by Melissa Mohr
They force us to take
Two oaths, but we’ll make
A third, that we ne’er meant to keep ’em.
From Feudal Lords to Boy Toys
One final cultural movement influenced the decline of oaths: the end of feudalism and the concomitant and related explosion of capitalism. In the feudal structure of medieval society, which had been eroding slowly for hundreds of years, oaths had delineated and guaranteed the relationships among lords, vassals, tenants, free peasants, and unfree peasants, linking them together in webs of mutual dependence and support. Central to the feudal system were the “great magnates”—nobles who held huge tracts of land, commanded private armies, and retained the personal loyalty of lesser nobles and gentlemen through networks of patronage. They were in effect mini-sovereigns, possessing the power to oppose or at least make life difficult for the supreme sovereign, the king or queen. By the time Elizabeth I acceded to the throne, the power of these magnates had already been severely reduced, and she implemented a program to shrink it even further. She might have served as inspiration for Louis XIV of France in the way she encouraged her nobles to bankrupt themselves in ever finer displays of clothing and spectacle. She insisted that they spend lots of time and money at court, making the dispensation of lucrative monopolies dependent upon their attendance and their (apparent) personal loyalty to her. They were thus unable to spend as much time on their own estates, cultivating their own networks of patronage. When Elizabeth took the throne, there was only one hereditary duke left in England, and she executed him (to be fair, he had tried to overthrow her). The next time there was a duke in England again, it was George Villiers, created 1st Duke of Buckingham in 1623 most probably because he had good-looking legs and was the lover of King James I. The great magnates and the feudal system they sustained were dead; long live a fine calf and nimble dancing.
What took over from feudalism as the structuring principle of society was capitalism. The market demanded honesty over and over, quicker and quicker—there was no time to swear by God before each transaction that the goods involved were of high quality, that the price was fair, and that they would be delivered on time. If they were, all was well, and the merchant or producer would thrive; if not, he’d go bust at a time in history when there was no unemployment insurance and people were regularly thrown into debtors’ prison. As historian Christopher Hill puts it, “Supernatural sanctions became less necessary in a society in which honesty was manifestly the best policy, in which those who did not keep their covenants made were apt to have difficulties in business relationships.” Hill describes the society taking form during the Restoration as a Hobbesian one in which the contract replaced the oath, where self-interest reigned and led to the discovery that “it paid a man to make his word his bond because of the rise in social importance of credit, reputation, respectability.” For all these reasons—(1) the decline of feudalism, (2) the rise of capitalism, (3) the administration of too many oaths, (4) the overuse of equivocation to avoid them, and (5) the Protestant Reformation and the resulting idea that an oath based in God’s spiritual body was less effective than one that exerted control over his physical one—people stopped swearing sacred oaths and started making promises and contracts.
This decline can be overstated. In the Renaissance people were still thinking and writing about oaths and were certainly swearing them, as of course we still do today, in court and in frustration. The scientist Robert Boyle, who discovered the eponymous law about the pressure and volume of gases, is less well known for his circa 1647 Free Discourse Against Customary Swearing. And Queen Elizabeth I even used profuse profane swearing as a way to strengthen her hold on the English crown. She liked to sprinkle her speech with “God’s death!”—still one of the most shocking phrases a sixteenth-century Englishman could utter. Man is the operative word here—women’s language was supposed to be both chaster and more devout than men’s. As one poet who worked at Elizabeth’s court put it, women should avoid indecent or irreligious words, because “the chief virtue of women is shamefastness … when they hear or see anything tending that way they commonly blush.” Elizabeth, though, swore “God’s death!” so often that even foreign ambassadors remarked on it.
