The Cotswold Dovers

 

 

The subjects of this essay came into my mind by way of a train of thought that began with the beautiful villages of the Cotswold hills of southwestern England, and that topic was stimulated by a couple of videos  that I chanced upon.  The circumstances also forced upon my mind the “uncertainty principle” associated with the German physicist Werner Heisenberg.  It holds that the smaller the particle the investigator sets out to study, the more likely it is that the investigation itself will frustrate the search for exactitude.  The Cotswolds are noted for their numerous beautifully preserved and picturesque villages.  Like so many other beautiful things in our world, whether made by God or by us, their delicacy is threatened by mass tourism.  This presents a dilemma for modernity and the democratic dogma, but fortunately not for me.  I am writing, at a long distance away, concerning two members of the Dover family, prominent in parts of Warwickshire in earlier centuries: the Dover family.

 

For Captain Robert Dover, a lawyer born in Barton-on-the-Heath in Warwickshire, we have a certain death date (1641) and an approximate birth date, proposed by the Dictionary of National Biography.  England has a good historical claim to being the Land of Eccentrics, and the Seventeenth Century has a claim to be at least one of the also-rans for the Age of Eccentricity.  Captain Dover, whose military rank, like those of so many of his contemporaries, was mainly ceremonial, had a legal career that was likewise somewhat of the same sort.  “He was bred an attorney who never tried but two causes…”  That is because he had a good deal of inherited money and had better things to do. 

 

What better things, exactly?  England in the early seventeenth century was already showing the religio-political divisions that by mid-century led to civil war.  Two great historians (W. C.  Sellar and R. J. Yeatman) characterized the two sides as follows: the Anglican Cavaliers were “wrong but romantic” while the Puritan Roundheads were “right but repulsive”.  The Puritans were, well, puritanical killjoys.  They frowned on cakes and ale, dancing, and good old family fun sports like bear-baiting.  Remember Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night? Or the community self-righteousness in The Scarlet Letter?  In 1605 Dover, politically conservative, religiously conventional,  and classically educated, decided that what the country needed was a revival of the ancient Olympic Games.  They would be set for the Thursday and Friday in Whitsun week (seven weeks after Easter), and the venue would be a particularly handsome spot in the Cotswolds.  The competitors would come from the local countryside.  In addition to various foot races, there was much leaping, walking on hands, rabbit hunting, throwing of heavy objects, etc., and of course “a country dance of virgins.”  All this was to be punctuated by bibulous al fresco feasting.    In short, something for the whole family, and something guaranteed to scandalize Puritans, and all of it presided over by Captain Dover in fancy dress on a big white horse.  The Cotswold Olympics had a surprisingly long run, followed by  frequent mini-revivals  down into living memory.

 

But Robert’s peculiarities may be thought to pale in comparison with those of a later eminence of the Dover clan, namely Thomas Dover, M.D. (1660-1742), alias “Doctor Quicksilver.”  This Dover has earned a place both in medical and in maritime history.  Quicksilver is of course the chemical element mercury (Hg, atomic number 80), and Dr. Dover became famous for his successful use of it as a specific medicine in treating what in the England of his day was euphemistically called “the French disease” (and less euphemistically the pox or the clap.)  This malady was rife among the dissolute aristocracy of Europe.  It is a recurring motif in the English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in the racier stage plays of the era. 

 

 

 One of Hogarth’s famous series “Marriage à la mode” depicts a visitation to the clinic of a syphilis quack.  The dread disease was considered the appropriate stuff of mirth.  Two young agricultural workers on the estates of Stanton Harcourt near Oxford, a young man and young woman engaged to be married, were working in the fields when a violent rainstorm suddenly burst out.  They took refuge beneath the branches of a large tree which, unfortunately, was struck by a lightning bolt that killed them both.  The poet Pope memorialized this tragedy in an X-rated obituary couplet:

Here lie two poor lovers, who had the mishap
Tho’ very chaste people, to die of a clap.

 

 

Today the oral ingestion of heavy metal is generally frowned upon, some of us indeed objecting also to its aural form.  But Dr. Dover discovered that if he had very good luck and a precisely minute dosage, quicksilver might kill the syphilis before it killed the one afflicted with syphilis.  But it was a close call.  But he did not invent the treatment, but rather refined it.  One struggles to imagine the process by which this medical discovery had first been made.  It was presumably by some such process as   that described in Charles Lamb’s “Dissertation upon Roast Pig” in his Essays of Elia.

