This essay offers an analysis of arguments put forward and rhetorical strategies employed in Artificiall Embellishments, a remarkable little book on cosmetics by an anonymous author printed at Oxford in 1665.1 One of the reasons why this book is of considerable interest is the way its subject matter is being treated. Like most other books of its type, it contains a large number of recipes for homemade cosmetics serving a wide range of purposes. These are grouped in chapters ranging from the general to the specific, beginning with ‘Of the whole Body, and the beautifying thereof, or ‘What course of life is probably the best either to procure beauty or to preserve it’ and then moving on to aspects such as ‘How to repair the beauty of an itchy or scabby skin’ or ‘How to beautifie the fore-head’. Each chapter contains a number of recipes, some of them quite elaborate.
What makes this book more than a mere collection of such recipes is that there are short – sometimes very short – introductory essays dealing with the topic of each chapter.2 These are in fact virtuoso literary performances abounding with allusions and saturated with intricate imagery.
The preface addressed ‘to the Ladies’ gives a taste of things to come; it is made plain from the very beginning that we are dealing with no common example of the genre.
Deformiry (fairest Ladies) is a single name, yet a complicated misery; for a young Algebraist in this only word, knows how to read a whole Iliad of evills. Poets fancy the creature to be hatcht in Hell; neither do they greatly injure it, forasmuch as it brings with it sufficient matter for a whole Hell of misery to those, whose darkned soules are clouded with it’s frightfull adumbrations. [ … ] For those whose bodyes are dismist natures presse with some errata’s, and have not the royall stamp of Beauty to make them currant coyne for humane society, make choice of obscurity;judging death lesse instifferable, then that ignominy which too often attends deformity. It is a disease usually looked upon as infectious, and hath one symptome of dangerous consequence, it breeds obstructions, and that chiefly to Ladies preferment, since none save Grooms or Oastlers think those worth their courtship, who are rusted over with ill-enticing looks.
Now to quit you Ladies from the loathsome embraces of this hideous Hagge, … I have published these Cosmeticks; so beautifying, that those who use them shall Diana it in company, and with a radiant lustre outshine their thick-skind companions, as so many browner Nymphs.
Though you may look so pallidly sad, that you would be thought to be dropping in your Graves; and though your skins be so devoid of colour, that they might be taken for your winding sheets; yet these Recipe’s will give you such a rosie cheerfulness, as of you had new begun your resurrection. They are the handsome ladies Panacaea, of such ejficary that they will teach you creatures of mortality to retrace the steps of youth, and traniforme the wrinkled hide of Hecuba into the tender skin of a tempting Helena.3
The language employed here is highly elaborate. A high overall level of rhetorical ornatus is maintained throughout, and of course ornatus is to language what cosmetics are to the body: the text and its subject-matter move along parallel lines. The imagery employed and the high density of straightforward and more obscure allusions combine to make the text fairly demanding.
Deformity, so the preface says, can be read. The body and its appearance is legible – particularly to the ‘young Algebraist’, as the text mysteriously but quite aptly states. Algebra (derived from the Arabic al-jebr) literally means ‘the reunion of broken parts (of the body)’, that is, the healing of deformities.4 The mere word ‘deformity’ spells out a whole history of calamities, an ‘Iliad of Evils’. In these first paragraphs of the book, there are allusions not only to the Iliad (directly and through mention of Hecuba, the wife of Priam), but also to the Odyssey (‘Helena’), and to literature in general: ‘Poets fancy the creature to be hatcht in Hell’. By means of establishing links to other literary works, the text under discussion draws attention to the fact that its purposes are literary as well as merely utilitarian. To be fully appreciated, it requires knowledge of classical literature and languages – otherwise’ rhetorical figures such as the almost bilingual pleonasm ‘darkned soules … clouded with frightfull adumbrations’ would be quite lost on the reader.
Both the human body and the text discussing it are made to appear as a plastic medium inviting manipulation or ad hoc transformation to achieve the desired effect. Readers obviously interested in and presumably in need of cosmetics can be addressed as ‘fairest ladies’; the ‘wrinkled hide of Hecuba’ can be transformed into the ‘tender skin of a tempting Helena’, just as nouns can be transformed into verbs: ‘those who use [cosmetics] shall Diana it in company’.
