‘THE APISH ART’: TASTE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND ELIZABETH LOUISE SWANN PHD THESIS UNIVERSITY OF YORK ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE JULY 2013 Abstract The recent burgeoning of sensory history has produced much valuable work. The sense of taste, however, remains neglected. Focusing on the early modern period, my thesis remedies this deficit. I propose that the eighteenth-century association of ‘taste’ with aesthetics constitutes a restriction, not an expansion, of its scope. Previously, taste’s epistemological jurisdiction was much wider: the word was frequently used to designate trial and testing, experiential knowledge, and mental judgement. Addressing sources ranging across manuscript commonplace books, drama, anatomical textbooks, devotional poetry, and ecclesiastical polemic, I interrogate the relation between taste as a mode of knowing, and contemporary experiences of the physical sense, arguing that the two are inextricable in this period. I focus in particular on four main areas of enquiry: early uses of ‘taste’ as a term for literary discernment; taste’s utility in the production of natural philosophical data and its rhetorical efficacy in the valorisation of experimental methodologies; taste’s role in the experience and articulation of religious faith; and a pervasive contemporary association between sweetness and erotic experience. Poised between acclaim and infamy, the sacred and the profane, taste in the seventeenth century is, as a contemporary iconographical print representing ‘Gustus’ expresses it, an ‘Apish Art’. My thesis illuminates the pivotal role which this ambivalent sense played in the articulation and negotiation of early modern obsessions including the nature and value of empirical knowledge, the attainment of grace, and the moral status of erotic pleasure, attesting in the process to a very real contiguity between different ways of knowing – experimental, empirical, textual, and rational – in the period. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Table of Contents 3 List of Illustrations 6 Note on the Text 7 Acknowledgments 8 Declaration 10 INTRODUCTION 11 I. ‘The Apish Art’ 11 II. ‘The savour called greene’ 19 III. ‘the Gusto of the fond Feminine’ 23 IV. ‘de Gustibus’ 26 CHAPTER 1 ‘To dream to eat Books’: Of Bibliophagy, Bees, and Literary Taste 39 I. ‘A Banquet of Wit’ 39 II. ‘the dainties that are bred in a booke’ 43 III. ‘curious tasters’ 52 IV. ‘hony and gall’ 57 V. ‘sweete humiddities’ 62 VI. ‘Men of better Pallat’ 69 VII. ‘to dream to eat Books’ 75 3 CHAPTER 2 Touching Taste in Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia 77 I. ‘instead of a preamble’ 77 II. ‘of the mind present in sensation’ 82 III. ‘of the Taste and of the Voice’ 93 IV. ‘to have in minde... at fingers end’ 96 V. ‘a confusion of hungers’ 101 VI. ‘sucked from the sappe of... anathomistes’ 107 VII. ‘the Art of Chyrurgery’ 110 CHAPTER 3 Bitter Sin, Salvific Sweetness: Piety and Palate in Devotional Literature 115 I. ‘wanton plenty’ 115 II. ‘the Corporall and Spirituall taste’ 121 III. ‘ruminate and chew these things’ 137 IV. ‘his palate that could judge’ 146 V. ‘sweet sins’ 149 VI. ‘how sweet a thing grace is’ 156 VII. ‘by experience tasted’ 159 CHAPTER 4 ‘Those fruits of Natural knowledge’: Taste and the Early Royal Society 161 I. ‘those fruits of Natural knowledge’ 161 II. ‘the fruite forbid?’ 167 III. ‘true Rellish’ 178 IV. ‘the Corpuscularian Doctrine of Tasts’ 187 V. ‘sweeter and more plausible Studies’ 199 4 CHAPTER 5 ‘Honey secrets’: Erotic Secrets and Epistemology 203 I. ‘honey secrets’ 203 II. ‘Palats both for sweet, and sowre’ 209 III. ‘my honey bee’ 216 IV. ‘inward taste’ 227 V. ‘Love’s tongue’ 235 VI. ‘Fashions grow up for tast’ 245 AFTERWORD ‘The way to know’ 248 BIBLIOGRAPHY 252 5 LIST OF ILLUSTRATONS Figure 1.1. Anon., etching depicting taste (Gustus); part of a series of five. London: John Garrett, 1630-1640. First published by Thomas Jenner. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 1.2. George Glover, engraving depicting taste (Gustus); part of a series of five. London: William Peake, 1625-1635. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 2.1. Anon., Antomical Tables, frontispiece painting commissioned by John Banister (c1580). Ms Hunter 364, V.1.1. © University of Glasgow Library Special Collections. Figure 2.2. Anon., Anatomical Table 1. Painting commissioned by John Banister (c1580). Ms Hunter 364, V.1.1. © University of Glasgow Library Special Collections. Figure 3.1. Pickleherring Pottery, tin glazed earthware dish. London, 1635. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Figure 3.2. Thomas Mangy, silver spoon. York, England, 1670. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London; photo © Simon Moore. 6 NOTE ON THE TEXT In my citations of early sources, I modernize i/j, u/v, y/i, long s and double v, and silently expand contractions, but retain original punctuation and spellings. In citing other scholars’ transcriptions, I defer to their methodologies. 