By hippopotamus across the Irish sea: Francis Kynaston's 'Leoline and Sydanis'

My tutor back at college was C. F. Williamson, and he has come back into my mind this week, for I recall that Colin wrote his doctoral thesis on Sir Francis Kynaston, whose Leoline and Sydanis, a romance of the amorous adventures of princes (1642) I have been reading at odd moments.

This rather pleasingly silly verse romance was published by Kynaston in the year he died: he half apologises that “being old and stricken in yeares, [he] doth write of love and such idle devices; he entring into his second, and worst childhood may of course be excused.”

What is it like? In the first place, it’s like a daft Caroline theatre romance cast in verse: princes in love, worries about honour and reputation, magic by a ligatory point to make the male prince incapable of sex on his wedding night, nocturnal consultations with druids, girls dressed as page boys, a masque (described at length by someone who had clearly seen them performed), a bed trick, a very creaky dea ex machine.

As a piece of verse writing, it is in places so indebted to Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ as to suggest an older writer’s affectionate tribute to the poet he had enjoyed most. The manner of narrative is Spenserian, a Spenser without the allegory, but the characters travel from place to place, and spend a lot of time in ‘Erinland’. Kynaston describes his poeticized Ireland with every sign of having read up on the early Irish in commentators like Spenser (?) and Campion.

It is what 19^th century critics would have called a ‘rather warm’ work, with an enthusiastic account of sex, and of sexual impairment miraculously lifted. The narrative leaps into bed with its protagonists, and describes the action. Prince Leoline, his manhood restored after a piece of malificium versus hanc has been lifted, comes nine times aloft on Sydanis, who has bed-tricked her way there. The detail slips over from a satyr in Spenser: something only to be expected in a satyr perhaps looks a little indecorous in the Prince. Nine times is hardly easy nonchalance, is it?

Another nostalgia, alongside that for Elizabethan authors and the desire for former potency, is for Queen Elizabeth herself, whose ‘pacification’ of ‘Erinland’ is brought in as a prophecy: an Irish princess, Mellefant, is all set to marry the British Leoline and be in at the start of Tudor ancestry. She tells her new British suitor that:

it is foretold in prophesies,
Who writ on barkes of trees, a mayden Queene
Hereafter Erinland shall civilize,
And quite suppresse those Salvage rites have beene
Amongst us, as they never had beene seene:
This Queene must of the Brittish bloud descend,
Whose fame unto the worlds poles shall extend...

But Kynaston has to drop this: the match simply cannot go ahead, for the Prince has so resoundingly consummated his previously frustrated marriage to the bed-tricking Princess Sydanis, that he is already married beyond alteration.

Another thing impedes Leoline’s Irish match. At the end of his memorable night with the woman he thinks is Mellefant, he gives her a light-emitting ring, which Sydanis rather thoughtlessly (has she not read this kind of plot?) hands on to her Irish rival. Leoline has seen the ring on Mellefant’s finger, and they are both keen to marry. However, they mistime their request to her father, mistime it in a way that is obviously important to Kynaston:

But their designe they brought to no effect,
Being commenc't in an unlucky houre,
No planet being in his course direct,
And Saturne who his children doth devour
From his Northeast darke Adamantine tower
Beheld the waining Moone and retrograde,
A time unfit for such affaires had made.

They should have made election of a day
Was fortunate, and fit to speake with Kings,
When the Kings planet, Sol's propitious ray,
Who great affaires to a wisht period brings,
And is predominant in all such things;
When Iupiter aspecting with the Trine,
His daughter Venus did benignly shine.

This was the cause proceeding from above,
Which Clerks do call inevitable fate
That was the hindrance of these Princes love,
And made them in their Suit unfortunate…

Poor astrology lets them down. I have never read a verse narrative so insistent upon the role of the planets and the stars. The two are chidden for not having made ‘election’ of a fortunate day. This is astrology urged without hesitation. (I think of Samuel Jeake, who will claim in his diaries not to have made elections of fortunate days when he sets off from Rye on his business ventures. He clearly did make elections, but obviously thought it proper to disavow having done so, even in a private diary.) The ODNB life of Kynaston says that at the academy, the Musaeum Minervae, which he founded at his Covent Garden house, ‘sons of peers and gentlemen’ were to learn, among many other things “law, antiquities, coins and medals, husbandry, anatomy, physiology and ‘physic’, astronomy…” – ‘astronomy’ clearly meant ‘astrology’, if this poem is any index to the priorities of its author.

But here’s some sample passages. Leoline’s wedding night debacle:

… woe is me: the damned hellish spite
Was first discern'd upon the wedding night.

But though the Prince enjoy'd all sweets of sence,
Her rosie lips, which with sweet dew did melt,
And suckt her breath, sweet as their quintessence,
Which like to Aromaticke Incense smelt,
Though he her dainty virgin beauties felt,
Embracing of soft Ivory and warme snow,
Arriv'd at her Hesperides below:

Though Venus in Loves wars hath domination,
Sworne enemy to every Maidenhead,
And Soveraigne of the acts of generation,
Whose skirmishes are fought in the field bed,
Although her sonne a troupe of Cupids led;
Yet thus much had the dismall charme effected,
As Venus standard might not be erected.

Leoline’s apologies are probably the best eloquence ever assigned to a man in such a trying situation:

… you still shall finde,
There is no want of love in me, no more
Than want of beauty in your heavenly minde,
Which I religiously shall still adore:
And though I as a husband lov'd before,
I'le turn Platonick lover, and admire
Your vertues height, to which none can aspire.