As the text is all about the treatment of the female body, the author playfully inverts this relationship and discusses the female body as a text. Bodies are dismissed from ‘natures presse with some errata’s’ – ultimately a Platonic concept: the ‘idea’ of beauty is there, but it has been unsuccessfully captured in a text riddled with misspellings. Given this state of affairs, it is only good scholarly practice to correct such physical typos: by means of cosmetics, one can prepare, as it were, an improved edition of the imperfectly reproduced text.
In its rapid and associative transition from image to image, the text almost appears like a prose equivalent of some particularly fast-moving specimen of Metaphysical poetry. It moves almost effortlessly from texts and the act of reading (‘read a whole Iliad’) to the printing of texts (‘nature’s presse’, ‘errata’s’), from printing to the technically related process of minting coins (‘royall stamp’, ‘currant coyne’), from coins to ‘Ladies’ preferment’, that is the chance of finding a reasonably wealthy husband, and from marriage to a revolting parody of love and sexuality, the ‘loathsome embraces’ of the ‘hideous Hagge’ that is deformity – and so on. Sometimes the author compresses a tour de force sequence of associations in a single sentence, moving from eating to drinking and then straight on to the paraphernalia of excretion: ‘Other Ladies in your company shall look like brown-bread sippets in a dish of snowie cream, or if you will, like blubberd juggs in a cupboard of Venice glass, or earthen Chamberpots in a Goldsmiths shop.’5
The text makes it obvious that both author and envisaged audience are still largely unaffected by considerations of what would in eighteenth-century parlance be described as ‘delicacy’. The readers of Artificiall Embellishments are supposed to handle and use substances such as ‘mans urine’, ‘Hens dung, the whitest and freshest you can get’, or to contemplate taking ‘twelve or thirteen Lizards’ and ‘cut off their heads and tails’.6 There are recipes not only for curing facial bums but also ‘to help the Complexion when it is marr’d with blew and congealed blood, or black and blue, proceeding from a stroak, or bruise.’7 The author does not make any attempt to disguise the fact that the consequences of occasional physical violence were very much an emergency to be reckoned with.
One can detect a deliberate use of prima facie ‘disgusting’ images in a book that is, after all, primarily aimed at a female readership. The author never hesitates to call a spade a spade:
How much evacuation or retention of the excrements either promote or hinder a good complexion, you may easily imagine, if you consider that the reaking entrails are the bodies sinke, which, if not duely cleans’d and scour’d, affects the face with such noisome exhalations, that the squeamish Queen of Love will never be wonne upon to make it her court of residence.8
The fact that the discussion of bodily functions or malfunctions is usually clothed in straightforward or more complex conceits does not mean that these topics are being ‘sanitized’ or obscured in any way whatsoever: quite the contrary. Instead of having recourse to euphemisms, the author employs images that are every bit as unappetizing as the things they represent. The introduction to a chapter on ‘How to cleanse the sweaty and sluttish Complexion’ is a case in point:
The Microcosme through the sordid sluttishness of some is often drown’d in a nasty deluge of sweat; out a designe [sic] perhaps to take Cupid captive, and birdlime his Wings with such clammie excrements: but if they have no other tempting bait, then the greasie pomatum which their own ill stuff’d bodies supply them with, I am afraid (though being blind he cannot see them) he’l [sic] smell them a mile off, and so keep his distance. They would doe much better to break off this petty plot upon Cupid, and scoure their bodies well with these abstervises.
Take bryony roots half a handfull …9
The image of sweat as the flood devastating the human microcosm is introduced and quickly abandoned for a conceit in which sweat becomes an altogether inadequate device to capture Cupid.
From the very first page, one of the most predominant images – the most predominant image even – is that of deadly disease and death itself, often in startlingly dramatic forms. The first three paragraphs of the introduction contain a cluster of related words and phrases such as ‘death’, ‘disease usually looked upon as infectious’, ‘symptome of dangerous consequence’, ‘looks so pallidly sad’, ‘dropping in your Graves’, ‘skins devoid of colour’, ‘windingsheets’, ‘resurrection’, ‘Panacea’, ‘mortality’. Such elements of morbid medical discourse did of course sometimes find their way into texts dealing with cosmetics, but usually in a much more diluted form. Why is it that the very opposite of the effect one would like to achieve by using cosmetics – the full visual impact of death instead of the sought-after appearance of youth and beauty – could become such a prominent feature of this text?
