The Practical Renaissance

Information Culture and the Quest for Knowledge in Early Modern England, 1500-1640

Donna A. Seger

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350200227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

What sort of information did people in early modern England seek? In The Practical Renaissance Donna Seger explores the diffusion and reception of prescriptive publications over the 16th and 17th centuries. Published in an age of dynamic religious and political change, these texts demonstrate the universal desire for health and wealth, a fortified body and an orderly household. Showing how classical and continental information had been "Englished" over time, this book shows how new publications supplanted these traditional ideas with more empirical and authoritative knowledge. Published in an age of dynamic religious and political change, these texts, which include plague tracts, husbandry handbooks, printed recipe books, and navigation manuals, demonstrate the universal desire for health and wealth, a fortified body and an orderly household. Divided into three parts, the opening chapters explore factors which affected the diffusion of practical knowledge via prescriptive texts. Part two focuses on the interaction between new discoveries and traditional authority, and the final section considers debates in the 'medical marketplace', the term 'knowledge-mongerer' and the commodification of knowledge at this time. A thorough exploration into the popular and pragmatic expressions of the period, The Practical Renaissance offers a new window into the movement in which knowledge and information became power.

1

Regimens and Rules:

The Rudiments of Health and Husbandry

Early Tudor England was a society and a land in recovery: from mortality crises and depopulation with the attendant impact on land utilization, from the civil wars and strife that engendered a desire for a new order in all things at the end of the fifteenth century. The “fresh start” represented by the new Tudor regime, was echoed by an apparent demand for information that could refresh and improve one’s body and one’s lot, the essentials of existence, furnished by the most popular of practical publications in the early sixteenth century: those focused on the preservation of health and the improvement of husbandry. The word “practice” is used in the titles and texts of both types of publications, but in the former it is generally a noun rather than a verb, as medical practice was governed by theory and tradition rather than experience. Texts providing instruction to those working the land, or more aptly, those overseeing work on the land, were by contrast purely practical, though prescribed steps were sourced from the classical past as well as the present.

Two authors dominated the market for health and husbandry manuals in the early sixteenth century: Thomas Elyot (c. 1490–1546) and John Fitzherbert (d. 1531).¹ Elyot’s The castel of helth gathered and made by Syr Thomas Elyot knyghte, out of the chiefe authors of physyke, wherby euery manne may knowe the state of his owne body, the preseruatio[n] of helthe, and how to instructe welle his physytion in syckenes that he be not deceyued was first published in 1534, and reprinted in at least seventeenth editions over the sixteenth century, while Fitzherbert’s Boke of husbandry and Boke of surueyeng and improume[n]tes were issued in twenty and thirteen editions respectively in the same period. Their works were, quite literally, never out of circulation in the mid-sixteenth century, and they were referenced by their peers and successors in acknowledgement of their authority. While both men were of similar background and professed similar aims—to disseminate “profitable” and necessary information to the reading public—they came by that information in different ways: Elyot “gathered” his from a succession of authorities from Galen onward, and Fitzherbert practiced husbandry (or likely estate management) for 40 years prior to documenting his own observations and experience in print. These two authors, conveying the most essential of information rather than abstract ideas, represent the conflicting and converging sources of knowledge in the early modern era: the past and the present, the gathered and the experienced. Yet despite the divergent sources of their authority, Elyot and Fitzherbert were both concerned with established order in an age of recovery in transition, an order that was more individual than communal. Fitzherbert asserted that his book was “necessary to be known of every degree, that they might do and order them self according to the same,” while Elyot presented his readers with a daily regimen to follow, with many “general rules” therein. Both authors also offered their readers prescriptions for action: their utility—and attraction—lay not only in their promises of “ready reference,” but also in their ability to direct their readers “how to” achieve the self-preservation of their bodies and improvements of their lands.

Self-Preservation in its Setting

From our privileged perspective, it is impossible to comprehend fully either the basic difficulties of daily existence or the threats to daily life represented by sicknesses mundane or dramatic over the early modern era. With the assumption that prescriptive literature was responsive, we can only glean shadows of its inspiration, and we can read about the most conspicuous “epidemics,” a word that entered the English vocabulary in the sixteenth century, not before. While plague struck with unprecedented ferocity in the fourteenth century, it was endemic until the eighteenth, a fact of life that was never taken for granted. In the Tudor–Stuart era, there were eleven notable plague epidemics: in 1499–1500, 1509, 1513, 1530s, 1563, 1578–1579, 1589–1593, 1603, 1625, 1636, and 1665, roughly every generation, with a relatively long break between 1636 and 1665, which made the latter epidemic even more cruel. In the first half of the sixteenth century, another generational peril was the mysterious English “Sweat” or sweating sickness, which struck in 1485, 1507–1508, 1517, 1528, and 1551. A “great lask” of dysentery (the “bloody flux”) was noted in 1540 as well as a “massive manifestation” of new and “strange agues and fevers” (influenza) in 1557–1559.² And then there were the “pocks,” smallpox and the French Pox (syphilis), which became additional facts of life. A succession crisis and parliamentary petitions were the public consequences of Queen Elizabeth’s private struggle with the former in 1562, when both her vulnerability and that of the kingdom were exposed. This was a conspicuous strike, but every year and every day there were deaths during childbirth for anonymous mothers and infants, rotten teeth, blindness and deafness, headaches, breaks and strains, and blemishes: a relentless struggle against the susceptibility of one’s body.

