Structured to showcase the triumph of nature over art, Ben Jonson’s 1616 masque Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court begins with an exasperated and complaining Mercury being tortured by alchemy, represented by “a troupe of threadbare Alchemists” and a group of “imperfect creatures, with helms of limbecks on their heads.” The scene then dissolves to “a glorious bower, wherein Nature [is] placed with Prometheus at her feet.”1 With Prometheus’s help, Nature demonstrates that the twelve courtly masquers, accompanied by their ladies, are her offspring, not alchemy’s: “Nature [is] here no stepdame, but a mother” (183).
So far, so good. But even while it demonstrates nature’s superiority to an enterprise whose practitioners “abuse the curious and credulous nation of metal-men through the world” (44–45), Mercury Vindicated seems anxious about one remaining arena of competition between alchemy and nature: the generation of humankind. It is easy for Mercury to mock alchemists’ medicinal and cosmetological promises. He has a slightly more difficult time, though, dismissing perhaps the most audacious claim that alchemy ever made: that it could create human beings.
Mercury first brings up alchemy as a maker of men as a point of derision. Alchemists, says Mercury, claim they can “produce men, beyond the deeds of Deucalion or Prometheus (of which one, they say, had the philosophers’ stone and threw it over his shoulder, the other the fire, and lost it)” (120–23). But in fact the only men the alchemists have created are the kinds of men who are shaped in venues of courtly or urban artificiality: “a master of the duel”; an astrologer or “supposed secretary to the stars”; and “a broker in suits”—either lawsuits, or second-hand clothes (132–53). These kinds of men are not, Mercury assures us, “Paracelsus’ man . . . that he promised you out of white bread and deal-wine” (129–31). The sardonic reference here is to De natura rerum, a treatise attributed to Paracelsus that was notorious in Jonson’s day for its instructions on how to create an actual person. If you heat human sperm in an alchemical vessel, says De natura rerum, you can make a homunculus. No, counters Mercury: the men that the alchemists can make at court are not Pseudo-Paracelsus’s parthenogenetic homunculus. But such an assertion is not exactly the same thing as saying that Pseudo-Paracelsus’s homunculus cannot be made at all. Indeed, Mercury Vindicated ends with Nature worrying that the ladies at court are not inclined to do their part in generating human beings the old-fashioned way: “ ’Tis yet with them but beauty’s noon, / They would not grandams be too soon” (206–7). If the women will not do their reproductive duty, Pseudo-Paracelsus’s artificial offspring may be the only alternative.
Interpreting the fantasized equivalence of human reproduction and alchemical production requires gauging the status of the fantasy of masculine parthenogenesis. On the one hand, as we will see in this chapter, parthenogenesis has considerable hold on the early modern mind as a workaround for the seeming feminine mastery of the reproductive process. On the other hand, alchemy’s reputation for folly can be deployed to expose the parthenogenetic dream as folly, too. When writers like Jonson both air and mock the fantasy of male parthenogenesis in terms of alchemy, they are conjoining a theory of physical change that, to many, seemed preposterous with a theory of human reproduction that was equally so.
The stakes of such exposure are high. As silly as Pseudo-Paracelsus’s early modern version of test-tube babies may seem, the academic study of anatomy in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England continued to be committed, to a surprising extent, to a hybrid Aristotelian-Galenic model of human reproduction that is, in many ways, only a somewhat less extreme vision of male parthenogenesis. That model, too, demonstrates disknowledge in action in that it substitutes a questionable theory for others more plausible. As scholars have recently shown, and as I will discuss further, alternative and far more sensible theories of human reproduction were readily available in England and were also widely accepted. To continue to adhere to, elaborate, and refine the long-standing Aristotelian-Galenic model, then, represents not an inevitability but a choice: the choice to be wrong rather than right. To borrow a crucial word from Stanley Cavell—a borrowing whose significance I will discuss fully later in this chapter—that choice is the avoidance of knowledge.
Like the Christian kabbalists discussed in Chapter 3 who used Jewish books, early modern anatomists were engaged in book-bound learning that required them to assess and to incorporate (or reject) predecessor texts. Nancy Siraisi, Peter Dear, and others describe the work of early modern anatomy as a complex and often fraught interchange between a humanistic reverence for classical learning and empirical demonstrations of how Galen, Aristotle, and other paradigmatic classical authors on medicine got it wrong.2 My interest in this chapter, as in my discussion of early modern matter theory in Chapter 2, is how the imagery of alchemy is used to signal the intellectual quandary that often results in the transition from old learning to new. I focus in this chapter on how some early modern English authors identify alchemy not simply with the fantasy of parthenogenesis but with the choice to believe that fantasy even when better explanations abound.
In the first section of this chapter I discuss the unexpected conjunctions of alchemy and anatomy in the context of early modern academic medicine’s reluctance to acknowledge active feminine participation in human reproduction, and sometimes even its reluctance to acknowledge the sheer existence of the external female genitalia. My discussion here examines how alchemical imagery serves anatomists such as William Harvey and Helkiah Crooke in excluding women from an active role in the generation of children and even from the realm of knowability. Such a use for alchemy, however, has already been anticipated by Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the focus of this chapter’s second section. The Faerie Queene’s “marriage books” (books 3, 4, and 5) couple the fate of desired and desiring women like Florimell and Britomart with versions of alchemical reproduction, some of which, for all their absurdity, seem preferable for the poem’s male characters to female fecundity. From Spenser’s sharply critical commentary on the avoidance of gynecology, I turn to William Shakespeare’s more ambivalent examination of the intellectual process and the intellectual venues that are required for the avoidance of female reproductive capacity: the alchemically inflected all-male academy of Love’s Labour’s Lost.
As it did with other topics, early modern alchemy tracked the humanist use of classical learning when it came to thinking about how matter originates and grows. Humanist practice meant that alchemical theory hewed to classical tradition for this purpose—but hewing to classical tradition often meant borrowing from multiple and even contradictory strands of classical theories of mineralogy and of sexual reproduction. In the first instance, medieval and early modern alchemists declared that their theories, contrary to critics’ detractions, adhered in orthodox fashion to the Aristotelian description of how metals are formed in the earth. Aristotle’s Meteorologica describes metal as one of the products that results when the sun’s heat produces “exhalations” of two sorts in the earth, moist and dry. When trapped in the earth, moist exhalations encounter the dry exhalations contained within rocks and congeal into metal.3 With some modifications of Aristotle’s account—for example, interpreting the moist exhalations as mercury and the dry exhalations as sulfur—alchemists could claim that their operations, using fire to replicate the heat of the sun, simply accelerate what takes nature many years. This version of alchemical theory has the merit, in medieval and early modern eyes, of preserving Aristotle’s notion of the conservation of matter, since what goes into metal is what comes out: the four elements, recombined. At other times, however, alchemists replaced Aristotle’s description of how metals are formed in the earth with his theories of sexual generation. While excoriated for violating Aristotelian earth science, a theory of alchemical production as sexual reproduction makes it possible for the alchemist to envision multiplying his product far beyond his raw ingredients. With alchemy, as with the generation of life, you can get more—infinitely more—at the end of the process than was put in at the beginning.4
Once alchemy is conceived as sexual reproduction it activates a rich storehouse of tropes of gender identity, gender difference, and gender roles in conception and birth. One of medieval and early modern alchemy’s most attractive aspects, in fact, is the playfulness with which questions of gender identification in alchemical reproduction can be approached. As we will see, reading a large swath of alchemical texts presents an array of options for characterizing the gendered metaphors of alchemical reproduction, an array from which one may pick and choose. While most alchemical texts exhibit either a weak or a strong bias toward eliminating feminine influence from human procreation, as Sally Allen and Joanna Hubbs have argued, other texts—or sometimes even the same texts, as Kathleen Long has demonstrated—subvert the ideal of the normative masculinized body in a way that amounts to a queer stance on gender norms and gendered physical functions.5 Allison Kavey makes the point that this variety of viewpoints on the nature of the “chemical wedding” corresponds, in England, to the last hurrah of a sense of gender malleability, before the institution of a stable sex-gender binary in the eighteenth century.6 Idiosyncrasy—a word picked up by English in about 1600, precisely to characterize the individualized “self-mixed-together-ness” (idio-syn-crasis) of the post-Paracelsian human body—defines how Renaissance English alchemy approaches the question of reproduction.
What I wish to do in this section and the ensuing sections of this chapter, then, is not simply describe how alchemical imagery relating to sexual reproduction does or does not depart from prevailing Aristotelian-Galenic norms. Rather, I contend that, when associated with the issue of human sexual reproduction, alchemical imagery can signal and demonstrate the very prospect of optionality. That is to say, in contrast to other medieval and Renaissance sciences that insist upon some version of classical orthodoxy, alchemy, in its very sloppiness and imprecision and in its characteristically improvisational style, insists upon the theorist’s having the opportunity to make a choice, to design her own system. Alchemy signals, in this instance, the choice either to examine or to avoid examining the feminine role in reproduction.
Alchemy’s identification with the possibility of choice helps explain, I think, a peculiar phenomenon in late Renaissance discussions of human reproduction. It is not just the case that alchemical theory borrows from gynecology; gynecological theory also borrows from alchemy. Both pictorial and textual descriptions of female reproductive anatomy draw from alchemical conceits. They do so, I believe, in a way that graphically demonstrates the operations of disknowledge. Alchemy is used in anatomical texts as a vehicle for disclaiming the woman’s part in reproduction. At the same time, however, this figuration draws attention to that choice, and to the fact that it might have been otherwise. Alchemy surprisingly pops up at precisely those moments at which anatomists turn away from knowledge of female reproductive anatomy that they could have had—and in fact did have, but chose to bypass. The turn to alchemy thus represents willed ignorance. In a period of rapid changes in anatomical science, alchemy can thus cut both ways: it can signal intellectual invention, or it can signal intellectual conservatism so severe that it enacts disknowledge in its worst possible form.
Early modern conjunctions between alchemical theories of material production and biological theories of human reproduction should not surprise us, since alchemy borrows from theories of sexual generation from its very beginnings. The sexualization of alchemy became even more heightened at the end of the fifteenth century, when Marsilio Ficino, on the orders (as legend has it) of Cosimo de’ Medici, interrupted his translations of Plato to render a newly unearthed manuscript supposedly by Hermes Trismegistus from Greek into Latin.7 Titled Pimander when first printed in 1471, after the first of its fourteen tractates, Ficino’s edition sparked numerous new translations and editions that fueled the sixteenth-century alchemical revival. The titular tractate of the Pimander, an elaborate myth of the relation between divinity and nature involving both sexual and asexual reproduction, joined the already influential Hermetic text Asclepius to present a complex and exceptionally ambiguous set of opinions on the roles played by male and female entities in natural fertility.8 The “Pimander” tractate begins, in Judeo-Christian fashion, with a god who asexually creates a man in his own image. But then this man, identified as a “craftsman” (dēmiourgos), goes on to make love to a feminine nature who “took spirit from the ether and brought forth bodies in the shape of the man.”9 These bodies, the “seven governors”—taken by alchemists to be the seven metals—are conceived in a fashion that conforms to the Aristotelian model of human reproduction, in which the man’s semen provides the “form” that is imprinted on the inert “matter” furnished by the woman’s womb. In contrast, while the Asclepius also posits a single sex in natural reproduction, that single sex is the feminine principle; nature “can breed alone without conceiving by another.”10 The Asclepius also, however, posits that “each sex is full of fecundity, and the linking of the two or, more accurately, their union is incomprehensible.”11 If one were to construct a theory of male and female reproductive roles based on solely the “Pimander” tractate and the Asclepius, one would already have a number of options from which to choose.
Even before Ficino’s late fifteenth-century introduction of the Pimander into the conversation, however, alchemy had already staked out various positions on whether the alchemical “multiplication” of minerals proceeded in the same manner as the multiplication of humans. Generally speaking, those positions came to reflect the same muddle of classical precedent that characterized much scholarly thinking about human reproduction into the seventeenth century. Along with the Aristotelian “one seed” model of masculine form imprinting itself on inert feminine matter, alchemical texts also often suggest the Galenic “two seed” model, in which both sexes contribute to human reproduction even though the man’s influence is far greater than the woman’s. As Joan Cadden describes it, the medieval scholarly debate over the roles of the sexes in reproduction stressed both the distinctions between Aristotle and Galen—one seed for Aristotle versus two for Galen; two ontologically different sexes for Aristotle versus one sexual continuum for Galen—and their commonalities: in both authors, women’s contribution to conception is evaluated as decidedly lesser.12 Similarly, medieval and early modern alchemists drew freely on both the congruities and the disagreements between Galen and Aristotle, often to the point of changing their imagery of the respective reproductive capacities of masculine and feminine alchemical ingredients in the middle of a description of an alchemical process.