The time and the place of publication of Artificiall Embellishments provide a clue and ultimately an answer to this question. The book was printed at Oxford in 1665. 1665 was the year of the Great Plague, the year of the horrifying events so vividly described in Samuel Pepys’ eyewitness account and later in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. The epidemic lasted well into 1666, and it had its worst effects in London; estimates vary from about 68,500 to 100,000 victims in the capital alone.10 The well-to-do fled while they could, and they did so in ever-increasing numbers from April onwards, Oxford being among the obvious places of refuge.
In plague times, it was usual for mortality to peak in the hot summer months. The court left London in June, going first to Hampton Court, then to Salisbury and eventually ending up in Oxford in September. Parliament was summoned to Oxford for early October. Charles installed himself in Christ Church, while both the Queen and Charles’ then-pregnant mistress, Lady Castlemaine, were put up in Merton College. After Parliament came the lawyers, as the Michaelmas term was adjourned from Westminster to meet at Oxford in November.11 It was only on 1 February 1666 that King Charles felt it safe to return to Westminster.
In his monograph on the Great Plague, Walter Bell comments that little news of the plague filtered into Oxford and that the court and its hangers-on were obviously and understandably anxious to forget all about it.
L’Estrange’s bi-weekly sheets, The Newes and The Intelligencer, left any curiosity there might be unsatisfied, printing little beyond a summary of the weekly Bills of Mortality – three or four lines indicating how the Plague’s virulence rose or fell. Visitors from the infected capital were few in number, and found themselves objects of distrust…. The statesmen were atoms adrift in a whirl of enforced gaiety and irresponsible light-heartedness. The talk of Oxford was not about London’s many thousands of Plague victims, but of the impending birth in its midst…. With balls and entertainments and scandal the exiles from Whitehall made life bearable, out of place as they felt in the University city.12
This is the background against which Artificiall Embellishments was published.13 The complexities, the learned or otherwise obscure allusions of the text were pitched at an audience mainly composed of elite refugees from London. There is consequently a number of references – plainly obvious for those in the know – to the court: a ‘Royal soul’ should have a ‘White-hall’, that is, a beautiful body for its lodging. The body must be granted supplies suiting its ‘active powers’ so that it can repel ‘disobedient matter’,14 just as the Oxford Parliament voted supplies for Charles’ war against the Dutch. Chapter I is entitled ‘How women with Child are to order themselves that they may be delivered of fair and handsome children’, a situation that is not at first glance readily associated with cosmetics. However, there might well be a link between the existence of this chapter and the fact that Lady Castlemaine’s pregnancy was a much-discussed topic.
The readership of the text was perhaps even more elite in social than in cultural terms, and so it is not surprising that imagery referring to social difference, to status and privilege appears with a certain regularity. This is what the author has to say about ‘How to repair the beauty of an itchy or scabby skin’:
I am afraid, Ladies, that whilst I prescribe remedies for so loathsome a skindefiling malady, you will think I have forgot ye, and am now addressing my self to your kitchin maids … If ever then you see ill disposed humours grow so strong, to break their way through the inclosing skin, it will do you no harm to have something in readiness that may check their presumption.15
Scabby skin is discussed in terms of social order. Medical conditions of this type are supposed to be a problem of domestic servants. If this disease affects their betters, then this is a case of ‘presumption’. The disease, as it were, behaves with a deplorable lack of deference, thus committing a blatant act of transgression.
The scars caused by the smallpox (or possibly even by venereal disease) are described in a similar way: ‘The feature fretting Pox, if it sets but a foot within that paradice [sic] of perfections, the face; it leaves more disfiguring impressions there, than a Coridons clouted shoes on a Cedar floor.’16 The disease has no business to affect the face of a lady in the first place, it behaves like a rustic thoughtlessly ruining an expensive and beautifully fmished floor. Beauty self-evidently appears as an attribute of rank. Therefore, the scars left by the ‘Pox’ are socially inappropriate, as is ugliness in general – hence the need to rectify these acts of transgression by means of cosmetics.
Still much more powerful than such images of social order and its reversal is the recurrent and drastic imagery of disease, death and decay. The text as a whole is deeply affected by the horrors of the plague. Morbid imagery, medical discourse and hence by implication the plague itself provide a potent sub-text to the entire book. The plague was the unmentionable everybody tried to forget, the repressed but nevertheless ever-present threat from which everybody tried to escape. Unmentionable though it was, in the text under discussion it is plainly present in the shape of recurrent lexical clusters impregnated with the horrors of death.
The plague is also present on an allusive level. Let me briefly return to the first sentence of the preface: In the word ‘deformity’, a young Algebraist ‘knows how to read a whole Iliad of Evills’. As any reader of the Iliad would have known, the very first lines of the text describe the outbreak of the plague in the Greek camp: ‘he [Apollo] in wrath against the king roused throughout the host an evil pestilence, and the folk were perishing.’17 Thus the plague is present in Artificiall Embellishments – veiled and only faintly perceptible, but defmitely there – from the very first line of its preface.
Images associated with mortality are brought up repeatedly. In the introductory essay entitled ‘Of the whole Body, and the beautifying thereof, the body is called ‘that weak and moving mansion of mortality, … exposed to the treacherous underminings of so many Sicknesses and Distempers’. It is a ‘fading house of distemper’d clay’; ‘to morrow it will be so white washt with a meager paleness, as if Death had took it to hire, and make it a whited Sepulchre’.18 The ‘whited sepulchre’ is easily recognized as a reference to Matthew 23, verse 27: ‘for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.’ It is remarkable how a locus classicus for denouncing dissimulation, which could so easily be employed in harangues against cosmetics, is here assimilated into a defence of cosmetics. An obvious anticosmetics topos is being subverted – a bold move on the part of the author which appears even bolder when one considers the sinister overtones the image of a sepulchre must have acquired at a time when the plague was on everybody’s mind. The author almost seems to be overdoing it, recklessly conjuring up the idea of death’s aspect being made momentarily more agreeable by applying a thin coat of paint.
The author discusses whether it is possible ‘to sublimate Nature beyond the reach of Sickness … and by cosmetick Antidotes to fortifie it with an incapacity of being surprized by any feature-fretting malady’ – surely a most heartfelt wish in plague times.19 Alas, this cannot be done – but at least it is feasible to keep ‘Deformity’s filthy fingers’ at bay so as to strengthen ‘the Lure of Love’.20
Gluttony is to be avoided because it ‘makes a Lady … a Mountaine of greasie mummy.’21 In the seventeenth century, ‘greasie mummy’ still meant both a corpse, and a drug made of corpses: genuine mummy, mumia vera, was imported from Egypt and prized for its medicinal virtues.22 Discussing the topic of reducing weight, the author employs the image of swelling carcasses: it would of course have been well known that dead bodies tended to swell as they decayed.23 On the other hand, women who are too meagre are ominously described as ‘breathing skeletons’, dwelling on the visibility of their bones.24
In the introduction to the chapter ‘How to polish the Skin when it is disfigured with Scars or marks of the Small Pox’, the author again has recourse to medical discourse: CV arious are the surprising casualties that deforme a polisht Skin; each wound is a grave where loves dumb orator lyes inshrin’d; and Chirurgeons usually the unskilful Plaisterers, that make an ill-rais’d cicatrice the swelling monument to departed beauty.’25 The mentioning of ‘Plaisterers’ recalls the ‘whitened sepulchre’ image. At the same time, there are sinister overtones of contemporary treatments of the plague (that is, opening the pestilential buboes or ‘tokens’) and the use of ‘Antipestilential Emplasters.’26
In the essay ‘What course of life may probably be the best either to procure beauty or to preserve it’, the author’s advice is to avoid ‘perturbations of the mind’ and especially grief as it ‘renders those who over much indulge in it, so wannish and pale, that they seem but walking shrouds to carry themselves to their own shady sepulcher’.27 One cannot help thinking of Defoe’s horrifying tales of nearly-dead plague victims struggling to fling themselves into a plague pit: ‘people that were Infected, and near their End, and dilirious also, would run to those Pits wrapt in Blankets, or Rugs, and throw themselves in, and as they said, bury themselves’.28
Defoe’s text is of course neither an eyewitness-account, nor necessarily reliable in all of its details. However, descriptions of nearly-dead infected persons losing their wits and staggering about in the streets like walking corpses are common. Examples can be found in Nathanael Hodges’ Λοιμολογía: sive Pestis Nuperae apud Populum Londinensem grassantis Narratio Historica (London, 1671) and Thomas Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the Ciry (London, 1667).29 Considering the contemporary connotations of ‘walking shrouds’, what the text would seem to imply is that it is not a good idea even to think about unpleasant things (and the plague is a very unpleasant thing indeed), because this might make one look like a plague victim.
