Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England

Douglas A. Brooks, Douglas A. Brooks

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351908832
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Literatur
• Thema: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

The relation between procreation and authorship, between reproduction and publication, has a long history - indeed, that relationship may well be the very foundation of history itself. The essays in this volume bring into focus a remarkably important and complex phase of this long history. In this volume, some of the most renowned scholars in the field persuasively demonstrate that during the early modern period, the awkward, incomplete transition from manuscript to print brought on by the invention of the printing press temporarily exposed and disturbed the epistemic foundations of English culture. As a result of this cultural upheaval, the discursive field of parenting was profoundly transformed. Through an examination of the literature of the period, this volume illuminates how many important conceptual systems related to gender, sexuality, human reproduction, legitimacy, maternity, kinship, paternity, dynasty, inheritance, and patriarchal authority came to be grounded in a range of anxieties and concerns directly linked to an emergent publishing industry and book trade. In exploring a wide spectrum of historical and cultural artifacts produced during the convergence of human and mechanical reproduction, of parenting and printing, these essays necessarily bring together two of the most vital critical paradigms available to scholars today: gender studies and the history of the book. Not only does this rare interdisciplinary coupling generate fresh and exciting insights into the literary and cultural production of the early modern period but it also greatly enriches the two critical paradigms themselves.

Part I
Reproductive Rhetorics

Chapter 1
Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes

Margreta nde Grazian

I Metaphysics

Why Wax?

In the Meditations, Descartes alone in his study, sitting by the fire, wrapped in his cloak, resolves to make a clean sweep of all his old opinions – among them, the opinion that external objects are more real than consciousness itself. In order to examine this opinion, he needs a representative thing or body. He chooses wax.¹ 'Let us consider ... one particular body. Let us take, for example, this piece of wax.'² My question is, with a world of objects to choose from, why wax?

It is generally assumed that he chooses the object most noted for mutability.³ Wax waxes. As he notes, it has already undergone two transformations – from flower to honeycomb – before reaching him. And when put before the fire, it suffers a whole gamut of additional changes, one for each of the senses: shape, but also colour, flavour, smell, feel, even sound (when he raps it). That he still, despite these permutations, knows the object to be wax demonstrates that, contrary to his old opinion, perception of the wax does not depend on the wax itself but on 'the intellect alone'.⁴

It is not just wax in the abstract that Descartes contemplates, but a particular piece of wax: 'this piece of wax' [my italics]. He not only observes this piece of wax: he handles, whiffs, licks, knocks it. It is at hand; why at hand? Because it is on the top of the desk where he is writing.⁵ Until replaced by self-adhering and gummed envelopes (before envelopes even), return addresses, individuating signatures and a national postal service, wax belonged on every well-equipped desk, as indispensable as paper, pen, and ink. As the editors of his eight volumes of letters point out, Descartes – in self-imposed exile for most of his life – was a prolific letter writer.⁶ Every letter he sent, he must have sealed. (If we had receipts for purchase of wax, we could approximate the number of letters he wrote and sen!.⁷) What must be noted, however, is that Descartes makes no mention of the instrument that was used to make the imprint on wax: the signet. Indeed, he seems to be teasing us with its absence. Wanning the wax by the fire was part of the sealing routine: the wax was melted and then imprinted. But Descartes softens the wax not so that it will receive the signet's defining form but so that it will go formless.

Descartes had good reason to dismantle this little piece of standard desktop equipment. It was the traditional metaphor for how knowledge is acquired and retained. A common household item, the signet/wax apparatus symbolized the mystery of how the outside world entered the mind and stayed there. As the mirror received reflections, so the wax received impressions. Unlike reflections, however, impressions remained – as memory or fantasy. To repeat, then, my opening question: why wax? Why did Descartes choose wax as the representative object? It was not, after all, the only mutable object at hand: he might have reached for a sheet of paper from his desk, for example, and crumpled, ripped, stained, burned it to ashes; he might have taken frost from the window pane. I would like to suggest that his choice of wax was a choice of wax-without-signet. To feature wax alone was to dismantle the apparatus which as we shall, see, was key to those old opinions he determined to clear from his mind. It was critical, for example, to Plato's epistemology and Aristotle's metaphysics, as well as to Descartes's own earlier philosophy.

The model of the signet and wax figures centrally in the Platonic dialogue generally considered to have defined epistemology as a separate science from ontology, knowing as a separate domain from being. In the Thaetetus, Socrates asks Theaetetus to 'imagine that our minds contain a wax block',⁸ the scriptive surface used in classical times before papyrus; vellumand paper.⁹ It is on this wax block that impressions were made of perceptions and of ideas 'as if we were making marks with signet-rings', says Socrates.¹⁰ Knowledge and memory depend upon these imprints: 'We remember and know anything imprinted, as long as the impression remains in the block; but we forget and do not know anything which is erased or cannot be imprinted.' The quality of a man's intelligence depends on the state and upkeep of his mental wax block. Those whose wax block is 'deep, plentiful, smooth and worked to the right consistency ... are called clever'; while those in whom it is 'dirty, with impurities in the wax ... or too moist or too hard ... are said to be in error about things and to be ignorant'.¹¹

