Political currencies: Money, Locke and the circulations of gender in seventeenth-century England

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POLITICAL CURRENCIES MONEY, LOCKE AND THE CIRCULATIONS OF GENDER IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND by Carol Pech

A dissertation submitted to the Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree o f Doctor o f Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland October 1999

© Carol Pech 1999 All rights reserved

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UMI Number: 9950580

Copyright 1999 by Pech, Carol Ann All rights reserved

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ABSTRACT This project explores how a variety o f seventeenth-century English writers attempted to articulate a cogent understanding o f currency and its relation to differing notions o f the political, a task undertaken with difficulty given the material and epistemological flux that money caused during the period. Through a focus on both scholarly and popular texts written during the most severe monetary upheavals o f the 1620's and the 1690rs, this study examines how different understandings o f one key conceptual site shaped monetary discourse and its political valences - namely, the relations between the realms o f convention and the natural. This nexus is especially significant given the notable changes that notions o f money underwent during the seventeenth century, moving from an insistent association o f coinage with its presumed natural qualities to regarding currency as a predominantly artificial tool designed for the convenience o f trade. Similarly, figurations o f the political shifted from an emphasis on the image o f the body politic and its analogical structure to a reliance on the more conventional constructs o f human design, such as contract. These shifts, however, were fraught with a myriad o f highly strung tensions across a number o f registers epistemological, moral and semiotic - that have often gone unexamined. Particularly important to the articulation o f these tensions was the figurative language that emphasized money’s characteristic fluidity and other traits strongly identified with notions o f femininity throughout the early modem period. To bring these conceptual stresses to the fore in order to discern how the fluidity associated with money related to concerns about stability and order understood as central features o f the political, this ii

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study relies on a feminist reading o f Locke and various other writings that is attuned to the complexities o f text and historical context. Thus this project not only elaborates a more complex relation between money and the political in early modem England, but also contributes to the development o f a more nuanced understanding o f Locke’s place in the history o f political theory and the problematics o f gender that shape that history. Readers for this dissertation were Richard E. Flathman and Linda M. G. Zerilli.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to several people, whose thoughts and assistance circulate throughout the pages that follow. First in many ways, I am very thankful to Diane Rubenstein, from whom I first learned how to read in detail. Diane also gave me the opportunity to pursue a graduate degree and her friendship has helped sustain me along the way. Dick Flathman and Linda Zerilli have been generous readers for this dissertation. Flathman’s suggestions assisted me in the initial framing o f this study and in keeping things on track during its composition. Linda’s work in feminist political theory has shaped my own and her comments have greatly strengthened my feminist formulations. Kirstie McClure introduced me to the frustrations and fun o f reading Locke as well as the complexities o f historiography. I am very grateful to Kirstie, whose work has inspired me and whose support and encouragement made this project possible. Many o f my interests and questions concerning early modem England developed their critical form at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Grants-in-aid from the Folger Institute allowed me to participate in two seminars that provided me with considerable intellectual and personal sustenance. Conversations with fellow seminarians in “Researching the Renaissance” and “Renaissance Fetishisms: Clothes and the Fashioning o f the Subject” helped me sort through my thoughts and gave me new ways to say them. I am particularly grateful to three individuals who I was fortunate enough to cross paths with at the Folger. My fellow renaissance dummy, Torsten Kehler, has been a kind critical interlocutor and a faithful source o f both humorous and encouraging words. Gil Harris has generously shared and discussed with me his own work on early modem iv

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monetary texts. Peter Stallybrass’ interest in and enthusiasm for my research gave me a much needed intellectual boost that encouraged me to pursue lines o f inquiry that might otherwise have been lost. Several others have also influenced the direction o f this study, including Elizabeth Weed, whose seminar on the fetish kindled my interests in fetishism in its many forms. Nancy Hirschmann read and offered insightful critiques o f several early versions o f chapter four. The work o f Stephanie Jed has been an exemplar o f what reading can be and our well timed conversation reminded me to attend to the material details o f texts themselves. Bett Miller, rare book curator at Hopkins, guided me through those details more than once and answered all odd bibliographic queries without fail and with much kindness. This dissertation would not have been completed without the steady friendship o f several Hopkins comrades, including Mark Cushman, Eben Friedman, and Jeff Mullins. I am also thankful to my family for, among other things, their very welcome disinterest in the particulars o f my research. Finally, the strength and affection o f two wonderful friends saw me and this project through some very dark days indeed. Tim Kubik stood by me during some tough moments and has been an extraordinary source o f support. My older and invariably wiser brother, Siba N. Grovogui, offered thoughtful counsel as well as a ready ear and shoulder. For all o f these gifts o f friendship, I am truly grateful.

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CONTENTS EDITORIAL NOTE ............................................................................................................ vii INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................

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Chapters 1. PRACTICES OF READING: CONTEXTUALISM. FEMINIST POLITICAL THEORY AND EARLY MODERN T E X T S.......................................................................10 2. FIGURING COMMERCE: MONEY, GENDER AND THE POLITICAL IN 1620’S ENGLAND .............................................................................................................................. 68 3. “THE MACHINE OF THIS WORLD”: ORDER, LAW AND CONVENTION . . . 137 4. “HIS NUTS FOR A PIECE OF METAL” : FETISHISM IN LOCKE’S MONETARY WRITINGS ............................................................................................................................ 175 CO NCLUSIO N..................................................................................................................... 223 BIBLIOGRAPHY.............

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EDITORIAL NOTE For all early modem texts in original or facsimile editions, I have retained the original orthography except for silently modernizing i, j, u, v, w , w and long s. I have also retained the original punctuation and capitalization, and all italics - unless otherwise noted - are in the original. With the occasional exception for those o f excessive length, titles are given in their long form. When accurate, page references are given in arabic numerals and when not, folio references are provided. All dates are in old style, but the year is taken to begin January 1 rather than March 25.

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INTRODUCTION Silver is the kings stampe, man Gods stampe, and a woman is mans stampe, wee are not currant till wee passe from one man to another. Thomas Dekker, Northward Ho Spoken by a harlot in Dekker’s Northward Ho, the above words prefigure by some two to three centuries the emergence o f theoretical investigations o f the role o f women in relation to various kinds o f exchange, as evident for example in works by Marx and Engels, Freud, and Levi-Strauss.1 In turn, these writings have been scrutinized by various forms o f feminist scholarship that have sought to more thoroughly examine the links among women, money and commercial society.2 Within these feminist critiques, the operations o f different circuits o f exchange are understood to structure the oppression o f women and these are often regarded as trans-historical (and from some perspectives, trans-cultural) phenomena. Although much consideration has been given to how and why women are caught up within these mechanisms o f exchange, relatively little attention has been paid to how these associations may function within particular historical settings. 1 See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1965); Frederick Engels, The Origin o f the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1942); Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, vol. 13, The Standard Edition o f the Complete Psychological Works o f Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1950); and Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures o f Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 2 See, for example, Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983); Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Ts Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ o f Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology o f Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).

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Moreover, the possibility that currency as well as other aspects o f commerce may themselves be impacted by varying understandings o f gender has only recently become the subject o f study. Though the various ways in which different economies continue to problematically structure the lives o f all sorts o f women require continued examination, this project pursues a line o f inquiry that departs from more standard feminist critiques o f exchange. By focusing on a period characterized by significant commercial turmoil, this study considers how historically specific constructions o f gender shaped - and were shaped by - shifting forms o f monetary and political discourse. This conceptual locus allows for an examination o f the relations among gender, commerce and the political that affords a different critical perspective from that offered by some forms o f feminist theorizing. In particular, this project explores how a variety o f seventeenth-century English writers attempted to articulate the meanings and functions o f currency, a task undertaken with difficulty given the great flux - material as w ell as epistemological - that money caused during the early modem period. This dissertation analyzes the difficulties Locke and others faced in explicating not only a cogent understanding o f money itself, but also its crucial relation to differing notions o f the political. Through a focus on a number o f both scholarly and popular texts written during the most severe monetary upheavals surro u n d in g the coinage crises o f the 1620's and the 1690's, this dissertation examines

how different understandings o f one key conceptual site shaped monetary discourse and its political valences - namely, the relations between the realms o f convention and the natural. This nexus is especially significant given the notable changes that notions o f

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money underwent during the seventeenth century, moving from an insistent association o f coinage with its presumed natural qualities to regarding currency as a predominantly artificial tool designed for the convenience o f trade. Similarly, figurations o f the political shifted from an emphasis on the image o f the body politic and its analogical structure to a reliance on the more conventional constructs o f human design, such as contract. These shifts, however, were fraught with a myriad o f often highly strung tensions across a number o f registers - epistemological, moral and semiotic, to name but a few - that have often gone unexamined. Particularly important to the articulation o f these tensions was the intensely figurative language that emphasized money’s characteristic fluidity and other traits strongly identified with notions o f woman and the feminine throughout the early modem period. To bring these multifaceted conceptual stresses to the fore in order to better discern how the fluidity associated with money related to overwhelming concerns about stability and order understood as central features o f the political, this study relies on a feminist reading o f Locke and a variety o f other writings that is attuned to the complexities o f both text and historical context. Thus this project not only elaborates a more complex relation between money and the political in early modem England, but also contributes to the development o f a more nuanced understanding o f Locke’s place in the history o f political theory as w ell as the problematics o f gender that shape that history. A consistent concern with approaches to the reading o f historical texts is a central feature o f each o f the broader methodological issues that frame my project and thus its opening chapter, “Practices o f Reading: Contextualism, Feminist Political Theory, and 3

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Early Modem Texts,” consists o f an analysis o f the interpretive difficulties posed by early modem monetary thought as w ell as some o f the critical limitations that inhere within prominent forms o f contextualism and feminist political theory. After an explication o f the challenges posed by the complexities o f early modem monetary discourse and its gendered connotations, this chapter turns to an assessment o f the works o f two o f the most notable contextual practitioners in political theory - Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock. Although each offers an understanding o f political discourse that holds promise for a more robust engagement with early modem works on money, the approaches advocated by Skinner and Pocock arguably construct a practice o f reading that privileges a particular reading subject resistant to gender and feminist concerns. However problematic contextual reading protocols may be, feminist political theory also possesses its own critical constraints that emerge, in part, from a troublesome relation to the classic texts and concepts o f political theory. The closing section o f this chapter thus evaluates the difficulties encountered by feminist perspectives in political theory, yet also considers how the resources o f more historically and semiotically informed modes o f inquiry may enable feminist political theory to better negotiate its own theoretical obstacles as well as the intricacies o f early modem texts o f various kinds. After exam ining the potential for different types o f feminist reading within political theory in chapter one, the following chapter, “Figuring Commerce: Money, Gender and the Political in I620's England,” pursues such possibilities through a consideration o f how a variety o f texts from the 1620's attempted to articulate the meanings o f money as well as its material and moral effects, especially in relation to the 4

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sorts o f language used to form an understanding o f the early modem body politic. This chapter maintains that the points o f convergence and contention between monetary and political discourse during the period indicate sites o f tension linked to qualities and modes o f signification associated with femininity and woman. Those concerned with the place o f money within this natural order frequently posited it as constituting the blood or other vital fluid that sustained the very life o f the body politic. This also meant, however, that from early on the stability and order o f the patriarchal body politic was intimately linked with the traits o f fluidity and inconstancy attributed to money as well as early modem notions o f woman, as evident in trade tracts written during the 1620's. Rather than regarding such instances as simply examples o f the displacement o f disorder onto womanly figures exiled from understandings o f the political, this chapter suggests that the continued articulation and recognition o f disruptive forces associated with the feminine was crucial to sustaining a specific notion o f the political as part o f a naturally ordered universe. In turn, this circulation o f gender not only shaped monetary and political discourse, but also figured different meanings for femininity and woman in the early modem period. The chapter closes with the suggestion that the traits and forms o f signification linked to woman that were relied on to resist the damaging effects o f certain political anxieties in the 1620's were echoed with important differences in the writings and monetary thought o f John Locke. Although Locke’s major monetary texts were published in 1695-96 as part o f a larger discussion about how to bring the coinage crisis o f the time to an end, the writings were connected to thoughts about money first put to paper between approximately 1668 5

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and 1674. This bit o f bibliographic information is significant, for my larger argument about Locke maintains that his monetary writings o f the 1690's ultimately articulate a position that favors a form o f uncertainty posited in a natural fluidity over the epistemologically mistaken and morally dangerous belief in the illusion o f stability offered by conventional constructs o f human design. The third chapter o f this project, ‘“ The Machine o f This World’: Order, Law and Convention,” suggests that this position unfolds across a number o f Locke’s texts over a fair period o f time in different attempts to delineate the relationships between what he regarded as natural (i.e., natural law, parental duties, human society) and as conventional (i.e, civil law, magisterial authority, fashion). The various understandings o f this nexus are crucial to assessing Locke’s thought on money, an object he considered as related in complex ways to both nature and convention. Yet to appreciate how Locke develops what is arguably a fetishistic stance regarding the increasingly symbolic character o f both money and the political in the 1690's, an analysis o f how points o f conceptual tension emerged and were reshaped over several years when Locke already had money on his mind is necessary. This set o f considerations is opened with an examination o f a text widely regarded as one o f Locke’s most conservative approaches to civil government, Questions Concerning the Law o f Nature. Though the stringency o f Locke’s understanding o f obligation in this early work depends on a tight coalescence between natural law and its conventional civil manifestations, this link does not go unchallenged by the forces o f human custom and design - most notably in regard to matters o f gender and sexual practice. In contrast, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding presents the realm o f the natural as 6

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more remote from human comprehension, while conventional constructs are portrayed as more immediate and as posing a greater moral danger. Whereas Locke is largely able to posit a notion o f the political inthe Questions based on a relatively successful cohesion between the natural and convention, the broadening o f epistemological concerns in the Essay make such an alliance increasingly difficult to sustain. Although Locke’s most successful attempt to bridge this widening gap is arguably found in the Second Treatise, my argument suggests that his writings on money best illustrate the enormity o f the task Locke faced in negotiating a divide with important epistemological, political, and ultimately moral stakes. Written within a historical context characterized by significant contestations over the meanings o f currency, Locke’s writings on money evince certain anxieties brought on by the uncertainties o f what may be understood as an emerging symbolic order. In an effort to negotiate these difficulties this study’s final chapter,“‘his Nuts for a piece o f Metal’: Fetishism in Locke’s Monetary Writings” argues that Locke relies on a logic o f fetishism that both disavows the rising force o f symbolic abstraction by asserting the importance o f the natural and simultaneously recognizes certain aspects o f the power o f convention. Moreover, my argument maintains that Locke is able to articulate a meaningful alternative position in regard to the vagaries o f the emerging modes o f abstract signification through a reliance on money’s associations with femininity that were the locus o f different political meanings earlier in the century. In order to bring the process o f fetishism to the fore, this chapter examines how Locke’s monetary writings are shaped by his semiotics and its epistemological moorings as presented in the Essay. The 7

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substantial effects o f Locke’s semiotics on his understanding o f money are particularly evident in the role o f the natural as manifested in the figurative language o f fluidity and its attendant trope, metonymy. In a manner similar to that found in commercial texts from the 1620's, Locke’s metonymic construction o f money not only introduces a certain instability into the world o f trade, but also serves as an avenue for desire that raises the sort o f anxiety that fosters a process o f fetishism. Through his symptomatic use o f silver articulated through a figurative language strongly associated with femininity, Locke’s fetishism asserts the natural as the true source o f value for money and for how meaning in the “economic” and, in turn, political world is generated. At the same time, Locke’s assertion o f the natural disavows the role o f the emerging symbolic as the sole site o f semiotic privilege and, in so doing, retains some o f the initial identification between natural law and civil law that he struggled to maintain in his earlier writings. Although a feminine fluidity was relied on early in the century to fend off an even more profound type o f political disorder than that already caused by money’s travels, Locke relies on such fluidity to resist the epistemologically false and morally dangerous forms o f stability offered by an increasingly conventional understandings o f both currency and the political. Thus through a greater recognition o f Locke’s reliance on a feminine semiotics to cope with significant conceptual hurdles, what is often regarded as a founding moment in the emergence o f distinctly modem political and economic vocabularies becomes far more intricate than frequently interpreted. This project concludes with a brief return to some o f the questions raised in chapter one concerning the possibility for pursuing more historically informed kinds o f 8

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feminist inquiry within political theory. In particular, a brief survey o f recent works in feminist historiography and women’s history provides support for this project’s arguments concerning the importance o f the close ties between gender and understandings o f markets as well as property in early modem England. These findings both contrast with and call for a modification o f more standard interpretations within historiography as well as feminist political theory which argue that women and the feminine were largely exiled from the public sphere, including substantial commercial activities. Moreover, the connections that may be drawn between evidence concerning the material aspects o f the lives o f early modem women and the constructions o f gender that shaped them are suggestive o f ways in which feminist political theory may become more attuned to the circulations o f gender within different historical contexts,

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CHAPTER ONE PRACTICES OF READING CONTEXTUALISM, FEMINIST POLITICAL THEORY AND EARLY MODERN TEXTS A central yet often implicit set o f issues framing any theoretical endeavor concerns the politics o f reading and how different reading protocols may both shape and be shaped by specific disciplinary settings. Within political theory, these broad interpretative matters are made salient by specific questions regarding not only the relationship between reader and text, but also the effects that canonical structures and established disciplinary norms may have on different critical practices. This set o f general concerns acquires particular importance in relation to this project’s focus on early modem monetary and political thought and the notions o f gender that circulate through and between these domains. Not only does this temporal and topical scope pose its own interpretive challenges, but the practices o f reading within political theory that seem most amenable to this subject - broadly construed here as contextualism and feminist political theory - prove problematic for an analysis o f the complex details o f early modem texts.1 Before turning to an examination o f the limitations and possibilities associated with such

1 Throughout this chapter contextualism and feminist political theory refer to the more established reading protocols associated with each area. Although some o f the differences within feminist political theory are noted in the final section o f this chapter, the contextual perspective is represented only through the texts of Pocock and Skinner. For other kinds o f contextual approaches, see the works o f Richard Tuck CPhilosophy and Government 1572-1621 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993]) and James Tully (An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993]).

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reading protocols, an exploration o f the textual and conceptual difficulties inherent to seventeenth-century monetary writings, including Locke’s, will be helpful. However problematic this subject may be for political theory, it has not necessarily fared w ell in others areas o f inquiry - including different forms o f historiography as well as literary criticism - and the problems encountered by these fields serve to illuminate specific interpretive dilemmas. Part o f the reader’s task in addressing early modem monetary writings involves a negotiation o f a complicated historical context, and therefore this chapter turns to an assessment o f the works o f Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, each o f whom is credited with formulating the most prominent historically oriented practices o f reading within political theory. Although they each offer a compelling understanding o f political discourse that holds promise for an examination o f early modem works on money, the critical approaches advocated by Skinner and Pocock are arguably resistant to feminist concerns in part because they adhere to a restricted apprehension o f language itself. Yet as constrained as contextual perspectives may be at least in regard to gender, feminist political theory also possesses it own limitations that arguably emerge from a troublesome relation to the classic texts o f political theory and the highly referential notion o f women upon which this canon depends. Hence the final section o f this chapter evaluates some o f the difficulties faced by feminist perspectives in political theory, yet also considers how the resources o f more historically and semiotically informed modes o f inquiry may allow feminist political theory to better negotiate the theoretical obstacles it encounters as well as the challenges inherent to early modem texts o f all kinds. Reading Early Modern Money 11

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With the exception o f certain scholarship on Locke, early modem monetary debates have largely escaped the critical examination o f most political theorists - a fact perhaps not surprising in light o f the difficulty in discerning salient political stakes in seemingly antiquarian discussions about issues like recoinage.2 Yet such interpretive obstacles are arguably exacerbated by political theory’s own adherence to a kind o f historical perspective that makes an analysis o f the intricacies o f monetary thought difficult to pursue. On a very broad level, the common structuring narrative o f political theory posits the works o f some seventeenth-century English thinkers as constituting a series o f conceptual contributions critical to the formation o f the modem era. Whether this is understood as a major epistemic shift or as a more gradual unfolding, seventeenthcentury writers deemed integral to the canon o f political theory are understood to anticipate or figure - to one degree or another and with varying degrees o f “success” - a recognizably modem form o f the political.3 Placed on a continuum o f sorts, these thinkers constitute points on a diachronic vector that moves from those forms o f theorizing that attribute the stability o f the body politic to the maintenance o f a natural

2 Notable recent contributions to work on Locke’s monetary writings include Patrick Hyde Kelly, introduction to Locke on Money, by John Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Kirstie M. McClure, Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits o f Consent (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); James Thompson, Models o f Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); and Karen Iverson Vaughn, John Locke: Economist and Social Scientist (Chicago: The University o f Chicago Press, 1980) and “The Economic Background o f Locke’s Two Treatises o f G o vern m en tin John Locke’s Two Treatises o f Government: New Interpretations, ed. Edward J. Harpham (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1992). See chapter four for additional references. 3 Roughly, the modem notion o f the political is taken here to mean one strongly associated with the state and its institutions, located within a distinctly public space increasingly separated from private concerns, and that supports and is supported by a folly monetary economy driven by self-interested, rights bearing individuals.

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and analogically structured universe, to those that develop such constancy through more self-determined and conventional constructs such as contract. However finessed in its differing versions, this trajectory o f intellectual development is enabled by at least two related narrative threads: the formation o f distinct public and private spheres, and the rise o f capitalist monetary economies. In particular, the close o f the seventeenth century is frequently regarded as a pivotal point o f confluence where these three stories meet and shape a specifically modem form o f the political - often posited in the singular figure o f John Locke.4 This exaggerated gloss is decidedly not the predominant line o f argument followed by all scholars working with early modem thought; rather it serves to illustrate the narrative point that approaches to the period with developmental elements are subject to a certain centripetal force that arguably fosters interpretive constrictions.5 The compelling force o f developmental accounts is arguably a result o f the ease with which the closely parallel narrative threads identified above can be woven together to constitute the defining features o f a modem notion o f the political. The result is a tightly cohering narrative possessing a centripetal force that frequently works against efforts to challenge such accounts by restricting the conceptual space available in which to consider those historical tensions that would complicate this story. Though fostering an attentiveness to

4 Examples of works that identify Locke with one o r all o f these narrative threads - albeit to varying degrees - include Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); William Reddy, Money and Liberty in Early Modern Europe: A Critique o f Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Gordon Schochet, The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes in 17th Century England, with a new introduction (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1988). s The reference to centripetal force is drawn from the work o f Mikhail Bakhtin. In particular, see “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University o f Texas Press, 1981): 272-73.

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historical detail within political theory may help in staving o ff the deleterious effects o f what may be termed narrative overdetermination, an uncritical turn to history alone is unlikely to remedy the difficulties confronted in assessing early modem monetary thought and its political implications. Indeed, many historians concerned with the workings o f monetary exchange and markets in seventeenth-century England also succumb to some o f the same narrative pitfalls encountered by political theorists - albeit to a lesser degree and with differing consequences. A signficant share o f the historical as well as literary work on money in the early modem period successfully evokes to differing degrees the great flux conceptual and material - with which English monetary thinkers grappled.6 The trauma caused by monetary difficulties was extraordinary, for although currency was explicitly understood as subject to state purview, England lacked the sort o f administrative apparatuses that could have managed and potentially eased the impact o f monetary crises. As many historically informed works recognize, referring to the webs o f monetary commerce characteristic o f England at the time as an “economy” - thus implying some coherent systematic control or understanding - is at best a rather absurd anachronism. As a result, the historiography concerning this period frequently renders it as a very murky prelude to the formation o f a recognizable “economy” that is often understood to emerge

6 This includes Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) ; Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age o f Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence o f Political Economy, 1662-1776 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); William Letwin, The Origins o f Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought, 1660-1776 (London: Vfethuen, 1963); and James Thompson, Models o f Value: EighteenthCentury Political Economy and the Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

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with the rise o f credit and capital during the eighteenth century. Yet this conclusion poses problems o f its own, for in their attempts to frame the confusion o f early modem monetary discourse, historians in particular are aided or obstructed - depending on one’s perspective - by the accidents o f fate that conveniently divide up the English seventeenth century for fairly easy periodization. With a twenty year section o f civil wars in the middle, many historians concerned with money in this era focus their efforts on the remaining years on either side o f the divide to the exclusion o f an analysis o f connections between them.7 This seemingly banal point has significant critical consequences since the narrative effects o f this division frequently obscure the conceptual import o f the very ambiguities many historians insist are characteristic o f early modem monetary thought. Depending on whether the focus is post-1660 (or 1688) or pre-1640, the interesting characteristics o f monetary writings have a tendency to be accounted for as merely anticipatory o f eighteenth-century economic developments or as symptomatic o f the confusion inherent to earlier “mercantilist” or even medieval approaches to money, respectively. With the notable exceptions o f historians like Appleby, such divisions make it difficult to explore the possible existence o f related, if not common, strands o f thought about money across this conceptual and narrative divide. Conversely, those attempting to resist the pull o f narrative forces in either direction often produce highly specific studies that, although often insightful, are unable to shed much light on the larger puzzle o f

7 The dates given in the titles of Hutchison, Letwin, and Barry Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600-1642: A Study in the Instability o f Mercantile Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959) are indicative o f this tendency.

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monetary discourse.8 Part o f the challenge, then, is to formulate an approach to early modem thought on money that does not result either in the occlusion o f important sites o f conceptual tension (as found in developmental narratives about the emergence o f the modem form o f the political) or in the atomization o f historical detail present in some economic history. In order to examine the complexities o f monetary discourse that have been obscured by the narrative effects o f different historical perspectives, a focus on money’s imbricated relations with early modem notions o f the political and gender is necessary. By itself, a renewed attention to the relations between monetary and political discourses is essential, for throughout the early modem period the integrity o f any currency was understood in direct relation to the legitimacy o f the political entity issuing it. Clipping, counterfeiting and other forms o f monetary abuse were regarded as acts o f high treason and hence the coinage crises o f the 1620's and I690's - each exacerbated by these crimes - caused profound concern not only about the stability o f English currency, but also the maintenance o f order at home and national reputation abroad. These patently political worries also worked in consort with other epistemological and moral anxieties to create a particularly dense and heated discourse about money that had as one o f its stakes questions about the very legitimacy o f the English state itself. Yet the significance o f currency in relation to the political was also shaped by a complex conceptual transition

8 The studies offered by Stephen Baxter and Joan Thirsk are illustrative o f this point (The Development o f the Treasury, 1660-1702 [London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1957] and Economic Policy and Projects: The Development o f a Consumer Society in Early Modem England [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978], respectively).

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from a reliance on natural, organic conceits to those more informed by convention.9 As early modem notions o f money moved from an insistent association o f coinage with its presumed natural properties to a greater confidence in the abstract character o f currency, figurations o f the political also shifted from an emphasis on a divinely ordered universe often presented in the guise o f the body politic to a reliance on the more conventional constructs o f human artifice. Rather than examine these shifts by regarding them simply as parallel tracts o f development along the same epistemic trajectory, the intricacies o f each discourse become apparent when analyzed more critically as closely related spheres whose languages cross - and at times conflict - in telling ways. From this perspective, a consideration o f how such struggles developed from the coinage crisis o f the 1620's as shaped in part by the languages o f patriarchalism, to a similar crisis in the 1690's thoroughly addressed in the writings o f Locke - a figure often regarded as the harbinger o f a distinctly modem political vocabulary - becomes possible. Tracing the points o f tension as well as convergence between these densely packed conceptual spheres suggests a far more intricate narrative concerning the development o f the modem political state and economy then commonly assumed within political theory as well as some forms o f historiography. Although a closer examination o f the imbrication o f monetary and political discourses offers important insights, this focus alone does not specifically attend to the ways in which monetary thought was articulated through language that carried

9 The significance o f this conceptual shift is thoroughly presented by Michel Foucault, The Order o f Things (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971; Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1994). A similar change in seventeenth-century political thought is explicated by Schochet.

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significantly gendered connotations. The reliance on such language is remarkable, for although concerns about gender were the object o f much discussion in religious sermons and household manuals, they were not an item for reflection in the political theory o f seventeenth-century England.10 Though not a specifically political issue in the early modem sense, questions about gender were nonetheless strongly contested across a number o f levels in society and an historical analysis focused on gender provides the opportunity to consider how the language o f such discussions was echoed elsewhere, including a consideration o f its political valences.11 This is particularly prescient for an examination o f early modem monetary discourse that consisted o f a rich locus o f associations among currency, language and particular understandings o f woman and the feminine. The connection between currency and language alone is not unfamiliar even to the late modem reader, yet some o f these connotations have faded in words like commerce that are now confined to a strictly economic meaning and have lost their early modem references to linguistic and intellectual exchange. A far more wide ranging loss, however, has occurred in regard to money’s early modem associations with gender and

10This is not to suggest that certain political theorists did not concern themselves with issues related to women, as evident for example in Locke’s observations on the education o f girls and Filmer’s tract on the ideal wife (see John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, in The Educational Writings o f John Locke, ed. James Axtell [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968] and Sir Robert Filmer, “In Praise o f the Vertuous Wife,” in The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History o f the Family, Margaret J. M. Ezell [Chapel Hill: University o f North Carolina Press, 1987]). 11A possible exception to the apolitical status o f concerns with gender might be found in the statutory law o f the era that regarded a wife’s murder o f her husband as an act o f petty treason (Declaration o f Treasonous Offenses. Statutes o f the Realm. 1352.25 Edw. 3, St. 5, c. 2). However, this statute also covered a servant’s murder o f his master as well as the murder o f clergy suggesting a broader concern with the maintenance o f social order that was not solely located around issues o f gender. For an extended treatment o f this matter, see Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

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sexuality that have almost entirely faded from modem view. Throughout the seventeenth century, however, words such as clip, counterfeit and coin were explicitly linked to women and concerns about sexuality - particularly promiscuity and illegitimacy.12 Money itself was highly personified (most frequently in fem inine form) throughout popular literature and in even seemingly mundane venues like accounting ledgers.13 Yet the sorts o f figurative language used in monetary discourse comprised more than a series o f simple equations (i.e., words=coins=women); rather they formed a more complex conceptual nexus in which not only was money gendered, but also certain uses and types o f language. For example, the presumed feminine vice o f garrulity or loquacity was in part an extension o f the disruptive fluidity commonly ascribed to women’s bodies that was initially posited by Aristotle and later Galen.14 The association o f woman with fluidity eventually found its way into early modem concerns with the correct uses o f rhetoric as well as the right ordering o f language.15 Hence given the close ties not only between

12 Reference works that further explicate these relations include Sandra K. Fischer, Econolingua (Newark: University o f Delaware Press, 1985) and Gordon Williams, A Dictionary o f Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols. (London: The Athlone Press, 1994). 13 For a treatment o f accounting and gender in the period, see Mary Poovey, “Accommodating Merchants: Accounting, Civility, and Natural Laws o f Gender,” differences: A Journal o f Feminist Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 1996) and for an analysis of related concerns about mercantile writing in the renaissance, see Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape ofLucretia and the Birth o f Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 14 For the association o f fluidity with women, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion o f Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) and for its implications for specific notions o f woman and femininity, see Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University o f Chicago , 1991) and Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines o f Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 15On this point see Juliet Fleming, “Dictionary English and the Female Tongue,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, (continued...)

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words and coinage but also words and women, an examination o f how concerns about gender shaped the language o f monetary texts becomes especially significant. In particular, a consideration o f how money was often figured through a feminine fluidity demonstrates how these sorts o f articulations raised various anxieties that often contrasted with early modem understandings o f the political that regarded the latter as a guarantor o f stability in the face o f all sorts o f flux. As the following chapters will explicate, although traits - and ultimately tropes - historically affiliated with concepts o f woman seemed to threaten the political order early modem writers were trying to sustain, they consistently relied on such linguistic figures to create understandings o f money and its relation to the political that, as a consequence, often echoed concerns about language as w ell as gender. An attention to the historical significations o f gender as well as the imbricated relations o f monetary and political thought thus begins to bring to the critical surface the intricacies o f early modem monetary discourse frequently obscured by other forms o f inquiry. The compelling links among money, gender and words are particularly important to the reevaluation o f the monetary writings o f Locke. Although the importance o f money to Locke’s thought has frequently been acknowledged and has received some notable critical attention, a closer consideration o f how his approach to money compares and differs with similar discussions earlier in the century has yet to be pursued. Situated at the end o f the seventeenth century, Locke’s published texts on money address the tremendous conceptual and material upheavals surrounding the coinage crisis o f the

ls(...continued) Property (London: Methuen, 1987).

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1690's. Taking place at almost the same time as the founding o f the Bank o f England in 1694, those writing in response to this crisis were caught between at least two very different understandings o f money. One m aintained an older focus on the moral meanings o f money and emphasized its intrinsic, natural value as a precious metal, while the other placed money in the considerably more abstract realm o f convention and credit where the value o f currency was solely derived from that assigned to it by human design.16 Placed at this critical but equivocal point in the emergence o f both the modem state and what would later be termed the economy, Locke’s monetary texts vividly display the tensions and anxieties produced by the conceptual contentions about money. Yet analyzing Locke’s writings presents a number o f challenges since they possess characteristics that are particularly subject to the sorts o f narrative difficulties and potential elisions that plague assessments o f early modem monetary thought as a whole. To read Locke’s texts with an attention to the workings o f multiple shifting vocabularies constitutes a degree o f resistance to the conceptual occlusions present in many treatments o f Locke found within both historiography and political theory. At the broadest level, a reassessment o f Locke’s writings along these lines sheds different critical light on Locke’s historical context as well as the terms o f debate about coinage then current, the complexities o f which have long been noted by scholars o f the period though rarely closely examined. More specifically, an investigation o f possible links between Locke’s thought on money and earlier discussions about commerce opens some conceptual space within which a reconsideration o f the status o f his texts becomes possible. In particular, a

16 For an analysis o f the development o f the latter position, see Appleby.

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more detailed reading o f the largely elided tensions within Locke’s monetary works permits an extended consideration o f both how certain concerns about money remained salient throughout the century and how shifts in political vocabularies shaped the languages through which such issues were addressed. A focus on the often fraught details o f historical shifts in monetary discourse alone, however, is not necessarily sufficient to bring the intricacies o f such transitional moments to the fore. If interpretations o f early modem monetary thought - including Locke’s - have frequently been influenced by the problematic effects o f differing historical narratives, then the task remains to develop the critical resources that can effectively bring to the forefront those aspects o f signification that have been occluded. By attending to the linguistic intricacies o f political and monetary thought within a variety o f texts and the complexity o f historically specific understandings o f gender that shaped such languages, a feminist reading is well equipped to negotiate those problems that have persisted in other studies. In particular, the sort o f feminist reading pursued throughout this project analyses how certain significatory processes and tropological figures shaped monetary discourse and in so doing, begins to more fully illuminate the dense interconnections among coinage, words and women during the early modem period. More than an exercise in compensation for what has been elided, this approach seeks to develop an understanding o f how the gendered fluidity and indeterminacy associated with coinage interacted with concerns about stability and constancy that were central features o f early modem understandings o f the political. Through a reliance on certain semiotic resources, Locke and others articulated meaningful alternative positions in relation to the 22

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anxieties brought on by uncertainties posed by changing notions o f money and the political as well as the instability o f gender. Moreover, this feminist reading o f early modem monetary thought not only allows the differences at play in the writings o f Locke and others to shed new light on his place in political theory, but also on some crucial aspects o f historical constructions o f gender. Significations o f woman and the feminine not only shaped the “public” discourses surrounding money and politics, but notions o f gender were arguably also impacted by its circulations within these conceptual arenas. Finally, by focusing on forms o f signification prominent within early modem monetary texts as well as their gendered connotations, this type o f feminist reading provides the critical resources with which to challenge those historical perspectives that obscure the links between money, language and gender from late modem view. From this perspective, very different historiographical questions may be raised concerning a period frequently regarded as the founding site o f a specifically modem form o f the political and economy. Though this kind o f feminist reading may offer an avenue through which a consideration o f an important early modem conceptual nexus becomes more feasible, it also contrasts in many ways with other reading protocols within political theory, most notably prominent forms o f contextualism and feminist political theory. Whereas contextual approaches and the reading strategy proposed above share an attunement to the details o f language, the former are arguably resistant to the forms o f signification and its gendered connotations that are integral to early modem monetary texts. Obversely, although various types o f feminist political theory are o f course attentive to the presence 23

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o f gender in works o f political theory, they have not on the whole been concerned with the articulation o f differing concepts o f woman, women, and femininity as they appear in diverse historical settings. Therefore both contextualism and feminist political theory each pose their own obstacles to pursuing an analysis o f the complexities o f early modem monetary and political discourses as well as their gendered valences. Thus a consideration o f the more problematic limitations o f each o f these practices o f reading is important for this project in order to better delineate a critical space that differs from those commonly available within political theory. Moreover, an examination o f the interpretive constraints that shadow some kinds o f feminist political theory and contextualism emphasizes the importance o f fostering more historically informed modes o f feminist inquiry better able to challenge the exclusionary effects o f more established versions o f the history o f political discourse and its relations to gender. Reading, Context and the Limits o f Specularity Although not the subject o f sustained feminist scrutiny, contextual approaches and their proponents have appeared in different accounts o f the exclusion o f feminism and feminist readers from political theory.17 For the purposes o f this chapter, the most important o f these arguments is that offered by Linda Zerilli, who asks “political theorists to consider what it means to intervene in the conversation [i.e., o f political theory] as a feminist” and examines this question in relation to the different conceptions o f political

17 For a review o f non-feminist critical engagements with contextual approaches, see Peter L. Jenssen, “Political Thought as Traditonary Action: The Critical Response to Skinner and Pocock,” History and Theory 24, no. 2 (1985).

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theory found in the works o f Wolin and Pocock.18 Zerilli argues that Wolin’s notion o f political philosophy constitutes a specific form o f vision that successfully “translates the ‘private’ relations o f sexuality and the home into a nonobject, a ‘nothing to be seen’ that can have no status in the political conversation except that o f disorder.”19 Relying on Luce Irigaray’s understanding o f the impossible position o f the female subject in regard to phallocentric systems o f representation, Zerilli argues that woman serves as a mirror for the (male) subject by “giving man back ‘his’ image and repeating it as the ‘same’” at the expense o f “her own sexual difference.”20 For Zerilli, Wolin’s approach to politics depends on precisely on this notion o f specularity that turns any threatening presence (i.e., any difference) into an absence thereby circumscribed from the field o f vision that constitutes political theory.21 Somewhat more problematic than Wolin’s occluded field o f vision is Pocock’s understanding o f a specific language polity within which the conversation o f political theory occurs, that Zerilli suggests is structured by an approach to language itself that assumes the stability o f a (masculine) speaking subject where conflict takes place “between the intentions o f the speaker and the social context o f his

18 Linda M. G. Zerilli, “Machiavelli’s Sisters: Women and the ‘Conversation’ o f Political Theory,” Political Theory 19, no. 2 (May 1991): 255. For a different feminist critique o f contextual approaches, see Christine Di Stefano, Configurations o f Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 19 Ibid., 262-3. 20 Ibid., 261, quoting Luce Irigaray, Speculum o f the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) 54. 21 Zerilli, “Machiavelli’s Sisters,” 262.

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‘performance.’”22 Pocock relies on a metaphoric use o f rape to describe the initial context o f communication in this language polity and argues that such violence may be mitigated by the use o f “shared conventions” that allow others to protest exclusionary utterances.23 As Zerilli argues, however, Pocock’s choice o f metaphor indicates the unexamined presence o f sex and gender within his language polity, since his version o f consent assumes that all w ill accept certain precepts and thereby forecloses the possibility for critical scrutiny o f those “fundamental conventions, such as ‘men’ and ‘women,’ that make verbal rape much more than a figure o f speech.”24 What Zerilli refers to as “this indifference to issues o f gender, speech, and power” characterizes not only the conversational setting o f political theory but also the history o f political discourse itself.25 Implicit within Pocock’s language polity is the historical riddle o f “‘Why weren’t there more women in the history o f political discourse?’” whereas, in contrast, “the feminist question is ‘Why don’t we know more about them?”’26 Without an examination o f the fundamental conventions that shape Pocock’s linguistic polity, questions regarding the place o f women in the conversation o f political theory as well as its history remain unheard, and the possibilities for feminist readings are extremely limited. In order to explore in greater detail the epistemological and related issues that 22 Ibid., 265. 23 Ibid., quoting J .G. A. Pocock, “Introduction: The State o f the Art,” in Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 19. 24 Zerilli, “Machiavelli’s Sisters,” 266. For Pocock’s response to this critique, see his “Letter to the Editor: A Response to Zerilli and Brodribb,” Political Theory 20, no. 4 (November 1992). 25 Ibid., 267. 26 Ibid., 267.

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arise in relation to Zerilli’s feminist questions, a close consideration o f the specific reading protocols advocated by Pocock and Skinner will be illustrative. Despite their shortcomings, contextual approaches to political theory have appealing elements that are not incommensurate with forms o f feminist and other kinds o f theory that seek to attend to the diversity o f political language and its performative qualities. The more robust notion o f language found in contextual readings is enabled in part by a refusal to adhere to the idea o f a singular tradition, for “the notion that there is “a’ history o f political philosophy disappears once we entertain the possibility that such philosophy may have been generated” in more than one place and by various individuals.27 Even if it were possible to construct such a canon, the texts that would constitute it are themselves understood to be entities that act in ways for which the reader must account. “Texts . . . act upon the languages in which they are performed: as they perform they inform, injecting new words, facts, perceptions and rules o f the game” to such an extent that any given text “is an actor in its own history.”28 Yet not only does the belief that “texts are acts” lend them a performative dimension, but also the intricate and dense linguistic contexts within which texts may be located.29 On the smallest level, it is necessary to know the “range o f reference” for any given word as well as the “the range o f attitudes ..

