Tag Archives: Seventeenth Century

In Which I Try to Understand the Peabody Essex Museum’s Current Exhibition on the Salem Witch Trials

The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), located here in Salem, deserves considerable credit for engaging in and with the history of the city’s trademark event, the Salem Witch Trials, in a series of exhibitions featuring authentic documents and objects beginning last year and continuing this year with The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming. For several decades prior, the PEM ignored the trials, and by association, the flocks of tourists who converged upon Salem because of their escalating exploitation. During this time, I always hoped that the PEM would offer some sort of exhibition to counter the commodified interpretations of the trials (or some essence thereof) which reign in Salem, and it has. Last year’s exhibition, The Salem Witch Trials 1692, was a little spare, but the authenticity of its items and the straightforward manner in which the story was told was striking, especially in the context of schlocky October Salem. But this year’s exhibition is……much more murky: I simply don’t understand what I’m supposed to take away from it, both in terms of “reckoning” and “reclaiming,” especially the former. Connecting the past to the present is a complex task, or maybe I’m just missing the links made, so I thought I would “write it out”.

Judge Jonathan Corwin’s Trunk: Corwin was a justice on the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which presided over the Salem Witch Trials, and his Salem house is now known as the “Witch House”.

I briefly visited this exhibition shortly after it opened in September, and returned yesterday with several students in my freshman seminar on the Trials: they are going to be writing reviews for our class, so we’ll see if they have grasped it better than I! There are three parts to Reckoning and Reclaiming. You enter into the world of seventeenth-century Salem, armed only with a map and a very brief panel introduction to the trials, and represented by objects or “material manifestations” belonging to people swept up in the trials: Judge Corwin’s trunk (above), victim John Proctor’s sundial, a loom belonging to one of the members of the accusing Putnam family, embellished with symbols of counter-magic, as well as documents related to the legal process of the Trials. The second part/room takes you, via a timeline on the wall and more primary-source documents, through the more focused prosecution of victim Elizabeth Howe of Ipswich and into the present, represented by a glittery black dress from her descendant Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 2007 collection entitled “In the Memory Of Elizabeth How, Salem 1692.” Still in the present, you (we) move on to the last part of the exhibition: photographs of modern witches by Frances F. Denny, who is also a descendant of a Trial participant, Judge Samuel Sewall, as well as a woman prosecuted for witchcraft in Boston in 1674, from her series Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America.

Edward Payson’s Testimony on behalf of Elizabeth How(e).

All the constituent parts of this exhibition are interesting and well worth your time, but how are they connected? And who is doing the reckoning and the reclaiming? The exhibition, or us? I discern responses on the part of descendants McQueen and Denny but I always though reckoning and reclaiming were a bit more intensive activities. I looked up both words in the Oxford English Dictionary in order to get some guidance.

Reckoning: The action or an act of giving or being required to give an account of something, esp. one’s conduct or actions; an account or statement so given. Also: an occasion of giving or being required to give such a statement; a calling to account. A calling to account! That’s it: so who is being called to account in this exhibition? The afflicted girls, the judges, the people of Salem? Nope, no reckoning on their parts is in evidence. Survivor Philip English’s 1710 statement “What a great Sufferer I have been in my Estate by reason of the Severe prosecution of me & my wife in that Dark Time”, as well as the 1712 petition for compensation by the daughters of victim Elizabeth Howe are included in the exhibition, but not the apologies issued by accuser Ann Putnam, members of the jury, and Judge Samuel Sewall. We can read the poignant testimonies of those who spoke up for the accused (and these are my favorite objects of the exhibition) but the swift, even jarring, movement into the present makes it seem as if redemption is not possible in the past. Before I saw this exhibition, the use of the word “reckoning” in its title was enticing to me as I thought we were going to be presented with an historical view of how people who lived through the Salem Witch Trials wrestled with what they had experienced in its aftermath, but we are not presented with a full accounting.

