Tag Archives: Renaissance

March 26, 2012

Utopia, not Dystopia

By daseger

Last week was a bit unnerving, unsettling, disconcerting.  Not only because of the unseasonably warm weather, but also because of a word (or two):  dystopia or dystopian.  The opposite of utopia, not a perfect, elusive place, often in the future, but rather a repressive and hostile place, definitely in the future, where individual freedoms are subjected to some all-powerful system. Whenever I was near a radio or a television,  I kept hearing that word, at least 20 times, more than I have ever heard that word in my life.  The primary contexts for the word were reviews of the Hunger Games film, set in a decidedly dystopian future, and related stories about the popularity of dystopian themes in young adult fiction, which is itself disconcerting.

As is always the case when things are not just quite right for me, I retreat to the past.  What better way to counter dystopia in the present than with some utopias of the past?  I really don’t know that much about ancient history, so I skipped the Garden of Eden, the Isles of the Blessed and Elysian Fields and went back to the Renaissance Utopia, Thomas More’s 1516 book, and then moved forward, more happily, toward the present.

Early Modern Utopias:  More’s Utopia, Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), Bartolomea del Bene’s City of Truth (1609), and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624).

As you can see (you’ll have to take my word on the cropped Bacon image), all of these utopias are self-contained islands or cities, apart from the corrupt world, and their very existence is a commentary on that world.  It’s also very interesting to me that in these four works, two written by Englishmen and two by Italians, a distinct nationalistic vision of utopia has emerged:  More and Bacon have located their utopias on islands and Campanella’s and del Bene’s utopias are walled cities.  The Italians seem to think they can find utopia through urban planning, which was both an artistic and a logistical enterprise. Not only did the Italian Renaissance inspire and create paintings like Piero della Francesca’s Ideal City (c. 1470) but also the Venetian “development” of Palmanova in 1593, a real “ideal city”.

With the coming of industrialization in the modern era, cities could not possibly be utopian.  The ideal life/world could now only be found in a long-lost Arcadian past or a pastoral enclave in the present.  American utopianism in the nineteenth-century seems to be best represented by the romantic landscapes of the Hudson River Valley school, like Thomas Cole’s Dream of Arcadia below, and social experiments like Brook Farm here in Massachusetts, where Nathaniel Hawthorne spent a few (apparently miserable) months in 1841.  A young and struggling writer at the time, Nathaniel clearly did not find his utopia at Brook Farm:  too much manure.

Thomas Cole, Dream of Arcadia, 1838. Denver Art Museum.

Joseph Wolcott, Brook Farm with Rainbow, 1845. Massachusetts Historical Society.

I’m not sure how the quest for utopia has fared in the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first.  Have we given up on it?  Are utopian ideas and ideals so personal that we don’t have a collective cultural vision?  Is is all about dystopia?  At least in the first part of the century, and despite the dreadful First World War, the Bauhaus movement was definitely driven by utopian ideals as well as the passion for modernism and the desire to integrate art, design and technology.  All of these goals are exemplified by the title and the typography of their publications from the early twenties:  the volumes of  Utopia:  Dokumente der Wirklichkeit (Utopia: Documents of Reality) were designed by Oskar Schlemmer in a style that still looks modern today.

An etching by the American artist Peter Larsen from just about the same time as the beginning of the Bauhaus School shows a decidedly more inaccessible Utopia, like that of Thomas More.  So we’re right back where we began, with those who believe that Utopia is within reach, or at least worth striving for, and those that believe it’s just a fantasy.

Peter Larsen, Utopia,1919. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

10 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

March 17, 2012

Green Men

By daseger

A succession of green men for St. Patrick’s Day, beginning with several of the most celebrated medieval “foliate heads” in Britain from the parish churches of Sutton Benger, Wiltshire and Winchelsea, East Sussex.  As you can see, these grotesques are not green in color but they are definitely green in spirit:  representing nature, fertility, the life cycle, and memory.  A very common motif of medieval architecture across Europe, I have always felt that the presence of the Green Man in sacred spaces also represents the assimilation of Christianity and pre-Christian cultures.

Green Men from Wiltshire and Sussex, from a comprehensive gallery of images at “The Enigma of the Green Man” site.