27 J. G. A. Pocock, “Political Ideas as Historical Events: Political Philosophers as Historical Actors,” in Political Theory and Political Education, ed. Melvin Richter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 141. 28 J. G. A. Pocock, “Texts as Events: Reflections on the History o f Political Thought,” in The Politics o f Discourse: The Literature and History o f17* Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1987), 29. 19 Quentin Skinner, “A Reply to my Critics,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 279.

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. [it] can standardly be used to express.”30 An appreciation for the richness o f connotation is important because “any text or simpler utterance in a sophisticated political discourse is by its nature polyvalent; it consists in the employment o f a texture o f languages capable o f saying different things and o f favoring different ways o f saying things.”31 The highly complex character o f political language results not only from the variety o f meaning associated with individual words, but also because the languages o f “subpolitical activities [e.g., theology and economics] migrate into the political speech” o f any given society.32 To gain a thorough understanding o f political language thus requires a studied attention to the many nuances o f language itself as well as to the influences o f diverse social idioms during the particular historical moment within which a specific text may be located. As much as contextual approaches stress the inherently ambiguous and complicated character o f political language and the importance o f its performative effects, these apparently permeable qualities are anchored by a particular - and problematic understanding o f what precisely constitutes political language. This notion is most thoroughly articulated by Pocock, who, though suggesting that different sorts o f language may be called “‘idioms’ or ‘rhetorics’ instead,” has described political language most succinctly as “not only a prescribed way o f speaking, but also a prescribed matter for

30 Quentin Skinner, “Language and Social Change,” in Meaning and Context, 122. 31 Pocock, “Introduction,” 9. 32 J. G. A. Pocock, “Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation o f the Study o f Political Thought,” in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1989), 22.

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political speech.”33 Though political language “does not refer alone to the structure o f political activities, institutions, and values” but also “all those activities . . . which it is the business o f politics to order,” it is nonetheless a highly specialized version o f “public language.”34 As a complex form o f public communication, “political speech becomes impregnated with the more or less institutionalized idioms o f the social activities” that are o f concern to politics.35 Yet these diverse linguistic conventions do not possess inherent political significance, for it is only through their appearance within the “practice o f politics” that such languages “become accredited, as it were, to take part in its [a political culture’s] public speech.”36 If Pocock grants the subject matter o f political language a unique position within public discourse relative to other linguistic entities, this distinction is echoed by the specific qualities that inhere within political language qua language. Although acknowledging that languages “vary in their degree o f autonomy and stability,” Pocock m aintains the proper objects o f the contextual reader’s attention are “modes o f discourse stable enough to be available for the use o f more than one discussant and to present the character o f games defined by a structure o f rules for more than one player.”37 This discursive stability is augmented by other qualities, for language also “must display a historical dimension; it must possess and prescribe a past made up o f those social

33 Pocock, “Texts as Events,” 27, and idem, “Introduction,” 12. 34 Pocock, “Languages and Their Implications,” 21, 16. 35 Ibid., 22. 36 Pocock, “Introduction,” 8. 37 Ibid., 7.

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arrangements, historical events, recognized values, and ways o f thinking o f which it has been able to speak; it discourses o f a politics from which the character o f pastness cannot be altogether separated.”38 Thus despite - or perhaps because o f - his recognition o f the polyvalent and ambiguous character o f languages in the history o f political discourse, Pocock insistently states specific qualities that act as the defining parameters o f such languages. The attributes that Pocock stresses not only circumscribe the performative dimension o f political languages, however, but also rely on the exclusion o f other linguistic conventions and modes o f signification. A similar claim shapes the analysis put forth by Zerilli, who argues that the reasons for woman’s exile from political conversation “lie not in the latter’s historically androcentric exclusivity nor in its specificity as a particular tradition o f discourse (as political discourse) but, instead, in the universal symbolic rules o f discourse itself.”39 Yet this contention can be explored from a slightly different direction in order to examine how a contextual understanding o f what constitutes a language not only reinscribes the problematic structure o f the symbolic, but also produces a practice o f reading resistant to woman and ultimately, feminist concerns. In her critique o f Freud, Irigaray argues that woman is portrayed as lacking a history o f her own because this allows the privileged position o f the masculine subject to be sustained unchallenged. This lack o f feminine historicity is necessary, for “if one day her sexuality was recognized, if it did enter into ‘History,’ then his-story would no longer

38 Ibid., 12-13. 39 Zerilli, “Macbiavelli’s Sisters,” 260.

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simply take place or have a place to take.”40 Such recognition has yet to occur, however, because woman does not exist in the “eyes o f discursivity” and is “struck dumb,” unable to successfully articulate her own experience or history 41 As such, woman is lacking the historical dimension as well as the ability to speak o f the social arrangements and ways o f thinking that Pocock argues are necessary attributes o f political language that must be present if it is to receive the reader’s full attention. Yet Irigaray argues that despite having no access to history, woman does nonetheless manage to speak o f herself, and perhaps, o f her history and her politics. “But not ‘like,’ not ‘the same,’ not ‘identical with itself nor to any x, etc. Not a ‘subject,’ unless transformed by phallocratism. It speaks ‘fluid,’ even in the paralytic undersides o f the economy.”42 Though woman does indeed speak, this does not mean that she is heard since “one must know how to listen otherwise than in good form(s) to hear what it says'543 Whether Pocock’s reader would be able to listen otherwise is doubtful, however, for not only does woman lack the necessary historicity, but her attempts to speak evince none o f the discursive stability that is also a defining aspect o f political language. Even if the contextual reader could hear woman, her words would most likely be translated into the terms of masculine discourse rather than listened to in ways that would question the structure o f that discourse. To allow such concerns to be articulated would be

40 Irigaray, Speculum, 112. 41 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 111. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid.

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problematic, “for raising it would mean granting that there may be some other logic, and one that upsets his own. That is, a logic that challenges mastery.”44 In the absence o f such considerations, Irigaray argues that woman’s speech would be once again caught up in the unquestioned categories o f the subject “until it paralyzes the voice in its flow ” thereby muting whatever opposition it might pose.45 Thus Pocock’s prescriptions for what constitutes the language o f political theory in many ways proscribe the presence o f women both as a speaking subjects and as subjects who matter within political speech. As problematic as Pocock’s notion o f political language may be, its com plex and performative qualities remain and suggest possible avenues through which it may be rethought or reread. Yet this particular understanding o f language proves resistant to attempts to read it otherwise, in part because it produces a restricted reader o f historical texts through a tightly enclosed relation based on identification. This process begins with the overall task Pocock and Skinner assign the reader, which is variously described as one involving translating, decoding, authoring, and/or speaking on behalf o f another text, author, or language. As readers o f historical texts, “we set out to reconstitute the author’s performance” for reading is itself often best understood as “an act o f translation: I translate your message into my understanding o f it.”46 Through the substitution o f one’s words for another’s, the reader becomes the author o f a “paralanguage or metalanguage, designed to explicate the implicit” or, put somewhat differently, the reader probes “below

44 Ibid., 90. 45 Ibid., 112. 46 Pocock, “Texts as Events,” 24, 30.

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the surface o f a text in order to attain a full understanding o f its m eaning ,” 47 To re­ present a text in order to “verbalize implications and intimations that in the original may have remained unspoken” necessitates in part “looking at it [the text] in different ways and saying things about it that would not have, could not have, and did not need to become apparent to the author himself.”48 To a certain extent, this work o f recovery and reconstitution is creative since “the reader himself becomes an author” or “an actor in the sense that he is one in a historical process.”49 Yet like the performative aspects o f political language, the reader’s creative activities are restricted, for the reader “does not desire to be the author o f his own past so much as to uncover the doings o f other authors in and o f it” and thus seeks in part to recover “an intellectual context that serves to lend support” to the language or text o f interest to the reader.50 Given this description o f the reader’s task, questions arise as to whether the fluid and excessive speech that is woman’s province could be recognized anywhere in the historical process o f which the reader is understood to be a part. Despite the complex and ambivalent character o f language found in contextual approaches, its reading subject is encouraged to search for discernible parts to be reassembled and translated into a coherent whole, not fluid bits and pieces that can barely be heard. Once again, even if woman’s speech is heard and somehow translated or re-authored, this occurs within a

47 Pocock, “Introduction,” 11, and Quentin Skinner, “Motives, Intentions, and the Interpretation o f Texts,” in Quentin Skinner and his Critics, 69. 48 Pocock, “Introduction,” 10, and idem, “Texts as Events,” 24. 49 Pocock, “Introduction,” 18, and idem, “Texts as Events,” 29. 50 Pocock, “Introduction,” 9, and Skinner, “Reply,” 247.

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language polity that - as Zerilli notes - is itself characterized by sexual indifference. These hesitations regarding the contextual reader’s ability to recognize other languages find support through an analysis o f the specific descriptions o f how political languages are best learned. For Pocock, the first step in this process involves identifying “the ‘language’ or ‘vocabulary’ with and within which the author operated.”51 Yet to do so accurately, Skinner asserts that the reader must seek to “recover the concepts they [the authors] possessed, the distinctions they drew and the chains o f reasoning they followed” to develop a sufficient understanding of the linguistic context within which a particular text acted.52 Since much o f political language is acknowledged to be subterranean, questions can be raised as to how well a reader relying on this “method” can negotiate inherent linguistic ambiguities and acquire a solid knowledge o f historical languages. Pocock’s response to such queries is unequivocal. If at this stage we are asked how we know the languages adumbrated really existed, or how we recognize them when we see them, we should be able to reply empirically: that the languages in question are simply there, that they form individually recognizable patterns and styles, and that we get to know them by learning to speak them, to think in their patterns and styles until we know that we are speaking them and can predict in what directions speaking them is carrying us.53

The very multiplicity o f language may complicate this “process o f familiarization,” yet the reader responds to this challenge by demonstrating the existence o f a particular language through its repeated usage in different texts and contexts.54 Although this

51 Pocock, “Languages and their Implications,” 25. 52 Skinner, “Reply,” 252. 53 Pocock, “Languages and their Implications,” 26. 54 Ibid., 28.

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procedure requires the reader to decide which languages to attend to, this determination emerges solely from a simple “obligation to choose, and declare our choice of, that history which we feel competent to tell.”55 Hence though the contextual reading subject is initially engaged with a complicated set o f unknown languages, these are identified and learned according to criteria predominately based on the reader’s ability to (reestablish familiar relations with both a language and the particular history o f which it is an integral part. What this process demonstrates is how the exclusionary effects o f language are compounded by an epistemology that privileges what is inherently familiar to the reading subject over what is strange in ways that form a problematic circuit o f identification. The importance o f identification to the contextual reader is considerable, for in order to become fully familiar with political language, “we need . . . to think o f the reader as an actor in the same historical sequence as the author.”56 By positioning the reader within an unspecified but familiar historical course, the way is open for the introduction o f other presuppositions that guide the reader’s progress. “We must be able to assume, in advance o f historical enquiries, that our ancestors shared at least some o f our beliefs about the importance o f consistency and coherence.”57 Akin to the role o f shared conventions within Pocock’s language polity, the notion o f shared beliefs allows the reader to assume the existence o f common intellectual features and to elide critical questions regarding

55 Ibid., 29. 56 Pocock, “Texts as Events,” 23. 57 Skinner, “Reply,” 257.

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how this assumption is itself constituted. In the absence o f such considerations, the contextual reading subject is encouraged to identify with both shared beliefs and a particular historical sequence in ways that determine how the history o f political discourse may and may not be engaged. Although the reader’s overall task obliges that the reconstitution o f political languages be done “as sympathetically as possible,” it does not “follow that our interpretative charity must always be boundless

[for] there may

be many cases in which, if we are to identify what needs to be explained, it may be crucial to insist, o f a given belief, that it was less than rational.”58 From within a confined historical setting, the reader is thus well equipped to reconstitute the history o f political discourse, in part by determining which languages and utterances are not worthy o f readerly charity, and that may be, in turn, construed as lacking in meaning and somehow external to familial contextual confines. Thus the exclusion o f woman that begins with a particular understanding o f political language arguably becomes more entrenched through an epistemology that directs the reader’s focus to those linguistic conventions and historical processes that are most familiar and with which the reader most easily identifies. This identification produces a restrictive similitude for, as Irigaray warns, “if we keep on speaking sameness, if we speak to each other as men have been doing for centuries” then, in the end, “w e’re going to produce the same history.”59 The effects o f the sameness that characterizes contextual epistemology are not limited to the foreclosure o f any recognition o f woman or

58 Ibid., 244. 59 Irigaray, This Sex, 205.

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her language, but rather extend to encompass critical perspectives such as feminism that seek to raise different questions regarding the presumed history o f political discourse. What may be understood as a resistance to alternative approaches is most evident in Pocock’s own version o f specularity, that - as demonstrated in Zerilli’s critique o f Wolin’s vision - works to exclude others as it describes political language. Initially, Pocock relies on specularity to caution that understandings o f the relations between language and context should not be “based on a simple mirror-object assumption concerning its nature.”60 Yet a different version o f specularity describes how language works and is based not on a single mirror, but rather “a system o f mirrors facing inward and outward at different angles, so that they [languages] reflect occurrences in the mirrored world largely through the diverse ways in which they reflect on another.”61 In their capacity as mirrors, political languages in historical texts respond to new experiences in the “form o f discovering and discussing new difficulties in language,” and this reflection upon reflection occurs long before language itself is able to folly focus “on the possibility that there is something new in the field o f vision.”62 As a consequence, [t]he historian o f discourse will therefore have to work outward from the capacities for discourse enjoyed by his actors, toward what he sees (and they came to see) as new elements in their experience, and the intimations o f their language may, or may never, intersect those o f the language he employs to write the history o f their experience.63

Although these mirrors are assumed to reflect the shifts in meaning within languages, the

60 Pocock, “Languages and their Implications,” 36. 61 Pocock, “Introduction,” 29. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 30.

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effects o f this specularity are problematic since what is reflected is more o f the same as these mirrors are in part constituted by the reader’s identification with already familiar linguistic and historical conventions. The reading subject is thus situated within an exclusionary mise en abime where, as Irigaray argues, the specular relation consists o f the male subject and his own self-reflection and woman only acts as a mirror o f - and not participant in - masculine symbolic economies. Hence even if the feminist reader (as a subject) could find her way to Pocock’s mirrored hall - perhaps, as Zerilli notes, dressed as a man - her questions (as subject matter) will go nowhere. Asked o f mirrors that will not reflect woman (expect insofar as she resembles man), the feminist reader’s words fall into the abyss o f what is unable to be re-presented via Pocock’s specular imaginary. Given the significant critical obstacles that inhere within contextual reading protocols, these sorts o f approaches seem to offer little towards the development o f a more historically informed feminist political theory. Moreover, given that a large share o f historical work in political theory is aligned with contextual techniques, the feasibility o f feminist political theory successfully pursuing more historical lines o f inquiry within such a constricted disciplinary context seems doubtful. Not unaware o f such concerns, Pocock provides an explanation for the exclusionary character o f contextual readings. We need not therefore apologize for the unrepresentative elitism o f studying only those readers whose responses were verbalized, recorded, and presented. The mentalite o f the silent and inarticulate majority should indeed be sought after and if possible recovered; it may have important information for us. But the history o f mentalites is not identical with the history of discourse.64

To accept Pocock’s formulation for the division o f discursive labor is problematic,

64 Pocock, “Introduction,” 18.

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however, for it forecloses any consideration o f how particular understandings o f discourse produce silence, in part through the privileging o f linguistic features that serve to distinguish the articulate from the inarticulate. The continued maintenance o f this distinction cedes important historical ground to contextual approaches, and this is o f significance to feminist political theory on at least two different levels. First, and perhaps most obviously, this segregation allows the history o f political discourse to continue to be written without in some way having to address issues regarding not only woman and gender, but also critical questions concerning (at least) race and sexuality. Second, to accede to the assumption that historical work in political theory is somehow alien to the myriad goals o f feminist criticism is to further marginalize feminist political theory by excluding it from engaging with a prominent mode o f inquiry within political theory. Rather than follow the dictates o f a disciplinary division o f labor, the challenge is to consider ways to bring into critical play what is deemed meaningless or inarticulate by contextual and other approaches to political theory and to begin to construct very different histories o f political discourse. Yet if contextual perspectives prove resistant to such endeavors, feminist political theory also presents its own difficulties that stem in part from a problematic relation between feminist critics and the classic texts o f political theory, each supplemented by a particular notion o f women. An exploration o f this troublesome nexus is important as a way to consider the possibility for pursuing a more historically attuned approach to feminist political theory better able to attend to the complexities o f gender and its connections with the history o f political thought. Reading Between the Lines: Feminist Political Theory and Its Limits 39

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Unlike other areas o f feminist inquiry such as feminist historiography or even more recently feminist economics and feminist geography, feminist political theory has only rarely conducted discussions about its own critical identity and other metatheoretical issues. Despite the absence o f these kinds o f debates and the ensuing ambiguity about who and what constitutes feminist political theory per se, there is remarkable consistency about how political theory itself is defined as an object o f or subject for feminist critique. In perhaps the most succinct definition offered by a feminist political theorist, Christine Di Stefano states that “western political theory is a historical and canonical discourse located predominately among white European men, and produced by such men for themselves.”65 For Di Stefano, the canonical structure o f political theory raises important questions about what such a tradition implies for “the contemporary political theorist who is also a woman and a feminist” and what this status means “for her assessment o f and relationship to the male-dominated canon o f ‘great works’ and ‘great thinkers.’”66 Although Di Stefano asserts the need for feminist political theory to “carefully scrutinize its relationship to the canonical literature,” she herself pursues the question to briefly focus on the exclusionary effects o f feminist engagements with the canon, most notably in regard to race. What remains unexamined by Di Stefano and others is how feminist interactions with the canon o f political theory produce exclusions and critical limitations. A consideration o f feminist political theory’s relations to the canon is particularly important since it may be understood as constituting “a

65 Di Stefano, I. 66 Ibid.

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religio, providing a community rhetoric, an educational strategy, and distinctive notions o f politics and political theory: to the political theorists, expressions such as ‘the great books,’ ‘the masters,’ and ‘the classics’ are almost cliches reflecting the pedigree’s potent and binding force.”67 To not interrogate the status o f this tradition is to miss the opportunity to consider how a “range o f classic names has been manipulated into a tradition which is a projection o f the discursive structure o f political theory” and that produces critically significant exclusionary effects.68 The inattention to questions o f canonicity that characterizes much feminist political theory is problematic not simply as a theoretical oversight, but because it works to facilitate feminist approaches to classic texts in political theory that in effect sustain a textual mythology rather than subvert it. As Linda Singer suggests in regard to feminist philosophy, “to represent the unity o f philosophy in canonical terms, as many feminists do, is already to adopt a critical posture toward the history o f philosophy and the privilege it claims for itself as the master discourse.”69 The sorts o f feminist readings in political theory that prove similarly problematic are analyzed by Zerilli, who argues that many feminist approaches to the canon focus on “what woman signifies instead o f how she signifies” and in particular read for “images o f women in terms o f whether they do or do

67 Conal Condren, The Status and Appraisal o f Classic Texts: An Essay on Political Theory, Its Inheritance, and the History o f Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 5. 68 Ibid., 75. 69 Linda Singer, “Defusing the Canon: Feminist Rereading and Textual Politics,” in Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age o f Epidemic (New York: Routledge, 1993),164.

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not add up to a coherent argument about politics and gender.”70 For Zerilli, these sorts o f feminist inquiries unintentionally undermine some o f the force o f feminist critique by relying on a referential model o f representation that understands language as an inherently stable and transparent conveyor o f meaning. In so doing, these feminist readings o f the canon posit “women” as a problem for political theory that is best remedied by insisting on “ a better fit between word and thing, sign and referent, women and ‘real’ women - to get women right, after all” within the framework offered by classic texts and concepts.71 What is obscured by such readings is a perspective that appreciates the “constitutive dimension o f political theory as a signifying practice” and that would be able to consider how the desire for an unmediated, self-identical representation o f women might itself be “a product o f political theory’s symbolic work.”72 To read “women” referentially is thus to ascribe to political theory an authority that - when understood from a discursive perspective - is the result o f textual constructs and does not stem from some autonomous and self-evident framework. Yet it is possible to push Zerilli’s analysis further and suggest that the deleterious critical impact o f an adherence to a referential understanding o f language also influences feminist approaches to the concept o f the canon itself. First, by regarding the classic works o f political theory as a stable canonical inheritance, different forms o f feminist political theory restrict their ability to effectively challenge the exclusive constitution o f 70 Linda M. G. Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 139. 71 Ibid., 141. 73 Ibid.

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that canon. This is disadvantageous not only to efforts to advocate a greater attention to the political writings o f women, but also inhibits feminist political theory’s capacity to begin to consider how different sorts o f texts other than those traditionally read might constitute significant forms o f political expression.73 Second, those forms o f feminist political theory that favor a referential approach to language articulate a notion o f “women” that helps to sustain the idea o f the canon o f political theory as having an integrity it might otherwise lack. If the classic texts o f political theory may be understood as consistently excluding “women” as an unquestioned category, then the repeated accounts o f that same unexamined category within some forms o f feminist political theory provide political theory itself with a narrative coherence across and between its canonical texts that might otherwise be more tenuous.74 What is at stake is not the rejection o f the canon o f political theory, but rather the need to more closely question how the relations between classic texts and feminist political theory shape the identity o f the latter as a distinct critical practice. The effects o f the absence o f such considerations become especially salient around the issue o f coherence already referred to and that

73 The need for such work is acute, given in part that the preeminent series for the publication of canonical texts in political theory - Cambridge Texts in the History o f Political Thought - currently consists o f some 80 plus titles yet only three are works by women (namely, Christine de Pizan, Mary Astell, and Mary Wollstonecraft). Moreover, efforts at re-forming the canon have not been a priority for feminist political theorists, who themselves occasionally make reference to the existence o f “(usually obscure) texts written by women” (Di Stefano, 5). This attitude has, however, recently begun to change as evident in works such as Women Writers and the Early Modem British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 74 The point being stressed here is intended to be distinct from concerns that the repetition o f canonical images o f women/woman (or even engagement with classic texts at all) further inscribes the exclusion o f women from political theory. Rather by drawing on and extending Zerilli’s argument, it is possible to see how the reliance on such images plays an important structural role in the maintenance o f the notion o f political theory as based on a (very singular) canon.

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Zerilli also raises from a related angle. By “treating each discrete image [o f women] as itself intrinsically coherenf’ and relying on such images to test the assumed unity o f classic texts, some forms o f feminist political theory produce “a rather seamless tale about ‘women in the history o f political thought’” that as suggested above serves, in turn, as a convenient prop for the canonical structure o f political theory .7S Yet the issue o f coherence takes on even greater importance when viewed in light o f Conal Condren’s suggestion that coherence itself is one o f the principal tricks o f the canonical trade. For Condren, “analysis in terms o f coherence focuses upon the problems o f determining the structure o f a stable identity” and this proves problematic for “the mere designation o f a phenomenon as a work, a text, or an argument signifies a certain oneness, by specifying a singular entity to be talked about.”76 The criteria o f coherence thus function as an “abridgement o f the range o f questions one asks o f a text” because the “very entailed vocabulary o f coherence (parts, wholes, and interconnections) presupposes sets o f clear identities, which in any given case may or may not exist.”77 Despite or because o f its constrictive effects, coherence acts as the conceptual backdrop upon which all other modes o f textual appraisal come to rest. As a primary and often initial category through which classic texts are approached, coherence itself lends stability to the idea o f political theory as a canon at the cost o f cutting off other avenues o f inquiry from the very beginning.

75 Zerilli, Signifying Woman, 140. 76 Condren, 143. 77 Ibid., 148, 163.

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The analyses o f Condren and Zerilli may be used to highlight other difficulties, for appeals to coherence as a reading strategy are evident in “classic” works in feminist political theory as well as in introductory texts that “present the classics’ treatment o f women according to certain themes in order to reveal a continuity and coherence in the historical debates about women” as represented in such texts.78 The most problematic effects o f coherence, however, arise in combination with the referential understanding o f language that Zerilli takes to task. Despite the relative lack o f meta-level discussion regarding feminist political theory’s critical identity, the difficulties o f coherence and referentiality appear in telling ways in works addressing what should serve as the basis for feminist political theory. In her conclusion, Valerie Bryson expresses a concern that though “feminists are increasingly agreed that the values o f existing political theory are inadequate, they have not developed an agreed goal o f their own.”79 The anxieties provoked by the absence o f a coherent goal are, however, alleviated with “signs that different [feminist] perspectives are drawing closer together as they move away from their origins in male theory and become increasingly based on the realities o f women’s lives and struggles.”80 Similarly, Nancy Hirschmann argues that “the future viability o f political theory in general” as well as feminist theory is best achieved through “an

78 See for example Arlene Saxonhouse’s claim that it is necessary to understand what canonical texts say about “the female” in order “to understand the totality to their thoughts on the problems of political o rd er” (A rle n e W. Saxonhouse, Women in the History o f Political Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli [New York: Praeger, 1985], vii). Diana H. Coole, Women in Political Theory: From Ancient Misogyny to Contemporary Feminism (Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1988), 7. 79 Valerie Bryson, Feminist Political Theory: An Introduction (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992), 263. 80 Ibid., 264.

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application o f standpoint epistemology to the idea o f multiplicity to allow for a variety o f standpoints that reflect the variety o f women’s and men’s experiences.”81 Yet the variety invoked is a circumscribed one for the “articulation o f such standpoints, within the parameters o f feminism, ensures that such experiences must be articulated from the perspective o f women’s or workers’ or African-Americans’ or lesbians’ lives.”82 From a different angle, Mary Lyndon Shanley and Uma Narayan strike a similar chord by emphasizing the diversity o f the collection they edit and yet carefully pointing out not only shared themes but also noting that “the conceptual rethinking common to these essays grows out o f an engagement with real-world phenomena.”83 Hence for certain approaches, an unmediated, referential notion o f women’s lives and experience acts as a privileged ground that lends definitional coherence to the feminist facets o f feminist political theory and that is understood as necessary condition for such perspectives to effectively challenge mainstream political theory. Feminist political theory is certainly not the only area o f feminist inquiry to privilege coherence as a measure o f theoretical efficacy nor is the reliance by some o f its practitioners on a referential understanding o f women and experience unique. What distinguishes feminist political theory’s relation to coherence and referentiality are the 81 Nancy J. Hirschmann, Rethinking Obligation: A Feminist Methodfo r Political Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 337. In developing the modified version o f standpoint epistemology suggested here, Hirschmann draws on the work o f both Sandra Harding ( Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinkingfrom Women's Lives [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991]) and Nancy C. M. Hartsock {Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985]). 82 Ibid., 340. 83 Mary Lyndon Shanley and Uma Narayan, eds., Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), xix.

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disciplinary contexts in which it works with these concepts. When a referential understanding o f women is combined with the criteria o f coherence, feminist perspectives that adhere to these notions inadvertently deepen ties not only to canonical political theory, but also to the broader discipline o f political science. This tendency is especially apparent in texts that offer prescriptions for what feminist political theory ought to be doing, for its own benefit as well as that o f the discipline as a whole. In the new afterword to her foundational feminist text, Susan Moller Okin attempts to explain “the reluctance o f many excellent feminist scholars o f political theory to spell out, explicitly, the policy implications that follow from their theoretical conclusions.”84 Although she acknowledges that the absence o f policy statements is not altogether surprising since “political theorists in general seldom seem to suggest solutions to the problems they discuss,” Okin’s sense o f surprise remains because “the feminist critique o f the tradition o f political theory clearly grew out o f an actual political movement, and one might therefore expect its proponents to be concerned with changing the world as well as criticizing theories about it.”85 What is most suggestive about the analysis offered by Okin is that her insistence on the need for explicit policy statements is very much in keeping with the disciplinary parameters o f political science. In asserting that the well­

84 Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 311. The founding status o f this particular work is stated for example by Christine Di Stefano and Nancy Hirschmann, who suggest that “feminist political theory really developed as a subfield” with the publication o f Okin’s text (introduction to Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions o f Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory [Boulder Westview Press, 1996], 4). Okin also addresses her concerns about the relations between feminist theory and practice on slightly different disciplinary ground in “Gender and Relativism in Recent Feminist Historical Scholarship,” New Zealand Journal o f History 29, no. 2 (1995). 85 Okin, Women, 329-30.

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being and political purpose o f feminist political theory is maintained only by the degree to which it consistently generates policy statements, Okin perhaps unwittingly subscribes to the sort o f positivistic model according to which political science frequently evaluates the research pursued in its midst. When measured against such criteria, projects - including avowedly theoretical ones - that lack a clear connection to a largely referential understanding o f politics are often regarded as highly suspect. Hence perspectives such as Okin’s that advocate an approach to feminist political theory that emphasizes theoretical coherence and referential perceptions o f both women and politics, act to reinscribe some o f the more troubling disciplinary lines that marginalize feminist research o f all kinds in the first place. Rather than formulating a distinct critical space, positions like Okin’s construct the identity o f feminist political theory through conceptual categories that are much in keeping with traditional disciplinary boundaries that sustain a relation between theory and practice as politics that inhibits the fundamental rethinking o f the political that is a crucial component o f feminist theory in its many guises. Yet it is not only a referential understanding o f women and politics that generates critical constraints, but also - and perhaps more problematically - the relation o f many kinds o f fem inist political theory to the classic texts and concepts o f political theory. The difficulties feminist theorists encounter in any discipline that positions itself almost entirely in relation to a selection o f canonical texts are considerable. As Singer argues, the concept o f a canon frequently produces its most problematic effects in relation to its particular disciplinary context and the ideals o f professionalization that are therein invoked. As a “condition for professional certification,” demonstration o f “one’s mastery 48

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o f the canon and, by extension, o f the synthetic chronology o f issues and positions that emerges from it” is an unavoidable requirement-86 Although knowledge o f classic works is mandatory for all, a familiarity with feminist texts is optional “as the sort o f thing one can pursue in addition to and often only after one has demonstrated one’s entitlement by a mastery o f the canon” (164). Given the non-reciprocity that exists between feminist perspectives and classic texts as well as the ensuing marginalizing effects, questions remain as to why - aside from professional necessity - feminists would wish to expend their critical energy on canonical works. For Singer, such questions are vital for “it would seem that any attempt to engage it [the canon], even critically, would involve contradictions and paradoxes o f legitimacy, authority, entitlement, and desire” (165). Given the importance o f her analysis for the discussion that follows, it is worth quoting at length the questions Singer asks o f feminist approaches to the philosophical canon. Why have we sought to return to the site o f our own exile, and what do we hope to accomplish through that return? Can we hope to win or seduce legitimacy by engaging the mechanisms that have been used to exclude us, and if we can, what is that kind o f legitimacy good for, especially if it is also something we seek to question and undermine? Can or should we hope to enjoy the pleasures and privileges of mastery, if that is precisely what we want to transform, not only, but at least in part, because it has been denied us? (164-5)

The issues raised by Singer involve not only questions about feminist critical identities (who “we” are and what “we” do or hope to achieve) but also how they are articulated within different contexts. To explore the motivations underlying feminist engagements with the philosophical canon, Singer suggests that it is less a required familiarity with canonical texts that drives feminist rereadings but more a matter o f disciplinary seduction. For

86 Singer, 164. Further references will be cited in the text.

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feminists, the enticement o f philosophy is that it is a “discipline that advocates truth and knowledge as the foundation o f power, [and thus] it provides to women the prospect o f empowerment and emancipation through knowing” (167). Yet if philosophy is seductive in promising the epistemological road to power, then political theory is arguably as alluring because through its canonical structure it offers a seemingly immediate access to the subjects o f power and politics. Given the imbricated relations between feminism itself and politics, feminist engagements with the classic texts and concepts o f political theory may seem to hold the promise to a (if not the) key for the political success o f feminist movements. Moreover, if the activity o f political theorizing itself is about creating distinct visions for politics and political life, then attraction to the field is very much in keeping with feminism’s own utopian aspects. Although political theory may hold a seductive appeal for feminist theorists, any relations between them are necessarily fraught given the exclusionary histories that canons construct. As Singer notes, “insofar as one is a feminist, one also stands in a problematic relationship to the history o f philosophy, precisely because it is the history o f one’s own subjection, as well as the discourse that has provided many o f the grounds and justifications for that subjection” and the same may well be said o f political theory (167). Thus the question remains o f why feminist theorists seek to return to what is effectively a place o f exile. For Singer, “recognition o f this situation o f exile also produces the desire to return, to take up or make up one’s own place, a room o f one’s own” and it is this drive to create a distinct space within or in relation to canonical traditions that motivates feminist rereadings o f classic texts (167). The real focus o f Singer’s attention, however, is not so much on 50

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explaining why feminists attend to certain texts, but rather how different reading protocols shape feminist criticism. Though Singer’s arguments concern feminist rereadings o f the philosophical canon, her insights map well onto the terrain o f feminist political theory and can be used to help bring the difficulties o f certain reading practices to light. Although some o f the difficulties raised by feminist approaches that rely on a referential understanding o f language have been addressed, this perspective on political theory is certainly not the only one nor is it itself monolithic. Thus in an effort to create a more nuanced picture o f some o f the various reading protocols in feminist political theory, reading Singer’s analysis together with the introduction to the anthology edited by Di Stefano and Hirschmann w ill be beneficial. As a recent and substantial attempt to address meta-level issues similar to those raised in other areas o f feminist inquiry, this text directly examines questions rarely discussed by feminist political theory at large. The links between these works are apparent in Singer’s identification o f a reading strategy prevalent within feminist philosophy as well as feminist political theory. Although Singer assigns no name to it, this reading protocol is described as one that “aims to challenge what the history o f philosophy has had to say about women on the grounds that such discourse amounts to a self-interested effort on the part o f men to construct women in their absence” (170). For Singer, the advantage o f this perspective is that it intensifies “the necessity and urgency for sustained feminist theory and practice” in part because it works to “articulate and validate . . . intuitions o f alienation, displacement, the sense o f not really being addressed by the texts” that constitute the philosophical canon (170-71). Similarly, Di Stefano and 51

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Hirschmann note that much feminist theory “has revealed that the history o f political thought has often been one o f barely masked power, disingenuously representing the beliefs and values o f particular subjects in particular places and times as timeless, universal, and eternally true.”87 This feminist unmasking o f canonical texts in political theory has further revealed how the subjects it privileges are “consistently exclusive in terms o f class (propertied), race (white), sex (males), and gender (masculine subjects)” (3). Much as Singer suggests o f similar feminist rereadings in philosophy, D i Stefano and Hirschmann acknowledge that feminist analyses o f the exclusionary history o f political theory “perform vital analytical and political work in critiquing the particular visions o f politics put forth in these ‘malestream’ theories” (3).88 Thus for Singer as well as Di Stefano and Hirschmann, feminists attending to the textual history o f their respective fields provide a valuable understanding as to how canonical texts exile women and their concerns from important areas o f inquiry. Although chere is an overlap among these authors as to the benefits o f this particular form o f feminist reading, there is a telling divergence regarding what is deemed to be problematic. Though Singer sees feminist attention to the exclusionary character o f the canon as important to the development o f feminist theory, she is also wary that “such a strategy, too long pursued, tends to bog one down in the eternal return o f the same - the same motifs, the same logic, the same absence” (171). Following a line o f argument similar to the one suggested earlier in regard to feminist political theory’s tendency to 87 Di Stefano and Hirschmann, 3. Further references will be cited in the text. 88 Di Stefano and Hirschmann borrow the notion o f “malestream theory” from Mary O’ Brien, The Politics o f Reproduction (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

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facilitate coherent canonical narratives, Singer also argues that reiterating “narratives o f exile does not really address the problem o f where we as feminists can dwell” in relation to traditional disciplinary canons (171). The most significant worry is that a feminist critique focused solely on exclusion expends valuable energy that otherwise could be directed toward the “capacity to envision, demand, and produce significant alternatives” (171). Though this approach to feminist rereading may reveal the oppressive structure o f canonical texts it does not effectively challenge it, for “our [feminists1] identity and our logic still remain dependent on the discourse o f the fathers” (171). If the principal problem for Singer is the lack o f distance between feminist critique and the dominant philosophical discourse, for Di Stefano and Hirschmann the concern is that there may be too much. Their anxiety regarding disciplinary distance is expressed through a series o f questions: “does this history o f exclusion that feminists identify make the enterprise o f political theory itself intrinsically problematic for feminists? Is the visionary dimension o f political theory something that feminists in the end must avoid?” (3). The high stakes o f this line o f inquiry, however, are made most apparent in the next question in the series: “Is the very term ‘feminist political theory’ an oxymoron, and is ‘political theory’ p er se something feminists should avoid except from the perspective o f tearing it apart?” (3). Concerned that feminist political theory has become “reluctant to take the risks o f offering positive visions” o f politics, Di Stefano and Hirschmann advocate going “beyond this strategy o f critique to engage in the process o f reconstruction” o f key concepts in political theory (2). Thus whereas Singer links the well-being o f feminist philosophy’s critical identity to a greater disassociation from its disciplinary fathers, Di Stefano and 53

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Hirschmann allay their concerns about the identity o f feminist political theory by moving in a very different direction. This notion o f returning to the scene o f disciplinary exile to further feminist goals is, in some ways, in keeping with another approach to feminist rereading that Singer addresses. Through this kind o f rereading, “one returns to the history o f philosophy in order to find or confirm the existence o f earlier expressions o f feminist sentiments or principles in philosophers whose work predates the rise o f feminism as a social movement” (168). Such rereadings effectively act as a “search for the ‘conceptual forefathers’ o f feminism” and in so doing, allow feminists to say that “we can be good daughters because we have had some good fathers” (168). For Singer, this perspective has some disciplinary advantages in that it offers a way for feminists to articulate their concerns through an already legitimated language, thereby making it more difficult for the field to reject them out o f hand. Moreover, engaging with canonical texts in this manner allows “feminist theorists to assure themselves that they are still philosophers” and to therefore ease their own disciplinary anxieties (169). Yet this approach is problematic since feminist revisions o f the history o f philosophy run the risk o f misrepresenting the “development o f phallocentric discourse and the development o f feminism as a historically specific discourse o f resistance” (169). Di Stefano and Hirschmann also recognize the difficulties o f rereading canonical figures for whatever reasons, in part because such approaches are “constitutionally limited to critique, since one cannot really ‘reconstruct’ historical figures” in any significant way (5). What they suggest instead as a more promising area o f inquiry is further work that builds on feminist engagements with 54

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key concepts in political theory rather than concentrating on the fathers who authored them. Because political theory is characterized by a “deep-seated conceptual exclusion” o f women and their concerns, feminists need to fundamentally reconceptualize ideas such as justice and authority in order.to formulate distinctly fem inist visions o f the political (15). Although Di Stefano and Hirschmann frequently note that the work o f reconceptualization is done from a number o f perspectives and that there is “no one right way to do this,” they also stress that the emergence o f new fem inist perspectives is “very much indebted to the ‘old’” theories and concepts (19, 5). Yet by emphasizing the importance o f an established textual and conceptual legacy, the editors also link feminist political theory to the exclusions that persist within this theoretical inheritance. Di Stefano and Hirschmann are, however, somewhat aware o f this potential problem for they sound a cautionary note by stating that the “feminist revisionings o f the political contained in this volume would never claim political innocence for themselves” and they therefore urge an “attention to the constitutive contexts and effects o f political discourse (including feminist discourse) as well as to alternative models o f political culture” (16). The challenges raised by feminist critical identities remain unexplored, however, as the editors turn to a canonical concept in the section o f their introduction that immediately follows their cautionary statements. Entitled “The Example o f Rights,” Di Stefano and Hirschmann illustrate the feminist approach they have just traced out in relation to rights, “a concept missing from our book (though we had hoped that two erstwhile contributors would write on this concept)” (16). To mark and perhaps ease this absence o f a major concept in political theory, Di Stefano and Hirschmann offer their 55

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own brief appraisal o f the somewhat troublesome discourse o f rights, particularly in its natural rights form that has acted as a “coded term for the disingenuous exclusion o f the poor, men and women o f color, and white women by propertied white males” (16). The absence o f rights is not the only lack that this section addresses, however, though this perhaps more significant lacuna is marked not in the text itself but rather in a note. The final footnote to their introduction opens with the brief editorial statement that “we consciously decided to include specifically feminist political theorists in this volume” (22). Although this choice is motivated by the wish to “communicate with our discipline that it is in fact changing,” the decision is itself admittedly “inherently conservative: the vast majority o f political theorists (including feminist political theorists) are white, for instance” (22-3). For Di Stefano and Hirschmann, this editorial conservatism is further amplified because “those who are women o f color are overburdened by demands placed on them to provide representations o f other-than-white voices” (23). Yet the work o f women o f color is not entirely absent, but is relied on by Di Stefano and Hirschmann to address the lack they mark in the text proper - namely, the example o f rights. The discussion o f rights by the editors is conducted in large part through and around quotations that primarily come from the texts o f Patricia Williams and Kimberle Crenshaw.89 In doing so, the editors employ these works by African-American women both to help provide their collection with a provisionally complete set o f canonical concepts and to allow for a brief discussion o f the “multiplicity o f women’s identity” 89 The particular works cited are Patricia Williams, The Alchemy o f Race and Rights: Diary o f a Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) and Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity, Politics, and Violence Against Women o f Color,” Stanford Law Review (1991).