Reclaiming:  Wow, this is a word that has many meanings and forms! Everything from falconry to recycling. I think the meaning that is relevant here is this one: To reassert a relationship or connection with, or a moral right to; (now frequently) to re-evaluate or reinterpret (a term, concept, etc., esp. one relating to one’s own demographic group) in a more positive or suitable way; to reappropriate. Clearly the exhibition is emphasizing the reappropriation of the word “witch” in our time through the creations of Alexander McQueen and the photographs of Frances F. Denny (along with the words of Denny’s subjects, who are all very expressive and assertive). But what does this reappropriation have to do with the victims of 1692 who were not, of course, witches? Again, the shift from past to present seems jarring, and the connective thread very thin, essentially McQueen’s and Denny’s lineage (and there about a million descendants of Witch Trial victims out there). Denny’s portraits are compelling for sure, so much so that they seem to constitute another, separate exhibition, tied to the first only through a word (and a dress?).

The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming is on view at the Peabody Essex Museum until March 20.


Under Cover in the Renaissance

It’s a beautiful day here in Salem, but I’m in lockdown in my study, more than halfway through the very last chapter of my book! I am taking a break to show you some early modern masks, just because they are so wonderful. There is no material culture in my book: it’s all about information culture. But some of the instructive information I am coming across refers to very mundane matters like personal and household hygiene: one of my very favorite books is all about how to remove spots and stains from both precious and mundane fabrics, with dyeing advice if they won’t come out. Out, damned spot! Out, I say! This was of course a huge problem, as I am not dealing with a disposable society. Cleanliness was increasingly important for health reasons as well: sixteenth-and seventeenth-century people were living through constant pandemics of plague and various poxes and fevers, and while they knew nothing about germ theory, they had associated disease and squalidness. When they went outside, into the pestilential air, they covered up for protection if they could afford to: with hats, hoods, gloves and fans and yes, even masks. Everyone is now familiar with the beaked plague masks of the later seventeenth century, but this was just one, rather dramatic, form of early modern masks, which were also worn for “disguising,” for protection against the weather, for festivity, and for fashion. The most elaborate of fashionable early modern masks for women, the vizard or visard, which covered the entire face except for the eyes, seems to have had Italian origins, like so many fashions then (and now): when they began appearing in England, many commentators, especially of the Puritan disposition, were not impressed. In his Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Phillip Stubbes wrote: When they use to ride abroad they have invisories or visors made of velvet, wherewith they cover all their faces, having holes made in them for their eyes, whereout they look. So that if a man, that know not their guise before, should chance to meet one of them, he would think he met a monster or a devil, for he can see no face, but two broad holes against her eyes with glasses in them. Nevertheless, the household accounts of Queen Elizabeth’s reign list vizards among her purchases, and a century later, these “visors” were fashionable apparel for women of some means, who would wear them out and about, particularly when attending the theater. Samuel Pepys was so struck by one vizard-wearing lady at a performance that he went right out and bought a mask for his (long-suffering) wife. There are several digital sources for early modern apparel: I chose the images below from a late sixteenth-century album of costumes in watercolor at the Morgan Library and the “Friendship Album” (Album Amicorum) of a German Soldier in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

An Album of Costumes, Morgan Library.

Album Amicorum, LACMA.

Wenceslaus Hollar’s engravings of English women clothed for every season from the mid-seventeenth century illustrate the bit more utilitarian masks worn by women of means during the winter: many more Hollar images are at the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto and the Rijksmuseum, where I obtained these images—there is a new “Rijkstudio” where you can get creative with collection items; no time for that now, but later……..

Wenceslaus Hollar at the Rijksmusum.


If We Can’t Picture Them, Were They There?

We don’t have any portraits of Salem women before the eighteenth century: the (European) women of Salem’s (European) founding century are therefore difficult to picture. We are left with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century romanticized and idealized images of dramatic women: persecuted Quakers, the two Annes, Hutchinson and Bradstreet (who never lived in Salem), and above all, the women who were accused of witchcraft. The latter are always represented by illustrations from long after their deaths, or by images of English or continental witch trials, utilized even on the covers of scholarly books on the 1692 trials. Why am I always seeing the Pendle “witches” from 1612 depicted as the Salem “witches” from 80 years later and across the Atlantic?

