by Richard Sugg
29 Cannibals, 60–64.
30 Cannibals, 60–64.
31 Cannibals, 65.
32 Hans Staden’s True History: an Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil, ed. and intro Neil L. Whitehead; trans Michael Harbsmeier (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 54, illustration 51. Cf. also the verbal taunts of triumph and vengeance (ibid., 127).
33 Hans Staden’s True History, 129–37.
34 Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 125.
35 Sanday, Divine Hunger, 141.
36 Again, as Daniel Korn, Mark Radice, and Charlie Hawes point out, among the Fijians (as encountered by European travellers in the first half of the nineteenth century) ‘cannibalism was part of an absolutely fundamental religious and social understanding of the world … founded on the worship of ancestor spirits’ (Cannibal, 66). For early Peruvian cases of ritual cannibalism (c.500 AD) possibly designed to consume the strength or vitality of captured prisoners, see: John Verano, ‘Paleonthological Analysis of Sacrificial Victims at the Pyramid of the Moon, Moche River Valley, Northern Peru’, Chungará 32.1 (2000): 61–70, 61. I am very grateful for Jonathan Trigg for bringing this article to my attention. For a much later incident, see Stephen Brumwell, who notes that the Indians who ate the heart of Captain James Dalyell before watching British captives in 1763 ‘were paying Dalyell a back-handed compliment: by devouring his heart they hoped to imbibe his bravery’ (Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 181n65).
37 Cannibal, 67. Cf., also, the aggressive cannibalism of the Asabano, occurring in Papua New Guinea until the 1970s: Roger Ivar Lohmann, ‘The Afterlife of Asabano Corpses: Relationships with the Deceased in Papua New Guinea’, Ethnology 44.2 (2005): 189–206, 189.
38 Sanday, Divine Hunger, 6. For some interesting beliefs on spirits and aggressive cannibalism among the Wari’, see Consuming Grief, 33.
39 Cf., again, the Moche sacrifices, which clearly had powerful cultural importance, and in which it was evidently only èlite priests or priestesses who consumed the blood.
40 First published in France in 1567, the account is given here in a 1568 English translation of Thevet’s book, The New Found World. Cf. Staden: ‘they do all this because of their great hatred’ for one another (Hans Staden’s True History, 127).
41 Cf. these figures with Gang Yue, who (also citing Zheng Yi) notes that eighteen bodies were stripped of all flesh; that the official number of cannibal participants was 400, whilst Zheng Yi estimated 10,000 to 20,000 (The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China (London: Duke University Press, 1999), 230).
42 All details and quotations from Cannibal, 97–98. For a fuller discussion of these incidents and their implications, see Yue, Mouth That Begs, 228–52. For examples of revenge cannibalism under the Tang dynasty in the eighth and ninth centuries, and other forms of cannibalism in twentieth-century China see ibid., 54, 128.
43 This interpretation also matches the youth of the participants (cf. Paolo Viola on the similar age of those involved in exo-cannibalism in the French Revolution (‘The Rites of Cannibalism and the French Revolution’, 165–68 (http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/quaderno/Quaderno3/Q3.C10.Viola.pdf)).
44 This kind of area is a special challenge to the scholar. While the most educated men were capable of believing what now appear to be wholly incredible slanders, some seemingly ‘barbaric’ activities look more plausible. The relatively sympathetic Thomas Hutchinson tells in 1764 of an Indian party on the march who, ‘their hunting failing … were kindling a fire to roast a child of one Hannah Parsons, when a strange dog, falling in their way, supplied the child’s place’ (History, II, 164). Again, the report is at least broadly comparable with tales of children eaten by Christians during severe European famines.
45 See Professor J.H. Trumbull, cited in OED.
46 On Columbus’ first encounter with the Caribs, and on the distinction between ‘cannibalism’ and ‘anthropophagy’ in the period, see Philip P. Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492–1763 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 15–16.
47 See OED, ‘Cannibal’ (etymology). It is also notable that relatively enlightened travellers admired both the dignity and strength of New World tribes in general. See, for example, Sir Walter Raleigh’s meeting with the chief of the South American Oreno- queponi in 1595 (Discovery of… Guiana, 64). For discussion of the few surviving Caribs (and their still formidable hunting skills) in the twentieth century, see: Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands (London: John Murray, 1951), 115–16.