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(18). By covering one lack through the brief appearance o f another, Di Stefano and Hirschmann work to fulfill their duties as political theorists by covering important conceptual bases as well as their strongly expressed obligations as feminists to attend to the diversity o f the women they hope to address. This doubling o f lack, however, is not entirely successful in compensating for what the editors themselves regard as troubling absences in their text. In the concluding paragraph o f their introduction, Di Stefano and Hirschmann acknowledge that their collection is not an “accurate or full sampling o f the varieties o f women’s emancipatory aspirations” and suggest that the exclusions o f their text “may ironically be due to our own personal location in the disciplinary norms o f political theory, our struggles to resist them notwithstanding” (20). The effects o f this position are symptomatically apparent in the last paragraph o f the section on rights in the editors’ introduction. After having argued for the “need to rethink ‘women’s rights’ in the modem world, to reflect difference and specificity,” Di Stefano and Hirschmann return to their theme o f reconstruction and make a singular reference to - but do not quote - Audre Lorde (18). The complete sentence appears as follows: “We are - contra Audre Lorde (1984) - forced to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, but even further, to use the master’s materials to build a new house, to perform the reconstruction” (19). Although this statement alone raises problematic questions, what is symptomatically most important is how Lorde’s text itself may be understood to work in this context. Though they do not specifically identify it by name, Di Stefano and Hirschmann are clearly making reference to Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s 57

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House,” which is not an essay per se but rather a set o f comments delivered at a 1979 conference.90 In her remarks, Lorde unequivocally takes to task the conference and its organizers for a lack o f commitment to addressing the differences among women as well as for failing to regard such differences as absolutely integral to feminist theorizing itself. Raising the issue directly, Lorde asks “why weren’t other women o f Color found to participate in this conference” and offers the response herself.91 In academic feminist circles, the answer to these [sic] questions is often “We did not know who to ask.” But that is the same evasion o f responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women’s art out o f women’s exhibitions, Black women’s work out o f most feminist publications except for the occasional “Special Third World Women’s Issue,” and Black women’s texts o ff your reading lists. (113)

Given Lorde’s own critique, the reference to this text by Di Stefano and Hirschmann takes on a certain irony and raises anew questions about how the discipline o f political theory fosters the evasion o f feminist responsibility that Lorde describes. Such questions are made all the more compelling by the editors’ own recognition o f the “need, often ignored in political theory, to take responsibility for these visions [of political concepts] in light o f the political agendas that reflect distinctively feminist priorities” (16). That this responsibility arguably gets somehow misrecognized in their editorial decisions and commentary suggests that something else is at work that obscures the strongly stated feminist goals o f Di Stefano and Hirschmann. To consider how such elisions may occur, a return to Lorde’s comments is helpful and in particular, those passages that the editors draw on for the language o f the master

90 The essay appears in Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984). 91 Ibid., 113. Further page references will be cited in the text

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and his tools. This particular language appears in a single paragraph o f Lorde’s remarks that opens with the assertion that “those o f us who stand outside the circle o f society’s definition o f acceptable women; those o f us who have been forged in the crucibles o f difference . . . know that survival is not an academic skilF (112). For Lorde, the skill o f survival in part involves “learning how to take our differences and make them strengths” rather than allowing them to be ignored in whatever fashion (112). Only after establishing the vital relationships between survival and difference does the language o f the master appear. For the m aster’s tools never will dismantle the m aster's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source o f support. (112)

The problem therefore is not that the master’s tools cannot be used in new ways, but rather that their use is necessarily limited, for “when the tools o f a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits o f that patriarchy. . . only the most narrow perimeters o f change are possible and allowable” (110-11). From this perspective, the kind o f reconceptualization proposed by Di Stefano and Hirschmann is thus far more constrained in its possibilities than they recognize, in part because o f the understanding o f difference as source o f political strength that inheres in their approach. For Lorde, “difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund o f necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic” (111) and through which significant political change becomes possible. In contrast, Di Stefano and Hirschmann maintain that what links the essays in their collection together is a “performative dim ension. . . [that] represents a larger commitment to the process o f theorizing about and on behalf o f ‘women,’ 59

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regardless o f the differences o f our particular visions” (20). Although a footnote to this sentence acknowledges that feminists dispute definitions o f women and emancipatory goals, the editors insist that “agreeing to disagree about these terms” because o f their political import brings “them together as feminists” (22). Yet it is precisely the assumption o f agreeing to disagree as well as theorizing regardless o f differences that are, for Lorde, symptomatic o f the most problematic and politically limiting points in academic fem inism . Thus in their efforts to posit a different feminist approach to classic concepts in political theory, the analysis offered by Di Stefano and Hirschmann becomes tangled in disciplinary lines that produce the sorts o f exclusions and erasure o f differences that subvert their feminist goals. By underscoring the need for their collection to address the field o f political theory and leaving unexamined their uneasiness regarding disciplinary norms, the editors unwittingly grant priority to the discipline and its critical principles. Lorde’s critique o f mastery, however, offers an avenue through which these difficult issues may begin to be addressed, for it affords the opportunity for feminist political theory to reconsider its interactions with the master discourse o f political theory and, more specifically, questions concerning the privileges o f disciplinary mastery raised by Singer. What is arguably a major obstacle to feminist political theory’s critical vitality is its relatively unquestioned investment in the classic texts o f political theory as well as the notion o f women it depends upon, each o f which not only help sustain the disciplinary lines o f the field, but also short-circuit the critical force o f feminist projects themselves. As Singer argues, part o f the difficulty with closely working with the canon is that it 60

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results both in “infantalizing father-daughter dynamics” and contentions among feminist theorists “over just whose father is the best father” or which conceptual inheritance is the most promising (174). What is so problematic is not debate among feminists, but rather that such discussions are focused on an exclusionary canonical structure and not on the important questions and differences raised by feminist theory and practice. For Singer, feminist theorists need to shift their focus away from traditional canons and towards “articulating and working through our differences with respect to the conceptual, epistemological, and ethical questions that em erge

in the context o f our theoretical

and political activities as feminists” (174). The guiding imperative is not a repudiation o f those canons in which feminists have been trained but rather the “need to address the questions we have produced ourselves, rather than those we have inherited” (174). What Singer’s argument may suggest in regard to feminist political theory is the need for a shift in identifications and this requires that the area attend less to the inherited canon o f political theory and concentrate more closely on its feminist contexts. As Singer acknowledges, this is a difficult task for feminists are not simply “free to ignore or dissociate themselves from their own intellectual histories” (175). To assume that feminist identifications can be easily changed is to ignore that “insofar as feminist theory emerges within patriarchy as a form o f resistance, it is to that extent also dependent, conceptually and genetically, upon it” (175).92 Although the issue o f feminist identification is complicated, a way to think through these quandaries is offered by Teresa 92 Works that address the difficulties o f feminist identification include Wendy Brown, States o f Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) and Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, L995). On disciplinary identification more generally, see Joan Scott, “After History?” Common Knowledge 5, no. 3 (Winter 1996).

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de Lauretis’s analysis o f feminist theory writ large, who argues that identity is best regarded as a “locus o f multiple and variable positions, which are made available in the social field by historical processes and which one may come to assume subjectively and discursively in the form o f political consciousness.”93 This consciousness then serves to encourage feminist theory to examine its own critical identity and to question “its own heterogenous body o f writing and interpretations, their basic assumptions and terms, and the practices they enable and from which they emerge” (138). According to de Lauretis, part o f this process involves a form o f dis-identification that acts as “a displacement o f one’s point o f understanding and conceptual articulation,” and it is this always uncertain mobility that is necessary for feminist theory “to sustain the subject’s capacity for movement and displacement, to sustain the feminist movement itself’ (139). For feminist political theory in particular, this involves a continual reassessment o f its positions in regard to its most common points o f understanding and articulation - namely, the classic texts and concepts o f political theory. Doing so is crucial, for it provides much needed critical space within which feminist political theory can not only continually question its relation to political theory, but also examine its various roles as a distinctly feminist mode o f inquiry. As such, for feminist political theory to assume what de Lauretis calls the eccentric position afforded by dis-identification, something other than an outright rejection o f the traditional canon o f political theory and/or the promotion o f texts by women “in the effort to incorporate different gendered meanings and possibilities

93 Teresa de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness,” Feminist Studies 16, no. I (Spring 1990): 137. Further references will be cited in the text.

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into the canon” is involved.94 Although the need for both these sorts o f work remains, tactics o f rejection and recovery do not attend to the questions concerning the critically constraining effects o f canonical structures. To directly address such concerns, a renewed attention to the politics o f reading protocols is required in order to begin to piece together perspectives that are better able to navigate the obstacles encountered by feminist readings o f classic political theory texts. The need for such meta-level analysis is acute not only because o f the relative absence o f such discussions in feminist political theory, but more importantly because “strategies o f writing and o f reading are forms o f cultural resistance.”95 Given Zerilli’s observation that much feminist political theory is characterized by an inattention to how gender signifies within differing contexts, it is important to develop perspectives that apprehend what may be termed the “subject o f feminism” as “not only distinct from Woman with the capital letter, the representation of an essence inherent to all women. . . but also distinct from women, the real, historical beings and social subjects who are defined by the technology o f gender.”96 In contradistinction to either o f these formulations, the subject o f feminism is perhaps best regarded as a “theoretical construct (a way o f conceptualizing, o f understanding, o f accounting for certain processes, not women)” that ultimately occupies a liminal position in regard to the “ideology o f

94 Di Stefano, 5. 95 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn rt: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 7. 96 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies o f Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 9-10.

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gender.”97 Such an approach relies in particular on those practices o f reading that enact a displacement o f dominant discursive structures as they seek either “to refuse the question [of woman] as formulated, or to answer deviously (though in its words), even to quote (but against the grain).”98 Although these sorts o f readings may be pursued in myriad directions, one specific way according to which feminist political theory may begin to answer more deviously is by cultivating a more historically informed approach to classic texts in political theory. A practice o f feminist reading that is attuned to complexities o f both text and context offers a way to bring historical constructions o f gender into critical play in ways not often found in political theory. The significance o f a greater reliance on the historicity o f gender for feminist political theory is roughly twofold. First, the differing notions o f gender that an historical perspective brings to the fore can challenge the static versions o f woman - as well as femininity and masculinity - articulated within individual texts and upon which the canon o f political theory depends. Second, the various understandings o f gender found in diverse historical contexts encourage an attention to the specificity o f gender and its relations to other factors - such as race - with which feminist political theory has struggled to come to terms. Both o f these considerations combine to open up some critical space within which feminist political theory may begin to more thoroughly question its broader disciplinary setting and its own critical identity. By recognizing the analytical potential offered by historicizing signification,

97 Ibid. 98 de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, 1.

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feminist political theory can acquire an enhanced capacity for bringing historical constructions o f gender into critical play as well as for formulating more nuanced understandings o f the historical contexts within which the classic works o f political theory have been frequently located. The advantages o f such a perspective are thus not limited to its ability to emphasize the workings o f gender, but also extend to the creation o f more robust and varied historical contexts than those advocated by Skinner and Pocock. The need for an approach to the history o f political discourse that is attuned to the significations o f gender and the more subtle valences o f different historical contexts is especially important for a consideration o f the complexities o f early modem monetary thought. Without a more supple technique for reading political languages, not only are their semiotic features obscured, but also their links with other discursive realms including monetary thought and apprehensions o f gender - that may shape notions o f the political within various historical settings. Similarly, without an attunement to its varying constructions within diverse contexts, gender too easily becomes regarded a somewhat static critical variable rather than a vexed work continually in progress throughout a number o f cultural registers. A practice o f feminist reading attuned to these concerns is thus better able to critically consider the circulations o f gender that characterized early modem monetary discourse and its political valences. Conclusion A feminist reading o f the complexities o f early modem monetary thought and its associations with the canonical figure o f Locke is in no way immune to the problems that inhere within more established reading protocols. What a different kind o f feminist 65

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reading can offer is an avenue through which, such, issues can become actively problematized and made a more integral part o f the enterprise o f political theory. Moreover, by examining processes o f signification from an historical perspective as they appear in diverse texts closely associated with the more conventional figures and aspects o f political theory, feminist political theory can effectively lay claim to valuable historical ground and challenge the exclusionary structure o f prominent historical approaches to political theory, as evident in certain contextual approaches. As a result, such feminist readings can begin not only to write a very different history o f political thought, but also refigure the often narrow understanding o f political language to which much o f political theory subscribes. By opening up such diverse historical and conceptual spaces, feminist political theory may not only help to reshape the discipline o f political theory, but is also better equipped to critically reflect on its own limitations, in part through a process o f disidentification. The displacement inherent to dis-identification does not constitute a panacea to the many problems faced by feminist political theory, but rather acts as one way through which feminist political theory can better negotiate the challenges raised by the disciplinary lines o f political theory as well as the more troubling effects produced by its own feminist investments. What dis-identification may enable is a distancing from the more static notions o f theoretical and critical identity that prove politically problematic, and allow instead for an understanding o f feminist reading as an active rather than reactive endeavor. As Kirstie McClure argues, to understand theorizing as an activity is to appreciate it “as a contingent and located social practice without the security o f

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foundations, as w ell as a political practice always and inescapably implicated in power.”99 Working with such a perspective in mind, feminist political theory might be able to surmount the significant difficulties o f its disciplinary location in ways that would facilitate the creation o f new theoretical spaces and different practices o f reading better able to negotiate the textual and contextual intricacies o f early modem texts.

99 Kirstie McClure, “The Issue o f Foundations: Scientized Politics, Politicized Science, and Feminist Critical Practice,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 365.

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CHAPTER TWO FIGURING COMMERCE MONEY, GENDER AND THE POLITICAL IN 1620'S ENGLAND Anne, queen consort to James I, died in early March o f 1619 and the considerable preparations required for the staging o f a royal funeral began soon after. Yet as planning for the event commenced, it became apparent that far more than the typical organizational difficulties had to be overcome, for Anne had the misfortune o f dying during one o f England’s more severe monetary crises and the already troubled Stuart coffers were hardly immune to its impact. With an initial estimated cost o f £24,000, the queen’s funeral was deferred until at least the end o f April and, as John Chamberlain accurately predicted, “perhaps longer unles they can find out monie faster, for the master o f the ward-robe is loth to weare his owne credit thread-bare, or to be so ill an husband as to use the Kinges credit and so pay double the price, which is now become ordinarie, because they stay so long for theyre money.”1 Chamberlain’s reference to concerns about threadbareness were apt well beyond the figurative level, for the royal household’s scramble for coin was driven in substantial part by the need to buy cloth and appropriate apparel for the funeral. Indeed, by mid April it was clear that the queen’s burial would

1 John Chamberlain, The Letters o f John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, vol. 2, Memoirs XII, Part II (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1939), 224. The initial estimate for the cost o f Anne’s funeral is given by Abraham Williams, Calendar o f State Papers, Domestic Series, 1619-1623, v. 10 (London, 1858), p. 26. This Calendar will be cited hereafter as CSPD.

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again be delayed because “the King and Prince’s servants are to go into mourning, [yet] credit for so much black is not to be had.”2 Despite the extended time frame, circumstances only worsened as the cost o f the funeral rose “beyond proportion, above three times more then was bestowed on Queen Elizabeth,” and desperate measures seemed called for with “talke o f melting the Queenes golden plate and putting it into coin: besides that the commissioners for her jewells and other movables make offer to sell or pawne divers o f them to good value.”3 Anne was eventually laid to rest on May 13th in a less than spectacular rite described by Chamberlain as a “drawling, tedious sight.”4 Although a large number o f participants o f notable status participated in the funeral procession, “they made but a poore shew, which perhaps was because they were apparelled all alike, or that they came laggering all along even tired with the length o f the way and waight o f theyre clothes, every Lady having twelve yards o f broade cloth about her and the countesses sixteen.”5 With an estimated final bill exceeding £40,000, Anne’s funeral and the flurry o f monetary activity surrounding it seems to represent little more than yet another instance o f legendary Stuart court extravagance and accompanying questionable conduct. Yet when viewed in light o f their larger historical context, the trivial details at the center o f both the plans for and accounts o f the queen’s burial offer in fragmentary form a glimpse

2 CSPD, v. 10, p. 37, April 16, 1619, Sir Edward Harwood to Sir Dudley Carleton. 3 Chamberlain, 232. 4 Ibid., 237. 5 Ibid.

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o f the monetary and cultural forces at work in the complex upheavals that characterized English markets o f all kinds during the early 1620's and that shook the foundations o f widely held views o f a rightly ordered world. Evidenced most clearly in what was understood to be a scarcity o f actual coinage, the monetary crisis o f the period was also closely intertwined with a number o f other factors including concerns about the fate o f the English cloth industries, the growing influence o f foreign trade on domestic markets, and the increased consumption o f superfluous or luxury goods across a range o f previously w ell delineated social levels. The instability o f money and trade that drew the attention o f a variety o f writers was not, however, simply confined to the narrow parameters o f what would much later be termed the “economic sphere,” but were closely tied to a growing unease about the status o f social and, ultimately, political order. Significantly, in their efforts to literally come to terms with the profound changes wrought by the flux o f increasingly permeable English markets, writers ranging from broadside balladeers to members o f parliament often articulated their concerns about currency and its disruptive effects through language freighted with fluidity that not only evoked concerns regarding pathology and corporeality, but also associations with early modem notions o f woman and the feminine. Although the complexities o f the monetary and trade crises o f the early 1620's are alone significant, the gendered connotations o f the discussions about coinage and commerce are particularly important in relation to those political vocabularies that sought to sustain and promote the integrity o f the body politic, however understood. An examination o f a variety o f writings dealing with money and trade at large, as w ell as the specific controversy over gold and silver thread, affords the opportunity to closely 70

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consider how the gendered languages used to figure market instabilities highlight important tensions not only in different forms o f monetary thought, but also prominent early modem understandings o f the political. Furthermore, the articulation o f monetary and political uncertainties via gendered tropes allows for an exploration o f the conceptually unsettling indeterminacy o f historically specific apprehensions o f gender that were not confined to the realm o f domestic reflection, but were woven throughout a variety o f texts with a more public currency. The Sovereign Coin Throughout the early modem period, money raised not only moral and social concerns but also distinctly political ones, in part because the integrity o f any currency was understood in direct relation to the legitimacy o f the political entity issuing it. Counterfeiting had been regarded as an act o f high treason in English statute since the fourteenth century, and other forms o f monetary abuse such as clipping since the fifteenth century.6 The standing o f crimes against coinage within common law was no different for, as Sir Edward Coke asserted, counterfeiting “was treason by the common law, as it appeareth by all the said ancient authors.”7 Yet despite its long and prominent standing within English law, different forms o f political theorizing within England did not regard money and the related concept o f wealth as subjects for sustained critical consideration

6 Declaration o f Treasonous Offenses. 1352. Statutes o f the Realm. 25 Edw. 3, St. 5, c. 2, and Declaration o f Clipping as Treason. 1416. 3 Hen. 5, St. 1, c. 6. 7 Sir Edward Coke, The Third Part ofthe Institutes ofthe Laws o f England (London: Printed by M. Flesher for W. Lee and D. Paleman, 1644), 16.

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until the sixteenth century.8 Following Richard Tuck, the emergence o f more robust monetary thought and its substantial links to political theory may be understood to have stemmed, in part, from the pan-European spread o f Tacitus-inspired humanism with its concern “to delineate realistically the sources o f strength and grandezza in the modem world.”9 A prominent figure in this larger development was Jean Bodin, whose Six Bookes o f a Commonweale provides money with a conceptual position within a detailed understanding o f the political that is not unlike that which it had held for so long in English law. For Bodin, control over both the form and content o f currency is one o f what he terms the principal marks o f sovereignty that serve to distinguish the powers that belong to a prince. As for the right and power to coyne money, it is o f the same nature with the law, and there is none but he which hath power to make a law, which can appoint the value, weight, and stampe o f coyne. . . For nothing is in a Commonweale o f greater consequence next unto the law, than the value, weight, and stampe o f the coyne; as we have in a speciall treatise declared: and in everie well ordered Commonweale, none but the soveraigne prince hath power to appoint the same.10

Bodin. carries the importance o f currency and wealth further in book six, for “if treasure

8 For an examination o f early writings on money and the political, see Neal Wood, Foundations o f Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 9 Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572-1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 82. In muted fashion, Tuck partially echoes some o f claims put forth by Heckscher in drawing links between the rise o f the nation state and the increase in concerted attention to monetary matters. The strong version o f this argument is found in Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2nd revised ed., 2 vols. (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1955). 10 Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes o f a Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles (1606), ed. Kenneth Douglas McRae ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), bk. 1, chap. 10, sig. Q4r. The treatise to which Bodin refers is his Response to the Paradoxes o f Malestroit, trans. and ed. Henry Tudor and R. W. Dyson (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997). The first edition appeared in 1568, followed by a second edition in 1578 that was amended to include many o f Bodin’s remarks about money as they appeared in the Six Bookes (itself first published in 1576).

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be the sinewes o f a commonweale, as an ancient Orator said, it is verie necessary to have the true knowledge thereof’ in order to sustain the well being o f the commonwealth as a whole." As such, the need to understand the workings o f wealth and commerce takes on a particular urgency in regard to issues concerning currency itself. “For that there is nothing that doth more trouble and afflict the poore people, than to falsifie the Coines, and to alter the course thereof: for both rich and poore, everie one in particular, and all in generall, receive an infinit losse and prejudice, the which cannot precisely in every point bee described, it breeds so many inconveniences. The Coine may not be corrupted, no not altered, without great prejudice to the Commonweale.”12 Although Bodin’s primary focus in the Six Bookes is on the alteration o f coin by the issuing state rather than through the illegal practices o f counterfeiting or clipping (an understandable emphasis, given that the manipulation o f the face value o f coinage was a problem more characteristic o f the Continent than England), the paramount importance o f maintaining a stable currency is quite evident. If the monetary system o f any given state is anything other than certain, “the estate o f the treasure and o f many affaires both publike and private shall be in suspence” and the stability o f the commonwealth left open to question.13 Yet even if the integrity o f a given currency is somehow assured, the movements o f money itself - both at home and abroad - bring in their wake further difficulties that threaten the integrity o f the commonwealth. Although a sound currency allows for the u Bodin, Six Bookes, bk. 6, chap. 2, sig. Kkkr. The orator to whom Bodin refers is Cicero, whose phrase neruvs belli is extended by Bodin to fit his understanding o f the commonwealth. 12 Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 3, sig. Nnn2r. 13 Ibid.

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establishment o f valuable avenues for international trade, Bodin insists that the alliances that may arise from such commercial activities are “more unsure or weaker” than any others that may be formed.14 The difficulties posed by foreign trade are so great that although it “may seeme to bee grounded upon the law o f nations, yet we see it oftentimes to bee forbidden by princes in their own countries, least their subjects should riotously abuse the store o f things brought in, or be pinched with the want o f things carried out.”15 In the absence o f such measures to control the traffic o f money and goods across its external borders, the commonwealth becomes internally susceptible to a problematic imbalance o f wealth that may have far reaching consequences. “It fals out as in mans bodie, where as the strongest and noblest members cast all superfluous and vicious humors upon the weaker, and when as apostume [i.e., an abscess] is so swolne as the weaker part can endure no more, then must it breake or infect all the members: even so it fals out when as the rich cities, the nobilitie and the clergie, lay all the charge upon the poore labourer, he sinks under his burden like unto Tisops Asse.”16 To lessen the risk o f such an infection and resulting disease, Bodin does not advocate a suspension o f those forms o f commerce that exacerbate already existing disparities o f wealth, but rather a very focused approach to taxation that is worth quoting at length because o f the detail it provides. [The] kind o f impost most pleasing unto G o d . . . is that which is layd on those things which serve onely to corrupt the subjects, as all kinds o f dainties, perfumes, cloth o f gold

14 Ibid., bk. I, chap. 7, sig. IT. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 2, sig. LU5r.

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and silver, silkes, cipresse, laces, rich colours, womens painting, pearles, precious stones, and all kinds o f works o f gold, silver or enamell, & such like things, which are not to be forbidden: for such is the nature o f man, as they esteem nothing more sweet & goodly than that which is stricktly forbidden them ; you must therefore raise them in price, by means o f the impost, as none but the rich and those that are curious shal be able to buy them.17

Thus only through a continued close attention to the reliability o f coinage itself, as w ell as the potentially socially disruptive goods that its circulations seem to inevitably bring, can money serve as the stable marker o f sovereignty and connective sinews that are defining features o f Bodin’s ideal commonwealth. Whatever his recommendations for containing the possible disturbances that the circulation o f money and commodities may foster, Bodin’s writings highlight the inherently uneasy relationship that exists between currency and early modem understandings o f the political. The discomfort o f this conceptual pairing finds more direct expression in the writings and speeches o f James I who, like Bodin, grants money a position o f political prominence with, rather unlike Bodin, strong moral overtones. Early on in Basilicon Doron, James counsels his son that there are “some horrible crimes that yee are bound in conscience never to forgive: such as Witchcraft, wilfull murther, Incest, (especially within the degrees o f consanguinitie) Sodomie, poisoning, and false coine.”18 As with Bodin, the injunction against meddling with currency applies to the prince as well as his subjects, for the prince ought to make his “money o f fine Gold and Silver;

17 Ibid., sig. LIF. 18 James I, Basilicon Doron, in Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 23.

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causing the people to be payed with substance, and not abused in number.”19 If the populace does fall prey to fiscal abuse, it is more likely to come from the actions o f merchants than o f the prince. According to James, merchants are inclined to “thinke the whole common-weale ordained for making them up; and accounting it their lawfull gaine and trade, to enrich themselves upon the losse o f all the rest o f the people, they transport from us things necessarie; bringing backe sometimes unnecessary things, and at other times nothing at all.”20 Beyond the problem o f superfluous goods that Bodin also noted, merchants are held by James to the far more serious charge that they are the “speciall cause o f the corruption o f the coyne, transporting all our owne, and bringing in forraine, upon what price they please to set on it.”21 Although Basilicon Doron was written before James succeeded to the English throne, his views on the centrality o f coinage to sovereignty underwent few changes during his reign. In a speech to parliament on March 21, 1610, James framed yet another o f his pleas for money in a Ciceronian vocabulary (also employed by Bodin) to argue that a kingdom is “not able to subsist, how rich and potent soever the people be, if their King wantes meanes to maintaine his State: for the meanes o f your King are the sinewes o f the kingdome both in warre and peace.”22 In one o f his final bouts o f exasperation with parliament in 1621-22, James took the Commons to task for attempting to interfere with his powers by rhetorically asking “what have you

19 Ibid., 30. 20 Ibid., 29-30. 21 Ibid. — “Speech to parliament o f 21 March 1610,” in Political Writings, 195.

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left unattempted in the highest points o f soveraigntie in that Petition o f yours, except the striking o f Coine.”23 Thus over a period o f some years, James regarded currency as not simply one aspect o f many characterizing sovereignty, but rather as one o f its most crucial features - any transgression against which could and ought to be judged according to the strictest moral and political terms. Although these textual pieces from Bodin and James demonstrate the centrality that issues concerning money held for their understandings o f sovereignty, what is arguably most intriguing about the relations between currency and the political goes beyond questions o f priority. More significantly, money serves as a marker o f sovereignty within a particular understanding o f the political widely and variously articulated in early modem England - specifically, a hierarchical body politic that is itself constructed through a densely analogical vocabulary. The use o f such language is evident in the works o f both Bodin and James, who each rely in different ways on analogies between household and politic government to explicate their visions o f the ideal body politic. In one o f the more well known passages from the Six Bookes, Bodin asserts that “as a familie well and wisely ordered, is the true image o f a Citie, and the domesticall government, in sort like unto the soveraigntie in a Commonweale: so also is the manner o f government o f an house or familie, the true modell for the government o f a

23 “His Majesties Declaration, Touching his proceedings in the late Assemblie and Convention of Parliament,” in Political Writings, 259. The petition to which James refers is the protestation made by the Commons asserting its rights to free speech and which, in a fit of pique, James tore out o f the Commons’ journal.

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Commonweale.”24 For Bodin, the well-ordered commonwealth must aspire to match the perfection o f the divinely ordained hierarchy in which angels rule “over men, men over beasts, the soule over the bodie, the man over the woman, reason over affection: and so every good thing commaunding over that which is worse.”25 Adding a more paternal spin to the device o f analogy, James opened his first English parliament by simply stating “I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the head, and it is my Body; I am the Shepherd and it is my flocke.”26 Not content to focus on merely one analogical pairing, James’s writings continually combine patriarchal language with the anthropomorphic imagery characteristic o f the concept o f the body politic.27 In his speech to parliament regarding the proposed unification o f England and Scotland, James stated that “Union is a marriage” that must be preceded by “the mutuall sight and acquaintance o f the parties one with another, the conditions o f the contract, the Joincture to be talked o f and agreed upon by their friends.”28 The proposed marriage is decidedly one o f two bodies politic, as the formerly contentious borders o f which are to become the “N avell or

24 Bodin, Six Bookes, bk. 1, chap. 2, sig. B4V. 25 Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 6, sig. Xxx6Cjfl). 26 “Speech to parliament o f 19 March 1604,” in Political Writings, 136. For a thorough analysis o f James’ use o f paternalistic language and its multiple connotations, see Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics o f Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). 27 For analyses o f the development o f the idea o f the body politic, see Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work o f Art: The Human Body as Image o f the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), Stephen L. Collins, From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: An Intellectual History o f Consciousness and the Idea o f Order in Renaissance England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), and David George Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). 28 “Speech to parliament o f 31 March 1607,” in Political Writings, 163.

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Umbilick o f both Kingdomes.”29 The figurative language afforded by the conceptual rubric o f the body politic thus allows James - as well as others - to demonstrate in rather vivid fashion the all-encompassing quality provided by an analogically ordered understanding o f the political. Yet on at least two fronts, the analogical structure and anthropomorphic articulations o f the body politic leave it particularly vulnerable to the kinds o f uncertainty associated with money. First, the prominent conceptual place accorded money as a defining marker o f sovereignty and the instability that is simultaneously understood to characterize currency suggests that its very presence always already threatens to undo the analogical rubric o f the body politic even as it serves to define it. Although the implications for notions such as political obligation differ profoundly depending on whether one regards the analogies used to construct the body politic as either similes or metaphors, the disturbing effects o f money are arguably similar in both cases if the importance o f semiotic and conceptual proximity is recognized.30 If, as Foucault argues, early modem epistemologies may be distinguished by their privileging o f tropes o f resemblance, then the differences between metaphoric analogies and those based on

29 Ibid., 169. 30 For a minimalist interpretation of the role o f analogy as simile in Stuart political thought, see J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London: Longman, 1986). Fora consideration o f the analogy o f the household and the political as simile, see Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). On the importance o f metaphoric comparisons for early modem political vocabularies, see Gordon Schochet, The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes in 17th Century England (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988). For readings that place greater stress on the significance o f the analogical structure o f the body politic and its inherently problematic ambiguities, see Constance Jordan, “The Household and the State: Transformations in the Representation o f an Analogy from Aristotle to James I,” Modern Language Quarterly 54, no. 3 (September 1993) and Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England: Essays and Studies (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989).

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similitude may be understood as those o f degree and not o f kind.31 To emphasize the role o f proximity across differing constructions o f the body politic is not to ignore the critical distinctions that a reliance on metaphor or simile produce. Rather, to focus on the significance o f proximity - semiotic and otherwise - is to draw attention to one o f the many features that is integral to the complex structure o f the body politic and that is particularly vulnerable to monetary instability. Thus from this perspective, whether understood as simply a series o f close comparisons or as more overt conceptual identifications, the often tension filled analogies relied on to constitute the early modem body politic are all too easily subverted by the disruptions caused by money through both the corruption o f its form in counterfeit or clipped coins and the excesses o f its function as a wandering instrument o f trade in often frivolous things. Second, these analogical problems are amplified by the figurative language o f the body politic itself since those concerned with the place o f money in this corporeal order frequently posited it as constituting some sort o f essential bodily fluid. As Patrick Kelly remarks in his introduction to Locke’s monetary writings, the “dynamic, demandinducing role o f money was expressed in the early seventeenth century in variants o f the metaphor o f money as the blood, or ‘Vital Spirit’ o f trade, embodying the concepts o f nourishment, stimulus, and the dangers o f plethora or deprivation inherent in the function o f the blood in Galenic physiology.”32 For merchants such as Gerard Malynes, who 11 Michel Foucault, The Order o f Things: An Archaeology ofthe Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), see chapters 2 and 3. 32 Patrick Hyde Kelly, introduction to Locke on Money, by John Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 69, quoting Edward Misselden, Free Trade or the Meanes to Make Trade Florish (London: Printed (continued...)

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regarded profit as “the radical moisture o f commerce” and money “(as the bloud in the body) [that] containeth the soule which infuseth life,” the imagery o f fluidity provided a useful way to attempt to make sense o f the intricacies o f international trade and other newly emerging financial phenomena within a broader understanding o f the body politic.33 Yet the articulation o f money and its movements via a fluid, corporeal vocabulary was not confined to debates about commerce in the early 1600's, but continued to appear throughout the century well after Galenic models began to fade in the wake of, among other factors, Harvey’s researches into the circulation o f blood. A prominent example is Hobbes’s mid-century comparison, in which the role o f money in the commonwealth is figured as akin to that o f “naturall Bloud” since both are “made o f the fruits o f the Earth; and circulating, nourisheth by the way, every Member o f the Body o f Man.”34 Whatever conceptual convenience a language o f fluidity provided, a continued reliance on such figurations also meant that, at its core, the stability and order o f the body politic was intimately linked with the always potentially subversive inconstancy that all too often characterized the circulations o f currency. What is at stake in the fluidity attributed to coinage, however, is more than an

32(...continued) by John Legatt for Simon Waterson, 1622; reprint Amsterdam: De Capo Press, 1970), 28. 33 Gerard Malynes, Consuetudo, vel, lex mercatoria or The antient law-merchant, diuided into three parts: according to the essentiall parts o f trafficke, Necessariefo r all statesmen, judges, magistrates, temporall and ciuile lawyers, mintmen, merchants, mariners, and all others negotiating in all places o f the world (London: Printed by Adam [slip for Nicolas Bourne, 1636), 47 and 177. Hereafter referred to as Lex Mercatoria, this text was first published in 1622. 34 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 174 .

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apparently simple - albeit crucial - paradox in which money serves as a signal feature o f sovereignty that simultaneously poses a substantial threat to the wholeness and order o f the body politic. More significantly, the links between monetary fluidity and Galenism locate currency not within a somehow neutral approach to bodily matters, but rather one in which certain physiological phenomena were strongly gendered. Although Galenic humoralism imagined that all bodies were saturated with fluids (including not only blood but also the humors o f yellow and black bile as w ell as phlegm), women’s bodies were consistently portrayed as far moister and colder than those o f men.35 Articulated not only within nascent scientific writings but also across a variety o f other popular texts, “the cultural association o f women and liquids was so deeply inscribed that it required little empirical support” throughout the early modem period.36 Moreover, the perceived leakiness o f women’s bodies first noted in medical texts acquired a normative cast since corporeal fluidity was often understood as excessive and, as such, “either disturbing or shameful.”37 As a consequence, the ascription o f fluidity to femininity served “not only to insinuate womanly unreliability but also to define the female body even when it is chaste . . . as a crucial problematic in the social formation o f capitalism.”38 In addition, the disturbance attributed to fluidity was not confined to the female body, but also

35 For the association o f fluidity with women, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion o f Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 36 Gail Kem Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Disciplines o f Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 44. 37 Ibid., 25. 38 Ibid.

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extended to early modem discussions concerning problems o f proper speech and rhetoric in which women were linked “with uncontrollable and even indecent garrulity” as w ell as with the “transportability o f certain tropes.”39 Thus initially located within the materiality o f women’s bodies, fluidity quickly became a defining characteristic o f both the fem inine and conventional representations o f woman throughout a number o f cultural registers. With the feminine connotations o f fluidity in mind, the compelling nature o f the threat posed by monetary incontinence to a body politic constructed through densely patriarchal vocabularies becomes more apparent. Given this initial schema, a rather conventional argument may be posited that the relations between money and the political constitute another example o f a masculine polity working to resist the challenges posed by a particular form o f disorder (in this instance, o f the monetary kind) by figuring it in womanly form and, in so doing, successfully displacing or diminishing the perceived danger. Yet to pursue such a reading would be to ascribe a certain fixity to both gender and patriarchal political discourses that is belied by the complexities o f texts as w ell as historical contexts. The instabilities that characterized the discursive settings for gender become especially evident when it is recalled that, though excessive fluidity was associated with women’s bodies and woman, humoralism maintained that all bodies female and male - consisted o f various liquids. “Every subject grew up with a common understanding o f his or her body as a semipermeable, irrigated container in which humors

39 Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 110. See also Juliet Fleming, “Dictionary English and the Female Tongue,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

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moved sluggishly. People imagined that health consisted o f a state o f internal solubility to be perilously maintained.”40 Hence although Aristotelean frameworks held that the male body was less fluid than the female and more (if not actually) perfect in its own form, the insistent fluidity o f Galenism - among other factors such as the importance o f body heat meant that “there was no stable biological divide between male and female.”41 This does not mean that no such divisions were made, but rather that distinctions o f sex and gender were often vexed works in progress rather than stable markers o f difference. As a consequence, the fluidity that was a vital feature o f both sexes (as well as a shared concern with temperature) meant that the allegedly superior male body was arguably vulnerable to the kinds o f pathological incontinence ascribed to the supposedly inferior female body.42 Arising from this discursive - and at points, material - indeterminacy was the implication if not the fear that “men can turn into - or be turned into - women; or perhaps more exactly, can be turned back into women.”43 The uncertainties that inhered within early modem conceptions o f sex, gender and even pathology are important to a consideration o f the instabilities - if not contradictions that characterized the forms o f patriarchal language relied on to ensure the integrity o f the

40 Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 8. 41 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics o f Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 81. 42 In an expansion o f her earlier work, Gail Kem Paster stresses the importance o f body temperature as well as fluidity to humoral notions o f gender in “The Unbearable Coldness o f the Female Being: Women’s Imperfection and the Humoral Economy,” English Literary Renaissance 28, no. 3 (Autumn 1998). 43 Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance o f Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 25.

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body politic.44 The significance o f any fissures in the edifice o f fairly all-encompassing patriarchal vocabularies may seem small, since “what we understand to have been intellectually satisfying about patriarchalism in its fully developed form was this comprehensiveness, a philosophical nexus that incorporated the domestic, the political, the ecclesiastical, and the corporeal in an apparently inexorably logic o f analogy and that served to authorize an inclusive system o f obligation.”45 Yet it was precisely because o f the wide swath o f its conceptual space that patriarchal apprehensions o f the political were especially vulnerable to ail kinds o f disorder that could emerge from any variety o f directions. This susceptibility is particularly apparent in regard to bodily matters, where the patriarchal body politic shared the same corporeal dangers faced by the male and masculine body upon which it was, in part, modeled. “For the humoral body, all boundaries were threatened because they were - as a matter o f physical definition and functional health - porous and permeable,” and the integrity o f the body politic was arguably in a similarly tenuous position.46 The conceptual impact o f this precarious setting is vividly evinced in the contestations that arose when the fear o f monetary uncertainty collided with the elusive ideal o f a stable and sound body politic, whose health and well-being may be understood as threatened by the pathologies o f currency and

44 On the often ambiguous lines between the normal and the pathological in early modem medicine, see Jerome J. Bylebyl, “The Medical Side o f Harvey’s Discovery: The Normal and the Abnormal,” in William Harvey and His Age: The Professional and Social Context ofthe Discovery o f the Circulation, ed. Jerome J. Bylebyl (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 45 Orlin, 98. 46 Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 13. Emphasis in the original. For an extended analysis o f pathologies and the body politic, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses o f Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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its circulations as frequently articulated in the guise o f an all too womanly fluidity. Yet rather than understand the conflicts between money and the political as simply conveyed through well-established conceits o f gender, an attention to the uncertainties o f these discursive frameworks helps illustrate a more intricate theoretical nexus. From this perspective, the associations between money and fluidity that appeared in a variety o f texts not only imbued a dangerous instability within the very pores o f the body politic, but also served as important sites for the cultural production o f gender and the articulation o f political anxieties during the early modem period. Money, Gender and the Disorders o f Commerce The assertion that the English suffered severe monetary and trade tumult in first quarter o f the seventeenth century must be accompanied by the acknowledgment that currency instability was a chronic and pervasive condition throughout the early modem period. Although protected in part by its geographical isolation from the fiscal confusion caused by the manipulation o f currency rates more commonly found on the Continent, England was not immune to either the forces o f nature or vagaries o f royal fortune that greatly impacted the conditions o f its domestic and, increasingly, foreign markets. Lacking reliable and efficient administrative apparatuses, the English state was illequipped to formulate - much less implement - consistent policies concerning trade and currency, thus leaving each in a perennially vulnerable position.47 The tenuous character o f English markets and money was exacerbated by the increasingly complex and abstract

47 For an examination o f English bureaucracy in the first half o f the seventeenth century, see G. E. Aylmer, The King's Servants: The Civil Service o f Charles I, 1625-1642 (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1961).

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financial forces that emerged at the advent o f the seventeenth century. Though the sixteenth century bore witness to its own share o f monetary uncertainty evidenced in such events as the dissolution o f the monasteries and the Great Debasement, English domestic markets remained fairly localized and strongly linked to fluctuations in the direct consumption o f staple goods. The more immediate if not tangible quality o f financial interactions began to shift in earnest during the early 1600's as improvements in the areas o f communication and transportation drew local markets closer together as well as more fully introducing them to the expanding circuits o f foreign trade. As promising as such developments may have seemed to some, “the seventeenth-century commercial order o f England was exposed to a new batter o f dislocating forces: international competition, monetary fluctuations, and discontinuities o f supply and demand. No longer visible and tangible, the economy became generally incomprehensible.”48 Thus responding to these changes involved not only learning the new tricks o f trade, but also developing fresh concepts that would begin to make sense o f these newly emerging and enigmatic processes o f exchange. The need for more thorough understandings o f market mechanisms became particularly acute during the monetary and trade crises that developed at the end o f the 1610's and continued into the early 1620's. Although the accession o f James in 1603 had brought some relief to the fiscal slump that marked the end o f Elizabeth’s reign, whatever gains had been made quickly disappeared in the wake of, among other factors, “the

48 Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 25-6.