Picturing Pendle Collage

Because “public-facing” history, presented in digital formats and disseminated through social media, needs pictures: texts just won’t do! And book covers need to draw the reader in. I’m as guilty as the next blogger of using the later nineteenth-century images (of which there are so many!) to illustrate some of my posts, although I never substitute depictions of one event for another. I’d love to have some contemporary illustrations of Salem women in the seventeenth century doing all the things I know they did: parent, cook, sew, garden, make all sorts of stuff, keep taverns, worship, wonder. But there aren’t any. I’d love to have a portrait of Lady Deborah Moody, who settled briefly in Salem before she moved on to New York and was labeled a “dangerous woman” by John Winthrop for her heretical Anabaptist views (and I think her independence), but there aren’t any—I’ve checked through all the English sources as well. I’d love to have an image of the adversaries Martha Rowlandson, who divorced her husband for impotence in 1651, and Eleanor Hollingsworth (mother of Mary English, who I’d also like to see), who operated her own tavern, brewed her own beer, and cleared her husband’s considerable debts. But nothing. There are several portraits of seventeenth-century Massachusetts women, so I guess they need to stand in for their Salem sisters: anything to avoid disseminating those simplistic “Puritan” images!

Women Pictured

Puritan WomanReal 17th Century Massachusetts Women and a “Puritan Woman, 17th Century” from Cassel’s Historical Scrap Book, c. 1880.

As an English historian, I have a wide range of texts and images available to me with which to explore seventeenth-century women: many portraits of wealthy ladies, prescriptive writing, prints and broadsides, recipe books and diaries, theatrical performances as social comment and criticism (with women as the focus quite a bit in the earlier seventeenth century). So English women seem more diverse, more interesting, more active, more layered, while their sisters across the Atlantic seem a bit…..one-dimensional in comparison. I guess that’s why the authors of books on the Salem Witch Trials pinch English images so often. Of course if we move away from the reliance on the visual we can learn a lot more, but I worry that the exclusive reliance on “picture history” in the public sphere erases those who do not leave an image behind.

Virtuous Women

I think I can illustrate my concern a bit better by examining some women from the nineteenth century, certainly a much more visual age, but not universally so. There’s been a lot of interest in Salem’s African-American history over the past few years, which is of course great. Two women in particular, have claimed the spotlight: Charlotte Forten Grimké (1837– 1914)  and Sarah Parker Remond (1824-1894). Both were incredible women: Charlotte came north from Philadelphia to live among the always-hospitable Remond family to attend Salem’s desegregated schools in the 1850s, and went on to graduate from Salem Normal School (now Salem State University, where I teach) and become Salem’s first African-American teacher in the public schools, while Sarah grew up in Salem in the midst of a very activist Abolitionist family and became a much- heralded advocate herself, before emigrating to first England and then Italy for her undergraduate and medical degrees. Charlotte remained in her teaching position for only a couple of years before returning to her native Philadelphia and then launching an amazing career of advocacy herself, in the forms of teaching, writing, and public speaking. Both women were illustrious, and completely deserving of the two Salem parks which now bear their name. But I can’t help thinking about another African-American woman, Clarissa Lawrence, who spent her entire life in Salem, running her own school for girls, founding the country’s first anti-slavery society for African-American women as well as a benevolent society, with only a brief trip to Philadelphia for a national Abolitionist convention in which she gave the riveting “We Meet the Monster Prejudice” speech. Where is Clarissa’s park or statue in Salem? Why is Charlotte, whose family is from Philadelphia, the feature of Destination Salem’s Ancestry Days, which seeks to serve as “a gathering point for descendants of Salem’s families as well as a research opportunity for people who want to learn more about their family history”? Her family history is not here! (well actually, none of Salem’s history is here). I suspect the answer to these questions is in good part based on the fact that we have no picture of Clarissa Lawrence, so it’s almost as if she didn’t exist.

Clarissa (2)

Clarissa 2

Ancestry-DaysCharlotte Forten between the two Salem Nathaniels, Hawthorne and Bowditch on the Ancestry Days poster. This sounds like a great genealogy event, but none of Charlotte’s family records are held by the participating institutions: why not feature Sarah Parker Remond, whose are? We even have several photographs of Sarah!


Really Rubbish Royal Relics

Sometimes, no all the time, I think that I’m devoting too much time to social media, but occasionally you find yourself in the middle of some very interesting exchanges. The other day a really funny thread about the sheer dreadfulness of English delftware coronation plates from the late Stuart era unravelled on Twitter, and I couldn’t help but jump in, as I had just seen this William & Mary plate in a Sotheby’s auction and I needed some context and “conversation”!