Having been present on an allusive level throughout the text of Artificial! Embellishments, the plague eventually rears its ugly head more explicitly towards the very end of the book. The last section of the text is entitled ‘Sents [sic] and Perfumes fitted for several occasions’. Its introduction is every bit as lighthearted as those to the preceding chapters, revelling in ostensibly carefree hyperbole: ‘these following [recipes] shal make ye walking gardens, so that ye shallead your servants by the noses after ye; they shal all turn Camoeleons [sic] and [l]ive on that aire which ye perfume.’30 However, it could hardly escape any reader’s notice that the recipes given here (which are the most elaborate and costly ones to be found in the entire book) were in fact luxury versions or exact equivalents of some of the most popular prophylactic and curative measures employed against the plague.
The dominant school of thought among authors of plague pamphlets was that the epidemic was caused by ‘pestilential Miasms, insinuating into the humoral and consistent parts of the body’.31 Strong, offensive smells were widely regarded as direct causes of the plague. A pamphlet entitled Cautionary Rules for preventing The Sickness published by order of the Lord Mayor in 1665 established a clear connection between ‘Stenches, corrupt Vapours and Fumes, generated by nastiness’ and the incidence of plague cases:
Hence it is that the Contagion has as yet kept it self amongst the poor and indigent People living in close Houses where many Families are thrust together, and where there is constantly a foul offensive Smell, almost suffocation a stranger at his first approach. From hence, I say, the Fomes [sic] of the Pestilence is held up and continued, and the Air will more and more from hence be vitiated unless preventive means be used.32
It stands to reason that, given such assumptions, the most practical preventive measures were thought to be manifold uses of perfumes. Hence we find analogous recipes and instructions how to use and apply them in Artificiall Embellishments and in contemporary plague pamphlets, the only difference being that in the first instance they are discussed in terms of cosmetics, that is as luxury items, while in the second instance they are discussed in medical terms, that is as necessary means to ensure one’s survival. The same substances – rue, rosemary, cloves, laudanum, cinnamon, amongst others – are mentioned over and over again in both contexts. We find a discussion of pomanders (mixtures of aromatic substances made into a ball to be carried about) both in Artificiall Embellishments and in Golgotha; or, A Looking-Glass for London (London, 1665), in Gideon Harvey’s A Discourse of the Plague (London, 1665) and in Richard Kephale’s Meclela Pestilentiae (London, 1665).33 Given the background of the plague and hence the perfectly obvious contemporary connotations of preparing such pomanders, it is not surprising that here, at last, the author of Artificiall Embellishments abandons – if only for a brief moment and towards the very end of the book – his elaborate façade of carefree frivolity. Having given a recipe for making a particularly elaborate pomander, he apparently cannot help slipping in a reference to what has so far been treated as unmentionable. The pomander in question is recommended as follows: ‘Beside the exceeding pleasant smell, it is good in Pestilential times, and in Fits of the Mother.’34
Although this is the only time the plague is mentioned explicitly, the last few pages of the book contain further hints which could easily be connected with the epidemic. The chapter entitled ‘Sweet Waters, Oils and Essences’ contains the following recipe: ‘Take oiles of musk one dram, of cloves six graines, a little Virgin wax, mix them together according to art, and you shall have an odoriferos [sic] balsam that comforts the brain and revives the spirits, if ye anoint the nostrils with a little of it.’35 Gideon Harvey recommends the same practice under the heading ‘The Preservative Cure’: ‘The Indicata relating to those Indicandia are: 1. Perfumes to smell to, correcting and purifying the air before it is attracted by the Lungs, or rather antipestilential unguents and oyls to anoint the nostrils with; for it is tedious to be alwaies obliged to hold a perfume to ones nose’.36 Authors of other plague pamphlets agree.37 What is presented in Artificiall Embellishments as an innocent cosmetic could in fact be easily recognized as a popular prophylactic against the plague.
