Inscriptional Culture in Pentapolitana Cities in the Early Modern Period

“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging the<i>Aethiopica</i>across the Channel

The construction and reconstruction of town halls in the cities of the Kingdom of Poland until the end of the 18th century (Summary) The article, which also takes into account the issues relating to the medieval town halls in Silesia, Western Pomerania and the Teutonic State, is an attempt at synthesizing the existing research. The following aspects have been analysed: the location of the town hall within the urban complex and the transformation of the forms and symbols of both its architecture and design. Town halls came into existence as a consequence of – although not necessarily immediately – founding towns based on German Law and the establishment of municipal authorities. The relationship between the town halls and urban planning varied. The town hall could be located along the front of the main market square (Wieliczka in Malopolska) or a street – a place functioning as the market square (evolution of the urban context in the town hall in Gdansk), sometimes (due to the location of the house of the municipal councillor?) outside the market place (originally in Nowy Sącz). Its location along the front of the market square in Early Modern towns could have both an aesthetic and symbolic aspect (Zamośc). The evolution of the central-market square block, with the town hall and stalls was very characteristic of medieval towns and infl uenced the Malopolska region (Krakow) and Wielkopolska region (Poznan) from Silesia (Wroclaw, Świdnica, Legnica). In Early Modern private towns, from the Renaissance era (Glowow) to the late Baroque (Siedlce), the town hall was often situated in a place which emphasized the axes of the urban layout. The tower was usually an important element in the architecture of the oldest town hall buildings (13th/14th century). It emphasized the town’s autonomy and, similarly to the adjacent hall, was derived from the architecture of feudal castles (Wroclaw, Krakow). The tower also emerged as the oldest element of the central-market square block in many Silesian towns, and was modelled on the beffrois (Bruges). The form of a tower came to the Malopolska region in the 14th century (the oldest town hall in Sandomierz) and Ruthenia (Krosno, Kamieniec Podolski). Two-naved halls which alluded to the palatium (Poznan), were particularly frequent in Western Pomerania (Stargard, Paslek, Kamien Pomorski, Chojnice, Szczecin). By contrast to the simple, purely functional architectural forms of the oldest town halls, in the lands of the Teutonic knights fi ne details were present as early as in the early 14th century (Chelmno). The richness of the forms and designs of the Pomeranian town halls, with Torun at the forefront (which Jan Dlugosz noticed) had an impact on the late Gothic town halls in the Malopolska region (reconstruction of the Krakow town hall, 1454). The transfer of the offi cial functions from the ground floor of the town hall to the Artus Court could also relate to Krakow. Bohemian models played a large role in the shaping of representative architecture, symbolism and the iconographic programme of the late Gothic town halls in Silesia (15th/16th century) – e.g. the relationship between the Ladislaus Room in Hradcany and the Lwowek town hall. In Early Modern times the “bipolarity” of architectural designs in Polish lands, which were inspired by ideas coming both from Italy and the Netherlands is most noticeable on examples in the Malopolska region, notably Krakow (attics surmounting the buildings) and Pomerania, notably Gdansk, where the designs by masters from the Netherlands were subordinated to erudite, complicated political “treaties”. In the Wielkopolska region the Mannerist style inspired by Northern Italian (Serlian) designs was at the forefront as can be seen in the reconstruction of Poznan’s town hall. In the era of urban decline in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (2 nd half of the 17th/18th century) anachronistic, medieval designs continued to be used (Stary Sącz); private towns were an exception (e.g. Leszno and Buchacz owned by the Leszczynski family), which were able to afford magnificent constructions. The architecture and design of town halls refl ect the ambitions as well as the condition of the bourgeoisie and therefore the phenomena which took various forms in the different historical periods and regions. Future research should put special emphasis on tracing the “migration” of designs and ideas from the magnifi cent urban centres of the West through the main Polish cities to provincial towns.