The omnipresent Green Man has a few cousins in medieval culture, including the “wild man” or “wild woodman”, sometimes referred to as the “wodewose” as in this great scene from Jean Froissart’s Chroniques d’Angleterre, titled the “Dance of the Wodewoses”.  In the seventeenth century, the wild/green man appears playing with fireworks in John Bate’s Mysteries of Art and Nature (1635), which is a bit menacing, given that this is the century of the Gunpowder Plot.  And after that, he evolves into “Jack in the Green”, the central focus of May Day festivities across Britain. Below are some May Day, or Jack-in-the-Green Day celebrants in Bristol and from one of my very favorite blogs, terrain.  I wish we had this custom in the United States.

British Library MS Harley 4380, folio 1, 15th Century


There has to be a connection between the Green Man and the other famous green man of medieval English heritage, Robin Hood, but I’m not sure what it is (besides the pub sign below).  There are both outside of civilization, in the woods, but still moral guides.  And then of course there is the green knight of Sir Gawain fame:  how does he relate?  This is not my field; I can only speculate.  He’s beyond the realm of outlawry and in the realm of otherworldly–like the Green Man.

Robin Hood illustrations from the Robert Copland edition of 1550 and the Louis Rhead edition of 1912; the headless Green Knight in F.J.H. Darton’s Wonder Book of Old Romances (1912) and a Ken Orvidas illustration in the New York Times.

I am well into this post and I haven’t even mentioned the man whose day it is:  St. Patrick.  This is defensible because St. Patrick is not really a “green man”; he’s the antithesis of the green man really.  Before the early modern era, he is never depicted in green because that would make him too wild, I think.  He is a conqueror of the wild (the non-Christian) rather than a wearer of the green.  Green might be nearby (in the form of shamrocks or the snakes he supposedly drove out) but he is not green.

P. Gally print of St. Patrick the Apostle of the Irish, 1806, British Museum.


The only exception that I could find is this much earlier image of Patrick below, from John Mandeville’s Voyage d’outre mer (1451):  he is standing on a patch of green surrounded by devils and souls in purgatory, and underneath his bishop’s robe he is clearly wearing a green tunic.  Green has become Christian, it seems, and perhaps a little bit of early Irish nationalism.

British Library Royal MS 17B XLIII, folio 132v, Fifteenth Century.

Once you get into the modern era, there are a lot of directions in which to follow the green man.  The medieval motif gets revived in late nineteenth-century urban architecture, so that occasionally you will see him among the surface embellishment of neo-Romanesque multistory buildings:  modern skyscrapers.  There’s a whole book about The Green Man in New York City by Asher Derman. I tried to find some green men in Salem, but there are none:  perhaps in Boston where the Richardson Romanesque is more prevalent.  And then you can go into the popular culture fantasy direction, where there are the little green men of science fiction and the super-heroic Green Hornet and Green Lantern. Green men are everywhere, even telling us when to cross the street.

I think I’ll finish up close to where I began, with the woodsy green man. The work below, Hidden Green Men by Bryony Drew, is one of the entries in this year’s Victoria & Albert Illustration Awards.  There are supposedly eight green men in this picture (a mix of illustration, photography and photoshop), but I have yet to find them all. Green men are ever-elusive.


10 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

December 31, 2011

Years of Protest

By daseger

The last days of the year are always a time for reflection and assessment, perhaps personally but certainly by the media.  So far, all of the pieces that I have seen on television and in print characterize 2011 as a “year of protest”, following Time magazine’s “Protester” Person of the Year.  Like all historians, I find agitation attractive because it signals a time of (exciting) change rather than (boring) continuity, but I’m not certain that this is the case with 2011 yet.  Everyone seems so distracted by their various electronic devices, and protesting (and change) takes real engagement.  Perhaps this is too American a view, but 2011 doesn’t look quite like 1968, or 1789, or the 177os, or the 1640s, or the 1520s, or the very rebellious period of 1378-1381.

This last (or first) era of rebellion, culminating in the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, did not really result in change but was exiting nonetheless for its novelty:  the 99 percent seldom rebelled against the 1 percent in the Middle Ages.  But the fourteenth century changed everything, bringing forth famine, plague, war and schism in intense degrees and leaving its survivors with nothing left to lose and everything to gain.  Abandoned by their Church and very conscious of their bargaining power in a world that had lost over 30% of its laborers to the Black Death, the peasants of England marched on London to seek an audience with King Richard II after the imposition of what they perceived as unfair taxes and wage restrictions.  With the charismatic Wat Tyler and John Ball leading them onwards, they got their audience with the young King (slaughtering the Archbishop of Canterbury along the way), but were defeated soon afterwards.