A more explicit hint as to obvious applications of the recipes given in this section follows. In the year 1665, as soon as one read the heading ‘Sweet Candles, and Perfumes to Burn’,38 one would have been more than likely to think of the manifold techniques of fumigation which were frantically employed all over London in an attempt to protect oneself from contagion. Appropriate recipes are a standard feature of plague pamphlets. The 1665 Cautionary Rules for preventing The Sickness, for instance, contain the following: ‘Take four Bay-leaves, a little Rosemary, a little Lemmon-peel, four Cloves bruised, some Vinegar and Rosewater, put them into a Pan, and set it gently steeming over a few Small-coal: There are perfuming Pots for the purpose.’39 Richard Kephale similarly advises readers of his Medela Pestilentiae,’for Correction of the Ayre … That the House be often perfumed with Rue, Angelica, Gentian, Zedoary, Setwel, Juniper wood or berries burnt upon embers, either simply, or they may bee steeped in Wine Vinegar, and so burnt.’40 The ‘correction of the aire’ is also the object of analogous perfumes described in Artificiall Embellishments. Having given a luxury version of the sort of recipes which could be found in contemporary plague pamphlets (the mixture includes precious ingredients such as amber, civet, musk and ivory), he concludes: ‘This is a perfume for Persons of quality, One or two of them [one or two doses] cast upon coals or put into a quantity of rose water that is set over the coals, will fill the room with a ravishing and coelestiall vapour, that refreshes the braine and vitall spirits and corrects the malignity of any contagious aire.’41 The parallels between the procedures described in Artificiall Embellishments and in plague pamphlets alike, not least the revealing similarities in the very phrasing of these descriptions, are obvious. It was not necessary to mention the plague explicitly in the passage quoted above, as there could have been no doubt whatsoever about the sort of contagion that was on people’s minds at the time.
Except for these brief allusions towards the very end of the book, the epidemic is never mentioned openly. Nevertheless, the horror of the plague is deeply imprinted on the whole of the text. The entire book can be read as an exercise in tacit morale boosting, working on a cosmetic façade that might possibly hold out against grim death itself. Thus, it could not differ more from the mainstream of religiously framed plague pamphlets which were meanwhile published in London. These tended to identify the ungodly pursuit of skin-deep beauty as one of the sins with which Londoners had brought the plague upon themselves. Thus Vincent condemned
the pride, which the daughters of London have had of their beauty, though it be but skin-deep, and the body is but a skin-full of dirt, and the choicest beauty without discretion, like a Jewel hanged at the ear or nose of a Swine: And the Lord knows what monstrous, and defiled, and deformed insides the most of those have had, who have been so fair and adorned outwardly. Many in London have been proud of their fine cloaths, and fair faces …42
However, there are other areas in which Artificiall Embellishments and a number of plague pamphlets overlap. It is worth bearing in mind that in plague pamphlets, perfumes were discussed not only as a potent prophylactic but also as a means of dispelling fear. In Kephale’s Medela Pestilentiae, we find the following passage: ‘Such as are to go abroad, shall do well, to carry Rue, Angelica, or Zedoary in their hands to smell to, and of those, they may chew a little in their mouths, as they go in the street, especially, if they bee afraid of the place.’43 It was taken to be of vital importance to dispel fear because the fearful were often regarded as the most likely victims of the plague. Humphrey Brooke, for instance, explicitly links contagion with ‘our Bodies thereunto disposed by Disorder and Fear’ in his Cautionary Rules for preventing The Sickness.44 Brooke then proceeds to discuss what, in modern parlance, could be described as psychosomatic aspects of the plague threat. His discussion of this aspect is worth quoting in extenso:45
the most prevalent Inducers of Disease are Fear and its attendant Sadness or Dejection of spirit: Against these let me take the freedom to avouch that they are at least the occasional or disposing cause of the Pest: How else can it be that Physicians, Chirurgions, Nurses, should visit and attend upon those in the highest degree infected, handle their Sores, drawing their Breath, as must needs, being long time in the Room, and yet for the most part escape untoucht? When others, passing but by a House or near a person Infected, yea, hearing a sad Story, shall immediately sicken, goe home and die: it cannot be the strength of the others Antidotes, since they use but what they advise; but Resolution of l\1inde, and freedome from those Dreads which are justly called Pabulum Pestis, the Food of the Pest. I speak not this to make you careless of Dangers, but to take that vain and groundless Timidity out of your mindes that exposes you upon every little occasion offered, sinking you often suddenly, and beyond the possibility of Recovery.
‘Freedome from those Dreads which are justly called Pabulum Pestif must have been exactly what those who could afford to do so, above all the court and its hangers-on at Oxford, sought while away from London. Considered in this context, Artificiall Embellishments, replete as it was with witty conceits, elaborate language and its array of ostensibly frivolous topics, could almost be regarded as prophylactic reading matter. In its attempt to take its readers’ minds off the plague, the text can be seen as an effort to ward off those fears that were thought to make people vulnerable to contagion. In this respect, it fits in well with the atmosphere prevailing among the refugees in Oxford as described by a French visitor, Denis de Repas, in a letter to Sir Robert Harley:46
There’s no other plague here but the infection of love; no other discourse but of ballets, danse and fine douse [clothes]; no other emulation but who shall look the handsomere, and whose vermillion and Spanish white is the best; no other fight than for ‘I am yours’. In a word, there is nothing here but mirth, and there is talk that there shall be a proclamacon made that any melancholy man or woman coming in this towne shall be turned out and put to the pillary; and ther to be whep till he has learned the way to be mery a la mode.
