., Tyndale’s New Testament (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), p. . John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online,  ed. (HRI Online Publications: Sheffield, ), www.johnfoxe.org, p. . See also John N. King, ‘“The Light of Printing”: William Tyndale, John Foxe, John Day, and Early Modern Print Culture’, Renaissance Quarterly,  (), –. For a perspective on the enthusiastic Catholic engagement with print, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘“Domme Preachers”? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past & Present,  (), –. John Polyander, A Disputation against the Adoration of the reliques of Saints departed (Dordrecht: George Walters, ), Dr. Clark, Vanities of the Eye, p. . See also chapter , especially pp. –. On dissimulation and the ‘illusion of transparency’ in more general terms, see Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. .

The Book as Reliquary



The texts I have been discussing here show how the relic-related anxieties of reformers and those they wanted to reform met each other at oblique angles. Defences of relics and attacks on relics, while they might be equally impassioned, are based on different standards of verifiability and interpretation. While it is the very materiality of relics that draws people to them in hope of spiritual succour, the specific details of this materiality (the precise identity and origin of the bones, for example, upon which anti-relic writers focus much of their attacks) are not questioned by the traditional believer. And while relics are frequently characterised by a spiritual bounteousness, which is sometimes physically manifested, literally pouring out as oil, blood, or fragrance, sixteenth-century critiques often stress the secretive, deceitful concealment of the reliquary as a box that deliberately conceals. The Reformation involved a kind of double emptying-out: the polemical denunciation of relics was an attempt to empty them of doctrinal value, and violent attacks on shrines literalised this rhetorical destruction. At the same time, it was easy for reformers to recode the material structures of the reliquary, making its multiple layerings into forms of concealment. However, while Protestants were keen to sabotage the idea that the reliquary was a vessel for divine essence, their rhetorical demystification of these objects inevitably reinforced the physical and metaphorical potency of the very material form they were trying to devalue.

The Book as Reliquary In his preface to The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe, John Bale contrasts Askewe and her contemporaries with earlier martyrs, such as the eighthcentury St Boniface, who ‘was slaine co[n]firminge neophytes, or professynge his newlie baptysed brode to ye Romysh popes obedie[n]ce’. Further evidence of Boniface’s problematic claim to Christian martyrdom, according to Bale, is that ‘there was fou[n]de aboute hym a casket full of rellickes or dead menis bones, whan he was put to death’. In contrast, ‘Anne Askewe & here felyshyp, had none other rellyckes aboute them, whan they stoode at the stake to be brent in Smythfelde but a bundell of the sacred scriptures inclosed in their hartes, and redye to be uttered aganist Antichristes ydolatries’. Bale juxtaposes Boniface’s ‘casket full of rellickes’ with Askewe’s ‘bundell of the sacred scriptures’, setting up a polemical contrast between reliquary and book in these images of the moment of 

The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe, Ciiiv–Civr.



How to Read a Reliquary

martyrdom. A voiceless box of ‘dead menis bones’ has nothing to offer in comparison with scripture, which can transcend the material realm and be ‘inclosed’ within heart of the martyr, to be readily drawn upon in the defence of the true faith. The contrast between the two nouns for the box and book here, ‘casket’ and ‘bundell’, is part of Bale’s rhetorical effect: the grand-sounding ‘casket’ holds nothing of value, while the humble ‘bundell’ contains that which is truly ‘sacred’. After the campaigns of literal and rhetorical assault during the sixteenth century, as evidenced here by Bale, what eventually became of the reliquary in post-Reformation England? The picture is a complicated one. The fate of the relic is bound up with complex historical issues including the question of residual and recusant Catholicism; the extent to which the spread of Protestantism allowed for adaptation of traditional beliefs; and the evolving confessional differences about concepts of sainthood and martyrdom. There may well have been a general sense of loss and confusion about relics among ordinary people, who were uncertain about new modes of worship in freshly whitewashed buildings swept clean of familiar devotional prompts. One Elizabethan preacher, emphasising the importance of worship now firmly centred on the word of God, satirised those who lamented that ‘there is no images or saints, to worship and make curtsey unto: little god in the box is gone’. On the one hand then, relics became peripheral (and often necessarily invisible) artefacts associated with the counter-Reformation; throughout much of Protestant Europe, as Walsham has explored, the Church of Rome ‘was obliged to depend for the most part on sources of supernatural power which could be carried in a missionary’s pack and swiftly conveyed out of sight’. Even a reliquary emptied of its relics might continue to provide a focus for illicit devotion, a void that still contained some trace of the sacred. On the other hand, relics were still kept in York Minster at the end of the seventeenth century, and other cathedrals displayed chests containing bones of kings and bishops for visitors to see. By the late seventeenth century, with the rise of secular antiquarian attitudes towards  



Cited Aston, Broken Idols, p. . Alexandra Walsham, ‘Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England’, The Historical Journal,  (), – (p. ). See also her ‘Skeletons in the Cupboard’, pp. –; Ronald Corthell et al., eds., Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, ); Sarah Tarlow, ‘Reformation and Transformation: What Happened to Catholic Things in a Protestant World?’, in David Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist, eds., The Archaeology of Reformation – (Leeds: Maney, ), pp. –. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. ; see also Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past, pp. –.

The Book as Reliquary



the material traces of the past, the relic ‘could safely be removed from grave or shrine and transferred to the closet’, where it might become an object of curiosity, rather than devotion – although it is often difficult to disentangle the sorts of superstition that might still cling to certain kinds of relic in such contexts. There is some evidence that reliquaries and pyxes may have been occasionally repurposed as pieces of secular tableware. Therefore the identity of the relic in post-Reformation England was by no means straightforward or homogeneous. Complex theological debates about exactly where the sacred might be found continued, in which other material objects of devotion, such as church furnishings, were often caught up. On the practice of bowing towards the altar, for example, the nonconformist preacher Daniel Cawdrey commented in the mid-seventeenth century that ‘not onely many Protestants, but even Papists doe condemne you, if so you doe, for the greatest Idolaters in the world, and worse than Papists themselves, who have their God alwayes in a Box upon the Table’. At least Catholics believe they are venerating the body of Christ inside the ‘Box’, Cawdrey argues – those who do not are even more idolatrous: ‘If there be no more Holinesse, no more speciall presence of God there, than in other places; then, the bowing towards the Table, with those respects, is Superstitious’. Relics remained the subject of derision in literary culture, although the less polemical texts portrayed them as curious artefacts associated with foreign or old-fashioned religious practices, rather than objects that presented the immediate danger of idolatry. Mock catalogues and inventories in the first half of the seventeenth century satirised relics and the boxes they might be kept in with abandon, such as William Crashaw’s Fiscus Papalis, addressed to ‘the devoute and distressed Catholikes of Great Brittan’, which claimed to be ‘Written as it seems from one of their Priests, to invite them to leave England as a den of Heretikes, and get themselves to Rome, there to be made partakers of the riches and blessings laide downe in this Booke’. Among the many treasures described is the placenta of the Virgin Mary, ‘laide up and kept  





Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past, p. . See, for example, the rock crystal and gold vessel made in England in  and now on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum from the Monastery of Poor Clares in Hereford, which seems to have been used as both a reliquary and a salt cellar. Museum number: LOAN:MET ANON.-. D.C., Superstitio Superstes: Or, The Reliques of Superstition newly Revived (London: A.N. for I.M, ), Cv, Dr. On gesture and the altar after the Reformation, see Isabel Davis, ‘Prosthesis and Reformation: The Black Rubric and the Reinvention of Kneeling’, Textual Practice,  (), –. William Crashaw, Fiscus Papalis. Sive, Catalogus Indulgentiarum & Reliquiarum septem principalium Ecclesiarum urbis Romae (London: Nicholas Okes for George Norton, ), Ar, Lr.



How to Read a Reliquary

close in a silver Tabernacle or Cabinet set with many pretious stones’ – a marginal note suggests this was done by angels. The religious controversialist Richard Mountague mockingly imagines reliquaries for the relics of contemporary Catholic martyrs: ‘You may keepe, if you will, and lock up, if you please, in your Cabinet, or Casket, or where you will, Saint Campions thumb, Saint Garnets strawe, Saint Loiolaes hayre [. . .] I know no Protestant will steale them from you’. A  pamphlet by Richard Overton similarly satirises the Church of Rome and her relics, but in the same year the printers of this pamphlet also produced an anonymous treatise, which reported with apparently genuine dismay the landing on the Cornish coast of Spanish ships intended for Ireland, in which were found many relics, including ‘a little water in a very small Vessell, which the Priests say is Mary Magdalens Teares’. For those who did not believe in their validity as sources for the sacred, but feared their tempting effect on the faithful, an imagined reliquary could be as significant as the real thing. In general, though, as Daniel Woolf has argued, ‘most Protestants could safely adopt an attitude of benign amusement to popular Catholicism, so long as it was kept outside the church and off the throne’. The antiquary John Weever, in his Ancient Funerall Monuments of , conveys the sense in which relics as devotional objects were understood to be largely confined to the past: ‘Let me tell you, that Reliques were ever holden in most reverend regard, amongst all sorts of people, insomuch that in the taking of any solemne oath, they used to lay their hand upon certain Reliques, as they did upon the holy Evangelists’. Weever’s words look back to a culture he sees as now definitely gone, in which the book and the  

 

Richard Montague, A New Gagg for the New Gospell? No: A New Gagg for an Old Goose (London: Thomas Snodham, ), Ggv. Richard Overton, New Lambeth fayre newly consecrated and presented by the Pope himselfe, cardinals, bishops, Jesuits, &c. (London: R.O. & G.D., ); Anon., A true Relation of Certaine Passages which Captaine Baset brought from the West parts of Cornewall (London: R.O. & G.D., ), Av. Merchants could be richly rewarded for smuggling in Catholic printed material; as Walsham has discussed, the privy council ordered searches of all vessels docking in London in the late sixteenth century to uncover any seditious books hidden among imports – see ‘“Domme Preachers”’, p. . Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past, p. . See also Woolf, ‘The Dawn of the Artifact: The Antiquarian Impulse in England, –’, Studies in Medievalism,  (), –. John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments within the United Monarchie of Great Britaine, Ireland, and the Islands adjacent (London: Thomas Harper, ), Pv. Such ‘non-literary’ uses of the book have been much discussed by Alexandra Walsham, Margaret Aston, Eamon Duffy, David Cressy, and others, as I noted in the previous chapter. See also Brian Cummings, ‘Iconoclasm and Bibliophobia in the English Reformations, –’, in Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds., Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –.

The Book as Reliquary



reliquary could be literally interchangeable as holy receptacles. A medieval book of the gospels might well have been lavishly decorated with precious metals and jewels, like a reliquary, and so there could be a striking visual resemblance between the two objects. There could also be a direct material overlap between book and relic: Walsham notes that in preReformation times, ‘often enclosing fragments of the bones and other remains of martyrs and saints, book covers were sometimes indistinguishable from reliquaries’, giving an example of a thirteenth-century missal cover that is engraved with details of the relics it contains. Such sources demonstrate how after the relic had been officially removed from the religious sphere, the idea of the relic and the possibilities offered by the material form of the reliquary persisted as powerful ways of thinking about the book itself as a material object, even in a culture that emphasised the superior authority of the Word. In his preface to the Great Bible Thomas Cranmer described scripture as ‘the mooste preciouse Juell, and moste holy relyque, that remayneth upon earth’, demonstrating how, as Margaret Aston puts it, the ‘pilgrimage centres and reliquaries of pre-Reformation England remained enshrined in literary consciousness – Protestant as well as Catholic – many years after their contents had been swept into the chests and wagons of Henry VIII’s officials’. The final part of this chapter will attend to this persistence of the reliquary in early modern literary consciousness, and in particular, the close relationship between the reliquary and the book as material object. It is helpful to turn here to some less polemical literary sources – to texts more distanced from the heated confessional debates of the Reformation, but influenced by them nonetheless. Firstly, Michel de Montaigne’s travel journal offers some rich illustrations of the material and metaphorical contiguities between the book and the reliquary. In Rome, he witnessed relics being employed in dramatic rituals of exorcism during Holy Week, and saw the crowds who prostrated themselves before a ‘Veronica’ cloth, as well as ‘at the same time and with the same ceremony the lance-head in a crystal bottle [. . .] with an assemblage of people so huge that even very far outside the church, as far as this pulpit can be seen, there is a tremendous 

  

See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. –; Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen’, p. . See also John P. Feather, ‘The Book in History and the History of the Book’, The Journal of Library History,  (), –, for descriptions of the ‘reliquary-like’ jewelled boxes for early Celtic manuscripts in the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin (p. ). Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen’, p. . Thomas Cranmer, The Byble in Englyshe (London: Richard Grafton, ), +iiv. Aston, Lollards and Reformers, p. .



How to Read a Reliquary

crush of men and women’. He also paid a visit to the Vatican Library, and his experiences in that privileged space offer a fruitful way into the imaginative connections between books and relics, in an account usefully free from the heightened rhetoric of religious polemic. The Vatican Library was one of the most elite of all the European libraries, and thus it was a place, like a shrine, in which there was an obvious tension between exclusivity and accessibility. However, Montaigne notes the relative ease with which he was able to enter and make use of its contents, recalling ‘I saw the library without any difficulty; anyone can see it thus, and can make whatever extracts he wants’. The library contains both pagan and religious works, and Montaigne remembers ‘a large number of books attached onto several rows of desks; there are also some in coffers, which were all opened to me; lots of books written by hand, and especially a Seneca and the Moral Essays of Plutarch’. The scene is not entirely dissimilar from Erasmus’s description of the shrine at Canterbury; like the relics he saw there, some of the most precious Vatican books are stored in ‘coffers’, which must be ‘opened’ for the visitor. Furthermore, the visitor may take away ‘extracts’ for future use, presumably in his notebook, like a pilgrim’s vial of holy water. Montaigne is also impressed by ‘an Acts of the Apostles written in very beautiful gold Greek lettering, as fresh and recent as if it were of today’. The lettering, he writes, is ‘massive and has a solid body [‘un corps solide’] raised on the paper, so that if you pass your hand over it you feel the thickness’. He is further amazed to see ‘a book by Saint Thomas Aquinas in which there are corrections in the hand of the author himself’, and ‘the breviary of Saint Gregory, written by hand; it bears no evidence of the year, but they hold that it has come down from him from hand to hand. It is a missal about like ours, and was brought to the last Council of Trent to serve as a testimony of our ceremonies’. From more recent times, there is 



 

Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. Donald M. Frame (London: Hamish Hamilton, ), pp. –. On the ambiguities of Montaigne’s thinking about relics, see Malcolm Smith, Montaigne and Religious Freedom: The Dawn of Pluralism (Geneva: Droz, ), pp. –. Montaigne, Complete Works, p. . See Warren Boutcher, ‘“Le moyen de voir ce Senecque escrit à la main”: Montaigne’s Journal de Voyage and the Politics of Science and Faveur in the Vatican Library’, Michigan Romance Studies,  (), –, for discussion of the structures of social obligation in visits to the Vatican Library. Boutcher stresses that Montaigne’s account does not tell the full story of the Vatican Library as a place with hidden secrets and varying levels of access according to the status of the visitor. Montaigne, Complete Works, p. . Ibid., pp. –. French text: Journal de voyage, ed. Fausta Garavini (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. .

The Book as Reliquary



‘the original of the book that the king of England composed against Luther, which he sent about fifty years ago to Pope Leo X, inscribed with his own hand, with this most elegant Latin distich, also in his own hand: To Leo Ten, Henry, king of the English sends/ This work, a pledge of loyalty between two friends’. Montaigne superstitiously appreciates being able to touch the pages on which ‘there are corrections in the hand of the author himself, who wrote badly, a small lettering worse than mine’. His particular enthusiasm for books bearing traces of ‘the hand of the author’, and for volumes that appear to have passed down directly ‘from hand to hand’ demonstrates the seductive power of material things that have a physical association with a famous dead person. They are not just things to be looked at, but artefacts you can ‘pass’ your own hand over. Manuscripts and printed ‘association copies’ are objects whose particular value often derives from the sense that, like a relic, they literally embody the essence of a once-living individual, and perpetuate their spirit beyond death. Montaigne’s account of his visit to the Vatican Library reveals some of the implicit similarities between books and relics, and the comparable settings in which they each might be experienced. However, the connotations of the relic were much more complex, and potentially troublesome, in the libraries of Protestant England. In the post-Reformation decades, evolving ideas about the purpose of a library were caught up in broader concerns about how to respond to the losses resulting from Thomas Cromwell’s campaigns of destruction. The contents of monastic libraries eventually began to be rescued and rediscovered, and the emerging libraries were seen, to a certain extent, as crucial sites of memorialisation of the medieval past. Jennifer Summit observes that John Weever ‘calls on libraries to do what churches can no longer be trusted to do: to preserve the memories of the dead’. As fears of a resurgence of iconoclasm heightened in the seventeenth century, antiquarians like Weever created ‘texts which could serve as surrogate churches full of funerary monuments, books which could reconstruct the social bodies of dead gentlemen and preserve them from the predations of an increasingly hostile culture’.    