Prague workshop, Pietà, c. 1400, from amongst the sculptures found beneath Bern Minster, 1986. Limestone, original height c. 85–90cm. Bern: Historisches Museum. Photo: Bernisches Historisches Museum/S. Rebsamen. The religious turmoil of the sixteenth century constituted a turning point in the history of Western Christian art. The iconoclasm precipitated by the Protestant Reformation was unprecedented in its scope: throughout northern Europe sculptures, altarpieces, paintings, stained-glass windows and ecclesiastical treasures fell victim to the purifying zeal of evangelical reformers. Images that had been venerated for generations were labelled as idols, and smashed to pieces (plate 1). Churches that had been filled with representations of sacred history were stripped bare. In response, the Catholic Church reaffirmed the value of visual representations. Theologians provided detailed guidelines for their production and use, and wealthy patrons stimulated the revival of religious art. While Protestantism devalued images and privileged hearing over seeing, the importance that Catholicism accorded to the visual was made manifest in the art and architecture of the baroque. The broad outlines of this history are familiar and incontestable. With regard to religious images, the Reformation certainly brought about a dramatic bifurcation, both at the level of theological debate and at the level of lived piety. Yet the Protestant destruction and the Catholic defence of images were merely two parts of a more complex story. The essays gathered together in this volume analyze the myriad ways in which both Protestant and Catholic reform stimulated the production of religious art during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The special issue examines the nature of images produced during the early years of the evangelical movement, asking how both theologians and artists responded to a new understanding of Christian history and soteriology. It traces the rich and diverse Protestant visual cultures that developed during the confessional age, and explores the variety of Catholic responses to pressure for reform. At the volume's heart lies a desire to understand how religious art was shaped by the splintering of Western Christendom that began five hundred years ago with Martin Luther's Reformation. Luther's own position with regard to religious images was far from straightforward. From 1522 he was a determined opponent of iconoclasm. Yet for Luther images were peripheral to true piety. In 1545, towards the end of his life, he preached a sermon in which he spoke of the two kingdoms present upon earth, ‘the kingdom of Christ and the worldly kingdom’. Christ's kingdom, through which we achieve salvation, is ‘a hearing-kingdom, not a seeing-kingdom; for the eyes do not lead and guide us to where we know and find Christ, but rather the ears must do this’.1 Here Luther privileged hearing above seeing – word over image – in a manner characteristic of evangelical teaching. Reformed theologians went much further. John Calvin undertook a thorough attack on the ‘superstitions of popery’. Idolatry – understood as a diminution of the honour due to God – occupied a more prominent place in his thought that in Luther's. Reformed Protestantism rewrote the Decalogue, making the prohibition of images a decree in its own right, and directed Christian worship towards a God who transcended all materiality.2 Yet Protestant piety was not fundamentally opposed to the visual. Even in his 1545 sermon, Luther accepted ‘visual sensation as part of the work that must be done to create religious conviction’.3 The Reformation, at least in its Lutheran manifestation, sought not to reject religious seeing, but rather to control it and the other senses (including hearing) through faith. The Catholic Church's defence of religious imagery was similarly nuanced. At its twenty-fifth session (3 December 1563) the Council of Trent stated that images were to be honoured, but not in a superstitious manner. Holy images – as opposed to idols – were of great value because through them Christians were moved to adore Christ, to remember the examples of the saints, and to cultivate piety. Theologians – most notably Johannes Molanus (1533–85) and Gabriele Paleotti (1522–97) – expanded on these themes.4 Catholic patrons commissioned illustrated books, devotional prints, paintings, sculpture and architecture, seeking to use images, as well as words, to awaken the senses and to engage Christians’ hearts and minds.5 Catholics continued to trust in the sacred power of images and relics. During the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the cultic use of images – the veneration of paintings and sculptures of Christ and the saints – flourished throughout Catholic Europe.6 No Protestant image – not even a miraculous portrait of Luther – was a place of holy presence akin to the Jesuit reliquary examined in this volume by Mia Mochizuki.7 Yet Catholic belief in immanence, in the intermingling of the spiritual and material, always coexisted with scepticism about the value of the visual. Catholic reform, from the late Middle Ages onwards, emphasized the importance of inner contemplation.8 During the sixteenth century Catholic commentators wrote, like their Lutheran counterparts, of images’ pedagogical value and affective potential.9 In the seventeenth century new devotional practices encouraged meditation on images as well as texts, and spread amongst Protestants as well as Catholics.10 In this volume, these new devotional practices provide the backdrop for Bridget Heal's investigation of the later history of Lucas Cranach's Schneeberg Altarpiece, and for Christine Göttler's analysis of the Catholic Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria's religious patronage. What of the visual cultures that evolved across Protestant Europe? Lutherans, driven by their desire to distinguish themselves from radical iconoclasts, allowed many images to survive intact and in situ in churches. They were convinced that God's Word would triumph over idolatry and superstition.11 Luther and his fellow Wittenberg reformers made extensive use of visual propaganda and illustrated key religious texts (the Bible and catechism, most notably), a reflection of their belief in the value of seeing for acquiring religious knowledge and understanding. The copious religious output of the Cranach workshop – altarpieces, epitaphs, portraits and prints – defined Lutheran visual culture for much of the sixteenth century, in Germany and beyond. Elsewhere – in Swiss and Southern German cities during the 1520s and 1530s, in France and in the Northern Netherlands – Protestantism's relationship with art was much more strongly shaped by iconoclasm. Yet memories of recent destruction did not prevent the production of new objects and images. In Calvinist churches Protestantism redirected rather than removed congregations’ desires to adorn and to commemorate.12 The domestic use of religious imagery also continued. Even in Reformed areas – for example in seventeenth-century Zürich, examined here by Andrew Morrall – religious iconographies were used in the home to foster a sense of confessional consciousness.13 The nature of these Protestant visual cultures – the position of art during and after iconoclasm – is an important theme of this volume. Christopher Wood has suggested that ‘Protestant iconophobia … permanently affected the ways in which images were made, exhibited and judged’. He writes of the ‘insulating strategies’ devised by artists in order to avoid charges of idolatry.14 In terms of medium, Protestants tended to favour black and white prints over sculptures and brightly coloured paintings that might seduce the eye. The 1519 woodcut known as Karlstadt's Wagen (wagon), analyzed here in an essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks, and the seventeenth-century Tischzucht (table discipline) broadsheets examined by Morrall exemplify this tendency. In terms of content, Protestant art is most readily associated with polemic, pedagogy, and allegory, and, in the case of the Northern Netherlands, with landscape, still life and everyday scenes filled with moralizing content. Regarding style, Protestant artists supposedly strove for plainness, for a visual culture ‘stripped of conspicuous artifice and deceptive pictorial rhetoric’.15 Here recent scholarship on Cranach is key: Joseph Koerner, for example, has argued that the art produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son in the service of the Lutheran Reformation deliberately eschewed aesthetic pleasure and affective power in favour of communicating evangelical doctrine.16 He speaks of the ‘mortification of painting though text, gesture, and style’.17 But not all religious art was polemical; not all religious art defended itself, as much of Cranach's did, from its enemies, the iconoclasts. Iconoclasm does not, Shira Brisman argues here, help us to read graphic studies of the period. Brisman asks us to dismiss iconoclasm from the privileged position that it has held in studies of sixteenth-century art. We need, she suggests, to erase our knowledge of images’ fall from grace in order to understand the works of Albrecht Dürer and others. Iconoclasm also played remarkably little part in the story of Lucas Cranach the Elder's first evangelical altarpiece, installed in the parish church in Schneeberg in 1539 and eventually, after a traumatic interlude during the Thirty Years’ War, reset in a magnificent baroque frame in the eighteenth century. The creators of some images certainly did respond to contemporary fear of the ‘uncontrolled nature of iconic representation’:18 Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt's Wagen, for example, in which Cranach's woodcut images are overburdened with explanatory texts. Others, however, continued to rely on very different modes of viewing: on ambiguity, as with Sebald Beham's small engraving of Moses and Aaron examined by Mitchell Merback; or on the restrained use of the imagination, as with Jan van Goyen's skyscapes, analyzed by Amy Powell. Their creators seem to have recognized, as Dürer did, that ‘pictures are, at best, mediators, affecting without determining what their viewers see in them’.19 The supposed bifurcation between a Protestant aesthetic of plainness and a Catholic effusion of colour and ornament can be seen by juxtaposing Morrall's Tischzucht prints with Mochizuki's seventeenth-century Portuguese reliquary. Yet it leaves in interpretative limbo the baroque incarnation of the Lutheran Schneeberg Altarpiece, which presents its central Cranach crucifixion panel as a relic, held aloft by angels and encased within an elaborately carved and gilded frame. This special issue brings together art historians and historians to consider the relationship between art and religious reform. The divisions between disciplines are no longer rigid, as they were in the days when Aby Warburg established his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek. Historians make effective use of visual and material evidence (though perhaps still not as often as they might); art historians ground their work in detailed historical understanding. For both, the Reformation, with its image disputes and iconoclasm, has acted as an intellectual lodestone since the 1960s.20 The essays assembled in this volume show how porous traditional disciplinary boundaries have become, but highlight the healthy plurality of methodological approaches that the religious art of the early modern era continues to inspire. Some of these essays tie images firmly to the religious, social and political contexts in which they were produced and received, reconstructed through close readings of texts. Others