Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

by Richard Sugg

  11 Apologie and Treatise, 145.

  12 Works, trans. Thomas Johnson (1634), 1029.

  13 Health’s Improvement (1655), 139–40. Victor Houliston notes, in the new DNB, that this was probably compiled about 1595.

  14 It was also in James’s time, in 1611, that ‘the Paris student Guillaume Desclames attacked a long list of popular occult cures for epilepsy, which included semen collected under a waning moon’ and ‘powders concocted from a human skull, human bones, and cuckoo’s ashes’ (Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 136). Again, this attack is not obviously or solely directed at corpse medicine.

  15 The Visions of Dom Francisco de Quevedo Villegas, trans. R.L. (1667), 32. Though composed between 1606 and 1622, Quevedo’s original Spanish work was considered controversial by official censors, and did not appear in Spain until 1627. A translation of some parts of the work was published by the poet Richard Crashaw in 1640.

  16 The World Surveyed, trans. F.B. (1660), 280.

  17 Hoplocrisma-spongus: or, A Sponge to Wipe Away the Weapon-salve (1631) (1631), 7–8. Interestingly, Foster also fuses claims of devilish aid with more precisely material attacks, noting that, as there are so many different recipes for the salve, the only effective common factor must be Satanic agency (see Ibid., 54–55).

  18 Klinike, or the Diet of the Diseased (1633), 365–66, 347. Hart does also glance at the New World (‘hence have we so many sacrifices of mankind’ which ‘even unto these our times … still continue; as our Spanish narrations make mention of the Western parts of the world’) but this could refer just to the Aztecs, rather than to more routine types of exo-cannibalism.

  19 Christ’s Tears, Works of Thomas Nashe, II, 184.

  20 Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (1599), 201.

  21 Not all medical clients would allow a doctor to impose on them at this time. It has been argued by medical historians that the whole concept of the modern ‘patient’ was an alien one until relatively recently. Those sufficiently educated and affluent to use physicians, it has been said, were often far from passive or deferential (see, for example: N. Jewson, ‘Medical Knowledge and the Patronage System in 18th-Century England’, Sociology 8 (1974): 369–85; Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London (Oxford University Press, 2003), 226; Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 53–69).

  22 A Help to Memory and Discourse (1630), 31–32. Notably, this passage does not occur in earlier editions of Basse’s popular work.

  23 Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606), 39.

  24 Jonson, Works, 4.4, 14. On dryness, see also a broadside ballad of 1635, The Old Bride, or The Gilded Beauty.

  25 Honest Man’s Fortune (1647), 5.1, 223–25. This play was first performed around 1613 and published in 1647 (see E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), III, 227). Cf. also S.S., The Honest Lawyer (1616), Act 3, 25–30.

  26 A Christian Turned Turk (1612), 1.5, 126–27.

  27 Ira Clark notes that this play was both produced and published in 1633 (‘James Shirley’, new DNB).

  28 Shirley, Bird in a Cage (1633), C1r.

  29 It must be emphasised that religious prejudice was at this time far more likely than racial antagonism.

  30 The White Devil (1612), D3r. David Gunby states that ‘The White Devil was first performed by Queen Anne’s Men at the Red Bull in Clerkenwell, probably early in 1612’ (‘John Webster’, new DNB).

  31 White Devil, B1r. A broad comparison with this image of exploitative, calculating consumption, is offered by Sir Toby Belch, in Twelfth Night, 3.2, 60–62 (see Richard Sugg, Murder after Death (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 62–66).

  32 It seems also to have been Webster who inserted the insult ‘rotten mummy’ into Marston’s play The Malcontent, in the revised version of 1604 (see The Malcontent (1604), Greg, I, 203(c), B4v; and cf. the earlier printing, The Malcontent [1604], Greg, I, 203(a); on revision see James Knowles, ‘John Marston’, new DNB). A more plainly negative reference comes, in 1621, from the clergyman William Loe, who asks: ‘shall the churchman, because he cannot preach to every palate, be censured in his ministration? Who knows not that manna is worse then mummy to some?’ (Vox Clamantis (1621), 12). Here the force of the rhetoric plainly depends on the assumption that these two substances are poles apart. It may also have been assisted by a pronunciation which could make ‘manna’ sound relatively like ‘munna’ (cf., again, Robert Cottington, True Historical Discourse …, K3r–v; and Hume, Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost, 57).

  33 John Webster, The Tragedy of the Duchess of Malfi (1623), K1r.

  34 Cf. OED: 1612 Woodal, Surg. Mate Wks. (1653) 16 ‘The Salvatorie if it contain six severall unguents, it is sufficient for any present use’. See, also, John Banister (‘mixed with a little unguent out of his salvatory’) in Clowes, A Proved Practice (1580), B4r–v.