Montaigne, Complete Works, p. . Sherman applies this term to books that bear the traces of a particular person, and are thus particularly desirable, especially in a modern context; see Used Books, pp. –. Summit, Memory’s Library, p. . Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), p. . On this nostalgia and the recovery of books, see also Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern



How to Read a Reliquary

While the Reformation had significantly altered perceptions of the relationship between the living and the dead, the vocabulary of shrines, reliquaries, and relics persisted in discussions about the creation of new libraries as repositories for precious literary materials. Critics frequently cite Francis Bacon, for example, who in  was called upon to oversee the founding of the library at Lambeth Palace, and who provides us with some elegant comparisons of books with relics. At the beginning of the second book of The Advancement of Learning (), he famously declares that libraries are ‘as the Shrynes, where all the Reliques of the ancient Saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved, and reposed’. Bacon presented a copy of The Advancement to Thomas Bodley to mark his refounding of the university library at Oxford, and in his accompanying letter, he praises books themselves as ‘the shrines where the Saint is, or is believed to be’. He writes elsewhere that the Church ‘did preserve in the sacred lap and bosom thereof the precious relics even of heathen learning, which otherwise had been extinguished as if no such thing had ever been’. These pervasive metaphors compare books and libraries alike with relics and shrines, and there is a slippage between book/ library and relic/shrine as sacred places and things that mutually define each other. This reappropriation of the relic depicts post-Reformation libraries, such as the Bodleian, as new kinds of shrine removed from Catholic superstition, and defines them as places where ‘the ancient Saints’ (including both pagan and Christian authors) may be found in a discriminating setting, which acknowledges its medieval past but is not constrained by it. While Bacon’s grandiose statements do not engage in any detail with the specific ways in which a book or a library might be like a reliquary or a relic, other than that they preserve precious material, individual books can be more forthcoming. Two scholars have drawn attention to a small manuscript now in the John Rylands Library, consisting of extracts from the Wycliffite Bible (MS Eng.). The manuscript bears an inscription on a front flyleaf in the hand of Stephen Batman, one of the Elizabethan period’s most enthusiastic book collectors, and a figure known for his contributions to anti-Catholic literature as well as for his willingness to accommodate some of the spiritual value of pre-Reformation texts. ‘This

 

England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Daniel Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. . Bacon, Works, III, p. .

The Book as Reliquary



book (honorable Syr)’, the inscription reads, ‘amongst others of great pryce written in parchement were preserved from the fyer in the tyme of the late kynge E the vith by my stepfather and after by me new covered and reserved as holy reliques the others in latyne and this in the olde Saxon English tongue’. These few lines reveal that Batman saw his role as one of practical care and preservation – he ensured that these parchment leaves, rescued from oblivion, were ‘new covered’, and so given appropriate external protection – but also one of a kind of resanctification, for they were consequently ‘reserved as holy reliques’. That a committed Protestant should use these terms without any apparent qualms, especially in connection with a vernacular version of scripture that was associated with early challenges to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, might seem surprising. However, Batman’s inscription illustrates the way in which the idea of the relic was reabsorbed in the specific realm of the book. His anecdote of its fortuitous rescue from ‘fyer’ remystifies this manuscript as something unique from the past that is worthy of preservation and appropriate attention. One of the most explicit ways in which the vocabulary of the relic persisted in English literary culture was in the use of the term reliquiæ to describe published collections of a deceased author’s works. Especially popular from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, volumes of reliquiæ preserved ostensibly exclusive matter that might otherwise have been ignored, lost, forgotten, or deliberately destroyed. Such books emphasise their identity as quasi-sacred repositories – volumes in both the textual and spatial senses – and often manifest further imaginative connections to the reliquary as a container for valuable material. The titlepage of the Reliquiæ Bodleianæ, for example, announces its contents as ‘Some Genuine Remains of Sir Thomas Bodley’, taken ‘from the  in the said ’. The compiler of this volume emphasises the relationship between books and libraries as places of preservation, writing in his prefatory letter that ‘whatsoever things of Moment were committed to Writing, were so much the more useful, as they were preserved carefully in such kind of Repositories’: if something important has been written down, it must be further ‘preserved carefully’ in a library. The implication is that Bodley’s literary remains are protected within a series of concentric structures, moving outward from the book 

A.S.G. Edwards and Simon Horobin, ‘Further Books Annotated by Stephen Batman’, The Library,  (), – (p. ). The authors speculate that the ‘honorable Syr’ is Matthew Parker, for whom Batman collected a great many books, but they have no firm evidence that this is the case.



How to Read a Reliquary

itself as a necessary box for preservation to the library as a repository for many books. Bodley’s autobiography, which makes up part of the volume, is accompanied by a printed note declaring that it was ‘written with mine own Hand, Anno . December th’. The printed replication of this note from the manuscript reinforces the edition’s connection with the original sheets of paper first inscribed by Bodley, linking his deceased body with the remaining body of his work. An emphasis on the ghostly presence of the hand of the deceased author, and thus by synecdochic association, his or her entire being, is a common characteristic of the reliquiæ genre. We might see this trope as one manifestation of ‘the extent to which, and the ways in which, the book and the hand were bound together in premodern culture’. Ulinka Rublack uses the term ‘grapho-relics’ to describe books, images, and other things that were ‘directly connected with the body and soul of Protestant heroes, whose hands had written or held the specific piece’. Volumes of literary reliquiæ offered a kind of physical contact with the dead person at several removes, but still emphasised the value of the authorial ‘hand’ even when it was simulated in the medium of print. The posthumously published devotions and Baptist conversion narrative of Sarah Davy, for example, are described on the title-page of the volume as ‘being a part of the pretious Reliques, written with her own hand’. In a similar vein, in the dedicatory epistle of the Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, Izaak Walton bequeaths to Lady Mary Wotton ‘these indeavours to preserve his [the diplomat Henry Wotton’s] Memory’. On the title-page, the contents of the volume are announced as having originated from ‘The Curious Pensil of the Ever Memorable Sir Henry Wotton Kt’, and readers are subsequently ‘requested to believe, that he was worthy of a more Worthy Pen to have preserv’d his Memory and commended his Merits to the Imitation of Posterity’. An engraved frontispiece portrait by Pierre Lombard 

 

 

Thomas Bodley, Reliquiæ Bodleianæ, ed. Thomas Hearne (London: John Hartley, ), Av. For obvious reasons, the book offers a particularly appropriate symbol with which to commemorate Bodley; his marble memorial in the chapel of Merton College, Oxford, depicts him encased within a frame of books that form the pillars of the monument.  Ibid., Br. Sherman, Used Books, p. . Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . Rublack expands on this idea with specific reference to Luther in her article ‘Grapho-Relics: Lutheranism and the Materialization of the Word’, Past & Present, Supplement  (), –. Sarah Davy, Heaven Realiz’d or, The Holy pleasure of daily intimate communion with God exemplified in a blessed soul (now in Heaven) (London: ?, ). Henry Wotton, Reliquiæ Wottonianæ. Or, A Collection of Lives, Letters, Poems, with Characters of Sundry Personages (London: Thomas Maxey, ), cv.

The Book as Reliquary



accompanies the work, as well as portraits of the many other subjects included in the work, making the volume into an object of visual as well as textual presence, offering multiple ways to connect with impressive figures from the past. The biggest and most famous seventeenth-century volume of literary reliquiæ is without doubt that associated with Richard Baxter, the leading Puritan controversialist (Figure ). The Reliquiæ Baxterianæ was published five years after Baxter’s death in , and its contents include detailed autobiographical notes from his long life, as well as meditations, doctrinal, practical, and controversial reflections, and documents linked to what Kathleen Lynch aptly describes as his ‘ceaseless machinations’ in church politics. The title-page of the unwieldy -page folio volume (Figure ) describes the work as ‘faithfully publish’d from his own original manuscript by Matthew Sylvester’, implying that literary reliquiæ have greatest integrity if they are based on material directly originating with the author. Indeed, in his Preface, Sylvester maintains that he ‘neither craved nor expected such a Trust and Legacy as his Manuscripts’ and in putting together the volume has ‘transcribed and published as such from his own Copy, which I keep by me for my own Vindication carefully; and as a Memorial of himself with me’. The printed volume derives special value from its origins in Baxter’s ‘own Copy’, and in keeping it ‘by me [. . .] as a Memorial’, Sylvester admits that he gave it the privileged status of a relic-like object. According to Sylvester, Baxter was ‘of such Repute and Figure in his day, as that many coveted to see his Face, to hear his Voice’ and so the publication of this volume offered people a physical proximity with Baxter that was not possible when he was alive. However, the haunting presence of Baxter in ‘his own Copy’ seems also to have created personal frictions; Edmund Calamy, who assisted Sylvester in editing the work, claims that Sylvester saw the manuscript as ‘a sort of sacred thing’ and was 

 



On authorial presence and the author portrait in this period, see Sarah Howe, ‘The Authority of Presence: The Development of the English Author Portrait, –’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America,  (), –. Kearney discusses the question of textual ‘presence’ more generally in Reformation literature; see The Incarnate Text, chapter . Richard Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, or, Mr. Richard Baxters narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times (London: T. Parkhurst, ). Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. ; on Baxter and the complications of Protestant nonconformity, see chapter . On Baxter’s readiness to engage with print culture, and his vast print output, see Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –.  Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, br–br. Ibid., br.



How to Read a Reliquary

Figure  Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, or, Mr. Richard Baxters narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times (London: T. Parkhurst, ), frontispiece. Tom Charlton

The Book as Reliquary



Figure  Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, or, Mr. Richard Baxters narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times (London: T. Parkhurst, ), title-page. Tom Charlton



How to Read a Reliquary

‘not very forward to let it be seen’. Moreover, the contents of this volume are badly organised and lack an adequate index, and Calamy attributes the very poor editing of the volume to the fact that Sylvester ‘was cramped by a sort of superstition’ in his treatment of the source material. Sylvester’s unwieldy volume appears less like a careful editorial project and more like an overflowing box of papers that needs to be emptied out and filed properly. Calamy went on to publish his own revised version in  and attempted to show that his was a better arrangement of Baxter’s textual remains by announcing in the preface ‘I have divided the whole into Chapters, and given things something of a Connexion’. Although this later book is a more compact octavo volume, it still runs to around seven hundred pages, and the editing of the contents is in no way a significant improvement on Sylvester’s work. A renowned and prolific controversialist during his lifetime, Richard Baxter continued to be at the centre of various arguments after his death. The Reliquiæ Baxterianæ is an example of a provocative text that drew clusters of devotees around it, but like the relics we saw earlier in this chapter, it also attracted critics who were anxious to undermine its significance by revealing its inherently deceptive features. Published in the same year as the Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, Samuel Young’s Vindiciæ Anti-Baxterianæ begins with a sardonic attack on Sylvester’s devotion to Baxter: ‘Seeing the words that your admired (and almost adored) Golden Oracle gave you, did you so much good [. . .]’. It is not right for the private letters of dead men to be reprinted ‘without their knowledge or consent, and who cannot in this sense being dead yet speak’, the author claims, implicitly rejecting any sense that the book might work like a reliquary, offering access to a transcendent source of ongoing sustenance. Young is critical of Baxter’s popularity, and expresses his disgust in religiously freighted terms, claiming to have known one that desired the favour to kiss his Hand. The lowly Man granted it, and was graciously pleased to condescend so far: He came with that Veneration as a Papist would the Infallible Man at Rome to Kiss his Tre;     

Edmund Calamy, An historical account of my own life, with some reflections on the times I have lived in, ed. John Towill Rutt,  vols (London: Colburn & Bentley, ), I, p. . Edmund Calamy, An Abridgment of Mr Baxter’s History of his Life and Times (London: S. Bridge for Thomas Parkhurst, ), Ar. The first ever scholarly edition of Reliquiæ Baxterianæ was published in  volumes by Oxford University Press in , edited by N.H. Keeble, John Coffey, Tim Cooper, and Tom Charlton. Samuel Young, Vindiciæ Anti-Baxterianæ: Or, Some Animadversions On a Book, Intituled Reliquiæ Baxterianæ; or the Life of Mr. Richard Baxter (London: ?, ), Ar. Ibid., Ar.

The Book as Reliquary



and Talk’ed of it with so much delight, as if his Lips had been Sanctified by this great Priviledge.

Young also scorns Sylvester’s title for the book, referring to ‘the First Part of his (what shall I call it) Reliquiæ’ and protesting that ‘when I took up this Reliquiæ, I expected some excellent Cases of Conscience [. . .] The best Arguments to strengthen Faith about Scripture, and the Life to come — But here a company of Bones are set before us, to feed on, Dogs-meat’. In this last image Young’s words echo the commonplaces of earlier Protestant diatribes about the falsehood of relics: like those fraudulent objects, the material contained in this volume is of no more spiritual significance than are the bones that are given to animals. The publication of Richard Baxter’s literary remains certainly provoked some bitter personal disputes, but the literary remains of a martyr figure could be even more controversial in early modern England, at a time when the concept of the martyr was appropriated by Catholics and Protestants alike, and played out in different kinds of martyrdom literature. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, or ‘Book of Martyrs’, was the central site for the collection of testimonial fragments associated with Protestant martyrs, who were seen as godly exemplars, rather than the divine intercessors of the Catholic tradition. It is hardly necessary to point out that the official title of this work draws on the overlap between the multiple meanings of ‘monument’ as a written document and a tomb; rather than bodily remains, it is the textual evidence of exemplary lives (and deaths) that are preserved inside this volume. Although it was not obligatory, copies of the Acts and Monuments may have been kept in churches alongside the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, and John N. King argues that the book functioned ‘in the manner of a symbolic reliquary that preserves for posterity the deeds and words that constitute the essence of saintly sacrifice’. Building on his assertion, it is not difficult to see how the architectural title-pages and considerable bulk of the book (after the first printing, subsequent editions increased in size, as more materials were  





 Ibid., Dv–Dr. Ibid., Mr. See Susannah Brietz Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), passim. On varying ideas of martyrdom, see Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, – (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, ). King, English Reformation Literature, p. . Thomas S. Freeman argues that there were probably relatively few chained copies; see his article co-authored with Liz Evenden, ‘Print, Profit and Propaganda: The Elizabethan Privy Council and the  edition of Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”’, English Historical Review,  (), –. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture, p. .