When Elizabeth became queen, she found herself in a difficult situation—a young woman of twenty-five, she presided over a government of men who at best half thought and at worst were entirely convinced that women were not fit to rule. “It is more than a monster in nature that a woman shall reign and have empire above man” was the central thesis of The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, a book popular at the time. In sprinkling her speeches with such a shocking oath, Elizabeth was asserting her right to rule. She was presenting herself as masculine, as having, as she liked to claim, “the heart and stomach of a king”—a fitting heir to the well-loved but extremely profane Henry VIII.
But despite tracts like Boyle’s and expletives like the queen’s, the great age of oath swearing was over, and the rise of obscenity was beginning.
All Things That Are to Be Eschewed
As we’ve seen, for hundreds of years people had worried that certain kinds of language—“foul words” or “words of ribaldry,” for example—could lead their hearers or readers into sin. The very nature of “bad” language lay in its power to incite immoral behavior. During the Renaissance a different term began to come into use, for a different sort of bad language: obscenity. Obscenus had been in use in Latin during the Middle Ages—it is part of the definition for foule in the Catholicon Anglicum, for example. But in the closing decades of the sixteenth century, it began to appear in English. The first recorded English uses show a word finding its form—John Harington called it “obscenousnesse” when he defended his translation of the Italian epic poem Orlando Furioso (1591) against those who thought it an immoral project. “In all Ariosto,” he claims, “there is not a word of ribaldry or obscenousnes.” (John Harington might serve as the presiding genius of this book, for his dual interest in sex and scatology. Not only was he one of the first people to use the word obscene in English, but he also invented the flush toilet and wrote a mock epic to publicize his invention, The Metamorphosis of Ajax. Ajax is a pun on “a jakes,” slang for privy at the time. He installed one of his new toilets at his manor house at Kelston [now demolished], and his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I, is supposed to have used it and liked it, but the idea didn’t catch on for another 250 years. It was cheaper and easier to have your servants empty chamber pots and clean ordinary privies than to install the plumbing necessary for Harington’s system.) Orlando Furioso (1532) is a wild story of knights questing after damsels in distress, Christians battling pagans, and magical creatures giving aid to both sides. There is plenty of obscenous matter in Ariosto’s poem, as Harington is the first to acknowledge: it appears in the character of “the bawdy Frier, in Alcina and Rogeros copulation … and in some few places beside” (including when the most beautiful of the distressed damsels is chained naked to a rock as an offering to a sea monster). But, Harington argues, vice is punished and virtue rewarded in the poem—it is moralized so that the bawdy friar comes to a bad end, adultery is punished, and so on. And, he adds, the words that he and Ariosto use for these dirty deeds are as pure as the driven snow.
This is a new distinction, between obscene words and the things they represent. In the Middle Ages, broadly speaking, there was no such difference. Any words that might lead to sin were bad, whether they were swive, cunt, or “Thou art more beautiful than Aphrodite herself.” Now, Harington implies, it is worse to employ obscene words in discussing wanton or immoral topics. Since Ariosto describes his morally questionable plot points “with modest words & no obscenous phrase,” they cannot be deemed objectionable. This appears to be very close to our contemporary notion of obscenity, in which certain words are worse than others, even when they refer to the same thing. For us today, certain words possess an offensive power far in excess of their literal meaning, an
d we see the beginnings of this in Harington’s “obscenousnesse.”
A few years later, John Marston employed obscene in a similar way, making a distinction between wantonness, which is okay, and obscenity, which most definitely is not. He ends his 1598 erotic poem “The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image” abruptly, just as the sculptor is really about to get into it with his living statue: “Peace, idle Poesie, / Be not obscene though wanton in thy rhymes.”* For Marston, wantonness or sexual suggestiveness appears to be fine—before he breaks off he has described how Pigmalion and Galatea “dally” and “sport” with each other:
Could he, oh could he, when that each to eyther
Did yeeld kind kissing, and more kind embracing,
Could he when that they felt, and clip’t together
And might enjoy the life of dallying,
Could he abstaine mid’st such a wanton sporting
From doing that, which is not fit reporting?