The preacher John Ball leading the peasants, the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and King Richard confronts the peasants, all from the Chronicles of Jean Froissart, British Library MS Royal 18 E I, circa 1483.

In retrospect, the English Peasants Revolt illustrated, rather than caused, change, but its message, articulated best by a speech attributed to Ball in which he speaks of “liberty” and asks the rhetorical question when Adam delved and Eve span who was then the Gentleman survived and was revived in the modern era, when it reflected even more change.

Edward Burne-Jones illustration for William Morris’s Dream of John Ball, 1888.

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History

September 24, 2011

Bewitching Beauty

By daseger

Enough of the Witch Trials, on to Witch City.  For the past century or so, rather then obscuring Salem’s association with the trials, the city fathers celebrated it, creating the present-day “Witch City”.  I’ve wrote about this development in numerous posts, but the essential beginning can be found here, with Daniel Low’s witch spoon.  Shortly after this successful turn-of-the century marketing campaign, other Salem businesses jumped on the witchcraft train, and it really took off.  Another example of a nationally-marketed Salem product was the “Witch Cream” manufactured by the C.H. and J. Price Pharmacy of Essex Street.

These advertisements can be found in all sorts of publications in the later 1890s; clearly “Witch Cream” captured the public’s attention.  This was a boon period for skin lotions and face creams (often called “vanishing creams” because they melted into the skin, unlike cold creams, which are ancient), following the success of the Pond’s Company and the discovery of new, less-irritating (than lead!) recipes.  While early modern women were often criticized for indulging their vanities and layering on too much cream and “paint” (the two women preoccupied with their faces below are clearly vulnerable to the wiles of the Devil), existing recipes for “precious” ointments and waters confirm that they whipped up their own moisturizers.  But the late Victorian era, in characteristic fashion, initiated a profitable cosmetics industry.

Daniel Hopfer, Death and the Devil Surprise Two Women (1520 etching, late 17th century print). Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum

The Price Pharmacy in Salem advertised several products, including “homeopathic tinctures”, a “hygienic wine” (a strengthening tonic for nervous protestation, dyspepsia, etc…), and New England Tooth Drops, but they definitely showcased their Witch Cream, which they sold by mail-order and also distributed to other apothecaries.

I’m not sure what was actually in Witch Cream, although if it’s anything like other contemporary concoctions on the market, it was probably made of cucumber, rose and/or elder flower oils, essences that go way back to the Elizabethan era, and probably beyond.  Like so many modern products, it was probably a case of the wizardry of words rather than ingredients.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in History

September 16, 2011

The Renaissance Rhinoceros

By daseger

Albrecht Durer’s supposedly-realistic rhinoceros is featured prominently in the new exhibition at Harvard University’s Sackler Museum, “Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe”, as well as in its companion catalog (in fact it’s on the cover), and with good reason:  horned beasts were the most fantastic of all creatures  in medieval bestiaries, and with the coming of the Renaissance their existence was either verified or disproved.  The appearance of Durer’s rhinoceros in print was part of this process, and also a great example of the Renaissance merger of art and science, two pursuits that seem incompatible today.

The exhibition also features an amazing print showing several men measuring a beached whale on a Dutch beach, another illustration of a great beast that was now the object of scientific scrutiny rather than passive wonder.  Contrast this whale with illustrations from two thirteenth-century bestiaries in the collection of the British Library and you can easily see the difference of attitude.  The two medieval whales are depicted in standard fashion as ” islands”, based on the legend of Saint Brendan the Navigator who awoke one morning during his long sea voyage on what he thought was an island but was really a whale.

Whales:  Anonymous after Hendrick Goltzius, Stranded Whale at Zandvoort, 1594.  Harvard Art Museum, Light Outerbridge Collection, Richard Norton Memorial Fund; British Library Manuscripts Harley 3244 & 4751.

In addition to prints of animals, the exhibition features maps and charts and illustrations of all the new scientific instruments of the age.  Of course, portraiture is a distinctly Renaissance genre, and rather than the usual royals and nobles we see a portrait print of mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Petri van Deventer with all the tools of his profession.

Nicolaus Petri van Deventer by Hendrik Goltzius, 1595.

