Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England (Routledge Research in Early Modern History) [1 ed.] 1138811165, 9781138811164

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Note on text
Abbreviations
1. Introduction: The problem of dearth in early modern England
Writing histories of dearth
Entitlements and anxieties
Charity, discontent, and “sustainability”
Notes
2.
Literatures of dearth
God, the “proper cause” of dearth
Turning penury into plenty
Literary dearth
Notes
3.
Dearth and knowledge making
Sir Hugh Platt, dearth scientist
The knowledge-makers: Platt and his network
Elizabethan dearth science
Notes
4.
earth science, sustainability, and the economy of manure
Natural magic and the circulation of nourishment
Manure and the circulation of knowledge
Recycling: “A practical discourse upon salt”
Economic cooperation: case study of soap boiling
The poetics of manure
Notes
5.
Sustainable households
Consumption and preservation
Households and trades
Dreams of plenty
Notes
6.
Trading in dearth
Trading and natural resources
Luxuries and necessities
Dearth science vs. sustainability
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Penury into Plenty

“Dr Mukherjee’s cross-disciplinary study extends our understanding of late-Elizabethan literary representations of dearth and the economic conditions that underpin them. In particular, her attention to the fascinating ingenuities of Hugh Platt, and contemporary georgic enterprises, offers a valuable account of the practical activities and writings of a neglected figure in the history of natural philosophy. This interesting and imaginative book should also interest eco-critics and anyone working at the interface of science and literature.” Claire Preston, Queen Mary University, UK Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England is an original examination of cultural meanings of dearth and famine in England at the turn of the sixteenth century. It focuses on the socio-economic and ecological crises of the 1590s, investigating the effects of widespread fears of famine on mundane activities and knowledge making by analyzing the remedial measures undertaken by the early modern English to illustrate their commitment to resource management. The activities, theories, and publications of the prolific “dearth scientist” Sir Hugh Platt are considered alongside other forms of literature such as sermons, plays, poetry, and prose fiction to explain not only what dearth or famine meant in the period, but how contemporaries understood sustainable resource management. By drawing upon environmental, economic, scientific, and literary history and theory, Penury into Plenty allows modern readers to see that sustainability is not a wholly modern concept and the investigation of cultural forms of ecological consciousness and social consequences of past environmental change is vital for understanding contemporary concerns. Ayesha Mukherjee is Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. Her research is focused on early modern English literature and cultural history.

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Penury into Plenty Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England

Ayesha Mukherjee

Routledge

Routledge

Routledge

Routledge Routledge

First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Ayesha Mukherjee The right of Ayesha Mukherjee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Mukherjee, Ayesha. Penury into plenty : dearth and the making of knowledge in early modern England / Ayesha Mukherjee. pages cm 1. Poverty--Social aspects--England--History--16th century. 2. Famines-Social aspects--England--History--16th century. 3. England--Intellectual life--16th century. 4. Plat, Hugh, Sir, 1552-1608. 5. Science--Social aspects-England--History--16th century. 6. Poverty in literature. 7. Famines in literature. 8. Human ecology--England--History--16th century. 9. Sustainability--England--History--16th century. 10. England-Environmental conditions. I. Title. HC260.P6M85 2014 305.5’69094209031--dc23 2014025861 ISBN: 978-1-138-81116-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73918-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

To Sunanda and Kamal Mukherjee, with love

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Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Note on text Abbreviations 1

2

3

4

ix x xiii xiv

Introduction: The problem of dearth in early modern England Writing histories of dearth 4 Entitlements and anxieties 8 Charity, discontent, and “sustainability” 11 Notes 18 Literatures of dearth God, the “proper cause” of dearth Turning penury into plenty 34 Literary dearth 44 Notes 59

1

20 21

Dearth and knowledge making Sir Hugh Platt, dearth scientist 63 The knowledge-makers: Platt and his network Elizabethan dearth science 85 Notes 89

63 72

Dearth science, sustainability, and the economy of manure Natural magic and the circulation of nourishment 97 Manure and the circulation of knowledge 103 Recycling: “A practical discourse upon salt” 111 Economic cooperation: case study of soap boiling 118 The poetics of manure 121 Notes 141

93

viii 5

6

Contents Sustainable households Consumption and preservation Households and trades 161 Dreams of plenty 182 Notes 191

145 148

Trading in dearth Trading and natural resources 195 Luxuries and necessities 215 Dearth science vs. sustainability 228 Notes 231

195

Bibliography Index

234 261

Figures

1.1

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17

“English Harvest Fluctuations 1480–1625”. From W.G. Hoskins, “Harvest fluctuations and English economic history”, Agricultural History Review 12 (1964): 28–46, Fig. 1 Platt’s broadside, A Briefe Apologie of Certaine New Inventions (1593), p.1 “Wares for my Jewelhowse”: inventory of Platt’s shop: Sloane MS.2197, f.15r Platt, Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594): “5 spittes in one”, p.21 Platt, Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594): “A Lanthorne wherein a naked candle is not blowne owte”, p.27 Platt, Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594): “Desks of glas”, p.39 Platt’s medical manuscript: Sloane MS.2209, f.22r Platt’s medical manuscript: Sloane MS.2209, f.22v Platt family coat of arms stamped on covers of books owned by Hugh Platt From Platt’s copy of Giambattista della Porta, Magiae Naturalis, p.261 From Platt’s copy of Girolamo Ruscelli, Secretes of Maister Alexis, Book 1, f.44v Platt, Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594): Perfumers’ vessel, p.25 Title page of Platt’s notebook: Sloane MS.2216, f.2r “The arte of marblinge”: Sloane MS.2216, f.12r Extract from Garrett’s notebook: Sloane MS.2216, ff.87v Extract from Garrett’s notebook: Sloane MS.2216, ff.88r “Matters of most royall and present Expectation”: Sloane MS.2216, ff.188v “Matters of most royall and present Expectation”: Sloane MS.2216, ff.189r

5 65 69 69 70 70 74 74 76 77 77 78 80 80 81 82 83 84

Acknowledgements

As this project has developed from an initial interest in images of food and dearth in early modern literature, to a PhD thesis on Hugh Platt, to a book on how dearth shasped approaches to knowledge making and resource management at a particular historical moment, I have accumulated plenty of debts. The British Library, the Cambridge University and Bodleian libraries, and the Wellcome Institute offered wonderful resources and inspiring environments to work in. The British Library has kindly permitted the use of images from Hugh Platt’s manuscripts and printed works. Guardians of rare books and archives at St John’s College, Cambridge, provided much help while I navigated through their Platt collections. I thank the archivists Jonathan Harrison and Malcolm Underwood for their dedicated and efficient assistance, and the Master and Fellows of St John’s for permission to reproduce images from books owned and annotated by Platt. The British Agricultural History Society has allowed the reproduction of a graph from W.G. Hoskins’ article “Harvest fluctuations and English economic history, 1480–1619”, AHR 12 (1964), and the Society of Antiquaries of London has permitted the use of an image from Platt’s first broadside. Some of the material in chapters 3, 4, and 5 appeared in my articles published in The Thomas Harriot Seminar, Occasional Papers Series (2007), The Seventeenth Century (2010), Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800, ed. Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), and Literature Compass (2014). A scholarship from the Felix Foundation enabled me to study for an MPhil in early modern English literature at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford, during which time my PhD project and many ideas in this book were initially conceived. The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, generously awarded a Prince of Wales Scholarship, supplemented by further grants, to support my PhD research and the archival work that inform this book. The collegial warmth, energy, and enthusiasm of the graduate communities at St Hugh’s and Trinity, and of the English departments at

Acknowledgements

xi

both universities, made my time there very happy and productive. I was fortunate to be taught by Juliet Fleming and John Carey, who saw the value of Hugh Platt’s writings long before I did, and their kindness, example, and advice helped me considerably to think through the process of developing the project into a book. I am grateful to the University of Exeter for providing the professional stability and consistent support required to complete this book, the interdisciplinary elements of which have been strengthened during my time at Exeter. The opportunity to present work-in-progress at conferences and seminars also enabled me to develop ideas, and I would especially like to thank organisers and members of conferences held by the British Agricultural History Society, Economic History Society, and the Society for Renaissance Studies, as well as members of seminars and workshops held at Bangalore, Calcutta, Cambridge, Durham, Exeter, Leicester, Oxford, and York, for their generous feedback. Activities of my AHRC-funded research network, Early Modern Discourses of Environmental Change and Sustainability, clarified broader issues underpinning my research on dearth, as did conversations with colleagues in English, History, and Social Sciences at Exeter, Penryn, and beyond. I am much indebted to Andrew McRae and Jane Whittle for their kind collegial support. They, alongside Karen Edwards, Henry French, Nick McDowell, and Philip Schwyzer, amicably steered me through testing moments in the shaping and writing of Penury into Plenty. I have received valuable guidance, encouragement, insights, and comments from many scholars over the years, particularly, Gordon Batho, Philippa Berry, Colin Burrow, Bhaswati and Swapan Chakravorty, Shobha Chatterjee, Sukanta and Supriya Chaudhuri, Stephen Clucas, Amlan Das Gupta, Lesel Dawson, William Eamon, Regenia Gagnier, Steve Hindle, Mark Jenner, Lauren Kassell, John Kerrigan, Kevin Killeen, Sarah Knight, Elaine Leong, Richard Maber, Jemima Matthews, A.D. Nuttall, Nigel Poole, Claire Preston, Julie Sanders, Malabika Sarkar, Lesa Scholl, Jason Scott-Warren, Richard Serjeantson, Pamela Smith, and Michael Winter. My students at Penryn have been an invaluable source of enthusiasm and stimulus – many thanks, especially to my third year “Literature, Culture, and Crisis” groups, for asking me the most challenging questions I have ever been asked! It has been my pleasure and privilege to work with Routledge. The anonymous readers of the book manuscript were very helpful with their insights and attention to detail, and I am grateful to the remarkable editorial team for moving matters forward so smoothly. I’m not sure how one thanks places, but the environs of Calcutta (where I grew up) and of Cornwall (where I now live) have influenced my research in subtle ways. My friends and family in India, the UK, and other parts of the world, assisted my progress with this book in more ways than I can say. Among them, Nonda Chatterjee sadly passed away before seeing it in print, but I hope the outcome reflects something of her enthusiasm for English literature, cultural history, and the rigours and pleasures of close reading, which

xii

Acknowledgements

she tried to impart. Penury into Plenty is dedicated to my parents, for in their households there is no dearth of affection and support. The publishers would like to thank the Society of Antiquaries of London for permission to reproduce Figure 3.1, the Master and Fellows of St John’s College Cambridge for permission to reprint Figures 3.9 and 3.10, and the British Library for permission to reproduce Figures 3.2–3.7 and 3.11–3.17.

Note on text

Quotations from manuscripts and early printed texts follow the capitalization, italicization, spelling, and punctuation of the originals. Hugh Platt’s manuscripts are held in the British Library’s Sloane Collection, and references to them only note the manuscript and folio numbers to avoid constant repetition. For manuscripts belonging to other collections, the name of the collection is noted. The place of publication for early printed texts listed in the Bibliography is London, unless otherwise stated.

Abbreviations

1H4 2H4 AHR APC Cole-balles Corne CSPD Delights EcHR ELH ELR EngHR Famine Floraes HLQ HMC JH LMA MLN MLR N&Q ODNB OED PMLA PRO

Shakespeare, William (2002). King Henry IV, Part 1. Ed. David Scott Kastan. London: Arden. Shakespeare, William (2007). King Henry IV, Part 2. Ed. A.R. Humphreys. London: Arden. Agricultural History Review Acts of the Privy Council Platt, Hugh (1603). A new, cheape, and delicate fire of cole-balles Platt, Hugh (1600). The new and admirable arte of setting of corne Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Platt, Hugh (1602). Delightes for Ladies, to adorne their Persons, Tables, closets, and distillatories Economic History Review English Literary History English Literary Renaissance English Historical Review Platt, Hugh (1596). Sundrie new and artificiall remedies against famine Platt, Hugh (1608). Floraes Paradise, Beautified and adorned with sundry sorts of delicate fruites and flowers Huntington Library Quarterly Historical Manuscripts Commission Platt, Hugh (1594). The Jewell House of Art and Nature London Metropolitan Archives Modern Language Notes Modern Language Review Notes and Queries Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford English Dictionary Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Public Record Office

Abbreviations P&P Sea-men SPD VCH

Past and Present Platt, Hugh (1607). Certaine philosophical preparations of foode and beverage for sea-men State Papers Domestic Victoria County History

xv

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1

Introduction The problem of dearth in early modern England

After the notorious dearth years of the 1590s, a poetry anthology Englands Parnassus was published in 1600. This period was marked by four consecutive years of harvest failure, leading to possibly the most prolonged of the economic crises that afflicted England (and other parts of Europe) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Englands Parnassus, compiled by Robert Allott, a central figure in the world of Elizabethan literary anthologizing and public circulation via print of privately collected texts, was part of an early modern tradition of collating, which attempted to “rewrite commonplaces in the language of a new canon of modern poets” (Moss, 1996: 210).1 It printed extracts from the poetry of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and other authors, arranged under thematic headings. In the context of the 1590s crises, the selections titled “Of Dearth,” “Famine,” and “Gluttonie” were especially significant. The compiled poems presented vivid pictures of the starving human body, thus activating, and not just reflecting, contemporary fears of dearth. The texts were part of a complex cultural discourse on economic and ecological crisis, which employed contrast and paradox as its predominant figurative strategies, and articulated anxieties about the future. The personified figures of Famine and Dearth in Englands Parnassus had the physiological symptoms of “famine edema”, a condition where fat and muscle were “consumed” to feed the vital interior organs, leading to loss of hair, greying skin, dental decay, swelling limbs or stomach, and general lassitude (Appleby, 1978: 7–8). Dearth yawned wide “with lothsome stinking breath”: she had “hollow eyes”, “meger cheekes and chinne”, “sharpe leane bones” that pierced her “sable skinne”, and one might plainly spy her empty bowels “Cleane through the wrinckles of her withered hide”. And yet, her knees and knuckles swelled “very great” (256). Grouped as they were, the selections emphasized that the famished body was a contradictory sight, emaciated and bloated at the same time, an irony extended through the observation that Famine and Dearth starved even as they devoured like gluttons. In fact, the two figures shared the same iconography as Gluttony, a thin-necked beast with a belly “vpblowen with luxurie” (87; cf. Spenser, FQ I.iv.21). As the “greedie gorge” of Dearth consumed her “owne deere babes” and, indeed, her own flesh, the irony of her self-defeat was that she “lessen[ed] her selfe, her

2

Introduction

selfe so to inlarge” (256). The description of the physiognomy of Dearth was taken from Joshua Sylvester’s translation (1598) of Du Bartas’ La Seconde Sepmaine (1584) where Dearth appeared in an account of the destructive operations of the Furies. Allott’s anthology invited the comparison of this extract with a similar picture of Famine (69–70) taken from Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” to The Mirror for Magistrates (1563). This work had appeared soon after the dearth of 1555–57, and we find it incorporated within the thematic arrangement of Englands Parnassus, published after another series of failed harvests from 1594 to 1598. Spectres of dearth persisted in public memory, and literary texts helped to circulate recollections of similar past experiences. The intertextuality of these selections, reinforced by the tradition of anthologized dissemination, introduced a critique of the human inability to learn from destructive consumption patterns and crises of the past. Dearth was anxiously conceived as a repetitive crisis, and the interrelated Dearth-Famine-Gluttony groupings of Englands Parnassus underlined the complexity of dearth-related distress as a social phenomenon. The compiled texts of Englands Parnassus obviously acquire a specific resonance in a historical period characterized by dearth, but they do not, it might be argued, constitute “evidence” of starvation. In many studies of early modern dearth, historians have treaded carefully around Peter Laslett’s famous question: did people “really starve”? As John Walter and Roger Schofield noted in their influential book of essays on famine, If we want to investigate questions such as how often people went so short of food that they were malnourished and starved to death, we need to find evidence recorded on a regular basis so that we can assess the typicality of our observations over time and space. (1989: 4) They continued that neither the nutritional status, nor the cause of death, was regularly recorded in early modern England, and pointed instead towards available evidence of grain prices and parish registers, evaluating the limits of each. Their assessment implied the need to probe beyond quantifiable kinds of evidence to other kinds, which underscored “the reality of the threat of harvest failure” and “the distress that dearth occasioned” (48). It may be argued that the clearly interrelated Dearth-Famine-Gluttony selections of Englands Parnassus give “real” evidence of such distress. As the extract from Sackville highlighted, “dearth” was “the liuely form of death”. The (in)distinction between dearth and death, in the minds of poets, compilers, and readers, was represented by merely a single letter. This signalled an easy conflation of the meanings of the two words in their minds. Poetic description could evoke death from malnutrition and its symptoms with just the precision and graphic detail that parish register accounts tended to lack. This naturally compounds the problem of what should be considered evidence. In early modern literary texts, dearth and famine were not only recorded on a regular basis, the themes also affected the

Introduction

3

rhetoric of these texts in typical ways that can be mapped. Such evidence, however, needs to be more fully studied, historicized, and theorized. The Englands Parnassus extracts provide a useful point of entry to understand the psychological and practical impact of the crisis they evoked. They call for an investigation of the widespread fear of the “famine” (the words “famine” and “dearth” were interchangeable in early modern England) and the effect of such fears and bewilderment on mundane activities, as well as on writing and language. It is apparent from the paradox exposed by these texts – the paradox of Dearth-as-Glutton – that the simultaneous existence of wasteful consumption and shortage in the contemporary national economy was investigated by poets and worried over by their readers. But what the poems also, more subtly, expose are the principles underlying remedial measures both executed and imagined by the early modern English. The fundamental aim, expressed by Sir Hugh Platt, a contemporary whose works this book will consider in detail, was to “turn this our penurie into plenty” (Famine A2r). To activate this aim, one did indeed have to “lessen to inlarge” as the poem on Dearth observed, but in a way that would invert the self-defeating pattern of self-enlargement embodied by the personified figures of Famine or Dearth. Platt, simultaneously a poet and a scientific practitioner, was not merely speaking in rhetorical tropes but expressing the pragmatic thrust of early modern measures for coping with economic and ecological crisis. In this book, I will analyze the anxieties, poetics, and knowledge-making practices that constituted the cultural discourse of dearth in England at the turn of the sixteenth century. It is thus necessary to situate the 1590s crisis in the wider context of theoretical understandings of famine causation and historiographic developments in the analysis of early modern dearth, while looking more closely at the range of literary evidence of dearth from this period. This evidence is important for understanding early modern dearthtime practices. Further to Laslett’s question, one may ask: what did people really do when faced with the threat of starvation? How did these practices alter the course of knowledge making? What can we learn from early modern modes of survival in a difficult socio-economic environment? After discussing theoretical, historiographical, and literary issues that underpin these questions, I will introduce, through the works of Hugh Platt, who sought to turn penury into plenty, the pragmatic evidence of how knowledge-making practices in the late sixteenth century were consistently inflected and motivated by pressures of dearth, as well as communal discussions of dearth-time anxieties. Much of this book is devoted to recovering the processes and practices of making knowledge in a moment of acute economic shortage and strain in English history. I will term this knowledge-making process “dearth science” and argue that the concept of dearth science can be a framework not only for understanding how early modern principles of making knowledge were created within a dearth-driven context, but that it may prove relevant to other historical and social contexts where the problem of dearth was, or is, operative.2

4

Introduction

Writing histories of dearth Historiographies of dearth and its alleviation in early modern England have a complex trajectory and rich scholarly tradition on which this examination of the subject relies. Studies of dearth undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the findings of historical demography and asked fundamental questions about quantifying dearth, national and regional price fluctuations, population levels, wages rates, nutritional standards, and the relationship between starvation and disease. In 1965, when Peter Laslett asked “Did the peasants really starve?” he pointed out there was little work in British historical demography on the subject in comparison with the French demographical studies to which he referred (repr. 2000: 122–52). By the time he published the revised version of his book in 1983, much had changed. While Laslett was raising fundamental questions of historical demography in the 1960s, agricultural historians were evaluating food scarcity and/or plenty regionally and nationally. Drawing on the Beveridge index of prices, W.G. Hoskins (1964–68) mapped harvest fluctuations in England between 1480 and 1759. Peter Bowden’s price series also appeared within the wider enterprise of the Agrarian History of England and Wales, volume IV, edited by Joan Thirsk (1967: 814–70). These works showed that, while economic stability in preindustrial England depended on good harvests, the latter part of the sixteenth century recorded the most serious dearths: 1555–57, 1586–88, and 1594–98. The turn of the century was a period of gathering crisis: not only did crops fail, but the population increased. With consequent pressure on food supply prices rose, and there were outbreaks of disease and war. Among these years, the 1590s presented a particularly dismal picture. Three good harvests of 1591–93 were followed by four disastrous years (1594–97) when food prices were driven up by the failure of the wheat harvest. In 1596, according to Hoskins, the average wheat price was 83 per cent above the norm (1964: 38; cf. Outhwaite, 1985: 23–43). Later analyses, by the Cambridge Group, of the geographical distribution of local crises in the 1590s showed that mortality rates during these crises were between 21 and 26 per cent above the trend (Walter and Schofield, 1989: 34–35).3 The “famine” (as it was called by contemporaries) extended all over Europe, where it was rumoured that the poor in Italy and Germany consumed fungus, cats, dogs, and snakes, while women in Hungary ate their own children (Hoskins, 1964: 38).4 Hoskins’ commentary, sometimes dramatically correlating price data, demographic pressures, disease, politics, and anecdote, was subsequently qualified (Harrison, 1971; Outhwaite, 1981: 389–406; Walter, 1989: 84; Wrigley, 1989: 244; Wrightson and Levine, 1995: 46). Nevertheless, his “harvest-sensitive” model, and attempt to quantitatively define the term “dearth”, marked a significant development. The Bowden indices assimilated information from a range of sources, enabling a more detailed analysis of movements in national and regional agricultural prices and wages in the long term (865–70). At the same time, this work drew attention to the fact that available data came largely from the south of

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31–year moving average price of wheat Annual average price of wheat

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1596 50 49 48 47 1622 46 45 44 43 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 1623 35 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 1620 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Figure 1.1 “English Harvest Fluctuations 1480–1625”. From W.G. Hoskins, “Harvest fluctuations and English economic history”, Agricultural History Review 12 (1964): 28–46, Fig. 1

1480 1485 1490 1495 1500 1505 1510 1515 1520 1525 1530 1535 1540 1545 1550 1555 1560 1565 1570 1575 1580 1585 1590 1595 1600 1605 1610 1615 1620 1625

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

SHILLINGS PER QC 50 49 48 47 46 45 44 43 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1482 10

6

Introduction

England (there is no national grain price series for England before 1884) and from institutional records (Mitchell and Deane, 1981: table D2). The wage data were based on rates rather than earnings and focused on the adult male. The nature of the data thus raised further questions about representing individual and household incomes and expenditures, and about regional variation and gender. The mapping of available price and wage data showed there were periods of sharp price rise and of dearth, perhaps most clearly indicated by Hoskins’ wheat harvest graph; but one still needed to tread carefully around the question of how far people “really” starved. Andrew Appleby’s seminal study Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (1978) looked beyond the south of England, focusing on famine-prone areas of the northwest – Westmorland and Cumberland. Appleby offered two related lines of enquiry: first, he queried how one could know about the physiological and nutritional aspects of starvation in this early period; second, he asked what were the “economic and social conditions that allow[ed] enough people to starve to qualify as famine”. He defined “famine” as “a crisis of mortality caused by starvation and starvation-related disease, a crisis measured by the increase in the number of deaths” and further emphasized the necessity of regional studies (1–3). He described regional population, local agriculture and economy, and ways in which social structures (such as landlord-tenant relationships) affected the distribution of agricultural yield. The three severe crises in the northwest, in 1587–88, 1597–98, and 1623, identified by Appleby, correspond to the periods of national crisis and dearth identified by Hoskins and indicated by the movements of Bowden’s indices. In short, Appleby’s answer to Laslett’s question was positive, and his methodology for detecting famine was centred on the fulfilment of carefully defined criteria.5 Thus far, the historical study of dearth had revealed not only particular crisis-driven moments in time, but specific points of regional vulnerability, which Appleby compared to the rest of England and Europe. Apart from providing a basis in historical demography for the study of famine, the work of Appleby and others also conveyed the importance of studying famine in its wider social, geographical, and ideological context. Subsequent studies, relying on these findings, expanded the picture in linked directions, by investigating poverty and policy, social disparities and dislocation, and elite and popular perceptions of dearth. This work demonstrated the significance of studying both the social economy and the ecology of dearth, for in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England saw increased levels of vagrancy, destitution, and food riots, especially in the uplands of the north and west, which suffered owing to the inaccessibility of markets. Appleby observed there seemed to be “two Englands”: one in the south and east that was able to avoid widespread starvation despite trade depression and failed harvests, and another in the uplands, which was pushed below subsistence level by the same crises.6 Local case studies, such as Rogers’ work on Lancashire and Slack’s analysis of crisis mortality in Devon and Essex, suggested systematic ecological differences between the crisis-free and crisis-prone areas. In upland

Introduction

7

areas, as one might expect, soil and climate were hostile to arable agriculture and there was a tendency to specialize in pastoral farming. In Westmorland and parts of Yorkshire, people depended on rural industry, which was itself dependent on harvest quality (Appleby, 1978: ch.12, 1973: 430; Wrigley and Schofield, 1989: 670–85; Rogers, 1975: 11; Slack, 1979a: 34–35; Walter and Schofield, 1989: 23–25). But, as Walter and Schofield commented, it was not as though “everyone in the apparently famine-free ‘southern’ communities was able to avoid a higher risk of mortality”. If there were “two Englands” geographically, that this was also true socially complicated the picture. Southern parishes that were predominantly woodland, or based on rural industry, had vulnerable ecologies similar to the northern ones, and there were impoverished individuals and marginalized social groups who were vulnerable to harvest failure. For example, in the 1590s, there was higher mortality in poorer areas of cities like Bristol, and the bad harvests of the early seventeenth century showed a more acute impact on the poor in the woodland area of the Warwickshire Arden (Slack, 1979a: 38; Skipp, 1978). Moreover, vulnerability to famine could be a function of not only social position but age and unsettledness.7 As Wrightson and Levine showed in their study of Whickham, vulnerable communities often comprised large numbers of transient, migrating members whose records were not perfectly maintained in local registers. Deaths of migrants could be registered in parishes through which they travelled, or in cities and towns to which subsistence migrants would flock in dearth years. Anonymous parish register entries revealed that bodies of the displaced rural poor who were mostly drifting to the south and east were found under hedges, in barns, or on the roadside. There was a substantial increase in the level of burials, as the old, the very young, and the marginalized died of starvation, or from eating inferior food (Wrightson and Levine, 1989: 129–65; Sharpe, 1995: 195–98; Appleby, 1978: 109–54; Wrightson, 1982: 121–48; Beier, 1985: 79).8 Studies of social dislocation and vagrancy in particular appeared to give renewed credence to Hoskins’ surmise, “Death [by starvation and disease] must have been as common a sight as on a battlefield” (1964: 32). Closer investigation of the social economy and ecology of dearth brought questions of social differentiation and access to resources to bear upon questions of food availability and productivity. This theoretical and methodological shift is apparent in the questioning of the familiar speculation that famine disappeared from England owing to advances in agriculture – larger cultivation areas, improved techniques, and greater productivity lifted population pressure and ensured that England, by the late seventeenth century, became an exporter of grain. Real wages improved, and consumer demand for non-agricultural products promoted mixed farming and diversified rural occupations. Improved transport and better market integration helped to address regional differences. As net yields outstripped population growth, harvest failure had a diminishing demographic impact over time (Wrigley and Schofield, 1989: ch.7; Hoskins, 1968).9 This narrative raised questions about broader sociological patterns of change. Although increased agricultural productivity would raise the available

8

Introduction

food per head, the changed structures of landholding and employment that achieved this increase may have made one section of society (the landless, smallholders, cottagers, and labourers) more vulnerable to harvest failure and high prices. Thus, to explain the absence of famine or low mortality rate, one would have to explain how these social groups survived despite their worsened circumstances. Such questions have prompted scholars to consider links between dearth and wider socio-economic issues, as marriages, kinship structures, and welfare provision through both formal relief via poor laws, and informal or semiformal structures of charitable giving (Kussmaul, 1985: 1–30; Bradley, 1970: 39; Wrigley and Schofield, 1989: 421–22; Wrightson, 1980: 176–91; Ingram, 1984; Smith, 1986: 43–99; Chaytor, 1980: 25–51). As provision of relief was an accepted part of the social order, it significantly inflected relationships between rich and poor within a community. However, harvest failure itself could affect the cost of providing poor relief; it could coincide with a drop in state revenue and attempts to increase the tax base (as in the 1590s) and could, in turn, provoke opposition to the state’s fiscal demands. The direct consequence of this was food riots, and indirectly, it synchronized other forms of opposition (e.g. to enclosure) and the incidence and prosecution of theft and crime (Thirsk and Cooper, 1972: 59; Walter and Wrightson, 1976: 24–25; Cockburn, 1977: 49, 67; Sharpe, 1998: 62; King, 1984: 59–64, 147–48). Consequently, as Walter and Schofield show, a society’s escape from the demographic disaster of famine did not mean everyone overcame “the distress that dearth occasioned” and it was “the continuing reality of the threat of harvest failure that underlined the value to the poor of their unequal relationships with their superiors” (1989: 48). This notion that early modern societies were not simply victims of chance fluctuations in climate and disease, and “the social order mattered” as a “critical determinant of demographic change” (73), is underscored by fundamental changes in the approach to writing histories of dearth: a shift in the theoretical approach to explaining causes of famine or dearth, and similarly, in the methodological approach to what constituted evidence of dearth and how this evidence could be read.

Entitlements and anxieties While demographic studies of dearth, as that of Hoskins, had relied on a Malthusian harvest sensitive model of the economy, later studies, as Walter’s, utilized Amartya Sen’s theoretical paradigm of famine causation established during the 1980s, the theory of declining exchange entitlements. Famines, according to Sen’s well-known formulation, were not simply caused by a “food availability decline”: Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.

Introduction

9

While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible [my emphasis] causes. (1981: 1) Agricultural production may keep pace with population growth but famines may still persist. Sen focused on distribution and how it was affected by systems of local exchange. To assess variations in people’s access to and command over available food supplies, he developed a theory of “exchange entitlements”. He argued that in a market economy, people could – through trade, production, or a combination of both – exchange what they owned for “alternative bundles of commodities”. The set of alternatives that people could thus acquire was termed their exchange entitlements. A person might starve if the exchange entitlement set, corresponding to what he or she owned, did “not contain any feasible bundle including enough food”. Sen’s argument exposed how the Malthusian computation of per capita food availability could be misleading, for famine was the characteristic of declining exchange entitlements, which were in turn a function of social, political, and cultural determinants (3–4).10 Shifting emphases in the historiography of early modern dearth coincided with a paradigm shift in the theory of famine causation itself. Explicitly applying Sen’s exchange entitlements model to the analysis of early modern dearth, Walter showed that the discourse of social change often applied to support the Malthusian harvest sensitive model needed modification. His essay on the “social economy” of dearth re-examined “the impact of change on the social and economic structures of early modern England” and drew attention to “strategies of survival” in a dearth-driven context (1989: 91). These strategies, such as gleaning, accessing food in common right areas like woods and fens, trading down in grains, using grain substitutes, eating food ordinarily proscribed by dietaries, crop diversification, and some kinds of rural industry, varied according to location and offered specifically local and regional contexts for the understanding of poverty. Similarly, markets and entitlements, as Sen showed, had a complex relationship where the nature of exchanges could be conditioned by factors other than market relations (3–8). Economic relations such as sharecropping and credit could offer defence against dearth, but so could the social structure that underpinned the early modern labour market itself (Holderness, 1976: 97–109, 1985: 435–42; Walter, 1989: 104). As Ann Kussmaul estimated, 60 per cent of the population aged between 15 and 24 were employed as servants, while two-fifths of the rural labour force lived in households of their employers (1981: 11–40). This offered insulation against famine by shifting the responsibility of feeding adults to employers. Similar protection was offered by payments in kind through which the landless could gain access to both land and food. Such practices could further stimulate perceptions of conscience and charity whereby the reciprocities of neighbours and richer members of communities were highlighted. While informal relief is difficult to quantify, it nevertheless existed in forms that underscored the heightened social consciousness and

10

Introduction

nervousness about dearth which was visible, for instance, in the toleration of local begging, or injunctions to fast and create spare food – practices where economic and religious concerns merged. The dearth-time strategies in Walter’s narrative thus drew attention to “underlying economic and social relations” (1989: 91) between those involved in a transaction. Thus, one must acknowledge the possibility of divergences between market transactions and local exchanges (including acts of conscience) before estimating the exchange entitlement of an individual or group. In analyzing such complexities, the historiography of dearth necessarily moves into the less quantifiable realm of moral attitudes and practices, and their imagined effects on society. This is a grey but intriguing area. Dearth was not only experienced as a physical shortage, it was equally feared as moral lack, which the absence of communal cooperation could exacerbate. “Dearth”, as Allott’s judiciously selected extracts emphasized, was a “lively form of death” (256) because, as early modern people knew, no matter how often they invoked godly wrath as the cause, both dearth and death were ultimately shaped by human hands. This was evident in the workings of early modern social policy and provision of poor relief, as Paul Slack (1988) and Steve Hindle (2004) have shown. The 1590s saw the formulation of the Poor Law from a previously ad hoc system of orders and proclamations. There was a shift of emphasis from relatively informal measures of “general hospitality” to more legalized and prescriptive measures, following the 1598 statute. Building on Slack’s analysis of the codification of poverty-related legislation, and its intellectual and cultural contexts, Hindle demonstrated the significance of analyzing the “micro-politics of poor relief” and informal, or semi-formal, survival strategies of the poor and middling sorts, which sought to make up for the insufficiency of formally administered relief. Hindle reconstructed “making shift”, or informal strategies such as utilization of common right, support from kin and neighbours, or even “crimes of necessity”, mechanisms of semi-formal private charities (alms, doles, and endowments), attitudes towards employment schemes, geographical variations of formal parish relief, concerns about eligibility, and the predicament of the “penumbral poor” who did not receive formal relief despite need (15–95). This account crucially uncovered aspects of the experience of poverty and available relief structures among ordinary men and women whose “exchange entitlements” were shaped by these day-to-day strategies and contingencies. As the responsibility for administering even formal relief often devolved upon men of humble status, it placed those who experienced poverty in an active position rather than one of passive sufferance. The actual activities of the poor, inflected by the micro-politics of poor relief, thus complicated what it may have meant to be a pauper, beggar, pensioner, collectioner, or vagabond in early modern England. In reality, to what extent were their entitlements defined and imposed from above, or manipulated by their own actions? A further complexity arose from the poor’s own perception and definition of their survival strategies. Hindle, evoking Wrightson’s account of economic change in Earthly Necessities, wondered “how those who supported themselves by wages ever managed to

Introduction

11

put food on the table” (2004: 14). So precarious was their employment when available that the only name they could give it was making “shift”. The uncertainty signified in the contemporary term is disturbing. If this was how the early modern poor described their own efforts to cope with dearth, it sounds uncomfortably close to contemporary negative characterizations, imposed from above by the authorities, of vagabonds, unsettled individuals, and itinerant labourers. “Shift” was a term of fascinating indeterminacy, having, on the one hand, positive moral and pragmatic connotations of hard work and ingenuity. In Hindle’s analysis, it signified “the struggles of the labouring poor to avoid declension into dependency [on the parish]” (Hindle, 2004: 21). On the other hand, it carried the sense of being unsettled, shifty, and untrustworthy. Shift included what Hindle termed “crimes of necessity”: “did the hungry really steal?” he asked, warning that the “analysis of motivations for theft is notoriously problematic” (83). The distinction between crimes of necessity and crimes per se would thus be equally problematic, as early modern society was aware. The ethical underpinnings, by no means steady, of making shift and its relationship to formal or semi-formal charity measures were recurring concerns in early modern literary texts from the 1590s, discussed in chapter 2. When viewed from the ground, survival strategies during dearth do not appear as random as “shift” suggests. Among those who made shift, did the activities carry a more organized sense than either modern readers or early modern authorities were able to gauge? And where does one look for such evidence? Hindle commented that although the parish relief system was too limited in its resources to ever be “anything like central to the survival strategies of the overwhelming majority of the indigent, its archives contain by far the most significant evidence available” of the “obscure world of informal relief” (8). Hindle relied on archives of endowment trustees, overseers who assessed and distributed pensions, magistrates auditing and coordinating relief, and judges who interpreted statutes. Though this gives evidence of the experience of the poor, it does not necessarily originate from them. Is it possible to get closer to their practices and determine whether those who made shift also consciously contributed to the making of knowledge? This question will be addressed by examining knowledge-making practices of poor and middling sorts, and ethical nuances behind these practices. But before this, it is necessary to consider means available to communities facing dearth for registering their discontent through the language and acts of protest against inadequacies of accessible charity, whether formal, semi-formal, or informal. Insurrection may have been derided as a punitive offence by authorities, but it carried ethical imperatives similar to “making shift”.

Charity, discontent, and “sustainability” Recent investigations of the relationship between dearth and insurrection at the turn of the sixteenth century move outwards, from the foundation of demographic history to the incorporation of evidence which had a literary

12

Introduction

character, as contemporary commentaries, complaints, and proclamations. Diaries, personal correspondence, and sermons recorded alarm about the uncertainties of weather and its impact on the harvest. As harvest time could mean higher wages, better food, and carnivalesque enjoyment, the appearance of dearth seemed a cruel inversion of this celebratory mood. While urban annals organized accounts of the past by reference to dearth, almanacs reflected anxieties about future harvests. Correspondence between central and local authorities demonstrated the constant fear that dearth would invert or threaten the social order and lead to sedition. As riots and uprisings were extreme symptoms of wider discontent, their analysis through a gradually widening range of documentary registers can be helpful. In contemporary records and commentaries, food shortage and social disorder were inextricably linked. For example, Alan Macfarlane’s meticulously gathered records of witchcraft prosecutions in Essex are demonstrably related to economic problems in the area. They show that offences included attacks on domestic livestock and food manufacturing processes. Cows, horses, pigs, sheep, chickens, and capons were “bewitched”, barns were burnt, beer and butter were spoiled, and witches’ familiars stole milk. Of the total 49 accused witches in an Essex sample used by Macfarlane, 23 came from the economically vulnerable labouring class, so it appears that several witchcraft practices were linked to the decline of hospitality and economic strain (1970: 147–57). Similarly, Edward Hext, justice of peace in Somerset, complained to the Queen’s chief advisor William Cecil in 1596 that a mob of 80 “wycked and desparate” persons, “that stick not to say boldlye … they will not starve”, had intercepted a cart of cheese heading for a fair, and distributed its load among themselves. Despite their punishment, there were others, “especyally in this time of dearthe”, encouraging people “to all contempte bothe of noble men and gentlemen” alleging that “ritche men have gotten all into their hands and will starve the poore”. Hext asserted that the dearth was caused by thieves and idle people who, “thowghe they labor not”, they yet “spend dobly as myche as the laborer dothe” (Tawney and Power, 1924: II.339–46). This well-known testimony presented two pictures of excess, both ethically condemned by different parties: the greedy hoarding of food by the rich nobility and the perceived gluttony of the idle poor. Conspicuous consumption coexisted with dearth, and was, strangely, a feature of it. Meanwhile, the London food market and, indeed, the city itself, epitomized this economic contradiction. The city, perceived as the locus of plenty, attracted a steady flow of immigrants, became a powerful competitor for food resources in surrounding areas, and appeared to be famishing its surroundings (Fisher, 1935, 1948; Pennell, 2000).11 It is frequently argued that the problem of feeding the growing population of London had, by the 1590s, had a “polarizing effect”, intensifying “the gap between rich and poor” (Guy, 1988: 41; Sharpe, 1995: 194; Sim, 1997: 91–103). This formed the theme of Thomas Lodge’s and Robert Greene’s A Looking-glasse for London and England (1594). The play presented the royal “frolicke” and “feast”, rapacious judge and lawyer, and feasting merchants as vicious contrasts to the “poore man” Alcon who

Introduction

13

pawned his only cow. His son’s cry, “some meat, or else I die for want”, was met with cynicism: “we must feed vpon prouerbes now; as … ‘A Churles feast is better than none at all’; for … [in London] No charitie bides” (Greene, 1964: XIV.13–14, 33–36, 52–55). Through similar texts, the notion of criminality was undermined; the poor were presented as a positive moral contrast to the criminalized rich. The ethical thrust of a conventional document like Hext’s letter could be undercut and complicated by sharpening focus on the failure of authority, governance, and charity, on which the poor were being asked to rely. Such contrasts and paradoxes were also played out in rural contexts. Traditions of charity and hospitality, especially among the landed aristocracy and gentry, had come under considerable strain (Stone, 1965: 454; Beier, 1985: 79; Heal, 1984: 90–91, 1990), and the practical reality, undermining idealized images of accessible, communal abundance, was observed in contemporary literary works. In Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will (1600), Christmas, the “cut-throat churl”, argued that hospitality was no longer good husbandry. His motto was “Liberalitas liberalitate perit”, and his household contained two “hungry knaves”, fed red-herring and poor-john (cheap hake) all year long. When there was sheep rot, Christmas kept open house for beggars, but they had to bring their own bread. In this ambience, the main character Will Summers wryly commented, there was “no giving but with condition of restoring” (196–200). Alongside Nashe’s satirized portrayal, there were ways in which contemporary discourses sought to justify the policies voiced by Christmas. As Wrightson argued, an increasing emphasis on “oeconomy” (management of household affairs) grew out of the decline in wealth and power of the nobility and gentry, who had to learn better husbandry to improve their lands (2002: 3, 30).12 This is evident, for example, in husbandry and household management manuals from the period (McRae, 1996).13 Nashe’s ambivalent phrase, “no giving but with condition of restoring”, could be read as exposing both sides of the challenge. It was also linked to the ethical bases of the counter-discourse that underpinned popular protest. The turn of the century saw some of the best-known instances of discontent and mutiny, like the Oxfordshire riots and the Midlands rising. Although historical arguments have often questioned the efficacy of popular protest, contending that such disobedience was successfully curtailed by skilful political management, recent studies of insurrection have demonstrated how effectively ordinary people could mobilize discontent and force political and legal action. During times of dearth, contemporary literary texts could play an active role in this process of resistance, much of which was rhetorical and performative, even though its underlying concerns were real hunger and hardship. This is established by Hindle’s reconstruction of discourses of hunger, protest, and punishment in the 1607 Midlands rising, imagined as a symposium between commoner (John Reynolds), monarch (James I), clergyman (Robert Wilkinson), and lawyer/statesman (Francis Bacon). Hindle’s reading (2008) provides a thought-provoking comparison with Chris Fitter’s analysis (2000)

14

Introduction

of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet within the context of the 1595 London riots. While Hindle effectively constructed a literary text – a dialogue or symposium – out of historical documents at his disposal to further the understanding of cultural meanings of dearth and public action, Fitter worked from an existing literary text to demonstrate how its construction directly informed (and was informed by) the historical events of dearth and riot. Drawing together the historian and the literary critic can reveal how rhetorical processes activated by dearth crucially shaped experiences of dearth among ordinary people who suffered and feared its consequences. The Midlands rising began in June 1607 with a group of “levellers” attempting to dig enclosed land in Newton, Northamptonshire. They were accused of sedition and charged by an army of local gentry, during which around 50 of them were killed, many injured, and more subsequently apprehended and executed. This was the culmination of six weeks of disorder across Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Warwickshire (Hindle, 2008: 23). It was also the culmination of long-term problems of population growth, inflation, and widening gaps between rich and poor, compounded by the relaxation of anti-enclosure laws in the 1590s (Thirsk, 1967: 228; Manning, 1988: 229–46; Martin, 1988: 39–45; Hartley, 1995: III.215–24, 230–31; McRae, 1996: 7–12). The language of insurrection deployed in a broadside possibly by Reynolds (a tinker and rebel leader) revealed adept use of local knowledge in organizing protest, and the sophisticated political economy of the commoners’ complaints. Reynolds’ scriptural language echoed and toppled leading arguments against popular protest used by the monarch, clergyman, and statesman. He shrewdly backed the expression of moral outrage by correlating depopulation and dearth and attending to local ecology. The Midlands had heavy clay soil fit for growing cereals, now converted to pasture, and the local proverb ran: “the more shepe, the dearer is the corne” (Walter and Wrightson, 30). In Reynolds’ critique local knowledge and language worked in tune with the popular rhetoric of gluttony, utilized, not for the first time, to attack enclosures: poor men were being starved to death while “devouring encroachers” garnered more food for their “fat hogs and sheep” (1607: Harley MS.787.11). The rhetoric was reinforced by his performative stance: Reynolds (nicknamed “Captain Pouch”) carried a leather bag containing, he claimed, “sufficient matter to defend them against all comers”; it actually contained a mouldy piece of cheese (Hindle, 2008: 6; Walter, 2004). I argue that gaps between reassuring speech and meagre provision underlined the way rhetoric gave efficacy to processes and practices of rebellion despite, or perhaps because of, the dearth of physical provisions. Similarly, discussions of suppression and sin, echoed in James I, Wilkinson, and Bacon (who, in their own ways, sought to balance the punishment of illegal enclosure and suppression of rebellion), were dominated by an alimentary language which was not simply metaphorical. Wilkinson moved from warning the poor that Treason consumed her offspring (an association identical to that ascribed to Dearth/Famine in Englands Parnassus) to assertions that, in the absence of bread, the poor must feast on faith, but not rebel.

Introduction

15

He combined this with a material reading of the proverb “The belly hath no ears” to justify a theory of necessity. In times of hunger and despair, public protest was inevitable and, although he wanted to define its moral limits, Wilkinson acknowledged the corruption of enclosing landlords (1607: D3r–4r). His balancing act, weighing sins of landlords against that of rebellious commoners, was undermined by the tension between figurative and literal senses of his alimentary language. The figurative intention of “feast on faith” was toppled by the literal thrust of “the belly hath no ears”. He seemed to be asking his audience not to heed (“hear”) the metaphorical sense alone because the belly “hath no ears” – hunger had its own physical momentum that led naturally to political action. Hindle’s essay concluded by reading Coriolanus as a staging of debates about causes of dearth, in which the citizens’ critique, attacking the surplus of the rich and arguing that malnutrition justified revolt, resonated with commoners’ complaints outlined above, while Menenius’ ineffectual “fable of the belly” exposed the failure of classic paternalistic arguments deployed by the state and authorities (47–48). Coriolanus was not, however, the only Shakespeare play to broach the subject of dearth and its concomitant socio-political strains. Literary fields of this debate can be expanded further to include authors other than Shakespeare. Hindle’s demonstration of intriguing intersections between the play’s critical machinery and the language and activities of those involved in the Midlands rising suggests the necessity of making the poet – Shakespeare or others – a more integral part of the imagined symposium. In this respect, Fitter’s analysis of the London riots and Romeo and Juliet can be seen to complement Hindle’s approach. Fitter paid similar attention to the idiom of hunger, which can be lost in focused analyses of prices series and mortality rates. It was not simply a matter of the coincidence of the play’s composition date (1595) with that of the London riots. It was the climate of dearth-related anxiety and crisis, and the fear of hunger, that provoked both popular opposition and authoring of a play that “displaced the urgent ethical paradoxes of the riots … onto a framework of romance, where political morality can be subject to debate and problematization on the wide public stage” (2000: 164). The language of violence in Romeo and Juliet, frequently commented on by critics, thus had an immediate, politicized function. It explicitly created a narrative of riotous opposition to “unfeeling authority”: “O brawling love, O loving hate. … Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms” (I.i.174–77). Moreover, if a riot was, as Ian Archer described it, “a negotiating strategy” (Archer, 1991: 6–7; cf. Thompson, 1971: 76–136; Sharp, 1985: 271–88) aimed at corrupt and negligent officials, as well as lax market regulations or poorly implemented anti-enclosure laws, the arena of a publicly staged play or a popular poem could serve in much the same way to fuel social processes of negotiation and debate over issues fundamental to the survival of the poor. In short, a literary work should be perceived as directly constituting a survival strategy in times of dearth. Penury into Plenty builds on this premise. If literary expressions of dearth can be regarded as active and strategic remedies, they must also be read as

16

Introduction

directly interacting with material and political practices that responded to dearth. To elucidate this interaction, cultural meanings of dearth and famine must be examined in specific contexts using the widest possible range of evidence. Focusing on the socio-economic and ecological crises of the 1590s, this book explores how widespread anxieties about famine affected daily activities and knowledge making. It recovers and analyzes remedial measures undertaken, as well as imagined, by the early modern English, and questions whether these measures were as randomly constituted as they might seem at first glance. It attempts to construct the measures from the ground up, considering not only causes of dearth, and responses of authorities, charities, and the clergy, but those of ordinary human beings who faced the threat of starvation. Moving beyond reconstruction, Penury into Plenty assesses to what extent these responses contributed to knowledge making, resource management, and discourses of environmental change. It illustrates that people, in this selected historical moment of acute crisis, were intellectually and pragmatically committed to an experimental programme of resource management, which I describe as “dearth science”, arguing, contrary to the frequent association of depression and passivity with shortage, that dearth can in fact stimulate human ingenuity. Early modern “dearth science” was an empirical practice and a moral philosophy that aimed to “turn … penury into plenty”. The activities and theories of the prolific “dearth scientist” Sir Hugh Platt (1552–1608) form the central, unifying motif. While his works provide vital evidence of the pragmatic workings of dearth science, the cultural understanding of dearth in this historical moment is recovered by considering this evidence alongside other forms of literature which foreground problems of dearth and famine, whether sermons, plays, poetry, or prose fiction. This holistic approach helps explain not only what dearth or famine meant in the period, but how contemporaries understood the management of resources and organized knowledge circulation to address issues of sustainability in their own moment. Consequently, this book challenges the view that “sustainability”, and the modern ecological ethics the term evokes, did not have an ideological and practical valence in the early modern period, before the development of “new” ideas about soil science and agricultural practice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sustainability is not a wholly modern concept. The next chapter analyzes discourses of dearth-time ingenuity in popular literatures of dearth in the 1590s to outline the complex social circulation of these discourses. Religious providential arguments about dearth as a divine scourge circulated through a range of popular pamphlets, sermons, local and political tales, which participated in and pushed against ethical imperatives of official attitudes. The texts overlapped with pragmatic manuals, like Hugh Platt’s Remedies against famine (1596), which simultaneously questioned and defined pragmatic and ethical bases of dearth-driven ingenuity. Their receipt book form and utilitarian emphasis did not preclude rhetorical engagement or debate of the kind visible in other literatures of dearth. They gave new meaning to “making shift”, aligned it with knowledge making, and spoke to a

Introduction

17

range of texts that have long been part of the literary canon. The cultural discourse of dearth was shaped by the way these remedial practices, exemplified by Platt’s work, resonated with the activities of literary conny-catchers, corrupt gluttons, and impecunious author figures. The analysis finally focuses on shifting definitions of ingenuity in Shakespeare’s construction of Falstaff, Robert Greene’s conny-catching pamphlets, and Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penniless and Lenten Stuff. The chapter exposes the wide-ranging commitment that developed, in response the 1590s crisis, to question meanings of waste, moderation, productivity, plenty, and dearth. Chapter 3 argues that these ethical tensions and paradoxes are elucidated by closely examining a specific community of practitioners, and observing how they negotiated the relationship between dearth, knowledge making, and public dissemination of knowledge. To this end, it recovers, describes, and codifies the work of Platt and his associates. Since Platt recorded early modern domestic and professional practices in minute detail, and experimentally tested his information, his manuscripts illuminate the evolution of knowledge in different fields, and show how the national economy coped with economic and environmental challenges. By clarifying the links between the diverse fields of his and his associates’ pragmatic experimentation, the chapter contends that Platt turned the work of coping with dearth into a “science”. It outlines fundamental principles of dearth science – continuous experimentation and knowledge circulation, cooperation across economic units, and adherence to a general principle of sufficiency – and concludes that these ethical justifications of resource management constituted an early modern conceptualization of sustainability, which developed in response to anxieties about dearth analyzed in the previous chapter. Remaining chapters trace the basic principles and practices of dearth science in its three fundamental strands: agriculture (chapter 4), household management (chapter 5), and trade (chapter 6). Chapter 4 argues that contemporary ideas about manure formed the core of early modern dearth science. Starting with Platt’s manure experiments, it draws attention to the range of his sources, and the larger field of religious and literary texts which theorized manure and agriculture. Engaging with historical narratives of ecological change in pre-industrial, “organic” economies, it challenges recent arguments that the agricultural understanding of sustainability was first formulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The chapter argues there were sophisticated early modern notions of waste, ecology, and sustainability, which should be accessed in their own terms. Chapter 5 examines waste-reductive food production, consumption, and preservation practices in early modern households. It draws together recent scholarly work on household consumption patterns, the shaping of national identity through middleclass conceptions of households, attitudes towards food and dietetics, and food consumption and labour. Using practical evidence in manuscript and printed receipt books authored by Platt and others, the chapter reveals how cultures of recycling and concurrent knowledge making were stimulated and refined by the experience of dearth across different classes of households – poor, middling sorts, and gentry. Moral debates about

18

Introduction

these practices are analyzed by revisiting well-known literary evaluations of households to elucidate how “ideal” means of household production and consumption of food were conceived in a climate of dearth-time anxiety and fear. Chapter 6 examines practices and politics of minimizing waste, circulating knowledge, and economic cooperation across selected trades, and argues that these fundamental principles of dearth science operated in daily practices of trading communities with interrelated economic interests and overlapping technologies. The chapter examines trades that raised practical and ethical issues about managing natural resources, and also luxury trades that expressed dearth-driven ingenuity and contributed to the redistribution of resources. Information in the Platt archives about particular trades and fuel management are used to reconstruct practices, attitudes, rhetoric, and perceptions about energy consumption, which do not register in the broader trends represented in quantitative surveys. Through its detailed analysis of communal responses during the 1590s, Penury into Plenty explains how discourses of dearth emphasized the continuity of environmental change and, therefore, of dearth. It exposes the contradiction that, while dearth science principles, of knowledge circulation, cooperation, and pursuit of sufficiency, were vital to them, early modern societies were aware that “sustainable” resource management was an ever-receding goal; as Platt put it, “yet here we are left with Tantalus to starue and perish for want of food” (JH, 38).

Notes 1 Allott also edited the prose commonplace book Wits Theater of the Little World (1599). See Williams, 1937: 402–05; Wright, 1961: 449–61; Marotti, 2004. 2 I use the term “knowledge making” to signify the active processes of ideation and practice by which knowledge is created and distributed. Recent work in histories of early modern science attends to the “manner and means” of knowledge making, rather than focusing on its “end products” such as texts, data, and ideas. See Smith and Schmidt, 2007: 1–16. 3 The figure on p.35 usefully maps the geographical distribution of local crises in 1596–98, compared with 1622–23. 4 While alerting us to the ambiguity of “famine” and “starvation” in early modern usage and warning that Hoskins’ “harvest-sensitive model” needs qualification, Walter admitted that the words gave “a sense of the alarm contemporaries felt when faced with the failure of the harvest” (Walter, 1989: 83; cf. Guy, 1988: 30; Williams, 1995: 161). I am concerned with the network of causes that produced this psychological effect, rather than the technical accuracy of calling the 1590s crisis a “famine”. 5 His criteria were: dramatic increase in mortality; increase detectable in several neighbouring parishes simultaneously; epidemics eliminated as possible causes; correlation between prices and mortality curve; contemporary accounts referring to dearth, misery, or death from want; dead should include high proportion of infants, children, beggars, vagabonds, widows (i.e. those physically vulnerable and economically marginal); fall in conceptions; absence of negative evidence such as good harvests or general prosperity. This was an expansion and modification of criteria outlined by Laslett: sudden, sharp increase in mortality; decline in conceptions and marriages; starvation as stated cause of death.

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6 This thesis was supported by the parish data (based on 404 parishes) in Wrigley and Schofield, 1989. The regionality of famine also complicated the assumption of straightforward relationships between high prices and high mortality. Years of harvest failure could mean increased, but not heavy, mortality in “national” trends (Walter, 1989: 79; Wrigley and Schofield, 1989: 319–35, 645–93; Schofield, 1985: 67–93; Watkins and Menken, 1985: 155–56). 7 Also true of modern famines (Watkins and Menken, 1985: 654). 8 Although historians have hesitated to claim a direct relationship between high food prices and death from malnutrition, or the possible synergy between disease and nutritional status, there appears to be a long-term pattern of coincidence between high prices and high mortality across geographical areas (Walter and Schofield, 1989: 17–21; Appleby, 1973: 423; Rogers, 1975: 26). On nutritional status, see Rotberg and Rabb, 1985: esp. 252–53. For arguments in favour of synergy, see Taylor, ibid. 285–304. 9 Apparently, in contrast to other parts of Western Europe, famine disappeared early from England. Despite three consecutive harvest failures between 1647–50, the death rate remained below average (Wrigley and Schofield, 1989: 321). For less optimistic views, see Outhwaite, 1986. 10 Malthus (1798) proposed that food supply was inelastic relative to population growth, whose tendency to outstrip food availability was constrained by “preventive” and “positive” checks: e.g. famine, war, and pestilence. This did not consider that available food may be unequally distributed, owing to geographical, social, or political factors, so that measuring aggregate food production against total population to calculate food availability per capita could be misleading. Malthus ignored the complex relationship between hunger, epidemics, and subsistence, and the effects of improved agricultural productivity or urbanization. Wrigley comments, Malthus “deployed his ‘positive checks’ with apocalyptic venom”, as a clergyman, viewing famine as punishment for man’s excesses. Thus, theories of famine causation can themselves be products of particular moments of crisis, shaped by specific anxieties surrounding famines. The “apocalyptic” vision appeared in modern studies (neo-Malthusian in tone and theory) predicting famine on a massive, global scale. Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968) declared, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death before this decade is out”; and Paddock (Famine – 1975!) provocatively stated, “The stork has passed the plough” (cf. survey of famine causation theories in Arnold, 1988: 29–46). 11 As Fisher shows, corn came from the south Midlands, milk and butter from Essex and Suffolk, eggs and poultry from Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire, sheep from Gloucestershire, fruit from Kent, hops from Essex, and cattle, bred in Wales or the north, were fattened in the Midlands before reaching city butchers. 12 Wrightson noted, the concept of “an economy” in the modern sense did not exist in early modern England, which comprised “loosely interrelated but partly autonomous units: local, regional and national”. Thus, when the term “oeconomy” was used, it was employed “in its original Greek sense to mean the management of household affairs” (cf. Walter, 1989: 101–05). 13 E.g. The Householders Philosophie (1588), a translation of Il Padre di Famiglia (attributed to Tasso); Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1573). Several others are discussed in McRae.

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In 1596, following consecutive harvest failures, the Privy Council sternly reiterated an order issued the previous year to regulate grain markets, thus marking the campaign for “general hospitality” during the 1590s crisis. As official registers of the problem of dearth, Privy Council reports are a useful place to start (Dearth of Graine, 1595; APC, 1596–97: xxvi.383–86).1 Hindle (2001a) noted the order combined the “spiritual antidote of repentance with the secular medicine of frugality”, illustrated in its provisions: good housekeeping, not leaving servants “to shifte for themselves”; charitable increase and careful distribution of parish collections; forbearing of suppers once a week so that this “superfluous fare” was “converted to the relief of the poore”; and endurance, patience, and rejection of the counsel of “discontented and ydle braynes” attempting to make people “swerve from the humble dutyes of good subjects”. To enforce these provisions, a formidable network of information gathering was installed. Local news from 9000 parishes travelled along an impressive channel of churchwardens, archdeacons, bishops, archbishops, and finally reached the council. Besides reinforcing the rhetoric of good governance, commonwealth, social justice, and state paternalism, parish responses to these orders illustrated that processes of food distribution brought the poor into the domestic worlds of the middle class and gentry, who made most contributions (Hindle, 2001a: 45–46, 58–73, 2001b; Heal, 1990: 127; Leonard, 1900: 122; Krausman Ben-Amos, 2000: 295–338). Thus, the relatively prosperous “tasted of the dearth” by creating “door-step encounters”, a process reversed by the 1598 statute that questioned the sustainability of general hospitality and made a crucial distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor (Hindle, 2001a: 70; Brigden, 1984: 108. Cf. Levine and Wrightson, 1991: 353). The formalizing of poor law, ironically, was built on charitable householders’ fears of the poor, in some ways exacerbated by close encounters of general hospitality. Conditions of undifferentiated charity metamorphosed, quickly it would seem, into statutory relief “targeted exclusively at the resident poor” (Hindle, 2001a: 86). However, this inexorable movement, by which the terms of entitlement of the poor came to be defined and imposed from above, coexisted with different notions of remedying dearth that cannot be accessed through the official

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register or literature of dearth. Literatures of dearth at the turn of the sixteenth century were richly varied, and they interrogated, adapted, challenged, and confused official notions of charity, good housekeeping, thrift, and social order. Daily, overlapping activities of the poor and middling sorts forged more than “door-step” encounters, and, through them, the middle class and gentry perhaps “tasted of dearth” more intimately than they may have done via semi-formal measures of charitable exchange, which still maintained a hierarchic distance between rich and poor. An active moral and pragmatic discourse arose from the way experiences of dearth shaped people’s direct engagement with the natural world and with daily tasks that required them to manipulate the materials of nature. At the same time, the very acts of human intervention, use, and amelioration were subjected to sophisticated, ironic debate in seemingly disparate genres or registers of writing. Anxieties about dearth, its causes and remedies, were hotly contested in famine sermons, cheaply printed providential tales, pragmatic manuals, prose fiction, poems, and plays. The complex discourse of dearth that emerged in the 1590s begs focused attention to the texture and detail of modes of writing, while emphasizing points of intersection between modes that might ordinarily be regarded as representing divergent discourses of dearth – religious, practical, and literary.

God, the “proper cause” of dearth Dearth was one of the Flagella Dei, a reminder of God’s absolute authority over human beings and the natural world; its primary or “proper” cause was God’s decision to punish human sin.2 Analyzing practical implications of the doctrine of judgements during dearth, Walter and Wrightson (1976) showed that while dearth led to social protest, it also paradoxically stimulated cooperation within local units. Hindle’s analysis (2001a) of undifferentiated charity and door-step encounters in the 1590s reinforced this point. But these approaches do not outline a discourse of dearth as such; dearth remains an aspect of a wider providential way of thinking which gave practical impetus to social cohesion. I rely on these previous analyses and, following Alexandra Walsham’s study of early modern providence (1999), adhere to the view that providential ideas powerfully impacted on popular assumptions; but I also see and present dearth as an integral part of providential thought. Dearth provided a centre around which, in the stressful climate of the 1590s, several social and political arguments could be staged. Some of these arguments endorsed conventional notions of godly or earthly deployment of power, but dearth itself constituted a discourse complicated by conflicting, dialectical elements. This was the real paradox: dearth created a discourse, which emerged from existing patterns of thought and practice about crisis and calamity, remedy and salvation, but was also open-ended, accepted the irremediable status of its central concerns, and resisted teleological patterns that sought to contain and resolve these concerns. Texts relying on wellknown providential arguments about dearth had to learn to incorporate

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oppositional ideas, and the structure of providential thinking was altered from within. When William Barlow, under the patronage of John Whitgift, translated into English and published Ludwig Lavater’s Von thüwre unn hunger dry predigen (Three Christian Sermons … of Famine and Dearth of Victuals) in 1596, he appears to have taken on a perfectly conventional religious agenda.3 He was making available for the public a text that displayed the characteristic traits of moral and religious works, playing out, albeit on a different register, the Privy Council’s discourse of general hospitality.4 The translation project was suggested by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself “to the end that all sorts among vs, might in this time of Dearth, be directed to know both the proper cause, and the right vse of this Iudgement” (A2r). The sermons, designed to appeal to the conscience of the rich and poor alike, argued that famine and dearth, like other calamities, were sent by God to punish mankind’s disobedience. This was of course a much-used argument: catastrophic events reinforced the basics of Calvinist providentialism. Hugh Roberts, preaching in Sussex in 1598, for example, exploited this to the full: “everie plague, everie calamitie, sudden death, burning with fire, murther, strange sicknesses, famine, everie flood of waters, ruine of buildings, unseasonable weather … are a sermon of repentance” (110).5 As Walsham wrote, “No Protestant minister could pass up the opportunity afforded by a major conflagration, blizzard, drought, inundation, or epidemic to deliver a thundering diatribe on the doctrine of divine judgements” (1999: 116). While famine was one rhetorical opportunity, listed by many preachers the way Roberts did, among a host of other calamities, the consecutive famines of the 1590s do appear to have generated religious and popular diatribes specifically focused on the calamity at hand. Such exhortations could naturally coincide with official action. Another of Whitgift’s chaplains, William Redman, later Bishop of Norwich, insisted on the full observance of Lent throughout his diocese, dutifully issued Orders for the redresse of abuse in diet, by her Maiesties expresse pleasure, and absolute commandement in 1595, and in 1596 expressed approval when the magistrates of Bury St Edmunds called for an extraordinary public fast. Lavater’s re-circulated sermons had a formal structure that played up the gravity of famines, in particular. The first sermon argued God had absolute power over the natural world and was able to reverse famine when He saw fit, regardless of its outward cause: “naturall courses, and mens malice beeing no causes, but outward meanes which God vseth” (E4v). Of all judgements, famine and dearth were the worst: “They that die in warre are not long tormented: but they which are pinched with Famine, hoping euerie houre for succour, are euer pining away, till in the end they die a lingring and a miserable death” (D6v). God’s reason for afflicting mankind with famine was to exact repentance for man’s many sins, outlined in the second sermon. The third sermon addressed pragmatic questions of what the human response should be when faced with this judgement. The careful tripartite structure allowed the sermons to collectively and systematically ally the doctrine of judgements to discourses of the

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commonwealth and public good. The remedies prescribed were prayer and repentance, backed by good deeds, good governance and household management, and undifferentiated charity. The text prescribed practical remedies with alarming specificity. Good magistrates were urged to “suppresse those vices, which are principally outwarde causes … as Monopoles, Ingrossing, Hoording, Dycing, Whoring: Excesse in meate, drinke, and apparel” (I1r). Charitable measures, like subsidizing grain and doling out food, were recommended (I3r–5v). Making no distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, the sermons promoted cooperation across classes and professions as an ideal remedy for the commonwealth in times of dearth: ministers must teach that plenty was God’s blessing and sin caused scarcity; householders (“both man and woman”) must say grace at meals; the rich must refrain from exacting debts and rents, lessen consumption, and invite the poor to their feasts (I6r). Pragmatic instructions were duly blended with the spiritual message, and dearth-time practices were expounded equally through the Bible, historical works, and contemporary observation. Through the mingling of different kinds of exempla, the sermons subtly resisted their own conventions. The first sermon, describing effects of hunger on the minds and practices of the poor, acknowledged that physical hunger and distress were complicated by shame: many being ashamed of their extream pouerty, dissemble it as long as they can, dare not co[m]plain of it to their neighbors & friends, & in this distres like bees they feed vpon their owne good [or rather like Snailes liue vpon the aire, & their own moisture, and so consume away, as Dauid speaketh, and in doing nothing, come to nothing, saith Austen] baking themselues bread of oats and bran (fit for horses and not men) borowing money here & there, laying their garments & furniture to pledge, their houses and land to morgage, and what wil not pouerty driue men to? They fal into ye mouths & teeth of biting and deuouring vsurers, who vnder a shew of licking them whole, suck out euen their hart blood, without a hope of any remedy. (D7v–8r) This account of the means by which the poor made shift was backed by biblical examples – famine compelled the Egyptians to mortgage their lands, prompted Abraham to flee from Canaan, and so on – as well as examples from secular chronicles of recent hardship in France, Austria, Germany, and Italy, where one could encounter on the streets “dolefull spectacle[s]” of corpses with herbs and grass still in their mouths (D8v–E3v).6 While such use of exempla was a standard tool for maintaining social order, it also created pragmatic curiosity and engagement, which require further investigation. In this respect, the transmission of Lavater’s sermons through the hand of William Barlow is significant. Barlow not only translated, he also made obvious interpolations supporting his fundamental aims. His dedicatory

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epistle insisted on the pragmatic applicability of Lavater’s sermons published in 1571 and 1587 to the English predicament in the 1590s. The sermons were “proper to the occasions offred … to vse saint Austen his words, both Commodi and accomodi, as well fitting the Occurrents, as profiting the Hearers” (A3r). To accommodate the sermons to his current crisis, Barlow insisted upon a historically and geographically comparative appreciation of dearth-time preaching.7 He compared famine sermons by the church fathers Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus to those of Lavater, who was following patristic practice “in framing of purpose three Sermons proportionable to the number of years wherein his country Switzerland was oppressed with Dearth”. Barlow saw himself following the same trajectory, having “expressly inhaunced” the sermons to have them reflect “the proportion of time answering to our Dearth, the price of things, for these three years successiue” (A4r). Such adaptation resulted in interpolations like the following. Oft tymes againe it happeneth that the cause of Dearth may come by continuall Raine, the seede perishing by too much wette: [as it happened this yeare 1596. in England, wherein God hauing opened his bottles, as himself speaketh, Iob.38.37. hath made the cloudes which should drop fatnesse, Psalm. 65.12. to poure downe the moisture of rottennesse. Ioel.1.17. so that sowing Wheat, we have reaped thornes, Iere.12.13.]. (C7r) An interesting feature here was the practice of advertising the interpolations as additions, rather than seamlessly blending them into the text, which suggests a specific understanding of authorship within the mode of famine sermons. The imperative was to establish a continuum of repetitive examples connecting past and present, going far back to patristic times. God always had, and always would, send such calamities, and the very practice of sermon writing had to demonstrate the providential power that lay in repetition across time. But justifying the ways of God to men was no easy task, nor was it achieved by homogenous literary means, and this awareness created dialectical complexities by drawing upon a range of contemporary anxieties. Indeed, Barlow’s adaptation, emphasizing the contemporaneity of Lavater’s sermon, showed that popular anxiety was central to providential methodology; to reapply Arthur Dent’s evocative metaphor, anxiety constituted the very “Cable Ropes, to drawe us up to the Lord by Repentance” (1581: C7r; cf. Walsham, 1999: 116). It is therefore necessary to consider official sermons alongside related texts that shaped and helped to circulate popular anxieties about dearth and famine. The mixed media of cheap print, and its interaction with oral traditions, transmitted social concerns and beliefs to a heterogeneous audience of educated gentlemen to middleclass traders and yeomen to servants and apprentices (Wright, 1965: ch.12; Johnson, 1950: 93; Slack, 1979b: 258–61; Spufford, 1981: ch.5; Clark, 1983: 18–23; Davies, 1986; Myers and Harris,

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1990; Watt, 1991: 14–33; Walsham, 1999: 32–64). Printers and writers churned out reports of crises and catastrophes at remarkable speed, sometimes within 24 hours of the event (Shaaber, 1929: ch.11; Watt, 1991: 264–65; Walsham, 1999: 44). It is not surprising that accounts, explanations, and critiques of the prolonged dearth of the 1590s entered daily lives through these subtle and often conflicted means. The providential message of the exemplary famine sermon interacted, in the readers’ field of awareness, with a variety of texts employing shrewdly modulated discursive tactics. Rhetorical flexibility within the mode of the famine sermon helped to keep popular anxiety alive. The sermons were both performative efforts and printed for circulation. Preachers utilized various authorial stances and rhetorical ploys. If Barlow added gravity to his venture by following an old patristic tradition of dearth-time preaching, the rector Peter Barker preached in the voice of Old Testament prophets to his small parishes of Stourpaine and Stepleton in rural Dorset. Tone and strategy within the famine sermon could thus vary considerably, and I suggest it was recognizable in the period, to preachers, listeners, printers, and readers, as a special mode of sermonizing that would immediately ring alarm bells and activate an express set of anxieties. Preachers used this reaction consciously as, for example, in Edward Topsell’s “sundrie lectures upon the book of Ruth” (cf. Ruth 1.1–6) or The Reward of Religion (1596; repr. 1597, 1601, 1613) where the godly may see their daily and outwarde trials. … verie profitable for this present time of dearth, wherein manye are most pittifully tormented with want; and also worthie to bee considered in this golden age of the preaching of the word, when some vomit vp the loathsomnes therof, and others fall away to damnable securitie. Topsell made a special point of the importance of adapting preaching modes to the specific condition of dearth, and to this end deployed the emotive language of lament with exemplary adeptness, as he exclaimed, wee … howle vppon our beds for corne and for newe wine, that is, for the bellye and for the throate, but there is a greater leannes in the soule. Now wee bite the stone which the Lord hath cast at vs, but we looke not at the hand, which did sende it, and who thinketh it to bee a punishment of sinne that now raigneth among vs? (5) “Euen in this time of dearth and famine,” complained Topsell, people did not forbear from drinking and drunkennes, dauncing and riot, feasting and surfetting, … accompting gaine to bee godlines, and godlines to be the burthen of the world, with a thousand greater and more greueous calamities, as if the

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His cleverly devised concluding echo of the Lord’s Prayer suggested that the plea for “the bread of this lyfe to banish our dearth” must coincide with genuine desire for spiritual remedy – prayers for “the bread of lyfe to escape damnation” (30). The amalgamated language of lament, complaint, and exhortation astutely consolidated the literary status of the famine sermon as a generic type, and drew attention to its several literary allies. Just as God could punish with famine, He could also reward just nations and their leaders; and the exemplary famine sermon had an ally in the cheap pamphlet that told politically inflected tales of famines conveniently occurring elsewhere. Geographical distance hardly concealed the parallel with England, and typically, such pamphlets utilized famine narratives to reinforce the political authority of the monarch. The coppie of a letter sent into England (1590) describing the Protestant Henry of Navarre’s siege of Paris (compared in this pamphlet to the “siege of Jerusalem”), A true relation of the French kinge (1592), and A true reporte of three straunge and wonderful accidents (published 1603, anonymously by William Barley, and with Francis Rappen as author by R. Blower) demonstrated the somewhat distressing solidarity of this alliance between political and religious discourses of famine. Godly portents further consolidated warnings against human sins that had invited dearth. Leonard Digges’ A prognostication euerlasting (1592), reissued in 1596, asserted that the appearance of comets signified through “corruption of the ayre” the dissolution of power and “great dearth of Corne” (6). On the other hand, Thomas Dekker, looking back on dearths of two consecutive decades, wickedly satirized the potentially unholy relationship between popular astrology, tales of earthly power, and religious advice by mockingly describing yet another “famine” in 1609 in The rauens Almanacke. Many deare yeares are set downe in our abridgements of Chronicles, but the face of this shall looke more leane then euer did any: I reade that in Edward the 2. time, there was such a famine, that Horseflesh was eaten and held as good or better meate then some mutton now: and that fat dogs, were then catched vp as fat pigs at Bartholmew tide: yea, that in many places, they had the dead bodyes of their owne children to deuoure them, and that theeues in prison made roastmeet one of another. In other Kings raignes likewise haue I noted other effects of hunger, as that sheepe haue beene sold at this price: Hogs, Chickens, Pigs, Geese, Ducks, with all other broodes of poultry-ware, at such & such excessiue rates, which haue beene lamentable to endure, and tragicall now to remember. But in this yeare 1609. beasts shall not bee sold deere, but men, yea men shall be bought and sold like Oxen and Calves in Smithfield, and young

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Gentlemen shal be eaten vp (for daintie meat) as if they were pickled Geese, or baked Woodcocks. (D1v–2r) Dekker’s exaggeration satirized the polemics of famine across different literary modes. Pretending to write a prophecy, he deliberately blended the modes of almanacs, political propaganda pamphlets, chronicles, and sermons to uncover social contradictions and paradoxes of famine. Famine not only affected different groups but was used at different professional and social levels, producing a climate of mutual exploitation. Dekker’s innuendo made the disturbing point that no single perspective on famine, or one mode of writing about it, could be morally prioritized, thus complicating and resisting the linear causal route suggested by providential motifs of famine sermons and the literature that supported them. Neither shall the teeth of this famine teare out the guts of the poore Farmer alone, nor shall the Country village cry out vpon this misery, but it shall euen step into Lords, Earles, & Gentlemens houses: Insomuch ye Courtiers shall this dismal yeere feed vpon citizens, & citizens on the contrary side lay about them like tall trencher-men to deuoure the Courtiers. The Clergie in this greedy-gutted time shal haue thin cheeks, for euery body shall fleece or rather vnfleece them. … If any complaint this yeer be made for the scarcity of bread, let none be blamed for it but Tailors, for by al the consent of the Planets, it is set downe that they will be mighty breadeaters, insomuch that half a score half-peny loaues wil make no shew vpon one of their stals. But least we make you hungry that shall read of this misery, by discoursing thus of so terrible a famine, let vs make hast to get out of the heart of this dry and mortall Summer. (ibid.)8 For Dekker, famine provided a rhetorical opportunity to expose and deconstruct collusive social arrangements and discourses that contributed to famine. Through the simultaneous operations of texts like these, the dialectical complexities of seemingly defined structures of providential thought about dearth should be reconsidered. If there was pressure during times of dearth to create a literary type, exemplified by the famine sermon, that could direct popular anxiety and institute officially sanctioned remedies, there was equal pressure to question or dismantle these structures of thought and writing. Moreover, there was a self-conscious and self-directed irony in Dekker, who knew his journalistic mixed mode was itself parasitical, and its own success in the literary marketplace depended upon the proliferation of calamities, and of literature on calamities. Barlow’s translated famine sermon too was printed, received, and circulated in this very market, in cheap octavo format, like its Latin and German predecessors. The book’s English printer Thomas Creede’s relatively small

