18 among Catholics and Protestants alike: Lynch, 25.
19 honours for her skills: British Library edition, (Venice, 1621).
20 influence, not only the household: Dekker, op. cit., 337–62, for informal, female lines of communication in Holland.
21 ‘… canalize its catalytic effect’: Paine, op. cit., 283.
22 His men are depicted at prayer: Der Ritter von Turn (Augsburg, 1498), facsimile edn Munich, 1970; E.-J. Grillot de Givry, Le Musée des sorciers, mages et alchimistes (Paris, 1929), 139, fig.113; The Book of the Knight of the Tower, op. cit., 49–50.
23 intrigue and secret liaisons: See Alison G. Stewart, The First ‘Peasant Festivals’: Eleven Woodcuts Produced in Reformation Nuremberg by Bartel and Sebald Beham and Erhard Schön c.1524–35. Ph. D. Thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1986. I am grateful to Alison Stewart of the Photograph Archive at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities for showing me her chapter on B. Beham’s woodcut ‘The Spinning Room’.
24 gossip, from another place: Les présentes heures à l’usaige de Rouan [de Simon Vostre] (Paris, 1508), 126–37.
25 women’s gossiping and consultation: Les Evangiles des quenouilles, ed. P. Jannet (Paris, 1815); see also Jeay and Roy; Jeay (1982, 1984).
26 the lash of his tongue: Olivier Maillard, Oeuvres françaises: Sermons et Poesies, ed. Arthur de la Borderie (Nantes, 1877), 95–6, describes his Sermon X, made sometime before 1470.
27 ‘… delicate, round and white …’: The riddles were illustrated with engravings in the Venice edition of 1599. See Giorgio Cusatelli and Italo Sordi, Da Edipo alle nostre nonne (Milan, 1975), 90–1; also Enigmata sive emblemata, (Leiden, 1624), facsimile edn intro. Jochen Becker, tr. Gary Schwartz, Incogniti scriptoris nova poemata (Soest, 1972).
28 crone inflamed with lust: EQ, 55.
29 scandalous appetites of women: Mariët Westermann pointed this gesture out to me: it had been painted over and only emerged in the recent restoration of the picture. See her forthcoming essay on Steen.
30 misery and shame: Christine de Pizan, The Book of the Duke of True Lovers, tr. with intro. Thelma S. Fenster, with lyric poetry tr. Nadia Margolis (New York, 1991), XX-XXIV, 67–76.
31 City of Ladies of 1405: Christine de Pizan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, or The Book of the Three Virtues, tr. Sarah Lawson (Harmondsworth, 1985), 98–105.
32 ‘… end is not considered very wise’: The Debate of Two Lovers, quoted Thelma S. Fenster, intro., op. cit., XXVI.
33 guilty of blasphemy and defamation: Jones, (1990); Antonia Fraser, f.p. 101.
34 swore, but women who could conjure: Fraser, op. cit., 114.
35 swearing and vituperation to retaliate: See Christina Larner, The Enemies of God: The Witchhunt in Scotland (London, 1981); Alan Macfarlane, ‘Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex’, in Witchcraft: Confessions and Accusations, ed. Mary Douglas (London, 1970), 81–99.
36 ‘Le Caquet des femmes’: By François Bac, reproduced in Gustave Kahn, La Femme dans la caricature française (Paris, 1912), f.p. 406
37 ‘And leave off Tittle Tattle’: My thanks to Roger Malbert, who showed me this print from the British Museum, which is included in the exhibition he organized and selected for the South Bank Centre, ‘Folly and Vice’, 1989–90.
38 Jests, alongside Les Evangiles des quenouilles: See Les Caquets de l’accouchée: Recueil général, Nouvelle edition, M. M. D. L. and Edouard Fournier (Paris, c. 1815).
39 so much he would regain his health: Recueil général des caquets de l’accouchée, Ou discours facécieux Le tout discouru par Dames, Damoiselles, Bourgeoises, et autres (Paris, 1623), 3.