Medicine was another fledgling science of the sixteenth century, an age of “new” threats like syphilis (“the French pox”) and gunpowder and old ailments like the plague and smallpox.  It was also an age of intense anatomical analysis and speculation, represented in the exhibition’s “skeleton portrait” by Philip Galle and close-up of cranial surgery from a contemporary “field manual for the treatment of wounds”.

Skeleton from Philip Galle’s “Instruction and Fundamentals of Good Portraiture”, Antwerp, 1598.  Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam;  “Instruments for Use in Cranial Surgery” from Hans von Gersdorff and Hans Wechtlin the Elder, Feldtbuch der Wundartzney, Strasbourg, Hans Schott, 1540.  Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Print and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe runs through December 10, 2011 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  It was curated by Susan Dackerman, the Carl A. Weyerhauser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums.  A closing symposium will be held on December 2-3, 2011.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History

August 25, 2011

Slug Slayers

By daseger

We’ve been fortunate to have had quite a bit of rain here in the Northeast, consequently the soil is moist and the plants are green.  The garden looks pretty good for late August, except for the slug bites evident on many of my leafy plants.  It is definitely slug season out there:  every morning I awake to slime on my brick paths and pockmarked plants, evidence of their nocturnal feeding frenzy.  I didn’t turn over the soil enough in the spring (to disrupt their larvae), I didn’t encircle my hostas with copper wire over which the slugs cannot slither past; I let them in and now there are really there.  Now my only hope is beer (or better yet, stout) traps placed throughout the garden, as the salt method is a little too intense (face to face) for me.

Garden Pests (including slugs) from Joris Hoefnagel's Archetypa studiaque patris (1592)

More slugs and pests: the entire Archetypa is at the University of Strasbourg's Digital Library

Or is it?  I hunted for some good slug-slaying advice and found plenty in my stack of gardening books and on the web. I particularly like the “Slug Fest” post from The Medieval Garden Enclosed, the Cloisters Museum and Gardens’ blog, and this article contains a great description of the effectiveness of nematode worms. They sound great, but do I want even more slimy things in the garden?  I like to seek solutions to practical problems in the past, so I also turned to my treasure trove of early modern gardening texts.  For the past few years, I’ve been writing a book on practical expressions of Renaissance culture in England, and have found that “how-to” gardening guides really exemplify the spirit of what I am trying to capture.  Three authors in particular, Thomas Hill, Leonard Mascall, and William Lawson, have something to say about garden pests in particular and slugs in general.

None of these guys are offering new and original advice; in typical Renaissance fashion, they borrow heavily from classical authors and their continental counterparts, but they are all very practical, offering step-by-step instructions on how to plant, cultivate, and harvest a garden. They claim to be exposing long-lost horticultural “secrets” via the new medium of print.  Hill, born about 1528, is the earliest of the authors, and his two garden books, The Profitable arte of gardening (first published in the 1560s) and The Gardeners Labyrinth (1577 and after) are among the most popular of all English books in the sixteenth century.

Hill proposes a multi-phased defensive plan against slugs and other “creeping things”.  Seeds should be soaked in various herb waters  in the shell of a snail, dried in the shell of a tortoise, then planted.  Young plants in the garden should be protected by the presence of plants that repel creeping things, including mint, fitch (not sure what this is, but it is always referred to as “the bitter Fitch”), rocket, garlic (vampire slugs!) and onions.  If the slugs still appear, Hill recommends applications of ashes (preferably from a fig tree), and a pungent mixture of Ox or Cow urine mixed together with the “mother of oyle Olive”.  As a last resort, the gardener should “fix river crevisses with nails in many places of the Garden”.  Impaling slugs sounds like an icky, though satisfying, option.

Leonard Mascall disappointed me with his slug solution, which basically amounted to hand-picking slugs off the plants in the very early morning before they go into their dark hiding places for the day.  I was disappointed because Mascall is becoming the hero of my book due to the sheer diversity of practical information he dispensed in the latter part of the sixteenth century:  he published tracts not only on horticulture but also on animal husbandry, fishing, health, and even stain removal. It was his Booke of  Engines and trappes to take polcats, buzzardes, rattes, mice, and all other kindes of vermine and beastes whatsoever (1590) that gave me hope that he might have some sort of secret weapon against slugs, but no.  Apparently slithering creatures are difficult to catch in traps.

In the seventeenth century, William Lawson’s popular New Orchard and Garden, with its companion volume (and one of the first gardening manuals to be addressed specifically to women), The Country House-Wifes Garden, recommended coal ashes and “sharp gravel” as slug preventatives; Lawson clearly did not want his “house-wifes” to get their hands dirty.  So that’s it for my Renaissance experts:  it is not until the next century that lime and the “cabbage method” (slugs love cabbage leaves, so lay them out at night for the slugs to “pasture” on, then scoop them up in the morning) appear, and much more toxic methods in the centuries that followed.  I think I’ll stick with the beer.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Home

June 15, 2011

Lady’s Mantle, Roses and Rue

By daseger

My garden is more plant-based than design-oriented, and I generally choose plants for their interesting historical associations rather than their appearance.  This doesn’t mean that if a plant is really ugly I won’t yank it out–despite its historical relevance (take that, horehound); I have some aesthetic sensibilities.  Three attractive plants that are in full flower now and have been used in all sorts of interesting ways in the past are Lady’s Mantle, roses, and rue.

Lady’s Mantle (alchemilla mollis or vulgaris) is a really common, self-seeding plant which some gardeners perceive as a weed, but I love everything about it:  its large and soft gray-green leaves and chartreuse flowers, its neat habit, and its history.  It forms a nice border in the shade garden pretty quickly, and blends in nicely with lots of other plants.  Here are some views of one of my shade borders, comprised of lots of Lady’s Mantle, sweet cicely,white baneberry, astilbe, and daylillies.

Like most herbs, Lady’s Mantle had lots of medicinal uses in the pre-modern past, but its Latin name, alchemilla, represents the role it played in alchemy, which moved out of the secretive laboratory and into the garden in the sixteenth century.  The water preserved on its velvety leaves was used for alchemical distillations, which amplified the healing powers of plants.  The common name denotes a multi-layered feminine association:  the “Lady” refers to the Virgin Mary (not just any lady!), the “mantle” to an women’s cloak, and (in the words of Nicholas Culpeper, a seventeenth-century physician and author of The Complete Herbal), “Venus claims the herb as her own”, meaning that it had long been perceived as a cure-all for the full range of “women’s problems”.

The Alchemical Garden. Theseaurus of Alchemy, 1734, Wellcome Library, London

Lady's Mantle illustration from Otto Brunfels' Herbarium, c. 1530

In addition to its aesthetic virtues, the rose was also used in both medicinal and cosmetic (as well as culinary) preparations in the medieval and early modern eras.  I can’t tell you how many rosewater recipes I’ve come across from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  For some reason, I’ve never been able to find the rose variety that was prized the most for its medicinal properties in this era, the Rosa Gallica Officinalis (also called the “Apothecary’s Rose”).  Instead, I just have really pretty, dependable David Austin roses.  Though I generally refrain from showy plants in the garden, this orange rose bush (whose name I can’t remember), blooms all summer long.

Symphorien Champier, Rosa Gallica, Paris 1514. Wellcome Library, London

Rue (Ruta Graveolens or “Herb of Grace”) was perceived as an extremely important plant before 1800 largely because of its role as a “counter poison” against the plague.  To quote Nicholas Culpeper again, rue “causes all venomous things to become harmless”; it was pretty powerful stuff.  It’s neat to have in a plague cure in your garden, but I love rue because it’s so beautiful, with the same soft colors as Lady’s Mantle:  silvery gray leaves, yellow-chartreuse flowers.  It’s a willowy shrub, that can work in lots of (sunny) places.  Here’s rue, along with lots of other herbs (skullcap, avens, dill, flax, calamint) at the front of my sunny perennial border, and in a fourteenth-century herbal.  The attendant snake is meant to accentuate the plant’s anti-venomous virtues.

British Library MS Egerton 747

I wanted to sneak one more shot of the shade border here from the other perspective, but somehow how an orange kayak snuck in here!

7 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Home

June 13, 2011

The Medieval World

By daseger

The medieval world was ROUND, smaller than in actuality, and largely comprised of a contiguous land mass.  It was not FLAT.  Please excuse my pedantic capital letters, but this week my graduate seminar is examining Columbus historiography, which raises the ongoing issue (not topic) of the so-called “Flat Earth Myth”, the continuing false belief that the majority educated opinion in the medieval “Dark Ages”  was that the world was flat.  Historians have been writing about the Flat Earth Myth for quite some time (see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth:  Columbus and Modern Historians), but despite their assertions it is still with us:  every year I poll the incoming freshmen in my World History class about what they were taught in primary and secondary school and every year more than half of them raise their hands in support of the medieval flat earth.

The novelist and Columbus biographer Washington Irving is generally given credit for inventing the flat earth, to use Russell’s title term. Irving’s multi-volume Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus accentuated the New World heroism of Columbus by emphasizing the “darkness”  of the Old World from whence he came.  First published in 1828, it remained the definitive text on Columbus until the publication of Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea more than a century later, influencing and infusing several generations of American history textbooks and students.  Given this text’s popularity, it is easy for me to understand why a student entering college as late as 1950 might have believed in the flat earth myth, but not 2011.

An 1873 likeness of Washington Irving from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery, his famous house “Sunnyside” in Tarrytown, New York (HABS, Library of Congress), and an illustration from an 1897 edition of The Life and Works of Christopher Columbus.

Many medieval sources, literary and graphic, exist that demonstrate the prevailing belief in the spherical earth, and these sources have been analyzed and discussed at length. Probably the greatest of medieval philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, asserted that “the world is round” in the same way that we might say “the sky is blue”.  It should be common knowledge, but apparently it is not, so here are a few images to reinforce the round medieval world.  I’m beginning, appropriately, with scenes of instruction from the early fifteenth century and then proceeding chronologically.

A geography master from  a fifteenth-century version of the De proprietatibus rerum (a medieval encyclopedia of sorts) of Bartholomeus Anglicus (British Library MS Royal 17 E III):

God holding a very round world, from an Aristotelian manuscript (BL MS Harley 3487, mid 13th century):

Angels turning the (again, round) world on its axis, from Matfres Eymengau de Beziers, Breviari d’amor (BL MS Harley4940, early 14th century):

God creating the Heavens and Earth, and land and sea, from the Bible Historiale of John the Good, circa 1350 (BL MS Royal 19 D II).  This strikes me as a lot of water for a medieval world map, and of course the medievals have no problem illustrating a not-quite transcendent God!

Some images from a fifteenth-century manuscript of thirteenth-century theologian Gautier de Metz’s popular Image du Monde (BL MS Harley 334), with (again) a very human-like God creating a very round earth:

Finally, a great image of the elemental round earth from John Gower’s Vox Clamantis, circa 1400.  The manuscript is from the University of Glasgow Library (MS Hunter 59) and the image is from the Library’s web exhibition Chaucer and his World.  Obviously medieval intellectuals possessed lots of incorrect and strange (to our eyes and minds) geographical ideas, including a complete lack of knowledge about the soon-to-be-discovered western hemisphere, but the flat earth was not one of them.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History

May 26, 2011

Very Odd Apples

By daseger

My title actually refers to tomatoes rather than apples, a great example of a New World crop that was introduced into Europe though the “Columbian Exchange” and then brought back to America in the eighteenth century. Like another consequential import from the western hemisphere,  the potato, the tomato was slow to find acceptance among Europeans, primarily due to its first introduction in print by the Italian physician and botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli (Matthiolus) in his 1544 Commentaries (the tomato page from a 1590 edition is below).  Matthiolus refers to the tomato as a “poma aurea” or golden apple, which is generally taken as evidence that yellow tomatoes preceded their red counterparts across the Atlantic.


Matthiolus tells his readers how to eat the tomato (fried in oil with salt and pepper) but he also classifies and compares the new vegetable (fruit?  He is confused as well) to the mysterious magical mandrake, which gives it a rather malevolent reputation in the early modern era.  Northern naturalists included the tomato in their “new” herbals in the sixteenth century, with name variations but the same magical associations. Conrad Gesner stressed the aphrodisiac qualities of mandrake but maintained its connection to the new plant in his Historia Plantarum (1553),  and thus “golden apples” became “love apples” (and sometimes “wolf’s peaches”) in northern Europe while in Spain the term “Moor’s apples” prevailed.  The most beautiful herbal of the sixteenth century, Leonart Fuchs’ De historia stirpium, included an illustration of the tomato in its later editions, as did Rembert Dodoens’ Cruydeboeck:

The most comprehensive herbal issued in sixteenth-century England, John Gerard’s Herball, was primarily plagiarized from Dodoens’ earlier work (there was a lot of “sharing” in the early modern publishing industry), but Gerard was a gardener who experimented with tomato cultivation (and consumption) himself.  He found the plant to be “of rank and stinking savour” and added this commentary:  In Spain and those hot regions they use to eat the Apples [of love]  prepared and boiled with pepper, salt, and oil:  but they yield very little nourishment to the body, and the same naught and corrupt.  Likewise they do eat the Apples with oil, vinegar, and pepper mixed together for sauce to their meat, even as we in these cold countries do mustard.”  An early reference to tomato sauce, this observation also tells us a lot about the difference between Mediterranean and northern European cuisines, then and now!