In this malleability, too, alchemical writers were bolstered by ancient alchemical texts. For example, the early Arabic alchemical Emerald Tablet, a text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus that reached Europe via its translated inclusion in a thirteenth-century version of the encyclopedic Secretum secretorum, describes what was taken as a recipe for the philosopher’s stone as a matter of the union of superior masculinity and inferior femininity: “That which is beneath [inferius] is like that which is above [superius]: & that which is above, is like that which is beneath, to worke the miracles of one thing. And as all things have proceeded from one, by the meditation of one, so all things have sprung from this one thing by adaptation. His father is the sun, his mother is the moone, the wind bore it in hir belly. The earth is his nurse.”13 A commentary frequently attached to the Emerald Tablet after 1541, attributed to an antique-sounding but unidentified author named Hortulanus, glosses these lines in both Aristotelian and Galenic fashion. On the one hand, the moon, identified as “Philosophers silver,” is labeled in Aristotelian fashion as merely the “fitte and consonaunt receptacle for [the] seede and tincture” of the sun, or “Philosophers gold.” On the other hand, the moon’s character contributes to the nature of the offspring in Galenic fashion: “sonnes like to the Father, if they want [lack] long decoction [that is, preparation by heat or by boiling], shalbe like to the Mother in whitenesse, and retaine the Fathers weight.”14 To make matters even more complicated, other texts of theoretical alchemy, perhaps reflecting alchemy’s debt to its earliest sources in Gnosticism, also emphasize the hermaphroditic nature of both the prime alchemical ingredient, alchemical mercury, and the desired alchemical product, either gold or the philosopher’s stone.15
The outcome of alchemy’s connections to multiple, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting theories of human sexual biology is a complex, rich, and often contradictory metaphoric system of the alchemical process as marriage and childbirth. Attempting to derive quintessentially pure matter, the alchemist begins with prima materia, a substance whose sex/gender role may be characterized in any number of different ways. Prima materia may be thought of as the “pure, basic stuff of creation,” Aristotelian matter stripped of all form—in other words, the matrix of the Aristotelian one-seed model of reproduction, and hence essentially feminine.16 In this connection, prima materia is sometimes identified, in fact, with the menstruum, the Latin word for menstrual fluid that was used to name the solvent in which the alchemist dissolves whatever substances are employed in the action.17 Prima materia may also, however, denote the alchemist’s initial mixture of sulfur and mercury, two elements that connote, respectively, masculinity and femininity, hot/dry and cold/wet humors. And finally, prima materia may describe, quite generally speaking, the original matter that generates the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire, each of which has gender affiliations based upon its humoral associations. The fact that the four elements may, in Aristotelian matter theory, be converted into each other is the basis for alchemical theory; their convertibility lends a certain gender fluidity to the alchemical reproductive process.18
Alchemists agree that one culminating step in the alchemical operation is coniunctio, or the “chemical wedding,” a mystical marriage of male and female, and they imagine this wedding as a form of copulation and pregnancy, as many images from medieval and early modern alchemical texts illustrate (see Figures 8 and 9).19 But what are the natures of the masculine and feminine principles that are wed, and do they play equal, subordinated, or absolutely unequal roles in their production of the pure element? For the most part, as I have already suggested, the discussions of theoretical alchemists imply that what they have in mind is a typically hybrid Aristotelian-Galenic reproductive scheme: either masculine form acts solely upon feminine matter, or the feminine component is an inferior and less developed version of the male, who thus plays the more active and more significant reproductive role. For example, at one point in his fifteenth-century Compound of Alchemy, monk and alchemist George Ripley seems to endorse a strictly Aristotelian view, declaring that for alchemy to succeed, the experiment must include only the masculine agent, the feminine container, and the requisite heat: “One thing, one glasse, one furnace, and no moe.”20 But even if a treatise depicts two seeds as in the Galenic system, and despite the equal roles implied by the embrace of “King” sulfur and “Queen” mercury in Figure 9, their hierarchy is clear. As the none-too-consistent Ripley would have it elsewhere, alchemy is effective because
all is sperme; and things there be no moe
But kinde with kinde in number two,
Male and female, agent and patient.21
The products of alchemy could bear out this same hierarchy of gender—“male and female, agent and patient.” As The Mirror of Alchemy asserts, “Golde is a perfect masculine bodie, without any superfluitie or diminution. . . . Silver is also a body almost perfect, and feminine.”22
But other, more radical imaginative constructions of alchemical reproduction could also be had. One option was to declare the principal gendered elements of alchemy to be equal in reproductive agency. Perhaps encouraged by the contention that alchemists’ basic materials were refined, improved versions of ordinary substances, and especially by their insistence that “philosopher’s mercury” was an idealized version of ordinary, lesser mercury, some alchemical theory elevated the feminine part in alchemical reproduction to a status equal to that of the masculine part. Another option was even to reach beyond binary ideas of gender. In confuting the leading classical theorists on the makeup of matter (as I discussed in Chapter 2), Paracelsus also confuted both Aristotelian and Galenic theories of gendered reproduction. For Paracelsus, the masculine Sol and feminine Luna who marry alchemically are not the traditional sulfur and mercury but instead sulfur and salt. Their child is the hermaphroditical mercury, “their Adam, who carries his own invisible Eve hidden in his body. . . . that is, the artificially prepared and true hermaphrodite Adam.”23 Significantly, all three elements possess seed. In effect, Paracelsus’s gendered alchemy amounts to what neither Aristotle nor Galen could have dreamed of: a “three seed” theory. “Our man, Sol, and his wife, Luna, cannot conceive, or do anything in the way of generation, without the seed and sperm of both. Hence the philosophers gathered that a third thing was necessary. . . . Such a sperm is Mercury, which, by the natural conjunction of both bodies, Sol and Luna, receives their nature into itself in union.”24 Believing that alchemy is at work at all times and in all bodies, both terrestrial and celestial, Paracelsus envisions a universe that continually generates and incubates seeds that exist in all things and all creatures. And all of those seeds, including those possessed by the feminine salt and the hermaphroditic mercury, represent active forces.25 The result, Amy Cislo argues, is a radically unconventional view not only of alchemical production but also of human reproduction, which Paracelsus regards as nothing other than an alchemical process.26
Figure 8. The alchemical coitus of Sol and Luna. Johann Daniel Mylius, Anatomia auri (Frankfurt, 1628). Courtesy of the Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections.
Figure 9. Alchemical conception. Johann Daniel Mylius, Anatomia auri (Frankfurt, 1628). Courtesy of the Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Paracelsus’s name is also, however, associated with a radical theory of alchemical conception that entirely opposes the idea of equal participation by masculine and feminine elements. Under the influence of De natura rerum (1572), a text widely taken to be by Paracelsus even though it was published decades after his death, alchemy began to propose that the highest end to which the alchemical vessel could be put was the creation of the homunculus: a true human, perhaps one that even resembled its maker and was infused with a soul.27 The homunculus is grown from heated male semen alone, “out [that is, outside] of the body of a Woman, and naturall matrix.”28 Elsewhere, in De homunculis et monstris (ca. 1529–32), the real Paracelsus shows himself wary of the creation of homunculi. He worries that misplaced male semen could create homunculi willy-nilly—for example, in the throats and intestines of men who had been the receptors in sodomitical intercourse.29 In contrast, whoever wrote De natura rerum openly champions creating a homunculus as what William Newman calls “the distilled essence of masculinity . . . [free] from the gross materiality of the female.”30 While relying on the Aristotelian notion that the male seed alone provides all the form needed for conception, the creation of the homunculus triumphantly eliminates the other element of Aristotelian generation, the feminine matrix. Thus masculine alchemical reproduction is superior in every way to human reproduction, which even in Aristotle’s scheme depends on the inferior content of women’s wombs to produce nothing better than degraded human flesh.
With these examples I have by no means done justice to the range, variety, and sheer oddity of early modern depictions of alchemy as sexual reproduction. Indeed, this range suggests that alchemical theory is not merely a field in which sex and gender variability appears but rather a field to which questions of sex and gender variability are central. In this field, variation morphs into methodology. One not only can choose among a tremendous range of options for imagining the gendered roles of the participants in alchemical sexual reproduction; one must choose. When juxtaposed with anatomical texts, alchemical texts can therefore shed light on how the understanding of human reproductive anatomy deploys selective thinking. More than this, though, the appearance of alchemical imagery in anatomy books should alert us to moments at which that selective thinking is taking place.
It is not news that early modern anatomists were as governed by patriarchalist and misogynist ideologies as any other group of intellectuals would have been at the time. It is, however, fairly new to examine how the science that academic anatomists produced reflects not an unconscious and inevitable misogyny but instead a determined and contingent misogyny. In the last decade or so, feminist historians of science and of intellectual history have demonstrated that the hybrid Aristotelian-Galenic model of human sex—with women as inferior, inadequately formed versions of men—was hardly monolithic. Thus, we can no longer assume that this hybrid scheme was an unavoidable, and hence forgivable, substrate of how early modern scholars thought of women’s bodies. Instead we must examine how and why the elite anatomists of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries persist in not understanding the equal female part in human reproduction.