With sighes, and such like words, these Princes spent
The wearisome and tedious night away;
Prince Leoline by this his complement,
T'excuse his want of Manhood did assay…

Pretty though this is, it isn’t good enough for the disconcerted Sydanis, who tells her nurse as soon as possible. The nurse is horrified that things have gone wrong. Kynaston explains that back in those days, a full display of the wedding sheets was expected:

… the ancient Brittons then did use,
When any Bridegroome did a maiden wed,
A custome they received from the Jews,
To bring some linnens of the Bridall bed,
To witnesse she had lost her maiden head,
Without which testimony there was none
Beleev'd to be a Virgin, although one.

They are unable to decide what to do. No crisis occurs until the second encounter between the two. The nurse has rushed off to the local druid for a potion to aid potency. But Leoline is a dismal flop again, and his blushing bride doesn’t feel that she can say exactly what kind of remedy she has to hand, but rather more decorously suggests that they commit suicide (and she has just the thing). The prince is too preoccupied to listen properly, but gulps it down anyway because he is in need of a stiff one, and promptly falls down apparently dead. The druid had a long-held grudge against his father, and supplied a potion that’s the very opposite of a pick you up:

‘Here is a drink, which if you please to tast
And drink to me, your pledge shall be my last.’

Prince Leoline with sighs and sorrow dry,
Onely to quench his thirst with it did thinke:
But having drunke it, he immediatly,
(Such was the force of the enchanted drinke)
As one starke dead into his bed did sinke…

So begins their long separation. Here’s the multiple climax of the bed trick, which occurs over in Ireland. By this point, Leoline has found the drowned body of the jealous French courtier who had enchanted him, and retrieved from the corpse his own wedding favour, a ‘point’ which had been tied in the ligatory knot. With this restitution, the charm breaks, and Leoline is full of vim. He thinks he’s in bed with the Irish princess. Sydanis sets all this up (though she is referred to here under the alias she chooses as page boy, Amanthis). When she takes the other woman’s place, she finds Leoline a very different man, disconcertingly so:

… in her smocke and a furr'd-mantle hies
To Leolines bed-chamber, where in sted
Of Mellefant , she goes to him to bed.

No sooner did they touch each others skin,
And she was in his fragrant bosom lay'd,
But that the prince loves on-set did begin,
And in his wars the valiant Champion play'd:
What faint resistance a young silly mayd
Could make, unto his force, did quickly yeeld;
Some bloud was lost, although he won the field.

For no hot French-man, nor high Tuscan bloud,
Whose panting veines do swell with lively heat,
In Venus breach more stoutly ever stood,
Or on her drum did more alarums beat,
But Cupid at the last sounds a retreat:
Amanthis at his mercy now doth ly,
Thinking what kinde of death she was to dy.

But she must now endure no other death,
For standing mute, but either must be prest,
Or smothering kisses so should stop her breath,
As that Loves flames enclos'd within her brest,
Should burne the more, the more they were supprest,
And so she as Loves Martyr should expire,
Or Phoenix -like, consume in her owne fire.

These pleasant kinde of deaths Amanthis oft
And willingly did suffer e're 'twas day,
Nine times the lusty Prince did come aloft …

This must have been rather raunchy for the tastes of 1642. Kynaston was writing to please himself, and recollecting The Faerie Queene, where it is a satyr who can perform like this (to the horror of Malbecco):

At night, when all they went to sleepe, he vewd,
Whereas his lovely wife emongst them lay,
Embraced of a Satyre rough and rude,
Who all the night did minde his joyous play:
Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day…

Kynaston has to work hard to round off his narrative. Sydanis has told so many lies that she finds she can’t proceed without hitting new problems. In a last desperate throw, she appears as a fairy at Leoline’s bedside, and explains that she, a fairy who looks just like Sydanis, spent the night with him, not the Irish princess. He must haste back to England. By other contrivances, Kynaston gets his characters back there, for a magical denouement assisted by both the goddess Cynthia and the druid. It’s all a mess, his relief at reaching the end is obvious.

As for those hippopotami, Sydanis is sent over to 'Erinland' by the druid, who summons up 'Amphitrite the great queen of seas' to do the ferrying: 'her robes were of Sea green / Her coach four Hippopotomi did draw'.

Altogether, a strange piece of work, full of magic, astrology – and sex. (I did mention all the sex, didn’t I?)

"I'll burn my books!" - John Allen, stationer, does just that, 1657.

John Allen's Printer's Mark. In some printing jobs, he collaborated with Richard Noon, whose sign was the seven stars.

I have been looking at the case of the printer John Allen, author of Judicial astrologers totally routed, and their pretence to Scripture, reason & experience briefly, yet clearly and fully answered, or, A brief discourse, wherein is clearly manifested that divining by the stars hath no solid foundation ... published by J.A. for publick good, Printed for John Allen (1659).

This is very typical anti-astrological writing: haggling over the Bible texts they always cited for and against astrology (like Jeremiah 10, 2), busily explaining away Daniel in the Book of Daniel as something completely different from the Chaldeans also consulted by Nebuchadnezzar.

Allen, a man rooted in the book trade, knowledgably deplores William Lilly’s massive sales: that his almanacs sold 30,000 copies a year, and Allen imagines the problem likely to be caused if all these diabolically deluded readers of astrology, morally awakened, burned all these almanacs. He does indeed appear generally interested in book burning: he cites approvingly Acts 19, 19 “Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men”. Nor is he very far off from recommending the burning of astrologers, but he settles, as the witch-hunters sometimes reluctantly did, for hanging, after the provisions of the 1604 statute against witchcraft.