How to Read a Reliquary

added) reinforced the sense that its imposing physical form worked like a reliquary. Like the imposing parish chest that it may have been stored in, this literally weighty book emphasised in visual, tangible terms the importance of what it contained. Whereas Richard Baxter’s reliquiæ also occupied an intimidatingly huge folio volume, similar books in smaller formats – perhaps illegally published – could more easily be concealed about house or person and might, like a relic in the hands of recusants, become the focus for clandestine, unsanctioned devotion. The Reliquiæ sacræ Carolinæ, which was printed secretly in London in  with several subsequent editions, contains speeches by Charles I (including ‘His Majesties last Speech on the Scaffold at His Martyrdom’), letters, messages, and declarations, as well as other texts gathered from many sources – an impressive amount of material crammed into a quarto volume. A work with similar aims, the Bibliotheca Regia; Or, the Royal Library, Containing A Collection of such of the Papers of His Late Majesty King Charles, contains state letters and documents from the king’s reign, and in the ‘Collectors Preface’ the reader is informed that ‘those Papers of his Majesty, which are here presented to the Reader, with no less fidelity than trouble, were scattered up and down in several places like the limbs of Absyrtus’. The purpose of this volume is to reconstruct the king ‘as if he lived and breathed’, and the author explains that ‘having found as many of his Majesties Papers, as my care and diligence could attain to; it next concerned me to joyn them, and dispose of them, in such manner as might express him in some reasonable proportion to the eye of the Reader’. The king can be reconstructed not from fragmentary pieces of his own body, but from the ‘scattered’ texts associated with this royal martyr; the multiple meanings of the Latin legere include ‘to read’ and ‘to gather’, both of which are simultaneously implied here, as well as the fashioning of a kind of box in the urge to ‘joyn’, with its associations of skilled woodworking, in ‘reasonable proportion’. In order to





See Walsham, ‘“Domme Preachers”’, for discussion of recusant booksellers and smuggling of Catholic material into England (pp. –). On both the insidious and revelatory potential of small books (as opposed to large books) in the Reformation period, see Aston, ‘Lap Books and Lectern Books’, passim; on the symbolic potential of small books more generally, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), p. . Anon., Bibliotheca Regia; Or, the Royal Library, Containing A Collection of such of the Papers of His Late Majesty King Charles, The second Monarch of Great Britain, As have escaped the wrack and ruines of these times (London: Henry Seile, ), *v–*v.

The Book as Reliquary



convey the miraculous nature of this reconstruction, the author depicts the scattering in corporeal terms – but those that evoke the classical model of Absyrtus (the brother of Medea, who killed him and strew his dismembered body parts on the road, so that their father would be delayed in his pursuit of her by gathering up the fragments), rather than the potentially controversial body parts of a medieval saint. These literary relics were just a few among the vast range of relic-like objects associated with Charles I that perpetuated after his execution, including books bound in covers made from his hair, or even dyed with his blood, as was the case for some copies of the most popular work of Caroline martyrology, the Eikon Basilike. Critics of these kinds of texts were quick to make the argument that literary memorialisation could easily become dangerous idolatry: the Eikon Basilike was condemned for its depiction of the late king as a martyr, and John Milton was commissioned to write a retort, the Eikonoklastes, which appeared in the same year. While they repeatedly reassert and contest the idea of martyrdom, texts such as these also resist being defined in strictly confessional terms, suggesting in turn the extent to which confessional and political identities themselves were not clear-cut. Although binary oppositions were often fundamental rhetorical tropes of religious polemic, the reality was that there were many potentially uncomfortable overlaps between traditional and reformed discourses. In post-Reformation England, Walsham argues, the artefacts associated with Protestant martyrs ‘operate in a grey area of reformed thought and experience but there is often little to suggest that their collectors believed them to be imbued with intrinsic sacredness’. In general, the reformed religious culture saw material objects linked to particular individuals as 





Anon., Eikon Basilike: The pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his solitudes and sufferings (London: n.p., ). On Caroline relics, see Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics, p. . Such relics were valued for their supposed curative powers. One pamphlet claimed that the king’s blood was ‘not to be had for love nor money; for where it is, they either keepe it secretly, or if it be known, they will not part from it’, and tells of a young woman whose blindness was cured by a handkerchief soaked in royal blood, by ‘no other meanes but by stroaking and applying the Handkircher to the soarnesse’. See Anon., A Miracle of Miracles: Wrought by the Blood of King Charles the First (London: n.p., ), Av. The first edition was published ten days after the king’s execution, and thirty-five editions were produced in England in  alone, while many others in English and other languages were printed abroad. John Milton, Eikonoklastes: In answer to a book intitl’d Eikon Basilike, the portature of his Sacred Majesty in his solitudes and sufferings (London: Matthew Simmons, ). See Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Milton and Idolatry’, Studies in English Literature, –,  (), –, for discussion of the ways in which the Eikon Basilike was thought to provoke idolatry.



How to Read a Reliquary

memorials, rather than things of miraculous material power, but ‘the problem was that the potential for slippage between souvenir and sacramental, sign and receptacle of supernatural virtue was high’. This chapter has explored how the imaginative associations between the book and the reliquary in this period represent an especially vibrant instance of such slippage. While relics had been the target of intense physical and rhetorical onslaughts in the sixteenth century, as particularly troubling reminders of traditional religion and symbols of what was seen as the inherent deceptiveness of the Church of Rome, the idea of the relic and its reliquary was creatively reabsorbed in Protestant England, re-emerging in the particular arena of the book as material object. The reappropriation of the reliquary, a box that refused to disappear, involved turning it into a metaphor that still carried some of the associations of the medieval relic – of exclusivity, rarity, and historical significance – but which was removed from the specific context of traditional Catholic devotion. The problem was, however, that metaphors of the relic or reliquary were still used in reference to material things, and even though these artefacts were not bones but books, the idea that they could provide access to some kind of numinous power through the material was a difficult one to control. The relic–reliquary dynamic was often one of physical and spiritual contiguity between the two, and just as the reliquary offered a porous boundary through which the holiness of the box’s contents could seep out into the believer, the book was a container whose contents could be absorbed in different ways, often involving the potentially dangerous intermingling of physical and intellectual apprehension. While the pre-Reformation cult of the saint was remodelled as the cult of literary biography in England, it was difficult to avoid using the enduring tropes of hagiography in the way these texts were presented, as well as in the way they were received. The urge to associate literary corpus with authorial corpse often made it impossible to shield posthumously published works from accusations of idolatry. Even as it appeared to be emptied of its dangerous religious significance, the reliquary haunted the early modern literary imagination as a box that could be continually reshaped and redefined. 

Walsham, ‘Skeletons in the Cupboard’, pp. , .

 

‘Because this box we know’ Embodying the Box

At the marriage of Mary Bridgewater and Richard Herbert in November , John Donne preached on Matthew : – ‘For, in the Resurrection, they neither mary nor are given in Mariage, but are as the Angels of God in heaven’. In a somewhat surprising twist for a wedding celebration, this sermon offers a very typical illustration of Donne’s persistent interest in corporeality and the inevitable destruction of the body after death. Donne uses Christ’s explanation to the Sadducees that ‘in the Resurrection’ the married state will ultimately become irrelevant to reflect more generally on corporeal decay: Where be all the splinters of that Bone, which a shot hath shivered and scattered in the Ayre? Where be all the Atoms of that flesh, which a Corrasive hath eat away, or a Consumption hath breath’d, and exhal’d away from our arms, and other Limbs? In what wrinkle, in what furrow, in what bowel of the earth, ly all the graines of the ashes of a body burnt a thousand years since? In what corner, in what ventricle of the sea, lies all the jelly of a Body drowned in the generall flood? What cohærence, what sympathy, what dependence maintaines any relation, any correspondence, between that arm that was lost in Europe, and that legge that was lost in Afrique or Asia, scores of yeers between? One humour of our dead body produces worms, and those worms suck and exhaust all other humour, and then all dies, and all dries, and molders into dust, and that dust is blowen into the River, & that puddled water tumbled into the sea, and that ebs and flows in infinite revolutions, and still, still God knows in what Cabinet every seed-Pearle lies, in what part of the world every graine of every mans dust lies [. . .].

Bringing together multiple images of the body broken down into the minutest of parts – ‘splinters’, ‘Atoms’, ‘graines’, ‘ashes’, and ‘dust’ – which will inevitably be ‘scattered’, corroded, ‘drowned’, ‘lost’, or eaten by worms, Donne then resolves the ‘infinite revolutions’ of his sea of images 

Matthew  is dense with references to marriage – see Chapter  for my discussion of the parable of the wedding guest without a wedding garment, which immediately precedes this moment.





‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

with the assurance of divine omnipotence. ‘Still, still’, he emphasises, despite the endless possibilities for bodily fragmentation and dispersal across eternal stretches of time and space, God is capable of recovering every single part. The multiple images of places of concealment – ‘wrinkle’, ‘furrow’, ‘bowel’, ‘corner’, ‘ventricle’ – are replaced by a God who ‘knows in what Cabinet every seed-Pearle lies’, and has the power to reunite ‘every graine of every mans dust’. Indeed, Donne continues, ‘in the twinckling of an eye, that body that was scattered over all the elements, is sate down at the right hand of God, in a glorious resurrection’. Here, in a passage that displays both his characteristic eschatalogical concerns and his signature range of imagery, Donne deftly performs a rhetorical act of gathering up and enclosing, bringing together the multiple things he has earlier emptied out. Scattered fragments are contrasted with the defined, contained space of a cabinet, as the chaos of bodily decay is replaced by the reassuring image of an omniscient God who, like a careful householder, knows in which box each precious possession is located. The sermon that follows this one in Donne’s Fifty sermons () was also preached ‘at a Mariage’. In this sermon, Donne uses an Old Testament verse more obviously appropriate for a nuptial celebration (Genesis : – ‘It is not good, that the man should be alone; I will make him a Helpe, meet for him’), but even this verse leads him to reflect on mortality. Turning to the difficulties of understanding the relationship between body and soul, another of his persistent intellectual and theological concerns, Donne once more invites his audience to think inside the box: Is your soule lesse then your body, because it is in it? How easily lies a letter in a Boxe, which if it were unfolded, would cover that Boxe? unfold your soule, and you shall see, that it reaches to heaven; from thence it came, and thither it should pretend; whereas the body is but from that earth, and for that earth, upon which it is now; which is but a short, and an inglorious progresse. To contract this, the soule is larger then the body, and the glory, and the joyes of heaven, larger then the honours, and the pleasures of this  



John Donne, Fifty sermons (London: Printed by Ja. Flesher for M.F., J. Marriot, and R. Royston, ), Br. For an overview of the theological history of resurrection and the reassembling of dust, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, ). No specific details are provided in the  Fifty sermons, but in their edition George Potter and Evelyn Simpson associate it with the marriage of Sir Francis Nethersole (to Lucy Goodere, eldest daughter of Donne’s close friend Henry Goodere, c. ): The Sermons of John Donne, vol.  (Berkeley: University of California Press, ).

‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box



world: what are seventy years, to that latitude, of continuing as long as the Ancient of dayes?

Here, Donne proposes a rather more inventive figuration of the box, in an image that challenges the reassuringly neat containment offered by the ‘Cabinet’ in his previous sermon. Though a letter might be enclosed in a box, it is itself an object that can unfold and enfold, with the potential to be more capacious and more dynamic than its container. While it ‘easily lies’, seemingly passive, in a box, a letter can ‘unfold’ in rhetorical as well as material terms, and so the sheer capacity of a sheet of paper is far greater than it might at first appear. As Ramie Targoff has discussed, Donne was heavily invested in both the habit of letter-writing, and the poetic potential of epistolarity, especially when articulating the interplay between bodies and souls. However, while Targoff highlights his interest in ‘making the corpse of the paper come alive through the sheer act of writing’, in this moment it is the box that is more corpse-like, contrasting with the vivacity of the paper as something inherently dynamic, which can unfold and enclose its own container. Letters sustain relationships, Donne clearly believed, and so it is not insignificant that he preached this sermon at the marriage of Lucy Goodere, the daughter of his close friend Henry Goodere, with whom he exchanged many letters. Elaine Scarry’s observation that in his own letters Donne ‘often contemplates the space-taking fact of the letter and speculates about the particular drawer or cabinet in which the recipient will put it’ further contextualises the image he uses here, of the letter as a material object whose final destination is not just a person, but a box of some kind. Early modern letters would not have been contained in separate envelopes as we know them today, but would have been secured in a special way so that they functioned as their own container, using what scholars have recently termed ‘letterlocking’ – the methods of elaborate folds, slits, tucks, and seals that prevailed before the invention of the

 

 

Fifty sermons, Bv–Br. Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, ) – see chapter  in particular for Targoff’s discussion of some of the other ways in which letters become literally and metaphorically wrapped up in Donne’s thinking about the interactions between bodies and souls. Ibid., p. . Elaine Scarry, ‘Donne: “But yet the body is his booke”’, in Elaine Scarry, ed., Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), pp. – (p. ).



‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

mass-produced envelope in the nineteenth century. As self-containing, securely ‘locked’ units, which had to be carefully opened for their contents to be accessed, early modern letters were inherently box-like, and so Donne’s image also suggests a playful concentricity typical of his writing – of a box containing a further kind of box, which in the end can be paradoxically enclosed by its own contents. In these lines, Donne implicates the box in a much more complicated hermeneutic than that of his ‘Cabinet’ of precious seed-pearls in the previous marriage sermon, as he invites us to question the distinctions and assumptions we make when something ‘is in’ something else. For, he states, ‘the soule is larger then the body’ – just as the ‘joyes of heaven’ are ‘larger’ than those of earth, and eternity surpasses the ‘seventy years’ of a human life. Multiple forms of enclosure and containment are at play in this paragraph – not only in the box and the unfolding letter, but also in Donne’s own sentences as he attempts to circumscribe the spatial and temporal relationships between body and soul, seeking ‘[t]o contract’ the ultimately unimaginable dynamic between them into terms that render it more manageable for his listeners. Behind this distinctive depiction of the body and soul hovers the image of another object, the book, an object similarly composed of paper folded up inside a protective box-like binding. The book-like potential of Donne’s image is further emphasised by the necessary opening of the box, and the dynamic nature of its contents, which can ‘unfold’ in both literary and literal ways. The revelatory unfolding of the letter from the body of the box is also suggestive of early modern anatomy, in which the contents of the body were unfolded and displayed, in anatomy theatres and also in anatomy books, some of which featured paper flaps adhered to their pages, inviting multiple acts of unfolding. In these various understated ways, the image in Donne’s sermon gestures towards some of the





For more information about early modern letterlocking, see the project led by Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith: www.letterlocking.org. Over thirty of Donne’s letters survive, and many of them feature particularly elaborate letterlocking techniques. On the early modern anatomical fascination, see Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, ); on philosophical scepticism and the early modern preoccupation with the internal spaces of the body, see David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism, and the Interior of the Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ). For brief discussion of books with anatomy flaps, see Richard Sugg, ‘The Anatomical Web: Literary Dissection from Castiglione to Cromwell’, in Stephen Pender and Nancy S. Struever, eds., Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, ), pp. –.

‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box



other contexts in which the distinctions between bodies, boxes, and books were blurred in the early modern imagination. These marriage sermons reveal just two of the almost innumerable moments in Donne’s writing in which he invites his readers or listeners to join him in trying to understand the complex questions of the ‘inglorious progresse’ of human life towards inevitable bodily decay and then to the joy of resurrection. His image of the letter in the box typifies his love of paradox, and his tendency to imagine the body as a receptacle, or system of receptacles (including skin, the womb, the bosom, for example), for the other constituent parts of the flesh, and for the soul. At the same time, the sermons illustrate Donne’s fascination with the vulnerability of the body as a container – epitomised, perhaps, by his frequent references to worms penetrating and destroying the corpse, as in the first of the marriage sermons discussed above, and in his famous Deaths duell sermon, among many others. Ultimately, the body is a vulnerable mortal thing because of what it cannot contain, even as it is itself contained in the grave: at the conclusion of his elegiac poem The First Anniversary, Donne reminds us, ‘the grave keeps bodies’, but ‘heaven keeps souls’. In the distinction between body and soul that Donne makes with his similes of container and contained, he participates in philosophical and theological conversations about ‘the conundrum of embodiment’ that reach back across millennia. Donne’s image of the letter and the box plays creatively with the dualistic notion that the soul is superior to the earthly vessel of the body. This idea was frequently expressed in much blunter terms by early modern theologians shaped by the particularly Protestant insistence on the body as a necessary but ultimately 



 

In addition to Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul, passim, see Robert N. Watson, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), chapter , for discussion of Donne’s poetics of immortality; on Donne and decay, see Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time: Seventeenth Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), pp. –; Catherine G. Martin, ‘The Advancement of Learning and the Decay of the World’, John Donne Journal,  (), –. John Donne, Deaths duell, or, A consolation to the soule, against the dying life, and living death of the body (London: B. Alsop, ), passim. See also Donne’s sermon on Job : – ‘And though, after my skin, wormes destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God’. John Donne, The first anniversarie: An anatomie of the world (London: M. Bradwood, ), Dv. I borrow this phrase from Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: How the Enlightenment Transformed the Way We See Our Bodies and Souls (London: Penguin Books, ), p. . Although the ‘Enlightenment’ perspective of his discussion inevitably casts medieval and early modern understandings of the relationship between body and soul with a particular bias, Porter offers a useful survey of the key points in the development of ancient and Christian dualistic thought in chapter .



‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

burdensome material container. The puritan Edmund Calamy, for example, drawing on St Paul’s reference to ‘our vile body’ (Philippians :), asserted in a funeral sermon that ‘the Body is the worst half of man, the boxe the shell, the carcasse’, whereas ‘the Soul is the Jewel, the life, the man of man’. In very similar terms another puritan preacher of the midseventeenth century, John Bartlet, reiterated how ‘The Soul [is] not made for the Body, but the Body for the Soul, as the Box for a Jewel, and the House for the Inhabitant’. Similarly again, in his slightly earlier catechetical treatise A modell of divinitie, John Yates concluded his answer to the question ‘Wherof, how was this body made?’ with the reflection that ‘this body compared to the soule, what is it, but as a clay-wall that encompasseth a treasure; as the wooden box of a Jeweller; or, as a course case to a rich instrument’. Such articulations involve a clear hierarchy between body and soul: the former is always but a convenient ‘Box’, ‘made’ from ‘course’ (sic) materials (clay, wood – and so by analogy, flesh is similarly ‘coarse’) by a divine creator for the purpose of temporarily protecting the latter, which like a jewel or instrument is ultimately of far greater value. These early modern preachers offer a sense of how the body was thought about almost compulsively as a box, as something that was made for the purpose of containing other things – fleshly, mental, and spiritual. In other contexts, early modern writers played with the dualistic dynamic of the body as a box in more elaborate ways, as in the climactic scene of the Duchess’s murder in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. When, 

 





Donne’s writing is frequently coloured with Pauline dualism and shaped by Augustine, but it is perhaps more accurately described as Trinitarian, in that his understanding of the body in relation to the spirit as well as the soul mimics the Trinity, a unity of distinct parts. See the sustained examination of the Augustinian influence on Donne in Katrin Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), passim. Edmund Calamy, The saints transfiguration, or, The body of vilenesse changed into a body of glory a sermon preached at Martins Ludgate, October ,  (London: Joseph Cranford, ), Av. John Bartlet, The practical Christian: or, A summary view of the chief heads of practical divinity in order to the begetting, preserving, and increasing the life and power of godliness in the hearts and lives of professors (London: Thomas Parkhurst, ), Or. John Yates, A modell of divinitie, catechistically composed Wherein is delivered the matter and method of religion, according to the creed, ten Commandements, Lords Prayer, and the Sacraments (London: John Dawson for Fulke Clifton, ), Yr. Yates takes this passage almost verbatim from an earlier work by his Puritan contemporary and bishop of Norwich, Joseph Hall’s Contemplations upon the principall passages of the holy storie (London: M. Bradwood for Sa. Macham, ), Bv. For key studies of the body and conceptions of interiority in early modern literature, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Discipline of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ); Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ).

‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box



moments before her death, the Duchess asks the disguised Bosola the stark rhetorical question ‘Who am I?’ his response is an evolving assemblage of boxes: Thou art a box of worm seed, at best, but a salvatory of green mummy: what’s this flesh? a little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste: our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in: more contemptible; since ours is to preserve earth-worms: didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.

In these lines, the body metamorphosises with disorientating speed, from a medicinal ‘box of worm seed’ (plants with anti-parasitic properties – but with the suggestion also of the worms that will inevitably consume the body, picked up several lines later), to something as flimsy as pastry or paper, and then solidifies as a cage, which traps the soul like a ‘lark’ – it is ‘our prison’. Bosola replaces the transient ‘crudded milk, fantastical puffpaste’ and ‘paper prisons’ with the more sinister image of a cage, an object that cruelly allows the clear sight of freedom while wholly boxing in its contents. Just a few lines later, this mass of metaphors is starkly materialised in a final box, the coffin, which is brought onto the stage just before the Duchess is strangled. In various ways, each of the previous chapters in this book has touched on the close relationship between the body and the box in early modern England. In Chapter , I introduced some of the key imaginative affordances of the box against the backdrop of a material culture that proliferated with boxes and chests. Just as the box became a key unit of domestic space, enabling people to store, protect, and organise their things, it also became a key unit of mental space, a way of figuring the unseen spaces within the individual, where the workings of the memory and spiritual encounters might be similarly organised and enclosed. In locating the origins of many early modern metaphors of the box in Plato’s famous Silenus statue, Chapter  explored some of the persistent (and often confessionally driven) anxieties about deceptive exteriors in early modern writing. The box materialised the hermeneutic challenges of interpretation – of people, as much as texts. My discussion in Chapter  developed some of the questions implicated in this dynamic between insides and outsides, focusing on early modern sacred books as objects that demanded 

The Duchess of Malfi, ..–, in John Webster: Three Plays, with Introduction and Notes by D.C. Gunby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ).



‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

the interplay of physical and intellectual apprehension. I explored the differences and overlaps between traditional and reformed responses to materiality further in Chapter , in my discussion of the reliquary – a box involved in the display, protection, and sanctification of body parts, which, I demonstrate, was reabsorbed from traditional devotional practices into the culture of the book in post-Reformation England. In this final chapter I will consider in more detail some of the ways in which thinking inside the box is a natural corollary of embodiment. The chapter unpacks the box as a rich focal point at which two things often presumed to be of different orders, the bodily and the artefactual, are complexly and productively enmeshed in early modern writing. Across a broad spectrum of texts, from sermons and devotional poetry to anatomy textbooks and drama, the body is repeatedly understood as a box or collection of boxes, and in tracing some of these moments in more detail, this chapter reveals the ways in which early modern writing responded to materiality as something that is not separate from us as embodied beings, but actually constitutes us. In doing so, the chapter challenges the distinctions we are persistently tempted to make between subjects and objects, or between people and things. The very idea of the box, as something that can contain, protect, and conceal, but which is also vulnerable to a range of violations, is rooted in the lived materiality of human existence. What follows here is in two parts. Firstly, I attend to the living body as a container that offers various possibilities of enclosure. The chest in particular, like the familiar piece of household furniture that shares its name, is associated with security, protecting the heart and circumscribing a location for mental and spiritual experiences that are taken for granted to be ‘interior’. Images of the ‘box’ of the chest, bosom, heart, or mind are ubiquitous in early modern writing, demonstrating the sheer convenience of the box as a model for inwardness, but the intersecting of the box and the body goes beyond mere analogy or metaphor. The texts I bring together here illustrate how the mental and the spiritual realities of being human are grounded in the body as a bounded object that is just as material as any other box – with all the possibilities and challenges that materiality brings. Moreover, the body is not just a practical storage place, but a box or set of boxes with the potentially troubling capacity to conceal, disguise, and withhold. For early modern writers, boxes materialise the 

For example, the title of the influential new historicist volume Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), reinforces such a distinction, despite the nuance offered by the essays it contains.

Living Boxes



joyful and sorrowful complexities of embodiment, both when they do what we expect them to do, and when they do what we might not expect. The second part of my discussion offers a kind of post-mortem of the body as a box. In an epigram ‘On a Box’, one seventeenth-century poet neatly captured the irreversible effect of death: ‘Mans body is a box till death it split/The Soul, that precious Gem is kept in it’. At the final moment of death, the body changes from a complex receptacle filled with possibilities to something that has been definitively opened in some way, a discarded empty shell that no longer functions as a container. In contrast with some of the other boxes I have discussed in earlier chapters, from parish chests to reliquaries, which though not completely indestructible can outlive their contents and survive for hundreds of years, the destruction of the earthly body after death is inevitable. Thus in an instant, death transforms the body from something that offers essential strength and protection to something utterly vulnerable – from container to something that itself has to be contained. The texts I bring together in this final part of the chapter illustrate how the box was frequently implicated in articulations of the transformation brought by death to the body as a material object that had been definitively opened and emptied. In postReformation England, changing burial practices meant that the dead body increasingly demanded enclosure not just inside a grave, but within another box, a simple wooden coffin. At what was a key historical moment for the dead body, then, I consider the imaginative interplay between corpse and the coffin for early modern writers. Corpse and coffin intimately shape each other in various ways, at once reinforcing and unsettling the containment and closure offered by a box.

Living Boxes In Chapter , I drew attention to the expansion of meaning that happened around the word ‘chest’ in early modern England, as the -year-old noun from the Latin cista, a box, also came to describe the upper torso or thoracic cavity of the human body. In turn, the Latin thorax has its origins in the Greek thṓrax, meaning breast-plate or cuirass, a solid metal or leather piece of armour that encases the upper half of the body. In these two words then, cista and thorax, there is a back and forth between the  

Nicholas Billingsley, A treasury of divine raptures consisting of serious observations, pious ejaculations, select epigrams (London: TJ for Thomas Parkhurst, ), Fr. ‘thorax, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press.



Figure 

‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

Book chest reputedly belonging to Hugo de Groot, Netherlands, –.      cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

bodily and the artefactual that comes from their shared material affordances of enclosure, strength, and protection. There are similarities not only between the function of each kind of ‘chest’ as a site of secure containment, but also between the appearance of both, too – a ribcage covered with skin is visually resonant of a leather-bound timber frame, or a wooden chest strengthened by iron bars (no matter how well-seasoned the timber is, a boarded chest will always shrink – the bars help to contain the inevitable splitting). Figure  shows one such example, reputed to be the book chest inside which the imprisoned Dutch writer Hugo de Groot escaped from Loevestein Castle in . Iron strongboxes, imported from Nuremberg and Augsburg where they were made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, featured elaborate locking systems nestled inside the lid, tightly packed like anatomical entrails (Figure ). The modern term ‘carcass furniture’, applied to chests, boxes and other (usually wooden) furnishings, which consist of a solid shell around an empty core, again suggests that both kinds of chest – anatomical and artefactual – can be reduced to the same essential material form. While as one art historian has put it, ‘[t]here is something particularly corporeal about boxes’, early



On the use of iron bars to reinforce wooden chests, see Chinnery, Oak Furniture, p. .

Living Boxes



Figure  Steel strongbox, German, possibly Nuremberg, late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. .  . cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

modern writers responded to the fact that there is also something particularly box-like about bodies, in material, visual, and imaginative terms. 

Adrian Randolph, Touching Objects: Intimate Experiences of Italian Fifteenth-Century Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), p. . Chests are sometimes distinguished from other boxes by the ‘legs’ or ‘feet’ that elevate them from the floor – another humanoid feature (see Chinnery, Oak Furniture, p. ).



‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

Depicting the process of being formed in the womb as one of divine craft, Mary Sidney’s translation of Psalm  plays with some of these material and structural similarities: Thou, how my back was beam-wise laid, And raft’ring of my ribs, dost know; Know’st every point Of bone and joint, How to this whole these parts did grow, In brave embroid’ry fair arrayed, Though wrought in shop both dark and low.

Although her imagery suggests at first that the body is like a building, constructed with beams and rafters, by the end of the stanza it has shrunk to something small and precious that is ‘wrought’ in a ‘shop’ and ‘fair arrayed’ in ‘brave embroid’ry’ – like a small casket, or a bound book of psalms, of the kind discussed above in Chapter . A ‘joint’ is a comparable structural feature of a body and of a wooden box of superior quality, reinforcing the image of the body here as a carefully made and decorated casket – skilled craft, not just crude carpentry. Miraculously, it does not matter that the fleshy workshop in which this creation happens is ‘both dark and low’. In just a few short lines, Sidney vividly conveys the imaginative potential of the slippage between body, box, and book in the act of divine making by the one she addresses in the first stanza of the psalm as ‘closest closet of my thought’. A comparable blurring between body and box is found in a quite different description of the human body and its construction, in the first anatomy textbook printed in English, A profitable treatise of the anatomie of mans body (). This compilation is attributed to the surgeon Thomas Vicary, and is mainly a reworking of medieval sources (and thus, preVesalius). ‘The Brest or Thorax’, it is stated, is the Arke or Chest of the spiritual members of man, as sayth the Philosopher, where it is to be noted, that there be foure thinges conteyning, and eyght conteyned, as thus, The foure conteyning, are, the Skinne, Musculus fleshe, the Pappes, and the Bones: The partes conteyned, are, the Hart, the Lunges, Panikles, Ligamentes, Nerves, Veines, Arteirs, Mire or Isofagus. 



Hannibal Hamlin et al., eds., The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. On the intricate images of embroidery in Sidney’s psalms more generally, see Osherow, ‘Mary Sidney’s Embroidered Psalms’, passim. Thomas Vicary, A profitable treatise of the anatomie of mans body: compyled by that excellent chirurgion, M. Thomas Vicary esquire (London: Henry Bamforde, ), Hivr.

Living Boxes



The four concrete nouns, arranged in two pairs – ‘Brest or Thorax’ and ‘Arke or Chest’ – become interchangeable here, as labels for the Platonic site of ‘the spiritual members’ and essential organs, which are also listed systematically, as if in an inventory. These two anatomical moments, one devotional and the other medical, illustrate the readiness with which the two kinds of ‘chest’ blended into one another in the early modern imagination. At a purely phonic level, the convenient rhyming of ‘chest’ and ‘breast’ is matched by the equally tempting alliteration of ‘box’ with ‘breast’, ‘bosom’, and ‘body’, across all kinds of writing. ‘An Emperour beareth all his Lawes in the boxe of his breaste’, an early seventeenth-century edition of John Fortescue’s fifteenthcentury treatise on English law states, meaning he ‘understandeth the Principles of them, likewise their forme and their nature, in which respect he is judged to bee skilfull in all his Lawes, Which also he may altar, change, and repeale: So that in him are potentially all his lawes, as Eve was in Adam before she was made’. This image of the ‘boxe of his breaste’ is not one of static enclosure, but a much more dynamic one, an active bureaucracy with the capacity to ‘altar, change, and repeale’, embodied in one man. In the subsequent allusion to Eve being ‘made’ from one of Adam’s ribs (Genesis :–), the two kinds of chest coalesce again, challenging any reduction of this image of the ‘box of his breaste’ to mere analogy or passing metaphor. While the shared visual and material affordances of a sturdy wooden chest and the human thorax are obvious, the various material and metaphorical contents of the latter were often thought of as boxes, too. Bodily boxes seem to generate more boxes with almost organic prolificacy, as if the strong physical resemblance between a human chest and a wooden chest is enough to transform other locations or parts inside the body, even those that do not share such striking physical resemblance, into comparable kinds of box. In Chapter  I touched on some of the ways in which early modern writers thought of the heart, in particular, as a secure textual storage place. The heart was found inside the security of the chest, but it was also often described as a ‘chest’ itself, suggesting an imaginative fluidity between container and contained. In one of several sermons he preached on Matthew : (Againe, the kingdome of heaven is like unto a treasure hid in the field [. . .]), for example, the Elizabethan clergyman Richard Greenham reminded his listeners that 

John Selden, ed., De laudibus legum Angliae writen by Sir John Fortescue (London: Adam Islip[?], ), Riiiiv–Rvr.



‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box thou must know that the seate of faith is not in the braine, but in the heart, and that the head is not the place to keepe the promises of God, but the heart is the chest to lay them up in. Therefore as the minde must be convinced of sinne so the heart must be continually rebuked, feared, humbled, and terrified from sinne, it must be the closet wherein the word of God must be kept.