focus their attention primarily on images’ non-verbal means of communication, suggesting that the power of art can never be fully captured through words. Brisman's and Powell's essays in particular invite us to pay proper attention to artistic processes and to art's tendency to develop through visual conversations. They remind us that art, like music, requires us to exercise our historical imaginations differently.21 The volume has been timed to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, yet Martin Luther himself is more or less absent from its pages. He appears in the analysis of Karlstadt's Wagen, but he did not design this first piece of Reformation visual propaganda. He appears in Merback's discussion of Beham's 1526 engraving, but his thought does not explain the iconography. His theology offered a qualified endorsement of religious images, but cannot account for the flourishing of Lutheran art in parts of the Holy Roman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At a moment at which twenty-first-century anniversary culture celebrates ‘The Reformation’, focusing its attention on a particular date and on a particular man, this volume does the opposite. It adopts a broad chronology, ranging from the first decade of reform, the dawn of a new era in northern Europe, through the confessional age to the early eighteenth century. Three essays focus on the period of Umbruch – upheaval – during the early Reformation; five move into the seventeenth century, juxtaposing Protestant with Catholic, Lutheran Saxony and Reformed Zürich with Bavaria and the Jesuits’ overseas missions. These later essays show that although images played an important role in creating confessional consciousness, devotional art did not simply reflect theological divisions. It crossed confessional borders, and also evoked much broader cultural landscapes, landscapes that were being transformed during the early modern period by historical forces other than religion. The essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks that opens this collection focuses on a woodcut produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his Wittenberg colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (see plate 1, page 258–259). It was almost certainly the first piece of visual propaganda for the Reformation, produced in January 1519 at a moment at which the evangelical movement was still finding its way. It is a fascinating image: it draws on well-established visual formulae to present a procession of figures, and prefigures later Lutheran propaganda in its use of binary opposition and mockery. Its design is, however, overly complex. Its images are hard to make out because of the abundance of texts, and these texts are hard to decipher and understand. The woodcut was so cryptic, in fact, that Karlstadt had to produce a lengthy written tract to explain it to his supporters. Despite its apparently sequential structure, the woodcut was intended to be read, Roper and Spinks argue, not as a polemical narrative but as part of a devotional exercise. Karlstadt's written explanation suggests that he intended it to be used as a series of discrete points for meditation, as an invitation to reflect on key aspects of Augustinian theology. The woodcut is also intriguing because it was produced at a moment at which the early evangelical movement was still coloured by mystical piety, before the rupture between Luther and the more radical reformers – the Schwärmer or fanatics, as he labelled them – that shaped the 1520s so decisively. Karlstadt himself went on to publish, in 1522, the first evangelical defence of iconoclasm, On the Removal of Images. The 1519 woodcut provides, therefore, vivid testimony of the extent to which iconoclasts understood the religious and psychological power of images. It helps us to understand why image makers became image breakers. Hans Sebald Beham's 1526 Moses and Aaron, examined in Mitchell Merback's essay, is a very different type of image, one of the small-scale engravings for which the Beham brothers were famous (see plate 1, page 288). It is labelled with MOSE and AARON, and signed and dated, but that is all: it suffers from none of the textual overburdening of Karlstadt's Wagen. It shows two half-length figures seated on a mountainside with an open codex on their laps and the blank stone tablets of the Law resting beside them. The image's narrative and its doctrinal message resist easy interpretation, but this time such an opacity is intentional. Merback situates the engraving in the context of the debates about Mosaic Law that followed the Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–25, at a time when the split between the Wittenberg theologians and radicals such as Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer had become irrevocable. The engraving was also, however, he suggests, a personal reflection on religious exile, on Beham's own experiences as a ‘non-aligned evangelical’ who had been expelled from Nuremberg in 1525, and labelled a ‘godless painter’. The image testifies to Beham's familiarity with Lutheran teachings on the relationship between the Law and Gospel. But Luther's writings – even his 1525 sermon How Christians Should Regard Moses – offer no simple key for its interpretation. Rather, the artist produced his own reading, an allegory of the parting of ways between the Lutherans and Spiritualists. The priestly Aaron reads the codex before him while Moses, the lawgiver in Luther's interpretation, gazes out, seeking illumination beyond the Word. Beham has, Merback suggests, ‘subtly reasserted the hero's prophetic vocation and charisma’. The image can be read as veiled polemic against Wittenberg, or perhaps as a warning to both sides at a time of discord. Both of these first essays explore the relationship between image and word. The visual cannot, it seems, be reduced to an expression of the verbal, even in the case of Karlstadt's Wagen, with its inscriptions and detailed they are to with their must be allowed to for as Lutheran Shira Brisman's essay on graphic studies made the time of the Reformation these in a very different The she suggests, prophetic of the destruction that images during the most of But we resist seeing them as and iconoclasm from the of Christ's with a piece of and of the Christ with a beside it (see plate 1, page and plate page that cannot be in words. We see Brisman as of a visual that the through a of Images she suggests, their own the by the of the artist to to resist the narrative by or we might by and engravings such as examined by Spinks and we a different type of interpretative – one that not, as for Sebald from to the of the Reformation, but rather from the artistic processes of the While the first essays in very different art's role at the of a new the two us into the confessional Bridget Heal's essay focuses on Lutheran on a Protestant in from the early of the Reformation the eighteenth century, religious art It examines Cranach's Schneeberg and its This has a it was installed in 1539 but by during the Thirty Years’ Its were in Schneeberg in but the was in when the church was were in a and frame that in situ (see plate 1, page The Protestant of which the is a example, our of Lutheran art. Heal's the within the context of two broader the of Lutheran confessional and the of Lutheran piety. in particular the importance of historical not for the image's original and but also for its The of the made use of the visual of the baroque – perhaps not the cultural of the It also, however, a understanding of images’ devotional a new perhaps to them a role in the by which the intellectual (the knowledge of became the affective presence in the Protestants the with Cranach's image through the of and dramatic Andrew Morrall's essay us to Zürich, to a very different religious Morrall his discussion a painting of the of a Hans seated at a The of and a life are here in the of the and and in the domestic that them. The painting Morrall an expression of a Protestant and was part of a broader visual of Tischzucht that to the Morrall also explores the of of the of images by the for Protestantism he suggests, an It the of art, made it and and stripped it of or was by its to and its The images used by Morrall in the to by Brisman – for the image is a message must be out through In Zürich the Reformation brought he suggests, the of images. In the seventeenth-century art flourished in the of iconoclasm, as Amy shows in discussion of the paintings of Jan van argues that of iconoclasm, its of and in the works examined here and in like them. explores van Goyen's his use of and which did not, as art of the period did, filled with like the on the in church a of images that never fully These suggests, be seen as images of the by as to In a however, artistic had to be with – van who van Goyen's in him for not far from the Goyen's paintings were also – he is thought to have been a Catholic, but his works across the confessional responses to iconoclasm have been in through the of church and through the analysis of the religious and of and Here adopts a different one that art recent in and in the found in and early modern art. she van Goyen's of a particular she also against a that images within their historical brings seventeenth-century painting into with modern art, in particular to the use of which later played a role in of Here van Goyen's paintings from their own time and themselves to the With Christine Göttler's essay we move to a Catholic to the Bavaria of the Duke Wilhelm V examines the and the and cultural of within an Catholic focuses on the that the at his and and on a series of engravings of by Jan and that were to Bavaria's and made extensive use of images, and to their and religious from the to the The examined here however, a It not on but on reform, on on or from the – a for the after his in This by the but it was to move beyond confessional It in some Despite the that the on and the was in the at for example, were and that sacred scenes or They suggests, to the that to the religious of the The of the of the religious was key to both Protestant and Catholic reform, but in Duke and it was to be through In the essay of the volume Mia a detailed of one particular a Portuguese reliquary from the of the seventeenth century (see plate 1, page Here the of Catholicism that were present in Göttler's of into a account of the importance of overseas and for early modern religious At the of Mochizuki's reliquary is a of the from in the that the with them on their missions. It is in a that was to and and evoked The image is in this with of It is, suggests, seeking to through its of sacred It is an through its and its brings together two that of the of Western Christendom and the polemical that and that of with the The essay us that while iconoclasm did, without the ways in which religious images were made, exhibited and received, image or also a much cultural In his Joseph the essays within this volume in a broad The Protestant Reformation of merely one in the history of iconoclasm, a history that to the present art to both image making and image how and why iconoclasm to be accorded an important place within the history of art. he a tendency – certainly in this volume – to focus not on of destruction but rather on the in their It was the of iconoclasm that the attention of social history and art history during the and however, against the backdrop of image in and we seem more by the ways in which early modern cultures – both Protestant and Catholic – responded to the of iconoclasm, and were transformed by the that it The workshop that to this special issue was by the and the are very for the also to for to the for their help and and above all to for the