Like many of these denunciations of astrology, Allen’s work is particularly interested in the converts, those who did practice the art, and then recanted of it: ‘holy Master [William] Perkins’, and the much cited case of Henry Briggs, ‘Geometry-reader at Oxford’ (the Savile professor of Mathematics, who produced tables of logarithms):

“… Mr. Briggs left that study. Yea, he affirmed that he would undertake to the skilfullest Astrologer in the world, that let him set down any conclusion touching either man or State, yea, or weather, and he would prove that it would fall out so, and that it would not fall out so, from their own Rules and Principles: He said also that his opinion was, that they that addicted themselves to the practise of divining Astrology, the Devil did at first lend his secret assistance, and at length by degrees, if God prevented not, entice them into a contract.”

 The first part of this does sound quite plausibly what a professor of mathematics might have said: that astrology has just too many variables. But when Allen claims that the Savile Professor of Mathematics came to believe the study of astrology led on to a diabolic pact, we might suspect some editorializing, in line with his own approval of drastic measures.

What’s behind all this becomes apparent in the second edition of the work, as put out by Allen ‘for publick good’. I imagine he might have been giving copies away, and hence the rapid second printing of an unremarkable book, which he’d have had done in house, ‘The Rising Sun in Paul’s Churchyard’. For we arrive at confession time:

“The former Part of this Book finding a general acceptation with the Judicious, (and Gods wonderful deliverance of me from so great a snare, when I was for many years a Student in this abominable practice of Judicial Astrology)…”

For this is the same John Allen who had published John Gadbury’s Coelestis Legatus: OR, The Coelestial Ambassadour Astrologically Predicting the Grand catastrophe that is probable to befall most of the Kingdoms and Countries of Europe in 1656, Magia Adamica (in the same year), and Astrology proved Harmless, useful, Pious – the wildly unstable Richard’s Carpenter’s sermon to the Society of Astrologers,  1657.

What happened to John Allen is amusingly told in a pro-astrological pamphlet of 1660, A brief answer to six syllogistical arguments brought by Mr. Clark, minister of Bennet-Finck, London: against astrologers, and astrologie, London : Printed for Samuel Speed, at the sign of the Printing-Press in Pauls Church-yard, 1660.

“This is the nativity of Mr John Allen, Stationer, as himself hath made it known to several: it was rectified by diverse eminent Accidents; from which I shall excerpt one onely, which I adjudge the greatest of all, viz. On Friday, August 21. 1657. he burnt and destroyed in printed books and Manuscripts, the worth of one hundred pounds, and upwards: in the height of this (strange) action, his Zeal (or Folly rather) wrought so furiously, that for haste to destroy his Books, he had nearly set a house of one of his Neighbours on fire. When the man came to himself, (for without question, he was then in a Frensie) he reported that several Presbyterian Ministers excited him thereunto. Whether that be true, I know not; but it is most certain, destroy his books he did: and in all probability (had not worthy and ingenious persons of his own profession, interposed their Moderation and reason) he had in the heat of his Enthusiastick Zeal, destroyed most (if not all) of his Estate."

The writer obviously knew Allen in the days before his dramatic conversion, and smugly points out that astrologers had foretold something like this happening. Nor does he miss the readily made joke about the Moon being in the ascendant when Allen performed his lunatic act:

“Now to shew Mr Allen a reason in Art for this his unhappy misfortune, (although he cannot deny but he was forewarned of it near three full years before it happened unto him) I shall take the boldness to acquaint him, that then the moon was directed to the Quartile of the Sun, and the place the direction happened in, was the ascendant…”

£100 worth of books was certainly a big bonfire: four thousand books if they were at the usual sixpence, though almanacs seem to have gone for half that. It was a big step for a stationer to make, and a decisive shift out of a market whose lucrative nature Allen knew well.

A dumb fortune-teller

I am always interested in the stray lives that occasionally get mentioned in 17^th century texts, people otherwise unrecorded, making their way through life as best they could.

My image is of a fortune teller by Simon Vouet. The number of early modern paintings of fortune tellers reminds us just how common a vocation this harmless activity must have been.

In the anecdote below, George Carleton, in his Astrologomania: the madnesse of astrologers (1624) drops that perpetual 17^th century mode of ‘my opponent says this, but the Bible says…’ to produce a reminiscence from his childhood in Carlisle:


“Secondly I answer…

(yes, it is part of one of those arguments – a colleague points out that Milton once reaches a resounding ‘and ninthly’)


… that those Predictions do not always fall out jump and true, as they would bear us in hand; but that either the Divell doth miss sometimes, or that his instrument doeth mistake his informations. This I am able to justify and make good by a plain story of my self when I was a child, & went to School at Carleill where I was borne. There came an odd Fellow about the Country: He was reputed a Cunning man, and so called, for that he took upon him to tell Fortunes. The Fellow was dumb, or at least feigned himself speechless, but certain it was, he had an instinct or Familiarity with some Spirit. This Fellow being on a time in my Fathers House, there were some there more simply honest then Religiously wise, made signs unto him, to show what should be my Fortune, and another School-fellows of mine that was then present. Whereupon, this Wizard having looked earnestly upon us both, and paused a little; for my School-fellow, he takes me a low stool, and gets up upon it, with a Book in his hand, and began to act after his fashion, signifying thereby that he should be a Preacher: and for me, he took a Penne and a scroll of Paper, and made as though he would write, signifying thereby, that I should bee a Scrivener. Now it so fell out, that my School-fellow proved the Scrivener, and I prove the Preacher. By which it is plain to bee seen, that either the Divell himself did miss, or his instrument was mistaken in his informations.”