Greenham’s exhortation demonstrates the theological and imaginative slipperiness of the concepts of ‘braine’, ‘heart’, ‘head’, ‘chest’, and ‘minde’ in the early modern period. In these lines, the ‘heart’ is superior to the ‘braine’, ‘head’, and ‘minde’ as the central location for the internal enactment of faith. While the other three parts of the body are imbricated here, implied to be at once distinct places and the same place, the heart is clearly a separate location, ‘the seate of faith’, in which ‘the promises of God’, and ‘the word of God’ must ‘be kept’, in the security of a ‘chest’ or ‘closet’. Such figurations of the heart, or the bosom, or the breast or the body more generally as a box are ubiquitous in early modern writing. The sheer expediency of the box for thinking about human interiority, both physical and mental, parallels the practical convenience of the box in early modern domestic space, as illustrated by the wills and inventories I explored in Chapter . In her edition of George Herbert’s English poems, Helen Wilcox highlights ‘box’ as one of about a dozen of ‘the most frequently used and multivalent words in The Temple’, echoing Richard Rambuss’s observation that in these poems ‘what emerges as the privileged architectural form-language [. . .] is a lexicon of small, private structures – boxes, cabinets, walled gardens, urns, cells, chambers, secret rooms, and closets’. The prevalence of boxes, chests, and cabinets in The Temple suggests Herbert’s ‘fascination with containment – in forms, liturgy, language’, and his interest in ‘domestic imagery given heavenly significance’. The many boxes in The Temple are also points at which the domestic and the bodily often tightly intersect. Herbert’s many boxes furnish not only his







Richard Greenham, The workes of the reverend and faithfull servant of Jesus Christ M. Richard Greenham, minister and preacher of the Word of God collected into one volume (London: William Welby, ), Ccv. Helen Wilcox, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. xli; Rambuss, Closet Devotions, p. . Quotations from The Temple that follow are taken from Wilcox’s edition. Wilcox, p. xli. In addition to Rambuss, see the following discussions of recurrent motifs of containment in Herbert’s verse: Robert Higbie, ‘Images of Enclosure in George Herbert’s The Temple’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language,  (), –; Frank L. Huntley, ‘George Herbert and the Image of Violent Containment’, George Herbert Journal,  (), –.

Living Boxes



printed Temple, but the temple of every human body, and they do so in ways that are more complicated than they seem at first. For Herbert, they are not just convenient ways of portraying individual experiences of interiority, but intricate and often difficult objects that ground spiritual encounter in the material reality of embodiment. Two poems in particular, ‘Confession’, and ‘Ungratefulnesse’, experiment with these possibilities, embellishing the familiar verbal and material interplay between breast and chest, but also disarming the reader by apprehending these boxes from unusual perspectives. ‘Confession’ begins with an image of concentric chests made ‘within my heart’ – ‘in those chests, boxes; in each box, a till’ (–) – a fairly familiar iteration of the heart as a secure, enclosed site. Yet, the speaker admits, ‘grief knows all, and enters when he will’ (). In the stanzas that follow, the capacity for sin reduces the individual to the crude material components of a wooden box – when faced with ‘Gods afflictions’ (), the speaker is like a ‘piece of timber’, readily pierced with screws, and pliable to the divine joiner’s will (). Paradoxically, ‘Onely an open breast/Doth shut them out, so that they cannot enter’, for ‘Smooth open hearts no fastning have’ (–, ). Herbert acknowledges the human instinct to articulate private spaces within the divinely-made receptacle of the heart or the breast, but then completely subverts these boxes, so that what is closed is actually most accessible, and what is open is also locked. In this transformation of the box as a site of reassuring enclosure into something much more difficult and paradoxical – something that resists, rather than enables – Herbert conveys some of the complicated challenges of spiritual identity and embodiment. ‘Ungratefulnesse’ is a similarly confessional poem, but here it is God, not the speaker, who has created ‘two rare cabinets full of treasure’ – the ‘Trinitie’, and the ‘Incarnation’ (–). The former remains firmly closed in the poem, inaccessible until ‘death blow/The dust into our eyes’ (–). In contrast, the Incarnation is a box full of ‘sweets’ and ‘delights’ (, ) – the humanity we share with Christ. Yet the poem’s final stanza, like ‘Confession’, renders each individual a box that is stubbornly shut: ‘man is close, reserv’d, and dark to thee’ (), in whose ‘poore cabinet of bone’, sins ‘have their box apart’ (–). Crucial to the theological thrust of this poem is the acknowledgement that we share in the Incarnation: ‘Because this box we know,/For we have all of us just such another’ (–). To be human is to ‘know’ what it is to be framed around a ‘cabinet of bone’. At the same time, to be human is also to contain the possibility of sin – of trying to withhold truth even from God, even as the ‘poore’ cabinet at our



‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

bodily and spiritual core is the fundamental connection between humanity and Christ. For Herbert this ‘poore cabinet of bone’ is not merely a convenient metaphor, but an image of the total imbrication of spiritual experience and embodiment in each divinely created human being. These readily blurred intersections between body and box offered early modern writers much creative potential, particularly at moments of poetic tension, as in The Temple. In writing for the theatre, the inherently artefactual characteristics of the body, and its shared materiality with boxes and books could be thrust into even sharper focus. My final example here is Shakespeare’s late play Cymbeline, which explores the dramatic possibilities of some of the more unsettling imaginative interactions between breasts and chests. In this play, two boxes of very different scales are required among the stage properties, but the visual and verbal language of the box has a more pervasive presence in the play, too, as we are confronted with bodies that are verbally or literally opened, unlocked, or cut apart. In Act  of the play, the Queen, angered that her stepdaughter Imogen has married the poor gentleman Posthumus instead of her son Cloten, obtains what she thinks is a box of fatal poison from a doctor. ‘I do know her spirit’, the doctor says in an aside, however, ‘And will not trust one of her malice with/A drug of such damned nature’ (..–). The Queen is not aware that instead, he supplies her with drugs which will only ‘stupefy and dull the sense a while’ (), and gives the box to Pisanio, the servant of Posthumus, who in turn believes that it contains life-saving medicine (..–). This threefold transformation of the box’s contents as it moves rapidly between different hands is disorientating to watch, and foreshadows in miniature the disturbing transformation of the contents of a bigger box, the trunk in the following Act, in one of the play’s most wellknown scenes. Having wagered Posthumus that he can seduce Imogen in his absence, Giacomo’s plan solidifies around a large box, a trunk whose contents he lies about in order to gain access to Imogen’s bedroom. Giacomo convinces Imogen to look after a gift for the Emperor, ‘plate of rare device, and jewels/ Of rich and exquisite form’ (..–), and Imogen promises him several times that she will ‘keep them/In my bedchamber’ (–). Several scenes later, the trunk appears on stage in a scene that takes place entirely in Imogen’s bedroom. While she sleeps, Giacomo emerges from the trunk and sets about ‘To note the chamber’, creating an ‘inventory’ (.., ) that will serve as evidence of his intimate knowledge not only of this private space, but of Imogen’s body.



Living Boxes

As Giacomo notes the furnishings of the room, Imogen’s body becomes the most important feature of his inventory, because it will make his claim to have seduced her more convincing. He continues: [. . .] On her left breast A mole, cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops I’th’bottom of a cowslip. Here’s a voucher Stronger than ever law could make. This secret Will force him think I have picked the lock and ta’en The treasure of her honour. No more. To what end? Why should I write this down that’s riveted, Screwed to my memory? She hath been reading late, The tale of Tereus. Here the leaf’s turned down Where Philomel gave up. I have enough. To th’trunk again, and shut the spring of it. (..–)

From the chest he hides in, to the breast he looks at, Giacomo physically and morally transgresses, and in these lines the trunk itself informs his language to the end of the scene. If he tells Posthumus about the intimate detail of the mole on Imogen’s breast, Posthumus will believe he has ‘picked the lock and ta’en/The treasure of her honour’, Giacomo euphemistically suggests, transforming Imogen’s body into something he could penetrate, like the trunk he has successfully hidden inside, and the bedroom he has entered. The mole is a ‘stronger’ voucher than anything written in law, and it will ‘force’ Posthumus to believe him – the material properties of the trunk as something strong and something locked that might be forced open hover also behind these words. Giacomo does not need to write the detail of the mole in his inventory because it is ‘riveted,/ Screwed to my memory’, and in this unusual depiction of the memory, his imagery is again imbued with the distinctive materiality of the trunk, a thing held together with rivets and screws, with associations of physical force and permanence that take on a violent, disturbing quality in this context. Finally, as he prepares to leave the bedroom, his comment that he will ‘shut the spring of it’ is another superfluous detail, at once drawing attention to his cunning mode of passage into Imogen’s private space, and revealing something of the trunk’s hidden interior that is seen only by him. This verbal exposure of a small and otherwise inconsequential feature of the inside of the trunk – ‘the spring’, with its sinister associations in this context of ‘springing’ on unwitting prey – reinforces the voyeurism of the scene, adding to the profoundly discomforting excess of intimate detail. With an Italian name that aurally evokes the English ‘Jack’, the protagonist uses the trunk to set up his own sordid ‘jack in the box’ trick.



‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

Giacomo’s reference to ‘shut[ing] the spring’ of the trunk also illustrates the communicative potential of the tiny in Cymbeline, such as Imogen’s more poetic imagining of how she would have strained her eyes to the extreme in watching Posthumus disappear into banishment: ‘Nay, followed him till he had melted from/The smallness of a gnat to air’ (..–). The scene in her bedroom is framed around three miniature details from three significant objects – book, body, and box – the leaf of Imogen’s book of Ovid ‘turned down’, the ‘mole, cinque-spotted’ on her breast, and the ‘spring’ inside the trunk that Giacomo emerges from and returns to. Around these three focal points occur a mesmerising (and appropriately, almost metamorphic) sequence of critical acts of folding and unfolding, and opening and closing, beginning with Imogen asking her servant to fold ‘down’ her page at the moment we only later discover to be, ominously, ‘Where Philomel gave up’ (). Helen closes the covers of the book mere seconds before the trunk opens and Giacomo comes out of it. In order to do so, he must push open its heavy lid from within, in a suspense-ridden reversal of the matter-of-fact folding-down of the page, or the closing of the book. As Sarah Wall-Randell suggests, ‘the impression is almost created that he is actually coming out of the book she [Helen] has just laid aside’. In many productions of the play, he then goes on to fold back the sheets of Imogen’s bed to expose her breast. The scene returns to Imogen’s book, as Giacomo unfolds the page and ominously reveals precisely what she has been reading, and it concludes with the closing of the trunk as he returns to it. Thus body, book, and box all work in a synchronised way in this scene, each furnishing the stage as sites of tension to be manipulated by various intrusive acts of folding and unfolding, opening and shutting. Shakespeare borrowed the wager story of Cymbeline from a tale in Boccaccio’s fifteenth-century Decameron, which included the crucial plot device of the chest. This device, of a sexually motivated villain concealing himself in a trunk to gain access to a young woman’s bedroom, perverts the tradition of Italian marriage chests, costly objects often adorned with gold and colourful painted images, which usually occupied the bedroom of 

 

See Shakespeare’s First Reader, chapter , for Scott-Warren’s discussion of the ‘startling’ (for modern readers especially) elision of ‘people with inanimate objects’ in this scene (p. ), and the early modern inventory as ‘a key technology of self-evaluation’ (p. ). Sarah Wall-Randell, The Immaterial Book: Reading and Romance in Early Modern England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), p. . Patricia Phillippy draws out the tomb-like qualities of this scene, with Imogen’s body laid out as if on a monument: see Shaping Remembrance, pp. –.

Living Boxes



a newly married couple, and were often filled with dowry goods. Surviving examples of fifteenth-century Florentine cassoni and forzieri include panels from several that depict this very tale from Boccaccio, in a reflexive interplay between these objects and the story portrayed on them. These richly decorated chests could be painted on the inside too, sometimes with naked bodies that were titillatingly revealed when the lid was opened. Yet other examples feature fine carving, often of multiple three-dimensional figures writhing around the exterior, in convincing impersonation of human flesh. When Ambroguiolo, Boccaccio’s villain, conceals his own body inside the chest, he manipulates all of these associations, transforming them into something much more sinister. The word forziere has its etymological roots in ‘to force’, suggesting that this term originally meant specifically a chest with a lock (in modern Italian, a forziere is a strongbox or safe), and in the context of Boccaccio’s tale, this image of forcing – a verb Shakespeare’s Giacomo notably uses – also takes on particularly ominous implications. While Shakespeare’s English audiences would not necessarily have been familiar with the cassoni that hover vividly in and around Boccaccio’s tale, they would have recognised the wooden chest as a standard piece of bedroom furniture, often originating in the occasion of a marriage, that stood at the foot of the bed, itself another site of protection and enclosure. The invasion of such objects, which ‘mirror[ed] the bed in their form and function’, whether in







  

In a further elaborate perversion of the marriage chest, another tale in the Decameron sees Spineloccio locked inside a chest by his friend and neighbour Zeppa, so that he can sleep with Spineloccio’s wife in revenge for his own cuckolding. These examples, from the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, and a private collection, featured in an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, which has a significant collection of Florentine wedding chests. See Caroline Campbell, Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence: The Courtauld Wedding Chests (London: Paul Holberton, ), although photographs of these two particular chests are not featured in this catalogue. Such chests often survive only as separate panels today, and in the context of their corporeal identity, it is apt that Campbell describes dismantled examples as ‘dismembered’ (pp. , ). See also James R. Lindow, ‘For Use and Display: Selected Furnishings and Domestic Goods in Fifteenth-century Florentine Interiors’, Renaissance Studies,  (), –; Claudio Paolini, ‘Chests’, in At Home in Renaissance Italy, pp. –; Sarti, Europe at Home, p. . For discussion of forzieri with painted nudes inside their lids, see Randolph, Touching Objects, chapter , especially pp. –. Randolph repeatedly emphasises ‘the chestlike qualities of the body’ (p. ) and, implicitly, the body-like qualities of the chest. Campbell, Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence, p. . Victor Chinnery notes that ‘hundreds of wills and inventories refer to chests placed “at the bed’s feet”’, making it a common practice in early modern England: see Oak Furniture, p. . Hamling and Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England, p. ; see also pp. – for their further discussion of the bed as an important imaginary site of enclosure.



‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

fifteenth-century Italy or early seventeenth-century England, would have had equally disturbing implications. The noun Shakespeare employs in his version of the wager plot, ‘trunk’, like ‘chest’ accumulated multiple senses in early modern England. Its origins as a term for the main stem of a tree had branched pretty much contemporaneously, by the early sixteenth century, to mean both a box made from that section of the tree, or any large wooden box (often with a gently curving lid, visually reminiscent of a hollowed-out tree trunk even if not actually constructed in such a way), and the main part of the human body without the appendages of head or limbs – both kinds of chest, in other words. Paradoxically then, a trunk means at once something that has been lopped, severed, or carved out, and something that is whole and selfcontained. Cymbeline is a play filled with symbolic imagery of trees, especially the judicious cutting and pruning they require, and so it is not surprising in the wider context of such imagery that the word ‘trunk’, which first materialises as Giacomo’s deceptive piece of furniture, resurfaces again in the play in its other, bodily sense, at the brutal death of Cloten in Act . Cloten is killed by Belarius while he is looking for Imogen, who by this point is on the run disguised as Fidele. While Imogen/Fidele lies in a death-like slumber, having taken the Queen’s ‘medicine’, Belarius and his sons position her body alongside Cloten’s headless corpse. Imogen’s climactic speech on waking, when she believes the body next to her is that of Posthumus, is followed by the arrival of some Romans including Lucius, who exclaims: Soft, ho, what trunk is here Without his top? The ruin speaks that sometime It was a worthy building. (..–)

Everyone in this scene struggles when first encountering the decapitated body, and turns to poetic artifice to counter its traumatic visual effects. While Imogen isolates its various parts and gives them classical attributes, believing she knows ‘his hand/His foot Mercurial, his Martial thigh’ (..–), Lucius regards Cloten’s body in artefactual terms, rendering it a ‘trunk’ without a ‘top’. Multiple senses of ‘trunk’ are possible here, and it is as if he cannot bring himself to speak of the decapitation directly, using ‘top’, with its less gory suggestion of treetops, instead of ‘head’, and then immediately transforming the sight again into an architectural ruin. Dismembered body parts – heads, hands, tongues – feature fairly often in

Corpses and Coffins



the early modern theatre, but Shakespeare offers a more unusual example in Cloten’s ‘trunk’, which receives as much attention on the stage as his head. In Cymbeline, as indeed in many other early modern plays, ‘body parts are imagined as independent entities, separated from their erstwhile owners and transformed from persons into things’. The successive elaborate spectacles of Giacomo’s trunk and Cloten’s trunk confront us in blunt yet also poetic terms with the persistent intersections of body and box, and they illustrate how early modern literature was not only informed by their shared material and linguistic intricacies, but imaginatively explored and reinforced them.