 

In popular literature of earlier times a besetting sin of the medical professional is avarice.  The money-grubbing medico was already a stock literary character by the time Chaucer wrote his trenchant portrait of the “Doctor of Physic” in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.  But Thomas Dover took the concept of the piratical physician to an altogether new level.  Since 1684 he had been practicing in Bristol, a major port city south of the Cotswolds.  When he decided he needed to improve his income, he went to sea, though not as a physician.  He lived in the golden age of privateering.  A privateer was a government-sanctioned pirate, that is, someone legally sanctioned to plunder England’s enemies on the high seas on a system of sharing the spoils.  He and some associates undertook a joint enterprise along these lines, putting up the venture capital necessary.  In 1708 their ships, the “Duke” and “Duchess” set out on a world-wide quest in search of floating wealth.  Dover, a major investor, was captain of the “Duke”.  A real captain.

 

 

For the English, the enemy of choice was Spain, its once powerful empire in decay and decline.  The continent of South America, half of which was made up of Spanish imperial principalities, provided the privateers with a fine hunting ground.  In the course of their hunting expedition the entrepreneurs of the “Duke” and “Duchess” experienced an event of indirect importance to the history of English literature.  A few blobs of earth arising from the Pacific Ocean about two hundred and fifty miles west of Santiago de Chile are dignified by the name of the Juan Fernandez Islands.  On one of these a British mariner named Alexander Selkirk found himself stranded, under circumstances that are not entirely clear, in total solitude. He was an ingenious and resourceful fellow, and he had survived without seeing another human being for four years when he was discovered and rescued by the privateers, who had  been amazed to see a light shining over the seascape in the night.  In daylight hours they poked about and and discovered the literally isolated Scotsman.  It is plausibly believed that his remarkable tale, when it became known upon his return to the British Isles, provided Daniel Defoe with the idea of writing Robinson Crusoe, a book that has been being read with pleasure by a large number of readers for the last three centuries. Later Dover was involved in a plunder raid on Guayaquil, Ecuador, a town that was an important depot for the silver mines.   

 

Before returning home Doctor Quicksilver further displayed his maritime chops by capturing a Spanish war ship (twenty-one guns!) which he brought back to Bristol on the homeward journey of 1711.  The expedition had set out in the summer of 1709.  Sailing around the tip if South America was no mean feat, but Quicksilver took it in stride.

 

 

 

 

R. L. Stevenson, Man of Letters

 

Maybe other people who love  poetry, as I do, find the “situation” of poetry in America today somewhat paradoxical.  There are probably more active poets in the country than there have ever been.  At practically every college in the country a poet in residence is teaching a poetry workshop that has a waiting list of hopeful applicants, many of them talented.  But how many of our fellow citizens regularly read poetry?  I believe that the paradoxical answer is: not as many as the number of them writing it.

 

            Whether or not there is any substance behind this suspicion, I have been thinking about my own reading history.  I can remember very clearly how I got turned onto poetry and can still recite the poem that did the turning: “Bed in Summer,” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

 

 

In winter I get up at night

And dress by yellow candle-light.

In summer, quite the other way,

I have to go to bed by day.

 

I have to go to bed and see

The birds still hopping on the tree,

Or hear the grown-up people's feet

Still going past me in the street.

 

And does it not seem hard to you,

When all the sky is clear and blue,

And I should like so much to play,

To have to go to bed by day?

 

This is a poem of remarkable simplicity, three stanzas long, with each stanza made up of two rhyming couplets of absolutely regular iambic tetrameter.  The rhyme words are emphatic and exact.  More than ninety percent of its roughly eighty words are monosyllables.  There are few poems simpler in structure and diction than “Bed in Summer”.  But it tells a story, and it was my story and that of most children my age, the story of a kid who wants to stay out in the waning light of a long summer evening.  That’s what we want in a story—for it to be ours, or susceptible to being made ours by imagination.  I want to emphasize the story aspect of poetry.  I do not deny the power of lyricism, but great poetry demands the amplitude of narrative.

 

During the war—I refer to the Second World War of the last century--my mother, my two siblings, and I took up residence in the house of my maternal grandparents in Denver.   My dad was in the South Pacific.  Back in the day—the day being the first decades of Colorado statehood, my grandmother Davidson had been a school-teacher in the mountain village of Salida.  Salida is now a rather fancy place and miniature Aspen, but it was then a company town of the Denver and Rio Grande Railway Co.  Her husband, my grandfather Davidson, was a locomotive engineer.  My grandmother remained at heart a teacher all her life.  My older brother and I benefited from being her captive residential pupils.  After a while she introduced me to more Stevenson—this time to two of the great “youth” novels in our literature: Treasure Island (1882) and Kidnapped (1886), to be read in that order. For a growing boy the youthful heroes of these two tales, Jim Hawkins and David Balfour are the most “relatable” literary characters imaginable.  At the same time they are both “historical” novels—meaning that for their contemporary audience they already had the allure of exotic times, curious customs, and a vanished or vanishing maritime world.   Long John Silver has to be one of the greatest characters in world history, so good that he cannot be ruined even by having his name appropriated by a bad fast-food joint or parodied in a puerile obscenity that surface in the Clarence Thomas Judiciary Committee hearings of 1991.  Thus, I owe to this formidable lady—Cora Louise Nelson Davidson—many wonderful examples of the role of family mentoring in the transmission of knowledge and the whetting of a young person’s appetite to know things.  Among the other fatal misprisions undermining our national social arrangements is the legal fiction that the public schools, or any school for that matter, can compensate entirely for the informal but crucial education of family life.  Some other reading advice my grandmother gave me was that, though I should try to read widely, I should likewise carefully choose some authors to be my personal favorites, and that I would easily find one or two who had written many books, so many that I should not soon run out of them.  She gave Dickens as an example, but at that time it was Stevenson who stuck.  I especially loved the stories in New Arabian Nights.