One avenue of accounting for the state of knowledge of the female reproductive organs is through an examination of medical texts’ treatment of the ovaries. Such an examination might lead us, like many scholars—most prominently Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex—to lay the blame for the failure to modernize knowledge of female reproductive anatomy at the feet of humanist reverence for classical learning. Aristotle’s one-seed version of reproduction had no use for the ovaries at all, since the nourishing “matrix” the woman furnishes in her uterus is the only thing she contributes to conception. And although Galen’s two-seed version of reproduction asserted that the ovaries, analogous to the male testicles, produced female seed, this version does not necessarily lead to a valorization or even a precise examination of the ovaries’ role in conception. Galen also held that the ovaries or “female testicles” were but malformed structures that had much more utility, because much more perfection, in men; as a result, early modern anatomical writers often discounted or simply did not bother to describe the ovaries’ separate function in human reproduction.31 For example, Andreas Vesalius’s tremendously influential De humani corporis fabrica (1543) only notes, in Galenic fashion, “The function and activity of the female . . . testes are made sufficiently clear by what was said above concerning the male seminal organs.”32 A second and ancillary reason for discounting the ovaries is the influence of teachers upon their successors. Vesalius’s pupil Fallopius described the female oviducts in 1561, but he still could not imagine them as anything other than conduits along the lines of the male seminal vesicles.33 A third cause for the failure to understand female generative function was that anatomies of female corpses were rarer than those of male corpses and often hastily undertaken. One of Vesalius’s anatomical subjects, for example, was the corpse of a monk’s mistress, whom his students immediately skinned so that her body would be unrecognizable to her lover and her relatives. Since anatomists usually obtained their corpses from hangings, female cadavers were in shorter supply than males, and pregnant cadavers were downright difficult to come by, given that pregnant condemned criminals were allowed to give birth before an execution sentence was carried out.34 In the second edition of De humani corporis fabrica, Vesalius confesses that much of his material on the human female reproductive organs had been derived from studying animals, primarily dogs.35 For all of these reasons, it is perhaps understandable that a standard theory for the separate and equal function of the female ovaries did not take hold until the late seventeenth century.36
But the story of academic anatomical ignorance may also be told in much less sympathetic fashion, as one of willed ignorance. Recent work in the history of medicine describes early modern writers on human reproductive anatomy as having a much broader range of knowledge models to choose from than the hybrid Aristotelian-Galenic consensus. Eve Keller, for example, describes the early modern English state of knowledge regarding women’s reproductive anatomy as one of eclecticism and lack of agreement, and Laura Gowing speaks of “The comparison of women’s bodies to men’s” in early modern popular medical texts as “part of a heterogeneous corpus of ideas and arguments.”37 If Vesalius was willing to challenge Galen on any number of anatomical points, and if Fallopius was in turn willing to challenge Vesalius, then skepticism about received wisdom might reasonably have been expected to extend to studies of the ovaries long before the late seventeenth century.38 And indeed, skepticism seems to have been a choice available alongside acceptance of classical norms, a choice that appeared particularly in vernacular-language texts. Mary Fissell’s work on vernacular anatomies from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England reveals those writers’ habits of tailoring, adapting, and confuting their sources to suit the local needs of author and audience—sometimes elevating, sometimes denigrating the extent to which female organs participate in and contribute to the generation of offspring.39 Similarly, Janet Adelman describes English physicians writing in the vernacular in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as mostly unconvinced by the hybrid Aristotelian-Galenic model of human reproductive anatomy. In their view, female reproductive organs had separate operations and perfect functions, even if these authors were not entirely sure what all those functions were.40 This skepticism reaches its fullest expression in Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia (1615). Crooke is not exactly remarkable for his feminism, as I will discuss further below, and he generally accepts Galenist views.41 Nevertheless, he asserts that the homology of female and male generative organs is, on the face of it, ridiculous, since those organs hardly resemble each other:
Those things which Galen urgeth concerning the similitude, or parts of generation differing onely in scite and position . . . savour little of the truth of Anatomy, as we have already prooved in the Booke going before: wherein we have shewed how little likenesse there is betwixt the necke of the womb [vagina] and the yard [penis], the bottome of it [labia/vulva] and the cod [head of the penis]. Neither is the structure, figure, or magnitude of the testicles one and their same, nor the distribution and insertion of the spermatick vessels alike, wherefore we must not thinke that the female is an imperfect male differing onely in the position of the genitals.42
The lack of consensus on women’s reproductive role is especially apparent in medical texts’ treatment of the ovaries. Decades after Crooke, at about the same time Dutch anatomist Regnier de Graaf confirmed the perfected and separate nature of the female reproductive organs by explaining what the fallopian tubes really do, Jane Sharp’s Midwives Book (1671) still felt obliged to note, rather tartly, that despite their continuing influence, the likes of Galen and Vesalius had no idea what the ovaries, or female “stones,” look like or what function they serve: “The stones of a woman for generation of seed, are white, thick and well concocted, for I have seen one, and but one and that is more by one than many Men have seen.”43 In 1690, Aristotle’s Master-Piece, Or, the Secrets of Generation claimed the authorship of Aristotle in order to entirely confute both Aristotle and Galen: “The Stones in Women are very useful, for where they are defective, Generation is at an end, for although those little Bladders . . . contain nothing of Seed, as the followers of Galen and Hippocrates did erroneously imagine, yet they contain several Eggs, (commonly to the number of twenty in each Testicle) one of which being impregnated by the most spirituous part of the Mans Seed in the Act of Coition, descends through the Ovi-ducts, into the Womb, and from thence, in process of time, becomes a living Child.”44
The sturdy insistence of a range of early modern medical texts that female reproductive organs, including the ovaries, have their own, separate functions equal in importance to those of the male—perhaps even greater importance—allows us to reinterpret the ignorance of those influential early modern anatomists who clung to the hybrid Aristotelian-Galenic model. It is possible to argue that a physiologist who maintained some version of the Aristotelian-Galenic view of the ovaries was deliberately holding the female reproductive system in a kind of half-light. For the great sixteenth-century thinkers in the field, like Vesalius and Fallopius, and for those prominent seventeenth-century anatomists who followed them, female reproductive anatomy could be seen and yet not seen, described and yet not comprehended. For such thinkers the “sheer repetition” of the Aristotelian-Galenic model, as Patricia Parker asserts, requires interrogation as “symptomatic and ideological rather than as descriptive discourse.”45
For an example of how the concerted application of ideology attempts to sidestep evidence contrary to an updated version of the hybrid Aristotelian-Galenic model, we may look to William Harvey. Potentially, the experimental findings recorded in Harvey’s Exercitationes de generatione animalium (1651) could have prompted a crisis in the patriarchal assumptions of medical learning. Harvey’s determination that there is no gain in mass in either chicken eggs after fertilization or deer uteruses after intercourse prompts him to surmise that semen does not enter the bird’s egg or the mammal’s womb at all. As Keller details, this is a conclusion that might have upended the entire Aristotelian-Galenic system of inherent male superiority.46 Certainly Harvey’s De generatione has been read as revolutionary in this fashion, both by his contemporary Alexander Ross—who grumbled that if Harvey’s theory was true, the female had no need of the male—and by John Rogers, who reads De generatione as protofeminist and antiauthoritarian.47
Harvey himself, however, gets around the seeming problem of male non-participation in conception through a complex series of analogies, culminating in the theory that the male “genitor” imparts his influence noncorporeally, in the same way that an artist’s noncorporeal idea shapes the work produced: “And from this . . . Conception it cometh to pass, that the female doth produce an offspring like the male Genitor. For as we, from the Conception of the Form, or Idea, in the Braine, do fashion a form like to it in our works, so doth the Idea or Species of the Genitor, residing in the Uterus, by the help of the formative facultie, beget a Foetus like the Genitor himself.”48 Harvey thus reinstantiates Aristotle, for whom the seminal “form” impressed on uterine “matter” also has no mass and no physicality. Furthermore, Harvey pooh-poohs the very notion that mammalian ovaries produce anything like seed. At one point, he quite bluntly calls the ovaries “things utterly unconcerned in the matter of Generation” (407 [Dd4r]).49 At another point he puts it far more polemically: “But for my part I wonder much, how they fancy, that so elaborate, concocted, and quickening semen, can arise from so imperfect and obscure parts” as the ovaries, so much so that the female semen “should exceed the Males in power, spirit, and generative ability” (175 [M8r]).
The “they” whom Harvey mocks here, specifically, is Helkiah Crooke. As evidenced by prose echoes and paraphrases, Harvey demonstrably referred to Crooke’s Microcosmographia while composing his De generatione.50 What we read as we read De generatione, then, is a record of Harvey’s having Microcosmographia propped up in front of him, adopting its phraseology but choosing to depart from its plausible contentions of ovarian usefulness. We thus find Harvey, who is otherwise often quite pugnacious about disproving classical theory, in this case preferring the conceptual framework of the classical text over a contemporary empirical account. At this moment, Harvey’s approach to his topic is overtly imparted by humanism’s command: when given alternative theories, choose the one that comports with antique authority.
Studiously avoiding Crooke’s assertion of ovarian function requires, however, a good deal of effort on Harvey’s part, and Harvey deliberately turns to fiction to help him make the case. Specifically, he turns to the fiction of alchemy. After hundreds of pages of markedly dry analysis of chicken eggs, Harvey enters upon a much shorter and much more florid discussion of mammalian reproduction based upon his dissections of deer. This discussion engages, as Keller has analyzed, in extravagant analogies to explain how it is that the male essence determines conception even when no semen enters the uterus. Harvey’s most elaborate prose, however, is reserved for De generatione’s last three chapters, in which he departs from his anatomies of deer species in order to mount an operatic paean to the nurturing qualities of blood, which, he argues, provides the nutrition and developmental environment that the fetus needs. The vitalist strain in Harvey that John Rogers has analyzed is on full display here.51 Also on full display, however, is alchemy. Walter Pagel, Allen Debus, and Peter Mitchell have established that Harvey’s theories of blood circulation are in large part derived from Paracelsian alchemical medical theory.52 On the one hand, Harvey rejects Paracelsian alchemical notions such as a vital “distinct spirit, and innate heat, which is of a celestial extract . . . partaking of a fift essence” (449 [Gg1r]). On the other hand, even while he explicitly rejects Paracelsus’s concept of the blood as “partaking of a fift essence,” he expropriates exactly the alchemical qualities of the quintessence, the philosopher’s stone, for blood. Like Paracelsian “spirit,” Harvey’s blood derives from primordial heat, possesses “fruitful” (that is, formative) powers, and is “answerable in proportion to the element or substance of the Stars” (452 [Gg2v]). In short, “The Blood therefore is a Spirit” (455 [Gg4r]).53 Here Harvey recapitulates some of the alchemically derived language of his predecessor Andrea Cesalpino, who in the sixteenth century had proposed a theory of the circulation of the blood based upon alchemical processes of repeated distillation, of heating and cooling.54 Thus, while Harvey has excluded semen from the uterus, he has, in a sense, reincorporated it by means of the old physiological association of refined blood with semen as “spirit.”55 In this case, the blood seems to have been alchemically refined.
And yet the appropriation of alchemical “spirit” to the blood is the appropriation of a fable. Who could believe that blood has such efficacy, Harvey asks rhetorically, when its name is so commonplace (460 [Gg6v])? To make his point, Harvey borrows from Jean Fernel’s On the Hidden Causes of Things (De abditis rerum causis, 1548) a riddle of a “miraculous Stone” of “infinite purity” and tremendous beauty that possesses extraordinary powers: it cannot be touched; it transforms everything it touches; it has been known to fall from heaven to earth (460–61 [Gg6v–Gg7r]).56 The philosopher’s stone, surely. But no: the answer to the riddle is “flame.” With this answer, the magical alchemical object is revealed as purely ordinary after all. “In like manner,” analogizes Harvey, “if I should describe the Blood under the veil and covering of a Fable, calling it the Philosophers stone, and displaying all its endowments, operations, and faculties, in an aenigmatical manner; doubtless every body would set a greater price upon it, and believing it to act beyond the Activity of the elements, would ascribe another and more divine body unto it” (462 [Gg7v]). Harvey is describing his own strategy here: he has given blood the attributes of the philosopher’s stone, proposing its qualities and operations in the “aenigmatical,” fabulous, and (despite his protestations) manifestly grandiloquent language of alchemy.
Only by resorting to the fabulist terms of alchemy can Harvey cement his case about the wonders of blood. Elizabeth Spiller makes the point that Harvey’s alliance between fetal and mental conception extends to Harvey’s own scientific practice: “Harvey is talking not so much about women . . . as about himself and his acts of scientific creation.”57 But in resorting to alchemy, Harvey only highlights the fact that his decision to shrug off the influence of the ovaries, and even of the uterus, in conception and gestation equates to the choice of a certain kind of fiction. There is a kind of willfulness, if not exactly a kind of arbitrariness, about a biological theory that describes itself in alchemical terms. After all, as I described above, alchemy itself offers any number of models for assigning agency or passivity to one gender or another. The frontispiece of Harvey’s 1651 London edition of De generatione, which features Jove opening an egg from which, as if from Pandora’s box, creatures of all kinds are emerging, could serve equally as an alchemical emblem—drawing upon “egg” as a common term for an alchemical vessel—and as an illustration for the primacy of the female in generation. “Ex ovo omnia,” the egg is labeled.58 It is as plausible that “everything comes from the egg” as that everything comes from the spirit. Turning from one alchemical fiction of reproduction to another, from egg to spirit, is not so terribly difficult.59
To a large extent, of course, Harvey’s theories of sexual reproduction do not matter. Even though Harvey saw his influential work on the circulation of the blood as a companion to his work on embryology, De generatione had almost no influence on the study of physiology, and it marks, as Laqueur notes, a kind of last hurrah for Aristotelianism.60 In another sense, however, Harvey models the way in which the avoidance of female reproductive anatomy paradoxically remains a kind of academic and philosophical norm in the seventeenth century, even while the body of accurate knowledge concerning human reproductive processes increases.
Up to this point in this chapter, I have been using the word avoid largely to describe a kind of reading practice: for example, Harvey avoids information that is on the pages of Crooke’s Microcosmographia in front of him. In addition, however, my use of avoid draws from and incorporates Stanley Cavell’s usage in his classic essay on King Lear, “The Avoidance of Love.” Cavell describes the characters’ need to avoid love as a matter of their need not to acknowledge others, and thus not to own up to the responsibilities that love requires. Avoiding love brings comfort in that it brings less pain, less effort. Another aim of avoidance is certainty, which gives us “the idea that we can save our lives by knowing them.”61 When Harvey traffics in fable in De generatione—fable that is allied with alchemy—he does so in a way that both reaches toward certainty and reveals the leaps of comforting illogic that such knowledge requires.
In the process Harvey also, however, inches toward the same mid-seventeenth century separation of individual from world that, perfected by René Descartes, will both support epistemological certainty and enable the kinds of epistemological crisis that Cavell identifies with Shakespearean tragedy. Harvey’s description of embryonic fertilization as originating in a male idea, like his description of the blood as the sole support of the self-sustained human body, tends to diminish human dependence on anyone outside the self: the man’s seminal conception requires no female contribution, just as the circulation of blood requires no Galenic, humoral interpenetration of the elements of the body with the elements of its terrestrial surroundings.62 For Cavell, this kind of separation of self from world, at its extreme, leads to the kind of misogynistic violence seen in Shakespeare’s tragic heroes like Othello, whose “disowning” (to use Cavell’s term) and murder of his wife reflect both the futile hope that utter knowledge of the female other is possible, and the realization that this hope will always be dashed. In adopting Cavell’s analysis of Cartesian skepticism, I emphasize the extent to which the feminine epitomizes that which cannot be known. Cavell attributes the skeptical crisis whose end stage is murderous violence to both capitalist and psychic causes: to the problem of “exclusive possession, call it private property” and to “an intellectualization of . . . the child’s sense of loss in separating from the mother’s body.”63 If he is correct in these causes—and I think he is—then it is clear that managing this skeptical crisis without resorting to violence would require a better system of possessing and intellectualizing the feminine. Such a system, a culture-wide project of epistemological misogyny, would enact a milder, less engaged, and hence more socially functional form of Cartesian skepticism. It would enable dominance over the construction of women because otherwise women represent the incomprehensible nature of the physical world. But instead of achieving dominance through violence, it would achieve it merely by eliminating from the prevailing knowledge scheme any element of femininity that cannot be dominated.
The kind of reading and study practice I have detailed with Harvey, one that recycles classical frameworks when they preserve a male-dominated model of human reproduction, becomes an exceptionally useful component of this kind of avoidance of knowledge. Epistemological misogyny can profitably take place on the level of the cited source: which to include, which to discard. We can discern this kind of misogyny, I have argued, in Harvey’s analysis of the female reproductive organs. However, this sort of studious misogyny can also take place in other bookish registers—including, paradoxically, ones that choose to discard classical authority entirely. For example, Will Fisher describes how some anatomy books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries depart from Galen to deemphasize the importance of the testicles, lauded by Galen as the principal part of the human body. Such a counterintuitive move, argues Fisher, is aligned with what Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin have identified as the emergence of “performative masculinity” in the period, a more effective form of masculine dominance that came to replace the old regime of patrilineal inheritance.64 Similarly, Jonathan Sawday identifies the “stridently aggressive language of appropriation and domination” in the Royal Society’s publications with Harvey’s and his culture’s need to reassert royalist, masculinist psychosexual authority after the feminizing disruptions of the English Civil War.65
One point must be stressed in order to modify Fisher’s and Sawday’s insights, however. The stakes for avoiding gynecology in bookish medical culture were not only the preservation of male dominance but also the preservation of male sexual desire as the indispensable prop of that dominance. Keeping male desire alive requires knowing less about the feminine, and knowing less may be assisted by the way the knower is presented with bookish information. We see this form of useful avoidance in a number of early modern anatomy books, including the work of none other than Helkiah Crooke, who despite his championship of the ovaries’ reproductive role follows upon a long tradition of anatomy books’ steering clear of the facts of female sexual organs. Because Crooke’s volume was written in English rather in the customary and properly obfuscatory Latin, portions of the text that circulated before publication came under attack in the Royal College of Physicians for what was deemed their overly clear descriptions of female generative parts. The Bishop of London informed Crooke’s printer, William Jaggard—who was, incidentally, also the printer of Shakespeare’s First Folio—that if the book was not altered it was liable to be destroyed.66 In his preface to the chapter dealing with “the Naturall Parts belonging to generation” that ultimately appeared in print, Crooke goes to great lengths to defend himself against this charge of making too much known. Crooke worries that his book might be misconstrued as an effort to “ensnare mens mindes by sensuall demonstrations,” and he admits to having been tempted by the option of skipping the topic of the reproductive organs entirely: “Being arived at this place in the tract of my Anatomicall Peregrination, I entred into deliberation with my selfe, whether I were best silently to passe it by, or to insist uppon [including] it as I had done in the former [chapters].”67
Crooke’s eventual decision not to “pass by” the place of the genitalia and to forge ahead with his descriptions contrasts, at first glance, with the many other early anatomy books that go to great lengths, even while they are ostensibly illustrating the female organs of generation, to avoid a full revelation of female bodies and thereby to maintain the typical aesthetic apparatus of male desire. This avoidance depends on several specifically print-based devices. The first of these is illustration. As Valerie Traub has shown, the female figure in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century anatomy book typically composes herself into the form of the classical nude, complete with the classical gesture of modesty—the hand covering the genital area—that is meant to compensate for what Traub calls the “dread of the female genital interior.”68 The illustrated woman’s covering hand also indicates, however, that the dread of the female genital interior is matched by the dread of what is technically exterior—that is, the visible parts that cover and accompany the entrance to copulation and conception. For example, the extraordinary “flap book” anatomy text of Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum, first published in Latin in 1613 and later in French, English, German, and Dutch, decently obscures the female figure’s genitals not only with the customary painterly drape but also with a marvelous cloud of unknowing: one made of the smoke of a phoenix, whose caption obfuscates the facts of genital reproduction by comparing the life of man to that legendary bird’s fiery death and asexual rebirth (see Figure 10).69 (At least one copy of a later English edition accomplishes this genital occultation by replacing the drape/cloud flap with the face of Satan.70) Once the flaps are opened to reveal what lies beneath, the cloud cleared to expose the female form, what is found between the woman’s labia is only a vacancy, nothing, a literal “avoidance” (see Figure 11).
Along with anatomical illustrations’ obfuscation or omission of what lies between maids’ legs, as Hamlet would put it, we must consider their frequent pictorial setting within a scene of seduction. The anatomized female figure reveals her own reproductive capacity within the somewhat reassuring context of the bedchamber, complete with soft pillows and a gestured invitation to join her in bed.71 Together these details put the lie to Crooke’s anxieties. Anatomical drawings and descriptions provoke and preserve male desire not by revealing the female sexual organs but by avoiding them.
In the end, Crooke himself makes allowance for meliorating his own book in the direction of avoiding gynecology, thus converting his reader from the man who knew too much into the man who has been relieved of too much information. That relief comes about both through Crooke’s rhetoric and through his deployment of yet another print-based technique for avoiding a revelation of the feminine: a suggestion for the scholarly handling of his book. Referring to his discussion of reproductive anatomy, Crooke reassures us, “As much as was possible we have endeavoured (not frustrating our lawfull scope) by honest wordes and circumlocutions to molifie the harshenesse of the Argument.” Like the woman’s genitalia in Remmelin’s “flap book,” Crooke’s rhetoric regarding female genitalia is softened, clouded, “molifie[d]” through “circumlocutions.” If that is not enough, however, the offending material may be physically removed from the volume: “beside we have so plotted our busines, that he that listeth may separate this Booke [that is, the section “On . . . generation”] from the rest and reserve it privately unto himselfe.”72 If thy text offend thee, cut it out. Crooke may be secondarily suggesting that if the offensive cut-out section is “reserve[d] . . . privately,” it will have a second use as an aid to masturbatory pleasure. This too, however, would be a mode of avoiding knowledge. Using the practice of scholarly reading against itself, the masturbating user shunts aside academic anatomical knowledge in order to engage in sexual fantasy.
Figure 10. Anatomical figure of a woman, flaps closed. Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum (Augsburg, 1619). Photograph used by permission of the University of Iowa John Martin Rare Book Room.
Figure 11. Anatomical figure of a woman, flaps open (detail). Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum (Augsburg, 1619). Photograph used by permission of the University of Iowa John Martin Rare Book Room.
For some writers, these anatomy books’ application of the technology of the printed book to the scholarly avoidance of female reproductive anatomy—via ingenious illustration or via pages typeset so as to be excisable—aligns with another fruitful set of metaphorical associations between alchemy and disknowledge. I have detailed how alchemy is a theory and practice of perfectibility that extends to perfecting the process of sexual generation. Because alchemy’s ways of imagining sexual generation are so diverse, however—indeed, as I have argued, alchemy represents the very act of choosing how to regard human reproduction—alchemy may be used as a way to figure the process of knowledge making involved in determining how, exactly, we imagine the perfect woman and the perfect mode of reproduction. In the literary works to which I now turn, alchemical imagery surrounds exactly these issues. On the one hand, as in the anatomy books, alchemy applied to the female body may signify a choice to remain permanently in the state of seeing only her most pleasing aspects, never obliged to know more. On the other, as in the more adventurous alchemical theory I discussed above, alchemy may also signify a choice to radically reimagine the female role in reproduction along nonpatriarchal lines.
When Edmund Spenser examines alchemical reproduction in The Faerie Queene, he introduces alchemy to explore what men desire to know, what they think they know, and what they avoid knowing about women’s bodies. Not coincidentally, the most prominent instances of alchemy appear in the “marriage books” of The Faerie Queene: books 3, 4, and 5, which include the travels and travails of the poem’s one knight whose quest is marriage, Britomart, and the poem’s longest-standing object of male desire, Florimell. For Spenser, alchemy helps explain how female beauty serves, like the nonrevealing, sexy pose of the female anatomical illustration, to preserve male sexual desire while diverting men from more challenging theories of women’s part in sexual reproduction. The Faerie Queene, however, treats this diversion as a truly stupid option, one that closes off both epistemological sophistication and—what amounts to the same thing for Spenser—literary innovation.
Throughout The Faerie Queene a constellation of Hermetic-Neoplatonic-Pythagorean ideas are brought to bear on questions of biological reproduction in ways that evidence Spenser’s association of Hermeticism with the female body and with the feminine reproductive role. This typical Renaissance mishmash of cosmologies emerges, for example, in book 3’s superfecund Garden of Adonis and in book 2’s House of Alma, whose entire construction is based on an allegory of the (arguably female) body.73 More important than their evincing this cluster of Spenserian intellectual obsessions, however, is the fact that those episodes are precisely where The Faerie Queene conspicuously both feints toward and veers from an examination of what human reproductive organs look like and do. The Garden of Adonis canto, while it metonymically displaces both female and male genitalia onto the landscape and its fauna (the middle of the garden features a “stately Mount” of Venus, under which is a rocky cave in which the “wilde Bore” that gored Adonis is chained), declines to explain the exact sexual function of all of these topographical features or how, exactly, the hidden Adonis manages to be “the Father of all formes” that emerge from the garden (3.6.43, 47–48).74 And famously, Alma’s house omits the genitals entirely from its allegory of the human frame.75
When alchemy is added to this mix, however, the question of why one would want to diverge from the organs of reproduction, specifically the female organs, is highlighted. This query begins in book 1, when Archimago, whose name evokes an “Arch-Magus,” creates a false double for Una out of a hell-dwelling sprite,
And fram’d of liquid ayre her tender partes
So liuely and so like in all mens sight,
That weaker sence it could haue rauisht quight.
(1.1.45)
The “liquid air” he uses to fashion this artificial woman corresponds to the elemental qualities of alchemical mercury, that feminine component of the alchemical trial, which, as Maier’s Atalanta fugiens puts it, is the “water of the Air . . . [that] dissolves body into spirit, and makes a living thing of a dead thing, and conducts a marriage between man and woman.”76 In particular, the stanza dwells upon how Archimago uses this liquid air to form the false Una’s “tender partes.” While most of the real Una’s parts are no doubt “tender,” Spenser plays on what A. C. Hamilton calls the “folk etymology” for “woman” (Latin mulier) as molis air, or “softened air,” to imply that Archimago requires alchemical means specifically to concoct the false Una’s most womanly parts, her genitalia (1.1.45n). In this way, Archimago “mollifies,” softens and blurs, the false Una’s sexual equipment just as Helkiah Crooke “mollifies” the language of his descriptions of the human female reproductive organs. And as with both Crooke’s descriptions and the anatomy books’ decorously draped female nudes, it is the “mollified” woman who proves more attractive than the authentic one. Even Archimago himself is beguiled “with so goodly sight” of his creation: sight, that is, not of the fleshy parts of an actual woman but of the liquid air of an alchemical one (1.1.45).77 In other words, even the man who knows the difference—or, I should say, especially the man who knows the difference, Archimago—prefers looking imperfectly at an alchemical woman to looking plainly at a real one.
The poem also suggests, however, that when avoiding the sight of the feminine is signaled by alchemy, we can discern, as in William Harvey’s account of generation, the choice of a particular kind of knowledge and a particular kind of fictionalizing. While we do not hear what ultimately happens to the false, alchemical Una, the similar replacement of a beautiful woman with her alchemical double becomes a significant story arc of books 3, 4, and 5. When the oafish son of a witch falls for Florimell (“flower honey”), the poem’s sweetest woman, he is so racked with lovesickness that his mother undertakes “a wondrous worke to frame” (3.8.5), the alchemical production of a false Florimell:
The substance, whereof she the body made,
Was purest snow in massy mould congeald,
The same she tempred with fine Mercury,
And virgin wex, that neuer yet was seald,
And mingled them with perfect vermily,
That like a liuely sanguine it seemd to the eye.
(3.8.6)
What would otherwise be a standard-issue satire on the poetic construction of a woman through blazons—the witch also uses “burning lampes” for eyes and “golden wyre” for hair (3.8.7)—is transformed into an alchemical operation through three significant ingredients: “fine” or refined mercury, the kind that was usually part of the initial mixture of the alchemical work; “virgin wax,” a common alchemical ingredient; and vermilion, indicative of a much-desired state called “rubification” that was a sign that the alchemical process was nearing perfection.78 This stanza’s idiosyncratic spelling of “virgin wex,” the only instance of “wex” used for “wax” in Spenser’s works, also indicates the moonlike “wexing” of the alchemical pregnancy that follows coniunctio.
Perhaps obviously, given that book 3’s bipartite structure follows up its first six cantos of natural production with six cantos of unnatural, parodic production, the witch’s creation, located in the eighth canto, trots out the alchemist’s fantasy of a purified, nonfleshly reproduction of human bodies in order to deride it as just that—fantasy. Spenser also, however, uses the pairing of the false and true Florimells to explore an epistemological question: What is it about beautiful women, exactly, that we wish to know? The remainder of False Florimell’s career challenges us to recognize how much or how little we want to understand of the female body’s anatomical structures and reproductive capacity, and how satisfied we are with noticing golden hair and snowy skin instead. Just as Helkiah Crooke recommends that the squeamish or titillated reader of Microcosmographia remove and “reserve” the pages on human reproduction, so too does the narrative of The Faerie Queene remove the true Florimell from the prospect of marriage and childbirth, putting False Florimell in her place. Captured by Proteus in book 3 and imprisoned under the sea, the true Florimell languishes until book 5, when, after her rescue by her true love Marinell, she and her alchemical duplicate—who has been taken for the true Florimell in the meantime—are finally brought together at the tournament held to celebrate Florimell’s and Marinell’s wedding. No one, including Marinell himself, is able to distinguish the true Florimell from the false on the basis of appearance. Their exactitude sets off an epistemological crisis:
All that behold so strange prodigious sight,
Not knowing natures worke, nor what to weene,
Are rapt with wonder, and with rare affright.
(5.3.19)
Artegall, the knight of justice who attempts to solve the conundrum of what is “natures worke” and what is not, moves to differentiate false from true Florimell by pointing out the company False Florimell has kept: her champion is Braggadocchio, whose borrowed plumes mask the fact that he has never been in battle at all. Stripping his own sleeve to show his battle scars, Artegall asks Braggadocchio to do the same (5.3.21–22). The implication is that if the two women were stripped like Artegall’s and Braggadocchio’s naked arms, they would show the same difference: one woman would be wounded and one not. In the women’s case, the “wounded” woman, the one who has been penetrated, would be the false one, False Florimell, whom Artegall identifies as “some fayre Franion, fit for such a fere [as Braggadocchio]” (5.3.22). Perhaps derived from the Old French fraignant, present participle of “to break,” franion generally means the kind of roistering young man who breaks things: furniture, hearts, hymens.79 Stripping a female franion, like stripping the upper-body armor from both a true knight and a false knight, would thus seem to be a strategy to identify her on the basis of physical breakage. Artegall proposes that a hymen, if it were found, would distinguish true from false Florimell.80
Such a gynecological examination is not to be had, however. As with the false Una, an alchemical apparition distracts from the uncovering of female reproductive anatomy. The minute the true and false Florimell are placed next to each other, False Florimell undergoes a new round of alchemical processing, in this case melting:
Th’enchaunted Damzell vanisht into nought:
Her snowy substance melted as with heat,
So did this Ladies goodly forme decay,
And into nothing goe, ere one could it bewray.
(5.3.24–25)
Nor is the true Florimell “bewrayed” (revealed), either. Rather, Artegall confirms the true Florimell’s chastity by presenting her with a substitute, crafted hymen, the girdle that she lost just before her capture by Proteus:
Such power it had, that to no womans wast
By any skill or labour it would sit,
Vnlesse that she were continent and chast.
(5.3.28)
Though crafted of gold, the purest of substances and one of alchemy’s holy grails, the girdle’s true usefulness seems to be as a covering that displaces the view upward toward the woman’s waist, in the same fashion that the decorous hand of the anatomy book’s female nude encourages us to gaze anywhere but there.
What would we see if we saw? Spenser here asks us, briefly, a different and more challenging version of that question: What would we like to see if we saw, and what would we fear to see? The Faerie Queene identifies one version of that desire and that fear when it becomes clear that many of the male knights would prefer to see as little as possible. When False Florimell melts instead of being stripped, Spenser indulges in a joke, much beloved of his younger contemporary Shakespeare, that he makes only twice in The Faerie Queene, as best as I can tell: the joke that a woman’s genitals, if we saw them, might in fact be “nothing.” In Shakespeare’s most famous use of this bitter trope, one to which I have already alluded, Hamlet retaliates against Ophelia’s assertion of will—she declines his request to “lie in [her] lap”—first by making an obscene pun (“Do you think I meant country matters?”) and then by taking her shocked reply, “I think nothing, my lord,” as an opportunity to convert the cunt in his word country into a vacancy, a nothing:
Hamlet.That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
Ophelia.What is, my lord?
Hamlet.Nothing.81
Hamlet’s need to void the feminine has been well explored and need not detain us here. What we must notice is that Spenser, in contrast to Shakespeare, associates the “nothingness” of female genitals not with a real woman but only with a woman who has been specifically constructed to have nothing real about her. Threatened with stripping, False Florimell reveals only nothing: she “vanisht into nought.” Thus “did this Ladies goodly forme decay, / And into nothing goe” (5.3.24–25; emphasis added).82 Still, when False Florimell melts into nothingness, the male knights in attendance reveal that they preferred her alchemically crafted falsehood to any other woman’s true being:
They stricken were with great astonishment,
And their faint harts with senselesse horrour queld,
To see the thing, that seem’d so excellent,
So stolen from their fancies wonderment.
(5.3.26)
False Florimell’s “thing, that seem’d so excellent” was no thing at all, and yet this alchemical diversion is still preferable to the feminine body better left unseen.83
In the case of nonartificial women, in contrast, Spenser if anything makes the reverse joke: a feminine nothing is hardly a vacancy, but rather can be the most noticeable thing a man has ever met. Hence Spenser’s habit of naming book 1’s primary women in multiples of one—Una, Duessa—as if to emphasize from the beginning of the poem that whatever women are, they are not nothing. This feminine presence in The Faerie Queene in turn corresponds to an alternative alchemy, one that presents a much more challenging and less mollifying view of human reproduction than the kind of alchemy that creates the false Una or False Florimell. Among the many choices that alchemy presents regarding male and female roles in conception, Britomart’s dream in book 5’s Temple of Isis chooses one of the most radical options, discussed above, for male and female reproductive roles. It adopts neither Aristotle’s view (masculine form imprinting upon feminine matter), nor Galen’s view (active masculine seed uniting with passive feminine seed), nor Pseudo-Paracelsus’s view (masculine seed acting alone, parthenogenetically). Rather, it plays out the alchemical scenario propounded by the real Paracelsus, in which all three contributors to the alchemical process—masculine sulfur, feminine salt, and their offspring, the hermaphroditic mercury—share equal potency and equal participation. This proposition proves to be a dangerous business, however, as evidenced by the fact that the episode closes out with an ostentatiously bad reading of Britomart’s dream, one that attempts to render her vision palatable by avoiding any further consideration of an equal feminine reproductive role.
The Isis Church episode of book 5 is replete with alchemical meaning and iconography to an extent that has not yet been studied.84 This episode is the only extended instance in which The Faerie Queene turns to ancient Egypt, the legendary origin of the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus. Although Egypt’s Nile and its fecundity are significant touchstones throughout The Faerie Queene, only in Isis Church does Egyptian lore acquire Hermetic and specifically alchemical connotations.85 For example, the temple priests wear
rich Mitres shaped like the Moone,
To shew that Isis doth the Moone portend;
Like as Osyris signifies the Sunne.
(5.7.4; emphasis in the original)
Given these gods’ associations with marriage and fecundity, it is at first glance unremarkable that the symbology of Isis and Osiris appears here.86 Yet these two gods are mentioned by name only here in The Faerie Queene, and the reference seems designed to carry alchemical as well as mythographic weight. As sun god and moon goddess, Osiris and Isis denote for alchemical theory the chemical wedding of masculine and feminine elements upon which the alchemical work depends, with Osiris/Sol as sulfur and Isis/Luna as either the traditional mercury or the Paracelsian salt. Not for nothing, then, is book 5’s statue of Isis framed in silver and crowned with gold (5.7.6). In this metallic context, the odd hermaphroditism of the crocodile at the statue’s feet (addressed with female pronouns in the sixth stanza and male pronouns in the fifteenth) completes the alchemical scheme, since in alchemy, crocodiles and their more or less interchangeable scaly siblings—serpents, basilisks, dragons, and cockatrices—signify the hermaphroditic product of the marriage of Sol and Luna.87 Thus, proclaims Michael Maier in his Arcana arcanissima (1613), the “chemist’ gods” are “Osiris, Isis, Mercury, and Vulcan.”88 The full effect of the statue’s fusion of emblematics and alchemy is to anticipate the kind of elaborate alchemical emblem that, having circulated throughout the Renaissance, became popular after the publication of Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1617).89
With this setup, it is perhaps inevitable that Britomart’s dream is a dream of an alchemical conception, pregnancy, and birth. It is a dream that unites the four elements. Air and fire surround her, as a “hideous tempest . . . / all about did blow / The holy fire” of the temple, and as she herself, an earthy and liquid woman, brings her “earthly parts . . . deeply drowned” in sleep (5.7.12). Britomart begins by being alchemically transfigured into the statue of Isis, with the “linnen stole” she dreams herself decked in “transfigured / . . . to robe of scarlet red” and her “Moone-like Mitre” transfigured “to a Crowne of gold” like the one Isis’s statue wears (5.7.13). As Peggy Muñoz Simonds has argued, the tempest marks the first stage in alchemy, the confusion of elements; and reddening or “rubification,” as I have already mentioned, is a significant stage in the progress of the alchemical work.90 Most important, however, is the fact that Britomart and the hermaphroditic crocodile become reciprocally pregnant. The crocodile devours “Both flames and tempest” and “grow[s] great, / And swolne with pride of his owne peerelesse powre”; she in turn “of his game . . . soone enwombed grew” and gives birth to “a Lion of great might” (5.7.15–16). A transvestite knight herself, Britomart mates with a hermaphroditic crocodile to produce a lion whose sex, at this point, is unspecified. The end result of this coniunctio is a dream of Paracelsian alchemical reproduction in which no element has the upper hand, no element is either purely masculine or purely feminine, and the child resembles its mother (since Britomart is Britain and so is the lion) as much as its father (since a crocodile is a beast and so is a lion).
Of all the radical reenvisionings of gendered reproduction in The Faerie Queene, Britomart’s dream may be the most radical of all. Neither a conception along Aristotelian-Galenic lines, with a subordinate feminine agent, nor even a strictly feminine parthenogenesis whose agency may be safely sloughed off onto “nature” or blamed upon monstrosity (as in the case of Errour’s brood in book 1), Britomart’s and the crocodile’s “game” is the coniunctio of equals. It is a dream so unnerving that Britomart, “fraught with melancholy” (5.7.17), seeks advice, and the chief priest to whom she relates her vision reacts “Like to a weake faint-hearted man . . . / Through great astonishment of that strange sight.” Like the “astonied” men who appear frequently in Spenser’s poetry, the priest, “with long locks vp-standing,” is evidently the victim of the Medusa effect. Momentarily unable to speak, he “stifly stared / Like one adawed [daunted] with some dreadfull spright” (5.7.20).
This gender malleability does not last long, however. I use the pronoun he to describe the chief priest here because, in the aftermath of Britomart’s dream, that is the poem’s pronoun for him. When Britomart first enters Isis Church, Isis’s priests, like the lion to whom Britomart gives birth in her vision, are not identified as one sex or the other. A secure pronoun assignment swiftly follows her vision, however, and it signals an effort to wrench Britomart’s dream back into the typical Aristotelian-Galenic model of reproduction and of male-female gender hierarchy. Interpreting the crocodile of Britomart’s dream as Artegall, Britomart’s intended, the priest reads the vision as a political allegory in which Artegall defends Britomart’s “iust heritage” of her father’s kingdom. After marrying Artegall and joining him “in equall portion of [her] realme,” Britomart “a sonne to him shalt beare, / That Lion-like shall shew his powre extreame” (5.7.23). Alchemical emblem shifts to royal coat of arms and gender complexity to gender simplicity, with Britomart’s androgynous lion-child now not a lion at all, but a merely “Lion-like” son. From this point in the story, Britomart heads off to right the gender hierarchy, freeing Artegall from the Amazon Radigund’s shameful captivity and handing the rule of Radigund’s city-state over to him.
The outcome of the priest’s reinterpretation of Britomart’s vision in Isis Church is not, however, simply the loss of an alternative gender identity, as Britomart’s trajectory is redirected from wandering, transvestite knight to subordinate wife and mother of British kings. It is also the loss of an alternative epistemology, which for Spenser always also means an alternative poetics. Analyzing instances in The Faerie Queene of feminine parthenogenesis, Elizabeth Spiller argues that the very structure and composition of the poem are imbricated in alternative early modern theories of pregnancy. Quests, which tend to be of nine-month duration in The Faerie Queene, are equated with gestation, and gestation with ideation and with the formulation of fiction. Spiller thus finds it important both for an Aristotelian-Galenic model of biological reproduction and for a male-centered model of authorship that, for example, Britomart’s quest—which begins as her independent conception of her future lover Artegall—is appropriated by Merlin’s narrative of what she is up to. Otherwise, other, less predictable modes of biological and authorial conception could intervene.91 The Isis Church episode, in my view, demonstrates quite openly how arbitrary—indeed, how intellectually inadequate—such an appropriation can be. As Lowell Gallagher puts it, book 5 as a whole is in the habit of showing what details must be left out of the story for ham-fisted interpretation such as the chief priest’s to happen. Book 5 is also in the habit of thematizing this blindness. Thus book 5 is “about and yet not about the hegemonic economy of interpretation brought to bear in the production of pious legends” such as the pious legend of justice.92 Or, I would add, the pious legend of male elements mastering female in the conception and gestation of children.
The interpretative choice of what story to tell is also, however, the epistemological choice of what phenomena to notice and to know. Dorothy Stephens and I have both identified moments in The Faerie Queene—like Britomart’s dream, or the Medusan “astonishment” with which the chief priest hears of her dream—with narrative contingency: they are moments when anything might happen, and when the range of objects and events in view might expand beyond one’s ken.93 Another word for these periodic apertures of contingency might be wonder. According to Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included a new (and never again repeated) overlap between natural philosophy and the study of marvels. Following upon the way that thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino and Girolamo Cardano innovatively argued for the admission of contingency and chance into the physical and metaphysical structure of the universe, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophers granted the contingent and unexplained event “a brief but key role in forging a new category of scientific experience: the fact detached from explanation, illustration, or inference.”94 The marvelous, contingent, astonishing phenomenon might lend itself to epistemological innovation.
Indeed, Descartes’s efforts late in his career to construct a theory of wonder propose exactly that kind of innovation: apprehension without the attempt at ownership. When the observer is in the state of wonder, objects and persons are simply seen, not assimilated into a knowledge system that effaces them. “When our first encounter with some object surprises us and we find it novel, or very different from what we formerly know or from what we supposed it ought to be, this causes us to wonder and to be astonished at it. . . . [T]his may happen before we know whether or not the object is beneficial [convenable] to us.”95 What we notice about Cartesian wonder is, first of all, its potentially revolutionary application of the scientific method. It takes in new phenomena without inserting them into previously established knowledge. In contrast with the link Cavell outlines between skepticism—that other Cartesian response to the world—and a horrendous, destructive misogyny, wonder might take in, say, the visual and conceptual object of study that is female reproductive anatomy and consider it marvelous. Descartes makes it possible, in other words, for the sense of the marvelous that Daston and Park associate with premodern natural philosophy to persist in an age of scientific discovery.96 The second thing we notice is the feminized quality of the brain in wonderment as Descartes imagines it: “objects of the senses that are novel affect the brain in certain parts where it is not normally affected; and . . . since these parts are more tender or less firm than those hardened through frequent agitation, the effects of the movements produced in them are thereby increased.”97 Descartes’s tender brain in the state of wonderment brings Luce Irigaray to describe Cartesian wonder as an experience that sidesteps castration anxiety so that the feminine may be truly encountered. “A separation without a wound,” Irigaray calls it.98
Arguing for an application of Irigarayan wonder to certain examples of blazons addressing a woman, Grant Williams suggests that Renaissance literature sometimes evidences the ability to encounter the female body as feminine alterity rather than as something to be known and mastered.99 This literary wonder seems to have extended to some avenues of early modern anatomical science in the form of innovative curiosity about what can be seen of the external structures of female genitalia. For example, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw in England, improbably enough, the “discovery” of the female clitoris as an anatomical feature designed for something previously unthinkable: feminine pleasure with no immediate reproductive end. On the one hand, the discovery of the clitoris and the prospect of excess female sexual pleasure drew, as Traub has shown, a tremendous amount of disapprobation.100 On the other, as Traub, Park, and Bettina Mathes have all discussed, discovering the clitoris requires acknowledging at least some possibility of consequential female sexual difference that countervails the Aristotelian-Galenic scheme.101
The Spenserian equivalent of this kind of gynecological wonder occurs in book 6 of The Faerie Queene, when one of the knights of courtesy, Calidore, stumbles onto “An hundred naked maidens lilly white / All raunged in a ring, and dauncing in delight” (6.10.11). It is a distinctly vaginal circle, and yet it is one that is most definitely not nothing. Rather, it is a “girland,” a “Crowne,” a “goodly band, / Whose sundry parts were here too long to tell” (6.10.13–14). In response,
Much wondred Calidore at this straunge sight,
Whose like before his eye had neuer seene,
And standing long astonished in spright,
And rapt with pleasaunce, wist not what to weene.
(6.10.17; emphasis in the original)
Finally we see here the revolutionary approach to the study of female anatomy in action: just looking, “wisting not what to weene,” observing but not categorizing and delimiting what you cannot yet fully know. As I have previously argued, this episode, along with others in The Faerie Queene, proposes an alternative kind of sexualized poetics and poetic pleasure, one associated with female desire.102 Moreover, Calidore’s ravishing vision of the “sundry parts” of women recognizes those parts as just that: apart, “sundered” in kind from those of men. As opposed to the interpretive gambit practiced by the chief priest in Isis Church, one that strategically avoids the alchemically envisioned significance of Britomart’s parts, Calidore for the space of a quatrain does not have an Aristotelian-Galenic story to tell about what women’s parts are like and what they do.
It doesn’t last, of course. Calidore decides he must classify what he sees within a familiar knowledge scheme, “Whether it were the traine of beauties Queene, / Or Nymphes, or Faeries, or enchaunted show, / With which his eyes mote haue deluded beene” (6.10.17). And thus, “Therefore resoluing, what it was, to know, / Out of the wood he rose, and toward them did go” (6.10.17). Upon which the vision disappears. Spenser has made his point. Looking at women in the hope of seeing only what you want to see leaves you in an epistemologically impoverished position. And a sexually impoverished one, too. Calidore next seeks an explanation of his vision from a shepherd he runs across—who turns out to be Spenser himself in his pastoral persona as Colin Clout, and who proceeds to dress Calidore down for his stupidity. The nymphs’ ring, Colin explains, was meant not for Calidore’s pleasure but for their own: “For, being gone, none can them bring in place, / But whom they of them selues list so to grace” (6.10.20; emphasis added). Female desire, what “they of them selues list,” is required for both male pleasure and aesthetic pleasure to happen. And female desire requires men seeing what they see truly, and seeing what they see in wonder.
Love’s Labour’s Lost is William Shakespeare’s most explicit portrayal of the scene of knowledge making. It is a play in love not only with the written word but also with textbooks, as Carla Mazzio has observed; it is also a play that begins with a debate over what should be studied, and to what ends.103 The play’s curriculum turns out to be an unusual one. Like one of its sources, Pierre de la Primaudaye’s L’Académie Française, in which the discussants in an all-male academy focus largely on the nature of marriage and child rearing, Love’s Labour’s Lost seems to posit coupling and reproduction as more pressing issues than typical academic subjects. In some ways it would be a mistake to argue that Love’s Labour’s Lost engages any mode of learning deeply or consequentially: this puzzling drama of surfaces holds all knowledge at arm’s length, from book learning to authentic acquaintance with one’s romantic partner. But at the same time, Love’s Labour’s Lost flirts openly with alchemical modes of learning, especially with alchemical modes of converting troublesome women into a purer and more tractable form. The result is that, like the other works I have discussed in this chapter, Love’s Labour’s Lost entertains a fantasy about a mode of reproduction that might be alchemical rather than sexual. Unlike William Harvey, Love’s Labour’s Lost is not committed to eliminating women’s shaping influence from the reproductive process entirely. Nor, however, is Love’s Labour’s Lost as sure as Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is that the dual-gendered generativity of true alchemy may be distinguished from the parthenogenetic fantasy of bad alchemy. Rather, the play moves ambiguously and uncertainly among alternative reproductive prospects: the mystical marriage of male and female elements; the male-only reproduction of finer bodies; and the inescapable reality of the woman’s reproductive role. In turn, alchemical structures and tropes in the play become a way of figuring the impossible fantasies that pertain when men try to suture study to experience. Their approach to learning morphs into their desires regarding marriage and regarding the comedic endings that marriage signifies.
Specifically, Love’s Labour’s Lost ponders what should be studied by a group: we are invited to imagine learning not as the activity of an individual reader but as the activity of a collective in accord about what should be known. When William Harvey lays aside his volume of Helkiah Crooke’s anatomy—which asserts the perfection and undoubted functionality of the female ovaries—in order to argue that the ovaries are useless, he is engaging in an individual and idiosyncratic reading practice. But when that gesture is repeated in wider scholarly and scientific circles, it becomes a metonym for the efforts undertaken by scholarly communities and networks committed to downplaying the female role in reproduction.