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London printing house at the sign of the Catherine Wheel, near the Old Swan in Thames Street, churned out a mix of religious and literary texts, including Shakespeare quartos and works by Dekker, Marston, Chapman, Greene, and Lodge. In 1599, he was among the 14 printers warned not to reprint banned satires. By 1600, Creede had relocated closer to the centre of the book retail trade, near St Paul’s, and focused more on producing books about politics and current events. The famine sermons published in 1596 were thus part of the output that signalled this motivation and movement.9 In 1603, he published another well-known account of calamity, Dekker’s plague journal 1603. The Wonderfull Yeare. In other words, the sermons, conventionally endorsed as they were by Barlow and Archbishop Whitgift himself, nevertheless rubbed shoulders with a mixed set of companions, including those less orthodox, in the material world of the printer’s shop. What books could Thomas Creede have vended alongside this collection of sermons? What was his output in the 1590s? It was wide and varied, but Creede printed a cluster of books on dearth and famine in the late 1590s. Besides the Barlow-Lavater famine sermons, he sold Peter Barker’s The prophecie of Agabus, concerning a generall famine to come vpon the worlde (1597) and Henry Arthington’s Prouision for the Poore, now in penurie (1597). Barker, described on the title page as “Preacher of Gods word, at Stowre Paine, in Dorsetshire”, was also the rector of the neighbouring parish of Stepleton. His famine sermon, using the prophetic mode common in providential sermons, amplified the crisis experienced locally within his small parishes to the level of an imminent apocalypse. God, speaking through the OT prophet Agabus, and indeed through Barker himself, said, “I wil call a famin on the land, and break the staffe of bread, men shall bee hungrie, and thirstie, their soule shall faint in them, the people shall crie for bread, and all plentie shall bee forgotten”. The famine in Stourpaine, prophesied Agabus-Barker, would extend to the world, because in the very sins of the parish, Agabus could see the “sinne wherevnto the worlde is inclining” (C7v).10 Arthington, by contrast, was a Yorkshire gentleman dubiously embroiled in the early 1590s with controversies surrounding Puritan ministers and self-styled prophets such as Edmund Coppinger, William Hacket, and Thomas Cartwright.11 His famine pamphlet, published some years after his recantation, was relatively restrained, but it still occasionally erupted in perilously subversive diatribes against the “pooremakers” of the establishment. The tenor of social critique and complaint in these works connects them with a cluster of satires on Creede’s list: Thomas Lodge’s and Robert Greene’s A Looking-glasse for London and England (1594, repr. 1598); Joseph Hall’s deeply pessimistic Virgidemiarum (1597–8); Robert Greene’s tongue-in-cheek recantation Greens Groats-worth of wit (1596); John Lyly’s dark, farcical play on the pursuit of wealth Mother Bombie (1598); Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1599) which was overtly concerned with dearth and insurrection; Micro-cynicon: six snarling satires (1599) attributed to Thomas Middleton; the wickedly subversive anonymous play The Wisdome of Doctor Dodypoll (1600) and a “newly corrected” decorated reprint of Thomas More’s

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Utopia (1597). While it may not have been Creede’s sole intent to tailor his 1590s publication agenda to concerns about dearth, instability, and godly providence (printers’ lists at the time could be more randomly affected by the exigencies of the London book trade and print culture), the list shows that the repertoire of even a relatively small-scale printer in these years included a substantial number of works specifically on dearth, and related social critiques. Even these varied texts, drawn together in a printer’s shop through the forces of the book market, could easily be made to speak to each other. Creede knew one area of popular anxiety he was tapping into was about shortage and social instability; and, as such, his turn-of-the-century repertoire illustrated potential intertextualities, and the wider field of texts within which a particular text about dearth and providence might be received by contemporary readers browsing a list like Creede’s. Texts specifically concerned with dearth drew upon and intensified broader concerns about religious conflict, social equality, disease, crime, local economies, and national and international politics and identities. There were two elements of providential thought that demonstrated, in resonant ways, the connectedness of these concerns in the 1590s. First, God’s absolute power over the resources of the land and its topography were crucial when seen through the lens of dearth. As Barlow, Topsell, Barker, and other sermonizers frequently pointed out, God could impose the curse of barrenness upon the land in the twinkling of an eye, and this curse reflected barrenness in the human soul. Fortifying this belief was the anxiety that God could change the face and structure of the land itself, and directly affect the way people lived on and drew sustenance from it. Second, God had absolute power over the political organization of nations and national resources, exercised through divinely appointed rulers. So, a providential design could be seen to underpin the distribution of resources and territorial conflicts. However, both of these elements, seen in the context of dearth, ironically reinforced the power and potentiality of human action and intervention in God’s plan. The providential discourse of dearth was of particular importance because it foregrounded human causes and consequences within its frameworks of debate. Dearth created dialectical openings, affecting major religious, social, political, and literary arguments about the organization of resources. The interplay of these concerns can be more precisely seen by comparing a cluster of little-known texts circulating in the 1590s: John Chapman’s A most true report of the myraculous mouing and sinking of a plot of ground (1596), The mutable and wauering estate of France (1597), The coppie of a letter sent into England (1590), and A true relation of the French kinge (1592). The marketable potential of sensational reports, reinforcing concerns about calamitous judgements and political stability through observation and historical review, was considerable at this time. But because of their sensational, saleable nature, the immediate contextual and local anxieties underlying such reports have often been underplayed. Creede printed, in 1596, a rather strange pamphlet: John Chapman’s A most true report of the myraculous mouing and sinking of a

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plot of ground, about nine acres, at Westram in Kent, which began the 18. of December, and so continued till the 29. of the same moneth. The odd phenomenon was witnessed by Chapman, 23 other named yeomen and gentlemen in the area, and the local JP, physician, and vicar. People apparently travelled 15 miles from London to wonder at this topographical change. Chapman narrated, in minute detail, the gradual physical changes to this land, along with its location, ownership, tenancy, and cultivation patterns. This was not only a sensational narrative but also a process of recording, and it is the process, rather than its possible accuracy, which is notable. Chapman’s diagram of the area marked topographical variations that had occurred, and provided measurements supposedly made, while the changes were occurring, by local inhabitants who relied on this piece of land for their livelihood. The tenant Giles Browne, walking towards his barn on 18 December 1595, found 12 perches of “that part of it which laye about the head of the gozelles” sunk 6½ feet “by measure taken by himselfe and other”. The next morning the ground had sunk another 16 feet, and the next another 80. From then on, that great trench of ground lying partly in these two closes, and partly in sundry other … began with the hedges and trees thereon to loose it self wholy from the rest of the ground lying round about it, and withal to moue, slide, and shoote southward, not with any suddaine shot, but creeping by little, and little. Workers on the land perceived no movement but only “the cracking of the rootes of trees, the brushing of boughes, the noise of the hedge-wood breaking, the gaping of the ground, and the riuing of the earth asunder, the falling of the torne furrowes and huge trenches”. These were four to seven feet deep and soon there were “eleuen thousand furrows, riffes, cracks, and clefts in diuerse places heere and there” (B1v–2r). These events caused major disruption for local inhabitants, but the account self-consciously blurred boundaries between fact and fiction. The relatively dry factual narrative was prefaced by a religious warning and a dedicatory epistle to “Lady Margaret, Barronesse Dacre of the South”, stressing godly providence. The preface (it would not be surprising if Chapman had help from his vicar named on the witness list) adeptly deployed Calvinist rhetoric to convey God’s power over the land, its resources, and people who lived by the land. Citations of biblical calamities were followed by the pointed, sermon-like reminder that God alone could impute barrenness or fertility, dearth or abundance: One while he turneth running riuers into a wildernesse, and the springs of waters into dry ground, and conuerteth fruitful land into barrainnesse, for the sinnes of them that do dwell thereon. An other while he turneth the wildernesse into pooles of water: And a dry land into water springs. Whereto we may adde, that sometime hee hurleth downe hilles, and

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maketh them to become lowe vallies, and withall exalteth the lowe vallies, and maketh them to become high hills. The preface merged the human labour of recording natural phenomena with the providential message, which had certainly been driven home to the local community whose daily lives were directly affected by this particular godly sign. The text registered an inherent tension between the unquestioning acceptance of God’s will over the land, and the human effort to understand, measure, and chart the sudden alteration, recover the damage, and accordingly realign the pattern of daily rural existence, especially in an economic context that God had already made difficult enough by inflicting three consecutive years of dearth and barrenness. Marginal as both Chapman’s text and locality were in the grand scheme of things, they illustrated a subtle elision of providential absolutism which, as I will argue later, found its way into even the conventional enterprise of Barlow’s translated famine sermon. But God’s design, as people knew, extended beyond Westram parish in Kent. To recall an earlier example, even a famine in the village of Stourpaine could be imagined to universally extend to the world. God’s long arm reached right across national borders, across specific points in time, to The mutable and wauering estate of France, from … 1460, vntill the yeare 1595, the subject of another pamphlet printed by Creede in 1597. It belonged to a familiar genre of historical review, establishing the advantages (and God’s endorsement) of a strong monarchy, and warning against conflicting self-interests of different Christian groups. In the late 1590s, faced with the visible decline of Elizabeth’s reign, the threat of Spain, the regular conflicts of Reformation politics, compounded by economic crises, this was a pertinent genre. It fed nationalist and political elements of providential thought. Books concerning contemporary France were an apt and frequently deployed tool (Levy, 1967: 209). The mutable and wauering estate thus predictably presented France as a looking-glass for England, describing “great battailes of the French nation”, abroad and at home with a “declaration of the seditious and trecherous practises of that viperous brood of Hispaniolized Leaguers” (cf. Colynet, 1591).12 Although, as the author said, France was still topographically intact – “it be neither split vpon the sandes, nor swallowed vpon the fearfull billowes” – yet it served “as a perfect glasse, to viewe the vnstable estate of these earthly things: for an assured proofe of the variable change, and the continuall vicissitude in the most flowring kingdoms and commonwealthes” (2). This kind of international mirroring, founded upon providential ideas, acquired a special edge during dearth. Narratives of famine in France and beyond served particularly well the ends of political and national self-reflection. In 1590, The coppie of a letter sent into England described a famine in Paris. In this year, England had not suffered crop failure, although hardships of the previous decade could be recalled, and those of the latter half of the 1590s were still to come. Paris, on the other hand, was in the throes of a politically caused famine, or siege warfare. The Protestant king Henry of Navarre,

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following his victory against Catholic forces in March 1590, placed a siege on Paris, blocking its food supplies. By July, starvation had set in and help was sought from Spain. In August, a relief army led by Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, through clever military strategy, brought food supplies to the city. Henry retreated, the duke’s army remained to protect the city, while radical Catholic Leaguers executed suspected Protestants and moderates. In July 1593, in a counter-move taking advantage of the partisan politics of the League, Henry converted to Catholicism and was crowned king. The contemporary Pierre de L’Estoile estimated that hundreds died from starvation in the Paris siege (1948: I.70). This was no story of Protestant success, politically or morally, but English reports struggled to present it as such.13 The pamphlet, revealing how contemporary anxieties about dearth were used to construct national identity, first narrated political events and dwelt on the godly mission and valour of the king with somewhat gruesome relish. Eager to elide the superior strategic acumen of the Spanish army, the author insisted on the king’s total awareness of the army’s whereabouts. Political intelligence and a spying system became concertedly attached to godly foreknowledge, building the comforting assertion that God would “blesse and prosper the kings royall Maiestie, and send him the victorie ouer all his enemies … for there was neuer in France a king of so noble a courage, so skilfull in the warres, and so hardie against the proudest foe” (8–9). The famine narrative then reinforced the king’s godly authority in ways politically useful in the English context, with its post-Armada anxieties and concerns about royal authority and succession. The Paris famine asserted the monarch’s benevolence. Readers were reminded how Henry was “moued with a kingly compassion … sawe with his eies and conceiued in his heart, what intolerable famishment the obstinate Citie had already endured” (12–13). But no concrete action demonstrated this mercy, and the text used providence to evade the point. The king had made the famine, albeit with the alleged sanction of God, and when faced with its horrific human consequences, he revived people’s hearts “with a fauourable countenance, and according to his princely disposition, in a mild manner” demanded inside information from the famished citizen-narrator about exactly how much provision remained in the city, what alternatives were being planned, and how long citizens thought they could hold out: if they hoped “to finde mercie at his hands” they should deliver this information “in all trueth and simplicitie of heart” (16). The text struggled with moral ambivalences of this kind. The famine’s human consequences, justified by the king as political necessity and strategy, were described. Sundry “poore creatures” emerged from the city precincts, “resembling rather the Anatomies of death, then people possessed with life”. On the one hand, this could strategically manipulate public opinion through fear. Rebellious citizens in Paris, and English readers, saw that the monarch was powerful enough to create dearth, and derived this power from God himself. But this confident surface of righteousness hardly seems stable within the narrative, which simultaneously demonstrated how human intervention and manipulation of resources could

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cause dearth. While it tried to convince that such dearth was a godly tool, the text revealed that the politics of resource distribution was clearly in human hands, and its moral validation no easy task. Similar points were taken up in satires of the later 1590s, and in canonical texts such as Shakespeare’s history plays. Poverty and environmental hardships did not, as some historians previously claimed, deter ordinary people from engaging with providential arguments (Thomas, 1971: 130–32; Wrightson, 2002: 201; cf. Walsham, 1999). Walter and Wrightson have argued that the doctrine of judgements presented dearth as a “metaphysical problem” and made remedial action, through repentance, both possible and intelligible. Their local examples showed that this led to concrete and coordinated action by the authorities and the protesting poor, and they concluded that to assert famine was man-made was not uncommon, nor did it really contradict the idea of God’s judgement as primary cause (Walter and Wrightson, 1976: 22–42; APC, 1597: 30). But the texts studied above suggest considerable contemporary unease about this point. Accommodating authorized providential arguments with the human execution and imagining of remedies was a debated issue. The effect of providential thought on remedial approaches was complex and unstable because the moral and religious literature about dearth was itself more argumentative in its discursive patterns than historical assessment, or dismissal, of this literature often concedes. Further, because providential thought entered the daily lives of people, it was contested and modified from within. Its inherent tensions and contradictions became visible to people, and this had more radical consequences. If there was a reciprocal containment of power and disorder of the kind that Walter and Wrightson describe, the conflicted and discursive nature of that process needs attention. The clues lie in literary discourses of dearth which cannot be set aside because dearth was indeed an intricate metaphysical problem. As translated sermons like Barlow’s circulated in the same popular market that disseminated social complaint, the providential side of the discourse of dearth had to learn to accommodate ideas that could not be so readily absorbed into the structure of this thought. This subtle paradox generated by dearth had significant impact. Sermons such as Barlow’s not only participated in a recognizable religiopolitical agenda of dearth-time preaching and social welfare, they also pointed towards an existing economy of knowledge that was being shaped to address dearth pragmatically. If their narrative of dearth provided a stimulus for remedial action, this can be located in their tensions rather than their cohesive patterns. Barlow’s curiosity about the pragmatic knowledge of dearth allowed him to elide, at certain points, the arbitrariness of the doctrine of judgements by attending to the specificity of practical details in the original text. The sermons keenly expounded natural phenomena, economic conditions, and practical causes of dearth, somewhat tensely accommodated to the absolutism of providential doctrine. (Barlow himself was by no means an unambiguous figure.14) The theological argument seemed to close off other discussions of causes: God’s judgement was the primary cause. Yet, the closure was resisted by the very process of evaluating the practical world of dearth. The emphasis

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on puzzlement and anxiety about causes of dearth, an affliction both sudden and contrary to human expectation, was continually underlined by the leitmotif of Barlow’s interpolations, asserting the immediacy of the subject: “and this yeare 1596. with vs in England” (B9r). Moreover, his curiosity about natural phenomena was palpable in the text. His preface was preoccupied, like the sermons themselves, with climate and its relationship to dearth. He pointed out that, unlike in his patristic examples, the current cause of dearth in England was not drought but the “neuer ceasing raine” and the “lowring and Sunlesse” sky, ultimately attributed in a conventional manner to “the heauie hand of God” (Exodus 8.19). But the biblical quotation could not override questions raised, in the lengthy intervening discussion of English topography, climate, and seasonal anomalies, about physical environments of scarcity or plenty (A2v–4r). Debating natural and economic causes pushed against the text’s conventional discursive theological boundaries and was characteristic of the knowledge-making environment in Barlow’s times. This added a further layer of complexity to early modern cultural responses to dearth, and we are prompted to examine the overlap between discursive patterns of providential thought and of making knowledge in times of dearth.

Turning penury into plenty The accommodation of “metaphysical” causes of dearth with its practical manifestations allowed sermons to interact with a different genre of pragmatic writing, illustrated by Hugh Platt’s Sundrie new and artificiall remedies against famine, also published in 1596. This manual collected famine remedies from printed works, practices of Platt’s own household and that of his neighbours and acquaintances, and reports and anecdotes informally circulating in the 1590s. It discussed issues such as diet reform in times of hardship, prevention of waste, food preservation, and the reduction of fuel consumption. Pragmatic discussions were interwoven with miraculous tales of survival on little or no food, and reports of relief measures used in other parts of the world. While these reports might be regarded as fanciful travellers’ tales, they were incorporated into the pragmatic world of daily household experimentation. The stories were rationalized and practices they described were tested and brought into the realm of practical knowledge making and remedying of dearth. A century later, Platt’s text was reprinted in the Collectanea Chymica, placed with works by Starkey, Ripley, Francis Anthony, and Jean Baptiste van Helmont. William Cooper’s preface praised the selected works for their “usefulness”. Platt’s place in the early modern knowledge economy and history of science will be discussed later; this chapter regards his book of famine receipts as an active mode of writing about dearth. With recent critical and historical interest in receipt book culture, the form and value of the receipt book has come under scrutiny. As William Eamon, Pamela Smith, and Elaine Leong have argued, these texts were records of processes by which knowledge was generated, and their empirical and epistemological principles should be

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uncovered, as well as their social value.15 Elizabeth Spiller (2010: 55–72) and Joan Fitzpatrick (2010: 1–7) have similarly analyzed intellectual and cultural shifts that defined uses of recipes in relation to Renaissance attitudes towards food. While it is useful to scrutinize empirical, epistemological, and generic principles of these texts, the social value of a receipt book can be uncovered by observing its interactions with other modes of writing. During periods of dearth, there was a heightened consciousness of the importance of such books. Yet, dearth is not an issue that has greatly concerned commentaries on receipt books, although disease and health have been major preoccupations. On the other hand, scholars attentive to dearth-time remedial measures, and how the poor made shift, have not studied the receipt book as a record of these practices. I attempt to simultaneously address the gaps by considering how a receipt book operated discursively in a climate of dearth, and how it recorded, transmitted, and evolved remedial measures as part of a wider enterprise of knowledge making. This can show how the social economy and philosophical climate of dearth actually worked, and what dearth-time ingenuity meant, both practically and imaginatively. The title page of Platt’s work prominently juxtaposed the Augustinian motto “non est quo fugias a Deo irato, nisi ad Deum placatum” (Augustine, 1835: IV.1127.9) with the assertion that the treatise was written “vppon thoccasion of this present Dearth,” emphasizing the problem’s immediacy. Platt’s list of aims and “counsels” deployed the standard providential trope – famine was God’s punishment for sin, only cured by “harty praiers from a zealous heart” (Famine, A2r). But he quickly edged past this spiritual remedy to pragmatic ones, praying that God might provide “such meanes as shall seeme best in his owne eyes, for the reliefe of these our present wants, to turne this our penurie into plenty [my emphasis]” (A2r). However, the turning of penury into plenty, favoured by God, was actually reliant upon the careful deployment of resources and the manipulation of Nature by human hands. Human action was not in principle flawed, but men tended to exploit God’s plenty and turn it into waste, a process that must now be reversed. As Platt outlined the corruption of markets and middlemen, promoted recent royal proclamations on grain use and prices, and urged local organization of charitable measures, his economic discussion was shaped by his elegant combining of biblical language and Classical precept. The treatise overlapped with the mode of famine sermons. I cannot want good will to wish though I haue no authority to command, that the very food of the earth euen the blessing of the Lord, should be no longer subiect to this copyhold & slauish tenure, of such base & vnmerciful lords, who vpon euery petit transportation, yea rumour of transportation onely, vpon faire weather, or foule weather, or any weather if they list, can make the same finable ad voluntatem Domini, and set what price they list vpon the bushel. Is there no Court of Chauncery, neither in heauen nor vpon earth, to bridle these couetous and vnmercifull Lords, yea and to stint them, that howsoeuer it shall please the God and giuer of all thinges

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Literatures of dearth to crosse vs from the heauens, that yet no inferior person should dare to exceede a certain price to bee set downe by authority, vpon the confiscation of whatsoeuer graine hee shoulde so ouerrate vnto his poore and needy neighbour? … if euer Abstinence were a true Christian virtue, then now let it appeare amongst vs, for why should the rich men feast, when the poor are so ready to famish? was there neuer but one Diues, and one Lazarus vpon the earth? Or doe we want wit, or will, or grace to apply a parable? Here I may wel cry out and say to the rich, and fat weathers of our time, as Tully sometime said to Anthony. Te miror Anthoni, vt quorum facta imitere, eorum exitus non perhorrescere. I wonder at you o you Epicures that you are not terrified with their destructions whose deeds you seeme to imitate. Well if we haue brought our pampered bodies to those delicacies, that wee can nowe aswell leaue our liues, as our lustes; yet if euerie rich man woulde spare but one meale in a weeke, and confer the estimate vppon the poore of the parish where hee dwelleth (nunquam nimis dicitur, quod nunquam satis discitur) I saie euen this one meale would serue wel to mend a whole weekes commons of a poore Subscisor. (A2v–3r)

The efficient rhetorical effort identified “the very food of the earth” as “the blessing of the Lord”, using the well-worn language of grace that householders would recognize; powerful metonymic constructions then highlighted the human corruption of God-given bounty. The food-blessing (which stood for resources in general) was itself under “slavish tenure”, like the people who laboured to cultivate the grain. This built towards the rhetorical question, noting the failure of formal or legal means of control: was there no “Court of Chauncery” in heaven or earth to “bridle” human corruption and regulate the distribution and management of resources? Platt’s rhetorical strategies made the violation of price regulation akin to the violation of God’s decrees. Blending classical quotations and biblical allusions – such as the quote from Tully, modified in its English translation and brought to bear upon the moral message evoked by the reference to Dives and Lazarus – was a frequent means of consolidating the ethical foundation of his treatise. Arguably, these literary strategies were intended to play on dearth-time anxieties and fears of the godly readers, and prod them into action. Ultimately, Platt was interested in individual or collective action in knowledge-making communities in times of dearth. The literary strategies and arguments of providential literature provided him with a basis to construct a different discursive and ethical framework for his treatise, which proposed measures for dearth that were not only active, but experimental and open-ended. The attack on grain hoarding, characterization of “base & vnmerciful lords”, and insistence on informal, communal relief measures underlined human (rather than godly) responsibility. Hoarding and market manipulation for private profit was, in Platt’s argument, an example of wrongly turning God’s plenty

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into waste and, ultimately, penury. Correspondingly, he prioritized a particular kind of human effort to reverse this corrupt and fallen process: a type of food-based experimentation in extreme conditions that was part of wider knowledge-making activities and household management. One could turn penury into plenty in the everyday context of one’s home to take pressure off limited natural and economic resources in Platt’s organic economy. Crucially, experimentation itself was necessarily dialectical. All “solutions” were partial solutions, open to modification and discussion. Platt’s treatise on famine is one of the few texts in the period that tried to define and organize pragmatic dearth-time remedies within the wider contemporary discourse of causes and measures. Other texts, slightly later than Platt’s, such as Henry Arthington’s Prouision for the Poore (1597) or Richard Gardiner’s Profitable instructions for the manuring, sowing, and planting of kitchin gardens (1599), compiled practical remedies for dearth loosely tied to the central interest of the authors. Arthington added practical suggestions such as the encouragement of grain imports and the punishment of “pooremakers” – prodigals, greedy landlords, usurers, engrossers of grain, corrupt lawyers and magistrates, gamesters, and exploitative masters – but his focus was on moral conduct and social organization. Gardiner, a Shrewsbury market gardener, advised broadly on his profession, while the prayers that began and ended his pamphlet evoked familiar notions of judgement, sin, hard work, and repentance. Platt’s work distinctively relied on organized reading and experimentation. While its tone was investigative, it was not a rushed and unplanned piece of work (contra Thick, 2010). He had published, the year before, a more broadly discursive pamphlet on dearth, A Discouerie of certaine English wants (1595). Remedies against famine carefully utilized a European printed source, the German physician Joachim Struppe’s treatise on famine, published in Frankfurt (1574) and presented to Queen Elizabeth.16 Other sources were Platt’s own printed works and manuscript notebooks of practical experiments. The formative manuscript texts demonstrate how famine “remedies” were gathered from a variety of people and developed in a community. Remedies were then tested, modified, and incorporated into Platt’s various publications, including this treatise, which provides detailed and individualized insight into what people really did when faced with the threat of starvation. The receipt book form in which these activities were represented helps us understand the relationship between practice and discourse, and consequently, the multivalent nature of dearth, as society negotiated the pressures of supply and demand.17 Remedies against famine contained three main areas of experimentation: how householders and traders made do with substitutes for staples, like bread; adaptation of “outlandish” foods for sea voyages and for times of war into domestic contexts of dearth, taking into account the unsettled state of its itinerant consumers who were not necessarily sailors and soldiers alone; and strange tales of eating, which were on the edge of fact and fiction, yet considered as practical options. Together, these concerns discover a pragmatic

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discourse of dearth and knowledge making with crucial ethical dimensions in this period, not fully captured in previous studies of dearth. Measures for extreme conditions demonstrate the interrelations of different branches of Platt’s knowledge, as well as his tireless inventiveness. His consciously multifaceted remedial devices suggest that the shaping of dearth-time knowledge was achieved more by efforts from below than by injunctions from powerful authorities. Substitutes for staple foods In the 1590s, concerns about the production and distribution of staples focused on the trade in grains. “Corn”, broadly designating the seed of important cereals such as wheat, rye, or barley, was a coveted source of staple food. Alternatives to wheat were common in dearth years, and the husbanding of corn was a crucial issue in agriculture (Gras, 1967: 9, 36; Walter, 1989: 100–03; Appleby, 1979b: 865–87; Wrigley, 1989: 235–78). Platt’s The new and admirable arte of setting of corne (1600) stressed that recent years had seen many “rich experiments” with corn-growing “farre beyond the hopes and haruests of all our predecessours” (A3v). Supplying London with grain was a vital problem. Proclamations were issued to attract grain from neighbouring counties, millers and bakers were placed under supervision, public granaries were established, city guilds gave money, and still, demand outran supply (Gras, 1967: ch.3; Dearth of Graine, 1595). Rising demand brought home the interrelatedness of markets for other food and fuel products. London’s need for provisions other than corn, which could be satisfied only by close suppliers, compelled it to look further away for its corn supply (Gras, 1967: 107–09, 126–27). Thus, corn productivity was both an influence upon and influenced by metropolitan growth. Platt responded to these circumstances by outlining measures for the better cultivation of grains and more economical ways of producing bread, starch, and beer, which competed for the available grain.18 While in The arte of setting of corne Platt addressed the topic of corn cultivation at length, his manuscripts and Remedies against famine contained numerous instructions for making bread, starch, and beer using additives or wheat substitutes. Instructions were drawn from Giambattista della Porta’s Magiae Naturalis (especially Book 4 on “Oeconomia”), Struppe’s work, and consultations with local acquaintances, practitioners, and traders. The advice in books was often compared and blended with advice from people: for instance, Platt obtained from the Spanish Ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza instructions to make bread from wheat straw. With this, assured Mendoza, he had once relieved a Spanish town “in an extreame dearth, and scarcity of victual”, and showed Platt such a loaf.19 The practice, Platt later discovered, was usual in some parts of England during hard times. Experimenting with the technique himself, he found it made bread too brown and gritty. The problem, he concluded, lay in English grinding methods – “our stones be not apt … the same cannot wel be ground but in a steele mill, or hand mil” (B2r). By bringing information gathered from books and reports

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into an immediate context of pragmatic endeavour and exchange, Platt ensured its application in times of dearth. He occasionally found assistants to help gather and maintain records. In one manuscript, bread experiments were begun in a different hand and continued by Platt, who recorded experiments with fuel-saving baking methods and dearth breads (MS.2189, ff.56–57).20 His notebooks were constantly concerned with alternative staples such as macaroni and couscous, specifically marked out as products for “the poore” and sold from Platt’s shop (MS.2216, f.112v; MS.2189, ff.41, 118, 126; MS.2244, f.29v). They were also placed among his lists of mariners’ victuals as “wholesome” and “nourishing” foods for arduous voyages: his manuscripts affirm Platt had taken his earliest versions of these receipts from Francis Drake (Sea-men, 1607). In his own modified applications of the receipts, Platt keenly debated how a single product could find multiple uses and be marketed in different ways. His practical efforts to produce dearth-time staples were painstaking and sustained. Of the 11 receipts in the first part of Remedies against famine, 8 were concerned with bread and economical grain use. The second part provided 40 famine remedies from Struppe’s treatise of which 29 dealt with making bread cheaply. Platt highlighted the economic and ethical purpose of his receipts, “that the bulke and body of our meale and flower will be much increased and multiplied at the least for the poore mannes Table” (A2v). He was drawing on a tradition of alternative grain use, widely practised in households and trading communities. These practices, and texts like Platt’s that aided their formulation, were a significant part of the discourse of dearth. They defined a positive moral realm for human action in tangible terms, gave specific shape to the micromanagement of resources, and uncovered an extraordinarily detailed culture of thrift in the period. Dearth at sea and war The discussion of staples in Remedies against famine broadened, in other publications, to the analysis of “extreme measures” in specific contexts of hardship, such as sea voyages or times of war. There were socio-economic reasons for Platt’s choice of these contexts: not only was the threat of war a constant feature of these times, sailors and soldiers were “familiar peripatetic types”, as Patricia Fumerton described them, signifying unsettledness and hardship (2006: 1–11). Fumerton analyzed their “unsettled subjectivity”, assessing the psychological impact of their vagrant status and consequent selfdefinition. But their pragmatic relationships with “settled” households are also revealing. Soldiers and sailors offered specialized knowledge of survival with their perpetually limited resources. Ordinary households could learn from their methods, as Platt knew. His receipt for macaroni was a striking example of the multi-layered efficacy of these measures. The product was treated as a novel and valuable invention, whose production process and use were continuously reviewed. In Jewell

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House (1594), Platt had tempted his readers with the promise of “A wholesome, lasting, and fresh victuall for the Nauie”; when corn was sold for an exorbitant 20 shillings the quarter, eight ounces of this victual could be had for a penny. A small amount was “competent meale for any reasonable stomach”, and served “both for bread and meat”. The magically cheap and lightweight food was shaped like wafers, easy to carry, and lasted three years, if kept dry. The “wafers”, if carefully dressed, made not only sufficient but pleasing food in extreme conditions: Platt had tested this by serving them at his own table. An illustration of the “Engin for the making of this victual” showed a box with two compartments, the upper containing a grinding mechanism (74–76). This tantalizing text was probably the basis for a later broadside Certaine philosophical preparations of foode and beuerage for seamen. Platt’s manuscripts testify that between 1594 (the publication of Jewell House) and 1607 (the broadside), he repeatedly conducted experiments with food for mariners and soldiers. The broadside was a compendium of these experiments, discussing food, beverage, and medicine separately. It first advertised a cheap, fresh, and lasting victual called “Macaroni” among the Italians, which, said Platt, was not unlike the “Cus-Cus” of Barbary. He had furnished Sir Francis Drake (c.1540–96) and Sir John Hawkins (1532–95) with macaroni for their voyages. Published receipts were the outcome of elaborate experimental procedures. Platt’s manuscripts contained his formative experiments with different compositions of macaroni to make it more wholesome and of better taste. The paste of flour was kneaded with aniseed, liquorice, and ginger, or boiled milk, or eggs. To make it last, aqua composita, cinnamon, and wine or ale wort were added. Seething the macaroni in “blathers” or pudding skins apparently made it tougher, and the paste was coloured with saffron, driven through hollow pipes, and dried. In Barbary, reported Platt, “cus-cus” – a cheap food, comparable in his mind to macaroni – was made by strewing flour on a flat strainer, and sprinkling water upon it with a fine brush. Then, by “searcing the flower vpp and downe” until one had “spent all ye flower”, the “cus-cus” became “in foarme like carrawayes” (MS.2244, f.29v; cf. MS.2216, f.112v; MS.2189, ff.118v, 126). Interconnected clusters of receipts (published and unpublished) showed the careful detail underpinning the labour of famine “remedies”. Some receipt clusters were deliberately linked with others, thus connecting different areas of experimentation and clarifying shared points of emphasis, such as reduction of volume and long-term preservation of food, or overlaps between food and medicine. Platt’s macaroni and couscous receipts possessed a logic similar, for instance, to that of his recommended “broths” for ailing mariners when there was no fresh meat “to strengthen or comfort them”. These broths “will stand cleare and liquid, and not gellie or growe thicke when it is cold”, and “may also be preserued by this fire of Nature from all mouldinesse, sowrenesse, or corruption, to any reasonable period of time that shall be desired” (Sea-men, 1607). One such broth seems to be the early modern equivalent of “instant soup”. It was made from beef jelly, boiled and cast in moulds, or made into a paste adding isinglass. The paste was rolled out, dried, and cut in thin slices,

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which could be dissolved and heated for consumption. More “gellies” of this kind were described in a receipt titled “Of lasting and fresh victuals to be carried in the form of glew to the sea”, where Platt explained how to boil an ox leg to obtain a “strong” and “stiff” jelly, which could be sliced and dried. His source Mr Dakeham said one litre of this concoction would “greatly strengthen fresh water” (MS.2216, ff.112v, 158). Occasionally, the jelly was rolled into pills “like mowthglew” (glue and sugar compound used by moistening with the tongue), and when dissolved later for consumption, mixed with liquorice (instead of expensive sugar) for better taste (MS.2244, f.29v). In the context of dearth, especially useful features of sailors’ and soldiers’ food were durability and easy transportation. Platt advised that meat taken on voyages be shredded, the fat removed, dried in the wind, sun, or “gentle stove”, and sealed in a barrel in layers, lined with paper. The dried shreds were immersed in salt water, consumed with oil or butter, or powdered and mixed with macaroni. As this receipt and its variations, “affirme[d] confidently” by the “maister of a ship”, enabled one to eat meat “out of season”, it was also proposed for ordinary household consumption when meat was in short supply (MS.2216, f.52v; MS.2189, ff.116r, 118v). Other foods, recommended for consumption during dearth, appeared on lists of sea victuals. Sodden oatmeal, seethed with clarified butter and spices like mace and cloves, had the advantage of being easily warmed by a candle or the heat of one’s body: it was placed “in ones boosome or breaches”. Various fish – Platt mentions stockfish, ling, saltfish, and cod – were incorporated with flour, breadcrumbs, and isinglass. Parched parsnips, carrots, peas, beans, pastes of fish, dried cheeses, chestnuts baked and soaked in wine, corn paste (ground in a “gonpowder morter”), and hard-boiled eggs (salted, buttered, and barrelled) were all part of the repertoire of mariners’ or soldiers’ food (MS.2189, ff.126v, 127, 119, 25r; MS.2244, ff.29v–31r). The corollary of the emphasis on preservation and production of “concentrated” forms of food was a constant worry about freshness and health. Speculations about causes of decomposition, efficient storage, and health – especially the health of itinerant persons exposed to dearth and disease – were intricately linked. Addressing problems of fresh water supply on voyages, Platt offered to prepare several tuns of water “by a Philosophicall fire, being of a sympatheticall nature with all plants and Animals”, which would “last sweete, good, and without any intention to putrefaction”. This meant adding ingredients such as molasses, vinegar, or spirits of herbs and wine to clean water, and allowing time for natural transmutation (MS.2216, ff.50v, 152).21 He also noted, “Snow water is supposed never to decompose”, and added a reminder in the margin to find out “to what vses it may best bee applied”. Besides these measures, drinks like beer and aqua vitae took less storage space on board the ship if the wort was boiled down to a “sirrop”. Platt found similar means of storing wine, perry, cider, and ale (MS.2189, ff.25, 126v). “Essences of spices and floures (as of Cinnamon, Cloues, Mace, Nutmegs, Rosemary, Sage, & c) being in the forme of powders” were, likewise, carried “with lesse danger”. The powders were incorporated with “Syrupes, Iuleps or Conserues” and served the dual

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purpose of food and medicine (Sea-men, 1607). Platt offered to provide mariners and travelling merchants with medicinal compounds such as “special distilled waters, decoctions, or iuyces of any plant or any other liquid vegetable or animall body”, including a preparation from lemon juice (lately discovered by Sir James Lancaster22) as a cure for scurvy. He offered a powder for agues “taken in Wine, Beer, or Ale”, a sweet paste for headaches, a “general and gentle purging Powder” taken in white wine, an “Antidotary powder” against the plague, and a medicine for the “flux of blood”. For most of these remedies, Platt claimed multiple functions. The purging powder, for instance, could prevent gout and dropsy, and cure “most of those diseases that spring from rheumatick causes”. The antidote to plague was also a cure for smallpox and measles, which frequently afflicted soldiers and mariners. Such medicines and drinks revealed that their psychosomatic effect was valued, and medical applications included the efficacy of placebos or “general” cures, which these remedies represented. They were, as Platt emphasized, “pleasing to nature”, providing a “feel-good” effect, critical on a dreary voyage. This made the remedies easily transferable to the context of dearth, where the psychological reassurance they offered was precious. They restored hope. The intersections between receipts for sailors and soldiers, and receipts for famine, become more apparent when the interactive processes that led to their making are scrutinized. It seems logical that food and remedies produced for the unsettled and itinerant would assume special relevance, both material and psychological, in times of dearth. The “unsettled subjectivity” of mariners and soldiers, to whom Platt’s Philosophical preparations … for sea-men purported to cater, was itself a problem aggravated by dearth. Fumerton laid particular emphasis on their isolation (2006: 63–83). Platt’s accumulated wisdom on these matters demonstrated, however, that the unsettled and itinerant were communities bound by certain kinds of knowledge, freely exchanged, and driven by the need to find innovative ways of stretching limited resources, as well as exploring multiple and interlaced functions of materials at their disposal. As a result, dearth created a common ground, based on need and knowledge exchange, between these unsettled and liminal figures, frequently travelling overseas, and those who suffered dearth in their seemingly defined domestic contexts. Peculiar tales The emphasis on innovation in times of dearth unsettled divisions between fact and fiction. Platt’s extreme measures included receipts that attracted him for their strangeness. Like sea and war victuals, they provided means of survival during acute hardship, when access to ordinary domestic facilities was not forthcoming, and the principle of turning penury into plenty was pushed to the limit. Remedies against famine published them under the title “Certaine strange and extraordinarie waies for the relieuing of a prisoner, or other poore distressed creatures, when all hope of vsual victual is taken from him”

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(B1r). The title marked the tone of the receipts: they were “strange”, associated with severe distress, poverty, abandonment of hope, and outside the scope of “usual” food. Their usefulness was by definition in question, and Platt made a special point of stressing that they were “the credible report of men of woorth”, and he would “deliuer them as faithfully” as he had received them. We are told that “Paracelsus himself affirmeth” fresh turf or earth applied externally every day to a man’s stomach would “preserue him from famishing for some smal number of daies”. Platt had heard travellers “deliuer of their own knowledge and experience” that a man may live for 12 days by sucking his own blood. Giambattista della Porta told the story of a man trapped under a fallen house, who remained alive for 10 days by drinking his own urine. According to Pliny, chewing liquorice “satisfie[d] both thirst and hunger, and yet maintaine[d] sufficient strength in the body”. The East Indians, Platt had read, rolled tobacco juice and ashes of cockleshells, and “in their trauaile they place one of these balles betweene their neather lip, and their teeth, sucking the same continually, and letting downe the moysture”, a practice that kept them from hunger and thirst for four days (B1r–2r). Platt simultaneously marvelled at the incredulity of such measures and analyzed their practical potential. The “strangest and most incredible of all” was a story he ascribed to Edmund Grindal (1519–83), Archbishop of Canterbury. Two English prisoners in Turkey, condemned to death by starvation, bribed the prison-keeper to provide them with “a smal piece of Allom”, which they sucked six times a day. After 10 days, the Turkish captor found them alive and increased vigilance. When more days passed, the exasperated Turk swore that if the men were able to continue without food for a further 10 days, he would admit “the God of the christians” had preserved them. In this manner, the prisoners obtained their release and returned to England (B1v). The Christian victory obviously appealed to the archbishop, who narrated it to the “Parson of Newington”, who, in turn, told Platt. Platt skimmed over its religious and mystical significance, but was deeply curious about the physiological enigma, attributing the success of the measure to the mineral content of alum: “For though we might suppose that the salt of nature might receiue some strength or vigour from this minerall salt, yet howe the guts should bee filled with so small a proportion I cannot gesse much lesse determine”, he commented in a still puzzled tone. The paradoxical idea that the stomach need not be filled to satisfy hunger appealed to Platt all the more because he associated it with ingenuity. He continued collecting evidence of “extraordinarie” survival strategies, and his deliberations on whether man could live on the “smell or sent of bread”, or whether milk would serve instead of meat, drink, and medicine, showed his efforts to find scientific explanations for these phenomena. On 28 May 1597, Platt met a traveller, Spenser the caster, probably at “The Star” or “Three Cupps” inns on Bread Street. Spenser told Platt about Mr Pitt, 80 years old, who lived “only on the iuyce of his meate”. It appeared he had, for the last 10 years, only chewed his bread, “wthout suffering any of the gros part to goe downe his bodie”, forbearing to swallow because he had “no passage for it”. He fed the chewed matter to his dog. Pitt

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was a “leane man” of “faire complexion”, in “perfect health”. He used to be a draper in Bristol, and now dwelt in Exeter, where he kept a shop. Similarly, Mr Woodward of Long Compton, Warwickshire, about 50 years old, had lived on “the iuyce of meate” for the last 12 years and enjoyed good health. Another gentleman, Mr Wrath of Enfield, “casteth vpp all his meate wthin a certein tyme after euery meale and therby lyveth of the nutritive iuyce only” (MS.2189, ff.119, 127). These examples proved to Platt that “repletion of the guttes” was not a criterion for survival, and that his receipts for “gellies”, “iuyces”, “essences”, and other extracts could in fact provide adequate nourishment. These kinds of survival strategies were central to contemporary discussions of the moral economy of dearth. Pitt and the others seemed quasi-heroes, who had beaten the ultimate dearth-time enemy, the human stomach itself, and their example confirmed the scientific extension of ingenious ways of beating hunger. In a context of dearth, apparently fictive “reports” were therefore used to enhance the credibility of tested or practised measures. They performed the function of psychosomatic remedies discussed earlier, harnessing the hope of survival that Platt’s experiments sought to make real. They carried to a logical extreme the very process of reduction that contemporary pursuits of household economy held important: how little could one survive on? This became a mark of real ingenuity, and making very little go a long way came to be ethically prioritized in the discourse and practice of oeconomia.

Literary dearth Through the practices collected and described in Platt’s texts (and their ethical explication) “making shift” acquired a new meaning embracing both what was done and what was imagined. This was less randomly constituted than the term “shift” might suggest, and was part of the process of making knowledge with the specific ethical aim of increasing the entitlements of the poor and hungry through efforts from below (Sen, 1981: 3–4; Walter, 1989: 32; Hindle, 2004: 92–95). The texts suggested if this process could be systematically organized, a sustainable remedy for dearth might emerge. However, the imagination activated by dearth-time ingenuity required carefully moralized monitoring. (This was part of Platt’s purpose in evoking the doctrine of judgements.) Without it, ingenuity could easily take negative, parodic forms during years of dearth. Consequently, constructions of negative ingenuity were an important part of the discourse of literatures of dearth. Much of this writing has been read as the literature of crime and vagrancy (e.g. Woodbridge, 2001), but I argue that the texts can usefully be read within the larger framework of moral debates about dearth, not crime alone. Examples of negative ingenuity abound in the literature of the 1590s, from the conny-catchers of Robert Greene’s imagining to corrupt gluttons of satires and plays. Not only did these texts imaginatively intensify the consequences of negative dearth-time ingenuity, they complicated moral frameworks seeking to separate “good” and “bad” ingenuity. Though apparently different in their literary register

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from Remedies against famine, the texts helped to articulate ethical complications of making shift and making knowledge during dearth. This body of literature highlighted, in particular, the problematic interchangeable relationship between prodigality and moderation; the complexity of punishment in a society where poverty could be regarded as the cause of excess and corruption, and corrupt practices followed principles that overlapped with basic principles of positive ingenuity; the transitory nature of abundance; and the notion of writing itself as an enactment of remedies for dearth. In what follows, I will focus on texts from different genres that interweave these concerns. “Sir John Paunch” As an example of negative ingenuity, Shakespeare’s Falstaff aptly illustrates tensions between prodigality and moderation in a commonwealth struggling to manage resources. The 1590s provided exceptional theatrical opportunities to represent the ideology of moderation that Shakespeare and others were quick to recognize. Henry IV, Part I (1598) opened with the picture of a decaying commonwealth, setting the context for the emergence of Falstaff, a remarkably conspicuous consumer of severely strained resources. The Henry IV plays, as their cosmic analogies reminded, were set in diseased and ravenous times: the “thirsty” soil daubed her lips with her own children’s blood, “civil butchery” caused violent indigestion – an “intestine shock” – in the body politic (I.i.5–16). The motif was repeated later: “Diseased nature” had its own bodily cycle, and “oft the teeming earth / Is with a kind of colic pinched and vexed / By the imprisoning of unruly wind / Within her womb” (III.i.27–30). The visceral analogies find close rhetorical resonance in contemporary manuals like those of Platt. In his imagery, Nature’s intestine shock was caused by her being “decayed”, “stricken”, and “pinched” by famine (JH, Preface). While the politics of the plays have attracted considerable critical attention, the contextual significance of dearth-time practices and practical discourses for the political debates of the Henriad has received hardly any comment.23 When Falstaff first loomed upon stage it was as a figure of monumental idleness in a world that required constant political, social, and economic industry. But to Falstaff, hours were cups of sack, minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds. The second act of Part I made this contrast clearer as it began with a scene in a flea-ridden inn on its last legs: its poor, worm-ridden workhorse, fed dank peas and beans “since the price of oats rose” was as miserable as the flea-bitten carriers in charge of the animal. Their idiomatic speech was a constant reminder of poor harvests, food shortage, and poor distribution. The starving “jade” was, ironically, loaded with food: “I have a gammon of bacon, and two razes of ginger, to be delivered as far as Charing Cross”, urged a carrier. “The turkeys in my pannier are quite starved”, responded another (II.i.1–45), before the scene shifted deftly to Falstaff, the “fat-kidneyed rascal”, who asserted, “I’ll starve ere I’ll rob a foot further” (II.ii.5–21). The play was replete with fat-and-thin jokes, and Falstaff continuously threatened to starve or melt even as he ate

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and drank voraciously. His worldview was mediated by food, and all things described and understood in food-related terms: the “fat-witted” Falstaff deftly redefined “grace” to signify a “prologue to an egg and butter” (I.ii.19–20);24 “gravity” reminded him of “gravy” (2H4, I.ii.161–62); dinner was his constant setting, and invitations and references to it were incessantly made in his presence (2H4, II.ii.197–98).25 Such manipulations of language and meanings underlined that his self-directed redistribution of resources was ruthless. He longed to transplant the “substance” of every tavern keeper, as well as the “store” of the “bacon-fed” travellers he robbed, into his own belly (1H4, II.ii.81–89; 2H4, II.i.71–75). He was called several names throughout the plays conveying his state of being permanently and materially stuffed with food and drink (“Sir John Sack and Sugar”, “chops”, “good sweet honey lord”, “stuffed cloak-bag of guts”, “roasted Maningtree ox with the pudding in his belly”, “huge hill of flesh”, “Sir John Paunch”), and eventually, through the text’s persistent wordplay, he turned into a hogshead with “a whole merchant’s venture of Bordeaux stuff in him” (1H4, I.ii.108, 129, 152; II.iv.439–41, 237; II.ii.4). Falstaff appeared to be correspondingly possessed with a strange ability to transform, so that his pistol at a critical juncture turned into a bottle of sack, and repentance gave way to merry-making as his verbal play turned “ashes and sackcloth” into “new silk and old sack”. He would not, as he said, asserting his large physical presence upon the stage, “be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion” (2H4, I.ii.220). Falstaff made shift to challenge and overturn the language and practices of moderation. The presentation of dearth and social inequality is therefore complicated by the humour this challenge generates. I suggest that, rather than being a means of regeneration and liberation, as numerous “festive” and “carnivalesque” interpretations have argued, the humour generated by Falstaff functioned in a subversive, dark, and depressing way. It was a means of satirizing dearth and the power structure that could perpetuate and indulge the existence of Falstaff, even as the serious economic shortages of the period continued. A contemporary audience might have been struck by the socio-economic incongruities of their times so vividly and ingeniously embodied by Falstaff on stage. For contemporaries the play would arguably have had an uncomfortably direct resonance (perhaps lost to a modern audience belonging to a different environment) as a text that turned dearth into spectacle and entered and interrogated the language and practices of moderation and knowledge making that shaped their immediate lives. Texts such as famine sermons or Platt’s Remedies against famine directly attacked the principle of conspicuously consuming resources to nothing, which Falstaff, quite literally, “embodied”. He, on the other hand, directly challenged the drive of sparing “oeconomy”, represented by those who had to cater to Falstaff or keep him in check. One such figure of contrast was the thin Justice Shallow, a figure similar to Slender, who constantly refused to eat, in The Merry Wives of Windsor (I.i). Shallow was dearth – “the very genius of famine”, “starved justice”, as Falstaff commented resentfully, riled by the man’s meagreness. Shallow, Falstaff complained, was “like a man

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made after supper of a cheese-paring” (2H4, III.ii.295–308). For those among Shakespeare’s audience who may have made their suppers of cheese-parings, following the principles of Platt-like waste reductive measures, the resonance of this humour may have been rather complex. They may have seen the more subversive point that Shallow, meagre as he was, had nevertheless acquired “land and beefs” (as Falstaff described his property) possibly through years of economizing and careful husbandry, and Falstaff’s ultimate scheme was to consume them: “If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him.” He swore, in a grotesque image, to “devise matter enough out of” the thin Shallow to keep up Prince Hal’s (and his own) riotous excesses (2H4, III.ii.322–27, V.i.75). The complexity arose from the conflation of images of selfish consumption as natural law, and of making the most of available resources: this conflation was a marked feature in Falstaff’s distortion of the ethics of making shift. Counterpoising fatness and thinness – a central textual motif translated into visual terms in the figures of Falstaff and his Prince – constituted the dramatic exaggeration (and complication) of the corrective moral stance of early modern ideas about economy. Not only did gluttonous Falstaff need to be starved or purged out of the fabric of society for the good of the realm, Hal’s stated intention when he played his famous trick on Falstaff was to see that he “sweats to death, / And lards the lean earth as he walks along” (1H4, II.ii.105–06). This was no mere metaphor. Hal acquired power by appropriating the prevailing discourse of remedying dearth among ordinary people. But, unlike Falstaff, he was cast as an agent relieving the “lean”, harvest-starved world, and restoring balance by the renunciation of fatness. His language turned Falstaff’s melting body into fertilizer, performing the same function as the bodies of dead animals Platt advised thrifty farmers and gardeners to bury at the roots of dying trees to rejuvenate them. This moment in the play may have been the moment of recognition for a contemporary labourer pragmatically involved in such daily shifts. The prince employed a transforming procedure directly opposed to the knight’s. He purged excess, turned bad into good, and lessened to enlarge. His remedy for his kingdom, like Platt’s receipts, was resistant to waste, proposing moderation and economy (rather than excess and exuberance) as being miraculously regenerating. This is apparent when we locate Hal’s trick in a world where practices of moderation were marks of positive ingenuity and knowledge making. Just as his thinness counteracted the fatness of Falstaff, his ethically prioritized “trick” thwarted the negative ingenuity of Falstaff’s tricks and schemes. The language of negation and depletion in his famous last words to Falstaff reflected this: “I know thee not, old man. … Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace” (2H4, V.v.47–52). Hal was remembering and reversing the momentum of Falstaff’s own earlier play on “grace”, which prioritized the term’s material association with food and consumption. The closing speech of King Henry V (as Hal was now) represented a specific balancing of the national, moral, and domestic economies, whose deliberation should be fully recognized. The sternness of the command, “Fall to thy

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prayers”, was counterpoised by the fact that the punishment meted out was carefully adjudicated, forcing moderation, but ensuring that the offenders had “means” enough for “competence of life”. There was the promise of plenty in the future, provided moderation was exercised now. The King “hath intent” that his followers shall be “very well provided for”, if “their conversations / Appear more wise and modest to the world” (V.v.98–101). Henry’s “fair proceeding”, in accord with the conventions of the play’s closure, rhetorically doomed Falstaff, and yet he was, materially, strangely persistent. When the audience saw the last of him in the play, he still boasted of his capacity to make the thin Shallow “great” as he gathered his followers and prepared to go to “dinner” (V.v.76–90). As long as provisions existed, so did Falstaff-like measures of ingenious overconsumption, and his continued presence was disturbing to the “wise and modest” economy of the new regime, which could not eliminate prodigal attitudes altogether, however committed it was to their regulation by forcibly dividing ingenuity into positive and negative moral spheres. Critical interpretations of Falstaff have continuously emphasized and refined the notion that the Henry IV plays present a polarized discourse of festivity versus order. Opinions have differed as to which side wins, or what the specific structures of the contest are. But the emphasis on this basic theme has dominated readings of Falstaff’s role ever since C.L. Barber asserted the “inexhaustible vitality” of Falstaff as the “Lord of Misrule” (1959: 241) and François Laroque defined the oppositional structure further through his application of the Carnival versus Lent motif. According to Laroque, “Falstaff’s rebellion is first and foremost that of the belly and it is made to look like the general leading Carnival’s army against the soldiers of famine and the spare practitioners of Lent” (1997: 87). And when Falstaff is banished, “monarchical order once again rises from the ashes of Carnival, but not before the pendulum has long continued to oscillate between the court and the tavern, day and night” (1991: 207). No matter how subtly varied, the critical focus on the polarized contest between festivity and order as defining the plays’ structures has persisted, even when arguments have suggested that festivity and order could be collaborative.26 This has led to the reading of space, time, and values within the play in persistent opposition: moderation is the value of the ordered world and of historical time, while regeneration is the underpinning moral gain of the festive world and time. The domination of this critical stance has also made Falstaff into a heroic embodiment of Carnivalesque energy and regeneration.27 Falstaff as “the general leading Carnival’s army” regenerates, while the “spare practitioners” of Lent or famine moderate. But in the early modern discourse of dearth, as I have argued, moderation and regeneration were logically intertwined. To view them as opposites is ultimately neglectful of the complex patterns of everyday life and the context of dearth within which the plays and Falstaff himself were conceived. If the moral force of Carnival lay in its regenerative energy, such energy can also be located in practical discourses of moderation and ingenuity during dearth. Spare practice itself ingeniously regenerated. If it was Hal’s intention to separate, and thereby contain, positive and negative

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forms of ingenuity, the very context of dearth-time knowledge making made this separation difficult. Even the “contingency” argument, focusing on tension rather than resolution,28 seems not to address the source of contingency – the paradoxical moral overlap of order/moderation and ingenuity/regeneration. This overlap invites us to resist the reading of Falstaff as a Carnivalesque hero and a singular locus or symbol of regenerative potential within the plays where he appears. “Duke Humphrey’s Squires” The incomplete punishment of Falstaff in the Henry IV plays, or the way his containment had to be continuously re-envisaged and re-attempted, problematized any simple moral notion of moderation. His processes of making shift not only exploited local communities of traders and householders, his negative ingenuity continuously claimed justification by claiming poverty. He was, in this sense, a “conny-catcher” and utilized their rhetoric efficiently to his own ends. It is thus useful to investigate, alongside Falstaff, a similar ambiguity, destabilizing moral assumptions, in literature representing vagrancy, crime, and punishment, such as Robert Greene’s popular conny-catching pamphlets. Such texts have long been the subject of critical debate regarding whether they should be approached and read as “factual histories” or “literary fictions”, moral indictments of nascent capitalism or evidence of complicit participation. My reading assumes that literary and historical materials in these texts are inseparable, and demonstrates how this complicates perceptions of their moral impact.29 The ingenious practices of Greene’s conny-catchers were a means of coping with poverty and their basic principles problematically overlapped with those of morally endorsed “remedies” outlined in Platt’s treatise. One might ask if, and to what extent, literatures of dearth sought to address this ambivalence by separating the negative ingenuity of conny-catching strategies for making shift from the positive ingenuity of knowledge making. Scholarship on conny-catching pamphlets frequently discusses the issue of boundaries between revelation and representation, and between the potentially subversive criminal “underclass” and the orders of power and social privilege. The “containment” of the vagrant and the contribution of vagrancy literature (or “rogue” literature) to this end have been widely debated, especially from new historicist and cultural materialist perspectives. Stephen Greenblatt’s influential essay “Invisible Bullets” (1988) saw the subversive practices of Thomas Harman’s trickster as revealing processes of absolute containment. Katherine Eisaman Maus similarly argued that the conny-catcher showed “calculated tactics” of self-display that extended beyond courtly circles and “penetrate[d] … down the social scale” (1993: 26). Linda Woodbridge regarded conny-catching literature as being generically contained by the comic, jest-book tradition to which these pamphlets arguably belonged, thus distancing the works from the literary tradition of social complaint (2001: 67). More recently, Patricia Fumerton argued that the primary focus of the pamphlets was the newly emerging “vagrant

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economy”, highlighting the problems of market processes, shifting occupational roles, and geographical mobility (2004).30 This critical focus on the marketplace, power structures, and socio-economic and geographical mobility is useful for assessing discourses of dearth within the texts. As dearth facilitated the mixing, as well as conflict, of social groups, and complicated processes of moral evaluation, the conny-catchers illustrated further the paradoxes of dearth. The immediate physical contexts of conny-catching ingenuity are notable, in this respect. Taverns, brewhouses, and inns appeared often as literary locations conveying the corruption of the times (Beier, 1985: 79–85; Griffiths, 2000: 121; Clark, 1983: 123). They were an ambivalent sign of the concurrence of excess and want. In Greene’s tales, the tavern repeatedly became the centre of cozening activities, where the absence or appearance of food was an aide to vice. In Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594), the tavern was a reminder of hell: its kitchen was the devil’s own, run by a grotesque hostess who carried a shoulder of mutton on a spit (1964: XIII.19–21). Greene’s hostess had the same quality of repulsiveness as Jonson’s Ursula, the fat, oily “pig-woman” in Bartholomew Fair. Ursula was, as Neil Rhodes suggested, identified with the place she inhabited – her pig-booth was “the seedy [and hellish] metropolis in microcosm” (1980: 142). In a recent study, Adam Hansen showed that early modern London’s complicated cultural geography made impossible the spatial separation of illicit and legitimate social groups (2004: 213–39), or, for that matter, the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.31 In spite of the efforts of authorities to maintain separate spheres, or create social and moral distinctions, different groups mixed, both metaphorically and materially, so that the city was reproduced in writing in ways that reflected and stimulated ambivalent intermingling. The tavern itself, like Ursula’s booth, provided a location where such mixing and resulting contradictions were visible in concentrated form. The conny was invariably led to the tavern, beguiled with food and drink, and/or the promise of sex, and then robbed or cheated at cards. “A pottle of Ipocras” repeatedly featured as the means of bringing down the victim’s defences or stimulating the cozener’s wit.32 Falstaff similarly plotted his “villainies” inspired by “sack and sugar” (1H4, II.iv); and as the four servants in John Lyly’s Mother Bombie (1594) “consult[ed] at the Taverne” to “digest” their plans, wine stimulated their ingenuity: “O the deare bloud of Grapes, / Turnes vs to Anticke shapes, / Now to shew trickes like Apes” (1902: III.187). Meals and cozening were openly linked in Greene’s A Notable Discouery of Coosnage (1591), where conny-catching became the subject of table talk. The whole conny-catching game was often a means of stealing a meal. Catchers, who paced up and down St Paul’s in search of prey, hoped “this place yet will yeelde vs all our suppers this night”. Were it not for Nan the “she-conny-catcher’s” wit and “wanton pranks”, she may have gone to bed “supperlesse”. Rich merchants, able to afford their dinners, were so thoroughly fleeced that they now “dined with Duke Humphrey”, that is, were deprived of their meals. The same fate befell Lucanio in Groats-worth of Wit (1596) when he lost all to Lamilia the “devouring” courtesan (1964: X.143, 166, 233; XII.113). The setting of

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the tavern, the meals, and the material context of these representations of poverty and hardship reinforced the sense that making shift and remedying dearth were morally ambivalent. In A Defence of Conny-catching (1592), the whole world thrived by ingenious preying. “Fox-furd Gentlemen” preyed like vultures “vppon the spoyle of the poore”. Lawyers “feede on poore mens purses”. Millers robbed “euery poore man of his meale and corne”. Vintners mixed wine with water. Butchers “puffe[d] vp” their meat (by blowing their foul breath into it) to make it look fresh. In A Quip for the Upstart Courtier (1592), brewers, bakers, and tapsters, with their special means of adulteration, were added to this list (XI.273–78). Yet, the texts offered no single-minded censure of these practices, which were, instead, merged with conny-catching pranks that readers were meant to enjoy. Entertaining narration itself was regarded as a kind of “making shift”. But, as with Falstaff, humour in this milieu functioned darkly and, far from being distanced from the mode of literary complaint (contra Woodbridge, 2001), humour in the pamphlets merged with concurrent modes of satire. The phenomenon of telling tales or lies to gain a meal was satirized in Jonson’s “To Captain Hungry”, in the antics of “smell feast” gallants in John Davies’s epigram “In Afrum”, and in Hall’s Virgidemiarum, Book 6. Davies’s “Afer” ate “as fast as he will utter lies” (147). Hall’s “Vitellio” smiled on his master “for a meale or two; / And loues him in his maw, loaths in his heart” (VI.i.47–50). Jonson’s terse reprimand to the captain, “you are Hungry; eat” (73) found resonance in the tongue-in-cheek hucksters’ proverb in Greene’s Defence: “Such must eate as are hungry and they must pay that haue money” (XI.77). This maxim, with its own imperative, evolved alongside the approach to economic redistribution recommended in Platt’s famine manual. The hucksters’ proverb not only demonstrated the thinness of the line between negative and positive devising of measures to gain more food, but that dearth was a condition that distorted moral distinctions and certainties. Hence, the traditional moral theme of punishment was destabilized. The ingenuity of the cozener, though equated with indiscipline, corruption, and deviousness, followed, simultaneously, the principle of tireless, constant inventiveness that governed the experimental methods for remedying dearth, which I describe in the next chapter as “dearth science”. The ethical and economic status of the locations where these methods were evolved could be similarly ambivalent. The tavern was also an important means of income and the source of much information for a figure like Platt, who owned such establishments constituting communities of practitioners. It was presumably there that he met many of his informants, conducted trade, and exchanged knowledge. Yet, in the popular imagination, taverns and alehouses were also commonly the locus not just of drunkenness and lechery, but of cozening practices, some of which were uncomfortably close to practices that attracted the attention and approval of those seeking to remedy famine.33 Beier observed (1985: 74–76) that vagrants frequently turned to cozening, choosing inns and alehouses in market towns for their activities, and mingling with genuine tradesmen like Platt and his associates. The ambivalence was

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intensified because pretending travellers in the literature described above, who won their meals by boast (Greene, 1964: XI.52, 62, 69, 70, 74), were both reminiscent of and a contrast to the presumably “authentic” travellers to whom a figure like Platt might have listened, and whose tales and information required verification by experiment and research. The complications that result from placing representations of dearth in these pamphlets alongside texts like Platt’s treatise are centred, therefore, on the following concerns. First, this calls for a reassessment of frequent metaphors for conny-catchers as perennially hungry, ruthless, gluttonous eaters: they were the “consuming moths” or “worms” of the commonwealth, often found at Bartholomew fair where “food” (victims or “connies”) was abundant. “Cross-biters” preyed on men “like rauens vpon dead carcases”, “like droanes [they] eate away what others labor for”, and would be “trust vp at Tiburn” to warn others. At the same time, cut-purses “worke[d] like bees” during term time; Nan the “She Conny-catcher” fed men with “sugred words”, only to consume their riches; Ned Browne the unrepentant cozener spied the fat purse of a rich gentlewoman and said, “my teeth watered”. In the end, “rauenous Wolues” dug up his grave and devoured him. Ned was paid back in his own terms; as was William who had 16 wives, and was given a grand supper before being castrated as punishment: “Thus was this lustie cocke of the game made a capon.” Similarly, the unscrupulous collier who cheated a cook was put to flight when threatened with the cook’s weapon, a spit (Greene, 1964: X.16, 30, 50, 71–72, 105, 212; XI.22, 36, 92; X.57). The ultimate threat for the voracious cozener was the threat of being quartered, roasted, and consumed. There was a tendency to imagine punishments using the very materials and methods of the crime (reminiscent of Falstaff’s fatness being melted to feed the lean land) and this appeared to effect a moral tit-for-tat resolution, a restoration of balance. Yet, such metaphors, or fantasized judgements, acquired a different slant as the texts compelled readers to consider that the conny-catchers were impoverished people, gluttonous because famished. Their negative ingenuity, or deviousness, might be their means of coping with lack, as the hucksters’ proverb quoted earlier implied. Second, the world of cozening overlapped with the world of making and exchanging knowledge. Conversations between conny-catchers, corrupt traders seeking shortcuts, and legitimate innovators operated in tension with the parodic, didactic undertone of Greene’s texts which were a criticism, as well as a “discovery” and imaginative rendering, of conny-catching practices. A Notable Discouery of Coosnage drew attention to the organization of connycatching, as both a game and skill that needed to be taught and handed down. Cozenage was represented as having its own professional jargon, lexicon, and codes of behaviour. The text began with the idea that card games – the cozener’s staple – were invented, first, to distract attention from hunger with “sport”, and, second, to make a living. It is intriguing, in this respect, that a figure like Platt too devised card tricks that were essentially methods of “telling” the opponent’s cards. One wonders what his relationships with these resourceful vagrants were like; if he learnt these tricks from conny-catchers

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(or they from him), whether Platt himself used the knowledge to win money at card games to fund his remedial experiments, and what this kind of overlap did to unsettle the moral condemnation of such transactions. The open inclusion of these schemes in his published works and manuscripts further blurs moral distinctions governing means of making money as well as knowledge making in times of dearth. Commenting on the notion of “travail” in these pamphlets and in other texts, such as husbandry manuals and improvement literature, critics have argued that labour, industry, and ingenuity “sanitized commerce” in early modern mercantile culture; consequently, the pamphlets appropriated and exposed this self-serving interpretation of labour and deflection of idleness onto the poor and unsettled (Helfand Bix, 2006: 183–88; McRae, 1996: 202; Agnew, 1988: 142–43; Fumerton, 2002; cf. Muldrew, 1998: 136, 199). Conditions of dearth, in particular, by highlighting shared notions of knowledge making, complicate this oppositional model. “Conny-catching fellowship”, their “alehouse camaraderie”, or “spirit of team sports” seem not to be so easily accommodated to an expression of solidarity against the hypocrisies of the socially superior or wealthy, because contexts of dearth-time knowledge making suggest that boundaries were fluid enough for the circle of alehouse camaraderie to incorporate normally divergent social groups. Knowledge was shared across these seeming boundaries. Third, the moral imperative for conservation and moderation that dominated the imagining of remedial measures was complicated by the ease with which abundance slipped into scarcity – a continuous and threatening motif in the literature and life of the 1590s. The life of the conny-catcher calls to mind W.G. Hoskins’s harvest graph (1964: 40), and can be imagined as an endlessly fluctuating map of alternating points of plenty and dearth. Hunger in this environment was fraught with danger, pathos, and creative heroism. An uncertain and hand-to-mouth existence countervailed the jovial spirit of the conny-catching world: “And so Nan lets sit downe to our meate and be merry” (Greene, 1964: X.156, cf. 166, 205, 235). Indulgence in food and excess while abundance lasted appeared to be justified because of an impending penury – the homeless could not store things because their unsettled status allowed no access to household structures to support preservation. It was wasteful, in their case, not to consume while stores or consumption opportunities lasted. This aspect of geographical mobility, or “vagrant economy”, if we use Fumerton’s term (2004: 203; 2006: ch.2), in conditions of dearth requires special attention. But even this principle did not remain uncontested in literatures of dearth. It created the conditions for debate around the idea of waste. Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will presented and questioned views of wasting through a different mode. Acted in 1592 (a “good” harvest year) and printed in 1600, when the memory of the most serious food crisis of the century would have been fresh, Nashe’s play announced the near-apocalyptic vanishing of “All good things”. “Peace, plenty, pleasure”, with their alliterative abundance, “suddenly decay” and “earth is hell”. Unthrift consumed rich men’s lands and “long

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labour’s gains” in an hour (1972: 150–51), driving home the radical instability of this “economy of consumption” (Hutson, 1989: 15–37). The “monstrous unthrift” of the profligate in Will Summers’ story, who “spent, in less than a year, eight and fifty pounds in mustard” was worse, said Nashe, than the “sea’s vast throat” that, in such a short time, neither “Devoureth nor consumeth half so much” (154). Yet, the notion of “living within bounds” was also rejected by Vertumnus, who provided a perverse version of carpe diem extending from the grazing of beasts to the banquets of men, and put forward spending as a “moral” imperative: “This world is transitory. … We must help to consume it to nothing” (155). The story of Geta the Roman Emperor, told by Vertumnus, frighteningly illustrated this motto: he commanded a banquet to be made him of all meats under the sun, which were served in after the order of the alphabet, and the clerk of the kitchen following the last dish, which was two mile off from the foremost, brought him an index of their several names; neither did he pingle when it was set on the board, but for the space of three days and three nights never rose from the table. (155) In this account of systematic, indexed over-consumption, where the emperor inexorably ate through every kind of meat, every available resource, in three days, one can almost imagine Geta’s household managers keeping a notebook or account book on how to consume – a parodic inversion of the notebooks kept by Platt, his associates, and other households for the purpose of managing and conserving strained resources. The abrogation of the “householders’ philosophy” of systematic conservation made Lent inevitable: “His [Lent’s] scarcity may countervail thy waste. / Riot may flourish, but finds want at last” (157). Utilizing Lent to “countervail/counteract waste” was literally true of the 1590s when fasting days were increased to combat dearth (Walter, 1989: 112–15; cf. Weever, 1599: VI.5; Honigmann, 1987: 93). In the context of property and household ownership, the moralized imperative to conserve tended to return. The dialogue between Vertumnus and Summer can be compared with the wasting of Lucanio’s fortunes in Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit. In two years, Lucanio’s “infinite” inheritance was wasted: Then walkt he like one of Duke Humfreys Squires, in a thread-bare cloake, his hose drawne out with his heeles, his shooes unseamed. … In this sorrow he sate down on pennilesse bench; where Opus and Usus told him by the chymes in his stomacke it was time to fall vnto meat, he was faine with the Camelion to feed upon the aire, and make penitence his best repast. (XII.133) The account did more than merely convey the instability of an individual’s fortunes, and the rapid onset of dearth if one did not “increase and preserve”,

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as Platt suggested in his treatise. It drew attention to an ingenious “extreme measure” suggested by the phrase “Duke Humfreys Squires”. Lucanio was one of many “Duke Humfreys Squires”, as was Nashe’s Pierce Penniless. The idiom recurred in different forms and recorded the effort to elide the reality of hunger: one dined with Duke Humphrey, so to speak, when one had nothing to dine on, by pacing before the Duke’s grave in St Paul’s during the dining hour. The location was a site of increased surveillance, mentioned in popular and official literature as the haunt of criminals. Here, it became a site of remedy, material and linguistic. The space of a concrete meal was filled by the elegant nothingness of the phrase itself. In “dining with Duke Humphrey”, one did, indeed, feed “upon the aire”. While Lucanio’s wasting of his inheritance and resources was condemned, he was also freed from the burden of this wealth and the moral obligation to conserve. As one of Duke Humphrey’s Squires, he entered the morally uncertain world of the “ingenious” hungry, and Greene’s narrative captured this painful rite of passage from the ownership of resources to unsettledness. This recurrent literary motif of reduction – making do with the smell or idea or mere hint of food – that characterized representations of hunger resonated with practices of reducing solid food to juices, spirits, powders, essences, and “smells”, outlined repeatedly in a treatise like Platt’s. Both practice and literary imagination afforded the psychological consolation that, in extreme situations, the stomach need not be really filled in order to survive. Paradoxically, the motif was used to both justify and elide processes of conserving and moderation. Unlike Platt, whose survival strategies were based on practical experiences as a trader and a gentleman protecting and preserving his lands, the authors Nashe and Greene had their own experience of dearth, based on displacement and unsettledness. Both authors were of relatively humble origin,34 and matriculated at St John’s College, Cambridge, as sizars, performing menial tasks for free “sizes” or rations. Greene moved to London (probably in the late 1580s), acquiring the image of a patronless bohemian writer, and forged a commercial career (Crupi, 1986; Helgerson, 1976; Woodbridge, 2001; Newcomb, 2004). Nashe’s portrait of an impoverished “scribbler” in search of a patron in Pierce Pennilesse was supposedly semi-autobiographical, and the circumstances of poverty, censorship, and imprisonment in which his works were composed are well documented by his biographers (Nicholl, 1984; Hutson, 1987: 199; Duncan-Jones, 1996). The conditions of their writing affected the way they fashioned their authorial stance and imagined the role of literature in a context of dearth. In other words, the discourse of dearth configured the act of writing itself. Begetting “paper-monsters” In the 1590s, the tension that suffused the paradoxical coexistence of prodigality and moderation, emerged in literary works, and was grounded in economic issues and the growing concept of a national economy, also affected the way

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authors described the act of writing. “Metaphors” of food and taste appeared in contexts where one would least expect them. Gluttony and famine, greed and niggardliness, expenditure and preservation, waste and recycling, provided the language for expressing issues that did not directly concern food. Writing social and political satire, for instance, was often depicted as the renouncing of “sweetness”: wit, judgement, learning, and invention cannot be shown in “sugred vaine”, wrote John Weever. Satire had a salty taste and wit proceeded from “want” (1599: I.21, II.4). In this climate, “satire” was viewed as a mode that could shape concerns about resource management across varied genres.35 Motifs of food, taste, and dearth, with their universal connotations offered apt ways of extending the application and efficacy of the satirical mode. Thomas Bastard wrote that his “booke” was made “for the homely countries tast”, eliminating “spice” and “pepper”, since mere “salt” was enough. Writing satire was a kind of cooking or pickling, whose corrective taste came from the purgatives “wormewood” and “Aquafortis”. Bastard’s act of paring, pruning, and corrective seasoning made his books “easie of digestion”. Satire was thus the perfect remedial food in times of dearth: “When dull, cramde, grosse, and swollen gluttony, / Scornes wholesome temperance with leaden eye. … / May we not well O times, O manners cry?” (1598: 33, 184–88). The text remedied famine through criticism and invective directed at social and political structures that fostered excess, uneven distribution, and the waste or misuse of resources. However, both attitudes of frugality and prodigality were applied to notions of writing and style. In more subtle literary arguments, the prolixity of the written word became a measure for tackling dearth. Nashe’s Pierce Penniless began his supplication with an account of his struggle to write. His text was a conversation, he said, “with scarcity”. In the prime of his wit, he was “laid open to poverty”. Reinforcing the connection between writing and other economic practices, he recalled a cobbler worth 500 pounds, an ostler worth 40 a year, and a scrivener better paid for his occupation than a scholar for his best poem. Those who had plenty spent it with “superfluous liberality”, while men of art “seek alms of cormorants” or retired to St Paul’s to dine with Duke Humphrey (53–55). The prodigality with words and imaginative excesses of Nashe’s characters like Pierce or Jack Wilton thus became both a product of and remedy for their hunger: words were all they had to expend and the text was born of want. The notion, also prevalent in satires (“wit is born of want”), appeared with a different inflection in Pierce’s account of textual production. “I determined to claw Avarice by the elbow”, wrote Pierce, “till his full belly gave me a full hand, and let him blood with my pen (if it might be) in the vein of liberality; and so, in short time, was this paper-monster, Pierce Penniless, begotten” (57). The “full hand” made up for the writer’s empty belly; writing afforded an opportunity for liberality; and resources were imaginatively transferred from the avaricious hoarder to the penniless writer. The prolific, bleeding text produced in this way, elided or, better still, remedied the pragmatic reality of scarcity and hardship. As Platt’s tales of survival and

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the phenomenon of dining with Duke Humphrey also demonstrated, elision itself could be conceived as a remedy. And yet, what made the idea problematic was the accompanying awkward awareness that the text was insubstantial, and a complex language of waste and deception grew around this awareness. Nashe often described the text as constituting “vomit” and “purgations” wrapped in waste paper, waiting to be cleared by the “unsavoury visitation” of the St Paul’s dog-whipper every Saturday. The writer’s product (unless it brought material recompense) was no different from the supplications of masterless men posted on the door of St Paul’s or the “dunghill papers” and pamphlets distributed in Westminster Hall (139). The text, though plentiful, was also a reminder of dearth and empty in its own way. Will Summers, in Nashe’s play Summer’s Last Will, complained that the text of the play he was stuck in was mere “dry sport” of no meaning (159–60, cf. 164, 170). This dual notion of the text as both plentiful and curiously unsatisfying reached its tense climax in Nashe’s Lenten Stuff. Lorna Hutson argued that the satiric focus in Lenten Stuff was not any specific individual, but “the activity of inventing language … to create references”. The very search for a single meaning was “mocked by the material density of the linguistic surface” (1987: 246–47), so that the search became the “red herring” itself. Through this “light friskin” of his “wit” and proliferation of references, the writer turned “mole-hills into mountains” and “out of dry stubble” made an “after-harvest and a plentiful crop without sowing” (376). By staging the materiality of a text, which, in substance, was mere Lenten stuff, Nashe could claim to serve a product that enabled him to demand “hospitality” in return: Here I bring you a red herring; if you will find drink to it, there an end, no other detriments will I put you to. Let the can of strong ale your constable, with the toast his brown bill, and sugar and nutmegs his watchmen, stand in readiness to entertain me every time I come by your lodging. In Russia there are no presents but of meat or drink: I present you with meat, and you, in honourable courtesy to requite me, can do no less than present me with the best morning’s draught of merry-go-round in your quarters. (375) Nashe’s Yarmouth – the “superiminent principal metropolis of the red fish” (381) – was an ironic land of Cockaigne, where the author claimed he met with “kind entertainment and benign hospitality” when unable to live by his “own juice” (379). To describe it adequately, the writer would run out of paper (397), such was the measure of her plenty. When Homer came to “one of the chief cities of Greece” and promised them “corpulent volumes of immortality if they would bestow upon him but a tender outbrother’s annuity of mutton and broth”, he was turned away (379). Poets who came “a-begging” to Yarmouth were better served. Their “corpulent” productivity was repaid.