What would he doe when that her softest skin
Saluted his with a delightfull kisse?
…
Who knows not what ensues?
The details are left to the imagination. When it comes time to get graphic—to describe exactly how the key fits in the lock, as it were—Marston demurs. To say more, he argues, would be obscene.
A year later, the pamphleteer and satirist Thomas Nashe wrote a much less titillating mock encomium to the Herring in which he mentions in passing “the obscene appellation of Sarding sandes.” (Sard, you remember, is the archaic word for “fuck” that appeared in the Lindisfarne Gospels.) This appears to be obscenity exactly as we know it—sard is an obscene word, Nashe notes, making “sarding sands” worse somehow than “dallying dunes” or “bescumbered beaches” but perhaps still not as bad as the “fucking fells.”* Thomas Thomas’s definition of obscœnus in his 1587 Latin-English dictionary admirably sets out the new meanings accruing to the English word obscene by the end of the sixteenth century: “all things that are to be eschewed: filthie, foule, uncleane, wanton, bawdie, unchast, ribauldrie, abhominable, dishonest.”
Along with the smallpox virus, obscenity was in the sixteenth-century air, especially among dictionary makers—a small subset of the population, perhaps, but one with inordinate influence. This was the Renaissance—it began in England two hundred years later than it did in Italy—and there was great cultural excitement over the rediscovery of ancient classical texts. Huge numbers of dictionaries were published in order to help readers whose command of Latin was less than solid glean the “pith and marrow” from these texts. Thomas Elyot’s Latin-English Dictionary was revised and republished five times in twenty-one years; Thomas Thomas’s Dictionarium was issued in fourteen editions over almost sixty years; Riders Dictionarie, bidirectional English to Latin and Latin to English, was revised eight times in fifty years. And these are only three of the most popular. Numerous other dictionaries were published at this time as well, giving readers of Cicero and Virgil a wide variety of choices.
But certain words presented a special problem for these new scholars of language, who were under the pressure of two competing imperatives. On one hand, dictionary makers subscribed to the classical principle of copia, defined by the great Renaissance rhetorician Erasmus (whom we met in the previous chapter as author of On Civility in Boys) in his 1512 De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (On Copia [abundance] of Words and Ideas). Erasmus argues that an author or speaker must be able to command a large vocabulary and be able to write in a wide variety of styles in order to teach and persuade effectively. Without this abundance “we shall also bore our wretched audience to death.” Dictionaries must strive for a copia of words, both to allow their readers to understand as many of the Latin classics as possible and so that their readers may in turn use a wide variety of words in their own writing and speaking. Thomas Elyot listed as a selling point of his 1538 Dictionary that it contains “a thousand more Latin words, than were together in any one dictionary published in this realm.” The more words, the better—the more definitions it supplies, the more useful his dictionary will be in helping readers understand vocabulary they might find in “any good author.”
On the other hand, however, dictionary makers were faced with the problem that these “good authors” produced material that wasn’t appropriate for all readers. “Good authors” included Catullus, despite the fact that his most famous poem begins “I will fuck you in the ass and make you suck my dick.” And Martial is a “good author” despite the fact that his oeuvre consists solely of epigrams cynical, mocking, and often graphically obscene—“So I confess I thought you a Lucretia; but Bassa, for shame, you were a fucker. You dare to join two cunts and your monstrous organ feigns masculinity,” for example. When Renaissance Englishmen read Martial, they were supposed to look for his “many commendable sentences and right wise counsels” and ignore the stuff about two cunts rubbing together. This was fine when it was grown men reading, who were learned and stable enough to have mastered Latin, the language of male initiates. What would happen, though, if young men or boys—or, God forbid, women—were to encounter some of Martial’s vocabulary translated in a dictionary? In his famous treatise on education, The Boke Named the Governour (1531), Elyot explains what would result, warning that “there may hap by evil custom some pestiferous dew of vice to pierce the [brains and hearts] and infect the soft and tender buds, whereby the fruit may grown wild and some time contain in it fervent and mortal poison, to the utter destruction of a realm.” Renaissance dictionaries, then, were supposed to include as many words as possible, but they also had a responsibility not to let any “pestiferous dew” poison young men by exposing them to words and ideas that they could not handle. Copia demanded, for example, that they include cunnus, because it is found in Marital, but didactic responsibility demanded that they leave it out. The way early modern lexicographers handled these conflicting imperatives gives us new insight into the development of modern obscenity.