William and Mary Sotheby's 2

Oh no, poor William, and even poorer Mary, with so much exposed. Neither looks very happy–or dignified. These crude plates started to appear with the Restoration, when people apparently sought them as symbols of a revived and “colorful” monarchy after years of dour Cromwellian rule. Many of the images of King Charles II in his coronation robes appear naive but charming, but by the time his niece and nephew were crowned, it looks like aesthetic standards have deteriorated quite a bit—or perhaps the potteries could not keep up with demand. When we look at these items now, they look comical, rather than reverential. The curatorial contributors to our Twitter exchange labeled these plates “Really Rubbish 17th-century Royal Memorabilia” so I am following suit, but I can’t help but also notice a distinct differentiation of display by gender in these plates: after Queen Mary’s untimely death (from smallpox, at the age of 32 in 1694), King William is depicted in a more stately fashion alone, and after he is succeeded by (poor) Queen Anne, we once again see the return of extensive decolletage. Why such excessive immodesty?

Coronation Plate Collage

William and Mary Charger BM

William and Mary Winterthur

editrs365881_603191-lpr_0

Queen Anne V and A

Delftware Queen Anne Ashmolean

William and Mary Coronation plates, c. 1690-94 from (clockwise): Samuel Herrup Antiques; Sotheby’s; and the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum; Queen Mary does come off a bit better (or at least more covered up) in SOME of the coronation plates in which she and William are standing, but it varies, as these two examples from the British Museum and Winterthur illustrate (and occasionally he is handing her the orb, which is good). It’s hard to make Queen Anne look good, but I don’t understand why she has to display such extravagant cleavage in these delftware plates from the Victoria and Albert collections and the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University.


Fireworks for the Fifth

I’ve been immersed in seventeenth-century English instructional texts during my sabbatical, so it wasn’t difficult to find directions for fireworks for Guy Fawkes Night. Whether it was the foiled Gunpowder plot or the aspirational magnificence of the Stuart court, clearly there was demand for some very fancy displays in the air, on the ground, and in the water. One imagines that these flagrant displays would have been one more thing to irk the Puritans, if they were ever produced. Lots of fiery dragons (to highlight St. George), serpents and dolphins. I just love the idea of fighting fire with fire by celebrating with gunpowder, the key ingredient in all of the firework recipes in John Bate’s Mysteries of Art and Nature (1634), John Babbington’s Pyrotechnia. Or a Discourse of Artificial Fireworks (1635, is there any other kind?) and John White’s A Rich Cabinet with Variety of Inventions in Several Arts and Sciences (first published in 1651). The “Green Man” wielding the “firecracker” introducing Bate’s fireworks chapter is one of my very favorite printed images. Remember, remember.

Bate 1

Babington

Dragons

Dragons Pyrotechnia 1635

Bate 3Green Man

Bate's Fireworks Collage

Bate 9

Bate 16

Fireworks CollageAll (embellished) illustrations from Bate (1634) with the exception of the Knight +Dragon (Babbington, 1635).


Sugar and Sage in the 17th Century

I’m working on three projects during my sabbatical this semester, but the one that has (re-)captured my attention, and to which I have devoted the most time so far, is an old study of the more utilitarian features of the long English Renaissance, including agriculture, medicine, home-keeping, construction (rather than architecture), engineering, navigation and other individual and collective “industrious pursuits”. Food and drink are at the intersection of several of these pursuits, so I’ve spent several weeks researching not so much what early modern people ate and drank but rather what they were supposed to eat and drink according to contemporary “authorities”. This is far more interesting than the basis of my other industrious pursuits, which is of course math. Eventually I must get into math but right now I’m enjoying reading about food. There are many opinions in the early modern regimens organized around the Galenic concept of the non-naturals, external and environmental factors which affect health: air, food & drink, rest & exercise, sleep & waking, excretions & repletions, and “affections of the mind”, but in this post I’m going to focus primarily–but not exclusively– on the advice of a physician-entomologist named Thomas Moffat, which was published posthumously as Healths Improvement: or, Rules Comprizing and Discovering the Nature, Method, and Manner of Preparing all sorts of Food used in this Nation in 1655, with “corrections and enlargements” made by Dr. Christopher Bennet. Moffatt wrote the original manuscript around 1595, and he segregated diet from all the other non-naturals in a manner that is more modern than early modern: it is an orderly and due course observed in the use of bodily nourishments, for the preservation, recovery, or continuance of the health of mankind. 