As I mentioned in my discussion of The Tempest in Chapter 3, recent historical studies have emphasized how sociable an enterprise early modern science came to be. In late seventeenth-century experimentation, the public “demonstration” of such new techniques as blood transfusion or the air pump became one of the central activities of London’s Royal Society. And late seventeenth-century science, as Lisa Jardine has argued, was carried out in coffeehouse discussions more than it was in solitary thought.104 Anatomy and alchemy were both early adopters of this scientific sociability. Whether in the anatomy theater or in the practical alchemist’s workshop, work took place in groups that might include the practitioner’s family members, servants, friends, fellow adepts, and students. The primary conceit of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist—that alchemy gives an extraordinary collection of people occasion to visit an experimental space—anticipates the later age of scientists like Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, when experimental venues were often located within private residences and were subject to unannounced social calls on the part of the curious. Boyle’s attempts to get some time alone to work by posting a sign on his laboratory door, “Mr. Boyle cannot be spoken with to-day,” were considered unusual.105 That sociability, it is worth emphasizing, had its roots in the humanist culture in which seventeenth-century scientists were steeped. The group work of anatomy, alchemy, and nascent chemistry and physics alike had learned its habits from humanistic traditions of close collaboration and humanists’ attempts to make their work part of the public polity.106
It is important, however, not to assume that “sociable” necessarily means “open-minded” or “noncoercive.” Thomas Hobbes’s concern that the experimental space, like the humanist classroom or closet, was still governed by the agenda of a “master” should not fall off our radar.107 That “master” function may, of course, be implemented beyond the agenda or even the lifetime of a single individual. Hewing to an explicit or implicit agenda of “correct” knowledge, the corporate, aggregated, or networked body of scholars can, in fact, be an ideal vector for the promulgation of disknowledge. The group, whether physically present as in the anatomy theater or formed by farther-flung intellectual networks, can reinforce an agenda of not discarding outmoded ideas when those ideas prove to have their own kind of utility. The disknowledge of the female reproductive system is a case in point. Nancy Tuana argues, for example, that the medical establishment’s de-emphasis on the role of the clitoris in female sexual pleasure has been perpetuated from the sixteenth century to the present, just as Marlin Ah-King, Andrew Barron, and Marie Herberstein have argued that female animal genitalia are still understudied by biologists only because of a long-standing prior assumption that female genitalia just aren’t that interesting.108 Adept at avoiding knowledge as much as creating knowledge, intellectual circles can enforce and reinforce cherished assumptions about women’s part in generative reproduction.
Love’s Labour’s Lost is Shakespeare’s examination of just what that effort of avoidance on the part of an intellectual circle looks like and what purpose that effort might serve. While feminist historians of science have begun to explore the habitual, commonplace misogyny of the rhetoric and the habits of thought of early modern science, the extent to which early modern academic relationships among men reinforced misogynistic assumptions has not yet been studied. But Shakespeare’s play, in its way, conducts that very study. Just as Shakespeare, in Lynn Enterline’s incisive analysis, both recapitulates and explodes the ways in which the early modern schoolroom attempted to enforce strict divisions between masculinity and femininity, so too does Shakespeare’s imagination of an all-male scientific society recapitulate and critique the hothouse misogyny indulged in by male academic circles.109
While there is no necessary reason for an all-male intellectual circle to be any more suspicious of women than any other gathering of early modern men would be, such misogyny certainly characterized what Jesuit Robert Parsons called the “school of atheism,” the loose intellectual circle around Walter Ralegh that included writers, mathematicians, and natural philosophers such as Giordano Bruno, Thomas Harriot, George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe, and the “Wizard Earl,” the alchemist Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland.110 Shakespeare’s personal, professional, and/or intellectual acquaintance with many of these men or their writings encouraged M. C. Bradbrook and Frances Yates in the 1930s each to propose a detailed topical allegory for Love’s Labour’s Lost in which the King of Navarre’s retreat of gentleman scholars is modeled after this boundary-testing intellectual circle, supposedly referred to in the play’s murky phrase “the school of night.”111 The particularities of this topical reading, as Mary Ellen Lamb has pointed out, are impossible either to prove or to disprove; nor does the play’s “school of night” phrase require such an ingenious set of references to make it legible.112 It is fairly clear that no such “school” existed in the way that Bradbrook or Yates imagined it. Nonetheless, I am intrigued by Bradbrook’s groundbreaking assertion that Shakespeare’s play specifically satirizes elite scholarly circles’ misogynist habits. Stung by the consequences of unwise marriage and a queen’s fury (as Ralegh was) or simply habitually disgusted by femininity (as Bruno was), the scholars associated with Ralegh seem truly to have been unusually dedicated, even in late sixteenth-century terms, to loathing the feminine.
Evidence for this loathing ranges from the portrayal of ignorance as feminine in Chapman’s “Shadow of Night” (1594); to the speaker’s abject whining about female authority in Ralegh’s The Ocean to Cynthia (1590s); to the full-blown horror of female sexuality registered by Bruno’s On the Heroic Frenzies (1585), which—despite being what Ingrid Rowland calls “a veritable anthology of love poetry”—urges its dedicatee, Philip Sidney, to leave off sonneteering about such an unworthy object as a woman’s body:113
Here we have written down on paper, enclosed in books, placed before the eyes and sounded in the ear a noise, an uproar, a blast of symbols, of emblems, of mottoes, of epistles, of sonnets, of epigrams, of prolific notes, of excessive sweat, of life consumed, shrieks which deafen the stars, laments which reverberate in the caves of hell, tortures which affect living souls with stupor, sighs which make the gods swoon with compassion, and all this for those eyes, for those cheeks, for that breast, for that whiteness, for that vermilion, for that speech, for those teeth, for those lips, that hair, that dress, that robe, that glove, that slipper, that shoe, that reserve, that little smile, that wryness, that window-widow, that eclipsed sun, that scourge, that disgust, that stink, that tomb, that latrine, that menstruum, that carrion, that quartan ague, that excessive injury and distortion of nature, which with surface appearance, a shadow, a phantasm, a dream, a Circean enchantment put to the service of generation, deceives us as a species of beauty.114
At first Bruno satirizes the contrast between high-flown poetic excess and the plain physicality of the female form to which it is applied. Surely “tortures which afflict living souls with stupor” are ill matched to something as ordinary as “those lips, that hair, that dress.” But with the odd trope of “window-widow” (vedova fenestra), Bruno raises the specter of a female body that is not simply what it is but a window onto death for any man foolish enough to enter it. In “service of generation” (serviggio della generazione) and in pursuit of that “excessive injury and distortion of nature” (estrema ingiuria e torto di natura) that is the castrated, ill-formed female body, men are deceived into diving into their own putrid tomb.
Buried in Bruno’s screed, however, is the suggestion that his description of femininity contains its own cure for the degradations it depicts. In Bruno’s telling, the excremental and rotting female body—“that stink, that tomb, that latrine”—is also the stuff of an alchemical experiment. As the natural philosopher Bruno well knows, “that menstruum” and “that carrion” (quel menstruo, quella carogna) are among the substances on which early modern alchemists depend: menstruum as prima materia or wondrous solvent, carrion as the significant alchemical stage of putrefaction that signals the coming rebirth of the philosopher’s stone. In other words, once converted from flesh to metaphor, femininity becomes the means for leaving the female body behind. In this regard, The Heroic Frenzies revises Plato’s Phaedrus in typical humanist-Neoplatonic fashion so that the love of a beautiful woman, not a beautiful boy, might ultimately lead a man to abandon physical love in favor of contemplating the divine; The Heroic Frenzies also recapitulates humanism’s hopes that the language arts might assist in a man’s ascent from physical to metaphysical bliss.115 Bruno’s alchemical references, however, make explicit that this ascent is also a matter of disdaining and even eschewing heterosexual coupling and reproduction. He thus proves the equivalences proposed by an anonymous volume called The Riddles of Heraclitus and Democritus (1598). To the riddling question of who, like Paracelsus and Prometheus, “not onely maketh persons at her pleasure, but also bringeth them from hell or heaven to life againe when they be dead,” the answer comes: “Paracelsus, in his booke de natura rerum teacheth an artificiall generation of an homunculus, or little man. Prometheus, the sonne of Iapetus, was the first maker of images, and thereupon, was fained to make men. This riddle is ment by Rhetorike, or the figure Prosopopeia, that to stirre and moove affection, attributeth speech to dead men.”116 Alchemy, art, and rhetoric—characterized here as personification—are all good for two things. First, they generate men. Second, they make dead men live, escaping the dread horrors of the killing pit that is the female body.117
The alchemical, rhetorical, poetic wresting of reproduction from feminine influence seems to be exactly what Navarre has in mind for his “little academe, / Still and contemplative in living art” (1.1.13–14). While “living art” means “the art of living,” one cannot help but catch a whiff of Navarre’s longing, in his academic retreat, to make life out of art, as Paracelsus or Prometheus did, rather than life out of sexual intercourse. The opening of Love’s Labour’s Lost, in which the gentlemen agree to Navarre’s compact, draws a boundary between masculine study and feminine sexuality. The “end of study,” says Navarre in response to Berowne, is limitless—“that to know which else we should not know” (1.1.55–56). Except for one thing: when Berowne suggests they study mistresses, Navarre calls women “the stops that hinder study quite / And train our intellect to vain delight” (1.1. 70–71). Berowne’s proposed curriculum is in jest, but Navarre’s reply suggests nonetheless that the male academic circle exclude not only women but even the study of women.
If the gentlemen’s academy is to entertain thoughts of reproduction, it will thus require reproductive vessels alternative to women. As the play continues, male rhetoric adopts different strategies for avoiding and erasing the femininity that the men encounter—both the aristocratic women the gentlemen will woo, and Jaquenetta, a dairymaid who is pregnant by someone in the king’s household, either the comic Spaniard Armado or (far more likely) the clown Costard. These rhetorical strategies are borrowed wholesale from alchemy’s assays at converting the physically feminine into the metaphorically masculine: woman’s base matter transmutes into purer, linguistic form, and female sexual anatomy is replaced by visions of an alchemical apparatus that is capable of a better kind of reproduction.
The alchemical imagery and terminology of Love’s Labour’s Lost have long been recognized. Both here and in his poems, Shakespeare, like John Donne (as discussed in Chapter 2), readily turns to alchemy as a reservoir of metaphors for how to purify love’s less seemly aspects.118 It is thus plausible to read the play’s surprisingly frequent queries about the color of a man’s beloved as an alchemically tinged investigation into how to purify the otherwise irredeemably sullied woman of her baser physicality. When the page boy Moth notes that Samson loved a woman who was of a “sea-water green” complexion, Armado protests that his own love, Jaquenetta, “is most immaculate white and red” (1.2.82, 87). Eager to translate his love into the well-worn language of love sonnets, Armado also purifies her alchemically. Green, red, white: these are progressive colors that alchemists carefully watched for in the distillation and calcination processes. Green, or the “green lion,” indicates a fairly raw stage of the purification process, often called “vegetable mercury” and distinguished from the more valuable Sol and Luna.119 Sometimes identified with copper, the “green lion”—described by a late fifteenth-century English alchemical manuscript claiming to be the “ascertations” of Raymond Lull as “quyk gold unfixed and uncomplete by nature”—replicates the liquid and unstable feminine humors in ways that must be overcome if further refinement is to be had.120 The color green’s alchemical connotations thus nicely dovetail with the early modern interpretation of women’s “green sickness” as a superfluity of corrupt menstrual fluid or of female “seed.”121 If Jaquenetta is “green” alchemically as well as by virtue of her imperfect female body, it will take a great deal of rhetorical work to raise her to the “red and white” status Armado claims for her—red and white being more advanced stages of alchemy, with red as (among other things) the color of the “aurum potibile”—“an Oyl as red as Blood”—and white as the near-final version of the philosopher’s stone, “the white Sulphur, not burning, and the stone of Paradice, that is, the stone which converts imperfect Mettals into fine white silver.”122
A similar alchemical reformation of the female lover’s color occurs in Berowne’s discourse about Rosaline. His efforts to prove his dark love fair reflect not only his need to “whiten” his beloved into an acceptably valuable commodity, as Kim Hall has argued, but also the typical inexactitude of alchemical discourse, in which the utter whiteness that is the goal of successful experiment must be preceded by an equally utter blackness.123 “[Y]our werk with blak must begyne,” advises Thomas Norton’s Ordinall of Alchemy, “If the end shuld be with whitnes to wyne.”124 “When thou findest it blacke,” says The Mirror of Alchemy, “know that in that blacknesse whitenesse is hidden, and thou must extract the same from his most subtile blacknes.”125 Navarre protests in response to Berowne that black could not possibly be proximate to white: “O paradox! Black is the badge of hell, / The hue of dungeons and the school of night” (4.3.250–51). But Berowne and the ladies all insist upon the two colors’ commensurability. Berowne claims that “No face is fair that is not full so black” (4.3.249), and Katherine calls Rosaline a “light condition in a beauty dark” (5.2.20).126
Katherine’s pun on “light,” however, indicates the difficulty of incorporating actual women, rather than metaphorically feminine alchemical supplies, into a refining project whose end is perfection. Women’s “lightness” makes them subject to adultery, as well as adulteration, and women’s commonness and commonality seed the entire action of Love’s Labour’s Lost—even past the ending of the play, as act 5’s closing song features the call of the cuckoo, “word of fear, / Unpleasing to a married ear” (5.2.888–89). The fatherhood of Jaquenetta’s child, a question raised in the play’s first scene, is still unsettled in the last. Is it Costard, who plays the pimpy “Pompey the huge” in the Pageant of the Nine Worthies, or is it Armado, as Costard claims (5.2.671–82)? Similarly, the aristocratic women threaten at every turn to corrupt genteel masculinity with whorishness and mean estate. Nicknaming his beloved with the commoner’s name Joan, which appears in the “cuckoo” song as the name of a greasy kitchen maid (5.2.917), Berowne seems to suspect that Rosaline’s darkness is accompanied by an unladylike status of two kinds, wanton behavior and low station:
And among three to love the worst of all,
Ay, and by heaven, one that will do the deed
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard.