Corpses and Coffins At the close of the scene with Cloten’s body, the Romans do what they can in such strange circumstances, promising to bury the corpse and adorn the grave with flowers – ‘he shall be interred/As soldiers can’ (..–). Their promise implicitly acknowledges that a dead body must be properly tidied away for cultural reasons of respect, tradition, and hygiene. In early modern England, even a dead body without the disturbing mutilations of Cloten’s could be, as the writer Owen Felltham put it, ‘a thing so full of horror that children feare to see it’. This disturbingly visceral reminder of mortality had to be contained, and hidden from sight, ‘transmitted from all these inchanting blandishments to the darke and hideous grave’, where it lay ‘imprison’d but in five foot of lead and is become a nest of wormes, a lumpe of filth, a box of pallid putrefaction’. The imagery in Felltham’s very popular anthology evidently appealed to another writer, Robert Crofts, who lifted these words almost exactly when he wrote of being ‘imprisoned for ever in a narrow darksome grave, and there to become



 

In Titus Andronicus, a play awash with body parts, Aaron boasts of digging up dead bodies and carving words on them, ‘as on the bark of trees’, to taunt the loved ones of the deceased (..–) – an image that similarly conjures up both kinds of ‘trunk’. Erika T. Lin, Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), p. . Owen Felltham, Resolves a duple century ye d edition (London: Henry Seile, ), Lv. Such images of bodily decay, and especially the language of worms and ‘putrefaction’ echo the twelfthcentury treatise De Miseria Condicionis Humane by Innocent III, which was widely known in medieval Europe. Early modern English translations included H. Kerton’s The mirror of mans lyfe Plainely describing, what weake moulde we are made of: what miseries we are subject unto: howe uncertaine this life is: and what shal be our ende (London: Henry Bynneman, ) and the first part of George Gascoigne’s The droomme of Doomes day Wherin the frailties and miseries of mans lyfe, are lyvely portrayed, and learnedly set forth (London: Gabriell Cawood, ).



‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

onely a lump of filth, a box of pallid putrifaction, a nest of crawlers’. Felltham’s description blurs the distinction between the body and its container – it is unclear, at the end of his line, whether the ‘box of pallid putrefaction’ describes the coffin or the decaying body, or both. Lead and a dead body are each characteristically pale, or ‘pallid’, and in this image, coffin and corpse literally and grammatically dissolve into each other. As Felltham’s particular iteration of the ‘contemptu mundi’ tradition vividly evokes, the absolute finality of death disrupts the containing function of the body. The corpse no longer contains the crucial biological, mental, and spiritual activities that make it alive – it has been opened, and emptied. Reporting the death of the young Arthur in Shakespeare’s King John in such terms, the Bastard tells the King ‘They found him dead and cast into the streets,/An empty casket, where the jewel of life/By some damned hand was robbed and ta’en away’ (..–). The precise circumstances of Arthur’s death are unclear, and as when Cloten’s body is discovered in Cymbeline, the trauma of the moment is tempered with poetry, here transforming Arthur’s body into a ‘casket’ emptied of its rich contents. Such figurations of death splitting open a box find the most precious model of all in the death of Christ, caused by sin – as one early seventeenth-century Catholic controversialist lamented, in terms evoking a reliquary, or the scriptural box of perfume, ‘our offences have wroughte so greate an injurie and despite against Christ, as to have broken the christall box of his humanitie, receptacle of the divinitie’. Despite the relatively sanitised qualities of such figurations of death, in which the body is opened (albeit usually with the implication of physical force) to release its rich spiritual contents, the fleshy materiality of this nolonger-animate body remains vulnerable to messy processes of decay, and so even as the corpse is ontologically empty, it is also still at risk of leaking and spilling. The corpse demands to be contained, so that the repulsive reality of decomposition can be concealed from the living. The Reformation rewrote the theology of death and burial in early modern England. During the s and s, the doctrine of purgatory was disputed and abolished; masses and prayers for the dead were forbidden because they reinforced the idea of purgatory and the cult of the saints; and sometimes the places associated with the burial of dead bodies, such as  

Robert Crofts, The way to happinesse on earth concerning riches, honour, conjugall love, eating, drinking (London: G.H., ), Gr. Edward Weston, The triall of Christian truht [sic] by the rules of the vertues, namelie these principall, faith, hope, charitie and religion (Doway: Widdow of Laurence Kellam, ), Vr.

Corpses and Coffins



tombs, sepulchres, and charnel houses, were physically attacked, because of the purported threat of idolatry. At the same time, however, as Philip Schwyzer and others have explored, early modern English Protestants were ‘by and large more obsessed with the fate of their individual bodies postmortem, and more scrupulous in providing for their corpses’ needs, than their medieval Catholic forebears’. Ever-increasing urban populations and the resulting pressures on space in burial grounds (especially in times of plague) meant that corpses had to be managed carefully in practical terms, as well as without superstition. Major shifts in burial practices in early modern England meant that the culture of death was increasingly a culture of the box. Before the Reformation, most corpses were interred in winding sheets or shrouds made from wool or linen, but by the mid-sixteenth century coffin burials were becoming more common, and by the seventeenth century, it was the norm to be buried in a coffin. Some parishes supplied a reusable coffin for the funerals of the poor in which the body could be carried respectably to the grave – the archaeologist Sarah Tarlow notes a surviving example at Easingwold parish church in North Yorkshire dating from about , which has a catch to close it, because its constant reuse meant it would never have been hammered shut. At the other end of the social scale, as Tarlow describes, coffins could signal the status of the person whose remains they enclosed. Elite coffins were more likely to be double or triple shelled – often the body was enclosed first in a lead coffin (much longerlasting, heavier, and more costly than wood), which was then enclosed in a wooden coffin, which in turn was often covered in dark-coloured velvet. Tacks secured the velvet to the wood, and sometimes marked out the dates and initials of the deceased on the exterior of the lid. So while a reusable parish coffin meant a shared anonymity for corpses, as with plain cloth shrouds, more elite coffins (and, indeed – the elaborate tombs, vaults, and graves in which they might be interred) emphasised the individuality of what they contained. Albeit minimally, such inscribed coffins were textual  

  

Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature, p. ; see also chapter  passim. Ibid., p. ; see also Harold Mytum, ‘Mortuary Culture’, in Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling, and David Gaimster, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (Abingdon: Routledge, ), pp. –; Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, ), pp. –. Sarah Tarlow, Ritual, Belief and the Dead in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. , . On the increasing use of lead coffins, see Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in London and Paris, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. Tarlow, Ritual, Belief and the Dead, pp. –, p. .



‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

objects, and with their concentric layering of velvet upon wood these dignified boxes for the dead would have been almost book-like in outward appearance, a final personalised record of an individual life. The transitive verb ‘to chest’, meaning ‘to put into a coffin’, is early modern in origin, and this verbal interplay is a reminder that the coffin was, in essence, just another of the many wooden boxes or chests that furnished the entire span of life in early modern England. In early modern English, the noun ‘coffin’ could also refer to a piecrust (Shakespeare’s Titus ghoulishly blends multiple senses of the word when he prepares a ‘coffin’ of pastry for the bodies of Tamora’s sons), and a wooden part of the printing press. In The Revenger’s Tragedy Vindice offers Lussorioso a cynical depiction of a deathbed scene furnished with various boxes: think how a great rich man lies a-dying, and a poor cobbler tolls the bell for him; how he cannot depart the world, and see the great chest stand before him; when he lies speechless, how he will point you readily to all the boxes, and when he is past all memory, as the gossips guess, then thinks he of forfeitures and obligations.

This passage ironically evokes the advice of Christ to the disciples about how it is ‘easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’, and also perhaps the parable of the rich man and Lazarus the beggar. Vindice pictures ‘a great rich man’ who in his final moments remains so invested in the material wealth of his earthly ‘boxes’ and ‘forfeitures and obligations’ that he cannot see beyond ‘the great chest’ that holds his earthly wealth to ‘see’ another ‘great chest’, the coffin that holds no such material wealth but inevitably waits for his soon-to-be worthless body. In these lines, the various boxes of life and death jostle against one another, and ‘the great chest’ of the coffin is just another piece of furniture, the natural conclusion to a lifetime of boxes. One significant consequence of the shift towards coffins was that bones could not be dug up again and moved to charnel houses, for graves to be reused, as had been the usual fate of decomposed bodies. The introduction of the coffin thus had a combination of practical, social, and theological

  

 ‘chest, v.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press. Titus Andronicus, ... The Revenger’s Tragedy (..–), in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, eds., Thomas Middleton, Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Matthew :; Luke :–.

Corpses and Coffins



effects – reshaping public space and the use of burial grounds, maintaining a sense of the individual beyond death, and emphasising the complete separation between the living and the dead. The coffin, as Owen Felltham’s ‘box of pallid putrefaction’ suggests, also shielded the corrupting body from ‘the eyes and noses of the living’, and therefore allowed the body to ‘retain its integrity in the memories and imaginations of those left behind’. In post-Reformation England, the coffin was not only a necessary place of enclosure for hygienic reasons, but a space in which the rotting empty shell of a human life was accorded relative dignity until the day of resurrection. George Herbert’s reference in ‘Even-song’, for example, to ‘thy Ebony box’ in which ‘Thou dost enclose us, till the day/Put our amendment in our way’ (–) evokes not only the restorative sleep of night, but also the dark closure of the coffin. This valuable and suitably black ‘Ebony box’ becomes something divinely endorsed, offering the quiet reassurance of rest to weary bones. While the increasing use of coffins visually reinforced the finality of death, circumscribing a solid, opaque boundary between the corpse and the mourners, the changes made by English reformers to the rites with which the dead were buried reiterated this separation liturgically. Indeed, the order for the burial of the dead was one of the services most heavily changed in the Elizabethan revisions to the prayer book. Several key liturgical features were dramatically cut – there was no longer a processional element, collects were altered to omit direct prayers for the departed, and prayers at the graveside and the provision for holy communion were also removed. The rubrics of the  text consistently refer (as in the original  version) to ‘the corps’ or ‘the body’, beginning with ‘[t]he priest metyng the corps at the Church style’, and then moving to the grave, where ‘the corps is made redy to be layd into the earth’, and ‘the earth shalbe cast upon the body’. As these liturgical stage directions reveal, although the soul of the dead person could no longer be prayed for, the revised order for burial still treated the body with dignity – perhaps even more so despite the dramatic alterations to the order, because the body was







Tarlow, Ritual, Belief and the Dead, p. . See also Roberta Gilchrist, “‘Dust to Dust”: Revealing the Reformation Dead’, in Gaimster and Gilchrist, eds., The Archaeology of Reformation, pp. –. Brian Cummings, ed.,The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of , , and  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Some of these elements of the Order for Burial were restored in the  revisions. Ibid., pp. –.



‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

now the only focus of the service. In retaining the vocabulary of ‘the corps’ and ‘the body’, the liturgy never refers directly to the coffin that would most likely have contained this body, although it would increasingly have been the wooden box of the coffin that mourners saw being brought into church, and which was laid in the grave and sprinkled with earth. Even as it concealed the reality of physical decay, then, the coffin had a kind of transparency, allowing the living to be present comfortably with the body although it was hidden from sight, and emptied of its soul. In the coffin, box and body became one. Such was the dramatic effect of the coffin that it was almost impossible to think about a dead body without thinking inside the box. Although the coffin was only required after death, it permeated the ways in which the writers thought about the living body as well, in a sort of anachronous recolouring of corporeality from the grave. The Jacobean preacher Thomas Adams, for example, wrote that ‘[o]ur graves shall as surely be Coffins to our bodies, as our bodies have beene Coffins to our soules’, blurring the distinction between the grave and the coffin in a way that renders the coffin merely a simile for the grave, and equates the soul-filled living body with a wooden box – thus making the body itself the original template for a coffin. In more elaborate terms, in a sermon preached at Whitehall in , based on the biblical account of the killing of the protomartyr Stephen (Acts : – And when he had said this, he fell asleep), John Donne warns of the importance of anticipating death properly – of living well before death, and being adequately prepared for it with a clear conscience. For the person who denies the reality of death, life itself is not fully lived: the sting of Death is in every limb of his body, and his very body, is a victorious grave upon his Soule: And as his Carcas and his Coffin shall lie equally insensible in his grave, so his Soule, which is but a Carcas, and his 





This is in contrast with the Church of England’s modern authorised liturgies, which consistently refer to ‘the coffin’ at the equivalent moments, with an almost squeamish reluctance to mention ‘the body’. See Church of England, Common Worship: Pastoral Services (London: Church House Publishing, ). At Prince Henry’s funeral in , the relationship between coffin and corpse was less straightforward: an effigy of the Prince lay on top of the coffin, dressed in the rich robes he wore at his creation as Prince of Wales in . Mourners lining the streets of London focussed not on the coffin and what it concealed, but on the lifelike effigy. Only the wooden torso and legs of this survive today, in Westminster Abbey. They show the effects of woodworm infestation – ironically, a reminder of the fate of the human flesh the effigy was made to represent. See Catherine MacLeod, The Lost Prince: The Life & Death of Henry Stuart (London: National Portrait Gallery, ), p. . I am grateful to Helen Hackett for pointing this out to me. Thomas Adams, The devills banket. Described in foure sermons (London: Ralph Mab, ), Yv.

Corpses and Coffins



body, which is but a Coffin of that Carcas, shall be equally miserable upon his Death-bed.

In this dense sequence of concentric images, Donne suggests that a kind of death can happen pre-emptively to the living. The insensible ‘Carcas’ inside the ‘Coffin’, which is in turn buried in the grave, is reflected back onto the deathbed, rendering the yet-living soul in the body as but another kind of ‘insensible’ carcass inside a coffin. These multiplying images of carcasses and coffins offer a stark equation of moral hollowness with the desolation of physical emptiness. Such images also emphasise the dimensional resemblance between the coffin and the body – the unique function of the coffin determines its particular shape and size, as something that neatly encases its contents. Though not as closely as the winding sheet, which traces the contours of the corpse exactly, the coffin performs a kind of visual mimesis of the body even while it shuts it away from sight, and in this way it is a kind of skeuomorph, an object that mimics the physical form of another in a different material (from the Greek for ‘container’ and ‘form’). Playing on this material mimesis, Donne disrupts the reassuring closure of the grave. Perhaps it should not be surprising that for a writer who famously ‘preach’t his own funeral Sermon’ and posed in a winding sheet for the making of his own funeral monument before he died, the grave and its contents were a dynamic place, in which even time itself could be manipulated. Donne’s images capture the peculiar tension of death: it inevitably involves some kind of opening, and an ontological emptying, but at the same time death is a kind of closing-off, which is only emphasised by the subsequent containment of the body in a coffin. Both the coffin and the corpse will eventually disappear, however, each equally returning to their organic origins, as nature’s processes of decomposition make little distinction between wood and human flesh. The sources I have brought together in this chapter and throughout the rest of this book have illustrated how the box brings into stark relief the particular contradictoriness of human existence, as something in which the material and the immaterial coexist. The box, like the body, is both a very material thing, and an abstract idea.

  

Donne, XXVI sermons, Ggv. ‘skeuomorph, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press. On this term, see George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. Izaak Walton, The lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (London: Thomas Newcomb, ), Fr.



‘Because this box we know’: Embodying the Box

For early modern writers, the box offered a concrete way to think about the opportunities, challenges, and mysteries of embodiment, but at the same time it offered a versatile metaphor with which to figure out the almost unimaginable aspects of that embodiment – the relationships between the body and the soul, the challenges of interiority, and the distinction between life and death.

Conclusion

In his sermon given in May  at the burial of Susanna Howard, Countess of Suffolk, Edward Rainbowe preached on Ecclesiastes : – ‘A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one’s birth’. The sermon was published shortly afterwards, and in the accompanying dedicatory letter to the late Countess’s husband, Rainbowe confirms that he has made ‘no addition, nor considerable alteration’ to the text in its printed version. Yet a closer look at this quarto reveals the extent to which the sermon offers a continuing performance of grief in the particular medium of the printed page. The sermon opens with a declaration that ‘[t]he Text needs no preface’, because ‘the sad occasion of our present meeting’ is ‘a black and mournfull Preface before the Text’. Taken as a record of how Rainbowe, chaplain to the Howard family, began his address to the assembled mourners, these words establish the unique ‘sad occasion’ of Howard’s burial as the only necessary ‘Preface’ to the scriptural verse. On the printed page, however, there is another ‘black and mournfull Preface’: the scriptural verse appears conventionally in italic font before the main body of the sermon, and directly above it is a block of solid black ink, where the reader would usually expect to see a printer’s ornament (Figure ). This black rectangle literally prefaces the scriptural ‘Text’, standing in for the original ‘Preface’ or ‘occasion’ for which Rainbowe wrote the sermon. The quarto illustrates the trend that emerged largely after the death of Prince Henry in  for extravagant use of black ink in printed 



Edward Rainbowe, A sermon preached at Walden in Essex, May th. At the interring of the corps of the right Honorable Susanna, Countesse of Suffolke (London: Printed W. Wilson, for Gabriel Bedell, M. M[eighen] and T. C[ollins], ), Av. On the relationships between sermons as preached and sermons in print, see Mary Morrisey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).