  35 ‘Can houses, lands, can gold or silver give/To minds distract, heart’s-mummy to relieve?’ (Labyrinth (1611), K1r).

  36 A Pathway to Penitence (1626), 229–30.

  37 Good Thoughts in Worse Times (1647), 100–101.

  38 ‘Thomas Fuller’, new DNB.

  39 Holy State (1642), 156.

  40 For a broad comparison, cf. Donne on blasphemy: Sermons, I 308, 19 April 1618. Cf. also Sermons, III, 218.

  41 Fuller’s remark on illegitimate jests was repeated by David Lloyd, writing on Fuller in 1668 (see Memoires of the Lives … of those … that Suffered … for the Protestant Religion (1668), 524).

  42 The Holy State, 426.

  A broad comparison with this figuring of tyranny is found in a poem by Hester Pulter:

  You know the royal eagle finds it good

  In his old age he lives by sucking blood

  [fol. 116v] Nay if you’re loath, great kings have done the same

  For which they live still in the book of Fame

  For fatting of their nobles up in cages

  Eating their mummy with the blood of pages

  To an old tyrant melancholy grown

  No music pleaseth but the dying groan

  Of innocents …

  (Leeds Brotherton MS Lt q 32, 116r–v)

  Here ‘mummy’ is used in part as a general synonym for ‘flesh’ (cf., again, Falstaff’s ‘mountain of mummy’). I am very grateful to Alice Eardley for this poem, derived from her forthcoming edition of Pulter’s writings (Lady Hester Pulter: Complete Works (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming, 2012)). Eardley dates the poem c. 1650–60. She is clearly right to suspect that ‘Pulter may have had Thomas Fuller’s account of tyrants in mind when she wrote this’ (see: Holy State (1642), 426).

  43 The basic aptness of Fuller’s repeated equations between plunder and mummy is neatly underlined by a parallel usage from the French Revolution: ‘their fanatical confidence in the omnipotence of church plunder, has induced these philosophers to overlook all care of the public estate … With these philosophic financiers, this universal medicine made of church mummy is to cure all the evils of the state’ (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), 338).

  44 A Pisgah Sight of Palestine (1650), 79. It was believed that in the three-year Old Testament siege of Samaria by the Assyrians mothers were forced to eat their own children (see, for example, George Abbot, An Exposition upon the Prophet Jonah (1600), 221).

  45 Almost as if conscious of the need to regain control, Fuller then shifts gear again, adding more soberly: ‘however, whilst some squeamish stomachs make faces to feed on the dead, perhaps their hard hearts at the same time, eat up the living as if they are dead, either by fraudulent contracts or forcible oppressions’ (citing Psalms 14.4). Even this suggests to us that Fuller has a more general sense of public unease about mummy.

  46 Threnoikos the House of Mourning �
� delivered in LIII sermons preached at the funerals of divers faithfull servants of Christ (1660), 546. This collection is credited to ‘Daniel Featly, Martin Day, John Preston, Ri. Houldsworth, Richard Sibbs, Thomas Taylor … Thomas Fuller and other reverend divines’. Fuller’s parenthetical ‘seeming’ evidently refers to the ghostly, ‘apparitional’ status of the Old Testament (summoned by Saul and the so- called ‘witch of Endor’); it is not actually Samuel, hence the qualification. Although sermons themselves are not individually credited, there seems no doubt as to Fuller’s authorship of this one. We are not told whose funeral this was for. For a possible hint as to dating, see ibid., 546–47. It seems certain that the sermon fell somewhere after 1640, as an earlier edition of this collection appeared (twice) in that year, without Fuller’s name amongst those credited.

  47 It must be added that, even in this last attack, there is some sense of the Egyptians being blamed for the phenomenon of medicinal cannibalism, rather than European consumers.

  48 Memoirs for the History of Humane Blood (1683), 333–34.

  49 Memoirs, 334.

  50 A Treatise of the Asthma (1698), 85.

  51 Similarly, the Royal Society fellow Nehemiah Grew believes that mummy does not work (‘let them see to it, that dare trust to old gums, which have long since lost their virtue’) but has nothing to say about its ethical status (Musaeum Regalis Societatis (1685), 3). Over on the continent, Paul Ammann, director of the medical garden at the University of Leipzig in 1675, opposes mumia but not usnea (Thorndike, History, VIII, 98).