48 The Doctrine of the Synod of Dort and Arles (1631), 161. See also, Twisse, A Discovery of D. Jackson’s Vanity (1631), 550.
49 A Just Invective (1661), 1, 34.
50 Full and Easy Satisfaction (1674), 86.
51 Cf. also: William Leigh, The First Step, Towards Heaven (1609), 197.
52 A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor (1673), 4–5.
53 Nosce Teipsum (1599), 97.
54 Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (1643), 49.
55 de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of Peru (1688), 278–79. Ironically, de la Vega claims that the only thing the Spanish did achieve was the elimination of funerary cannibalism (279).
56 Sylva Sylvarum (1627), 7.
57 See Edward Daunce, A Brief Discourse of the Spanish State (1590), 28–29. For further discussion of the syphilis-cannibalism link, see: William Eamon, ‘Cannibalism and Contagion: Framing Syphilis in Counter-Reformation Italy’, Early Science and Medicine 3.1 (1998): 1–31.
58 John Norden, A Pathway to Penitence (1626), 229–30. On cannibal usurers, see also: Complete Works of Ben Jonson, IX, 477. For biblical attacks on usury, see: Leviticus 25.36, 37, Ezekiel 18.10, 12, 13, Exodus 22.25, Psalms 15.1, Luke 6.35. (The attentive reader will note that most of these are from the Old Testament, and therefore in fact Jewish.)
59 Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of the Blood Countess, Elisabeth Báthory (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 21, citing an account by Pàlőczy Horrrath (1944).
60 See Harold Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1934), 86–87. Again: the mingling of exo- and endo-cannibalism practised by the vengeful Hungarian èlite is echoed by numerous reports of people forced to eat parts of their own relatives, during recent wars in Liberia and the Congo.
61 The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft-Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21.
62 For some fascinating examples, see: Susan Griffin, The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of their Virtues (London: Pan Macmillan, 2002), 172–74. For other examples of seemingly arbitrary (even ‘savage’) social codes and customs, see: Wilfrid Hooper, ‘The Tudor Sumptuary Laws’, English Historical Review 30.119 (1915): 433–49; Liza Picard, Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London (London: St Martin’s Press, 2005), 152–53; John Andrew Boyle, ‘A Eurasian Hunting Ritual’, Folklore 80.1 (1969): 12–16, 13, 12; D.H. Madden, The Diary of Master William Silence: a Study of Shakespeare and of Elizabethan Sport (London: Longmans, Green, 1897), 62–65.
63 Oracle Bell’s New World, 11 September 1789.
64 Memoirs, trans. A.S. Kline (2005), Bk IX, ch. 3, §1 (http://tkline.pgcc.net/PITBR/Chateaubriand/ChateaubriandMemoirsBookIX.htm).
65 Evening Mail, 21 September 1792.
66 See ‘Rites of Cannibalism’, 165–68.
67 Evening Mail, 17 October 1792. This alleged cannibalism occurred during an event which was certainly marked by extremes of violence, now known as ‘the September Massacres’. Hundreds of Royalists were slaughtered, and several bodies mutilated. For a Homeric instance of the desire for exo-cannibalistic violence, see: James M. Redfield, on Achilles’ slaying of Hector (Nature and Cu
lture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 199. On the essentially tribal violence of Homeric culture, see also: R.B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought (Salem: Ayer, 1987), 3–4). For the more habitual violence of everyday European life, see: Henry Goodcole, The Adultress’s Funeral Day (1635), A4v; Picard, Elizabeth’s London, 200; Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 77–78, 80; Anon., An Exact Relation of the Bloody and Barbarous Murder, Committed by Miles Lewis, and his Wife, a Pinmaker upon their Prentice (1646); The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. J. Bowle (London: Oxford University Press, 1983), 133–35 (7 May 1650); More English Diaries ed. Arthur Ponsonby (London: Methuen, 1927), 65–66.
68 For some particularly vivid examples, see the 1686 persecution of the Waldenses in Piedmont (Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Persecution of the Valleys of Piedmont (1688), 30–34).