Conclusion

Figure  Edwarde Rainbowe, A sermon preached at Walden in Essex, May th. (London: Printed W. Wilson, for Gabriel Bedell, M. M[eighen] and T. C[ollins], ), Br. National Library of Wales

funerals, mourning verse, and elegies, where heavy dark frames, borders, and sometimes entirely black pages visually proclaimed the state of grief. Like Prince Henry, Susanna Howard died in her youth, aged just twentytwo, and thus merited an especially sombre remembrance in print. This

Conclusion



sermon is distinctive, however – the black ink here does something more specific than simply dressing the quarto in appropriate mourning weeds. The focal point of the original ‘sad occasion’ would have been Howard’s coffin (later in the sermon, Rainbowe implores his listeners to ‘take your eyes awhile [. . .] from her Herse’), and so perhaps the reader of the sermon is looking, when confronted with this alternative ‘mournfull Preface’, at a printed evocation of that coffin, which was possibly draped in black cloth, or even, as they incline their eyes to the page, down into the dark grave in which the coffin was laid. It is also possible that in some copies of the sermon, the natural grain of the wooden block with which the black rectangle was printed may have been just visible in the ink, rendering this two-dimensional black shape almost three-dimensional, in a further material gesture towards the wooden box of the coffin. This page, to a greater extent even than apparently much more elaborate early modern ‘mourning pages’, pushes at the limitations of its own materiality in its attempt to recreate the coffin or the empty space of the grave within the bounds of the printed text. In the main text of the sermon, Rainbowe elaborates on the relationship between his chosen verse of scripture and the specific occasion in more detail, explaining: The text and occasion mingled together make a chequer-worke, a mixture of black and white, mourning and joy; when we present to your imaginations how Precious a Vessell of Oyntment is this day broken, and that the Day of Death hath seized on her, who can blame our griefe? But if we will consider, that by breaking this boxe of spikenard, her Good name, which is better than precious ointment, is powered forth, and makes a sweet fragrancy in the world; and that to those, who dye in the Lord, and with such a Good Name, the Day of Death is better than the Day of their Birth, surely then we will not grieve, as without Hope.

In the context of the sermon’s original occasion, Rainbowe’s images of the mingling opposites of ‘black and white’ and ‘mourning and joy’ offer emotional reassurance to the mourners, but in print they also draw attention to the page as another kind of ‘chequer-worke’, in which the black ink of letters and ornaments mingle with white space to recreate  



Rainbowe, A sermon preached at Walden in Essex, Bv. R. Mac Geddon [Randall McLeod] has drawn attention to the appearance of the natural grain lines of wooden printing blocks in the black ink of mourning pages: see ‘An Epilogue’, in Pete Langman, ed., Negotiating the Jacobean Printed Book (Farnham: Ashgate, ), pp. – (pp. –). As I mentioned in the previous chapter, a ‘coffin’ also described a wooden part of the printing press. Rainbowe, A sermon preached at Walden in Essex, Br.



Conclusion

some of the emotional experience of the sermon for readers. Eliding the ‘precious ointment’ of his original verse from Ecclesiastes with the gospel image of the box of costly ointment poured over Christ by the woman in the house at Bethany, Rainbowe portrays Howard herself as a ‘Vessell of Oyntment’ or a ‘boxe of spikenard’, ‘broken’ in death. Interweaving these two scriptural moments as he develops the metaphor, Rainbowe imagines that this breaking-open has allowed ‘her Good name, which is better than precious ointment’ to be ‘powered forth’. In the space of just a few pages, the opening of this funeral sermon encapsulates many of the ideas I have been exploring throughout this book. With its printed evocation of the coffin, and its transformation of Susanna Howard into ‘this boxe of spikenard’, the sermon demonstrates the very close imaginative relationship between the body and the box in early modern writing, and offers another example of how, as I explored in the previous chapter, both the material practicality and the imaginative potential of the box could mediate some of the potential trauma of death. At the ‘sad occasion’ of Howard’s burial, the coffin conveniently hides the reality of her physical decay, but in the space of the sermon, the scripturally inspired depiction of her body as a box of precious ointment transforms death into something joyful. As one box is closed forever and buried in the grave, another is opened for eternity. Hovering behind his reassurance that her ‘Good name’ will not leave mourners to grieve ‘without Hope’ is a variation on yet another box, the mythical one associated with Pandora, which released all the evils of the world when she opened it, leaving only hope inside. Here, however, the opening of the box releases only the goodness of Howard’s ‘fame and memory’, which are themselves a source of ‘Hope’ to those who outlive her. Rainbowe thus provides his audience, whether at the graveside or in print, with a kind of relic in Howard’s ‘Good name’, which after death ‘makes a sweet fragrancy in the world’. This image of a box spilling over with fragrant ointment has clear echoes of (largely pre-Reformation) descriptions of tombs and reliquaries of saints miraculously overflowing with sweet-smelling liquids. Rainbowe invites his audience to revel in the materiality of his images – the ‘mournfull’ qualities of blackness, the striking contrast between black and white, the visual intrigue of ‘chequer-worke’, and the sensuality of ‘precious ointment’. The reproduction   

See Chapter  for my discussion of the popularity of this gospel story in early modern writing. Rainbowe, A sermon preached at Walden in Essex, Br. It is tempting to imagine that Rainbowe or the printers may have been conscious too, in print, of the contrast between his ‘black and mournfull Preface’ and his multicoloured surname.

Conclusion



of his sermon in print only reinforces his positive emphasis on the affectiveness of the material, for this is a textual object that draws attention to the materiality of its component parts of ink and paper. As I explored in Chapter , relics were associated in Protestant England with unreformed, continental devotional practices, but here Rainbowe (an ‘orthodox but moderate’ Anglican of the mid-seventeenth century) presents an acceptable relic, validated by imagery and vocabulary taken from both the Old and New Testaments. The medium of print gives permanent, tangible form to this relic, Susanna Howard’s name, to which the reader can return repeatedly for spiritual inspiration. The printed sermon thus functions as a kind of reliquary, a vessel containing the ‘sweet fragrancy’ of words directly inspired by the Word. In extolling Howard’s many virtues, Rainbowe emphasises her exemplary devotional habits: she read her Bible every day, marking important passages with a pin, and could readily cite scripture from memory, as well as sermons she had heard, and poems from George Herbert’s The Temple. Her Puritan upbringing was also implied by her modest dress – ‘for her Attire and Dressing, this I can aver, that her self had the least affectation for it’, Rainbowe states – she ‘avowed to wear no other Garments but Black, so long as she should live, not only presaging what the Tragicall times might require, but as being the gravest and most suitable to her disposition’. He adds ‘that which was seen above and over all the rest, was that Garment which the Apostle commends, Humility, she was clothed all over with that, the Ornaments of her Mind and Body all shined through that, and the Veil of Modesty’. Running through this description of Howard’s habits of mind and body is a complex fascination with outward forms. Rainbowe sees Howard’s black garments as a pious negation of worldly exteriors, but at the same time he remains fixated on them, reading ‘Tragicall’ significance into them, and yet then overlaying them with the scripturally inspired ‘Garment’ of ‘Humility’, and the ‘Veil of Modesty’. Rainbowe projects onto Howard some of the paradoxes of the most fervent expressions of early modern Protestantism, whereby an apparent rejection of ostentatious exteriors itself becomes an ostentatious obsession with exteriors, from 

 

R.S. Ferguson, ‘Rainbow [Rainbowe], Edward (–), bishop of Carlisle’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/view/./ref:odnb/../ odnb--e-. William H. Sherman discusses Rainbowe’s portrayal of Susanna Howard’s reading practices, and those of Anne Clifford in a similar funeral sermon, in Used Books, chapter . Rainbowe, A sermon preached at Walden in Essex, Dv–Dv.



Conclusion

those that clothe bodies to those that enwrap books. His sermon illustrates the rich imaginative connections between the box and other metaphors of exteriority, such as clothing, that have been evident elsewhere in this book as well. The dominant image here, however, inspired by scripture, is that of the box, as a distinctive model for thinking about not just exteriors, but the rhetorical force of both containing and breaking open uniquely afforded by this object. Bringing a multiplicity of overlapping and intersecting boxes together within the neat confines of a printed quarto, Rainbowe’s text draws together many of the intricate connections between bodies, books, and boxes in early modern English literature and material culture that have been central to this book. As the five preceding chapters of Boxes and Books in Early Modern England have shown, boxes were ubiquitous objects in early modern material culture. Their affordances were many and varied, and tell us much about the changing configurations of domestic space, and the escalating measure of material consumption in this period. In this book I have explored the ways in which this distinctively early modern proliferation of boxes encouraged and informed a rich imaginative realm of the box. While the category of the box includes some of the most physically solid kinds of object, the imaginative affordances of boxes allow them to become extremely labile, flexible forms. In their engagement with boxes, early modern writers reveal the extent to which this category of object is a fascinating material and metaphorical confluence. Two contrasting literary figures, Desiderius Erasmus and John Donne, have been crucial touchstones throughout my discussion, for the particularly imaginative and often intriguingly ambiguous ways in which they invite us to think about materiality. In their respective historical contexts, the confessional identity of each of these writers is not always straightforward, and so each embodies some of the intellectual and theological complexities implicated in the changes and continuities of the Protestant Reformation. With his persistent fascination with the potentially problematic nature of exteriors, Erasmus anticipated many of the concerns that would later dominate the rhetorical landscape of Reformation England. His resurrection of Plato’s Silenus figure epitomises the complicated relationship between the material and the metaphorical that often characterised the box in early modern writing. The Erasmian Silenus and its successors in early modern English writing demonstrate that this relationship is not always best understood as one of the material world shaping thought, but as one of the mind constructing the material forms necessary for modelling its own processes of interpretation. The Silenus also

Conclusion



embodied a crucial temporal dimension: as an object that had to be opened for its unexpectedly beautiful contents to be revealed, it illustrated the imaginative potential of the box as the physical embodiment of epiphany, an object whose material and imaginary affordances operate across time as well as space. John Donne has also appeared at various points throughout this book. In his poetry and prose writings, Donne frequently demonstrates how the imaginary affordances of the box stretch the idea of containment to its limits. Donne’s engagement with the box contrasts its material solidity and fixity with its metaphorical flexibility, with the result that a box, or an intriguing nest of boxes, often becomes an earthly springboard to the divine. In complicating the dynamic between inside and outside, and challenging our assumptions about the relationship of each to the other, Donne’s imagined boxes offer his readers ways to think about the relation of spirit to matter, the experience of bodily interiors, and the connections between interpretation and material text. Though Donne’s writings have been a very useful pivot, this book has drawn on many different early modern authors and texts, and in doing so has brought together a wide range of objects and literary practices, from diaries, wills, and inventories to poetry, drama, pamphlets, and religious debate. The persistent intersections between book and box reveal how early modern literature was not only informed by their common material and imaginative affordances, but creatively reinforced them. In my discussion, real and imagined books have jostled with chests, nests of boxes, embroidered caskets, bookbindings, bodies, portraits, coffins, and reliquaries. As some of these objects have revealed, even the very word ‘box’ became caught up in the religious polemic of the Reformation and its aftermath, deployed as a plosive term of suspicion for some of the objects that, according to Protestants, deceived the faithful. At times, this included books, which could manifest a troubling tension between what they claimed to contain according to their various material and intellectual exteriors, and what they actually held within. By definition, most boxes exist only because of the existence of other things. A box thus often testifies to the presence, potential presence, or absence of something else. Boxes are frequently intended to protect or preserve, but ironically it is often the case today that early modern boxes survive when their contents do not. While reliquaries are one illustration of this phenomenon, with their own particular narrative of trauma in the early modern period, the modern-day emptiness of other surviving boxes, like the embroidered caskets made by young girls that featured in



Conclusion

Chapter , or the parish chests described in Chapter , testifies to the ways in which such objects offered more transient kinds of containment. While most boxes were made for the service of other material things, others were aesthetically desirable objects in their own right: they might be highly decorative artefacts featuring luxurious materials, or they might be intriguingly small, or impressively large, forming the centrepiece of a room. The affordances of a box go far beyond that of apparently straightforward containment – a box can manipulate matter, apprehension, and access, resisting the distinctions we readily make between insides and outsides. Books were fully integrated into this rich material culture of boxes. As some of the wills and inventories discussed here have revealed, they were often stored in boxes or chests, in domestic and institutional contexts, and as material objects these receptacles for textual matter often shared striking similarities with the boxes in which they were themselves stored. In situating early modern books within a detailed picture of other material things, especially boxes, Boxes and Books in Early Modern England has invited a reconsideration of the codex as a tactile object that invites openings and closings both physical and mental, and an artefact whose material and intellectual surfaces are constantly reflecting, informing, and responding to one another. Susan Stewart asserts that ‘the metaphors of the book are metaphors of containment, of exteriority and interiority, of surface and depth, of covering and exposure, of taking apart and putting together’, but this book has demonstrated that we ought to moderate such discussions of ‘the metaphors of the book’, and think more carefully about the distinctions we make between the material and the metaphorical. Early modern books, with potentially hefty bindings bearing metal locks and clasps, or with printed title-pages proclaiming their cabinet-like qualities, challenge the distinctions we might make between book and box, presenting us instead with a constant back and forth in material and imaginary terms. In the context of post-Reformation England, this synergy was sometimes playful, and often polemical, and is symptomatic of the extent to which, in a culture that was generally suspicious of externals, the identity of the book as the necessary receptacle for the Word of God became increasingly complicated. At times during the writing of this book, some of the early modern objects I encountered so keenly blurred the ideas of book and box that they resisted categorisation. Among them was an object that did not fit neatly in any one of my five chapters – a wooden box from the late sixteenth or early 

Susan Stewart, On Longing, p. .

Conclusion



seventeenth century, lined with waste printed pages of a late Elizabethan devotional text, A true patterne of pietie meete for all Christian householders to looke upon, and filled with eighteenth-century manuscripts. Is this object, now in a library, most appropriately classified as a box, or a book, or a box of various kinds of text? Or is it a kind of multi-temporal reliquary, preserving not only eighteenth-century manuscripts, but also the pious remnants of a much earlier printed book? Does the paper lining of this box represent merely the practical use of whatever was conveniently to hand at the time, or should we think more carefully about the use of this particular printed text? Read another way, ‘A true patterne [. . .] for all Christian householders to looke upon’ seems like an invitation to revel visually in the appeal of the ‘patterne’ of letters inked onto paper, and so makes the very ordinary household object of the wooden box into something aesthetic, as well as practical. A group of seventeenth-century English objects even more intentionally blurs the distinction between book and box. Sometime in the early s, William Hakewill, a legal antiquary with links to Thomas Bodley, commissioned four ‘travelling libraries’ (now in the British Library, the Brotherton Library, the Huntington Library, and the Toledo Museum of Art) as New Year gifts for a circle of friends. From the outside, each library looks like a folio volume bound in brown leather with simple gold tooling but, when opened, reveals itself to be a painted wooden case with three shelves, housing around  or  small printed books in vellum bindings, also with gold tooling. Opposite the shelves, the painted ‘inside cover’ of each giant ‘book’ catalogues its contents – mainly classical works of theology, philosophy, history, and poetry. The splendid polychrome design of the index, an elaborate architectural frame painted to look like marble, and adorned with coats of arms, further transforms each object into a building. Book, bookcase, and library merge into one another, blurring the boundaries between different kinds of storage place associated with containing, preserving, and presenting the written word. These miniature libraries play in the most literal terms with the book’s container function but they are not entirely practical, and it is unclear to what extent 



The box is part of the Jones Collection at Dr Williams’s Library, London. The printed remains are from John Parker’s A true patterne of pietie meete for all Christian householders to looke upon, for the better education of their families, in the feare and service of almightie God (London: John Wolfe, ). For further details, see Howard M. Nixon and William A. Jackson, ‘English Seventeenth-century Travelling Libraries’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society,  (), –. See also Razzall, ‘Small Chests and Jointed Boxes’.