40 Church, the law, and science: Elisabetta Rasy, La Lingua della nutrice [The Nurse’s Tongue] (Rome, 1978), 66–7.
41 padlock through her lips: At weddings in Korea today, a brace of ducks is given to the bridal couple as a lucky charm, like old shoes and rice in Europe. The duck has her beak tied, the drake’s is free: an augury of a happy marriage the médecin céphalique’s customers would have laughed at with pleasure. On the night, it is still the custom to stage a charivari – the groom’s friends erupt into the bedroom and assault him; if the wife cries out or does anything to intervene to stop her husband’s friends, the marriage is deemed to be doomed as she will be wielding the upper hand. I was told this by a member of the audience at a reading I gave in Dunedin, New Zealand, in November 1992. My thanks to my anonymous informant.
42 shuts them up in a trunk: Seen in exhibition ‘L’enfance et l’image au XIXe siècle’, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 1988.
43 Mill of Old Wives … print: cf., for instance, Le Moulin Merveilleux, printed at Epinal, 1833–40; I am grateful to Dr Birté Carlé for her translation of the verses.
44 with an evil tongue: e.g. ‘A grosse Hagge; and Lozell, thou art worthy to be hang’d, that wilt not stay her tongue.’ The Winter’s Tale II.iii.108. See Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The metaethics of Radical Feminism (London, 1984), 14–17, for an attempted rehabilitation of the Hag and the proclamation of a new age: Hagocracy.
45 ‘… webbed like a swan’s’: René d’Anjou, Le Livre du cuer d’amours espris, ed. Susan Wharton (Paris, 1980), 36; see also King René’s Book of Love (Le Cueur d’amours espris), ed. F. Unterkircher (New York, 1980), fo. 9.
46 good judge, the almsgiver: Warner (1985).
47 working under their control: Lotte van de Pol, ‘The Image and Reality of Prostitution in the Dutch Republic’, paper given at the Royal Academy, London, in 1985, and kindly lent to me by the author. She combines evidence from the city archives with another precious source, The Whoredom of Amsterdam, a highly popular description of prostitution published in Dutch in 1681 and translated into German and Italian. See also Lotte van de Pol, ‘Beeld en werkelijkheid van de prostitutie in de seventiende eeuw’, in Gert Hekma and Herman Roodenburg (eds), Soete minne en helsche boosheit: Seksuele voorstellingen in Nederland, 1300–1850 (Nijmegen, 1988), 109–44.
48 special abuse: See Horace, Epode 8, tr. Amy Richlin, in The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (Yale, 1983), 109–10.
49 De Vetula, for instance, inveigh: The Pseudo-Ovidian De Vetula, ed. D. M. Robathan (Amsterdam, 1968).
50 mane of hissing snakes: See ‘De Nicht’, Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Amsterdam, 1644).
51 lizard footmen … and the pumpkin coach: See for instance The Cabinet of Amusement and Instruction, published by J. Harris (London, 1819). The artist is probably Robert Branston. ONC, 40–3, 123–4.
52 images of their victims: Vaultier, 39–44.
53 Christian principles of humility: I am very grateful to Julian Barnes for giving me this information, in ‘Montaigne’s Tower’, unpublished.
54 stood in blood relationship: Lynch, 16; Shell, Elizabeth’s Glass, 8–73.
55 innovations of a startling kind: See ‘The structure of dwellings as an indicator of social structure’, Elias (1983), 41–55 for the social context.
56 ‘salon’ itself … had died out: See Les Salons littéraires au XVIIe siècle (Catalogue), Paris, 1968; DeJean (1981), 301; id. (1991), 20–2.