69 Essays, trans. John Florio (1613), 104.
70 Cannibals, 80.
71 A General Martyrology (1660), 420, 421–22, 423–24, 425.
72 Cannibals, 1–2.
73 The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (London: Cape, 1970).
74 A Year with Swollen Appendices (London: Faber, 1996).
75 Cannibal, 66.
76 Cornelius Walford, ‘The Famines of the World: Past and Present’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London 41.3 (1878): 433–535, 435–37, 441. Unless otherwise stated all famine references are to Walford’s article.
77 Mercy in the Midst of Judgment (1670), 8.
78 See: Harding, The Dead and the Living, 112. Cf., also an alleged famine among the Arabians, in which ‘the people was driven to pluck out the dead bodies out of their graves, and … suck the marrow of their bones’ (Thomas Lupton, A Thousand Notable Things (1579), 180).
79 A Field of Blood (1641), 46.
80 Vincent, Lamentations of Germany, A7r–A8v. There is no obvious reason for Vincent to have fabricated these tales, and they are supported by German legal authorities, as well as the ministers who wrote to Vincent narrating these events.
81 Bread of Dreams, 40. Cf. George Starkey, who had ‘heard many travellers deliver of their own knowledge and experience, that a man may live ten or twelve days by sucking of his own blood’ (Eirenaeus Philalethes [i.e., George Starkey], Collectanea Chymica (1684), 164). Cf. also the siege of Colchester in 1648, when the famished Royalists surrendered after having eaten cats, dogs, rats and mice (The Journal of William Schellinks’ Travels in England 1661–1663, trans. Maurice Exwood and H.L. Lehmann (London: Camden Society, 1993), 33).
82 Brunwell, Redcoats, 178.
83 Cannibals, 74–78. On Léry’s suspicion that the old woman was – like Ficino’s aged bloodsuckers – possibly trying to renew her vitality, see ibid., 77.
84 Cannibals, 69.
85 Cesar de Rochefort, History of the Caribby Islands, trans. J. Davies (1666), 329.
86 For all its extremity, Rochefort’s description is not implausible. There is a reliable account of a Jesuit prisoner being killed and eaten in roughly this way (although his flesh was first roasted) by the Canadian Iroquois in the seventeenth century (see Sanday, Divine Hunger, 126–27). For a similar case in the Old World (minus the eating), see the Russian execution of John Michaelovits Wiskowaty, in 1570 (J. Crull, The Ancient and Present State of Muscovy (1698), 336–38).
87 For a fictional version of such blood-drinking in New England, see Frances Brooke, Emily Montague (1769), 23.
88 On raw cannibalism in Peru, see also John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690), 72–73, citing de la Vega. For more details on the Antis, see: Anon., Virtue Rewarded (1693), 66–67.
89 Miscellany Poems (1691), 54.
90 A Geographical Description (1657), 69–70. This and the Samuel Clarke of A General Martyrology are different people. For an interesting British parallel with this attitude to meat, see also Richard Franck on those in ‘the country of Southerland … a rude sort of inhabitants … almost as barbarous as cannibals’ (Northern Memoirs (1694), 177).
91 A World of Words (1598); Queen Anna’s New World of Words (1611). It is probably no accident that the newest, most shocking term ‘cannibal’, rather than ‘antropophago’, is used here.
92 Wit’s Commonwealth (1634), 734.
93 Geographical Description, 70.
94 Cannibals, 69.
Dirty History, Filthy Medicine Notes
1 Nicholas Culpeper, Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, or, The London Dispensatory (1653), 52–53. Culpeper’s work was first published in 1649.
2 On its supposed origin, see: Thomas Lupton, A Thousand Notable Things (1579), 259–60. For Bacon’s belief in it, see The History of Life and Death (1638), 133. ‘East bezoar’ came from Persian goats, the Western variety from deer.
3 Although synthetic musk is now used extensively, civet cats are still kept for this purpose in some parts of the world.
4 King Lear, 4.6, 130–31, ed. G.K. Hunter (London: Penguin, 1980).
5 See the MS of Boyle’s Medicinal Experiments (1694), 20; and MS read, alphabetical book of physical secrets, 72. Boyle commends this against cataracts; and the read MS against ‘fistula or cold sores’. (Again, I am indebted to Elaine Leong for these references.)
