̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Bonnie Lander Johnson

Saffron: a Cambridge spice

sjr81 — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 15:08:30 +0000

An investigation into the local histories of saffron in Cambridgeshire.

Blood and bodies: the messy meanings of a life-giving substance

amb206 — Thu, 03 May 2018 12:00:00 +0000

What is blood? Today we understand this precious fluid as essential to life. In medieval and early modern Europe, definitions of blood were almost too numerous to locate. Blood was simultaneously the red fluid in human veins, a humour governing temperament, a waste product, a cause of corruption, a source of life and a medical cure.

In 1628, William Harvey, physician to James I and alumnus of Gonville & Caius College, made a discovery that changed the course of medicine and science. As the result of careful observation, he deduced that blood circulated around the body. Harvey’s discovery not only changed the way blood was thought to relate to the heart but revolutionised early science by demanding that human physiology be examined through empirical observation rather than philosophical discourse.

This turning point, and its profound repercussions for ideas about blood, is one of many strands explored in Blood Matters: Studies of European Literature and Thought,. A collection of essays, edited by Bonnie Lander Johnson (English Faculty, Cambridge ̽��ֱ��) and Eleanor Decamp, it examines blood from a variety of literary, historical and philosophical perspectives.

“ ̽��ֱ��strength of the collection is that, in a series of themed headings, it brings together scholarship on blood to bridge the conventional boundaries between disciplines,” says Lander Johnson. “ ̽��ֱ��volume includes historical perspectives on practical uses of blood such as phlebotomy, butchery, alchemy and birth. Through literary approaches, it also examines metaphoric understandings of blood as wine, social class, sexual identity, family, and the self.”

Contributors include several Cambridge academics. Hester Lees-Jeffries (English Faculty) writes about bloodstains in Shakespeare (most notable, of course, in Macbeth) and early modern textile culture. Heather Webb (Modern and Medieval Languages) looks at medieval understandings of blood as a spirit that existed outside the body, binding people and communities together. Joe Moshenska (English Faculty) examines the classical literary trope of trees that bleed when their branches are broken.

“ ̽��ֱ��idea for the book came from my previous work on chastity. I was struck that early modern writing about the body is all about fluids, especially blood. Blood was perceived as the vehicle for humours, the essence of being and the spirit – and something that could flow between people,” says Lander Johnson.

“I became fascinated by the fact that we use this word all the time but we have no real sense of what we mean. Our predecessors used it even more frequently and yet there was no scholarship that could help me to begin to understand how many things blood meant for them. A conference at Oxford in 2014 brought together a group of people working in related fields. ̽��ֱ��book reflects the excitement of those three days.”

Definitions of blood in Western European medical writing during the period covered by the book are changeable and conflicting. “ ̽��ֱ��period’s many figurative uses of ‘blood’ are even more difficult to pin down. ̽��ֱ��term appeared in almost every sphere of life and thought and ran through discourses as significant as divine right theory, doctrinal and liturgical controversy, political reform, and family and institutional organisation,” says Lander Johnson.

“Blood, of course, was at the centre of the religious schism that split 16th-century society. ̽��ֱ��doctrinal dispute over transubstantiation caused ongoing disagreements over the degree to which the bread and wine taken during Mass were materially altered into the body and blood of Christ or merely symbolic.”

̽��ֱ��role of blood in sex and reproduction meant that it was routinely described as a force capable of both generation and corruption. Menstrual blood is a case in point. Menstruation was seen as a vital and purifying process, part of a natural cycle essential to human life. But menstrual blood and menstruating women were also thought to be corrupting.

In Shakespeare’s plays, blood makes many appearances, both spoken and staged, from bleeding wounds to the rebellious ‘high’ blood of youth. Lander Johnson examines Romeo and Juliet’s love affair in the light of early modern beliefs about weaning and sexual appetites.

“Writing about birth and infancy reveals that early moderns were as anxious about their children’s health as we are but for them the pressing questions were: should I breastfeed my baby myself or give it to a wet nurse? How and when should I wean it to food? What sort of food?” she says.

“ ̽��ֱ��wrong decision at this early stage of life could have a fatal outcome and was thought to not only form the child’s blood in either a healthy or corrupted state but also to shape the child’s moral appetites for the rest of their lives.”

Blood is synonymous with family and, in elite circles, with dynasty. Contributor Katharine Craik (Oxford Brookes ̽��ֱ��) explores character and social class through references to blood in Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V. In these plays about warfare and the relationships between royalty and common men, blood is often a substance that eliminates the differences between soldiers who die together in arms, their blood mingling in the dirt of the battlefield.

