Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Bruce Boehrer This issue of JEMCS marks the start of the journal’s thirteenth year of publication and its second year as a quarterly issued by the University of Pennsylvania Press. To see the year in, we offer a range of articles dealing with transnational encounters, witchcraft and occult lore, and material culture in its various manifestations. Two articles, from Deborah Willis and Julia M. Garrett, respectively, revisit the particular forms of knowledge associated with witchcraft in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England: Willis focuses on the discourse of the family while Garrett looks closely at the links between sexuality and witchcraft. For Willis, the witch-lore of early modern England lends new attention to the familial context of witchcraft, constructing fantasies whereby witches use family relationships to pass occult knowledge from generation to generation in a parodic inversion of conventional family ties. This caricature of regular family relations then becomes secondarily available as a model for the ostensibly dysfunctional families of the underclass—subversive families made up of beggars, criminals, or rebels. Where Willis thus views witch-lore as contributing to the formation of discourses on the family, Garrett presents this same subject matter as implicated in the history of sexuality. For Garrett, witchcraft provides a frame for the discursive exploration of feminine sexual pleasure. In particular, the physical anomalies associated with witch-proceedings—as for instance the witch’s mark or teat popularly supposed to distinguish the bodies of women who had intimate conjunction with the devil or demonic familiars—offer a material context for thinking about feminine sexuality and erotic satisfaction. On a broader level, Garrett’s article argues that witch-lore and witch-proceedings helped develop a legitimate official discourse of sexuality through their association with legal authority. [End Page 1] Further articles deal with exchanges in the realm of material culture. John R. Ziegler’s “Irish Mantles, English Nationalism: Apparel and National Identity in Early Modern English and Irish Texts” concentrates on the single item of clothing that became perhaps the most potent symbol of Irish cultural integrity in the early modern period. In English colonialist discourse, the Irish mantle came to be associated with sexual promiscuity, nudity, the collapse of social difference, and cross-cultural exoticism more generally. As a result, English efforts to domesticate the Irish tended to focus in large part on sartorial reformation—a reformation enacted symbolically by Ben Jonson’s Irish Masque at Court. Ironically, however, contemporary Irish sources betray little of this concern over national dress, perhaps because contemporary Irish culture was itself not so heavily dependent upon emergent discourses of race and nationhood. Continuing the focus on material culture, Bret Rothstein’s “Strange Wooden Objects and the Early Modern Pursuit of Difficulty” conducts a sustained close reading of a particularly resistant object: a nameless wooden helical torus of unknown manufacture located in the Wunderkammer of Rudolf II, Archduke of Tirol. As Rothstein works his way through the possible meanings and purposes of this item, he moves from questions of practical utility through the categories of mathematical puzzles, wondrous artifacts, impossible objects, and experiments in perspective and anamorphosis. Over the course of this disquisition, the torus itself comes to embody a fascination with the difficulty that lies behind the emergence of mental challenges and visual tricks as a distinct class of commodity whose value resides precisely in a kind of mute resistance: their refusal to deliver up their secrets to the viewer. Finally, Peter C. Remien studies the effects of broadening market activity on the estate poetry of seventeenth-century England. Focusing upon the verse of Robert Herrick and Mildmay Fane, Remien presents Fane’s poem “A Peppercorn or Small Rent” as representative of the generic innovation made possible by the development of global trade networks. Thus Fane’s poem rehearses the transition from notions of the preindustrial household as a unit defined by economic self-sufficiency to models of the modern estate as an institution organized primarily around modes of consumption. In this respect it paves the way for the pastoral-imperial mode of eighteenth-century estate poems like Pope’s “Windsor Forest.” As these articles shift their focus from social practice and religious belief to the histories...