  52 Du Bartas his Divine Weeks, trans. Joshua Sylvester (1611), 353.

  53 Kingdom’s Intelligencer (1661), 23 December 1661. On the continent, one could see ‘the mummy of an Egyptian Prince above 1800 years old’ in the University of Leiden’s famous anatomy theatre (Gerard Blancken, A Catalogue of all the Chiefest Rarities in the Public Theatre and Anatomy-Hall, of the University of Leiden (1697), 7). For a discussion of those pre-eighteenth-century collections which would only later become ‘museum pieces’, see: Amy Boesky, ‘"Outlandish-Fruits": Commissioning Nature for the Museum of Man’, ELH 58.2 (1991): 305–30.

  54 For uses which are negative but not comic, see: Dryden, Amboyna, a Tragedy (1673), 62; Charles Goodall, Poems and Translations (1689), 162.

  55 Cf. Richard Head The English Rogue (1668), 267: ‘I basted him soundly, till that I had made jelly of his bones, and that his flesh lookt like Egyptian mummy’.

  56 Sir Martin Mar-All (1668), 4.1, 508–9.

  57 Innocent Mistress (1697), 29. For other instances of beating, see: 1662 R. Brathwait Chimneys Scuffle 3 (OED); Richard Head, The English Rogue Pt 1 (1665), 241; Roger Boyle, Mr. Anthony (1690), 28; George Powell, A Very Good Wife (1693), 30; William Winstanley, The Essex Champion (1699), 103; Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. By Captain Lemuel Gulliver (1726), II, 191. For making or selling, see: Anon., The Bloody Duke (1690), 8.

  58 The Fond Husband (1677), 27.

  59 See for example George Villiers (d.1687), Miscellany Poems (1692), 52; Thomas Duffett, The Amorous Old-Woman (1674), 13.

  60 An early version of this echoes Volpone, combining Voltore’s proverbial dryness with the hint that the aged have little value except for the material utilities offered by their bare physical matter: ‘If ‘twere thy plot I do confess/For to make mummy of her grease,/Or swap her to the paper mill,/This were extracting good from ill’ (‘To my honoured Friend Mr. T. C. that asked me how I liked his mistress being an old widow’, John Cleveland (d.1658), Works (1687), 263).

  61 Lewis Maidwell, The Loving Enemies (1680), 23.

  62 Robert Gould, The Rival Sisters (1696), 10.

  63 The World in the Moon (1697), 11.

  64 Thomas Duffett, The Amorous Old Woman (1674), 13, 41.

  65 Familiar Letters (1697), 189–90, T. Brown to W. Knight at Ruscombe.

  66 Bury-Fair (1689) 17. Cf., also, Oldwit when drunk: ‘Old spouse, mummy; thou that wrap’st thy self every night in sear-cloths!’ (39).

  67 The Plain Dealer (1677), 33.

  68 Lustra Ludovici (1646), 5.

  69 For other instances of age and dryness, see: William Chamberlayne, Love’s Victory (1658), 3; Sir Robert Howard, The Surprisal, in Five New Plays (1692), 1; Charles Hopkins, Neglected Virtue (1696), 2; Howard, Poems (1696), 93; David Craufurd, Courtship a-la-Mode (1700), 20. An early usage of this sense from William Davenant appears to derive from a 1635 ballad. Where that version had ‘lips’, Davenant has ‘hips’ (Love and Honour (1649), 22). One such instance echoes Falstaff as a ‘mountain of mummy’, and refers to ‘Don Bertran’, who is evidently fat, but also precisely defined in dramatis personae as ‘an humorous old man’ (italic mine; John Corye, The Generous Enemies (1672), 57). For a usage attacking female cosmetics (and thus implying that those decried are all surface and no substance), see Anon., England’s Vanity (1683), 103.

  70 Psyche Debauched (1678), 18.

  71 All references from The Sacrifice (1687), 9–13.

  72 Fane’s dedication to the Earl of Dorset, quoted by J.P. Vander Motten, new DNB.

  73 Canidia, or, The Witches (1683), 29. Noting that this poem was originally ascribed just to one ‘R.D.’, Jason McElligott, in his new DNB article on Dixon, argues that it probably was written by Dixon the clergyman.

  74 For a broad parallel with this instance, see Richard Burridge, The Shoemaker Beyond his Last (1700), 12.

  75 Canidia, 76.

  76 Canidia, 24. Cf. also those illusory ‘gods’ who are really ‘but sepulchral jars:/Crocks and dust, mummy at best’ (84).

  77 Fuller arguably does this when he remarks, ‘they it seems being cannibals, who feed on man’s flesh for food, though not for physic’ (Threnoikos, 546). But it is important to note that this statement is relatively brief by comparison with the attacks made by Montaigne and Boyle.