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It was a fair exchange, as writing itself was a kind of cooking, brewing, or embellishing of the subject: “I might haps marshal my terms in better array, and bestow such costly coquery on this Marine Magnifico as you would prefer him before tart and galingale” (401–02). Carefully balancing comic and serious tones, Nashe substituted the metaphor of the text as waste paper with the analogy of cookery, a useful household task whose social value was recognized. With self-conscious ambiguity, he played with both popular notions of the writer: a cozener of sorts, who distributed “gudgeon dole” (443), as Nashe described the text, among his readers, and a productive contributor to the values and morals of a national economy. Just as “benign hospitality” was a “red herring” in the harsh material world driven by economic strain, no “deep politic state meaning” could be “fished” out from the “mingle-mangle cum purre” (the phrase was used to call pigs to the trough) of the text (444). His starved readers might, like the personified figures of Dearth and Famine in popular poetry, “disjoint and tear every syllable betwixt their teeth severally”, but all “in vaine” (Nashe, 1972: 445; cf. Allott, 1600: 256). The writer, bitterly and prodigally, received and returned nothing, it could be said; except that with this very stance, Nashe brought to the fore the imaginary nature of his Yarmouth and thereby generated debate about the social utility of his text. Michel Jeanneret, commenting on the loquaciousness of Rabelasian feasts, famously identified a correspondence between the prolixity of the speakers (their rhetorical exuberance, comic force, range of language and style) and their enjoyment of food and material excesses (1991: 99). Nashe’s works of the 1590s, read in their historical context, invert this pattern. The decade’s anxiety about food and resources translated into anxieties about the nature and “substance” of words, writing, thought, and debate. Literatures of dearth proliferated from these anxieties, creating complex, intertwining discursive strands. This chapter’s overview suggests that the main discursive strands constituted debates about: judgement and punishment, practice and remedy, experiment and innovation, fiction and imagination, and moral distinction and intersection. Each strand appears with varying emphasis across the generic range of texts discussed here: sermons, providential tales, pragmatic manuals, prose fiction, poems, and plays. Not only were literatures of dearth prolific and varied, the structures of the discourse of dearth were consequently more intricate than the discursive patterns of official documents alone can suggest. By being loquacious, authors exposed a wider material and moral crisis, conscious of the power of writing to question and unsettle meanings of waste, moderation, productivity, plenty, and dearth within the social and political structures that produced the text itself. Thomas Nashe’s literary posture provides an intriguing parallel to Hugh Platt’s. At the close of this broadside, Platt expressed anxieties about the reception of his life’s work: If it shall receiue enterteinement according to the worth thereof and my iust expectation, I may happily be encouraged to prie a little further into

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Natures Cabinet, and so to disperse some of her most secret Iewels. … otherwise, finding no speedy or good acceptance of this my proffer (but rather crossed by malice or incredulity) I doe here free and enlarge my selfe from mine owne fetters: purposing to content my spirits, with such priuate and pleasing practises, as may better sort with my place and dignitie, and in likelyhood prooue also more profitable in the ende, then if I had thankelessly deuoted my selfe to Bonum Publicum. In which course, happy men are somtimes rewarded with good words: but few or none, in these days, with any reall recompense. (Sea-men, 1607) The broadside, advertising receipts without full instructions, was, in its own way, an empty text, and deliberately so. Anxiety about reception, and tension between secrecy and revelation, were features of Platt’s printed works. In this text, published a year before his death, when illness and financial troubles loomed ahead, the tone was newly bitter and obstinate. It was in marked contrast to his first broadsheet (1593), with fuller descriptions, illustrations, and promises that were fulfilled by the publication Remedies against famine (1596) and The Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594). Now, in 1607, Platt feared that prolific publication in the past had been prodigal, and devotion to public good “thankless” and “unprofitable”. The generous dissemination of secrets seemed a “fetter”.36 Unlike Nashe, who sardonically claimed to have churned out texts that readers chewed in vain, Platt had produced texts of material use with substantial instructions, proposing scientific and applicable remedies for dearth. But their hopes and anxieties were similar. Both authors established that writing and publication were part of the ethical practice of remedying dearth, and were concerned whether the social environment, where their practices were placed, would allow their texts to bring “reall recompense” either to the public or to themselves. Platt’s broadside ended by taking refuge in rhetorical strategies that avoided giving away too much substance, and ultimately hid behind metaphors. The pragmatic receipt book, where the act of writing was a tangible contribution to the national economy, threatened with some bitterness, in this last broadside, to remain the metaphorical “Nature’s cabinet of jewels”, closed to the public. The genesis and development of this tension can be further understood by focusing on ethical relationships between dearth, knowledge exchange, and the writing and public dissemination of knowledge within a community of practitioners.

Notes 1 For analyses of these orders and the decline of general hospitality, see: Hindle, 2001a; Slack, 1988: 148, 1992: 2; Archer, 1991: 199; Heal, 1990: 128; Walter, 1985: 130–31, 1989: 109–10; Appleby, 1978: 145; Greaves, 1981: 481, 497; Walter and Wrightson, 1976: 34.

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2 The standard view is, as one of many providential calamities such as war, disease, or floods, dearth had no specific import above other calamities within the structure of providential thought (Walter and Wrightson, 1976: 30–32; Walsham, 1999: 116–66). 3 The sermons, first published in Zurich (1571), were translated into Latin, De caritate annonae ac fame conciones tres (1587). Ludwig Lavater (1527–86), Archdeacon at the Grossmünster in Zurich, and son-in-law of Heinrich Bullinger, is better known for his work on supernatural phenomena De spectris, lemuribus et magnis atque insolitis fragoribus (1569) translated into English by R.H., Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght,: and of strange noyses, crackes, and sundry forewarnynges (1572). See Landwehr, 1984: 125–34. On Barlow, see: Knighton, 2004; Collinson, 1982: 483, 557, n. 77, 1983: 11–15, 28–29, 44; Tyacke, 1987; Fincham, 1990. 4 Famine sermons developed the official discourse of remedying the crisis and supplemented the content of formally used homilies: see The Second Tome of Homelyes, 1563: 89–102, 168–81, 273–92; abridged in 1586 in the Order for Publike Prayers; supplemented in 1596 by Three Sermons, or Homelies to Move Compassion towards the Poor and Needy. Other preachers include: Richard Curteys (1600: F6v); William Vaughan (1600: 6–7); Samuel Bird (1598: 79); Henry Holland (1596: 8); Henry Arthington (1597: C1); Samuel Gardiner (1597: 11); William Redman (1595); Edward Topsell (1596); Peter Barker (1597). On ecclesiastical involvement and public fasting and prayer during dearth: Fideler, 1992: 199–201, 208–10; Kitching, 1985; Bartel, 1955; Freeman, 2000: 40–43. 5 Cf. William Cupper compared “dearth, famine and warre” in the same category of God’s judgements (1603); similarly, George Wilkins, Three miseries of Barbary: plague. famine, ciuill warre (1607). 6 Marshalling examples from beyond England was established practice in providential discourse (Walsham, 1999: 128). 7 On dearth as part of a wider context of crisis and calamity, see Walsham, 1999: 126–28; Sharpe, 1995; Hindle, 2000: 37–54. Essays in Clark (1985) make a more sceptical assessment of the “crisis”. 8 Cf. Woodwall’s sermon on Ezekiel (1609) issues a more conventional warning. 9 For Creede’s biography, see Yamada, 1994. 10 Barker also published A iudicious and painefull exposition vpon the ten Commandements (1624; repr. 1633). The Stourpaine parish register records that he became rector in 1590, dying before 1631 (will dated 14 January 1631; PROB 11/159). Hutchins’ History & Antiquities of Dorset noted: “[Barker’s] learning and quaintness remind one strongly of the writings of his contemporary Thomas Fuller, and the strings of old saws, and strange comparisons and anecdotes, both classical and familiar, with which he illustrates and enforces his sound Protestant doctrine, fully entitle him to rank with that still popular writer, and demand his restoration to a niche amongst the worthies of Dorset.” See Dorset OPC Project: www.opcdorset. org/StourFiles/Stourpaine/Stourpaine.htm 11 On 19 July 1591, Coppinger and Arthington moved through London streets proclaiming “newes from heaven”, before mounting a cart in Cheapside and announcing the second coming of Christ in the guise of William Hacket. After their arrest, Hacket was executed, Coppinger died in Bridewell, and Arthington recanted in a pamphlet (1592). The episode was used as anti-Puritan propaganda to drive home the dangers of religious enthusiasm (Walsham, 1998). 12 On national identity and chronicles, see Salmon, 1959; Levy, 1967: 202–36. On English representations of French history, see Kirk, 1995, 1996. Providentialism was intertwined with other forms of causation in the English chronicles (Rackin, 1990: 5–8; Levy, 1967: 167–201, 1987: 3–4; Kelly, 1970). 13 In 1592, A true relation of the French kinge gave a similar godly account of the success of Henry’s troops against Parma in Rouen. Publications swiftly followed volatile events; comparable pamphlets circulated in France, giving very different

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23

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accounts. Besides L’Estoile, see Bref traite des miseres de la ville de Paris (1590) in Cimber and Danjou, 1834–50: XIII.271–85. Barlow’s “eclectic” career suggests he adeptly balanced radical theology and religious convention. Although commissioned to write the official account of the Hampton Court proceedings, he had friends among the Puritan clergy and Arminians (Collinson, 1983: 483, 557, n.77; Fincham, 1990: 46). On approaches to knowledge, see especially Siraisi and Pomata (2005); Smith, 2007. On the role of “books of secrets” in knowledge-making processes, see Leong and Rankin, 2011; Eamon, 2011: 23–46; Smith, 2011: 47–66; Mukherjee, 2011: 69–86. Leong and Pennell discuss the social and market values of receipt books (2007: 133–52; cf. Rankin, 2007: 23–53). Platt’s appendix describes Struppe’s
ITOOTIAMATEXNIN (1574): “An abstract of certaine frugall notes, or obseruations in a time of Dearth or famine, concerning bread, drink, and meate, with some other circumstances belonging to the same, taken out of a Latin writer, intituling his booke, Anchora famis & sitis”. Struppe (1530–1606) practised medicine in Frankfurt, becoming (in 1575/6) personal doctor, advisor, and librarian to Elector Friedrich IV of the Palatinate. The British Library possesses a presentation copy of Anchora famis inscribed to Elizabeth I (D-7953f.34). Cf. Hindle and Humphries (2008: 1–4) call for multivariate approaches to dearth within economic history. The bread, starch, and beer trades are discussed further in chapter 5. Spaccini’s Cronaca Modenese (1588–1636: 2.177) narrates an extreme case in 1601 in Reggio when three abandoned children of peasants tried to stay alive by consuming boiled straw (cf. Camporesi, 1989). The assistant’s italic hand makes it tempting to speculate that this may have been Platt’s wife, Judith, who assisted him at work. MS.2244, ff.29v–31 provided the following measurements: “1/4 of good vinegar in water makes a good beverage and is cooling. Per Sr Fr. Drake”; “1/8 pt of malassoes makes good drink”. As director of the East India Company, Lancaster (1554–1618) commanded four ships on their first expedition in 1601, when 105 men died of scurvy, but he managed to save many of his crew with his lemon juice remedy (Beckingham, 2004). The exception is Charles Whitney’s article (1994). New historicist approaches to Falstaff have been challenged by the enduring fascination with Falstaff’s “character” and “subjectivity” (Morgann, 1777; Everett, 1991; Bloom, 1998: 271, 288, 306; Grady, 2001). On history, politics, and form in the Henriad, see Tennenhouse, 1986; Yachnin, 1991; Mayer, 1997; Dean, 1997; Rumrich, 1996; Dutton, 1998. These arguments are developed in discussions of the juxtaposition of high politics and everyday (Erskine-Hill, 1996: 79–80; Howard and Rackin, 1997: 160; Billington, 2005: 19) and Falstaff’s place in Puritan satire (Taylore, 1985; Helgerson, 1991: 249; Womersley, 1999; Poole, 2000: 20, 21, 39; McAlindon, 2001: 100–07; Kastan, 1999: 93–106). The long tradition of interpreting Falstaff in relation to festive and grotesque is significant for the context of dearth (Dover Wilson, 1943; Barber, 1959; Rhodes, 1980; Laroque, 1988, trans. 1991; McLoughlin, 2000). Critical debates on festivity and order in Henry IV are summarized by Ruiter (2003: 1–39). This is a reversal of the sublimating movement A.D. Nuttall detects in sixteenthcentury Primers containing “graces” to be said at meals (1989: 118). Existing interpretations of Falstaff’s fatness often obscure this comment on distribution of resources by a transcending emphasis on the importance of character and subjectivity, or by specificities of anti-Puritan satire: e.g. Everett (1991) and Womersley’s riposte (1999). For different constructs of this polarization, see Pugliatti, who identified three components, order, misrule, and rebellion (1996: 109); Howard and Rackin argued that order and national identity were reinforced by casting misfits out from the

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Literatures of dearth commonwealth (1997: 179); Mossman concurred that Falstaff was the Lord of Misrule defeated by forces of political order (1997); Leggatt argued Shakespeare intended to make order win (1998); Mayer and Womack discussed the implication of the opposition for the depiction of time (1997: 29–46; 1995: 140); Berger Jr discussed Falstaff’s wilful immolation (1998); Reid and Tennenhouse argued that order won, but by absorbing festivity into its power structures (1996: 471; 1986: 74); and Dean emphasized the teleological framework of order (1997). See, for example, the notion of Falstaff as the hero of a counter-culture, a “Falstaffian movement”, which modulates into the familiar argument that “rule needs misrule” and power needs opposition to define itself (Hall, 1997: 123–51; Ruiter, 2003: 69–73). For different formulations of the contingency argument, see Rumrich, who highlights the “organic messiness” of the plays (1996: 111–41); Goldman, who says the plays thrive on their “rhythm of instability” and “perpetual realignment”(1998: 203–19); and similar arguments about the indestructibility of Falstaff (Hunter, 1959; Dean, 1997; Howard and Rackin, 1997; Yachnin, 1991), which have led to creative reinterpretations of Falstaff’s own quip on “perpetual motion”, recently by Ruiter (2003). For a useful analysis of empirical and rhetorical modes of analyzing rogue literature, see Kinney (2004: 361–81); and the classic study of criminal microhistories by Sharpe (1998: 235). The critical literature on this subject is considerable: representative positions are outlined in Dionne and Mentz (2004). On spatial realities, segregation, and social intermixing in early modern London, see especially Cowen Orlin (2000); Rappaport (1989); Jutte (1994: 165); Griffiths (2000: 115–33); Gowing (2000: 130–51). Roger Finlay suggested there was an attempted selection or coerced habitation of some places by specific social groups, and each of these places had a “distinctive demography” (1981: 16); but the studies above suggest that such imposed and imagined boundaries were ineffectually maintained. See Greene, “A Notable Discouery of Coosnage” (1591), “A Disputation between a Hee Conny-catcher and a Shee Conny-catcher” (1592), “The Life and Death of Ned Brown” (1592), “A Defence of Conny-catching” (1592), “A Quip for an Upstart Courtier” (1592), and “Greens Groats-worth of wit” (1596) in Works, vols. 10–12. “Wicked Rablais dronken reuellings”, says Joseph Hall, “grace the mis-rule of our Tauernings” (1598: II.i.57–58). Anne Lake Prescott terms Hall’s lines “curiously festive” (1998: 112), but “hellish” alehouses, as argued above, caused the authorities some concern. Greene’s father was either a saddler or an innkeeper in Norwich, and Nashe was the third of seven children of a clergyman in Suffolk. For a discussion of satire as the product of neo-classical conventions, see Kernan, 1959. Cf. Richard McCabe argued that 1590s satirists were “beginning to realise the full potential of their medium as a vehicle for social complaint” (1981: 188–93). For recent approaches to satire as a mode that worked across a range of texts, see Connery and Combe, 1994; Bogel, 2001; McRae, 2004. Platt used the opposite argument, favouring revelation to secrecy, in earlier optimistic works (Mukherjee, 2011).

3

Dearth and knowledge making

While examining how discursive relationships described in the previous chapter actually affected knowledge making within a particular community of practitioners at a time of dearth, Hugh Platt has proved an unavoidable case study. His texts give unusually detailed evidence of the genesis and functioning of a community of “dearth-scientists”, and this chapter recovers, describes, and codifies their work. It defines basic principles underlying Platt’s “dearth science”, explains my coinage of this term and its broader ethical and environmental significance. The aim is to demonstrate why the practices of Platt and his associates can usefully be termed “science” in their historical moment, and how “dearth science” could be seen as constituting an early modern understanding of sustainability. I focus on Platt’s biography and socio-economic challenges, which clarify his preoccupation with dearth, and on his manuscripts, which help to reconstruct his wide network of associates and their knowledge-making practices. While previous chapters have uncovered cultural meanings of dearth across a wide range of texts, this chapter views dearth through the lens of early modern scientific practice and its complicated textual dissemination.

Sir Hugh Platt, dearth scientist Hugh Platt, the son of a London brewer, was a remarkably energetic Elizabethan whose famine remedies, discussed in the last chapter, were located within a larger, more complex philosophical and practical enterprise. Platt’s printed texts and manuscripts addressed an extraordinary range of topics from food and fuel substitutes to alchemical procedures, and, as a result, scholarly writing on him records a struggle to position him as an author. He has been variously described as a “writer on agriculture and inventor” (Lee, 2004), a “gardening authority” (Rohde, 1924: 31), an “imitative poet”, a “zealous popularizer of projects to benefit his country” (Panofsky, 1982: v–xxi), a forerunner of Francis Bacon in his emphasis on experimental science (Webster, 1975: 468; Harkness, 2007: 211–53), an expert on agricultural chemistry (Debus, 1968; Thick, 1994: 2), an “Elizabethan professor of secrets” (Eamon, 1994: 311), and an exponent of mnemotechnical devices who demonstrated the secular and commercial uses

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of artificial memory schemes (Engel, 1991: 12–33). The only book-length charting of Platt’s “multifarious interests” by Malcolm Thick sums him up as a “gentleman of varied interests, a Londoner trying to make his way in the world” (2010: 9). Platt’s occupational range has invited contradictory evaluations: an early article on his printed works praised him as a “virtuoso” (Mullett, 1946), while one recent assessment reviled him as a “quack” (Burrow, 2004). Often only partially comprehended in modern accounts, Platt was better understood in his own day and in the century that followed. The first members of the Royal Society regarded him as a pioneer, and adopted his agricultural reforms. Samuel Hartlib praised him as a “learned Philosopher” (Hartlib, 1655: 217–19; cf. Coxe, 1665: 91–94; Review, 1675: 302–04). Platt’s work on gardening, Floraes Paradise (1608), was reprinted seven times in the seventeenth century as The Garden of Eden,1 and The Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594) reappeared in 1653, with an appendix by Arnold de Boot, Hartlib’s associate. Several of Platt’s manuscript works on alchemy were examined by Samuel Harsnett (1561–1631), Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge (1605) and later Archbishop of York (1628).2 Before they became part of the Sloane Collection, his manuscripts were in the possession of Thomas Hodges (1600–72), Dean of Hereford and father of the physician Nathaniel Hodges. Thomas was a lecturer at Highgate Chapel in Hornsey, Middlesex, in the 1630s, where he became a friend of Platt’s son William. Through this connection, Hodges obtained Hugh Platt’s manuscripts, which he annotated copiously, and to which he compiled a thematic index (Atherton, 2004).3 While describing the full range of Platt’s writing, life, and network of acquaintances, associates, and clients, I argue that the aim and consequence of his interests are best understood by observing the interrelations of his diverse subjects and his commitment to combat scarcity. He was a poet, and a theorist and practitioner of alchemy, medicine, agriculture, horticulture, husbandry, and household management, as well as participating in manufacturing and marketing practices of many contemporary trades and professions. In 1593, his first broadside, A Briefe Apologie of Certaine New Inventions, advertised inventions he exhibited to some Privy Councillors and citizens of London: a labour-saving and hygienic “boulting hutch” to avoid waste of fine flour, a wooden boiling vessel that saved fuel, a “new kinde of Fire”, a portable pump, and “a wholesome and lasting victuall for the Nauie” (see Figure 3.1). Besides the famine treatise discussed earlier, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594) expanded on such inventions, presenting “receipts”4 concerned with preserving food, cheap animal feed, brewing, shoemaking, fuel-saving, carpentry, weapons, perfuming, building, and sport, and also appended treatises on husbandry, distillation, and moulding. The apparent disjointedness in this list conceals a unity of thought that would have been clear in Platt’s own moment, and was organized around the author’s efforts to fashion himself as a provider of cures for dearth. Despite his own comparatively privileged background, Platt’s engagement with family trades and professions that might bring wealth and privilege

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Figure 3.1 Platt’s broadside, A Briefe Apologie of Certaine New Inventions (1593), p.1. Society of Antiquaries of London, Main Library, Cab Lib g – Broadsides (Bound), 1–107

could not, in these times, preclude an engagement with dearth. Hugh Platt was baptised on 3 May 1552, in the parish church of St James, Garlickhythe in London.5 His father Richard Platt (1528–1600) was a prominent member of the parish, and a wealthy brewer. Richard, originally from Hertfordshire, appears to have moved to London and risen steadily in his society and profession. He had begun as an apprentice to Hugh Mynors of the Brewers’ Company in 1542, become a Freeman of the Company in 1550, and by 1553 (soon after the birth of his third son, Hugh), the Company records show him taking on several apprentices (including two of his grandsons by Hugh) until 1598. Richard served as Master of the Brewers’ Company in 1576 and 1581, and his coat of arms, granted in 1583, still hangs in the Company’s Livery Hall. He served as Alderman and Sheriff of London, and became actively engaged in charitable causes, endowing a free grammar school and almshouses in Aldenham, in his native Hertfordshire, in 1597.6 But Richard was also an astute trader, and his case is illustrative of the rise in power and status of the mid-sixteenth-century suburban landowner and tradesman. Richard owned a brewery chain. He was proprietor of the Old Swan on the Thames in Garlickhythe, which eventually passed to his son Hugh, while names of other breweries (“The Vyne”, “The Golden Tunn”, “The Red Lyon”, and “Three

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Blew Anchors”) appear in the Platt estate papers. These documents, along with Richard Platt’s will, show that he held various properties and his brewhouses were also retail outlets.7 Hugh was his only surviving son, and appears to have had an income enabling him to invest in scientific experiments. Upon his father’s death in 1600, Hugh was the executor and main beneficiary of his wills (LMA, CLA/023/DW/01/279; PRO, PROB11/96). These inherited responsibilities, to protect and supervise his family’s wealth, did much to shape Platt’s theory and practice of a science informed by a gradually evolving ethic for managing socio-economic and environmental crises. His corpus thus allows us to reconstruct, with unusual specificity, not only the material culture and practices of ordinary inhabitants of early modern London and its suburbs, but to reassess their engagement with economic and ecological concerns of their day. Like many well-to-do gentlemen of his time, Platt matriculated as a pensioner from St John’s College, Cambridge, at Michaelmas 1568, graduated B.A. in 1571–72, and was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn, where he later became steward and master of revels (Venn and Venn, 1922–54: I.3.370; Baildon, 1896: I.79). By his first marriage, in 1573, to Margaret Younge, Platt had three sons, Richard, Hugh, and John.8 Not much is known about the family from this early marriage, except that the sons Richard and Hugh were apprenticed to their grandfather (in 1597 and 1598) and benefited from the latter’s will, while John intermittently appears in a seventeenth-century dispute over the Platt properties. After the death of his first wife, Platt married Judith Albany in 1584 at All Hallows, Bread Street, London. They had three daughters, Ann, Judith, and Mary, and two sons, William and Robert. Both sons went to Cambridge as Fellow-Commoners at St John’s and Emmanuel, respectively. William became a barrister, but Robert was, alas, a squanderer.9 The children are often anxiously mentioned in Platt’s logbook of medical treatments, as he worries over their susceptibility to fevers or “agues”, while his wife Judith emerges as a distinct character in her husband’s manuscripts and published works. He evidently hovered about her kitchen with active curiosity. She is mentioned admiringly as an example of domestic efficiency, an able assistant to Platt’s experimentation, and the envy of other wives who coaxed her to divulge her superior (because less wasteful) cheese-making methods. Platt’s seemingly conventional and comfortable family life was accompanied, however, by sharp shifts in his vocation, linked to the challenges presented by his crisis-driven environment. At the age of 20, he had embarked on a short-lived literary career, publishing what was probably his commonplace book, a work called The floures of philosophie (1572). This volume contained a compilation of Senecan precepts with a collection of poems authored by Platt. Ironically titled “the Pleasures of Poetrie”, the poems sharply satirized contemporary socioeconomic practices such as the racking of rents, enclosures, bad husbandry, and covetousness. Platt was thus engaging in one of the rapidly developing contemporary vehicles of social criticism, verse satire, which became prolific in the dearth years of the 1590s, until officially banned in 1599 (McCabe, 1981: 188–93). An alphabetical index to this book categorized the Senecan

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precepts under broad topics connected with the moral themes of Platt’s poems. This indexing methodology was refined not only in a second published compilation, a book of sententiae from Petrarch and the church fathers (1594), but also in indices to Platt’s subsequent publications on pragmatic subjects. The methodology encouraged readers to engage, sift, construct their own meanings, and thereby participate in Platt’s processes of moralized socio-economic criticism. The idea that his reader must be as active as himself – physically, mentally, and morally – would prove crucial to Platt’s programmatic endeavours to cure dearth. From the 1580s onwards, his activities and his reading demonstrate his versatility. His printed works, recording several years of reading, consultation, and experimental endeavour, appeared from the 1590s, in quick succession: 1593, 1594, 1595, 1596, 1600, 1601, 1602, 1603, 1607, 1608. With almost a publication per year, Platt seems to have been something of a publishing phenomenon in his time. But his manuscript receipt books, where he noted results of experiments, and names of his advisors and associates, contain receipts dated from the early 1580s (e.g. MS.2203, ff.203–32). In other words, he was quick to perceive both need and opportunities for continuous dissemination of ideas crucial to his programme. By the 1590s, he was probably a known figure, at least in London and Middlesex. He oversaw substantial properties belonging to his father, for the Platts had estates in the city of Westminster, the parishes of St Sepulchre and St Pancras in Middlesex, East Greenwich in Kent, and St Albans and St Michaels in Hertfordshire.10 The St Sepulchre properties included (according to William Platt’s will) 66 houses, gardens, yards, tenements, and lands, and their location is revealing in relation to Platt’s moral economy. The parish of St Sepulchre lay mainly outside the city wall and ditch and comprised, according to sixteenthcentury maps of the area, much green space. West Smithfield bordered on the Bartholomew’s Fair ground, and to the north of the field were the bars or gates, beyond which lay the Platt property on Cowcross Street. The street was lined with houses and tenements, north of which lay the precincts of St John, Clerkenwell. To the west of Cowcross were open pasture grounds, orchards, and scattered houses, as illustrated by a map of London from 1550. A survey map completed by William Morgan in 1682 showed that these open spaces had already become considerably populated. In stark contrast to the 1550 map, which depicted a rustic scene in these parts, Morgan’s map revealed closely packed tenements with garden plots. This suggests the Platt properties were in semi-rural suburbs at a moment when these areas were beginning to become developed. Richard Platt had also leased land in the manors of Tottenhall and Cantlowes in St Pancras, which amounted to 71 acres at the death of Mary Platt (William Platt’s wife) in 1687 (LMA, CLA/023/DW/01/279; St John’s Archives, D111–13). Hugh Platt owned leases in Bishop’s Hall, former country seat of the Bishop of London, and later in Kirby Castle. Both were in the Bethnal Green area, so much of which was home to the wealthy middle class. He kept a garden in Martin’s Lane, and estates of 70 acres called Parsonsfields and Leventhroppes

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near St Alban’s, Hertfordshire (Baker, 1998: XI; PROB 11/175). These were the sites of his agricultural and horticultural experiments (Mukherjee, 2010). He had at least 10 tenements on “the bankside of Surrey”, and “diuerse houses” on Thames Street in London, which he left to his wife Judith (PROB 11/112; cf. 11/175). Platt also ran his father’s brewhouse the Old Swan in the St James parish, and possibly others (PRO E134/8Jas1/East2). His writings show an intimate knowledge of the brewing trade and its manufacturing procedures. Somewhere in, or close to, Bethnal Green (the precise location is nowhere mentioned) Platt leased a warehouse and kept a shop, known to his acquaintances, clients, and associates as the “Jewell House”, and sold a range of intriguing products. The name became the title of one of the owner’s bestknown books, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594), which made available to the public the knowledge that had gone into the making of things stored in the “Jewell House” (MS.2197, ff.14, 15). From the 1580s until his death in 1608, Platt appears to have lived the life of a wealthy gentleman and trader with eclectic interests, so cleverly captured in the name of his shop. The name “Jewell House” may seem oddly ironic given that its owner was consistently preoccupied with dearth. The irony is compounded because, throughout his life, Platt maintained his courtly connections, having befriended members of the Segar family: Francis Segar (Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Moritz of Hessen-Kassel), and his nephew William, mentioned in Platt’s manuscripts as “Segar the herald”. He also knew the explorer Sir Francis Drake and, as described in the previous chapter, gleaned from him information about preparing lasting foods for sea voyages. The wine made from grapes cultivated by Platt in Bethnal Green was praised by the French ambassador, while his manuscripts repeatedly note the names of local MPs, landowners, and gentlemen (Sir Thomas North, Lord Roger North, Sir Thomas Mildmay, Valentyne Knightley, and others) in connection with his experiments and merchandise.11 Platt’s socially privileged associates constituted a carefully cultivated resource: these informants, advisors, and buyers themselves were “jewels” whose contributions could be polished and set in frames of reference that counted towards Platt’s dearth-time concerns. Besides his prominent friends in high places, a large and closely engaged group of Platt’s friends and “jewels” were equally drawn from the professionals, merchants, working hands, and traders, living and operating in London, Middlesex, and Hertfordshire, where his lands and tenancies were scattered. He keenly observed professional pursuits of his tenants in St Albans,12 meticulously noted experimental variations made not only by other landed gentlemen, but also gardeners, farmers, apothecaries, carpenters, brewers, bakers, starch-makers, goldsmiths, limners, dyers, soapboilers, saltpetre men, clothiers, medical practitioners, housewives, travellers, and sailors – informants who are frequently mentioned by name and profession. When Platt used printed sources, he noted the alterations to these receipts proposed by himself or other informants (esp. MSS.2244, 2197, 2216, 2189). His papers reveal he effectively combined the offices of a landed gentleman with those of a trader. In his environment, it was perhaps no longer practical

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to do otherwise. It is probable some of his informants too practised the same conflation of roles, and social distinctions between these roles were not as sharp as we might imagine.13 Platt’s manuscripts thus offer an insight into the social realities with which the early modern “middle class”, whose activities are notoriously difficult to document, had to contend (Wright, 1965: viii, 18; Pelling, 1998: 3). The inventories of Platt’s shop “Jewell House” mirrored such realities (see Figure 3.2): among many products, he and his associates designed, made, and sold “chaffing dishes to heate without fier”, “reuerberators [metal reflectors] to roust with”, and “5 spittes in one” (see Figure 3.3), which conserved fuel in cooking and heating. Efficient transport of food was another central concern: “Boxes to carrie past or other meates hotte in” and “A waggon for the

Figure 3.2 “Wares for my Jewelhowse”: inventory of Platt’s shop: Sloane MS.2197, f.15r. © British Library Board

Figure 3.3 Platt, Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594): “5 spittes in one”, p.21. British Library, General reference collection, 1651/69. © British Library Board

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seamen to draw their victualls on land” were listed. “A Lanthorne wherein a naked candle is not blowne owte” appeared as a product for sale, as well as being elaborately described and illustrated in the book Jewell House (see Figure 3.4). “Yncks powder”, “Paper prepared for blew and red letters”, “Desks of glas” (specially designed frames for tracing patterns; see Figure 3.5), and “old Tables in oyle refreshed” were included to aid cheap production of decorative items. The shop also featured the extraordinary assortment of “oyles for the Tooth ach”, “collors for hayre”, and “cinnamon water” along with “piercing bulletts for the warr” and “Wheels to drie gonpowder without danger of fier”.

Figure 3.4 Platt, Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594): “A Lanthorne wherein a naked candle is not blowne owte”, p.27. British Library, General reference collection, 1651/69. © British Library Board

Figure 3.5 Platt, Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594): “Desks of glas”, p.39. British Library, General reference collection, 1651/69. © British Library Board

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Cheap bread, macaroni, and “cuscusow” were marked out as products “for the poore”, while “oranges, lemons and other fruites owte of season” displayed Platt’s gardening expertise. Many shop items were described in Platt’s book Jewell House. In such texts, one may hear the sophisticated, elite, analytical voice of Platt, the gentleman author, blended with the voice of Platt, the Elizabethan shopkeeper, hawking his wares. His social reality, and that of his numerous friends, is better perceived if we understand this dearth-time merging of seemingly incompatible personae. Neither “gentleman” nor “expert mediator” can fully explain Platt’s motivations: he was clearly a trader, and yet commanded respect and trust due to a “gentleman” at the time; he theorized and codified practical arts by experimenting and trading with the materials of these arts alongside its common practitioners, rather than following social and behavioural distinctions so constantly touted in the period’s prescriptive literature.14 Dearth, as previously noted, created more than “doorstep” encounters between the poor and the middling or wealthy sorts. It brought about active exchanges of knowledge, practices, and identities. Such exchanges were not as unsystematic as it is often argued. Deborah Harkness’s work on Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution put forward the provocative argument that many of Francis Bacon’s ideas for the reform of natural knowledge were repetitions of proposals made by figures like Platt (2007: 246; cf. Eamon, 1994: 314). Harkness wrote that Platt offered his readers “a smorgasbord of natural knowledge gleaned from hands-on practices” (212). Despite the “messy” aspects of Elizabethan science and its methods of fact-gathering (222), Platt’s efforts of knowledge production and dissemination, though copious, were not, I would argue, so randomly constituted from “whatever struck his fancy” and the sheer accessibility of observable data in Elizabethan London (225).15 Nor were these efforts simply representative of diverse pursuits of a “virtuoso” – “a gentleman of varied interests” – as Malcolm Thick’s categorization of Platt suggested (2010: 9). By highlighting, in their own ways, the seeming randomness of Platt’s endeavours, Harkness and Thick overlooked the underlying coherences of Elizabethan knowledgemaking efforts that were stimulated by serious economic and ecological anxieties. This examination of Platt’s manuscripts and printed works aims to fully register the particular concerns of these texts, their material contexts, as well as their principles of interrelation, coherence, and structure. Platt’s contribution can be reassessed as a far more systematic effort to produce knowledge and bring civic and economic benefit. Economic motivations for the emergence of English virtuosity and virtuosi were powerfully argued by Eamon (1994: 302–05). While virtuosity may have been, in part, a “symptom of aristocratic defensiveness” and idleness (ibid.), for figures like Platt (who were not noblemen and, therefore, had to deal with their contemporary crises in ways distinct from aristocratic strategies) virtuosity itself had to be transformed into both economic productivity and ecological benefit. Another point of departure from existing assessments of Platt is that I perceive him as a significant and remarkable figure rather than one of many “typical” or “humble” practitioners

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of the Elizabethan period (Harkness, 2007: 218–19; Debus, 1965: 65–81; Pumfrey and Dawbarn, 2004: 137–88). Platt himself often drew and relied on the work of other practitioners, but to their knowledge and ethics he applied his own extraordinary organizing intelligence.

The knowledge-makers: Platt and his network The Platt manuscripts in the British Library’s Sloane Collection, rarely analyzed by modern scholars, illuminate technical evolution in many different fields of knowledge, and present a unique picture of the workings of the early modern national economy under pressure of economic crisis and environmental change. The texts clarify Platt’s theorizing of dearth and its remedy, and may be divided into the following categories: correspondence between Platt and his professional associates; medical notebooks containing records of his patients, their illnesses, and remedies prescribed; abstracts, translations, and selections from printed works or circulating manuscripts; notebooks containing records of alchemical experiments by the author; and receipt books that recorded, categorized, and organized information under varied subjectheadings. Each category helps to reconstruct Platt’s network of associates and different facets of their knowledge-making practices and principles. The correspondence includes an exchange with a hard-up gentleman, Thomas Elkinton, who enlisted Platt’s help to set up a medical practice to supplement his income. Platt was often called upon for such help. A letter also survives from his cousin Henry Davenport, a Coventry clothier with a deteriorating cloth trade, who functioned as his assistant, bartering professional secrets and merchandise on his behalf. The help Platt gave or received was part of a complex structure of exchange. There is an agreement (in Platt’s hand) with Arthur Blackamore, citizen and grocer of London, dated 28 February 1599. Blackamore testified to having purchased from Platt a “Secrete” for extracting the liquor of “Logwood … wherby the same may bee reduced into a new and lesse … boddie then naturally it beareth” (MS.2172, ff.28–29, 27, 12). Given the contemporary use of logwood extract in dyes, medicines, and even to colour inferior port, Blackamore the grocer evidently thought it worth his while to pay Platt for his recipe for reducing this bulky wood to an “essence”. In these documents, Platt was the more established trader, but in other letters, he adopted a different tone and a subservient address (MS.2203, f.112; MS.2172, f.18). The unnamed addressee of one letter was offered various secrets: for making cinnamon water, spirit of herbs, flavoured butter, sage ale, “waters” from flowers, purges, powders for agues, and golden figures of beasts using “the 1/8 part of gould that any ordinarie Ieweller shall doe”. Platt offered to convey eight of the easiest receipts immediately, while the others (he asserted tactfully) could wait because they were troublesome and “more soiling in the workemanship then is fitt for soe honorable a person as you are”. The tone and ploy here were similar to the letter to Francis Segar (1608), asking him to intercede with his master the “Landgrave of Hesse”, containing

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veiled accounts of alchemical secrets Platt was willing to impart to Moritz of Hessen-Kassel, well known for his interest in alchemy (Moran, 1985: 110–26). These documents prove the existence of a network of intellectual exchange, and a mercenary trade in “secrets”, where Platt played an active part from at least the turn of the century. While he was successfully engaged in the business of trading receipts with other professionals, he looked for opportunities to obtain patronage and support for his experiments from sources beyond the local. As the exchange with Segar suggests, Platt was keen to tap into the opportunities provided by princely courts of Europe as sites for the production of alchemical and natural knowledge for pragmatic, commercial, and ideological ends (Evans, 1973; Moran, 1991; Smith, 1994). Alas for Platt, this particular bid for patronage may have come to nothing, as there is no evidence that Moritz responded. Nevertheless, Platt continued to be a keen advertiser of his own work, as apparent from his broadsides and appendices, which adopted the same confiding tone as the last two letters discussed and tantalized readers with promises to deliver astonishing or useful secrets (e.g. JH I3). As an unlicensed medical practitioner, Platt travelled through the city of London and beyond, dispensing remedies to patients of widely varying social and professional status, from flax wives to diamond cutters. One of his medical manuscripts noted people he treated between 1593 and 1605, a list of remedies bought from 13 other practitioners, and an index of diseases (MS.2209; see Figures 3.6 and 3.7). Others contained medical receipts and a treatise De Terra Lemnia (possibly composed by Platt) about the virtues of a reddish astringent earth called terra lemnia or terra sigillata, used for both medicine and red pigment (MSS.2210, 2171). These records address a range of early modern social concerns, analyzed further in chapter 5. We wend our way through London streets and suburbs with Platt as he willingly cures poor widows free of charge, accepts the humble payment of two pullets from a Kent coalmaker, and then quarrels with a relatively well-off mercer’s wife for not paying his boat hire. Allied to these medical manuscripts are Platt’s numerous extracts, abstracts, and translations from alchemical and other texts. He followed the familiar Renaissance practice of collecting manuscript excerpts of authoritative texts and varied compendia (Moss, 1996; Blair, 1992: 541–51; Nummedal, 2007: 18–27). His practice was not only a combination of the old-fashioned gathering of quotations from diverse authorities and the relatively organized compilation of humanist commonplace books, it was also governed by the desire to produce, through such gathering, authoritative and socially applicable texts of his own. We thus see him trying to make sense of material from Paracelsus, Thomas Norton, Cornelius Agrippa, Giambattista della Porta, Alexis of Piedmont, and others. In due course, Platt produced a prose summary of Norton’s Ordinal, copied out Thomas Charnock’s Breviary of Philosophy, and translated Agrippa’s De occultis philosophiae (MS.2203, ff.91–97; MS.2194, ff.48r–56r; MS.2223, ff.25–47). The latter was intended for publication. Copious extracts from the Latin exist in three manuscripts, one

Figure 3.6 Platt’s medical manuscript: Sloane MS.2209, f.22r. © British Library Board

Figure 3.7 Platt’s medical manuscript: Sloane MS.2209, f.22v. © British Library Board

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of which contains Platt’s English translation (MS.2246, ff.31v–49v; MS.2245, ff.48v–61; MS.2223, ff.1–17, 25–47).16 In his context of dearth, the prospect of discovering the philosopher’s stone captivated Platt, and several manuscripts contain lists of quotations on the subject from Lull, Ripley, Norton, Morien, Palingenius, and unnamed authors, interspersed with extracts from Alexander van Suchten on antimony, from Paracelsus on planets (MS.2246, ff.92r–98v; MS.2194, ff.5r–28v, 58r–69v; MS.2223, ff.53–56), and vigorous quarrels with the French Paracelsian Joseph Duchesne and his followers who are “censured” by Platt (MS.2223, ff.18–24). Extracting, summarizing, and criticizing were evidently crucial to Platt’s practice of alchemy, as well as his own writing on the subject. He attempted to compose an independent alchemical treatise (MS.2246, ff.1–30, 53–59, 60–91) closely linked to receipts in his alchemical notebooks, which he called “secretes in metals, vegetables, animals, stone, pearl &c” (MSS.2245, 2195). As an alchemical and medical practitioner, and admirer of the Paracelsian corpus, Platt gradually evolved a personal theory and practice of alchemy and distillation, which may be traced through his reading and application of other authors to issues affecting the pragmatic lives of people in his day. In other words, his alchemy did not set him on the sidelines of society. He was neither a fraud nor an abstruse mystic philosopher. His alchemical philosophy and technology intersected with different areas of knowledge and shaped his experimentation.17 This placed his alchemical work firmly within everyday concerns of his local communities, as well as making it relevant to broader socio-economic questions affecting early modern England, as the following chapter on manure, recycling, and “sustainability” will show. Fortunately, Platt’s reading materials for several subjects, including alchemy, as well as his methods of reading, can be recovered. Many of his books were fortuitously preserved in the William Platt Collection of St John’s College Library in Cambridge. Seventeenth-century lists of this benefaction identified 58 items, all of which are not now in the library’s possession.18 But the library has at least 20 additional works, not mentioned in the manuscript lists, which I have identified as being part of the same benefaction. Together, these items represent the libraries of Hugh and his son William Platt. Most volumes are stamped with the Platt family coat of arms (see Figure 3.8), and 19 works contain Hugh Platt’s annotations.19 Six of these are legal works and abridgements of cases, consistently annotated with cross-references and summaries. Seven are alchemical collections, including a book of Paracelsian aphorisms printed by Iohannes Lertout (1582), Israel Harvet’s Defensio Chymiae (1604), Gulielmo Gratarolo’s collected works (1554), and an anonymous text on the philosophers’ stone (1600). There is a rare edition of Robert Record’s Castle of Knowledge (1556), marked with a distinctive symbol often used in Platt’s manuscripts. An edition of Levinus Lemnius’s De occultis naturae miraculis (1573) contains the inscription “Hugo Platt of Lincolnes / Inn me suum Vendicat”, and marginal notes. There is also a heavily underlined copy of Platt’s own work, Hugonis Platti Armig: Manuale, sententias aliquot diuinas &

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Figure 3.8 Platt family coat of arms stamped on covers of books owned by Hugh Platt

morales complectens (1594). But in what ways, and with what possible intentions, did Platt read his books? What did he look for, and how did he hope to apply his reading to his immediate conditions and economic setting? The sharpest clues are found in three heavily annotated texts in the collection, belonging to the versatile genre of “books of secrets”: Giambattista della Porta’s Magiae naturalis (1584), Johann Jacob Wecker’s De Secretis (1588), and William Warde’s The Secretes of the reuerend Maister Alexis of Piemont (1562, 1563, 1566), originally by Girolamo Ruscelli. Here, Platt’s notes are more informal and personal. In his della Porta, annotations are made in both pen and pencil, probably at different times.20 In his three-volume Secrets of Alexis, he marked nearly every secret with distinctive symbols that appear to rank the receipts according to their importance in his eyes. The designs he used are: and He marked receipts with one or both of these symbols, using them several times, in various formats, and often in combination, indicating an elaborate private coding system that allowed him to record the number of times he had put the receipts to trial (see Figure 3.9).21 He used the same marking system in his manuscripts. Platt also filled his books with heavy underlining and

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Figure 3.9 From Platt’s copy of Giambattista della Porta, Magiae Naturalis, p.261. St John’s College Library, University of Cambridge (Ee.8.1). By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College Cambridge

Figure 3.10 From Platt’s copy of Girolamo Ruscelli, Secretes of Maister Alexis, Book 1, f.44v. St John’s College Library, University of Cambridge (Mm.12.25 (1)). By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College Cambridge

marginal notes, including cross-references, queries, and reminders. One receipt that caught his attention described how to make a perfumed oil, called oil of Ben. The reader was instructed to place over a fire various ingredients in “a vessell such as perfumours vse”. Platt underlined the phrase, and impatiently wrote in the margin, “qre of ye vessell./” (see Figure 3.10). In another case, he The printed marked a receipt for extracting oil of nutmeg with a symbol: version recommended soaking nutmeg in malmsey before crushing it, and Platt, attempting to simplify the receipt, noted, “qre of leavinge owte the malmsey”. Similarly, he followed up instructions for making “Bengewyne” (benzoin) oil by sealing the resin in a glass vessel and burying it in a dunghill with the query, “what other oyles may be made in this way” (Warde, 1562: I.44v, 46v, 51r).

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In other words, the text was read and assessed in relentlessly pragmatic terms, any vagueness was questioned, and Platt’s own ideas, variants, or possible alterations were noted. His marginalia also clarified that receipts of these well-known authors were, in Platt’s time and environment, being tried in workshops and stillrooms: against a receipt to make a plaster for wounds, Platt noted, “this my Vncle Birches comended greatly vnto mee vppon his owne experience/” (Warde, 1562: I.34r).22 The query about the perfumers’ vessel was answered, in a sense, by the actual design of such a vessel in Jewell House (25; see Figure 3.11). Similarly, manuscript and printed records of Platt’s experiments with various oils, the subject of the other notes, are prolific. In short, from the evidence of Platt’s library, it is possible to reconstruct dialogues between his reading and consultation, and his original writing and experimentation. Platt revisited his books while he worked to perform and record his experiments. The dynamism of his reading is exposed in the constant overlapping of his use of “receipt” and “experiment”. Moving beyond the expected passive signification of received knowledge, whether taken from books or current practitioners, Platt’s “receipts”, as his reading demonstrated, continuously turned into “experiments”, as they became, through an infused currency and originality, sites of activity and transformation whereby knowledge evolved. Platt’s use of the terms can be seen in the receipt addressing the scarcity of hops, titled “How to brew good and wholsom Beere without anie Hoppes at all”, in Jewell House, where he lucidly explained how readers of his own book must themselves actively experiment to extend the knowledge received from him and “one of the best experienced Brewers of London who yet liueth” (15). Readers were asked not

Figure 3.11 Platt, Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594): Perfumers’ vessel, p.25. British Library, General reference collection, 1651/69. © British Library Board

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to rely on received knowledge alone, a plea that made Platt’s own sites of experiment active, accessible, malleable, and distinctly different from later formal, restricted experimental sites of the Royal Society (Shapin, 1988). Many of Platt’s manuscripts may be described as notebooks, or compiled records of experiments, written in single volumes, some of which retain their original binding. There are nine volumes of varying length (36 to 200 leaves) numbered by Platt himself and later by the library (MSS.2244, 2245, 2197, 2249, 2216, 2212, 2247, 2189, 2210). In these notebooks, we see Platt managing his simultaneous work in a striking array of fields, making notes based on reading, consultation, or direct observation. These volumes, including two small duodecimos (MSS.2247, 2249), filled with Platt’s minute handwriting, could have been easily carried on his person. They give the sense of having roamed about Elizabethan London and its suburbs quite as much as their owner. He assigned sections of notebooks to specific themes: one volume appears to have been begun as a compilation of wine-making instructions, but from f.24 onwards contains notes on other topics, such as “orenges and lemons”, “Garmentes for Raine” and “Victualls for Warr” (MS.2244). Occasionally, he stalled in his attempts to organize receipts, and recorded experimental endeavours under the heading “A Chaos of conclusions” (MSS.2216, 2189). This practice gives the modern reader an initial impression of randomness. The careful hand that subsequently re-organized and re-shaped recorded observations, or reconsidered its own practices of knowledge making, to bring these in line with a vision of moral economy and resource management, can remain hidden from our immediate view. It is not enough, therefore, to look at the recorded receipt alone. It is necessary to read their work-in-progress methodology inscribed, often quite literally, between the lines and along the margins of these densely written notebooks, scrutinizing stray leaves and seemingly inconsequential scribbles, where crucial interconnections usually appear. During his experiments, Platt paused to draft prefaces, apologies, and plans for broadsides, or found a handy blank half-page or so to maintain lists of wares in his shops, and notes on his clients. He made plans for selling his goods and approaching contacts. He appears to have had assistants to collect and record information on his behalf: occasionally, receipts begun in a different hand are continued by Platt. Such evidence of his evolving processes of organization and ideation is often more illuminating than the ostensibly finished receipt. Sloane MS.2216 offers a typical example of the collaborative making and organizing of Platt’s notebooks. He wrote its title page in his cheaply home-made “copper inck”, whose receipt, with a sample of writing, he provided later in the manuscript (see Figure 3.12). He then left space for a long index, presumably filled in afterwards, applying the method of organizing commonplace book contents to the compendium of experiments and pragmatic data in the notebook. This became a means of reviewing and realigning the notebook’s contents. He began recording receipts from f.12 with a section headed “The arte of marblinge vppon paper, satten, taffata, leather & c accordinge to the turckie manner” (see Figure 3.13).

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Figure 3.12 Title page of Platt’s notebook: Sloane MS.2216, f.2r. © British Library Board

Figure 3.13 “The arte of marblinge”: Sloane MS.2216, f.12r. © British Library Board

Next to the heading, he scribbled a note to himself: “this arte I learned of Mr Gregory thinginer and Mr Spenser the perfumer in Ianuarie 94”. The information would prove useful when he needed to consult his sources again (it could not have been easy to keep track of numerous informants on numerous subjects) or if he needed to review chronologically, as he often did, the progress of his experimentation and knowledge on a particular subject. This section, containing 77 items (cross-referenced with similar receipts in other notebooks), set out procedures for marbling, types of leather and other bases used, colours, drying methods, and tips for neatness. After this (until f.161), the manuscript contains several apparently unconnected receipts, including instructions for making a special “still” to extract larger quantities of aqua vitae (f.18r), obtained from a Mr Edgcombe who, in turn, claimed to have got the receipt from Stephen Burcott, a doctor. (Platt usually tried to track and verify the provenance of receipts as far back as he could.) This is

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followed by receipts for gilding on glass, “An excellent redd for bewtie”, receipts “in peterwoorckes”, instructions for setting up a portable musket-proof wall, making wine, fattening carps, gardening, making bread, hunting deer and rabbits, brewing ale, improving the quality of tallow candles, making a vanishing ink, brewing cheap beer, preserving fruit, and other topics. In most receipts, Platt noted his sources,23 marked his variations or additions, and cross-referenced receipts on interrelated subjects in this and other notebooks (ff.18v–86v). He highlighted improvements in procedure at every stage. The slightest hint of “waste” upset him, and his particular obsession was with finding the most resource-efficient or waste-reductive methods. This is especially apparent where Platt saw fit to inscribe an excerpt (ff.87–93) from the manuscript of Thomas Garret, his neighbour at Bishop’s Hall, whom he cited frequently and identified as an apothecary (see Figures 3.14 and 3.15). Bishop’s Hall housed (like Platt’s later residence Kirby Castle) tenants of the professional class. His extract, titled “Ex veteri libro manuscripto Mri Garret. habitantis prope Bishopps haall. quem exscripsi mense Iunii 1595”, suggests the location provided a useful network for the exchange of professional expertise, especially in times of shortage and crisis. Garret’s manuscript shows the two men consulting on how to improve sour ale and beer,

Figure 3.14 Extract from Garrett’s notebook: Sloane MS.2216, ff.87v. © British Library Board

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Figure 3.15 Extract from Garrett’s notebook: Sloane MS.2216, ff.88r. © British Library Board

make “artificial” white and grey sugar (when real sugar grew more expensive), clarify honey, destroy “wevills” in malt, as well as on gilding, colouring, moulding, distilling, and preserving. Garret, it appears, maintained a notebook similar to Platt’s. It is likely that his other informants did the same, and these manuscripts circulated informally. There was among them a strong ethic of mutual acknowledgement: Platt scrupulously cited the precise extent of his informant’s contribution in his private notebooks, and kept a vigilant eye on the progress and development of ideas. In this way, the professional team of Platt, Garret, Hill, Gascoigne, and Gregory (to take some oft-cited names from Platt’s manuscripts) worked as a close-knit one, despite the apparent diversity of formally claimed professions of each individual member. Professional diversification was itself encouraged, or exacerbated, in conditions of dearth; but this network additionally demonstrates that cooperative knowledge exchange was also stimulated by the need to address mundane problems created by shortage. When Platt recorded their findings, he brought to them his own organizing voice as he weighed and combined experiments in different ways. We often see him pausing to evaluate their individual and collective potential to influence the workings of the wider economy.

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The effort to see beyond details of each receipt, and classify experiments to explore their socio-economic potential, is visible in characteristic inventories in later folios (MS.2216, ff.177, 182, 188v–89). In one of these, headed “A Note of such secretes as are woorth the search and not as yet founde owte in any perfection by the Author”, Platt listed 25 ideas he intended to pursue, such as “The secrete of Turnsole”, “the fixation of the Coollor of Logwood”, “The hardninge of suger in a short tyme”, and “To make wormsede to grow in England”. Another list, “Matters of most royall and present Expectation”, recorded Platt’s inventions sufficiently perfected to constitute potential sources of income (see Figures 3.16 and 3.17). Some of these 37 items tally with the first list, indicating that Platt had, when compiling the later list, found some of the secrets he had set out to discover. These “secrets”, and others, were now recast as saleable things. The ideas had been shaped into tangible benefits such as “My shopp of Arte” (no.6), which could not only sell “My infernall smoke” (no.8), “My new Candle” (no.13), “Apparrell for rayne” (no.15), and “Reuerberators to roast wth” (no.23), but also be used as a base to “teach” the tricks of “Card play” (no.21), “thart Spagiricall” (no.26), “thuse of glas deskes” (no.27), or “matters of husbandry” (no.31). The complex analysis by which Platt had achieved the transition is evident in another list, where money-saving propositions evaluated the precise economic positioning of

Figure 3.16 “Matters of most royall and present Expectation”: Sloane MS.2216, ff.188v. © British Library Board

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Figure 3.17 “Matters of most royall and present Expectation”: Sloane MS.2216, ff.189r. © British Library Board

ideas Platt had developed into “goods” in markets facing strains of shortage and inflated prices. He thus included reminders like: “Buy all the oyle of Vitrioll and Sulphur of the distilling woeman, employ so much as you can therof in wines, & the rest you may sell at good rates to the Apothecaries, vnder selling other men”. Like the annotations in his library books, such records suggest ongoing experimentation and attempts to manage resources and refine known methods according to criteria that constantly located these methods in everyday socioeconomic concerns. Platt could not have managed all these ventures on his own and trained assistants: he sold his expertise, and earned money by teaching the arts he knew. His “shopp of Arte”, or “Jewell House”, was probably both a retail outlet and a workshop. He was highly conversant with needs and weaknesses of markets for several products and skills, and continuously devised means of manipulating his trades by following the market closely, buying and selling at appropriate times and prices. The miscellaneous notebooks in the Platt collection provide an insight into ethical concerns and systematic professional practices that governed the business of keeping receipt books and producing knowledge in a difficult economic setting.

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Elizabethan dearth science Platt turned the task of combating dearth into a “science”. As Harkness’s work on Elizabethan London demonstrated, the collective term “science” was widely used to denote a study of the natural world and its manipulation “for productive and profitable ends” (2007: xv).24 It is, therefore, not anachronistic to apply this term in Platt’s context, as she argued. Nevertheless, the applications and meanings of “science” were still formative, and it did not yet mean what it does today. Platt’s analysis of his own environment gave Elizabethan science a special slant through his organization of practical work and skills, which depended on the knowledge and conscious application of rules he defined. To understand this science, it is necessary to discover the links between diverse chosen fields of Platt’s pragmatic experimentation. A significant proportion of his experiments was concerned with food, and Platt approached the subject in an organized way, attempting to discover new methods of cultivating, preparing, and consuming food. He was thus curious about aspects of agricultural science, particularly the quality of manure. His study of soil types, printed in Jewell House (1594), put forward his own theories on preparing compost heaps, revising opinions of previous authors, and devising different means of fertilization for different soils. In Floraes paradise (1608), he considered efficient procedures of horticulture, economizing on costs and space. He expounded these contributions to gardening and agriculture in terms of his search for a fundamental philosophical principle of nourishment and regeneration in nature. This allowed him to relate his ideas to contemporary theories of alchemy and “natural magic”, and also articulate ecological concerns and remedies. Works such as Jewell House and Delightes for Ladies (1602) proposed similarly efficient means of hunting animals, feeding cattle and fowl, preparing and preserving food, and other aspects of domestic economy, articulating these in the larger context of ecological anxieties. Shorter works, discussed in the previous chapter, like Remedies against famine (1596) and The new and admirable arte of setting of corne (1600), focused on food shortage, arguing that bread could be made from “pompions”, beans, and vetches, “sweet and delicate cakes” from powdered parsnips, cheap ale from aqua composita, and that beer could be brewed without hops to counter the “great dearth and scarcity of hops” in the land (Famine A4r, B2r–C1v). Platt’s writings on trades such as brewing and starch-making emphasized their direct impact on grain supplies and the production of staples like bread, while his broadside on food, drink, and medicine for sailors announced ingenious means of tackling shortage of supplies on board (Sea-men, 1607). He keenly debated possibilities of recycling waste products of various trades, to ease pressure on natural resources. He argued, for instance, that spent ashes of soap boilers, obtained by burning wood, could be recycled as manure (JH 50).25 He saw that individual inventions were often connected in complex ways: his coal briquettes made fuel cheap, bringing down costs not only in domestic environments but trades that consumed vast amounts of fuel (Cole-balles, 1603). Investigating procedures

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of these trades individually, Platt brought to notice further means of resourceefficient production. He proposed, for example, using additives in brewing to reduce grain investment, and tried to modify malting to consume less fuel and recycle used grain. He anticipated the preparation of artificial nitre-beds for saltpetre (potassium nitrate) production, reducing the dependence of petreworks on natural nitre deposits, and suggested transforming weapons so that less gunpowder was consumed in the frequent warfare of his time. Many of Platt’s “manipulations of nature” were thus designed to make significant contributions to fuel technology and technological advances to aid practices of economy and energy efficiency in contemporary trades. Contrary to appearance, his production of “luxuries”, such as gilded furniture, ornaments, and cosmetics, also reflected a direct concern with dearth. In his manuscripts, these were listed with economical ovens, roasting devices, and cheap distilled products, under the category “Necessary and Helpinge meanes for the Gayninge of Money”. Platt’s copious writings on limning, dyeing, and casting emphasized the adoption of cheap production procedures. They made visible the labour these trades involved, and the employment they provided in an environment where vagrancy and hunger were constant issues. He repeatedly asserted such trades encouraged redistribution of surplus incomes in the hands of his wealthy courtly acquaintances. Platt himself possibly utilized part of the proceeds from his sale of decorative items to conduct his food-based experiments. He adopted diverse means to fund his own research: through his interest in woodwork, perfumery, waxwork, shoemaking, designing pewter ornaments, waterproof garments, inventing card tricks and other magic tricks, ciphers, and secret writing. He designed compasses, bridges, wagons, lamps and lanterns, and a revolving bookshelf.26 There was an element of playfulness in these receipts, but the very range of Platt’s activities contributed to his extensive knowledge of the contemporary economy and survival measures offered by and practised in it. His conscious formulation of “dearth science” demanded this range, and a distinctive aspect of his work is the impression of compatibility between occasionally playful manipulations of things and the evaluation of serious gains in knowledge, economy, and ecology derived even from such manipulations. The motto in the famine treatise “turne this our penurie into plenty” (A2r) was the centre of his economic vision and self-definition, and is the basis for my coinage of the term “dearth science”. In the moment of socio-economic upheaval that Platt inhabited, he observed that the human desire to turn penury into plenty was the guiding motif in many mundane activities. He also noted how this desire stimulated active investigations of nature and knowledge production. He believed, like others in his time, that hands-on engagement and “experience” was “the undoubted mother of all true and certaine knowledge … kept in the bosome of Nature” (JH A2r). Platt’s environment had taught him dearth led to such engagement through the evolution of empirical practices, which aimed to turn dross into valuable material, and stimulated human ingenuity. He devoted himself to refining the knowledge

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being produced, in the hope this would bring him to “certaine knowledge”. Here, he was partly following Paracelsian definitions of “scientia”, certain knowledge that was God-given and inherent in nature, and of “experientia”, the process by which “scientia enters into” the human subject desiring to acquire certain knowledge.27 But Platt’s “dearth science” additionally took into account powerful socio-economic factors and environmental crises that motivated the desire for and production of knowledge, and guided its organization. In this way, he attempted to see how dearth science practices might constitute a moral philosophy. We see this effort in the progress of Platt’s economic and moral vocabulary, his language and “metaphors”, exemplified in the treatise A Discouerie of certaine English wants (1595). He stated that the prevention of waste, whether of natural, material, or human resources, was key to supplying “wants”. If our English Artists … were sufficiently emploied in the fulnes, and height of their spirits, that they would bring foorth so many, so rich, and so inestimable buds, and blossomes of skill, as neither any ciuill pollicy that hath bin hitherto shut vp in printed bookes, nor any religious charity that hath bin so often, and so diuinely sounded in at our deaf eares, could yet produce or shew any comparable effects vnto them. … I hope to giue you such a true, & liuely tast of the fruits of art, that I shal make your stomacks euen long, & mourne to be better satisfied with that secret foode which these silent Philosophers & Inginers haue reserued vnto themselues, & will hardly offer vnto their country. … It is but your countenance, your commendable labours, and examples which are in authority that I require, it is but that which now you loose, & without me you cannot saue, nay they are but the very crums that fall from Diues table wherwith I wil vndertake to relieue poore Lazarus, who neither as yet with the saltish drops of his body, is able by his labour, nor yet by the bleeding teares of his soule is able by his misery to procure sufficient maintenaunce the one way, or compassion the other way, to relieue himselfe, and his family. (A2v–3r) Three features of this passage and its rhetorical stratagems require special notice. First, the “artists”, who possessed expertise to remedy dearth, were allied to the material garden supplying “wants” with its “rich”, “inestimable” buds and blossoms, and their active skills were promoted beyond theories of “ciuill pollicy” and frequently ineffectual, ad hoc measures of religious charity. Exercising the hands-on skill of fighting dearth through continual and openended experimental effort was, I suggest, the first rule of dearth science. Second, a “dearth scientist”, like Platt, possessed a coherent vision of his national economy that was born of his practically oriented approach, and was collaborative even within a competitive environment. The “fruits” or inventions of individual “artists” were viewed as “secret food” with potential to

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drive hunger away, and the silent hoarding of it was detrimental to the economy. Dearth science, as we have seen among Platt’s network, was perfected by sharing knowledge, and Platt envisioned an ideal practice of it which would require not only individualized “inventions”, but cooperative and congruous measures to be taken across different sectors. This called for a transformation of contemporary ethics of trade and commerce, as well as domestic economy. Such cooperation and synthesis was the second rule. Finally, the Lazarus allusion in the passage highlighted the communal guilt of an economy where resources could so easily be inappropriately utilized and distributed. Dearth science was also a survival strategy and a business policy based on the rule of “sufficiency”, which was contrasted with excess and waste by advocating preservation measures through an ethically positive type of “scrounging” – “picking up the crumbs” – that extended from material resources to the gaining and deployment of knowledge and skills. This kind of ethical practice has, arguably, been characteristic of shortage-driven economies throughout human history, and its varied contexts across time and space need more discussion and research than this book can provide. In Platt’s time, dearth scientists may be viewed as members of a vital group working interactively and methodically to restore the balance of sufficiency in their national economy and environment. Their ethical justifications of resource management point towards, as the next chapter demonstrates, an early modern conceptualization of sustainability. Thus, the significance of figures like Hugh Platt cannot be adequately addressed by focusing on single aspects of his expertise (as “gardening authority”), or by applying nebulous terms like “virtuoso”, or, indeed, by dismissing him as a negligible “quack”. Such terms do not help to uncover early ideas of ecology embedded in the practices of these figures. Remaining chapters of this book, therefore, have two fundamental aims. They allow their data to dictate the method and the form in which it needs to be brought to attention, following the logic of Platt’s and his contemporaries’ own apprehensions and concerns, rather than prescriptions of modern ecocritical methodologies. Second, the chapters place Platt’s texts within a wider discursive field of economic and ecological critique, exemplified by literatures of dearth. I thus begin with fundamental questions about causes of fertility, agricultural and horticultural reforms, moving on to modifications of domestic economy and the development of various trades in times of dearth. Each discussion draws attention to the complex synthesis of Platt’s myriad concerns: as he was well aware, one could not, for instance, discuss fertility and manure without simultaneously discussing, say, the soap-boiling trade and national economic rivalries between the Dutch and the English. Living as he did in a politically and economically turbulent period, Platt knew that failed harvests did not by themselves create dearth (cf. Walter, 1989: 75–128). To record and analyze intricate interrelations, it is necessary to uncover the constitution of (often obscure) early modern material and technical practices, like manifold applications of “isinglas”, produced from fish bladders, or sources and procedures for making coloured inks. Paracelsus, whom Platt and his contemporaries

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so admired, had argued that “knowing” was “doing” (Smith, 2004: 142). Platt’s manuscripts give us the opportunity to discover and register what the author and his associates actually did, and to understand how quotidian actions, born from the mere effort of living in a crisis-driven environment, helped to produce and systematize knowledge.28 Understanding socio-economic and ecological beliefs in this milieu necessarily means paying close attention to their modes of articulation as well as processes of ideation. Platt’s language overlapped with that of literary texts introduced in chapter 2, and it shaped and drove his dearth science. His rhetorical training and labours as a poet are persistently visible in all his writings, which invite us to consider intersections between practical treatises and (sometimes more canonical) literary works where concerns about remedying dearth, managing resources, and preserving the natural world for posterity also appeared. The personal story of Hugh Platt, as signalled by the pessimistic overlap with Thomas Nashe’s authorial voice, appears to have ended less happily than he deserved. Although he was knighted three years before his death by James I in 1605 for his work during the critical 1590s, I find no evidence of Platt obtaining support for his projects from resources other than his own. Upon his death in 1608, he was, according to his son William, “somewhat in debt”. Most debts were paid by his wife Judith from the income of copyhold lands he left to her. The remainder (amounting, in 1633, to £250) was paid by his son (PROB 11/175). For some decades after his death, as Webster’s study of the Scientific Revolution noted, Platt’s work attracted the attention and admiration of the Hartlib circle. This is evident from the frequent republication of Platt’s work in the seventeenth century, from the appropriation of his methods and measures by later agricultural reformers, and from marginalia of early modern readers in surviving copies of Platt’s printed works. Since then, he has somehow plunged into relative obscurity. The first modern edition of one of his books appeared during the post-war crisis in 1948, with the editorial claim that it contained lost knowledge of principles of domestic economy, ecology, and health, especially needed in shortage-driven households of post-war England. The sudden attempt at recovering Platt in a modern moment of crisis is intriguing in itself. It suggests that the story of Hugh Platt and his associates, told through the analytical framework of “dearth science”, can provide a picture of the lives and ecological understandings of ordinary people in Elizabethan England, which may seem to us, in the context of our current discourses of sustainability, both familiar and strange.

Notes 1 In 1652, 1653, 1654, 1655, 1659, 1660, and 1675. 2 These texts (MS.2223) are signed, “Examinat. et approbat. Sa: Harsnett”. Harsnett possibly examined them in his capacity as censor. 3 Hodges’ annotations are in MSS.2189, 2216, 2197, 2209, 2212, 2195, 2210, 2245, 2244, 2247, and indices in his handwriting to the “books and manuscripts of Hugh Platt and Thomas Hodges” are in MSS.2242, 2243. He is also named as an executor of William Platt’s will (PROB 11/175).

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4 The word “receipt”, in the Elizabethan context, referred to a statement of both ingredients and procedure necessary for the making of something. Its application was not limited to medicine and cookery, and the word was often used interchangeably with “secret”, emphasizing (truthfully or not) the hidden wisdom and originality of the authors. 5 The account of Platt’s life in the Oxford DNB is brief (Lee, 2004), and in the following account I include further details from the wills of members of the Platt family, records of the Brewers’ Company in London and the Aldenham School in Hertfordshire, and deeds and documents on the Platt estates in the archives of St John’s College, Cambridge. 6 See “London Apprenticeship Abstracts (1442–1850)”, Society of Genealogists Dataset, compiled from Brewers’ Society records, The Origins Network, www.origins network.com; Edwards and Wood, 1997: 1–20. Richard Platt made the Brewers’ Company trustee of the benefactions. The almshouses no longer exist, but the Aldenham School was governed by the Company for many years. Its benefactor’s coat of arms still serves as the school crest, while the school prayer commemorates Richard Platt. 7 “The Old Swan” is mentioned in PRO E134/8Jas1/East2 (1609). Several papers concerning the Platt family and estates are held in the St John’s College Archives (D111–13). An indenture between Judith Platt and the three sons from Hugh Platt’s first marriage states that Richard Platt had given his son Hugh “diuerse and sundry Messuages houses landes tenemts and heriditamts … within the Cittye of London and the suburbs thereof and within the Citty of Westminster and in the parish of St Pancras in the County of Middlesex and in East Greenwiche in the County of Kent” (D111.1); corroborated by Richard’s will (LMA, CLA/023/DW/01/ 279), leaving to Hugh all “messuages” in Birchin Lane, Thames Street, St James’ Garlickhythe, and in London and its suburbs, except the following left to his grandsons by Hugh: one messuage in Knightrider Street, four in St Michael’s, Cornhill, others in parishes of St Mary Botolph and St Swithen, and a brewhouse “The Vyne” in St Giles-in-the-Fields. The Platt Records mention the following brewhouses: at the sign of “The Hartichoke” in St Michael’s, Cornhill (D111.17, 1631); “The Golden Tunn”, and an adjoining brick shop, at the lower end of Cowcross Street (D111.12, 1620; D111.25, 1632); “The Tunn”, with shops, cellars, yards, warehouses, rooms, etc, in St Michael’s, Cornhill (D.111.11, 1620); “The Red Lyon” and “Three Blew Anchors” in Red Lion Alley on the south side of Cowcross (D111.39). These brewhouses were leased to various tenants at the dates mentioned in the documents, but are probably part of the original bequest from Richard to Hugh and his heirs. 8 Upon this marriage, Platt received a gift of property from his father (St John’s Archive, D113.1). In the first indenture (31 January 1573) Richard Platt promises to settle “4 tenements & 15 gardens with th’appertenances neere Cowe Crosse” on Hugh and Margaret Platt and their heirs. 9 “London Apprenticeship Abstracts” and “Percival Boyd’s Marriage Index 1538– 1840”, The Origins Network, www.originsnetwork.com; “Copy of Mr Plat’s Pedigree” (St John’s, MS.C8.34, ff.502–05). The pedigree records that Hugh Platt’s eldest and youngest daughters Judith and Mary died young. His second daughter, also Judith, died aged 18 in 1622. It does not mention Ann, named in the memorial inscription of Hugh’s elder son William (Cansick, 1869–75). Both sons from his second marriage died without heirs, and the Platt estates (except the inheritance of the three sons from the first marriage) were left to St John’s College by William Platt. Robert Platt, originally named heir to William, was disinherited as he was “wedded to gaming” (1637, PROB 11/175). 10 The St Sepulchre and St Pancras lands were left to St John’s College. William Platt’s will mentions two survey maps of this property were bequeathed to the

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college, but these are not among the extant papers. The bequest was contested by Robert Platt in 1639, and possibly, in the ensuing conflict, the maps never came into the college’s hands. See letter to Francis Segar (MS.2172, f.18); “Segar the herald” was the source of limning receipts (MS.2189) and Drake of two receipts (MS.2216, f.50). Thomas North (1535–1603), translator of de Guevara’s Diall of Princes (1557), was brother to Roger North, who owned property in Middlesex, which Thomas eventually inherited. Valentyne Knightley was probably the extravagant son of Sir Richard Knightley (1533–1615), MP, Northamptonshire, from 1597. Thomas Mildmay (c.1515–1608) was landowner and MP, Moulsham, Essex, and brother of Walter Mildmay (1520/21–1589), founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Other names listed are Peter Wentworth (1524–97), MP, Northampton (1580s), and Sir John Leynard and Sir Edmond Feald, whom I am unable to trace (MS.2197, f.43v). Platt describes a height-adjustable cover for dunghills, “a patterne whereof standeth to be seene nere vnto S. Albones not far from Parkmill, in the backside of one of my tennaunts howses there” (JH 34). Shapin (1994: 94) explained how, despite the “intermingling of gentle and mercantile families”, traditional values of “gentlemanly” culture distrusted and set apart “tradesmen’s preference for lucre over the light of knowledge”; while Ash (2004: 16) describes the evolving role in Elizabethan England of “expert mediators”, trusted and patronized, distinct from common practitioners, but able to “theorize and codify the practical arts for the benefit and pleasure of educated and cultured patrons”. Both studies uncover the indeterminacy of early modern social categories. See prescriptions for being a gentleman in Shapin, 1994: ch.2. Cf. Kuhn (1970: 15) similarly argued, “early fact-gathering” occurred in the absence of a scientific paradigm and was “restricted to the wealth of data that lie ready to hand”. In “To the Reader”, Floraes, Platt wrote that he had “abbridged, and made ready for the Presse” Agrippa’s work. Nummedal (2007: 12–14) analyzed the integration of “entrepreneurial” alchemists into “normal social structures, work patterns, and practical concerns of everyday early modern Europe”. Platt’s work, likewise, demonstrates such integration in early modern England. Thus, the definition of “alchemy” (somewhat like “science”) did not produce a consensus in the early modern period and included, as Nummedal argued, “a variety of practices, skills, and knowledge-bases” acquired through books, conversations, and expertise in related fields. Cf. Newman and Principe, 1998: 32–65. St John’s College Archive, MSS.U2, f.53; U3, f.47. William Platt bequeathed his library to the College in 1637. According to the librarian, items from the Platt bequest may have been sold in subsequent years, when the library acquired duplicates of many of these texts through other bequests. See Bibliography for full list. E.g. in Lib.III, cap.11, Platt cross-references a receipt in pen, and (possibly later) adds a note in pencil: “make dwarfe compositions for diuerse trees”. next to a receipt for sugar paste (Warde, 1562: I.62v), Typical examples are:

and next to a receipt for varnishing gilded items (I.96v). 22 Birches was the maiden name of Platt’s mother, Alice. 23 E.g. Platt takes from della Porta, “How to carrie a letter in a bottom of threede” (f.31v); and from Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera (1570), “To butter Apples in a paper and so likewise of oysters” (f.85). 24 Harkness emphasized that the term “natural philosophy” did not fit the context of Londoners like Platt. She used the term “science” but not “scientist” as she found

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Dearth and knowledge making no Elizabethan usage of the latter “to describe a student of nature” (xv–xvii). I see no harm in using the latter if the former is admitted: none of the “specific early modern designations [admitted by Harkness] – such as alchemist, surgeon, apothecary, and mathematician” adequately addresses Platt’s range or his organization of knowledge. Consequently, if the ways of knowing and manipulating nature evident in Platt’s work can “fruitfully” be called “science” or “vernacular science” (Harkness, 2007: xvii; Smith, 2004: 142–49), then individuals practising, evaluating, and organizing such knowledge may fruitfully be called “scientists”. Although the modern term “recycling” is not used by Platt, many of his practices constituted an early species of recycling, described in following chapters. JH 6, 11, 13, 19, 22, 24, 26, 35, 41, 45, 48, 60, 71, 73, 76, 93, 109–10; MS.2216, ff.32, 38, 42, 45, 96, 128–29, 147, 182, 189; MS.2189, ff.75–84, 87–89; MS.2197, f.18. On Paracelsian definitions of “science” and “experience”, and how these ideas led to the definition of a “vernacular science”, see Smith, 2004: 87–89, which quotes: “Scientia is inherent in a thing, it is given by God; experientia is a knowledge of that in which scientia is tested. For instance, the pear tree has scientia in itself, and we who see its works have experientia of its scientia. Thus we pass on knowledge through experience as that same tree has perfect scientia in itself” (Paracelsus, 1538: ch.6). Cf. Cook (2007: 42) noted, “methods of exchange” had “fundamental implications for establishing the value of certain kinds of knowing, turning information into knowledge”.

4

Dearth science, sustainability, and the economy of manure

Discussing manure in the socio-economic and ecological contexts of the early modern period, E.A. Wrigley argued that the transition from a pre-industrial to an industrial world was marked by a shift from an “organic economy” to a mineral-based energy economy, or, in ethical terms, a movement from a world that prioritized the natural circulation of organic matter to one that saw greater value in exploiting stores of fuels that would be depleted over time. Pre-industrial ecologies were subject to “energy constraints”, or specifically, a “photosynthetic constraint”, noted Wrigley. Organic species store energy for a limited time. In the absence of access to fossil fuels on a large scale, the “organic economy” was constrained by the amount of solar energy absorbed by plants and animals and converted into growth (1988, 2003). One could say this explained the Industrial Revolution as an escape from energy constraint (Warde, 2006: 13), or that it explains the work of seventeenth-century improvers, who followed Platt, as a gradual progress towards this escape. Changes in manuring practices may be seen as tied to this shift as the use of fertilizer from waste products within an ecological system gave way to the use of chemical fertilizers. A pessimistic description of the change is found in Christian Pfister’s idea of a “manuring-gap”, which pre-industrial agricultural economies could not bridge. Crops extracted nutrients from soil, which had to be replenished by the dung of animals, which in turn had to be fed. Shortage of pasture created a vicious cycle of lack and limited productivity. The problem would of course be exacerbated in times of dearth, or with other crises such as war or epidemics. Local communities and the ecological system as a whole adapted as far as possible but were ultimately constrained by a “poor recycling technology” on which they had to depend for the circulation of nutrients within their local ecologies (Pfister, 1985: 126; Warde, 2006: 17, 52–56). This chapter interrogates these larger narratives of ecological change by focusing on the particularities of ecological understanding in the period. What did people actually do to adapt? Pioneering work in early modern agricultural and economic history recovered some of the specificities of rural and urban uses of fertilizers, traced processes of scientific improvement in fertilizing techniques, and linked these improvements to recurring socioeconomic crises. Historians of science and alchemy discussed manure in the

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context of early modern chemical understandings of soil composition and plant growth (Debus, 1968), focusing on specific kinds of manure, such as marl, crucial in pre-industrial economies for maintaining the acid-alkaline balance of soil (Fussell, 1959; Thick, 1994). But we need to address the philosophical and ethical principles guiding such practices. Studies of local economies and ecologies of small units such as villages identified survival within energy constraints as the reason behind communal organization and collective resource management. Communal relationships provided a defence in times of dearth and other crises (Walter, 1989; Wrightson and Levine, 1995). This chapter further argues that such relationships and defences were reinforced by a scientific and philosophical understanding of the circulation of not just nutrients but knowledge within ecologies. Connected to this was the development of knowledge of waste management. Surveying the issue in an urban context, Donald Woodward demonstrated that recycling was practised across a variety of economic activities and trades in the period, not just in agriculture and households. Woodward, following the earlier work of Carlo Cippola, saw dearth and poverty as the impetus behind early modern recycling (Cippola, 1976; Woodward, 1985, 1998), while recent work on early modern civic management by Mark Jenner and others addressed wider social meanings of “dirt” and waste (Jenner, 1992; Jørgensen, 2010b). Both collaborative and competitive structures for managing waste within the urban environment are revealed by these studies, drawing attention to the social malleability of waste.1 Did early modern societies optimize their relationship with the environment? While many regional studies have argued for the potential to optimize resource management through local cooperation and adaptation, Warde’s study of Württemberg delivered the caveat that survival over the long term does not automatically evidence optimal behaviour in relation to the ecological system or environment (347). The caveat was repeated in his recent article on sustainability (2011: 156). The underlying narrative is a linear and, in some studies, disturbingly progressive one where agricultural practices of manuring were “improved” in the course of time through better understanding of chemical compositions of soil, removal of constraints on energy flows, and collective managing of an ecological system. The impetus is to search for a resolution of some kind, whether we seek it by demonstrating that some early societies or “organic economies” were ecological optimizers, or suggest that the means for and understanding of optimal behaviour became available in a later period. What remains under-investigated, however, is the early modern ethical and theoretical understanding of these issues as debates, and especially the modes of literary expression which underpinned their oppositional, and yet intersecting, strands. Was early modern recycling simply a coping mechanism against dearth, or did it provide evidence of a wider philosophical understanding of waste and lack? Was there an early modern theorizing of an ecological system, or “energy constraint”? Was there an understanding of sustainability and how was it articulated?

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This chapter argues there were sophisticated (and conflicted) early modern notions of waste, ecology, and sustainability, which should be understood in their own terms. The theorizing of manure was at the heart of “dearth science”, a term that serves better to describe early modern ideas of resource management. This led to a quest for a fundamental principle of nourishment, circulation, and regeneration in nature. The ideas themselves circulated through a wide range of texts, and across complex, intersecting modes of writing, which this chapter traces. The crucial question centres on what gave impetus to the human anxiety to optimize. Dearth science, as described in the previous chapter, articulated the eternally variable process of optimizing. Early modern knowledge-makers conceived of resource management as an open-ended and deliberately inconclusive process, and this is where the sophistication of their theories lay. The continuity of experimental effort, alongside the principle of sufficiency, was a key element in dearth science. Perhaps modern societies too need a less teleological, monochrome, and conclusive paradigm for sustainability. The teleological force provided by religion (or for that matter by the scientific quest for “certain knowledge”) in early modern assessments of dearth was continuously complicated by articulations of uncertain ends. The assumption that the achievement of ecological optimization constituted sustainability is fallacious. Sustainability was, instead, defined by the desire and ongoing effort to optimize, predicated upon the continued perception and experience of lack, and consequent questioning of optimizing processes. The removal of this paradox would eradicate an essential means of ethically conditioning human actions. The early modern English recognized this when they constantly projected forward their desire to optimize by debating the meaning of “posteritie” in literary registers. In this sense, modern “sustainability” is a variety, and a modulation of early modern dearth science. The Brundtland Commission report (1987), frequently used as a benchmark for the definition of “sustainable development”, may be one expression (not uncontested) of the modern desire to optimize, but such aims were imagined, expressed, and theorized by different societies, responding to their specific conditions of dearth or perceptions of lack. The chapter will show how a society searched for and defined an essential principle of nourishment circulating in nature, and how it left this search open for posterity. We need to ask not only how this society bequeathed its “solutions” for ecological issues, but also how it bequeathed anxieties and the desire for ecological understanding to future generations. In the context analyzed here, discussions of manuring, its practice and its highly ambivalent literary articulation, offer a powerful example of ecological debate. Manure has been, if somewhat incidentally, discussed in literary and cultural studies of husbandry as part of a developing discourse of “improvement”.2 Scholarly focus on discourses of improvement and narratives of scientific progress in the seventeenth century can obscure subtler aspects of early modern ecological thought.3 Fundamental aspects of this thought were articulated through ideas linking natural philosophy and religion. Connections between biblical hermeneutics

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and religious or esoteric discourses, such as Calvinist providentialism, arcane alchemical philosophy, and vitalism, need further exploration. While contemporary studies have challenged the perceived separation of scientific and religious discourses (Harrison, 1998; Killeen, 2009; Killeen and Forshaw, 2007), there is a reluctance to regard the overlap of science and religion as potentially linked to ecological thought. Part of the problem is the modern development of the term “ecology” itself. The rapid eschewing of mystical senses of wholeness and interconnection in Ernst Haeckel’s term “Ökologie” (1866) by the ecological sciences, social ecology, and anthropology, and the appropriation of the term’s emphasis on the natural world, which continued even as the term “environment” replaced “ecology” in disciplines of local history and historical geography (Ellen, 1982; Moran, 1984; Warde, 2006: 10), evinces a modern nervousness about the taint of mystical thought. This has arguably obscured narratives of human engagement with nature in the early modern world. Historians of alchemy such as Allen Debus (1965) separated practical and arcane versions of alchemical engagement with nature, while some histories of science separated mechanist and vitalist ideas and practices in the seventeenth century (Rogers, 1996: 8–16; Killeen and Forshaw, 2007). Histories of agriculture and economy maintained careful distinctions between prescription or belief and practice in their analyses of cultivation and market operations (Thirsk, 1967; Walter, 1989). Harrison, who so clearly demonstrated the overlapping practices of biblical exegesis and exposition of natural phenomena, ultimately offered a narrative of progress according to which older symbolic traditions were dislocated by Protestant emphasis on the literal (107–20). Early modern figures often lacked such discomfort about mystical and arcane ideas of interconnections, and applied these in direct ways to understand human participation in the natural world. If the terms “ecology” and “sustainability” did not exist in this period, the notions and surrounding anxieties did. It is necessary, then, to identify the modes by which they were articulated, rather than shy away from these as “mere tropes”. Literary production was part of processes of knowledge making in early modern England (Spiller, 2004; Preston, 2005). Careful literary articulation of ecological thought was thus important to authors, who were engaged in making and circulating knowledge through varied written and visual media. To better understand the relationship between practice and articulation, one might look beyond texts and authors – agricultural, scientific, or literary – that have canonical status in historical or literary studies; and the early modern language of ecology need not be analyzed to underplay historical specificities of practice, as eco-critical studies have often done. This chapter thus uses Hugh Platt’s manure experiments as a starting point, and broadens the perspective by considering the range of Platt’s sources of information and the larger field of religious and literary texts which crucially contributed to the theorizing of manure. The theme of manure, as a practice that affected daily, ordinary lives and wider social structures, and was represented across canonical and non-canonical texts, creates the opportunity to study the blend

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of pragmatic action, imagination, and modes of articulation. Beginning with the notion of circulation of nutrients in older versions of the Arcana and alchemical philosophy (the popular and practical implications of which have recently received more attention4) the chapter shows how these philosophical and quasi-magical ideas shaped early modern ethics of knowledge circulation. Moving through magic and philosophy to the material world, it shows how the early modern English conceived of matter underpinning the principle of regeneration, and then traces how these moral and ecological concerns affected economic relationships. These values cannot be fully understood without considering, however strange it may sound to modern ears, the circulation of poetic discourses generated by the perception of manure. The interdisciplinary oddities of the “poetics of manure” were typical of the early modern period, with their merging of seemingly disparate ideas and approaches to sustain paradoxes and contest teleological notions of optimization and progress.

Natural magic and the circulation of nourishment The pragmatic Hugh Platt, who wrote about manure, market gardening, and other subjects of economic importance, appears to have had a doppelganger. While he mocked the professori secreti (professors of secrets) like Giambattista della Porta for making much of the “great mysterie or Magisterie of nature” when addressing practical topics like grafting and grain cultivation, there were times when Platt adopted a mysterious stance himself. He believed that not all nature’s mysteries could be computed, and was interested in the more arcane aspects of Paracelsian theory. This ambivalence is characteristic of his times and is not adequately addressed by labelling a figure like Platt a practical Paracelsian interested in chemical transmutations but not in magic and the Arcana – a distinction that was itself not entirely clear in Platt’s time and environment (Debus, 1965: 65–81; Thomas, 1971: 268–71). Much of Platt’s work was devoted to finding the appropriate source of nourishment for plants, and his cultivation of gardens was thus closely allied to the issue of manure. He addressed the matter in an intriguing receipt in Floraes paradise, which proceeded in the “concealed” manner of the professori secreti, whom he admired and criticized. The receipt is as much poetry as it is a set of instructions.5 A square plot was filled with “vegetable η”, which had stood two years “quiet within his own Sphear”. It was powdered, imbibed with aqua caelestis (or the “φ” of herbs) and made to stand two or three days to “better attract from all the heauenlie influences”. This matter, enriched from the heavens, “without the helpe of any manner of soyle, marle, or compost” would make rare or foreign flowers, fruit, and seeds flourish. Recent horticultural miracles had occurred through its broad-ranging efficacy: the blackthorn bush and walnut tree at Glastonbury Abbey, the oak in Wiltshire, and many other “philosophical plants” in England which blossomed on Christmas day, even though they stood bare till the day before, owed their growth to this mysterious “vegetable η”.6 The English alchemist George Ripley was reputed to have

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made a pear tree fructify in winter in this manner, noted Platt, and it was not “the crime of coniuration” but Ripley’s altum silentium7 in the manner of his secret that “wrought his overthrow” (5–6).8 In fact, it was believed that if the earth, “after it hath thus conceived from the clowdes”, was left alone and no seeds or plants placed therein by the hand of man, “this heauenly earth, so manured with the starres”, would bring forth more strange and glorious plants than any herbarist to this day had noted, unless human sins impelled the “great GOD of Nature” to suspend those “fructifying blessings which at the first he conferred vpon his celestiall Creatures” (6–7).9 The idea that the earth “generated” plants of its own accord had a long intellectual history, linked to Classical and Christian ideas about seminality which, later in the seventeenth century, informed thinking on fertility and spontaneous generation by figures like Thomas Browne and Robert Boyle.10 Their blend of empirical, metaphysical, and scriptural approaches, the subject of much recent scholarship, has precedent in Platt, who drew clues to the secret of fertility from Paracelsus, della Porta (who in turn referred to Diogenes, Theophrastus, and Pliny), and Agrippa, whose De occulta philosophia (1533) Platt had translated (Hirai, 2008; della Porta, 1584, 3.1). Agrippa, in Platt’s version, wrote: Take any small portion of hir [earth] & the same being washed depured & subtiliated, expose it to the open ayer, & forth wth the same being made fruitfull, & as it were great wth young by the powers of heaven, out of hir selfe she will bring forth plantes, little wormes, & other living creatures, stones and bright, metalline sparkes. In hir are secretes of great worth, if she bee artificially purged by fire, and by due lotion or washing reduced to her simple nature. (MS.2223, ff.30v–31r) Platt’s receipt (to which he does not ascribe a specific source) was, I suggest, a modulation of these ideas in della Porta and Agrippa in particular, and attempted to locate the ultimate material source of growth and fertility, denoting it as “vegetable η”. The enigmatic “vegetable η” had a generative value that Platt, following two other thinkers Bernard Palissy and Francisco Valles, would ascribe to “vegetable salt” – a natural principle of fertility which, though part of an eternal circulatory process, could be recovered in specific forms at specific times through experimental method, and shared for public good. Platt’s analysis of soil types aimed to locate and define, in temporal, geographical, and material contexts, the precise nature of this “salt”. His analysis provided a pragmatic framework for the application of arcane ideas to his contemporary socioeconomic preoccupation with dearth. The cryptic receipt described above drew attention to the crucial significance of the fertilizing agent, moving stealthily from divine influence to earthly practice: [The man] who knoweth how to lay his fallows truly, whereby they may become pregnant from the heavens, and draw abundantly that celestiall

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and generatiue vertue into the Matrix of the Earth; this man will no doubt prooue the true and philosophicall Husbandman, & goe beyond all the country Corydons of the Land. (Floraes 9) Earthly husbandmen could inform and sustain the circulation of “generative virtue” provided they laboured to “lay their fallows truly”. This seemingly arcane notion of “true and philosophical” human intervention in natural processes suggests an early articulation of ecological responsibility and needs investigation. These ideas, though rooted in Paracelsian doctrine, moved beyond it. Paracelsus’ theory of “salt” as the key to all growth, the balsam of life, was a recurring theme among sixteenth-century chemical philosophers, who cited De mineralibus to establish that there were as many different types of salt as there were objects. For Paracelsus, all mineral varieties of “salt” were dominated by the property of solidity (conferred by the principle of salt), binding together the “extreme principles” of mercury and sulphur (1894: I.98–99, 244–45). This prioritization of salt was applied in the sixteenth century to practical processes concerning soils. Debus thus placed Platt within a practical tradition of Paracelsianism, “the Elizabethan compromise”, alongside figures such as John Hester, Thomas Hill, George Baker, William Clowes, and Thomas Moffett, who preferred Paracelsian chemical receipts “above” the theory (Debus, 1965: 65–81). The apparent neatness of this categorization, which presumes a separation of receipt from theory, can be questioned. Debus’ analysis, moreover, was based in a critical and historiographical climate which saw scientific pragmatism and scriptural or arcane poetics in conflict, constructing a narrative in which the latter was overridden by the former.11 But it is the overlap of the practical, the religious, and the poetic that conveyed the circulation-based thinking in Platt’s manuring receipts, and he was by no means a singular instance in this respect. The practitioner Thomas Moffett, attempting to develop Paracelsian medical theory, commented that Paracelsus and others, drawing light from God, had demonstrated that the principle matter of man (“materialia hominis principia”) came from the earth where it was hidden (“in terra unde prouenerat abscondi”). His rhetoric, appropriate to his medical focus, conflated the language of dissection and digging: continuo atq; improbo labore venas eius dissecuerunt, viscera aperuerunt, ossa fregerunt, medullam colliquarunt, nullum non lapidem mouerunt, vt quae illic habentur corpora diligenter examinarent. Tandem vero Pyrotechnie Alchymiaeque beneficio, longisque suis et plusquam Herculeis laboris, nihil simplex in terra deprehenderunt, praeter vaporosum, inflamabile, fixum: nihil mixtum, quod non ex iisdem simplicibus componeretur. (1584: 91–92)

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The literary motif here was not mere embellishment. It allowed Moffett (and others) to regard Paracelsian theory and practice as a process for understanding the operations of the common principle of fertility and human life. Digging and anatomizing were necessarily merged, not simply by analogy, but because writing itself (and explication through writing) was a means of digging. It is not accidental that both Moffett (1.76) and Platt described the fundamental principle of fertility as food. To understand the relationship between theories of fertility and practices of fertilizing, and the full measure of their complexities, it is necessary to look closely at modes of representing the relationship. The title page of Platt’s Diverse sorts of soyle emphasized that the types of soil he would describe had not yet been brought “into any publique vse, for manuring both of pasture and arable ground”. He aimed to conduct practical experiments for the “bettering of all hungry and barren grounds” (3), an aim frequently justified by merging arcane and religious ideas with famine-driven imagery. The death and barrenness motif was thus expanded through an explication of 2 Kings, 4.19–22: And the men of the Citie (that is of Hierico) saide vnto Elisha, Beholde sir, the dwelling of this Citie is pleasaunt as thou thy selfe seest: but the Water is naught, and the grounde barren. Hee saide, bring mee a new Cruse, and put salt therein. And they brought it him. And hee went vnto the Spring of Waters, and cast the salt therein, and sayde, thus sayeth the Lorde, I haue healed these waters: there shall not come hence foorth either death, or barrennesse. So the Waters were healed vnto this day according to the saying of Elisha which he spake. (4)12 The biblical text had a special resonance in Platt’s social context. Technologies of growing food were divine gifts, as he explained in another work on grain cultivation: It hath pleased the great God of heauen in his vnspeakeable mercie and loue, and in these times of dearth and penurie, to offer a most plentifull encrease of our best nourishing, Manna vnto us … (Corne ch.1)

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These God-given means ought to be applied by those “drowsie wittes” who were still “content with the fly-bitten and leane iades, to liue or starue vpon the bare common”. Human inertia in the face of crisis drove Platt to intensify and literalize his comparisons and to hark back to theories of seminal potential. Winter corn, for instance, lost its “generatiue vertue” from cold showers which fall vppon the graine, lying either naked and bare to all weather, or very slenderly clothed with a poore and thinne garment, not able sufficiently to defend the inward and secret fire of nature, from such outward and piercing enemies. The exposed grain was like the undernourished and inadequately clothed human body: its “inward Balsamum” nipped with the cold could not “draw for his owne nourishment such store of that vegetatiue salt from the earth, as it desireth” (ch.2). It resembled the lean jades and their owners who “starue[d] vpon the bare common”. Corn, which was food for men, must itself be fed: this was the task of manure. The poetic, magical, religious, and pragmatic fields of Platt’s receipt for “vegetable η” underlined fundamental ethical concerns and articulated a circulation-based thinking about the natural world whose generative virtue was “manured with the starres”. The alchemical efficacy of this idea depended on the symbolic as well as literal, chemical meaning of manuring with “stars”, or by heavenly influence. The metaphorical language of alchemy was inextricably allied to its practice, but this alliance is usually seen in relation to alchemical practices of secrecy and concealment, or as a symptom of the “early modern taste for riddles, allegories and intellectual exercises” (Eamon, 1994: 3–12). The reading of a metaphor is placed on the same scale as the deciphering of signs and emblems to see correspondences between things on different levels. This satisfied the reader’s desire for a quest or hunt (venatio) and the alchemical conceit is thought to heighten the sense of mystery through images of discordia concors. Arguments along these lines are often used to explain, on the one hand, the uses of alchemical imagery by poets (such as Donne, Herbert, or Vaughan) and, on the other hand, the writing of poetry by alchemical philosophers and practitioners, such as Edward Taylor or George Starkey (Linden, 1996; Newman, 2003: 224). To see alchemical rhetoric as purely “imagery” or the “expression of chymical theories and practices in an elegant and contrived format” is too limited (Moran, 2006: 99–131; also Newman, 2005: 156). Rather, this rhetoric and its assemblage of symbols and allusions marked an effort to debate appropriate modes of human intervention in the natural world. The language filtered into texts that were not explicitly alchemical in their aim. The circulatory processes of nature were mysterious, and the alchemical mystery of Platt’s receipt, preserved through its poetry, existed in tension with the practicality of the text. However, while ideas of circulation thrived on mysteriousness, this reinforced the point that human intervention in natural

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processes had to be a carefully considered art. The ethical question underpinning the receipt and its explication – from religious, practical, and metaphorical points of view – was how to position the work of human hands within this ecological vision. The concern, expressed in the language of medication and recovery, was about the ideal means by which humans could or should intervene in the circulation of natural replenishment. Even the Arcana, after all, worked through the magus who was a human practitioner. Platt’s deployment of the language of death, barrenness, and starvation was thus accompanied by an underlying belief in the innate generosity and openness of nature that could be aided by experiment and analysis. He warned (differentiating his position from some of his Paracelsian sources) that the earth would not “by quietnesse or rest alone … become fatte again” without the ministering of “nourishment or food vnto it”. This attempt to balance the human need to utilize nature with human responsibility was reflected in the way the language of productivity and profit surfaced and was tensely suppressed by the moderating language of medicine and remedy. Was it reasonable to assume a patient could recover his former strength without restorative broths? Nature alone “ministreth matter enough for vs to worke on, but wanteth hands onely”; if helped, “she will retourne our labour againe with an excessiue vsurie into our bosomes” (JH 32–33). Emphasis on the right kind of labour and ecologically sensitive human engagement with the natural world combined with anxiety about the continued fertility or ministry of nature. Works on soil and marl, by authors like Francisco Valles (the Spanish physician) and Bernard Palissy (the French naturalist), were important to Platt because the knowledge they contained was “wrung out of the bowels of the earth”, and “true infantes of Art” received through these texts “a full light into nature”.13 Nature’s “Cornucopia” was not to be mindlessly exploited, but utilized and replenished judiciously. With guidance, farmers may glean “a fewe lose and scattered eares, to make so much breade of, as may relieue their hungrie bellyes” (9). Sufficiency and moderation were emphasized – “so much bread … as may relieue”. The search for manure, and scientific invention in general (or giving Nature a helping hand), were, therefore, not only economically, but ecologically and morally grounded. In his recent article on the “invention” of sustainability, Paul Warde argued that modern notions of sustainability drew on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideas of “a circulation of essential nutrients within ecologies” which “allow[ed] the perception that disruption to circulatory processes could lead to permanent degradation” (2011: 153). Warde said that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ideas about loss of soil fertility were based on a humoral theory of imbalance rather than of flows; there was no awareness of an “essential element that could be, or come to be, deficient”; and early modern improvers demonstrated a “complete lack of sense that there could be a longterm trend in soil quality”. He saw Platt as an anomalous thinker in this respect, closer to later writers in identifying “an active agent that brought about herbaceous growth” (156–57).14 Reading Platt more closely, within a cultural context wider than that represented by agricultural manuals alone,

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demonstrates that his ideas were not anomalous. They were part of a linked religious, literary, alchemical, and agricultural discourse about not simply an active agent of plant growth but a philosophical and material principle of nourishment and regeneration in nature, fully recognized as having long-term significance for past and future generations and a circulatory mode of operation. “Magical” manure receipts established this by exploiting the poetic valence of manuring practices. Ideas and arguments about seminality and circulation were reinforced by modes of knowledge circulation among a wide network of expert practitioners, as this chapter further shows, and by marshalling powerful theological arguments about the doctrine of judgements and divine complicity in efforts to protect natural resources. Mystical powers of God were thought to be expressed through the divine balancing of natural elements. The “Waters of Elisha” passage quoted earlier was glossed as a sign of divine willingness to nourish nature and humankind by an act that embodied the principles of both balance and flow. This nexus of discursive strands created the context for human disruption of natural circulatory processes to be glossed as sin, and fed a self-conscious wariness about economic enterprise. By noting these subtle processes and contextual specificities governing early modern articulations of ecological thought, in their own terms, we may appreciate the historical inheritance of modern ideas and anxieties about sustainability.

Manure and the circulation of knowledge In scientific texts, manuals, and notebooks, the centrality of “experience” (hands-on understanding of natural processes) for knowledge making was rooted in the Paracelsian idea of experientia as a means of accessing scientia by uniting with nature. Paracelsus’ argument, Pamela Smith observes, promoted a fundamental epistemological change by “locating scientia in nature and … emphasising the productive aspects of the knowledge of nature” rather than emphasizing syllogistic logic as the means to scientia in the established tradition of knowledge making (2004: 87–89). I would add that the emphasis on unity made the role of the human practitioner, and sustaining his unity with nature, crucial. Not only was experience important for accessing “certain knowledge”, as scientia was often translated in the period; it was a mark of responsible human intervention to “pass on knowledge through experience” to future generations of practitioners (Paracelsus, 1553: 192; Smith, 2004: 88).15 Discourses of knowledge making and agricultural chemistry were thus linked, not merely by analogy but an understanding of how humankind could access and circulate knowledge of a fundamental principle of sustenance inherent in nature. Processes of transcription, rewriting, and ideation defined harmonious human intervention. Platt’s manure experiments were drawn from widely different social groups and professions. Collected communal practices were compared with his own, and with knowledge from books. His manuscripts, publications, library books, and annotations show how conceptions of natural processes shaped methods of knowledge making. An example is Platt’s analysis and use of the authors

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Francisco Valles and Bernard Palissy within the discursive context of his own treatise on soil. Platt’s Diverse sorts of soyle (in Jewell House) began with abridgements from works by Valles and Palissy, selected as much for their approach to knowledge making as for content. Valles, personal physician to Philip II of Spain (whose court became a centre for experimental alchemy in the 1570s), taught medicine at the Complutensis University in Alcala from 1554 to 1572. Platt referred to his De sacra philosophia (1587).16 Valles’s influential work Controversiarum medicarum et philosophicarum (first published in 1556, and thereafter in ten editions printed in Basel, Frankfurt, Venice, and Spain) aimed to address inconsistencies between medical theory and natural philosophy. In his commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorologica IV, for physicians and medical students, Valles’s pragmatic emphasis shaped his criticism of Aristotle for not using “experience” to confirm his opinions: “But the art of medicine is needed. For, it, accepting certain principles from this part of philosophy, and combining these with experiment, teaches the temperaments of everything, including parts in living bodies” (Martin, 2002: 18, 29; also Crowther, 2008: 397–427). The stress on experience and experiment clarifies his appeal for Platt, who chose to translate Valles’s practical exposition of biblical miracles with salt. Valles’s position on furthering knowledge was comparable to that of the Italian surgeon and vendor of miraculous cures Leonardo Fioravanti, whom Platt mentioned in the preface to Jewell House (B3v). Fioravanti expressed disenchantment with traditional medicine in Secreti Medicinali (1561) and De Capricci Medicinali (1565). Alchemical practice was for him a means of self-fashioning, located in the bustling marketplace for distilled products in sixteenth-century Italy, as Eamon argued (2000: 196). Fioravanti’s epiphany in 1548 was recorded in his autobiography, which astutely began on the day he left Bologna to “walk the world and plough the seas, seeing many cities and provinces, practicing with various kinds of persons, medicating many men and women with all sorts of infirmities” (Il Tesoro della vita humana, 1570).17 He turned his residence in Naples into an informal academy where like-minded empiricists met to conduct experiments in alchemy and distillation.18 Fioravanti resided for a year (1576) at the court of Philip II of Spain and may have been acquainted with Valles (Eamon, 2000: 209–13; Goodman, 1988). In the process of selective transcription, therefore, Platt created a field of references aligned, though not identical, in their approach to knowledge making. Valles did not go as far as Paracelsus in distinguishing between “experience” and “experiment” to consolidate the alliance between knowing and doing. Despite differences in emphasis and circumstance, sources selected by Platt provided, in addition to information, models for networks of knowledge circulation.19 As Platt wrote, “what one man could euer attaine to al things in their ful perfection”. Not only should knowledge making be interactive and collaborative, it must be “drawne from the infallible grounds of practise” (JH B3v; Mukherjee, 2011). His selected texts and authors prioritized “experience” in a manner similar to Paracelsus, engaged with the natural environment through

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travel, and consciously opposed knowing the natural world through logical abstractions of Aristotelian natural philosophy alone. These authors were also practitioners aiming to arrive at scientia, certain knowledge of nature, through experientia, hands-on engagement with nature. Another central figure in this field of experts, whose views were tested and interactively arranged in the pages of Platt’s own notebooks and publications, was Bernard Palissy. Known for his research on glazed pottery, Palissy also investigated the chemistry of manures, especially marl. His Discours admirables de la nature des eaux et fontaines tant naturelles qu’artificielles, des metaux, des sels et salines, des pierres, des terres, du feu et des emaux. Avec plusieurs autres excellent secrets des choses naturelles; plus Un Traite de la Marne, fort utile et necessaire … (1580) better illustrates his range.20 Palissy trekked industriously over the Pyrenees and Netherlands, observing their natural features (especially soils and minerals), suffering poverty and ridicule, selling the furniture of his cottage and even his coat to procure materials for research. His life and self-fashioning resemble Paracelsus, with whose work he was familiar (Debus, 1968: 74; Amico, 1996).21 Palissy laboriously studied lead and tin glazes, the chemical composition of soils, and the arts of clay modelling. In 1575–76, and in 1584, he organized scientific congresses in Paris, attended by learned contemporaries and dignitaries including Ambroise Paré, First Surgeon to the King, two physicians to Margaret of Navarre, and possibly Francis Bacon. He had lectured frequently in the city on agriculture, chemistry, mineralogy, and geology, and formed a considerable museum whose collections he used to illustrate his lectures, encouraging the hearer’s faculty of observation with demonstrations of natural objects (Allbutt, 1913: 233–47). Palissy’s congresses bring to mind Platt’s exhibitions to the Lord Mayor and citizens of London, which sought to disseminate knowledge gathered through experience, making it part of the experience and practice of others. In the dedication to Sir Anthoine de Ponts in Discours (1580), Palissy wrote, “J’ai dressé un cabinet auquel j’ai mis plusieurs choses admirables et monstrueuses, que j’ai tirées de la matrice de la terre [I have dressed a cabinet, in which I have placed several admirable and monstrous things, that I have pulled out of the matrix of the earth].” The image of the matrix of the earth resonated with the use of similar images in the context of circulation-based theories discussed earlier. One can hear the same note in Platt’s claim that his works were not written “by an imaginary conceit in a Schollers priuate Studie, but wrung out of the earth, by the painfull hand of experience” (Floraes A8r). Did Platt see himself as an English Palissy? The image of the lonely, wandering scholar, who turned away from traditional learning in a quest for rare secrets, and went to every corner of the world, approached people of all ranks, also appeared frequently among the authors of secrets in the sixteenth century. Girolamo Ruscelli and Leonardo Fioravanti, among others, manipulated this stance consciously (Eamon, 1994: ch.8). While he agreed with the principles of eclecticism governing this stance and approach to knowledge, Platt also adapted to his own local and national knowledge-making environments the

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principles of dissemination and circulation he found in Palissy. His selective summaries of Palissy and Valles demonstrate the blending of these concerns. The extract from Valles focused on natural (and rationally explicable) causes of divine miracles with salt, signifying the purifying of waters “done in token of some Sacrament”. But Valles was concerned with the role “of Nature in this myracle”, for God had many excellent reasons “to vse some naturall cause”. It was a custom “with our auncient forefathers” to plough and sow with salt “all such ground as became forfeit and confiscate vnto the Crowne, by reason of any high and capitall offence committed”. This made the ground barren, as in the case of Abimelech’s destruction of the city of Sichemites (Judges 9). If salt, therefore, was the principal means of making soil unfruitful, how could there be a “naturall vertue” in it to help sweeten the waters of Jericho? There were two logical possibilities: either a course contrary to nature was deliberately adopted by God in the miracle of Elisha to heighten the wondrous effect, or salt functioned as a corrective to some form of corruption in the waters. For salt, being hot and dry, consumed all putrefaction, argued Valles. This was supported by practical knowledge and experience. Mariners carried brackish water on long voyages as it lasted longer. Springs were cleaned by casting salt into them. However, when used in extreme, salt could kill: the sea of Sodom (“dead sea”) engendered no living thing and destroyed all that fell into it. Valles surmised that the spirit of God that spread itself upon the waters in the beginning was a kind of fire, which made the waters salty, and accounted for the creation of all creatures. This divine act of origination established the circulatory processes of ecological harmony, moderation, and balance. Thus, in a moderately saline sea, plants and creatures were engendered, growing “into huge and mightie bodies”. The same applied to man – moderately taken, salt provoked “venerious actes” and “helpeth to the generation of mankind”. It ensured the continuity and posterity of a species. This explanation was followed by a series of eclectic proofs of the procreative effects of salt – Egyptians fed their dogs salt meat to make them breed, ships at sea were often pestered by “exceeding store of mice”, fishmongers’ wives were wanton owing to their constant handling of salt (Platt, JH 4–9; Valles, 1587: 227–32). Valles’s combination of biblical exegesis and practical exempla to illuminate the function of salts in the natural and human world is reminiscent of the overlapping methodologies of Barlow’s sermons and Platt’s famine treatise discussed earlier. Religious and pragmatic (or scientific) modes of explication, as noted in chapter 2, were interactive and often compatible rather than competitive modes (cf. Harrison, 1998; Killeen, 2009; van der Meer and Mandelbrote, 2008). Valles’s emphasis on moderating the degree of salt was of key significance to Platt, who proceeded to summarize the views of Palissy, thus setting the two authorities in dialogue. He was adept at using the hermeneutic tools of logic and dialectic in conjunction with an applied, empirical methodology. Rather than illustrating a frequently assumed linear historical movement from early reiteration of ancient textual authority through textual criticism and translation to active empirical engagement with the natural world, Platt’s mode of explication showed he inhabited a moment

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when textual recovery, criticism, translation, and active engagement collectively define knowledge-making processes (contra Harrison 120). The already intricate interlinking of these methods, and their moral connotations, was further complicated in Platt’s collaborative programme of knowledge circulation, shaped by his close reading of textual sources in conjunction with his practice. In Palissy’s “Des sels divers”, “salt” or “salts” denoted that mineral composition which was the source of nourishment and being in all material things – “there is not any one thinge in the worlde, [as Platt translated] which dooeth not participate of this salt”. No man, beast, tree, plant, metal, or rock could exist without it. Stones, posts, rafters, and beams of a house would “fall to powder, in lesse than the twinkeling of an eie” without it, as would all metals. Objects contained as much salt “as is sufficient for them”. There were as many different kinds of salt as there were tastes or scents. Salt imparted the specificity of flavour or “savour” to objects, and “alone causeth the vegetation, perfection, maturitie, and the whole good that is conteined in euery thing that nourisheth”. Dung, muckheaps, and excrement enriched arable ground because of their salt, and “fools” who left their dunghills exposed to the weather should be aware that rainfall could cause the vital salt to flow down to the valleys, making this manure ineffectual (JH 10–11, 14–15; Palissy, 1580: 164–78). What appealed to Platt was, first, the idea that the fundamental principle of nourishment and regeneration in nature circulated through natural operations, such as rainfall. Second, Palissy’s work reinforced the awareness that human intervention (or failure to intervene in the right way) could affect the natural system of flows. Palissy’s deployment of local knowledge and personal experience was important to a figure like Platt, directly involved in maintaining and cultivating his lands. He scrutinized Palissy’s considerably detailed lists of practical uses and properties of salt, observing, for example, that ashes were used to whiten linen because of their corrosive salt content. Alchemists, for the same reason, blanched copper with the salt of tartar, while dyers used alum to make cloth take their dye better. The flavour of cinnamon sticks suggested that salt resided in the barks of trees. Pigeons devoured moulding walls made of lime and sand because the salt therein was “the verie potable Golde of the Pigeons” (JH 11–14). Deploying his personal experience and local knowledge, Palissy commented that upon the hillocks of Xaintonge (on the Atlantic coast of France) grew better grass, fairer corn, and more fertile vines than he had ever seen. In these salt marshes, all kinds of fruit, wild herbs, thorns, and thistles prospered. All living things in Xaintonge were helped by the salt exhalations of the air. The all-encompassing efficacy of “salt” was posited by Palissy with some rhetorical vehemence: For salt whiteneth all thinges, it hardeneth all things, it preserueth all things, it giueth sauour to all things, it is that Masticke that gleweth all things together, it gathereth and knitteth all minerall matters, and of

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The conviction that salt was “all” created the space for a utopian dream of plenty and fertility that both Palissy and Platt evoked. Tropes of plenty were common in this period’s agricultural literature and it is argued they took a markedly utilitarian, proto-capitalist slant in seventeenth-century discourses of agricultural improvement (McRae, 1996: 252, 298–99). However, the trope here is moderated by the subtle moral modulation of “all”, reinforced by medicinal metaphors – “the verie potable Golde of the Pigeons”. Through this language, salt acquired a philosophical and semi-religious force, drawing attention to the ethical implications of natural knowledge. Not only was salt ascribed pragmatic functions such as whitening, hardening, or preserving, it also “giueth beautie to all reasonable creatures”. The combined pragmatic, aesthetic, and moral appeal of salt was of special significance to Platt. The animal and vegetative world seemed to have an instinctive awareness of its import, as did the simple countrymen of Xaintonge, so why not men of Palissy’s (or Platt’s) day? The land acquired through Palissy’s description (and Platt’s transcription) a magical aura of plenty grounded in moral value, placed in specific contrast to their own homelands: a single Xaintonique vine equalled six Parisian ones. If the key to all this abundance was “salt”, then it had to be located, defined, and mined. Consequently, Platt placed alongside this text his abridgement of Palissy’s “De la marn” in an attempt to show how. In his treatise, Palissy had complicated the search for salt by distinguishing between “common salt” (which we consume) and “vegetative salt” (which inheres in specific forms in each material object) that was the crux of his treatise on marl (JH 16; Palissy 169). Marl was a “white earth which men digge out from vnder the ground” to lay “vppon their hungrie and barren groundes, first in small heapes, and afterwards they disperse the same vpon the whole fielde, as is accustomed in the common manner of dunging” (JH 20–21). The virtues of marl – a deposit of clay mixed with calcium carbonate – as fertilizer were known from prehistoric times, but the practice of using it declined in England by the fifteenth century, and this was criticized in Fitzherbert’s Book of Husbandry (1533).22 Platt’s attempt to disseminate Palissy’s views, which highlighted the more practical aspects of the origin, location, transformation, and use of marl, thus marked a revival in agricultural methods.23 Palissy identified different chemical transformations of marl, and noted it was cold and dry like clay, and had, like salt, an “inward” heat which could “actuate nothing, vnlesse it were first stirred vp by a counter-heate wherin consisteth the seminal acte”. One had to locate the source of this heat and “looke to the essential cause that moveth and worketh herein” (JH 21–23).

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For Platt, this idea brought the human practitioner of natural knowledge closer to the “essential cause” of fertility, clarifying that the principle of fertility was not static; it moved, flowed, changed its outward form and circulated through the natural environment. This seminal cause Palissy called the “fifth element” – a “generatiue water … mingled inseparably” with “common waters”, which carried it along valleys, rivers, springs, and floods.24 When the common water evaporated, the generative water hardened, engendering marl. When marl – a transmuted soil formulation containing the congealed fifth element – was scattered on arable ground, the seed sown in it “doth not take of the substance of this marle, to helpe his vegetation, but doth rather glut it selfe with this generatiue, and congelatiue water”. Platt insisted on the distinction between the substance of the fifth element and that of marl, which was its retainer and the conduit for the seeds’ nourishment. When the fifth element had been consumed by the seeds, “marle becommeth vnprofitable, as a sign of some decoction finished”.25 In Platt’s summary, the mediation of both marl and common water was highlighted, thus placing special emphasis on the circulatory process. The fifth element could not act without an agent, but its power and appeal lay in its omnipresence and indestructibility. It “upheld” straw and hay, pebbles and stones, trees and plants, beasts and man, whose very bones were framed in its “kind” (JH 23–26). In this account, both discourses on marl and on salt were recast as practical quests for a hidden key to generation and growth in the natural world which would, Platt felt, reform the agricultural economy of England. The distinctive power of this magic manure lay in its presentation as both natural and divine, turning barren English farmland into a plentiful Eden: Marle is a naturall, and yet a diuine soile, being an enemie to all weedes that springe vppe of themselues, and giueth a generatiue vertue to all Seedes that are sowne vpon the ground by the labour of man. (JH 28) This had significant consequences for understanding human intervention: “the labour of man”. It drew attention to the process of the quest for varieties of nourishing substances in nature. Palissy conjectured that marl was discovered accidentally by a farmer, who chanced to throw marl-rich soil on his arable fields, and afterwards experimentally repeated the practice, discovering “by long experience” that it worked better than other kinds of manure. Platt applied this narrative of experimental practice, literally and metaphorically, to creating and circulating knowledge. Making and sharing knowledge were forms of digging and manuring which replicated and aided the circulation of essential nourishment in nature. He wrote, “I think it necessarie that euerie man shoulde haue a long Auger or Percer” to pierce “in diuers places of his Lande, alwaies marking what seuerall vaines of earth he fyndeth”, of which “he may make some triall vpon the ground” until assured that “he hath hit vppon the right Marle” (26–27). The diversity of nature and soil directly shaped the diversity of knowledge-making processes, including that of revising,

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appropriating, and transmitting works by Palissy, Valles, and others. It also shaped an understanding and language of waste. Platt deplored the fact that Palissy’s work could have been “extant so manie yeares together with so little fruit, and profit”. Stagnant, uncirculated knowledge was wasted knowledge and contrary to nature. “Digging” acquired a moral force which attempted, not without ambivalence, to balance dissemination of knowledge to “all” with volatile metaphors of venture capitalism.26 Palissy’s text, in Platt’s persuasive rhetoric, became a mine of hidden plenty. It was time “some studious scholler” stepped forth to “take our idle Farmers by the hand, and either leade them ouer shooes into one of Maister Barnards Mucke-heapes, or else by violence thrust them into one of his Marle-pittes”. The mock violence articulated the urgent need to stimulate the circulation of knowledge. What cheaper tools could there be than the human hand and a piercing augur “to search into the bowels of the earth for all her marrow, and fatnesse?” The idea of hidden wealth was firmly tied to practical economy: the veins of marl “are more in number, much longer and broader, and deeper than wee think”; so, it was “a small adventure to hazarde a shilling to gaine a pounde” (JH 29). The alliance between digging and handling received knowledge reminded that ideas unearthed had to be reapplied in specific local contexts to keep them circulating. Texts used so copiously by Platt were thus passed on in transmuted form, their theories extended by local trial and error (cf. Smith and Schmidt, 2007). The localized understanding of knowledge making sharpened debates on ethical aspects of human intervention. Platt suggested the quest for marl would address contemporary dearth and unemployment issues. Economic and ecological benefits could be discovered in unlikely places, and anxieties surfaced about the ambivalence behind balancing the two kinds of benefit, especially in times of dearth. Testing received knowledge in local contexts was tied to these ecological anxieties. The surmise that marl contained clay was confirmed by an ingenious old man who had shown Platt the fertilizing properties of clay dug up from St George’s fields. As Palissy observed that rain water contained “vegetative salt”, Platt recommended using as manure soil found in streets, channels, ponds, rivers, ditches, or any place where water “hath a long time settled”. Following the theory that dunghills lost their richness when rain carried away the vegetative salt, Platt recommended a cheap method of covering compost heaps he had observed in the backyard of his tenant’s house in St Albans (JH 31–34). Palissy’s observations were made in France, but in the English setting, Platt asked, might there be varieties of marl that Palissy never saw or knew? One must make “full tryall of all the inward veynes of the earth, in all the seasons of the yeare, in all degrees of proportion, in all kindes of graine, vpon all sortes of grounde, with all such like necessarie circumstaunces” (JH 30–31). Readers of Platt’s books were encouraged to be as dynamic, active, and enquiring as the author himself (Mukherjee, 2011: 82–86). The renewed moral modulation of “all” allied the variety of local soils to that of local knowledge, recycling, and waste-reductive methods. Blindness to local

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climates and ecologies was cast as being a form of waste which could disrupt the harmonious circulatory processes of nature and human knowledge.

Recycling: “A practical discourse upon salt” Platt’s innovations within the contemporary discourse of manure led to the investigation of communal recycling strategies through which he criticized existing theories. Donald Woodward’s study of recycling measures related to clothing, building, metals, and paper commented that pre-industrial agriculture “consisted of a vast, interlocking productive system”, and drew attention to the thin line between adulteration and recycling (1985: 175–76).27 During dearth, moral frameworks for evaluating adulteration and waste were less fixed. Following Cipolla’s argument that “pervasive poverty” occasioned the re-use of things and avoidance of waste, Woodward too emphasized that dearth led people to recycle whenever possible, thereby contributing to national welfare (175; Cipolla, 1976: 132–40). Jane Whittle contended that early modern recycling practices stemmed not necessarily from dearth but from a (probably gendered) culture of thrift that also shaped the workings of elite households. Her evidence described recycling practices in the upper-gentry household of Alice Le Strange (Whittle and Griffiths, 2012: 242; Whittle, 2011). The arguments are not necessarily contradictory. Woodward’s analysis of selected areas of recycling and Whittle’s analysis of consumption and thrift in a particular household together draw out the economic complexities of early modern cultures of recycling. Cultural understandings of dearth and thrift interacted and overlapped, as evident in the work of Platt who operated as a mediatory figure, across social groups and professions. He also produced and sold ornamental or “luxury” items (as we might call them today with our relatively polarized modern conceptions of luxury and economy) and, in these practices, exercised thrift and adopted recycling measures. His theorizing of dearth and fertility stimulated his recycling practices, while his application of theorized remedies shows how knowledge of recycling was circulated, and to what extent it could be transmitted across social and professional boundaries. Platt’s emphasis on recycling and waste-reduction emerged from his criticism of Palissy and Valles. In “A practical discours vpon salt”, Platt explained the implied link between marl (the carrier of the fifth essence) and “vegetative salt”, by the joint consideration of “Des sels divers” and “De la marn”. He then emphasized (following Valles) the fertility of salt sea waters and (following Palissy) the productivity of salt marshes, pointing out that neither author had left “any assured meanes, how wee may purchase any store of this salt, whereby wee may make any great vse thereof”. They had led us “vnto the riuers of life, and to that goodly tree so laden with golden apples, yet here we are left with Tantalus to starue and perish for want of food” (JH 38). For Platt, gaps in knowledge gathered from written sources, whether Paracelsus or Palissy, were inevitable reminders of the looming threat of food shortage. The contemporary reality of dearth was reiterated by evoking the Tantalus myth, casting the problem of

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shortage as a moral issue, as well as a pragmatic one. Starvation or, more insidiously, eternal deprivation of nourishment was Tantalus’ punishment for various crimes: greed for material possessions (signified by the appropriation of the golden dog) or for knowledge (signified by the stealing of heavenly secrets) and, finally, the violation of hospitality, gruesomely represented in the tale of his offering the gods his own butchered son at a banquet, for which he lost access to divine food and table, and even to ordinary forms of nourishment (Euripides, Orestes ll.1–10, 982; Homer, Odyssey xi.582; O’Brien, 1988). Tantalus was, moreover, a familiar trope in contemporary literary critiques of exploitative human greed, appearing repeatedly in poetry anthologies, or philosophical and theological texts. In Allott’s anthology Englands Parnassus, for example, Tantalus embodied the paradox of “Auarice”: “Like Tantalus staru’d in the midst of store, / Not that she hath, but what she wants she counts, / A well-wing’d Bird, that neuer loftie mounts” (1600: 10).28 The figure constituted a trope that could resist and balance the rhetorical impetus of the vocabulary of profit, utility, or usury that Platt sometimes found necessary to deploy to argue his case.29 There was a deliberation in Platt’s choice of this analogy and myth which highlighted food-centred crimes and punishments. He adapted the story of Tantalus to his critique of waste and withheld knowledge, and the rhetorical move became a means of projecting his anxieties for posterity. He argued vigorously with Palissy for not taking his findings far enough, and his cutting tone was part of his self-fashioning as a rectifier of logical errors in texts through practical experience: Why how now maister Barnard? Is it possible, that you, which could first find out the meanes, howe to furnish vs in al places, with new springs of sweet and delicate waters, where there was neuer any before, that could first finde a fift element, which nature had hitherto locked vp in her owne cofers, which coulde teach vs the reason of al petrefiyng, vitrifying, & metalizing of earthy bodies, yea which could so learnedlie set downe, the generatiue reason of al vegetables, should now be ignorant howe to reconcile earth and salt togither, or how to turn a common salt into a vegetatiue salt? (JH 39) Pressing forward Valles’s principle of moderation, Platt argued common salt was a variant of vegetative salt and could be changed into the latter by natural transmutation. Valles was right to say it was the excessive proportion of salt that destroyed the malefactors’ grounds. Furthermore, element theory seemed to bear out Platt’s point. Criticizing the abstract theorizing of Classical authors, he claimed to have learnt, not from Aristotle, nor Velcurius, nor Garceus,30 but “on the backside of Moore fieldes”, that the elements could be reduced to one, differing only in “attenuation” and “condensation”. Earth attenuated became water, and water condensed became earth, and so on. It followed that all elements must “spring from one roote”, and there was a “greate, and neere

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affinity betweene the lande, and the sea, wherein we shall finde salte water enough for our purpose” (JH 40–41). The unity of the elements, of land and sea, made it possible to relate sea salt with the vegetative salt in earth. As Palissy’s works sought to identify the essential basis of growth and life in natural objects, the answer, Platt thought, lay in a single (though transmutable) substance present in all things. His rhetorical questions emphasized its singularity and essential nature. To assert, as Palissy did, that common sea salt (which generated life in the sea) was not only distinct from, but opposed in its nature and effects to, vegetative salt was logically flawed; nor was it borne out by the investigation of manuring practice. Thus, local practice provided the basis of Platt’s “discourse upon salt”. He now constructed his own history of the use of sea salt as manure based on local reports. The narrative bore some resemblance to Palissy’s conjectures on the discovery of marl: a “sillie swaine” accidentally dropped his sack of seed corn into the sea. He planted the seed out of necessity, and reaped an unusually good crop. This led to the superstitious belief that seed corn would not fructify unless it fell into the sea by chance. However, a farmer at Clapham experimented by sowing sea salt in his barren fields, which “to this daye remayneth more fresh and greene, and full of swarth” than surrounding fields. West-country farmers carried salt sands to their barren fields; and the exceptionally fertile fields near the breaches at Erith and the salt pits at Nantwich (Cheshire) were regularly seasoned with salt water drained from these pits and breaches. Platt thus proposed channelling sea water to adjacent land to increase its fertility. The water could be drained back into the sea by “conuenient sluces”, and the earth, left to her own workmanship, would by her inward heat and transmuting nature convert common salt into vegetative salt.31 However, he proposed gradual experimentation on waste ground or small arable plots before moving on to pasture. Different grounds required different proportions of salt and the time taken for natural transmutation would vary (JH 41–47). With the movement from local myth (the story of the “sillie swaine”) to local practice, Platt demonstrated that beliefs and stories underpinning local knowledge had scientific bases that could be recovered through experiment and attention to detail. Using the belief as a starting point, his narrative developed comparisons of local manuring and recycling strategies. He traced the action of various “salts”, constructing a hierarchy of measures stressing the local appropriateness of manure types. He allotted first place to putrefied vegetable matter, like ferns, which were cheap, plentiful, and rotted speedily. Platt knew a Yorkshire knight who laid fern through the alleys of his hop garden, gathering rich manure each year. Calcination (“Denshiring”) was identified as a popular fertilizing method: fern, stubble, straw, heather, firs, sedges, beanstalks, and the “sworde, and swarth of the ground” were burnt, and the ashes applied to soil. Mould, found in hollows of old willow trees, was gathered for manure by “studious practicers”, as was malt dust in malting towns. Animal “salts” followed the vegetable: pilchard oil was used in coastal towns, and Platt concluded that the waste of all fish (and blood, offal, and entrails of beasts) would be

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equally effective. London butchers, he noted, who buried the latter (to avoid offensive odours) in grounds kept for this purpose were creating rich soil (47–60). Platt continuously expanded his lists of manures, recommending seaweed for pasture grounds, dregs of beer and ale, soot of chimneys, saltpetre residue, shavings of horn (which he claimed to have used successfully at Bishop’s Hall), used soap ashes, artificial brine, woad fat, hulls of oats, burnt iron ore (extensively used for pasture ground in Essex, Sussex, and Wales, where there had long been iron works), dead cattle or stray cats and dogs (commonly buried under trees), as well as drained water from rubbish heaps (Corne ch.6). The manure lists are linked to broader experiments with waste conducted over time. This is evident in the listing and planning of waste use in the manuscript notebooks, one of which contains recycling ideas in 38 paragraphs on the following topics: leftover heat from domestic fires and candles; discarded orange pulp; egg whites; remnant molasses, turned into a drink for seafarers; urine; dead sheep, blood and brains of slaughtered animals, and carrion; sheep dung; earth from graves; dead bodies; residue liquor from starch-making and steeped barley; brine from salt pits (specifically, Lord Dudley’s brine pit); waste brine from households and salt makers; woad roots and fallow woad ground; spent Spanish Black; alum springs (specifically, Lord Shrewsbury’s alum spring); wormwood to substitute hops; sawdust, coal ashes, soap ashes, beanstalk and kelp ashes; oilseed pulp; waste iron filings; tiles used as whetstones; saltpetre residue; parchment shreds; and “vile and contemptable thinges in physicke” (MS.2189, ff.163–65).32 With these realities in mind, one might re-read Platt’s quarrel with the courtier, poet, and satirist John Harington, who published, in 1596, his satire on urban sanitation, containing designs for a flush toilet, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax. Taunting Platt, he wrote: But that you may see M. Plat, I have studied your booke with some observation: if you would teach me your secret of making artificiall cole, and multiplying barley (though I feare me both the meanes will smell a little of kin to M. A Jax) I assure you I would take it verie kindly. He added a marginal note: “Some conjecture, that stale & cowdoung must effect both these multiplications” (1962: 166–67).33 If Harington was satirizing urban sanitation or contemporary politics, as scholars have argued, he also appears to be satirizing waste-reductive recycling measures across a number of Platt’s proposals. His style, diagrams, and notes parodied contemporary scientific notebooks.34 In the same year, Platt published his treatise on famine containing measures for reducing waste, where he reiterated the significance of recycling and manuring practices during dearth and responded to Harington’s joke. I will here (without praying in aide of M. AIAX or of his stale marginal notes, whose reformation hath already more offended the eares of

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Honourable persons, then his first falts could euer offende their noses) make a publick offer to al those Gentlemen and Farmers of Englande, who dwell in such partes of this Realme, as doe neither yield any store of Marle, or other common and ordinarie dung or soile, how they shal be sufficiently furnished with a newe and plentiful compost, and whereof there haue beene already sundrie and rich trials made, whose quantitie shall not exceede eight bushels, whose yearelie charge shal not amount to xviii. pence the acre communibus Annis, one year with another, and whose nature is so transmuted and disguised, as that one neighbor, yea M. Aiax himself, though he were present at the disposing or scattering thereof, shall not be able to discerne what his next neighbour hath done to his ground. In which secret, all those whome the author shal finde willing and worthie of the same, may vppon reasonable composition, become owners of the skill, aswell for their owne as for the good of their countrey. Neither doe I know any iust obiection, why the same should not inrich aswell pasture ground as arable. (Famine E2r) There was more at stake than a conflict of personalities or class (contra Donno, 1962; Bowers and Smith, 2007). Platt and Harington represented conflicting approaches to waste in the period, not necessarily proscribed by class, but associated with different modes of writing and knowledge dissemination. Ajax was written in a context where pollution and waste disposal were problems exacerbated by dearth and urban migration, and the issue of individual or household hygiene represented by Harington’s flush toilet was perceived to affect the wider sanitary system of the city of London.35 Harington explicitly linked waste production and disposal to congested population and infection. The foul “breath of Ajax” became the subject of repeated witticisms; the smell of waste, miasmic and invisible, helped the flow of infection through the city. Eliminating privy odours was the first means of controlling the corruption of the environment (Jenner, 2000: 131–32; Cipolla, 1992). Harington was familiar with traditional medical theory (he later translated the medieval text Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum in 1608) and his relentless ironic emphasis on smell echoed the sanitary mandates of contemporary councils who dealt daily with waste disposal specificities like the deposition of dung in marketplaces, dumping of wash water into gutters leading to rivers, maintenance of wooden conduits carrying solid and liquid waste from stools to common cisterns, privy litigation, conditions and mechanics of individually owned or shared toilets and their impact on activities within households and workshops, or the cleaning of streets to prevent plague.36 Waste-related anxieties were linked in Platt’s and Harington’s time to anxieties about spreading disease, and choking a system of flows that sustained the urban environment. Waste management was not just a private matter but a public one debated in official and legal registers. Harington’s text marshalled these worries along with biblical, Classical, historical, and contemporary socio-political references to consolidate his satirical

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address, presenting waste as a collective problem cutting across classes: “even in the goodliest & stateliest pallaces of this realme, nowithstanding all our provisions of vaults, of sluces, of grates, of paines of poore folkes in sweeping and scouring, yet still this same whorson sawcie stinke” (160). His partial solution in designing a privy with a false base, brass sluice, and flushing mechanism, allegedly installed in the households of his acquaintances, stopped short of addressing wider problems of a centrally managed drainage system. His ironic account of historic systems of drainage self-consciously placed the formal concerns out of his reach, at the same time gesturing towards an efficient Roman past with centralized control of urban environments and public health (111). In Harington’s scheme, waste – the “whorson sawcie stinke” – was a persistent source of infection and disruption of public and private well-being that needed to be centrally contained, controlled, and eliminated. In Platt’s scheme, waste was itself a resource that could and should be re-used in localized and productive ways to sustain a wider natural system of circulation and flow. Platt’s response to Harington first drew attention to recycled waste as a means of maintaining fertility, referring to the contemporary practice of night time collection of human waste to recycle it as fertilizer, better known by the polite euphemism “night soil” (Woodward, 1985: 189; Thirsk, 1967: 27, 52; Campbell, 1983: 34).37 The suggestion was typical of Platt who elsewhere recommended that London households should save their urine for regular collection to water artificial nitre-beds created to generate saltpetre, thus addressing the problem of rapid depletion of natural nitre deposits. He drew attention to practical and economic gains from recycling human waste, and highlighted the principle of natural transmutation discussed in his manure treatise. It was an apt answer to Harington: M. Ajax must not be offended by the smell of waste because it was, after all, subject to natural processes, and smell was evidence of a positive transmutation in progress. The real requirement was better understanding of the transformative potential of waste; transforming the disposal system without metamorphosing attitudes to waste was ineffective. As a medical practitioner who specialized in plague remedies, Platt presumably understood the problem of defining “infection”, and he presented a more subtle solution, suggesting the replacement of an older miasmic notion of waste as a source of infection with the notion of incorporating waste as a participant within the circulatory operations of nature. Finally, he emphasized the need for knowledgeable collective deployment of waste, being keen to pass on his recycling ideas to others, thus disseminating a more wholesome notion of waste and influencing public practice in that direction. The concern with knowledge dissemination shaped Platt’s critique of literary form, which is a significant aspect of the debate. The literary practice of addressing concerns about waste and infection through veiled satire was not new. Harington had a precedent in Thomas More’s Utopia, where the dream of a waste-free, and therefore plague-free, land may be linked to More’s acquaintance with such civic issues as Commissioner

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of the Sewers (Totaro, 2005: 8). Besides, scatological humour, widely prevalent in Renaissance literary culture, generated abundant models for Harington, who was thus writing about waste in a mode appropriate to project and intensify anxious links between waste and infection (Persels and Ganim, 2004; Velz, 1984, 2003). Part of Platt’s purpose was to caution against the use of this mode. And if i shal here discouer a secret both newe and profitable for our English Maltsters,38 whereof as yet there is not so much as any model extant, and that I could fal into M. Aiax veine, and had some of his glib paper, & gliding pens, I might soon scribble ten sheets, and sell euerie sheet for two pence, towarde necessarie charges: and in the end conclude the expectation of manie leaues, in a few sweeter lines then he hath done before me: but because I wil bind my selfe to no such priuy presidents, I will deliuer my conceipt in as plain and naked tearmes as I may. (Famine E1v) Just as Platt was concerned to provide new models for the productive and responsible use of waste matter, he was also concerned about creating a new model for writing about waste to foreground recycling “in plain and naked tearmes” and avoid falling into “M. Aiax veine” of expression. Humour based on political and social allegory could obfuscate practical concerns and their dissemination.39 Harington’s glib paper, gliding pens, and soon-scribbled 10 sheets constituted a waste of ink and paper because the text thus produced kept serious issues within a coterie of sophisticated insiders who were privy to his meaning. The pun on “priuy presidents” / privy precedents underlined that Platt, as an advocate of public circulation of knowledge, was not inclined to follow the precedent of veiling one’s meaning. Using scatological humour against its own vein, he moved on to outline recycling measures in plain terms so that the contrast became evermore evident. His quarrel was not so much with Ajax-Harington himself as with his views of waste and with the means by which Harington chose to articulate these views.40 The Platt-Harington debate helps to situate recycling practices within a wider context of attitudes and approaches to waste. It underlines that through his local research, Platt exposed gaps in received textual knowledge, criticized unapplied, wasted, or withheld knowledge, and articulated anxieties for the future. He demonstrated that these anxieties could be addressed through “discovering” and ascribing productive and moral value to objects categorized as rubbish. His innovation lay in converting their status and, through his analysis, exposing the fluidity and social malleability of categories of waste. The self-consciousness of this conversion was expressed through the very descriptions of items on his recycling list – for example, “vile and contemptable thinges in physicke”, which would presumably be re-used to positive effect. Such exposure was the point of embedding his reply to Harington within his famine treatise. The deployment of the quest motif, so that readers themselves were implicated and encouraged to continue the process of discovery,

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highlighted the fluidity of the meaning of waste and made it morally desirable (cf. Thompson, 1979: 9). Meanings of quest, digging, and discovery were thus slanted towards justifying communal and local cooperation, complicating the expected alliance of these themes with exploitation and individual profit.41 Platt’s recycling practices, and those of his network, were self-conscious about these contradictions created by their interaction with markets and trades. The preoccupation with recycling waste matter as fertilizer illustrated how people noted in specific experiments and measures a series of connected effects on aspects of socio-economic practice. How could one balance ecological and communal concerns with the growing complexity of market forces? This emerged as a regular point of concern in the period’s debate about resource management. One means by which Platt entered the debate was through his writings and practices of market gardening. He was at the centre of a fastdeveloping trade in market gardening in Bethnal Green, the area of his residence (Mukherjee, 2010). While his gardening practices also illustrate the importance of local networks and cooperation, and how these fed concerns about sustaining local organic economies and their productivity alongside operations of an increasingly competitive marketplace, the competition, in this case, was still focused at a relatively localized level. At the turn of the sixteenth century, broader and more apprehensive questions were also beginning to be asked. The next section considers the apparent digression on soap ashes in Platt’s manure treatise as an example of wider concerns about economic cooperation, given the emergence of international rivalries and their effects on local ecologies.

Economic cooperation: case study of soap boiling There were several advantages of using soap ash, made by burning certain kinds of wood (such as ash and elm), as fertilizer. Waste soap ashes were cheaply obtained: soap boilers gave them away, and some paid for carriage. Their transport cost was significantly less than that of soil or dung, whose carriage was scarcely affordable to the “poorer sorte of farmors in many places of this realme”. Two loads of soap ashes, Platt estimated, were sufficient for an acre of land and “soone bestowed” by the labour of one man without the help of cart or horse. The grain was sown, and the ashes strewn by hand until the ground “did seeme to haue gathered a whitish garment vppon it”. This sufficed for a year, and the ground did not have to be left fallow at any time. In Bishop’s Hall, Platt cultivated barley, sowing barren ground with soap ashes. As proof of their efficacy, he provided a picture of an ear of summer barley, claiming that its stalk measured to an ell and three inches (48 inches) in length (JH 50–52). The ashes were useful also on pasture ground, and for growing woad and hops, important crops in early modern England. In Lombardy, they were esteemed above common dung, and the writer on husbandry Barnaby Googe said they made artichokes prosper. Indeed, Platt himself knew a “graue and well experienced Cittizen of London” who tried them out on his artichokes in

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winter and benefited greatly. Platt advised that the best time to use soap ashes was around the Feast of All Saints (November), so that winter showers could dissolve them and plants could draw up the “vegetable salt” swiftly (53). In chemical terms, Platt’s explanation was accurate, as soap ash was wood ash, containing potassium and other nutrients. It also contained calcium carbonate, and its liming action raised the pH level of soil. It was thus most effective on acidic soils, making them more alkaline, and for plants that required alkaline conditions. Soap boilers, in Platt’s day, drained these ashes to produce the alkali required to react with acids used during soap making. Soap boiling, as Platt was well aware, was at the centre of flourishing projecting enterprises in the late sixteenth century. It was among the new industrial projects being enthusiastically pursued, and was of economic significance in creating employment in some rural areas and towns (Thirsk, 1978: 7, 24–50). These projects contributed to the growth of the concept of a national economy, as is evident in the way Platt’s account of soap boiling was tied to his sense of national identity: I would bee loth to leaue the most renowmed citty of Englande, wherin I was borne, without some further & sweeter helps for her barren groundes, then shee hath bin hitherto acquainted withal. … I daily do see, a most rich commodity trampled vnder foot, and contemned of al men, I hold my selfe euen bound in conscience, for my countries good, not to hide the same any longer, but rather to publish al such profitable vses therof. (JH 50) The fear of waste and concerns about recycling were becoming inescapably tied to concerns about national benefit. Platt was also alert to the politics of patenting, and its effect on national soap makers, sharing the contemporary fear of reliance on imports of indispensable goods.42 He thought that the case of soap ash provided an instance where the practice of recycling measures by localized traders could inform the construction of national identity. In 1561, a patent had been granted to the Dutchmen Stephen Groyett and Anthony le Lewyer to make hard white soap, equivalent in quality to the Spanish Castile manufactured in Triana and Seville. The import of soap into London, even in 1565, was valued at £4,422; that is, soap featured in the intermediate range of imports (measured by value) at par with other consumer goods such as pins (£4,374) and Spanish leather (£3,691). Soap ashes were also imported, and valued at £2,600. The best soap produced indigenously at the time was Bristol soap, unsuitable for fine laundry. In this economic climate, Groyett and le Lewyer had acquired the sole right to manufacture of Spanish Castile for 10 years, submitted their wares for inspection to the municipal authorities, and employed two native English servants (Thirsk, 52–54, 181–85). By the time Platt was writing in the 1590s, though soap boiling was being practised by English traders, the Dutch had acquired a hold over various aspects of the laundry trade (as well as other ventures), which partly explains the author’s

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patriotic irritation with them. Platt was annoyed by the way local trades and recycling measures were being increasingly driven by these market dynamics, and his case study of soap boiling illustrated particularly well the worries and recognized ambivalences about accommodating philosophically and ecologically justified recycling measures and production procedures to rapidly changing market structures. Platt pointed out that popular opinion which inferred that soap ashes were manufactured from a tree (like the native oak) of which “Dansicke Wainscot” was made, or from another tree that “somewhat resembleth our Witchen Elmes”, was incorrect. The ashes were not of any particular tree (whose secret only the foreign makers knew), but of diverse trees burnt together. Even waste ashes retained nutrients for plants. How was it, Platt asked in exasperation, that “our Fleminges (who wil not lose so much as the parings of their nayles, much les the vse of so rich a commodity) should wholly abandon them, and for so many yeares together discontinew all their traffike and barganing with our sope boilers?” (JH 53–54) There was a time when they “enriched themselves” substantially by buying ashes from soap boilers in England for “ten grotes a load”, plus transport (50). The traffic in ashes was linked to the politics of a recently revoked patent. The Dutch were charged by Platt with having obtained under false pretence patents for the extraction of saltpetre and sulphur. The first patent for saltpetre was granted to a Dutchman in 1561 (Thirsk 54). Platt alleged that, with such patents, native soap boilers were prohibited from selling ashes openly, in the hope that the ash could be used by patentees to extract saltpetre. But this proved pointless: no patentee could, with all his “chimicall skill, draw out or seperate one pound of peter, or brimstone from them”. In the end, after much discontent, the boilers demanded a higher rate upon the tun, which the Dutch denied, “and thereupon the first discontinuance of them grewe betwixt the flemings and the Sope boilers” (JH 54–55). Platt admitted that “the Low country men of Flanders” were the “most skilful & painful husbandmen of al Europe” (JH 50). It was possible that constant use of soap ash might leave a hard crust (“or caput mortuum”) on the ground, making it unprofitable.43 However, “our London borderers” concerned with the affairs of husbandry were urged by Platt, in indignant language of competition, to capitalize on this recent and uncharacteristic Dutch neglect of a lucrative venture. English husbandmen were “to step into the dutch mens romes, and to neglecte no longer so rich and bountifull an offer”. The wet and cold climate of England, Platt felt, was likely to prevent the ashes from crusting. He demonstrated the ashes also had household uses, providing a particularly strong case for recycling them. They were better and cheaper than masons’ dust for scouring trenchers, as “our duche liskins, and kitchin maides well approue, whose dressors, shelves, and molding bordes are muche whiter and cleaner keept, then those which are washed, and scalded after the English manner”. They could thus be used to clean wooden floors and glass windows, served better to whiten linen than common ash, and were a cheap substitute for buck lee, which had grown expensive owing to its use in saltpetre works. Many

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hundreds of loads of soap ash were yearly consumed in London alone to pave streets, and lay bowling alleys. (There was a bowling alley in Kirby Castle in Platt’s time.) Platt knew of a “skilfull and auncient sopeboyler” who, having observed the binding nature of the ash, erected an entire building where he mixed soap ash with bricks and mortar. This edifice still stood “without any shew of ill accident”, and Platt recommended a more large-scale use of the ash in the building trade than currently practised. He outlined measures for dealing with possible drawbacks (such as corrosive effects on workers’ hands), and calculated financial gains from the project. It would provide employment for the poor, whose labour could be used to grind the ash. This would add no extra charge, he observed, as the price difference between ash and lime would cover the men’s wages and leave a small profit (54–58). This apparent straying from the subject of manure and limits of husbandry allowed him to register and think through complexities of practically applying ecological concerns. Platt struggled here with the contradictory pulls of the language of commodification and competition and that of “true and philosophical” husbandry which led to the re-valuing of waste. He found himself forced to consider that waste, such as soap ash, could be a “commodity”. His unease was further fuelled by the threat of competition from abroad. The picture of a complex economy where a variety of forces competed and collaborated to manufacture food, make a living, and survive was precisely what preoccupied Platt, who was anxious about balancing interlinked concerns regarding economic and ecological relationships, pressures, and changes. The “late troubles, and turmoiles of the low countries”, he wrote, “hath beene a meanes both to cut off a great parte of the entercourse betwene them and vs, and to make them almoste vnwilling to performe any proffitable practice for their owne good least the enemy should like a drone Bee deuoure their hony” (JH 54). The closing simile is a telling one. The fear of being devoured – in this case, by national economic rivalries and jealousies – was a feature of the environment. This reinforced Platt’s emphasis on organizing resources, mainly through management of waste and by-products, within a national context. The somewhat grudging respect for the Dutch as efficient managers of husbandry and trade was a paradoxical symptom of this concern with optimization, as well as of an unease (common in the period) about organizing the increasingly complicated economic machinery. The context of environmental thinking specific to this historical moment, which sought to understand ecological processes and appropriate modes of human labour and intervention in the natural world, inflected economic concerns in contradictory ways. The complex discourse that resulted also surfaced through texts and debates that had overtly poetic and rhetorical agendas.

The poetics of manure There was an organic relationship between the poeticizing, theorizing, and practice of manuring in early modern culture where literary and knowledge-making

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practices, and their dissemination, were inextricably tied. Some of these connections have been explored in studies of agrarian literature, rhetoric, and science, and biblical hermeneutics, which demonstrate that poetic tropes in this period were rarely “mere tropes” (McRae, 1996; Harrison, 1998; Spiller, 2004; Preston, 2005). The intricate rhetorical potential of manure is apparent in the word’s etymology. The original Latin conflation of manus and operari, through to the Anglo-Norman manovrer, gave the term its literal association with hands-on labour. Practical meanings current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included “dung, excrement, compost” (n.1a) and varied senses of applying these (v.5a, b, d), “to till, cultivate, train” (v.1a, b), “to hold, occupy, take possession of, have tenure of, manage” (v.2a), and “to dwell/inhabit” (v.2b, c). “To handle, prepare” (v.3b) was applied to objects other than land. All of these meanings, however, had richly figurative implications and uses that complicated the literal practices and products they signified. The OED definitions suggest a separation of meanings between verb and noun – manure as the process of tillage and cultivation seems concurrent with the frequently discussed trope and act of ploughing, and distinct from the meaning of manure as a circulating nutrient. In rhetorical practice, these meanings were interactive and often conflated in ways that enhanced the idea of circulation and flow of nutrients through knowledge and labour. Moreover, manure could powerfully signal both labour and rest. “Manure thyself”, said John Donne, thus evoking it as a key term in the poetry of retreat where “labour” was interiorized (“To Rowland Woodward”; cf. Watson, 2007: 147). This section focuses more explicitly on generic literary expressions of early modern environmental anxieties which intersected with and developed poetic motifs underpinning the theorizing and practice of manure and recycling discussed in previous sections. It first identifies the strands of early modern poetic discourse that shaped the understanding of manure. Two fundamental lines of poetic strategy were fused in early modern discussions of manure – that of rural poetics and of biblical poetics and hermeneutics. The former has been more frequently written about, but there is surprisingly little on the poetics of manure, in particular, and on the way it entered and shaped early modern discussions of sustainability. The second strategy, the poeticizing of familiar providential arguments about God’s authority through the language of manuring, seems both unexplored and vital. The poetic use of the idea of manure had a wider context than that of husbandry manuals and georgic or pastoral poetry. While wide-ranging studies, such as McRae’s God Speed the Plough (1996), have discussed sermons and other forms of religious literature in relation to rural poetics, a more concerted focus is needed on aspects of the alliance between theology and agricultural theory and practice that were fundamental to early modern anxieties about resource management. Another issue in existing discussions of rural poetics, replicated in discussions of relations between biblical hermeneutics, poetics, and natural science in the period, is the critical focus on “improvement” discourses, which gives readings of rural and biblical poetics a teleological direction. Looking at contested poetic meanings of

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manuring allows a clearer view of the dialectical process. Three intertwining strands of figurative and discursive use appropriated, modified, and thereby criticized the more straightforward association of manure with progress and improvement. Discourses of the human soul, “wit”, and posterity articulated, through the trope of manure, ideas of circulation and flow, waste and recycling. The critical impetus was more than a “residual influence” of mid-Tudor notions of moral economy and stewardship (contra McRae, 1996: 72). It was central to the overarching discourse of dearth. As previous chapters have shown, the alliance between literary and economic practice, reflected in Platt’s work and other writing, was more firmly secured in the climate of dearth at the turn of the century. This made manure, in practice and in writing, a key issue in dearth science. Dearth gave powerful resonance to literal and literary uses of manure, and did not allow for an easy accommodation of the poetics of manure into individualist discourses of labour and improvement. Regarding manure from this perspective helps to reinforce our understanding of the selfconscious open-endedness of early modern debates about managing resources. It also better captures the early modern awareness of paradoxes inherent in the concept of sustainability: that the very bases of optimal use or “sufficiency” (to use the period-specific term) were ever-shifting and needed continuous reformulation. The poetics of manure may seem readily allied to “georgic economics”, which tied together economic practices, problems, and literary visions of agricultural improvement and national development. Central to this discourse was the representation of labour. McRae revised Anthony Low’s paradigm for a “georgic revolution”, showing that early Tudor religious and social complaint tied godly labour to social degree and codes of stewardship, but with growing need for gentlemen and landlords to engage with practical labours of husbandry, coded links between labour and degree were destabilized. McRae defined authors and translators of husbandry manuals, like Googe and Tusser, as practitioners of georgic writing and georgic economics who negotiated, on the one hand, a shrewd mixing of georgic and pastoral modes, and, on the other hand, a linked discourse of thrift, labour, and individualism. These complexities highlighted “the potentially vital interaction between literary mode and agrarian practice in the English fields” (McRae, 1996: 208; Low, 1985: 5–6). Language and knowledge of manuring vitalized interactions between literary mode and agricultural or economic practice in perhaps less visible but no less significant ways than frequently discussed tropes of ploughs and bees, as analogies for labour and thrift (Hartlib, 1655; Levett, 1634; Purchas, 1657: 13; Taylor, 1630: 82, 559; cf. Raylor, 1992: 105; Thomas, 1984: 63; McRae, 1996: 220–25). In Googe’s translation of Heresbach, the estate overseer Cono used manure as a metaphor for labour itself: “the best doung for the feelde is the maisters foote” (Heresbach, 1577: f.3r). Rather than suggesting the landlord’s “vicarious involvement in labour” (McRae, 1996: 205–06), the powerful image of physical engagement with dirt and waste asked readers to picture the overseeing function as one of daily squelching through freshly manured fields. Platt foregrounded

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this strain of active engagement and its levelling effect through his astute manipulation of rhetoric that allowed him to focus on actualities of manure. Yet, this movement was not the same as Tusser’s individualist georgic, which regarded manuring as part of thrifty toil leading to profit. Practical application of Tusser in the 1590s could propel this individualism, as McRae argued using John Kay’s manuscript: “Marlyng & Buyldyng Both were large / the Costes whereof I have defrayed” (McRae, 1996: 210; Folger MS X.d.446, f.66). For this farmer, manuring, allied to building, constituted an investment whose costs were recovered by improving his estate. Platt’s focus on elaborate details of manuring emphasized labour governed by a communal ethos, signalled through the definition of manure as recycling of materials and knowledge, embedded in wider philosophical discourses affecting practice. Its ethical pattern was circular and reciprocal rather than linear and “improving”. The poetics of manure had the potential to resist the inexorable movement towards improvement, national and individual, that would become apparent in developing seventeenth-century tropes of ploughs and bees. Platt’s own embedding of poetry in practical prose works illustrated a conflation of georgic and pastoral modes to highlight the philosophy of manuring, recycling, and circulation, as well as the desirable open-endedness of knowledge making. In his treatise on grain cultivation, Platt cited the following passage from the first book of Virgil’s Georgics. Semina vidi equidem multos medicare serentis et nitro prius et nigra perfundere amurca, grandior ut fetus siliquis fallacibus esset, et, quamvis igni exiguo, properata maderent. Vidi lecta diu et multo spectata labore degenerare tamen, ni vis humana quot annis maxima quaeque manu legeret, & c. [Many a sower I have seen treat his seeds, drenching them first with nitre and black oil lees, that the deceitful pods might yield larger produce and the grains be sodden quickly, however small the fire. I have seen seeds, though picked long and tested with much pains, yet degenerate, if human toil, year after year, culled not the largest by hand.] (Georgics I.193–99 in Corne B2v) He admiringly described Virgil as “that learned and poeticall Husbandman”, but also reiterated the meaning of the lines as being better suited to his own aims: “But now let vs leaue Virgill to his poeticall vaine” (Corne B2v). Emphasis on literal meaning was part of the well-established cultural enterprise incorporating humanist learning and religious reform (Harrison, 1998: 107–38; Auksi, 1995: 232–65). Yet, this apparent renouncing of poetry was “poeticall” in itself. Platt used the rhetorical ploy frequently to argue the advantages of “plain style” as

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a mode of writing that foregrounded labour. He ended the quotation from Georgics focusing on the work of human hands: “ni vis humana quot annis / maxima quaeque manu legeret”. Virgil had continued with an extended simile describing human resilience in adversity. Sic omnia fatis in peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referri, non aliter, quam qui adverso vix flumine lembum remigiis subigit, si bracchia forte remisit, atque illum in praeceps prono rapit alveus amni. [Thus by law of fate all things speed towards the worse and slipping away fall back; even as if one, whose oars can scarce force his skiff against the stream, should by chance slacken his arms, and lo! headlong down the current the channel sweeps it away.] (Georgics I.200–03) Platt’s “& c” subtly gestured towards, rather than eschewed, these lines. The Georgics were to him a kind of “poetic husbandry”. He developed his own strategic poeticizing of manure to ethically ground pragmatic practices. His treatise on manure thus closed with another quotation from Virgil, Eclogue 3. Claudite iam riuos pueri, sat prata biberunt. [Shut off the springs now, lads; the meadows have drunk enough.] Here endeth the booke of Husbandry. (Eclogue 3.111) In the absence of a formal epilogue, the gestured poetic convention and the very arrangement of the final words on the printed page were used to close the text. Unlike the treatise on grain cultivation, where he evoked the georgic trope of active labour, here Platt appropriated the pastoral voice of the Eclogues. In the original, this closing line is thought to signify the convention of pastoral resolution, but the very subject of this well-known eclogue was debate. The debating structure was complicated by the way the contest between the shepherds Damoetas and Menalcas revealed underlying similarities in their insecurity about their environment and resistance towards poetry. The ambiguity was furthered by the judge Palaemon’s admitted indecisiveness (both shepherds were awarded prizes) and by his establishment of another point of view to counter the joint pessimism of the shepherds. As Celia Schultz observed, “Palaemon sees the soft grass (mollis herba) as the perfect place for singing verses (55); Damoetas and Menalcas look at the grass and fear the snake that lurks there (latet anguis in herba [93])” (2003: 199–224).44 The contest, in Schultz’s view, was between hostile and harmonious visions of nature, underlined by contrasting approaches to pastoral. The real argument, however,

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seems to go a step further: the very impetus towards resolution, in both generic and ethical terms, is questioned. The mollis herba and the anguis in herba worldviews had to be simultaneously accommodated rather than resolved, and the ideal poetic form was one that was flexible enough to do so. One form of debate, generated by the singing contest, had to generate another. It is precisely this desirable insolubility that Platt’s use of the closing line of the eclogue demonstrated. In his application, the metaphorical stream came to represent the discursive flow of the manure treatise itself, as well as reminding readers of the material circulation of nourishment in the natural world. This recast the pastoral ending not as retreat and closure but as hope for posterity, maintained through the continuity of human discourse, which would enable continuous reformulations of human relationships with nature that constituted the essence and paradox of dearth science. The absence of formal literary conclusion was reinforced by Platt’s use of the receipt book genre that not only permitted but encouraged such flexibility. He tended to conclude with practical receipts or summaries of inventions to follow, creating expectation and asking for further engagement, rather than offering neat conclusions. This was the outcome of his epistemological stance, emphasizing the openness of experimental endeavour and knowledge making, and he utilized the ambivalence of rural poetics to signify it.45 If the poetics of manure complicated rural poetics in this way, it also confounded another discursive strand often used to construct narratives of scientific and agricultural progress: that of biblical poetics and hermeneutics. Harrison, describing the interaction between religious reformation, humanist scholarship, and the development of natural science, argued that Protestant hermeneutics, stressing the primacy of scriptural authority, created “an alternative conception of natural order”, which informed the emergence of natural science: A revolution in hermeneutics would make orphans of all natural objects, stripping them of all those associations from which they had derived their meanings, and abandoning them to that silent and unintelligible realm which was to become the subject of the modern science of nature. (1998: 107) The crux of this “revolution” was located, for Harrison, in the shift from allegorical to literal sense. Reformers preferred the literal sense of scripture and resisted allegorical and mystical meanings. This continued into the seventeenth century with increased emphasis on the determinacy of scriptural meaning. Platt’s work can be located in this moment of transition. His resistance to allegorical expositions of the professori secreti, insistence on “plain terms”, and praise of Valles for his literal, rational understanding of biblical miracles point towards an emerging determinist approach, contradicted, nevertheless, by a tendency to merge rather than divide literal and mystical interpretations of the natural world. The merging produced a sophisticated evaluation of human intervention or labour, and may lead us to query Harrison’s revolutionary paradigm.