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growth o f rival industries, the financial burdens on English cloth, the disturbances provoked by continental warfare, and the widespread pre-existing difficulties for English merchants.”49 These rather severe problems were further complicated by and directly linked to the same monetary quandary that delayed Anne’s funeral - namely, what was perceived by contemporaries as a shortage o f coins in circulation. The gravity o f the situation was apparent to all by 1621, when the Venetian ambassador in London reported home that the English government was having significant trouble raising funds to support possible military actions on the Continent because “the scarcity o f money in the realm is greater, and the means o f collecting a quantity o f it more difficult, than their pride feels inclined to admit, since everyone spends more than he has, trade has diminished, much gold has been transported and everything is in astonishing disorder.”50 Despite its evident severity, the coinage crisis o f the 1620's may be regarded as simply another instance o f the difficulties monetary matters invariably posed to early modem governments especially those that understood the maintenance o f sovereignty and currency as virtually identical tasks. Yet the commercial developments o f the seventeenth century meant that money was problematic not only due to continuing troubles with currency itself (e.g., counterfeiting), but also because “the idea o f a commerce in money was loaded with im p lica tio n s

subversive to the concept o f the world as containing an order o f real things.

49 Barry Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in E n g la n d 1600-1642: A Study in the Instability o f a Mercantile Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 64. 50 May 7, 1621, Girolamo Lando, Venetian Ambassador to England, to the Doge and Senate, Calendar o f State Papers Venetian 1621-1623, v. 17 (London: 1911), 41. This Calendar will be cited hereafter as CSPV.

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A commerce in money suggested fluidity instead o f fixed points.”51 The scarcity o f coinage thus presented the English with a fam ilia r though vexing practical problem, greatly compounded by the increasing conceptual elusiveness o f monetary exchange and the disorder - social and otherwise - it affected. Governmental response to the currency crisis began, predictably enough, with the establishment o f various committees to look into what was generally referred to as the decay o f money and trade. Yet as Supple notes, “one notable feature o f governmental policy in these years was the eagerness with which local opinion and advice was sought.”52 This is apparent in a request issued by the Privy Council in September o f 1621 to a number o f port towns stating that having resolved to take into our serious consideration the true causes o f the decay o f trade and scarcitie o f coyne within this kingdome and to advise o f some fitt course for the remooving o f soe great inconveniences, for our better information herein and to the end that in providing for the generall wee may first heare the opinions o f such particulars as seeme to be most interested in this affair, wee have thought good to direct our letters unto you . . . requireing you to send unto u s . . . some fitt person whose experience in these businesses and particular knowledge o f that port may be o f use unto us.n

The reports based on this solicited advice served as material for subsequent parliamentary debates on these questions and, as importantly, some o f those sought out by the Privy Council to offer counsel - as well as those who were not - published their thoughts “in a series o f tracts that opened official investigations to the public.”S4 The existence o f these

Appleby, 44. 52

Supple, 66.

53

Acts o f the Privy Council, 1621-1623, v. 6 (London: 1932), 40. The Acts will be cited hereafter

54

Appleby, 35.

as APC.

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works is o f considerable practical as w ell as conceptual import given the relative paucity o f primary documentation concerning the handling o f monetary issues by the government in the early part o f the seventeenth century. In addition, although the Privy Council took steps to establish a permanent commission on commerce that in many ways prefigured the Board o f Trade formed at the end o f the century, unfortunately very little textual evidence remains o f their proceedings. Thus those tracts on money and trade written around the time o f the monetary crisis o f the 1620's provide valuable materials for a consideration o f how language emphasizing fluidity and its sometimes pathological effects was used to articulate the fiscal dangers facing a less than healthy body politic. Yet the historical significance o f these texts is somewhat complicated by the interpretive challenges they present for, as Patricia Fumerton has argued, “none o f the trade pamphleteers was able to penetrate beyond means and effects to an adequate analysis o f cause. Or rather, their idea o f analysis was ‘description,’ a mere survey o f disease symptoms amid which, somewhere, an undiscovered germ hid.”55 Rather than offering coherent explanations, “the fumbling inarticulateness o f the trade tracts (sometimes masked in excessive rhetoric) almost seems to parallel the symptoms o f economic costiveness” and, in so doing, these works only added to the growing sense that “trade was so strange that it was at last unutterable mystery.”56 Given the confused if not contradictory character o f the arguments presented by individual writers as well as the

ss Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice o f Social Ornament (Chicago: The University o f Chicago Press, 1991), 177. S6 Ibid., 175.

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larger debates o f which they were a part, “the dispute o f the pamphleteers came down, in the end precisely to the issue o f articulation, o f the writer’s own ‘utterance’ or language.”57 As already suggested, a prominent feature o f these monetary debates was a reliance on corporeal imagery to help figure the seemingly inexplicable strangeness o f commerce. Yet the significance o f this sort o f language is not so much that it constitutes “a systematic or one-to-one analogy o f foreign trade with corporeality as a confusing, semi-literal/semi-metaphorical saturation o f one discourse by another.”s8 Whereas Fumerton interprets this discursive saturation primarily through the trope o f cannibalism and its relation to early modem constructions o f consumption, a different reading o f these tracts is possible through a more sustained focus on the role o f pathology and the ultimately gendered connotations o f its bodily articulations. An avenue through which to begin to consider the complex imbrication o f monetary and corporeal language is offered by a writer already cited as providing an especially vivid example o f an intensely bodily figuration o f currency and trade - Gerard de Malynes. Along with Edward Misselden and Thomas Mun, Malynes emerged as one o f the most prominent figures participating in the trade debates o f the 1620's and, o f the three, was the most prolific in terms o f published texts. Yet Malynes’ extensive interests in monetary affairs were evident several years prior to the coinage crisis, for he had served as assay master to the mint and was deeply involved during 1612-13 in a failed scheme to ease an already noticeable shortage o f currency through the issuing o f lead

57 Ibid., 177. 58 Ibid., 187.

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farthing tokens.59 Moreover, his first text on money was published in 1601 with its corporeal tendencies immediately evident in the first words o f its title - The Canker o f England’s Common Wealth. In it, Malynes echoed aspects o f the political vocabularies o f Bodin and James in stressing the close connections between money and political power, stating that “the valuation or alteration o f money concemeth only the soveraignty and dignity o f the Prince or govemour o f every countrey, as a thing peculiar unto them.”60 Given its status, Malynes stresses the importance o f examining the reasons for England’s loss o f money, which he termed “the unknowne disease o f the politike body o f our weale publicke before mentioned: the efficient cause whereof must be found out, before any remedy can be applied or devised.” 61 For Malynes, the “abuse o f the exchange for money [is understood] to be the very efficient cause o f this disease wherewith as with a Canker the politike body o f our weale publike is overtaken” and is exacerbated by the flux o f unregulated exchange where “every man in particular, not knowing the weight and fineness o f the money, but following the course o f exchange,. . . [is] carried away with the streame.”62 Although Malynes acknowledged the trouble caused by difficulties in England’s foreign trade, his primary concern was with currency and his remedy for the

59 Dictionary o f National Biography, 1967 ed., s.v. “Gerard Malynes.” 60 Gerard de Malynes, A Treatise o f the Canker o f Englands Common Wealth. Deuided into three parts: Wherein the Author Imitating the rule o f good Phisitions, First, declareth the disease. Secondarily, sheweth the efficient cause thereof. Lastly, a remedyfo r the same (London: By Richard Field for William Johnes, 1601; reprint, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Ltd., 1977), 14. 61 Ibid., 3. For an examination o f Malynes’ Canker, see Jonathan Gil Harris, “ The Canker o f England's Common Wealth: Gerard de Malynes and the Origins o f Economic Pathology,” Textual Practice 13, no. 2 (1999). My thanks to Gil for valuable discussions about the trade tracts and for sharing his manuscript with me. 62 Malynes, Canker, 18,49.

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pathology it fostered was “a revitalization o f the Royal Exchange in London, to enforce published official rates o f exchange between English and foreign coins.”63 Some twenty years later when he entered into the trade debates o f the early 1620's, Malynes relied on the same sorts o f language and even expanded on its humoral aspects to more folly encompass the nature o f money itself. In his first publication from 1622, Malynes details the corporeal framework that structured his earlier text, stating “that as the Liver (Money) doth minister Spirits to the heart (Commodities,) and the heart to the Braine (Exchange:) so doth the Brayne exchange minister to the whole Microcosme or the whole Body o f Traffique.”64 As in the Canker, Malynes insists that money is at the heart o f any discussion o f England’s commercial woes since “the Hammers at the Minte, where the pulses o f the common-wealth should be felt, are the life and moving.”65 Unless the importance o f monetary exchange is recognized, Malynes argues that “the present disease o f this Trade may increase and cast the Body into a more serious Sickness.”66 The humoral features o f England’s monetary ills are especially evident in Lex Mercatoria, in which Malynes draws a fairly standard comparison between precious metals by locating “Gold under SoT and “Silver under Luna.”67 Several pages later, however, this alignment acquires a more distinct humoral twist when Malynes asserts that whereas gold

63 Appleby, 42. 64 Gerard Malynes, The Maintenance o f Free Trade (London: Printed by I. L. for William Sheffard, 1622), 38. 65 Ibid., 53. 66 Ibid., 10. 67 Malynes, Lex Mercatoria, 178.

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is warm and dry, “the nature and quality o f Silver is like unto the Moone, that is, cold and moist.”68 By relying on humoral conceits, Malynes seeks to make in slightly different form the familiar claim that silver is an inferior metal in relation to gold. Yet in so doing, Malynes also aligns silver with the same qualities attributed to the feminine body within Galenic medical frameworks - a notable comparison given that (as Malynes was aware) silver coin was in far wider circulation among the majority o f people than was the allegedly more perfect and constant gold coin.69 If Malynes’ principle concern was with the dangerous instability o f currency as evident in often confusing exchange rates, those merchants such as Misselden and Mun who argued against Malynes strove to articulate a wider view that was attentive not only to the circulation o f coin in relation to monetary exchange, but also the circuits o f trade it sustained. In particular, Misselden and Mun were attentive to the increasing complexities o f international commerce in which each act o f exchange was often tied to a number o f factors as well as people and whose seemingly nebulous rules England was - in sharp contrast to rival states such as Holland - still struggling to master. Yet whatever differences existed among their perspectives, the texts o f Misselden and Mun shared significant conceptual and semiotic commonalities with those o f Malynes. At the

68 Ibid., 192. 69 Throughout the seventeenth century, the great majority o f English currency consisted o f both gold and silver coins, with gold coins having a far more limited domestic circulation than silver coins. Although gold coin served as an instrument for the purposes o f wholesale and international trade as well as for saving, silver coin was the tool for almost all other exchanges. As Barry Supple suggests, for all intents and purposes silver was money (Supple, 173). For further details on the relationship between gold and silver coin during the period, see C. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 15001700, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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conceptual level, both. Misselden and Mun echoed Malynes’ endorsement o f the centrality o f money to sovereignty, as evinced clearly in Misselden’s statement that “surely matters o/STATE and o/TRADE, are involved and wrapt up together.,m As importantly, although Misselden and Mun have been credited by economic historians for formulating more consistent (if not indeed proto-modem) arguments than those created by Malynes’ corporeal imagery, their writings display a similar reliance on fluidity and bodily tropes.71 In an extension o f the figuration o f money as blood that is integral to Malynes’ texts, Misselden asserts that “money is the vitall spirit o f trade, and if the spirits faile, needs must the body faint. And as the body o f trade seemeth to be dead without the life o f money: so doe also the members o f the Common-wealth, without their meanes o f trade.”72 Yet even within those politic bodies with an adequate and reliable supply o f money to keep trade alive, trouble is always close at hand. For Mun, this is particularly evident in the case o f Spain “who have the very Fountain o f mony” yet this same nation becomes vulnerable when “it [money] is stopt in the passage by the force o f their enemies, or drawn out faster than it flows by their own occasions . . . to the great confusion o f their trade, and not without the undoing also o f many o f their own people.”73

70 Edward Misselden, Free Trade. Or, the Meanes to Make Trade Florish (London: Printed by John Legatt for Simon Waterson, 1622; reprint, Amsterdam: De Capo Press, 1970), sig. A5V. 71 A prominent example o f the tendency to regard the writings o f Misselden and especially Mun as recognizably more modem than those of Malynes is offered by Appleby, particulary chapter 2. 72 Ibid., 28. 73 Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade. Or, the Ballance o f our Forraign Trade is the Rule o f our Treasure (London: Printed by J. G. for Thomas Clark, 1664), 23-4. Although this text of Mun’s clearly dates from the 1620's debates, it was not published until 1664 through the efforts of his son, John Mun.

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Similarly, Misselden notes that plans designed to improve trade and the supply o f money (commonly referred to as projects) are inherently problematic, for in any “mutation o f the naturall course o f Trade, there ought to be Perspicuity and apparency o f evident utility: Else a Breach may be sooner made in Trade then can be repaired: and the Current once diverted, will hardly bee revolved, into it [yfc] genuine Source and Course againe.”74 Hence though they have in common with Malynes an emphasis on the central import o f money to the maintenance o f the body politic, Misselden and Mun are far more attuned to the perils entailed by the necessary fluidity o f currency within the increasingly complex circuits o f commerce. The tenuous character o f such commercial activity is further evident in Mun’s description o f the importance o f foreign trade, in which “by a course o f traffick. . . the particular members do accommodate each other, and all accomplish the whole body o f the trade, which will ever languish if the harmony o f her health be distempered by the diseases o f excess at home.”75 Yet as Mun’s comments suggest, trade and the money that drives her are not easily kept in good health since any measures or courses o f artificial control are “not only fruitless but also hurtful: they are like violent flouds which bear down their banks and suddenly remain dry again for want o f water.”76 Mun’s concerns about fluid excess are reiterated by Misselden, but from a somewhat different perspective since for Misselden the troublesome floods spring from not too much regulation but in some aspects not enough. For Misselden, the “want o f

74 Misselden, Free Trade, 126-27. 75 Mun, England's Treasure, 34. 76 Ibid., 87.

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Government in Trade, openeth a gap and letteth in all sorts o f unslrilfiill and disorderly persons: and these not only sinke themselves and others with them; but also harm the Merchandize o f the land” and, in turn, endanger the health o f the commonwealth.77 Thus the worries about an excess or absence o f fluidity in commercial affiars that are evident in the trade tracts o f Misselden and Mun also mark broader concerns about the maintenance o f order - social and otherwise - in the midst o f market upheavals. Although the language o f fluidity that emerges from these writings may be read in its historical context as having certain feminine connotations, the anxieties about monetary disorder figured by such imagery are not by themselves particularly remarkable. Beginning at least with the biblical denunciation o f it as the root o f evil, money continued to be regarded throughout the early modem period as a source o f all sorts o f disruption in virtually every kind o f text. With the increasing complexity of commerce, the social confusion that money seemed to inevitably generate became the object o f not only moral scrutiny but also popular jest. The popular appeal o f money as a topic for discussion is evident in numerous dramatic works as well as prose tracts such as John Taylor’s The Travels o f Twelve-Pence, which at one point tracks the rapid circulation o f a shilling through the hands o f some three hundred professions and social groups in less than three pages.78 Yet the chaos and discomfiting societal intimacy evoked by texts such as

77 Misselden, Free Trade, 84. 78 John Taylor, The Travels o f Twelve-Pence (London: Printed for Henry Gosson, 1635), sig. B5V - 6V. Originally published as A shilling or. The Travails o f twelve-pence (London: Printed by Edward Allede for Henry Gosson, 1621). For examinations o f the broader relations between money and drama, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge (continued...)

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Taylor’s was not indicative o f an isolated discourse, but rather - like humoral physiological frameworks - was constructed and amplified through gendered conceits. I f as Fumerton argues, the trade tracts are examples o f the imbrication o f corporeal and commercial discourses, this linguistic saturation occurred within a vocabulary already heavily imbued with notions o f gender and sexuality. In what Sandra Fischer refers to as the econolingua o f early modem England, words regarding money and the market were consistently related to sex and gender through the semiotic work o f puns, metonymy and metaphor, as well as double or triple entendres.79 For example, counterfeit not only referred to the falsity o f coin, but also to the sexual deception o f a woman (i.e., a counterfeit woman was a wanton) or the “false” child she might bear (i.e., a counterfeit child was a bastard). In addition to the connotations o f individual words, the gendered aspects o f monetary language were amplified by the often feminine personification o f money itself in popular literature and the prominence o f concepts associated with femininity (e.g., chastity) in seemingly mundane textual venues such as accounting ledgers.80

78(...continued) University Press, 1986) and Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age o f Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 79 Sandra K. Fischer, Econolingua: A Glossary o f Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama (Newark: University o f Delaware Press, 1985). For further reference on the linguistic links among gender, money and sexuality, see Gordon Williams, A Dictionary o f Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London: The Athlone Press, 1994). 80 For examples o f the feminine personification o f money, see Richard Bamfield, Lady Pecunia; or The Praise o f money (London: Printed by W. L, 1605) and the mid-seventeenth century tract, The Death and Burial ofM istress Money (London: Printed by E. Cotes, 1664). For brief analysis o f accounting and gender during the period, see Mary Poovey, ‘‘Accommodating Merchants: Accounting, Civility, and the Natural Laws o f Gender,” differences 8, no. 3 (Fall 1996). For an examination o f the relations between (continued...)

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With these contextual details in mind, the gendered fluidity o f the trade tracts may possibly be read as examples o f the taking up a kind o f figurative language that was merely conventional and therefore discursively convenient. More subtly, the figurative language o f these texts may be regarded instead as simply revealing another instance o f the gendering o f disorder writ large, as evinced in a variety o f early modem texts that construed “women as creatures whose bodily margins and penetrable orifices provide culture with a locus for displaced anxieties about the vulnerability o f the social community, the body politic.”81 Yet as suggested earlier, those arguments that posit feminization primarily as a strategy o f displacement frequently elide the all-encompassing character o f the political vocabulary o f the body politic, that - however idealized necessarily limits how far any threat can be pushed aside. Moreover, in the specific texts being considered here, the association o f femininity with effective displacement misses both the centrality o f monetary fluidity to the body politic and persistent qualms about the less easily dismissed vices often ascribed to women that the flux o f currency and

“ (...continued) money and femininity on the Continent, see Ann Jensen Adams, “Money and the Regulation o f Desire: The Prostitute and the Marketplace in Seventeenth-Century Holland,” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University o f Pennsylvania Press, 1999). For a close consideration o f chastity in mercantile writing in the Italian renaissance, see Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape ofLucretia and the Birth o f Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Jed’s arguments regarding the significant links between chastity and money are arguably quite relevant to an English context, given Malynes’s assertion that the debased currency o f Henry VTII was restored “to her former purity and fineness” through the efforts of his daughter Elizabeth (Malynes, Canker, 91). 81 Lynda E. Boose, “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 195. For an earlier examination o f the role o f the scold, see David Underdown, “The Taming o f the Scold: The Enforcement o f Patriarchal Authority in Early Modem England,” in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For a discussion o f the displacement of anxiety through the feminization o f objects, see Bruster.

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commerce also seemed to encourage if not depend on - namely, garrulity and promiscuity. The connections between garrulity and fluidity have already been noted, but it is important to emphasize here that two o f the m ost common indiscretions with which early modem women were commonly accused o f - “being a scold and being a so-called whore were frequently conflated.”82 Throughout the era, “the talkative woman is frequently imagined as synonymous with the sexually available woman, her open mouth the signifier for invited entrance elsewhere. Hence the dictum that associates ‘silent’ with ‘chaste’ and stigmatizes women’s public speech as a behavior fraught with cultural signs resonating with a distinctly sexual kind o f shame.”83 This collocation o f disruptive traits was the subject o f much early modem conduct literature that helped to construct the disorderly woman as a subject who continually needed to be brought under control or, at the very least, carefully watched.84 A similar set o f concerns about the disorderly fluidity o f money and trade begins to become apparent through an attunement to the multiple meanings o f certain words that are prominent throughout the trade tracts - specifically, utter and utterance. Then as now, to utter meant to speak and an utterance was a verbal expression, yet the early modem use

82 Ibid. For an extended analysis o f the social and juridical impact of the links between promiscuity and words, see Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 83 Boose, 196. 84 The amount and variety of conduct literature prohibits providing a meaningful survey o f such works here. Useful reference for these writings include Kate Aughterson, ed. Renaissance Woman: Constructions o f Femininity in England (New York: Routledge, 1995); Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Booksfo r Women 1575-1640 (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1982); J. Larson Klein, Daughters, Wives and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640 (Chicago: University o f Illinois Press, 1992); Maclean; Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance (Chicago: University o f Illinois Press, 1984).

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o f these words also included the circulation o f currency as well as the buying and selling o f goods. As Fumerton notes, utter was a common term for market exchange (much like vent) and the extent o f utterance was o f concern to those investigating England’s decayed trade. For Misselden, “a Common-wealth that excessively spendeth the forreine Commodities deere, and uttereth the native fewer and cheape, shal enrich other Common­ wealths, but begger it selfe.”85 As Misselden argues, the lack o f utterance o f English goods is accompanied by excessive utterance o f those from abroad such as “the Silkes o f Italie, the Sugers & Tobaco o f the West Indies, the Spices o f the East Indies.”86 The consumption o f these overly uttered commodities allows “most men [to] live above their callings, and promiscuously step forth Vice versa, and into one anothers Rankes.”87 Hence like the excessive utterances o f disorderly women, the profusion o f goods uttered in English markets promotes a form o f social - if not sexual - dissolution that challenges the stability o f the well-ordered body politic. For Misselden, the cause o f this kind o f social indiscretion is the “want o f Government in commercial affairs, the absence o f which results in “such a loose trade, as many now a daies so much desire.”88 In the absence o f reliable regulation, trade becomes not only disordered but also “a receptacle and Rendes-vous for every Shopkeeper, Stragler, and Unskilful person” to do with as he w ill without regard for “the Inconveniencies that doe perpetually accompany” ungovemed

85 Misselden, Free Trade, 13. Also quoted by Fumerton, n. 12, 253 - 54. 86 Ibid., 12. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., 79, 87.

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trade.89 As figured by Misselden, the disordered utterance o f monetary commerce brings the politic commonwealth into rather anxious proximity with the most promiscuous body o f all - namely, the well traded body o f the common woman or prostitute.90 Like the continuous, arbitrary passing o f goods and coins from one hand to another, the harlot was distinguished in early modem conduct literature by her “gadding about from place to place, from person to person, from company to company

she is ever more

wandering.”91 Thus though monetary fluidity is necessary for the utterance o f commodities, it all too easily becomes roving and excessive, thereby endangering the health o f the commonwealth in part through the fostering o f disorderly social and moral promiscuity.92 As disturbing as the promiscuity associated with spending and trade may have been, their feminine figurations arguably did less to displace such concerns than to express the anxious need to at least attempt to control the worst proclivities o f monetary

89 Ibid., 87. The extent o f Misselden’s concerns in these passages acquire some significant resonance when one keeps in mind that, although inconvenience meant then what it means now in terms o f personal discomfort or annoyance, its early modem references also encompassed the more morally fraught terrain of acts contrary to reason that impacted the community as a whole rather than solely the individual. My emphasis on the import o f inconveniency is indebted to the work o f Kirstie McClure in Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits o f Consent (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), see especially chapter 4. 90 In addition, there existed a semantic association between a harlot and the commonwealth, since the latter word could also be used to refer to a prostitute or brothel. See Fischer, s.v, common-wealth, p. 58. 91 Bamabe Rich, My Lady’s Looking Glass, (London: 1616), 11, quoted in Aughterson, 96. 92 The eroticized language used to figure commerce not only evoked the disorder associated with gender, but could also extend to concerns with race. As Kim Hall suggests, the instability o f gender permitted for slippages between worries about the strangeness o f foreign cultures and persons and the unruliness o f women - a tendency particularly pronounced in the discourses o f colonial trade and travel. See Kim F. Hall, Things o f Darkness: Economies o f Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

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commerce that were all too much a part o f the body politic. From this perspective, the language o f pathology relied on to varying degrees by participants in the trade debates takes on a more complex tone. In keeping with the tenets o f humoral frameworks, both Mun and Misselden address the decay o f trade in part through concerns about extremes in the flow o f money and goods. Mun employs the imagery o f pathology to examine the lack o f monetary flow or the “want o f Silver,” that he asserts is “a generall disease o f all Nations, and so w ill continue untill the end o f the world; for poore and rich complaine they never have enough: but it seemeth the maladie is growen mortall here with us, and therefore it cries out for remedie.”93 Although Mun hopes “it is but imagination maketh us sicke, when all our parts be sound and strong,” Misselden is far more certain that the illness is anything but hysterical and that something is gravely amiss with the circulation o f coin. Misselden blames bankers and foreign merchants for undervaluing English coin and, in so doing, acquiring the power “to draw dry the Currant o/H is Majesties Coine,”94 As a consequence, “the Hepatitis o f this great body o f ours being opened, & such profusions o f the life blood let out; and the liver or fountaine obstructed, and weakened, which should succor the same; needes must this great Body languish, and at length fall into a Marasmum.”9S The pathological tendencies o f monetary fluidity thus work in combination with worries about utterance to underscore the contradictions seemingly innate

to trade and exchange. As Paster notes, such tensions are inherent to the humoral

93 Thomas Mun, A Discourse o f Trade: From England unto the East-lndies (London: Printed by Nicholas Okes for John Pyper, 1621), 46. 94 Misselden, Free Trade, 10. 95 Ibid.

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body for “humoral physiology ascribes to the workings o f the internal organs an aspect o f agency, purposiveness, and plentitude to which the subject’s own w ill is often decidedly irrelevant.”96 A similar set o f difficulties seems to plague the body politic’s relations with commerce, for although the absence o f money and the goods it utters poses a clear mortal danger, its fluid presence is no less problematic. The flux attributed to currency not only allows it to be quickly drained from the commonwealth, but also sustains the seemingly ungovernable excessive utterance o f commodities that contributes to the loss o f English money and places England in the position o f the leaky and often diseased prostitute body who arbitrarily welcomes all commercial comers. The writers o f the trade tracts worked to counter the myriad pathologies produced by unruly trade by relying in part on the notion o f balance, a concept that was also crucial to humoral medical models which were preoccupied with “achieving the ideal internal balance” within the body.97 The understanding o f the balance o f trade as first articulated in the texts o f Malynes et al. was largely in keeping with humoral uses o f balance for, as Appleby argues in regard to Mun, “it was not the poise o f perfectly balanced weights that he evoked in his writings but rather the persistent, complementary, and orderly flow o f goods and money.”98 The role and complexity o f the balance o f trade is vividly portrayed by Misselden, for whom “all the mysteries o f other Exchanges are hidde in this mystery [i.e., o f the balance o f trade]. A il the knowledge o f Commerce, is presented and

96 Paster, Body Embarrassed, 10. 97 Ibid., 9. 98 Appleby, 38.

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represented to the life in this story, this history. All the rivers o f Trade spring out o f this source, and empt themselves againe into this Ocean”99 Yet in contrast to the disordered fluidity and utterance that are central to Misselden’s story o f the too open, feminized body o f ungovemed trade, the balance o f trade is “the daughter or image in the Eie: the beauty, the ornament, the complement, the accomplishment o f Commerce.”100 Like the limited domestic circulation that defines the ideal ornamental daughter and wife-to-be, the proper balance o f trade is not characterized by promiscuous monetary flux but rather, as Mun argues, “the treasure which is brought into the Realm by the ballance o f our forraign trade is that money which onely doth abide with us, and by which we are enriched.”101 Hence in contrast to the wasteful promiscuity fostered by undisciplined traffic, the balance o f trade offers England a remedy for its socio-cultural ills that ensures domestic prosperity and order through the close governance o f money and the commerce it brings. Yet like maintaining a healthy balance among differing bodily fluids, the task o f determining and then achieving the correct balance o f trade was one fraught with difficulties. As already mentioned, the disorder o f commerce was linked to what was understood as extremes in the utterance o f goods, but another destabilizing factor was also prominent throughout the trade tracts - namely, superfluity. Although superfluity referred to an overabundant circulation o f either domestic or foreign commodities, this disruptive flux was closely associated with trade in what were regarded as morally 99 Edward Misselden, The Circle o f Commerce (London: Printed by John Dawson for Nicholas Bourne, 1623), 142. 100 Ibid. 101 Mun, England’s Treasure, 21.

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suspect superfluous or unnecessary things. As Sandra Clark suggests, the word superfluous “was used to mean extravagant in consumption or expenditure, and to describe a greater abundance o f worldly goods than was necessary for existence in a Christian and equitable society” and, in keeping with this perspective, “superfluity signified excess as a moral concept.”102 A concern with the problem o f superfluity is apparent in Malynes’ earliest work on trade, in which he argues that it is not necessary “to speake o f other dainties and delicacies o f superfluous things, so long as moderation is used.”103 Twenty years later, however, the superfluous circulation o f goods is far more problematic since, for Malynes, a principle cause o f the decay o f trade is “the immoderate use o f forraine commodities.”104 For Malynes, superfluity is profoundly contradictory for although “by the Superfluity o f our native Commodities, Trade is procured: yet if that Superfluity do abound so, that thereby the price o f it becommeth abated: Then forraine Commodities being more used and wome, come in liew thereof and are advanced, which bringeth an evident overballancing o f Commodities.”105This troubling overbalance o f trade does not simply encompass all foreign stuff, but rather more problematically those things that are most superfluous, most unnecessary. For Mun, this includes not only “Sugars, Wynes, Oyles, Raysons, Figgs, Prunes, and Currandes,” but also “Tobacco, Cloth o f gold and silver, Lawnes, Cambricks, Gold and Silver lace, Velvets, Sattens,

102 Sandra Clark, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets, 1580-1640 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), 212. 103 Malynes, Canker, 69. 104 Malynes, The Maintenance o f Free Trade, 57. 105 Ibid.

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TafFaeties and divers other manifactures.”106 The availability o f these superfluous commodities contributes to “the general leprosie o f our Piping, Potting, Feasting, Fashions, and mis-spending o f our time in Idleness and Pleasure. . . [that] hath made us effeminate in our bodies, weak in our knowledg, poor in our Treasure.”107 The general superfluous circulation o f all goods and the particular consumption o f superfluous things therefore contributes to the corporeal pathologies fostered by commerce as w ell as the moral and social perils associated with the over-flowing feminine body. The dangers posed to the body politic by superfluity are obviously considerable, in no small part because - unlike the instability produced by the inherent fluidity o f money itself and the accompanying circuits o f trade - the consumption o f superfluous things is a somewhat embarrassing instance o f the members o f the body betraying themselves since “whilest we consume them, they likewise devoure our wealth.”108 To put a stop to this corruption from within, Misselden argues that “the superfluity o f other commodities may bee restrained by lawes Vestiary and Sumptuary, according to the example o f Germany & other our Neighbor Countries.”109 Yet such a solution is not as promising as M isselden may have wished, not only because o f the historically uneven efficacy o f vestiary and sumptuary laws but also because, as Mun asserts, a too strict regulation o f certain

106 Mun, Discourse o f Trade, 6-7. 107 Mun, England’s Treasure, 72-3. 108 Mun, Discourse o f Trade, 7. 109 Misselden, Free Trade, 109. For a review o f sumptuary legislation, see Alan Hunt, Governance o f the Consuming Passions: A History o f Sumptuary Law (Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996).

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superfluous things may literally make one sick. Immediately preceding his detailed list o f sometimes problematic foreign commodities, Mun raises a question regarding other seemingly unnecessary things by asking “who is so ignorant, in any famous common wealth, which w ill not consent to the moderate use o f wholesome Druggs and comfortable Spices?”110 The corporeal utility o f such goods is particularly evident outside England, where they are desired “by so many Nations; not thereby to surfeit, or to please a lickorish tast (as it often happeneth, with many other fruites and wines) but rather as things most necessarie to preserve their health, and to cure their diseases.”111 The healthful benefits ascribed to superfluous things such as spices were not simply claimed by Mun for the sake o f argument, but rather had been “most notably set forth, by some learned men, who have undertaken, to write upon this subject.”112 In a marginal note to this section, Mun makes reference to Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Castle o f Health, a text designed to serve as a sort o f practical guide to Galen’s medical framework and in which a variety o f foods are identified as having potentially beneficial effects on the body including allegedly superfluous items such as figs, dates, and raisons.113 Therefore like the fluidity o f money and goods in general, the circulation o f superfluous things within the body politic is healthful only so long as a precarious balance between pathological

110 Mun, Discourse o f Trade, 6. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Castle ofHelth, first augmented edition (n.p., 1541), especially chapter 14. Elyot’s text was first published in 1537, but was printed several times in different editions through at least 1610.

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extremes is maintained. When read with an attention to some o f the details o f their historical context, what ultimately emerges from the tangle o f figurative language that appears throughout the trade tracts are two rather interwoven sites o f particularly problematic instability that may be broadly characterized as semiotic and significatory on the one hand, and on the other, conceptual and epistemological. At the semiotic level, the organic and corporeal vocabulary relied on by Malynes et aL afforded a useful, familiar framework within which to begin to bring together the pieces o f a frustratingly complex commercial puzzle. Yet as indicated above, the saturated vocabulary o f the trade tracts reasserted - and at times, produced - stubborn pathologies and, through its emphasis on the excessiveness o f monetary fluidity and the utterance o f commodities, established disturbing links between the body politic and the perennially problematic feminine body. Hence though it was relied on to help draw clear and often oppositional distinctions between such things as healthy and sick trade, this use o f corporeal language with its feminine connotations illustrates how “an excess o f signification proliferates meanings in unexpected directions, directions those very oppositions attempt to circumscribe but at which they never fully succeed.”114 Given the troublesome disorder that seemed to proliferate through its articulations, the language o f fluidity and its bodily figurations did more to contribute to the anxieties arising from the monetary chaos o f the early 1620's than it did - for example, through a process o f displacement - to mitigate them.

114 Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 11.

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From this perspective, questions could be raised regarding the appeal o f such a problematic vocabulary to those striving to come to terms with market upheavals. This includes the writers o f the tracts already considered, each o f whom endorsed the Aristotelean view that money was artificial, as evinced for example by Misselden’s simple statement that the “Artificiall matter o f Commerce is Money."115 Malynes perhaps went furthest in this regard by stating that “Moneyes were invented and made by common consent to be the rule and square to set a price on all things.”116 Yet as the prominence o f bodily vocabularies throughout the trade tracts suggests, this recognition o f the arbitrary character o f money was only partial thereby indicating some ambivalence regarding the figuration o f commerce along purely conventional lines rather than more organic ones. What this ambivalence points to, in turn, is an arguably problematic nexus o f conceptual and, ultimately, epistemological instability that becomes sharply evident through the traffic o f artificial things. As already demonstrated, the fluid circulations that characterized early modem notions o f the balance o f trade were driven in part by the movement o f frequently foreign superfluous things. Yet the superfluous items that proved most problematic were not those that were organic - such as raisins and figs - but rather those that were deemed most artificial, such as velvet, cosmetics, and metallic ornaments. Though the circulation o f these sorts o f decorative goods was a vital component o f the balance o f trade Mun and Misselden advocated, it also opened the way for fashion to exacerbate the moral and social disorder already generated by unruly

115 Misselden, Free Trade, 7. 116 Malynes, Lex Mercatoria, 44.

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monetary fluidity and, in so doing, to make the ideal o f balance within the body politic seem ever more elusive. Moreover, the increasing prominence o f foreign and artificial fashionable goods that were not at all inherent to the English commomvealth posed a profound challenge to the naturalized, organic vocabulary that was characteristic o f early modem understandings o f the political. Thus at a number o f levels, the growing commerce in seemingly trivial items like face paint raised serious questions about the stability and normative force o f a previously well-known conceptualization o f political and socio-cultural order. Although the implications o f these issues are far too extensive to be fully considered here, a close examination o f the specific controversy surrounding the production o f gold and silver thread during the 1620’s offers a way to begin to unpack the instabilities that followed in fashion’s wake and, in so doing, return to the ultimately political issues raised by the feminine fluidity and disorder integral to figuration o f commerce in the trade tracts. Counterfeit Stuff To the late modem eye, a close examination o f the contestations over gold and silver thread may initially seem disproportionate in relation to the trivial status now frequently accorded to such small, largely decorative material items. Yet at the broad level, this sort o f perspective not only fails to consider the possibilities for significant connections between materiality and political discourse, but also ignores the importance o f particular materials such as textiles within the specific historical context o f early modem England. As concerns the latter, although exact figures are difficult to determine, “the weight o f contemporary opinion, the repercussions o f dislocation, the nature o f 111

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governmental action, and a wealth o f other qualitative evidence leaves no doubt that the manufacture o f cloth was England’s primary non-agricultural occupation” during the seventeenth century and beyond."7 The highly concentrated cloth industry was not only a fixture o f English domestic markets, but during the early part o f the seventeenth century “certainly over 75 percent o f England’s exports were o f articles made from w ool.”"8 The paramount importance o f cloth to English commerce was expounded upon at length by M isselden, who argued that the manufacture o f cloth “concemeth both the Soveraigne and the Subject, Noble and Ignoble, even all sorts, and callings and conditions o f men in this Commonwealth.”"9 Misselden asserted that cloth was not simply one important aspect o f trade among many, but rather “is said to bee a Flower o f the KINGS Crowne, the Dowry o f the Kingdome, the chiefe Revenue o f the KING. This is a bound to fortifie, and a bond to knit the subjects together in their severall societies.”120 Hence for the English, the cloth industry was understood as the most vital component o f efforts to more fully engage with the growing circuits o f international trade as well as constituting the quite literal fabric that helped define the increasingly complex structure o f the domestic body politic. Yet the importance o f cloth went well beyond its value as a staple commodity and primary focus for manufacturing, for within its larger socio-cultural context cloth itself

117 Supple, 6. 1,8 Ibid. 119 Misselden, Free Trade, 40. Also quoted by Supple, 6. 120 Ibid. 112

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could be regarded as a form o f currency that signified across various levels. This notion o f cloth as currency is particularly prescient in regard to early modem women, virtually all whom - whatever their social class - were trained in needlework o f some kind for practical purposes and/or as a frequently advocated means o f inculcating women into the feminine ideal o f the chaste, silent and obedient woman.121 Given the close links between women and the needle, “textiles were almost as fluid as money as a medium o f exchange” for they could be bartered or sold “among a personal network o f female friends and neighbours, without recourse to commercial markets.”122 The informal currency o f textiles also held strong symbolic value as pieces o f needlework were often given as gifts and, at differing social levels, clothing figured prominently in the bequests women left to friends, relatives and servants.123 Although a particularly close association existed between the two, the figurative meanings o f textiles were in no way confined to women, for in a commercial system heavily dependent on cloth many workers were paid “not only in the ‘neutral’ currency o f money but in material which is richly absorbent o f symbolic

121 On the relations between needlework and the feminine, see Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making o f the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1984), and Lena Cowen Orlin, “Three Ways to be Invisible in the Renaissance: Sex, Reputation, and Stitchery,” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday. 122 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 222-3. 123 For an examination o f women’s wills, see Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993). Although men also bequeathed clothing to others, the role o f clothing in women’s wills is particularly notable because - in contrast to men - it was one o f the very few material items over which a woman might be able to assert ownership and thus often served as a rare tangible legacy o f a woman’s life.

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meaning and in which memories and social relations were literally embedded.”124 Yet clothing was not simply a substitute for monetary currency but could be more directly convertible, whether through the pawning o f clothes for coin, selling them on the second hand market, or renting out pieces o f clothing to, for example, theater companies. Records regarding the commerce o f currency and clothes around the world o f the theater in particular highlight “the specific oscillations o f men and women between their need to raise ready cash (through pawning) and their need to maintain and assert status and identity (through buying or renting clothes).”125As significant as the symbolic currency o f clothing may have been, the narrow fiscal stakes o f the clothing market could also be quite remarkable given the monetary value ascribed to some items o f clothing: “The Earl o f Leicester paid £543 for seven doublets and two cloaks, at an average cost for each rather higher than the price Shakespeare paid for a house in Stratford.”126 Thus in part because o f the monetary as well as symbolic value that could be attached to it, clothing and other assorted textiles were easily regarded as a form o f dependable currency within a nascent monetary system that relied on the circulation o f frequently questionable coins. Yet like coinage, the circulation o f textiles generated anxiety since they were not only associated with the problems caused by excessive consumption, but were also subject to the kind o f disordering corruption that plagued English money. This was

124 Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 291. ,2S Ibid., 301-02. 126 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 13, quoted in Stallybrass, 296.