The same graphic device returns in Aristotle's De anima, again in relation to cognition, with emphasis on a new detail: 'as the wax takes the sign from the ring without the iron and gold – it takes that is, the gold or bronze sign, but not as gold or bronze', so too sense receives the forms of the objects it perceives but not their matter.¹² In both processes, efficient and material causes remain distinct. These figural imprints constitute sense impressions which register in the mind as memory, 'just as when men seal with signet rings';¹³ both remembering and thinking draw on these images. Their durability depends on the quality of the surface: a diseased or aged memory, for example, retains no more imprint than if a 'seal were impressed on flowing water'. The metaphor of imprint on wax continues well into the middle ages and beyond, in discussions of mnemonic devices which derive the metaphor from the anonymous Ad Herennium, as well as from Quintilian and Cicero.¹⁴

In his earlier Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628), Descartes called upon the same device to describe perception: 'sense-perception occurs in the same way in which wax takes on an impression from a seal'.¹⁵ Descartes insists that this statement is to be taken literally: 'It should not be thought that I have a mere analogy in mind here' [my italics]; and he proceeds to explain how the surface of our sentient bodies is literally changed by the perception of an object 'in exactly the same way as the shape of the surface of the wax is altered by the seal'. It is not just touch that depends on impressions made on skin, but the other senses as well, for each is wrapped in thin, skin-like membranes which are malleable but not permeable: 'in the ears, nose and the tongue, the first membrane which is pervious to the passage of the object thus takes on a new shape from the sound, the smell and the flavour respectively'.

Even vision depends on physical impressions, for an 'opaque membrane receives the shape impressed upon it by multi-coloured light'. To illustrate how colour impresses the eye, Descartes reproduces three imprints representing white, blue, and red. The figures illustrate the abstract form in which extended things, res extensae, like colour, might enter the brain as thought, res cogitans. The imprint made by the object on the eye is in turn imprinted on the internal surface of the brain.¹⁶ There is no perception that could not be reduced to a similar imprint: 'The same can be said about everything perceivable by the senses, since it is certain that the infinite multiplicity of figures is sufficient for the expression of all the differences in perceptible things'.¹⁷ The senses relay such imprints first to the common sensibility (the internal sense, which receives and coordinates impressions delivered by the external senses) and then to the imagination (or memory). At each stage, the transmission takes place 'in exactly the same way as the shape of the surface of the wax is altered by the seal'.¹⁸ The triple relay of imprints finishes in the brain of 'cognitive power'. Unlike the passive senses, common sensibility, and imagination, the brain functions like both parts of the instrument: now passive, now active: 'sometimes resembling the seal, sometimes the wax'. But now we are in the realm of mere analogy: 'But this should be understood merely as an analogy, for nothing quite like this power is to be found in corporeal things'.¹⁹ What was literally true in relation to the senses is in relation to the mind no more than a figure of speech.

Ten years later, when Descartes writes the Meditations, the apparatus is not even useful as analogy. The device has been disassembled: wax stands alone. Signet and wax had represented the process by which objects in the world became objects of knowledge; wax by itself, however, suggests an autonomous consciousness, dependent on its own innate ideational resources. The absence of the signet is conspicuous too in a letter Descartes wrote on 2 May 1644 in which wax returns as an analogue for the brain, not because it receives imprints, but because it assumes different shapes.²⁰ Paired with the signet wax worked as something of an epistemic talisman, guaranteeing a correspondence between inner and outer, mind and bodies. Apart from it, mind is thrown back on its own devices – its innate ideas – the most salient of which is the idea of God itself, 'as it were, the mark of the craftsman stamped on his work'.²¹

II Genetics

The signet/wax apparatus presided over another area of classical enquiry besides epistemology. It was repeatedly evoked to illustrate a similarly mysterious phenomenon: not only how world entered mind to produce thought, but also how man penetrated woman to produce children. The gendering of the two parts of the apparatus was predictable: the form-giving seal was male and the form-receiving wax female. The male bearing down on the female left a foetal imprint (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The analogy supported the theory that the foetus was from the moment of conception complete, its parts and organs fully formed and therefore undergoing no development only enlargement.²² Early modern engravings suggest how easily this theory lends itself to the wax/ signet analogy. In Figure 1.1. for example, the womb of the woman before impregnation is represented as a blank armorial seal awaiting the imprint that is blazoned on the pregnant womb of Figure 1.2, a flat surface imprinted with a completely formed child. The signet and wax apparatus, then, served to illustrate both processes of conception: the having of thoughts and the having of children.

The double designation appears as ancient as the technique itself, existing in both Greek and Latin, activated in several of Plato's dialogues.²³ In the same dialogue that features the wax block, Socrates discusses learning in terms of giving birth, brainchildren as children of loins, using the language of fertility, barrenness, gestation labour, delivery, and childbirth to describe the arduous and protracted process by which ideas are generated in the mind.²⁴ In addition to introducing these obstetrical terms, Socrates assigns himself the role of midwife: 'my midwifery has all the standard features, excepts that I practise it on men instead of women, and supervise the labour of their minds, not their bodies'.²⁵

Socrates's identification of himself with midwife seems calculated to replace (and neutralize) his identification in Symposium with lover or eros.²⁶ In ancient Athens, relationships between older men and younger boys were conventionally erotic and instructive, pederastic and pedagogic;²⁷ bodies as well as minds were deduced and established by the priestess Diotima in Symposium. In her famous disquisition, she explains how 'the ladder of lov...