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Harrison and others observed how passages of scripture, read in their literal or historical sense, influenced scientific approaches to the natural world through their language of dominion. Literal readings of Genesis, particularly influential in this respect, were identified as the source for justifications of exploiting the natural environment. Lyn White Jr argued that the ideological origin of Western exploitation of natural resources lay in Christian doctrines of creation and the granting of dominion to Adam (1967: 1203–07). Ideas and rhetoric of dominion over nature charged visions of human intervention and posterity from the seventeenth century onwards (Barbour, 1973; Attfield, 1983; Spring and Spring, 1974; Whitney, 1993; Steffen, 1992; Harrison, 1998: 205–65). The early modern project to restore Eden, or reverse the Fall, relied on literal and historical interpretations of biblical narratives justifying “the image of a human individual who knows and controls nature, and who directly exercises a divine grant of dominion”. This narrative would have collapsed had it not been for the eschewing of the symbolic, mystical potential of biblical stories. Scientific, philosophical, and biblical hermeneutics joined forces to impress upon humankind the need and means of regaining dominion over nature (Harrison, 207, 226–49). The movement of biblical poetics and hermeneutics can easily be seen to complement literary movements of rural poetics increasingly endorsing proprietary notions of improvement. But there were ideas and practices that simultaneously resisted this movement. Symbolic and mystical elements, as previously argued, were not readily eschewed. Sermons at the turn of the century aptly illustrate how the poetics of manure complicated the biblical language of dominion. Their varied tropes of socio-economic critique, in times of dearth, show how sermons utilized ideas of circulation, flow, and waste to articulate their vision of human labour and responsibility.46 The preachers taken as examples here, Robert Abbot, Thomas Adams, and Peter Barker, used Calvinist doctrine with varying emphasis, but together they illustrate the extension and manipulation of Calvin’s own use of the poetics of manure. As Calvinist theology is frequently seen as reinforcing improvement, individualism, capitalism, and the rise of science in this period, it is intriguing to find motifs within its determinist structure that rendered these impulses ambivalent. This discussion revisits some familiar motifs of Calvinist theology, before focusing on the preoccupation with the language of manure in Calvin’s own work and that of the selected English preachers. The centrality of providential thought and the Calvinist emphasis on God’s sovereignty, vigilance, and intervention did not only assist the rise of Protestant individualism (Walsham, 1999: 8–32; Vander Molen, 1978: 27–47; McGrath, 1988; Langford, 1981; Gorringe, 1991). Simultaneously and paradoxically, belief in God’s sublime nature renewed focus on the coherence and mysterious synchronicity of his methods. Human participation in God’s perfectly synchronized design acquired greater significance, and the synthesis of Classical philosophy and Christian patristic theology further shaped this vision of universal order (Walsham, 8–9; Partee, 1977). If there was an essential source of nourishment in nature, it was governed by an essential source of

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power; humans had to cooperate and harmonize with these divinely coordinated workings, especially because the same power nourished the soul. Pragmatic and spiritual strands of this thought were not separable. Moreover, the ideas were linked to the centrality of divine grace (Vander Molen, 1978: 29–33). On the one hand, the total powers of God placed grace above human effort in the matter of salvation; but this also honed the classic anxiety about the place of human effort and action. It produced some odd moments in religious writing, visible in the way ideas and tropes of waste and choking suggested that the flow and circulation of divine grace could be impeded by human action and spiritual negligence. The preoccupation with the flow of grace itself derived from the theological significance of God’s foreknowledge and active intervention. “Mere prescience” did not suffice; God did not simply create a framework like a clock-maker or a shipwright (Calvin, 1588: 4; Walsham, 10). But arguably, in this scheme, God was a continuous doer, not just a knower and a singular maker; his constant occupation made him a force in motion, rather than a static and distant being. His involvement made him part of the flow of things, and his secret instinct directed the circulation of nourishment in nature, for which purpose he operated through conduits. The mediate workings of God made him perceptible (though not in his entirety) to human beings (Walsham, 12; Czapkay Sudduth, 1995: 53–68). This complicated matters because God became visible operationally, as a force in motion, in flowing form. As a result, the static pattern of dominion and hierarchy (replicated in earthly realms and structures) which drove providential thought and theology was balanced by a pattern of circulation and flow, according to which God worked with human beings, who worked with each other, the natural world, and other creatures. This operational and more levelling pattern was visible in the frequent appearance of the manure trope across a range of Calvin’s treatises, sermons, and commentaries, popular in the latter part of the sixteenth century when they were translated into English, summarized, and repeatedly printed.47 His commentary on the parable of the seed in Institutes captured the tension between human and godly labours. For as sede, if it fall vpon a desert and vntilled pece of grounde, will do nothyng but die: but if it be throwen vpon arable lande well manured and tylled, it wyll bryng foorth her fruite with very good encrease: so the word of God, if it light vpon a stiffe necke, it will growe barrein as that whiche is sowen vpon sande: but if it light vpon a soule manured with the hande of the heauenly Spirite, it will be moste fruitefull. (1561: IV.14.11, f.86) “Manured and tylled” created the expectation that “good encrease” would be achieved through human effort and will, but this was undercut as the manure metaphor deflected power from human hands to “the hande of the heauenly Spirite” and the mysterious operations of faith. The theological tension between divine grace and human will was foregrounded through the manure

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analogy, which also helped to locate the source of the preacher’s labour in the “ministerie of the Spirite” by extending the comparison between preacher and husbandman: He compareth the ministers themselues to husbandemen, which when they haue bestowed their labor and trauaile in tillyng the earth, haue no more to do. But what shold tillyng, and sowing, and wateryng profit, vnlesse that whiche is sowen should receiue liuelynesse by heauenly benefite? Therfore he concludeth, that bothe he that planteth and he that watereth are nothyng: but that all thynges are to be ascribed to God, whiche alone geueth the encrease. (Ibid.) The metaphor separated labour from “liuelynesse”, the husbandman from God, the manuring of the seed (or the “outewarde worde” of God) from the other meaning of manure as a container of the mysterious source of fertility. The secret of fertility, as Calvin’s metaphor demonstrated, lay just beneath the outward word of the gospel, the preacher’s text, and the act of labouring and manuring. It was in his interest to establish that human labour and will were conduits for the spirit, not spiritual in themselves,48 so that waste and corruption were firmly located in the human realm, undermining the idea of human dominion: God had “tilled” and “manured” mankind, who “bring foorth sower fruite to choke” him (1583: 197). The paradoxes of the trope became more apparent when Calvin (and his followers) struggled to accommodate economic markers and metaphors that could mediate divine operations to human understanding. And whereas Moses speaketh afterward of the great and goodly Cities, of howses full of gooddes, of vineyardes, oliuegardens, and of all other commodities: it is to make the people to vnderstand the better, that God delt not nigardly with them, but had powred forth his tresures, to the intent that they should be the more prouoked to serue him. (1583: 279) As it progressed, the analogy re-ascribed the production of man-made “commodities” – houses, goods, gardens, cities – to God’s manipulation of forces beyond labour – “There is not any thing of thine owne labor, sayth hee” (ibid.). The genuinely productive impetus was co-opted by God, and the determinist impulse itself created a context for highlighting human irresponsibility and the importance of retreat. In the sermon on Deuteronomy 15.1–6, advocating temporary retreat from labours of husbandry and economy by evoking the injunction of the seventh year of rest, the punishment incurred for disobedience took the practical form of dispossession and loss of fertility: “For ye shalbe driuen out of it [land], and none shall be left in it to manure it” (573). The sinful refusal to leave land fallow was glossed as literal corruption

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of the land, leading to unfruitfulness (cf. Sermon 4 on Deut.16). The metaphor was intensified in relation to sin and the poetics of manure in the sermons converged obsessively on the ease with which misdirected human labour modulated into corruption: For we see how vicious and wicked we are: as many thoughts as are in vs, so many thornes & briers. … This is the cause, why the Prophete saith, That men must breake vp their fallowe ground, and not sowe among the thornes. … But it is not enough to sowe in a field, but one must ridde the grounde of rootes and thistles, and first breake vp the ground, whiche hath lien fallowe. But while you doe nothing else, but endeuour to appeare faire vnto the eye, the thornes, the brambles, the nettles, and such other like euill weedes remaine still within. (Sermon 8 on Ten Commandments, 1579: f.63) The husbandry trope blurred into that of building (“filthie corruptions” remained within men who “plaster and white lime them ouer, as they which would bee at no great cost doe, when their houses are ruinous and full of cleftes”) and was reasserted. Nature, God’s agent, taught us differently: “for if one will sowe a field, will he cast his corne among briers and thornes? No. … he grubbeth vp the brambles, he manureth and tilleth it” (ibid.). By writing over the building metaphor with that of manuring and tilling, the sermon uncovered tensions between profit-driven endeavour and divinely sanctioned labour. This was a contrast to the Kay manuscript where marling and building were allied investments. In Calvin, labour and thrift, without the hidden operations of godly manure, preserved corruption and promoted waste. Thorns and brambles were repetitive signals of wickedness, and choking became the central image of human irresponsibility: If we bring forth good fruite: the father manureth vs, and we feele that hee hath his hande alwayes vpon vs, to make his graces auailable, and to multiplie them. But if wee beare euill fruite … God may make this complaint … My vine, what haue I done to thee that thou bearest me nothing but bitternesse? I haue looked for some sweetnesse at thy hand, & it seemeth that thou wouldest choke thy master: What shall I then doe, but plucke thee vp? this ought to make our haire stand vp vpon our heads, for … we are as good as quyte stubbed vp. And in deede all the afflictions that lyght vpon the dispysers of God, and vpon such as are past mending, are as many stubbings vp. (Sermon on Job, 1574: 162–63) It may be argued that godly diligence was being promoted here to inform an understanding of work and improvement. But the trope of manure, at the same time, produced a language for criticizing irresponsible human labour, and destabilized the meaning of profit. Human labour for individual gain impeded

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the flow of divine grace; it created waste and led to visions of apocalyptic destruction. Poetic motifs of flow, waste, and destruction were pointedly used by preachers at the turn of the sixteenth century who, on the one hand, reinforced the Protestant work ethic by using the language of husbandry but, on the other hand, were keen to foreground limitations of human labour. Robert Abbot, preaching at New Year 1596, used Psalm 110.3. His subject, appropriate to the sermon’s context, was time. In his exegesis, the hidden work of godly manure drew particular power from its timelessness. He explicitly linked the discourse of manure to a Christian discourse of continuity. Human labour was short term in its efficacy, while timeless godly labour was described through Abbot’s associated images of womb, garden, and field. The “offspring and youth”, the locus of hope for the future, “shalbe as the dew from the womb of the morning”: the dew, symbolizing spiritual rebirth and the continuity of generations, was not “wrought by mans hand, but descendeth from the Lord” (1601: 47–48). As he developed the Calvinist language of husbandry and manure, Abbot was more insistent on secrecy. The preacher’s words activated “secret words inwardly” which manured the soul. Manuring became magical, reminiscent of the alchemical images in practical treatises. The exaggeration of secrecy heightened the sense of a mysteriously flowing divine grace, explicitly configured as the true source of fertility. We sow the seede. … and though we know not how it groweth, yet in the end we see and perceiue that it hath growen. Thus we comfort our selues that though we cannot giue successe vnto our owne labours, yet we loose not our labour, but the spirite of God as it were in the hart of the earth fostereth and cherisheth the seede that we sow, and quickneth it to bring foorth fruite, and out of the wombe of Gods eternall election, still raiseth vp a newe youth … to receiue the promises of grace. (49) The metaphor separated the human labour of sowing and God’s secret labour of growth. The former, like marl, was no more than a conduit. Boundaries of metaphorical identity were threatened by such literalism: the spirit of God worked in the heart of the earth to foster, cherish, and quicken the seed; the earth was the womb of God’s eternal election; this womb was eternally fertile and engendered a saved posterity which, in turn, carried the seed of faith in its heart. The circularity of Abbot’s logic suggested that conceptions of spiritual interiority and continuum were underpinned by a pragmatic understanding of the sustained circulation of nutrients in the natural and physical world. Just as Platt’s pragmatic language marshalled religious motifs for support, religious discourse itself relied on the practical.49 This was vividly demonstrated by Peter Barker who, addressing his small parish in Dorset, afflicted with dearth in 1596, imagined in strikingly literal

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terms the circulation of God’s benevolence through the material land itself. Before dearth set in, God embraced our land so kindly, that we suckt the sap of wealth from branche and roote. The fruit of our ground was blessed, for God crowned ye yeere with his goodnesse, the Lord did heare the heauens when they desired raine for the earth, the earth did heare the corne, & the corne did heare man, and that same blessing did come vpon vs which god promised to Israel. (D3v) The connecting verb “heare” directed the organic connection between God, heaven, earth, corn, and man. Not only were earthly and heavenly realms drawn together through the flow of divine operations, they formed part of a historical continuum where patterns of divine benevolence were repeated with a circular momentum connecting past and present, nation and locality. Present generations were blessed in the manner of Israel; the parishioners of Stourpaine in Dorset enjoyed the benefits bestowed by God upon the nation, and gave their labour and loyalty in return. The loss of divine grace became, through the manure trope, not only a loss of privilege but of harmonious interconnections, which would set in motion the negative spiral of waste, barrenness, and sin. this last yeere, the ground hath not yielded vnto vs her strength, Bashan is wasted and Carmell and the flower of Lebanon is wasted, Gods creatures haue bin deafe, because God himself hath bin as one that heareth not, so yt we haue bin constrained to borrow of other nations, but are not able to lende any. Thus God hath punished the seed of our soile for the sin of our soule, & because our folly hath bin in the blossom, our fruit hath not budded out of the earth. (D3v–D4r) A reciprocal deafness countered the perfect mutual hearing, and consolidated the crisis. The play on deafness and hearing also connected with the central motif of speaking the prophecy, or preaching, which guided the whole sermon. The preacher was part of an intricate system of conduits through which God’s harmonious design operated: There is a doore of the heart: Acts 16.14: & a doore of the lips, Ps.141.3: and he which hath the key of Dauid, Reuel.3:7, must open the doore of the heart, and let the worde in before the Prophet open the doore of the lips to let the worde out, Ezech.10.11. (A5v) The circulation of God’s word and the fulfilment of His design were reinforced by the literal and physiological imagining of connections between God and preacher-prophet, who was taught by God before he taught others: “Therefore

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Ieremie must eate the words Iere.15:16: and Ezechiel must eate the roll wherein the prophecies are written, and then speake to the house of Israel. Ezech. 3.1”. This had particular resonance in times of dearth, and AgabusBarker must “eat the prophecie concerning famin, & then giue notice to the world, how litle they shal eate” (A6r). The word of God, imagined to be physiologically mediated by the preacher, became spiritual manure and substitute for the absence of material food. The counterpart of the vision of spiritual and ecological harmony, therefore, was the narrative of impediments to the flow and circulation of divine grace, of waste and choking, and catastrophic destruction. Indeed, Barker’s providential arguments allowed him to envision the local crisis of his small parish as a symptom of the apocalyptic destruction of the world. He imagined a series of connected effects, from the barrenness of the land to emptiness in the domestic realm to spiritual dearth. The earth our mother is out of heart, dead and barren. … God hath so rotted the seed, pinched the blade, shaken the eare, that it hath not answered our expectation, neither vnder the flaile, in the mill, in the dough, or in the ouen, & that curse is come vpon vs, which Iob speaketh of cap.31.40: for thistles grow instead of wheate, and cocle instead of barley. (D5v) Such bleak landscapes found resonance in the preacher Thomas Adams’ masterful exaggeration of negative Calvinist motifs. His narratives of bad manuring translated frequently into evaluations of economic processes. In a sermon on Proverbs 9.17, Adams used element theory to discuss sin and material existence. In human beings, “there is no rest till Earth [lowest of the four elements] haue the predominance. These men liue, as if there was neither Earth to deuoure their bodies, nor gulfe lower then Earth to swallow their soules” (1614: 54). This led to the manure analogy, defining and materializing sin. The world is ranke & manured with sinne: Atheisme growes vp as a Tree, Errour and Ignorance are the Leaues, Profanenesse and Rebellion the Fruit, and the end is the Axe and the Fire. Their best is verball Deuotion, actuall Abomination. Diuidunt opera a fide, & vtrum{que} perimitur. They seperate workes from faith: they diuide the childe and kill it. … Oh, that I could cut this point short, and yet keepe my discourse but somewhat euen with the subiect: but the world drinkes too greedily of these profane waters, which rob God of his glory. Most men are no longer Tenants to the Deuill, and retailours of his Wares, but proprietaries. (54–55) With the foul manure of sin, husbandry became a monstrous enterprise, breeding a corrupt landscape based on mere “verbal devotion” and “actual abomination”, and inviting apocalyptic destruction. In Adams’ language, the

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flow of grace that dominated Abbot’s and Barker’s positive images of manure was replaced by the flow of profane waters. The idea of corrupted flow (similar to Abbot’s choking images) was taken up in another sermon where the husbandry metaphor merged with a medicinal one. Preaching on Jer.8.22 (“Is there no balm in Gilead”) Adams glossed: Thus saith the Prophet Hosea: Gilead is a Citie of them that worke iniquitie, and is polluted with blood. Therefore God turned that fruitfull Land into barrennesse, for the wickednesse of them that dwelt therein. For not content with the fertillitie of their soile, they manured it with blood, saith the Prophet. Hence no maruell, if it became at last, like the cursed Mountaines of Gilboah, that drunke the blood of Saul and Ionathan. (311–12) Gilead and Gilboah were places associated with the divine imposition of barrenness as punishment for human irresponsibility and iniquity. The punishment was specifically attached to the productivity of the land and its loss of fruitfulness for posterity. The allegorical “physician” and “balm” evoked the cure for this loss: “The Prophets are allegorically called Phisitians, as the word is Balme. So are the Ministers of the Gospell”. But the cure was beyond human husbandry or physic: “Christ is our onely Phisitian, and wee are but his Ministers, bound to apply his sauing Phisicke to the sickly soules of his people. It is he onely, that cures the carkasse, the conscience” (312). Yet the effect of Adams’ metaphor was also literal, like the prophetic eating described in Barker’s famine sermon. “Balm” had a range of meanings in the period – alchemical, medicinal, and agricultural. Material senses of the word and its variants, such as “balsam”, associated with aroma, healing, preservation, and fertility, translated easily into figurative usage evoking restoration and renewal. In the alchemical Paracelsian sense, balm or balsam was the preservative essence thought to exist in all organic bodies, and embodied the animating life-principle flowing through all things. These ideas fortified Christian representations of grace and Christ’s blood as universal balm or panacea. In Adams’ Pauls Cross sermons, The Barren Tree and The Temple, this network of assumptions about ecological harmony provided the subtext for his censure of wealth. Wealth was the visible sign of corrupt plundering of God-given abundance, linked to idol worship, excess, and elision of labour. The covetous man “spare[s] the labour of forming” and “worship[s] the very metall” (1626: 53; cf.9–10). Adams set manuring, as a divinely sanctioned necessity, against “digging into the bowels of the earth”, as a mark of acquisitive excess. He drew attention to the complicated moral connotations of “digging”, allying it to the language of property and devilish productivity: when they had manured the ground, sowen seeds, gathered fruits, and found out other things to sustaine life, then Itum est in viscera terra, they digged into the bowels of the earth. O that man should lay that next his

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heart, which God hath placed vnder his feet!. … Mammon hath his Temple, the world: God hath his Temple, the Church: but there be many that balke Gods Temple to goe to Mammons: and they offer faire, that make some reuerence to God, as they passe by him to the world. (53) There was “no balme at Gilead” because of the misdirected human labour of converting potential fertility into hell. Pessimism of this kind was manifest in religious verse representations of inverted, sinful manuring. Such was the power of the trope that the Catholic poet Robert Southwell appropriated it in his agonized ruminations on the “trespasse foule” of sin and ingratitude Saint Peter’s Complaint (1595). He noted, the processes of the natural world offered a perfect model of reciprocity: “The mother sea from ouerflowing deepes, / Sendes foorth her issue by diuided vaines: / Yet back her offspring to their mother creepes” (ll.103–05). Mankind, in contrast, drank “the drops of heauenly food” and “Bemyred the giuer with returning mud” (ll.107–08). The image of choked channels marked human sin, while manuring metaphors articulated despair: Is this the haruest of his sowing toile? Did Christ, manure thy hart to breed him bryars? Or doth it neede this vnaccustomde soyle With hellish doung to fertile heauens desires? No: no: the Marle that periuries do yeeld, May spoyle a good, not fat a barraine field. (109–14) Mankind was “vnaccustomde soyle”, a “barraine field” manured with “periuries”, and guilty human actions inevitably disrupted the circulation of divine grace facilitated by Christ the husbandman. Ironically, this poem played up anxieties about human intervention in nature, arguably taunting, as hellish and akin to perjury, the Protestant figurative and practical deployment of manure. Southwell was writing when Protestant verse satire also reached pessimistic heights. The satirist and priest Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum (1597–8), a “scathing and cynical assessment of socio-economic practice” written in the wake of serious dearth and crisis, distanced itself, as McRae argued, from ideals of stewardship in mid-Tudor complaints. In Hall’s cynical voice, the “happy daies of olde Deucalion” became “no more than a distant standard by which to judge the essential sinfulness of humanity” (1996: 90). But the poetics of manure could, with grim appropriateness, drive home the not only essential but irreversible sinfulness of humanity. Describing the power of economic motivations to override moral concerns, Hall wrote, Will one from Scots-banke bid but one grote more My old Tenant may be turned out of dore,

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Dearth science and the economy of manure Tho much he spent in th’ rotten roofes repayre, In hope to haue it left vnto his heyre; Tho many a lode of Marle and Manure led, Reuiu’d his barren leas, that earst lay dead. Were he as Furius, he would defie, Such pilfring slips of Pety land-lordrye. And might dislodge whole Collonyes of poore, And lay their roofe quite leuell with their floore, Whiles yet he giues as to a yeelding fence, Their bagge and baggage to his Citizens, And ships them to the new-nam’d Virgin-lond, Or wilder wales, where neuer wight yet wound (I.101–14)

The potential the poetics of manure had to reinforce hope for the future through its rhetoric of remedy, in literary and practical texts, was overturned by Hall’s account of the irretrievable passing of right labour and industry. Posterity itself became a paradoxical idea because the moral value of labour could no longer be bequeathed, and “marle” and “manure” (whose remedial effect was future-facing) no longer served, in the pessimistic depths of Hall’s imagination, to remedy barrenness both ethical and literal. This oddly overlapped with Southwell’s point. Hall noted how productivity, in this rapidly changing world, lay in dislocating labour to the “new-nam’d Virgin-lond” to utilize resources in “wilder wales, where neuer wight yet wound”, rather than directing human effort to preserve and rejuvenate the “barren leas”. Such worries were intensified in the dearth-driven environment of the 1590s. But economically and ecologically oriented pessimism seemed to ease up in later seventeenth-century conflations of rural and spiritual labour (McRae, 1996: 212–28). George Wither’s Emblemes, economic reward, and spiritual salvation were merged. Unlike Hall, here labour became the basis of hope for posterity. Wither’s “high conceit” of manuring was not just an explication of individual spiritual labour, as often argued (ibid. 220), it was also a means of materializing God’s labour in human terms: “Oh Lord, thou know’st the nature of my minde; / Thou know’st my bodyes tempers what they are. … My barren Soule, therefore, manure thou so; / So, harrow it; so emptie, and so fill. … As best may lay it levell to thy Will” (1635: X.21–28). The trope of manure was applied to narrow the focus on the human subject – “my bodyes tempers”, “my minde”, “my barren Soule” – who became the primary object of God’s labour. This was different from the sermons considered earlier, which articulated God’s labour upon the human subject in broader terms. In Abbot, for example, God laboured to “redeeme the time” and maintain continuity. A vigorous appropriation of the trope to the language of self-hood, selfpossession, and interiority, and one that resonated with proprietary, improvement discourses but used a complex irony, not often noted, was John Donne’s epistle to Rowland Woodward (c.1597). The poem, about retreat, retirement,

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and writing, pointedly eschewed satirical modes Donne had experimented with (Carey, 1990: 60–93; Bald, 1970: 73–74). Its dominant trope of husbandry and manure defined the poet’s introspective posture. Donne accentuated retirement from his previous tending of “love-song weeds” and “satirique thorns”, now configured as misdirected labour and waste; his muse lay “fallow” to regain its generative virtue and nurture the “seeds of better Arts” (ll.1–6). The poem described this period of fallowness as intense introspection, and the final manure trope was intertwined with analogies of scientific and medical experiments. As men “force the sun with much more force to pass, / By gathering his beams with a crystal glass”, so must we seek “ourselves in ourselves” to “out-burn / The straw which doth about our hearts sojourn”; or, like physicians infusing “souls of simples” into oil, allow time for gestation (ll.19–27). The idea that human reflection, introspection, and the maturing of poetic imagination worked like natural, scientific, and remedial procedures was reinforced by Donne’s return to the language of manuring to close the poem. We are but farmers of ourselves, yet may, If we can stock ourselves, and thrive, uplay Much, much dear treasure for the great rent day. Manure thyself then, to thyself be improved; And with vain outward things be no more moved. … (ll.31–36) The poem recorded a latent tension between the language of virtue, or potential for positive fertility that “God Imputes”, and the language of profit and self-improvement enabling inclusion into a coterie of “elect” writers (Marotti, 1986), represented by the comradeship with Woodward. Donne allowed a persistently ironic edginess to drive the poem, exposing this tension: “vanity weighs as much as sin” (l.12). His complex poetic voice showed how smoothly the accommodation of the language of science, remedy, economic gain, hoarding, improvement, and moral virtue could be achieved, and how problematic it was to claim with certainty, on this basis, that one was unmoved by “vain outward things” (contra Watson, 2007: 148). Donne’s irony is comparable to contemporary parodies of the language of husbandry to undermine human wit. Seemingly abstract meanings of “wit”, associated with faculty (consciousness, reason, intellect, knowledge: OED I.1–2, III.11–13) or quality (wisdom, talent, judgement, prudence: OED II.5a, 6a), were not clearly separable at this time from the term’s practical meanings such as skill, pragmatic ingenuity, device, or apt expression (OED I.3, II.5b, 6c, 7–8). The latter had economic associations as well. The merging of practical and qualitative understandings of human wit created moral ambivalences captured, for example, by Shakespeare’s villains and mischief-makers who parodied religious uses of the manure trope, embracing its potential human misuse. Iago and Falstaff, especially, constitute powerful examples because, besides their embodiment of human wit in a radical form of negative

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ingenuity, their employment of the manure trope grotesquely exaggerated the alliance between self-possession, improvement, profit, and property. They projected a moral future devalued by the ease with which human wit could exploit available resources. Iago operated within the wider ironic motif of Othello, presenting moral abstractions in concrete economic terms. Riches, gold, sell, buy, gain, profit, jewel, pay, borrow, dear, worth, purchase, prize “constitute[d] a precise, unsentimental vocabulary for keeping before us the problem of values” (Heilman, 1953: 555). But the vocabulary, largely driven by Iago for his own subtle ends, generated the pressure to redefine “value” and “virtue” in terms of economic gain. “Manure” first appeared, allied to “industry” but deliberately separated from “virtue”, in Iago’s conversation with his dupe Roderigo. When the latter lamented his love for Desdemona, “it is my shame to be so fond, but it is not in my vertue to amend it”, Iago swiftly counteracted this vocabulary of remorse and remedy. Virtue! a fig! ’tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs, or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. (I.iii.319–26) While Roderigo conventionally allied moral and medical meanings of “virtue”, also a medicinal term denoting the fixed source of positive efficacy in natural ingredients, for Iago it was specifically malleable. He deliberately used the manure trope to place human endeavour and intervention in an aggressively prioritized and exploitative position. “Manured with Industry”, in relation to Iago’s aims, became parodic in the extreme – Machiavellian intrigue and self-interest justified in the terms of Protestant individualism. Pretending to be a virtuous helper, Iago prepared to steal from Roderigo, convincing him to sell his land for ready wealth. The refrain “put Money in thy purse”, repeated ad absurdum, darkly underlined that the transmutation of land into money, used to buy “jewels” (allegedly for Desdemona), was designed to transfer wealth to Iago: Thus do I ever make my fool my purse: For I mine own gain’d knowledge should profane, If I would time expend with such a snipe. But for my sport and profit. … How, how? … I have’t. It is engender’d. Hell and night Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light. (I.iii.383–404)

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Iago’s wit propelled the appropriation of property by the flow of profit in his own direction through market transactions. He achieved this with the psychological brutality for which he was famed and “engender’d” the destruction of virtue. Shakespeare’s imagination of Iago’s “double knavery” concretized the worst nightmares of preachers like Adams, as human wit and will supplanted the secret and providential manure of God’s will, perversely using the very discourse employed to assert the latter. There were similar inversions in Falstaff’s famous parodic oration on “Sherris-Sack”, presented as perfect manure for human wit. His insinuation that the prince had neither wit nor valour to run his kingdom was based on the complaint “he drinks no wine”. Parodying Protestant denunciations of excess, Falstaff inverted the implications of “sober-blooded” virtue. I would you had but the wit: ’twere better than your dukedom. Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me; nor a man cannot make him laugh; but that’s no marvel, he drinks no wine. There’s never none of these demure boys come to any proof; for thin drink doth so over-cool their blood, and making many fish-meals, that they fall into a kind of male green-sickness; and then when they marry, they get wenches. (2 Henry IV, IV.iii.84–92) Sobriety was turned into a political liability. It inhibited the ability to beget appropriate heirs, while “a good Sherris-Sack” stimulated fertility by a “twofold operation”. It dried foolish, dull, and crude vapours, and filled the brain with nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which transformed language and voice, giving birth to excellent wit. It warmed the blood, and made it “course from the inwards, to the parts extremes”: it illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain, the heart, who, great and puffed up with this retinue, doth any deed of courage; and this valour comes of sherris. (IV.iii.106–12) The birth of wit and valour were key outcomes of the circulation of SherrisSack through the human body and, as the political allusions were designed to signify, through the kingdom or political body as a whole. Falstaff, typically, was unable to resist expanding the implications of his subversive trope: skills in weaponry and learning were “nothing, without Sack” which set skill “a-worke”, “commence[d]” learning and put it “in act, and vse”. If the prince was valiant, it was because, under Falstaff’s tutelage, the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land, manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent

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Dearth science and the economy of manure endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack. (IV.iii.116–23)

Falstaff envisaged as complete a subversion as can be imagined of the notion of manuring used in religious, rural, and scientific writing. His “fertile Sherris” mockingly became the very principle of fertility and growth, and, in some ways, a god. It circulated, in the associations formed by Falstaff’s language, through the human body, political and economic structures of the nation, and the land itself. In a direct parody of sermon literature, he turned the Protestant language of sterility, poison, and sin on its head. Principles of moderation and sufficiency became signs of barrenness, while the labour of manure, husbandry, and tilling were re-ascribed to the magic wine marking idleness and excess in Protestant discourse. The word “endeavour”, with its resonant associations of religious and practical effort, was subverted to justify selfishness rather than cooperation. The survival of posterity was, with hilarious mockery, located in the continued access of future generations to the crucial resources of “fertile Sherris”. Falstaff, as argued in chapter 2, was a parody of self-centred processes of “improvement” and, in this figure, Shakespeare pushed those values to their extreme. In their own ways, both Iago and Falstaff, if read in the context of dearth, were embodiments of forces and modes of thinking that threatened to overturn existing positive ethical views of cooperation, sufficiency, and ecological harmony. They were particularly treacherous because they performed their subversion from within, using the very rhetorical and theoretical weapons of early modern ecological thinking. The literary discourse of manure, considered alongside the theory and practice of manuring in this period, assists our understanding of early modern cultural responses to dearth. It was a multifaceted discourse, intricately interweaving literary, religious, agricultural, alchemical, and practical elements. The poetics of manure not only created oppositional positions about dearth, or its remedies, and intensified debates on sustainability, it also provided an apt articulation of paradoxical human efforts to optimize resources. It presented the quest for “certain knowledge” and harmonious human intervention in natural processes as necessary goals, yet persistently out of reach. While dearth stimulated ingenuity, invention, and the drive to seek solutions, it also awakened the need to bequeath not just solutions but the continued sense of lack itself to posterity. Literature played a special role in this, through its heightening of pessimism, contesting voices, and dialectical patterns. The early modern English had access to discursive structures which could preserve the paradox that constituted sustainability; this was gradually lost through the tightening of teleological modes of thinking in the years that followed.

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Notes 1 On theoretical implications of waste and dirt as social categories, see Thompson, 1979; Douglas, who argued dirt is “matter out of place” and “a relative idea” (1966: 35–36); Freud, on dirt and civilization (1985: 282); Greenblatt, on cross-cultural perceptions of filth (1982: 3). 2 E.g. in McRae (1996) modulations of early modern meanings of manure do not enter the nuanced analysis of georgic economics and rural poetics, where paradoxical ethical motivations of husbandry appeared (198–228, 262–99). 3 E.g. Warde contended early modern improvers had no sense of the circulation of essential nutrients in nature and that the idea of sustainability was “invented” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (2011: 156). This was not the case, and there are obvious dangers associated with applying the term “invention” to ideas (Tully, 1988). 4 For arguments about the popularization of alchemy from the medieval period to the advent of printing, see Pereira, 1999; Hirsch, 1950; Eamon, 1994: ch.3, 2010. Nummedal (2007) analysed the world of ordinary alchemical practitioners in the Holy Roman Empire, and Kassell (2005) described the diversity of alchemical and magical knowledge deployed by Simon Forman in Elizabethan London. 5 As Spiller notes, literary techniques and texts were part of knowledge-making processes. While she focuses on canonical works, it is possible to see the shared aesthetics of knowledge production pervasively at work in less canonical literary and scientific pursuits at the turn of the sixteenth century. 6 The Glastonbury thorn, cut down during the Civil Wars as a superstitious relic, allegedly planted by Joseph of Arimathea, marking the arrival of Christianity in Britain, was a form of the common hawthorn, but flowered twice a year, in winter and spring. According to The lyfe of Joseph of Arimathea (1520), Joseph arrived in Glastonbury and set down his staff on Wearyall Hill, from which this thorn grew. The miraculous walnut tree was reputed to flower abruptly on the feast day of St Barnabas (Warner, 1726: xxxvi). The Wiltshire oak is probably the Big Belly Oak in Savernake Forest; the devil was said to appear to anyone who danced naked at midnight twelve times anticlockwise round it. Platt was blending local myth, practice, and contemporary theories of fertility. He treated local beliefs as sources of information to be tested through experimental practice. 7 Authors of “secrets” traditionally observed a code of silence to protect their methods from the vulgus. 8 Platt’s manuscripts contain quotations from Ripley’s Compound of Alchymy (1591). 9 Alchemical symbols “η” and “φ” stand for Saturn and Mercury respectively, whose complex meanings in alchemical theory and practice mark them out as crucial agents of transmutation. They merge connotations of agricultural fertility and physic. The first emblem of Basil Valentine’s Practica shows Saturn with his scythe, explaining: “As the physician purges and cleanses the inward parts of the body, and removes all the unhealthy matter by means of his medicine, so our metallic substances must be purified and refined of all foreign matter, in order to ensure the success of our task” (Hermetic, 1991: 1: 24–25; Abraham, 1998: 124–28, 178–79). 10 Notions of seminality, which underpinned early modern interest in fertility, interweaved Augustinian, Platonic, Stoic, and atomist ideas (Augustine, 1982: v.23.175; McKeough, 1926). For the Classical heritage, see Plotinus, Enneads; Proclus, Commentary on Timaeus; Ficino, Commentarium in Convivium Platonis, II.3.149–51. Through the latter, Platonic ideas of seminality were conveyed to Renaissance thinkers (Hirai, 2005). For Stoic and atomist discussions of the Greek notion of the logoi spermatikoi, see Plotinus, Enneads IV.3.xi; Lucretius, De rerum natura [On the Nature of the Universe] I.159–61; Long and Sedley, 1987. Ideas about seminality in the seventeenth century often cut across divides between vitalist and mechanist

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philosophies (Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica I.541, 179, Religio Medici I.50, Works I.62; Sennert, 1633; Boyle, 2000: XIII.277). Discussed in Killeen, 2007: 215–33; Anstey, 2002. On issues with traditional narratives of the “scientific revolution”, see Lindberg and Westman, 1990. Recent challenges to earlier understandings of scientific explication focus on biblical exegesis: see esp. Harrison, 1998; Killeen and Forshaw, 2007. As quoted by Platt. Cf. Harrison, 1998: 193–204. Platt echoes Moffett’s notion of drawing light from God, a commonly noted function of the medical or alchemical practitioner, also reflected in Platt’s compiled manuscript quotations from Norton’s Ordinal. Warde takes as his basis the modern definition of “sustainable development” from the Brundtland Commission’s 1987 report: “development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (153; I.1). The statement is later clarified further: “sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations” (I.15). If, in the absence of the term “sustainability” / “sustainable development” in the early modern period, we need an early modern term that encompasses points made in the Brundtland report, McRae’s suggestion (2011) that we consider “posteritie” seems a practicable option. However, the term posterity was often as flexibly used in the early modern period as sustainability in our day; we might thus consider aspects of the discourse of posterity underscored by early anxieties about dearth and the depletion of resources. Smith discussed the relationship between scientia and experientia in the context of “artisanal epistemology”. Paracelsus made this point in relation to the efficacy of medical cures, but the passage has wider implications for the theorizing of making and organizing knowledge (cf. Pagel, 1960). Other editions appeared in 1588, 1590, 1592, 1595, 1608, and 1622. I quote Eamon’s translation (1998: 7) from Il Tesoro della vita humana (1570). Cf. biographies by Eamon, 2010; Giordano, 1920; Furfaro, 1963; Camporesi, 1997. Platt’s other source della Porta was associated with a similar academy established by Girolamo Ruscelli (Eamon and Paheau, 1984; Eamon, 1994: ch.4). Eamon disagrees with the assumption in modern historiography that Fioravanti and other contemporary European practitioners of alchemy were “Paracelsian” (2000: 212). However, following Smith’s conclusions about epistemological changes brought about by Paracelsus’ reorientation of the relationship between theory and practice, I adhere to the former view (López Piñero, 1973: 113–41; Butters, 1996: 224–25). “Admirable discourses of the nature of water and fountains both natural and artificial, of metals, of salts and salines, of stones, of soils, of fire and enamels. With many other excellent secrets of natural things; plus A Treatise of Marl, useful and necessary. … ” While there is work on Palissy’s artisanal contributions (Multhauf, 1958; Thompson, 1954; Smith, 2004), there are few studies of his agricultural observations (Ziegler, 1928; Debus, 1968). On the history of marl use, see Fussell and Fussell, 1959; Ernle, 1961: 10; Chambers and Mingay, 1966: 62. The sophisticated understanding of marl, its constituents, types, and effects, in past times is often underestimated in modern studies of its uses: e.g. Tegethoff (2001: 276). This aim is evident in Platt’s selective explicatory structure and method. Palissy’s digressions, such as on the use of salt during mummification, are condensed, and the dialogue form of the original is dropped. While Palissy used this definition of the fifth element to refute the claim of alchemists that metals could be generated by man, Platt was sympathetic to the alchemical

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arguments as well, attempting to find a balance between arcane and natural philosophy. The term decoction evokes an alchemical understanding of fertilization. On science as venatio (hunt), a common theme for sixteenth-century professori secreti (appearing, for instance, in Antoine Mizauld, Levinus Lemnius, Giambattista della Porta, Johann Jacob Wecker, and Girolamo Cardano, to whom Platt refers) and later deployed by seventeenth-century natural philosophers, see Eamon, 1994: 269–300. For recycling measures in agriculture, see Thirsk, Agrarian History; Fussell and Fussell, “Crop Nutrition” 95–106. They give no account of the theorizing of fertility, focus on the later work of Googe, Markham, and Gabriel Plattes, and dismiss the “fantastic” alchemical aspects of manure theory and practice. Other examples are found in Thomas Adams’ sermons and Churchyard’s moral poems. In the former, the “Couetous man pines in plenty, like Tantalus, vp to the chinne in water, yet thirsty. He that hath no power to take part of Gods blessings, which he keepeth, playes the Thiefe finely, and robs himselfe” (The deuills banket, 1614: 82); thus, Tantalus becomes representative of spiritual famine: “No maruell then if the Soule be famished, when she is onely fed with such fugitiue meat which vanisheth like Tantalus Apples” (Englands Sickness, 1615: 74). Churchyard intensifies the paradox: “Wealth hath desire, to drinke great riuers drie / His scalding thirst, cannot be quenched well / Want pines awaie, and comfortles doth lie / And water tasts, like Tantalus in hell / The needy sort, in dolour daily dwell / The hautie head, thinks skorne to turne his face / And rue the state, of naked wretches case.” (Churchyards Charitie, 1595: 4). A similar trope for resistance and balance is provided by the biblical (rather than Classical) figure of Lazarus (see ch.3). For contemporary mineralogical debates about changes of state, see Oldroyd, 1974; Emerton, 1984; Norris, 2006. On seventeenth-century blending of these ideas, see Killeen, 2007: 122. Classical sources referred to by Platt are: Aristotle, Meteorologica, Works, III.6.378a–b; Velcurio, 1588; Garceaus/Gartze, 1568, 1574. The use of sea water as fertilizer has been the basis of modern experiments in sea energy agriculture (Murray, 1976). On the use of waste products and by-products, see further: Woodward, 1985, 1998; Lemire, 1988: 7–9; Jenner, 1992: 87–99; Thick, 1998. Diagrams representing the privy are reproduced in Jørgensen, 2010b. She argues that Harington’s work had practical relevance for reforming civic facilities for waste disposal. On the quarrel with Platt, see Donno, 1962; Bowers and Smith, 2007; Thick, 2010: 24–26. For the political and cultural contexts of Harington’s work, see: Scott-Warren, 1996, 2001; Bowers and Smith, 2004; Leland, 1982. On the politics of medieval and early modern urban sanitation, see Kucher, 2005; Magnusson, 2006; Jørgensen, 2008, 2010a; Jenner, 1995; Hiltner, 2007; Totaro, 2005: 8, 23. On urban sanitation in environmental discourse, see Melosi, 1981, 1993, 1999; Meisner Rosen and Tarr, 1994; Porter, 1998; Reid, 1991. Primary records of complaints about these issues are found in: London viewers and their certificates, esp. nos. 288, 209, 267, 295, 320, 323, 325. On the problem of smell, Jørgensen (2010a) cites The Coventry Leet Book III.775, and Records of the City of Norwich II.335–37. On anxious links between vagrancy, waste, and disease, see Slack, 1985: 304–06. Some of these problems went back to medieval times (Sabine, 1933, 1934; Magnusson, 2006; Jørgensen, 2006). Thirsk identified the use of night soil in Hertfordshire, Platt’s native county. The night soil experiment is preceded by a recycling experiment in malting. Use of allegorical modes worried not just Platt but reformist textual and scientific scholars as a whole (Harrison, 1998: 108–11). Similarly, Platt expressed discomfort with della Porta for his use of sources and his language (Mukherjee, 2011).

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40 Bowers and Smith (2007) suggested that an anonymous pamphlet published in 1596 titled Ulysses upon Ajax, attacking Harington’s work and defending Platt, was authored by Platt himself. There is no conclusive evidence of this. As Thick convincingly argues (2010: 25), the disgruntled author who describes himself imitating Harington’s own allusive, insinuating style as “a Young that will be old” is likely to be the heir of Richard Young, a Middlesex JP and Platt’s first father-in-law, who was also attacked in Harington’s book. 41 On economic and scientific appropriation of related notions of “secret” and “hunt” by Bacon and early Royal Society members, see Eamon, 1994: 285–300. See feminist critiques of Bacon’s use of the idea of “torturing” secrets out of nature in Merchant, 1980: 164–90. Hanson (1998: 20–31, 122–49) identified Bacon’s notion of torture as “a paradigm for discovery”. Charles Webster (1975: 338) similarly commented: “nature would be ‘tortured’ into revealing her secrets”. Positive accounts of the idea of discovering nature’s secrets in Bacon and his followers are provided by Briggs (1989: 35); Pesic (1999, 2000, 2001). 42 The patent system, a widespread Continental practice, was copied in England in 1552. By the 1560s, through the efforts of William Cecil, patents were being granted to foreign inventors. 43 The overuse of alkaline substances such as soap ash can lead to an excessive rise in the pH level of soil, causing nutrients to become chemically tied to the soil and less available for plant use. 44 For the view that Palaemon restores harmony, see Otis, 1963: 130; Segal, 1967: 279–308. Winsor Leach (1974: 180–82) and Boyle (1976: 187–203) argued that the debate is incapable of resolution. Schultz’s view is similar to Monteleone, 1994. 45 On Platt’s use of theatrical convention to underline the same stance, see Mukherjee, 2011: 84. On the scope for scholarly commentary on generic literary traits of early modern receipt books, see Smith, 2011: 52–54. 46 On the social impact of sermons in the period, see Wadell, 2008: 165–82; McRae, 1996, 58–79; Collinson, 2001; Hindle, 2001a; Walter, 1997. 47 Thomas Norton’s English translation of Calvin’s Institutes, first printed in 1561, was reprinted in 1562, 1574, 1582, 1587, 1599, 1611, 1634 (Warfield, 1899: 193–219). 48 Cf. Calvin’s sermon on Ephesians 3.13–15 (1577: f.134). 49 There were numerous contemporary representations of God as the “original husbandman” and Christ as gardener, equipped with appropriate garments and tools (Harrison, 1998: 228; Otten, 1985: 14). This helped to maintain the literal value of the manure trope, along with the emphasis on restoring the natural world to a pre-fallen state by imitating the labour of God and Christ, seen across many activities from husbandry to alchemy.

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In 1609, writing to his courtly friend Henry Goodyer, the poet John Donne lamented the difference between his past life of plenty at court and his present reduction to impecunious domestic drudgery in the country: These, sir, are the salads and onions of Mitcham, sent to you with as wholesome affection as your other friends send melons and quelques choses from court and London. If I present you not as good a diet as they, I would yet say grace to theirs and bid much good do it you. (Donne, Selected Letters: 50) The “salads and onions” of Donne’s letter were more than indicators of social exclusion, owing to his rashly lost court appointment. The letter subtly evoked insidious emotive powers of food hierarchies, presented self-consciously in a domestic context of shortage and strain. It revealed the close intertwining, in Donne’s contemporary cultural system, of socio-economic, medical-dietetic, and domestic meanings of food. Salads and onions, like brown bread, were poor, detestable (Harrison, 1968: 133–34; Moffett, c.1595: 231), while melons were both dangerous and desirable (Albala, 2002: 13), and quelque-choses signified daintiness rather than substance – “That scarce at first had course bread … must now feed on kickshoes and made dishes”, complained Robert Burton (1621: II.iii.II.319).1 Donne’s exploitation of cultural associations of food bemoaned his lack of resources and simultaneously undermined the very thing he regretted losing. He was anxious to establish that his fare was nevertheless “wholesome” and generous, merging with the self and its “affection” (Carey, 1990: 59, 69, 76). The moral stance that slyly raised its head followed the pattern of Renaissance dietaries: insipid salad was applied with corrective logic to the perilous dainties of the court. As an example of how the rhetoric of food and domesticity was used, the letter portrays the manipulative possibilities of meaning that food served in households could assume. Early modern dietetics sustained such tensions and ambiguities by justifying hierarchy and, simultaneously, using “inferior” foods as medicines to restore health. Most bread extenders, for example, were classified as crass food in dietary literature: hard to digest, fit for peasants and the poor engaged in

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physical labour, these foods sent fumes through the body, swelling it, and causing nightmares (Albala, 2002: 94, 199–200).2 Yet, during economic shortage, the social and moral importance of such foods became more prominent. As Craig Muldrew demonstrated, the largest proportion of energy on which the economy relied came from food: “the calories contained in the food consumed by labourers were the petrol of the early modern economy”. In the dearth years of the 1590s, available calories would have been reduced by 25–37 per cent (2011: 2, 159). The identification of bread extenders or alternatives by authors like Platt was thus governed by experience and knowledge, choosing food that contained carbohydrates. But alongside dietetic invectives against them, these foods were frequently used as animal fodder, and their human consumption meant shortage of animal energy. These pragmatic concerns reoriented meanings of food, and the nature of household tasks allied to the processing, utilization, and consumption of food. As Platt noted, the requirements of “these vrgent times” transcended considerations of social and gender hierarchy supported by a complicated and often contradictory dietetic theory. One had to experiment at home with “all manner of trees, plants, roots, greene pulse and herbes, out of which” one “might by any probabilitie draw any kind of sustenance for the relief of man” (Famine A4). The insistent word “any” opened up the possibility of finding nourishment in food condemned by dieticians. Platt’s open-minded approach propelled him to consult local practitioners (often not of the “better sort”, nor male), record seemingly fanciful receipts, and conduct experiments. The procedures were not simply a question of intuitive apprehension or “experience” without the sophistication of modern knowledge about carbohydrates (contra Muldrew, 2011: 160). This chapter shows that, during dearth years, early modern English households provided a basis from which existing cultural systems of making and interpreting food were re-evaluated. Recent historical perspectives on early modern food (e.g. Albala, 2002; Thirsk, 2007; Muldrew, 2011) give useful accounts of the relationship between practice and perception with regard to food, but do not focus on the household as a central mechanism for expressing concerns about food, health, and sustainability. At the same time, early modern households have been studied in relation to constructions of gender and national identity. Examining literary representations of households, Wendy Wall argued that a middleclass, rather than court-based, understanding of national identity was “generated out of reflections on the material realities of household work” (2002: 6). Attending to the contest between patriarchal advice literature and household practice, she concluded that, far from being trivialized, the domestic emerged as an important means of defining the national in non-state-centred ways. The household imagined by Wall was “a busy, chaotic, threatening, playful, transgressive, and gory workplace” (Wall, 2002: 7; cf. Dubrow, 2004). Although Wall and others commented on “the complex realities of domestic work”, the question of what constituted these realities was less consistently clarified. Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths’ recent historical analysis (2012) of gender and consumption provided much-needed detail on actual practices

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of household organization.3 Their evidence of account-keeping and consumption patterns uncovered coordinated practices of household organization, where assumed female and male boundaries between household and estate matters could be dissolved or destabilized. This was not necessarily achieved in opposition to advice literature. Female competence and influence in related fields of household and estate management could modify from within structures of patriarchal ideology propounded in husbandry and household manuals. The Le Strange household library, the authors’ case study, contained canonical advice literature: Robert Cleaver’s A Godly Forme of Houshold Government (1598), William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties (1622), Charles Estienne’s Maison Rustique, or The Countrey Farme (1616), and Gervase Markham’s Whole Art of Husbandry (1631), which included The English Husbandman and The English Housewife. Alice Le Strange’s management practices closely reflected descriptions in Markham and Estienne (Whittle and Griffiths, 2012: 36–43). Arguably, the “longing for the self-contained household” in Markham and others, that Wall saw producing sites of “fantasy”, in fact reflected sites of practice. Texts such as Hugh Platt’s Delightes for Ladies – which Wall considered dedicated to the pleasure of cooking, novelty of foreign culinary arts, and class-conscious imagining of such arts – were considerably more pragmatic and economy-driven. They articulated with clarity the “complex realities of domestic work” that Wall alluded to (19–53), but did not recover. As Whittle and Griffiths showed, the reach of female influence in matters of resource management in the period has been underestimated (8–14). In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it would not be perceived as unusual, let alone fantastic, for women to take on assertive roles in these matters. The making of Platt’s receipt books indicates it was, equally, not unusual for men to take practical, hands-on, collaborative interest in female work, and this was not necessarily done with the aim of fantasizing. Critical literature that has examined elements of fantasy in early modern domestic spaces, focusing on defamiliarization tactics in the representation and work of households, may have over-imagined this aspect. Besides noting the material and economic importance of housewifery, as Wall, Whittle, and Griffiths have also done, this chapter will discuss the centrality of household work as a means of defining and organizing sustainable practice in the period. It will argue that dearth formed the wider socio-economic context of housewifery, and informed the ambivalences of household practice and representation. The necessity for thrift not only ensured female knowledge could not be dismissed as “non-knowledge” (Wall, 2002: 32), but that it was characterized as knowledge to be engaged with, and applied to wider economic and environmental concerns. The chapter recovers the specificities and economic realities of household food production procedures through Platt’s receipt books and considers how these domestic practices overlapped with patterns of economy within related trades. Household spaces intersected with traders’ workshops. It finally discusses the imagination of utopian and dystopian households in this context of

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political uncertainty and economic crisis. Literary readings can be re-oriented through an awareness of the practicalities of domestic work and its interaction with the wider economy. This analysis shows that the polarities within which household work and its literary representation have been viewed are problematic. Over-emphasis on the alliance between consumption and pleasure can obscure the mundane, as well as the association of women with work rather than pleasures of consumption (Whittle and Griffiths, 2012: 11).4 In Wall’s view, early modern receipt books worked across two poles, represented by Platt and Markham. Platt’s work was concerned, not with thrift or shortage, but with making aristocratic principles of pleasurable consumption accessible to the urban middling sorts; Markham’s work was rural, thrifty, and practical. Platt’s books were fashionable, urbane, and specialized; Markham’s were oldfashioned, and a subset of husbandry. Unlike husbandry guides, cookbooks (as she classified Platt’s Delightes for Ladies) were unconcerned with authenticity or uniformity of practice. They severed housewifery from the site of production and turned female work into a site of pleasure. Elite mysteries were exposed to all classes and domesticity was organized around pleasures of acquisitiveness (Wall, 2002: 37–53). This emphasis on decadent and self-indulgent creativity needs revision. Words such as “delights”, “jewels”, “closet”, and “conceit”, which appear in early modern receipt books, are prone to being misapprehended. The argument separates innovation from thrift because it does not register the early modern receipt book’s complicated processes of creating knowledge, and the transmission of this knowledge to practical spheres of households. The transition from manuscript to print, in the case of Platt’s Delightes for Ladies, and local networks from which receipts were drawn, are relevant in this regard. Emphasis on household consumption as a site of pleasure and rarity can also distract from the apprehension of the household as a site where necessities such as food were primarily addressed, and where social meanings of food were thereby reformed and redressed.

Consumption and preservation The early modern household was an elaborate machine whose efficient functioning required perfect seasonal timing and coordination of myriad tasks, within which the partnership of housewife and husband played a crucial organizational role. Platt’s works are exceptional documents of these domestic procedures and a sophisticated articulation of intricate interrelationships between household management and operations of a national economy. They enable reconstruction of the variety of food produced at the time and recycling practices embedded in these production processes, and reveal the collaborative efforts of men and women in the practice of household economy. As Whittle suggested, household units in the period produced very little waste (2012: 242). Waste-reductive measures were utilized across different classes of households – poor, middling sorts, and gentry. Knowledge of these measures was circulated across and within households and helped to define the ethics of

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sustainable use. Households were thus part of the culture of recycling described in the previous chapter. Flesh, fowl, and fish Sufficiency, a fundamental principle of dearth science, formed the thrust of Platt’s receipts on household work. Catching and fattening food efficiently were the first steps in ensuring supplies sufficient for domestic needs. The “Fishing and fowling” section in MS.2189 began with the receipts “To take a deere” and “To take connies”, before addressing the subjects of its title. To catch deer, an apple soaked in aqua composite was thrown at the herd, and the strongest deer would eat it, fighting off the rest. The alcohol made the animal “turne vpp his bellie”, and it was easily killed. Berries soaked in aqua composita were used in similar fashion for rabbits (f.6). Platt described means of catching fowl: baits of flesh, worms, fish, and garbage were hooked to lines fixed to the ground and covered with earth, grass, and straw; partridges were duped by a silk net made to look like hay, and set up with a live partridge tied to it; blackbirds were lured with artificial lights set in a glade (f.144). The receipts continued with different baits for different types of birds, ways of making birds and fish “drunk”,5 and means of catching fowl on a moonlit night.6 The composition of baits had to suit immediate fishing conditions. Cheap bread mixed with cockle seeds and aqua composita, rolled into wheatsized grains, were cast on the river to catch chub, which swam near the surface. According to Isaac Walton, chub was “the worst fish that swims” (1653: I.47), but easy to catch as it was relatively lazy. Fish liver was apparently good bait to catch fish of the same species, and if “Dunghill wormes” were cleaned, by laying them three days in moss to “scowre” themselves, the fish would “bite the better at them”. For fishing at night, Platt constructed an ingenious underwater lamp lit by glow worms to draw fish into the net (JH 47). Alternatively, fishermen, stationed on either bank of the river, drove fish into a trammel by moving downstream towards the net, strewing unslaked limestones in the water. This made “such a crackling” that the frightened fish swam forward and were trapped.7 Many such receipts printed in Jewell House (53–57) could be construed as poaching. The moral line between theft and thrift, or the question of what was legitimate economy and survival strategy, became hazy in the context of economic strain. The very acts of catching and baiting involved ingenious duplicity sanctioned by these receipt books. Yet, similar ingenuity protected and preserved food, especially grain, from “rauening” pests: wasps were drawn into pots of heated honey; birds were killed by strewing fields with “cheese curds” poisoned with arsenic, taking care the bait was not consumed by one’s hogs or cattle; corn was defended from rats by trapping the latter in the garner; hives were protected from thieves by hiding them in “the midest of a great beech tree, so close as that it may not be discerned” (JH 57–58; MS.2189, f.144). Dependence on storage and preserved goods during dearth made protective measures all the more significant. Dearth

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heightened the need for vigilance, foresight, and smoothly operating domestic networks of knowledge. It was evident to practitioners of dearth science, in the messy drudgery of feeding pigs, fowl, and cattle, that there were intricate economic issues to negotiate. Grain fed animals as long as their price stayed low, but in dearth years substitutes were found for man and beast.8 The blood of dead beasts – a waste product from butchers’ shops – was obtained at no cost. Filled in stone pots with ventilated lids, “as that the flesh flies in sommer time, may easilie get in and out”, it bred “white and glib worms”, which anglers called “Gentils”. Platt related that a Dutchman was paid a lifelong yearly stipend of 20 nobles by a wealthy household for inventing the receipt, and fowl bred and consumed in this house were “highly commended” for the tenderness of their flesh. Platt made his own additions: the worms were scoured with moss or bran for clean feeding, while carrots, turnips, parsnips, and pompions were added to the mixture. Elite household practice, in other words, travelled through channels of informers and turned into useful knowledge for practices of economy lower down the social scale. Among other measures, Platt noted that turkeys were fed with bruised acorns, hogs by boiling stale blood with bran until it congealed into a “bloud pudding” (cf. MS.2216, f.102), and other animals by recycling stale bread crusts and crumbs soaked in milk. Similar to modern battery farming, capons were placed in narrowly sectioned coops so that “the hen or capon may onely feed himselfe and roost therein, not being able to turne his bodie”. It was believed that starving animals for two or three days, followed by generous feeding, was an effective means of fattening them (cf. MS.2244, f.67v). There was sometimes a ruthless pragmatism in the collected measures. Householders daily confronted unpleasant facts of negotiating with the animal world. In Platt’s “Secretes in Oxen, sheep, and Kyne” (MS.2244, f.31v), “fattening” receipts were combined with advice on buying animals, special diets designed to prevent rot, or make animals give more milk. He later added instructions for making calves lick clay or chalk so they would “carry red or white flesh”, and for curing short-winded horses and oxen by mixing sulphur and salt in their food. These measures were part of the province of “huswiferie”, a term that is redefined in the light of these experiments. A “good huswife”, concluded Platt, would choose the means best suited to her own household. The flexibility suggests the domain of household practice incorporated a variety of tasks, and measures of economy located in the very processes of mundane efficiency. As Whittle and Griffiths showed, Alice Le Strange’s domain of housewifery expanded through household account-keeping to include wider issues of estate management on which she also exercised influence (2012: 34–36). This worked both ways. Boundaries between domains of knowledge were porous, and the housewife could as easily draw on knowledge of practices beyond matters of household and estate. In times of dearth, for example, the predominantly masculine world of mariners offered useful knowledge of preservation techniques. Platt’s work drew not only on mariners themselves for the compilation of such knowledge, but also on locally

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accessible sources such as Master Paris the schoolmaster, Master Hill the gardener, or his “sister Humfreys”. His task was to create links between the fields of expertise represented by his sources. Several cookery receipts for “flesh and fowl” in Platt’s work are drawn from his experiments for preparing victuals for mariners (see chapter 2). Apart from inevitable concerns with preservation, these instructions highlighted problems of transport, keeping flesh tender, and roasting it speedily. Boiling meat was common, according to Muldrew, among the poor as it was more fuel-efficient than roasting. Nevertheless, he found roasting equipment in nearly half the labourers’ inventories he used from the late sixteenth century (2011: 100). Items stocked in Platt’s shop show that roasting and other equipment were deliberately designed for greater fuel efficiency – “Reuerberaters to roust wth”, “5 spittes in one”, and “Boxes to carie pastes or other meate whott in”.9 The quality of meat was often dubious, and receipts in MS.2216 tried to make beef and the flesh of “old” hens, cocks, or rabbits “eat tender” (ff.33, 158v–60r), while another in Jewell House discussed elaborate methods of preserving meat. Fowl were stuffed with wheat and buried, or coated in “Barrowes greace” (boar fat), sprinkled with cloves and salt, and laid in stone pots in a cool room; venison was covered with bay salt and wrapped in cloth. Meat was piled in layers in meal or flour, and barrelled to last a month (MS.2244, f.64, no.1; MS.2189, f.119r), or preserved partially cooked. According to Platt’s “sister Humfreys”, roasted meat was best kept in salt, butter, purified lard, vinegar, syrup of sugar, and, possibly, the cheaper molasses (MS.2216, f.123v; MS.2189, f.118v; MS.2244, f.64, no.3). Fowl baked with salt, pepper, and cloves were sealed in lead pots (MS.2244, f.64; MS.2216, f.87r). Cookery receipts gathered in Delights and MS.2189 discussed various meat broths, using salt, sugar, white wine, vinegar, or butter, ingredients to which preservative virtues were ascribed.10 A lot of meat, Platt complained, “in this lande is yearely lost, in hote and unseasonable Sommers”. To prevent this waste, he hung meat in a “high and windie” room in a “plate cupboard full of holes, so as the wind may haue a through passage”. His advisor Mr Hill had kept venison fresh for 10 days in this manner (MS.2189, f.116v). A receipt addressed to mariners put forward the ingenious method of sealing meat in vessels with holes, which were tied to the stern and dragged through the sea. Platt derived this method after experimenting repeatedly with immersing beef in sea water. He had heard “a maister of a Shipp affirme” that beef tasted better kept in brine than in dry salt (MS.2189, ff.25r, 32v, 118v). The problem with most receipts for preserving meat was their high salt content and inferior taste, which Platt attempted to resolve, recommending that the meat be shredded, dried, powdered, sealed in a barrel, and soaked in salt water, oil, or butter before consumption. Such methods served mariners, and supplied households with meat “out of season” (MS.2216, ff.52v, 87–93; cf. Delights 3.18, 19, 20; MS.2189, f.118v). Criticizing habits of waste in contemporary practice, Platt observed that even rotting sheep could provide wholesome food: “I have knowne some of good worth that have taken theyr partes therof wth theyre servantes”. It was

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wasteful, he felt, to dispose of dead sheep by merely drowning them in ponds to engender eels, as was done during a recent epidemic when sheep died “by whole thowsandes of the rolle”. To recover “tainted” meat, he suggested, “cut awaie all the flesh that is greene, and cut out all the bones, and bury it in a thin olde course cloth a yard deepe in the ground for 12 or 20 houres space, and it will be sweet enough to be eaten”. This was allegedly practised by thrifty housewives, and Platt obtained it from “a Gentlewoman of good credit” (JH 22–23). Similarly, the blood and brains of beasts, usually thrown away, were wholesome nourishment “in hard and extreme yeeres of dearth and famin”, and relieved many who “of this present are ready to sterue for want of foode”. These instructions are in a section titled “Vsus rerum abiectarum”, containing 38 receipts on subjects as varied as chimney fires, starch water, pulp of oranges, whites of eggs, salt pits, woad roots, soap ashes, iron filings, candles, and dyes (MS.2189, f.163). The household problem of wasted meat was thus placed within the perspective of a larger economy of “throw-away things”. The creation of this category confirms that Platt sought to re-inscribe wasted matter with value. Multiple connotations of abjectus (“throw-away”, “common”, “subservient”, “downcast”, and “vile”) came into play in Platt’s descriptive category. Things cast out of or devalued by the society and economy had to be reinstated and justified during dearth. Following the principle of transforming waste into socially and economically valuable material was ultimately the only way of “eliminating” waste. Household consumption was a crucial arena for this kind of transformation. We can thus review some prominent narratives of early modern consumption. Descriptions by travellers to England, William Harrison’s record of food consumed daily by the nobility, and the notorious Star Chamber dinner accounts were often used to map practices of “conspicuous consumption” (Rye, 1865: 70, 110; Harrison, 1968: 126; Simon, 1959; Drummond and Wilbraham, 1958: 57–63). According to the Star Chamber accounts, it appears that 10 pounds of beef were served per lord per dinner, in addition to mutton, lamb, veal, brawn, cocks, hens, pullets, capons, geese, pigeons, ducks, pheasants, partridges, quails, snipes, woodcocks, plovers, gulls, curlews, herons, blackbirds, and larks (Stone, 1965: 561; Appleby, 1979a: 97–116). But such accounts, used as evidence of the pleasures of consumption and preoccupation with displays of the rare and strange above the everyday, provide a partial picture.11 Without Platt’s information, the dietary evidence as we move further down the social scale would be scant. It is likely that meat consumption of “middling” and poorer groups declined sharply with repeated economic crises in the late sixteenth century, indicated by a rise in the importance of fish days.12 The observance of fish days was relaxed after 1585, but a 1595 proclamation reaffirmed their importance, noting that 135,000 heads of beef “might be spared in a yeere, in the Cittie of London, by one dayes abstinence in a weeke”. If fish was one alternative to meat in times of dearth, the other was “white meats” or dairy products. According to Bowden’s index, prices of milk, cheese, and butter in the sixteenth century increased

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3.4 times (Thirsk, 1967: 814–70). Prices of dairy and poultry products, as Harrison complained, were artificially raised by “pestiferous purueiours” or “buttermen” who travelled to farms buying up eggs, chicken, and butter (127). It is probable that activities of “buttermen” increased in dearth years, when demand for these products rose (Appleby, 1979a: 109). The emphasis Platt and other authors of receipt books placed on preservation was stimulated by practical problems of transport affecting availability of fish and dairy products. Most fish landed at the wharf of Queenhythe, near the fish market, where it was salted or pickled. Fresh fish did not form a large part of the fishmonger’s trade (Drummond and Wilbraham, 1958: 38–40). The sale of bad fish was an acute problem, and putrefaction was regarded as a cause of epidemics. It was feared that the city air might become infected by the stench, and confiscated fish was burnt or taken outside the city. The herring trade largely depended on salt as a preserving agent (Wilson, 1991a: 51). It was also used to preserve powdered salmon, and the then inexpensive oysters and mussels. Some fresh water fish was kept in artificial ponds or “stews” (Drummond and Wilbraham 39). Platt noted (under “Proffitable Vses of the Sea water”) possibilities of storing live fish in saline ponds – a “rich secret” for fishmongers, who “may venter to engrosse fresh fish at his pleasure and bee well furnished of fresh herringes, whitinges, place, fresh samons, lobsters, prawnes, & c. when other mens stalls are emptie” (MS.2189, f.32v). Such speculations underline how the language of market competition could swiftly merge with the language of thrift. Practitioners like Platt were conscious of this, as well as the related moral paradox of dearth-time practice: preservation techniques and relative scarcity of fresh products obscured the difference between adulteration and legitimate means of preserving food. How far could one go with the process of transforming waste or dross into useful or consumable matter before this endeavour became morally “abject” or “vile”? While the reintegration of “abject things” into a sphere of socio-economic acceptance was morally commendable in one way, it operated in tension with equally active concerns about contamination and spoiling. The case of early modern fish was an apt illustration of this problem. Platt’s documents showed that pickling and salting were also means of disguising spoilt fish: anchovies and herrings that had grown “rusty” were re-barrelled in new brine. Storing fish with powdered chalk disguised their yellowing (MS.2189, f.25r). Buyers were regularly warned about such tricks (Wilson, 1991a: 52). Simultaneously, some of these means were commended to deal with the problem of transporting and storing fish. Jewell House and Delights described these measures for the benefit of individual consumers and fishmongers. To the contemporary practice of barrelling oysters in sea water while they were “new and quick at the Sea-side”, Platt added the alternative of piling them in “roundelets” and casting salt upon each layer. They would last, he estimated, for 12 days; but a receipt in Delights improved on this. Oysters, opened and barrelled in vinegar, salt, and pepper, lasted six months “sweete and good, and in their naturall taste”. This was not just a useful receipt for

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the housewife, as its inclusion in the “Cookery and Huswiferie” section indicated, but “an excellent meanes” for fishmongers conveying them to “drie towns”, or mariners carrying them on voyages (JH 75; MS.2216, f.99r; Delights 3.15). In warm weather, lobsters, crayfish, prawns, and shrimps were wrapped in rags moistened in salt water, and buried in “Calis sande”. The practice benefited fishmongers, who often had to sell these fish cheap owing to their “speedy decay” (Delights 3.31; MS.2189, f.25r). Similarly, by seething salmon in vinegar and rosemary, “Vintners and Cookes may make profit thereof when it is scarce in the markets”. Salmon, thus prepared, could be transported from Ireland and sold in London (JH 76). Attempting to balance conflicting interests of buyers and traders was characteristic of the work of Platt and his associates. The feat of coordinating their roles as householders and traders created intersections and tensions between domains of home and trade, especially evident in receipts for cooking fish in Delights. Household activity suggested that preparing food for consumption was itself a means of preservation (Delights 3.3, 14, 16, 17). Fish was made into paste with breadcrumbs, flour, isinglas, and spices, and then moulded into the shapes of “naturall” fish (MS.2189, ff.120–22, 126). Strong broths were made with yeast, wine, or vinegar, and stewing fish with berries or beer was common (Delights 3.3; MS.2189, ff.120–22, nos.3, 7, 20, 22). Most of these cookery receipts in Platt’s collections were based on the principle of making fish last, and masking rotten taste or smell. Similar techniques were applied to milk, cheese, and butter, which could not be kept unless obtained fresh from farms outside towns (Stow, 1598: 91). Butter was often sold in rancid condition (Drummond and Wilbraham 41), and even the best kind, complained Platt, contained a fourth part of dross, making it “more fit for the dunghill, then for a mans stomach”. Adding impurities to butter was a common trick to increase weight, and the butter was clarified by dissolving it over a slow fire, pouring it into a basin of fair water, and skimming the impurities. Clarified butter lasted longer, and was seasoned with distilled oil of sage, cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, and cloves to make it taste better. Platt had tried this while entertaining friends “who thought it very strange to find the naturall tast of herbs, and spices conveied in to butter without any apparent touch of color”. Colour, he commented, could be added by churning the cream with petals of roses, cowslips, marigolds, or violets (JH 1–14; Delights 3.21, 22; MS.2189, f.111). While traders of food evolved measures for increasing their income in times of economic hardship, householders found equally efficient ways of remedying the poor quality of food. Profit, need, health, and display of household ingenuity became strangely conglomerated. Moreover, there was nothing specifically feminine about such display. The masculine and feminine, trade and home, need and pleasure, were balanced when modifying typical household practices to suit increasingly stringent conditions of economy. Mrs Platt’s cheese-making receipts vividly exemplified how this worked. Platt experimented with ways of pressing curd to minimize waste during cheese-making. The curd was given “a gentle peize, whereby ye whey that runneth from the curdes, will bee as thin as water, and carry no substance

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with it”. He confessed to having “robbed” his wife’s dairy of the receipt. Mrs Platt had refused “all recompenses” offered her by gentlewomen keen to learn her method, in which the process of gradual pressing was aided by Platt’s specially designed wicker covers that slowly sank into the moat. The “violent pressing” of ordinary cheeses made them “spongious and full of eyes”, while Mrs Platt’s cheese “settling gently and by degrees … cut as close and firme as marmalade”. It wasted no fat – the whey pressed out by usual methods carried “a Creame vppon it, whereby the cheese must of necessitie be much lesse”, by “a fourth parte”. The precise gain from this practice of economy was meticulously measured and analyzed. To minimize loss of strength through expulsion of whey, it was better to put unbroken curd into the moat. This was troublesome (it made the curd difficult to turn) but possible: “I suppose that the Angelotes in Fraunce may bee made in this manner in small baskets, and so likewise of the Parmeesan”, observed Platt, fluidly linking personal and local knowledge of domestic procedure with the apparently unfamiliar and foreign (Delights 3.22; cf. MS.2189, f.111). Cookery receipts in Delightes for Ladies were procedures evolved from food experiments outlined in Platt’s manuscripts. This justified the seemingly odd inclusion of mariners’ victuals in a text ostensibly catering to the “delight” of ladies. Instead of the complacent abundance of the banqueting table, ingredients and methods of the receipts evoked the harsh world of “long and dangerous voyages” where victuals usually “meerely perish, or else by the extreame pearcing of the salte, doe lose euen their nutritiue strength and vertue”. As his apology in Delights indicated, Platt was acutely conscious of his departure from traditional expectations raised by the title of the work: “I will make bold to lanch a little from the shoare, and trye what may bee done in the vast and wide Ocean” (3.20). The departure highlighted the awareness that “huswiferie” represented a significant and serious aspect of dearth science, not unrelated to the wider concerns of a national economy and ecology. Roots, fruits, and flowers The importance and range of the province of housewifery within the wider economy was further established by Platt’s insistence on efficient domestic utilization of garden and orchard produce. Delightes for Ladies contained receipts for preserving edible roots, fruits, and flowers – an “arte” that, in times of dearth, provided a means of creating a store of food, which could last the entire year. Manuscript versions of these receipts, compiled over the years, formed the basis for the printed book. Their sources were middleclass traders and “gentlewomen”, including his wife.13 Some receipts were ascribed to male sources, like “M. Parsons, the Apothecarie”, indicating that, in developing the procedures, Platt was not the only man in the period with a practical involvement in “huswiferie”. The practices of experiment and exchange behind the production of a receipt book, like Delightes for Ladies, prompt us to read beyond its conventional tropes of masculinity and femininity. Male authors

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learnt their receipts from both men and women, and housewifery was an applied science, less “gendered” than it is often assumed to be. The receipts addressed an “expert” audience, evaluating relative merits of current preservation methods and suggesting alternatives. They gave pragmatic and localized meanings to the idea of preservation. The book went through several editions rapidly. Extant copies in the British Library and the Bodleian Library’s Juel-Jensen collection are almost unique. Fussell has thus argued that the printed texts were used “in the ordinary daily round until their copies dropped to pieces with wear and vanished” (1948: preface). The view seems justified when the printed works are regarded as having evolved from practical experiments in the manuscripts. The receipts provide an insight into the complex daily tasks of the Elizabethan housewife, including keeping account of available stock and inventing methods of keeping fruit and flowers fresh (JH 61–62). Fruits were put in lead casts “sodered verie close”, and buried in shady places or hung by running brooks. Each flower or fruit was sealed separately in earthen pots, placed in larger pots, and resealed in wooden vessels. Making containers airtight was a crucial part of the expedient. Platt suggested using goldsmiths’ wax, made of pitch, “rosen”, and powdered brick. Fresh fruit was also placed in custom-made glass containers “nipped (hermetice) with a paire of hote tongs”. This early form of bottling required no specialized equipment, and was accomplished by the housewife or a servant. A glass container was placed in a pan of ashes, with an inch of its neck exposed and charcoal laid round it. Once this area of the glass was evenly heated, the neck was sealed with hot tongs. Distilled oils were stored in the same way. Commonly used measures, such as dipping fruit in wax, were rejected by Platt, who emphasized that preservation methods must differ according to the type of fruit or flower. He designed a special contraption for keeping cherries: pewter vessels were fashioned like “bell Saltsellers” with hooks attached inside. Cherries were fastened to the hooks by their stalks. The vessels were placed in pans of “fayre water”, and their bases weighed down by lead rings. In this manner, the ayre beeing kept coole, and defended from chaunge (whose alteration from heate to colde, and from moysture to drinesse, is the principall meanes of the ruinating of all mortall bodies) will preserue such Cherryes as it receyueth in charge for two whole Moneths at the least as I haue long since prooued. (JH 1–6; Delights 1.70, 72, 68) Drying was another method applied particularly to cherries, prunes, damsons, and chestnuts, which were boiled, strained, and dried in the sun or “leftover” heat from the oven. Plums were dried whole, while apples, pears, quinces, and wardens were pared, sliced, and laid out in the sun on metal dishes, upon high frames covered with canvas. Grapes were hung up in clusters on lines, and made plump again by soaking in warm water; or a branch of the vine

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containing clusters of grapes was cut, driven into an apple, and kept in a moderately warm room (Delights 1.36–37, 45–47; MS.2216, ff.87, 94). Walnuts were kept in their shells “vntill Newyeers tide”, and then the kernels steeped in “conduit water”. Quinces were steeped in “peny ale” and the liquor changed every 10 days (Delights 1.64–66, 73). To delay the ripening of fruit was another way of making it available for a longer period. Platt’s landlord’s son Peter Francke assured him it was common practice in Turkey (“where he has made triall”) to bury unripe lemons and oranges, which could be “made to swell” at a later date (MS.2216, f.112). If unripe cherries, upon their branches, were enclosed in an earthen jar “deuided into two equall partes, and euerie breathing place well stopped or luted, and the Sunne sufficiently defended from the pot … the fruit would keepe fresh a long time vpon the tree whereon it groweth”. Platt practised the same trick on artichokes, presented John Allet, Mayor of London, with the proceeds of this experiment, and furnished his own store with 200 artichokes, to the surprise and envy of guests “who would haue bin right glad to haue dined with the secret onely” (cf. Delights 1.73; JH 5). The painstaking detail of the receipts, sheer variety of household tasks, their constant intersection with varied sources of knowledge, and the efficiency assumed to underpin this work point towards actively debated notions of preservation. Thus, the idea of decay too was carefully evaluated through practical engagement with daily household labours. The receipts reflected the awareness of decay as a medical and philosophical concept – “the principall meanes of the ruinating of all mortall bodies” – and a larger problem to which individual tasks of preservation were linked. Decay and preservation became especially visible in contexts of shortage, and gave new, unexpected meanings to material agents of preservation. Sugar, an item readily linked by modern commentators with wealth, pleasure, and exoticism, was an apt example. The role of sugar, an important preservative in Platt’s receipts and environment, requires careful assessment. Its ubiquity was a feature of the late sixteenth century. In medieval Europe, sugar was an exotic, highly priced commodity. By 1422, Portuguese navigators had brought sugar cane to the islands of Madeira; and by 1515, it was being cultivated in Hispaniola (Ellis, 1905: 52–59; Thorold Rogers, 1886: I.633; de Herrera, 1740: II.155). Transplanted to the New World, sugar “rapidly became the most important item of transoceanic trade”, and by the 1580s, Brazil had become the world’s major producer of sugar (Fernández-Armesto, 2002: 206; Ellis, 1905: 60). Refineries were established in Venice from the mid-fifteenth century, but by the sixteenth century, there was a flourishing refining industry in Antwerp (Deerr, 1950: II.451).14 The refined sugar was shipped to England, the Baltic, and Germany. In England, first attempts to refine sugar were made in 1544: Stow’s Survey of London records the existence of two sugar houses in this year, but Antwerp sugar was still cheaper than the home-refined variety. After the sack of Antwerp, these refineries became increasingly wealthy, and similar establishments appeared (Deerr, 1950: II.458; Ellis, 1905: 62–64). When Platt was writing, in the 1590s and early 1600s, sugar had replaced honey as the favoured sweetener.