Taking their cue from Gerard, the tomato was scorned in Anglo-American cuisines until the modern era, despite efforts by such varied advocates as Thomas Jefferson, who cultivated tomatoes at Monticello, and the Neapolitan artist Michel Felice Corne, who escaped the Napoleonic Wars by departing Naples in 1800 on one of Elias Hasket Derby’s Salem-bound ships, the Mount Vernon.  Corne lived and worked in Salem for the next six years, ostensibly introducing both Italian painting techniques and Italian tomato sauce to the town, but Salemites would have none of the latter.  It would take another half-century or so, and a huge wave of Italian immigration, for “love apples” to become American (again).

Michel Felice Corne, The Ship Mount Vernon of Salem Outrunning a French Fleet

An 1869 Advertisement, Library of Congress

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May 24, 2011

Maps Come Alive

By daseger

In the course of putting together my summer graduate seminar on the expansion of Europe this past weekend  I reacquainted myself with some digital map collections on the web.  Maps provide an accessible entryway into this topic, in every era of European expansion.  The shift from conceptual to more realistic cartography in the early modern era is a very evident and important trend, but early modern mapmakers retained a bit of whimsy when they produced maps in the form of plants, animals and humans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The maps contained in German theology professor Heinrich Bunting’s Travels according to the Scriptures (1581) are very popular with my students and with the blogosphere:  the known world as a clover leaf, part of Asia as the flying horse Pegasus, Europe as the classical virgin Europa.  This is still very conceptual geography; the clover leaf map is merely a new version of the medieval T-O map, in which the world is inhabited by the descendants of Noah dwelling in Asia, Africa and Europe.  Jerusalem is at the center of the world as it has always been.   Even though it is almost a century after Columbus, Heinrich’s “world” map only references the eastern hemisphere.  His Europa map was stolen from one of the most popular books of the sixteenth century:  Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia, first published in 1544 and issued in many editions by the end of the century.  This is what these new, colorful, fantastical maps are all about:  competition in the new age of print.

Another Europa:  Sebastian Munster’s version from a 1570 edition of Cosmographia:

Another lively early modern map is the “Dutch Lion” map (Leo Belgicus, Leo Hollandicus ) issued in a succession of variations from the late sixteenth century, contemporaneously with the Dutch Revolt against Spain.  The rebellious Dutch provinces are shown in the form of a lion, roaring in the face of the powerful Spanish Empire.

"Leo Hollandicus", JC Visscher, 1648

Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic maps continue on into the modern era; they seem to be quite popular in the nineteenth century as a forms of political commentary and expressions of public opinion.  These satirical maps are especially prevalent after 1870 and the unification of Germany:  French and English versions definitely contain an alarmed awareness of the potential of the new empire to dominate the Continent, as these examples( L’Europe Animale, 1882 and Angling in Dangerous Waters, 1889) from the huge collection of such maps at the University of Amsterdam illustrate:

In L’Europe Animale, Germany is a sly wolf waiting to pounce, while the Angling map personifies the nation with its militaristic ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who is looking over the horizon.  The great big Russian bear and Tsar Nicholas are pretty intimidating as well.  The end result of all this animosity was of course World War I, and BibliOdyssey has a great post on the jingoistic satirical maps of the Great War here, including the English map “Kill that (German) Eagle” from 1914.

On the lighter side:  plates from William Harvey’s Geographical Fun.  Being Humourous Outlines of Various Countries, an atlas (presumably for children but quite sophisticated in its humor) first published in 1869.  The entire text can be found at the Library of Congress, and it has also been republished.  Here, from a very British perspective, are France and Prussia (it’s just before the unification of Germany):

Finally, I can’t resist adding an elephant to this group even though he’s not quite a map:  a World Wildlife Fund advertisement by Ogilby and Mather from our own time:


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