57 wastelands of betrayal: It appeared in her novel, Clélie (10 vols, Paris, 1654–60), 7, 284; see ed. René Godenne, Histoire de la nouvelle française aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Geneva, 1970); G. Mongrédien, Mlle de Scudéry et son salon (Paris, 1946), 91–3, 221–2; DeJean (1991), 55–7; Paul Zumthor, ‘La Carte de Tendre et les précieux’, Trivium, VI (1948), 263–73; E. H. Wilkins, ‘Vellutello’s Map of Vaucluse and the Carte de Tendre’, Modern Philology (1931–2), 275–80.
58 the spoken word: L. Belmont, ‘Documents inédits sur la société et la littérature précieuses: extraits de la Chronique du Samedi publiés d’après le régistre original de Péllisson (1652–1657)’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, ix (Paris, 1902), 646–73; Marc Fumaroli, ‘L’art de la conversation’, in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, III (Paris, 1993), 2; Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions
and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Cornell, 1993).
59 ‘… ordinarily best to consult women’: Vaugelas, Remarques sur la langue française [1646/7] (Paris, 1880), 503, quoted DeJean (1989), 301.
CHAPTER FOUR: GAME OLD BIRDS
1 ‘… state of sleepy bliss’: Tadeusz Konwicki, Bohin Manor, tr. Richard Lourie (London, 1992), 169.
2 ‘… creatures just like us’: EQ, 120–1. Henry Watson (tr.), The Gospels of Distaves (London, c. 1510), gives the stork masculine gender so misses that the bird is the wife in disguise. Stith Thompson, in his Motif-Index of Folk Literatures (6 vols, Bloomington, 1955–8), includes reference to a tale about a man who winters in Egypt in the shape of a stork (B775) but does not mention the legends of Mother Stork.
3 Dame Put-down Over-the-top: Henry Watson has Dame Abreye the Swollen for her name, but my thanks to Dr Malcolm Jones for his help glossing this name more interestingly. With reference to the folklore about storks in this chapter, I am deeply indebted throughout to the information and insights of Malcolm Jones, Mariët Westermann and John Dickson.
4 ‘… in the habit of doing’: ‘comme ils avaient l’habitude de le faire’, EQ, 121.
5 ‘facétie joyeuse’ (a merry jest): EQ, 122.
6 entertain and amuse children: ‘Conte’, Le Grand Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (Paris, 1696).
7 distaff to a stork: Malcolm Jones, Letters to MW, 1 Nov. 1993 and 9 Nov. 1993. I am entirely indebted to him for this piece of recondite knowledge, as Martin Le Franc’s Estrif de Fortune et Vertu (BN, f. Fr., 1151, 1152), where the phrase conte de la quelongne occurs, is not published.
8 ‘… there is no semblance of reason’: ‘Oye’, Le Grand Dictionnaire.
9 ‘… tales of the stork, as people say’: Quoted in Jeay (1982), 177.
10 Isles of the Blessed … human form: Celorio, 32, quoting Aelian.
11 Perrault’s Contes du temps passé: The frontispiece was considered ‘the soul of a book’ in the seventeenth century. See Alastair Fowler, ‘The art of storing a mind’, a review of Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A study of memory in medieval culture, TLS, 28 Dec. – 3 Jan. 1991, 1391.
12 It all ends happily, of course: Rivière de Fresny, Les Fées, ou Les Contes de ma mère l’Oye, Comédie en un acte Mise au théâtre par Messieurs du F.*** et B. *** et représentée pour la première fois par les comédiens Italiens du Roi dans leur hôtel de Bourgogne, Mars 2 1697. In Le Théâtre Italien de Gherardi ou le recueil général (Paris, 1741), VI, 625–47.
13 Hecuba’s tales … ‘Donkeyskin’: Cyrano de Bergerac, quoted Storer (1928) 12; Scarron, Le Virgile travesti, II (Paris, 1648), quoted P, 53; Delaporte, 43.