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

g d e g e n h a r d t , University of Massachusetts Amherst Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill, or else my project fails.-The Tempest, Epilogue, 11-12 1 a fter wielding the power to command storm and shipwreck throughoutThe Tempest, Prospero speaks an Epilogue in which he acknowledges how his manipulation of the sea has always been subject to the indulgence of the audience.In comparing the audience's compliance to favorable sea winds, Prospero's speech plays upon a familiar association between theatrical performance and seafaring in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.The Prologue to Thomas Middleton's No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's (1611) wonders "How is't possible to please / Opinion tos'd in such wilde Seas?" given the sheer numbers of people who attend the theater and the diversity of their tastes. 2As Douglas Bruster has argued, The Tempest's opening shipwreck can itself be read as an allegory for playhouse labor, since theatrical productions, like seafaring, required hard work and cooperation. 3Unwilling audiences interfered with this labor by disrupting the performance or its representational fictions, rather than helping to keep the ship afloat.Theater and seafaring also shared a precarious status as risky enterprises undergoing new forms of commercialization in early modern England.For early modern playwrights, the risks, dangers, and

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Representing the Duke of Buckingham: Libel, Counter-Libel and the Example of The Emperor’s Favourite’

Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750

The 1658 edition of sixteenth-century Zurich surgeon Felix Wurtz's treatise The Surgeons Guid [sic] complained that, ‘Patients are like Children, still desiring such things which are offensive and hurtfull’.1 Early modern medical literature produced by physicians and surgeons is littered with complaints about the behaviour of their male sexual health patients. They were particularly aggrieved that reckless consumption of food and alcohol, and engaging in sexual activity undermined their efforts to cure the body. As Wurtz noted, without close supervision patients made their surgeons ‘accessary to the evill that should ensue’.2 He therefore cautioned surgeons to monitor and regulate their patients because if ‘he should not do well, then all the fault would be laid upon the Surgeon’.3 These complaints and the actions of such patients reveal that the relationship between male medical practitioners and their male patients was sometimes difficult and characterised by the tense negotiation of authority. The patients examined here all suffered from either sexual health or genitourinary conditions such as venereal disease, kidney and bladder stones, and hernias. These men were not unique, and tend to reflect the behaviour of patients more generally. Both genders were liable to manipulate healers in order to receive treatment that accorded with their own ideas about suitable remedies and therapies.4 In the complex and competitive medical marketplace patients willingly and wilfully abandoned medical practitioners who did not comply with preconceived notions of treatment. Additionally, patients who remained with one practitioner could be evasive, demanding or obstinate. They could actively or passively hinder treatment regimens. Women as well as men were obstructive patients.5 One apothecary complained that a female venereal disease patient was irregular in her behaviour and would not be confined to her chamber, her prescription, or the requisite diet to allow him to cure her.6 Medical men described how they had to change their treatment plans because women were uneasy.7 And some practitioners were overruled by the strength of their female patient's convictions, bolstered (as men were) by disparities in social and economic status.8 Scholars have explored in detail the ways in which female patients interacted with early modern healers, focusing on how ideas of modesty and the potential for eroticism shaped these encounters.9 Despite excellent studies by Robert Weston and Alison Montgomery, far less attention has been paid recently to men's interactions.10 Men suffering from genitourinary conditions often experienced shame and embarrassment and as such were, perhaps, more likely to end up in a fractious or contentious relationship with their healers.11 They also faced moments of crisis if their ailments caused impotence, infertility, and a loss of facial hair that undermined the manliness of their bodies.12 Their actions were then likely to be implicitly shaped by notions of manliness, as women's were by ideas of femininity, even as these conflicts manifested as negotiations of authority. In scrutinising men's fractious relationships, the article will prompt social historians of medicine to reconsider the relationship between men and their healers. To fully understand medical interactions in this era both male and female patients need to be considered. One tool that patients and practitioners (here referring predominantly to physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries rather than itinerant practitioners, empirics, cunning-folk and other unregulated healers) used, although not always consciously, was space – in terms of particular sites. Space could be used by both groups in their attempts to exert authority and control over the patient/practitioner interaction. Male patients used space, and place (here meaning geographical location), as part of a strategy of resistance against the investigations, diagnoses and treatments recommended by medical practitioners. Medical practitioners in turn obliged patients to occupy certain spaces to enforce their treatment regimens and utilised space to negotiate the hierarchical relationship with other practitioners. Male patients did not solely rely on space to disrupt the work of their medical practitioners, and this article does not argue that if space and place were removed from the examples below that tense interactions and struggles for authority would not have taken place. Rather it suggests that space facilitated men's articulations of their desire for particular medical outcomes or exchanges. Space is therefore one element of the patient/practitioner interaction that deserves further scrutiny. As men acted in a range of ways that disrupted the medical interaction, the article begins by exploring the various complaints, like Wurtz's, that medical practitioners made about their patients. It will then consider the role of space in these contentious relationships. The texts discussed here were published between 1658 and 1757. Printed materials discussing medicine and the body flourished from the mid-sixteenth century.13 Costly folios down to cheap palm-sized books were available in a way that they had not been before. Particularly during the civil wars when print censorship was suspended and there was a backlash against medical elitism, the availability of medical self-help literature increased rapidly.14 Between 1649 and 1699, 282 books on medical-chemical and astrological themes alone were registered with the Stationers’ Company.15 Many of these books were translations of works originally written on the continent. These European texts connected medical practitioners and interested readers, and reveal a shared medical culture. Although specific cases might not be directly comparable to customs or experiences in England, the publishers of these works believed English audiences would find them relevant. Even though large and heavily illustrated tomes were very costly, some medical texts were relatively widely read.16 Mary Fissell has shown that numerous medical texts were sold at auctions for lower prices and so circulated more widely, than brand-new copies did.17 Purchasing a work through the second-hand trade made them available to a wider cross-section of society.18 It also ensured that medical treatises had a long shelf-life, which helped to create a medical culture where changes of orthodoxy were slow to occur. Although Wurtz's treatise was an English edition of a sixteenth-century work, these texts largely cover practitioners working in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, until approximately 1740. These examples, therefore, consider the experience of medical care up until the time humoral theory began to be superseded by nervous medicine, and the time when medical consultations were increasingly shaped by the language of sensibility.19 The focus on the