Elyot broaches this conflict in a Latin epistle to his “truly learned readers” that prefaces his Dictionary. The topic of obscenity is itself so volatile that it can be discussed only in Latin. He declares: “If anyone wants obscene words, with which to arouse dormant desire while reading, let him consult other dictionaries and spurn mine, under this excuse, if he likes, that it lacks words of this very sort.” Although copia is one of his guiding principles, and he boasts that his dictionary contains a thousand more words than the next man’s, Elyot maintains that none of those words is obscene. “I knew how much human feelings are always ready for blazing up, once they are even moderately able to enjoy a little bit of half-hidden fire within a few lascivious little words,” he writes. Therefore his dictionary will remove these little words and not “furnish raging Cupid with a torch.”
This is very much the medieval view of foul words inciting other sins—a few lascivious little words ignite the blaze of desire, and pretty soon “Cupid” is running around with a “torch,” sticking it who knows where. It differs from the medieval view, however, in that Elyot singles out “obscene words” (obscœna uocabula) as the ones that light the fires of sin. He seems to consider obscene words as more dangerous than other words, more capable of arousing that terrible and ultimately punishable desire.
Which words are obscene? Looking through Elyot’s dictionary, we find that they correspond pretty closely to what we might expect, with some interesting exceptions. He includes the Latin vulva but explains quite chastely that it refers to “the womb or mother of any female kind, also a meat used of the Romans, made of the belly of a sow, either that hath farrowed [has had a litter], or is with farrow.” He has deliberately censored the definitions found in earlier Latin-English dictionaries; Wynkyn de Worde’s Ortus Vocabulorum of 1500, for example, defined vulva as “in English, a cunt.” And he while he includes cunnus, he defines it not with its vulgar English equivalent but as “a womans wycket.” In this case, Elyot judges all Latin words proper to print, accompanied by
their circumlocutionary explanations in English, but decides that their straightforward English equivalents must be avoided. These plain English words evidently wield more power to arouse lascivious desires than their Latin equivalents or vulgar euphemisms.
That Elyot singles out obscene English words as the chief—almost the only—inflamers of concupiscence is even more apparent when we look at the words he includes for breasts. He starts off with the very factual mamma, “a dugge or pappe,” and mamilla, “a little dugge or pappe,” words that might apply either to people or to animals and which are described quite clinically, with no hint of the wanton uses to which these mammae could be put. Elyot goes on, however, to define mammosus, “having great dugges,” and perhaps most strikingly mammeata, “a woman with greate dugges or pappes.” The description Elyot provides for mammeata seems as likely as any word in his dictionary to stir up lust—after reading about “a woman with greate dugges or pappes” it seems hard not to picture one, and in deference to Elyot we won’t speculate about where imaginations might go from there. But Elyot seems to have found nothing wrong, nothing dangerous to his readers’ mental landscape, about including mammeata and words related to it in his Dictionary. We saw in the previous chapter how John Stanbridge, following the medieval model, censored anything tending toward licentiousness from his Vulgaria: remember vulva as “locus ubi puer concipitur.” For Elyot, in contrast, only words such as cunt corrupt—words such as pappe or dugge, though they have sexual referents and might be thought to inflame the passions, are not obscene and are therefore less dangerous. There seems to be something magical about the way obscenities infiltrate the mind. They have an offensive (or erotic) power in excess of their literal meaning.