14 ‘But of the duck of Montfort … resembles her’: Letter to Mademoiselle, 30 Oct. 1656, SC 1, 40–2, quoted P, xxi–xxii, Delaporte, 33. This is only one version of the story. See Isabelle Grange, ‘Metamorphoses chrétiennes des femmes–cygnes: Du folklore à la hagiographe’, Ethnologie française, XIII (1983) 2, 139–50, 139–40.
15 ‘… more fools than wise’: See Poems on the Underground, ed. Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik, Cicely Herbert (London, 1993).
16 ‘… many words; many geese, many turds’: Coates, 31; cf. ‘Deux femmes font un plaid, trois un grand caquet, quatre un marché complet.’ Cesare Lombroso, La femme criminelle et la prostituée (Paris, 1896), 183, quoted Bloch, 16.
17 laid more than a hundred: La Fontaine, ‘Les Femmes et le secret’, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marty-Laveaux (Paris, 1858), I, 223–4.
18 tall tales she passes on: Compare such Gallic saws on women’s chatter as: ‘La poule ne doit point chanter devant le coq’, from Molière’s Les Femmes savantes, V.iii; or the earlier lines from Jean de Meung’s Roman de la Rose: ‘C’est chose qui moult me deplaist/ Quand poule parle et coq se taist.’
19 Sibyl of Cumae: The Crane Bag of Irish legend similarly tells a story about the origin of writing. Made of the skin of Aaife, the metamorphosed sea-goddess, it contains the treasures of Manannan, God of the Sea – including a strip of whaleskin and the King of Scotland’s shears – which encrypted the letters of the alphabet. Robert Graves, The Crane Bag and Other Disputed Subjects (London, 1969), 1–8.
20 ‘crane with his trumpe’: John Skelton, ‘Philip Sparrow’, NOEV, 28.
21 alarm on the Capitol: See Rogers, lix–lx.
22 Boeotia of the sixth century BC: Terracotta figurine, C6th Boeotia, Louvre, Paris, illustrated in Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess (London, 1991), 357.
23 begged and received between lovers: ‘La petite oie; enfin ce qu’on appelle/ En bon français les préludes d’amour.’, La Fontaine, ‘L’Oraison de saint Julien’, 628–36, lines 357–1.
24 Goosebottom, from Paris, in 1292: Letter to MW, 16 June 1993. Malcolm Jones compares this name with a certain Aalis Hochecul, from Arras, in 1222, which he interprets as ‘Wigglebottom’.
25 convent girls, ripe for picking: Dictionnaire des expressions et locutions figurées, ed. Alain Rey and Sophie Chantreau (Paris, 1979), 655–6.
26 goslings’ down: François Rabelais, Gargantua, Ch. 13.
27 skilled homemaker too: Ad de Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery (Amsterdam and London, 1974), 221ff.
28 or a foul, on humans: Delaporte, 38–9.
29 birds and tall tales together: cf. the discovery of ‘Pterodactylus anas’, a fossil with a ten-foot wing span, which was discovered by French tunnellers, still alive, or so the Illustrated London News reported on 9 February 1856. The bird cried out before expiring. The Victorian reader would have chuckled at the pun: anas = duck = canard = hoax. Paul Sieveking and Val Stevenson, Fortean Times: The Journal of Strange Phenomena, 24 Jan. 1993.
30 ‘… first storks who … experienced it themselves’: A, 553.
31 storytelling stork … fairy tales: W. Davison, publishing The History of Blue Beard: Or, the Effects of Female Curiosity (Alnwick, n.d.), in a series of Juvenile Books, included a stork in flight holding a baby among the vignettes on the cover.
32 Antigone … is changed into a stork: AHA, lx, 14, 1; Plutarch, De Solertia Animalium, 4; OM, 6, 93ff.
33 bird symbolizes filial piety: See for instance Thomas Palmer, ‘Two Hundred Poosees’ Sloane MS 3794, ed. John Manning (New York, 1988), no.49, 53. Palmer, the earliest English emblem book, took its inspiration from continental works by Valeriano and Alciatus. See also Rowland (1978), 161–3. Patricia Diane Olson, from Winnipeg, Canada, communicates a legend that the stork plucked out its feathers to soften the Christ child’s manger at Bethlehem, FLS News, 19 June 1994, 19.