“Frequently these same descriptions turn into assertions of an essential difference between aristocratic and vulgar bloods,” says Lander Johnson. “Shakespeare is particularly inventive at building character through distinctions of this kind.”

In contrast, Ben Parsons (Leicester ̽��ֱ��) looks at blood and adolescence in the context of the medieval classroom where ‘too much blood’ was understood to cause wild and unruly behaviour. Medieval pedagogues were concerned about how the ‘full blood’ of students ought to be managed through the kind of material they were asked to read and when, the sort of food they ate while learning, and the style of punishment administered to those who were inattentive.

Blood Matters makes a valuable contribution to the history of the body and its place in literature and popular thought. It draws together scholarship that offers insight into both theory and practice during a period that saw the beginnings of empiricism and an overturning of the folklore that governed early medicine.

Today's scientists understand blood as a liquid comprising components essential to good health. But English remains a language peppered with references to blood that hint at our conflicted relationship with a liquid vital to human life.

A collection of essays explores understandings of a vital bodily fluid in the period 1400-1700. Its contributors offer insight into both theory and practice during a period that saw the start of empiricism and an overturning of the folklore that governed early medicine.

̽��ֱ��book brings together scholarship on blood to bridge the conventional boundaries between disciplines.

Bonnie Lander Johnson

'Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library (Keynes.D.2.7)

Detail from William Harvey's De motu cordis (experiment confirming direction of blood flow)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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̽��ֱ��language and literature of chastity

amb206 — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 15:00:00 +0000

When BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour used the topic ‘purity’ as a talking point for a late night discussion, the themes that emerged ranged from sex to food to spirituality. ̽��ֱ��common denominator was the female body and the ways in which women feel, and are judged, as pure and impure. For most of the contributors, purity was perceived as a state experienced on a personal basis – through control and denial – often at great cost to themselves.

In her introduction, the presenter Lauren Laverne equated chastity (“a word you don’t hear bandied about much these days”) with celibacy and she wasn’t challenged by her guests. And why would she be? Chastity has come to mean abstinence from sex and is often used synonymously with virginity. However, for members of the world’s religions chastity has a much wider meaning that is lost in the language of secular Britain. Four centuries ago the opposite was true: chastity was one of the most important virtues, not just for individuals but for the public discourses through which the period’s greatest political controversies played out.

In her book Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture, Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson (Faculty of English) describes how chastity became a cult that was as much embodied by the ceremonies and performances of the court as it was espoused by the anti-court Puritan writers working in the new world of popular print. Lander Johnson writes that chastity, as an important Christian virtue, was “one of the key conceptual frameworks through which individual men and women understood their relationship to their own bodies, to their community, to the wider Christian world and to God”. But “the same virtue that could protect the body from infection and a marriage from dissolution could eventually help to topple a government and undo a King”.

Chastity played a powerful role in both national affairs and international relations. Elizabeth I was famously the Virgin Queen of the Protestant country created by her father Henry VIII. Her unsullied state was much more than simply personal. It offered her subjects a vision of the nation itself as both impenetrable against outside invasion and purified of the ‘popery’ of Catholicism. ̽��ֱ��Protestantism of the Church of England was chaste and pure; in the vitriol of religious schisms, the Roman church was “the whore of Babylon”.

̽��ֱ��Virgin Queen’s Stuart successors were on shakier ground. Charles I married Henrietta Maria of France, a devoutly Catholic princess who had spent her childhood in a convent and was dedicated to her mission of re-Catholicising England. She arrived in her adopted country not only with a fabulous trousseau of worldly goods, but also an entourage of friars and firm ideas about devotion and decorum. Although fiercely loyal to her husband and supportive of his power as monarch, she did not recognise his status as head of the English Church.

For England’s Catholics, living mostly in obscurity and practicing their faith illegally, Henrietta Maria became the unofficial leader of the Catholic Church in England. While the King and Queen lived harmoniously together for over two decades, the religious tensions that had only barely been kept in check since the establishment of the Protestant Church began to erupt around them. At the heart of these tensions was a debate over which of the country’s religious and political factions could lay the greatest claim to the virtue of chastity.

“Importantly, chastity was not the same as virginity,” writes Lander Johnson. “Virginity was an anatomical state that preceded sexual activity; chastity was a state, both spiritual and psychological, that could be observed through all stages of a person’s adult life.” Sanctified by God, marriage and sexual relations between man and wife could be chaste – as could childbirth. By implication, a ‘chaste’ relationship produced a healthy child. By the same token, an ‘unchaste’ union created a monster. When the child in question was born of a royal marriage that was surrounded by accusations of religious ‘unchastity’, the outcome could have far-reaching effects.