Food Moffett

Even though he was a practicing physician and an avid entomologist, Moffatt’s diet advice is more ancient Greek/biblical than empirical, though he does make the interesting distinction between “full, moderate, and thin” diets, which increase, repair, and lessen flesh, spirits and vapors in the body respectively. Most adults should follow moderate diets in alliance with their designated humoral complexion or temperament, representing the particular combination of humors (blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile) with their attendant qualities, or degrees (hot, cold, moist, dry). Everything and every substance has humors, not just bodies, so foods should be chosen to preserve health according to the rule that like is sustained by the like, or restore health by employing foods with contrary degrees. That’s all pretty standard for this time, but Moffat explores food to a greater degree than many of his contemporaries:  its taste and distaste, its preparation, when to eat it—and when (and how) to kill it if it is a beast. All beasts are fair game, both domestic and wild (even hedgehogs) and all parts of all beasts (believe me). A few expressions of vegetarianism will emerge over the course of the seventeenth century, but Moffatt’s treatise is not among them. Nearly every food is good for someone at sometime, but the when must be considered along with the what, as for example, seemingly-harmless butter, which is best at break∣fast, tolerable in the beginning of dinner; but at supper no way good, because it hinders sleep, and sendeth up unpleasant vapours to annoy the brain, according to the old Proverb, Butter is Gold in the morning, Silver at noon, and Lead at night. It is also best for children whilst they are growing, and for old men when they are declining; but very unwholesome betwixt those two ages….a veritable lifetime of no butter! Thankfully, Moffatt seems to be the only one proffering this advice; most regimen writers assert that butter is just fine, especially when salted and mixed with honey and/or sugar, the universal panacea of the early modern era (for those who could afford it).

Food Sugar Nova Reperta 1600 FolgerMaking miraculous sugar in Nova Reperta (New Inventions of Modern Times), engraved by Jan Collaert I, after Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus, and published by Philips Galle, 1600.

Sweeteners make everything better—water, wine, butter–not just better-tasting, but better, according to all opinions: “Sugar agrees with all ages and all complexions”, wrote Thomas Cogan in his Haven for Health (1584). Water should be avoided at all costs, unless it was pure rain water or mixed with sugar or honey; ale, beer and wine were much preferred, especially “Rhenish” (white) wine. Writing several decades before Cogan, Philip Moore summarized his diet advice according to ease of digestion and engendering of “good juice” in his Hope of Health: partridges, pheasants, chickens, capons, hens, small birds, newly-laid eggs, rare or poached, young pork, veal, new milk, fresh fish from gravelly and stony rivers…bread made of the flour of good wheat, being well-leavened, sufficiently salted and well baked in an oven, being two or three days old. And also pure wine. Even though “meate” is often used to refer to all food, it’s not difficult to glean that meat (or flesh) was key to a healthy diet, and chicken and mutton were generally preferred, “boiled and eaten with opening (fresh) cordial herbs”, a beefed-up version of the pottage most people probably were eating.

Food November

Food Trevelyon Miscellany 2Two calendar illustrations from Thomas Trevilian’s marvelous Miscellany, 1608: Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b. 232 (formerly Folger MS 450517).

