Areas of my Ignorance

A French ambassador described his first meeting with QE in 1597:

She was strangely attired in a dress of silver cloth, white and crimson…. She kept the front of her dress open, and one could see the whole of her bosom, and passing low, and often she would open the front of this robe with her hands as if she was too hot…. Her bosom is somewhat wrinkled … but lower down her flesh is exceeding white and delicate, so far as one could see.

Zoinks. That’s more of the virgin queen than had expected to hear about. His description of her face doesn’t improve matters any.

As for her face, it is and appears to be very aged. It is long and thin, and her teeth are very yellow and unequal…. Many of them are missing so that one cannot understand her easily when she speaks quickly.[1]

Sufferin’ succotash. Lest we misunderstand what the ambassador really saw, he described her apparel in their second meeting as well. At that event, she was

clad in a dress of black taffeta, bound with gold lace…. She had a petticoat of white damask, girdled, and open in front, as was also her chemise, in such a manner that she often opened this dress and one could see all her belly, even to her navel…. When she raises her head, she has a trick of putting both hands in her gown and opening it insomuch that all her belly can be seen.

The queen was 64 years old by this point, just over five years before she died. By early modern English standards, she was an old woman and yet was still perfectly content to allow men see her naked chest. Now I need to go look up about the standards of modesty for dress of young women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How much skin was acceptable?

The pesky eighteenth and nineteenth centuries get in the way of my really getting inside the head of early modern English men and women. Once again, I’m startled at our own past.

NOTES: [1] Quotes above were found in Montrose, Louis A. “‘Shaping Fantsies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture”, Representations 1.2 (1983), 61-94. Print.

Despite its positive symbolic associations with purity, cow’s milk was largely undrinkable in early modern England due to the absence of pasteurization and refrigeration. Numerous medical and domestic guidewriters make precisely this point: people should avoid water and milk except in special circumstances. Given that few people drank cow’s milk, it would have triggered two primary associations for an early modern person: an infant feeding from a breast or the raw material for foodstuffs and medicine — in both cases it was tied to the world of housewifery.

The idea that cow’s milk was harmful is only partly accurate. It was harmful to drink straight, of course, and Wendy Wall makes that point in the quote above. But she also demonstrates that there were a wealth of uses for liquid milk in the early modern English household, mostly for medicinal purposes. Then there was, of course, cheese. Ah, cheese.

What surprised me wasn’t necessarily the harmfulness of straight milk, but that it retained connotations of wholesomeness despite its dangers. The literature of the day used milk often to symbolize purity, but that symbolism does not seem to go deeper than the visual, because cow’s milk was only pure in its whiteness, otherwise is was dangerous, temporary, and socially bound up with the violence and unpleasantness of the early modern kitchen.

There is, of course, the association with mother’s milk, but that’s a different discussion entirely. (Well, perhaps not entirely, since there’s surely some relation between the sexualized image of the milkmaid with the maternal production of milk, but that’s not a discussion for now. When you’re older, kid.)

NOTES: Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity. Cambridge UP. 2002. 134-35. Print.

Matthew Flowerdale, the prodigal son of a merchant, Flowerdale Senior, is a libertine, gambler, swearer, brawler, drinker and thief.

The London Prodigal is a play without definitive attribution nor even a firm date for first performance. It looks to have been sometime between 1590 and 1607, though that’s a pretty rich couple of decades, and so those dates don’t really help much at all