  78 Richard Lower performed the first roughly modern blood transfusions in 1666, switching the fluid directly between the veins and arteries of dogs (rather than introducing the blood orally). In 1667 a human volunteer survived after receiving the blood of a sheep. Such procedures were halted when a French subject died in that same year. Even before that, these first transfusions were of course novel and (for some) dangerously impious.

  79 Daniel Korn, Mark Radice and Charlie Hawes, Cannibal: A History of the People-Eaters (London: Channel 4/Macmillan, 2001), 9–10.

  80 Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects (1665), 194–200. Michael Hunter’s new DNB article on Boyle notes that parts of this work date back to the 1640s.

  81 Gunpowder is usually composed of 75 per cent saltpetre, 15 per cent carbon, and 10 per cent sulphur (or, in early modern terms, saltpetre, charcoal, and brimstone (cf. Thomas Fuller, History of the Worthies of England (1662), 318–19)). Whilst saltpetre seems in this period to have often been extracted from ordinary earth, a popular source was also clearly animal or bird excrement. Morland (whose scientific interests imply some specialist knowledge of its production) may be referring here to dungheaps in which human and animal excrement were indiscriminately mingled. On saltpetre and non-human excrement, see: Fuller, History, 278; Henry Stubbe, Legends no Histories (1670), 51–52, 85; John Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia (1698), 257. Stubbe at one point possibly implies the value of human organic matter, reporting the belief that ‘no place yields petre so plentifully as the earth in churches’ (Legends, 51–52). Cf. van Helmont the younger, on the production of saltpetre from ‘privies or stables’ (Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, The Paradoxal Discourses of F.M. Van Helmont (1685), 62). The professional role of ‘salt-petre men’ was sufficiently well-known to allow the preacher John Boys, in 1613, a sly pun during a commemorative gunpowder sermon: ‘again these S. Peter men (and as I have warrant to term them on this day salt Peter men) err from the true meaning of our text … ‘ (An Exposition of the Last Psalm … fifth of Nouember, 1613 (1613), 5).

  82 The Urim of Conscience (1695), 92–93. Alan Marshall in
new DNB notes that Morland had to turn down work from 1690 onwards because of blindness. In the preface to The Urim of Conscience Morland writes, ‘it having pleased almighty God, to deprive me of the sight of both my eyes, for above three years already past; and being thereby disabled to do my king or country any further service, I thought it might not be amiss, to employ some part of my time … in recollecting some observations and reflections, which I have heretofore made’ (Urim, 3–4). This would seem to place the composition of the work around 1693 or 1694, at a time when Morland was likely to be expecting death. He finally died on 29 December 1695. For discussion of Morland’s scientific and mathematical interests and inventions, see: J.R. Ratcliff, ‘Samuel Morland and his Calculating Machines c. 1666: the Early Career of a Courtier-Inventor in Restoration London’, British Journal for the History of Science 40.2 (2007): 159–79.

  The Eighteenth Century Notes

  1 Leo Kanner, ‘The Folklore and Cultural History of Epilepsy’, Medical Life 37.4 (1930): 167–214, 190.

  2 F.M. Valadez and C.D. O’Malley, ‘James Keill of Northampton, Physician, Anatomist and Physiologist’, Medical History 15.4 (1971): 317–35, 328.

  3 Henry Curzon, The Universal Library: or, Complete Summary of Science, 2 vols (1712), I, 531; J. Quincy (ed.), The Dispensatory of the Royal College of Physicians (1721), 86, 221. Cf., also, Thomas Fuller, Pharmacopoeia Domestica (1723), 17, where cranium humanum is listed without comment amongst various ingredients. It is important to note that Curzon’s work is a compilation.

  4 Jean Jacob Berlu, The Treasury of Drugs Unlocked (1738), 39; Poole, A Physical Vade Mecum … Wherein is Contained, the Dispensatory of St. Thomas’s Hospital (1741), 295. Berlu’s book first appeared in 1690. Cf., also: John Allen, Synopsis Medicinae [1740], 184–85. This cites cranium humanum for epilepsy on the authority of Ettmuller, and expresses no objection.

  5 Daily Courant, 21 June 1709; Daily Advertiser, 7 January 1743. See also: George Bate, Pharmacopoia Bateana: or, Bate’s Dispensatory (1720), A4v; Sir Richard Blackmore, Discourses on the Gout (1726), 123; George Cheyne, The English Malady (1735), 221, 232. Although Thomas Sydenham himself died in 1689, his works were still vigorously recommending Goddard’s drops as late as 1769 (The Entire Works of Dr Thomas Sydenham (1769), xxvi). As we see in the conclusion, certain writers now held the active ingredient of Goddard’s drops to be silk, not skull.