There is still a reticence about fruits and vegetables among seventeenth-century regimen writers, particularly the former, although that is changing: a terrible famine in the 1590s inspired a major reconsideration. William Vaughan, in his Approved Directions for Health, both Natural and Artificial (1600), asserts that fruits are eaten more for wantoness than for any nutritive or necessary good”, but he praises many vegetables, and gives us a recipe for the very best “sallet” made of pennyroyal, parsley, lettuce and endive, which “opens the obstruction of the liver and keeps the head in good plight”. Moffatt is more open to fruit, but like most of his contemporaries, he warns against the raw state: all apples are worst raw, and best baked and preserved (with rosewater, honey and/or sugar, of course). But by all means avoid “melomachia, the ‘apple-fight”; [as] cruel fluxes surprised the Army upon this, and many died of intolerable gripings. It seems as if most fruits are acceptable if they are baked, roasted, or “cunningly preserved”, with sugar, and taken with wine: figs, in particular, draw much commentary as a wholesome fruit, but only if consumed in the right way. According to Moffatt, figs are dangerous without wine, but wholesome with it. Vegetables can be nourishing as well, but only if you pick the “whitest and tendrest-leafed” and steep and cook them for quite some time. In addition to the application of fire, the accompaniment of wine, and sweeteners, garden herbs and spices, both “homebred” and imported or “outlandish”, can change the nature of everything, particularly sage, the versatile herb of salvation from time immemorial. Moffatt (and Bennett) leave sage to the herbalists, an indication of the increasing specialization of medical texts in the seventeenth century, but Vaughan gives us a “wholesome diet drink” for everyone, made of a variety of the most useful domestic herbs, processed in seventeenth-century style.

Stoneware jug 17th century with Vaughan Diet Drink


The Worst Day/Samuel Wardwell

I always think about the Salem Witch Trials in September, as the cumulative hysteria of 1692 was coming to a close with the execution of the last eight victims on September 22. Every year at this time I ponder a particular aspect of the accusations and trials, or a particular victim. There’s always a certain poignancy about this time of year in Salem for me—and others too I am sure—as the anniversary of the worst day comes just before the City descends full throttle into the celebration of Halloween, drawing on a very tenuous connection between the persecution of people who were not witches, and a modern holiday symbolized by stereotypical figures who are. So this is a nice week of reflection before the deluge. This month, and this week, I’ve been thinking about the sole male victim of September 22: Samuel Wardwell of Andover, who also happened to be the sole accused person to be executed after recanting an earlier confession. Wardwell had confessed, in detail, to entering into a covenant with the Devil almost as soon as he was accused: he implicated others as well and was in turn accused by his own wife and child. He was not a pristine character, but rather a real person: who made mistakes, and enemies. At the eleventh hour, and right up to the moment of his death, he recanted, and according to the famous narration of Robert Calef, Wardwell was still proclaiming his innocence on the gallows on this very day in 1692, when a puff of tobacco smoke from the executioner’s pipe “coming in his face, interrupted his discourse: those accusers said that the devil did hinder him with smoke”.

Wardwell Memorial

The devil did hinder him with smoke. Wardwell does sound like a bit of a rascal; I wonder if he had come to the conclusion that his confession would not save him because of his reputation in general, and his fortune-telling in particular. And so he recanted bravely, only to have his big moment marred by the Devil’s smoke! A tragedy in numerous ways. Wardwell seems like a regular seventeenth-century Englishman to me, rather than an abstract Colonial Puritan: across the Atlantic people were buying books of fortune-telling tricks, and demonic interventions were the stuff of ballads, rather than trials. The Devil was a capricious bogeyman in Old England in 1692, but in New England he was very, very real.

Wardwell and the Devil

Wardwell the Fortune Teller

Devil Men in the Moon Cruikshank

Devil Man and the Moon, CruikshankStrange News from Westmoreland, 1662-1668; A Merry Conceited Fortune-Teller, 1662. Over a century later, George Cruikshank’s satirical illustrations for The Man in the Moon (1820) seem to mock contemporary descriptions of the executions on September 22.


Considerations on Color

I teach what is commonly known as the “Scientific Revolution” in several of my courses, and I always endeavor to expose my students to the broad range of the “new science” in the seventeenth century as they tend to have a very narrow view of what this revolution entailed. We come to the topic from very different perspectives: for them, it’s all about the heliocentric universe (conception, proof, acceptance? I’m not sure which); for me, it’s about nothing less than a new conception of truth and a new methodology of inquiry. To demonstrate its truly revolutionary impact, I stress the universality of this methodology by exposing them to the range and variety of “ingenious pursuits”, encompassing everything from botany to medicine to chemistry to mechanics to navigation and from the theoretical to the practical. I’m a bit more interested in the latter–and that’s what I’m studying during this sabbatical–but sometimes it’s hard to separate the two approaches: a case in point is Robert Boyle’s Experiments and Considerations Touching Colourswhich was first published in 1664. Boyle is primarily known for his pioneering work in chemistry and physics, but his interests were varied: like his contemporary Isaac Newton, he also experimented with alchemy. As its title indicates, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours consists of experiments and observations which “enquire seriously into the Nature of Colours, and assist in the investigation of it [them]”, and his empirical data consists of examples of craftsmen creating color, including the English dyers who had perfected the process of transforming a red acid extracted from the American cochineal insect into scarlet and crimson dyes: and voilà, Redcoats! (Well a bit later). It is these intersections of “science”, industry and art that really demonstrate the spirit of inquiry in the seventeenth century.