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It afforded greater sweetness, better solubility, and easier transportation, in its dry, crystal form. The changing context of sugar production and use began to transform cultural meanings of the item. It was not merely a luxurious pleasure, nor was sweetening its primary function. Alterations in market and trade conditions also altered sugar’s domestic use. Earliest descriptions of sugar refining found by Noel Deerr (1950: I.464–66) are dated 1637 and 1698, but Platt gave more elaborate descriptions in 1594. Both raw muscovado and white sugar were available in the English market, the former priced lower at 13.84 pence per pound between 1583–92, and 15.67 pence between 1593–1602, compared with the prices of white sugar in the same periods – at 17.10 and 19.10 pence, respectively (Deerr, 1950: I.528). There were complaints about the inadequacies of muscovado sugar (Ligon, 1673: 85), but Platt recommended buying this cheaper variety and refining it: it was dissolved in quicklime (calcium oxide) and boiled, mixed with egg whites beaten in oil, strained and boiled again to a consistency that was “a meane between sirruppe and hard Sugar”. This was poured into an earthen pot with a drainage hole. Once the molasses had drained, the mouth of the pot was topped with clay, which sank in as the sugar congealed. The sugar loaves were dried on a stove until they hardened (JH 94–96; MS.2216, f.141). Platt’s record of household-based sugar refining enables us to see sugar use as part of the environment of mundane labours, linked to preservation practices. Early seventeenth-century manuscript receipt books, compiled by housewives, confirm the centrality of sugar as a means of food preservation. The receipt book of Mrs Hughes contained about 60 culinary receipts, out of which 48 are sugar-based and deal mainly with making conserves. Elizabeth Bulckeley’s “Booke of Hearbes & Receiptes” devoted a section to “preserveinge” roots, fruits, and flowers. Mistress Jane Baber, similarly, included 28 such receipts out of a total of 42.15 Sugar, it appears, was a critical item in household accounts and, in the contemporary climate of dearth, a necessity: it was used for casting, preserving fruit, and making “marchpane”, “comfits” of seeds and fruit, “suckets” of lettuce stalk, ginger, and walnuts, syrups of violets and roses, pastes of almonds and quinces, jellies and “leaches”, jams, marmalades, and sugar plate coloured or flavoured with flowers and spices (MS.2216, f.161). The specialized terminology reveals the variety of sugar-based preparations in the period, whose procedures contradict common assumptions about their association with pleasure, fantasy, and delight. The art of “candying”, an elaborate procedure that often took several days, had a special status in the context of preservation. Fruits and roots were boiled in their own juice with “a conuenient proportion” of sugar, to make “preseruing” syrups and jams (Delights 1.1, 33, 42, 53; MS.2216, f.142).16 “Rock candie” was made from nutmegs, ginger, mace, or flowers, dipped in a mixture of sugar, rose water, and gum arabic, and set aside for 3 weeks. The petals (“neither in the bud nor ouerblowne”) were opened with “a fine smooth bodkin either of bone or wood”, and the flowers laid in the sun or oven. Roses, gilliflowers, marigolds, and rosemary are the most popular in Platt’s

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receipts and, by candying, their colours were preserved (Delights 1.7–9, 11, 35, 61). Sugar casts were made from a paste of isinglass, rose water, blanched almonds, milk, and powdered sugar. Adding stiffening agents like starch and isinglass reduced the amount of sugar required, and the paste was cast in moulds resembling birds, beasts, fruits, or an entire banquet. Household saucers, dishes, and bowls were used as moulds to make sugar replicas of these vessels, coloured with the paste of flowers (Delights 1.13; MS.2189, f.66). Marchpane, made from blanched almonds and sugar, and used in banquets, was made economically with small balls of paste “containing so much by estimation as will couer your mold or printe”. Platt mentioned a “countrie Gentlewoman” who sold sugar cakes of this composition, adding, “the onely fault which I finde in this paste is that it tasteth too much of the sugar, and too little of the almonds”. Thus, one could improve taste and cut down on sugar by incorporating more almonds, or flavouring the mixture with cinnamon or ginger (Delights 1.12, 18; MS.2189, f.64v). His sources, often cited very precisely (the “countrie gentlewoman” or “This I did see Mr Stanley of Nottinghamshire do with his own hands the 14th day of Oct. 96”), also suggest that these methods and recipes were not exclusively practised in urban contexts. For “comfits” (fruits, flowers, roots, or seeds encased in sugar) or “sallettes” of flowers (dried and boiled with powdered sugar) the proportion of sugar was high, but they lasted all year. Platt described the latter means of preservation as “my Wiffes inuention” (Delights 1.54; MS.2189: ff.35–38, 61–64). “Suckets”, on the other hand, were economical with sugar. Of the three receipts in Delights, two used honey as a substitute (Delights 1.32, 48, 49). Similarly, pastes and “Iumbolds” were made by grating stale cakes and manchet, adding almond paste and spices, baking the mixture, and sprinkling it with sugar (Delights 1.15, 24–30, 55, 57–58). Cakes were even made without sugar, using dried and powdered parsnips instead (JH 31). The practical context of sugar use stimulated the development of innovative, collaborative processes of economy. During dearth, “confections” were devised for the poor, and Platt introduced “A new cheape delicate deuise of foode resembling a kind of almond butter, Cheese & spice cakes in a tyme of dearth”, arguing that “cheape” and “delicate” were not contradictory ideas. This receipt resembled some of the dearth-bread receipts discussed earlier. Skirrets, parsnips, turnips, pumpkins, and carrots were ground, worked into a pulp with rose water, adding comfrey roots “to bind the rest to a bodie like cheese or firme cake”. The cakes were stored all year. The natural sweetness of some roots, especially skirret, served instead of sugar “to giue delicacy”. Mr Dakeham, a gentleman of Dorsetshire, from whom Platt obtained this receipt, affirmed that he had used skirret roots as a sugar substitute in marchpane (MS.2216, f.156v). A “Grocers weif in London” and “Payne the distiller” confirmed the preservation of fruit was occasionally possible without using sugar at all (MS.2189, f.142). Platt’s receipts for “crystall gelly”, “leach of almonds”, and “quidini of quinces” used 2–4 ounces of sugar (Delights 1.26–28). Similar economy was possible with marmalades if the pulp was first dried in a pan. A cheap sweet “sauce” was

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made from orange pulp, but most comfit-makers “make no reckoning” of the pulp, even though they use the “pilles and rindes”, complained Platt. For “conserves” of fruit boiled in water and wine, the proportion of sugar was variable (Delights 1.31, 34, 41, 50–52; MS.2189, f.163). Platt recommended a “sufficient quantitie of sugar”, enough to thicken the syrup, suggesting that individual definitions of sufficiency varied according to means and circumstances. Early histories of sugar classified it as “a superfluity, a good which satisfies pre-eminently a sensory desire. Man’s sensory desire for sweetness is one of the fundamental sensory wants. … it has been for its sweetness that this commodity has always been consumed” (Ellis, 1905: 17). More recently, sugar has been similarly designated a luxury good, and associated with “the feminine” and “the foreign”. Kim Hall concurred with Sidney Mintz that sugar use, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, spread beyond the wealthy classes, “presumably by those wanting to emulate a social elite” (Hall, 1996: 168–90; Mintz, 1985: 97; cf. Mennell, 1985: 86–87). Although she observed that sugar appeared in the earliest cookbooks as a “preservative” and “medicine”, not necessarily a “sweetener or confection”, she maintained it functioned “primarily as a spice”. Her analysis was occupied with this “primary” use of sugar in banquets, “voids”, decorative confections, and the “metameals” that “remind[ed] the feasters of their own luxury and wealth”, and was “specifically attached to female labour and creativity”. Male authors of receipt books, said Hall, drew attention to the “gender coding” of these works, assuring female readers they could “help them master cookery”. Wall’s analysis of household labour (2002) and Patricia Fumerton’s study of banquets (1991) were informed by similar assumptions. However, manuscript receipt books of the period, and Platt’s published works, suggest the utility of sugar extended beyond the “desire” for its sweetness. It was both a flavouring device and a conserving agent. Contemporary technical terms denoting the range of sugar-based preparations show that, like salt, sugar was a medium enabling housewives to create stores of specific kinds of food, which lasted at least through the year and were replenished methodically. This store served in times of crisis, when fresh food was in short supply, and became a means of ensuring the sustainability of household supplies. Sugar was not simply a luxury or a “marginal utility”, it was widely available at different prices, in varying degrees of “purity”, and used in varying quantities, determined by the recipes where it was included and the circumstances that produced those recipes.17 The case of sugar connects to wider issues about early modern attitudes towards household work. Narratives of early modern lives, prioritizing consumption, pleasure, and luxury, should be moderated. It is problematic to look at methods of display, whether physical, like banquets and tableware, or verbal, as the rhetoric of delicacy and delight, by themselves. Less dramatic aspects of evidence, such as ingredients, their sources, mundane labour, networks of tasks relating to particular receipts, suggest a different narrative where the equation of inventiveness with wealth and leisure may have to be replaced by its equation with thrift and labour. Definitions of preservation in critical

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studies, relating the term to guarding elite custom, social standing, and assertion of household ingenuity through wasteful extravagance, seem limited. Many products used in confections – isinglass, or fish bladder, being a common example – were waste products. Central principles of the receipts were making food last, recycling throw-away things by incorporating them in manifold ways in different kinds of receipts, and developing the receipts themselves through cooperative knowledge making, often across professional and class boundaries. A printed receipt book, like Platt’s Delights, was not merely an invitation to fantasy, nor uneasy about the particularities of household or “female” tasks, but quite the reverse. It cannot therefore be categorized as a book about the social art of domesticity or the “civilizing process” (Wall, 2002: 42–49). It was, instead, a book that brought into public view questions raised by everyday practices of actual householders and professionals about the sustainable management and organization of domestic tasks. Read in conjunction with manuscript sources, it demonstrated that household management interacted with resource management in contemporary trades.

Households and trades The early modern household was not only the site of domestic production of food, drink, medicine, and cosmetic goods. Similar to the way the management of elite households like the Le Stranges interacted with their management of the estate, household practices of a different social group like the Platts were difficult to separate from their trading practices. The domestic space of the household frequently incorporated the seemingly outside space of the workshop. Economy in one context directly influenced the workings of the other: household and workshop became linked knowledge-making sites, and while the overlaps widened opportunities for inventive adaptation to changes and crises, they also made the overall management of resources more complex. Areas of practice where households and trades were closely linked are the production of staples which had a direct impact on grain use, the art of distillation, and the provision of daily medical care. These practices assumed particular importance during dearth and uncover the cautious cultural modulation of meanings of preservation, substitution, taste and health, recycling and waste, employment and profit. Bread, starch, and beer Platt worked on his bread experiments in the latter half of the 1590s, and these are recorded jointly in Platt’s writing and another hand (MS.2189, ff.56–57). Some receipts (in an assistant’s hand) are for wheat bread, experimenting with different proportions of flour, salt, and eggs. Platt wrote from the fourteenth receipt onwards, recording experiments with dearth breads. When using products that relied on the grain trade, it was not easy to eke plenty out of penury. Home-baking was not independent of the activities of bakers and brewers.

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Bread was bought by the poor from bakers and, as the laws of the Assize of Bread indicate, loaf size changed with grain price variations. Bread was sold on credit measured by multiples of pennies, making it easier for bakers to keep track of what was owed by the poor (Muldrew, 2011: 62–64). The chaos of early English legislative efforts to balance concerns about bakers’ incomes indicated that bakers and merchants in the trade were also victims of dearth, although popular culture depicted them as perpetrators of corruption.18 Bakers, brewers, and starch-makers competed for the same supplies, and as all three products were made in domestic settings too, householders were aware that exercising thrift in the production of one item could affect the availability of another. Preservation and substitution issues cut across boundaries of household and trade when producing bread, starch, and beer. To avoid decay, householders and traders experimented with means of dehydrating bread. Platt argued, “it is very requisite that they [bread and corn] be perfectly dried, or gentlie parched” in the sun, warm air, or (“in the want of these two”) ovens and stoves. Bread, left to cool in the oven, or toasted over coals and steeped in wine, “satisfie[d] the hunger of a man in double proportion to that which otherwise it would”. The stomach, in times of crisis, must be filled with less. Even as little as the smell of bread could “nourish the body, and refresh the spirits greatly” (Famine D2). The experiments formulated an alternative definition of nourishment and its forms. As the physical volume of food was minimized, the practices progressively emphasized the psychological fulfilment of nourishment and the invisibility of means by which bodies and minds received nutrients and were “satisfied”. This re-orienting of the meaning of nourishment depended on identifying substitutes for bread, and, in turn, had an impact on production processes for starch and beer. What were the substitutes, and how were production methods modified in response to shortages? What were the principles underlying modification and discovery of substitutes? As in other famine-related measures, their economic and ethical purposes were articulated with biblical resonance: bread would be “increased and multiplied” for “the poore mannes Table” (Famine A2). The nourishment value of bread in particular was underscored by dietaries: it was “the staff of life” (Moffett, 1655: 235). If made from substitutes, it could be cooked cheaply with lower fuel consumption than wheat bread (Muldrew, 2011: 58). Making coarse bread was a significant part of the culture of finding and validating “inferior” substitutes. Flour was made from peas, beans, beechmast, buckwheat, chestnuts, acorns, vetches, roots of arum (arrowroot), turnips, “pompions”, and parsnips. Platt emphasized versatility and the need to keep looking for substitutes: “whatsoeuer is here spoken of beanes, pease, & c, may be generally vnderstoode of all other graine, seedes, plants, pulse, rootes, & c” (Famine B1; also MS.2189, f.126; MS.2244, f.73; MS.2216, f.40; MS.2197, f.22). Nothing was precluded as a possible source of nourishment, and this deliberately eclectic approach was not exclusive to Platt. Contemporary herbals and other texts suggested a wide tradition of alternative grain-use. Gerard’s Herbal of 1599 listed 6 different types of peas, 21 of beans, and 4 of

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vetches, that grew in gardens and fields in various parts of England. Some made “exceedingly delicate meate”, said Gerard, and recorded the practice of eating unripe kidney beans boiled with butter and lupins with salt or pickle. He agreed with Galen that vetches commonly served as food during famines, and showed that this was longstanding practice in England (Gerard, 1599: 2.510, 515; Fabyan, 1533: VII (1438), cxc; cf. Albala, 2002: 198). Other items on Platt’s list, such as beechmast, acorns, bean-meal, and chestnuts, were commonly used as animal feed, and extended to human use during acute shortage (Gascoigne, 1575: 151). Harriot’s report of “the new found land of Virginia” (discovered 1585) brought new kinds of bread to the English reader’s notice. Chestnuts, he noted, were boiled “to make spoonemeate, and with some being sodden they make such a manner of dowe bread as they vse of their beanes before mentioned”, while an acorn-like fruit was soaked, pounded, and made into loaves (1590: 18–19). Times of famine yielded innovative ways of making bread even from grass, weeds, and, according to Piero Camporesi, narcotic or hallucinogenic substances. As Sheppard and Newton wrote, “everything imaginable went into the loaf” during famines (1957: 26). Wheat substitutes, according to Camporesi, included hawthorn fruit, water brambles, acorns, turnips, dog grass, lupins, parsnips, radishes, pine nuts, fir seeds, laurel berries, wild asparagus, hazelnuts, sorb-apples, pumpkins, elm leaves, broad beans, millet, panic grass, rye, barley, vetch, sorghum, darnel, poppy seeds, locusts, green dragon, asphodel bulbs, and arum (1989: 62, 111, 120–30, 138, 148).19 Many of these are mentioned by della Porta, whose chapters on “various kinds of bread prepared from roots and fruits” in Magiae Naturalis Platt had read (4.16–19). One could even add bones of animals (and humans) to the list,20 which suggests a radical blurring of boundaries between the social categories of edible and inedible, healthy and harmful, pure and adulterated, useful and waste. Local knowledge, household practice, distant reports, seemingly esoteric speculation, all merged to produce an intricate culture of creating new food to “increase and multiply” not only the poor man’s table. Within this system, particular substitutes assumed priority. An “excellent” bread made from the arum roots was eaten by many in England and Germany according to Turner’s Herball (1568: 60). Gerard said arum grew in woods, near ditches, under hedges, and was accessible to the poor. It had appetizing properties: when bears emerged from hibernation, they first ate the herb arum, whereby “the hungrie gut is opened and made fit againe to receiue sustenance; for by absteining from foode so long a time, the gut is shrunke or drawen to close togither, that in a maner it is quite shut vp” (1599: 685). Bread made with arum was considered effective for malnourished stomachs. The natural and animal worlds provided examples of consumption that were turned into dearth food for humans. As English arum was sharp in taste, Platt recommended boiling, drying, and grinding the roots to make “white & pure” meal. By mixing a third of wheat, “a most faire & sauory bread” was made. Turnips, parsnips, and carrots were similarly treated to make “sweete and delicate cakes … without spice or Sugar”, which Platt served in his household

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(Famine B2v). “A new cheape delicate deuise of foode … in a tyme of dearth”, where root vegetables, fruits, and nuts were mashed in rose water, and baked, was another variant (MS.2216, f.156v). Remarkably, qualities of “daintiness”, “delicacy”, and “excellence” of taste were not eschewed, even in times of crisis, when the balance between pleasure and survival was maintained as far as possible. Making bread from “pompions”, for instance, was recommended both for pleasant taste and because pumpkins were “cheape, and great” (Famine B3; cf. della Porta, 142; Gerard, 919–20). Merging economy and delicacy of taste was not Platt’s individual quirk. He collected a fund of such receipts from other practitioners. Mr Hill, a “most sufficient gentlman”, thought the roots were best gathered just after the plant began to grow leaves. Mr Locke of Essex suggested soaking them in water with aniseed, cloves, pepper, and butter (MS.2216, ff.156v, 160). Changing taste was perceived to influence the nourishment value of substitute breads: “if you can but deceiue the taste, you shall find the bread very harty, wholsome, & nourishing”. To take away the “ranke and vnsauourie” taste of beans, peas, beechmast, chestnuts, acorns, and vetches, these were boiled until “a strange alteration in taste” occurred. Beechmast, for instance, yielded “a most sweet and delicate oile”, and made “an excellent bread with very smal correction” (Famine A4–B1, D2). These experiments established the psychologically important connection between taste and nourishment, and revealed how coping with dearth led to detailed investigations of material properties of things. The widespread effects of shortage ensured these investigations occurred in a wide variety of circumstances – local, domestic, and professional – and knowledge was created and disseminated across these arenas. The purpose of Platt’s assembly of such receipts was thus educational: availability of substitutes signified potential removal of dearth as long as consumers knew (or were taught) how to utilize them. This emphasized processes of consumption as well as what was consumed. Recommended alternative diets for “satisfieng … hungry mawes” included making a loaf from “dry, hard, or stale grated bread” that would go “as far as two new loaues” (Famine D1v–4). Measures of consuming remnants were used beyond households. Fine flour settled in brewers’ cowls were sold to bakers (MS.2244, f.73). Dearth bread was sold from Platt’s shop (MS.2197, f.14; MS.2216, f.112v; MS.2189, ff.41, 118, 126; MS.2244, f.29v). Dearth-driven knowledge and expediency became tradable in themselves. Awareness that bread shortage could not be addressed without practising similar methods of recycled consumption in related trades of starch-making and brewing paradoxically created anxieties about the very principles of thrift, preservation, and substitution practised through the receipts developed in households and workshops. The anxieties translated into technical processes. Platt’s receipt for saving flour “lost in all our vsual Corne mils” suggested annexing a “boulting mil” which returned the separated bran to the grinder, and “so as fast as you gather any branne, you must mixe it with more corne”. But the instructions came with a caveat:

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If I teach the Miller so to grinde his wheat, as that neither the starchmaker (if I be not deceiued) shal haue stuffe to make his starch with, except he grinde for himselfe after the ancient maner; nor the brown Baker any bran to make horsebread withall, I hope that my fault will be pardonable at this time, because I hold it much better to want flower about our necks then in our bellies, and that horses should starue before their maisters. (Famine B3) As bran usually went to makers of horse bread and starch, widespread application of the recycling method would affect livelihoods. During acute shortages even of bran, starch and brown bread makers invariably quarrelled (Lansdowne MS.152.7). Despite the conventional jibe against starched ruffs (cf. APC 3–4 Edw.VI, c.2§6; Stubbes, 1583: D8; Greene, 1592: 16), Platt noted the economic implications of suggesting that bran be recycled to produce bread. Standard methods of starch-making required no expensive equipment or capital, and were practised at home as well as offering a sideline for men and women who needed additional income in difficult times (Plot, 1677: 280–81; Thirsk, 1978: 84–85). Platt therefore suggested alternatives to bran, such as oatmeal, “cocle seeds”, buckwheat, musty meal, or arum roots, which might make “fairer starch, then our wheat” (MS.2189, ff.112, 157; MS.2244, f.66v). He wished that “some good husbandry were vsed in the planting, and multiplying of these rootes, obseruing the nature of such soile and place wherein they most delight” (Famine B2v). His method of making starch from these substitutes was quicker. In winter, starch was dried in stone pans on pots of “scalding water”. Efficient housewives placed the pans on the “biefe pot”, making “one fire to performe seuerall actions at once”. Not only was fuel saved (along with wheat), starch was made in individual households, in small quantities, by far less arduous processes than those required for wheat-starch. If gum arabic was added, starching took even less time and effort, and prevented damage to cloth, because “your starch is in a thinne water, and the Lawn & Cambricke wil be soone cleared, and with much lesse beating” (Famine B4; MS.2216, ff.41, 101). Promoting research on labour-saving starch substitutes by other “studious endeavourers of the common good” encouraged the early modern economy to revert to earlier methods of starching. Other materials were used in England before wheat-starch – potatoes (chiefly in households), milk (for lace), gum arabic (nets and silks), glue (dark cloths and woollens), and parchment cuttings bought cheap from law stationers, stewed, strained, and used to stiffen gauze, veils, and muslin (Hartley, 1964: 320–23).21 Platt drew attention to the advantages of similar non-commercial methods and to the increasing complexity of unemployment issues at the time. Political debates around starch-making were specifically focused on the unemployment question. The manufacture of starch in England probably began in London in the early 1560s, accompanied by the arrival of Dutch lawn and cambric, and a fashion for starched ruffs (signifying high social rank). Dutch refugees became major suppliers of starch. Its domestic use grew, and,

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by 1638, Joyce Jefferies, a landlady in Hereford, was ordering packets of 12 pounds at a time (Thirsk, 1978: 84–86, 92).22 Starch-making was constantly debated in government circles. Cecil’s efficient spying network revealed that many were turning to it for a living, and his expressions of outrage are well known: it was lamentable to “bestow that upon starch to the setting forth of vanity and pride which would staunch the hunger of many that starve in the streets for want of bread”. Times of scarcity and famine, he said, were precipitated by this fashion of wearing ruffs, which were growing in size every day and should be taxed (1585: Lansdowne MS.43.73). He handed over the monopoly for starch-making to patentees in 1588, which was revoked following much protest in 1601. By 1610, it was alleged even those other than the “better sort” were using starch and wearing ruffs. Production was prohibited, but there was widespread annoyance at the prospect of destroying livings of local English traders for the benefit of the Dutch starch industry (Thirsk, 1978: 89). A starch-making underworld emerges from Thirsk’s evidence of illicit traders whose numbers are hard to estimate. She surmised that starchhouses sprang up rapidly in sheds, outbuildings, amidst domestic houses in London, and spread to provincial towns. In 1620–21 there were protests against rooting out unlicensed starch-makers, many of whom entered the trade to supplement their household incomes. Thirsk recorded the cases of pig-fatteners whose animals were evidently fed with bran strained from starch: Jacob Meade, who owned 200 pigs, was unable to feed them when restrained from starch-making. Similarly, Michael Francis’s pigs starved when he was restrained for 23 weeks (91). Starch-making and famine were inextricably allied in mutually frustrating circumstances that Platt had tried to address. To continue making starch meant a steady drain of valuable wheat, as official rhetoric ceaselessly reiterated. A document (c.1612) claimed that a London starch-house used 1,500 quarters of wheat in less than a year, and ten others steeped 40–50 quarters each in a week. Between 1594 and 1601, when John Packington held a patent, 600 quarters of starch were allegedly sold in London every week (Thirsk 92). Suppressing this trade meant the loss of employment and impoverishment of many. The situation of early modern brewers, the other group especially affected by dearth, raised similar questions about overlapping exigencies of trading and household production of staple items.23 Special socio-economic meanings were attached to beer: a humorous dialogue by “Gallobelgicus” (1629: C2r) described it as a “more stayed liquor” which, like “the snaile carries the cares of a house and family”. Despite well-known associations of alehouses with leisure, disorder, and drunkenness, beer was also the province of healthful domestic economy and an apt dearth-time drink, providing substantial calories (Muldrew, 2011: 65–83). It used less grain than ale and yielded leftovers that could be utilized if brewers were ingenious enough. Platt had firsthand knowledge of brewing practices from his father’s trade, and it is likely that he supervised at least two brewhouses.24 He conducted, with members of the brewing community, experiments for minimizing waste of corn and its

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leftovers (Famine C2–C4; JH 15–18, 29, 59–62; MSS.2189, 2244). The benefits of the institution of brewing were thus as clearly recognized as its potential for disorder. Recycling, in this community, powerfully emerged as a new paradigm for consumption. Bread extenders also served as substitutes for grain in beer production. A quart of beans extended the wort as far as 1½ quarts of malt. Malting corrected “smottie” wheat (MS.2189, ff.57v–60; MS.2244, f.68v). The increasing popularity of hopped beer over un-hopped ale was grounded in economic reasons – a quarter of wheat would produce 8 gallons of ale, but 18 of beer (Unger, 2004: 101).25 Platt’s experiments with other additives showed there was also a shortage of hops. He wrote a “book”, which survives in manuscript as instructions entitled “Secretes in Hoppes and Hoppgrownde”, recounting ways of managing the shortage (MS.2189, f.85v; MS.2244, f.65). Green hops had “more force” and, mixed with wormwood and hop leaves, produced a strong decoction that was preserved a whole year, bringing “an infinite sauing vnto the brewers”. Extracts of wormwood, artichoke leaves, centaury, and broom flowers, or aloes hepatica and coloquintida, served as substitutes when hops were expensive (MS.2249, f.6; MS.2216, f.100; MS.2189, f.117v). The remaining instructions advised on economical cultivation, evaluating distance and depth of setting, position, polling, cutting old roots, harvesting blossoms, fertilizing, and watering. The last of these proposed the ingenious device of turning the hop garden into an “artificial island”, where water was let in through a sluice to flood the plots in June and July. Sim and Unger incorrectly surmised that Platt’s project with hop substitutes “never gained currency” (1997: 47–50; 2004: 100). Several substitute additives and wheat extenders had currency in his network of expert tradesmen. In years of extreme dearth, hop extenders such as wormwood, artichoke leaves, and arum were used. A Worcestershire brewer of Platt’s acquaintance used “wormwood instede of hoppes”, while Mr Cogganne malted bean, peas, and wheat together (MS.2189, f.54). Platt published the accumulated evidence of his experiments in receipts for making beer “without any hoppes”, printed in Famine and Jewell House (15–19). When it was difficult to obtain beer, alternative drinks were devised. Distressed travellers brewed fair water, aqua composita, sugar, and rosemary; poor men boiled heath flowers to make “a very pleasing and cheape drinke”; sailors, affirmed Francis Drake, drank water and vinegar, “a fine cooling and refreshing drinke”; distressed households made “wholesome” drinks of aniseed, fennel, and caraway seeds, or of powdered leaves of the apple, pear, beech, and oak trees (MS.2216, f.50; Famine D1v). These receipts in Famine, selected from experiments recorded in Platt’s notebooks, often served multiple purposes and produced marketable items. A receipt for infusing oats applied to starch as well as food and drink for soldiers; aqua vitae was produced cheaply from leftover malt, cider, perry, or “hay liquor”. In Platt’s list of wares for his shop, cinnamon water, spirit of honey, vinegars of “seuerall flowers and seuerall collers”, “vsqu bath” (“Irish Aqua Vitae”), and spirit of wine figured prominently (MS.2189, ff.12, 116v–119, 126v–127,

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134v, 139, 163; MS.2244, ff.29v–31r, 41; MS.2216, ff.30, 50, 95, 130, 152; MS.2197, ff.14–15, 23). If re-using and redefining waste emerged as dominant concerns in agriculture, they were no less fundamental to household practice and trade. Brewing and starch-making trades came to be organized as sites where leftovers were put to constructive use. This opportunity was located in the technology itself, as early modern malting procedures particularly exemplified. Descriptions extrapolated from early printed works (Unger, 2004: 100; Muldrew, 2011: 73) do not record the considerable variations possible in individual practices. The wort had to be extracted without wasting the malt’s potency. If ground malt was steeped for 48 hours and boiled, it grew “thicke and white”, a sign that “you haue gotten owte all the strength”. The liquor was strained, boiled with hops or wormwood, and mixed with yeast, “according to the ordinary maner of brewing”. If fresh liquor was infused after drawing the first wort, or if the wort was “stoved”, one bushel of malt extended as far as two (MS.2189, f.57v; MS.2216, f.55). Platt believed that heating unground malt saved the labour of grinding, used less fire, and eliminated the need for kettles and yeast (MS.2189, f.58). Another brewer confirmed this, recommending that fruit be added to the wort. Platt tried variations of “stoving”: heating water in the stove before infusing unground malt and hops, throwing boiled liquor on barley (instead of steeping), or stoving wort for 5 days till it gathered a sufficient head. As no yeast was used, it reduced problems of spoiling, and this brew lasted longer. By this expedient, he concluded, “you shall purchase the most excellent and well digested drinke of corne that euer was made in England” (MS.2189, f.60). To the basic procedure of brewing, Platt’s notebooks added numerous variations current in the period: Sir Charles Candish did mounte his copper ketle so high that it [the wort] might run owte of the same into his mashton wthout any labor and owte of his mashton into his colebacke and from thence into his guile ton and therby hee saued much labor. (MS.2189, f.58) An alewife “whose ale was comended above all the ale that euer was brewed” dried malt vppon sheetes (my frames for macaroni were excellent for this purpose) in the sun or winde, wherby she did avoyd the badd tast which is gotten by the smoke even in straw dried malte. qre of drying malte in a stoue (MS.2189, f.128; cf. MS.2189, f.118v; MS.2216, f.112v) The information in parentheses and the final query were characteristic of Platt’s methodology in the manuscripts, where he liked to apply his own inventions to methods invented by others. His new malt kiln used less fuel (MS.2197, f.41), and he refined the alewife’s methods, to make a “hartier”

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malt and bring “an infinite encrease in measure to all the Maltsters in England and better malte for all the brewers in England”. This procedure saved time, while the “common manner” took three weeks and more labour in “turning” the malt (MS.2189, ff.128–29). Making beer last, or “recovering” spoilt beer, was crucial in the absence of technology that could maintain the precise temperatures required at different phases of brewing (Unger, 2004: 4–6). Souring of beer was prevented by mixing salt or “powdered argoll” (MS.2189, f.117v; MS.2216, f.87v), Platt’s acquaintance John Tey “restored” flat beer by mixing it with strong beer, and his “Cosin Walker” and friend Thomas Gascoigne placed eggs in hogsheads to preserve the drink (MS.2216, f.79v; MS.2189, ff.57v–58). Small beer, made from by-products of the brewing process and usually given to patients or children, was widely consumed in dearth years despite the loss in calorific value.26 Its paleness was corrected by infusing the liquor maltsters threw away, or leftover starch water. In acute hardship, it was brewed by boiling straw and bran. Trading in technologies of recycling proliferated swiftly: vinegar was made from small beer; malting left fine flour settled in the coleback, which was sold to aqua vitae men or used to make bread for the brewer’s household. Starch residues left by brewing were sold by brewers. Platt’s account of this was followed by the reminder: “Yf this succeede, the brewer might sell cheape starch to mr Arthor” (MS.2189, ff.57v, 60, 118r, 90v; MS.2244, f.73). He obviously intended to practise this economy himself. In the 1590s, as the culture of recycling became closely embedded in operations of the bread, starch, and beer trades, methods evolved for tackling key issues of technology and marketing, and for noting their links with household economy. Available resources and technologies were explored through a complex network of expert practitioners. Dearth was the common problem that brought together their concerns. Dearth science aimed not only to outline for brewers low-cost techniques through the use of substitutes, but to present possible sidelines to their trade through the production of bread, starch, vinegar, aqua vitae, and alternative drinks. To test the viability of such ventures, costs incurred by different methods, and their effect on competitive pricing for individuals were worked out in elaborate detail. Platt’s notebooks were filled with speculations of the following sort: two bushels of oats extended as far as one bushel of barley, so if the former were sold at the price of a single bushel of barley, would there be “great profit” to the brewer (MS.2189, f.58v)? When “outlandish” wormseed was dear, should brewers buy all English wormseed and similar seeds, colour them, and soak them in coloquintida to increase their bitterness? Platt made the acerbic observation that the few clever brewers who used wormwood instead of hops were those who “can make a difference betweene fiue shillinges, or 5.pound charge, when hops are solde for 50.s. an hundred”. Such conclusions were based on the practical knowledge of “the best experienced Bruers in London, who yet liueth” (Famine C3–4; MS.2216, f.182), and this network of expert practitioners (whether in brewing, baking, starch-making, or other trades) were the

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backbone of Platt’s dearth-related enterprise. Through their networks of knowledge making, early modern philosophies and practices of resource management confronted and compromised with market realities. Oils, waters, and spirits The art of distillation was well documented by the end of the sixteenth century, and canonical works on the subject by Hieronymus Brunschwygk, Giambattista della Porta, and Conrad Gesner were available in English translation.27 These authors emphasized household distillation, with instructions on apparatus and the preparation of oils, waters, and spirits suitable for domestic use. They defined distillation, pragmatically and philosophically, as a process of separating gross substances from the pure, through which “breakable and destructible” matter was removed, and the “indestructible” isolated, “drop by drop”. By applying heat, “a thinner and purer humor” of liquids was drawn forth, and the “concealed” virtues and force of substances were uncovered (Brunschwygk, 1527: 9; Gesner, 1559: 2). In an environment affected by dearth, this theoretical understanding was modified by practice. Platt altered experiments in books through his experiments and the advice of “Maister Kemish, that auncient and expert Chimist dwelling neere the glashouse”, who manufactured and sold distilled products at “reasonable” prices (JH 9). Rather than defining distillation broadly, Platt concentrated on “diuerse chimicall conclusions”, or applications of the art focused on its labour (cf. Rankin, 2013: 49). His interest lay in how distillation, by eliminating perishable and gross elements of substances, could aid efficacy and storage in times of crisis. Distillation became a means of preservation and minimizing waste by locating the “indestructible” essence of a thing, sustaining it for future use, and isolating “grosser” substances that could be reused in other ways. Apparatus and procedure were adjusted to draw out the largest possible quantities of extracts of herbs and spices: “the greater the potte, or bodie is, and the more you distil at once, you shal make both the lesse waste, and the oyles will be in lesse daunger of adjustion”. The “first water”, in which herbs and spices were immersed, was recycled so that less oil was lost. Some distillers macerated the spices the night before distillation, but this was a waste of effort as they “gaine not any more oile by that practise”. Seeds of herbs, such as sage, thyme, rosemary, and lavender, yielded more oil than their flowers; and the flowers yielded more than their leaves. It was more efficient to dry herbs before distilling them, as they would give oil “in this manner in more plenty”. Oils of seeds and flowers were best rectified in a gentle “balneo”, allowing the water to evaporate slowly to avoid wasting or burning the oil itself. The oils yielded a useful by-product – large quantities of scented “washing water”. The taste of edible oils could be improved by flavouring them with nutmegs, cloves, or rinds of oranges and lemons, during distillation. Bartolomeo Scappi, the “maister cooke of Pope Pius Quintus”, said Platt, distilled olive oil with a piece of bread or dough, which would “draw vnto itselfe all the

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mustie and badde taste or sent”.28 Through distillation, seasonal limitations were overcome: “essences” of flowers, herbs, and spices were bottled away for use all year (JH 1–14, 38–40; Delights 3.36; Schildermans and Sels, 2003: 59–70). These advantages made the art of distillation economically important. Platt sold distilled products for flavouring butter and beverages, and as medicines, dyes, paints, alcoholic drinks, and perfumes: “oyles for the Tooth ach”, “All the oyles of spices”, “oyle of Turpentine”, “Oyles to perfume gloues wth”, “Cinamon water”, “Spirit of Honey”, “Vinigers of seuerall flowers & seuerall collers”, “Sallet oyle purified & graced in smell and tast”, “Spirit of Roses”, “A water for redd faces”, “A digestiue balsamum”, “English Claret wine”, “water for sore eyes”, “☽a [Luna, or silver] Solified”, and “Cheape washing waters” (MS.2197, ff.14–15). The eclectic shop inventories of items pertaining to medical, cosmetic, domestic, and professional uses illustrates the versatility and complexity of the distillatory process that equipped both households and traders’ shops. The products had domestic and commercial functions. Uses of items, like rose water, demonstrated that flowers and perfumes were not “superfluous” wants, but daily utilities.29 They improved or revived flavour, cleaned containers in which strong substances had been distilled, rectified smelly oils of ambergris, jet, or wax, and made confections of all kinds. They had to be available all year, and were distilled cheaply if the freshest petals were dried and sealed in stone pots. To make the water “more speedily”, the juice expressed from the petals was distilled first. In this way, Platt observed, “you shall dispatch more with one Stil, then others do with three or foure”. If the water became old and musty, it was recovered by infusing fresh roses or rosecakes. Platt recommended buying roses in large quantities when “you finde a glut of them in the market, wherby they are sold for seuen pence or eight pence the bushel”, and storing them for later use. Both housewives and traders needed to be aware of the workings of the market for such goods. Economy, of time as well as ingredients, was pursued further by drawing two products – such as rose water and rose oil – from the same distillation. Drawing the “spirits” of roses and other flowers or herbs also served storage, and the process was articulated in a philosophical language echoing that of natural transmutation in Platt’s manure treatise. Crushed damask roses, stored long in closed vessels, yielded a “delicate spirit” by natural distillation, or the “inward rotation, or circulation of Nature”. If, “by an outwarde fire to stirre vp the moist, and inwarde fire of nature”, the concoction was brought “to the fulnesse of a rose wine”, any apothecary or ordinary practitioner could “diuide his spirit from him”. “Spirits” of spices were drawn similarly from water left over after distilling oils of cloves, mace, nutmeg, and other spices. Distilled waters, like oils and spirits, were versatile and easily stored, and some were used both as drinks or hand-washes (Delights 2.5, 10–11, 20–21; JH 20–21). The language of alchemical transformation and purification was used repeatedly to emphasize why distillation was a crucial pragmatic skill for housewives and traders: it addressed contemporary problems with the quality of water. Along the banks of the Thames and its estuaries, there were

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slaughter houses, skinners, bone yards, horn works, glue boilers, soap boilers, chandlers, and refuse dumps (Hartley, 1964: 88). Serious questions about the quality of Thames water arose, and Platt’s insistence on the use of “faire [clean] water” indicated that its availability was not taken for granted.30 Distilling and adding “spirits” and “extracts” improved water quality, and there appears to have been a trade in “purified” water. Platt’s list of maritime victuals included receipts for “defending” water by incorporating oils of sulphur or vitriol, spirit of wine, or aqua vitae; drawing foul water through wine casks, and sprinkling handfuls of salt; “agitating” barrels of “putrified and offensiue” waters for 24 hours; or hanging lead plates in the centre of water containers (JH 9–11). The measures were applicable in domestic circumstances, too. The need to refine water ensured that, in practice, there was no clear distinction between the production of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. Liquids such as rosa solis, aqua rubea, aqua vitae, aqua composita, usquebath, or spirits of wine, ale, honey, vinegar, spices, herbs, and flowers, were broadly described as “waters”. Remedial beverages (rosa solis, aqua rubea, and aqua composita) contained additives such as dates, cinnamon, ginger, galingale, nutmeg, aniseed, fennel and caraway seeds, sage, mint, cloves, sugar, musk, rose petals, thyme, pellitory, rosemary, camomile, and lavender (Delights 2.6–8). Strong alcoholic spirits (aqua vitae, aqua ardens, or usquebath) were distilled from the lees of wine or leftover malt of beer brewers, and sold by “aqua vitae men” or women. Using similar ingredients in these beverages had recycling benefits: the leftover mash of aqua composita, licorice, and aniseeds was distilled again to make usquebath (JH 63–67; Delights 2.9). There was an active trade in these items, available readymade from apothecaries, doctors, or tradesmen like Platt. Their distillation was achievable in household stillrooms, and housewives or individuals needing to augment their income entered the trade. Distillation practices demonstrated how environmental concerns, such as the pollution of the Thames, were perceived to have domestic and professional impact; and searching for solutions blurred further the boundaries between domestic and professional realms. This brought concerns about health and economy to the forefront, but simultaneously stimulated projecting activities that complicated underlying moral and pragmatic concerns.31 Far from being purely profit-driven and negligent of communal or environmental concerns, many enterprises of early modern projecting relied on the availability of beer and wine dregs, or spoilt wine and beer, and were of interest to practitioners like Platt concerned with redefining and re-utilizing waste. The variety, accessibility, and principle of separating dross from pure substances, in distillation practice and theory, appeared to produce waste. But it also provided the technology for re-integrating waste materials into the economy and society. With the growth of the beer industry in the sixteenth century, more dregs became available to produce vinegar and aqua vitae, and numbers of brewers of these products increased, especially with the arrival of Dutch refugees, from the 1560s (Thirsk, 1978: 93). While this facilitated constructive employment of waste material, it raised serious concerns about

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quality, combined with a nationalist distrust of “the Flemings”. Distillation became a paradoxical site, defining and enabling healthy practice as well as threats to it. It created challenges to and means of constructing national identity. In 1576, complaints against vinegar makers were submitted to Cecil, alleging their use of elderberries, privet berries, and unwholesome colourings like “tournesole” (Lansdowne MS.22.19). Platt, concerned with quality, instructed brewers of vinegar and alegar to distil in glass containers, complaining that the common practice of using lead stills gave the products “an ill touch”. Best vinegar came from the “middle part that ariseth” – the first was too faint, and the last tasted of “adjustion”. Added colours and flavours masked faintness or burnt taste of inferior brews (JH 34–35). Vinegar made by heating small beer and fair water saved time (MS.2189, ff.24, 90v), and to aid this Platt devised a pewter still, fitted to pipes running through a container of cold water, to speed up cooling (MS.2244, f.41). He provided instructions to reduce the risk of burning (Delights 3.37), and obtained from his friend Mr Gascoigne a receipt for a concentrate from which vinegar could be made with the addition of fair water (MS.2216, f.22r). The receipts illustrated how local networks of English practitioners mobilized means of addressing concerns about corruption and adulteration in a volatile political and legislative environment. In 1593, an active year for official investigations, Cecil’s alderman Anthony Radclyff discovered that poor vinegar brewers “find more sweet by making it of weaker beer or ale or of worse stuff”. During wars in the Low Countries, the Dutch had bought large quantities of beergar from England to cool their guns, reported Radclyff. The quality of the product had not mattered, thus encouraging less reputable brewers. Aqua vitae men bought hogwash and dregs of coolbacks to distil secretly and mix with weak beer. When wine imports grew expensive, the Dutch and other “aliens” began to utilize dregs and washings of beer (formerly assigned to feeding pigs) to make aqua vitae and aqua composita (Thirsk, 1978: 94; Lansdowne MS.74.10). In 1594, Platt wrote that members of the Vintners’ Company had learnt how to draw “10 gallons of cleare wine at the least” out of a hogshead of wine lees. This mixture “beeing trickt, or compassed, or at the least mingled with other wine”, was retailed by vintners, and led to the deterioration of the quality of the lees in successive drawings, as it coagulated and was “wrought vp into the forme of bals”. In this form, it was sold in Pater Noster Row. Platt feared that this had become “a parcell of manie mens Creede that wil neuer be left til the worlds end” (JH 67). This practice left little wine lees for aqua vitae men and vinegar makers, who were compelled to turn to worse substances. Waste, evidently, was difficult to re-integrate, and its manipulation had potentially negative economic consequences. Cecil and his officials were, thus, in a dilemma. If a few reputable brewers were allowed monopolies, prices would rise. But “the trade doth concern so many poor men’s livings that it is impossible to bring it to one man’s hand by licence”, and back-street brewers would suffer if restrained (Thirsk, 1978: 95; Lansdowne MS.74.10–11). Despite doubts about granting monopolies, a patent was received by Richard Drake in 1594 to make aqua vitae, vinegar, and aqua

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composita from ale. Cecil added a clause allowing other traders to make vinegar from wine lees, and permitting all types of vinegar to be made for household and charitable purposes (Hulme, 1900: 50–51). The attempted balance did not work. From 1596, “poor makers and traders of vinegar, alegar, aqua vitae and aqua composita” alleged that patentees, who obtained their privileges by complaining against the use of unwholesome dregs, were now purchasing the same dregs in bulk. Roger Adeney, one of the poor traders, was forced by Drake to surrender his goods. In 1601, the Queen gave in to this storm of opposition, and abolished Drake’s monopoly, among others. Thus, Adeney was able to continue with his small business in St Olave’s parish, Surrey, till his death in 1619 (Thirsk, 1978: 96; Lansdowne MSS.74.12; MS.81.21). Other modest traders very likely shared his experience. Households could not but enter this politics of alcoholic distillation. First, domestic production was a means of emphasizing national identity. Platt repeatedly encouraged household and national production of wine. One should not, he argued, depend on France, but “draw wines as artificially as the best of them” (JH 67). One notebook contained a long section on wine, along with scattered receipts in others (MS.2244, ff.1–23).32 He insisted upon the selfreliance of the English economy for wine production possibly because wine was one of the costliest imports.33 He experimented with home production of imported wines, aiming to draw his countrymen “into such a liking of our Royston Grape, that in the ende they woulde for the most part content themselues with their English and naturall drinke, without raunging so farre for forreine Wines” (JH 63–67). The rhetoric of luxury was cleverly used to call into doubt the feasibility and efficacy of things that were “far-fetched”, and assert the greater wholesomeness of home-grown products. Second, the home was an important initial site of experiment. Problems of quality, taste, health, and cost, which worried traders, could be experimentally evaluated at home. The household was a testing ground from which criticisms of unwholesome profit-driven ventures could be launched. Jewell House contained receipts for long-lasting sweet wines with clarified honey and strong spices to disguise poor taste (JH 67–70). It was possible, as Platt’s receipt for brewing hippocras “speedilie” suggests, to produce a concentrate to add to cheaper alternatives such as spirit of beer, ale, or wine lees. Claret was popular for its lasting nature (JH 44, 71). In a receipt “To help wine that reboileth”, Platt discussed his worries about pressures on the wine trade. “Reboiling”, or spontaneous fermentation, in summer, led to great losses for vinters. Their standard remedy of drawing the wine into a fresh cask and cooling it was not always effective, as the wine’s “inward fire” often made it ferment again. Platt’s remedies included skimming the lees regularly, and putting pieces of bacon, cheese, or ashes in the casks (JH 63–67; MS.2244, f.4). Through household-based experimentation, distinctions between healthful and corrupt distillation practices were formulated. Platt was scathing about the greed of vintners and merchants who turned white wine into “claret” by altering colour, mixed “lay of Lime” with the sack grape to make the extraction more

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white, “compassed” natural wines (“if they bee a little hard”) with Bastard to make them sweeter, and “deceived” taste with honey and cloves if wine turned sour. Worse still, if wines failed either in substaunce or in colour, either by age, by the fault of Caske, soyle, salt water, or other accident, then manie tymes the Vintener is driuen to his hard shiftes, and then hee helpeth himself with Allome, with Turnsole, Starch, and with manie other Drugges, and aromaticall ware which he fetcheth from the Apothecarie. Such “vnwholesome” machinations, he complained, were current in the most “autentique” taverns, and his manuscripts noted their details (such as the addition of chalk, plaster of Paris, and tartar) taken from distillers of his acquaintance, which he chose not to publish in his printed works (JH 65–67; MS.2244, ff.5–8, 12). The household not only shared practices with workshops but could be transformed into a workshop; it was a transitional space where one attempted to distinguish between good and bad practices of re-using waste before the practices entered the competitive market. The very principle of distillation – separating dross from pure – was applied to assessing knowledge and acquired a symbolic and moral value through household practice. Platt’s attribution of the rise of adulteration practices to the poverty of men who supplied the market for additives elucidates Thirsk’s analysis of the problems afflicting poorer “projectors” and tradesmen. The distinction between projector and trader was, in practice, a difficult one to make. Some merchants and vintners, observed Platt, were well-to-do, though men who worked in league with them were not. The vintner’s man, the cooper, or the apothecary, who supplied unwholesome dregs, were poor and “plaine fellowes that neuer read their Grammer, nay scarcely know their A, B, C”. They got nothing for their labours but “now and then a Can of wine”. The poor man who taught the practitioners of Pater Noster Row to retail the foulest, most stiff wine lees in the form of balls got nothing for the disclosure of his secret except a suit of clothing, while vintners who used the idea made 30–40 pounds a year (JH 65). Platt’s intimate knowledge of adulteration practices and economic problems came from his firsthand experience, as the owner of taverns and retailer of “Ypocras”, “English claret wine”, “English white wine”, and various spirits (MS.2197, ff.14–15). He aimed to disperse his own products among vintners, and observed that cinnamon water could be sold at 4 or 5 shillings to apothecaries and distillers in London; while “Vsqu Bath” could be made known among “Irish Costemongers” who would advertise it to their fellows. There was an equally good market for “cheape and lastinge ypocras”, and trading it required a delicate balance between producing goods at cheap and competitive prices, and offering quality products (MS.2197, ff.20, 23). Platt’s manuscripts record continuous efforts to find methods to make this balance possible. Receipts for a special still to make greater quantities of aqua vitae, to “grace” a cup of wine with the more wholesome addition of berries and herbs, to turn white wine

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into claret by infusing prunes instead of unwholesome dyes, to make a weak wine stronger without harmful additions, or to make a cheap vinegar from fair water and fermented honey were designed to find healthy means of practising economy (MS.2216, ff.18r, 95, 30, 31r, 33v; MS.2244, f.17). He compiled a list of 29 “secrets” in vinegar, wine, and spirits, indicating that these liquors could be drawn from heath flowers, molasses, and honey; aqua composita made hotter and stronger by increasing proportions of ginger and pepper; aqua vitae brewed from “hay liquor”; and vinegar and aqua vitae distilled “at once” to save time and fuel (MS.2189, ff.139–40r). From “my L of Essex”, Sir Henry Umpby, Thomas Gascoigne, and “diuerse other gentlmen” he obtained receipts with which he claimed vintners themselves would not find fault, and experimented with making wines using raisins, currants, and molasses. Platt firmly held that when prices of wines were high, and that of figs, currants, and raisins low, it was possible to make wine out of these fruits.34 Economy was practised in the area of equipment and expertise as well as ingredients, and Platt meticulously noted rules “for the Cask, Sent, Ventinge, stovinge, fininge, helpinge, reboilinge, coloringe, altering”, listing wines third in his inventory of lucrative projects, or “Matters of most royall & present Expectation” (MS.2216, ff.46r, 119–21v, 62–63v, 188v–189, 61v, 113v, 121v, 116v, 118v; MS.2189, f.134v; MS.2244, ff.19, 18v). In “Diuerse proffitable conceiptes in the brewing of ale, bere, viniger & aqua vitae”, he realigned the meaning of “profit” by calculating it on the basis of healthful ingredients, like fruits, as well as the lower costs of production (MS.2216, f.39). Placed against the daily shifts of householders and traders, distillation meant more than chemical processes of separating the gross from the pure, as early works had defined it. As a means of remedying dearth, it was linked to the philosophy that underpinned agricultural experiments. In the imagination of practitioners like Platt, who simultaneously explored applications, philosophical meanings, and economic viability of the method by separating the gross from the pure, or condensing volatile matter into liquid, distillation was another way of accessing a heavenly, pure, and life-sustaining matter. This matter was a refined, but still material, manifestation of the fundamental principle of nourishment in nature sought through the manure experiments described in the previous chapter. This idea too had a long tradition in alchemical and distilling practice and theory, drawing upon philosophical speculations of the Arabic writer Jabir Ibn Hayyan (Geber), the medieval Franciscan friars John of Rupescissa (d.1366) and Raymond Lull (c.1234–1315), and the English philosopher Roger Bacon (1214–94). Platt copied into his notebooks views attributed to these figures, alongside pragmatic experiments. The notion of a singular, life-sustaining matter imaginatively merged with the search for an elixir or ultimate medicine to cleanse physical bodies, cure disease, and preserve life. The elixir, often described as the fifth essence, was the product of successive grades of distillations. Philosophical speculation and imagination thus had a direct effect on practice. As Bruce Moran argued, the distillation of wine provided the starting point in one of the most important procedures for

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producing the fifth essence (2006: 19–21). The material properties of alcohol appealed to the philosophical imagination of early modern practitioners. It was “a physical contradiction: a water that burned” (13). But it also, as noted here, served versatile uses among the grubby pursuits of households and trades. It retarded putrefaction, aided preservation, dissolved materials, evaporated quickly, invigorated its consumers, and seemed spiritual for these reasons. It seemed truly an aqua vitae, a trace of the first matter of creation. “Waters” and “oils” distilled from herbs and minerals could thus be regarded as patterns of the ultimate elixir, and well-known manuals of distillation, that Platt and other practitioners came across, argued that the world itself constituted a pharmacopeia of materials from which the elixir could be distilled. Household experiments with preservation, chemical transformation, and distillation thus moved beyond being practical tools for dealing with dearth. They constituted a way of living and thinking about human existence, and of preserving this knowledge for posterity. They reinforced the belief that mundane processes, even those carried out in competitive and harsh economic contexts, could fundamentally transform society and restore health and sufficiency. “Culinaria” and “Medica” Platt’s notebooks, like many early modern receipt and commonplace book collections, did not therefore separate the provinces of medicine and food. Wine receipts in MS.2244 concluded with a section on medicinal wines which were part of his campaign for “wholesomeness”. When dearth and disease operated simultaneously (Wrightson, 2002: 121–48) overlaps between “Culinaria” and “Medica” were inevitable, and production of food or drink and prevention of disease were considered part of household management.35 The relationship between dearth and disease is a debated one, but in people’s imagination they were evidently connected. Receipt books and commonplace books show the constant interlacing of medical cures with records of ordinary household tasks. They frequently contained “recipes” to cure or prevent plague and other diseases.36 Starvation and gluttony were directly connected with susceptibility to plague by medical and religious writers. People who fasted or starved had “empty bodies ready to be filled with plague air”, while “Gluttons and Drunkards (let them argue what they will for the filling of the veynes, as they use to say, to keepe out evill ayre) can never be free from crudities and distemper’d bloud; which easily takes infection” (Bradwell, 1636: 10; Wear, 2000: 286). The imagination of the body as a space literally filled by disease, when empty of wholesome food, explains the inclusion of “plague receipts”, interspersed with cookery or on inserted leaves in culinary receipt books. The ingredients used in remedies – endives, berries, treacle, sugar, white wine, vinegar – were often ordinary cooking ingredients. Thus, Platt’s inclusion of what he calls “Phisicall [medical] wines” in a collection probably designed as instructions on culinary drinks reflected quotidian practice. In Jewell House (45–46), he included receipts for medicines that had to be mixed with food, and most of

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his medical advice was incorporated (like the medicines themselves) with food-related matters. The merged meanings of food and medicine thus arose from the overlap of items or ingredients and were reflected further in the way medical and culinary knowledge making were linked. As practitioners exchanged medical knowledge, their daily pressures, material shortages, and professional circumstances ensured they also exchanged other kinds of knowledge that contributed to managing resources and health. Platt’s manuscript records of his thriving medical practice from 1593 to 1608 offer evidence of how these knowledge networks functioned (MS.2209; MS.2203). Platt continued to practise medicine until shortly before his death in 1608. One notebook begins with an index of ailments, cures, apothecaries, and other practitioners, who served as his sources. “Mr Garrettes pill for vomett”, “Mr Trowtes mastick pilles for a rhewme”, and “Mr Allens water for filmes of the eye” were items he had purchased for his own practice. Ten other practitioners are mentioned, with similar remedies to their names. Listed ailments included eye sores, “running of the reynes”, piles, green sickness, falling sickness, stones, labour, deafness, agues, gout, stinking breath, cancers, bloody flux, burns, corns, colic, and dropsy (MS.2209, ff.1–2). Names and complaints of patients are recorded individually. Platt treated his extended family (wife, sons, daughter, cousins, in-laws, servants) as well as outsiders. “Agues” (violent fevers) and the plague were his areas of expertise and administering remedies was often arduous and repetitive. In 1593, he cured “Nurse Pane”, his son William’s nurse, of a tertian ague; 14 days later she had a relapse, and was cured again. His brother-in-law Robert Albany and cousin “Nichols the Drapers weif”, on the other hand, were cured “at the first taking” of his medicine. He gave “good wiff Harsley”, his neighbour in Bishop’s Hall, a “defensatiue cake”, and she was cured of an “extreame tertian” at the second taking. In April 1608, Platt’s son and daughter were infected. One entry reads, “my little gerle burning extremely all night long after some cold, tooke this antidote and had no more fittes”. His son Robert also responded promptly, having taken the medicine mixed in a conserve of rosemary flowers (MS.2209, f.16; MS.2203, f.113). Besides documenting domestic crises in a household, these records showed how family networks and relationships with neighbours and servants guided and shaped the pursuit of health. The provenance of remedies and handing down of knowledge were considered important to record because they helped medical practice and the trade in cures. In a note to his list of plague patients, Platt wrote that a “notable defensative medecine” for plague was first used in Milan in 1579 by “D.Siringe”, and then brought to England in 1593 “in the greate yeere of Visitation” (MS.2209, f.21).37 During his practice of 1593, he dispersed “great nombers” of this medicine through London and Middlesex. He was not able to record all their names, but 96 clients were listed that year, many buying more than one “cake” of the medicine for friends or family. The total number of cures sold was 461. Networks of informal or unlicensed medical practice may have originated from the household but could ultimately extend to trade. Here too a moral balance

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had to be maintained between dispensing cures as products to consolidate communal and kinship ties, or to augment income in a strained economy. The lists uncover a remarkable cross-section of contemporary society: 45 cakes were bought by the “L. Admirall” for himself and his followers, 60 by the “LLs of the Counsell”, and 50 by “D. Flecher Bishopp of Worcester”. Richard Young, Justice of Peace, Middlesex, made a special trial in his parish of St Mary Abchurch. In the 9 households Young visited, 33 people were preserved from plague, to the great relief of the lords of the Counsel who asked for a report of the matter. Some men, such as Thomas Bland of All Hallows, Barling, John Smith of Greenchurch, and Frauncis Bradborne of St Swithins, bought small numbers for their families and servants. Merrick and Jarfield, preachers of Crooked Lane and St Mary Abchurch, bought some for ailing parishioners. Various inhabitants of Gutter Lane – John Webster, pursemaker, Mistress Eare, maker of gold lace, Mistress Hunt, victualler, and an unnamed “ruby cutter at the Dolphin” – bought individual cakes. Other buyers included “a duch goldsmith dwelling amongst the fether dressers in black friars”, “Goodwif Russell a herbwif in cheapside”, “Mr Susans the barbary merchant”, “Mr Elcokes mayd at the falcon in cheapside”, “Mr Phillipps of the Customehowse”, “Mr Smart Swoordbearer”, “Mr Deacons man the Queenes servant”, “a french gentlman, cousin to Monsieur de la Row”, and “Hanns van Streate a diamond cutter, little alley in woodstreet”. The apothecaries Pichfork and Colt bought and retailed 30 and 20 cakes, respectively. Even Signor Romero, who had brought the receipt from Milan, purchased the finished product from Platt. The medicine appears to have been dispersed all over the city of London, and beyond. Apart from the locations mentioned above, buyers came from Southwark, Watling Street, Bread Street, Milk Street, Colmon Street, Sherborne Lane, Kerry Lane, Deers Alley, Hackney, Stepneth, St Albans, St Michaels, Dowgate, Algate, Woodford, and Reading (MS.2209, ff.22–25). The geographical spread of local networks cannot therefore be underestimated, nor the professional range of people who dispensed and bought cures in times of crisis. If the lists for plague and ague patients are combined (and these are only the recorded cures), we find that Platt’s medicines were used by local servants, millers, grocers, flaxwives, lace makers, purse makers, victuallers, vintners, brewers, herbwives, apothecaries, cooks, bakers, pewterers, coppersmiths, painters, joiners, scriveners, mercers, carpenters, goldsmiths, merchants, mariners, coalmakers, gun makers, diamond cutters, gold wire drawers, tailors, linen drapers, poor widows, the 10-year-old son of a clothworker, a cooper’s wife, a cutler’s boy, midwives, pregnant women, sons of noblemen, “the old L. Threasorers barbor yt maketh the gregorian Night capps”, the “vndersheriff of Middlesex”, “Balthropp the Queenes Alebrewer”, and, indeed, the practitioner himself. Platt, suffering from “a tertian agew”, cured himself “wth once taking of my powder”. Medical practice was an efficient means of extending his influence and making professional contacts with people who had different areas of expertise. As knowledge itself was tradable, the pressure to informally

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trade it increased in times of dearth. One way of maintaining a moral balance in the circumstances was to trade in kind, replacing monetary transaction with cooperative exchange. Some of Platt’s remedies were administered free of charge to family and poor clients. He also recorded non-monetary payments: William Brooke, coalmaker of Kent, sent him two pullets “for a gratuity”; the wife of “Yorke the Heralt” sent him a ruff band for curing her husband of violent fits; and Ann Chappell the joiner’s wife gave him 12 sugar cakes. But wealthy Katherine Wright, the mercer’s wife in Cheapside, was cured of a tertian and “presently fell into it again”. Platt refused to re-administer the cure because she had not bothered, on the first occasion, to pay so much as his boat hire to Battersey (ibid.). Given his wide array of trader and professional clients, some “payments” possibly took the form of trade secrets and receipts; hence his intimate knowledge of current applications of many “arts” whose details could not be learnt from books. Some names on his patients’ list, such as Gascoigne and Hill, appeared frequently in citations of sources and authorities for his receipts in other manuscripts. By 1600, Platt’s remedies were sufficiently well known that he was assisting others, such as Thomas Elkinton of Leicestershire, to set up medical practices. Two letters from their correspondence survive: Platt’s response to Elkinton’s request for appropriate “Phisicall [medical] Secretes”, and the latter’s grateful rejoinder (MS.2172, ff.28, 29). Platt’s letter offered medical remedies to Elkinton, and illustrates the manner in which he conducted business transactions. It reveals much about the ethics of exchange in such contexts. With insistent reminders of their friendship, Platt reiterated that Elkinton must have “free Election” of the 16 remedies offered, including “a philosophicall extract for the gowte”, remedies for sciatica and piles, morphia, “pilles to purge the head”, and a diet for “Rhewmes, greene sicknes, and dropsies”. A seventeenth receipt, apparently the crowning item of the list, was a “generall medicine” for a number of ailments. “I am perswaded”, wrote Platt, that I can fill your Iar to the full contentment of your heart wth secretes of great woorth and easy practize such as will both spedely gaine you great favor and Crownes enough (I speak wth experience) yf they bee handled according to their valew. The friendly generosity uncovered a sympathetic understanding of Elkinton’s need to augment his income, but was combined with Platt’s need to protect his own interests and trade secrets. He offered Elkinton, in the first instance, not the receipts themselves, but a description of their uses, and (in some cases) the final product for a price. A gout remedy, for example, “easeth the payne at once, dressing, and giving such ease as the patient shall take good rest the first night”: it “hath already yealded cheines of gold to the practizer”. Platt offered to furnish Elkinton “wth some reasonable quantity therof at 10. the oz. which is the honest rate”, and asked for a share of the profits, as the medicine lasted long, and small amounts “yielded much profit” to the seller. The terms for a

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sciatica remedy were similar, and in no case was the receipt “discovered”. Nevertheless, Platt committed Elkinton to silence, and warned he would not otherwise deal with him, their friendship notwithstanding. He also said he had others waiting to buy the remedies, and so expected a speedy response from Elkinton. The latter’s reply, dated 11 July 1600, was full of promises of faithfulness, secrecy, gratitude, and agreed promptly to Platt’s financial terms. The terms and conduct of this example of knowledge exchange captures a significant ambivalence in the context of dearth. Platt repeatedly iterated the need for balanced economic cooperation. In his “ideal” national economy, the “recycling” programme was perfectly synchronized, and food and drink production processes interacted smoothly to use each other’s waste materials. “Technology” was invented at the individual and local level, and information deployed through personal networks, manuscript exchanges, and printed texts designed to popularize economical production methods. However, Platt and other practitioners (like Elkinton, and numerous professionals, traders, or amateurs cited in Platt’s records) were compelled to juggle trades and “means for gaining money”, and their medical practice was unregistered. Platt was acutely conscious of the legal and business side of his dearth science, and in this “trade”, composed of multiple, interrelated trades, the dissemination of knowledge had to be carefully phased. One had to tread cautiously between the paradoxical demands of secrecy and cooperation. Personal penury would hardly be good advertisement for one who claimed the ability to turn penury into plenty. This chapter began by noting that the association of early modern household and food consumption practices with fantasy and excess should be re-investigated in relation to contemporary cultural responses to dearth. Actual food consumption practices show that early modern consumption was shaped by a finely tuned culture of sufficiency. Principles of sufficiency were activated and accelerated by dearth, and the 1590s, with their acute crises, provide an opportunity to examine how this occurred. Documents like Platt’s manuscripts and printed books, offering unusual levels of detail, allow us to systematically view elements of household practice, food production, and consumption in this historical moment, demonstrating that households and trades interacted closely to gather knowledge of materials they worked with. That knowledge was used to minimize waste, recycle or reincorporate waste materials into patterns of socio-economic activity, and conserve food and fuel. The material culture shaped by dearth-time household knowledge making created new procedures and altered paradigms for consumption, whose nature and meaning were crucially reconstituted. Like the knowledge-making methods guiding it, consumption itself came to be seen as a collaborative and cooperative process, which could modify or balance competitive aspects of social exchange. Within this process, attention to re-accommodating waste led to the modification of taste. Items previously designated “foul” or “unwholesome” were made appealing and possible to assimilate. Ideas of nourishment and health were redefined and realigned accordingly. Formulations of national identity became linked to dearth science, as it offered a different way of

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understanding the world, human action, and what acts of present consumption might mean for posterity. These realities of practice and changing social meanings offer a new lens for viewing literary evaluations of households and fantasies surrounding domestic concerns.

Dreams of plenty Apparently, the experience of dearth should have stimulated escapist imaginings of plenty. In 1597, the Italian poet Giulio Cesare Croce celebrated the return of “Plenty” to Bologna after a seven-year famine. In his poem, Famine and Plenty argued heatedly, and the latter’s victory speech rejoiced in the free availability of bread to the citizens of Bologna, where the “insolence” of Famine had “so lowered and diminished” the size of bread that “with difficulty its presence was seen” (1597: ff.5r–6v; in Camporesi, 1989: 105). Size was not the only marker of abundance: other mundane details like colour, the way bread was made and displayed, ingredients, price, and market distribution signalled the defeat of insolent Famine. Croce constructed comparisons between “then” and “now”, past misery and present health and happiness, vividly evoking the fear and obsession of the Bolognese with hunger, and, especially, bread. Bread is no longer seen on display Already spoiled, as it used to be, But bright as snow, and well-baked; The bean, which sat on the throne, And which seemed like sugar to the artisans, Is now little appreciated or valued; … neither Will there ever be heard laments and complaints: Never more will there be seen atop the dung-heap So many wretched, afflicted and lifeless people, Wrapped up in the straw and refuse; In the future, they will be strong men, Proud and robust. …

(Croce 1597: ff.5r–6v)

In Croce’s poem, time shifted so smoothly that the reader might feel the idyllic future merge with the already improved present. Yet, the horrific past continued to usurp attention, especially of readers for whom the black, small, highly priced bread made from the enthroned bean, the wretched dung-heaps of lifeless bodies, and a countryside groaning with complaints were more familiar, at this time, than healthy, proud, and robust eaters of snow-white bread. Time, the subtext of Croce’s poem, was fearsome and uncertain, suggesting that Famine and Plenty, in the early modern world, were in constant dialogue with no sure victor in sight. As Stephen Mennell said, famines might disappear but pervasive fears of food scarcity do not. Time played an important role

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because the fear of dearth was “engendered by centuries of experience” (1985: 27; cf. Thirsk, 2007: 59–60; Hoskins, 1964: 88; Bowden, 1967: 621). The awareness made fantasized excess suspicious – “bread as bright as snow” was ostentatiously unreal and not an image that could be usefully bequeathed to posterity. “Plenty” needed a more viable meaning. Around this time, in England, in Pericles Shakespeare imagined the city of Tarsus, “on whom plenty held full hand”, whose tables were “stored full” rather to “glad the sight” than “to feed on” (I.iv.22–29).38 So rich was the city that the mere act of eating could be taken for granted. But soon the mouths of Tarsus, which “of late” gorged, were “starved”, and “Would now be glad of bread and beg for it”. Mothers were ready to eat the babies they suckled, and man and wife drew lots to compete for death. “So sharp”, commented Shakespeare, “are hunger’s teeth” (ll.34–46). The thoughtless gluttony of plenty had given way to the desperate greed of famine. Other cities “that of plenty’s cup, / And her prosperities so largely taste”, warned Cleon, should take heed of such ironic changes (ll.52–55). To this world arrived Pericles, offering deliverance in the form of bread. His ships were stuffed with “heavy load” of corn, with which Tarsus could make her “needy bread”, “give them life, whom hunger starved half dead”, and contrive the “overthrow” of famine, and its concomitant uncertainties, suspicions, and fears (ll.86–94). The arrival of Pericles’ corn-laden ships which, a moment ago, heralded political conquest and further doom, now seemed a heavenly gift, and were greeted with due rejoicing and prayers. But the remedy, I suggest, was consciously distinct from a reversal to the excess previously enjoyed in Tarsus. The emphasis now was on being able to make one’s “needy bread” rather than simply fortuitous abundance of bread. This would no doubt resonate in the contemporary English context of dearth, as would the anxious, unsteady mindset of a city alternately rocked by shortage and plenty. Thus, popular stories of miraculous loaves of bread, or miraculous plenty generally, were not what they seemed. In another poem (1601), Croce compared bread to the sun (in Camporesi, 1996: 153). The sun at daybreak is low at first, Then rises high, gilding the whole world, Lightening every road and lane. Bread when it rises is also small, And then it waxes great and its excellent form Reveals itself. … Magical enlargement was inherent in the very nature of bread – the virtue of its “excellent form” which “reveals” itself. But concealed and unspoken behind the apparent image of plenty was the reality of the labour of baking through which “less” was turned into “more”, following Platt’s favourite theme. In the English context, fantasies of domestic and economic abundance pushed against the impulse to imagine plenty in unproblematic terms. Fantasies about the abundance of food could not prevail without the condition of dearth

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simultaneously raising questions about the very modes of fantasizing. Literary writing on food at the turn of the sixteenth century frequently evoked its production and consumption in utopian or dystopian households. Literary traditions and modes were manipulated with the specific intention of interrogating existing practices of food production, consumption, and waste. A well-known trope, drawn from medieval literary tradition and applied to early modern utopian literature, was the myth of Cockaigne. Early modern utopian and dystopian modes of writing did not only offer political and socio-economic analyses. In many instances, they discussed household organization and consumption, especially in poems representing intersections between Utopia and the Land of Cockaigne. As Kendrick states, it is often argued that while Cockaigne was “anti-ascetic” (poems belonging to this tradition supported orgiastic consumption, spending, and waste) Utopia was a “land of eternal moderation” (Kendrick, 2004: 80; cf. Halpern, 1991: 161–63). The utopian mode is thought to define itself against (or by appropriating) tropes of the Cockaigne tradition. Utopias reversed the daily schedule of idleness to one dominated by labour, through which ruling classes were criticized; consumption fantasies of Cockaigne were substituted by those of consuming education and knowledge to lead to productive labour; and the sceptical potential of Cockaigne tropes was appropriated and exaggerated. But the interactiveness of modes was more subtle and ambivalent in times of dearth, perhaps better illustrated by the lesser-known poem by Platt (1572) than the universally discussed Utopia of Thomas More. The poem described a house (in a town called “Eutopia”) which was “tylde with tarte”, had walls of custard, posts “of Synamon / and Ginger ioyntly ioynde”, floors covered with wafer, and a table of “bisket bread” (98). The owner was a model of hospitality, and when the traveller Mendax crashed through the custard walls, they were swiftly repaired “with morter made of yellowe yelcks”. Mendax was invited to a meal as his host kept open house and asked “euery stranger” to dine (99). This Cockaigne-type fantasy was sharply undermined by continuously questioning the setting. One of the first things Mendax observed was a “paper prison” designed for flies attempting to partake of the feast: Some were put in for marmelad, Which lately they did sucke: And some were caught in sugerloues, Such was their grieuous lucke … And here they begging for a baite Were likely soone to sterue: A good example to the rest, Howe they the like deserue. (100) The flies offered an uncomfortable analogy to the guests at table, for contrary to norms of hospitality, the peculiar and rather nauseating caveat of the paper

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prison was designed to warn and exclude. It did not, however, deter Mendax’s interlocutor Credulus, whose curiosity was as hungry as the traveller’s stomach: I maruayle much I heare no worde, Of neither flesh nor fishe. I pray thee shewe what cheere thou haste … And wherevppon thy hungry lipps To taste, did first begin. (100) In accord with a common trope of the Cockaigne tradition – the perfect obedience of the food to the eater – Mendax then recounted how food in this household offered itself up for consumption. The tablecloth spread itself, the salt hastily appeared, the bread came tumbling behind and settled in “his wonted place”, the trenchers and napkins laid themselves before each guest, and elaborate courses turned up from nowhere (101).39 This motif from the medieval tradition survived into later centuries. Jonson famously adopted it in his representation of the Penshurst household, where the “purpled Phesant” and “painted Partrich” were “willing to be killed” for “messe”, fat carps ran into nets, pikes betrayed themselves, and, in emulation, bright eels “leap[ed] on land” or straight into the fisher’s hands (1975: 95–98, ll.28–54). Unlike the Cockaigne myth, which may be read as a dream of plenty at a time of dearth, the anachronistic world of Penshurst bordered on the absurd, for the “free” availability of its “provisions” depended upon the unreal and self-destructive generosity of others (ll.61–68). The truth was that Robert Sidney eventually impoverished himself by his extravagance at Penshurst (Chaudhuri, 2005: 95–96). In another poem, “Inviting a Friend to Supper”, Jonson picked up the same irony. Food was banished from the household table and celebrated at the same time. The speaker insisted that the guest’s worthiness created the perfect entertainment, “not the cates”. “Yet”, food was served – or was it? Yet “shall you have”, he said, an olive, capers, sallad, mutton, a short-legged hen full of eggs, “If we can get her” (70–71; my emphasis). The Jonsonian speaker (as the satirist Thomas Bastard observed in his poem on the extravagant gallants, Quintus, Sextus, and Caius) spoke in “The future tense of the potentiall moode” (1598: 121). He did not need to prove that the “potential” feast (miming a Classical one) was real. While many critics see consumption fantasies of Cockaigne poems being replaced by new utopian fantasies of productive education, knowledge, and labour, I argue that poems of plenty, through an eternal postponement of the material reality of food, or actual eating, could create their own kind of dearth. The fantasy of plenty was thus exposed as fantasy, allowing overlap with the bleak dystopian world represented in satires of the 1590s, where the presence of food was all the more monstrous because it was so grudgingly served. The “curteous Citizen”, as Joseph Hall showed, invited with “hollow words” and ulterior motive

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(III.iii.1–10), and plenitude in his household was nothing but a sign of deprivation and absence of generosity. Platt’s poem “Eutopia” similarly uncovered images of death, and joyful abundance was deliberately marred by the grotesque appearance of live meat in the poem: pigs arrived carrying long knives and crying to be eaten quickly in their “skrieking” voice, a reminder of material processes of slaughter (cf. “Luilekkerland”, 1546; in Pleij, 2001: 439). When asked why any beast would seek its “owne decay”, Mendax replied snidely that beasts did “as men would doe” under the circumstances, and chose to die quickly rather than prolong a “wretched life” (101–02). Platt, like Jonson after him, subverted the utopia of abundance, filling it with a sense of foreboding, using its tropes to undermine both greed and lack. The utopian mode explicitly modulated into satire through its criticism of dreams of plenty. The social criticism in Platt’s other poems too followed contemporary satiric traditions, which recorded rapacious greed, excess and waste, feasting and vice, corruption, adulteration, and ill-health as typical features of the gluttonous world. Numerous examples are found in satires and epigrams by Everard Guilpin, John Davies, Thomas Bastard, Jonson, and Joseph Hall.40 While it was deemed that the glutton’s ostrich-like belly could digest anything (Hall, 1599: IV.iv.34–41), it was especially voracious when consuming meagre rations of the poor. In an epigram by Bastard, the glutton was personified as “a Crocodile” (Bastard, 1598: 18–19) whose exploitative “hollow rauening iawe” represented (if we compare Hall’s satires) the specific vices of greedy upstarts (“Lolio’s sons”), unscrupulous grain dealers (“Muck-worme[s] … rich with lawlesse gaine”), or cruel landlords (Hall, 1599: IV.ii, iv, vi.23, vv.77–78). The poor farmer, housed in a “starued Tenement” with his swine beneath his bed and “his pullen ore the beame” must, nevertheless, “haunt his greedy Land-lords hall” with “crammed Capons euery Newyeares morne” (V.i.63–78). Hospitality, as Hall famously commented, was “dead” – “Plenty, and hee, dy’d both in that same yeare, / When the sad skye did sheed so many a teare” (V.ii.13–14). This decline was grimly linked with the arrival of “Famine”, whose “forepined face”, “full of Angles of vnequal space”, was strangely juxtaposed with that of the unhealthy “swolne Bezell at an Alehouse fyre” pouring gallons into his “bursten panch” (V.ii.77–82, 91–102). Satirical poetry turned excess into a feature of famine itself. Platt’s poems attacked a conventional range of vices (poor husbandry, the greed of the rich, ill-judged foreign trade, the racking of rents, miserliness, misuse of wealth, bad household management, envy, lack of enterprise, excesses in food, drink, and entertainment) and in his criticism, miserliness and over-spending merged (1572: 77–80, 89–93, 103–08). Whether “we spende vp all our gaynes” while “our household is full to feede”, or we “abounde in worldly wealth” but for fear “canst not dine or suppe”, or whether “want” pinched our purse, it was the outcome of bad “oeconomy” (118–20, 115–18). The censure culminated in a nightmare vision of the discovery of penury in plenty – the precise reversal of the central motif in Platt’s dearth science. In another poem, contrasting his “Eutopia”, a traveller encountered a destroyed town consisting of houses with

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“rotten roofes”, crashing “tile stones”, walls crying for props, “broken sparres” reeling, and bare, weakened posts. Yet, surrounding them were “fat and fresh” fields full of corn with ears so heavy that the stalks bent to graze the ground. The traveller was horrified to find “in moste excesse of plenteous store / such scarcenesse”. The story of the “battered towne” (flanked by two high and “fayre” buildings owned by “Gentlemen” who had “pinchte the poore with racking rents / to heaue their wals on hie”) was a paradigm of ill husbandry, with devastating effects on the poor agricultural labourer, and heralding the ultimate destruction of the town itself: So, whilst the Plowman was not able, such loaftie rent to pay, He suffered all his naked barnes to fall in deepe decay. And thus eache man neglected one Till all did faile at length, And towne came topsie turuie downe When founding had no strength. (1572: 111–15) The parable of the town emphasized inappropriate distribution and consumption of plenty, not its absence. Writing this poetry was not a projected “fantasy” of domestic oeconomia, but part of the English practice of sufficiency. The “topsie turuie” socio-economic structure of the town in Platt’s poem drew attention to economic practices which he deplored and sought to rectify through shrewd practical remedies in his receipt books. Revival was posited as being pragmatically sought through labour, open-ended experimentation, and careful deployment of limited resources, not a mere dream. It was easy, commented Platt, to criticize the imperfections of post-lapsarian labour, but “former ages have brought forth and perfected” many “rare and inestimable inventions for the use and benefit of man”, and the “promise of fullness” continued to exist in present times (JH B1v–2r). As Platt’s works located the “cure” for dearth in meticulous measures and details of household economy, they aimed to try to construct an achievable “utopia” through the practice of mundane household functions. The “promise of fullness”, rather than the dream of an achieved excess, was kept in view. The chaotic abundance of the Cockaigne dreams was replaced, particularly in Jewell House and Delightes for Ladies, by sufficient reserves of food. Imagination and practice merged in early modern literature discussing household matters. That writing about the ideal household constituted an ongoing effort to practise sufficiency is exemplified in intersections between receipts for managing resources and didactic household literature. Platt speculated how “a Countrey Gentlman, may wth a small coste in a few yeeres, procure a proffitable and sufficient reuenew vnto him selfe vppon 40 or 50 acres of good grownd to mayteyne himself and his family” (MS.2210, ff.29v–30v). The receipt

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provided guidelines on maximizing land yield and organized utilization of its produce. The gentleman should plant pompions on one acre of his land, and feed his family with the yield. Bread must be made from pompions dried and ground into powder; any surplus would be used as food for hogs and sheep, and a special concoction of leftover pompions sufficed for the fowl. Part of the land must contain a willow wood and an orchard. Apart from supplying the family with fruit, orchard produce should be used to make cider and perry, while sheep may be kept there and in the willow wood. Hops would be planted on 8–10 acres, and rabbits bred on the same land. In an adjoining field of ash trees, walnut trees should also be grown. The gentleman should buy fowl cheap, have a dove house, maintain pigeons and a fishpond. He must sow onion, arum, and rose seeds, grow carrots and parsnips. In these notes, Platt drafted a model for combining needs of land and household management. The gentleman’s household would become a self-sufficient organism, protected from shortages. This was not intended as a fantasy. It is likely Platt tried to organize his own lands along these lines. His instructions, or projected vision, can be compared to didactic texts like The Housholders Philosophie (1588), a translation of Il Padre di Famiglia, attributed to Torquato Tasso, but adapted to an English context.41 Its title page claimed to “perfectly and profitably” describe “the true Oeconomia and forme of Housekeeping”. The dialogue form demonstrated how practical and imaginative modes of writing connected in household literature, whether practical receipts, didactic manuals, or poetry. Different forms of writing colluded to debate the principle of sufficiency. In this narrative, similar to Platt’s poem “Eutopia”, a tired traveller, offered shelter by a generous host and amazed by the household’s clockwork efficiency, engaged his host in dialogue to extract the secrets of his hospitality. The work stood distinct from the Cockaigne fantasies, which focused on the business of conspicuous consumption, while discounting the means by which copious reserves of food were gained. Here, every course of the meal served to the visitor turned into a discourse on the items consumed. Relative merits of different kinds of flesh and fowl and origins of wines were debated, the host instructed his listener in household government, and passed on secrets learnt from his father. This patriarch of simple parentage, heir to a “small patrimonie”, had augmented his meagre assets with “industrie, sparing, and good husbandry” (ff.1–8v). Sufficiency (not abundance) of means was portrayed as the starting point of “true Oeconomia”, which began with “less”, turning it into “more” through efficient management. As the text moved from familiar tropes of travel narratives towards generic conventions of practical manuals and receipts, it divided the householder’s function into care of “person” (marriage, raising children, and managing servants) and of “goods”. The latter was based on principles of “conservation” and “encrease”. The master of the household must know precisely the quality and quantity of his goods, revenues, and expenses to correctly evaluate his wealth. In times of plenty, he must “preserve” his resources. The work took for granted that abundance would be followed by

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dearth, and conserving became vital to the householder’s philosophy. The task of preserving “whatsoeuer are brought into the house, eyther from the Countrey, or bought from the Markets” belonged to the wife, “who is to keep and set them vp, in seuerall places, according to their natures”. Her expert knowledge of managing household inventories was crucial – she knew what would not keep and must be eaten first, and how to store food. It was necessary for women to stave off dearth through the domain of household and kitchen. When a good housewife “makyng store, for her prouision” faced a sudden shortage of meat in the market, or had to suddenly entertain a stranger, she was expected to “furnish her messe with those iunckets [made from preserved food], and yt in such good sort, as there shall be no misse of any other meats”. She also ensured that her household corn was “sparingly disposed” in suitable proportion for bread and drink. Careful distribution and thrift were as essential as “liberalitie”. It belonged to the wife “to keepe”, and to the husband “to encrease” (ff.8v, 18–21v). Similar injunctions were repeated in manuals like Cleaver (1598: 169), but this text stressed that the latter depended on the former. Food receipts in Platt’s practical writing were consistently preoccupied with the notion of increasing by preserving to forfend shortage in times of crisis. If recycling and preservation shaped conceptions of the ideal household that practised dearth science, this affected paradigms of household-centred national ideology. For Wendy Wall, national ideology was domestic and middleclass rather than court-centred (Wall, 2002; cf. Erickson, 1987: 116–40; Helgerson, 1999: 162–82). Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor is one of the best-known canonical texts used to analyze national identity construction through the household. For Erickson and Helgerson, the play (especially its closing scenes) embodied the production of early modern domesticity as an object of national and aristocratic appropriation. Wall contended that the play parodied courtly values and unsettled the appropriation of popular folklore by a court-centred national mythology: “Commerce, industry, and work pervade the fabric of Merry Wives, such that the fairies’ regard for housework serves as the culmination, rather than the repressed subtext, of this play” (113). In the final scene, the fairies oversaw domestic labour and moral conduct, so that the wives were allowed to emerge as thrifty and chaste, their ethical housekeeping endorsed by the simulated fairy world. Work, or “ethical” domestic management, for Wall, was specifically associated with “purity”. She highlighted specific types of household work (laundry, bucking, sweeping, cleaning, and distilling) that purified, and argued that the fairies marshalled herbal knowledge to this end, cleaning and healing were collapsed, and when Falstaff famously reappeared in this environment, he was, predictably, distilled and purged out of the household system (117–26). As he summed it up himself, I suffered the pangs of three several deaths; first, an intolerable fright, to be detected with a jealous rotten bell-wether; next, to be compassed, like a good bilbo, in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head;

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Falstaff’s “kitchen torture”, however, did not simply subject him to “purifying household activity” (Wall, 2002: 19). His re-emergence in this play as a focal point, embodying threats to households, must be placed in relation to his earlier role in the Henriad. Falstaff as a domestic threat, expressed through the language and practice of material domestic concerns, was a conscious parallel to Falstaff as a political and economic threat, expressed through the language and practice of agriculture and manure. This connection should be kept in view, rather than seeing the household as a self-contained, pure world of English fantasy. The well-known anecdote about the writing of Merry Wives claimed that the Queen herself expressed a desire to see Falstaff back in circulation, and this time, “in love”. Supposedly in response, Shakespeare – rather subversively – resurrected the “fat knight” in a context of household management, transforming erotic pursuit into domestic processing. But the subversion was more shrewd than it is often imagined to be. The domestic processing of Falstaff was not just about cleaning but also, like his agricultural processing in the Henriad, about recycling. When Falstaff feared the ridicule of his courtly peers, he complained, If it should come to the ear of the court, how I have been transformed and how my transformation hath been washed and cudgelled, they would melt me out of my fat drop by drop and liquor fishermen’s boots with me; I warrant they would whip me with their fine wits till I were as crest-fallen as a dried pear. (IV.v.94–100) Being melted out of his fat excesses, drop by drop, re-utilized as liquor for fishermen’s boots, and transformed into a dried pear refer to the ultimate fear of being subjected to household recycling and preservation practices, which Falstaff thought even his friends at court would begin to replicate. The melting recalled precisely the process of Prince Hal’s trick designed to melt Falstaff down as fertilizer to “lard the lean earth”. The ethical point can thus be realigned: the drive in both examples, domestic and agricultural, was not to purify by excluding waste, but to reincorporate waste. Saying that household work aimed to purify is an incomplete apprehension of the moral aim of domesticity, which was more ingenious. Household work re-assimilated waste and was about inclusion and preservation rather than exclusion. I argued in previous

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chapters that in early modern agricultural manuals, manure experiments, and famine remedies, the definition of waste as matter to be excluded came under considerable pressure in this context of dearth. The pressure was increased by the waste-reductive recycling practices this chapter has discussed in relation to households. Sweeping, cleaning, bucking, and scouring constituted the focus of Wall’s analysis and her discussion of the fantasy of household efficiency was based on the prioritizing of these tasks. In reality, agricultural and household efficiency, and the related construction of national identity, were equally based on preservation, recycling, inclusion, and cooperation. To over-emphasize cleansing in the context of the household at this historical moment is to misread constructions of English national identity as inevitable “fantasies” of middleclass dominance, “warding off” both the aristocracy and foreigners. In the dearthdriven, pre-colonial moment when the play and other texts considered here were written, before the consolidation of “improvement” discourses and consequent erasure of discourses of dearth-time knowledge making, the English imagination and practice of identity construction was precisely not based on the fantasy of unbridled production, consumption, and perfect purity. It was based, rather, on much more subtly modulated cultural meanings of recycling and preservation underpinned by the open-ended and cooperative principles of dearth science.

Notes 1 In dietetic terms, cucumbers, onions, and leeks were listed among foods that “clogged” the body (Albala, 2002: 194, 250–51, 265–66, 271; Fernández-Armesto, 2002: 141). Melons were a standard gift from courtiers to princes, despite the circulation of stories about kings and emperors who had died eating them: illustrated in the frontispiece of Messisbugo’s Banchetti (1549), describing meals served at court. 2 Legumes and seeds contain storage sugars to feed the growing plant that are difficult for human enzymes to break down, and, when metabolized, release the by-products carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrogen sulphide. Albala concludes that contemporary dieticians were less attentive to malnourishment than to gluttony. 3 Other reconstructions of household practice include Vickery, 2009: 106–28; Connor, 2004: 17–24; Archer, 2010; Lemire, 2005. 4 Studies of consumption in modern Britain show that, when shopping to provision the household, thrift is a primary source of satisfaction, not the pleasures of expenditure (Miller, 1997: 44–46; Muldrew, 1998: 158–65). The range of mundane skills in early modern housewifery and the involvement of households with markets are discussed in Hole, 1953; Fussell and Fussell, 1955; Davidson, 1982; Sim, 1996; Robertson, 1997; Whittle, 2005. 5 With a bait of bean flour, corulus indiae (hazel wood), asafoetida, egg yolks, aqua vitae, and oil of osprey. Although the osprey, or fish hawk, preys on fish, I find no other evidence of “oil” made from it. Perhaps it was believed this oil could mesmerize fish, i.e. make them “drunk”. 6 With a “milck white dog” around which fowl apparently gathered on a moonlit night. 7 Receipt taken from John Hester, “one of the most auncient chimists of my time in London”. 8 For receipts discussed below, see JH 12–13.

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9 MS.2197, f.14, nos. 4–6; repeated in a second list, f.15, nos. 28–30. “Reverberatores” (metal reflectors used to conserve fuel) mentioned again in MS.2216, f.188, under the heading “Matters of most royall and present Expectation”, suggesting they sold well. Cf. OED’s first recorded use of “reverberators” by Adams (1794). 10 MS.2189 contains receipts copied by Platt’s assistant (no.17 onwards by Platt) on stewing, roasting, soaking, and baking to preserve meat (ff.120–22, nos. 4–6, 8–11, 13, 17; f.127, nos. 19–21). Cf. Delights 3: nos.1, 2, 8, 12 (pork), nos.4–6, 9–11 (fowl), no.7 (mutton), no.10 (veal), no.13 (brawn). 11 On early modern “conspicuous consumption”, see Kowaleski-Wallace, 1997; Berry, 2002: 375–94; Berg, 2005; Levy Peck, 2005. Literary criticism based on similar ideas includes: Wall, 2002; Fumerton, 1991: 111–67. On everyday concerns, work, and thrift, in relation to consumption, see Miller, 1997: 44–46; Muldrew, 1998: 158–65; De Vries, 2008: 186–237; Oakley, 1976; Whittle and Griffiths, 2012: 1–17. 12 In 1548, Parliament reintroduced the Saturday fish day; 15 years later, in agreement with Cecil’s proposal, Wednesday was added. From 1563 onwards, there were 153 fish days in the year. Eating flesh on these days was punished (Wilson, 1991a: 46; Appleby, 1979a: 99; Drummond and Wilbraham, 1958: 63–64; Wriothsley, 1877). Cf. Muldrew’s evidence (2011: 83–100) of labourers’ meat consumption is taken mainly from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources. 13 MS.2189, ff.35–38, 61–74, 120–22, 126, 142v, 163; MS.2216: ff.32, 41v–42, 44v, 54, 80, 85–94r, 111v–112, 124v, 141–42, 152v, 156v, 160–61, 177, 188–89; MS.2249, f.36; MS.2197, ff.22v, 41. Examples of sources show their network and range across classes and professions. Sloane MS.2189: “Sirrup of violets” (from “Frederick the Surgeon”), “To preserve whole roses, gelliflowers, marigolds & c.” (from “Mrs Yetswirt”); MS.2216: “Candying ginger and other rootes” (from “my Sister Gerard Goare whoe learned it of Mrs Yetswirth”), “To butter Apples in a paper” (from Bartolomeo Scappi, cook to Pope Pius V). 14 In 1550, there were 13 refineries, 19 by 1556, accessible by the Suykerruye. Chief sources of supply for the Antwerp refineries were Lisbon, Madeira, the Canaries, Spain, and Barbary. In 1564 and 1567, two Dutch merchants owned factories in the Canaries and São Vicente in Brazil. 15 The manuscripts 363, 169, 108, Wellcome Institute, London, are dated 1637, 1627, and 1625. However, the receipts were collected over a number of years before the “books” were compiled. 16 Manuscript receipts marked with “X” indicate they were used in printed works. 17 Contra Muldrew (2011: 113) who maintains that “cheap sugar” was an eighteenthcentury phenomenon. Average price calculations alone do not elucidate the practical use of this item. In contrast, Thirsk (2007: 51, 81, 94–95, 106–07) gives a fuller account of the use of sugar for preservation. 18 The history of the English bread trade records a constant struggle with dearth. Formal legislation was first established after the 1266 famine, when people were driven to eating bark from trees. For the next 6 centuries, the Assize of Bread regulated weight and price. Bakers’ profits were not generous, and expenses, covered by an allowance fixed after infrequent official test-bakes, were subject to ongoing disagreement between government and Bakers’ Companies (Sheppard and Newton, 1957: 48–49). 19 The late sixteenth-century Modenese chronicler Tomasino de’ Bianchi recorded that children were sent into the woods to look for hawthorn fruit. Darnel caused drowsiness and was used strategically, says Camporesi (1989), to keep the poor from rioting. Giovan Battista Segni’s treatise on hunger commented that eating locusts (which were easily ground and contained animal fat) was based on the irreproachable examples of Moses and John the Baptist (1591: 44). 20 A 1590 report stated that during famines in Italy, people dug up bones from cemeteries and graves, which were crushed to make flour for bread (Camporesi,

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23

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1996: 121). Eighteenth-century English writers Emanuel Collins and Joseph Manning accused bakers of adulterating bread with ashes of bones from refuse heaps (Sheppard and Newton, 73; Collins, 1762). A 1996 survey shows the maximum percentage of starch world-wide is still produced from corn (83 per cent). International Starch Institute, Denmark (1999–2004), accessed 30 January 2006. www.starch.dk/isi/stat/rawmaterial Thirsk cited an undated Jacobean document showing there were 19 starch-makers in London, King’s Lynn, and Norwich; 40 horseloads of starch were taken from Norfolk to Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire; other licensed starch-makers producing large quantities were found in Oxford, Northampton, Wisbech, Ely, and Peterborough. This recorded “the better sort of starch-makers”, not accounting for smaller traders. Sources for reconstructing brewing practices demonstrate the overlap as they include household account books, manuals, and commentaries (Scot, 1574; Tusser, 1573; Harrison, 1968; Petre’s household accounts in Emmison, 1964: 56–57, 103–06). Recent historical studies (e.g. Unger, 2004: 4–6) have documented brewing processes, but more attention needs to be paid to the use of substitutes and practical means devised to minimize grain consumption. On competition between beer and ale, Dutch breweries in England, roles of women in brewing, political efforts to monitor brewing and its grain consumption, environments of alehouses, and Puritan critiques of beer and ale consumption, see Unger, 2004; Bennett, 1996; Corran, 1975; Monckton, 1966; Clark, 1983; Wrightson, 1981. Hugh Platt and two of his sons inherited Richard Platt’s property, including his brewhouse “The Vyne” in the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields. Hugh’s will (1608) bequeathed “A Brewhowse with other Howses and Tenementes” to his wife Judith, who was involved, the following year, in a legal dispute regarding a brewhouse “Old Swan” in St James’ parish, originally owned by her father-in-law (PROB 11/96; PROB 11/112; E134/8Jas1/East2). Ironically, criticized in literary accounts accusing corrupt brewers of selling “sodden water”, “be barly never so cheape” (Greene, 1592: C3). Muldrew calculated 600 kcal/pint of strong beer, 350–500/pint of middle beer, and 200–50 for small beer. Brunschwygk’s Liber de arte distillandi was translated by Laurence Andrew, The vertuose Boke of Distyllacyon (1527). Della Porta’s Magiae Naturalis was available in several editions from 1569 onwards, though it appeared in English in 1658. Gesner was translated by George Baker (New Jewell of Health, 1570, 1576; The practise of the new and old physicke, 1599) and Peter Morwyng (The treasure of Evonymus, 1559, 1565). Platt’s book of distillation in Jewell House mentions Baker’s translation of Gesner, refers frequently to della Porta, and uses an illustration of apparatus from the latter. Scappi was personal cook (“cuoco segreto”) to Pope Pius V. His Opera (1570, 1596, 1605, 1610, 1622, 1643) is an elaborate text with illustrations and banqueting receipts. Platt extracted from it preservation methods closest to his concerns. For receipts on rose extracts discussed below, see JH 30–31, 34, 42–43; Delights 2.14–18, 23–25, 3.34. Platt also attempted to address this problem by designing “a conuenient pumpe, for all such as dwel neere the riuer of thames, to force vp water for the service of their kitchens”. It was labour saving, durable, small, cheap, and delivered 5–6 tons of water every hour (Inventions, 1593; JH 73–74). Aqua vitae appeared as an important “new” item in the period between 1560 and 1630, an active phase of projecting. In 1594, a patent was issued for making aqua vitae, aqua composita, and vinegar, and by 1614, aqua vitae was listed by travellers and settlers as an essential item to carry abroad (Thirsk, 1978: 6, 57, 49; Wyndham Hulme, 1896: 149, 1900: 45–51; Wright, 1965: 204).

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32 The sections in MS.2244 are more deliberately organized and in a neater hand than Platt usually troubled to use. He probably began with the intention of producing a short work for publication but changed his mind, and the small duodecimo notebook, in later folios, became a convenient pocketbook where Platt could note receipts on diverse topics. 33 In 1565, wine imports cost £48,634, the highest figure in Thirsk’s table of imported wares (1978: 181–85). 34 These receipts appealed to Thomas Hodges, to whom Platt’s manuscripts had passed. Hodges’ hand appears repeatedly on the folios mentioned here, noting possible variations and adding his own receipts for fruit wines along the same lines as Platt’s (MS.2216, ff.182, 115v, 117v; MS.2244, ff.16–20). 35 The period was badly hit by the influenza epidemic, plague, smallpox, pneumonia, and “the sweat”. There were major outbreaks of plague in Devon (1546–47 and 1589–93), Staffordshire (1593), and London (1590s). See Guy, 1988: 30–31; Slack, 1985. 36 Examples of family receipt books containing medical and cookery receipts are MSS.169, 363, 160, 184a, 311, 213, 141, 108, 212 (Wellcome Institute, London). Commonplace books showing similar overlaps could be differently structured (e.g. MSS46, ff.112v, 122v, 155v, St John’s College Archive, Cambridge). 37 Platt lists the ingredients as “cartam 9”, “scamomine” (possibly the purgative “scammony” extracted from the plant Convolvulus Scammonia), “turbit electi”, “diatragaganti frigidi”, ginger, “mannae” (could be gum extracted from various plants, like manna ash or eucalyptus), rose honey, quince conserve, sugar, “bezoar stone” (antidote from the concretion found in some animal intestines, formed by the deposition of layers of animal matter round some foreign substance), and saffron. 38 The date of Pericles cannot be later than 20 May 1608, when it was entered in the Stationer’s Register. 39 On medieval sources, especially texts of the oldest Cockaigne (“Luilekkerland”) poems in Middle Dutch, see Pleij, 2001: 38. 40 See Guilpin, “Of Gnatho”, Skialetheia (1598: 46); Davies, “In Fuscum,” Epigrammes (1594–95) in Poems (1975: 146–47); Jonson “On Gut” (Poems 80); Bastard, “Chito and Trogus”, Chrestoleros (1598: 106). 41 Dutch and German translations appeared later: De Adellikke Huisvader van Torquato Tasso (1658) and Der adeliche Hausvatter (1650).

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Trading in dearth

Just as early modern “recycling” was understood within specific frameworks of agricultural practice and household management, contemporary understandings of “energy consumption” were shaped by the practices and politics of minimizing waste, circulating knowledge, and economic cooperation across several trades during the 1590s dearth. The fundamental principles of dearth science were operative in daily practices of trading communities, with interrelated economic interests and overlapping technologies. This chapter selectively examines trades that raised practical and ethical issues about the management of natural resources, and also luxury trades that expressed dearth-driven ingenuity and contributed directly to the distribution of resources. Platt’s documents place particular emphasis on contemporary debates about increasing strains on natural resources in relation to trades in coal, salt, and saltpetre. This chapter discusses the effects of waste-minimizing tactics, technological modification, and the politics of resource distribution on these and related trades, such as the production of fuel-saving devices and weaponry, before examining how these issues inflected the trade in ornamental items and meanings of “luxury”.

Trading and natural resources What were the “natural resources” available to people in the 1590s, and what constituted debates about energy consumption? Previous studies, focused on particular energy sources such as wood or coal, demonstrated a shift in this period from reliance on traditional energy carriers within an organic economy to fossil fuels (Wrigley, 1988, 2003; Sieferle, 2001).1 Broader investigations of early modern energy consumption (Warde, 2007) suggested a gradually shifting paradigm: in the late sixteenth century, traditional energy carriers constituted 81 per cent of total energy consumption, and fossil fuel already played an important role in the economy. Of the main energy sources identified in Warde’s study (food, fodder, firewood, wind, water, and fossil fuel) the first three supplied a significant proportion of the energy consumed (2007: 16–18). By the early seventeenth century, coal became a more important provider of thermal energy than wood. In the 1590s, firewood consumption ranged from

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28–29 per cent and coal from 14–17 per cent. A crucial question was whether the shift from wood to coal could be attributed to a “timber famine”, or whether wood shortages were mainly local issues.2 Warde’s data suggested that, in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, approximately a cubic metre of wood could be supplied per person per annum. He argued this was low by northern European standards, and admitted that contemporary fears of a general timber famine by the early seventeenth century could have been well founded. The fears were alleviated by the early and rapid expansion of coal use. Warde’s caveat was, however, that this may not mean wood shortage was the cause of transition to fossil fuel use (2007: 39). This chapter suggests considering more seriously the implications of contemporary perceptions and responses: whether or not timber famine was the cause, or one of the causes, it was perceived as such by the early modern English. This significantly affected the practical culture of coal and wood use, which, in turn, shaped ethical constructions of energy consumption tied to wider fears of dearth and famine in the 1590s. According to Warde, trends in aggregate energy consumption were driven by coal use, and per capita energy consumption increased sharply from 1800 onwards. He concluded that before this benchmark date, fossil fuels were used to supplement rather than substitute traditional energy carriers (2007: 72–73). This overview may not fully reflect what contemporaries thought they were doing. People possibly knew they were not replacing or eliminating wood consumption, but were also fearful of the imminent problems of having to do so. Anxieties about, and principles of, substitution that operated in the world of food production and consumption were applied and shaped practices in the context of fuel efficiency. The narrative of transition from wood to coal, traditional to modern fossil fuel, may be incomplete without considering relationships between perceptions of food and fuel shortage. Food was the main source of energy that propelled the economy, or, as Muldrew has recently said, it was the “petrol” that drove it. Human food constituted 27.5 per cent of energy consumption in 1600, only slightly less than firewood at 28.7 per cent, and slightly more than fodder at 25.6 per cent. It was certainly higher than fossil fuels at 16.7 per cent. Throughout the 1590s, dependence on food and fodder (human and animal energy) was high, at 27–28 per cent and 25 per cent. Periods of dearth could lead to a significant fall in calorie intake for agricultural labourers, and this was worsened by poor distribution of calories (Wrigley, 1988: 27; Warde, 2007: 69, 123; Muldrew, 2011: 3, 158–59). Calories were reserved during dearth for those who worked and, therefore, for those who could get work. Problems of access to calories affected those labouring in trade as well as agriculture, especially in a culture of “industriousness”. In this environment, practices for coping with food and fuel shortage acquired similar structures, and their alliance cemented fears about energy sources available, both now and for posterity. The Platt documents are useful for understanding the practical and philosophical relevance of trade-related energy consumption. They alert us to detail

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and tell us about practices, attitudes, perceptions, and assumptions about energy consumption, which may not register in the broader trends represented by figures provided in wide-ranging quantitative surveys. Knowledge of the ways in which energy was consumed is likely to be as crucial as asking how much was consumed. As Paul Slack commented, environmental awareness is not objective: just as environments change, “perceptions of the environment – by individuals and social groups – equally alter over time, and are no less complicated in their origins” (1999: 1). One should therefore ask what people’s assumptions were about energy consumption in a particular context of dearth, following the concerns of a household, individual, trader, or professional group. This chapter focuses, therefore, on areas of trading practice covered by Platt which had an impact on fuel and energy conservation: an individual’s choice of concerns is revealing in itself. The emphasis of the chapter is on interrelations between different areas of activity, and waste-reductive measures, which suggest that early modern practitioners worked with their own overview of energy consumption and resource management in mind. Finding fuel Platt engaged directly with a variety of trades, besides those overtly linked to food. His manuscripts give detailed accounts of coal use, weaponry, salt refining, and saltpetre production, as well as craftsmanship in glass, wood, wax, and leather. True to his “no waste” policy, he provided receipts for cleaning glassworks, cementing broken glass, cheap blacking for leather, hardening leather for pumps, cheap wax, joining wood, building bridges and posts (MS.2216, ff.124r, 38, 96, 109–10; JH 51, 19, 71, 60, 21, 33, 26–27, 74, 94, 59). He was also concerned with practical benefits from the production of cosmetics (Delights pt.4), the arts of limning (MS.2189, ff.92–106, 3–5, 33–34), casting (JH 49–68), marbling (MS.2216, ff.12r–16v), and dyeing (MS.2247). These trades, directly or indirectly, affected the annual consumption of fuel. Energy consumption, investigations of fuel technology, and related tasks of minimizing waste, especially in times of dearth, were thus fundamental unifying concerns behind trade-related experiments among Platt and his associates. In 1603, Platt published A new, cheape, and delicate fire of cole-balles, which finally “discovered” the secret of the “new fire” with which he had tantalized his readers 9 years earlier in Jewell House (69). In the preface to the pamphlet, he wrote that though dearths, miseries, and wants had persisted, the tract on coal would finally bring forth, out of his “manie and manifold trauels”, some “substantial and comodious inuention for the auoiding of idlenesse, and relieuing the present misery, which the fortune of warres, together with the want of profitable labors hath brought vpon vs” (preface). He compared Cole-balles to his work on famine, thus linking the dual scarcities of food and fuel. While his rhetoric recorded contemporary fears about fuel scarcity, he also noted how daily practices were organized to deal with this fear. According to J.U. Nef ’s study of the rapid growth of the coal trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth

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centuries, the annual output of coal (estimated by adding outputs of principal mining districts3) in 1551–60 was 210,000 tons (1932: I.23–77). By the 1680s, it had increased nearly 14-fold to 2,982,000 tons.4 Equally shocking were figures for shipments and imports. Shipments from Newcastle at Michaelmas 1563–64 amounted to 32,951 tons. In 1608–09, a few years after Platt’s publication of Cole-balles, the figure had increased to 239,271 tons. Similarly, imports of coal into London multiplied from 10,785 tons in 1580 to 73,984 tons in 1605–06 (I.21, II.D). Reasons for this rapid growth, said Nef, were the secularization of mineral properties and the crisis of timber. By 1547, most coal-bearing territories, formerly in the Church’s possession, were owned by the Crown, which leased mines to tenants on easy terms (1932: I.142–56). From the 1550s, wood prices rose more rapidly than average prices of all commodities.5 Besides this, contemporary complaints against the stripping of woodlands are well known. In Platt’s home county of Middlesex, the Bishop of London’s agent lamented in 1598 that owing to the crisis of timber in his estates the Bishop himself was “nowe driven to burne seacoles” (Lansdowne MS.103.80; APC 27 Eliz.c.19; Privy Council Register of Scotland 12.605; SPD Eliz.127.68, 266.119). Inter-regional competition in the coal trade was based on transport cost and quality. London received most of its supplies from Durham and Northumberland. As trade between London and Newcastle grew, illegal activities among London coal-mongers increased, complained Platt. Besides bulk-buying to artificially raise prices, these included tampering with quality, which was a complicated question anyway. Different grades of coal, available from the same colliery, were sorted (“riddled”) and quality distinguished by size of the block, brightness of the flame, odour of the fumes, or potential damage to clothing, furniture, and tapestry. Larger, less sulphurous coal blocks were sought by domestic consumers for use in the kitchen and fireplace, and by brewers, soap boilers, glassmakers, and other manufacturers who required bright flames. Smaller lumps gave more noxious fumes, were suitable for heating brick kilns and dyers’ vats, and were used by smiths and lime makers. The salt industry utilized poorer “pan coal” (remnants in underground passages of mines, cast aside by riddlers) often mixed with better coal (“ship coal”) to deceive buyers. Prices varied according to grade and, occasionally, district: by the seventeenth century, Scottish “great coal”, Newcastle “sea coal”, and Pembrokeshire “culm” were three distinct commodities. The latter was sold in London, priced higher than Newcastle coal, as it burned with less smoke and dirt (Nef, I.109–16; HMC, xi, 171–72; Owen, 1994, I.88). From the 1590s, dissatisfaction with the quality of coal and its adulteration grew. Documents, reports, and petitions show that the debate about the quality of London coal continued into the seventeenth century. Apart from mixing inferior coals with the better sort, slate, stone, earth, chalk, and all kinds of “unmarchantable stuffe” were added (Nef, II.240–51; Star Chamber Proceedings, James I, 56/10; City of London Repertories 24, f.320; Rawlinson MS.c.784). The debates centred round uses of additives, which worked in

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ways similar to bread extenders, by stretching the main item in short supply and allowing experimentation with alteration of texture and smell. Food and fuel, two main energy sources, were thus “saved” or stretched to their limit using the same fundamental principle. This initiated careful reassessments of quality. Platt, urging magistrates to disallow sale and unloading of untested coal, suggested that the indicator of good quality was not size (as the above accounts of coal grades would imply) but texture: the best coals would “cake and knit together, and so make a hot and durable fire”. If legal measures binding coal suppliers to a system of quality control failed, individual buyers should test their coal by lighting sample fires. Platt himself had been duped in the past, and surmised that “many poore & vnskilfull men” were forced to “make a most miserable prouision for themselues & their poore wiues and children” (Cole-balles B1r–v). His commentary clarifies there was a domestic market, even for the worst grades of coal, among the poor. Details of practice, therefore, show that the “timber famine” was not only a perception – it was a fear acted upon. It influenced how people assessed quality and usage of the newly emerging fossil fuel, and debated its efficacy as a source of energy. Platt outlined methods for telling the quality of coal. Good coal had the “colour and lustre of pitch”, a “fattie and sulphurious nature”, and melted if held over a flame, while “leane and hungrie” coals of a “dead earthly colour” grew hard. But Platt had heard of “bad seacole” which, when “newly digged out of the mine, and brought drie in sommer time”, would appear lustrous. Thus, the most “assured” test was that of weight: lightness indicated freedom from impurities. He adopted the shrewd practice of carrying around “halfe a peck of the best and lightest coles, finely powdered”, against which he tested the quality and weight of his purchase. These tests were essential to the technology of making briquettes, “sweetened” and “multiplied” by using a good grade of coal as the “basis & foundation of the whole work” (Cole-balles B1v–B2r). His language echoed that of food experiments described earlier: “sweetened”, “multiplied”, “lean and hungry” were phrases that allied crises and remedies of food and fuel shortage. Platt aimed, in both cases, to strike a balance between economy and quality, essential, in his view, for efficient consumption. This was aided by thorough knowledge, among traders and householders, of variations in local characteristics of fuel. Platt evaluated different coal mines: best coal came from “Durham, Blaidon, Stillow, Redhew, and Bourne”, and there were, he estimated, ten other mines providing inferior coal, of which Sunderland was the “worst of all”.6 It was common to mix coal from various mines, making it impossible to identify “the predominant cole in the whole bulke” (Cole-balles B2v). The case of the “worst” Sunderland coals illustrated his point. Located in the lower Wear valley, Sunderland did not have a flourishing trade in coal until the early 1600s, because it did not possess as many natural advantages for shipping as did Newcastle. Its coal seams dipped sharply some distance before reaching the sea, and the nearest mine lay about 10 miles upstream. The river was shallower than the Tyne and difficult to navigate, and the harbour could not accommodate as many vessels as the

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Tynemouth bar. Examining the port books, Nef did not find a single entry for Sunderland coal between 1580 and 1600 (I.29–30). But, in 1603, Platt indicated that the import of Sunderland coal into London was regular practice, “whereof the poores wharfe in London can giue a sufficient testimony”, even as he emphasized its poor quality as a reason for lack of demand. Apparently stocks of Sunderland coal lay in the wharf for an entire winter, until some of it was transported elsewhere “to make the bulke seem lesse”. Remaining coals were then “sold and distributed amongst the poore, for whom that charitable prouision was first meant”. This compromise, Platt remarked, was a futile economy: “Here xviii. pence or fiue grotes in the price of a chaldron was ill saued” (Cole-balles B1v). Platt’s “inside” view of the coal trade helps to reassess early modern understandings of energy consumption. In the 1590s, Sunderland was a centre of salt manufacture, which had a bearing on its coal trade. In 1591, Robert Bowes erected salt pans at Sunderland, investing large sums in a colliery to supply his fuel requirement (SPD, Addenda, 1580–1625: 327). Salt making required poorer quality “pan coal” and, presumably, this is what was utilized. When the growing demand for coal in southern England could not be met by Tyne valley supplies, a regular trade in Sunderland coal arose. Platt’s commentary clarifies this turn of events. Everyday realities of trading within contexts of hardship imparted value to even the “worst” kind of fuel source. Sunderland coal functioned in this economy as an extender or substitute, the way vetches served to make bread, or dregs of beer and ale served as manure. The extent of recycling practices and the early modern ability to recuperate energy by minimizing waste should thus be examined. The rising importance of coal fires also created opportunities to question economic efficiency and raise issues of unemployment and poverty. If the pressure on energy sources necessitated the re-use of waste products, it simultaneously provided opportunities to accommodate “wasted” human labour. Platt urged London authorities to “gather vp all the idle and vagrant persons, & all the maimed & vnpensioned souldiers, which … pester the streets and suburbs of this citie, and imploy them in their profitable labors” in the coal trade. Such arguments created ambivalent counter-pressures, and foregrounded tensions between consumption, conservation, and profiteering with regard to energy sources. Platt also proposed seasonal price control whereby winter prices of coal could be reduced, not admitting a profit above 3 shillings per chaldron to the coal-monger. Profiteering, especially with high domestic demand during winter, was common: the collier profited “at the least 20. or 30. in the hundred, & vpward, if you adde herevnto that fiue in the hundreth, which he gaineth by ouer measure, when he buyeth a whole ships lading in the poole together” (Cole-balles B2v–B3r). In other words, the collier, given the advantages of bulk-buying, would have made (even when prices were steady) a profit between 3 and 5 shillings per London chaldron, or between 5 and 8 shillings per Newcastle chaldron. Assuming that Platt was using the London chaldron as his measure, his suggestion of limiting

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profits per chaldron to 3 shillings, as a charitable act during winter, was viable, balancing the consumer’s and the coal-monger’s interests.7 These issues affected the processing of coal for consumption, the main subject of Platt’s treatise. Briquette-making was not invented by him, but he experimented with the method and tried to “perfect” it. The practice probably originated in China, and was current in Liège before it appeared in England (Nef, I.13, 246–48; Henaux, 1872: II.35; Hue, 1910: I.344, 351). Platt noted, his receipt for making “cole bals” followed “the maner of Lukeland [Liège] in Germanie: which forme of firing hath been in vse with them for many yeares past, and doth continue to this day” (Cole-balles B4r). In 1590, John Thornborough, Dean of York, received a grant from the Crown for “refining” sea coal to correct its “sulphurous nature”, but no adequate description of his methods exists (Nef, I.247; SPD, Eliz.233, Oct.10, 1590; Lansdowne MS.67.19–20).8 Platt’s description of 1603 appears to be the earliest account of the procedure in England. He advised that “half a peck” of loam (gathered in winter, when it easily crumbled) dissolved in a tub of water was sufficient to “knit vp” a bushel of coal into balls. The coals, strewn upon a stone floor, hammered or broken under one’s feet, were spread equally, “some handfull thick”, and loam water sprinkled over them. The mixture was turned with a spade, adding more water, until the mass was soft enough to be wrought into balls “according to the maner and making of snowbals”. The balls were dried and piled in heaps in a “conuenient place, where they may be defended from raine” (Cole-balles B3v–B4r). Their advantages were that coal-balls burned easily, required less supervision (thus saving labour), and the smoke was “searced through” the loam. This effect of filtration made it “so refined and subtilated” that “it either consumeth and swalloweth vp, or els leaueth behinde it the grosse residence of his owne nature”. The “hellish smoke and smoder” from coal fires, aggravated by frequent stirring and dispersal of soot in “subtile atomies abroad into the aire”, was frequently subject to complaint: it ruined gardens, defaced furniture, hangings, clothing, and polluted the city air (Cole-balles B4r–C1r). Economic benefits of using coal were thus weighed against costs of pollution. Anxieties about social and environmental costs of burning the new fossil fuel were palpable in the rhetoric of the period, and these apprehensions further informed the contemporary language of taint. On the one hand, coal was hell; its blackness was symbolic. Natural and urban environments, and immediate surroundings of one’s home, could be tainted by coal. A contest between the personified figures of Newcastle “Sea-coal”, Charcoal, and Croydon “Small-coal” was published in 1643, by which time coal use was well established. The later dialogue consolidated the worries, palpable a few decades earlier, about pollution and taint, as well as fears of fuel running out: Charcoal argued that, “were Sea-coales whole lineage burnt out”, his [Charcoal’s] “cousin Billet”, “brother Faggot”, and he “could supply the defects of the City, farre more sweetly and cleanly than this vaporous sooty-fac’d Sea-coal can doe possibly”. Sea-coal replied, swiftly appropriating the fear of fuel depletion and rhetoric of usefulness and wealth:

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Trading in dearth thou that art burned out like a farthing Candle immediately, one bushel of mee being worth a load of thee, or an hundred of your cousin Billets and Faggots that you so boast of; what are they but meere flashes, quickly in and quickly out, whilest I by burning, cake, and grow more usefull, in my very cinders, than either thou art at thy perfect estate … (Adamson, 1643: 7)

The irony lay in Sea-coal’s attempt to articulate its economic and ecological viability by emphasizing its own potential for recycling, while its opponents deployed the rhetoric of wholesomeness and beauty. The latter was a symptom of the anxiety that coal use could disrupt the healthful economy practised in households. Such worries stimulated efforts to justify coal use in aesthetic terms, exemplified in Platt’s earlier treatise. If piled in a certain way, his briquettes produced a “strong and lasting” fire that did not require stirring and was aesthetically appealing (Cole-balles B4r–C1r).9 The “beautie” and symmetry of coal-ball fires were in themselves valuable: their forme and shape … doth far surpasse all other fiers whatsoeuer; whose bals being round and all of one equall bignes, when they are all truely placed together, they do much resemble the piles of shot as they ly in a most beautiful manner within the tower of London. (C1r) The analogy evoked Platt’s distinctive blend of aesthetics and practical economy, continued in his instructions on lighting fires. He emphasized both efficiency and artistry of arrangement: bricks were laid an inch apart and “edgewise” to protect the hearth, and “to draw wind to the bals, to make them burn the better”. Coalballs were arranged in a semicircle, with alternating rows of “faucon or saker shot” built up to the preferred “hight and compas”. Short pieces of faggot stick and charcoal were placed in the middle and the fire kindled at this point. To save coal, Platt suggested giving the fire an artificial core of stone, brick, or iron (C2r–v). The title page illustrated this arrangement, accentuating the perfect symmetry (and economy) of the fire, so that the presentation of the printed work was designed to appeal aesthetically as well as practically. Contemporary attitudes towards the growing use of fuels such as coal could be ambivalent. It was embraced as a necessity and a means of escape from the “timber famine”. Wood supplies were regarded as an energy source to be judiciously used in households or trades like brewing, where coal use marred taste. At the same time, coal itself was not perceived to be in infinite supply. The experience with wood generated a wider fear surrounding fuel supply. People experimented with fuel sources to address the scarcity of coal and employ no more than was sufficient. The principle of sufficiency, embedded in dearth-time practices and perceptions, was difficult to eschew. In the final section of his treatise, Platt offered alternative methods (not practised outside England, he claimed) of making fires when coal was scarce. These included

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mixing “small coal” or “thorn coal” and earth with sea coal to form balls using loam water. It would not make a bright fire, he warned, but would suffice during shortages. He recommended recycling the remnants from an old fire with new coals, and suggested mixing sawdust with sea coal to make “a verie good and sweet fire”. Substitute fires employed methods similar to means of adulteration used by corrupt colliers, thus complicating the moral impetus behind the initiative. Platt complained, “Many haue thought my fire to consist of seacole and Cowdunge”, adding that although he had not suggested any such thing, he felt mixing cowdung might make “a sweete and pleasing fire” and did not “vtterly dislike this mixture”. The speculations carefully evaluated contemporary means of mixing fuelling materials, and ascribed value to appropriate substitutes. The problem with the cowdung mixture, said Platt, was that the fire did not last: the “matter” of dung was not “substantial enough to match with a seacole”. The point was still being made in the 1643 dialogue discussed above. Furthermore, there was the perennial problem with substitutes across different fields of experimentation: they could be applied elsewhere. Dung was widely used to enrich grounds, and could “hardly be spared in some places to be consumed into firebals”, where its use would merely cause a shortage in another sector of the economy. It was also rumoured that Platt’s fire contained chopped straw – a “conceit”, he joked, not “worth a straw”, as stubble and straw, though easily ignited, were as quickly consumed. Tanners’ bark could prove a possible substitute, but this too was in short supply since it was used in another trade. Turf could possibly be charred and incorporated with coal to sweeten it, but Platt had not tried this method yet; nor had he yet determined what “[tanners’] oozes will do either for the multiplying or binding of our colebals” (C1r–C2r). Besides evaluating advantages and properties of fuel substitutes, concerns about purchasing materials led to discussions of broader environmental concerns. The main point of debate was long-term implications of substitution. For example, thorn coal was bought cheap in summer at 3½ pence per bushel, “farre vnder the price of seacole”, while the addition of loam gave it bulk. If, through wide application of this practice, charcoal prices increased, the demand might be met by planting “smal twigs of willow, sallow, alder and such other speedy growing plants, in al such places as may best bee spared and are fittest to increase them” (C1v). The willow, Platt explained, was a tree “whereof one plant in seuen yeares commonly bringeth forth seuen plants, besides other boughs and spray, that may be conuerted into faggots, charcole, and small-cole”. This kind of husbandry perhaps worked best on “vnprofitable and surrounded groundes, which may best endure a dead rent for seuen yeares”. Such speculations strengthened the awareness that one must return to the natural world what one took out of it. It was recognized that this equation was not a simple one. Debates on appropriate use of “unprofitable” grounds illustrated ecological complications vividly for someone like Platt. One of his speculations centred on the “ouerflowed fennes of Lincolneshire”, where “Captain Louel by his skilful and industrious labours” had “newlie won

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33000 acres” (C3r). From 1596 onwards, Thomas Lovell had been promoting land reclamation schemes in fens around Peterborough, Ely, and parts of Lincolnshire, patronized by the Cecils (Trim, 2004; cf. Thirsk, 2004; Harris, 1953; Korthals-Altes, 1925). Platt followed these “ingenious” promotional schemes with interest and queried whether willow woods could be grown in the marshes and ditches of Rumney, and if “all the riuers, brookes, ditches, pooles, and marsh grounds of England besides” should be planted with willows, sallows, and other trees. There might then be “in a few yeares space” enough wood supply to counter previous “woodfals”, bringing down the price of billet, charcoal, and small coal (C3r). The rhetoric of ingenuity, as Platt knew, was by no means straightforward; his early speculations registered uncertainties surrounding schemes of environmental transformation which took full shape 50 years later, when land drainage was aggressively claimed as being “an unquestionable good” and allied to nationalist production of encyclopaedic knowledge (Preston, 2013). But the awareness of economic and environmental interrelations makes Platt’s formative moment of environmental debate intriguing. “Usury”, he commented, may have been a “dangerous trade”, condemned by God and his ministers; but was there a “natural kind of usurie” in the interdependent workings of the environment, which could be justifiably used for national benefit? (Cole-balles B3r, C3r). The dearth scientist’s task was to manage “natural usury” in its complex and variable forms, and, as a result, Platt’s treatise on coal not only addressed wider issues about provisioning of fuel in general, but broadened to topics like the breaches at Erith, wooden vessels, malt kilns, chaffing dishes, musket shots, card games, leather work, engraving, and perfumery. His typically smooth transition, at the end of Cole-balles, signalled his constant plying of an eclectic range of professions: “And thus much as a cole-maker: I will now alter my trade, and play the Cooper another while” (C3v). Saving fuel If speculations about fuel consumption generated debates on wider environmental concerns such as the benefits of wasteland, they also led to re-evaluations of modes of fuel consumption in households and trades. Substantial quantities of fuel were consumed in starch-making, sugar refining, baking, firing pottery, tiles, and bricks, malting grain and hops, boiling soap, salt making, saltpetre works, glassworks, dyeing, and metal works, all of which were subjects of Platt’s experiments. There were complaints about wood consumption in brewing, petreworks, salt refining, quicklime production, glazing, and smelting (Nef, 1932: I.190–201; Hartshorne, 1897: 426–31; SPD, James I, 162.63; Lansdowne MS.56.36; Norden, 1607: 214; Kemp, 1887: 5; Collingwood, 1912: 13–14, 93). A Worcestershire inhabitant, in the 1590s, protested that when trees in local woods were used up by glasshouses, these establishments simply moved on to a different wood “with small charge” (VCH, Warwickshire: II.248–49). Nef estimated that, in 1578, the total consumption of wood for brewing in

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London alone was 20,000 wagon-loads, while two loads were enough to consume the trunk and branches of a large tree (I.192–93). The problem was compounded by the growth of the wool industry and by increasing demands for corn, as both diminished the space available for planting trees. Wood was a crucial raw material for many enterprises: charcoal was mixed with saltpetre to prepare gunpowder, sap from barks was indispensable for the making of pitch and tar. Wood ashes produced potash, essential for producing soap, glass, and saltpetre (Nef, I.165–261). This complex web of connections intrigued Platt and generated worries among authorities. Small demands on wood supplies collectively comprised a major problem, and in 1593, Parliament passed an act requiring beer exporters to return their barrels or bring back an equivalent quantity of clapboard fit to make casks (APC 35 Eliz.c.11). Ad hoc legislative measures may have helped, but the real problem, of which governments and traders were conscious, was to develop policies to collectively address the fuel crisis, keeping the complex interrelations of resource utilization in view. On an individual level, Platt attempted to address this by experimenting with modes of fuel consumption accessible to himself, his trade networks, and households. His writings attempted to balance coal-centred and wood-centred technologies in trades. In some, such as salt making, production of alum and copperas, saltpetre and gunpowder, soap boiling, and waxwork, the transition from wood to coal involved no major technical problems. In other trades, like dyeing, brewing, and baking, as well as domestic use, it was more complicated. Platt’s experiments in these fields are an index of these changing technologies and the environmental concerns behind their development. Jewell House included fuel-saving devices he designed. Some were for domestic use, and related to household economy. To keep food warm at the table, he recommended a “chaffing dish” containing a hot iron, another being kept in reserve “to heat as the first cooleth”. Preserving heat efficiently was also about managing time. Variations of this method were employed to heat beds with “warming pins”: iron rods placed in cases, further insulated in linen bags, and used “to heate beddes with, and to cast one into a kindly sweat”. Occasionally, the pins were placed in wooden boxes lined with metal, or iron chests, which people used to keep their feet warm when they wrote or studied in cold weather. The king of Portugal, said Platt, had a special pair of wooden soles designed that could be warmed on hot iron and fitted into his shoes (19–20). To efficiently consume energy, measures of domestic efficiency in one area – in this case cooking – were extended to other domestic issues. As a result, impacts of fuel-saving measures were often direct, intimate, and home-bred. A frequent site of economy was the household oven: fires tended to burn clear at the mouth of the oven, and remained “black & deadish” at the farther end where it was choked by the smoke. With minor modifications to create a passage for the smoke, Platt recommended, the oven could be heated more evenly (24). Household devices were scrutinized with remarkable precision for their energy efficiency, and new devices with more efficient consumption methods were invented on the go. “To rost meate more speedily,

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and with lesse fire then we now do in our common maner”, Platt suggested making a concave wooden roasting box, lined with cylindrical iron plates. The outer lining “covered” the meat, remaining open on the firing side. Joints of meat were placed on the plates and roasted simultaneously as the cylinders rotated. The “reflexion of the heat that is gathered within the boxe will make great expedition”, he explained. News about the latest energy efficient options travelled fast in this world. This device, he had heard, was constructed in clay by a foreign potter, but had several disadvantages that Platt’s engineering corrected: “his deuice wanted a couer, it was exceeding heauie, very apt to bee broken, and not so strong in reflexion as this metalline deuice, especiallie if it be kept cleane and bright”. Another less elaborate mechanism was a five-pronged roasting spit, with a single handle for rotating it. This was borrowed from Bartolomeo Scappi, and Platt’s text carried an illustration of it (19–22). Some of his gadgets had multiple functions, serving both the householder and the professional workman, illustrating again overlapping concerns and knowledge exchange between households and workshops. An intriguing copper vessel, with a round bowl soldered to an elbow-shaped pipe, which narrowed progressively, was illustrated in Jewell House. (The vessel could also be made out of silver in the size of a “little round ball”, filled with rose water, and used to perfume the room: “by this meanes a small quantitie of sweet water will be a long time in breathing out”.) Platt asserted that the vessel, heated and then dipped in cold water, would “sucke some of the water vnto it”. If it was halffilled with water and set on a coal fire with the mouth of the pipe directed towards a large furnace, the device would act as “bellows”, making the main fire burn stronger. Platt had apparently become aware of the power of an artificially induced jet of steam: “I make no question, but that it is possible with a verie small helpe to melt down either gold or siluer with these bellows, and that the same may be made so large as that they wil blow one whole houre together, without anie intermission” (25). Ordinary household inventions could impact on more widespread fuel consumption in trade. The same means of saving fuel could be scaled up or down, adapted to suit the needs of a goldsmith’s furnace or the ladies’ boudoir. In his own brewing trade, Platt ensured malt kilns, fired by sea coal, were constructed to save fuel. Brewers, who consumed large amounts of fuel, commonly complained that coal fires affected the taste of the brew. Platt’s malt kilns addressed both problems: it consisted of a platform, constructed over an iron grate on which coals were laid, made of “sheet lead thinlie driuen” upon which grain was spread. Four vents were made on the sheet to “draw vp the heate and steame of the fire, as also to conuey the smoake by smal leaden pipes into some woodden trunke or tunnel of brick or plaister”. If the lead grew too hot, the fire was lessened to a “true degree”, or a haircloth spread on the platform. This gave the brewer greater control over the fire, avoiding the common danger of “hastie malting”. Platt added that the kiln could be heated by steam “issuing out of a great copper vessell being placed ouer the fire”, thus providing (even with coal fires) a more “pleasant” malting, and

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saving labour as the method did not require constant attendance (Famine preface). He planned to experiment further with the “fire of beane stalks”, which, he had heard, would “defraye his owne charge”, its ashes being worth more than the fuel itself. But he had yet to determine what trades this fire was best suited for: “whether they serue best for the making of glass, sope, or salte Peter, I cannot determine”. As Platt’s inventions were sold from his shop, experiments with fuel consumption brought him into contact with an array of contemporary trades and professions. A Dutch “Ioiner” provided the tinder receipt. An Irish gentleman “being a great practiser in artificiall conclusions” showed how to stop chimneys from smoking (JH 72; MS.2189, f.18). Platt thus augmented his knowledge of trades, but his own experiments did not simply foreground technological needs or modes of profit. The subject of investigation was the “fire”, or fuel consumption, itself. This created an ethical focus on energy efficiency, applied to Platt’s evaluation of trades, creating, in turn, an ethical tension and anxiety around the notion of “profit”. Platt’s experiments with salt making and saltpetre were prominent sites of anxiousness. By the 1590s, both trades had serious economic and political connotations. Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Common Weal (1549) mentioned edible salt as an essential commodity imported by England. Smith argued that insufficient quantities were being produced at home, and urged, in clear economic terms, the necessity of remedying the deficit. Expenditure on imported salt was high and, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, its price continued to rise.10 From 1563, Cecil encouraged home production, proposing that German manufacturer Jasper Seler should make white salt in England, helped by local authorities, for a period of 20 years. In 1565, Seler, assisted by Frances Berty and Thomas Baroncelli, set up pans and instruments round Dover. They were granted permission to make bay salt (sea salt by natural evaporation11) instead of white, as the former required less fuel and cost a third of white, but the project did not succeed owing to practical difficulties with climate, fuel shortage, and Berty’s inability to obtain technological information from the Netherlands refining industry, which had begun experiments with producing salt from sea water. Another proposal, in the 1570s, by William Herle on behalf of Francis Franckard, also fell through after much negotiation (Hughes, 1925: 337–43, 347–48; Thirsk, 1978: 6, 14, 55; Hulme, 1896: 148; SPD Eliz.40.11, 73.12, 13, 16, 21, 22). Edward Hughes argued that the failure of such contracts, combined with high prices owing to problems on the continent, offered unique opportunities for independent local production, especially around the Tyne and the Forth, and on the Yarmouth coast. Coal was crucial to these local ventures, which therefore flourished in coal-mining districts. By 1605, the annual consumption of “pan coal” in the salt works in Durham and Northumberland had reached 50,000 tons (Hughes, 1925: 349; SPD Eliz.146.39; Nef, 1932: I.207; Brand, 1789: II.22). The procedure entailed boiling a pan of salt water at high heat for 3½ days. About 6 tons of coal was consumed to make a ton of salt. As water from brine springs was more saliferous, some inland works consumed less: Cheshire “wiches”

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required less than a ton of coal, and Droitwich (Worcestershire), having weaker brine, needed at least 2 tons (HMC, Report on MSS Duke of Portland 29; Nef, 1932: I.207). While Platt worked within this context of profiteering, monopolies, and foreign competition, his experiments consistently re-oriented manufacturing processes to reduce energy consumption. His manuscripts provided meticulous instructions for appropriate furnaces, pans, and tubs, and he prioritized procedures that took less time and yielded recyclable by-products (MS.2189, ff.114–15). His preferred procedure was quicker than other contemporary methods: loam was stirred for 24 hours in carefully constructed vessels of sea water, whose drainage holes were then unplugged to draw water from the uppermost faucets, which (and “so much as you find to haue no saltines at the other holes”) was thrown away. At second and third drawings from the “nether Tampions”, the water turned “brackish”. The faucets nearest the settled loam yielded saltiest water, which consumed less fuel when boiled dry. Loam expedited salt extraction because it “serveth to attract the saltnes of the water downward 5 or 6 times”, explained Platt. When it was “glutted” with salt, fresh loam was added; if the extracted salt proved “dampish”, “calcined” salt was mixed “as a ferment to harden the rest” (MS.2212, no.54). Platt’s associate Helmond showed that the wind’s direction affected the fuel efficiency of boiling. Platt agreed, and added a note that “spent” loam was a useful by-product, used to make bricks that would endure all weather, “by reason of its glassy nature” (MS.2189, f.115). Such experiments invite us to revise our perceptions of seemingly trivial details. Unlike, for example, Smith whose Discourse of the Common Weal discussed trades in wider contexts of international competition, emphasizing production on a national scale, Platt drew attention to the efficacy of measures taken on a small, individual scale. The householder could produce edible salt from ashes of burnt vegetables (MS.2212, no.69). Small-scale measures for managing resources were particularly effective in times of dearth. In conditions of extreme want, “euery poore man dwelling by the seaside” could try “in whott sonny dayes” to make a sufficient store of salt for his individual consumption by “filling basons, drippinge pans or any other emptie and shallows vessells wth sea water”, and setting them in the sun, in hot sand, and in “high places”. If, for Cecil and others, encouraging home production of an essential commodity like salt meant granting patents and monopolies, and importing (sometimes by dubious methods) technological innovations, for Platt and other mundane practitioners, remedies lay in the utilization of immediate local circumstances and resources. For this purpose, detailed local knowledge mattered. Platt’s notes contained a list of economic advantages and pointers concerning prices, imports, and profitable uses of English salt pits (MS.2212, f.163). Salt-panners’ “dunghills” in Newcastle, he commented, “wold enrich much grownd”; “waste” brine could be used as fertilizer, or recycled by clarifying and mixing more bay salt. As bay salt was imported at 12 or 14 pence a bushel (water measure) by retailers, who sold it at 18 pence a bushel (land measure),12

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it would be a “profitable course” in London to have a salt house near the river (thereby saving land transport costs) and procure the best Lisbon salt to make “salt vpon salt”. This could be retailed “at the worckhowse”, presumably, his shop. One of his notes contained instructions to make “a delicate trencher salte”, probably a useful addition to his wares (MS.2189, ff.114–15). As he astutely pointed out, retailers often gained more than refiners and “so one man might purse vpp two mens gaynes”. Thus, “profit”, a familiar term in the rhetoric of national gain, was subtly redefined and re-evaluated in localized terms in Platt’s discourse of pragmatic, mundane experimentation. Through the lens of local management, broader national and political measures were reassessed. This is seen in Platt’s discussion of another topical concern, the condition of English salt pits, which had gone out of use for financial and political reasons. He queried what could be done with “my L Dudley’s brine pitt in Staffordsheire for in october 99 ther was no vse of it” (MS.2189, f.163). It was not the potential of the pits themselves that was in question (“euery salt well doth yeald more stoare of brine then the Owner is able to make vp or vent in salt”) but their under-utilization that had prompted Platt to have “thought vppon some other good vses therof”. First, natural brine would “serve very sufficiently to kepe and season our beoff being brought to the trew saltnes or strength of our vsuall brine”. Why waste time and resources to “buy salt and then dissolue it againe … when wee may haue naturall brine”? Second, this brine diluted with fresh water served “to steipe such Corne as you will sow in a barrain ground”. Third, it could be used to water compost heaps. Finally, seafarers’ provisions could be salted with the brine (MS.2189, f.115). It was a neglect of economy to let natural brine remain unutilized when it could be applied to domestic use or husbandry. These perceptions comprised a critique of the short-sightedness of national policy with regard to a particular trade. Platt’s notes and queries deliberately uncovered the relationship of the trade with issues like food preservation, grain cultivation, and manure, which were major socio-economic concerns, and the notes revealed complex networks of local economy less visible to makers of trade-related policy. Similarly, Platt’s focus on the saltpetre trade illustrated particular intricacies of local knowledge and economy in times of dearth. Given the primary function of saltpetre as the crucial ingredient of gunpowder, these experiments were the site of ethical tensions. On the one hand, saltpetre extraction allowed Platt to explore and justify ecologically efficient procedures, and reinforce the importance of local knowledge and concerns; on the other hand, these investigations informed his experiments relating to warfare, which reinforced emerging notions of national supremacy, competition, and defence. It was more difficult, in this trading context, to ethically re-orient the meaning of “profit” than it may have been in the case of salt manufacture. Part of the reason for Platt’s interest in saltpetre was its ambiguous status and meanings in his society. As a commodity, saltpetre, or potassium nitrate, the naturally occurring mineral source of nitrogen, was crucial. As its sources were

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manifold, it provided apt opportunities for a scientific practitioner like Platt to investigate local ecologies. Saltpetre could be found wherever the basic conditions necessary for its formation were fulfilled: the presence of decaying organic matter, an alkaline or earthy base (such as potash or lime), sufficient moisture, exposure to oxygen, and shelter from sun and rain (Chaloner, 1584; Clarke, 1670; Leconte, 1862). In narrow, dirty streets and lanes of crowded towns, decomposing organic matter in the soil was gradually nitrified, oozed through and dried on walls and floors of cellars “as a whitish crust, easily detectable by the taste”. The same was true of undisturbed soil in caves, cellars, beneath old stables, sheep and cattle pens, or dunghills (Leconte, 1862: 5).13 Two main issues affected early modern understandings of the saltpetre trade: excavation and fuel consumption. In 1589, its annual output was relatively low, estimated at 300 tons, because saltpetre manufacture, even until the late seventeenth century, relied on excavation from natural deposits, rather than artificially prepared nitre-beds (Houghton, 1727–28: II.115; HMC, Report on Lord Middleton MSS: 163–64; Nef, 1932: I.210–11). Processes of extraction outlined by William Clarke (1670) said nothing about the creation of nitre-beds, a technique described by Joseph Leconte (1862: 6–11).14 Whether manufacture relied on excavation or artificial nitre-beds, extraction processes consumed large quantities of fuel. According to John Houghton’s early eighteenth-century account, the first boiling lasted 60 hours, followed by two subsequent ones after adding wood ashes. Using coal as fuel was contemplated in 1589, when issues were raised about the low output of saltpetre. Thus, in Platt’s experiments, problems of reliance on excavation and fuel consumption became closely allied. He knew that saltpetre could be generated artificially, not just excavated, and conducted speculative experiments, consistently emphasizing localized elements of production processes, fuel and labour conservation, and recycling waste materials and energy. Means of augmenting saltpetre supplies occupied him for some time. He noted reminders to check the viability of making saltpetre using water drained from copper colour and wasted soap ashes, wondered whether salt of lime dissolved in urine would turn into saltpetre, whether covering “laystalls” with a mix of earth and lime would “speed” its generation, and if the process of refining it could be aided by mixing soap ash and egg whites (MS.2197, f.41; MS.2244, ff.37, 71; MS.2247, f.2; MS.2216, f.24). His queries included speculations about additives, like common salt, to speed up boiling to ensure “so much fier and labor wold bee saued”. Platt’s use of “laystalls” or refuse and dung heaps to generate saltpetre was close to Leconte’s mid-nineteenth-century technology of nitre-beds. His treatise on soil shows his knowledge of its chemical transmutation, which he applied while investigating saltpetre manufacture and effects of substances like lime, urine, and ashes. With an eye on constructive employment of waste matter, he suggested that if every house in London was compelled to save its urine, this could be collected and mixed with earth and lime to “engender” saltpetre in large quantities. He proposed to lay up, in a “large barn”, “an artificiall heape of earth to engender peter” and emphasized the significance of the type of waste

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matter chosen for the purpose: “ordure of man” mixed “wth such earth as is fit to yeald peter” served well, as did sheep, goat, and horse dung. Addition of lime calcined the dung and expedited the process. Once a store of “rich earth” (nitrified soil) was thus prepared, a furnace was erected according to the volume of soil, ensuring no fuel was wasted. During leaching, the “first third part” of the liquor, “both of great strength and deepe in collor”, was boiled separately, while the remaining (“cleerer and weaker”) two-thirds were infused upon fresh earth. Of this newly infused liquor, Platt drew as much as was “equall in tast, strength and collor wth the first”, recycling the rest by further infusion of soil or waste. Platt claimed he could make as much saltpetre as commonly produced in 60-gallon vessels, using a kettle of 40 gallons. His method saved two-thirds of the cost of fire, labour, and carriage. Its success hinged on infusion procedures, emphasized alongside artificial creation of nitre-beds. Platt displayed an advanced understanding of saltpetre manufacturing technology. His meticulous leaching methods added to the labour cost, but this would be “doble requighted in the ende”, taking into account the increase in technological efficiency (MS.2245, ff.74v–75r). At pragmatic moments like this, the evaluation of technological efficiency in terms of energy efficiency drove discussions of profit and use. The cost, quality, effects, and uses of saltpetre interested Platt, as well as manufacturing methods. He complained that although it was a good fertilizer, there was not enough to spare for this purpose. In a list titled “Plattes Desires in probable Secretes”, he included “To make peter shoot without ashes”, “To make a more excellent gonpowder”, and “A more speedie way of making gonpowder” (MS.2189, f.24). A manuscript plan for a broadside on this subject discussed advantages of “conceipts in peterworks” in a style similar to the broadsides of 1593 and 1603. Identifying fuel charges as the main cost of production (not “lesse then fyve Thowsand powndes yearely through this Realme”), Platt claimed he would “vndertake to deducte at the least 2500li yeerly and yet to performe worke to purposes as exquisite and beneficiall as it is at this present performed with a dooble charge of Fier”. The “new Inuention” would require no modification of existing implements, leading to “a greate sauinge both in all the Furnaces, Ketles, and cariages at this day in vse, and peradventure in mens wages”. Time would be saved, making “weekly asmuch peter this way as our peter men doe now make in one fortnight yf not in 3 wekes”. It would reduce prices, as “the Maister of the worke in respecte of this greate and yeerely savinge” would “afford his peter at a lower rate for the Queenes service vz. deductinge 2500li yeerely owte of that proportion of peeter or powder wherwth the Queenes Storehowses are yeerely furnished”. The promotion of ecologically efficient procedures had to be justified, in Platt’s climate, using the rhetoric of profit and economic arguments. Conducting experiments to improve energy efficiency was in itself expensive, rather than profitable, for individual scientific practitioners or traders. No state policies covered these expenses, so Platt offered to perform a public trial of his method at his own cost, and asked to “haue some reasonable yeerely pension conferred vppon

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him”. It was not his desire “to be chargeable vnto her hignes” but to receive part of the profits which, without his discovery, were “not likely in any shorte tyme to be saued or gayned”. He offered to “bring forth” inventions of further profit “in respecte of these continuall warres”. The country, he argued, needed such remedies, since, in recent years, “diverse honorable enter prises … vndertaken for the publique and generall seruice of this Realme” had been overthrown (MS.2172, f.15). Whether this drafted proposal was printed or reached royal ears is unknown, but it reveals the real tensions underpinning early modern experiments for improving ecological efficiency of trades. Experiments, local practices, and networks driven by ecological concerns were complicated by the way political connotations and national concerns filtered into evaluations of experimental practices, and problematized their ethical measures. While experimental orientations of saltpetre excavation and manufacture emphasized the value of local ecologies, practical uses of saltpetre, especially in warfare, powerfully fortified both the rhetoric and implementation of national ambition and power. This ambivalence was remarkably vivid in the way saltpetre experiments modulated into experiments with weapons and combustion. Saltpetre was a necessary ingredient in making gunpowder, but the processes of producing the latter relied on the continuation of principles of domestic economy where particular attention was paid to saving time, employing additives, and recycling materials. To make gunpowder “by hand in a shorter time than it is vsually made”, Platt advised grinding the ingredients (saltpetre, charcoal, and sulphur15), and moistening the mixture occasionally with “apt liquor”, like “spirit of peter” (MS.2245, f.76; cf. MS.2189, ff.24, 32, 146). He experimented with substitutes, familiar in domestic or local contexts: “the finest and most combustible sawdust” (“qre of tuchwood, straw, chaff gom, mach well dried, redd sannders, lavander & c. of powdred Corcke, tow, hempe”) “consumed wth pottash lee and then dried”, the “powder of an old post”, cows’ hairs, tobacco, henbane, and rosemary leaves (MS.2244, f.55v). Makeshift measures were devised to tackle the problem of drying gunpowder on a small scale, in spaces that were extensions of a workshop or household. In a published receipt, Platt complained “retchlesse” drying of gunpowder in stoves had caused “much mischiefe & spoile”. For the “preuention of all daungers to come” he devised a vessel with two bases and a pipe running between them, conveying scalding water heated (by extension of the pipe) in a separate room. If the water cooled, it was let out through a stopcock on one end, and more hot water let in through another valve. (To dry on a smaller and cheaper scale, one poured in hot water through a funnel.) The gunpowder, laid on the upper base of the vessel, thus remained a safe distance from the fire. When drying it in a hurry, Platt used a “fireshouel” tested by laying a piece of paper on it (JH 52). Experiment and publication were linked to trade. Gunpowder, and related items, became wares for Platt’s shop. He sold vessels “to drie gonpowder in” and “wheels to drie gunpowder wthout danger of fier” priced at 10 shillings (MS.2197, ff.14–15). Trade created impetus for further experiments to improve

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technical knowledge of pistols, bullets, swords, poisons, bombs, and armour. Platt placed his notes on “muskett shotts” under the title “Means for gayning money” (MS.2212, no.34; MS.2172, f.5). His “oyle for Armors” cost 2 shillings and sold well (MS.2197, ff.14–15; MS.2244, f.29). There was self-conscious discomfort in the receipts about contradictions of these practices. Threats of war in Elizabeth’s reign undoubtedly intensified contemporary perceptions of crisis and dearth. For Platt, wars were an aspect of dearth, creating demands that had to be supplied with minimal drain on resources. His writings denounced the crisis, addressed its paradoxes, while noting opportunities for trade and ingenuity. These contradictions became most evident in the linked deployment of invasion fears and secrecy. In an “abstract of secretes”, Platt stated that his oil for armours would prevent artillery and armour from rusting for 7 years – a “fit secret for all her Maiesties Armories”. A drafted advertisement (describing advantages of the oil, but not its making) stated this was “a most royall trew secrete, and yet I see not how to make any proffitt thereof because before I shall haue solde much of the oyle, it will be discouered” (MS.2197, f.18). With a similar blend of protectiveness about trade secrets and national wartime technology, he advertised a “secret weapon”: “A Philosophicall and martiall inuention not bee disclosed much better to be practized, but vppon a Spanish Inuasion” when ordinary weapons of war failed. “This secret”, said Platt, “the Author will not willingly discover but vppon the commandment of his Souereigne” (MS.2197, no.15). Invasion fears appeared frequently in his warfare receipts, demonstrating designs for a gun (learnt from “an English gentleman”) to “deliuer a bullet point blank at eight score”, a “wooden trunk or Canon to deliuer wildfier”, a canon ball able to “fly in the Aer” long distances and destroy ships or houses, and bullets cheaply cast from iron filings, nails, and other scraps (JH 23, 80; MS.2197, ff.9–11). Platt’s shop sold “piercing bulletts for the warr”, and his network of associates divulged strategies to save bullets: “Sr Romero” showed him how an army on foot could repulse 1000 horsemen with a mere 500 shots (MS.2172, f.5; MS.2197, no.12, ff. 14–15; MS.2216, f.27). The claimed efficacy of the receipts grew more exaggerated as the anxiety itself became more palpable. A “whole army of Turks or Saracens” could be killed by a “smoking and poisoning ball” that incorporated the powder of “Ars. Ant. Sul.” (probably arsenic, antimony, and sulphur) into gunpowder. But the secrets were well guarded – secrecy was proportionate to anxiety – often describing them in abbreviations or codes. “A perfume for the Spaniardes, iff they offer to make an inuasion” was made as follows: “Put a T into a.D. and lay vnder him sufficient stoare of S, and.S.P., labor well vppon the.D. for 2 howres”. The result was noxious pellets that would apparently put the Spanish invaders out of action (MS.2189, ff.32, 130–31, 141–42; MS.2216, ff.81r, 123). One effect of this fusion of economy, secrecy, profit, and anxiety was the blurring of boundaries between ethical concerns and expediency in resource management. The circumstances were complicated further by combining utility with aesthetic pleasure and playfulness. Inventions arising from experiments

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with combustion techniques, such as “A fiery composition kindled by the Sun beames only”, torches that remained lit in windy weather, ropes and matches kindled without smoke or smell, means of making a “most villanous offensiue smoke”, and of setting “the whole aer on fier wthin any priuate Roome” leaving a foul smell behind, were not always patently “useful” or the outcome of Platt’s explicit dearth-driven agenda. Some combustion experiments resulted in the invention of particular types of fireworks: “An extreme burning water, wherof aer in the night time will seme full of sparkes”, “To make the aer seme full of flying serpents”, or a “grenish fier first deuised by Callimachus” that could be lit underwater (MS.2197, ff.9–11). These kinds of experiments were aesthetically driven and capable of producing both profit and pleasure, despite the fact that sources of knowledge on which they relied were stimulated by grim anxieties about dearth, war, and the protection of national boundaries. Following the concerns of a widely networked trader like Platt reveals how energy was consumed through trade, and the practices, perceptions, and assumptions about its consumption. This gives us access to complex and malleable cultural understandings of using natural resources, and shows how these shaped environmental awareness in a particular context of dearth. Traders like Platt negotiated multiple, constantly shifting, often contradictory, perceptions of environmental concerns. They were accustomed to coping with the variety and complexity of moral and pragmatic conditions governing energy consumption. Shortage of fuel was evidently an overriding concern, cutting across different areas of experiment and practice, such as coal production and use, trades, retailing processes, and also, as the next section shows, the production of “luxuries” in a climate of dearth. There was an awareness of interrelations between these areas with regard to fuel use and the development of more efficient means of fuel consumption during production processes became the basis of “improvement”. The meaning of this term in relation to trade was thus not unambiguously profit-driven; it was equally driven by principles of dearth science. The dualism is partly explained by the fact that dual scarcities of food and fuel were connected in early modern perceptions of environmental crisis. Strategic and structural similarities of coping with domestic, agricultural, and energy crises were visible, and comprehended, during the 1590s dearth, and reflected in common principles of recycling, waste-minimizing strategies, attention to substitutes, additives, and extenders, and in knowledge exchange across trading, domestic, and agricultural environments. Trading environments discussed here reveal close relationships between concerns about consumption of natural resources and everyday patterns of use. Platt and other traders were acutely in tune with details of use and the materiality of products. Their perceptions of “saving” natural resources were thus not construed in the abstract but part of daily practice and material engagement. This is apparent in each of the practices discussed: attention to coal quality, methods for making salt or extracting saltpetre, or extension of scarce natural resources to accommodate wartime concerns. The assumptions and effects of coping with scarcity in the context of trade significantly shaped attitudes towards labour and profit.

