Summer's Distillation

Finally turned in my abstract for a paper at the Shakespeare Assocation of America in the spring:

Summer’s Distillation
abstract

Shakespeare’s Sonnets have so far prompted very little eco-criticism, not because they lack references to the natural world but perhaps because the poems’ seasonal metaphors and flower images have seemed to reflect poetic conventions rather than any real interest in the natural world. Recently, however, there are some signs that scholars may be willing to reconsider this position. Robert Markley’s very fine chapter in Early Modern Ecostudies argues that the Sonnets’ insistence on the shortness of summer reflects a concern with actual climatic conditions in Europe’s “little ice age.” Robert Watson’s Back to Nature, while not commenting on the Sonnets themselves, tentatively offers the claim that Shakespeare’s response to the natural world blends the inherently conflicting poetics of what was to become metaphysical and cavalier poetry (373). Drawing in part on Watson’s suggestions, I argue that the seasonal and natural language of the Sonnets dramatizes an unresolved conflict at the heart of Shakespeare's poetic project. On the one hand, the poems approach the progress of the seasons as a process capable of being both countered and co-opted, literally in the case of distillation, harvest, or marriage, and poetically through the speaker’s often triumphant insistence on metaphor and simile, as in Sonnet 18’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.” On the other hand, the poems simultaneously portray the natural world as an irreducible and immutable metonymic part of the larger drama of the vegetable soul, something many early modern natural philosophers saw as common to all living things, as in Sonnet 73’s “That time of year thou mayst in me behold.”

Markley, Robert. “Summer's Lease: Shakespeare in the Little Ice Age.” Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare. Ed. Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, & Karen Raber. New York: Palgrave, 2008. 131-142.
Watson, Robert N. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007.

The return of Adam's worm

OK, so looking at my last post, I see I was a bit optimistic. Year... week... what's the difference?

Out of the blue I got a note from an old colleague asking whether I might have an essay to contribute to an almost complete volume that needed something on "land animals" in the Renaissance. I suggested this piece, one I had originally intended for another book that never materialized :( Here's the abstract:

Adam’s Worm: Invertebrate life in the Early modern English Body
Abstract

"From whence came these insects in all these bodies?"
Daniel LeClerc, A Natural and Medical History of Worms

For a variety of reasons, recent scholarship on early modern zoology has tended to focus on large perennially charismatic creatures.(1) The development of ecocriticism, however, has made clear the need for a wider vision, one that allows us to understand how individual disciplines such as zoology participated in wider attitudes toward the interplay between humans and the natural environment.(2) In the case of zoology, it is actually in the lower reaches of land animals, among humble invertebrates like worms and caterpillars that one finds the most profound distance between early modern natural philosophy and modern science and consequently the most visible evidence of epistemological change at work. Creatures like worms and caterpillars challenged basic notions of ontogeny. On the one hand, they were associated with putrefaction and death. On the other hand, their astonishing fecundity and apparently spontaneous derivation within substances made them the most basic example of the generation of life. Indeed, popular opinion had it that Adam was created with his worm already inside him. In this essay, I begin by drawing on works ranging from Latimer’s sermons to early treatises on helminthology in order to suggest that the paradoxical notion of life arising from putrefaction resonates with more general early-modern English ambivalence about what constitutes economic, political and social well-being. The two concepts are so closely related, indeed, that the connection goes beyond metaphor into metonymy. Invertebrates like worms and caterpillars served in many cases as a metonymic representation of an ambivalence that runs equally through both natural philosophy and early modern society, including its literary works. The best-known literary text in which this ambivalence plays a major role is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, revolving as it does around the notion that there is something "rotten" in the Danish state. The play is full of references to invertebrate life. The zoological and the political find their natural concurrence in Hamlet’s everyday language. In the second half of this essay, I suggest that the metonymy of worms might cast new light on passages traditionally understood mainly as metaphorical or merely symptomatic of Hamlet’s condition. These images suggest that Hamlet’s ambivalence is not personal but a symptom of a larger cultural uncertainty metonymized by invertebrate life. The social forces at work in the play are of a piece with the most basic zoological categories of generation and corruption.

1. See for example Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman, eds., At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave, 2002), Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

2. The breadth of the field is indicated in a wonderful series of papers derived from a 1994 ASLE conference: Michael Branch, Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice, 1994, ASLE, Available: http://www.asle.umn.edu/conf/other_conf/wla/1994/1994.html, July 17 2006.

Nostos

Here's my abstract for the Shakespeare Association. My session is on "Shakespeare and Global Capitalism." I'm feeling as though I'm not sure of the topic any more, though. Half of the abstracts submitted so far are on global capitalism in the Renaissance; half are on the currency of Shakespeare in modern global capitalism. Mine is of the former ilk. Here's the abstract:

203 Barbary Apes: Misadventures in Global Capitalism and the Geography of Time in Shakespeare's England

One of the peculiarities of early global trade, from a modern perspective, is the fact that information moved at more or less the same speed as goods. As the distances over which trade was conducted increased dramatically, delays in news and miscommunications also increased. Sometimes the consequences were comic, as with a disastrously mistaken order by a London merchant for "2o[r]3" apes in 1637. More often, however, they threatened to undermine financial markets. A mercantile venture was always, in some sense, a wager against the future. When trade occurred over vast distances, much of that future had already happened; European markets were thus constantly catching up to a future whose dimensions were as much geographical as temporal. The immediate result was a profusion of financial instruments designed to manage and control risk, including aleatory contracts, loans, and investment strategies. More broadly, developments in trade wrought fundamental changes in the understanding of causation, probability, fortune, and even time itself. In this essay I trace some of the connections between the early modern global financial markets and developing attitudes toward causation and probability. These attitudes are clear, I argue, not only in works like The Merchant of Venice where economics plays a key role but more subtly and profoundly in tragedies like Hamlet and Macbeth.

Thinking about causality in Star Trek

So I was reading a short interview online with the writers of the new Star Trek movie, and I came across an interchange about coincidences:

Kurtzman: One of the things we're playing to is the theme of destiny ... the idea that it wasn't actually random chance. It seems like random chance if you run into Spock in that cave, but it wasn't. And in some way, the time stream is trying to mend itself.

MTV: And how about Scotty? Is it a coincidence that he happens to be on that moon as well?

Kurtzman: It goes back to the idea that the time stream is trying to mend itself. These characters are essentially destined to find each other in one way or another — and that fate is literally bringing them together.

Where exactly do we get this idea that the "time stream" desires to "mend itself"? It's the modern version of Aristotle's first cause. One of the writers even says that quantum mechanics give a mathematical basis for destiny. I'm not sure how this works, since quantum mechanics only demonstrate a mathematical basis for uncertainty and perhaps for free will. This isn't the same as destiny, quite the opposite.

I've been thinking how astonishingly easily we accommodate the unpredictability of the individual event with the predictability of aggregate events. We can even believe that single events are inherently unpredictable even if the aggregate is entirely predictable. This is a conceptually weird position.

“'Star Trek' Writers Answer Five Burning Questions - News Story | Music, Celebrity, Artist News | MTV News.” 13 May 2009 <http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1611247/20090512/story.jhtml>.

Mystery still unsolved

So in idle moments I've been trying to figure out why caterpillars, butterflies, and snails appear on the covers of Psalms. You would think that, having written on the topic of invertebrates, I'd know, but so far I am turning up only negatives. Here are some of them.
a) It's not typological. The caterpillar's transformation to butterfly simply wasn't deployed as an image of transformation or metamorphosis as far as I can tell.
b) It's not part of a traditional iconography of David or of the Psalms.
c) There are very few references to any of these creatures in the Psalms.  OK, there are some, and the melting snail of Psalm 58 is particularly interesting. But overall, the Psalms have fewer insect images than other parts of the Bible.
c) These creatures have uniformly negative connotations.  If they represent anything, it would be the wrath of God, sin, or the fallen world. But they're not unique to the Psalms. 

Very puzzling. I'll keep thinking.