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especially the case by the latter part o f the 1610's when the cloth industry entered a severe slump in the aftermath o f a disastrous scheme (i.e., the Cockayne Project o f 1614-17) designed to improve the balance o f trade by having unfinished cloth dyed and dressed in England rather than abroad as had been common practice.127 Although the textile trade experienced a small rebound prior to the onset o f the larger monetary crisis o f the early 1620's, concerns about cloth were a prominent part o f the trade debates, with particular attention being paid to the difficulties raised by what was referred to as false cloth. Like counterfeit coin, false cloth was made below the legal standards that had been set by the government in an effort “to standardize production methods in manufacturing industry, and to maintain the quality o f its products in the interests o f maintaining the reputation o f English goods overseas.”128 Yet more than England’s good name was at stake since regulations required that cloth be inspected for quality and sealed with the king’s stamp before it was sold; therefore the sale o f defective cloth involved the same kind o f deception that was regarded as treason in the counterfeiting o f coins. Although it is “probable that reductions in quality represented attempts by the manufacturers to cut production costs so as to enable them to meet the competition,” contemporaries understood the prevalence o f false cloth as a primary cause - rather than a symptom - o f England’s commercial crisis.129 Prominent among those making this argument was M isselden, who complained that the king’s seal was “dishonoured by false Cloth and

127 For details on the Cockayne Project, see Supple, ch. 2. ,2» Clay, v. 2, 33. 129 Supple, 121.

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other Manufactures . . [and] those that buy the same both within and without the Land, are perswaded the same is good and true, when the same is utterly false: which is a great indignity offered to the KING.”130 Misselden’s concerns were not solely theoretical, for he had petitioned the Privy Council in 1618 for assistance in his difficulties with clothier Francis Hawkins, who Misselden claimed attempted to sell him cloth that was “exceeding false and defective in waight, in breadth and in length.”131 The Privy Council expressed dismay over this apparent abuse o f “so evill consequence” since Hawkins’ alleged actions were regarded as demonstrating that the cloth “searchers’ seales are at the pleasure o f the clothiers and tuckers for a bribe sett upon false cloath to the deceit o f the buyer, and the contempt o f his Majestie’s lawes.”132 Much like the circulation o f counterfeit coins, the trade in false cloth seemed to pose a troubling challenge to the sovereign integrity o f the body politic. When combined with the overall depressed state o f the textile industries and growing trouble with monetary currency, the problems associated with false cloth helped generate the kind o f widespread disorder that raised serious questions about the stability o f the commonwealth. Alarming reports from the counties poured into London about the dangerous state o f local affairs as the decay o f the cloth trade dragged on. The clothiers protest their inability longer to maintain their workmen, much o f their cloth being unsold, or in pawn. The people begin to steal, and many are starving; all trades are decayed, money very scarce, the whole county impoverished and unable to maintain their poor, by public stock, or any means except by their own trades; entreat the unrestrained

130 Misselden, Free Trade, 88-9. 131 A PC, 1618-1619, v.4, 25. 132 Ibid., 26.

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buying o f cloth, that the clothiers may be able to continue their trade, and much misery be prevented.131

As described earlier, these kinds o f dispatches prompted the formation o f committees to inquire into the root causes o f the decay o f both money and trade, which resulted in reports to parliament offering a diverse if not confusing list o f reasons for the crisis, ranging from faulty employment practices to the import o f French wine. Though certain factors were held responsible for the decay o f money and while others were linked with the demise o f cloth, one item was noted as troublesome for both o f these vital aspects o f the body politic - namely, the production and consumption o f gold and silver thread. Unlike cloth such as woolens, thread made from precious metals was a far more recent and largely foreign - feature o f the English textile trade.134 Permission for the sale o f such thread by foreigners had been granted in the late fourteenth century and the practice o f wire-drawing (which was an initial stage in the manufacture o f thread) was noted in 1423, yet the full production o f gold and silver thread in England did not take root until the early seventeenth century.135 Because the manufacturing process for thread was relatively complicated and could involve a number o f tradespeople, the development o f a domestic thread industry was not a cheap prospect - especially for a product that was used overwhelmingly for decorative purposes. Yet with the repeal o f the sumptuary laws in

133 CSPD, 1619-23, v. 10, Justices o f the Peace o f Gloucestershire to the Council, March 13, 1622, p . 358. 134 Unless otherwise specified, thread will hereafter refer to gold and silver thread for the sake o f brevity. 135 On the history o f the production and trade o f gold and silver thread and related items, see Horace Stewart, History ofthe Worshipful Company o f Gold and Silver Wyre-Drawers and ofthe Origin and Development o f the Industry which the Company Represents (London: Printed for the Company, Leadenhall Press, 1891).

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1604, the demand for superfluous items such as thread had expanded and a more robust commercial structure had begun to take shape, thereby making the possibilites for a domestic industry seem more appealing than had hitherto been the case.136 On the surface, the development o f English thread manufacture appeared promising not only to enterprising merchants but to the state as w ell, since through the granting o f patents and other administrative mechanisms the government could acquire a share o f the potentially significant profits. Although the trade in thread - like other superfluous things - raised concerns about the social and economic impact o f excessive consumption, many such as Mun argued that “i f in our rayment we will be prodigal” this “cannot impoverish the Kingdome; if it be done with curious and costly works upon our Materials, and by our own people, it will maintain the poor with the purse o f the rich, which is the best distribution o f the Common-wealth.”137 With perhaps many o f the same ideas in mind, James granted a patent in 1611 to four London merchants allowing them a twenty year monopoly for the production o f thread based on their apparently successful argument that they had introduced a process for its manufacture that was completely new to England.138 This process was indeed a complicated one, for it involved making gold or silver wire often as fine as a strand o f hair, then flattening such wire between rollers, and

136 On the general expansion o f domestic consumption, see Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development o f a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

137 Mun, England’s Treasure, 9, 60. 138 My narrative o f the thread industry draws from and is indebted to Anna Hollinger Siegler, “Royal Prerogative and the Regulation o f Industry: Regulation o f the Gold and Silver Thread Trade under James I and Charles I” (Ph.D. diss., University o f Chicago, 1980).

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finally spinning it around silk thread that could then be easily used for sewing.139 Yet because o f the many steps required for its production, protests from several quarters immediately arose regarding the 1611 patent, most notably from the goldsmiths who argued that the patentees had not developed a new process but rather had infringed on already established practices. While petitions against the patent were being dealt with by the Privy Council, the unauthorized production o f thread proceeded unchecked and was almost impossible to control since “any goldsmith who refined gold could prepare metal for the wiredrawers; spinners and drawers could easily conceal their tools and their wares; and once the thread was in the hands o f dyers, silkmen and embroiderers, it was virtually impossible to detect legally made from illegal, or ‘underhand,’ thread.”140 Although the Privy Council ultimately came down on the side o f the patentees and issued a more comprehensive patent in 1616 in an effort to quash illegal production, craftspeople continued to complain against the patent and to manufacture thread. Though the conflict was turned over to the Court o f Exchequer in 1617 in the hopes o f reaching a settlement, no decision was reached after the initial taking o f testimony from those engaged in making illegal thread, that was itself often alleged to be o f poor quality. With matters at an apparent standstill and with the Crown facing a much broader fiscal crisis, in 1618 James issued the first o f six proclamations concerning the governance o f the thread trade. Noting both that thread was “a commoditie o f great use” and the importance o f “Arts and Inventions . . . [as] the greatest means to increase and

139 Siegler, 51. H0 Ibid., 78.

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preserve the wealth and strength o f State and people,” James declared that the manufacture o f thread would come under royal purview.141 James’ overall argument asserted that since thread was a matter o f so great consequence, and wherein so many o f Our people should be interessed, both in the making and use therof, may well be judged more fit for Us to take into Our hands, then to leave the same to the power and dispose o f private men; and aswell to prevent the abuses which may bee offered to Us and Our Subjects, by the counterfeiting o f the said Gold and Silver threed, as likewise for the preservation o f Bullion within this Our Kingdome, for the generall good and benefit o f Our people. (385)

To achieve the general good, James’ proclamation a) designated an agent who would administer the now royal manufacture o f thread through the licensing o f individual producers at fixed wages; b) commanded that participants in the thread industry at all stages keep records o f both their suppliers and buyers; and c) prohibited the sale o f any foreign thread at all and any domestic thread that was not “first sealed with Our Seale” by special appointees (388). Aside from putting a stop to the illegal production o f thread and the complaints o f the goldsmiths, the intent o f establishing a royal manufacture was explicitly to ensure that the English would not “at any time want convenient quantitie o f the said Gold and Silver threed for their use, but shal also be served of it at reasonable prices” (385). Accordingly, an official commission - which included then Lord Chancellor, Sir Francis Bacon - was named in April 1618 to oversee the enforcement o f the proclamation. The commission, however, fell short o f its mandate, yet not for a lack o f

141 James I “Proclamation for reforming the abuses in making o f Gold and Silver Threed,” March 22, 1618, in Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. I, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 385. Hereafter cited as SRP and further references will be cited in the text.

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surveillance - as in the case o f the initial patent - but rather due to the somewhat overzealous efforts o f the minor officials who went about “seizing unsealed goods and confiscating tools and supplies” as well as imprisoning those who resisted their efforts.142 Despite numerous complaints lodged by the targeted craftspeople and their lawyers about such abuses, the crown remained focused on the need to control the thread trade and revised the commission in the latter half o f 1618 by extending its powers and those o f its members. Predictably enough, this only led to further abuses that were themselves amplified by James’ next proclamation on thread issued in October 1619. In it, James decried that “notwithstanding Our Proclamation, many have adventured secretly and by stealth to import Gold and Silver threed from forraine parts, and many others to make the same within this Realm e. . . and to utter the same to divers o f Our loving Subjects, not being Sealed with the Seale.”143 To make matters worse, “much false and counterfeit Stuffe is vented, to the great deceit o f Our Subjects, scandall o f the worke, and Our owne proper losse, and yet the Offenders therein cannot easily be discovered. . . for that the Silkemen and Silkeweavers, and others, who buy and use the said Gould and Silver threed, are unwilling to discover such Offenders” (443). To tighten up regulations already issued and to ensure that the English state got its share o f the profits, James introduced the use o f bonds “to coerce craftsmen, who either bound themselves not to work or conversely, to cooperate with the agents by swearing to meet specified

142 Siegler, 85. 143 SRP, “A Proclamation for the better setting o f his Majesties Manufacture o f Gold and Silver thread,” October 10, 1619,442.

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production quotas.”144 Though even more arm twisting was required to convince craftspeople to enter into such disadvantageous bonds, they did manage to put a brief stop to the resistance raised by the skilled trades. Yet whatever progress had been made in enforcement o f thread regulations was simultaneously undermined by James’ own actions for, in his perennial search for quick money, he again opened the import trade for thread in 1619. Although the customs collected from such trade were sizable, they also undermined the domestic manufacture by flooding the home market with the usually higher quality foreign thread. In addition, once imports resinned so did smuggling since, though foreign thread was also to be sealed before it was sold, it was quickly snatched up by the silkmen whose illegal actions largely escaped prosecution due to the fact that “once it was wrought into fabric its foreign provenance and unsealed beginnings could not be detected.”145 What the increasing disarray emerging from the tangle o f competing interests in the thread trade began to demonstrate was the inability o f the body politic to incorporate foreign things and industries without succumbing to the kinds o f pathological disorder that occupied the writers o f the trade tracts. Although the mishandling o f thread manufacture was in many ways no different from the confusion that characterized English monetary and trade policies writ large, the problems o f the thread industry were closely associated with the already troubled cloth trade as well as growing concerns about the scarcity o f coin. This complicated morass o f issues was left for parliament to attempt to

144 Siegler, 88. 145 Ibid., 98.

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sort through, when, it met again in 1621 and, o f all England’s many commercial woes, thread was a matter quickly seized upon by the Commons, in part because it involved increasingly touchy questions regarding the exercise o f royal prerogative. Along with the patent to license inns and alehouses and the patent for concealed lands, the patents for thread were considered by a Committee o f Grievances which examined several witnesses who testified to the multiple abuses involved in the enforcement o f the thread regulations. Concerns over the abusive exercise o f the thread patent were grave enough to serve as the basis for impeachment proceedings in parliament not only against the minor government appointees directly involved in enforcing the patents, but also against Lord Chancellor Bacon and other high ranking officials. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, thread was simultaneously a focus o f committees looking into the general decay o f commerce and currency, which resulted in reports to the Commons that asserted “the Patent o f Gold and Silver Thread, which did wast 20,000/. o f our coin, and stay’d the Importation o f 20,000/. more in bullion brought in from Venice in that Commodity” was a principle cause o f the scarcity o f money.146 Thus at the level o f formal politics, the fashionable trifle o f thread was understood as a significant threat to the body politic since the industry generated contempt for the law, fostered disorder among English craftspeople, and interfered with the flow o f trade. Perhaps most importantly, however, thread undermined the integrity o f coin as a privileged marker o f sovereignty by draining bullion supplies for the domestic production o f thread that when completed and sold, was itself often considered

146 Commons Debates, 1621, v. 5, ed. Wallace Nortestein, Frances Helen Relf, and Hartley Simpson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), 492. Hereafter cited as CD.

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counterfeit Yet the threats posed by thread went well beyond the narrow level o f politics and wider fiscal concerns, for they also encompassed anxieties about maintaining the socio­ cultural order o f the body politic. Though James’ earliest proclamation on thread designated it as an industry “fit” for England and royal attention, such a declaration was made within a social context at times obsessed with clothes that did not fit the normative order o f the body politic. O f particular concern was clothing that allowed one to transgress one’s rank, as class rather than gender or other factors had been the primary focus o f sumptuary legislation and continued to be a source o f worry after their repeal. Discussions about class transgression via clothing were not, however, completely separate from gender since from the sixteenth century forward “lavish dress in men and women is increasingly described as ‘feminine’ or ‘effeminate’ and is part o f a variety o f discourses . . . that together produced the category o f ‘femininity’ in early modem England.”147 Within this fraught discourse surrounding sartorial excess, gold and silver thread became an object o f some scrutiny since it provided an accessible and striking way to transgress one’s station - however constructed along the complex lines o f (at least) gender and class. Although in its most extravagant form it could be woven to create metallic fabrics, thread

147 Newman, 111. The links between gender and clothing were the subject o f especially heated debate in 1620, in part due to the publication o f the pamphlets Hie Mulier: or. The Man-Woman: Being a Medicine to cure the Coltish Disease ofthe Staggers in the Masculine Feminines o f our Times (London: G. Purslowe for J. Trundle, 1620) and Haec-Vir: or The Womanish-Man: Being an Answere to a late Booke intituled Hie Mulier (London: For J. Trundle, 1620). For a discussion o f these and other works related to growing concerns regarding gender and apparel, see Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, H alfHumankind: Contexts and Texts ofthe Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640 (Urbana: University o f Illinois Press, 1985).

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was most commonly used as a decorative detail in embroidery as well as lace trim.148 By no means inexpensive, thread was nonetheless a relatively accessible commodity in part because only a little was needed for the minimal trimming of, for example, a pair o f gloves.149 As a consequence o f its availability at James’ proclaimed reasonable price, thread offered an easy way to alter the social currency o f one’s clothing and, in turn, one’s identity and status. Herein was the real danger to the social order o f the body politic, for the use o f thread (whatever its own quality) provided a way for those o f comparatively lower status to effectively acquire a counterfeit identity that could belie their former or current station in life through what they wore. The assumption o f counterfeit status through clothing not only threatened the higher ranks by blurring previously well marked social distinctions, but also arguably encouraged excess consumption o f items such as thread by those initially better situated in an effort to maintain their position and resist the social promiscuity that so alarmed Misselden. Misselden was not alone, however, in expressing such concerns, for consumption was an issue brought up in the discussions about commerce conducted by the parliament o f 1621. Sir Edward Coke, for one, bemoaned that “the state is in a consumption; there is a leak in the Shipp o f the common wealth; we shall sink in tym.”150 Though Coke did not focus on the consumption o f any commodity in particular, Christopher Brooke (M.P.)

148 Siegler, 51. 149 In addition, there existed an apparently “down markef’form o f metallic thread made from a copper base that was gilded or silvered and then spun around cotton rather than silk thread. See Siegler, 5 1. Siegler estimates the cost o f an ounce o f thread to be about 43 d., though the fineness o f thread would vary prices. 150 CD 1621, v.5, 515.

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certainly did and strongly argued for the reinstatement o f sumptuary laws. Brooke based his call for laws against “excesse o f Aparrell” on his perception that “many consume more in Roses [i.e., ornamental knots o f ribbon or metal in the shape o f roses worn on shoe fronts] and shirts then all their fathers Apparell was worth.”151 Brooke directed his remarks at not just all superfluous apparel, but specifically condemned the “great vast o f Gold and Silver” in clothing, the cost o f which “was both against the Law o f Nature and o f God.”152 The magnitude o f the moral wrong done by wearing such clothing was, according to Brooke, easily evident for “God did not attire our first Parents with Excrements o f Worms, or out o f the Bowells o f the Earth, but did apparell them with Skins.”153 The moral dangers posed by thread were directly linked by Brooke to the imbalance o f trade, for “the greatest return forth o f Italy and Turkey for our Cloths, was Cloths o f Gold and Silver, Gold-Lace and Gold-thread, which, if the wearing thereof was prohibited here, their Merchants would not be able to make any return at all.”154 Although Brooke’s call for legislation against thread and related apparel was not heeded, the remarks attributed to him reveal just how closely the seemingly trivial material item o f thread was tied to a complicated set o f anxieties about the apparent decay o f moral and social order as well as the body politic, whose very life depended upon sustaining the sorts o f stability that thread seemed to continually undermine.

1SI Ibid., v. 4, 59. ,S2 Ibid., v. 5,465. ,S3 Ibid. 154 Ibid., 465-66.

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Whether or not James had an appreciation for the wide scope o f problems thread raised, he certainly understood that the abuses that had characterized the various patents for thread had opened the way for parliament to consider troublesome questions about the exercise o f royal prerogative in the granting o f monopolies. Under pressure, James grudgingly revoked the patent for thread - along with that for alehouses - in March 1621 by first condemning it in a speech to parliament, stating that the patent for “gold and silver thread was most vilely executed; both for wrongs done to men’s persons, as also for abuse in the stuff; for it was a kind o f false coin.”155 A proclamation issued a few days later explained that because those entrusted to execute the patents “for his Majesties honour, and the good o f the publike” had instead “perverted” their privileges to “the great damage, hurt, and oppression o f many o f his Majesties subjects,” the patents would be revoked.156 As a further effort to put a stop to the making o f this sort o f false currency, another proclamation was issued in June that prohibited the domestic production o f thread “o f what kind soever, or by whatsoever name it be called” since it was “found to be a great waste & consumption o f Coyne and Bullion o f the Realme” from which “many unsufferable inconveniences doe daily arise, & more are like to ensue, to the generall hurt and damage o f the whole common weale.”157 Yet despite such a definitive rejection o f thread, Siegler notes that “this proclamation was virtually ignored, however, and no

155 The Parliamentary History o f England, ed. William Cobbett (London: R. Bagshaw Publ., 1806-1820), 1: 1221. 156 SRP, “Proclamation for the repeale o f certaine Letters Patents,” March 30, 1621, 504. 157 Ibid., “Proclamation for restraint o f the exportation, waste, and consumption o f Coine and Bullion,” June 11, 1622, 542, 540.

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enforcement o f it was attempted.”158 With the m anufacture o f thread continuing unabated, the Crown changed course in rather dramatic manner a year after the ban by granting through proclamation a charter o f incorporation for the wiredrawers and thread makers. Acknowledging that many thread producers had “against all Law and Authoritie” continued their trade “though in a more secret and close manner than before,” James declared that he “resolved o f a more moderate and fitting course, by reducing those Trades under order and government, whereby inconveniences may be prevented.”tS9 The grant for the new corporation bore many o f the traits o f former patents, since it restricted production to members o f the company and required that all thread be inspected and sealed before it “be bought, uttered, or solde.”160 With the next meeting o f parliament in 1624, however, grievances were made concerning the new corporation’s monopolistic structure and these were supported by the continued view that thread was a waste o f coin and bullion. Accordingly, James issued his last proclamation on thread in July 1624 that declared the industry “unfit to be continued within this Realme” and prohibited any further production under the force o f an existing statute from the reign o f Henry VII that forbade the melting o f coin.161 As could have been predicted, this prohibition was no more successful than the others and the problems caused by thread were to linger not only into Charles’ reign, but would also serve as an irritant to Cromwell’s government. The

158 Siegler, 110. 159 SRP, “Proclamation concerning Wyer, Threed, and other Manufacture made o f Gold and Silver,” June 16, 1621, 579. 160 Ibid., 580. 161 SRP, “Proclamation for avoiding the consumption o f Coyne and Bullion,” July 10, 1624, 594.

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English state ceased to be quite so bedeviled by thread only with the permanent establishment o f a corporation for wiredrawers that, perhaps not so coincidentally, was granted in the 1690rs during the midst o f the next coinage crisis. Though parliamentary objections to the thread industry had all along been based on serious doubts about the exercise o f royal prerogative in the granting o f monopolies that ultimately resulted in the passing o f the restrictive Statute o f Monopolies in 1624, much more was arguably at stake than the growth o f a politics o f conflict between Crown and parliament. In rather problematic ways, the attempts to order the manufacture and consumption o f thread demonstrated the power o f artificial material things - especially those that were fashionable - to exceed the ruling grasp o f the allegedly all encompassing body politic. The repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to prohibit gold and silver thread may then be read not simply as efforts to assert (or extend) parliamentary rights, but also as part o f a broader struggle to sustain the normative order and efficacy o f a political vocabulary that was facing multiple challenges. As Sommerville suggests, “little was heard in early-seventeenth-century England o f the doctrine that government is an artificial and not a natural creation,” and thus relatively few conceptual resources were available through which a more conventional picture o f the political could have been envisioned.162 From this perspective, the appeal o f the unruly and fluid language used to figure commerce begins to have greater saliency, for it offered a vocabulary that contrasted 162 Sommerville, 19. This is not to suggest that understandings o f the political with conventional features were entirely absent during the era, as evident in discussions surrounding the idea o f an ancient constitution. Yet the discursive presence of terms such as contract during the early seventeenth century was relatively limited compared to later years. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study o f English Historical Thought in the 17* Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).

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sharply with nascent understandings o f trade and currency that privileged artifice and convention. The danger o f a conventional approach was quite profound, for if money became to be regarded as solely an artificial tool o f human design, so too would it become possible to comprehend the body politic in similar ways. Hence, the continued articulation o f money’s association with an organic and disruptive feminine fluidity offered a semiotic avenue through which to resist the almost unimaginable loss o f the intimately known order o f a divinely given universe as represented in the figure o f the body politic. Although this may help explain the allure o f a corporeal commercial language, the role o f gender remains elusive unless one considers the possibility that viewing money as an object o f artifice was problematic not simply because this opened a way to directly understand the political as itself conventional, but also because it potentially raised questions about the status o f notions o f gender with which currency was so closely intertwined. If the value and meaning ascribed to coinage were solely the consequence o f human design, then the traits associated with woman and femininity that had long been used to figure understandings o f commerce would be similarly open for question. The potential impact o f such doubts about gender for conceptions o f a rightly ordered world most frequently constructed and expressed via a series o f different analogies between domestic household and political state could be considerable. Thus the stability o f a particular comprehension o f the political arguably relied on a recognition and articulation o f the disordering, powerful features o f money associated with women to fend o ff more profound challenges to the “givenness” o f that order itself as they emerged within the 130

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conflicts over thread. This is decidedly not to suggest that attributes and tropes linked with femininity were simply used to form coherent conceptual strategies, for the trade tracts demonstrate that such significations o f money and trade often spun o ff in uncontrollable and problematic directions. Rather, vocabularies associated with woman may be understood as having possessed a semiotic force o f their own with which allegedly dominant discursive formations needed to come to often uncomfortable terms. Hence this circulation o f gender may be understood as not only having shaped monetary and political discourse, but also suggests the possibility o f different meanings for early modem femininity and woman that have yet to be fully considered in the history o f the political and monetary thought o f the period. Contrary to approaches to historiography as well as feminist political theory that regard early modem notions o f gender as somewhat static and/or as precursors to the exclusion o f women and femininity from the public realms o f money and politics in the modem era, the commercial tumult o f the 1620's presents a more intricate and fraught conceptual nexus that requires a different sort o f analysis. More is at stake here, however, than simply accounting for what has been missing from the critical record. Without an attention to the workings o f often vexed understandings o f gender, the textual complexities o f the trade tracts may be too easily dismissed as merely confused if not naive responses to a very particular monetary crisis and thus as lacking broader implications even within their own context. Yet with a closer attention to the figurative language in these works and its gendered connotations, not only do the nuances o f the tracts acquire some theoretical saliency, but their significant links to early modem notions o f materiality and the political also come to the 131

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surface and thereby open these texts to further critical inquiry. Bibliographical Postscript Although the important role o f Malynes, Misselden, and Mun in the trade debates o f the 1620's has long been noted, the historiographical assessment o f their writings has been rather more mixed. When they have received critical attention, the texts o f all three have been most frequently regarded as individual responses to a historically specific monetary crisis and therefore mostly lacking substantial theoretical significance beyond the confines o f their particular context. Though some have recognized the value o f the insights offered by Mun and Misselden on the development o f early modem commerce, the works o f Malynes have been viewed as written by a “man living well beyond his time” who held a static view o f the world based on “eternal values grounded in the nature o f things.”163 Yet bibliographic records for the seventeenth century suggest that the texts o f each writer had a rather different fate than the pertinent historiography o f the period would suggest.164 Although Misselden’s Circle o f Commerce was printed only once in 1623, his Free Trade was published in two editions in 1622 and again almost thirty years later in 1651. Mun’s Discourse o f Trade also only appeared in the year o f its original publication in 1621 and, as noted earlier, his England’s Treasure was not published at all until 1664 at the behest o f his son. The latter text apparently met with some success since it was printed in another edition in 1669 and, somewhat remarkably, was again published

163 Supple, 2 1 1 and Appleby, 43. 164 Bibliographic information for this section is primarily drawn from English Short Title Catalogue (The British Library and ESTC/NA, 1995) [database online]. My thanks to Bett Miller for her generous assistance with deciphering the historical record and details of the trade tracts.

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by the same publisher in 1698 in the midst o f the second coinage crisis o f the century. Although there is no way to determine how well the later editions o f Mun’s and Misselden’s works sold or why they were put to press so many years after their first publication, the costs o f printing would have strongly discouraged the arbitrary publication o f subsequent editions in the absence o f some demand. Though, like the other aspects o f publication and readership, the precise make up o f the later audience o f these texts remains obscure, it is well worth noting that among the works listed in John Locke’s library were the first edition o f Misselden’s Free Trade and the second edition o f Mun’s England’s Treasure}65 Although there is no indication that Locke possessed any o f Malynes’ writings, their bibliographic history is arguably even more notable than that o f Mun and Misselden. The only work o f Malynes’ to appear beyond its initial publication is his Lex Mercatoria, which first appeared in 1622 and then again in 1629. Yet these editions are only the beginning o f the story, for the text was published again in 1636 and this time it was coupled with another work by Robert Daffome, entitled in part The Mercchants Mirrour, or Directions for the Perfect Ordering and Keeping ofH is Accounts. The title page describes Daffome as an “Accountant and Teacher o f the same,” whose text is “Framed by way o f DEBITOR and CREDITOR, after the (so termed) Italian manner [i.e., double entry bookkeeping]” that included “two other Waste-bookes for the exercise o f the Studious” as well as “A MONETH-BOOK, very requisite for Merchants, and

l6S John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library o f John Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1965), s.v. Misselden and Mun.

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commodious for all other SCIENCE LOVERS o f this famous art.” In other words, the title page indicates that Daffome’s work was intended for the instruction o f double entry bookkeeping, a technique itself designed to bring order to bear on the inconstant fluidity o f money and trade that occupied Malynes’ attention throughout Lex Mercatoria. This combination o f texts was evidently popular since they appeared together again in 1656, with two additional works by John Collins and John Marius on accounting and commerce included with the new editions o f Malynes and Daffome. In turn, all four o f these works were published together in two different editions in 1686, both o f which also included four new tracts by four different writers on accounting and maritime law. Although the whole text o f Lex Mercatoria was not published again after 1686, chapter 47 (which concerns the fishing trade) was published separately in 1720. As with the writings o f Misselden and Mun, many bibliographic questions about the history o f Malynes’ text must go unanswered, yet the frequency o f subsequent publication alone strongly suggests that Malynes’ work continued to hold some appeal well beyond the 1620's trade crisis. This inference is further supported by the textual details o f the works themselves, for throughout its publication history as a complete text, Lex Mercatoria appeared in folio and by itself ran in excess o f three hundred pages - a figure that was easily doubled when it was published with additional texts.166 Given the relatively higher cost o f folio works in comparison with quartos or other formats, Lex Mercatoria would not have been a

166 The separate publication o f chapter forty-seven was not in folio, but rather octavo.

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cheap purchase even as a solo text.167 From the perspective afforded by bibliographic records and the material details o f the texts themselves, the common historiographical assessment o f the trade tracts from the 1620's requires modification on at least two points. First, at the general level, the understanding o f the works o f Mun et al. as responses to a specific crisis and therefore lacking substantial relevance apart from that context seems overly narrow. Although the exact appeal o f these writings to later seventeenth century readers is impossible to ascertain, their repeated publication indicates that they found an audience well removed from the particular circumstances o f their initial printing and thus continued to hold some kind o f significance. Second, at the particular level but with larger implications, the conventional interpretation o f Malynes as the writer most closely tied to his immediate context and whose writings best exemplify the reliance on an already outdated figurative, corporeal vocabulary is open to question. Whatever the reasons for its repeated publication, the bodily and gendered language that constituted Lex Mercatoria circulated until the end o f the seventeenth century and a bit beyond. Although the extent of Malynes’ influence on later writers remains to be determined, traces o f a corporeal vocabulary outside o f Malynes’ text are evident on one o f the separate title pages included in one o f the 1686 editions o f Lex Mercatoria. The page belongs to John Marius’ Advice Concerning Bills o f Exchange, which explains that the text sets forth, among other things, “generally the whole practical part and body o f Exchanges

167 On the cost o f books and broadsides, see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 15501640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Francis R. Johnson, “Notes on English Retail Book-Prices,” The Library, 5th ser. 5 (1950).

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Anatomized.” Thus however the contributions o f Malynes and his fellow tract writers may be regarded, their persistent textual presence opens for consideration the possibility that linguistic resources similar to those relied on to address the monetary crisis o f the 1620's continued to have currency in the latter half o f the seventeenth century and offered a way to articulate the myriad tensions that monetary commerce stubbornly generated.

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CHAPTER THREE “THE MACHINE OF THIS WORLD” ORDER, LAW AND CONVENTION The stability o f the English state and the maintenance o f social order in the midst o f increasing commercial turmoil were matters for the worried attention o f not only the trade tract writers o f the 1620's, but also those grappling with the problems generated by the monetary crisis o f the 1690's.1 Yet the political vocabularies through which these shared concerns were articulated and that shaped these discussions about currency differed sharply; by the 1690's the analogical structure o f the body politic that had frequently delineated understandings o f the political earlier in the century had lost much o f its discursive force in the aftermath o f its all too literal dismemberment during the interregnum and the subsequent rise o f more conventional political concepts, such as consent. Although various thinkers contributed to this transition, John Locke is frequently regarded within otherwise divergent interpretations o f the history o f political thought as well as other forms o f historiography as the signal figure whose works decisively mark the emergence o f a recognizably modem mode o f political language. In particular, Locke’s Two Treatises o f Government have been widely read as constituting the primary text that definitively put to rest the naturalistic frameworks associated with

1 The title for this chapter is drawn from question 5 o f Locke’s Questions Concerning the Law o f Nature. See note 5 for full reference.

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patriarchalism and preceding versions o f the political in favor o f the more abstract language o f contract and civil society. This broadly construed approach to the Treatises has been facilitated in part by the role attributed to money in the Second Treatise, in which Locke describes currency as a conventional object o f human design invented through a process o f consent that, in turn, serves as a key impetus for the formation o f civil government. Along with its pivotal narrative location within the Second Treatise, money’s apparently artificial character has served as vital textual evidence for many later readers who consider Locke’s work as constituting (albeit to varying degrees) a decisive turn within the history o f political thought to an increased reliance on more conventional political vocabularies that enabled the development o f distinctly modem economic languages. Despite the otherwise sharp differences that pertain among them, such interpretations have often shared the view that money constitutes a defining feature o f Locke’s efforts to formulate a political language that separated public from private, the fa m ily from politics and, in so doing, paved the way for the ftdl assembly o f the modem

rights bearing political subject.2 Placing aside for the moment issues concerning the role o f money in the Second Treatise, a wider set o f questions may be raised about this rather familiar interpretive gloss when the chronology o f Locke’s work on currency is closely considered. Although Locke’s major monetary writings were published in 1695-96 as part o f the debates about

2 An especially notable example o f this approach is C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory o f Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Different variations on similar themes are also offered by Daniela Gobetti, Private and Public: Individuals, Households, and Body Politic in Locke and Hutcheson (London: Routledge, 1992) and William Reddy, Money and Liberty in Early Modem Europe: A Critique o f Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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the currency crisis o f the time and well after the initial publication o f the Treatises, these texts bear some relation to thoughts about money first put to paper between approximately 1668 and 1674.3 This bit o f compositional history is significant, for it highlights that Locke’s initial engagement with monetary matters is temporally as close (if not closer) to the writing o f his earlier political texts - such as Two Tracts on Government and Questions Concerning the Law o f Nature - as it is to later works - such as the Treatises. What is o f note here is not simply the determination o f an accurate textual genealogy but also its theoretical import, for the now conventional political vocabulary subsequently associated with Locke is barely evident within his earliest texts. Rather, these works evidence a significant reliance on aspects o f the very kind o f naturalistic and morally imbued languages more typical o f those modes o f political understanding that Locke would later be credited with dismantling. The existence o f this apparent divide in Locke’s work has long garnered critical attention, and the relations between the natural and convention within his later texts have been frequently employed by feminist scholars to explicate the exclusions inherent to political abstractions such as contract.4 Yet the meanings o f this conceptual nexus for Locke’s views on money have not been fully considered and this constitutes a notable critical lacuna since - contra to certain approaches to the Second Treatise - Locke considered money to be related in

3 The time frame for Locke’s works on money is fully explicated in Patrick Hyde Kelly’s introduction to John Locke, Locke on Money, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 4 Examples o f such feminist critiques include Teresa Brennan and Carole Pateman, ‘“ Mere Auxiliaries to the Commonwealth’: Women and the Origins o f Liberalism,” Political Studies 27, no. 2 (1979), Linda Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits o f Social Theory in the Age o fthe Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), and Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).

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complex ways to both nature and convention. Hence to acquire a better sense o f the theoretical tenets and tensions that shaped Locke’s monetary writings o f the 1690's, a focused examination o f his different parsing o f the relations between what he regarded as natural (i.e., natural law, parental duties, human society) and as conventional (i.e., civil law, magisterial authority, fashion) within his earlier works will be helpful. To explore this intricate set o f conceptual connections, this chapter w ill concentrate on two o f Locke’s texts - Questions Concerning the Law o f Nature (hereafter referred to as Questions) and Essay Concerning Human Understanding (hereafter referred to as Essay).5 The aim o f this analysis is not to provide a thorough explication o f the relations between the natural and convention within and between these diverse texts, nor to offer an examination o f the influence o f the natural law tradition on Locke’s treatment o f these realms in relation to his overall thought - each o f which are interpretive tasks that have been well undertaken elsewhere.6 Rather, the reading pursued here seeks to far more narrowly consider how Locke’s articulations o f the relationships between the natural and convention are inherently fraught with significant epistemological and

5 Locke’s early work on the law o f nature has been published in two translations: Questions Concerning the Law o f Nature, ed. and trans. Robert Horwitz, Jenny Strauss Clay, and Diskin Clay (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) and Essays on the Law o f Nature, ed. Wolfgang von Leyden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). My reading o f this text relies on the more recent edition, although I will refer to the von Leyden edition throughout (hereafter cited as ELN). For references to the Essay, I rely on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). 6 For an examination o f the relations between nature and convention in the work o f Locke and others, see Gordon Schochet, The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes in IT h Century England, with a new introduction (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988). For analyses o f Locke’s ties to the natural law tradition, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

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political tensions that become more acute over the temporal and theoretical span covered by these texts. A survey o f the development o f these fissures in Locke’s writings is not intended as a corrective to established interpretations, but rather furnishes a crucial backdrop for my larger argument about Locke and money, that maintains that his monetary writings from the 1690's articulate a position that favors a form o f uncertainty posited in a natural fluidity over the epistemologically mistaken and morally dangerous belief in the illusion o f stability offered by the conventional constructs o f human design. Yet this position does not spring whole from Locke’s texts on currency alone, but rather unfolds over a period o f time that may be understood to begin with the Questions, a text widely regarded as one o f Locke’s most traditional or conservative approaches to civil government.7 Though the stringency o f Locke’s notion o f obligation in this early text depends on a tight coalescence between natural law and its conventional civil manifestations, this connection does not go unchallenged by the forces o f human artifice and custom - especially in regard to matters o f gender and sexual practice. In contrast, Locke’s epistemological worries in the Essay present the realm o f the natural as more remote from human understanding, while conventional constructs are portrayed as more immediate and accessible and, consequently, as posing a greater moral danger. As in the Questions, gender again appears at points o f significant theoretical contention and highlights the persistent and seemingly unresolvable tensions that increasingly characterized Locke’s perspectives on nature and convention. This growing divide thus

7 For such an assessment, see von Leyden’s introduction to ELM. Von Leyden’s position is echoed by Philip Abrams in regard to both the Two Tracts and the Questions in his introduction to John Locke, Two Tracts on Government, ed. Philip Abrams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).

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emerges over a period when. Locke already had money on his mind and, as the next chapter w ill demonstrate, leads him to develop a fetishistic stance towards the increasingly symbolic character o f currency. Before turning to the conceptual ends that Locke’s fetishism ultimately attempts to tie back together, however, it is essential to first consider how they began to become unraveled. Law and the Order o f This World Along with the Two Tracts on Government, the Questions constitute Locke’s most politically strident presentation o f the fundamental importance o f maintaining a rightly ordered world and properly fulfilling the moral imperatives that such order necessitates. Yet the meanings o f Locke’s figurations o f order - whether understood as primarily focused on moral, political or epistemological matters - have been interpreted in often diametrically opposed ways. Hence before exam ining how Locke lays out an early picture o f an ordered universe and the relations between nature and convention upon which it depends, it is necessary to take a step back to gain a better sense o f the broader notions o f order with which Locke worked throughout his life and which will inform the reading o f his texts pursued here and in the next chapter. In a thorough analysis o f what she refers to as the architecture o f order that is woven throughout his writings, Kirstie McClure argues that Locke’s notion o f order was very much in keeping with traditional images o f the world as consisting o f various relations based on divisions o f rank and degree.8 Whereas earlier articulations o f this schema depended upon a parallel design in which “as God had

* Kirstie M. McClure, Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits o f Consent (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). My readings o f Locke are much indebted to McClure’s work.

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differentiated the world o f created beings by degrees o f perfection, so had he ordered the ranks o f human society into hierarchical relations o f station and status,” Locke’s own refiguration refuted the conceit o f a social hierarchy established through divine ordination.9 Despite his well known insistence on the fundamental equality that obtains among people, Locke nonetheless retained key aspects o f a hierarchical vision o f the world that would continue to shape his cosmology - not the least o f which included the place and purpose o f human beings within that order. Governed by God’s laws, Locke “represented the order o f nature as a seamless web o f connection, harmony, and interdependence among all created things,” yet among such diversity God has uniquely endowed humans with the faculty o f reason.10 Through the exercise o f reason, humans can both perceive that the very tangible world around them is a Godly creation and discern what Locke understood as their own divinely ordained “dual purpose: that they both honor and reflect his glory and that they pursue a life in society with their fellows.”11 Yet the fulfillment o f humans’ earthly purpose and the possibility for the salvation o f their immortal souls hinges upon the degree to which they rightly use reason to guide their actions in order that they are in keeping with God’s most important rule, the law o f nature. Though all aspects o f creation are governed by rules expressive o f God’s will, the distinctive place accorded humans within the larger hierarchy means that “the rules

9 Ibid., 28. 10 Ibid., 32. 11 Ibid., 34. The morally imbued and religiously freighted character o f Locke’s understanding o f order and the place of humans within it has also been stressed by - among others - Dunn; John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and W. M. Spellman, John Locke and the Problem o f Depravity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

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prescribed to human agents differ in kind from all the rest. In a word, they invested human action with a moral rather than simply physical or instinctual dynamic.”12 The importance o f the law o f nature for Locke’s understanding o f humankind raises two particularly thorny issues: “the specific content o f the law o f nature and the manner in which human agents might come to know it.”13 The questions emerging from these concerns would continually appear throughout Locke’s works although, as McClure and numerous other commentators have well noted, his success in answering them is itself a matter o f considerable debate.14 However the adequacy o f Locke’s treatments o f the law o f nature may be judged, his struggles with the epistemological moorings o f this law and the moral implications o f such knowledge (or lack thereof) for the human beings for whom it was intended would persistently inform his efforts to articulate the political face o f a rightly ordered society. Locke’s stakes in this set o f considerations are clearly evident in the Questions, an early work that is entirely devoted to the epistemological underpin n in g s

o f the law o f nature and its political consequences. Though frequently

regarded as one o f Locke’s most conservative or even immature writings that has been sometimes deemed to offer relatively limited critical insights into his later, traditionally prominent works, a closer reading o f this text suggests something rather different.

12 Ibid., 37. 1J Ibid., 38. 14 A brief sampling o f such works includes Richard Cox, Locke on War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, I960); John Dunn, The Political Thought o f John Locke: An Historical Account o f the Argument o f the “Two Treatises ofGovernment” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1953); Tully; John W. Yolton, Locke and the Compass o f Human Understanding: A Selective Commentary on the “Essay” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

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Whatever their status within Locke’s oeuvre, the Questions not only present a strong version o f Locke’s understanding o f the ordered hierarchy o f the world but also hint at the tensions between nature and convention that would raise stubborn doubts about the constancy o f such order within his later writings, especially those on money. The first o f Locke’s questions addresses the existence o f the law o f nature, that from its opening words is unequivocally linked with a certain knowledge o f God’s presence in the world. Locke asserts that “there will be no one, who recognizes that either some rational account o f our life is necessary or that there exists something deserving the name o f either virtue or vice, who will not conclude for him self that god exists.”IS For Locke, to doubt God’s existence would be “impious” for it is evident to all that he “has prescribed for every kind o f plant the manner and season o f its germination and growth; and all creatures in their obedience to his will have their own proper laws governing their birth and life” (1,95). After one has acknowledged that “there is nothing in all this world so unstable, so uncertain that it does not recognize authoritative and fixed laws which are suited to its own nature,” the next important step is to inquire “if man alone has come into this world entirely outside some Jurisdiction, with no law proper to him” (1, 95, 97). Since “the very fabric o f this world” indicates that all creatures other than human beings observe laws that guide their existence, it does not seem “fitting to the wisdom o f the first artificer to fashion a most perfect and ever active anim al. . . and yet 15 Locke, Questions, Question 1, p. 95. Further references cited by question and page number will be included in the text The reader should also note that all brackets within quotations are, unless otherwise noted, those o f Horwitz et al., and not my own. Due to the differences between the Horwitz and Von Leyden editions o f Locke’s work, for readers consulting the latter I will note the corresponding essay number after the initial reference to each question. Hence, in this case, ELN, First Essay.

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to assign him no [proper] function, or to fashion man alone with a capacity for law that he should obey none” (1,113). Indeed, the existence o f such a law for hum ankind is required if God’s order is to be maintained at all, for without a law o f nature “everything would have to be referred to the w ill o f men, and, since duty would demand nothing, it seems that a man would have to do nothing except what either interest or pleasure urged upon him” (1, 117). Therefore whatever moral standing virtue and vice hold within the world, “they ow e entire to this law o f nature, since their nature is fixed and eternal, not something to be valued by the public decrees o f men or some private opinion” (1, 117). Thus the law o f nature is absolutely essential to the very existence o f human beings themselves, for they cannot “put o ff all sense o f that law, unless at the same time they cast o ff all humanity” (2, 119).16 Yet for Locke simply recognizing that the law o f nature is the essential core o f God’s design for humankind is not sufficient, for this law is neither an innate principle inscribed in the human mind nor is it established through tradition. Rather, true knowledge o f the law o f nature depends on the individual’s sense perceptions and the exercise o f reason. Though in the first question Locke declares that “there exists a law o f nature knowable by reason,” question five is devoted to a more thorough consideration o f what he means by reason and its relation to the sensible world (1, 109). In the clearest definition found in the Questions, reason is posited as “the discursive faculty o f the soul which progresses from the known to the unknown,” yet the knowledge this process

16ELN, Second Essay.

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produces has its foundations in “the objects o f the senses” ( 5 ,157).17 For Locke, “without the help o f the senses and their service, reason can produce nothing more than can a workman in the dark behind closed shutters” (5,155). When the senses are put to good use, however, humans are able to examine “the machine o f this world” with all its ordered array o f things and can, through reason, determine that this must be the work o f a “powerful and wise creator” (5, 161). Based on this recognition as well as a sensible awareness o f the finitude and imperfection o f human existence, “reason dictates that there is some superior authority to which we are rightly subject, god, that is, who holds over us a just and ineluctable power” (5, 163). The comprehension that humans are subject to a superior has crucial moral and political implications since, for Locke, “for anyone to know that he is bound by law, he must first know that there is a legislator, a superior; that is, some power to which he is rightfully subject” (5,159). Only after acquiring an understanding o f the hierarchical character o f God’s design can human beings turn their senses and reason to discovering what their creator wills them to do and how their earthly purpose may be best fulfilled. As with the existence o f the law o f nature itself, the specific duties it requires can be known through the powers o f inference. From the surrounding world, God’s intentions are discemable “in part from the end and purpose o f all things w hich. . . do not seem to be destined by him to any other end than to his own glory, to which all things ought to be directed” (5, 167). Although this general mandate certainly includes human beings, as creatures uniquely endowed with reason humans have specific additional duties

17 ELN, Fourth Essay.

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assigned to them suitable to their divinely given faculties. Each individual is “driven by a certain natural propensity to enter society and is fitted to preserve it by the gift o f speech and the commerce o f language” (5, 169) and hence from this inclination, a duty towards others is established. For Locke, implicit within this duty is the preservation o f self that almost goes without saying; “indeed, there is no need for me to stress here to what degree he is obliged to preserve himself, since he is impelled to this part o f his duty, and more than impelled, by an inner instinct” (5,169). Thus these three things “comprehend all o f men’s duty toward god, his neighbor, and him self’ required by the law o f nature, and the basic obligation o f this multifaceted duty is “perpetual, that is, that there is no time in which a man would be permitted to violate the precepts o f this law; here there exists no interregnum, no holidays or Mardi Gras” (10, 21).18 Similarly, this law is “binding on all men wherever men exist, kings as well as subjects, senators together with the commoners, parents and children together, barbarians no less than Greeks” (10,225). In addition to performing God’s w ill, the moral and material rewards for fulfilling the duties mandated by the law o f nature are substantial, “for from the keeping o f this law peace arises, concord, friendship, freedom from [fear o f unjust] punishments, security, the possession o f our own property, and, to embrace all these things in a single word, happiness” (11, 251).19 However profound the stakes may be for Locke’s individual to both know and follow the dictates o f the law o f nature, the human inclination to form societies and the

18 ELN, Seventh Essay. 19 ELN, Eighth Essay.

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naturally hierarchical condition o f human existence considerably complicates what might otherwise be understood as a purely solitary endeavor. In sharp contrast to the Second Treatise, the Questions offer little in the way o f a narrative o f the development o f political society, but instead baldly state key pieces o f a framework o f governance that demands a series o f political as well as moral obligations. In question eight, Locke addresses the issue o f obligation at length and indicates early on that the compass o f human obligation is necessarily limited since “no one can oblige or constrain us to do anything unless he has right and power over us. And when he commands what he wants done and what not, he relies only on his own right” (8, 205).20 Yet the “he” to whom Locke refers here is not God alone - to whom all human beings are eternally subject - but includes other worldly authorities who may rightfully assert power over other individuals within civil society. For Locke, the obligation to obey the law stems not only from the “right o f nature and creation” that establishes God’s superiority, but also from “the right o f donation, as when god, to whom all things belong, has transferred some part o f his authority to another and granted the right o f ruling, as [he has] in the case o f firstborn sons and monarchs” (8,207). Because o f their divinely derived authority, such figures have “both the right o f making laws and binding [men] to obey them” (10, 211). Though individuals are only “bound to what a legislator has in some manner made known and published as his w ill,” once this has occurred, obey they must “because such would be god’s will and such is his command, and consequently, by obeying these [i.e., civil laws] we are also obedient to god” (10, 211; interpolation added). Put differently in more

20 ELN, Sixth Essay.

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overtly political terms, because “a king, princes, and a legislator, or whatever name you would give a superior” each derive their right to rule “at the command o f the law o f nature” as a result, “the obligation o f civil law depends on the law o f nature” (8,215). For Locke, the tight cohesion between civil law and the law o f nature not only serves as a fundamental basis for the existence o f political society, but also functions as a strong brake on the otherwise seemingly extensive powers o f civil authorities. In many ways, the force o f the law o f nature outweighs that accorded by Locke to civil law, for without the binding strength o f the former on human beings, “neither can any human positive law bind them, since the laws o f the civil magistrate derive all their force from the binding power o f this [i.e., natural] law” (8,213; interpolation added ). Indeed, civil authorities act more as conduits for the law o f nature than anything else, for humans are not “compelled so much to show obedience to a magistrate by virtue o f his power as we are bound by the law [jus] o f nature” (8, 215). Yet what is at issue here does not solely concern the obedience o f subjects to their governments, but rather encompasses the limitations and legitimacy o f those designated by God to rule over them. In question one, Locke raises the matter explicitly: “What, I ask, would be the face o f a state . . . if that part o f a commonwealth which has the greatest power to harm, could do anything at its own pleasure?” (1, 115). Locke answers his own question by wondering in grim fashion what the state o f human affairs might be “if princes, when they acted, seized [the possessions of] their subjects by force, broke in upon them, threw them to the ground, murdered them, [and] relied only on their own private right” (1,115). This dire scenario arises directly from the absence o f a law o f nature within the conventions o f civil society, 150

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for without it princes “whose power it is to form or alter laws at their pleasure, and to do everything on behalf o f their own rule, as lords over others, neither are nor can be constrained by their own positive laws or those o f others, if there were not another law o f nature superior to them, that is, [a law] they ought to obey” (1, 115). Locke’s use o f ought is pivotal, for there is no guarantee that princes will choose to obey the law o f nature though they not only risk their own souls in not doing so, but also the very structure o f human society. Since civil laws bind others in no “other manner than by the force o f the law o f nature, which bids obedience to superiors and keeping the public peace,” without it “princes could possibly compel the commoners to obedience by force and arms, but could not truly bind them” (1, 115). Without the kind o f obligations required by the law o f nature, every sort o f agreement within society becomes suspect in both moral and practical terms and, as a result, a principle foundation for “human society collapses” (1, 117). However important knowledge o f the law o f nature may be for civil authorities who seek to fulfill their divinely ordained function, their understanding alone is not sufficient for the maintenance o f political society in accordance with godly tenets. Though the law o f nature has a particular significance for those designated by God to rule over others, their subjects must also individually acquire an accurate knowledge o f this law not only to guide their private moral actions but also to ensure that the various relations o f more public forms o f obligation - that, for Locke, constitute the very fabric o f political society - are sustained. Yet this epistemological task is at best a strenuous one, made so in part by the challenges that inhere within this law itself. Despite its divine 151

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origins, “one can rightly doubt that the law o f nature is binding upon the human race as a whole, unstable and variable [as it is],” for “men depart from one another in so many directions; in one place one thing, in another something else, is declared to be a dictate o f nature and o f right reason. . . some recognize a different law o f nature, others none, all recognize that it is obscure (10,217; 4, 141).21 The opacity o f this law is further compounded by its complexity for, though the law o f nature holds some things absolute for all (e.g., prohibitions against theft and debauchery), some o f its other precepts “concern the different conditions o f men and their relations among themselves [and] are binding on men only to the extent that their functions, either private or public, demand” (10, 225; interpolation added). Hence each person must puzzle through the obscurity and tangles o f status that characterize the law o f nature as it operates in civil society. Although Locke asserts that “reason is granted to all by nature” and therefore all are theoretically able to know the law, “it does not follow from this that it is known to each and all, for some make no use o f this light, but love the darkness and would not be willing to reveal themselves to themselves” (1, 109). Excusing those who “because o f a defect o f nature, have a keenness o f mind too weak” to discover the law o f nature, Locke worries that most people “are often driven o ff their proper course by the onrush o f their feelings . . . [and] follow not what reason dictates but what their low passions urge upon them” (1,111). According to Locke, “rare is the man in a commonwealth who knows the laws o f his city, which have been published, displayed in public places, easy to read and comprehend, and obvious to every eye” (1,111). Thus whatever their natural faculties,

21 ELN, Seventh and Third Essays.

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humans too often fall w ell short o f their epistemological calling and instead are “either seduced by long established habits or the examples [they discover] at home” (10,233). In so doing, “they follow the herd in the manner o f brute beasts” rather than fulfill their earthly purpose as creatures u n iq u ely endowed with reason and with a particular station in God’s hierarchy (10,233). The grave problems raised by the epistemological seduction o f humankind from the path o f reason are the sole focus o f Locke’s consideration in question seven that, more than the other questions, brings to the fore the troubling tensions that persist between the law o f nature and the diversity o f human conduct. Locke opens this questions by condemning the conventions established by humankind, asking “what is there so evil, so impious, so contrary to every law, civil and divine, that at some time consent, or rather the conspiracy to which the multitude in its madness has not persuaded [men to]” (7, 17375).22 Although consent is necessary as a basis for “the free movement o f ambassadors, a free market, and other things o f this kind” that characterize civilization, from neither the conduct nor the common opinions o f humankind can the law o f nature be derived and, indeed, to pursue such an exercise would be akin “to playing the part o f the madman according to reason” (7, 175,181). Locke’s concern is not solely with the errant ways o f individuals but also the deleterious social manifestations o f such wrongful conduct, for “there exists virtually no vice, no violation o f the law o f nature” that is “not only something allowed privately somewhere in the world, but also ratified by public authorities and practice” (7, 181-83). To illustrate the prevalence o f these kinds o f

22 ELN, Fifth Essay.

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disconnects between natural law and the conventions o f civil society caused by the figural as w ell as literal seduction o f humankind, the remainder o f question seven consists o f a series o f examples, the majority o f which concern the status o f gender, sexuality and family. Relying on instances drawn from travel literature as well as the ancients, Locke begins by highlighting the diversity o f opinion “concerning modesty and chastity,” noting that “among the Assyrians it was the custom o f women to mingle with men at banquets, their bodies completely naked and exposed to the eyes o f all, while among other nations women are permitted to go into public [only] fully clothed” (7,187). The standards for chastity fare no better, since for some nations “unwed girls are permitted to engage in debauchery; they consider chastity to apply only to married women,” while others “consecrate the bridal bed by debauchery and ignite their wedding torches with the flames o f lust” (7, 187). Thus the diversity o f human practice noted by Locke contrasted sharply with the more reified notions o f gender and sexuality articulated by many in early modem England who regarded both factors as immediately knowable, stable aspects o f human existence that, as such, were understood as constant markers o f godly order in the world. Yet if the seeming instability o f sexuality and gender is alone remarkable, even more so are the varying conventions regarding two primary tenets o f the law o f nature namely, the duty o f self-preservation and the duty to preserve others. In considering lapses in the latter, Locke turns his attention to familial relations, the realm o f human existence where the duty towards one’s fellows would seem - at least within the framework o f early modem England - most natural and virtually impossible to obscure. Such assumptions are quickly belied, however, for “entire nations have been found 154

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among whom offspring, when they become adults, kill their parents” and for whom “parricide is counted among the duties o f obligation to one’s parents” (7,189). This startling misinterpretation o f duty falls on both sides o f the parent-child equation, however, since there exist people who “seem to have given life only that they might take it away” (7, 191). For Locke, the fete o f girls in these situations is particularly disturbing, for there are “peoples who completely neglect a female child as if she were illegitimate or a freak o f nature, and they buy their wives from their neighbors in the hope o f having [male?] children by them” (7,191). Yet gender functions to delineate not only the extreme moral disorder that arises from perversions in the duty to preserve others, but also negations o f the duty o f self-preservation, that Locke suggests is perhaps the obligation “most sacred among men” (7,191). Although Locke briefly cites the example o f (presumably male) slaves willing to die with their kings, his chief case study for the denial o f self-preservation is a fairly detailed description o f the practice o f sati. Locke notes that “males, the more spirited part o f the mortal race,” are not the only ones willing to die, for “among the Indians the weak and timid female sex is daring enough to despise extinction and [to hasten] to join their dead husbands through flames” (7, 191). Locke’s account o f sati ends abruptly with the assertion that “it would be tedious to continue with such examples” o f how, in a bewildering variety o f ways, human conduct fails to conform to the dictates o f a perpetual and universal law o f nature. An indictment o f the ancients, however, concludes this question and offers a final demonstration o f the transgression o f the law o f nature as enacted through sex and gender. Locke bemoans that “the wisest o f the Greeks and Romans . . . [who] admitted others to their own bed chambers, made 155

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available to their friends their wives’ favors, and become purveyors to another’s lust” (7, 197). Thus the conduct o f such worthies is definitive evidence that “the law o f nature can by no means be derived from that agreement which exists among men” regarding even those features o f human existence that are most fundamental and presumably most difficult to misconstrue (7, 197-99). Yet for Locke, the profound differences o f law and conduct that persist among human societies arise not from the admitted obscurity o f the law o f nature or any lapse within that law itself, but rather from the failure o f the majority o f human creatures to abide by the principles o f their epistemological calling. Whether led astray by “either the example o f others or the practices o f their country,” most individuals “are but little concerned about their duty” to know the law o f nature (2,135). Those not falling prey to custom are likely to succumb to the dictates o f their own interests, since there are those who believe “that nothing in nature is binding except insofar as it is something which carries with it some immediate advantage” (11,239). As with the faulty precepts o f custom, however, the criteria o f interest and usefulness do not produce a genuine knowledge o f the law o f nature, but rather allow “all society and trust, the bond o f society . . . [to be] destroyed” (11,247; interpolation added). Therefore this all too common reliance on custom and self-interest rather than reason highlights the weaknesses o f human beings, not that o f the law designed to govern them. As mentioned earlier, the dereliction o f their epistemological duty leaves humankind in a precarious position, both individually and severally. By neglecting to exercise the effort required to learn the law o f nature, humans fail in their individual duty to both obey and give due glory to the God 156

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who created them. The danger that emerges from this profound lapse goes beyond questions o f the fate o f individuals and the possibility for their salvation, however, for the absence o f the law o f nature at the individual level also serves to deny the force o f civil law in society. Hence Locke admonishes that should the law o f nature be abolished, “you overturn at one blow all government among men, [all] authority, rank, and society” (8, 213). To resist the dissolution o f order that the separation o f civil law from the law o f nature portends and that is caused by the epistemological laxity o f humankind, Locke again stresses the importance o f individual duty in a manner that seemingly privileges obedience over knowledge. Unlike the variations that characterize the strength o f individual epistemological efforts, a rather equal level o f obedience is owed by all for “once the will o f a legislator is known to us, or widely enough proclaimed for it to be known, unless there is some obstacle arising in ourselves, we are bound to conform to it and obey it in all respects” (8, 205). For Locke, the imperative to have known laws and thus to lay the groundwork for obedience is seemingly absolute, as suggested by his reference to Draconian legislation: “we read that the laws o f Draco were written in blood, but they were written, so that they could be known” (10, 219).23 Hence because laws promulgated within civil society have the distinct advantage o f being readily legible to all and the right to make and enforce such laws - however harsh or unjust they may be ultimately derives from God, obedience remains paramount. Any refusal to obey (on presumably whatever grounds) has clear consequences for the individual: “those who in

33 Emphasis in the original.

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their conduct and the rectitude o f their lives are unwilling to be led by reason and refuse to acknowledge themselves subject to a superior power are compelled to recognize that they are subject to this power by force and punishments, and to feel the force o f him whose w ill they would refuse to obey” (8,207). In so powerfully asserting the duty to obey, Locke’s argument is suggestive o f the differing voluntarist perspectives associated with figures such as Hobbes and Pufendorf.24 Yet the distinctions Locke draws between the motivations for obedience work to distance his argument from such potentially problematic connections, even if they do not entirely dissolve them. Acknowledging that “obedience is useful to the extent that it averts punishment which must be paid for a crime,” Locke nonetheless insists that human convenience is decidedly not the proper basis for obedience (11,251). Rather, obedience is a distinctly moral duty since “obligation binds [our] conscience and lays a bond upon the mind itself, and thus it is not fear o f punishment that binds us but our determination o f what is right” (8, 207). Indeed, those subject to authority must not “obey a king out o f fear, because he is more powerful and can compel us. For this would be to establish the power o f tyrants, thieves, and pirates; but [we must] out o f conscience” (8,213). Hence although the maintenance o f political order requires subjects to obey the dictates o f civil magistrates, the moral quality o f such acts o f obedience (and perhaps o f governing authorities as well) depends upon the individual comprehension o f what is right - a knowledge itself accessible only through an understanding o f the law o f nature.

24 For a thorough examination o f Locke’s relationship to voluntarism as well as rationalism and hedonism, see James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), especially chapter 6.

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By construing the question o f obedience as a fundamentally moral consideration rather than strictly a matter o f governmental policy, Locke thus ensures that the law o f nature remains a constant force within the admittedly diverse conventional parameters o f civil societies. This notion o f obedience instantiates a vital conceptual cohesion between the law o f nature and civil law, yet the value o f this connection depends on the degree to which human creatures fulfill their epistemological calling - an endeavor presented in the Questions as at best, fraught; at worst, simply ignored. Although Locke sharply condemns the often willful ignorance o f the individual as well as the multitude, at least two potential political challenges that may emerge from the epistemological frailties o f humankind are left to percolate immediately below the surface o f this text. First, concerns regarding the capacity for any given magistrate to correctly apprehend the law o f nature and thus acquire the proper moral grounding for the exercise o f authority are not expressed, but are rather elided by Locke’s repeated insistence on the absolute character o f the strenuous epistemological duty that all are compelled to perform. Second, though conscience is an essential component o f rightful obedience, the possibility that the studious effort inherent to this structure o f obligation may generate differing and perhaps subversive understandings o f the law o f nature is abjured by Locke’s persistent assertion o f the importance o f order - whatever the epistemological legitimacy o f its civil implementation. Yet in his later writings through a different parsing o f the burdens o f moral right and duty within civil society as well as the epistemological parameters that govern such actions, Locke would work to resolve each o f these problems. Whereas the purview o f civil authority is restricted in the Letter Concerning Toleration through, in 159

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part, an acknowledgment o f the inherent limits o f magisterial knowledge, the right to resistence in the Treatises is established, again in part, by an affirmation (albeit narrow) o f the ability o f individuals to judge the legitimacy o f civil authorities and to act accordingly.25 Though this broad gloss suggests that Locke was able to provide answers to the thorny issues o f policy that lurked in the shadows o f the Questions, the epistemological tensions that fostered them were not as readily dispelled. Indeed, Locke’s refiguration o f moral knowledge and its relation to civil society reinforced - if not amplified - the necessity for individuals to fully tend to the epistemological duty that God has given them. This knotty problem would capture Locke’s far more extended attention in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that, no less than the Questions, would be concerned with the pursuit o f an ordered society in the midst o f growing epistemological instability. Knowledge and Fashion Although disparate in many ways, the Essay and the Questions have in common at least one notable textual feature - in each work Locke employs numerous examples drawn from travel literature to demonstrate the often dismal state o f humankind in regard to their epistemological capacities.26 As in the Questions, Locke’s Essay relies on instances o f

25 John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James Tully (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983). For a thorough examination o f the epistemological stakes of the Letter that relates to the arguments presented here, see Kirstie M. McClure, “Difference, Diversity, and the Limits o f Toleration,” Political Theory 18, no. 3 (August 1990). 26 In addition, Locke relied on travel writings collected by Melchisedec Thevenot in both the Questions and the Essay. Locke owned two editions o f Thevenot’s Relations des Divers Voiages Curieitx(Paris, 1663 and 1671) as well as Recueil de Voyages (Paris, 1681) (see The Library o f John Locke, ed. John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Oxford Bibliographical Society, n.s. 13 [Oxford: Oxford (continued...)

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deviant familial and sexual relations to illustrate the extreme moral perversity that human creatures are led to in the absence o f both innate knowledge and, more importantly, the exercise o f right reason.27 The appearances o f sex, gender and the fam ily in the Essay, however, are not confined to the role o f moral exemplar for, as critics such as Catherine Hobbs and William Walker have noted, gender comes to the fore in the now standard edition o f the Essay before one even opens the book.28 In the fourth and fifth editions o f the Essay, the title page bears an epigraph from Ecclesiastes 11.5: “As thou knowest not what is the way ofthe Spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb o f her that is with Child: even so thou knowest not the works o f God, who maketh a ll things.’,29 As Hobbs suggests, this quote serves to emphasize that “the origin o f our knowledge - much as the origin o f our bodies - is an ungraspable, mysterious process” and thus from the very beginning o f the Essay, Locke ties together “epistemology, origins, production, and reproduction” (154). For both Hobbs and Walker, the presence o f gender at the opening o f Locke’s work prefigures his own treatment o f woman, who emerges at other originary moments in the text but is also continually displaced, if not forgotten, because o f the

“ (...continued) University Press, 1965]). 27 See in particular, book I, chapter 3, section 9. Further references to the Essay will be cited in the text by book, chapter and section number. 28 See Catherine Hobbs, “Locke, Disembodied Ideas, and Rhetoric That Matters,” in Bodily Discursions: Gender, Representation, Technologies, ed. Deborah S. Wilson and Christine Moneera Laennec (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997) and William Walker, “Locke Minding Women: Literary History, Gender, and the Essay,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 3 (Spring 1990). Further references to each work will be cited in the text. 29 The quote on the Essay’s title page differs from the King James version only in the addition of the word things to the end o f the verse, that in the latter ends at the word all.

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disruption she is understood to foster. Although Hobbs and Walker provide helpful analyses o f the function o f woman in certain spots in the Essay, the more epistemologically complex relations o f gender and sexuality developed by Locke in other locations go unexamined. Yet togther with the examples considered by Hobbs and Walker, these additional textual sites allow for an examination o f not only the kind o f instability associated with gender, sex and the family similarly described in the Questions, but also the epistemological trouble it leads to that culm inates in that most unruly o f human creations - the law o f fashion. The first o f the two instances cited by Hobbs and Walker in which woman plays a key role occurs shortly after Locke’s illustration o f the unsettling diversity o f human affairs via travelers’ accounts. Towards the close o f the same chapter that is devoted to the refutation o f the existence o f innate principles, Locke argues that people are unfortunately prone to cling to principles based not on reason, but rather “that have been derived from no better original, than the Superstition o f a Nurse, or the Authority o f an Old Woman” (1.3.22). As Walker also notes, although “length o f time and consent o f Neighbours” are part o f the process by which doctrines “how remote soever from Reason” become entrenched, women are clearly charged with starting individuals o ff on the wrong epistemological path (1.3.21-22). This accusation is echoed many pages later in regard to the wrong association o f ideas, for though “the Ideas o f Goblines and Sprights have really no more to do with Darkness than Light; yet let but a foolish Maid inculcate these often on the Mind o f a Child, and raise them there together, possibly he shall never be able to separate them again so long as he lives” (2.33.10). Yet what is 162

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significant in both passages is not simply that different women are blamed for the inculcation o f false knowledge, but also that women are posited as the first things in the world children come to truly know. “The Ideas o f the Nurse, and the Mother, are well framed in their Minds; and, like Pictures o f them there, represent only those Individuals” and as a result, “a Child certainly knows, that a Stranger is not its Mother” (3.3.7; 4.7.9). As Walker argues, the presentation o f women in the Essay in these passages and others entails a degree o f irony, made all the more acute by what he refers to as “the fade o f the female” (255). For Walker, the particular figures o f the nurse and the mother become increasingly eclipsed by the other people and things that a child encounters, a process facilitated by the development o f the general term “man” that comes to represent hum ankind in general, though not woman in particular. In comparing the Essay to the

Treatises, Walker argues that Locke “neglects to observe how the general name ‘Man’ eclipses the female just as the term ‘paternal power’ negates the mother’s claim to parental power which, according to Locke, belongs to her” (257). As put somewhat differently by Hobbs, the displacement o f women by man may be read as evidence that “Locke’s Essay is constructed on universal principles that are, in the final analysis, abstract and male” while “woman and the body remain bracketed, relegated to the origins” (160). If representations o f women - and the false knowledge they are portrayed as producing - fade into the background, the same cannot be said o f woman and femininity. Walker argues that the virtual erasure o f female figures is in some ways counterpoised by Locke’s reliance on femininity and sexually freighted language (e.g., the use o f terms 163

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such as acquaintance and lay) to figure “the mind as a space o f socio-erotic activity” and knowledge itself as the object o f (heterosexual male) desire (247). More interestingly, Hobbs suggests that though “woman and the body are distanced from Locke’s Essay . . . their traces remain to ravel the edges o f the text he has scrupulously knotted together” (153). In particular, Hobbs reads Locke’s denunciation o f rhetoric - set forth in oftquoted chapter 10 o f Book 3, in which eloquence is compared with the “fair sex” - as an attempt to “construct a closed, masculine space for philosophy apart from the deceit o f embodied feminine rhetoric” (157). Although Hobbs acknowledges that this delineation o f discrete gendered domains is continually subverted by the return o f supposedly repressed rhetoric throughout the Essay, she also asserts that “Locke’s quest for control and mastery logically associates language with women, desire, and the body and enacts prohibitions against their free circulations” (159). Yet despite these constraints, woman and desire do continue to travel through the pages o f the Essay and emerge in at least two rather curious and epistemologically telling ways largely elided by Hobbs and Walker. The first o f such episodes occurs in one o f Locke’s treatments o f mixed modes, which are defined as complex ideas “made by the Mind, but made very arbitrarily, made without Patterns, or reference to any real Existence” (3.5.3). To illustrate the process by which mixed modes are made, Locke does not employ as examples abstract concepts such as faith or charity that draw his attention elsewhere, but instead primarily focuses on adultery, incest and parricide. In support o f his claim that mixed modes are generated without reference to “outward Things,” Locke asks the following: “To know whether his Idea o f Adultery, or Incest, be right, w ill a Man seek it any where amongst Things 164

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existing? Or is it true, because any one has been Witness to such an Action” (3.5.3). For Locke, the answer is no and it simply “suffices here, that Men have put together such a Collection o f complex Ideas. . . whether ever any such Action were committed in rerum natura, or no” (3.5.3). Though mixed modes are therefore posited as “Creatures o f the Understanding’ without any inherent connection to nature, this does not mean that they consist o f ideas “jumbled together without any reason at all” for people only create mixed mode terms for those things “they find they have occasion to have names for, in the ordinary occurrence o f their Affairs” (3 .5.5, 7). Yet Locke’s vision o f the ordinary course o f human existence is seemingly rather grim and complex, since the first example following this statement concerns parricide. “I f they join the Idea o f Killing, the Idea o f Father, or Mother, and so make a distinct Species from Killing a Man’s Son, or Neighbour, it is because o f the different heinousness o f the Crime . . . and therefore they find it necessary to mention it by a distinct Name” (3.5.7). This is not the only moral and legal - transgression that requires its own word, for “though the Ideas o f Mother and Daughter are so differently treated, in reference to the Idea o f Killing . . . yet in respect o f Carnal Knowledge, they are both taken in under Incest; and that still for the convenience o f expressing under one name, and reckoning o f one Species, such unclean mixtures as have a peculiar turpitude beyond others; and this to avoid Circumlocutions, and tedious Descriptions” (3.5.7). Thus for Locke, the creation o f complex ideas is not simply tied to gender and desire, but is rather exemplified by those aspects o f familial and sexual relations that are, in a number o f ways, most disruptive o f order in the world. The importance o f sexuality and gender in the production o f mixed modes does 165

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not end here, however, as Locke returns to these themes in the following chapter and presents them within a distinct narrative form. In contrast to Locke’s accounts o f the origin o f knowledge in children, this story begins not with a nurse or a mother, but rather with Adam and Eve. Adam, in “a strange Country, with all Things new, and unknown about him . . . observes Lantech more melancholy than usual, and imagines it to be from a suspicion he has o f his Wife Adah (whom he most ardently loved) that she had too much Kindness for another Man” (3.6.44).30 Locke states that “Adam discourses these his Thoughts to Eve” and in these discussions, Adam “makes use o f two new Words, Kinneah and Niouph” that stand, respectively, for a husband’s suspicion o f his wife’s sexual disloyalty and for the act o f adultery itself (3.6.44). Yet Adam eventually discovers that he has made a “mistake

for he finds Lantech’s Trouble proceeded from

having kill’d a Man” and not from Adah’s alleged sexual misdeeds (3.6.44). Though the words Adam created through his conversations with Eve o f what he had only imagined to be true therefore turn out to have no immediate purpose, they nonetheless “by degrees grew into common use” (3.6.45). The currency o f these words becomes part o f Adam’s legacy, for “those therefore o f Adam's Children, that found these two Words . . . in familiar use, could not take them for insignificant sounds: but must needs conclude, they stood for something” (3.6.45). Moreover, should these children wish to use these words “as Names o f Species already establish’d and agreed on, they were obliged to conform the

30 Although Locke may have borrowed this story from any number o f sources, the King James version o f the Bible is not, as far as I have discovered, one o f them. Though Lamech is stated as having another wife in addition to Adah and to both whom he confesses murder o f an unnamed man, no mention is made o f adultery (see Genesis 4.19 and 23).

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Ideas, in their Minds, signified by these Names, to the Ideas, that they stood for in other Men’s Minds” (3.6.45). Even if some definition should be agreed upon, however, it was “liable to be inadequate, as being very apt. . . not to be exactly conformable to the Ideas in other Men’s Minds” thereby producing another linguistic problem that Locke suggests can only be remedied by further explication among those seeking to use certain words (3.6.45). What is o f importance here is not merely that contentions arise over words designed to represent certain problematic sexual and gender relations, but also that the initial creation and subsequent circulation o f these terms has a significant place within the epistemological history o f humankind. Within this narrative, gender and sexuality are not relied on to simply figure the disruption o f order that (as noted by Hobbs) is evident in Locke’s feminization o f rhetoric, but rather are present in complex ways when individuals first exert the epistemological effort required to create complex concepts that literally give voice to the order - and disorder - that characterizes their lives. Although Locke’s Adamic narrative provides rather different notions o f woman and sexuality than found in the originary moments examined by Hobbs and Walker, both sets o f accounts arguably come to rest in the same epistemologically troubled territory. Whereas this trajectory is readily legible in, for example, the episode o f the maid leading a child perhaps permanently astray from the path o f reasoned knowledge, this same development is both more complex and more difficult to discern in the story that begins with Adam’s imaginary o f adultery. Yet at a general level, one epistemological quandary emerges fairly clearly in this narrative from Locke’s insistence that ideas o f sexual practices (as well as the gender and familial relations he identified in the preceding 167

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chapter) are mixed modes and therefore are creatures o f potentially diverse understandings. Though the potential for such epistemological variance inheres in all mixed modes, the dissension this may cause in regard to gender takes on a significant moral shading for notions o f an ordered world - such as those articulated in seventeenthcentury England - whose structures hinged, in various ways, on the certainty o f gender and familial dynamics.31 In terms o f Locke’s work in particular, however, a more profound problem arises around the precise manner in which mixed mode terms for sex and gender are created and acquire their linguistic currency. Like all mixed modes, Adam’s ideas o f adultery are based on his “own Imagination, not taken from the Existence o f any thing” and the words he produces attain an established meaning only through the consent o f others (3.6.46). In this specific instance, knowledge o f certain kinds o f sexual misconduct and familial disorder depends on how individuals agree to define the words used to represent them. Although for Locke this process o f linguistic agreement is an integral component o f the generation o f complex ideas, it also instills into the Essay the same kind o f consensus-oriented form o f epistemology that he excoriates at length in the Questions. Moreover, as described earlier, Locke relies in the Questions on examples o f what he regards as morally abhorrent sexual, familial and gender relations to demonstrate just how far knowledge derived from human consensus is likely to stray from the realm o f right reason. Put differently, for Locke these deviant practices illustrate

31 For considerations o f such models, see Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History o f the Family (Chapel Hill: University o f North Carolina Press, 19878); and Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

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the disturbing divide that may exist between the order ensured by natural law and the conventions o f civil society. In the Essay, however, comparable sorts o f immoral conduct have a very different - and arguably more troubling - function within Locke’s epistemological framework that is linked in increasingly complex ways with consent and things o f human (rather than godly) design. Locke himse lf was not unaware o f the epistemological challenges posed by all kinds o f words and, as John Marshall and others have noted, he argued that “were the imperfections o f Language, as the Instrument o f Knowledge, more thoroughly weighed, a great many o f the Controversies that make such a noise in the World, would o f themselves cease, and the way to Knowledge, and, perhaps, Peace, too, lie a great deal opener than it does” ( 3 .9 .2 1).32 Yet the noise created by humans themselves is not so easily quieted for, as Locke explains, “Fashion and the common Opinion having settled wrong Notions, and education and custom ill habits, the just values o f things are misplaced, and the palates o f Men corrupted” (2 .2 1 .6 9 ). Although this passage is in many ways similar to concerns expressed in the Questions regarding how generally accepted ideas and practices undermine reason, one word in particular places some significant distance between these two works - namely, fashion. Unlike the Questions in which a strict notion o f hierarchy and an attendant web o f stringent obligations work to at least cover - if not fully bridge - the gap between an epistemology based on reason and the false truths generated through consensus, the importance o f agreement among individuals for key aspects o f Locke’s epistemology (i.e., the creation o f mixed modes)

32 This passage is also quoted in parts by Marshall, 354. 169

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and his attendant understanding o f the role o f fashion seriously complicate how the same problem may be addressed in the Essay. In a manner again akin to the Questions, Locke argues that the common measure o f virtue and vice “which by a secret and tacit consent establishes it self in the several Societies, Tribes and Clubs o f Men in the World: whereby several actions come to find Credit or Disgrace amongst them, according to Judgement, Maxims, or Fashions o f that place” rather than in concordance with the precepts o f right reason (2.28.10). Yet again unlike the Questions, standards based on social consensus are not simply inconvenient (in the complete early modem sense o f that word), but rather constitute their own distinct law. In contrast to the two kinds o f law (natural and civil) that occupy Locke’s attention in the Questions, the legal terrain o f the Essay is more complex. “The Laws that Men generally refer their Action to, to judge o f their Rectitude, or Obliquity, seem to me to be these three. 1. The Divine Law. 2. The Civil Law. 3. The Law o f Opinion or Reputation, if I may so call it,” although elsewhere, Locke refers to the last o f these as the “Law o f Fashion” (2.28. 10,12). In his description o f the law o f fashion, Locke is initially careful to suggest that although the force o f this law accounts for variations in

how virtue and vice are defined, “they for the most part [were] kept the same every where. For since nothing can be more natural, than to encourage with Esteem and Reputation that, wherein every one finds his Advantage; and to blame and discountenance the contrary” (2.28.11). From this perspective, moral actions “every-where correspond with the unchangeable Rule o f Right and Wrong, which the Law o f God hath established” and hence “whereby even in the Corruption o f Manners, the true Boundaries o f the Law 170

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o f nature, which ought to be the Rule o f Vertue and Vice, were pretty well preserved” (2.28.11). Yet in the very next section, this picture o f apparently easy coexistence among various laws is altered when Locke somewhat grimly observes that the largest part o f humankind “govern themselves chiefly, if not solely, by this Law o f Fashion; and so they do that, which keeps them in Reputation with their Company, little regard the Laws o f God, or the Magistrate” (2.28.12). Although many may wrongly believe that they may avoid the penalties that come with breaking the dictates o f natural or civil law, “no Man scapes the Punishment o f their Censure and Dislike, who offends against the Fashion and Opinion o f the Company he keeps” (2.28.12). For Locke, the power o f this law cannot be understated since “no Body . . . can live in Society, under the constant Dislike, and ill Opinion o f his Familiars, and those he converses with. This is a Burthen too heavy for humane Sufferance” (2.28.12). Thus in the Essay, Locke ascribes to fashion and social convention a force capable o f unraveling the fabric o f natural order so carefully woven together in the Questions and that is increasingly difficult to mend in midst o f a growing divide between the realms o f the natural and artifice. Yet Locke’s recognition o f the strength o f the law o f fashion should in no way be read as constituting a denial o f the possibility for maintaining order in the world - if anything, the disconcerting influence o f this law as explicated in the Essay serves to increase the considerable epistemological stakes so rigorously presented in the Questions as well as other writings. What the role o f the law o f fashion does suggest, however, is that disorder appears in guises different from - though not necessarily unrelated to - the deception ascribed to feminine rhetoric or the false ideas instilled in the mind o f a child 171

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by a maid or old woman. Although, rhetoric and faulty childhood beliefs may well aid and abet the the existence o f the law o f fashion, its primary source and the fuel that sustains it is arguably found in relation to the notions o f sexuality and gender described in Locke’s Adamic narrative. In this story that illustrates the creation o f mixed modes, though disorder seems to emerge through a woman’s sexual misconduct, Locke clearly states that this is only a figment o f Adam’s imagination and the words he produces gain linguistic currency only through the agreement o f others. Hence although they exist at the very core o f this account, what is epistemologically most problematic is not the disruption that is ascribed to gender and sexual practice, but rather the roles o f individual imagination and social consensus in the creation o f complex ideas.33 Although such ideas are necessary to give shape to aspects o f human existence, they are very much creatures o f human artifice and acquire their use through the very kind o f social agreement that ultimately develops into the law o f fashion. Moreover, mixed modes are important not only to the ordinary course o f human affairs, but also to philosophy that, as Hobbs and Walker argue, is portrayed by Locke as the masculine sphere o f mental activity par excellence. Thus the masculine endeavor o f philosophy - first pursued by Adam - and the linguistic constructs o f human design upon which it depends produce a form o f multifaceted disorder that is arguably far more problematic than the natural waywardness so frequently ascribed to woman and femininity throughout the seventeenth century.

33 For examinations o f Locke’s concerns about imagination and potential societal disarray, see Constantine George Caffentzis, Clipped Coins, Abused Words and Civil Government: Locke's Philosophy o f Money (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1989) and Udey Singh Mehta, The Anxiety o f Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in Locke’s Political Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

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Shaped by a widening split between natural and convention, these understandings o f disorder will play prominent roles in Locke’s efforts to come to terms with the myriad uncertainties caused by money and its deeply contested meanings. Closing Segue Before considering in detail the various conceptual fissures Locke negotiates in his monetary writings, this chapter closes with a return to McClure’s notion o f an architecture o f order and her perspective on the role o f money within this carefully constructed edifice. As many critics have noted, the invention o f money in the Second Treatise fosters difficulties largely because it allows individuals to accumulate more than they need or could use. For McClure, “with money’s elimination o f the direct use or sufficiency criterion, and with its consequent disruption o f the practical principles that guided the conformity o f human action with the demands o f the law o f nature, the designed complementarity o f law and right, virtue and convenience, necessarily becomes problematic.”34 Although the acquisition o f private property remains a natural right after the creation o f money, “the attenuation o f the relationship between the exercise o f such individual liberties and their social consequences severs their previous convergence with the convenience or harmony o f the whole” (180). As a result, money not only unmoors individuals from those principles that ensured certain knowledge o f the limits o f property, but in addition “the political power o f each to judge what is suitable for preservation and convenience is similarly disordered” (211). To counter this dangerous uncertainty , McClure argues that the primary task o f Locke’s notion o f civil power is to “reconstitute

34 McClure, Judging Rights, 180. Further references will be cited in the text.

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through civil law the possibility o f moral order once guaranteed by the epistemology o f right” that was undone by the development o f money (213). Yet as this chapter has demonstrated, a fair degree o f instability inheres even within Locke’s most strident articulations o f order that stems from epistemological trouble associated not with money, but with the frailties and failings o f human creatures. The introduction o f money certainly exacerbates these difficulties, but rather than regard Locke’s understanding o f an ordered universe as a harmonious whole that is undone by the arrival o f currency, it is also possible to see it as an always already fragile construction fraught with substantial points o f tension. Within this rather shaky landscape o f epistemological contentions, Locke must come to terms with the many challenges - moral, political and semiotic, to name but a few - that money helps bring to the surface.