second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century is dictated by the fact that texts produced prior to this include few detailed descriptions of cases. These became a more prominent feature of surgical texts from 1660 to 1700.20 It is also dictated by the survival of manuscript case notes which are more common for this later period. It is not the intention of this article to explore in detail whether men's actions changed over this period; however, the relative similarities in many of these cases suggest that men's actions broadly were a consistent feature of medical interactions. In the earlier part of the period considered here, certain patriarchal ideals rested on notions of self-control.21 Good manners were bound to self-control of the body.22 Neglecting one's health through unregulated consumption suggested that neglect of social duties was probably not far behind.23 Being a good patient could demonstrate self-control and self-mastery, and, therefore, patriarchal manliness. Not all men attained such mastery. Wurtz and the authors of several medical and surgical treatises published, re-published and re-printed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries explained that male patients were liable to be obstinate and unruly, unwilling to seek medical advice and unwilling to follow prescriptions. The continued discussion of these behaviours suggests that self-control, predominantly displayed through obedience to the prescriptions of a medical practitioner, remained an important feature of the manliness such texts perpetuated.24 Acting in an unreasonable and obstinate manner may not always have been the result of a lack of self-control, even if it was interpreted and described as such by medical authors, it may have been a deliberate strategy for asserting dominance over, or reclaiming authority over the body from, the medical practitioner. Exploring the context of French medical letters Robert Weston has demonstrated that tensions existed between elite male patients and the physicians and surgeons with whom they consulted.25 Medics were usually of a lower status than their patients and were denied the authority granted to practitioners of the law and the church.26 Practitioners’ authority was, consequently, sometimes weak and patients challenged them based on their own social status, wealth and medical knowledge.27 British healers were in a similarly precarious position. Physicians in Britain were tainted by the feminine associations of bodily care that their work connoted.28 Likewise the suggestion that they engaged in manual labour and a craft compounded surgeons’ inferiority. To combat these associations surgeons emphasised their learned traditions, technical skills and the manly aspects of their work such as the ‘fortitude to cut unflinchingly into flesh and physical strength to set bones’.29 Sexual health patients might well have posed a unique set of challenges because both the practitioner and patient feared that their manliness and authority was precarious. In the examples examined in this article the men range from ‘young’ men through to those in their fifties. Many were described as gentlemen, but others were designated with occupations, for example a senator and a surgeon. It has not been possible to consider in more depth the role that life cycle played in these encounters but that the men varied in age and status suggests that these methods of resistance and negotiation were accessible to all men, rather than specific groups. Pain and the inability to adequately complete daily activities often prompted men suffering from genitourinary and reproductive illnesses to seek medical advice and submit their bodies to the authority of a medical practitioner. However, this did not guarantee that men would not impose their own will onto a physician or surgeon, or act in rebellious ways. We should, however, be cautious of accepting accounts of unruly patients provided in printed medical and surgical texts. Lisa Smith has shown that eighteenth-century French surgeons used criticism of their patients to build ‘textual authority’ and a ‘moral advantage’.30 Wurtz fretted that surgeons would be blamed for a patient's continued ill health or death, and treatises reveal that medical and surgical writers used such stories to reinforce their own reputations of efficacy.31 In the case of failure practitioners suggested that the patient's unruly behaviour was actually to blame for continued or worsened symptoms, or death, thereby avoiding the implication that their own practice was ineffective. As suggested previously, the behaviours that practitioners complained about in their patients mirrored behaviours that were already thought to make a healthy man un-manly; an inability to regulate one's desires leading to gluttony, excessive drinking, and licentious behaviour.32 Moderate alcohol consumption was beneficial to the healing body, however, excess was considered damaging. Lisa Smith has shown that one eighteenth-century French physician believed that ‘persons subject to wine do not call the doctor except in extremity, because they know well that wine will be the first thing that they are forbidden to use’.33 Barthélemy Saviard commented in his ‘Remarks’ on a case of suppression of the urine that he was surprised that the frequency with which the condition returned could not convince the patient to live a more moderate life. He concluded ‘But he is not the first, that the most excruciating Pains could not prevail upon to quit the Passion of Drunkenness’.34 While Saviard appeared resigned to such interference, other practitioners were more frustrated by patients’ indulgences. In the observations recorded in the notebook of the Lockyer family, dating from 1675 to 1691, the medical practitioner who wrote the cases out explained that one of his patients – a man suffering from rheumatism in 1685 – relapsed because he drank too much ale, which made him ‘very angry’.35 The author told his patient ‘if he used such imoderate [sic] drinking it was in vaine’ for him to endeavour to cure him.36 … if a Patient be unruly, not caring for the Surgeons instruction, but fall on gourmandizing and drunkning, then no good is to be looked for; because the Patient refusing all natural helps, like a Swine trampling on Pearls, cannot expect any cure.42 Neither Sharp or Wurtz suggested that patients acted purposefully to counteract their medical practitioners, but they did reveal that patients rode roughshod over the prescriptions they received, implying that medical practitioners struggled to impose their authority on some patients. Inappropriate sexual activity was perhaps even more contentious for men suffering from genitourinary and reproductive disorders as poor regulation of their sexual activity may have contributed to their disorder in the first place. Wurtz was clear to point out this particular danger: ‘let wounded parties not practice Venereous lusts, whereby the worst accidents are caused’.43 Despite such cautions, some men were unable to bridle their lusts, sometimes with severe consequences. German surgeon Matthias Gottfried Purmann (whose observations were translated and published in English in 1706) recorded a case from 1694 of a twenty-eight-year-old draper treated for a watery swelling in his penis. He suffered a relapse after having sex with his wife before his condition was completely cured.44 Although Purmann did not criticise the patient for satisfying his libido, he made it clear that engaging in sexual activity was inappropriate and caused the patient's relapse, and eventual death.45 It is plausible that men returned to sexual activity as a way of asserting their belief that they had recovered. Hannah Newton has described how returning to a ‘lusty’ state was a feature of recovery narratives at this time.46 Richard Wiseman suggested in several of his observations that patients’ bad behaviour was inherently connected to their belief that they were recovered.47 If this were the case then this disruptive patient behaviour was potentially a means of reclaiming possession and authority over the body. A desire to return to daily life, and importantly to work, likely also prompted men to interpret their changing condition as a return to health.48 No matter the motivation medical writers, like Wurtz, found these behaviours frustrating and feared that bad outcomes might affect their reputation: ‘the Surgeon looseth his credit and reputation, and all his pains he bestowed will be in vain’.49 The disruptive behaviours of male patients may have been a strategy for reasserting dominance