COnsiderations of Color

Wright, John Michael, 1617-1694; Mary Fairfax, Duchess of BuckinghamFirst edition of the Experiments and Considerations Touching Colour, 1664, Skinner Auctions; The Duchess of Buckingham with her crimson wrap, after 1659, York Museums Trust.

Just two years later, Robert Waller, another fellow of the Royal Society (which we should remember was very interested in technology as well as theoretical science) published a really cool color chart in the Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. As you can read below, Waller had seen a “table of simple colors” some years previous but was resolved to “give a more philosophical and useful one by the addition of some mixt colors”. The vocabulary is similar to that of medicines–simple and compound–and like materia medica, everything was composed from nature but man was starting to amplify the process of production—or creation.

Creating Colors Waller 2

Creating Color Waller

Color Chart 1686Robert Weller, Tabula colorum physiologica (Table of Physiological Colors), Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1666.

And then there is the remarkable Dutch manuscript brought to (internet) light by the book historian Erik Kwakkel a few years ago containing a “proto-Pantone” code of colors: the Treatise on Colors for Water Painting (1692) by A. Boogert. A single and singular copy forgotten and full of the most amazing colors and color compositions, this book set the design world on fire back in 2014—understandably so.

color-guide-960x731

Color Chart 1690sA. Boogert, Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, Aix-en-Provence, Bibliothèque municipale/Bibliothèque Méjanes, MS 1389 (1228). Photographs by Erik Kwakkel.


September Strategies

I had high hopes for this particular September, one of the very few Septembers that I didn’t have to go back to school as a student or teacher in my entire life as I am on sabbatical. I’ve always thought that September was one of the most beautiful months of the year, and looked forward to long golden walks after I put in several hours of reading and writing. We’re halfway through the month, and so far it hasn’t turned out that way: the weather was unbearably muggy and hot in the first week of September, and last week I had pneumonia! But I’m on the mend now, so those walks will happen, and in the meantime I have been extraordinarily productive, so I have adopted a pre-modern mentality and come to the conclusion that it was God’s will that I stay inside and write. With both my lungs and the weather clearing up, however, I’m planning on a more (physically) active second half of the month.

I’m working with early modern prescriptive literature: texts on how to better “order” your health and household and garden, and feeling deficient in my own “government” of all of the above. September was a busy month for my seventeenth-century authors, who prescribe many activities for their readers: harvesting, preserving, cleaning, potting-up, sowing and sewing, among other monthly tasks. In his Kalendarium Hortense, which was published in fourteen editions from 1664, the famous diarist John Evelyn is a taskmaster for two gardens, or really three: the orchard (he was a big forestry proponent, for both timber and fruit), the “olitory garden” (a word he apparently made up) which produced plants for culinary and medicinal uses, and the “parterre” or flower garden. As you can read below, much is in prime during September so there is much to do in all three gardens.

September Evelyn Cover

September Evelyn

September Evelyn 2

September Evelyn 3

September Evelyn 4

September Evelyn 5

I’m reading these texts for specific information about life and learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but it occurred to me that gardening and husbandry texts, in particular, are great sources for understanding climate change as the authors take careful note of the existing weather conditions. September was as much a transitional month for them as it is for us. Michaelmas is really the turning point: before that it can be either hot or cold. After our very humid early September, I was kind of relieved to read the observations of Thomas Tryon, a wealthy merchant, popular author, and energetic advocate of vegetarianism who seemed to exist on nothing but gruel in the month of September as the Air (which is the Life of the Spirit in all Cities and great Towns) is thick and sulpherous , full of gross Humidity (YES!) which has its source from many uncleanesses…..I guess they had to suffer through humidity as well, even in the midst of the “Little Ice Age”.