In discussing things such as ‘vermillion and Spanish white’, Artificiall Embellishments was plainly part of an effort to be ‘mery a la mode’ while the plague was raging nearby. On one level, Artificiall Embellishments can be read as a sustained and resourceful attempt to construct a carefree façade, which could in itself be considered as a prophylactic measure. However, as has been shown, the author ultimately failed in his attempt to provide innocent and amusing reading matter for a readership who would have been more than willing to be diverted. The all-pervading fear of the plague seeped little by little into the text. For the most part without acknowledging it openly, it persistently circles around the unspeakable, the terrifying symptoms of the epidemic and the physical proximity of death. Written under extraordinary circumstances, it goes far beyond what is to be expected of a work of its genre. Artificiall Embellishments demonstrates forcefully how a didactic book on cosmetics can pursue more than one hidden agenda.
1 Artificiall Embellishments or Arts Best Directions How to Preserve Beaury or Procure it (Oxford, 1665). The British Library catalogue attributes the text to T. Jeamson; however, the dedication (‘To the Honourable And Truly Vertuous A. E.’) is signed ‘M.S.’.
2 Other books of recipes of the period such as W. M., The Queens Closet Opened (London, 1655) may contain allusive components but lack such para-texts. They typically present an unbroken sequence of recipes, each following formulas such as ‘Take x, y and z …’, ‘It is very good for …’, and so on.
4 Algebra is derived from the arabic ‘al-jebr, the redintegration or reunion of broken parts, f. )ahara to reunite, reintegrate, consolidate, restore, hence, the surgical treatment of fractures, bone-setting’ (OED). The Sinonoma Bartholomei, a late fourteenth-century glossary of medical terms defines the ‘algebra’ as ‘restauracio camis’: see Sinonoma Bartholomei. A Glossary from a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript in the Library of Pembroke College, Oxford, ed. J. L. G. Mowat (Oxford, 1882), p. 10. On p. 3 of Artificiall Embellishments, the text is described as a ‘magazeen of Medicines, endeavouring to unite all parts of the body in charming Concords of alluring features’. Maybe it is no coincidence that this paraphrase of ‘algebra’ is preceded by another technical term taken from the Arabic (magazine is derived from makazin, plural of the arabic makzan, meaning storehouse: OED, q.v.).
10 C. Morris, ‘The Plague’, in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds R. C Latham and W. Matthews (11 vols, London, 1970-83), x, pp. 328-37; B. Weinreb and C. Hibbert, eds, The London Enryclopaedia (London, 1987), p. 237 ff. W. G. Bell, The Great Plague of London (repr. edn, London, 1994; 1st edn, 1924); and Liza Picard, Restoration London (London, 1997), p. 100 ff.
13 Internal textual evidence suggests that Artificiall Embellishments was published during the winter months of 1665: that is, when the court was present at Oxford. There is a recipe beginning thus: ‘But to make an exact perfume, Take an ounce and a half of white snow’: Artificiall Embellishments, p. 187.
17 Homer, The Iliad, transl. A. T. Murray (London and Cambridge, MA, 1960), Book I, lines 9-10, pp. 2-3. The first book of the Iliad has, since antiquity, been known by its informal title, Iλιáδοζ, A: λοιóσ μηνισ (‘First book of the Iliad: Plague/ Wrath’). This brief indication of the book’s subject matter was probably added by Aristarchus, head of the Alexandrian library, who prepared an edition of Homer’s texts in the second century CE: K. Ziegler and W. Sontheimer, eds, Der Kleine Pauly. Lexikon der Antike in fünf Bänden (5 vols, Munich, 1979), i, p. 554.