Thinking about Goliath

I was struck by a post by Sarah Werner on her blog, Wynken de Worde, on an embroidered binding of a 1639 Psalter. Here's the image she uses from the Folger Library (I hope fair use covers this potential copyright issue):


The binding, which is carefully, if not beautifully, embroidered, shows two images of David, one with a sling and other (on the front) holding the severed head of Goliath. I wondered at the implications of this binding. Of course, the battle with Goliath was certainly one of the famous episodes of the psalmist's life, but since the psalms were frequently deployed in the early modern period as poems about the struggle of the righteous against powerful enemies, this episode has a particularly polemical charge.  William Gouge uses the Goliath story to argue that David is a type of Christ, who "in like manner did Combat with, and overcame that great Goliah the Devil" (190), and he notes the Goliath story in the margins when he talks about David's "putting forth himself to the uttermost for Gods Church" (188). Given the direction that religious conflict was taking in England in the 1640s, it's also hard not to imagine that this image looks forward to the beheading of Charles I in 1649.  In the decade immediately following this event, references to Goliath were extremely common. Usually the story was employed to justify some kind of resistance to the demands of those imagined as more powerful. 

As I look more closely at the binding (the Folger has a great site for high quality images), I notice the odd selection of creatures floating around David: a caterpillar, a butterfly, a worm, a fly, a bird, and a snail. The rendering of the embroidery reminds me of a child's work, too.  Are these creatures are being employed typologically - as images of transformation or the movement of the soul, say? And what does that have to do with the death of Goliath?  Or is it a reference to the taunting in 1Samuel17, where David promises to "give the carcasses of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls of the heaven, and to the beasts of the earth" (Geneva Bible)? The animals in the binding, at least, are creatures of corruption, as earthly as one can get. I don't think they're just decorative.  Time for bed. There's lots more that could be done.

Gouge, William. A learned and very useful commentary on the whole epistle to the Hebrews. London, 1655. 

Failing to ignore Aristotle

I had hoped not to have to spend much time with philosophy, but this sentence from Arbuthnot reminded me that I need to brush up on Aristotelian causation:
"it is no Heresie to believe, that Providence suffers ordinary matters to run in the channel of second causes."
Easy for Arbuthnot to say, but this is precisely the issue that concerns people in the century before.  A casual EEBO search for "second causes" turns up 796 works... and a quick survey of the results suggests that many are relevant.  I don't know why I haven't come across more references to Aristotelian causation in the period. Well, I guess I do know. It's because the language turns up mainly in religious works -- which is why my student handout on it is in my Milton folder :)  More on this later (lots of work needed first).
Actually, Aristotle's first two causes, final and efficient, are both familiar to us. Modern science admits only of the efficient cause (#2)- the means and manner in which something comes into being, but in the human world we care mainly about final causes (#1)- the purpose for which something comes into being.  The other two causes are somewhat more obscure (they don't seem like causes to me). Chance, of course, is in the modern world a second or "efficient" cause.  Understanding this requires one to realize as Arbuthnot puts it, "that Chance ... is nothing but want of Art" and that therefore the mathematics of probability is kind of a second-best approximation.

Oh, one piece of news. My article on Daniel has actually passed its peer review at Appositions. One thing that can be said for baby journals is that they're fast.

The fungibility of hazard: reading forward

As a useful endpoint, I read John Arbuthnot's 1692 book Of the laws of chance. This was the first English publication on probability theory. It is mostly a translation of Huygens (1657), but of course Arbuthnot's introduction is his own.  I think some of the examples are his as well. There are two things that struck me about this piece. The first is the extent to which Arbuthnot claims that mathematical probability applies to the world at large. "All the Politicks in the World," he says  "are nothing else but a kind of Analysis of the Quantity of Probability in casual Events."  The second is the degree to which he employs economics to convey his ideas.  His most basic principle is that ""Ones Hazard or Expectation to gain any thing is worth so much, as, if he had it, he could purchase the like Hazard or Expectation again in a just and equal Game" (B2). This sounds confusing, but he gives an example to make it clear.  If someone has hidden seven shillings in one hand and three in the other and says "choose one hand and I'll give you the contents" Arbuthnot argues that this is equivalent to being given five shillings. This means that chance itself has a value predicated on exchange.  He's not really thinking of commodification as much as fungibility. This is the real epistemological revolution behind the idea of probability.  It's what I need to look for in earlier accounts.

Arbuthnot, John. Of the laws of chance, or, A method of calculation of the hazards of game plainly demonstrated and applied to games at present most in use : which may be easily extended to the most intricate cases of chance imaginable. London 1692.

