The Glutted, Unvented Body

  • Margaret Healy
Chapter

Abstract

We have seen how, through the course of the sixteenth century, the age-old sin of lechery evolved into a complex notion of ‘fornication’, synthesizing medical, religious and political discourses into an intriguing saga of bodily corruption. The related sin of appetite — gluttony — was not to be outdone: it emerged, too, with formidable ideological resonances that were to have profound repercussions, not least for the constitution of the country. This may sound rather extreme but an illustration of a decapitated paunch printed in 1651 (see Plate 8) suggests one major consequence.1 At this stage, however, I shall dwell on the medical dimension of this image, for it provides a useful point of entry into a seventeenth-century pathological landscape of ‘excess’ inhabited by — amongst other uncanny forms that will be encountered in this chapter — glutted, unvented bodies.

Keywords

Woollen Cloth Corporeal Analogy East India Company Ideal Vision Paradise Lost 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 3.
    George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) p. 156.Google Scholar
  2. 4.
    For a very cogent and persuasive account of the centrality of the belly in this period see Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘Fables of the Belly in Early Modern England’, The Body in Parts, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (London: Routledge, 1997) pp. 243–61.Google Scholar
  3. 8.
    Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977). See letter to ‘Sir Walter Raleigh knight’: ‘The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’ (p. 737).Google Scholar
  4. On Spenser’s body narratives see Susanne Scholz, Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. 10.
    Collection of Additional Manuscripts Preserved in the British Museum 34324, fol. 179, cited in B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600–1642: A Study in the Instability of a Mercantile Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959) p. 53.Google Scholar
  6. 12.
    Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967) pp. 155–6.Google Scholar
  7. John Milton, ‘A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle’, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1971). The Ludlow masque features a Comus closely associated with ‘swinish gluttony’ (l. 775). All references are to this edition.Google Scholar
  8. 15.
    Thomas Carew’s Coelum Britannicum’, in Court Masques, ed. David Lindley (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1995). All references to masques, other than those by Ben Jonson, are to this edition.Google Scholar
  9. 17.
    Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince (1516), trans. Lester K. Born (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968) p. 210Google Scholar
  10. Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue Between Pole and Lopset, ed. T. F. Mayer (London: Royal Historical Society, University College, 1989) pp. 3, 9.Google Scholar
  11. 18.
    Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor (1531), ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: Dent, 1962) p. 183.Google Scholar
  12. 19.
    Margaret Healy, Richard II (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998). Richard II also appears as a monarch of excess in Ponet’s important political treatise, which will be discussed later, and in civil war polemics accusing Charles I of tyranny. See note 102 below.Google Scholar
  13. 28.
    East India Company Court Minutes, Calendar of State Papers Colonial Series, 1574–1660, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury et al. (40 vols; London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1860–1939; reprint Vaduz: Krauz Reprint, 1964) vol. 4, pp. 256–7, cited in Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991) p. 186.Google Scholar
  14. 35.
    Craig Muldew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1998) p. 18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. 38.
    Jean-Christophe Agnew, World Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) p. 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. 39.
    See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966; London and New York: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar
  17. Catherine Waldby, AIDS and the Body Politic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) especially p. 39Google Scholar
  18. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) xiv–xv; Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, esp. 25.Google Scholar
  19. 44.
    Richard Rowland, ‘“Thou teachest me humanitie”: Thomas Heywood’s The English Traveller’, English Comedy, ed. Michael Cordner, Peter Holland and Jon Kerrigan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) pp. 137–57, p. 148.Google Scholar
  20. 48.
    William Harrison, The Description of England (1587) ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968) p. 129.Google Scholar
  21. 60.
    Conrad Russell, ‘Parliament and the King’s Finances’, The Origins of the English Civil War (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1973) p. 99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  22. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) p. 75. Tricomi, Anti-Court Drama, pp. 7, 8.Google Scholar
  23. 61.
    John Holles, Historical Manuscripts Commissions Reports: Duke of Portland Manuscripts, vol. IX (London, 1905) pp. 41–2Google Scholar
  24. cited in Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (1990; London: Routledge, 1993) p. 28.Google Scholar
  25. 62.
    R. Lockyer, James VI and I (London: Longman, 1998) p. 83.Google Scholar
  26. 65.
    The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington ed. N. E. McLure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), pp. 119–20. See also Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986) pp. 10–11.Google Scholar
  27. 75.
    See J. P. Kenyon, The Stuarts: A Study in Kingship (Glasgow: Fontana, 1958) pp. 94–8Google Scholar
  28. and Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–9 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) pp. 269–303.Google Scholar
  29. 78.
    Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (London: Pinter, 1989), p. 104. For a detailed discussion of the language of corruption in this period see also Peck, Court Patronage, pp. 195–8.Google Scholar
  30. 79.
    See J. R. Tanner, English Constitutional Conflicts of the Seventeenth Century, 1603–1689 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) pp. 60–1.Google Scholar
  31. 80.
    John Ponet, A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970) sig. K3v. All references are to this facsimile edition.Google Scholar
  32. 84.
    It is undoubtedly significant that broadsides featuring deformed children proliferate in the years following the publication of Ponet’s treatise. Fifteen examples survive, virtually all from the 1560s. See Tessa Watts, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 165.Google Scholar
  33. 86.
    George Buchanan, De Jure Regni Apud Scotos (1579) trans. Charles F. Arrowood, The Powers of the Crown in Scotland (Austin, Tex.: University of Austin Press, 1949) p. 50.Google Scholar
  34. 87.
    ‘Of Reformation’, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, revised edn (8 vols; New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1980), vol. I, p. 599. This passage is discussed in David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) p. 113.Google Scholar
  35. 93.
    All references are to John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1979).Google Scholar
  36. On the ‘alimental vision’ in Paradise Lost see Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) pp. 131–68.Google Scholar
  37. 98.
    John Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works, revised edn. (8 vols; New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1980) vol. II, p. 527.Google Scholar
  38. 100.
    Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) p. 363.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Margaret Healy 2001

Authors and Affiliations

  • Margaret Healy
    • 1
  1. 1.University of SussexUK

Personalised recommendations