Tryon collage

The more elaborate horticultural texts are sources for garden design, machinery, experimental crops–even adjoining houses. One of my favorites is John Worlidge’s Systema Agriculturae, the Mystery of Husbandry Discovered (1669) , which also included a “Kalendarium Rusticum” of monthly tasks for the larger estate as well as other reference materials. This is a pretty substantive text describing the workings of a pretty substantive estate: thank goodness there is an epitome! For the steward of such an estate, as opposed to the mere gardener or farmer, September is all about getting ready for the plough, mending your fences, making cider (which Worlidge calls the “wine” of Britain) and perry, drying your hops, sowing a host of vegetables and planting your bulbs, gathering your saffron, “retiring” your tender plants into the conservatory, and tending to your bees. In these early days of an emerging agricultural revolution, it’s good to see some machines to help with all of this work: Worlidge’s work–and his calendar–are aimed at more of a collective or national audience than that of the individual householder as his reference to a “System” implies.

September Worlidge 1691

September WOrlidge title 1681

September Worlidge 1681 verse

September collage

September Worlidge BIG

September walter_d_ae_garten_idstein_fruehling_florilegium_nassau_idstein_1663 The 1681 edition of Worlidge’s Systema Agriculturae; a more ornamental continental garden from the Nassau-Idstein Florilegium by Johann Walter the Elder, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.


Hang the King and Queen in the Dining Room

Back to the seventeenth century, where I am working my way through a series of instructional books produced to meet the apparent and universal demand for better health, more wealth, and an enhanced quality of life. For most of yesterday I was in the company of William Salmon, Doctor of Physick, who wrote an comprehensive and detailed compendium titled Polygraphice: or The Arts of Drawing, Engraving, Etching, Limning, Painting, Washing, Varnishing, Gilding, Colouring, Dyeing, Beautifying and Perfuming, which was published in eight expanding editions from 1671 to 1701. Here we have the third edition, from the University of Heidelberg, which includes an additional “Discourse on Perspective and Chiromancy”. In some ways, this is your typical early modern mishmash of arts, “sciences”, and a bit of magic, but in other ways it is very precise and technical, the instructions for perspective and shading particularly so. Salmon is always referred to as an “empiric” in terms of his medical practice, but his publications are so diverse one assumes they are primarily derivative—yet there seems to be some strong opinions among the instructions.

Salmon Pyro

salmon1675_0068

salmon1675_0036

salmon1675_0079

And the long seventeenth-century title does not mislead us: Salmon offers up instructions on all aspects of drawing, engraving, and etching, he tells us how to mix up paint colours, of both water and oil, and how to gild, varnish and dye, and then he makes the remarkable transition from painting canvases to rooms to faces! This is the rationalization: some may wonder that we should meddle with such a subject as this, in this place, but let such know; the Painting of a deformed Face, and the licking over of old, withered, wrinkled, and weather-beaten skin are as proper appendices to a painter, as the rectification of his Errors in a piece of Canvas. Well. Since he’s in the realm of cosmetics, he tells us how to make a variety of waters, and touches on alchemy for a bit—more in forthcoming editions. I was delighted to see a very early reference to “Popinjay Green”, which I think must be my favorite color (no–apparently not that early a reference: the Oxford English Dictionary tells me that the word first appeared in English in 1322, and the reference to the color began appearing in the sixteenth century).

Popinjay Green Collage

Popinjay Susan Sandford

Adding an anachronistic image here: this “Popinjay” collage of a turn-of-the-century dandy by artist Susan Sanford just seemed to fit in this post + I like it.

There is very little creativity in this text about art, but the time, place, author, and genre dictate didacticism. Salmon instructs us not only how to make paints, but also which colors to apply to which subjects, whether it’s the sky or the clouds or the grass in a “landskip” or the skin of the subject of a portrait. Once the paintings are complete, he tells his readers where they should be “disposed of” (hung) in their houses: royalty in the dining room, forbear all “obscene pictures” in the banqueting rooms, and family pictures in the bedchamber. Art is essentially skilled imitation of nature, in an ideal sense: the work of the Painter is to express the exact imitation of natural things; wherein you are to observe the excellencies and beauties of the piece, but to refuse its vices.

Salmon CollageThe dining room at the royal palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, over which King George IV reigns.


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