Well, I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue and groan.
Some men must love my lady, and some Joan.
(3.1.190–200)
For reasons that are never specified, Rosaline is repeatedly accused of loose sexual conduct in the play.127 The other three ladies are similarly at fault, though for more associative reasons. Together their names and identities either echo or anticipate a whole host of sexually problematic Shakespearean women. The generic title of the French Princess looks back to 1 Henry VI’s whorish French Joan La Pucelle, who claims noble birth, and looks forward to the French princess of Henry V, who despite her sexual fastidiousness is made wanton by Henry’s unwelcome kiss in that play’s wooing scene. The name Katherine recalls the shrew whom Petruchio rhetorically transforms into his whorish “household Kate” and forecasts Henry V’s similar domestication of his French princess into another Kate, as well as Measure for Measure’s Kate Keepdown. And Maria metamorphoses in Love’s Labour’s Lost’s “cuckoo” song into Marian, a name associated elsewhere in Shakespeare with lower-class women and, via the common appearance of Maid Marian characters in Morris dances and May games, with sexual availability (5.2.912n).
No wonder, then, that when Berowne calls his compatriots to the cause of love, his discourse struggles to keep the alchemical reproductive process within an Aristotelian-Galenic framework in which men are the fashioners of women rather than the other way around:
From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world;
Else none at all in aught proves excellent.
For wisdom’s sake, a word that all men love,
Or, for love’s sake, a word that loves all men,
Or, for men’s sake, the authors of these women,
Or women’s sake, by whom we men are men,
Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves.
(4.3.324–35; emphasis added)
This speech in a way puts love’s alchemy on safe ground in that women remain alchemical vessels, receptive to “Promethean fire.” At the same time, however, the notion that women do not merely “show” and “contain” the entire world but also “nourish” it leads to some confusion over whether men are “the authors of these women” or women make men men. Buried in this endlessly reversible speculation upon who makes whom is the enigmatic suggestion that, because women are involved, perfection is unattainable. Women “show, contain and nourish all the world; / Else none at all in aught proves excellent”—they are indispensable. But there is also an aural pun here, that “none at all in naught proves excellent,” simultaneously asserting that nothing excellent emerges from women’s genitals, their “naught.”
Yet even though it is uncertain about the desirability or efficacy of an alchemically purified feminine reproductive role, Love’s Labour’s Lost is equally uncertain about Pseudo-Paracelsus’s all-male alternative. Not only does the gentlemen’s all-male academy collapse almost as soon as it is conceived, but the play’s most enthusiastic alchemist is the pedant Holofernes, whose epithet “Thrice-worthy gentleman” (5.1.135) recalls the “trimagisterial” name of Hermes Trismegistus, and whose name I am thus tempted to read as an alchemical pun on “hollow furnace.”128 Holofernes presents a ridiculous and easily debunked version of masculine parthenogenetic invention: “This is a gift that I have—simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions. These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of [primater], and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion” (4.2.65–70). This boast contains a telling textual crux. Editors of Shakespeare beginning with Nicholas Rowe have emended the Quarto and Folio editions’ rendition of Holofernes’ phrase, “the womb of primater,” into “the womb of pia mater”—that is, the womb of the membrane protecting the brain. I find this emendation unnecessary and have restored “primater” to the passage, since “primater” as a compositor’s error or eye skip is more plausibly an error for prima mater[ia], alchemy’s prime matter/mater that Holofernes appropriates for his own fertile brain.
Responding to Holofernes, the curate Nathaniel unwittingly mocks the pedant as engaging in a far less intellectual, and clearly not parthenogenetic, mode of begetting and delivering: “Sir, I praise the Lord for you, and so may my parishioners, for their sons are well tutored by you, and their daughters profit very greatly under you. You are a good member of the commonwealth” (4.2.72–75). Shakespeare’s bawdy witticism here does not go as far in the direction of alchemy as Falstaff’s planning to sponge off Justice Shallow enough to emasculate him entirely—“I’ll make him a philosopher’s two stones to me”—or as the apprentice Rafe’s saying in John Lyly’s Gallathea that his alchemist master, upon meeting a “pretty wench come to his shop . . . with puffing, blowing, and sweating . . . so plied her that he multiplied her . . . by the philosophers’ stone.”129 Still, Holofernes’ reputation for begetting recalls the joke personified by his Rabelaisian namesake and predecessor pedant, Tubal Holofernes, Gargantua’s sophistical tutor. Shakespeare’s sidelong glance at Rabelais’s anatomical pun, “Tubal,” works even better in English than it does in French: with “two balls” and a “hollow furnace” to boot, Holofernes’ cognominal back story suggests no end of reproductive capacity.130 Just not the kind of all-male, one-sex reproduction imagined by Pseudo-Paracelsus. Elsewhere the malapropisms exchanged among Armado, Costard, Moth, and Holofernes exclude women from the intellectual sphere only to substitute a sodomitical society whose product—as the genuine Paracelsus feared for misplaced semen becoming colonic homunculi—is only intestinal effluvia. Armado solemnly asserts his familiarity with Navarre to be such that “it will please his grace, by the world, sometime to lean upon my poor shoulder and with his royal finger thus dally with my excrement, with my mustachio” (5.1.94–97). Far from the textually productive homoerotic male interchanges analyzed by Jeffrey Masten, Love’s Labour’s Lost’s all-male academic enterprise produces nothing but shit, a shit that is both literal and—in the sorry spectacle of the Pageant of the Nine Worthies—literary.131
Thus Love’s Labour’s Lost’s male-controlled reproduction, whether it includes or does not include elements of feminine matter, falls flat, its products sometimes distasteful but always untenable. Berowne’s initial dismissal of the academy scheme as an “abortive birth”—spelled “abhortive” in the 1598 Quarto of the play—nicely encapsulates both the slim likelihood of the project’s success, and the abhorrence of its product (1.1.104). Male parthenogenesis must thus be added to the list of ways in which the men’s activities in Love’s Labour’s Lost are failed experiments. Indeed, the ending of the play piles failure upon masculine failure. First the gentlemen swear fealty to the wrong ladies in the masque. Their mistake is interrupted by the even more egregious Pageant of the Nine Worthies—which, in another display of poor “multiplication” skills, turns out to be just three Worthies. This comically bad show is in turn interrupted by the announcement of the death of the Princess’s father, which cuts off the merriment of comedy. This last development reveals the entire love plot as an experiment that has failed to come to its conclusion. When Navarre tries to make that failure right too hastily by proposing marriage, the Princess remarks that it is “A time, methinks, too short / To make a world-without-end bargain in” (5.2.782–83). And so they must meet again a year and a day hence, to see if love has failed too. It’s not right, says Berowne. “Jack hath not Jill” (5.2.863). This is not how the comic experiment ought to turn out.
Still, the play’s conclusion cannot give up the experiment. Love’s Labour’s Lost comes to a close with the arrival of Marcadé, the messenger who announces the Princess’s father’s death and shuts down the love idyll. On the one hand, Marcadé acts as the dramatic equivalent of the two-handed engine in John Milton’s Lycidas, the inexplicable intrusion that threatens to collapse the whole frothy structure of what has come before. He is Mar-arcady, the one who mars Arcadia. On the other hand, Marcadé is Mercury: not only is he a messenger, but, as H. R. Woudhuysen argues, Shakespeare’s referent here is a play by Robert Wilson called The Cobbler’s Prophecy, where the god Mercury is alternatively called Markedy.132 And mercury is the essential ingredient of yet another go at the alchemical process, indicating that perhaps the experimental trial is about to begin again. Perhaps it is not surprising that a play occupied, as Patricia Parker says, with “preposterous reversals”—reversals of language, of gender hierarchy, of comedic structures themselves—ultimately sustains both an irresolvable skepticism about alchemical reproduction’s efficacy and an impossible desire for it to continue.133
Marcadé’s association with death even aligns him with “putrefaction,” the stage that, almost all alchemical writings agree, is crucial to the alchemical process and that is associated with the transition from blackness to whiteness. Putrefaction is, moreover, key to the alchemical process as reproduction. If the alchemist “putrifie not,” says Nicolas Flamel’s Hieroglyphical Figures, “hee doeth not corrupt nor ingender, and by consequent, the Stone cannot take vegetative life to increase and multiply.”134 Pseudo-Paracelsus’s De natura rerum begins by citing John 12:24 on the subject: “putrefaction produceth great matters, as of this wee have a most famous example in the holy Gospel, where Christ saith: Unlesse a grain of wheat bee cast into the Earth, and be putrefied, it cannot bring forth fruit in a hundred fold.”135 Sensible enough, and in accordance with alchemy’s Gnostic and Christian antecedents: death leads to conception and rebirth. Along these lines, the Mercurial death at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost seems like a rather promising development, reversing the alchemical failures that have been seen thus far. On the other hand, though, many alchemical writings propose that the alchemical wedding either precedes alchemical putrefaction—as in Ripley’s Compound of Alchemy, in which “conjunction” is the “Fourth Gate” and “putrefaction” the “Fifth”—or coincides with it, “for there shall be no composition / without marriage and putrefaction.”136 Conception leads to death, rather than the reverse, just as the “cuckoo” song begins with two stanzas about cuckoldry and concludes with two stanzas about winter’s assaults upon physical energy, “when blood is nipped and ways be foul” (5.2.904). Given these associations, the coincidence of death with Marcadé’s appearance would seem to be a natural consequence of the female fecundity and potential unchastity that have been emphasized throughout the play. An alchemically fruitful future beyond the end of the play hovers uncertainly between these two options: death producing life, female sexuality producing death.
What are we to make of the play’s continued irrational faith, then, that we can start over in parthenogenetically alchemical fashion, that alchemical death will bring new life? I would suggest that in Love’s Labour’s Lost this faith is both exposed as irrational, and allowed to stand. Death is not a finality, but a postponement: the gentlemen must bear solitude and fasting for “a twelve-month and a day” before reuniting with their ladies (5.2.865). This typically Hermetic time span, both specific and ritualistic, poignantly unites mourning and marriage. Even if it could easily turn on a dime to the kind of silly ritualized duration that is mocked in The Alchemist, when the con artists convince Dapper that he must await the Fairy Queen for exactly two hours with his mouth stopped with gingerbread, Love’s Labour’s Lost cannot go so far as this mockery. While the play’s alchemical imagery attests to the frivolity of scholarly learning, Love’s Labour’s Lost truly wants death to be life, and hence continues to capitalize on the jumble of needlessly occult, deliberately obfuscatory confusions and crosstalk by which alchemy tries to have its parthenogenetic cake and eat it too. “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo” says the play in closing (5.2.918–19), but how are we supposed to take this pronouncement? Even its attribution is unclear. In the Folio version, it belongs to the braggart Armado, the same man stupid enough to think he will get ahead at court by letting the king play with his excremental mustache. In the Quarto, in contrast, it floats free and unattributed in a larger typeface that seems to conclude and comment on the play as a whole, as if Mercury’s words are a harsh but necessary corrective to the play’s deathly failures so far.137 If Marcadé/Mercury has the final word, then alchemy commences again, co-opting the mercurial, feminine component of the prima materia as the alchemist’s first step toward bringing his own offspring into the world.