̽��ֱ��royal household was under intense scrutiny as religious factions tussled for ascendancy. When Charles and Henrietta Maria’s first child died at birth, suspicions about the chastity of their marriage as an inter-religious union grew. ̽��ֱ��remarkably resilient Queen went on to give birth to a further eight children, seven of whom survived.

This fecundity was celebrated in court masques and portraits. ̽��ֱ��central message of the court’s various spectacles and ceremonies was that the chastity of the royal marriage, and of the nation, was sanctified and maintained by the Queen’s prodigious fertility. For this reason, Lander Johnson argues, the Queen’s birthing ceremonies need to be considered as important events among the many forms of art, writing, and performance generated in the 1630s.

Each delivery was an elaborate performance, carefully orchestrated to draw down the greatest blessings from God, to ensure the most fortuitous outcome, and to communicate Henrietta Maria’s piety, purity and queenly authority. ̽��ֱ��Queen’s many births also became platforms for debates over the relative chastity of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Who was allowed to attend the Queen in these important and dangerous moments? Who would most safely deliver the future head of the nation and Church?

̽��ֱ��Queen’s unsuccessful first birth was mourned across the country, and at the English and French courts. It had been attended by Chamberlen, Physician to the King, a figure viewed with suspicion by the Queen, her French cohort and her family at home in France. Chamberlen was not only Protestant but a man (something the French, with their excellent reputation for female scholar-midwives, thought particularly unchaste). But Chamberlen was also a maverick whose secret instruments (eventually revealed to be an early form of forceps) were increasingly thought to do as much damage as good to mothers and babies.

In her grief over her first child, Henrietta Maria took charge of her subsequent births, employing a French midwife and surrounding herself with nuns, Catholic nurses, pictures of the Virgin Mary and all the comforts of Catholic devotion: incense, music and gestural prayer. ̽��ֱ��second birth was a success, producing an heir both healthy and male: the future Charles II.

̽��ֱ��Queen marked each of her births with elaborate court masques that celebrated her chastity, fertility and spirituality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Queen’s religious convictions and devotional tastes became increasingly popular in and around the court. In response, the pro-Parliamentary plain-religionists who eventually deposed the King worked harder than ever to claim the virtue of chastity for their cause and to accuse the Queen of infecting the King and the Throne with her unchaste religious practices. In a new world of public debate, dissenters made full use of mass print technology to rapidly disseminate their fiery sermons and commonwealth political theory.

Throughout the 1630s the court’s claims to chastity, primarily through the prodigiously fertile body of the Queen and her elaborate masques, were highly successful. But the young John Milton was preparing to enter the debate with his own masque of chastity. Milton’s skilful recoding of the virtue as Protestant spiritual adventure bolstered the moral strength of pro-Parliamentary arguments. Within a decade the King, Queen and their many children were dead or in hiding and the court’s depiction of chastity as familial, fertile, and spectacular was replaced with a version of chastity more at home in the written word, more masculine, and more martial: a steely and inviolate virtue fit for revolution.

Lander Johnson has written her first book in order to look in depth at chastity as a theme running through the life of the royal court, and the circles of power around it, in the first half of the 17th century – as seen through the literature of William Shakespeare, John Milton and a number of lesser known poets and playwrights, including John Ford. It is a scholarly book, aimed at an academic readership, but it touches on universal human preoccupations – how we see ourselves, how we want to be seen, how we curate our own image through private and public performance.

“I was motivated to explore constructions of chastity, and manifestations of the virtue in literature, by a desire to recover a moral code that is rapidly disappearing from current cultural awareness but which was of the greatest importance to our predecessors and a primary consideration in our revolutionary history,” says Lander Johnson.

“I’m interested in the ways a society’s beliefs, in all times and places, can shape those words and images that have the power to sway public opinion so decisively. Today we are interested in tolerance and equality. Even if we don’t practice these modern virtues as much as we like to think we do, they have the power to grant moral strength to any public speech, debate, or Facebook post.”

Chastity in Early Stuart Literature by Bonnie Lander Johnson is published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press

In her debut book, Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson (Faculty of English) shows how deeply the Christian virtue of chastity was embedded into the culture of the early Stuart world. In the struggle between the newly established Church of England and Roman Catholicism, chastity was a powerful construct that was both personal and political.

Virginity was an anatomical state; chastity was a state, both spiritual and psychological, that could be observed through all stages of a person’s adult life.

Bonnie Lander Johnson

Charles I and Henrietta Maria with their children by Anthony Van Dyke (detail)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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