So, here’s a chap who may or may not be dumb: Carleton can see that dumbness might be part of the act, certainly the charades by which the fortune teller acted out his diagnoses would have added a lot to the entertainment value of his little act, and dumbness gives him a mystique that relates him to the more normal line of blind prophets. A fortune teller who cannot speak, that's quite clever, it intrigues your client.


However, although Carleton has some perception of the flummery involved in the divination, he retains a belief in it as supernatural: indeed, it is diabolical in its inspiration. “Certain it was, he had an instinct or Familiarity with some Spirit”, he says solemnly. The predictions for the two boys were both diabolically prescient, and diabolically wrong, for the devil will always tell lies – the right vocations, but each assigned to the wrong child.
Carleton cannot see a bit of harmless fun, cannot see a man surmounting a possible disability and making a living. This is a moment when the devil reached out and nearly touched his life, it has stayed with him ever since. He could not have told the story, of course, had the prediction been exact.

From Astrologomania: the madnesse of astrologers. Or An examination of Sir Christopher Heydons booke, intituled A defence of iudiciarie astrologie. Written neere vpon twenty yeares ago, by G.C. And by permission of the author set forth for the vse of such as might happily be misled by the Knights booke. Published by T.V. B. of D.

An appetite for wonders: Robert Gell considers Marcle Hill

Robert Gell made much of the subject of my last post, the Marcle Hill landslip, in his sermon to the Society of Astrologers, published as Stella nova, a new starre, leading wisemen unto Christ. Or, A sermon preached before the learned Society of Astrologers, August 1. 1649.

As Gell explains it, the earth shook at the giving of the law (he cites Psalm 114), then the earth was shaken again when the gospel came to be revealed (his far-fetched connection here is when King Herod was troubled by Christ’s birth: Herod’s name, he tells us, connotes ‘mountain’). Finally, as he sums up this three-part view of history: ‘what the Lord did at the giving of the Law, prefigured what should be done at the publishing of the everlasting universall Gospell’ (p. 28)

That’s right, Gell seems to have been a reader of the works of Joachim de Fiore, and to have been expecting the angel of Revelations 14, who would deliver the third Testament, that of the ‘everlasting gospel’. He cites Joachim directly, quoting the over-stimulating verses in Revelations, and saying ‘But who this Angel was, every one judgeth as he is affected. Abbat Joachim tells us, it was Gregory the Great’ (in his Aggelokratia theon, 1650).

Though he is a relatively temperate reader of Joachim (Gell insists that nobody has produced writings ‘holy and pure’ enough for them to be seen as the Third, Everlasting Gospel, and that the prophet expected to preach the third Gospel is a ‘Non est inventus’), Gell’s argument about Marcle Hill exhibits that total lack of a sense of proportion that marks so much mid-seventeenth century religious writing. He goes on to spell out the strange symbolisms of the divinely-altered landform in detail, as it now prefigures the geography of his ideal city of Christian brotherhood, Philadelphia:

‘This hill (i.e., Philadelphia) like that I told you of out of Master Camden and Master Speed, keeps the sheep safe in their cotes, and all the trees of righteousness growing upon it; only it turns those West which were East, and the East West. They that were first become last, and the last first. It over turnes all meer ceremoniall outside worship; and changes the great beaten roads, even that broad way of open known sinners, and that kind of narrow way, which is indeed cut out of the same broad way, consisting of an affected kinde of strictnesse, in regard of some bodily exercises; which neglect of the true narrow way of mortification which leads unto the everlasting life. And as that Hill mounted it selfe on the top of another, and there rested; so this Hill of the Lord must raise it selfe above all the little Hils, even all particular Churches divided in judgements and opinions.’

So Marcle Hill, after the landslide, symbolises all the inversions of earthly rank of the heavenly city itself …

Reading Stella nova, one can hardly help not imagining the astrologers, who perhaps expected their own proclivity for nutty deductions from perfectly natural events to be flatteringly treated by their preacher, sitting there wondering what on earth he was on about, as he digressed so unpredictably from the phenomena they were interested in to these wild geological-eschatological conclusions. Instead of anything astral or planetary, here he was, seeing the apocalypse in a landslide a trifling matter of 75 years before.

Gell, in his Stella nova sermon, introduces a long quotation from Speed’s account of Marcle Hill like this: “Master Camden in his Britannia tells us, in the Description of Herefordshire, that Prope confluentes [Lugi & Vagae] Collis quem Marcley-hill vocant, annus saluties 1575. quasi somen solutus consurrexit & triduum se in immanissimam molem propellans horrendo reboans mugitu, & obvia quaeque prosternans in superiorum locum, magna cum admiaritone se promovit, eo terrae motus genere, ut judico, quod Physici Brasmatiam vocant. Master Speed, in his Description of the same County, gives us the History more fully; onely there is in him a mistake of the yeere, unlesse it were onely the Printers fault, as I believe.

Gell then quotes Speed’s version at length, as given in my previous blog entry, and comments: “This (landslide), although we may refer unto its second causes, as master Camden doth; yet if we consider the great manifestation of that Divine light, by the publishing of the everlasting Gospell that very yeere unto this nation, we cannot but apply that of the Psalmist; What ailed yee, yee Mountaines that yee skipped like Rams, and yee little Hils like yong Sheepe? Tremble thou Earth at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Israel (Psalm 114.)”

“The Lord then made manifest His presence by the moving of the Earth”, Gell proclaims. What connects the landslide (with its strangely misunderstood reports of the slip piling up on itself into a new eminence) to a Stella nova (the nova in Cassiopeia) is, to re-iterate a point, the miraculous nature of any change to the divinely ordered creation.