 

            Such were the origins of my admiration of the great Scottish writer as poet and fiction writer.  Many other authors have been drawn to my attention in a similar manner, that is, on the recommendation of relatives or friends.  I am particularly admiring of our many writers who have excelled both at poetry and prose.  But more recently, in fact only quite recently, have I come to appreciate Stevenson in a third important category—that of literary critic and historical scholar.  In the past few months, I have been nosing around in the works of a medieval French poet I too long underestimated and thus neglected: François Villon.  Regular readers of the blog may have noticed a few references to him recently.  Villon is one of few medieval poets that many general readers have heard of.  There are many reasons for his (comparative) fame, but one of the principal ones is the modern taste for the edgy, irreverent, and transgressive.  Villon was a bad boy, a very bad boy, actually.  I refer to his actual documented personal criminality, but there is a sauciness in much of the verse itself that is daring and provocative.  He became something of a vogue among French and English bohemians in the nineteenth century.  Having now had the opportunity to read a good deal of the more recent scholarship and criticism Villon continues to attract, I still adjudge two periodical pieces published by Stevenson in 1877—one of them a short work of fiction—among the finest and most illuminating things ever written about the vagabond versifier.  But then I revel in being old-fashioned, frequently quoting Oliver Goldsmith’s most famous dictum—perhaps his only famous dictum?  I love everything that's old, - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.  But these days it's ixnay even on the vino.

 

 

 

 

Grounds for Sculpture

 

Last Friday we rounded out Joan’s birthday week in a delightful way.  The “we” was a group of four.  In addition to Joan and me there was our very dear friend Frank and our delightful granddaughter Lulu, recently returned from a term abroad at Cambridge University to begin her senior year at Barnard.  Joan is a person who, in the gift category, prefers experiences above things, and she had expressed an interest in a visit to the Grounds for Sculpture, an outdoor museum improbably carved out of burgeoning suburbia on forty-some acres of brilliant green between Route 1 and I-295. The land is that on which in years gone by the New Jersey State Fair used to take place.   Part of its border fronts on a small, narrow, clean and attractive lake.  This surprising and improbably placed sculpture garden has changed dramatically since our last visit probably a decade ago.

 

 

Eighteenth-century London saw the rise of the urban “pleasure garden,” such as the famous Vauxhall Gardens, which developed from models developed by private aristocrats in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  These are the (far) distant ancestors of our theme parks.  The Grounds for Sculpture owes its existence to the imagination, money, and political influence of Seward Johnson (1930-2020), a scion of the Big Pharma empire of the Johnson and Johnson Corporation, the Band Aid Kings, who was as well an ambitious sculptor.  The Johnson and Johnson Corporation was (and is yet) a huge presence in New Brunswick, a small city just up the road.  It is home to, among other things, Rutgers, the New Jersey state university.  Seward Johnson, an artist himself, likewise had the vision (and resources) of an entrepreneur.  Rodin he was not, perhaps, though several of his profusion of sculptural constructions are far more than just “interesting”.  His vision of the possibilities of a permanent yet malleable site for the exhibition of “outdoor” art created a pleasure ground of genius.  Seward Johnson’s own artistic atelier was prolific.  His work was varied, but one common genre is quotidian life (a man seated on a bench while reading a newspaper, for example) inconspicuously sited and trompe l’oeil in effect.  There are several such pieces in public places in Princeton.

 

He also did a lot to stimulate (and democratize) the local artistic scene, fostering a definite local character that was emphatically independent of the New York City painting scene.  One of the interesting New Jersey artists featured is George Segal (1924-2000), who spent much of his life in the New Brunswick area.  In one phase of his interesting career as a sculptor he experimented in using impregnated gauze bandages—Johnson and Johnson brand, of course—as a medium for shaping human and other forms.  Among his more monumental metal works, and one of his finest pieces (depicting Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac) is one well known to Princetonians as it is sited  just outside the east end of the magnificent cathedral-like chapel at one of the prominent entrances to the campus.  It has an interesting history.  Segal was responding to the slaughter conducted by the undisciplined Ohio National Guard at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.  The Kent State campus is obviously where the piece should be, but its implications were as unacceptable as they were obvious to the political regime of Governor James Rhodes.  Bible-based art can be very disturbing.  Try reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which is another serious response to the story in Genesis 22.