Mercantilism vs. hazard

Sorry it's been so long... doing some pro bono work, as it were, for the local school.

Now according to most economic histories, early modern England is supposed to be deeply mercantilist, believing that wealth and money are synomous, and interested in hoarding specie [the word itself incorporates the mercantilist view of money] via a positive balance of trade.  I've rarely seen this belief expressed in early modern English texts, though, and a nice article by Mark Notzloff helps explain why. He argues that by the end of the 16th century, mercantilism had become associated in English minds with Spanish policies, and the English colonists weren't finding gold anyway, so they were more likely to laud domestic production and circulation. I disagree with his ultimate claims about the Merchant of Venice (his literary text), but I like the broad historical claim. It reinforces the protocapitalist nature of risk. At this point I don't think there is any historical resolution to the contradictory economic aspects of risk: a) legitimizing because divine and b) the logical end of an idolatrous economic trend.   Tomorrow I'm going to declare a temporary end to the purely economic stuff and turn to games of chance (not literally - a pox upon the new Firekeepers casino down the road!).

Notzloff, Mark. “The Lead Casket: Capital, Mercantilism, and the Merchant of Venice.” Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism. Ed. Linda Woodbridge. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 159-172. 

Risk and inequities of wealth

I've been reading the book Suellyn lent me, Eric Beinhocker's The Origin of Wealth. I'm struck by the role he accords to chance within an economic system. According to him, it "above all" explains inequities in wealth and perhaps even the dynamic quality (not tending to equilibrium) of the whole system (86). I wonder if this chance is the same as the risk which is managed and cultivated within the system itself?  In any case, if Beinhocker is right, the relationship between risk and return in a capitalist system is mathematically valid (some have claimed that it's only a convention). 

I haven't read far enough to say for sure, but I'm not sure that Beinhocker's model successfully explains the major cooperative undertakings of essentially egalitarian societies in the paleolithic period. If economic systems tend toward the inequality of wealth and if wealth and power are socially synonymous, it's hard to imagine an egalitarian society commanding the kind of complex economy necessary to build, say, Stonehenge. No doubt there's an answer to this further on...

Beinhocker, Eric D. The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School Press, 2006. 

Bending the soul

This may be babble. Tell me.

I was reading Colin Renfrew's new book The Prehistory of Mind, and his discussion of the growth of religion in the context of "cognitive archaeology" set me to thinking about concepts of freedom or captivity in the soul in the Renaissance. Given Hawkes' insistence that religious and economic discourse in the period should never be separated, any presumed inclinations of the soul may also be understood as a kind of warping influence upon an at least conceptually neutral (or random) model. This is true even if the inclination in question is "natural" because one can only be inclined from some original imagined position. That some kind of alteration of form is implied seems clear when you look at the early popularity of the word "bent" to describe an inclination as Milton does in his famous sonnet XVI ("When I consider how my light is spent"): "my Soul more bent / To serve therewith my Maker," his speaker says. The "bent of the soul" was a popular phrase in the period.  Donne also alludes to it in his Holy Sonnet "Batter my heart, three person'd God." "Bent" means inclination, but it implies bending, which comes ultimately from binding (and a "bend" in nautical speak is still a binding knot).   There's lots more that could be said about the use of the word in those two poems, but there are epistemological implications as well. The dissolution of Aristotelian teleology in the 17th century could be seen as a kind of unbinding of the soul (and resented as such by many).  I'm thinking that chance, understood in discrete terms followed a similar path.  Chance in an earlier world is bent away from the verticality of the random by the will of God. But that means the concept of such verticality is there, even if it is never supposed to be in operation.

Early modern center conference

This was a great little conference with some wonderful papers. I was intrigued by the fact that so many other presenters used some form of Powerpoint. It's true that the topic was image-friendly, but the tradition in history/literature conference papers is simply to read a paper. Maybe the discipline is changing! My favorite presentation was by Rachel Crawford. She demonstrated connections between English formal gardens and Milton's garden of paradise in Paradise Lost. I'm excited to be able to use this in teaching.

Here's a picture of flowers near the beach at Coal Oil Point from my morning run.

Crawford, Rachel. “Simplex Munditiis: English Formality and the Seventeenth-Century Garden.” Conference Paper, UCSB Early Modern Center, 2009.