This essay began as an attempt to document an hypothesis that turned out to be false. While preparing a course on early modern autobiography, I ran across an intriguing essay by Georges Gusdorf which hypothesized that the invention of the clear glass mirror in the sixteenth century gave rise to modern, reflexive self-consciousness, which, in turn, led to the sudden proliferation of autobiographical genres.¹ I thought it might be worthwhile to trace the role this novel everyday artifact played in the emergence of early modern selfhood; at the time it seemed a plausible and suitably materialist alternative to current narratives...

Horses in early modern England plowed fields, transported humans and goods across the countryside, and carried men into war. Perhaps because horses are so ubiquitous a part of the early modem world, yet so foreign to our own context, the social and political ramifications of their use in early modern culture have rarely been foregrounded in recent criticism. Anthony Dent, one exception to this rule, laments that contemporary scholars blithely accept their own ignorance of what has become a “special interest” in the twentieth century.¹ I agree with Dent—we lose tremendously if we do not attempt to recover something...

I heard a joke recently: outside a theater, a homeless man approaches a well-dressed member of the audience for a handout. The theater patron says, archly: “‘Neither a borrower, nor a lender be’—Williarn Shakespeare!” To which the homeless man replies: “‘Fuck you’—David Mamet!” Now I can tell this joke in the context of a scholarly essay and have some reasonable expectation that a reputable academic press will print it; that is, of course, if the rest of my essay meets certain standards. Fifteen years ago this would not have been a reasonable expectation. But the situation in academic...

Complaining against arduous training under his tutors in Latin, the boy-king, James VI of Scotland, grumbled: “Thay gar me speik latin ar I could speik Scotis.”¹ “Scotis” originally meant “Gaelic,” the language of social dominance in Scotland until the Middle Ages. In the course of the Middle Ages, however, Gaelic lost dominance, retired to the Highlands, and came to be known as “Yrisch” or “Ersch.” The term “Scotis” had found a new voice. By the late fifteenth century, it meant “Inglis,” a language of the Lowlands that I shall risk calling a dialect of English.² It is this dialect to...

In a letter to a friend, Sylvia Townsend Warner, the author of a historical novel about early modern nuns, wrote that she was “inclined to call it ‘People Growing Old.’” Sensibly, she jettisoned the title, knowing full well that it would not garner readers. But she probably did not realize the extent of its historical accuracy or how contrary to the opinions of scholars were her beliefs about the longevity of nuns and its causes.¹ Since the mid-eighteenth century, scholars have tended to agree with Antoine Deparcieux, one of the founders of demography, that “it is a false prejudice to...

When Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury, began construction on her estate, Hardwick Hall, she assumed the position of an artistic creator. While there were some women visual artists in the period, and a few more women writers, as a woman builder Bess was more nearly unique. Work on Hardwick Hall began in 1590 immediately after—or perhaps a few weeks before—the death of Bess’s husband; the end of a multiple-year legal battle with her husband had finally given her the resources to build one of England’s most elaborate estates.¹ Her construction of Hardwick Hall powerfully illustrates the female...

In 1607, just four years after his accession to the English throne, James I commissioned John Norden to produce a survey of “the honor of Windsor,” the royal domain that included Windsor Castle and the surrounding forests. What we see in Norden’s beautifully drawn and colored maps is the visual equivalent of a country house poem: an estate wholly amenable to the pleasure and possession of its proprietor. The most detailed of the maps is a perspective view of the royal manor house, Windsor Castle itself (Figure 1). The other sixteen maps show large or small parcels of the park...

In John Ford’s’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Annabella has just had her first sexual experience—with her own brother—, has pledged herself to him, and has received her maid Putana’s bawdy congratulations when her father Florio unexpectedly approaches. He calls from “within” (off-stage), “Daughter Annabella.” In a chaos of emotion, she is certain of only one thing, which is that Florio must not know what has taken place. “O me, my father!” Annabella cries. “Here sir!” she calls out in response to him, while whispering frantically to Putana, “Reach my work.” Still offstage, he inquires ominously, “What are...

Recently a number of critics have described sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture as a “culture of violence.” Those who do so tend to assume that such a culture is invariably dialectical: Francis Barker, for instance, discusses “the dialectical relation between the coercive violence of the authorities on the one hand, and the various forces which attempt to oppose, block or mitigate that violence on the other.”¹ The evidence that early modern England was a “culture of violence” comes most obviously, then, in its reliance on public whippings, mutilations, burnings, hangings, and beheadings to punish crime and maintain order, and in...

In 1654 Gerard Terborch created an image of prostitution whose exquisite portrayal belies its subject (Berlin, Staatliche Museum, Dahlem, Figure 1).¹ Seated in a lavishly appointed interior, a soldier raises his hand—and may proffer a coin—to an expensively dressed young woman, whose profile is outlined by a bed richly draped in red.² A slightly older women, a procuress seated between them, is preoccupied with the glass of wine she silently sips. The latter’s presence and activity dispel any doubt about the nature of the encounter. Rather than responding to the gesture or accepting money—much less soliciting either—...

In his studyThe Writing of History, Michel de Certeau invokes the moment in which historians question the relation between their fields of research and the spaces in which they come to know about the past: “Interrupting their erudite perambulations around the rooms of the National Archives, for a moment they detach themselves from the monumental studies that will place them among their peers, and walking out into the street, they ask, ‘What in God’s name is this business? What about the bizarre relation I am keeping with current Society… ? … no thought or reading is capable of effacing...

“In the eighteenth century,” Michel de Certeau writes, “the ideology of the Enlightenment claimed that the book was capable of reforming society, that educational popularization could transform manners and customs, that an elite’s products could, if they were sufficiendy widespread, remodel a whole nation.”² This ideological program’s long-term effect on Shakespeare’s plays—their appropriation and dissemination as a “book”—was to move these plays from the margins of the culture to its center where, remade as “an elite’s products;” they were called upon (through various modalities: in-, re-, trans-, con-) to “form” a heterogeneous public.³ In this location, Shakespeare’s comedies,...

The Booke of Sir Thomas More, submitted to the Master of the Revels for license in 1593 but not performed until much later, survives only in a fragmentary text. Written by Anthony Munday and at least five others, the manuscript is now something of a jumble: different hands, corrections, lacunae of various sizes, damage caused by both the effects of time and unfortunate attempts at repair. Although Hand D, one of six apparent contributors to the manuscript, is sometimes alleged to have been Shakespeare, for my purpose the most interesting contribution is that of Edmund Tilney, the Master of the...

At the end of theWelspring of wittie Conceights(1584) is a set of “Certaine worthie sentences, very meete to be written about a Bed-chamber, or to be set up in any convenient place in a house.”² In the appendices to Thomas Tusser’sA hundreth good points of husbandry married unto a hundreth good poynts of huswifery(1570) is a series of something called “Husbandly posies”—“Posies for the Hall,” “Posies for the Parlour,” “Posies for the Guest’s Chamber,” and “Posies for thine own bedchamber” (see Appendix to this essay).³ These two sets of poems bear witness to the surprising...