 

 

There is a playful theme in the Sculpture Grounds that is most pleasing.  In the first place,  the enterprise embraces a very catholic view of the idea of “sculpture” itself.  Very few (if indeed any) of the artistic creations scattered over the landscape are the products of stone shaped by hammer and chisel.  The works produced mostly involve less of Praxiteles than of Rosie the Riveter.  The range of subject matter is as varied and surprising as the subject matter presented.  One may safely assume that artists, on the whole, are a creative and whimsical bunch, and that there are many among them who are formally or informally experts in art history.  Thus much of the art is allusive or ironic, sometimes in a campy way.  Several of the more striking pieces echo famous paintings.  A huge Goyaesque maja (curvaceous babe reclining on a couch) bursts forth from a small hillside.  Manet’s famous picnic scene (“Dejeuner sur l’herbe”) becomes three-dimensional.  There are also transformations from literature.  The Weird Sisters from Macbeth boil and bubble along with their cauldron.  

 

 

            The horticultural aspects of the Grounds for Sculpture are naturally as important as the sculptures themselves.  Or at least they form a perfect symbiosis with them.  New Jersey is called “the Garden State” for a reason I was slow to appreciate in years past.  Thinking that I came from a “real” agricultural state, and now surrounded by superhighways and burgeoning suburbia nearly everywhere, I only slowly realized the richness and fecundity of the New Jersey soil, especially in this part of the state.  And the summer climate is truly semi-tropical; there is a controlled lushness everywhere.   The Grounds for Sculpture is a preserved quarter section of land, half of it still wildish in its contours, partially bordered by a small lake, and surrounded by, well, stereotypical New Jersey.  I supposed that the sheer surprise of it all is one of the more remarkable aspects of the place.  The landscaping and gardening are most impressive.

 

 

We spent more than two hours in our walking tour.  I suspect we saw perhaps half of what was most interesting.  My ambulatory stamina is no longer what it once was, and I repeatedly had to sit down for a moment or two at one of the sylvan resting spots scattered throughout the grounds.    The moderated natural wildness of it all—never more than a matter of a short walk away from a comfortable bench or a swinging bench seat hanging from a stout tree limb—was my imagined version of an updated Arcady.  It is a tourist site, yet offers a sense of uncrowdedness.  The vibe is of privacy and even to a degree a kind of contemplative solitude.  The guardians must monitor the flow of visitors.  We saw many other visitors, of course—and had one fairly extensive, pleasant conversation with one group of them.  As the afternoon shadows lengthened, we rounded out the tour with a leisurely meal.  We dined in the fashionable restaurant in the gardens—Rat’s.  A good meal if an over-priced one.  Perhaps like me you might need reminding of why somebody might name a restaurant “Rat’s.”  The eponymous rat is a dignified and lovable character in Kenneth Graham’s Wind in the Willows, one of the best-selling children’s books of all time, first published in 1908, in which his monicker of preference is “Ratty”.  But we are a long way from 1908, and rapidly distancing ourselves from any shared popular literature; so that a restaurant rodent needs explanation.

 

 

 

 

 

           

Forty-Two

 

I have been thinking back to some of the political and cultural events of the early decades of my professional career.  In retrospect these years now seem to me rather quaint and distant despite their still obviously formative and continuing influence on our lives.  As I was a college professor working closely with young people, my own perceptions were inevitably much influenced by the young.  In particular there has swum into my mind for some reason the great vogue of certain cultural events as they impacted the undergraduate consciousness.  One of the most widely read books on our campus around 1980 was Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, a very engaging serio-comic romp through, well, the Universe.  Its fame, buoyed by radio, television, film, and for all I know board game versions is by no means extinct today; but around 1980 it was a cultural craze.

 

The book is not without its prophetic elements as we gulp or tremble before the vague but definitely menacing specter of something called “AI”.  In Adams’s book a monstrous computer named Deep Thought, having spent millennia contemplating the mysteries of “Life, the Universe, and Everything,” at last utters a numerical answer to the question of the meaning of it all.  The answer is 42.

 

For me, as a medievalist, this answer was a comforting confirmation of an hypothesis that I had been harboring for some years.  In the time we were at Oxford together my wife came to know the history don at her college, the late Marjorie Reeves.  I myself would later come to know her well.  Indeed we published a small book together, a book for which I personally set the type, did the printing, and made the bindings.*  Ms. Reeves, in addition to being a marvelous human being, was the world’s foremost authority on the writings of Joachim of Fiore.