and authority, either consciously or unconsciously enacted. As will now be illustrated space provided a tool – like the consumption of food or engaging in sexual activity – for men to claim authority over and shape medical consultations and treatment. Tapping into the ways in which, as sociologist Fran Tonkiss has shown, spaces could be the objects of struggle, patients, physicians, surgeons and apothecaries determined the location of medical practice in order to claim authority over, and claimed locations as their own to dictate the medical interaction.50 Beat Kümin and Cornelie Usborne have suggested that historians need to grasp ‘Spatiality as simultaneously … a social product (or outcome) and a shaping force (or medium) in social life’.51 Katrina Navickas has emphasised that historians taking the spatial turn have tended to rely on the definitions of space proposed by Edward Soja and Henri Lefebvre – in which there is a tripartite division of space into the material and concrete, the symbolic and representative, and the lived as a combination of the two – and emphasise the representative element because it fits neatly with pre-existing ideas in the cultural turn.52 James Epstein has considered how space interacts with the performance of political authority and how the articulation of particular ideas might be shaped by and reinterpreted in spaces designated as either public or private.53 Geographers have turned to notions of ‘embodied geographies’ to consider how space might interact with the performance of power and authority, and the ways in which bodies and spaces exist in a constitutive relationship.54 The examples investigated below reveal similar notions that spaces, at certain moments, might allow patients or practitioners to articulate their own ideas about medical practice and treatment, and so achieve authority.55 Place and space were inherently linked to health and wellbeing in the early modern era.56 It was widely believed that environment, as one of the six non-naturals (rest, diet, mental wellbeing, exercise, environment and evacuations) should be regulated to maintain a healthy body. For many British writers, the best environment was Britain itself. It provided the healthiest climate, although certain fenland and marshy areas were thought to pose a threat to the body because stagnant standing water bred disease.57 Likewise, the filth of towns and cities made them unhealthy.58 This could affect those who travelled to urban areas. The death of the, supposedly, exceptionally long-lived Thomas Parr was attributed to his relocation from the countryside to London.59 Practitioners and patients put this to They where and spaces that of healthy and used spaces to combat Place – in terms of geographical location – could also be important for those at a from a large or who might have travelled to receive medical care from a physician or surgeon. the that posed to the body, men and also considered this before such a However, has cautioned to be of the that had to to urban for medical and has that most in the could a medical practitioner although might still have travelled to large cities or towns to a range of medical As suggested here, certain were also connected with had a long of of medical and were and healing locations the medical writers the early modern era produced treatises the in these particular the recovery of health to the but also on to the place itself. In his of the by implicitly suggested that the in was a of healing – as to and others to which travelled to receive a In who was suffering from the made it clear that the disease had been by from to the of the and that returning to own in order to the was a in a Medical and treatments in a range of both physical and Many interactions between male patients and their healers at a by by the numerous letters to in the British and urban patients were all treated without the practitioner the Despite in the space these still displayed letters from these encounters reveal that men experienced a of crisis in which they about their bodies and their medical as already noted, Weston has shown that in these encounters social authority was this that their ideas of treatments on patients was Surgeons a range of medical spaces Lisa has that French surgical consultations in patients’ and in a wrote to in that he would that for the to therefore desire will be at against the in at half an after This was a and was in the However, place in with like at the patient's Surgeons also out of and patients were a in where their this them with some authority over the treatment which could be if they so were a more feature of medical practice the early modern The was of negotiation and the performance of because they patriarchal not did they patients to submit their bodily authority to but they to regulate and in their than as a means of the the and the They were of social are not very often in the examples but it is that this provided a for the negotiation of authority. did not a location of medical treatment to that of the In part this was because until the and had to to their it is plausible that they in ways similar to has for that they could and enforce social between and groups by the ways that space is used and the manner in which it is Medical practitioners often in their patients’ and In of medicine the has been predominantly as the of medicine, sometimes women like produced complex and used their skills to of their and However, has the of spaces and medicine as solely were were from locations that and in early modern has that during that also as were as if not public of working men claimed spaces as their a of power and Men claimed authority by particular spaces and their through spaces bodily and of their The to to of the also authority. of the were not even to those who lived in the for might to certain in the upon as a or their to enforce their own authority over the is that patients the of their medical practitioners, although it may have been that between of healers was through the of some groups to patients more or by a more and accessible space their need for this is perhaps not However, the medical was a of the and activity and patients may well have interpreted the by a medical practitioners could of be into the as a of authority. of medical treatment were, and inherently upon the actions of the social The to claim certain spaces was at certain a feature of authority, during medical consultations and Practitioners men's spaces when but were not on to monitor treatment and they may have with a who was suffering from disrupted caused by kidney or bladder that his doctor to him on and on the of the In or sometimes also remained the The physical of practitioners from their patients to have undermined their authority in medical The cases of a physician working in and England, were published in the The that may be perhaps, that he is sometimes in his This to how this of patients facilitated men's unruly and obstinate a wine who to be and and suffered from pains and suppression of the explained that he had a and the medicine as but that it and to all he it his to the behaviours previously, disrupted and his medical care based on his own of his from the space of medical treatment facilitated as he was not to enforce In a from he recorded that him this was to find he had not taken the He now to and having an to the patient and that treatment in the patient's own or perhaps bolstered his belief that his own authority in such was As with other observations used this as a means of the patient relapsed and had to further was for to him this and found him in like other practitioners, used stories like this to build a to shame patients into However, also here that by descriptions about the location of medical care was implicitly to claim authority over patients’ when they were used for medical treatment. It was he that patients that even when they were in their own they should submit to his authority in order to health and A patient's was often as the location of medical treatment and The had associations in the early modern period with women's health as the of and in the a space by the and Women confined to this space both before and after A from to from though that the was important for men as well as of a commented that is confined to his by a fall he had in his he will be to down recorded in his for that a was confined to by in his on several because of his as a and space where medical men, and and This was likely not an as although not at some in the the his and in his having a was not a feature of early modern life. For many their