'A worm the author of this book': William Ramesey's 'Helminthologia'

This chap is William Ramesey, and the amazing bonnet he is wearing was probably designed as an extra container or sump for the overflow of dotty notions stemming from his brain. Or there may be some ceremonial aspect to it: Patrick Curry’s ODNB life of Ramesey mentions that while he was born in Scotland into a family called Ramsey, he later changed his name because he had an idea of his Egyptian descent. He probably thinks of the hat as being like the crown of Upper Egypt Rameses the Great would have worn. This whole bogus Egyptian connection primarily suggests his inheritance from Ptolemy the Great, for Ramesey’s first obsession was astrology.

He was, however, an astrologer with a marked reluctance about making specific predictions. Ramesey was a royalist, and really didn’t want to make trouble for himself, so he keeps lapsing into this mode: ‘I could say somewhat of (Jupiter) … but I passe it over in silence, knowing it is neither safe nor fitting that the truth should be spoken always’ (Vox stellarum, 1651, p. 86). Ramesey hardly dares say anything particular about the fate ‘our Rulers or Grandees’ (pp. 97-8), but he looked to 1652 as a time when the nation might see ‘the pale Horse and his Rider as it were preparing for his march’ (p. 90). Ramesey duly called on England to ‘repent, repent … God is angry with thee’ (p. 88). Elsewhere in this astrological work, Ramesey seems unduly excited about Venus’s influence, and women in general, who are so threatened by pox (during 1652) that he says he will have nothing to do with women in the summer quarter, at least, ‘(as near as I can)’ (p. 108).

He became a physician, even court physician to Charles II, who would (as he famously said) die with the help of too many men like this. The major medical text by Ramesey is Helminthologia, or, Some physical considerations of the matter, origination, and several species of wormes (1668). It’s a work perhaps advisedly ignored by the compilers of the OED, whose references to things ‘helminthous’ are far later in date.

This is a book which sets off well, with its eye on the subject matter: “Worms the Subject, and worms the readers, and a worm the Author of this Book” (p. 8, and the formal beginning of his text after the prefatory material). “Infinite multitudes … die by them, under the notion of feavers of all sorts, Pleurisies, and most other Distempers”, he asserts. To believe that people die of little creatures living in them does seem to be thinking along the right lines. At times, the “Rational and Learned Physician” he saw himself to be flickers into view:

“ ‘view any corrupt blood with a * Microscope where they shall plainly perceive innumerable vermines’ * By which Instrument fitted with glasses at each end, the smallest mite will appear in that magnitude as you may discover every part thereof.”

But his topic wriggles away from him uncontrollably. Worms, he explains, are the product of ‘putrid, vitious and gross, viscid, corrupt matter’. As such, anything that upsets the perfect bodily regime can produce worms: God, his angels, the devil and his imps, witches and witchcraft, air, water, the planets, food, passions, retention of semen (Ramesey shifts into decorous Latin). Ramesey has his full say about witchcraft and the diabolic pact (being a Scot, he once saw “nine burnt at one time in Leith-Links”), about diet, planetary influences, anything. Worms, we realise, are to him what melancholy was for Robert Burton, and he palpably has his eye on Burton’s book, even writing about ‘Air rectified’ as part of a salubrious regime.

Ramesey was not, as his choice of headgear shows, overburdened with a sense of the ridiculous. He also can write like this, in apparent seriousness:

‘That my Reader may be Encincted with Reason able to Renix the Halucinations of that Panenerical evil of Envy and Ignorance, which is a Cacoethick Malady; But especially that he may injoy an Orthostadian Judgement, and not be Depsect with that Truculent Credulity which proves Sontick to most men, and an assured Prodromos of Ruine, I thought it not amiss here to aedepize some things, and Indigitate thee, wherefore others in this Book are handled in that manner they are…’

Credulous about all tales which seemed relevant to his maggoty notions, Ramesey cannot perceive irony in his sources: Erasmus’s story of an Italian, living in Germany and fluent in the language, whose helminthous  problems were so extreme that he behaved like a man possessed, until a wise physician treated him for worms, and simultaneously purged from him both the wriggling cause of his problems and all his grasp of the German language: this cock-and-bull story Ramesey tells twice (pages 42 and 312).

 He has much to say about the effects of milk, and again can be caught retailing as true a gosh-wow-fancy-that yarn: ‘A Slut at Packwood near Knole in Warwick-shire, did put a nurse-by-blow-child [he means, a bastard child, a ‘by-blow’, that has been put out to nurse] often to suck a Mastive Bitch, who at the same instant had Puppies, the Child throve well enough, but shewed the fruits and disposition of his Nurse, as he grew bigger, by his churlish behaviour, and never could sit or lie down, without turning two or three times round’. It seems a plausible story about squalor and neglect in early modern life, until that last couple of clauses.

Under diet, we learn about a Duke of Brunswick bursting after a surfeit of strawberries, and about King James’s opinion of ling, salt cod: ‘a dish for the devil’- Ramesey agrees: ‘they that eat ling, may as well eat a worse thing, and drink Piss’. He is insistent about the dangers of sea food: ‘We may absolutely condemn, and explode the Periwinkle, Cockle, Muscle, as dangerous food, offending the Brain’, and has stories of people who by eating too many cockles became natural fools.

All oddities of diet interest him. He writes about cases of pica, and one of his sources fills him in on what happens to you if you happen to consume cat’s blood: ‘a remarkable story of a maid, who by drinking of cats-blood, degenerated into the disposition and nature of a Cat, and by fits, would imitate a Cat, both in Actions and Voice; and in private would catch Mice, and contract herself so, (which was strange) to pass through holes, that no body else of her bigness could’. (She sounds to me like an entertainer whose spurious back-story has got garbled.)