 

If you have never heard of Joachim of Fiore, which is quite possible, I will tell you just a word or two about him.  Fiore was (is) an abbey in a once remote part of southern Italy—secluded away in the arch of the cartographic foot, the toes of which almost touch Sicily.  Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202) was for a time the abbot of this monastery. Joachim was a deep-thinking monk and a prophet.  What “prophecy” meant for him was grasping the plenary meaning of the Scriptures, the hidden and inward meanings lurking beneath the literal sense.  He was also a philosopher of history much influenced by Augustine, and especially by Augustine’s theologico-historical theories in the City of God and his analysis of the Trinity.  The most mysterious doctrine of the Trinity holds that the unitary God is manifested in three “persons”—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Joachim observed that the Bible of the Christians had two parts or “testaments”.  In what he called the Old Testament he found the history of the marvelous dealings of God the Father with Israel.  The New Testament manifestly dealt with the life of God the Son, Jesus Christ. And they obviously document sequential historical periods.  But what about God the Holy Spirit?  Here there was no book.  Joachim nevertheless posited the necessity of a metaphorical third age, an Age of the Holy Spirit, to be documented not in a third written book but in spiritual activity.  The Second Age must indeed be the one in which he was living, and it was probably already much advanced.  A new, apocalyptic Age of the Holy Spirit must be nigh.  And following that, the End.

 

But could the durations of the three trinitarian ages be more precisely delineated?  Surely, they would be of equal duration, as the persons of the Trinity were coequal.  A lot of Joachim’s followers thought so, and they searched the Scriptures for answers.  There was, unfortunately, no specific text that gave a straight-forward world chronology.   However, you may have noticed that Holy Writ is very big on its begats (See Genesis 5, for example—the period from Adam to Noah).  Every begat signals a human generation, and by long-standing tradition a generation was measured in medieval terms as thirty years.  And the prologue to the Gospel of Matthew is explicit.  It details the generations between Abraham, the legatee of the old covenant, and Jesus, founder of the new covenant.  The Joachists (or Joachimists) now knew precisely when the Age of the Holy Ghost must begin: in the Year of Our Lord 1260.  And in fact in that year the roadways of many parts of Europe were filled with processions of eager believers marching forward toward some new, unseen, spiritual renewal.  Why was that?

 

 

 

The truth was in the numbers, and the numbers were everywhere.  How many times had the escaping Hebrews temporarily paused in their flight from Egypt?   (These were called the “stations of the Exodus”).  How many bad boys got eaten up by bears for calling the prophet Elisha “baldy” (2 Kings 2:23-24?) After what number of words at the beginning of the Book of Genesis did God separate the light from the dark (Genesis 1:4)? 

 

It is extraordinary that a medieval apocalyptic and a twentieth century comic guru would agree on the transcendental importance of a single two-digit number.  But they did.  There is no telling why for Adams the number 42 is the “everything” number, but that doesn’t mean there is no talking about it.  He himself casually suggests that forty-two is the product of multiplying nine by six, and there are internet dissertations explaining (quite unsatisfactorily) the mathematical circumstances that could make that true.  His is a delightfully nutty book, and one can but wish that all its copious exegesis was also delightful.  To be fair, some of it is.  But modern craziness lacks the coherence of medieval craziness.  Quite independent of Joachim, medieval exegetes had concluded that forty-two was the number of completion or fulfillment.  That may be the reason that that so many medieval literary works are distributed in one way or another into forty-two parts.  The motive seems pretty likely to me in Dante’s Vita Nuova, for example.

 

I surmise that Joachim was possessed not merely of a mathematical mind, but also more specifically a geometrical mind.  A remarkable feature of many of the surviving manuscripts of his works—and these are surprisingly numerous—are their elaborate and sometimes cryptic pictorial illustrations.  One of his famous books is actually entitled “The Book of Figures”.  Joachim surely drew the original figures with his own hand.

 

Joachism like other chiliastic (millenarian) schemes is no longer in vogue; it seems mainly to have run its course.  In that regard it is somewhat similar to Marxist Communism.  Fortunately—and here very unlike Communism--it did not have to heap up hecatombs of victims in running its course and demonstrating its debility.  We may regard it as a “curious divagation of the human mind.”  So many interesting episodes in the history of thought are the chronicles of brilliant human minds chasing batty ideas.  Alchemy, a project that captured the minds of most of the brilliant scientists of the early modern period, proved utterly baseless in its material aims.  The search for the Philosopher’s Stone was about as wacky as the fevered anticipation of the Age of the Holy Ghost, but its alembics, retorts, reductions, and evaporation still contributed to the construction of modern chemistry.  Joachism has many of the features of a dazzling artistic construct utterly useless except for its ingenuity and beauty.