“Drowned in Blood”:

Although the study of Christian hagiography still primarily targets ancient and medieval texts, the early modern hagiography has recently been established as a distinctive research topic. Its focus is not only on the transformations of the post-Tridentine hagiography of the Roman Catholic Church, which effectively appropriated the cult of the saints as its important identifier. In this respect, the early modern texts seem to have dissolved the conventional association of hagiography with Catholicism: the analyses of surviving early modern texts demonstrate that the Protestant churches—while still critical towards the cult of saints as they knew it from late medieval devotional practices— did not reject the concept of sanctity or hagiography as such. Martyrology in particular seems to have been very frequent in all early modern Christian denominations, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; indeed, research on Czech early modern hagiography of non-Catholic provenance has concentrated on texts about Jan Hus, or other Czech supporters of religious reforms who died violent deaths. However, literary works such as a series of twelve Czech short texts published anonymously at the early seventeenth century under the title “Hystorye o bratru Janovi Palečkovi” (The histories of Brother Jan Palček) show that the equation of early modern Czech Non-Catholic hagiography with martyrology is unjustified. Indeed, the series employs many textual practices and topoi of (late) medieval Christian hagiography, and although its main character is not called a saint, it still bears distinctive features of the concept of Christian sanctity. The article aims to argue that the series can be interpreted as an example of non-martyrological hagiography of a Protestant Reformation type.

This thesis considers the place of women in the line of Tudor and early Jacobean succession between 1485 and 1615. The ability of a woman to transmit a dynastic claim was first established in England in the twelfth century, and the mid-sixteenth century saw an accident of circumstances which resulted in an almost complete lack of legitimate male contenders in the direct line to the throne. This thesis challenges historians’ traditional focus on the Tudor and Stuart queens and the underlying assumption that other women who possessed a dynastic claim were not actively involved in the politics of the succession. The place of women in the line of Tudor and early Jacobean succession is examined herein through the study of four different areas of this public debate. This thesis includes chapters on early modern understanding of female succession to the English throne before the sixteenth century; the marriages and courtships pursued by women within the royal line between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth century; the use of portraiture as propaganda in the politics of the succession, and the manuscript and print debate on female rule and inheritance in Tudor England.