7 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council doctoral award; I offer the AHRC my thanks. Thanks also to the Graduate Research Support Fund and to the F. R. Leavis Fund for financial support for research trips and conference attendance, and to the Humanities Research Centre for a HRC Doctoral Fellowship 2012 (all the University of York). In 2010, I participated in the SSHRC-funded project Making Publics (McGill University) as a Summer Fellow; a rich and rewarding experience for which I am very grateful. The University of York’s Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, and the Humanities Research Centre, have provided a welcoming and stimulating atmosphere in which to conduct this research. Thanks in particular to Bill Sherman, and to Tania Demetriou. Tania read and commented helpfully on chapter 5 at very short notice. To friends in the academy, thanks for convivial and thought-provoking conversation: especially, thanks to Hannah DeGroff, Dana Galbraith, Erika Kvistad, Robin Macdonald, Lisa McNally, Emilie Murphy, and Rachel Willie. My fascination with the sense of taste took root in Mark Jenner’s MA course ‘From Body Beautiful to Body Politic,’ and Mark’s encouraging response helped this early interest to flourish. As my thesis advisory panel member, Mark has continued to offer generous guidance. I am very thankful to have had the benefit of his infamously challenging and always perspicuous comments and questions. My supervisor Helen Smith’s unfailing ability to intuit a judicious balance between shrewd and instructive criticism and encouraging praise, as well as her erudition and enthusiasm, all make her a fantastic supervisor and an inspirational mentor. I am immensely grateful for her guidance throughout the process of writing this thesis, and for her boundless generosity with her time, particularly in the final stages. My husband Tomas McAuley has provided personal and intellectual support – as well as the endless cups of coffee the fuelled the completion of this thesis. His kindness and sense of humour have helped keep me sane, whilst his exasperation with my more abstruse lexical extravagances and my tendency to verbose loquaciousness has made the thesis clearer and more precise than it would otherwise have been. My parents-in-law, Ian and Liz McAuley, have welcomed me into their family. I am grateful for their warmth and sense of fun – not to mention the trips to Whitby. 8 Gregory and Louise Swann first inculcated my passion for literature and history – and food! – through example, rather than through prescription. Their love, generosity, resilience, and unfailing pride and support have been utterly invaluable. This thesis is dedicated to them, and also to the memory of my sister, Indira Daisy Louise Swann. Indira’s vivacity and independent-mindedness, and her curiosity about the world and affection for the people and animals in it, continue to inspire me. For Mum, Dad, and Dira, with love. 9 DECLARATION I declare that all material in this thesis is original and my own work, except where otherwise identified, and that no material has previously been submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. 10 INTRODUCTION I. ‘The Apish Art’ Two allegorical prints, from separate series published in England between 1625 and 1640, present the sense of taste, or ‘Gustus,’ as a young woman, smoking a fashionable tobacco pipe and with a full wine goblet close to hand (figures 1.1 and 1.2).1 The accompanying verses offer a commentary. The first warns that: Som with the Smoaking Pipe and quaffing Cupp, Whole Lordships oft have swallow’d and blowne upp: Their names, fames, goods, strengths, healths, & lives still wasting In practising the Apish Art of Tasting. The second offers a challenge: Match me this Girl in London, nay the world For Feathered beaver, and her hair well curled To none of our Viragos she’ll give place For healthing sack, and smoking with a grace. These women represent taste in two ‘senses.’ Savouring their tobacco and wine, they embody the physical pleasures of gustatory taste. Exhibiting their sartorial choices and fashionable habits, however, they also stand for the tasteful consumer. Whilst these two meanings of taste are conceptually distinguishable, both prints also indicate their commensurability. The contiguity is underscored by visual equivalence: the plumes of 1 For an overview of early modern sensory iconography, see Carl Nordenfalk, ‘The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985): 1-22. For more focused accounts, see Timothy Raylor, ‘ “Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue: William Cavendish, Ben Jonson, and the Decorative Scheme of Bolsover Castle,’ Renaissance Quarterly 52/2 (1999): 402-409; Gino Casagrande and Christopher Kleinhenz, ‘Literary and Philosophical Perspectives on the Wheel of the Five Senses in Longthorpe Tower,’ Traditio 41 (1985): 311-27; and Sharon Assaf, ‘The Ambivalence of the Sense of Touch in Early Modern Prints,’ Renaissance and Reformation 29/1 (2005): 75-98.