                                

(The illustrations are all from medieval manuscripts containing Joachite works.)

 

                  *Two Poems Attributed to Joachim of Fiore (Princeton: Pilgrim Press, 1978)

 

 

 

 

Two Irish Neighbors

               Robert Boyle

 

The animating premise of Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play Travesties depends upon the strange collocation of eminent people who in actual historical fact were living in Zürich at the time of World War I.  It must be great fun to imagine conversation between James Joyce, say, and Vladimir Lenin.  Today’s essay concerns two Anglo-Irishmen, both representatives of the English colonial (not to say imperial) project in seventeenth-century Ireland.  The two men, though united by their deep Protestant piety, differed dramatically in their intellectual and spiritual personalities.  One of them, Robert Boyle (1627-1691), was one of our earlier experimental scientists, a giant of early modern chemistry,  and a founding member of and mover and shaker in the British Royal Society dedicated to “the promotion of science in the benefit of humanity.”  The other gloried in the wonderful name of Valentine Greatrakes (1628-1682).  At mid-century he had been a soldier in the Puritan revolution under Cromwell.  After benefiting from a wide-ranging amnesty and conforming to Anglicanism he had withdrawn to his Irish homeland to live the quiet life of a gentleman farmer before, about 1662, becoming convinced—and convincing many others—that he had been given the divine gift of healing, with the touch of his hand, what was in that age a common disfiguring dread disease--scrofula.  The therapeutic method was a little more than mere touch.  It involved a kind of vigorous stroking of the affected areas, and its practitioner was often called “Greatrakes the Stroker”.   This tubercular ailment manifests itself chiefly in the area of the neck, throat, and chin, but in severe cases invades also the lower and occasionally the upper parts of the face.  In old England it was called the “King’s Evil,” the belief being that the monarch possessed thaumaturgical powers to effect its cure.

Valentine Greatrakes, the Stroker

 

Greatrakes and Boyle were very near contemporaries, and very near neighbors.  Boyle was the elder by a year.  His father was the great man of the district (the earl of Cork), and Lismore Castle, where he was born, is perhaps six miles from the hamlet of Affane, site of the Greatrakes family farmland.  Both spent many years of their lives in England; but it is quite possible, even probable, that they were as lads both in the same local primary school at Lismore.  What is certain is that when Greatrakes became an international phenomenon as a wonder-worker, their paths would once again cross.  Some years ago I told the strange story of Valentine Greatrakes in a book called The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  That book was in large part devoted to the exploration of some of the less obviously “enlightened” aspects of that crucial phase of Western intellectual history.  I now am thinking principally about Robert Boyle, an Enlightenment figure if ever there was one.  In the fundamentals of their unwavering Christian belief, chemist and faith-healer were of very similar mindset.  They both clearly believed in the genuineness of Greatrakes’s cures.  But Boyle, though he certainly thought that the world was the work of a divine creator, was an empiricist and an experimental scientist who believed that, in general, the divine creator regulated things according to general rather than partial laws.  It is in the nature of modern science to explain and demystify the paradoxes of observed phenomena, such as what everyone calls “sunrise” is not in fact the rising of the sun.  Boyle suspected there must be some explanation to be found here, that is, a scientific explanation.

 

scrofula

 

Boyle managed to avoid deep involvement in the civil war that ravaged England in the middle of the seventeenth century.  His father was an unequivocal royalist, but he himself had considerable sympathy for the Parliamentary side.  For the most part, he kept mum, not a bad default position for people surrounded by competing passions.  Still, he spent the most crucial years of the war in Tory Oxford.  (Greatrakes had of course been an officer in the Parliamentary army, and apparently a good one.)  All that was in the past at the time of Greatrake’s stroking fame, which reached its zenith in 1666—and when he came to the attention of his boyhood neighbor Robert Boyle.  Greatrakes’s fame went international when, reluctantly, he made a therapeutic tour of parts of southern England at the importunate bidding of a learned English nobleman, Lord Conway, whose wife’s migraine headaches he proved unable to cure.  (Though he had begun with scrofula stroking, and continued to specialize in it, so to speak, the Stroker had soon moved on to what might be called general practice miracle cures.)  It was through Conway and Conway’s erudite circle of scientific and theological friends that he reconnected with his boyhood neighbor, the now eminent Robert Boyle.  Greatrakes even became acquainted with several other members of the nascent Royal Society.

 

Remember that Boyle, like his even more famous younger contemporary Isaac Newton, was quite as interested in theology and scriptural exegesis as he was in experimental science. One could probably better say that for such men speculative theology and a close attention to the phenomena of the physical world were parts of a still unified quest for knowledge.  To the extent that Greatrakes’s supposed cures have been considered seriously at all by modern scholarship, they have of course been rejected as impossible.  Greatrakes had many doubters and even violent opponents, but none of them, so far as I know, took the view that miracles were impossible because there are no miracles.  If you read the rather shallow article on Greatrakes in Wikipedia, you will be told that he was a man self-deluded.  That is because what is known of his luminous moral character is so inconsistent with conscious fraud that the fraud must have been unconscious.  As to the (literally) hundreds of independent witnesses of his cures, they were not independent at all, simply participants in a self-generating mass delusion.  Certainly episodes of mass delusion are not unknown to history.  Yet none of the Stroker’s contemporary doubters made that argument.  The most powerful attack on the possibility of religious miracles in British philosophy would come only in David Hume, who lived just about a century after Boyle and Greatrakes, and who addressed the “miracle” question head on only in 1748.  But actually Hume’s argument is an argument based in probability.  Is it more likely that a man walked on water or that a man was mistakenly (with or without conscious fraud) reported to have walked on water?  To Hume (and modernity) the answer is obvious.

 

The hostile doubt that Greatrakes faced in the 1660s was of a slightly different sort.  There were, to be sure, skeptics.  But the main objection was that it was simply not appropriate that a Protestant should be performing miraculous cures, such cures being staples of the old unenlightened Romish, medieval religion.  So he was immediately hailed by one of his champions as “the miraculous Conformist”.  The word conformist meant that he was not a non-conformist.  He had submitted to the doctrine and the discipline of the national Church of England.

 

There is a good deal more to the Stroker’s amazing story though the part of it concerning me now is the reaction of his childhood chum, Robert Boyle, FRS, to the affair.  Boyle does not seem to have questioned the cures, but as a scientist he sought a scientific and material explanation for them.  He seems to have devoted a good deal of private thought to the matter, though he never arrived at firm conclusions, and we have a few--tantalizingly few—of his “lab notes” that record his thinking.  Some theory of contagious diseases had by Boyle’s time replaced that of miasma, or foul air.  (Think of the origins of the word malaria.)  Boyle seems to have toyed with the following hypothesis: if disease could be cause by contagion—meaning “touching together” in Latin—might also sanitation—being made healthy—be achieved by a similar process?  If a human agent could be a spreader of disease, might a human agent possibly be a spreader of health?  Thus Boyle was prepared to consider the possibility that the Stroker was such an agent, a man sanatively contagious.  The idea of sanative contagion, which appears as a trial balloon in some of the writings of the age, does not appear to have merit; but it is a scientific idea, not a religious one.  Boyle shared most of Greatrakes’s principal religious ideas, but he sought to examine the physical phenomena that the Stroker and others attributed to the realm of the supernatural in the realm of experimental science.  What is Boyle’s most famous book has an intriguing title: The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes (1661).  As I read that book I see an Enlightenment updating of a once famous work of medieval philosophy, Anselm’s Fides quarens intellectum, “Faith Seeking Understanding”.

 

 

Queen Anne: female thaumaturg

 

Edification by Example

 

 

Traditionally the twin aims of poetry, as expressed in Horace’s Art of Poetry are to instruct and to please.  He says the poet aims at either of these goals, but that the best poets aim for both, mixing the “sweet” with the “useful”.  The didactic side of some of our early classics is quite pronounced.  Some poems are presented as actual instruction manuals, only partly tongue in cheek.  Virgil writes a poem “useful to farmers”.  Ovid writes an Art of Love useful to everybody.  As late as the Romantic period, Percy Bysshe Shelley extravagantly claimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”!  How much of today’s “creative literature” has an explicit or even implicit pedagogic aim?

 

Medieval preachers, poets, and historians frequently used exempla—anecdotes drawn from history or phenomena observed in the natural order—to illustrate the points they were interested in making.  One of the meanings of Modern English example preserves the sense of the singular form of the Latin word, exemplum.  There were many compilations of wise sayings and exemplary stories attributed to the great men of ancient history.  It appears that the first book printed and published in England was a translation of something called The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, a medieval Arabic anthology of ancient and ecumenical wisdom

           

This week I have found myself interested in a particular exemplum that I have by chance run into a couple of times.  It might be called the example of “Alexander the Great and the Pirate.”  Its most influential appearance in a major work of medieval literature is that found in The City of God of Augustine, who found it already established as an ethical exemplum in Cicero.  My own first encounters were in two late medieval works of poetry, one in English (John Gower’s Confessio Amantis), the other in French (François Villon’s Testament).  In general, Alexander had a particularly good medieval press.  He was one of the “Nine Worthies” of historic myth, three of whom (including Hector and Julius Caesar) were ancient pagans. He had a whole large literature of his own, including a Romance of Alexander and several other fictive “biographical” works.