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CHAPTER FOUR “HIS NUTS FOR A PIECE OF METAL” FETISHISM IN LOCKE’S MONETARY WRITINGS For all o f the upheaval caused by the events o f the Interregnum, governmental policies concerning currency and trade underwent remarkably few alterations.1 This is decidedly not to suggest that the years between 1640 and 1660 did not bear witness to commercial turmoil, as evidenced most clearly in the usually temporary dislocation o f portions o f the population and consequent interruptions in local as well as international circuits o f trade. Obversely, the Commonwealth in particular garnered som e commercial success through the passage o f the navigation acts that resulted in English shipping gaining the upper hand over the rival Dutch - an achievement Stuart governments had only been able to imagine. On the whole, however, “whatever the limited consequences for international trade o f the navigation act, the revolution had patentiy not brought with it an expansive new economic framework.”2 More substantial reformations in how the English government managed its own finances as well as how it formulated broader trade policies only began to take root during the restoration period. Some o f the most remarkable changes occurred in the Treasury that, as a result o f orders issued by the Privy 1 The title for this chapter is a quotation from Locke’s Second Treatise, section 46 (John Locke, Two Treatises o f Government, ed. Peter Laslett [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988]). 2 Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603-1658 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 321. See also C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500-1700, v. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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Council at the urging o f Treasury officials, acquired significant new powers. The order o f 1668 mandated, in part, that virtually all warrants for the regulation o f governmental revenues and its expenditure had to at least pass through the Treasury - if not actually gain its approval - before implementation, and the existence o f secret accounts was to be severely restricted. These and other parts o f this order marked such a significant change for the role o f the Treasury that it “was copied out on a board and hung up on the wall o f the Treasury Chamber.”3 Yet however important the detailed regulations o f 1668 were, they did not acquire their full bureaucratic force until 1676, when the Privy Council ordered that “every department had to have Treasury permission to spend any money it had received.”4 Along with alterations in the personnel structure, these orders served as the basis for the emergence o f the Treasury as an increasingly effective and influential administrative apparatus during the latter portion o f the seventeenth century, a feature woefully absent in earlier governments. Yet despite such developments at the upper levels o f English bureaucracy, monetary problems persisted as the Treasury encountered difficulties with local officials over the enforcement o f its dictates, especially regarding the perennial problem o f the collection o f taxes. In addition, administrators struggled to gain control over administration o f the mint that, unlike the Treasury, had undergone little in the way o f reform. These problems were further complicated by the increasing use o f instruments o f

3 Stephen B. Baxter, The Development o f the Treasury 1660-1702 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1957), 13. 4 Ibid., 68.

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credit as well as continuing trouble with the quality and quantity o f money in circulation. By the advent o f the 1690's, England was once again faced with a serious currency crisis that, as in the 1620's, fostered significant contestations over the meanings o f money and exchange. As earlier in the century, these discussions occurred across a variety o f textual venues and such works appeared in far greater number than in the 1620's, due in part to the easing o f publishing restrictions. Yet the differences between the texts from these two crises involved more than just their number, for the languages relied on to express commercial worries in each period varied and this may be attributed to two broadly construed conceptual shifts. First, in contrast to the more morally and ethically freighted rubrics that had predominated earlier monetary disputes, the mid-seventeenth century saw the emergence o f a new framework for examining commercial matters that was frequently termed political arithmetic (and would later become political economy). Rather than focusing on the “disruptions, social dislocations, and human costs o f the emerging market system,” political arithmetic investigated the less personal processes that could be understood to structure various circuits o f trade and exchange.5 Though the older and newer forms for analyzing commerce continued to coexist, the second shift - that in political languages - was, at least on the surface, rather more stark. By the 1690's, the political vocabulary o f the body politic and its architectonics o f analogy had been largely put to rest in the wake o f the discursive rise o f conventional constructs such as consent

s Kirstie M. McClure, Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits o f Consent (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 165. For an examination o f the development o f political arithmetic, see Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

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and contract that, in turn, opened the way to figure currency and exchange along less corporeal lines. Hence both o f these changes fostered reevaluations o f money, governance, and their relations, and, as a result, generated sharper distinctions among those engaged in the 1690's currency debates than had been the case in similar contentions earlier in the century. A central figure in these heated discussions was John Locke, whose earliest writings on money date from the late 1660's yet whose published works on the subject first appeared in the 1690's. Shaped by the complexities o f their historical context, Locke writings on currency grapple with growing monetary uncertainty that is compounded by his own efforts to maintain a precarious balance between the realms o f nature and convention that, as demonstrated in chapter three, is central to his understanding o f a rightly ordered universe. Moreover, this knot o f problems produces its own textual challenges for, like the I620's trade tracts, Locke’s texts evince the confusion and anxieties money seemed to inevitably provoke in the early modem period. Hence this chapter seeks to unpack some o f the linguistic and conceptual intricacies that characterize Locke’s monetary writings by exam ining how they depend upon features historically associated with femininity to figure money and the worries it generates - namely, a figurative language o f fluidity and its attendant trope, metonymy. Through a focus on the operations o f signification, Locke’s overall understanding o f money across various texts may be construed as being structured by a process o f fetishism that permits a negotiation o f multiple theoretical tensions. In particular, Locke’s fetishistic fixation on money as silver may be read as being articulated through metonymic and fluid constructs that 178

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enable him to disavow the political and epistemological anxieties brought on by increasingly abstract systems o f exchange and notions o f governance. A close reading o f Locke’s fetishism serves to not only make the pu llin g details o f his monetary writings more theoretically salient, but also demonstrates the importance o f modes o f signification aligned with the feminine within a particular historical context. Money’s Perversions The use o f the conceptual apparatus o f the fetish in various accountings o f the historical adventures o f money has long been commonplace, especially in the wake o f Karl Marx’s identification o f the “riddle o f the money fetish. . . visible and dazzling to our eyes.”6 The real “magic o f money” is that it is “not a symbol” but rather serves as a “crystallization o f the exchange-value o f commodities” and in so doing, becomes the privileged object o f human fascination or, in other words, a fetish.7 As a fetish, money takes on a “perverted appearance” that carries a non-imaginary “mystification that is characteristic o f all social forms o f labor.”8 The perversity and obsessive fascination that Marx ascribed to the fetish became in turn the object o f Freud’s investigations. In his explication o f fetishism, Freud argues that any given fetish serves to disavow the threat o f castration as allegedly represented by the perception o f a woman’s phallic lack. Through the logic o f fetishism, the fetishist does not simply deny a perceived fear, but also recognizes its “reality” - however unwanted - through the process o f displacement. By 6 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 187. 7 Ibid.; and idem, A Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy, ed. Maurice Dobb (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 49,48. 8 Contribution, 49.

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fixating on a particular object or quality, the fetishist finds a substitute for what appears to be lacking and thereby reaches a compromise “between the weight o f the unwelcome perception and the force o f his counter-wish.”9 As a result, the fetish “remains a token o f triumph over the threat o f castration and a protection against it” by successfully mediating the intense anxiety brought on by the apprehension o f a profound danger, however perceived.10 Recently, Jean-Joseph Goux’s work has sought to bring together the analyses o f both Freud and Marx to develop a more detailed examination o f money’s perverse association with the fetish. In so doing, Goux describes the history o f money as one “marked by a progression toward abstraction and convention” during which “increasingly abstract signs are gradually substituted” for items with material value.11 Following Marx, Goux argues that the emergence o f this form o f symbolization occurs via a “shift from the instrument to the fetish, from the fetish to the symbol, and from the symbol to the simple sign” (49). Within this movement toward a fully abstract conception o f money, the fetish thus functions as a discrete stage where the overestimation o f a privileged object (e.g., silver) serves to moderate the anxieties brought on by the rise o f increasingly symbolic modes o f signification. Put differently according to Goux’s adaptation o f Lacan, “fetishism is a means o f linking the imaginary to the object, thus o f clinging to the real”

9 Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition o f the Complete Psychological Works o f Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), 154. Freud’s works will hereafter be cited as SE. 10 Ibid. “ Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 49. Further references will be cited in the text.

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(158). Money’s fetish stage therefore allows the subject to grasp onto some aspect o f the material imaginary that is about to be lost with accession to the symbolic order.12 Moreover, the point o f hesitation marked by the fetish is decidedly gendered because it is located betwixt what Goux interprets as the masculine symbolic order and the feminine imaginary. This ambivalence is only temporary, however, for the subject must recognize the abstracting elements o f the symbolic order to attain subjectivity and once this has occurred, “the fetish is no longer necessary as the crutch on which valorizing desire must lean” (159). For Goux, the fetish is but a moment o f token resistance to the loss accession to the symbolic demands and hence money’s fetish stage as well as its connection to the imaginary vanishes with the presumably inevitable assertion o f the (paternal/masculine) forces o f the symbolic signification over the (maternal/feminine) imaginary. Although his analysis is structurally provocative, Goux’s notion o f the fetish is rather static and lacks some o f the flexibility necessary for a closer consideration o f how fetishism and its gendered associations might operate within texts - such as Locke’s written during those historical moments when understandings o f money are particularly fraught. A more robust approach to fetishism, however, is offered by E. L. McCallum who regards the fetish as less a reified thing than as a part o f a process with significant epistemological features. Like Goux, McCallum emphasizes the role o f the fetish as “the

12 Goux’s schema construes the imaginary and the symbolic as fairly discrete stages rather than as mutually imbricated orders o f signification. In contrast, references to these terms in this chapter work with the understanding that although the symbolic order exists as the “register o f language, social exchange and radical intersubjectivity,” the imaginary as the realm o f identification “continues to coexist with it” (Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985], 59).

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thing which provides reassurance and enables difference - sexual or ontological - to be negotiated.”13 Yet unlike Goux, McCallum focuses on the ambivalence inherent to the terms fetish, penis and phallus in Freud’s work in order to argue that fetishism involves more than a series o f simple substitutions designed to deny an intense fear.14 In addition to stressing the constructed quality o f these concepts that contrasts with more deterministic approaches to fetishism, McCallum highlights Freud’s own variation in “emphasis in the description o f fetishism from the fetish object. . . to the function o f that object in sexuality” (36). This important shift allows “for the development o f a broader understanding o f fetishism as an epistemological function, as a strategy, because it directs our attention away from the thing to its employment” (36). For McCallum, fetishism’s epistemological import derives from its ability to bridge the “gap between subjects and objects by disregarding the injunction that relations to objects should be rational and unclouded by emotion” (109). As a “deviant form o f knowledge,” fetishism sharply diverges from traditional philosophical ideals o f epistemology that privilege sharp distinctions between subject and object. Fetishism may be used therefore to illuminate “how subjects negotiate the world through objects, desire, and knowledge” in ways not

13 E . L. McCallum, Object Lessons: How to Do Things With Fetishism (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1999), 23. Further references will be cited in the text.

14 McCallum is o f course not the only critic to examine the ambiguities in Freud’s writings on fetishism. Other feminist works that inform McCallum’s work on the fetish as well as my own include Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice o f Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Elizabeth Grosz, “Lesbian Fetishism?” differences 3, no. 2 (1991); and Naomi Schor, “Female Fetishism: The Case o f George Sand,” Poetics Today 6, no. 1-2 (1985) and idem, “Fetishism and Its Ironies,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 17 (Fall-Winter 1988-89). The essays of Grosz and Schor are included in a broader collection o f analyses o f fetishism; see Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds., Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

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necessarily confined to the realm o f sexual difference (44-5). Though, like Goux, McCallum posits the fetish as that which compensates for loss or fear o f it, she asserts that this function is hardly absolute since “fetishism is a mastery that is grounded in an ambivalent sense o f knowing better, knowing that one’s mastery is limited” (141).15 Though primarily focused on sexuality and gender, McCallum’s analysis o f fetishism opens some critical space within which to examine the anxieties that Goux suggests emerge from contentions over changing notions o f currency. These sorts o f worries are particularly evident in the intricacies o f Locke’s monetary writings, for they vividly display many o f the conceptual tensions that characterized discussions about money throughout the seventeenth century. To bring the process o f fetishism present in Locke’s text to the fore, particular attention must be paid to how Locke articulates his anxieties about currency through a language o f fluidity that, as argued in chapter two, possesses significantly gendered connotations within the specific historical context o f early modem England. Yet the manner in which such connotations find expression is by no means static for, though traces o f a figurative language very similar to that found in the 1620's trade tracts appear throughout Locke’s texts, his reliance on fluidity to characterize the troubled monetary system o f the I690's is also discemable at the semiotic

15 For a different reading o f loss in a period closer to Locke’s that also addresses fetishism, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering ofMelancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics o f Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). For an analysis that employs a broad notion o f fetishism to the works o f one o f Locke’s contemporaries, see Joel Reed, “Robert Hooke’s Academic Patriarch, or, Fetishizing the Restoration State,” Genre 28, no. 3 (Fall 1995).

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level through the movements o f metonymy.16 In this regard, certain tropes o f fluidity are somewhat less overtly present on the textual surface o f Locke’s writings than o f those earlier works on commerce that depended on liquidity to figure the often corporeal flux ascribed to money and the disorders o f all lands it was understood to cause in the body politic. By contrast, the rather more subtle operations o f fluidity in Locke’s writings are more closely tied to a broader, epistemologically imbued rubric o f signification with its own moral and political valences shaped by the specific historical circumstances o f the late seventeenth century. In part, this includes a different relationship between gender and politics; for, unlike the political vocabulary o f the body politic and its prominent ties to corporeality and the household, the position o f gender in regard to the languages o f contract and consent is rather more ambiguous.17 Despite these differences, however, Locke’s arguments concerning money - like those o f his predecessors - both depend upon and are challenged by the often unpredictable fluidity they put into circulation. An avenue through which to consider the particular rhetorical difficulties posed by

16 Throughout this chapter, metonymy and metaphor are used in ways broadly consonant with Lacan’s adaptation o f Roman Jakobson’s work and especially Luce Irigaray’s subsequent interpretations. Metaphor is therefore understood as the trope associated with condensation and substitution, while metonymy is linked with contiguity and displacement. See notes below for specific references to Irigaray and Jakobson. Lacan’s formulations o f metaphor and metonymy may primarily be found in Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) and The Psychoses 1955-1956, The Seminar o f Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Book HI; trans. Russell Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993). 17 On the relations o f gender to contract in regard to Locke and the seventeenth century, see Teresa Brennan and Carole Pateman, ‘“ Mere Auxiliaries to the Commonwealth’: Women and the Origins o f Liberalism,” Political Studies 27, no. 2 (1979); Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth-Century English Thought,” Western Political Quarterly 23, no. 1 (March 1979); and Gordon Schochet, “The Significant Sounds o f Silence: The Absence o f Women from the Political Thought o f Sir Robert Filmer and John Locke (or, ‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’),” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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fluidity in Locke’s texts - and the fetishism it structures - is offered by Luce Irigaray’s work, who asserts that “historically the properties o f fluids have been abandoned to the feminine” because the structure o f language itself maintains "a complicity o f long standing between rationality and a mechanics o f solids alone ”ls The preferred relation between rationality and solids, as well as the province o f masculine privilege it sustains, threatens to be undone through the recognition or articulation o f feminine fluidity. Such liquid features are therefore m inim ized or idealized “so as to keep it/them from jamming the works o f the theoretical machine.”19 As a result o f this occlusion, conceptualizing the implications o f the historic privileging o f solid over fluids is made quite difficult by an “historical lag in elaborating a ‘theory ’ o f fluids"20 Yet not only is fluidity itself elided, but its subsumption by a masculine solidity generates a specific rhetorical effect evident in the “privilege granted to metaphor (a quasi solid) over metonymy (which is much more closely allied to fluids).”21 The rhetorical antinomy poses its own challenge to pursuing alternative critical approaches for, as Roman Jakobson suggests, metonymy “easily defies interpretation” and consequently “nothing comparable to the rich literature on metaphor can be cited for the theory o f metonymy.”22 Hence for Irigaray, the task remains to

18 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 116, 107. 19 Ibid., 107. 20 Ibid., 106. 21 Ibid., 110. 22 Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals o f Language (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1956), 81.

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develop different reading practices that do not simply “re-marks [sic] a historical ‘inattention’ to fluids” but instead give voice to alternative or historically obscured modes o f signification.23 Irigaray’s linguistic critique thus provides an analytical perspective through which to consider how Locke’s reliance on a fluid figurative language and the privileging o f a certain trope produces a decidedly gendered monetary discourse. When paired with an attunement to the complexities o f context, such an approach allows for a reading o f Locke’s texts that not only seeks to account for differing levels o f signification but also the historical circumstances that helped shape them. This kind o f analysis, however, offers something other than an analysis o f how the fluidity associated with historically specific understandings o f femininity works to rhetorically figure a compelling form o f fetishism within Locke’s monetary writings. Rather, by taking up some o f the feminist strategies delineated in chapter one and reading Locke’s works both with and against their semiotic and historical grain, features o f these texts often occluded from critical view by the more exclusive elements o f certain forms o f historiography and political theory are able to the surface. More specifically, the reading o f Locke pursued here seeks to illuminate how diverse modes o f signification operate within texts published during a period frequently regarded as the founding site o f distinctly modem political and economic vocabularies. Through this sort o f feminist reading, the myriad concerns that are woven throughout Locke’s texts - semiotic, epistemological, political - acquire a distinct theoretical saliency which demonstrates that the monetary crisis o f the 1690's

23 Irigaray, This Sex, 110, 106-07.

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involved much more than the particular fate o f some shabby silver coins. A Context o f Crisis At the close o f the seventeenth century, England’s monetary system was in a shambles o f no small proportion. Plagued by the widespread practice o f clipping (whereby coins were shaved o f some o f their precious metal) and out o f sync with international money markets, by the mid-1690's English currency was on the verge o f collapse for the second time in less than seventy years. This monetary morass was further complicated by the increasing expenses o f war with France and the illegal smuggling o f precious metals, factors that combined to generate the last and arguably most critical debate concerning money during the seventeenth century. Since “there had not been a general recoinage since 1601 and the hammered silver shillings had been clipped for at least half a century,” the ill state o f the coin and its possible remedies were the subject o f much discussion in various texts ranging from more formal pamphlets to broadside ballads.24 Despite the afore mentioned reformations o f the Treasury as well as the founding o f the Bank o f England in 1694, the deterioration o f the currency by the mid1690's was so great as to result in a public lack o f faith in the acceptability o f the coin then in circulation. In his 1695 proposal for recoinage, then Secretary to the Treasury William Lowndes evoked the severity o f the situation quite vividly. “|T]n consequence o f

24 Appleby, Economic Thought, 217. The number o f texts published on monetary affairs during the I690's is considerable, especially when compared with the quantity o f works published during the crisis o f the 1620's. For a fairly exhaustive bibliography o f some 600 more formal texts on commercial matters, see John Keith Horsefield, British Monetary Experiments 1650-1710 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, I960). Popular writings on money were similarly numerous and include Moneys Mischievous Pilgrimage. Or; Some Considerations Touching the ill State o f the Coyn o f the Kingdom (London: n.p., 1695) and [L. Meriton], Pecunice Obediunt Omnia (London: By John White tor the author, 1696).

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the vitiating, diminishing, and counterfeiting o f the current monies, it is come to pass, that great contentions do daily arise amongst the king’s subjects, in fairs, markets, shops, and other places throughout the kingdom, about the passing or refusing o f the same, to the disturbance o f the public peace.”25 Action o f some sort clearly needed to be taken in order to prevent a total collapse o f English trade as w ell as public security. Arguments over recoinage proposals were particularly heated, in part because the coinage debates o f the 1690's brought questions concerning the value and very definition o f money to a prominence not seen since the commercial crisis o f the early 1620's. Given the difficulty involved “in finding a definition o f money that would be adequate to the many new roles it played,” this was no small or lightly taken task.26 Concerns regarding the definition o f currency and its role in society were indeed central to the numerous proposals for the reminting o f English coin, o f which Locke’s was but one o f the plans proffered.27 The main position opposed to Locke’s stance on recoinage was best articulated by Lowndes, who called for the taking in o f old coins at face (or extrinsic) value and reminting these coins at the same face value but with a lower

25 William Lowndes, A Report containing an Essayfo r the Amendment o fth e Silver Coins (London, 1695), in Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, ed. Joan Thirsk and J. D. Cooper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 701. 26 Appleby, Economic Thought, 199. 21 Locke’s two major texts on money are Some Considerations o f the Consequences o fthe Lowering o f Interest, and Raising the Value o f Money (originally published in 1691) and Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value o f Money (1695). In certain respects, Some Considerations was an amended and expanded version o f his earliest works on interest initially written between 1668 and 1674. Page references to these texts are from John Locke, Locke on Money, 2 vols., ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Some Considerations is reprinted m volume one, while Further Considerations appears in volume two. However, these works will simply be cited in the text as SC and FC respectively.

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silver content. Lowndes and his proponents in effect favored a devaluation o f the currency to bring it into line with the unofficial going rate o f exchange rather than attempt to restore the official - and now inflated - standard. Lowndes further argued that this course o f action promised to “put an end to clipping, as there would no longer be a divergence between the purchasing power and bullion value o f coin.”28 Locke, however, sharply disagreed with such proposals since they played directly into the hands o f the clippers. Because clipped coins had come to circulate with little fear o f effective legal sanction, the lines between legitimate and criminal commercial activities were increasingly blurred and, as a result, the real measure o f coin for Locke (i.e., its true intrinsic value) had been lost.29 To reestablish the true value o f money required the reassertion o f the official legal weight o f coin, not a policy that accommodated the unofficial standard set by the clippers who had helped precipitate the coinage crisis in the first place. In his proposal presented to the Lords Justice in the fall o f 1695, Locke therefore called for the taking in o f old coin at weight (i.e., according to its intrinsic value) rather than as Lowndes proposed at face value. To remint and return coin at weight would reassert the previous lawful standard for silver content rather than create a

28 Patrick Kelly, introduction to Locke on Money, 25. 29 As Kelly notes, intrinsic value referred to “the origin of money, the source o f its exchange value, and the ratio at which money exchanges for other commodities” and could also “denote the bullion value o f a coin as opposed to its denomination” (Kelly, introduction, 86). Although all o f these connotations are present in Locke’s texts, Kelly maintains that Locke ultimately endorsed the view that the “capacity to function as the general medium o f exchange is the intrinsic value o f money as such, not simply a quality o f the metals o f gold and silver” (Kelly, 87). Yet as this chapter will demonstrate, Locke’s use of intrinsic value is more complex than Kelly suggests, in part because the ability o f money to act as a medium o f exchange is, for Locke, heavily dependent on the maintenance o f a particular relationship between currency and silver.

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new - and degraded - official measure. Although Locke’s plan would initially lessen the number o f coins in circulation, it would at the same time reestablish the certainty o f intrinsic value for English coin. Locke’s unflinching insistence on the importance o f maintaining the integrity o f intrinsic value was met with a mixed and deeply divided reception by his contemporaries. Opponents such as Nicholas Barbon blasted Locke for his assertions that money’s value relied almost completely on its silver content and regarded his apparent resistance to the increasingly symbolic character o f coin as naive at best. Barbon and others argued instead that currency was only “the Instrument o f Commerce from the Authority o f that Government where it is Coined,” and they thus stressed the importance o f the extrinsic rather than intrinsic value o f money.30 Although the majority o f those engaged in the coinage debates sided with the position o f Barbon et al., Locke’s stance on intrinsic value resonated with William III and a recoinage designed with Locke’s arguments in mind was carried out from 1696 to 1698. Given that England’s history o f regulating its own currency had been at best problematic from the fourteenth century up to the 1690's, it is perhaps unsurprising that the immediate effects o f recoinage were rather disastrous. “Much o f the newly minted silver was melted and down and sent abroad to realize a profit as bullion. The actual minting could not keep pace with the demand for a circulating medium, and wage earners and shopkeepers found themselves desperate for

30 Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse Concerning Coining the New Money Lighter (London: 1696), 7, quoted in Appleby, Economic Thought, 225.

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some kind o f money.”31 Although Locke him self had foreseen such problems and had attempted to address them in his own plan, the recoinage did not follow his technical recommendations for its implementation. Despite his own cautions and his minimal involvement in the actual reminting, Locke was subsequently held responsible by many for the initially deleterious effects recoinage was understood to have on those portions o f the population less well o ff as well as English markets as a whole.32 As mixed as the immediate technical impact o f Locke’s monetary writings was, the texts themselves have subsequently encountered their own difficulties. Although the importance o f money to Locke’s overall political thought has been long noted in a variety o f scholarship, the focus for such considerations has most frequently been the Second Treatise rather than his works solely devoted to monetary issues. With the notable exceptions o f Marx and John Maynard Keynes, Locke’s specific writings on money have until fairly recently languished outside the purview o f critical attention.33 In part, this is because they have only lately appeared in a critical edition that provides for a smoother negotiation o f their considerable textual and contextual complexities. Even when these texts have been more closely considered, however, such studies have frequently followed

31 Appleby, Economic Thought, 235. 32 For analyses o f the recoinage as well as Locke’s role therein, see Horsefield; Peter Laslett, “John Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Origins o f the Board o f Trade, 1695-1698,” William and Mary Quarterly 13, no. 3 (Juley 1957); and Ming-Hsun Li, The Great Recoinage o f 1696 to 1699 (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1963). 33 Recent works that consider Locke’s monetary thought include: Constantine George Caffentzis, Clipped Coins, Abused Words and Civil Government: John Locke's Philosophy o f Money (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1989); Kelly, introduction to Locke on Money; McClure; and James Thompson, Models o f Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

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one o f two critical paths by casting Locke either back into the perceived naivety of the bullionists and mercantilists or forward as a precursor - reluctant or otherwise - to the rise o f credit and capital.34 A notable (though partial) exception to such interpretations is the work o f Joyce Appleby who, by situating Locke’s texts within a particular approach to economic history, argues that Locke relies on a natural law framework to posit the “new market system” o f the very late seventeenth century as impervious to external controls.35 Through a consideration o f Locke’s own emphasis on the import o f the intrinsic value o f coin, Appleby argues that Locke transforms the “mint standard into an immutable fact o f nature.”36 In maintaining that money and property derive their principle value from nature, Appleby asserts that Locke is simply locating them outside o f the authoritative parameters o f civil government and as therefore immune to the “power o f the sovereign

34 For studies that stress Locke’s ties to earlier modes o f monetary thought, see for example Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2nd revised ed., 2 vols. (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1955); William Letwin, The Origin o f Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought, 1660-1776 (London: Metheun &Co. Ltd., 1963); and Douglas Vickers, Studies in the Theory o f Money 1690-1776 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1968). For works that regard Locke’s texts as anticipatory o f eighteenth century commercial developments, see Thompson and Reddy. Arguably the most prominent “capitalist” reading o f Locke is o f course that offered by C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory o f Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Macpherson’s argument, however, relies largely on the Treatises rather than Locke’s writings on currency from the 1690’s. For reevaluations o f Macpherson’s argument that attend more closely to Locke's monetary thought, see for example E. J. Hundert, “Market Society and Meaning in Locke’s Political Philosophy,” Journal o fth e History o f Philosophy 15, no. 1 (1977) and Paul Marshall, “John Locke: Between God and Mammon,” Canadian Journal o f Political Science 12, no. I (March 1979). 35 Joyce Oldham Appleby, “Locke, Liberalism and the Natural Law o f Money,” Past and Present 71(1976): 44. Other works that examine the role o f natural law in Locke’s writings on currency include Terrence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence o f Political Economy, 1662-1776 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); and Letwin. 36 Appleby, “Locke,” 61.

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to influence the creation o f property” that Locke allegedly found “repugnant.”37 Hence although Appleby’s argument regards Locke’s stance on the importance o f intrinsic value as constituting something other than “a series o f paradoxes” produced within a highly specific historical setting, her reading finally places Locke’s monetary thought within the same - albeit very loose - category o f liberal political economy that has so appealed to other interpreters who have more narrowly concentrated on the role o f money in the Treatises.3S Although hardly extensive, Locke’s presentation o f the invention o f money in the Second Treatise certainly does offer some initial insight into the difficulties he addresses in the writings on coinage.39 In laying out the self-governing and self-limiting character o f property in the state o f nature, Locke seemingly winds down his account with the assurance that “every Man should have as much as he could make use o f . . . without straining any body” (36).40 This picture is radically altered, however, almost as soon as these words are read. There would have been enough for all in the state o f nature “had not the Invention o f Money, and the tacit Agreement o f Men to put a value on it, introduced (by Consent) larger possessions, and a Right to them” (36). The agreement

37 Ibid., 63. 38 Kelly, introduction, 105. 39 For a nuanced interpretation o f the narrative functions of money in the Second Treatise, see Kirstie M. McClure, “Narrative Investments: Money, Meaning, and the Lockean State,” in Telling Tales: The Politics ofNarrativity in Locke’s Second Treatise, forthcoming. For a comparative assessment of money in the7>eatoes and Locke’s earlier writings, see Patrick Kelly, ‘“ All Things Richly to Enjoy’: Economics and Politics in John Locke’s Two Treatises o f Government,” Political Studies 36 (1988). 40 Locke, 7\vo Treatises, II, section 36. Further references are all to the Second Treatise and will be cited in the text by section number.

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“that a little piece o f yellow metal — should be worth a great piece o f Flesh” (37) allows individuals to exceed the bounds o f use and accumulate property; for “if he would give his Nuts for a piece o f M etal,. . . he invaded not the Right o f others” and may “heap up as much o f these durable things as he pleased” (37). Therefore “by putting a value on gold and silver and tacitly agreeing in the use o f Money,” individuals have also “agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession o f the Earth” (50). Moreover, this “inequality o f private possessions, men have made practicable out o f the bounds o f Societie, and without compact” (50) and thus neither money nor the benefits and inconveniences brought with it have its source in government. “For in Government the Laws regulate the right o f property,” not the accumulation o f property enabled by the invention o f money in the state o f nature (50). Hence although the invention o f money in the state o f nature serves as the basis for the formation o f civil society and the establishment o f civil law, it remains for Locke uneasily outside o f governmental purview. The complexities o f the narrative location o f money in the Second Treatise are thus important to ascertaining the ambiguity that the concept o f money itself inherently involves, but this does not address a principle point o f Locke’s fearful attention throughout his monetary writings - namely, clipping and accompanying dilemmas such as counterfeiting. As demonstrated in chapter two, throughout the early modem period the integrity o f any currency was understood in direct relation to the political entity issuing it and the statutes that declared all forms o f monetary abuse as acts o f high treason continued to be enforced - albeit less than comprehensively - at the close o f the seventeenth century. Locke echoed this perspective, stating “this is the reason why the 194

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counterfeiting the Stamp is made the highest Crime, and has the weight o f Treason laid upon it: Because the Stamp is the publick voucher o f the intrinsick value (SC, 312). Like the commercial turmoil o f the 1620's, the coinage crisis o f the 1690’s also fostered a deep unease not only about the stability o f the currency but also the legitimacy o f the English state. Yet the worries generated by clipping were not solely political for, as already alluded to, coinage and its ancillary terms carried a variety o f associations including those related to gender and sexuality. Clipping in particular was a concept with a number o f connotations used “to signify the corruption o f language (words as the coins o f intellectual exchange, communication), embracing, kissing, fornicating, theft, cutting, and battles in war - and may operate on several levels o f meaning simultaneously.”41 The uncertainty and indeed violence ascribed to clipping - whether in regard to semiotic, moral or sexual concerns - was the source o f much anxiety. Many o f these disturbing associations lingered w ell into Locke’s own time and worked in consort with specifically political concerns to create a particularly dense discourse concerning money as well as its influence in human affairs.42 Given the acute apprehensions generated by the act o f clipping, fetishism serves

41 Sandra K. Fischer, Econolingua: A Glossary o f Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama (Newark: University o f Delaware Press, 1985), 56. Fischer also notes that purses were frequently hung from belts or attached to undergarments and therefore acquired literal and metaphorical associations with the sexual parts o f both genders (110). To be clipped o f one’s purse could thus involve a potentially perilous invasion o f personal space. Yet although the links between clipping and the fear o f bodily castration are strong, my reading seeks to keep in play not only the multiple meanings o f clip but also a broad notion o f castration. Like the analyses o f McCallum and de Lauretis, I understand castration and the fear its provokes as potentially having various referents beyond the confines o f allegedly self-evident body parts. 42 See The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. clip.

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as a particularly useful way to begin to unpack the multiple layers o f meaning and attendant anxieties that circulate throughout Locke’s monetary writings. Although the clippers arguably present the threat o f castration that Locke seeks to deny across a number o f levels (monetary, epistemological, political), it is not enough to merely identify the source o f what he seeks to disavow because fetishism consists o f more than a simple (albeit intense) denial. According to Freud, the process o f fetishism also involves a rebellion o f “the portion o f his narcissism which Nature has, as a precaution, attached to that particular organ” that the subject thereafter strives to protect against the threat o f castration.43 Locke’s fetishism includes not only a denial o f the clippers’ influence in currency matters, but also an intense recognition o f the value nature attaches to his organ - in this case, money as silver. Locke’s obsessive assertion o f the intrinsic value o f money is not merely an overvaluation o f the importance o f silver that would indeed make it a reified fetish, a privileged object o f his fascination as Marx might suggest. Rather, Locke’s insistence on intrinsic value exists within an epistemologically complex process o f fetishism (similar to that suggested by McCallum) where the integrity o f the privileged object - money as silver - is m aintained through associations with particular natural attributes. These connections are not simply asserted as givens but rather construed by Locke through a specific understanding o f the operations o f signification. A closer examination o f Locke’s semiotics brings the intricacies o f his fetishism to the fore and in particular, those aspects o f signification with feminine associations upon which his ability to successfully articulate the natural value o f money depends.

43 Freud, “Fetishism ” 21: 153.

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The Signification o f Fluidity In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke divides language up in a number o f ways with one o f the most critical distinctions drawn between substances and mixed modes whose differences are found in how ideas for each are formed. Ideas o f substances are formed from information o f the external world “conveyed in by the Senses, ” from which simple ideas are formed and given names.44 This is not solely an operation o f mindful creativity for “Names o f Substances being not put barely for our Ideas, but being made use o f ultimately to represent Things” (3.11.24). Substance names are not to be understood as inventions, but rather “tis intended their Names should stand for such Collections o f simple Ideas, as do really exist in Things themselves, as well as for the complex Idea in other Men’s Minds” (3.11.24). Mixed modes, however, are products o f the “Workmanship o f the Mind” that are “not only made by the Mind, but made very arbitrarily, without Patterns, or reference to any real Existence” (3.5.4,5). These mixed modes are constructed by “the Mind, that combines several scattered independent Ideas, into one complex one; and by the common name it gives them, makes them the Essence o f a certain Species, without regulating it self by any connexion they have in Nature” (3.5. 6). Thus mixed modes do not themselves refer “to the real Existence o f Things” but rather are names that signify “that barely complex Idea, the Mind itself has formed” (3.5.14). Locke’s struggle to come to terms with how language works produces an

44 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), bk. 2, chap. 23, sect. I. Subsequent references will be cited in the text by book, chapter, and section number.

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understanding o f representation that poses a dilemma when it comes to money, which is both a substance (i.e., silver) and a mixed mode (e.g., a creation consented to in the state o f nature). Or, as put differently by Caffentzis, “money is an. idea o f substance plus something else - a value men attribute to a substance that is not in it, a willingness to accept an equality between it and another object that is not in it either - a mixed mode.”45 Money cannot be regarded as only a substance because its creation is predicated upon its ability to represent something else besides its silver content (e.g., property). Yet to regard money as only a mixed mode - and thus subject to the every twist and turn o f language - is to give room to the dangerous possibility o f reducing the ability o f currency to act as a constant standard o f value to virtually nil. Given this backdrop, Locke’s insistence on the necessity o f maintaining the intrinsic value o f the coin begins to look rather different. Caffentzis argues that according to Locke’s semantic schema, the proposals o f Lowndes and his advocates were based on endorsing money as purely a mixed mode thereby separating it from its other characteristics as a substance.46 For Locke, this was unacceptable and dangerous because the only way the symbolic certainty o f money could be guaranteed was to insist on maintaining the silver standard that could then “provide a supra-social point o f agreement necessary for the coordination o f a huge variety o f individual minds expressing themselves in a cacophony o f tongues.”47 Without a stable standard, questions and disagreements over what precisely constituted money

45 Caffentzis, 75. 46 Ibid., 107. 47 Ibid., 84.

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would multiply and the sort o f instability already generated by the clippers would only worsen. Thus Locke’s arguments about the importance o f the intrinsic value o f money were not only shaped by semantic concerns, but also linked to a set o f epistemological worries that raised troublesome questions about the maintenance o f political order in an increasingly complex commercial society. As McClure notes, the invention o f money in the state o f nature alone wreaks a certain degree o f epistemological havoc for currency allows individuals to accumulate beyond what they can use and, in so doing, dissolves “certain knowledge o f the lawful bounds o f one’s property.”48 The capacity for currency to unravel Locke’s carefully constructed understanding o f order carries over into civil society, for “the function o f money as a measure o f value and a vehicle o f desire in the exchange o f worldly goods thus endows it with a kind o f public consequence, civil facticity, and moral weight that Locke’s epistemology denies to the speculative truths o f religion.”49 However disruptive money may be within this scenario, the epistemological ante is arguably upped when the uncertainty that inheres within money itself is also taken into account. As most clearly evident in the Second Treatise, money - whatever problems it may pose - undergirds not only commerce but also civil society itself, yet such functions are subverted if confusion prevails regarding knowledge o f money qua money. Should the representational and hence epistemological certainty o f money be called widely into question - as it then was in Locke’s eyes through the activities o f the clippers

4* McClure, Judging Rights, 211. 49 Ibid., 252.

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and the circulation o f degraded coins - much more than a disruption o f trade could be at stake. Yet to more fully unpack the complexity that characterizes Locke’s understanding o f language and its profound epistemological consequences in regard to substances and in turn, coinage, the analysis needs to be pushed further to a consideration o f the underlying difference between nominal and real essence. Nominal essence refers to a conceptual entity consisting o f the various properties ascribed to a thing under a single name and without which that thing would no longer exist. “Between the Nominal essence and the Name, there is so near a Connexion, that the Name o f any sort o f Things cannot be attributed to any particular Being, but what has this Essence, whereby it answers that abstract Idea, whereof that Name is the Sign” (3.3.16). Whereas for nominal essence the name is the thing, real essence refers to those properties believed to inhere in the thing itself. “By this real Essence, I mean, the real constitution o f any Thing, which is the foundation o f all those Properties, that are combined in, and are constantly found to co­ exist with the nominal Essence', that particular constitution, which every Thing has within it self, without any relation to any thing without it” (3.6.6). These real essences, however, remain largely unknowable due to the constraints o f the mind’s faculties that are limited to what is observed in the material world. For Locke, it is a futile endeavor to “range T h in g s into sorts, and dispose them into certain Classes, under Names, by their real

Essences, that are so far from our discovery or comprehension” (3.6.9). Hence nominal essences are the knowable if somewhat arbitrary constructs o f the understanding, whereas real essences ultimately refer to those aspects o f nature that either are not or cannot be

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known by the human mind. The differences between real and nominal essence do not pose any critical problems for mixed modes since they are by definition collections o f ideas placed in close relation with each other “without examining whether they exist so together in Nature” (2.22.2). As such, a mixed mode is “the Name which is, as it were the Knot” that ties ideas togther and thus “in these the real and nominal Essence is the same” (3.5.10,14). Lacking any tangible connection to natural substances, mixed modes are “nothing else but an Artifice o f the understanding” designed to address the linguistic needs o f humankind by giving focus to complex ideas that are “crucial in those centers o f mixed-mode ideas and names: religion, justice and morals.”50 Though mixed modes are certainly arbitrary and hence liable to linguistic uncertainties, for Locke these difficulties can at least be mitigated with sufficient attention to how language is used and reforming the ways in which it is abused. In sharp contrast to mixed modes, substances raise a very different set o f concerns with more troublesome implications. Unlike mixed modes, substances “are supposed conformable to the reality o f Things, and are referred to Standards made by Nature” (3.9.11). Yet because those aspects o f substances that relate to real essence are fully knowable only to God, “the Names o f Natural Substances, signify rarely, if ever, any thing but barely nominal Essences o f those species” (3.4.3). As a result o f their necessarily nominal character, ‘“tis evident they [substances] are made by the Mind, and not by Nature” (3.6.26). Here the trouble begins, for “though the nominal Essences o f Substances, are all supposed to be copied from Nature; yet they are all, or most o f them,

50 Caffentzis, 112.

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very imperfect” (3.6.30) as they are the constructions o f various and disagreeing human minds. Although Locke maintains the separation between nominal and real essence for substances that is collapsed in reference to mixed modes, he also makes it clear that substances share with mixed modes some o f the latter’s more arbitrary features (3.4.17). Locke’s understanding o f the uncertainties o f substances brings into sharp relief the semiotic complexity o f his repeated assertions that money must be intimately associated with silver. As much as the other parts o f language Locke examines, substances are equally subject to the “Inconveniencies” (3.10.32) o f the word abuse and the semiotic mismanagement that he struggles against throughout the Essay and elsewhere. Given the necessarily constructed nature o f substances, Locke cannot simply weigh a substantial silver anchor to weather the brewing tempests - epistemological and otherwise - posed by the symbolic vagaries o f purely mixed mode money. Locke is unable to posit a rather reified, transparent substance to serve as a reliable fetish object since substances are as much a construct o f the mind as the source o f the fear that fetishism itself is designed to protect against. Hence, Locke’s fetish must not be understood as simply an overprivileged object but rather, as McCallum’s analysis o f Freud suggests, as a complex position constructed through a process o f fetishism designed to ward off the symbolic threats posed by the clippers and others. In addition, this epistemologically imbued process that characterizes Locke’s fetishism is ultimately made possible by those modes o f signification historically aligned with the feminine that he relies on to articulate a particular understanding o f money. Specifically, it is within the intricate constitution o f the dual character o f money as artificial (a name like any 202

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other) and as natural (silver, a substance unlike any other) that the complexities o f Locke’s fetishism and its fem in in e semiotics come to the fore. Early on in both o f his major works on currency, Locke makes clear his insistence on a bivalent understanding o f money. Repeating a key aspect o f the narrative found in the Second Treatise, money’s most artificial attributes derive from consent that places “an imaginary Value upon Gold and Silver by reason o f their Durableness, Scarcity, and not being very liable to be Counterfeited” (SC, 233). The artificial character o f money conferred by consent does not, however, lead to the conclusion that “this measure o f Commerce, like all other measures, is Arbitrary” (FC, 412). Those who think so “w ill be o f another mind, when they consider that Silver is a measure o f a nature quite different from all other” (FC, 412). Although consent is necessary to make money the agreed instrument o f trade, “the intrinsick Value o f Silver and Gold used in Commerce is nothing but their quantity” (SC, 234). Common consent confers on money the role o f an artificial general equivalent in regard to other commodities but the very existence o f money also relies on the presence o f natural, precious metals. “For it not being the denomination but the quantity o f Silver, that gives value to the coin” (SC, 310). Hence although the use o f money is agreed to through common consent, its intrinsic value is heavily dependent on natural substances - in Locke’s historical period, primarily silver.51 Having firmly attributed the artificial aspects o f currency to the convention o f

51 As in the earlier part o f the seventeenth century, silver still served as the principle metal for the most commonly used coins in circulation during the 1690's. For examinations o f currency in the latter part o f the seventeenth century, see C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 15001700, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) and Li.