Notice that none of this discussion has any notion of parasites being transmitted. Sea food, for instance, in itself upsets the bodily regime, and leads to worms spontaneously generating in any part of the body.

Ramesey produces this splendid illustration of the varieties of internal parasite, though the numbers do not key to specific discussions in the text, that would be too limiting. That’s a flat worm 300 feet long that he has picked up report of, and that weasel is a worm shaped just like a weasel, which was found when a pox-ridden gentleman was trepanned, and from his brain, a worm was “taken away, which was on the Dura Mater, in the form of a weasel”. He also reports how in October 1637, Dr May found a worm in the left ventricle of Mr John Pennat, aged 21 (and dead) ‘splendent as if it had been varnished’.

When Ramesey does finally get off the causes of worms to worms themselves, his account of the symptoms (p. 297ff) is horribly graphic and convincing. To that extent, he knew what he was talking about. His account of the treatment for worms retreats into Latin, as his medicine (a highly technical matter of purges and enemas) is something only the educated can practice. Writing of ‘The force of the imagination’ as a possible cause of worms, Ramesey instances the power of the imagination by referring to it ‘all Cures done by silly Women’.

I was disappointed that Ramesey did not have more to say about sex as a cause of worms, for Vox stellarum seemed to show that he was anxious about sexual matters. He does, however, come out strongly for eugenic practices, which among other things will eradicate left-handedness:

‘Sots as we are, in this most weighty matter we are too remiss, marrying any deformed unwholesome piece of mortality for a little money, when we are curious of the strain of our Horses, Doggs, Pigeons, game-Cocks; and so frequently, we leave a Crook-Back’d, Flat-nos’d, Bow-leg’d, Squnit-Ey’d, Left-handed, ugly, infirm, Weesle-fac’d, Diseased, half-Witted, Hair-brain’d, Nonsensical, Goos-cappical and Coxcombical, Worm-eaten Idiot, not only to possess our Estates, but our Names, and to build up our Families…’

To end with, here’s a tale he has of someone offering a toast to the devil during the civil war: ‘Or that of a mad fellow, in the time of our uncivill Wars at Salisbury, who being drunk, in a Bravado, drank an health to the Devil, saying, that if he did not come and pledge him, he would not believe there was either a Devil or a GOD, his Associates trembling at his expressions, retired into another Room, and left him, and never saw him more; for immediately the Devil came and carried him away, as it is thought out of the Window, the Bar thereof being bowed.’

Stick with the status quo, says William Lilly

 

In November 1649, William Lilly published his Merlini Anglici ephemeris for the year ahead, 1650. In it, he came to the effects of an eclipse of the moon, 360 years ago today, on the 5^th May 1650. He admits that things will be touch-and-go:

“Such will be the general carriage of Affairs amongst our selves and with our Neighbour Nations, so ambiguous and doubtful the chance and fate of England, and we so terribly threatened, as very many, and they no vulgar fools, will be upon terms of revolting from, or under-hand practicing against, the now established Government, which appears not in their capricious judgments so pleasing as they could desire…”

Well, tough, Lilly (in effect) said: “the State is necessitated yet a while to keep an Army on foot for the preservation of the present Body Politique of this Nation; and to speak more nearly to the matter, even to preserve from ruine those Vipers who would most wretchedly destroy both this Parliament, Councel of State, and themselves, to set up they know not what.” (Sig B4)

So the astrologer embarked on predicting much, much better times ahead: a little bit more patience, he asserted, and then will come the days when we all stand to inherit fortunes or find buried treasure:

“When Jupiter, in a Revolution, is in the fourth house, many men increase their fortunes by inheritances falling unto them, and estates are left unto them from dead men; men increase their fortunes by taking of Farms, by discovering Treasure his under ground, and its recovery, or moneys unexpectedly happening unto them, and by things and matters of great antiquity: Mens sorrows are taken quite away, and such things will be offered them as produce great joy and comfort…” (Sig B6)

Lilly had already given some account of the Land of Cockaigne London citizens will soon be inhabiting: you will be able to give up your jobs, and live on rents from your land:

“A time is coming when they shall live upon the Rents of those Lands, and not upon their Trades, and then they will have cause to rejoice; for treasure may fail them, it being subject to fire, and the casualties of War, but land cannot be moved…”  Sig B

Not only all this, but you won’t even have to worry about women (I like the way that in this part of the prediction, he revises the initial ‘generally prove chaste’ to something more reassuring, which he re-iterates, in a ‘Did I mention chaste?’ kind of way):

“Women will generally prove chaste, shall have very good success in their own womanly affairs, all manner of Jewels will be at high rates; all over the whole Nation  fertile year may be expected, women will be harmless, truth-speakers, and loyal to their Husbands, chaste, and enjoy quiet lives.” (Sig B5v)

And so William Lilly argued for keeping what you have got, and so live to see an England where “The condition of the people begins to amend, and their minds inclinable to a more familiar obedience to the Edicts of the Parliament than formerly.”

To fill in an explanatory footnote to all this, Lilly was writing at a time when people were concerned about whether it was worth putting money into the purchase of lands sequestered from Bishops, Deans, and Chapters. The obvious fear was that a reversion to an episcopal church would see such purchases declared illegal, and the lands restored without compensation. Go ahead, Lilly says, it will all be lastingly valid and legal – he rather mischievously commends Dr Cornelius Burgess, the City preacher, for his purchase of the Dean of London’s house.