 

But in this anecdote he doesn’t come off so well.  The Emperor has brought before him a captured petty marauder and pirate, intending to berate him—doubtless before having him executed.  “What do you think you are doing,” he asked the man, “terrorizing the seas in this manner?”  But the malefactor was staunch and fearless in his reply.  “Just what you think you are doing in terrorizing the whole world.  But because I do it with a little boat, I am called a brigand.  Because you command a great fleet, you are called an emperor.”*

 

It is a medieval illustration of this exemplum that I have put at the top of this essay.  It is from a fifteenth-century manuscript of Gower’s Confessio Amantis.  It depicts a magnificently dressed and baby-faced emperor and a scruffy pirate with his loot beside him and his pirate ship in the waterway behind.  If you have never heard of John Gower, you are certainly not alone.  He was a friend of Chaucer and a man of similar learning, an energetic scholar and writer.  He produced extensive works in three languages: French, Latin, and of course English.  He was thus an important literary figure: what he was not was a great poet.  Comparing the work of the two men, one immediately perceives the difference between artistic genius and artistic so-so.  But for exemplary purposes—and I am writing about exempla, after all—he is a more obvious and uncomplicated representative of the conventional morality of his age.  The title of his poem means “The Lover’s Confession,” and its content is, indeed, in the form of auricular confession made by an allegorical penitent to an allegorical priest.  It has many of the features of a medieval manual of penance and delineates in detail the nature of each of the seven deadly sins and deals at length with their several ramifications.  (Chaucer’s corresponding work is the “Parson’s Tale,” which is not a tale at all, but an undisguised confession manual.)  What medieval writers considered important and what their modern readers think is important are not always the same thing.  The “Parson’s Tale” is very long and tedious; yet Chaucer obviously thought it was very important for his scheme, implying that it is the key to the whole of the Canterbury Tales.  I doubt that anyone but literary scholars have read it in the last three hundred years, and few if any of them with pleasure.  For his part, Gower blends his religious framework with the elements of a love allegory—producing an odd literary goulash. But his poem is very important for its opulence of classical materials, especially those from Ovid.  Modern readers are likely to think that like the curate’s egg, Gower’s poem is “good in parts”.

 

In Augustine, the exemplary purpose of the little story of the pirate (elsewhere named as Diomedes) is clear and serious.   The opening argument of the City of God, especially developed in its first four books, is that the Roman Empire had lost the divine approbation for its want of justice. In some ways the argument is not dissimilar to contemporary left-wing critiques of western imperialism in the modern period.  Of course it is not advanced in material or “dialectical” terms, but in those of the categories of traditional antique ethics and philosophy.  Its categories are those of the great Greek philosophical traditions put into a Latin vocabulary by Cicero and others.  If you suppress justice, writes Augustine, what are kingdoms except great criminal enterprises?  And what is a criminal gang except a small kingdom?  This is part of an entirely serious treatise on political philosophy.

 

But sometimes a little story meant to serve as a teaching device takes off on its own.  That is what happens in Gower.  The Emperor is so impressed by Diomedes’s gutsy response that he immediately inducts the pirate into his household, makes him a knight and bestows upon him an estate of land.  All thoughts of Augustinian social justice vanish from the narrative.  In his new life the pardoned pirate becomes a famous warrior in his own right.  People can read of his exploits in the chronicles. Soon enough Gower himself seems to realize that what is a pretty good moral exemplum is not the plot of a decent narrative poem and struggles to get back to the point, at least to the degree that he can recall what it is. 

 

Perhaps the most popular exemplary book in late medieval England was one called the Gesta Romanorum (The Deeds of the Romans).  It might also be described as one of the most fantastic books ever written.  The stories, anecdotes, or “deeds” are followed by moralizing interpretations.  The book’s content has no really coherent organizing structure, and the moral “applications” are often as incoherent as the stories to which they in theory relate.  But it is absolutely full of amazing little “historical” narratives, many of them involving the weird, the violent, and the miraculous.  Since it was a book of free-standing anecdotes, more or less anybody could have added one to the collection, and apparently did.  But it appears that everybody in the literary world read it.  Its moral applications are sometimes hard to figure out.  I recall one little tale, for which the “application” tells us that the “king” means God.  That would hardly be surprising were there a king in the story, but there isn’t.  No matter.  A literary device so versatile as to have served the purposes of Augustine’s probing theology of history and the moralizing authors of pre-modern comic books must capture our attention.  Absolutely everybody seems to have read and borrowed from the “Deeds of the Romans”, including major English writers of the Renaissance period.  Gower certainly did.  A moral application without its tale is perhaps more tolerable than a tale with no conceivable moral application, which seems to be our most prominent current mode in fiction.

 

 

 

           

*City of God, IV, iv.