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common consent, Locke focuses on developing the association o f money with the natural so clearly established in the the Second Treatise. Although Locke often notes the seemingly obvious fact that “Money is necessary to Trade,” this is in part only due to the failings o f wheat to serve as a convenient standard measure for commerce (SC, 232). Locke argues that “Wheat in England does come nearest to a standing measure” because it is “the constant and most general Food, not altering with the Fashion, nor growing by chance” (SC, 262-63). Whereas wheat may be the “fittest Measure to judge o f the altered Value o f things,” it nonetheless “cannot serve instead o f Money: Because o f its Bulkiness and too quick Change o f its quantity” (SC, 263). By deriving its durability from unique natural substances such as silver, money comes to serve as the “best measure” o f the value o f other commodities (SC, 263). Although Locke ultimately rejects the notion that other natural substances such as wheat may serve as a reliable mode o f currency, he is at pains to show that money is in very crucial ways no different from those natural commodities for which it serves as a standard measure. “This I suppose is the true Value o f Money when it passes from one to another in Buying and Selling; where it runs the same Changes o f higher and lower, as any other Commodity doth” (SC, 249).52 In order to justify the legitimacy o f charging interest, Locke carries this argument further in order to demonstrate how money “comes to be o f the same Nature with Land’ (SC, 249). Interest “is not only by the necessity o f Affairs, and the Constitution o f Humane Society,

52 Locke’s larger argument in this passage involves a recognition o f the role of money as a commodity like all others and with a price o f its own. As will be argued, however, this recognition is only partial and does not diminish the strength o f the ties Locke establishes between money and natural substances.

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unavoidable to some Men, but that also to receive Profit for the Loan o f Money, is as equitable and lawful, as receiving Rent for Land” (SC, 251). Through as series o f such metonymic associations, Locke establishes the existence o f a “Natural and Current Interest o f Money” that “does not follow the Standard o f the Law, but the price o f the Market” (SC, 253). This insistence on the existence o f a “true and natural Value” (SC, 212) for money later complicates the quality o f Locke’s fetishism and poses significant problems for the already problematic notions o f law examined in chapter three. Why, however, understand these initial associations o f money with the natural as necessarily metonymic? Technically, there are any number o f ways in which Locke could construct this relationship - or so it would seem. Yet at this point Locke’s semiotics serve as an important touchstone, for he is quite particular about what sorts o f figurative language ought to be avoided. In his rather infamous attack on rhetoric in Chapter 10 o f Book 3 in the Essay, Locke evinces great concern with catachresis or the taking o f words for things, particularly in relation to already too uncertain substances. The sort o f word abuse that plagues the understanding o f substances is, for Locke, further exacerbated by the use o f rhetoric that is an obstacle to the understanding and that serves as a “powerful instrument o f Error and Deceit” (3.10.34). For Locke, such use o f language works to subvert reason for “all the Art o f Rhetorick. . . all the artificial and figurative application o f Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgement; and so indeed are perfect cheat” (3.10.34). Later, Locke cautions against the use o f two tropes in particular - metaphor and synecdoche. In pursuit o f the truth, men are gravely misled when “their Phancies 205

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[are] struck with some lively metaphorical Representations” (4.17.4). Similarly, Locke identifies among the “Trifling Propositions” hindering the increase o f knowledge the instance “when a p a rt o f the complex Idea is predicated ofthe Name ofthe whole” (4.8.4) and this is a definition o f synecdoche. That Locke goes on to examine the problems posed by synecdoche through the example o f a precious metal (i.e., gold) is o f no small interest in developing an understanding o f his writings on money. Locke’s suspicions o f metaphor and synecdoche alone, however, neither necessitate a turn to metonymy nor constitute an absolute repudiation o f the use o f figurative language. Rather, his reservations regarding particular tropes emphasize Locke’s subtle understanding o f the constructed nature o f all language that makes signification, at best, a very tricky business.53 Again, the concerns with substances inherent to Locke’s understanding o f money serve to stress the absolute importance o f attending to the workings o f different tropes. Since the natural substance o f money (i.e., silver) consists o f a real essence that is unknowable, the best one can do is observe “the Properties that flow from this Essence” and even so these are not “easily known, or enumerated” (2.32.24). In tropological terms, metaphor in particular does not lend itself well to figuring such fluidity for it is based on an act o f substitution where one thing takes the place o f the other. Through this standing in o f one thing for another, metaphor almost completely covers over what it replaces. For Locke, however, such replacement is S3 For an examination o f attitudes towards the use and abuse o f figurative language in the Restoration period, see Richard W. Kroll, The Material Word: Literature and Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). For an analysis o f the role o f rhetoric in the history o f empiricism and Locke’s role therein, see Jules David Law, The Rhetoric o f Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I. A. Richards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

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unacceptable for money must be dual in character with nothing left out or inaccurately substituted - especially those natural attributes that flow from money’s essential substantial features. Moreover, the flow o f natural attributes from money’s substantial character is doubled by the fluidity inherent to these features themselves. The only trope that allows for the establishment o f relations between things based on contiguity as well as the fluidity o f movement found in money’s natural aspects is the trope that Irigaray argues is most strongly associated with the feminine - metonymy. In particular, Locke’s reliance on metonymy to establish money’s specifically natural attributes comes to life in his uncharacteristic use o f figurative language to describe its necessity to trade and that in its vividness also evokes pieces o f the vocabulary found in the 1620's trade tracts. Money is described as “running in the several Channels o f Commerce” that “in its Circulation [drives] the several Wheels o f Trade, whilst it keeps in that Channel (for some o f it will unavoidably be dreined into standing pools)” (SC, 236-37, 233). Locke concerns him self not only with questions o f how much money should flow but also with “the quickness o f its Circulation” (SC, 235). In lamenting the role o f brokers, Locke maintains that they hinder “the Trade o f any Country, by m ak in g the circuit, which the Money goes, larger, and in that Circuit more stops, so that the Returns must necessarily be slower and scantier, to the prejudice o f Trade” (SC, 241). Locke’s dependence on metonymy allows him to figure money’s fluid operations in ways not possible via metaphor and synecdoche, both o f which introduce a certain semiotic stasis through either substitution or reduction, respectively. Thus the natural features and functions attributed to money are in no way quaint figures employed 207

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to explain how currency really functions nor is fluidity merely part o f a larger whole somehow separate from the rest. Rather, money’s fluid properties are contiguous with its other less substantial properties and o f greater import for understanding currency than its arbitrary mixed mode features. Yet Locke’s metonymic association o f money with a feminine semiotics o f fluidity is not without its difficulties and these add further twists to his perverse focus on silver coin, particularly in regard to the relations between money and law. Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes As Paul de Man suggests, tropes are rarely dependable or predictable assistants in the construction o f arguments because “tropes are not just travellers, they tend to be smugglers and probably smugglers o f stolen goods at that.”54 In Locke’s case, although metonymy provides the ability to constitute a desired relationship between money and silver, it also associates currency with the kind o f unruly fluidity that was also relied on in various ways during the early modem period to characterize the disorder (e.g., cultural, linguistic) frequently ascribed to woman. As Irigaray suggests in her critique o f phallocentric language, “[fjluid - like that other, inside/outside o f philosophical discourse - is, by nature, unstable. Unless it is subordinated to geometrism, or (?) idealized.”55 Yet bringing fluidity under control is no simple matter precisely because its feminine connotations link it with a nature that “is forever dodging his [man’s] projects o f

54 Paul de Man, “The Epistemology o f Metaphor,” Critical Inquiry 5 (Autumn 1978): 19. 55 Irigaray, This Sex, 112.

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representation, o f reproduction. And his grasp.”56 Thus Locke’s reliance on metonymy in his monetary writings does more than enable the appropriate signification o f money’s connection to the natural substance o f silver. Rather, as the trope best able to figure contiguity, metonymy brings with it all the contrariness o f a feminine fluidity that is “continuous, compressible, dilatable, viscous, conductible, diffusable,. . . unending, potent and impotent owing to its resistance to the countable.”57 Because o f its unpredictability and its capacity for resistance, fluidity poses its own challenges to allegedly more stable (masculine) entities for - aligned with the feminine - it is “always in a relation o f excess or lack vis-a-vis unity.”58 This excess and lack associated with fluidity raise conceptual trouble within Locke’s texts similar to the kind that bedeviled the writers o f the 1620's trade tracts for, although the fluid nature o f money allows it to drive trade, it also constantly threatens to undo the very system o f civil society that it is supposed to uphold. To start with, money may indeed become a standing pool due to hoarding or, alternatively, the raising o f interest may result in “stopping so much o f the Current o f Money, which turns the Wheels o f Trade” (SC, 224) that commerce could dry up. In the worst case, money does not lie stagnant or dry up but rather runs amok as evidenced in Locke’s fear o f the clippers. “Clipping is the great Leak, which for some time past has contributed more to Sink us, than all Force o f our Enemies could do. ‘Tis like a Breach in the Sea-bank, 56 Luce Irigaray, Speculum o f the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 134. 57 Irigaray, This Sex, 111. 58 Ibid., 117.

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which widens every moment till it be stop’d” (FC, 4 7 2 ). Yet there is no overtly simple solution for, in bemoaning the existence o f clipped coin, Locke suggests that the monetary crisis would not exist “if our Money and Trade were to Circulate only amongst our Selves, and we had no Commerce with the rest o f the World” (FC, 4 69). Such a closed system o f circulation in which the meaning o f money could be closely controlled, however, is no longer possible “in any country that hath Commerce with the rest o f the World” (SC, 2 6 4 -6 5 ). Furthermore, commerce is a necessity “naturally fit” (SC, 2 2 3 ) for England if it w ishes to obtain the silver it needs to coin unclipped and freshly minted money. Locke’s specific historical context thus operates in ways that impel him to recognize that his necessarily fluid construction o f money must be allowed to circulate beyond previously acknowledged channels in order to keep the system it supports alive. Yet Locke’s recognition o f the necessity o f extended circulation introduces not only a rather unpredictable fluidity, but also the critical and anxiety provoking problem o f the relation between need and desire - or in Locke’s terms, fashion and fancy. The tensions between what Locke terms use and necessity on one hand, and fashion and fancy on the other, are brought about by the very widening o f circulation that he recognizes as the inescapable reality o f monetary affairs. In several passages, Locke condemns the whims o f fashion for undermining the principles o f use and necessity that he maintains ought to govern trade and exchange. Whereas “things o f Necessity must still be had. . . things o f Fashion w ill be had as long as Men have Money or Credit” (SC, 276). This is

especially the case in regard to those items that earlier in the century would have been defined as superfluous. “How many things do we value or buy, because they come at 210

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dear rates from Japan and China, which if they were our own Manufacture or Product, common to be had, and for a little Money, would be contemned and neglected” (SC, 276). In other passages, the desire for the “newest French cut and Stuff’ as well as “French Wine” provides further evidence that fashion has acquired a disturbing influence in English markets (SC, 231, 277). Whatever Locke’s difficulties with fashion and fancy, however, he is also perfectly aware that the roles they play cannot be reversed and acknowledges that the teVent o f any Thing depends upon its Necessity or Usefulness, as Convenience, or Opinion guided by Phancy or fashion shall determine” (SC, 244). Put differently, what Locke’s frustrations with fashion underscore are those tensions symptomatic o f the transition from an enclosed market economy based solely on need and demand to an increasingly abstract system o f exchange operating through desire. As money gains wider circulation and becomes increasingly conventional, it also becomes the avenue for desire that carries with it the differing demands o f symbolic modes o f signification. Caught between a historical rock and a semiotic hard place, Locke thus turns to fetishism to maintain an understanding o f money that is becoming increasingly tenuous due to currency’s expanded circulation and the rise o f those modes o f signification most liable to semiotic subversion. By acknowledging both the power o f desire and the arbitrary aspects o f the nominal features o f coin, Locke partially recognizes the increasingly symbolic character o f money. Yet by fervently insisting on money’s profound links to silver, Locke is able to disavow the ways in which symbolic modes o f sig n ification have begun to sever the connections between currency and natural

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substances. However troublesome and uncertain such substances may be, the maintenance o f this link is crucial not only in regard to the integrity o f English money but to the stability o f the political as well. Any possibility that this key connection could be or has been - cut produces an intense uneasiness that becomes the focus o f Locke’s disavowal. In order to sustain a fetishistic position that accomplishes all o f this, however, Locke must rely on metonymic constructs that are always on the move. Much as Irigaray’s analysis suggests, Locke’s privileging o f metonymy introduces not only an uncontrollable fluidity into his own texts but also unwittingly opens up the avenue o f desire which brings the very anxiety provoking semiotic abstractions that the clippers manage to manipulate so well. Located within an ever shifting historical context, Locke’s fetishism begins to appear as if it is caught within its own semiotic double bind. The vicissitudes o f Locke’s fetishistic assertion o f money’s metonymic association with natural fluidity are particularly evident in regard to the difficulties surrounding the relation between currency and law. Throughout his monetary writings, Locke notes the presence o f a number o f tensions between money’s natural attributes and law, beginning with the assertion that natural value is “that respective rate they find any where without the prescription o f Law” (SC, 325). Although this scenario is not inherently problematic, difficulties with currency soon arise in part “because the desire o f Money is constantly, almost every where the same, its vent varies very little, but as its greater scarcity enhanses its Price, and increases the scramble, there being nothing else that does easily supply the want o f if’ (SC, 255). As a consequence, “he that wants Money, rather than lose his Voyage, or his Trade, will pay the Natural Interest for if ’ 212

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rather than obey the prescriptions o f civil law - or, rather, force lenders to do so (SC, 21819). Locke demonstrates at length how previous attempts at statutory control o f the price o f money utterly failed and concludes “that the price o f Things will not be regulated by Laws, though the endeavours after it will be sure to prejudice and inconvenience Trade, and put your affairs out o f Order” (SC, 282). Like those struggling with similar problems in the 1620's, Locke thus also recognizes that the “flux o f money” undermines the efforts and, more importantly, the reason o f individuals to control fiscal matters with any degree o f success (SC, 283). The strains between money and law are so great that although civil law is necessary to establish the legitimacy o f the king’s stamp in the minting o f coin, “‘tis not necessary that it [currency] should have a fixed value set on it by publick Authority” (SC, 327). Rather, Locke asserts that any change in the value o f money will occur “not by the force o f Statutes and Edicts; but by the natural Course o f things” (SC, 286). The difficulties civil law appears to have confronting the strength o f money’s natural qualities pose a danger that goes beyond what the monetary writings alone suggest. In the Second Treatise, the transition from the state o f nature to civil society is marked by a crucial metaphoric operation where civil law is instituted in the place o f natural law. O f the “many things wanting” in the state o f nature, foremost is the lack o f “an establish ’d, settled, known Law” to serve as “the common measure to decide all Controversies” (124). Although the “stated Rules” o f civil society offer a remedy to the uncertainties surrounding natural law, such “promulgated standing Laws''' must still “be conformable to the Law o f Nature, i.e. to the Will o f God” (135-6). The relationship 213

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Locke establishes between the law o f nature and civil law is thus fundamentally metaphoric and designed to cover all the vexing inconveniencies existing within the state o f nature - not the least o f which is money itself. As a metonymic construct, however, money’s fluid associations seemingly escape the metaphoric efforts o f civil law to control it and hence Locke’s fetishistic focus on silver begins to look rather peculiar. On their own, the clippers threaten the authority o f civil law to guarantee the extrinsic value o f money and without such guarantees, not only is the legitimacy o f civil law questioned but that o f the state as well. Yet Locke’s own insistence on money’s metonymic associations with the natural substance o f silver also appears to pose a fluid and significant challenge to the stability o f civil law. Although such assertions are consistent with money’s origin in the state o f nature, this seems a rather sad if not unsuccessful case o f fetishism since it apparently provokes more distress than it alleviates. Locke’s persistent articulation o f money’s fluid qualities begins to make more sense, however, with a closer consideration o f how the clippers represent the threat o f castration his fetishism seeks to deny. What the clippers place at risk is not simply the integrity o f silver coin but the privileged relation between natural law and civil law Locke posits in the Second Treatise. Although England’s increasing participation in world trade and related historical circumstances might themselves be pulling natural and civil law apart, the clippers deliberately expand this growing fissure. As Caffentzis suggests, “the act o f a clipper or a counterfeiter presupposes the existence o f civil government;. . . it is

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parasitic upon the state regulation it destabilizes.”59 By manipulating the abstracting forces allied with desire and newly emerging forms o f signification, the clippers cause more dissemination o f meaning than the metaphoric relation between natural and civil law can withstand - and to grave result. Clipping, and clip’d Money, have besides this robbery o f the Publick other great inconveniencies: As the disordering o f Trade, raising Foreign Exchange, and a general disturbance which every one feels thereby in his private Affairs. Clipping is so gainful, and so secret a Robbery, that penalties cannot restrain it, as we see by experience. (FC, 418)

From this perspective, Locke’s hostility to those proposals for recoinage that appeared to cave to the abstracting power o f the clippers acquires some added complexity. By submitting to the new “standard” set by the clippers, Locke’s opponents in the coinage debates were also guilty o f severing civil law from the realm o f natural law and o f at least tacitly endorsing the rule o f fashion or desire.60 In so doing, such plans were just as likely to lead to the derogation o f civil law as the schemes o f the clippers they were designed to prevent. For Locke, bringing this dangerous situation to an end without falling prey to an equally treacherous solution required nothing else but asserting the natural substance o f silver as the source o f value. Again and again, Locke states that nothing “can put a stop to Clipping, now it is grown so universal, and Men become so skilful in it, but making it unprofitable” (FC, 418). Doing so required no change in civil law but rather simply its reassertion by “making all light Money go only for its weight” (FC, 418). Locke’s privileging o f silver is thus symptomatic o f a fetishism that results not

59 Caffentzis, 72. 60 For an extended examination o f the “law o f fashion” at work in Locke’s monetary thought, see Caffentzis, 150.

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only from the widening split between money’s natural and symbolic features, but also from a rupture between natural law and civil law caused by desire and fashion. The metaphoric relation between natural law and civil law o f Locke’s imaginary as exemplified in the Second Treatise is slipping away in the face o f the increasing abstraction brought about by money’s expanded circulation. Increasingly separated from natural substances and natural law through the seductions o f the law o f fashion, civil law wanders in directions that prevent it from effectively prohibiting clipping thereby endangering the stability o f civil society. Yet as deleterious as the effects o f the emerging symbolic may be, the necessities o f acknowledging it are overwhelming for without it England’s much needed engagement in world trade would become impossible. In asserting the natural substance o f silver as the source o f value for money in its extended travels, however, Locke is able to disavow the role o f symbolic signification as the sole source o f semiotic privilege (SC, 304). According to Locke’s schematic, it is only “Silver, which makes the Intrinsick Value o f Money” and silver therefore remains the rightful source for how knowledge in the “economic” and, in turn, the political world is generated. By fetishistically maintaining a connection between money and the natural substance o f silver, Locke is able to disavow the dangerous drift o f civil law and retain some o f the initial identification with natural law that would otherwise be severed by the modes o f more abstract signification introduced by currency’s expanded movements. The success o f Locke’s fetishism, however, is not found in a totalizing attempt to fully resolve the anxieties raised by the increasingly conventional character o f money and law. Unlike his treatments o f convention in the Questions and, to some degree, the 216

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Essay, the multifaceted challenges posed by the symbolic features o f currency are seemingly insurmountable even within a particularly exacting epistemological framework. Rather than being consumed by such thorny problems, Locke’s texts ultimately display what is in effect a splitting o f civil law that is facilitated at the semiotic level through his reliance on metonymy and fluidity. Such splitting is consistent with the process o f fetishism itself for, as Freud suggests, the defenses deployed by the fetishist (and ultimately the psychotic) entail a splitting o f the ego that allows the subject to simultaneously maintain two incompatible positions. “On the one hand, with the help o f certain mechanisms he rejects reality and refuses to accept any prohibition; on the other hand; in the same breath he recognizes the danger o f reality, takes over the fear o f that danger as a pathological symptom and tries subsequently to divest him self o f that fear.”61 Locke accomplishes something very similar, for in disavowing the authority o f civil law to establish the content o f value for money, he is then able to affirm its role in establishing the representational form o f value for currency. In some critical ways, Locke could care less about the extrinsic, nominal value o f coin. The stamp o f the mint serves to guarantee the intrinsic value o f currency and as long as this is assured, call the coin what you w ill, “for etis Silver and not Names that pay Debts and purchase Commodities” (SC, 312). Locke is willing to cede to civil law governance over the significatory value o f money - however arbitrary - so long as natural intrinsic value remains intact. Indeed, for those so attached to names and only concerned with the relation o f civil law to extrinsic

61 Sigmund Freud, “Splitting o f the Ego in the Process o f Defense,” in SE, v. 23 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), 275.

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value, Locke provides a suggestion o f his own. “If any one thinks a Shilling or a Crown in name has its value from the denomination, and not from the quantity o f Silver in it, let it be tried; and hereafter let a Penny be called a Shilling, or a Shilling be called a Crown” (SC, 310). Hence, Locke’s concerns with the affairs o f civil law in regard to money end where recognition o f natural substances as the source o f value begins. The intricacies o f Locke’s fetishism thus appear to provide him with the ideal solution to a series o f semiotic, epistemological and ultimately political quandaries. Yet as Freud’s model o f fetishism demonstrates, however well any fetishistic split initially works “everything has to be paid for one way or another, and this success is achieved at the price o f a rift in the ego which never heals but which increases as time goes on.”62 The high cost o f fetishism’s psychic rift finds resonance within Locke’s historical period, since the very abstracting forces o f symbolic signification that were subject o f his unease and the object o f the clippers’s manipulation succeeded in gaining hold with the rapid rise o f credit in the early eighteenth century, as evidenced for example in the events surrounding the South Sea Bubble.63 Although Locke’s fetishism may therefore seem to fade rather quickly into its own historical horizon, its significance and that o f his monetary writings extends beyond their immediate context. The intensely complicated

62 Ibid., 275-76. 63 On the development of credit in England and some o f its consequences, see P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development o f Public Credit, 1688-1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967); J. G. A Pocock “The Mobility o f Property and the Rise o f Eighteenth-Century Sociology,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting fo r Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and idem, “Promises, Promises: Credit as Contested Metaphor in Early Capitalist Discourse,” Modem Philology 94, no. 3 (Feb. 1997); and Thompson.

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character o f these texts indicates the importance o f tracing out how Locke pulls together a variety o f threads in an effort to address the difficulties posed by money during an era marked by a considerable degree o f conceptual dissonance. Though the sorts o f abstraction associated with symbolic forms o f signification were prominent enough to constitute serious threats to the integrity o f English currency and the legitimacy o f the political, they did not dictate the manner in which such anxieties were to be addressed. Among the shifting interstices created by contrasting modes o f signification and the notions o f money they supported, Locke was able to posit a meaningful fetishistic response to the coinage crisis that allowed for the increasingly tenuous connections among epistemology, money and the political to be sustained - however briefly. As put somewhat differently by McCallum, “the gift o f fetishism is that it enables us to imagine something outside o f the bounds o f the cultural script.”64 Whatever the assessment o f his monetary fetishism, what remains notable is that Locke availed him self o f the benefits o f fetishism by successfully articulating it through modes o f signification historically associated with differing understandings o f the feminine. Thus through a consideration of the semiotic intricacies o f Locke’s fetishism and the historical details that shaped it, what is often regarded as a pivotal period in establishment o f specifically modem economic and political vocabularies begins to look far more complex than commonly understood. Parting Words In a broad sense, Locke’s monetary writings and the 1620's trade tracts share several features in common, starting with a dependence on fluidity to figure different

64 McCallum, 95.

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understandings o f markets and circuits o f exchange. Although all o f these texts struggle to come to terms with the disorder generated by fluidity, each relies in different ways and to varying degrees on such instability and its feminine connotations in order to ward o ff the problems posed by increasingly abstract notions o f money and the political. Despite such similarities, the epistemological - and ultimately moral - purchase o f Locke’s use o f these tropes diverges from that found in earlier works on commerce. As argued in chapter two, the texts o f Malynes et al. employed an unruly language o f liquidity that contrasted sharply with newly emerging and equally unsettling understandings o f trade and currency that privileged artifice and convention. The persistent articulation o f currency’s links with a disruptive feminine fluidity provided a semiotic path through which to resist the almost unimaginable loss o f an intimately known order as guaranteed by the figure o f body politic that conventional vocabularies seemed to threaten. For Locke, however, the situation was very different for, though fluidity retained its disorderly qualities, the loss it was relied on to protect against was not merely vaguely perceived, but was rather all too immediately tangible. Susceptible to the criminal acts o f the clippers and the corruption o f language, the most conventional and allegedly most clearly discerned feature o f money - its extrinsic or face value - proved to offer nothing but the illusion o f knowledge that subverted Locke’s epistemology and the morally imbued understanding o f order it supported. Rather than endorse the false certainty arising from money’s nominal aspects (as did his opponents in the coinage debates), Locke asserts the importance o f currency’s naturally fluid attributes that, precisely because o f the instability they foster, strongly encourage individuals to exercise their 220

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faculties o f reason in order to attend to money’s m eanings and movements in civil society. Hence in contrast to the fictional knowledge associated with an increasingly conventional notion o f money, Locke favors the uncertainty inherent to natural substances that serves to remind human creatures o f the worldly necessity o f fulfilling their epistemological calling. Thus Locke relies on fluidity and metonymy not to simply figure disruption or to construct a place o f exile immune from the anxieties newly emerging modes o f signification. Rather, through an inherently ambivalent process o f fetishism, Locke posits a kind o f instability that successfully - albeit temporarily - resists the epistemological and semiotic threats posed by the rise o f increasingly abstract forms o f signification, whether represented in the guise o f the clippers or otherwise. In a manner at least structurally similar to the trade tracts, Locke’s articulation o f a unruly feminine fluidity enabled him to construct an alternative position within the coinage debates that produced its own meaningful effects, political and otherwise. What may remain problematic about Locke’s reliance on feminine tropes, especially from a feminist perspective, is that their theoretical saliency emerges most strongly through a process o f fetishism. Given the common gloss that sociality itself is founded on the exchange o f women as fetishized objects, arguing that Locke’s fetishism is made possible by qualities historically associated with femininity may appear to be a rather uninteresting retracing o f all too familiar territory. Yet the semiotic operations characteristic o f Locke’s fetishism enable the formulation o f a momentary resistance to the abstracting symbolic forces that allegedly facilitate the exchange o f women and obscure those processes o f signification 221

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that may be ascribed to the feminine. Therefore, a consideration o f how feminine elements are articulated within the perverse arena o f fetishism serves to considerably complicate - rather than simply reinscribe - the domination o f what may be termed the “syntax o f exchange.”65 Rather than assume that woman has always already been turned “into coins that have an established value in the marketplace,” Locke’s texts offer the opportunity to explore how modes o f feminine signification functioned to briefly “suspend and melt down all systems o f credit” within a particular historical context.66 Although raising as many questions as it may answer, reading Locke’s texts with an attention to fetishism and the fem in in e semiotics that facilitate it does cast a different critical light on the tremendous stakes involved in giving one’s nuts for a piece o f metal.

65 This phrase is taken from Karen Newman’s critique o f feminist preoccupations with theories of exchange, “Directing Traffic: Subjects, Objects, and the Politics of Exchange,” differences 2, no. 2 (1990): 44. 66 Irigaray, Speculum, 234.

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CONCLUSION A primary goal o f this project has been to examine in detail how early modem notions o f gender shaped - and were in turn impacted by - different kinds o f monetary and political discourse in seventeenth-century England. Through a focus on the roles o f woman and femininity (and occasionally, masculinity) within a variety o f early modem texts, this study has sought to challenge the sorts o f interpretive aphasia found in some forms o f historiography as well as more conventional Locke scholarship that have occluded what are often construed as marginal historical elements and languages from critical view. From this perspective, my dissertation has demonstrated that during the early modem period the dynamics between shifting understandings o f womanly unruliness and fem inine fluidity on the one hand, and ideals o f political as well as moral stability and order on the other, were not always - if ever - simply oppositional in character. Although diverse political and monetary writings throughout the seventeenth century shared a sometimes anxious preoccupation with constructing or maintaining a rightly ordered universe, these worries were frequently articulated in relation to different

forms o f gendered instability that possessed their own distinct political and commercial implications within varying historical contexts. Thus by attending to the significations o f gender within the complexities o f early modem texts, this study has not only sought to foster a reassessment o f prominent approaches to the history o f political and monetary

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thought, but has also emphasized the significance o f varying constructions o f gender within different contexts. What this project has not endeavored to do is to draw connections - causal or otherwise - between the discursive roles o f gender in early modem writings and the material existence o f women as historical subjects during this period. To make these kinds o f links is problematic for, as argued in chapter one, to collapse representations o f gender with referential ideas o f women as subjects produces a critical stasis that may significantly limit the analytic force o f feminist research. Although the difficulties involved in parsing the relationships between (at least) gender and women have been intensely debated within feminist historiography for well over a decade, many forms o f feminist political theory have adhered to a notion o f “real” women as a measure o f theoretical validity and political efficacy that makes an examination o f the workings o f gender - especially as located within specific historical contexts - rather difficult.1 In an effort to pursue a more robust line o f inquiry, this study has concentrated on how conceptions o f gender circulated within different discursive formations as well as how these circulations may, in turn, have altered how gender was comprehended. Though the approach that has guided this project has emphasized gender, this does not suggest that women as historical subjects are absent from the topics that have been considered. For example, in the course o f research for this dissertation evidence has emerged that

1 Works in feminist historiography that have sparked contention over these issues include Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name? ’ Feminism and the Category o f ‘Women ’ in History (London: Macmillan Press, 1988) and Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics o f History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

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suggests that women played a significant role in the manufacture o f thread as well as the controversy surrounding its production. A thorough investigation o f this and other aspects o f early modem commerce in which women appear has been prevented by the necessarily limited scope o f this project as well as constraints in the kinds primary resources available. Yet recent works in women’s history suggest future avenues through which the intersections between gender and different kinds o f women in the early modem period may be analyzed in more innovative ways that hold particular interest for feminist political theory. In the specific example o f early modem England, historical studies have frequently focused on the nexus o f women, law, gender and property as evident within a variety o f texts. Through an examination o f wills, probate accounts and Chancery records, Amy Louise Erickson has argued that the relation between legal theories o f coverture and primogeniture and the practices o f their implementation varied to a greater than degree than has been generally acknowledged. In regard to landed property,

Erickson suggests that “it is certainly true that land pulled inexorably to males, but it spent a good deal o f time in female hands along the way” and these less recognized forms o f property holding require further study to develop a better sense for how women o f different status may have been impacted by shifting understandings o f the dynamics o f gender and property.2 Via an analysis o f the records o f ecclesiastical courts in London, Laura Gowing demonstrates the frequency with which women availed themselves o f one

2 Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modem England (London: Routledge, 1993), 5.

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o f the few paths o f legal recourse open to them in order to promote their personal and/or professional interests. Gowing asserts that the actions o f women in these courts provide another perspective on the operations o f gender for records offer textual evidence that suggests that “despite the precepts o f advice literature, in the early modem world masculinity and femininity were not equatable with publicity and privacy; nor was the household a private sphere.”3 Similarly, in his study o f the Court o f Requests, Tim Stretton states that “the central courts at Westminster regularly processed cases involving knowledgeable women who were neither submissive nor deferential” and, despite the hostility o f the law itself, as well as court officials, “female litigants went to court in their thousands.”4 Like Gowing, Stretton notes the divergence between advice literature and its idealized version o f woman and the representations o f women that emerge within court records. “Despite incessant calls to stay home, to remain chaste, and to speak only when spoken to, women worked, they went to market, they exerted political influence and exchanged political gossip, they shouted, they cursed, they rioted.”s Although all three o f these authors carefully state that their findings do not offer a picture o f early modem women as unfettered by the myriad restrictions that surrounded them, each work does provide a more subtle appraisal o f the interactions o f women with various discourses o f gender as well as the institutions that shaped them.

3 Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 269. 4 Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 216. s Ibid., 226.

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The insights offered by these studies are in many ways not dramatically different from other recent works in feminist historiography as well as literary and cultural studies, and the divergences between representations o f gender and evidence o f women lives have long been noted in a variety o f scholarship. In crucial ways, however, feminist political theory has on the whole yet to fully engage with the more complex understandings o f women and gender that have increasingly come to characterize feminist research in other fields. Works such as those o f Erickson et al. demonstrate the importance o f attending to the differing details inherent to constructions o f gender and women - an approach that, as argued in chapter one, is also necessary for fe m in ist political theory to develop in order to pursue more historically informed lines o f inquiry. Moreover, the texts o f Erickson et al. arguably have an added significance for feminist political theory since they each focus on concepts and institutions - such as property and courts - that have a direct relation to political theory itself. Throughout the seventeenth century, many forms o f political theory were centrally concerned with property and the rights o f political subjects, though overwhelmingly only in regard to men. Yet the research reviewed above suggests ways in which many o f the same issues can be considered with gender and women more fixity taken into account. What is at stake here is not simply the problematic matter o f inclusiveness, but rather the need for feminist political theory to broaden notions o f the political as well as what constitutes a politically significant text within the confines o f political theory. By pressing on these issues, feminist political theory may foster modes o f critique more attuned the complexities o f gender and its circulations within various historical texts and contexts as well as the factors by which it continues to be shaped. 227

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Calendar o f State Papers, Venetian. 38 vols. London: 1864-1947. Calendar o f Treasury Papers, 1556-7-1696. Vol. I. London: 1868. Chamberlain, John. The Letters o f John Chamberlain. Edited by Norman Egbert McClure. Vol. 2. Memoirs XII, Part II. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1939. Coke, Sir Edward. The Third Part ofthe Institutes ofthe Laws o f England. London: Printed by M. Flesher for W. Lee and D. Paleman, 1644. The Death and Burial o f Mistress Money. London: Printed by E. Cotes, 1664. Elyot, Sir Thomas. The Castle ofHelth. First augmented edition. N.p., 1541. English Short Title Catalogue. The British Library and ESTC/NA, 1995. Database online. Filmer, Sir Robert. “In Praise o f the Vertuous W ife.” In The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History o f the Family, Margaret J. M. Ezell, 169-203. Chapel Hill: University o f North Carolina Press, 1987. ________ . Patriarcha and Other Writings. Edited by Johann P. Sommerville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ________ . Quaestio Auodlibetica; Or a Discourse, whether it may be lawfiill to take Use fo r Money. London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1653. Reprint, The Harleian Miscellany, volume 10, second supplemental volume. London: Printed for White and Cochrane, 1813. Haec-Vir: or The Womanish-Man: Being an Answere to a late Booke intituled Hie Mulier. London: For J. Trundle, 1620. Harrington, James. The Commonwealth o f Oceana and A System ofPolitics. Edited and translated by J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Harrison, John, and Peter Laslett, eds. The Library o f John Locke. Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, n. s., 13. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Hie Mulier: or, The Man-Woman: Being a Medicine to cure the Coltish Disease o f the Staggers in the Masculine Feminines o f our Times. London: G. Purslowe for J. Trundle, 1620. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University 229

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Press, 1996. Hooker, Richard. O f the Laws o f Ecclesiastical Polity: Preface, Book I, Book VIII. Edited by Arthur Stephen McGrade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. J., T. The Nature, Mobility, Character, and Complement o f Money. London: Printed for William Thackerary, 1684. James I. Political Writings. Edited by Johann P. Sommerville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. King, Lord Peter. The Life o f John Locke, with Extracts from His Correspondence, Journals, and Common-Place Books, 2 vols. London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830. Larkin, James F. and Paul L. Hughes, eds. Stuart Royal Proclamations. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. ________ . Essays On the Law o f Nature. Edited by Wolfgang von Leyden. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954. ________ . A Letter Concerning Toleration. Edited by James H. Tully. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983. ________ . Locke on Money. Edited with an introduction by Patrick Hyde Kelly. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. ________ . Questions Concerning the Law o f Nature. Introduction, text, and translation by Robert Horwitz, Jenny Strauss Clay, and Diskin Clay. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. ________ . Some Thoughts Concerning Education. In The Educational Writings o f John Locke, ed. James Axtell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. ________ . Two Tracts on Government. Edited by Philip Abrams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. ________ . Two Treatises o f Government. Edited with an introduction by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

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________ . The Works o f John Locke in Ten Volumes. 1823. Reprint, Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1963. Lowndes, William. A Report Containing an Essayfor the Amendment ofthe Silver Coins. London: Printed by Charles Bill, and the executrix o f Thomas Newcomb, 1695. ________ . Some Remarks on a Report Containing an Essayfor the Amendment o f the Silver Coins. London: Printed for W. Whitlock, 1695. Magnusson, Lars, ed. Mercantilism, 4 vols. London: Routledge, 1995. Malynes, Gerard. The Center ofthe Circle o f Commerce. Or, A Refutation o fa Treatise, Intituled “The Circle o f Commerce, ” or “The Ballance o f Trade, ’’ lately published by E. M. London: Printed by William Jones and are to be sold by Nicholas Bourne, 1623. Reprints o f Economic Classics. Clifton, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1973. ________ . Consuetudo, vel, lex mercatoria. or The ancient law-merchant, diuided into three parts: according to the essentiall parts o f trafficke. Necessarie for all statesmen, judges, magistrates, temporall and ciuile lawyers, mintmen, mariners, and all others negotiating in all places o f the world. London: Printed by Adam Islip for Nicholas Bourne, 1636. ________ . The Maintenance o f Free Trade, According to the Three Essentiall Parts o f Traffique; Namely, Commodities, Moneys and Exchange o f Moneys, by Bills o f Exchanges fo r other Countries. Or, An Answer to a Treatise ofFree Trade, or the meanes to make Trade flourish, lately Published. London: 1622. Reprints o f Economic Classics. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971. ________ . A Treatise o f the Canker o f England’s Common wealth. Divided into three parts: Wherein the Author imitating the rule o f good Phisitions, First, declareth the disease. Secondarily, sheweth the efficient cause thereof Lastly, a remedy fo r the same. London: 1601. Reprint, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1977. [Meriton, L.] Pecuniae obediunt omnia: Money does Master all Things. York: Printed by John White for the author, 1696. Misselden, Edward. The Circle o f Commerce or The Ballance o f Trade. London: 1623. Reprint, New York: De Capo Press, 1969. ________ . Free Trade. Or, The Meanes to Make Trade Florish. Wherein, The Causes o f the Decay o f Trade in this Kingdome, are discovered: And the Remedies also to remoove the same, are represented. London: 1622. Reprints o f Economic 231

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Carol Pech was bom in 1968 in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. She majored in political science at the University o f Wisconsin-Madison and received her B.A. in 1990. She attended Purdue University to pursue graduate work in political theory and was awarded her M.A. in 1992. After arriving at the Johns Hopkins University in 1993, Carol continued her studies in the areas o f political theory, feminist theory and historiography and completed her dissertation in the autumn o f 1999.

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