"We took particular Notice of one of those She-Astrologers": 17th century Venice

I have posted before about a woman astrologer’s advert in mid 17^th century London (both the adverts reproduced in this post have George Thomason’s hostile annotations about their being circulated by ‘one of Lilly’s whelps):

http://roy25booth.blogspot.com/2009/04/two-adverts-1651-and-1653.html

In late 17^th century Venice, women astrologers were part of the fun of carnival. I found the following story in Jean Dumont’s A new voyage to the Levant containing an account of the most remarkable curiosities in Germany, France, Italy, Malta, and Turkey; … done into English, and adorn’d with figures (1696). I have added paragraphs and modernized the spelling. During these public (and largely jocular) consultations, a ‘trunk’ – a tube – was used for more discreet communication between the woman astrologer mounted on her stage and the particular client below. In the story, the German officer asks for the tube to be reversed, so it must be a kind of elongated speaking trumpet. He then propositions her…

“During the Fair, the whole Place of S. Mark, and part of the Broglio, is covered with Shops: The other part is full of Jugglers, Tumblers, Puppet-Players, Bears, and Mountebanks, who are dancing frequented by all sorts of People, from the Nobleman to the Gondolier.

But the greatest Crowd is about certain Female-Astrologers, who are mounted on little Stages or Scaffolds, covered with Lace and Ribbons like Puppets; their Faces painted white and red, and surrounded with a great Number of Books, full of Figures and Characters, tho' they understand no more of 'em than to distinguish the White from the Black. There are also some Men who follow the same Trade; but they are not so much followed as the Women, whose triple Top-knots draw the Multitude after 'em. They sit upon a Chair, from whence, as from a Tripos, they blow good Fortune to their Customers thro' a Tin Trunk eight or ten Foot long, the Querist putting the other End to his Ear. The Price of a Consultation is no more than Five-pence; and for so small a Sum you may have the Promise of as much Honour and Riches as you please.

These Wenches, who sometimes are not ugly, observe an admirable Gravity in pronouncing their Responses; but they are not so starch’d in private, and may be easily prevailed with to lay aside their affected Severity. One of my Friends, who is a German Officer, happened t’other Day to try the Experiment; and since the Story is not unpleasant, I shall make bold to entertain you with it. As we were taking our Diversion in the Fair, we took particular Notice of one of those She-Astrologers, who was one of the prettiest and gravest of the whole Tribe. She was surrounded with a Crowd of People of all Ages and Ranks, who approached one after another to the End of her Trunk to learn their Fate, and to hear the Oraculous Sentences which she pronounced with an incredible Majesty and Authority. My Friend took his Turn among the rest, and after she had acquainted him with his Fortune, told her that he was desirous to consult her about some private Affair, and therefore entreated her to turn the other End of the Trunk, that he might communicate his Secret to her without disclosing it to the Company. But instead of proposing some Questions to her about his Fortune, he told her thro' her Trunk, that he came not to desire the Assistance of her pretended Art, which served only to amuse the Vulgar; that 'twas in her Power to grant him a more solid Favour; and that his Business was to enquire where and when he might spend a Night with her.

As soon as she had heard his Proposal, she turned the Trunk and replied, that he ought not to be surprised at her way of Living, by imposing upon the Credulity of the People, since the only Occupation of the greatest part of Mankind consisted in cheating one another, every one in his own Way, and according to the Nature of his Employment; and that for her part she thought five or six Crowns a day but a moderate Recompense for the Pains she took in deceiving those that were willing to be deceived; adding however that she was glad she had found a Man of Sense, that knew the Infirmities of Humane Nature, and would laugh with her at the Follies of Mankind, and concluded with giving him an Assignation at an Inn, where she promised to meet him that Evening. Her agreeable Humour furnished us with Matter of Discourse for above an Hour; but this was the End of the Adventure, for the Officer did not think fit to drive the Jest further.”

That’s a poor ending to the story: she ought to have been given the chance to swindle him in private. But he doesn’t even go as far as to ‘make an excuse and leave’, the craven. The image is a Venetian painting (for I have failed to find an image of the women astrologers, though I am sure there must be one), Antonio Zanchi’s ‘Abraham teaching astrology to the Egyptians’, out of Josephus, a painting of c.1665, says WGA.

Of widow's peaks

I was reading Sir John Melton’s Astrologaster, or, The figure-caster (1620) – a very peculiar generic mash-up, an attack on astrology cast in the form of a semi-fictionalised narrative, with lengthy pro et contra orations. At one point, Melton’s narrative is suspended for ‘A Catalogue of many superstitious Ceremonies, especially old men and women hold, which were first found out and invented by Figure-Casters, Cunning Men and Women in former ages, yet to this day are held for certaine and true observations’ – a list of familiar superstitions, but including this one:

“That by a certaine tuft of haire gowing on the foremost part of a mans forehead, it may be knowne whether he shall bee a widower or no.”

~ A widow’s peak! My father had a very prominent one, and it always used to puzzle me as a child when my mother referred to it in such terms. Internet sources on ‘widow’s peaks’ do not go very far back beyond the 19^th century for origins, but clearly the idea was around far earlier. Nor is the OED is not terribly helpful about when the expression came into use: under ‘widow’, they offer on ‘widow’s locks’:

“a1540 J. LONDON in Ellis Orig. Lett. Ser. III. III. 132 Suche as..hadde any slottiche wydowes lockes, viz. here growen to gether in a tufte. 1896 G. F. NORTHALL Warw. Word-bk., Widow’s-lock, a small lock or fringe growing apart from the hair above the forehead. Credulous persons believe that a girl so distinguished will become a widow soon after marriage.”