Histories of individual commodities and products abound these days, but Marsh’s Unravelled Dreams differs from most of them in one important respect. Rather than spinning a tale of biological and commercial success, Marsh traces how and why silk production failed in so many different places and in so many ways in the Western Hemisphere during the early modern period. Indeed, his chronicle of serial miscalculations and disappointments involving silk brings to mind nothing so much as Beckett’s famous lines in Worstward Ho: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.”1On the surface, the reasons for the many attempts to develop a viable silk industry in the Americas during the early modern period are understandable. The natural fiber was highly valued and much in demand at the time, and, as Marsh demonstrates in his opening chapter, it had been cultivated and processed successfully in many parts of Afro-Eurasia after its appearance in China c. 5000 b.c.e. In hindsight, however, experimenters with silk could have proceeded with a bit more caution; myriad challenges had to be overcome merely to produce good silk, much less to do so efficiently and at a scale sufficient to create an industry.Silk is derived from the cocoons of domesticated moths classified by Linnaeus as Bombyx mori. Once moth eggs of this species hatch into larvae, they eat voraciously and continually, with a preference for the leaves of white mulberry trees. At a certain point in the growth process, the larvae enclose themselves in cocoons of raw silk, which is essentially a protein produced by their salivary glands. Silk is harvested by boiling the evolving moths inside their cocoons and then unravelling the single thread of silk from which each cocoon is made. The raw silk, which is quite delicate, then must go through an elaborate multi-stage processing sequence before it can transform into one or another variety of silk fabric. Silk processing during the early modern period occurred both at the household level on manual reels and in certain areas at larger facilities known as filatures, which often employed mechanical power of one type of another.The above description of silk production, however truncated, is sufficient to suggest the elements that comprised the complicated, entrepreneurial undertaking of silk production in the Western Hemisphere: transporting fragile moth eggs long distances to places where white mulberry trees flourished and finding/acquiring, and then retaining, skilled workers who could tend to the worms and reel the silk, as well as experts who could manage and coordinate the entire process. Difficult as these problems were, if solved, sellers still had to compete in markets with rivals from venerable centers of production in the Old World, ranging from China and India to Italy and France.Through a series of detailed case studies, March chronicles the various sericultural miscarriages in different parts of the Western Hemisphere—New Spain in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Virginia in the seventeenth century, French Louisiana and the British colonies of South Carolina and Georgia in the eighteenth century, and New England and Pennsylvania in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In some instances, the major impediment was the inhospitable environment; in others, it was insufficient or inadequate labor. In certain areas, other economic activities displayed greater economic potential; in others, market competition from more efficient producers proved too formidable. Most often, however, some combination of these factors was decisive. As Marsh also shows, efforts in the early modern period to establish viable sericulture in parts of northern Europe, most notably in England, were hardly immune to such difficulties. Most of the failures detailed by Marsh occurred despite various types of governmental support.At the end of the day, sericulture’s failure to flourish in the Western Hemisphere during the early modern period is not surprising. Given the environmental and labor-market challenges and the opportunity costs associated with silk production, other economic activities undoubtedly offered better profit possibilities. That said, Marsh deserves praise for this fascinating and richly documented study of the trials and tribulations involved in trying to establish sericulture on American soil.

Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks (eds), Tobacco in Russian History and Culture from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, Routledge Studies in Cultural History, No. 10 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. X + 295, £60.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-415-99655-6. - Volume 55 Issue 1

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

Reviewed by: Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern Englandby Sarah E. Johnson Ariane M. Balizet Sarah E. Johnson. Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. xi + 185. $104.95. In Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England, Sarah E. Johnson interrogates early modern dramatic tropes of gender inequality to illustrate the multiple and surprising ways in which representations of women being manipulated or mistreated onstage can in fact reveal transgressive and empowering portrayals of women and the feminine. Chief among these dramatic tropes is the dynamic of soul and body, which was not only gendered (men were aligned with the rational, divine soul; women with the capricious, earthly body) but also hierarchized, in that the soul was placed above and thus governed the body in all things. By reframing the “soul-body hierarchy” as the “soul-body dynamic,” Johnson makes the persuasive case that many metaphors typically associated with gendered control can ultimately generate, on the stage, “empowering ideas of women” (5). That is, once we consider alternate power dynamics between soul and body, we can view afresh other relationships that appear hierarchized in the same manner. Over the course of four chapters and a brief conclusion, Johnson examines two tragedies, two comedies, several masques, and a religious treatise from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England. Her reading of the dramatic works in terms of the soul-body dynamic and its analogues unsettles and productively challenges scholarly thinking on the seemingly trenchant binaries that organized representations of men and women on the early modern stage. For Johnson, the perception of a power struggle between soul and body animates familiar tropes of gendered conflict in early modern drama, and thus each chapter focuses on a particular relationship manifest in one or more plays: puppeteer/puppet, tamer/tamed, ghost/haunted, and observer/spectacle. For each relationship, the author explores how hierarchized thinking about who is controlling whom gives way, on stage, to more complex representations of power and social critique. The puppet, for example, might be seen as a soulless, empty “body” brought to life only by the hand, voice, and will of the puppeteer. [End Page 369]In gendered terms, the staging of a man using a woman like a puppet reinforces the analogue between soul over body and masculine control of women. In performance, however, the puppet almost always takes on a “life” of its own, commenting upon and even critiquing the will of the puppeteer. Early modern puppetry, the author notes, often capitalized on the uncanny ability of the puppet to subtly (or uproariously) undermine the labors of its “master.” While, metaphorically, puppets represent (feminized) subordination, onstage they have a “disruptive feminizing power” that “holds positive implications for the representation of women more broadly” (27). In chapter 1, which focuses on this relationship between puppeteer and puppet, Johnson notes multiple early modern dramatic examples of men turning women into puppets. The most famous example is to be found in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, in which Katharina specifically scolds her husband for attempting to make her into a puppet. Her final speech, for Johnson, reveals both a puppet-like performance (throwing her cap on the floor, placing her hand beneath Petruchio’s boot) as well as the “disruptive” power of this puppetry (since her commendation of husbands’ duties may be read as parody). Many examples feature men displaying and animating women’s corpses; these macabre displays have been much discussed in terms of the volatile signifying power of the stage property. By analyzing Gloriana’s skull in Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedyas a puppet—not a prop—Johnson affirms the more active role Gloriana plays in the tragedy: “As Vindice unloads his contempt for women onto Gloriana’s skull and celebrates his ingenuity in suiting her up for the Duke, her perpetual, gruesome grin could very easily produce the effect of seeming to silently mock Vindice himself. Such mockery is in keeping with the daring vulgarity and rebelliousness that came to be expected from a puppet” (48...