22 For evidence that this was still current practice in the seventeenth century see OED, q.v. The Sinonoma Bartholomei defines mummia as ‘quiddam est quod invenitur in sepulcris Babiloniorum’. In the body of the MS, there are further explanations: ‘Solebant enirn antiqui corpora mortuorum balsamo vel mirra condire ad conservacionem corporum a corrupcione, et apud paganos adhuc ita fit praecipue circa Babiloniam, ubi ist copia multa balsami, et hoc faciunt maxime circa cerebrum et spinam, unde sanguis ad cerebrum calore balsami trahitur et excoquitur. Similiter cerebrum aduritur et desiccatur et in mummiam transmutatur. Similiter circa spinam mummia invenitur. Est autem eligenda quae nigra est et solida et fetida.’ (‘The ancients used to treat the bodies of the dead with balsam or myrrh so as to preserve them from decay, and among the heathens living around Babylon, where balsam is common, this is still done, and they apply it principally around the head and the spine. The blood is drawn from the spine by the heat of the balsam, and it is baked there. In a similar manner, the head is transformed into mummy by heat and desiccation. In a similar manner again, mummy is to be found around the spine. The best quality is black, solid and stinking.’), Sinonoma Bartholomei, p. 31. See also A. L. Mayhew, ed., A Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Wordr, especiallY from the Dramatists. Collected by W. Skeat (Oxford, 1914), q.v.
26 ‘For the swelling under the ears, arm-pits, or in the groines, they must bee alwaies drawn forth, and ripened, and broken with all speed’: Richard Kephale, Medela Pestilentiae: Wherein is contained several Theological Queries concerning the Plague, with approved Antidotes, Signes, and Symptoms: Also, An exact Method for curing that Epidemical Distemper. Humbly presented to the Right Honourable, and Right Worshipful, the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of the City of London (London, n.d. [1665]), p. 22 ff. For ‘Antipestilential Emplasters’, see Gideon Harvey, A Discourse of the Plague. Containing the Nature, Causes, Signs, and Presages of the Pestilence in general Together with the state of the present Contagion. Also the most rational Preseroatives for Families, and choice Curative Medicines both for Rich and Poor. With several waies for purijjing the air in houses, streets &c. Published for the benefit of this Great City of London, and Suburbs. By Gideon Harory, M.D. (London, 1665), p. 14 and passim.
28 Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year. Authoritative Text, Backgroundr, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Paula Backscheider (New York and London, 1992), p. 53.
29 ‘Foras occurrebandt correpti hue, illuc, per plateas, inebriatorum more, titubantes; illic jacuerunt Comatosi, & tantum non semimortui; quae gravis somnolentia non nisi sonoro tubae novissimae clangore discutienda: istic obviam se dederunt enormi vomitione fatigati, epoto velut aconito; medio in foro bene valentes derepente conciderunt; perinde acsi Contagium prostitisset Venale’ (‘Those seized [by the plague] rushed outdoors, up and down through the streets, staggering as if they were drunk; there they dropped to the ground, comatose and more than half dead, and their sleep was such that they were only to be woken by the sound of the last trump; they they succumbed, exhausted by copious vomiting, as if they had swallowed poison; the healthy suddenly collapsed in the middle of the market place, as if the contagion had been for sale there’): Nathanael Hodges, Λοιμολογía: sive Pestis Nuperae apud Populum Londinensem grassantis Narratio Historica. Authore Nathanaele Hodges, M.D. é Cofleg. Londin. (London, 1671), p. 21; see also T. V[incent], Gods Terrible Voice in the City (London?, 1667), pp. 31-2.
32 Humphrey Brooke, Cautionary Rules for preventing The Sickness; Published by Order of the Lord Mayor (London, 1665), p. 3.
33 Artificiall Embellishments, p. 17 6; J. V., Golgotha; or, A Looking-Glass for London, and the Suburbs thereof. Shewing the Causes, Nature and Efficacy of the present Plagues; and the most hopeful Way for Healing (London, 1655), p. 24; Harvey, A Discourse of the Plague, p. 13 ff; and Kephale, Medela Pestilentiae, p. 12.
41 Artijicia/1 Embellishments, p. 191. This recipe is followed by another one ‘of the same virtue with the former and used in the same manner’ (ibid.).
42 He also advocates a process of religious self-examination which is described in terms of the visual self-examination preceding the application of cosmetics: ‘Sinners, … take the glass of the Word, and look upon your faces in it, and see how many spots it will discover which you never did perceive; not beauty spots, but spots of deformity, Plague-spots, Death-marks, Hell-tokens, such as will bring upon you inevitable misery, unless they be wiped off: T. V[incent], Gods Terrible Voice in the City, pp. 124, 168. See also J. V., Golgotha, p. 5.