6 The Mysteries of Opium (1700), 192. For more on Jones, see Stuart Handley in new DNB.
7 Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 136.
8 Thorndike, History, V, 560.
9 History of Four-footed Beasts (1607), 581.
10 Boyle, Medicinal Experiments (1694), 47. The OED’s exact definition of erysipelas is: ‘a local febrile disease accompanied by diffused inflammation of the skin, producing a deep red colour; often called St. Anthony’s fire, or "the rose"’.
11 Antidotary (1589), 34r, 85r.
12 The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1998), 343.
13 Thorndike, History, II, 147.
14 Thorndike, History, II, 497.
15 Thorndike, History, VII, 176.
16 Thorndike, History, II, 496.
17 For further discussion of seventeenth-century amulets, see: Martha R. Baldwin, ‘Toads and Plague: Amulet Therapy in Seventeenth-Century Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 67.2 (1993): 227–47.
18 Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1971), 189.
19 Thorndike, History, VII, 176. On elk’s hoof, cf. Leo Kanner, who reports the seventeenth- century experience of a French huntsman, de la Martiniére: ‘in an elk hunt in Norway, one of the animals fell down suddenly in an epileptic fit, and his host immediately made him the present of the elk’s left [sic] hind claw’. De la Martiniere, ‘somewhat skeptical, remarked: If the remedy is really efficient, it is rather strange that the animal was not able to cure itself. He was informed that this is often actually the case; the elk does cure himself by putting the claw in his ear’ (‘The Folklore and Cultural History of Epilepsy’, Medical Life 37.4 (1930): 167–214, 191).
20 Thorndike, History, VII, 176. Some could take a relatively scientific view of amulets. The Dutch physician Henning Michael Herwig thought that, ‘growing hot by touching the body’, they ‘send forth atoms, and little particles and effluviums, when we perceive them not’, with these being absorbed through the patient’s skin (The Art of Curing Sympathetically (1700), 65–66).
21 Kanner, ‘Folklore and Cultural History of Epilepsy’, 177, 188, 193, 190, 188, 193, 200, 198.
22 John Keogh, Zoologia Medicinalis Hibernica (Dublin, 1739), 99–100.
23 Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 15, 17–18.
24 These figures derive from contemporary ‘Bills of Mortality’, lists introduced in the sixteenth century with the specific aim of recording plague deaths. At its outset, the bubonic plague of 1348 had decimated the English population by something like 40 per cent. It was not until the mid-seventeenth century that the population returned to its pre-pla
gue level. Over on the European continent and in the Near East, as much as one third of the populace was wiped out by this first plague epidemic in the years 1347–51.
25 On some parts of the continent outbreaks could be still worse. Cf. Vincent, Lamentations of Germany (1638), 62: ‘the very plague consumed in Saxony the other day in the space of two months, no less than sixteen thousand’.
26 F.P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare’s London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 106–7.
27 Wilson, Plague, 98.
28 Medicina Magnetica: or, The Rare and Wonderful Art of Curing by Sympathy (1656), 73.
29 Wilson, Plague, 8–13. The same principles underlay the use of sheep to test the safety of a house in plague time; you took two or three sheep, shortly before the full moon, and shut them in for a month. Removing the animals (which had presumably had some kind of food) you then washed them in warm water, and gave the water itself to pigs. If the pigs lived, the house was clean.
30 Tragedy of the Duchess of Malfi (1623), D1v.
31 On this range of cures, see again Wilson, Plague, 8–13.
32 Barbette, 354–55; 366–67. On mummy against the plague, see also A Brief Answer of Josephus Quercetanus …, trans. John Hester (1591), 33v–34r.
33 See, again, Aurora Chymica (1672), 8, 10; and George Thomson, Loimotomia (1666), 150.
34 A Book, or Counsel Against the Disease Commonly Called … the Sweating Sickness (1552), 9r.
35 The Haven of Health (1636), 316.
36 As Porter adds, the precise nature of this affliction ‘remains a riddle’ (The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Fontana Press, 1999), 168). On possible causes and possible cures, see: Caius, 14v; Bacon, History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1629), 9; Caius, 21v–22r; Cogan, 316–17.