by Melissa Mohr
De Haeretico Comburendo: English Historical Reprints, ed. W. Dawson Johnston and Jean Browne Johnston (Ann Arbor: Sheehan, 1896), 27.
At her trial in 1429: John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ed. George Townsend (New York: AMS Press, 1965); Norman P. Tanner, ed., Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31, Camden Fourth Series 20 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977).
“the sacrament on the altar”: Hudson, Selections, I.
“I abjure and forswear”: Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 540, 593.
you shouldn’t swear by creatures: Henry G. Russell, “Lollard Opposition to Oaths by Creatures,” American Historical Review 51, no. 4 (1946): 668–84.
William Thorpe, for example, was all ready: Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 249–85.
“false swearing become one of the most commonly”: Hughes, Swearing, 60.
In one example from 1303: Robert of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, ed. Frederick James Furnivall, EETS 119 and 123, 2 vol. (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1901–3), 2700–734.
Or, as Steven Pinker writes: Pinker, Stuff of Thought, 341.
The Pardoner addresses this kind of language: Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” The Riverside Chaucer, 629–50.
“it is not lawful to swear by creatures”: “On the Twenty-Five Articles” in John Wyclif, Selected Works, ed. Thomas Arnold (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871), III:483.
Jacob’s Well discusses these oaths: Jacob’s Well, 153.
Christ is seven feet tall: Hudson, Selections, I.
The first pattern poem written in English: Stephen Hawes, The Conversyon of Swerers (London, 1509), Early English Books Online, accessed May 15, 2012.
An Easter Sunday sermon: Woodburn O. Ross, ed., Middle English Sermons, EETS 209 (London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1940), sermon 22.
The mechanism of this miracle: See Chapter 1 of Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Hudson, Selections, 142; and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 91–130.
the tale of a monk who doubts: Handlyng Synne 9981–10072. Other such “miracle of the Host” stories can be found in Mirk’s Festial, ed. Theodor Erbe, EETS 96 (extra series) (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1905), 170–71; 173, and The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, ed. Lawrence F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 308–9. See also Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 91–109, for a useful contextualization of these stories in terms of medieval lay experience of the Mass.
There was once a man who swore constantly: Gesta Romanorum, ed. Sidney Herrtage, EETS 33 (extra series) (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1879), 409–10. The phrase “complaint against swearers” is Rosemary Woolf’s. See her English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 395, for more examples of these complaints. See also Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: Making and Unmaking the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) for an analysis of how societies often have recourse to the human body as the most effective means to legitimate cultural constructs and other “truths” because of its “sheer material factualness” (14).
“The body of Christ”: Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 91–92.
“even [to] touch”: Ibid., 110.
“A bell was rung”: Ibid., 97.
“holding up of the hands”: Ibid., 103.
“no state can stand”: John Downame, Four Treatises, tending to dissuade all Christians from 4 no lesse hainous then common sinnes (London, 1608).
Catholic pastoral literature expresses great anxiety: G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), 416.
Chapter 4
Gregorian calendar: The Gregorian calendar is the one in use throughout most of the world today. It replaced the Julian calendar, in which the dates of the equinoxes were moving earlier and earlier due to a slightly inexact calculation of the length of the year. Britain and its possessions finally adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752.
The 1585 Act: 27 Eliz.c.2 in Charles Dodd and M. A. Tierney, Dodd’s Church History of England, from the Commencement of the Sixteenth Century to the Revolution in 1688, vol. 4 (London: C. Dolman, 1839–43).
“I will waste no time reading it”: The quip is variously attributed to Benjamin Disraeli or Moses Hadas.
Henry VIII had halfheartedly: For more about how the English populace was affected by these changes, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
the bull Regnans in Excelsis: Pius V, “Regnans in Excelsis,” Papal Encyclicals Online, accessed February 14, 2011.
After this, English penal laws: “Penal Laws,” Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Charles G. Herbermann et al. (1907–1912), online at New Advent, accessed February 14, 2011. The statutes are: 1571—13 Eliz. c. 1 and 13 Eliz. c. 2; 1581—23 Eliz. c. 1; 1587—35 Eliz. c. 2.
souls in Purgatory might: Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 338.
There are several accounts of Southwell’s life, capture, and trial, including Christopher Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell: Poet and Martyr (London: Longmans, Green, 1956); Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell: A Study in Religious Inspiration (London: Sheed and Ward, 1935); and F. W. Brownlow, Robert Southwell, Twayne’s English Authors Series 516 (New York: Twayne, 1996).
the crown’s chief and most insidious weapon: For the oath ex officio, see Janelle, Robert Southwell; Devlin, Life of Robert Southwell; and Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schoken Books, 1964), 348.
“to a conscience that feareth God”: Hill, Society and Puritanism, 330.
The “Bloody Question”: Scott R. Pilarz, Robert Southwell and the Mission of Literature 1561–1595: Writing Reconciliation (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 236, and Alice Hogge, God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 232.
Southwell was accused of telling: Southwell’s teachings on equivocation are found in Janelle, Robert Southwell, 81; for more on Jesuit views of equivocation, see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 169–70; Robert Parsons, A Treatise Tending to Mitigation, English Recusant Literature 1558–1640 (Ilkley, England: Scolar Press, 1977), 340.
“if this doctrine should be allowed”: Brownlow, Robert Southwell, 20; Janelle, Robert Southwell, 81–82.
“not without some note and touch”: William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England (1688), 344. For Southwell’s death, see Devlin, Life of Robert Southwell, 323; Pilarz, Robert Southwell, 278–80; and Hogge, God’s Secret Agents, 188–90.
“they may charge us”: Christopher Bagshaw, A Sparing Discoverie of Our English Jesuits (1601), 11–12.
God is not “bodily”: Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 281.
The Thirty-Nine Articles: Gavin Koh, ed., The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, November 29, 1999, http://gavvie.tripod.com/39articles/articles.html, accessed March 19, 2011.
Robert Parsons scoffed: Robert Parsons, The Third Part of a Treatise, Intitled of Three Conversions of England (St. Omer, 1604), 134.
Protestant swearing was thought to rip apart: William Vaughn, The Spirit of Detraction, Conjured and Convicted in Seven Circles (London, 1611), 123.
The sheer number of oaths people were required to take: For more on the conflicting oaths, see Hill, Society and Puritanism, 382–419.
“they force us to take”: quoted in Ibid., 411.
“Supernatural sanctions became less necessary”: Ibid., S 399.
“it paid a man”: Ibid., 418.
The scientist Robert Boyle: Robert Boyle, A Free Discourse Against Customary Swearing (London: John Williams, 1695); Michael Hunter, Robert Boyle
1627–1691: Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2000), 64–68.
She liked to sprinkle her speech with: Peter Brimacombe, All the Queen’s Men: The World of Elizabeth I (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 118; Alison Weir, The Life of Elizabeth I (New York: Ballantine 1999), 166, 427.
John Harington called it “obscenousnesse”: John Harington, “An Apologie of Poetrie,” preface to Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1591), in Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy, ed. Joseph Hasle-wood (London: Robert Triphook, 1815), II:138–39.
He ends his 1598 erotic poem: John Marston, “The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image,” Poems, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961).
a much less titillating mock encomium: Thomas Nashe, Nashe’s Lenten Stuff, ed. Charles Hindley (London: Reeves and Turner, 1871), 14.
“all things that are to be eschewed”: Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (London, 1587).
Huge numbers of dictionaries: Janet Bately, “Bilingual and Multilingual Dictionaries of the Renaissance and Early Seventeenth Century,” in The Oxford History of English Lexicography, ed. Anthony Paul Cowie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 1:41.
“we shall also bore”: Desiderius Erasmus, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, trans. Betty I. Knott, in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 24:302.
“a thousand more Latin words”: Thomas Elyot, Dictionary (London, 1538), sig. Aiiir. For Elyot’s ideas of who is a good author, see his 1531 The Boke Named the Governour, ed. R. C. Alston, English Linguistics 1500–1880, 246 (Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1970), 51.
look for his “many commendable”: Elyot, Governour, 51v.
“there may hap by evil custom”: Ibid., 17r.
Elyot broaches this conflict in a Latin epistle: Elyot, Dictionary, “Lectoribus vere doctis.”
“a womans wycket”: For more on wickets, see James T. Henke, Gutter Life and Language in the Early “Street” Literature of England: A Glossary of Terms and Topics Chiefly of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1988).
Other lexicographers abandoned didactic responsibility: John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (1598), Anglistica & Americana 114 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1972); Palsgrave, Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse.
La Cazzaria: For more on this work, see Ian Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 147–48.
“O d fuckin Abbot”: Edward Wilson, “A ‘Damned F … in Abbot’ in 1528: The Earliest English Example of a Four-Letter Word,” Notes and Queries 40, no. 1 (1993): 29–34; Jesse Sheidlower, The F Word, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 139–40.
“He clappit fast, he kist and chukkit”: William Dunbar, “In Secreit Place This Hyndir Nycht,” in The Makars: The Poems of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas, ed. Jacqueline Tasioulas (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1999), 569.
“Non sunt in cœli”: Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell, eds., Reliquiae Antiquae: Scraps from Ancient Manuscripts (London: John Russell Smith, 1845), 1:91; Sheidlower, The F Word, 83.
Naff, for example, is not: Michael Quinion, “Naff,” World Wide Words, January 26, 2008 (online), accessed July 27, 2012.
If it’s not an acronym: Sheidlower, The F Word, viii–xii.
In the sixteenth century, the insults: These examples are from Bridget Cusack, ed., Everyday English 1500–1700 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 12, 22, 26, as well as from Colette Moore, “Reporting Direct Speech in Early Modern Slander Depositions,” in Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective, ed. Donna Minkova and Robert Stockwell (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002).
For more great real-life Renaissance insults, see B. S. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighborhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 189.
“Skaldit skaitbird”: “The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie,” in The Makars: The Poems of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas, ed. Jacqueline Tasioulas (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1999), 338–51.
“advance in the frontiers of shame”: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, ed. Eric Dunning et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott, rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 118.
Even confession, the most secret: Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 288, 570; see also Mary C. Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
Reading too was very often not private: Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 46.
Historian Victor Skipp: Skipp’s analysis quoted in Lena Cowen Orlin, Elizabethan Households: An Anthology (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995), 81–82.
Around 1330, fireplaces: Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 58–59.
Privies were also spaces: Girouard, Life in the English Country House, 56–57; John Harington, The Metamorphosis of Ajax, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 57, 82, 85, 89, and most of the book, really; Tony Rivers, Dan Cruickshank, Gillian Darley, and Martin Pawley, The Name of the Room: A History of the British House and Home (London: BBC Books, 1992), 93–95; Lucinda Lambton, Temples of Convenience and Chambers of Delight (London: Pavilion Books, 1995), 6–14.
“His head, and his necke”: “Sirreverence,” OED (online).
the family at Chilthorne Domer: Lambton, Temples of Convenience, 38.
For true privacy, a wealthy person: Girouard, Life in the English Country House, 56.
People of the middling and lower sorts: Orlin, Elizabethan Households, 3.
“evolving civility showed itself”: Nicholas Cooper, “Rank, Manners and Display: The Gentlemanly House, 1500–1750,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 12 (2002): 297.
others reverse the causation: See Orlin, Locating Privacy, 66–111 for a great summary of scholarly views of architecture as the cause of the new desire for privacy and for qualifications of it.
As we can see from the multiseat privies, however, shame had not advanced to quite to the levels of today. Privacy, and the shame it engendered, was in many cases more notional than actual. Especially for the middling and lower sorts, accommodations in London were often crowded, with nothing but paper walls or a few boards creating the new rooms of the Great Rebuilding. Court records still contain numerous eyewitness accounts of adultery or fornication, such as that of John Morris, whose elderly neighbor was able to observe him in flagrante with a girl (not his wife) by peeping through the apparently sizable gap between the door frame and his front door, or Sara Bonivall and John Crosbie (also fornicators), who were seen through a hole in the wall that separated Crosbie’s house from his adjoining neighbor’s. In cases like these, it seems that early modern people in London might have even had less privacy than in the Middle Ages, when London itself was not as crowded with people looking for work, and when people remaining in the country could have sought out a bush more private than urban bedrooms. See Orlin, Locating Privacy, 152–55,
“one should not sit”: quoted in Elias, The Civilizing Process, 117.
In life, she liked to show her breasts: For Hurault and Elizabeth, see Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 139.
There was a hierarchy of chambers: Rivers et al., The Name of the Room, 73–74.
John Harington relates: Harington, Metamorphosis, 91, 98.
Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition: The Workes of our Antient and lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer (London, 1598), Early English Books Online. The preface I quote was actually written by Francis Beaumont, the playwright famous for his theatrical collaborations with John Fletcher, but since it appears in Speght’s edi
tion, for simplicity’s sake I refer to it as Speght’s preface.
It is thus something of a surprise to read: The Whole Works of Homer (London, 1616), Early English Books Online. Chapman had previously published several editions of the Iliad alone and called someone a “Windfucker” there too. My point is that it is surprising to find that word in a work that is supposed to be the definitive edition of a respected author.
here is a tiny, tiny sampling: All quotes are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). The Merry Wives of Windsor: IV, I; III, iii; Henry V: III, iv; Hamlet: III, ii; “tun-dish” in Measure for Measure: III, ii; “bauble” in Romeo and Juliet: II, iii; “cod’s head” in Othello: II, i. Gordon Williams gives the most plausible interpretation, that the “cod’s head” refers to a foolish husband, and the “salmon’s tail,” a delicacy, to a lover. See his A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols. (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 493.