34 ‘… putteth out superfluities: ‘De Ciconia’, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum. A Critical Text, ed. M. C. Seymour (3 vols, Oxford, 1975), II, 619–2. John Dickson, letter to MW, 5 July 1993.
35 benevolent picking of crocodiles’ teeth: See Herodotus, The Histories, tr. Aubrey de Selincourt, rev. A. R. Burn (Harmondsworth, 1983) II, 68.
36 ‘… use of the clyster’: Polidoro Virgilio, De gli inventori delle cose, tr. Francesco Baldelli (Florence, 1592) bk 1, 60; Latin version, De Inventione Rerum, (Basle, 1546), 70. See also Rowland, op. cit., 84–5, for other defilements attributed to the ibis, though not the invention of the clyster.
37 Sainte Materne: Gaignebet and Lajoux, 55.
38 size of the clyster itself: Mariët Westermann tells me of ‘an elaborate comic song, in a songbook of 1658, about a young woman consumed with sexual desire who pays an old female matchmaker to fetch her a doctor.’ He administers ‘a good clystering’. She also points out that another Dutch painting, in Leipzig, of the ‘love remedy’ was also attributed to Jan Steen, but it is now lost. Letter to MW, 6 May 1993.
39 ‘… entrera doucement’: Part of a series of prints illustrating Trades, quoted Donald Posner, ‘Watteau’s Reclining Nude and the “Remedy” Theme’, Art Bulletin, LIV, no.4, Dec. 1972, 387. The word seringue has been derived from cigogne by
the Catalan writer J. Amades, but this etymology seems strained. It does however set up echoes with the pairing cigogne/quelongne alluded to in ch.4, and the overtones of the distaff’s shape do relate it to the beak/clyster motif. See Marlen Albert-Llorca, L’Ordre des choses: Les récits d’origine des animaux et des plantes en Europe (Paris, 1991). John Dickson, letter to MW, 5 July 1993.
40 ‘… I know how this should be done’: Simon Schama, ‘Wives and Wantons: Versions of Womanhood in 17th century Dutch Art’, Oxford Art Journal, III.1, April 1980, 5–13. Schama gives the print the explicit title, ‘The Abortion’. Mariët Westermann kindly translated the verses.
41 bed with a syringe: Now in the John Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, the drawing appears to be a study for the tender and exquisite small nude of a reclining woman in the Norton Simon Museum – the maid was either left out of the painting, or cut out later. See Posner, op. cit., 383–9.
42 bodily functions of various unmentionable kinds: See Fraser, 67, for ‘uterine douches of castor oil, camphor and rue’ to inhibit conception. In the last century and this, glass and pewter syringes as well as whirling sprays have been used as douches. Liquid ammonia, mixed with milk, or white wine, was sometimes injected in this way to stimulate menstruation. I am most grateful to W. A. Jackson for his information and bibliographical help on this topic. Letter to MW, 27 May 1994. See also Naomi Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe (Oxford, 1993).
43 long, curved, beak mask: Historical Museum, Amsterdam.
44 shape of a stork’s beak: From the collection of Javier Lentini, In Vitro de les mitologia de la fertilitat als limits de la ciencia (Catalogue), ed. Viçenc Altaio and Anna Veiga, Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona April–June 1992, 168.
45 lore that the stork brings babies: See Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, ed. Maria Leach (San Francisco, 1984), 10a–b, 1083a.
46 ‘made some little ones’: EQ, 120.
47 body of his dying mother: Histoire Universelle, BN, f. Fr. 64, Flemish, C15th. See L. F. Flutre, ‘La naissance de César’, Aesculape, Oct. 1934, 245ff; Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of a Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Ithaca, 1990).
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