The OED’s entry under ‘peak’ does give support for the notion that the expression for this particular type of hair line was based on the shape of widow’s hoods, worn in the Renaissance (as in my example above):

“Originally: the projecting front of a headdress, esp. of a widow’s hood. Later more generally: any more or less pointed projecting part of a garment or costume. 1530 J. PALSGRAVE Lesclarcissement 253/1 Peake of a ladyes mourning heed … 1706 J. ADDISON Rosamond III. iv, Widow Trusty, why so Fine? Why dost thou thus in Colours shine? Thou should’st thy husband’s death bewail In Sable vesture, Peak and Veil.”

I searched EEBO for other examples of the ‘widow’s peak’ as a recognizable shape for headgear or hair line, and was rewarded by two similes in Nehemiah Grew’s Musaeum regalis societatis, or, A catalogue and description of the natural and artificial rarities belonging to the Royal Society and preserved at Gresham Colledge made by Nehemiah Grew; whereunto is subjoyned The comparative anatomy of stomachs and guts by the same author (1685).

The first is in the description of what might be a form of nautilus (Grew is moving irregularly between species of sea creatures). He might be describing a suture line or the keel of the coiled shell:

‘The MAILED SAILER. Nauticlus Laminatus. I meet with it no where. Both within, and especially without, of the colour of the richest Pearl. It is composed of a considerable number of Plates, as if in Armor. Yet the Plates continuous; furrow’d along the middle, and produced with a blunt Angle, almost like a Widows-Peak. From under each of which, emergeth a kind of little Tongue, like that of a Shoo-Buckle.’

The second item in the Royal Society’s collection that reminded him in part of the headgear of widows was, rather charmingly, a Native American’s cache-sexe:

“An APRON for the Pudenda of a Woman. A ¼ of a yard deep, and shaped like a Widows Peak. Hath two transverse Labels, with several small Tassel’d Strings, to tie it about her middle; and a great one hanging down before. Made of Rushes, and other Plants. The out-side of several colours, sc. white, yellow, red, tawny, and brown; as flexible as any Thread. Woven in several Squares, and ½ Squares in a most exact and geometrick Order. The inside of smaller Rushes, all of one colour, and the Weaving uniform: as some Silks are plain on one side, and flowered on the other. A piece of Work, which an European could hardly imitate with all her Art.”

(They also had the male equivalent: “An Indian PURSE or CASE for the Pudenda of a Man. 'Tis a foot long, and closed at the bottom. Made of small Reeds woven together after the manner of course Linnen.”)

I can shed no light at all on the entry in A new dictionary of the canting crew in its several tribes of gypsies, beggers [sic], thieves, cheats &c., with an addition of some proverbs, phrases, figurative speeches &c. : useful for all sorts of people (especially foreigners) to secure their money and preserve their lives ; besides very diverting and entertaining being wholly new / by B.E. (1699).

(and I add a few more entries just for the joy):

“Bill-of sale, a Bandore, or Widow’s Peak.

Bing awast, c. get you hence. Bing'd awast in

a Darkmans, c. stole away in the Night-time.

Bing we to Rume vile. c go we to London.

Bingo, c. Brandy.

Bingo-boy, c. a great Drinker or Lover thereof.”

I glanced into a few early books about phisiognomy, but did not come across any further references. Those I did look at seemed surprisingly uninterested in hair-lines as denoting character; they were anyway perhaps unlikely to retail a superstition like this.

The portrait bust of a widow in her peaked veil is by Alessandro Algardi, ‘Donna Olimpia Maidalchini’, carved in 1646-47.

Pictures of Lilly!

I have been away on holiday, to Cyprus, an island which made one think that if Venus rose from the sea during August, she needed a high factor sun-block the moment she hit the beach.

I have put together a set of pictures of William Lilly. The dates (if the portrait is from an almanac) are the dates of the year the almanac was written for, the book itself would usually have been published late on in the year before. Lilly was a clever self-publicist (his house sign announced that the truth-telling Merlin lived within), and from about 1649 had his portrait in publications.

The most elaborate portrait is that from the 1659 edition of Christian Astrology, engraved by William Marshal.

Someone has tried their pen nib all over the 1650 face, where Lilly holds a ‘scheme’ of the heavens drawn up for a reading (the aspects of the planets, etc, at a ‘geniture’), and (I think) the astrological signs. 1651 sees Lilly looking splendid under all the signs of the zodiac against a balustrade. It is rather a surprise that this elaborate image was not apparently re-used once the block had been cut. By 1654 Lilly seems to have decided that his portraits were too saturnine, and his face is wreathed in smiles, like Malvolio. He now carries the motto ‘agunt, not cogunt’ on a piece of paper he holds: (they, i.e. the stars) act, but do not compel. It was increasingly important for the astrologers, under attack from clergymen of all kinds, to deny that they ‘maintained necessity’. Human free will had to have a place in their system. This facial type engraved by Robert Vaughan was closely copied by ‘Cross’ for the 1655 almanac, where Lilly looks even more like the clergyman he had really always wanted to be.

In the Restoration period Lilly suddenly bloats out, and looks like a debauchee. But by 1666, he has rapidly thinned back to what will be the set facial type for his last years. With small variations either due to different inkings or the state of the block (or maybe copied re-engravings), this lasts till the year of his death. The honorific triple portrait of 1683 places Lilly between Cardan and Bonatus, as a combination of the learning and skills of both.

‘Pictures of Lily’ performed by The Who, 1967:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G11oIadJfhI