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Hands-on understanding of details and materiality of labour involved in a trade created environmental awareness, as well as an awareness of conflicts between economic and environmental gains. National and local anxieties began to form around negotiations of such conflicts; and this, in turn, powerfully demonstrated the contingency of products, experiments, and procedures. Things and their meanings were unfixed. Dearth-time industriousness among traders meant working daily with scrupulous awareness of this contingency at a material and organizational level, with consequences for their perceptions of luxury.

Luxuries and necessities The active principles of dearth science discussed so far, in linked areas of agriculture, household management, and trade, had critical consequences for perceptions of luxury and its relation to work. Dearth science showed that luxury was not the equivalent of wasting resources, and could no longer be seen in simple opposition to need, moral ideals, reason, and God. The “luxury” trades operating during dearth threw into heightened relief the existence of two categories of agents in these trades: those who wanted and consumed the product and those who laboured to make it. But more subtle issues were attached to this obvious fact and, through dearth, a shift in the meaning of luxury can be identified. If luxury was defined as non-need, this perception was problematic when someone’s “unnecessary desire” became not just a means of satisfying someone else’s need, but of resisting waste or reincorporating waste materials and redundant people into society. This considerably complicated inherited notions of luxury.16 In the Classical (Platonic) intellectual context, luxury was a base drive opposed to reason, and an enemy of the state. The Republic emphasized that “the true and healthy” State was transformed into one “at fever-heat” by “adding sofas, and tables … dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes … in every variety”. Going “beyond the necessaries … such as houses, and clothes, and shoes”, the luxury-driven State “set in motion” the arts of “painters” and the procurement of “gold and ivory and all sorts of materials”. This well-known formulation is relevant to dearth science because it proposed that luxury skewed notions of sufficiency: Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is no longer sufficient. Now will the city have to fill and swell with a multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want. (II.372c–373c) Luxury, here, was the desire for variety, fed by the arts, creating particular focus on materiality, and activating a market for a multitude of professions and trades “not required by any natural want”. Poetry and the arts existed to support these market operations and society grew into a medley of poets,

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players, dancers, contractors, women’s dressmakers, barbers, confectioners, and cooks. But Plato’s account admitted ambivalence by demonstrating the variability of need. There were societies where possession of “houses, clothes, and shoes” was highly contingent, where food itself was perceived as the only real necessity; or societies where “sofas and tables” were classified as necessities. As Socrates himself conceded, in the end, things that were not needed before in a particular society may be “needed now”. Both luxury and need were contingently defined, but this openness of debate in the Classical discourse changed with its assimilation into religious contexts. As Christianity absorbed the Classical attack on luxury, the idea was associated with original sin and disobedience to God. In this theological framework, dearth itself, as noted in chapter 2, was primarily caused by God’s desire to punish unnecessary excess. Thus, the polemical opposition between luxury and austerity was theologically hardened. The cure for luxury was not just regulation but obedience, and the critique of luxury consolidated hierarchy and authority in ways, ironically, invaluable to temporal powers. Throughout the early modern period, this ambivalence persisted. As John Sekora (1977) showed, many authors, including Spenser, Marlowe, Webster, Tourneur, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, linked luxury and lust.17 Spenser in particular equated “lustfull luxurie and thriftless waste”,18 while the Son in Milton’s Paradise Regained denounced the Romans, once virtuous, now grown “Luxurious by their wealth, and greedier still, / And from the daily Scene effeminate” (iv.137–42). The luxurious and the feminine became inextricably allied. Nevertheless, luxurious display helped to reinforce power and authority, and many studies have examined how luxury goods were coded to display power. Helen Jacobsen’s study of the material world of Stuart diplomacy freshly demonstrated the crucial importance of luxury consumption in this context. She argued that “consumption [of luxury goods] was not just a means of displaying power, it was power and was as integral to politics as spectacle and pageantry” (2012: 7). Interpretations of luxury in early modern culture attached structured meanings to the idea. Sociological studies categorizing luxury on the basis of attributes, such as restricted access or specialist knowledge, were used to fortify the assumption of a coherent set of cultural codes defining luxury at a given point of time (Appadurai, 1986: 3–63; cf. Elias, 1983; Burke, 1993: 148–61; Brewer and Bermingham, 1995; Douglas and Isherwood, 1996: xxi; Levy Peck, 2005). But there was a different kind of cultural coding that pushed against easy equations of luxury, power, and sin in the early modern period. Luxury was not inevitably opposed to thrift, as the selective quoting of Spenser might suggest. In the trades discussed below, luxury goods were associated with substitutability and a kind of refinement drawing upon constructive attitudes towards waste. Dearth taught that substitutes could be refined to imitate the original luxurious or expensive item. For example, if the economic climate did not permit the use of gold to make gold ink, one developed (as Platt did) means for making copper ink that looked like gold; or one turned to the production of ornaments from waste materials. Luxury was tied to thrift. Dearth also taught – in a

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rather vivid manner – that a necessity was in some sense a luxury; to the individual consuming bread made of throw-away vetches, wheat bread, or even the smell of it, could appear a luxurious indulgence. The category of luxury, as conditions of dearth made apparent, was as malleable as the category of waste. Limners and casters The malleability of, and overlap between, the categories of luxury and waste is especially visible in the artisanal practices of moulding and limning recorded in such detail in Platt’s manuscripts. Objects were moulded, for different purposes, from varied materials: metals, wax, breadcrumbs, flour, and even bacon fat. It was a pleasing and commendable practise, by this Art to mold of those excellent counterfeites, of carued or embossed faces, dogges, Lions, Borders, Armes, &c, from toombes, or out of noblemens galleries: as of pillers, balles, leaues, frutages, or out of noblemens galleries, therewith to garnish beds, tables, court-cupboords, the Iawmes and mantletrees of chimnies, and other stately furnitures of chambers or galleries. (JH 67) These elaborate decorations had a flourishing market, and all kinds of objects were employed as “patterns”, or templates. Impressions were taken of herbs, leaves, and flowers. Moulds of human hands and faces were made with glue. Some traders ruthlessly killed toads and frogs by drowning them in oil or pouring ardent spirits down their mouths, and used these as patterns. Others put flies, spiders, grasshoppers, and other insects into closed boxes “and let them die for lack of aire”, to mould them when the bodies stiffened (JH 49–68). Templates were available everywhere (and free of cost) to those who could be innovative. It was thus not out of character for a dearth scientist to engage in this trade, which was also a “means of gaining money”. Platt’s account of “The Arte of Molding and Casting” in Jewell House emphasized artisanal labour and technical expertise, with instructions on making different types of moulds – plaster, wax, glue – and methods of casting in them. Limning, or painting on casts, parchment, and cloth, constituted a separate art, though not unrelated to moulding and often practised in conjunction. Platt’s “Secretes in wrighting, paintinge, printinge, guildinge &c” show he dealt extensively in this trade, and compiled 280 receipts on the subject to sum up his practice.19 Like the published account of moulding, this collection, re-organized thematically, provides a picture of the materials, procedures, and colours used in the arts of limning, gilding, dyeing, and painting. Both sets of procedures reveal common characteristics: they were driven by intentions of improving the quality of the material product and concerns about saving fuel, substitution, recycling and re-use. The processes attended to

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precise artistry and waste resistance, so that aesthetic and pragmatic concerns worked in tandem. For example, the “loam [clay] coffin” (in which the mould itself would be cast) was shaped according to the “patterne” to be cast, avoiding waste of plaster. The template – a flower or branch – was fixed inside the coffin, without touching the base, attached by its stalk to a tapered piece of clay. Occasionally, the branch was set upright to ensure the leaves or petals would spread (JH 49–50). “Casting pap” was prepared with burnt plaster or alabaster crushed and laid in stone furnaces (sold in “Moor gate”) between layers of coal, so that it burnt with a single firing and saved coal. Some practitioners adopted the “troublesome” way of beating plaster in iron mortars before firing it in earthen pots, but Platt was anxious to save this investment of labour. The composition of the casting pap (3 parts of powdered plaster and alabaster and 1 part of the “fine poder of newe earthen pots”) affected the sharpness of the cast, which could be improved, Platt speculated, by mixing gypsum or “spawd” [spaad]. He had seen “oftentimes many good patternes of metal” cast clearly in spaad alone, and observed some practitioners trying to make the mould sharper by grinding the powder on marble after sifting it. The mixture was dissolved in sal ammoniac and water, tempered with aqua vitae or urine. If too stiff in consistency, it would weigh down the delicate template. When the mixture poured into the clay coffin had hardened, it was “nealed” or baked, and the progress was checked by peering through the hole (“gitte”) left at the point where the template had been attached to the clay. The branch, flower, or wax template in the mould burned or melted, and was cleaned out through the hole. The metal was then cast, and the mould, dipped in cold water, fell to pieces, revealing the branch of gold or silver patterned according to the template (JH 50–56). In times of dearth, these basic procedures were subject to considerable manipulation, which, though begun with the aim of economy, could lead to unexpected aesthetic innovations. Platt frequently recorded means of economy, such as firing many moulds at once by laying them in a chimney, so that domestic fires also served the purposes of trade. Alternative methods of moulding were devised, using cheaper substitutes like glue or wax, or making saveable moulds that did not need to be dissolved to extract the metal cast (JH 53–54). Delicate patterns were cast in glue, and by bending these moulds backwards, patterns were extracted without the mould losing its shape (JH 56–57). Not only were glue moulds saved and re-used, melted and re-moulded, but several templates could be hung upon a thread attached to the clay coffin, and cut out of the main mould without impairing the designs. The characteristic shrinking of glue moulds provided an aesthetic advantage: if the workmanship of the template was too “grose and wide asunder”, the contracted mould made it better defined, thus making the quality of the cast better than the original. The cast could be sharpened further, Platt suggested, by re-moulding in glue until the required fineness was achieved. Glue was used for “life casts” of human hands and faces. The subject was laid on his back with eyes covered, nose and ears stopped with wool, mouth closed, breathing through a quill.

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The clay coffin was built around the face (which some practitioners anointed with oil) and glue poured on. This was “an excellent deuise”, wrote Platt, “to haue the liuely counterfeit of the true fauour & countenance of euery man” (JH 57–58, 66). In his compiled list of patterns likely to sell, such portraits figured prominently and the clientele sounded impressive. Two notes read: “The pictures of her Maiestie, her Father Brother and sister and of such noble men as are likeliest to bee of good sale” and “my L. of Essexes picture and Sr Francis Drakes will sell well in England but better in Barbary, Turckie, Venice &c/” (MS.2197, f.17r–v). While practitioners kept a sharp eye on the selling point of the final product, the experimental culture of luxury trades was itself a dynamic one. Experiments with substances were frequent and diverse. Some craftsmen, noted Platt, moulded in Highgate sand, loam, or cuttle-bone, and “diuerse other substances”. Preparing lasting “powders” for the moulds was a problem, and artisans of Platt’s acquaintance experimented continuously with measures to prevent damp or burning of moulds, improve precision of metal ornaments, prevent waste of metal by leaking, find optimum temperatures for heating different metals, cast ornaments in cheaper metals such as tin and latten rather than gold and silver, or economize by creating moulds to cast hollow ornaments (JH 58–61, 63–64). Economy, experiment, and collaboration went hand in hand. Individual traders developed specific expertise; the moulding expert often carried prepared moulds to goldsmiths, who had suitable furnaces for colouring, toughening, and heating metal. Terms connoting economy and necessity came up repeatedly in descriptions of artisanal procedures and materials. Necessity dictated the choice of materials, methods, and equipment. This is evident in Platt’s meticulous descriptions of preparing colours, binding agents, tempers, paper, parchment, and applicators, making use of a remarkable range of substances from egg whites, isinglass, and shreds of glovers’ leather to vinegar and ox gall.20 His account of the limner’s or caster’s knowledge was consistently tied to labour and precisely defined the material practices of that labour, stressing that adaptability and innovation were necessities in themselves. A simple implement like the early modern “pencil” could become a site of innovation and experimental variety. These sharpened applicators, made of wooden sticks or plaster, were greased, wiped with woollen cloth, washed in size, and their tips touched with ox gall before they were able to carry colours. Drawing pencils were made by charring birch twigs in sealed crucibles, and quenching them in cold water to harden them. “A man in necessitie”, wrote Platt, could improvise by repeatedly burning the end of a rush in a candle and putting it out in the tallow. Swan feathers or goose quills served as “erasers” to brush off coal drawings (nos.132, 155, 198, 156), while more complex methods were adopted to erase ink. Cloth tied to a stick, moistened in aqua fortis, was touched to letters. Fresh cloth moistened in water was used to “take away the corroding nature of the aqua fortis”. The letters were “cleane gon”, but one could not write again in the blank space. “This secrete”, Platt noted, “serueth well to take owte written bookes notes

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owte of printed bookes to make them more salable” (no.200), suggesting there was a side-trade in cleaning up and re-selling “second-hand” books – another version of recycling. Obtaining “patterns” or designs relied on similar ingenious economy: “tracing paper”, made by rubbing both sides of a thin paper with “oil of spike”, and drying the excess with breadcrumbs, was placed on a pattern, and later washed clean of tracings and re-used. But there were further shortcuts: outlines of printed pictures were traced with coal, and wet paper pressed on it to take the impression; or the reverse side of a printed picture was blackened, before laying it right side up on clean paper, and tracing its lines with a bodkin (nos.278, 202, 252, 275). Designs were traced from cloth by “pouncing” (no.203); armour engravings were copied by covering them with black grease and taking an impression (no.205). By these varied means, Platt demonstrated how existing designs on diverse objects and surfaces could be reproduced and adapted. If this emphasis on economy, re-use, and substitution proved that the production of objects of beauty was a grim and grimy process, the point was underlined in presentational aspects of Platt’s own manuscript records. He was preoccupied with producing shades and textures of colours, occasionally writing with his invented colours in his notebook, or applying paint or ink on the page to test shades. On the title page of MS.2216, the phrase “In Vulcano written with a greenish gold ink, Veritas” was followed by Platt’s pattern which reappeared on a later folio containing the receipt for a “copper ink” with an inscription: “a pattron of this incke”. In another manuscript, the space underneath scribbled calculations was used to test colour samples in shades of light blue and green. The markings suggest efforts to mix different quantities of the two colours to produce a third shade (MS.2203, f.103v). These experiments were followed by a series of colour receipts on the next folio, and the words “ink” and “paint” were employed interchangeably. Platt aimed to record or invent shades and textures from natural ingredients and chemical compositions. The range of shades thus produced was as wide and varied as the material procedures and sources. His experimental accounts registered enjoyment of this variety and, simultaneously, presented a relentless drive towards economy and moderation. This contradiction, demonstrating that aesthetic appeal was underpinned by labour, is aptly illustrated in Platt’s case studies of making the colours black and gold. The manuscripts contain 25 receipts for making black inks, showing the versatility of methods and complexity of professional motives. Black was more subtly variegated, in terms of content, methods, shades, and opportunities for economy, than colour itself. It served many functions, from printers’ ink and tanners’ black to household use. There were fine distinctions in methods and qualities. Printer’s ink was made by tempering smoke of “rosen” with varnish; but tempered with water, this smoke made finer “velvet black”; and the same was achieved with burnt soot or calcined tartar, whose fumes, ground with oil and calcined copperas, made “an excellent inck to rule wth” (nos.1, 144, 122, 146). Similarly, blacking of tallow or wax candles was gathered on the base

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of a kettle of cold water. “Lamp black” was gathered in the same way, but the candle flame had the advantage of producing three sorts of blacking: from the tip of the flame playing upon the kettle, the middle part, and the base of the flame (nos.186, 157). The quality, shade, and texture of black offered infinite variety, as the terminology indicates: a “fine black” was produced from smiths’ coal, or burnt nutshells; a “sable” colour from small coals and lamp black ground together; the coals alone, finely ground, made a light colour good “to marble a black with”; lightened further with white maten, it made a “lawne colour”. Ivory burnt in charcoal fire also produced a “velvet black”; black lead dissolved in isinglass produced “russet” which, laid on parchment and polished with dog’s tooth, made paper appear like russet satin (nos.197, 260, 257, 265, 145). Concerns with preservation and cheap substitution, similar to those in the context of food, were also visible here. Powdered galls and gum water were added to black ink made from copperas, and the mixture stirred continuously to prevent spoiling (nos.6–9). Platt provided characteristic cheap alternatives: black was made from bombast, chaff, straw, and other inexpensive materials, burnt to cinder and tempered with gum. The waste from liquor prepared by silk dyers for Spanish black was added to small proportions of copperas, gall, and gum. This was the ink with which Platt himself wrote in his notebooks: “[this] I haue don wth very small charge and these lynes are writt therwth” (no.149). Quality and appearance were improved, making black ink glossy by adding sugar, or dry fast with white copperas. “Mr Butterfield of Cambridge” showed that mixing concentrated gall, copperas, and gum produced black liquor to increase the volume of superior black inks at less cost (no.125). Like other household and trading materials, the colour trade depended on additives, many of which overlapped with food or food waste. White wine diluted ink, and charred or soaked fruit improved its texture. Liquid obtained by soaking oak apples and the sawdust of green oak for 6 days was added to tanners’ ink used to blacken leather. Stones of peaches, apricots, and cherries were burnt and ground with the smoke of rosin, vitriol, fried gall, and gum Arabic, and mixed with black ink to darken it. The same effect was achieved by burning old parchment (nos.128, 263, 127). Since organic inks were prone to mould, the standish was washed once a week and the ink stirred every day. Platt characteristically devised a longer-lasting portable “instant ink” (similar in principle to his “instant soup”), made from powdered gum, gall, and copperas rolled into balls, which were scraped and mixed with water and wine to make ink when necessary (nos.193, 277). This case study and other colours described in Platt’s instructions indicate the array of shades and textures available to the limner, who could use “all” kinds of wood, herbs, and flowers to make colours of various subtle shades (no.220). Attending to variety was economically crucial to the limner’s art. His aesthetic opportunities rested on the ability to concoct new colours, and experiments often produced (as in the case of black) new means of coping with shortage. It brought to light cheap substitutes, labour and fuel-saving

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processes, and affordable ways of multiplying volume. Many methods made it possible for limners to rely less, for instance, on the alum and copperas industries. Both ingredients were frequently employed in colour manufacture, and had elaborate, expensive production processes consuming large quantities of fuel. Alum stone was calcined, dissolved in water pits, mixed with kelp and urine, and boiled down in metal pans. At least 3 tons of coal was consumed to produce a ton of alum. Copperas stones were soaked in water for 6 days, and the solution heated for 20 days (Nef, 1932: I.209–10). Fuel and labour charges were included in the final price paid by limners to alum and copperas men. Platt’s cheap alternatives eliminated or minimized use of these products. His preoccupation with colour was not purely an aesthetic concern, designed only to “delight” clients. Colours were a trade, and experiments in the field allowed traders to augment income, minimize waste, devise fuel-efficient means, offer employment, and efficiently utilize materials in the natural world. In this respect, arts of making luxury goods overlapped with “serious” arts of war and weaponry, inventing fuels, or making salt, described earlier. The intersections significantly destabilized connotations of luxury traditionally ascribed to gold and silver, the “metalline” colours in Platt’s manuscripts. While popular literature at the turn of the century famously satirized avarice, gold worship, and mercantile values, ironically associated with the loss of a “golden age” (cf. Gil Harris, 2004; Bruster, 1992; Vilches, 2010), the realities of Platt’s texts indicated the simultaneous operation of a different cultural meaning of gold. In his world, the “metalline” colours of gold and silver were, in a sense, no different from black. Their production procedures and uses proved they could be employed economically, mixing other substances with powdered gold or silver leaves, or preparing other metals to simulate them. In contrast to the idle hoarding of Jonson’s Volpone, or the negative tropes of simulation and escape from work in The Alchemist, Platt’s texts realigned “gold” with labour. While one receipt recorded the “expensive” method of making “pure” gold colour by beating leaves of the metal in honey, and tempering with gum water (no.55), the rest dealt with additives or substitutes. “Cheap gold” was neither a contradiction, nor a derided term. It could consist of three or four gold leaves (or leftover cuttings obtained cheaply from goldsmiths) dissolved in gum water and bay salt, tempered with egg white, or amalgamated with four times as much silver or mercury.21 Other additives were gypsum, sugar candy, civet, and honey. If the colour suffered from the comparatively small proportion of pure gold, some additives improved it: gold was covered with a paste of sal ammoniac and verdigris, or orpiment mingled with vinegar or urine (nos.104, 250, 163, 226). It was possible to make “gold without gold”, as Platt called it, and likewise for silver. Orpiment and fine crystal, ground with egg white, served as a substitute for gold, and a mixture of tin, mercury, and gum water for silver (nos.59, 159, 237). Metals were treated to change their colours. Copper plates, for instance, sprinkled with distilled urine, turned azure (no.132). Some metallic colours provided cheap means for gilding: such as filings of copper, latten,22 silver, and other metals amalgamated with mercury,

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expressed through fine skin, and ground with gum water (no.142). Copper and latten were useful approximations of gold: the former, as Platt had discovered, made an attractive colour for ink. In the absence of latten, pin dust was sifted, dried, and ground to make “a latten colour”. These colours were used to simulate metal while gilding wooden pillars, bedposts, crests of pictures, and moulded ornaments (no.258). They could be laid on paper, parchment, metal, wood, or glass. To lay gold (or its substitutes), a base (or size) was prepared – from gum water, or egg white made into paste with the milk of figs. Chalk, saffron, ochre, and calcined pumice stone were also popular ingredients for gold or silver size (nos.176, 177, 110, 123, 253). After painting, the product was varnished with turpentine and linseed oil. Platt’s instructions uncovered diverse techniques: gilding book covers (nos.62, 240), making seals from marchpane wafers,23 burnishing iron to take the colour of gold (no.65), laying gold and silver files on objects (no.66), and limning with gold on silk and linen, flowers, furniture, paper, leather, or metal plates (nos.112, 124, 185, 162, 272). He paid minute attention to details like making finest possible lines with a special mixture, or drawing delicately with gum on preserved flowers and then laying on gold, or polishing gilded objects with a boar’s tusk or dog’s tooth before laying colours (nos.218–19). Thus, the meaning of gold was invested with the “vernacular knowledge”, to use Smith’s formulation, of artisanal labour, where simulating gold did not necessarily carry the common literary connotations of fraudulence and corruption. As Smith noted, there was a long tradition among goldsmiths of demonstrating their skill in “less precious media” (2004: 37). This meant that “gold”, in Platt’s world, did not need to be gold in order to be invested with positive values of labour, innovation, and skill. Making “cheap gold” or “gold without gold” (like the cheap “sugar” of bean flour and honey devised by Platt and his friend Garrett) in times of dearth additionally carried constructive meanings associated with the principle of sufficiency. “Profit” Besides providing technical instructions, Platt’s manuscripts conveyed wideranging applications to which the arts of moulding, casting, and limning could be put. A list of “ARTIFICIALL PLOTTES” described how items artisans produced entered and negotiated with the market. Moulded designs of fruits and flowers “knit together by their stalks” made borders for chambers and galleries. These “grace the roome exceedingly”, noted Platt, and were placed above tapestries, or around bedsteads, tables, and “hooues” of canopies. They were combined with cloth decorations cut into shapes of trefoils, stars, suns, moons, birds, beasts, flies, and spiders. Casts of “English or outlandish” birds, beasts, or fish, in various colours, were prepared from illustrations in Gesner and other printed books. These figures made “a delicate shew”, and mantlepieces, tables, portals, gables, and gardens were “beautified” with them. Frames for cabinets, desks, virginals, jewel chests, and mirrors were especially

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lucrative. “Roman letters”, cast in moulds, and composed into “diuine or philosophical sentences, poetical workes, emblems, adages, & c.” were set upon borders, mantelpieces, and furniture. Platt pragmatically advised cutting and casting mostly those letters “wherof you finde the moste woordes in a dictionary”. Moulding shields, scutcheons, and coats of arms were similarly marketable. A note reads: “large stately and rancke Compartiments wth blank schocheons, or so contriued that you may take owte the schocheons and place any coate therin”. These “blank scutcheons” were decorative frames in which noblemen could place their coats of arms, portraits, or mirrors. Platt proposed to economize by making “A square frame wherin all the 12 Companies armes of London, or if you please, the Q. armes, and the Cities armes also may bee graued”. The frame was “deuided” and separate pieces sold to “euery Citizen seuerally to garnish the corners of his mantletrees … cubbords, bedstedes &c” (MS.2197, f.16). Such notes not only revealed the range of the craftsman’s practices and products, they illustrated how his inventive strategies created markets for new products. It is likely that Platt’s shop, appropriately named “Jewell House”, was something like a modern showroom with these items on display. The reliance on local networks for the business side of these ventures gave “profit” a more nuanced meaning than simply income; it signified benefit in broader and often multiple senses. Platt noted ideas for his cast works and limnings which were likely to be “of good sale”. One list reads, Theise and such like may bee chosen for patrons to carue your moldes by. vz. the 9 worthies, the 12 romane Emperors, the 4 Elements, the 9 muses, the choysest of Whitneys emblems … All the Cities cutt of owt of Munster, the stories in ovides metamorphoses, the Queenes arms cutt large and compleate/. Historical and mythical figures, philosophical ideas, literary texts, geographical locations, and contemporary political figures became objects of artisanal representation and marketable goods. Platt proposed to sell reproductions of the arms of professional guilds, and deal with “some particular persons of each of the Companies … to take a certaine nomber of the Armes of theyr owne Company and by that meanes many meyst bee vended” (MS.2197, f.17). His notes showed how these deals were made through his network, and their heading conveyed an element of anxiety: “All the necessary and helpinge meanes that I can imagin for the present gayninge of money either by artificiall waies, secretes or otherwise” (MS.2172, ff.13–14). The first column described the product or specific trade from which money could be made, such as “Borders, freizes, blancke schocheons and other cast works”. The second and third columns included the actual “secret”, or ideas for negotiations with other traders, and sources of information or professional contacts. This was a summary of Platt’s marketing strategy with personal reminders. Mr Bashford (evidently the owner of a shop) must be asked, he noted, “what stoare he can

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vente of my Looking glasses so likewise of all the Milliners and Haberdashers”. Some “excellent Ioynder” had to be found to insert Platt’s borders and casts “in all his vestibules, tables, deskes, & c”. “Vpholsters” had to be contacted, who might use them for their canopies, or sell them to their own clients. There was little discrimination in Platt’s choice of the type of trader: he asserted with equal confidence that grocers and apothecaries would buy his friezes and flower borders, and that builders would buy his chimney pieces and mantel-rests. Beyond specific traders, he proposed to deal “wth my L. of Canterbury for the furnishinge of all the Churches in England wth the London armes”, and mentioned a contract with the Fishmongers of London for “sondry armes”, which he intended to deliver and then approach “all other Companies in London” and “both the Vniversities for all theyre College armes”. He contacted unnamed “Noblemen” about his blank scutcheons, and some went to “Pickhurst Emblemer”. The Segars, Francis and William, were asked to “comende” the product to acquaintances. Through his cousin Henry Davenport, a clothier, Platt sent his casts to the Bartholomew and Sturbridge fairs. He displayed a decorated table, cupboard, and desk at home “for all gentlmen to beholde”. Mr Browne was asked to recommend his flower casts, and “Cosin Robertson” brought gentlemen to view them. Some entries recording names of people who could promote his “artificial plottes” were comparatively brief: “here vse Warrens, Crosby, Pichforke”. These men appeared to have contact with grocers and apothecaries, or were perhaps of these professions themselves. It is unlikely that such contacts could be “used” without offering something in return. Perhaps they were offered a cut, as Platt demanded from Thomas Elkinton (see chapter 5), or the benefit of Platt’s expert advice. Traders relied on systems of exchange, and their cooperation gave impetus to economic activity. Their network also suggests that business activities of individual traders were diversified: apothecaries and grocers also dealt in cast works, or used these to decorate their shops, thus advertising Platt’s workmanship. Their systems of exchange and diversification of business interests could create personal defence mechanisms against dearth. The case of Platt’s cousin and close professional associate Henry Davenport was a striking example. His correspondence (MS.2172, f.27) thanked Platt for receipts and advice, speaking in enthusiastic tones about his shop the “Jewell House”. As a Coventry clothier, Davenport was affected by innovations in the production of woollen cloth, which impacted the Coventry cloth trade. In 1568, regulations were issued for making “new draperies” called “Armatiers [Armentières] cloth” and licences granted to some traders. Among them, John Barker and Henry Davenport became licensees in 1601 for the next 15 years (VCH, 1969: VIII.162–89). Writing to Platt in 1595, before obtaining his licence, Davenport was keen to move to London: Our best newes is that my wife is of her selfe very far in loue with London and Hoggesdon, and doth her best to encourage me that way and thervpon we haue disposed of one house and busines in such sort as

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Davenport was trying to scale down his Coventry business, and appeared to be planning to move in with the Platts. He requested Platt to discharge his rents for a warehouse in London, unless Platt himself wished to retain it, and to pay his debts to Mr Cosgood, frequently named as a source in Platt’s receipts. Davenport probably retained trade interests in Coventry but functioned, in the late 1590s, as his cousin’s assistant. His letter revealed their shared interests and discussed the efficacy and financial worth of receipts. He provided Platt with ideas for cheap banquet decorations, commenting, “the skill of yt Italian … were worth the learning as I thinke, and I suppose I know a meanes whereby it may be obtayned”. His tone was (like Elkinton’s) consistently deferential, thanking Platt for directions on starch-making, and the “seacret of amplifying or enlarging oranges and lemons”, both of which correspond to receipts in Platt’s notebooks. He occasionally provided Platt with professional gossip. Starch sellers, he remarked, were having trouble from “the Patenties” trying to prevent them from selling without a licence, and asked whether he might teach the secret of cheaply making starch to someone in Coventry, who would practise it and remit part of the profit to them both. He wished Platt success in engaging the attention of “my L. Cobham in the respectes wch you mention and in such other as the tyme shall offer occasion”. Liaising with socially illustrious figures was left to Platt, and the extension of their network required a balance between local cooperation and increasing income, which gave profitability a less fixed meaning. “Profit” was a vital word in Davenport’s letter, appearing constantly in evaluations of receipts for dyeing, mixing colours, polishing armours, making starch, and preserving food. Its meaning was partly shaped by the complex metaphor of the “jewel”, deployed in so many ways, by application to Platt’s shop, book, receipts, inventions, and skills of individuals. Davenport argued that an informant, of whom Platt disapproved, may yet “haue a Geam among our Jewells” and must not be condemned without sufficient trial. The shop “Jewell House” was a repository of “profitable” secrets, a treasury, and an insurance against dearth. These connotations extended to Davenport’s view of the owner himself: Platt, with his varied expert knowledge, was “as a Lodestone to draw [Davenport] vp the sooner” to London. The language of profit took a different turn in Platt’s letters seeking patronage. In 1608, he wrote to Sir Francis Segar, Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the practitioner of alchemy and medicine Moritz of Hessen-Kassel, attempting to negotiate a professional alliance (MS.2172, ff.18–19v). Moritz had received from Segar a taste of Platt’s expertise in the form of “imperfect” (incomplete) receipts – a means of selfprotection, though Platt gave the diplomatic explanation that he did not wish to burden the bearer with too big a package. He tempted the recipient with a further list of receipts that he might offer, provided his terms were met:

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To these I could add the oyle of [mercury] irreduceable yet not trewlie philosophicall, curinge the pocks in an easie and delicate manner as alsoe that sweete oyle of Amber whiche cureth the dead palsie and all crampes and conuultions. A spirit of wine made without anye fier at all times farr beyond al comon spiritts of wine though neuer so well rectified. The oyle of Talcum that giueth an excellent and durable tincture to , [copper] but this I haue not proued, but haue it warranted from the handes of a great scholler. … Imparting partial information was designed to attract the patron, or, as Davenport described it, to act as “a Lodestone to draw [him] vp the sooner”. Platt made an elaborate request for secrecy and hinted enticingly that an English nobleman was keen to deal in these very receipts. Moritz must, therefore, return a “spedie answere”, but if not interested, he was urged to burn Platt’s letter “without reseruinge anye note or memorye” of it. He asked that the cost of his experiments should be paid, and he would only deal through Segar or “doctor Mosanus whose father did first teach me to close a helme and a bodye together”. James Mosanus and his father Godfrey practised medicine between 1571 and 1603. Godfrey was fined in 1581, 1583, 1587, and 1591 for unlicensed practice. James, who had an MD from Cologne University, tried to obtain a licence in 1593, but was refused by the Royal College of Physicians, who told him to study Galen for 4 years and reapply (Pelling, 2003, 2004). Close connections with figures regarded suspiciously as “irregular practitioners” by powerful authorities provides a context for Platt’s professional position. The connections were “profitable” in many senses: they brought income, expertise, and reputation within local networks. As Platt wrote to Segar, the work he wished to share with Moritz was done at “great chardge in long time, not without great daunger of my life and health”. He was also anxious not to appear a mere “imposter”, a charge which posed a constant threat to practitioners of alchemy and medicine in his time: “my purpose is onelye to valewe thinges valewable, wherin I doubt not but that his excellencye shall haue both good ware and good measure for his monye”. To “valewe thinges valewable” was the essence of Platt’s definition of “profit” through dearth science, with its power to transmute seemingly valueless dross into constructive material. It dismissed almost nothing as being valueless, aiming to ascribe each object its appropriate kind of value. A concoction of elder leaves to “take away the freckles in the face” (Delights 4.24) was as worthy of attention as the production of coal balls. The “counterfeits” and “artificiall plottes” designed by practices in cast works and limning involved valuable expertise and brought remittance for such labour. The manufacture of so-called luxuries provided undeniable means of income and employment for Platt and his associates, especially in times of dearth. Neither did people or practices deemed “valueless” by conventional scientific authorities seem so to Platt, who respected and willingly acquired knowledge from publicly disdained figures as Godfrey and James Mosanus. Valuable knowledge, thus gained, was sifted by Platt with the open-minded discrimination of a dearth scientist. The

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absence of such discernment, and biased dismissal, was dearth itself. Platt’s approach to “profit” (and that of his little-known contemporaries) should provoke readers to revisit and reassess notions of gain and loss, or luxury and necessity, underlying early modern professions, trade, and commerce. The trading and knowledge networks analyzed above, through which luxury goods were dispensed, alongside other kinds of goods, allow us to question the equation of luxuries with the superfluous and the temporary. Well-known arguments along these lines emphasize that consumers of luxury goods were concerned with the present, and took no account of whether resources would remain available for future generations as a result of their consumption patterns (Sombart, 1967: 97). Luxury, viewed in this way, could be seen as directly opposed to sustainability, and unattached to any concern for posterity. Platt’s documents show production and consumption of luxury goods re-used waste, so that “luxury” was, paradoxically, a means by which dearth science and its values were practised. In this ambience, if the meaning of waste changed, as argued in chapter 4, meanings of luxury concurrently had to change. Through dearth, people became aware of the indefinite and contingent meanings of both luxury and necessity. In his re-evaluation of the concept of luxury, Christopher Berry argued that the meaning of the term could be fixed to four categories (sustenance, shelter, clothing, and leisure) but different societies tended to specify the content of each differently. Using sources as diverse as classical philosophy and contemporary advertising, Berry demonstrated the slipperiness of the value attached to luxury, which has changed from being a threat to social virtue to a ploy to support consumption (1994: 232–33). Early modern dearth-time practices, however, suggest a different shift. The attachment of luxury to the positive use of waste, and their simultaneous moralization (perhaps subsequently lost), was significant to Platt’s time and environment. It was informed by the connection between luxury and knowledge making: artisanal “vernacular knowledge” was valued and disseminated through the production of luxury goods. Their production, by utilizing resources in a locally efficient and knowledgeable manner, directly raised and addressed issues concerning the management of resources to protect posterity.

Dearth science vs. sustainability Platt’s verse epistle “To all true louers of Arte and knowledge”, which prefaced Delightes for Ladies, began with a subversive refashioning of the opening lines of Ovid’s Amores. Ovid renounced the writing of an epic and the theme of war in favour of a love elegy, with his famed metrical and generic joke: Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam edere, materia conveniente modis. par erat inferior versus; risisse Cupido dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem. (I.i.1–4)

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[Just now, I was preparing to start with heavy fighting and violent war, with a measure to fit the matter. Good enough for lesser verse – laughed Cupid so they say, and stole a foot away.] As the poet (seemingly) embarked on an epic, repeating the grave first word of Virgil’s Aeneid – “Arma virumque cano” (1.1) – and aiming to write in the dactylic hexameter, the weighty and traditional meter for Greek and Latin epic poetry, Cupid interfered and “stole a foot”. Ovid’s stance was in the poetic tradition of recusatio, where poets writing “light” verse explained why they had avoided graver genres and themes. Platt bent this tradition to his own purposes, explaining and contesting the idea that he may have shifted from writing about serious matters to frivolous ones: Sometimes I writ the formes of burning balles, Supplying wants that were by woodfals wrought: Sometimes of tubs defended so by Arte, As fire in vaine hath their destruction sought: Sometimes I writ of lasting Beuerage, Great Neptune and his Pilgrims to content: Sometimes of foode, sweete, fresh, and durable, To maintaine life when all things els were spent: Sometimes I writ of sundrie sorts of soile, Which neither Ceres nor her handmaids knew, I writ to all, but scarsly one beleeues Saue Diue and Denshire who haue found them true When heauens did mourne in cloudy mantles clad, And threatned famine to the sonnes of men: When sobbing earth denide her kindly fruit To painefull ploughman and his bindes, euen then I writ relieuing remedies of dearth, That Arte might helpe where nature made asaile: But all in vaine these new borne babes of Arte, In their vntimelie birth straight way do quaile. (A2v–3r) The poem consciously depicted Platt as protector and preserver of his country, ahead of his times, and not fully appreciated. The repetition of “sometimes” emphasized the extemporized nature of his contributions – coal-balls, fireresistant vessels, victuals for the sea, dearth foods, or manure – while the language of transmutation suggested that remedies for dearth were located in precisely this improvised methodology. As the author “writes”, or conducts experiments, his “formes” change. “Burning balles” gave way to fire-proof vessels, lasting beverages jostled for space with “sweete, fresh, and durable” foods. As the poem continued, quills turned into “Barbarian canes”, and ink

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(no longer “Coppres” or “galle”) into “Rosewater”, signalling the subject matter of Delightes for Ladies. Following the conventions of the Elizabethan “ladies’ text” (Fleming, 1993: 158–81), the reader was deliberately overwhelmed by signals of “sweetness”, fruitiness, and delicacy – plums, pears, marmalades, leaches, suckets, quidinia, nutmegs, cloves, mace, grapes, nuts, quinces, pomegranates, barbaries, and, most prominently, sugar crowded into the text, momentarily eradicating the whiff of the forge and compost heap. The subject of building and “empaling”, with its imperial, martial strain, and its contemporary Armada anxiety, was bid adieu: Tush! marchpane wals Are strong enough, and best befits our age: Let piercing bullets turne to sugar bals: The Spanish feare is husht and all their rage. (Delights A2v) Through this poem, Platt revisited his own life’s work. In the immediate context of the book where it appeared, his poem asserted the significance of women’s work as part of dearth-time knowledge making. Beyond this, it summed up dearth science by drawing together images of agriculture, trade, luxuries, and household work, and reinforcing the links between them. It depicted Platt as the provider of timely relief that cut across these discrete areas of knowledge making during dearth. Just as Nature could deny the “painefull ploughman” the “kindly fruit” of his labour, she could likewise threaten the woman’s delicate skin: And least with carelesse pen I should omit, The wrongs that nature on their persons wrought, Or parching sunne with his hot firie rayes, For these likewise, relieuing meanes I sought. (Delights A3r) “Relieuing” connected this passage with the earlier references to dearth and parched soil, both reviving and subverting the Ovidian recusatio convention of renouncing the serious for the light-hearted. Dearth, it was pointed out, could afflict in many forms, and Platt’s “arte” countered it in equally diverse forms and rhetorical modes. Each remedy, the author further claimed, was not “by fancie framde within a theorique braine”, but “tested and fined” with “firy flames”, from “painfull practise” and “experience” (A3r). The poem’s rhetorical strategies made it a compendium of dearth science principles. It insistently reminded readers, who would potentially perform and refine Platt’s remedies, of the necessity for continuous experimentation, knowledge exchange, cooperation, and the pursuit of sufficiency. In this regard, the poem’s depiction of time assumed considerable significance. It suggested that dearth itself was a

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continuous condition, rather than a temporary problem cured by ad hoc coping mechanisms. Even as Platt “writ relieuing remedies of dearth, / That Arte might helpe where nature made asaile”, the forms of dearth changed and “these new borne babes of Arte”, his remedies and inventions, “straight way do quaile”. The image recalled the allusion to Tantalus in Platt’s famine treatise: “yet here we are left with Tantalus to starue and perish for want of food”. The persistence of dearth was explicitly ascribed to the continuity of environmental change, or nature’s “assails”. Early modern dearth science, unlike many modern understandings of sustainability, recognized its own everreceding goals. It utilized temporal uncertainties to generate both caution and positive impetus. Evidently, in their effort to battle the crises of the 1590s, the early modern English recycled soap ash as manure, buried dead animals in their backyards to enrich soil, pioneered the battery farming of chickens, discovered instant soup, caught fish by making them “drunk”, warmed sodden oatmeal in their bosoms or breeches, invented cheap fuel such as “cole-balles”, constructed economical ovens and roasting devices, designed “garments for the rain”, erased marginalia from old books to sell them as new, and mass-produced plaster heads of Sir Francis Drake and Lord Essex from life-casts to sell them in England and abroad. But their remedies for dearth constitute more than an anecdotal collection of coping mechanisms. Early modern practices and literatures of dearth created sophisticated discursive possibilities for evaluating causes of scarcity and modes of human intervention in times of dearth and famine. Authors and practitioners examined the relevance of such discussions to wider questions concerning gender, consumption, economy, religion, and politics. They were pragmatically and ideologically engaged with ecological issues which affected the availability of, and access to, resources. Teleological approaches to solutions, and modes of improving access and availability, were powerfully debated and contested. Communities of early modern dearth scientists, represented by Platt and his network, were acutely alive to pragmatic and ethical ambivalences that could arise from ecologically informed, cooperative engagement with knowledge making, while confronting an inescapably competitive environment. In the bargain, their processes of turning penury into plenty, and their means of articulating and disseminating this knowledge for posterity, subjected the very meaning of “plenty” to constant ingenious moderation.

Notes 1 Histories of energy consumption from 1700 onwards (Humphrey and Stanislaw, 1979) explained shifts in energy intensity (energy required to produce a single unit of income). Fouquet and Pearson (1998) focused on modern carriers of energy. Studies of individual energy carriers in the earlier period focused on the debates about the transition to the Industrial Revolution (e.g. Nef, 1932). 2 Nef (1932) attributed the shift to timber famine and change of ownership (cf. Wilkinson and Anderson, 1987: 80; Hatcher, 1993; Thomas, 1986). For the sceptical view, see Flinn, 1959, 1978; Hammersley, 1973; Allen, 2003.

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3 Durham, Northumberland, Scotland, Wales, Midlands (including Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Worcestershire), Cumberland, Kingswood Chase, Somerset, Forest of Dean, Devon, and Ireland. Durham and Northumberland (coalfields along the Tyne and Wear valleys) and the Midlands constituted the highest percentage of total output. 4 There was no uniformity in measures used in different mining districts and ports. The London chaldron (possibly Platt’s measure) equalled 1⅓ tons in 1616 (according to Nef, 1932; contra Thorold Rogers). The Newcastle chaldron weighed 2 tons at the turn of the century; the West Coast chaldron 1¼–1⅓ tons in the same period; the Scottish chaldron 1½–2 tons in the early sixteenth century, and 5 tons in 1663 (Nef, 1932: I.19–20, II.367–71). 5 E.g. between 1583 and 1592, general prices were valued by Georg Wiebe at 198, and the price of firewood at 277 (1895: 375; cf. Nef, 1932: I.158). 6 Blaydon and Stella were among the chief collieries on the south bank of the Tyne. By “Durham”, Platt could have meant any, or all, of the important collieries along the south bank of the river. 7 Platt’s calculation seems accurate. A “hundred” contained 8 tons of coal (Nef, II.367–78). A profit of 20–30 shillings per hundred meant a profit of 2.5 (20/8) – 3.75 (30/8) shillings per ton. The London chaldron contained 1.33 tons, and the Newcastle chaldron 2 tons. Thus, one may calculate profits per chaldron as 3.33 (2.5  1.33) – 4.99 (3.75  1.33) shillings (London) or 5 (2.5  2) – 7.5 (3.75  2) shillings (Newcastle). 8 Thornborough, like Platt, was concerned that people should have “good and sweete coles, which shall burne without ill savoure” and colliers be prevented from mingling good coal with dust. 9 A most Excellent offer of a certaine Inuention for a new kind of fire (1628) and Hanbury’s “Account of Coal-Balls Made at Liege” (1739–41) listed procedures and advantages of coal-ball fires almost identical to Platt’s, citing him as their source. 10 Between 1559 and 1565, import expenditure for salt rose from £2943 to £3325. England was largely dependent on France for supplies. The problem was compounded by Anglo-French wars (1542, 1564). In 1544, prices of bay salt (unrefined) and white salt (refined) were 5d and 8d; by 1562, they had risen to a shilling and 18d (Thirsk, 1978: 184; SPD Eliz.26.30). 11 See procedure in Agricola, 1912: 547. 12 Platt’s figures tally with those in SPD Eliz.26.30. 13 Dunghills, as Platt knew, were a common source, as ammonia from the decomposition of urea and other nitrogenous materials underwent bacterial oxidation to produce nitrate. 14 Leconte noted nitre-beds were made from a “good supply of thoroughly rotted manure of the richest kind”. This “mould, or black earth” comprised vegetable and animal matter mixed with soil and ashes, watered with urine, and decomposed into a black mass. It was thrown (with old mortar, wood ashes, leaves, straw, twigs, and branches) on an impervious clay floor and covered by a shed. The heap was watered periodically with liquid manure (urine, dung-water, water of privies, cesspools, and drains), and turned over every month to expedite nitrification, until a “whitish efflorescence” appeared on the surface. This nitre crust was removed, exposing the next layer, and once a sufficient quantity was obtained, the remaining mound became the nucleus of another heap. Such heaps could be prepared by individuals (who may have done so in Platt’s time), but saltpetre works needed to make them on a large and systematic scale. The nitrified earth was steeped in water repeatedly, until a lea of sufficient density was obtained, to which wood ashes were added to convert nitrates of lime and magnesia (also in the mixture) into potassium nitrate. The converted lea was boiled to remove impurities such as sodium chloride

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15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

233

and organic matter. When the concentrated solution cooled, potassium nitrate crystals separated and sank to the bottom. The remaining liquor was recycled to water the nitre-bed. The recommended proportions of these ingredients (MS.2197, f.11r) are 6–8 parts refined saltpetre, 1 part brimstone, 1 part willow coals. For early sources on the idea of luxury, see Sekora, 1977: 23–62. See Marlowe, “Ignoto” poems (c.1599); Webster, Duchess of Malfi (1623: I.i.325–26). Shakespeare refers to luxury 60 times, mostly in the context of lechery, and Donne and Milton in the context of sin (Sekora, 1977). Spenser, Faerie Queene (1590–96): 1.4.1.5; 1.4.21.3; 1.12.14.9; 2.11.12.6; 4.10.23.1. An assistant’s compilation begins with the title and continues with Platt’s additions and corrections. Most receipts are in Platt’s own hand, and his corrections suggest that the assistant may have worked from rough notes made by Platt: MS.2216, ff.2r, 12–21r, 23, 26r–31v, 33–34r, 37–38v, 46v–49r; compiled (with additions) in MS.2189, ff.92–106, continued ff.3–5 and 33–34. Some are printed in Jewell House: painting on egg shells (34), inks (37–38, 43), repairing faded letters (43), making colours from flowers (44), patterns (39), engraving (45), applying ink on poor quality paper (46), refreshing oil colours (51), drying oil or varnish (62), removing stains on paintings (63), improving quality of parchment (76). Platt’s limning receipts are mainly in MS.2189, ff.92–106, 3–5, 33–34. Owing to the irregular pagination, limning receipts from this MS will be noted by receipt no. rather than folio no. Neither Peacham (1606) nor the author of Arte of Limming (1573) recorded this method. Latten vessels were used to gather lamp black, says Peacham (60), but does not mention the use of the metal for colouring. Wafers of marchpane, which were “large and sold for 12d the hundred or thereabt” made a cheap substitute for sealing wax.

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S LOAN E

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Index

Abbot, R. 127, 131, 134, 136 abjectus 152–53 abundance 53, 188 action 36 Adams, T. 127, 133–34, 139 Adeney, R. 174 adulteration 111, 173, 175, 203 advice literature 146–47 Aeneid 229 Agabus 28, 133 Agrarian History of England and Wales 4 Agrippa, C. 73, 98 agues 178–79 Ajax 114–17 Albany, J. see Platt, J. Albany, R. 178 alchemy 73–75, 85, 91n17; manure 104, 131, 134, 141–42n4,n9,n19; natural magic 96–101; trades 171, 176, 227 ale 167–68, 173–74 Alexis of Piedmont 73 Allet, J. 157 Allott, R. 1–2, 10, 112 alum 43, 222 Amores 228 animals 149–52, 186 anthology 1–2 Antwerp 157 anxieties 24, 29, 95–96, 117, 164, 201–2 Appleby, A. 6 aqua composita 40, 85, 149, 167, 172–74, 176 aqua vitae 80, 167, 169, 172–77, 193n31 arcane 97–99, 102 Archbishop of Canterbury 22, 43 Archbishop of York 64 Archer, I. 15 aristocracy 68, 71

Aristotle 104–5 Arte of setting of corne 38, 85 Arthington, H. 28, 37, 60n11 arts 215 arum 163, 167 ashes 113–14, 118–21, 210 attenuation 112 Augustine 35 Austria 23 Baber, J. 158 Bacon, F. 13–14, 63, 71, 105, 144n41 Bacon, R. 176 baking 161–62, 164–65, 183 balm 134–35 Barbary 40 Barber, C.L. 48 Barker, J. 225 Barker, P. 25, 28–29, 60n10, 127, 131–34 barley 118, 169 Barley, W. 26 Barlow, W. 22–25, 27–29, 31, 33–34, 61n14, 106 Baroncelli, T. 207 Barren Tree 134 barrenness 29–31, 100, 102, 134, 136 Bartholomew Fair 50 Bartholomew’s Fair 67 Basil 24 Bastard, T. 56, 185–86 beans 162–64, 167, 182 beechmast 162–64 beer 38, 41–42; households/trades 162, 166–69, 172–74; knowledge making 78, 81–82 begging 10 Beier, A.L. 51 Berry, C. 228 Berty, F. 207

262

Index

Bethnal Green 67–68, 118 Bible 95–96, 100, 162; causes of dearth 23, 25, 28, 30; manure 106, 126–29, 132–34 Bishop’s Hall 67, 81, 118, 178 black ink 220–22 Blackamore, A. 72 Blower, R. 26 Bodleian Library 156 Bologna 182 Book of Husbandry 108 bottling 156 Bowden, P. 4, 6, 152 Bowes, R. 200 Boyle, R. 98 bran 164–66 bread 85, 145–46, 161–67, 169, 192–93n18,n20; dreams of plenty 182–83; literatures 38–39 Breviary of Philosophy 73 Brewers’ Company 65 brewing 161–62, 166–69, 172–73, 175–76, 193n23–26; fuel efficiency 204–6; knowledge making 68, 85–86 Briefe Apologie of Certaine New Inventions 64 Bristol 7, 44, 119 British Library 72, 156 Brooke, W. 180 broths 40, 102, 151, 154 Browne, G. 30 Browne, T. 98 Brundtland Commission 95, 142n14 Brunschwig, H. 170 Bulckley, E. 158 Burton, R. 145 Bury St Edmunds 22 buttermen 152–54 cakes 159 calcination 113 calories 146, 166, 196 Calvinism 22, 30, 127–31, 133 Cambridge 55, 64, 66, 75 Cambridge Group 4 Camporesi, P. 163 candying 158 card games 52–53 carnivalesque 48–49 Cartwright, T. 28 Castile 119 casting 217–19, 223–24, 227 Castle of Knowledge 75 Catholics 32, 135

Cecil, W. 12, 166, 173–74, 204, 207–8 cereals 38 Certaine philosophical preparations of foode and beuerage for seamen 40 Chapman, J. 29–31 charcoal 201 charity 13, 20–21, 23 Charnock, T. 73 cheese 154–55 cherries 156–57 chestnuts 163–64 China 201 choking 128–30, 133 Christianity 43, 98, 126–27, 131, 134–35, 216 Cipolla, C. 94, 111 circulation 101–3, 116, 127–28, 131–34; of knowledge 103–11 claret 174–76 Clarke, W. 210 class 69–71, 115–16, 146, 148, 152 Classical discourse 215–16 clay 108, 110 Cleaver, R. 147, 189 Clerkenwell 67 climate 34 cloth 225 coal 195–207, 210, 232 Cockaigne 57, 184–85, 187–88 Cole-balles 197–99, 201–4 collating 1 Collectanea Chymica 34 colours 219–23 combustion 214 comets 26 commons 9–10, 14–15 competition 118, 120–21, 153 Complutensis University 104 compost 85, 110, 115 conny-catchers 49–53 conspicuous consumption 152, 192n11 consumption 1–3, 12, 53–54, 228; dreams of plenty 181–82, 184–85; energy 195–97, 200–201, 204–8, 210, 214; and preservation 148, 152 contingency 49 Controversiarum medicarum et philosophicarum 104 Cooper, W. 34 cooperation 118, 140, 181, 225–26 copperas 222 Coppie of a letter sent into England 26, 29, 31 Coppinger, E. 28, 60n11

Index Coriolanus 15 corn 38–40, 101 correspondence 72 couscous 39–40 Coventry 225–26 Cowcross Street 67 cozening 50–52, 58 credit 9, 162 Creede, T. 27–29, 31 crimes 12–13, 44, 52; of necessity 11 crisis 6, 214 Croce, G.C. 18203 Cumberland 6 dairy 152–55 Davenport, H. 72, 225–27 Davies, J. 51, 186 deafness 132 dearth: at sea and war 39–42; God as “proper cause” 21–27, 29, 32–34; personified 1–3; writing histories of 4–8 dearth science 3, 51, 63–72, 85–89, 227–28, 230–31; and charity/discontent 16, 18; economy of manure 95, 123; trading 214–15 debate 125 debts 89 Debus, A. 96, 99 decay 156–57 deer 149 Deerr, N. 158 Defence of Conny-catching 51 Defensio Chymiae 75 Dekker, T. 26–28 Delightes for Ladies 85, 147–48, 151, 153–55, 161, 187, 228 demography 4–6 Dent, A. 24 desire 95 determinism 126, 129 Deuteronomy 129–30 Devon 6 didactic manuals 187–89 diet 145–46, 152, 162 Digges, L. 26 digging 110, 118, 134 Discouerie of certaine English wants 37, 87 Discours 105 Discourse of the Common Weal 207–8 discourses of dearth 21, 33–34, 44, 58, 123, 140 disease 177–80

263

distillation 170–77 Diverse sorts of soyle 100, 104 domestic work see household dominion 127–28 Donne, J. 122, 136–37, 145 door-step encounters 20–21 Dorset 25, 28, 131–32 drainage 116, 204 Drake, F. 39–40, 68, 167, 219 Drake, R. 173–74 Du Bartas, G. 2 Duchesne, J. 75 Duke Humfreys Squires 54–57 Durham 198–99, 207 Dutch 119–21, 165–66, 172–73, 207 Eamon, W. 34, 71, 104 Earthly Necessities 10 Eclogues 125–26 ecology 6–7, 85, 88–89, 93–96 economy 9, 13, 19n12; dreams of plenty 186–88; household 176, 181; knowledge making 82–88; literatures 44, 46–47; luxuries 218–20; of nature 93, 121; trading 200–202, 205, 209 Eisaman Maus, K. 49 elixir 176–77 Elizabeth I 31, 37, 174, 190, 211–13 Elizabethans 71–72, 85, 89 Elkinton, T. 72, 180–81, 225 Ely 204 Emblemes 136 enclosure 14–15 endeavour 140 energy 146, 222; constraint 93–94; natural resources 195–97, 200–201, 204–8, 210, 214 Englands Parnassus 1–3, 112 entitlements 9–10 environment 94, 96, 121, 187, 203–4, 214–15 epistemology 103–5 Erickson, P. 189 Essex 6, 12 Estienne, C. 147 etymology 122 ‘Eutopia’ 183–85, 188 evidence 2–3, 11 exchange entitlements 9–10 Exeter 44 experience 86–87, 103–5, 142n15 experiment 37, 104; knowledge making 68, 77–79, 82–85; luxuries 219–22; natural resources 207, 211–14

264

Index

fallowness 137 Falstaff 45–51, 137, 139–40, 189–90 family 65–66, 178 famine 4, 6–7, 182, 186; entitlements model 8–9; God as cause 22–28, 31–33; personified 1–2 Famine in Tudor and Stuart England 6, 167 fantasies 147, 182–88, 191 Farnese, A. 32 fasting 22, 54 fatness 45–47 fens 203–4 fertility 93, 113, 118; circulation of knowledge 108–9; natural magic 98–100, 102; poetics 129, 131, 139–40 festivity 48 fifth essence 109, 111, 176–77 Fioravanti, L. 104–5 fire 106, 202–3, 205–7 fish 41, 113, 149, 152–54, 192n12 Fitter, C. 13–15 Fitzherbert, A. 108 Fitzpatrick, J. 35 Flagella Dei 21 Flemings see Dutch Floraes Paradise 64, 85, 97 Floures of philosophie 66 flow see circulation flowers 158–59, 167, 170–71 fodder 146, 150, 195–96 food 7–8, 45–46, 85; ‘availability decline’ model 8–9; energy 195–96; and medicine 177–81; prices 4; social meanings 145–48 see also preservation fossil fuel 195–203 fowl 149–51 France 23, 26, 31–32, 107, 174 Francis, M. 166 Franciscans 176 Franckard, F. 207 Francke, P. 157 Frankfurt 37 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 50 fruits 155–60, 176 fuel 195–97, 222; finding 197–204; saving 204–14 Fumerton, P. 39, 41, 49, 53, 160 Furies 2 Fussell, G.E. 156 Galen 163, 227 Garden of Eden 64 gardening 64, 97, 118

Gardiner, R. 37 Garlickhythe 65 Garret, T. 81–82 Gascoigne, T. 169, 173, 176, 180 Geber 176 gender 146–48, 154–56, 160–61 Genesis 127 georgic economics 123–24 Georgics 124–25 Gerard, J. 162–63 Germany 4, 23, 163 Gesner, C. 170, 223 Geta 54 glue 217–19 gluttony 1–3, 56, 177, 186 God 34–36, 43, 216; circulation of knowledge/nourishment 99–101, 103, 106; poetics of manure 122–23, 127–37; ‘proper cause’ of dearth 21–24, 26, 28–34 God Speed the Plough 122 gold 222–23 Goodyer, H. 145 Googe, B. 118, 123 grace 36, 46–47, 128, 131–35 grain 38–40, 85–86, 101, 161–62, 166 Gratarolo, G. 75 Greenblatt, S. 49 Greene, R. 12, 28, 44, 49–52, 55 Greens Groats-worth of wit 28 Greenwich 67 Gregory of Nazianzus 24 Griffiths, E. 146–47, 150 Grindal, E. 43 Groatsworth of Wit 50, 54 Groyett, S. 119 guilds 224 Guilpin, E. 186 gunpowder 209–13 Hacket, W. 28 Haeckel, E. 96 Hall, J. 28, 51, 61n33, 135–36, 185–86 Hall, K. 160 Hansen, A. 50 Harington, J. 114–17, 144n40 Harkness, D. 71, 85 Harman, T. 49 Harriot, T. 163 Harrison, C.J. 96, 126–27 Harrison, W. 152–53 Harsnett, S. 64 Hartlib, S. 64, 89 harvests 4–6, 12

Index Harvet, I. 75 Hawkins, J. 40 Ibn Hayyan, J. 176 health 172–73 hearing 132 Helgerson, R. 189 Henry IV 45–49, 190 Henry of Navarre 26, 31–32 Herbal 162–63 Herball 163 herbs 170–72 Heresbach, C. 123 Herle, W. 207 hermeneutics 106–7, 126 Hertfordshire 65, 67–68 Hext, E. 12–13 Hindle, S. 10–11, 13–15, 20–21 Hodges, T. 64 Homer 57 hops 78, 85, 167–69 Hoskins, W.G. 4–8, 53 hospitality 13, 20, 57–58, 184, 186 Houghton, J. 210 household 146–48, 181–82, 187–91; bread/starch/beer 161–70; distillation 171–72, 174–77; food/medicine 177; natural resources 205–6, 208; oils/ waters/spirits 170–77; preservation 148–52, 154–58, 160–61 Housholders Philosophie 188 Hughes, E. 207 Hugonis Platti Armig 75–76 Humanism 124 humour 46–47, 51, 117 Hungary 4 hunger 14–15, 23 Hutson, L. 57 Iago 137–40 imports 207–8 improvement 95, 122–24, 127, 214 indexing 64, 66–67, 79 individualism 122–24, 127, 1340 Industrial Revolution 93 inequality 6–8, 46 infection 116–17 ingenuity 16, 43–45, 47–50, 52–53, 55, 138, 149, 204 inks 220–21, 223 instant soup 40 Institutes 128 insurrection 11, 13 invasion fears 213 inventions 64, 83, 206–7

265

investment 124 isinglass 40–41, 88, 159, 161 Italy 4, 23, 104, 182 Jacobsen, H. 216 James I 13–14, 89 Jeanneret, M. 58 Jefferies, J. 166 Jenner, M. 94 Jewell House 68–70, 84, 224–26 Jewell House of Art and Nature 39–40, 59, 104; households 167, 174, 177, 187; knowledge making 64, 68–71, 78, 85; preservation 149, 151, 153; trading 197, 205–6, 217 John of Rupescissa 176 Jonson, B. 1, 50–51, 185–86, 222 Kay, J. 124, 130 Kendrick, C. 184 Kent 30–31 kilns 206 knowledge 33–34, 94, 181, 337–38; circulation of 103–11 knowledge making 3, 18n2, 34–35, 38, 53, 71, 86–89 Kussmaul, A. 9 La Seconde Sepmaine 2 labour 122–30, 136, 184, 187, 189, 222 Lancashire 6 land 188, 203–4 landlords 15 Laroque, F. 48 Laslett, P. 2–4, 6 Latin 122 Lavater, L. 22–24, 28, 60n3 Lazarus 36, 87–88 Le Strange, A. 111, 147, 150, 161 Leconte, J. 210 Leicestershire 14 Lemnius, L. 75 Lent 22, 48, 54 Lenten Stuff 57 Leong, E. 34 Lertout, I. 75 levellers 14 Levine, D. 7 Lewyer, A. 119 liberality 56 Liège 201 lime 210–11 limning 217, 221, 223–24, 227 Lincolnshire 203–4

266

Index

literalism 126–27, 131–32, 134 literatures of dearth 21, 27–28, 44, 58, 96, 140, 184 local knowledge 14, 107, 208–9 Lodge, T. 12, 28 logwood 72, 83 London 12–13; economy of manure 105, 115–16, 119–21; households 152–54, 157, 178–79; knowledge making 63–68, 71–72, 79; literatures 28–29, 38, 50, 55, 61n31; riots 14–15; starch 165–66; trading 198, 200, 205, 209, 224–26 Looking-glasse for London and England 12, 28 Lord’s Prayer 26 Lovell, T. 203–4 Low, A. 123 Lucanio 50, 54–55 Lull, R. 176 luxuries 86, 111, 174, 215–17, 219, 222, 227–28 Lyly, J. 28, 50 macaroni 39–41 Macfarlane, A. 12 McRae, A. 122–24, 135 Magiae Naturalis 38, 76–77 magic 97, 103, 131 making shift 10–11, 44–45, 49, 51 Malthus, T. 8–9, 19n10 malting 167–69, 206 Mennell, S. 182 manure 85, 93–97, 101, 103, 113–14; circulation of knowledge 103–11; poetics 121–38, 140 manuscripts 37–40, 63–64, 66–69, 73–82 marbling 80 mariners 39–42, 150–51, 154–55, 167 market 9, 84, 120, 153 market gardening 118 Markham, G. 147–48 marl 105, 108–11, 113, 131, 136, 142n22 matrix of the earth 105 matter 176 Meade, J. 166 meat 41, 149–52; roasting 205–6 medicine 41–42, 73–74, 104, 177–82 Mendax 184–86 Mendoza, B. 38 Menenius 15 Merry Wives of Windsor 46, 189–90 metaphor 56 Meteorologica 104 methods 103

Micro-cynicon 28 middle class 69–71, 146, 148 Middlesex 67–68, 178–79, 198 Middleton, T. 28 Midlands Rising 13–15 migrants 7 Milton, J. 216 Mintz, S. 160 Mirror for Magistrates 2 moderation 45–49, 53, 55, 112, 184 Moffett, T. 99–100 monarchy 32, 48 monopolies 173–74, 207–8 morality 51–53 Moran, B. 176 More, T. 28, 116, 184 Morgan, W. 67 Moritz of Hessen-Kassel 72–73, 226–27 mortality 4, 7–8 Mosanus, J. 31 Mother Bombie 28, 50 moulding 217–19, 223–24 Muldrew, C. 146, 151, 196 muscovado 158 Mutable and wauering estate of France 29, 31 Mynors, H. 65 mysticism 96–97, 127 Naples 104 Nashe, T. 13, 53–59, 89 national identity 119, 174, 181, 189, 191 nature 102–3, 125–27, 130, 230 necessity 219 Nef, J.U. 197, 200, 204 negative ingenuity 44, 47–49, 52, 137–38 Netherlands see Dutch New and admirable arte of setting of corne 38, 85 New, cheape and delicate Fire of Cole-balles 197–99, 201–4 Newcastle 198–99, 201, 208 Newton, E. 163 nitrogen 209–11, 232–33n14 Northamptonshire 14 Northumberland 198, 207 Norton, T. 73, 75 Notable Discouery of Coosnage 50, 52 notebooks 79–84, 177 nourishment 97, 103, 107, 112, 162, 176 occult 73, 75, 98 oeconomy 13, 19n12, 44, 46–47, 186–88 see also economy

Index oils 77–78, 170–72, 177 Ökologie 96 Old Swan 28, 65, 68, 90n4 Old Testament 25, 28 optimizing 94–95 order 48–49 Ordinal 73 organic economy 93–94, 118 Othello 138–39 ovens 205 Ovid 228, 230 Oxfordshire riots 13 Packington, J. 166 Padre di Famiglia 188 Palissy, B. 98, 102, 104–13, 142n20, n23–24 pamphlets 26, 28–32, 37, 49–53 Paracelsus 43, 73, 75, 87–88, 97–100, 103, 111, 134, 142n15,n19 Paradise Lost 216 Pare, A. 105 Paris 26, 31–32, 105 parishes 20 pastoral 125–26 patenting 119–20, 144n42, 166, 173–74, 208 Pater Noster Row 173, 175 pencils 219 Penshurst 185 Penury Into Plenty 15–18 perfumes 77–78, 171 Pericles 183 Peterborough 204 Petrarch 67 Pfister, C. 93 pH 119 Philip II of Spain 104 philosopher’s stone 75 philosophy 176–77 Pierce Pennilesse 55–56 Pierre de L’Estoile 32 plague 42, 116, 177–79 Plato 215–16 Platt, H. 3, 16–18, 34–38, 54–56, 58–59, 146–48, 228–31; bread/starch/ beer 161–70; circulation of knowledge 103–10; comparison with conny-catchers 51–53; ‘culinaria’/ ’medica’ 177–81; dearth scientist 63–72; dreams of plenty 183–89; Elizabethan dearth science 85–89; Falstaff comparison 45–47; flesh/ fowl/fish 149–55; on fuel (finding)

267

196–204; on fuel (saving) 204–14; his network 72–84; luxuries 216–28; natural magic 97–102; oils/waters/ spirits 170–77; poetics of manure 124–26; recycling 111–17; roots/ fruits/flowers 155–61; soap boiling 118–21; substitutes for staple foods 38–44 Platt, H. Jr. 66 Platt, J. 66, 68, 89, 154–55 Platt, M. 67 Platt, Richard 65–67, 90 Platt, Richard Jr. 66 Platt, Robert 66, 178 Platt, William 66–67, 75, 89 plays 45–48, 57, 189–90 pleasure 148 plenty 108, 231; dreams of 182–87 Pliny 43 poetry 66, 101, 215, 228–30; dearth 1–3, 15, 57–58; dreams of plenty 182–88; poetics of manure 121–24, 126–31, 135–37, 140 pompions 164, 188 Poor Law 10, 20 Porta, G. 38, 43, 73, 76–77, 97–98, 161–63, 170 Portugal 205 posterity 95, 136, 140, 142n14, 228 potassium 119 poverty 6–8, 10–14, 23, 49 powders 41–42 power 216 preservation 41, 149–54, 156–60, 170, 188–91 prices 4, 152–53, 198, 200 print 24–25, 27–29 prisoners 42–43 Privy Council 20, 22 prodigality 45, 55–56 productivity 7 professori secreti 97, 126 profit: luxuries 223–28; natural resources 200–201, 209, 211–12, 214; poetics 130, 137–39 Profitable instructions for the manuring, sowing, and planting of kitchin gardens 37 Prognostication euerlasting 26 projectors 175 Prophecie of Agabus 28 protest 13–15 Protestants 31–32, 96, 126–27, 131, 135, 138–39

268

Index

Prouision for the poore 28, 37 providential thought 21–22, 24–25, 27–35, 122, 127–28 Psalms 131 punishment 51–52, 134 Queenhythe 153 Quip for the Upstart Courtier 51 Rabelasian feasts 58 Radclyff, A. 173 Rappen, F. 26 Rauens Almanacke 26–27 reboiling 174 receipts: economy of manure 97–99, 101–3, 126; households 148–61, 177; knowledge making 64, 67, 76–81, 83–84, 90n4; literatures 34–35, 37, 39–42, 59 Record, R. 75 recycling 93–94, 124; discourse on salt 111–14, 116–18; households 169, 190–91; soap boiling 118–20 Redman, W. 22 reduction 44, 55 refining 157–58 Reformation 31 regeneration 48–49 regional differences 6–7 relief 8–11, 20 religion 95–96; circulation of nourishment/knowledge 99–101, 103, 106; literatures of dearth 21–26, 28–36, 43; poetics of manure 122–23, 127–37 Remedies against famine 34–39, 42, 45–46, 59, 85 Renaissance 35, 117, 145 repentance 22–24, 33 Republic, The 215 Reward of Religion 25 Reynolds, J. 13–14 rhetoric 14 Rhodes, N. 50 riots 8, 13–15 Ripley, G. 97–98 roasting 151 Roberts, H. 22 Roger, C.D. 6 Romeo and Juliet 14–15, 28 roots 158–59, 163 roses 171 Royal College of Physicians 227 Royal Society 64, 79

ruffs 165–66 rural poetics 122, 126–27 Ruscelli, G. 76–77, 105 Sackville, T. 2 sailors 39–42, 150–51, 154–55, 167 St Albans 67–68, 110 St John’s College 55, 66, 75 St Pancras 67 St Paul’s 28, 50, 55–57 Saint Peter’s Complaint 135 St Sepulchre 67 salt 56, 111–13, 153–54; circulation of nourishment/knowledge 98–99, 106–8; natural resources 207–10; use of coal in production 198, 200 saltpetre 86, 116, 120, 204–5, 207, 209–12 sanitation 114–16 satire 46, 51, 56–57, 61n35, 66; dreams of plenty 186; God as cause of dearth 26–28; recycling 114–15 Scappi, B. 170, 206 scatology 117 Schofield, R. 2, 7–8 Schultz, C. 125 science 71, 85–87, 91–92n24,n27, 103–5, 126–27, 142n15 Scientific Revolution 71, 142n11 seawater 151, 153 Secretes of the reuerend Maister Alexis of Piemont 76–77 Secreti Medicinali 104 secrets 97, 131, 144n41, 213; households 176, 180–81; knowledge making 72–73, 76, 83 seed 128–29, 131 Segar, F. 68, 72–73, 225–27 Segar, W. 68, 225 Sekora, J. 216 Seler, J. 207 self 136 seminality 98, 103, 141n10 Sen, A. 8–9 Senecan precepts 66–67 sermons 22–29, 33–35, 128–34, 136, 140 Shakespeare, W. 1, 14–15, 216; God as cause of dearth 28, 33; households 183, 189–90; literary dearth 45–48; manure 137–40 Shallow J 46–48 shame 23 Sheppard, R. 163 Sherris-Sack 139–40

Index shift 10–11, 44–45, 49, 51 shopkeeping 68–71, 83–84 Shrewsbury 37 Sidney, R. 185 silver 222–23 Sim, A. 167 sin 133, 135, 216 Slack, P. 6, 10, 197 Sloane Collection 64, 72 small beer 169, 173 Smith, P. 34, 103 Smith, T. 207–8 soap boiling 118–21 social economy 6–9, 46 Socrates 216 soil 85, 94, 100, 102, 105, 108–10 Somerset 12 sources 80–81 south 6–7 Southwell, R. 135–36 Spain 31–32, 38, 104, 119 Spenser, E. 1, 216 spices 41, 170–72 Spiller, E. 35 spirits 170–72, 176 Star Chamber 152 starch 165–66, 168–69, 193n21–22, 226 Starkey, G. 101 starvation 1–3, 6–7, 177 stewardship 123, 135 storage 41, 149–54, 156–60, 170, 188–91 Stourpaine 25, 28, 31, 132 Stow, J. 157 strategies of survival 9–11, 15, 44 Struppe, J. 37–39, 61n16 substitution 196, 221; food 38–42, 162–63; fuel 203 sufficiency 123, 149, 181, 187–88, 215 sugar 157–60, 192n17 Summer’s Last Will 13, 53–54, 57 Sunderland 199–200 Sundrie new and artificiall remedies against famine see Remedies against famine survival strategies 9–11, 15, 44 Sussex 22 sustainability 16–18, 88, 231; economy of manure 94–96, 102–3, 123, 140, 142n14 Switzerland 24 Sylvester, J. 2 symbols 76–77, 101, 127 Tantalus 111–12, 231 Tarsus 183

269

Tasso, T. 188 taverns 50–51 Taylor, E. 101 teleology 95 Temple, The 134 Tey, J. 169 Thames 171–72 Thames Street 28, 68 theft 11–12 Thick, M. 64, 71 thinness 47 Thirsk, J. 4, 166, 175 Thornborough, J. 201 Three Christian Sermons 22–24 thrift 111, 130, 147–48, 189, 216 timber famine 196, 198–99, 202 time 131, 182–83 toilets 114–16 Topsell, E. 25–26, 29 trades 195; bread/starch/beer 161–77; distilling 171–77; households 161–62; luxuries/necessities 224–25; medicine 179–81; natural resources 207–9, 214–15 translations 22–23, 33, 73, 75 travail 53 True relation of the French kinge 26, 29 True reporte of three straunge and wonderful accidents 26 Tudors 123, 135 Tully 36 Turkey 43, 157 Turner, W. 163 Tusser, T. 123–24 “two Englands” 6–7 Umpby, H. 176 uncertainty 11 unemployment 165 Unger, R. 167 unsettled subjectivity 39, 42 uplands 6–7 urine 210, 222 Ursula 50 usquebath 172, 175 usury 204 Utopia 28, 116 utopianism 184–87 vagabonds 10–11 vagrancy 7, 44, 49–50, 51–53 Valles, F. 98, 102, 104, 106, 111–12, 126 value 227–28 vegetable η 97–98, 101

270

Index

Venice 157 Vertumnus 54 vetches 163–64 vinegar 151, 153–54, 167, 169, 172–74, 176–77 vintners 173–76 Virgidemiarum 28, 51, 135 Virgil 124–25, 229 virtue 138 virtuosity 71 Von thüwre unn hunger dry predigen 22–24 vulnerability 7–8 wages 6 Wall, W. 146–48, 160, 189, 191 Walsham, A. 21–22 Walter, J. 2, 7–10, 21, 33 Walton, I. 149 want 56 war 39–42, 211–14 Warde, P. 94, 102, 196 Warde, W. 76 warming pins 205 Warwickshire 7, 14, 44 waste 93–95, 141n1; dreams of plenty 190–91; households 148, 151–53, 172–75; knowledge making 81, 87–88; literatures 53–54, 57; luxury 216–18, 228; natural resources 195, 200; poetics of manure 121, 130–31, 133; salt 111–12, 114–18; soap boiling 118–19 water 41, 106, 109–13, 170–73, 177 wealth 134, 138 weapons 212–13 Webster, C. 89 Wecker, J.J. 76 Weever, J. 56

West Smithfield 67 Westminster 67 Westmoreland 6–7 Westram, Kent 30–31 wheat 38, 161–67 Whickham 7 White, L. 127 Whitgift, J. 22, 28 Whittle, J. 111, 146–48, 150 Wilkinson, R. 13–15 William Platt Collection 75 willow 203–4 wine 40–42, 50–51, 68, 172–77 Wisdome of Doctor Dodypoll 28 wit 56–57, 123, 137–39 witchcraft 12 Wither, G. 136 womb 131 Wonderfull Yeare 28 wood 195–96, 198, 202–5 Woodbridge, L. 49 Woodward, D. 94, 111 Woodward, R. 136–37 Worcestershire 204 worms 149–50 wormwood 167–69 Wright, K. 180 Wrightson, K. 7, 10, 13, 21, 33 Wrigley, E.A. 93 writing 55–59, 117 Württemberg 94 Xaintonge 107–8 Yarmouth 57–58 Yorkshire 7, 28 Young, R. 179 Younge, M. 66