Conclusion

they were actually used for travelling purposes. However, resisting easy distinctions between books and other sites of textual containment, they offer further evidence of how early moderns creatively explored the visual, material, and imaginative possibilities of the book’s threedimensional form. Hakewill’s so-called travelling libraries were made at a crucial moment in the history of libraries. In early modern England, parish chests were beginning to be used more carefully as archives of important documents, a great improvement on medieval practices, according to Daniel Woolf, while the creation of new libraries such as the Bodleian produced dynamic places in which the national trauma of the Reformation and its destructive impulses were mediated, and new forms of knowledge were gathered and tested. In the building, furnishing, and development of such libraries, the relationship between container and content was one of mutual shaping and informing. Objects such as Hakewill’s ‘travelling libraries’, or the many surviving boxes that are lined with printers’ waste, such as the one above, present modern scholarship with particular challenges of classification and interpretation, but as Boxes and Books in Early Modern England has shown, it is in early modern literary responses to materiality that we find models for reassessing our own responses to the material and imaginary affordances of things. As these examples show, thinking about early modern material culture in terms of a specific category of object, such as the box, permits the juxtaposition of things that might otherwise not be considered alongside each other. It enables us to think across distinctions of class, status, and gender: while seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities were accessible only to the privileged few, everyone across the social scale would have known what it was to keep their personal things in a box of some kind. It also, as this book has shown, reveals distinctive patterns of thought that lead us across literary genres in sometimes unexpected but fruitful ways, enabling us to think about the shared imaginative influences underpinning what might seem like very different kinds of writing: a translated psalm or a medical textbook, a drama written for performance in the public playhouses or a sermon delivered in court, a diary or a piece of confessionally charged religious polemic. In his short volume Shipping Container, published in the Bloomsbury series ‘Object Lessons’ – ‘a book series about the hidden lives of ordinary 

Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England, pp. , , . See also Summit, Memory’s Library, passim.

Conclusion



things’ – Craig Martin describes the ubiquitous shipping container as ‘a world-object’, which is ‘part of an economic as well as spatial and temporal ideology that envisages the globe in a particular manner’. Martin’s book participates in a broader recent surge in critical attention to the shipping container – a standardised, mobile box, a globally networked unit of stuff, and a ‘material or imaginary unit of space that has the advantage of being easily filled with any thing (and emptied again)’. Once on the fringes of inhabited space in ports and on oceans, these familiar boxes are increasingly part of it. Within the systems they were designed for, shipping containers are infinitely reusable, but their reusability also extends beyond those global systems of movement. Although one of their primary affordances is portability, they can also offer useful immobility when they are reused as architectural space, from commercial units to offices or housing. The box of all boxes, this icon of global consumption and capitalism is an ever-present reminder that the way we live continues to be shaped by material things. This box has transformed the movement of stuff on a completely unprecedented scale, but ‘the core innovation’ of this industry is ‘so simple that it hardly deserves to be called a new technology’. The evident impulse to romanticise the shipping container, even as it presents ‘an almost lumpen face of contemporary capitalism’, perhaps has its roots in the proliferation of boxes in early modern material culture, a time of increasing consumerism and global trade. As this book has shown, however, there is no comparably standardised box in this period – the early modern precursors to the boxes we are now most familiar with (more immediately familiar than the reusable metal shipping container is the ubiquitous, disposable, cardboard box) represent an incredibly diverse array of objects, materials, purposes, and contexts. They are fundamental units for storage, protection, and organisation, but also for imagination and creativity, furnishing the mind and the body as well as rooms. In early modern writing’s embracing of the dynamic between material rigidity and metaphorical flexibility, we find the formation of the very ideas of what a box is, and what a box can do.  

 

Craig Martin, Shipping Container (Bloomsbury: New York and London, ), pp. –. Alexander Klose, The Container Principle: How A Box Changes the Way We Think, trans. Charles Marcrum (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), p. . See also Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Arthur Donovan and Joseph Bonney, The Box That Changed the World: Fifty Years of Container Shipping (East Windsor, NJ: Commonwealth Business Media, ); Julia Christensen, Big Box Reuse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ). Donovan and Bonney, The Box That Changed the World, p. . Martin, Shipping Container, p. .



Conclusion

The technological innovations of the twentieth century also prompted a transformation of the box into something two-dimensional – a bordered area of space on a printed page, a tiny square to be ticked on a form; and also something virtual – an inbox, a black box. All of these boxes do much more than simply contain – they demarcate, invite mark-making, enable communication, and express some of our anxieties about the hidden workings of technology. While such two-dimensional and virtual boxes might limit, define, and categorise, they can still be a stimulus for creativity, and blend the material and the mental. This book has told the story of the early modern precursors to these now ubiquitous concepts, a dynamic category of object that enfranchised ways of being, thinking, and writing. In its exploration of one of the most ordinary and yet most evocative objects we encounter, Boxes and Books has illuminated the inextricable relationship between the material and the imaginary in early modern England.

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

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Index

Achelley, Thomas,  Adams, Thomas, ,  Adoration of the Magi,  Aelianus, Claudius,  affordances, –, , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –,  agency of things,  Ainsworth, Henry,  Alcibiades, – allegory, , ,  Allyn, John,  altars, –, , , –,  anatomy, , ,  anthropology, –, ,  Anzieu, Didier,  apothecaries, – archaeology, , , – Archdekin, Richard,  Ark of the Covenant, ,  armour, , –,  Ashmole, Elias, – Askewe, Anne, , –,  Augustine, ,  Austin, William,  Bachelard, Gaston,  Bacon, Francis,  Bale, John, ,  Barclay, John,  Bartlet, John,  Batman, Stephen,  Baxter, Richard, – Beard, Thomas,  Becket, Thomas, ,  Bedingfield, Thomas,  bedrooms, , , ,  beds, , , ,  Bellarmine, Robert,  Bible boxes, 

Bible, books of  Corinthians,  Acts of the Apostles,  Exodus, ,  Genesis, ,  John,  Luke, , ,  Matthew, , , , , , –, ,  Phillippians,  Psalms, , , –, ,  Revelation, ,  Wisdom of Solomon,  Bible, editions of King James, ,  Tyndale, , , ,  black book bindings,  black clothing, ,  black ink, – Blackerby, Richard,  Boccaccio,  Bodley, Thomas, , – Boivin, Nicole,  book bindings, , , , , , , , , See needlework, embroidery book chests, , ,  Book of Common Prayer, , ,  bookcases, , , ,  bookshelves, , , ,  box early modern flexible terminology for,  etymology of,  boxes lined with paper, ,  nests of, , , , –,  two-dimensional,  Brown, Peter,  Bruster, Douglas,  Buxton, Antony,  Bynum, Caroline Walker, 



Index cabinets, , , , –, , , , ,  Calamy, Edmund, ,  Calvin, John, , – Camden, William,  Camillo, Giulio,  carcass furniture,  Cardanus, Girolamo,  carpentry, , , ,  Carruthers, Mary, –,  carving, –, , , , ,  Cassiodorus,  cassoni,  Cats, Jacob,  Cavendish, Margaret,  Cawdrey, Daniel,  Caxton, William,  Chaganti, Seeta,  Charles I, – chest as a verb,  as part of the body, See under parts of the body etymology of,  chests and memory,  Cambridge University Chest,  for alms-giving, ,  impenetrability of, ,  imported to England,  in the theatre,  marriage chests, ,  chests of drawers,  Chinnery, Victor, , ,  Christ, , , , –, ,  anointed at Bethany with box of spikenard, , ,  body of Christ as a box,  relics of, , ,  Churchyard, Thomas,  Cicero, ,  Clairvaux, Bernard of,  Clark, Stuart, ,  closets, , , , , , –, , , , ,  coffers, –,  coffins, , – as part of printing press,  as piecrust,  increasing use of, – Comenius, Johann,  concentricity, , , , –, , , , , , , , , ,  containment, , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , ,  Cranmer, Thomas, , , ,  Crashaw, William, 



Crofts, Robert,  Cromwell, Thomas, , ,  Crooke, Samuel,  Cave, Terence,  cupboards, , , , ,  Davy, Sarah,  de Groot, Hugo,  Dee, John, – Dekker, Thomas,  Denny, William,  depth ontology, ,  Dering, Edward,  Digby, Kenelm,  Dillingham, Francis,  divinity, , , , , , , , , ,  domestic space, , , , , , , , , ,  Donne, John Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,  Satyre ,  sermons, –, –, – Duffy, Eamon,  Du¨rer, Albrecht,  Eames, Penelope,  Edmonde, Christopher,  Elizabeth I, , , , ,  emblem books, ,  embroidery, , , , – emptiness, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , ,  Erasmus, Desiderius Ciceronianus,  Cyclops, or the Gospel Bearer,  Exposition of Psalm , ,  Godly Feast, The, ,  Handbook of the Christian Soldier, ,  Paraphrase on Matthew,  Praise of Folly,  Erickson, Robert A.,  Eucharist, – Evelyn, John,  exegesis, , ,  Featley, Daniel,  Felltham, Owen,  Fisher, John,  Flather, Amanda,  Fleming, Abraham,  Fleming, Juliet,  Foot, Mirjam,  Fortescue, John,  Foucault, Michel, 



Index

Foulis, Henry,  Foxe, John, , , ,  Fraunce, Abraham,  Freud, Sigmund,  Fulbecke, William,  Fumerton, Patricia, ,  funerals, , , – Garey, Samuel,  Geary, Patrick,  Gell, Alfred, ,  Genette, Gérard,  Gesta Romanorum,  gesture,  Gibson, James,  Golden Legend, The,  Gorton chest (Chetham’s Library),  graves, , , , – Greenham, Richard,  Grey, Lady Jane, – Hakewill, George, – Hakewill, William,  Hamling, Tara, , , ,  Harington, John,  Harris, Jonathan Gil,  Hegge, Robert,  Henry, Prince of Wales,  Hentzner, Paul, – Herbert, George, , –, ,  Hesiod,  hiddenness, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , ,  Holme, Randle,  Homer,  Horne, Robert,  Howard, Susannah, – humanism, , –, , , ,  iconoclasm, , , ,  idolatry, , , , , –,  Ingold, Tim,  inscriptions on objects, , , , , , ,  inventories, , , , , See Shakespeare: Cymbeline satirical,  jack in the box, , ,  James, Thomas,  Jenkin, William,  Jerome, St, ,  Jesuits, , , , , ,  John the Baptist, St,  Johnson, Mark, 

joinery, , , , ,  Jonah and the whale, ,  Jones, Ann Rosalind,  Jonson, Ben, – Kastan, David Scott,  Kearney, James, , , , ,  Kellison, Matthew,  keys, , , ,  King, John N., ,  Knappet, Carl,  Knell, Thomas,  Knight, Jeffrey Todd,  Kyd, Thomas,  Lakoff, George,  Latimer, Hugh, ,  Lees-Jeffries, Hester,  letterlocking,  letters, – Levi, Primo,  linen-fold panels,  liturgy, , ,  Locke, Anne Vaughan,  locks, , , , , –, , , –, , , , ,  Lynch, Kathleen,  Malo, Robyn,  manuscripts, , , , , , , –,  Marlorate, Augustine,  Marnix, Phillips van,  Martin, Craig,  Mary Queen of Scots, ,  materiality, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  Maus, Katharine Eisaman,  memory, , ,  Meres, Francis,  Meriton, George,  metaphor, ,  and memory,  box of ointment (spikenard, balm, balsam), ,  kernel/shell, , ,  painted box, , See apothecaries poison, , , –, – whitewash,  microcosms,  Middleton, Thomas, ,  Miller, Daniel, – Milton, John,  mimesis, 

Index miracles, , , ,  Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della,  models,  Molekamp, Femke,  Montaigne, Michel de,  More, Thomas,  Morton, Thomas,  Mountague, Richard,  moveables, , ,  Munday, Anthony, – Munro, Rona, – Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban,  Nashe, Thomas,  needlework, –, , See embroidery new materialism,  Norbrook, David,  Ong, Walter J.,  Orlin, Lena Cowen,  Overton, Richard,  Oxinden, Henry,  Pandora, ,  paratexts,  parchment-fold carving,  parish chests, , ,  parts of the body breast, , , ,  hands, , , , , , , , –, ,  heart, , –, , ,  ribcage, , , , – skin, , , , ,  thorax, , ,  Pearson, David,  Perkins, William,  Peterson, Robert,  phylacteries, ,  pilgrimage, – Plato, – polemic, –, , –, –, –,  Polyander, John,  porosity, ,  portraits, – pots,  Pownall, Nathaniel,  Price, Leah,  Psyche,  Puritans, ,  pyxes, , , , , 

Rabelais, François, – Rainbowe, Edward, – Rambuss, Richard,  Randolph, Adrian,  Raymond, Joad,  relics and John Calvin,  and satire,  at Canterbury,  at Durham,  at Walsingham,  at York Minster,  blood of Hailes,  in book covers,  of Charles I,  Protestant,  seen in Rome, ,  smuggled into England,  reliquaries and occlusion, , , ,  as a point of transmission,  as reverse Sileni,  form and materials of,  functions of, ,  leather case for,  metaphorical functions of,  repurposing of,  reliquiæ, – Richardson, Catherine, , , ,  Richter Sherman, Claire,  Ridley, Nicholas,  Rublack, Ulinka, ,  Ryrie, Alec,  scale, –, , , , ,  Scarry, Elaine,  Schwyzer, Philip, ,  Sclater, William,  Scott-Warren, Jason, ,  secrecy, , , , , ,  Selden, John,  Seneca,  sermons,  Calvin, John,  Donne, John, –, –, – Rainbowe, Edward, – servants,  Shakespeare, William Cymbeline, – Hamlet, , , , ,  Julius Caesar,  King John,  King Lear,  Macbeth,  Merchant of Venice, The, –





Index

Shakespeare, William (cont.) Merry Wives of Windsor, The,  Pericles,  Richard II, ,  Romeo and Juliet,  Sonnets,  Titus Andronicus,  Winter’s Tale, The,  Sheldon, Richard,  Sherman, William H., , ,  shipping containers,  shrines, , , –, , , , ,  shrouds,  Sidney, Mary,  Sidney, Philip,  Silenus statues, –, – skeuomorphs,  Smith, Helen,  Smith, Miles,  social status, , , , , , ,  Socrates, ,  sola scriptura, ,  Spencer, Brian,  Spenser, Edmund, ,  stage properties, , –, , ,  Stallybrass, Peter,  Stewart, Susan,  Stonley, Richard, – Strype, John,  Summit, Jennifer,  superficiality, , , , ,  suspicion, ,  Sylvester, Matthew, – Targoff, Ramie,  Tarlow, Sarah,  temporal dimensions, , , –, , , , ,  theatres,  Thomas, Keith, ,  three-dimensionality, , , , , , , , , , , ,  Tillyard, E.M.W.,  Tindall, Anne,  title-pages, , , , , , –

titles (of books), , , , ,  touch, , , , , –,  translation, ,  transparency, , –, ,  Traub, Valerie,  travelling libraries,  trunks, , , See Shakespeare: Cymbeline Tyndale, William, , , , ,  Tyrwhit, Elizabeth,  Ussher, James,  Valéry, Paul,  Vatican Library, – Vicary, Thomas,  vierges ouvrantes,  Virgin Mary, , ,  Wale, Thomas, – Walsham, Alexandra, , , , , , , ,  Walton, Izaak, ,  Warnier, Jean-Pierre,  Watt, Tessa,  Weatherill, Lorna,  Webster, John,  Weever, John, ,  Weston, Edward,  Whitford, Richard,  Wilcox, Helen,  wills, , , , –,  women, – wood, , ,  boxwood,  cedar,  oak, ,  Woodall, John,  Woodward, Sophie,  Woolf, Daniel, ,  Wotton, Anthony,  Wotton, Henry,  Yates, Frances A.,  Yates, John,  Young, Samuel, 