Given this context, it is not difficult to comprehend the popularity of books that offered the promise of better health, or more control over one’s health: these varied publications are second—albeit a distant second—only to religious texts in terms of editions published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.³ Like medical practitioners, medical texts were extremely varied in terms of their content and comprehensiveness: the genre encompasses slim pamphlets with random recipes and larger reference works like Christof Wirsung’s General practice of physick (1598) and everything in between. A useful classification began emerging with the publication of an influential 1979 article by Paul Slack, who divided Tudor vernacular medical literature into eight categories: 1) anatomy and surgery; 2) reflections on theory and practice; 3) herbals; 4) plague tracts; 5) other specific diseases; 6) single or specialized remedies; 7) explanatory textbooks and regimens; and 8) collections of remedies.⁴ The more recent Early Modern English Text Corpus adopts a slightly different categorization for its 231 texts, combining several of Slack’s categories and omitting herbals altogether.⁵ In this chapter, I will be focusing primarily on that part of early modern medicine that was typically classified under the label of “hygiene,” pertaining to the environmental factors that were deemed necessary for the “preservation of health” and their proper regulation through a diet or regimen, while later chapters will consider more specialized medical texts. In both its classical and early modern meanings, hygiene was both preventative and therapeutic, and consequently dietary regimens were prescribed for both the maintenance of health and treatment in times of crisis. Renaissance regimens were a conservative genre, but also a responsive and reflective one, and as such they offer the opportunity to assess the changing context of health and wellness over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Because of the mortality crisis of the late medieval era, the popularity of medical texts preceded printing, and consequently England’s early printers had a range of texts on which to draw.⁶ The classical tradition was not rediscovered in reference to medicine during the Renaissance (as it was never lost) but it was reinvigorated and epitomized as both physicians and laymen sought to navigate the new demographic regime initiated by the Black Death. The Hippocratic-Galenic corpus, with its environmental concepts of health, was both authoritative and flexible enough to offer both explanations and courses of action: both the “natural” components of health (elements, humoral complexion or temperament, age, region, climate) and the “contra-naturals” (disease) are largely out of the individual’s control, but the regulation of the “non-naturals” (air, nourishment, activity, sleep and wakefulness, retentions and evacuations, and emotions or “passions of the mind”) offered opportunities for self-help and self-sufficiency in an anxious age. Even before the Black Death, Roger Bacon had identified the importance of the preventative regimen for the prolongation of life in his interpretation and commentary on the Aristotelian Secretum secretorum, influencing one regimen tradition in England; another was the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum, a didactic poem containing rules for the preservation of health in rhyming Latin verse, ostensibly addressed to Robert of Normandy, son of William the Conqueror, by the faculty of the School of Salerno, the center of syncretistic medical knowledge in Europe. Both traditions converged in John Lydgate’s vernacular “Dietary” (c. 1430), of which fifty-nine manuscripts exist: it was issued by England’s first printer, William Caxton, and his successor Wynkyn de Worde as The Gouernayle of helthe, and assimilated by Richard Pynson in his 1506 almanac The kalender of shepherdes, which was itself reprinted regularly over the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth.⁷ The Gouernayle set the standard for the vernacular medical treatise of the early modern era in its conservatism and moderation: it assumed classical humoral theory and focused on the more practical regulation of the non-naturals by offering recommendations for daily exercise, food and drink intake, and avoidance of the “noise of evil governance.” The Baconian and Salernitan regimens, along with their late medieval derivatives, provided content, format, and inspiration for a succession of popular health manuals over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Thomas Elyot’s The castel of helth, Andrew Boorde’s Compendyous regyment or dyetary of helth and The Breuiary of helthe, William Bullein’s A newe booke entituled the gouernement of healthe and Bulleins bulwarke of defe[n]ce, Thomas Cogan’s The hauen of health and William Vaughan’s Naturall and artificial directions for health, among others.⁸

These general guides to health are the central focus of this chapter, which will follow their development (or lack thereof) through the sixteenth into the seventeenth century, in response to “new” challenges and information, thus offering a particular perspective into the classic Renaissance interplay of classical and contemporary knowledge as well as the continuity of late medieval didactic knowledge, also present in the foundational agricultural texts of the era. Chapters Three and Five will examine the reception of other types of vernacular medical texts in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as variety and hierarchy, of both publications and practitioners, emerged as key characteristics of early modern medicine. In addition to regimens—as well as the myriad remedies that were published in singular collections and incorporated into household texts as part of “kitchen physic”—a succession of herbals, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Conventions
• Introduction: Jewels Abound
• 1 Regimens and Rules: The Rudiments of Health and Husbandry
• 2 Measure for Measure: Mensuration and Mathematics
• 3 Elizabethan Alterations: Continuity and Crisis
• 4 Maritime Matters
• 5 Public Discourses; Practical Concerns
• 6 The Knowledge-Mongers
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright