1 Friedrich Ratzel, The History of Mankind (1896), 5, quoted in Dan Hicks, ‘The Material Culture Turn’, in Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 31.

² James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1977), 24–5, quoted in Hicks, ‘Material Culture Turn’, 48.

³ Joseph L. Black, ed., The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), liv–lv, 115.

⁴ Black, ed., Marprelate Tracts, liii.

⁵ Black, ed., Marprelate Tracts, 10, 16, 1, 19.

⁶ Anon, Papp with a Hatchet (London: T. Orwin, 1589), C4^r.

⁷ For the relative shares of the Welsh Presbyterian polemicist John Penry and the Warwickshire gentleman Job Throkmorton in writing the tracts, see Black, ed., Marprelate Tracts, xxxvi–xlvi.

⁸ The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, rev. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), III 354 (subsequent references are supplied parenthetically); Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 66; Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe (London: Routledge, 1984), 68.

⁹ J. B. Leishman, ed., The Three Parnassus Plays (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1949), 227, 245.

¹⁰ Caroli Fitzgeofridi Affaniae (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1601), fol. N3^r (‘Armatum juueni linguam calamumque tremendum/(Fulmina bina) priùs insidiosa rapit’; ‘Ipsa quidem metuit mors truculenta mori’); translation by Dana F. Sutton at http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/affaniae/ceneng.html#29 (accessed 29 January 2011).

¹¹ Michael Drayton, The Battaile of Agincourt (London: William Lee, 1627), fol. 2D1^v.

¹² Sir William Vaughan, The Newlanders Cure (London: F. Constable, 1630), fol. B2^v. Vaughan may have gained his acquaintance with Nashe when writing his study of The Spirit of Detraction (London: George Norton, 1611); see fos. P1^r–3^r for his strictures on railing pamphleteers.

¹³ Nashe distances himself from Aretino’s atheism at Works, I 285. See further Rhodes, Grotesque, 26–36.

¹⁴ Harvey asks ‘who can tell, what dowty yoonker may next gnash with his teeth?’; Fovre Letters, and Certaine Sonnets (London: John Wolfe, 1592), fol. D3^r.

¹⁵ Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52 (2001): 479–91 (479–80). See further idem, Untimely Matter in the Age of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

¹⁶ Douglas Bruster, ‘The New Materialism in Early Modern Studies’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 191–206, esp. 192, 194, 204. See also James A. Knapp and Jeffrey Pence, ‘Between Thing and Theory’, Poetics Today, 24.4 (2003): 641–71; and the telling discussion of commoditization and fetishism in Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 7–11.

¹⁷ Bruster, ‘Materialism’, 204–5.

¹⁸ For earlier meditations on Nashe’s material worlds, see Henry S. Turner, ‘Nashe’s Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599)’, English Literary History, 68 (2001): 529–61; and Julian Yates, Error Misuse Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), chap. 4.

¹⁹ Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 22.

²⁰ Miller, Stuff, 51.

²¹ Miller, Stuff, 16.

²² Miller, Stuff, 50–1.

²³ See especially Nicole Boivin, Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Role of Things in Human Thought, Society and Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

²⁴ C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 416. For divergent responses to Lewis, see Jonathan V. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) and Stephen S. Hilliard, The Singularity of Thomas Nashe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

²⁵ Brian Vickers, ‘ “Words and Things”—or “Words, Concepts, and Things”? Rhetorical and Linguistic Categories in the Renaissance’, in Eckhard Kessler and Ian Maclean, eds., Res et Verba in der Renaissance (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2002), 289–335.

²⁶ Vickers, ‘ “Words”’, 290–303, 324; Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 48–9.

²⁷ Rhodes, Grotesque, 11–17, 33–6 and passim.

²⁸ Rosalind Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 22–5.

²⁹ See Skinner, Reason, 188–94, for the rhetoricians’ prescription that an orator’s images should be far-fetched, but not fanciful or obscure.

³⁰ Rhodes, Grotesque, 97.

³¹ Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 26–32; David Hawkes, The Culture of Usury in Renaissance England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 31–5.

³² Compare Nashe, Works, II 332 (‘clapp[ing] a coat ouer a ierkin’).

³³ For the recycling of clothes in the period, see Jones and Stallybrass, Clothing, 181–93.

³⁴ See Nashe, Works, V 111–14 for McKerrow’s assessment of Nashe’s heavy reliance on collections of apophthegms, rather than original sources.

³⁵ On the early modern commonplace book, see most recently Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 3.

³⁶ Hugh Plat, Sundrie New and Artificiall Remedies against Famine (London: Peter Short, 1596). For Plat as ‘dearth scientist’, see Ayesha Mukherjee, ‘Food and Dearth in Early Modern England: The Writings of Hugh Platt’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2007). For a brilliant exposition of Nashe’s work as an affront to late Tudor ways of marshalling intellectual and material resources, see Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

³⁷ Hugh Plat, The Floures of Philosophie (London: Frauncis Coldocke and Henry Bynneman, 1581); Manuale, sententias aliquot diuinas & morales complectens (London: Peter Short, 1594).

³⁸ For ‘negative capability’, see Crewe, Rhetoric, 33–4; for the absence of stable literary identity, Rhodes, Grotesque, 52; for relentless innovation, see Philip Schwyzer, ‘Summer Fruit and Autumn Leaves: Thomas Nashe in 1593’, English Literary Renaissance, 24 (1994): 583–619.

³⁹ See Nashe, Works, I 303 for the denial and compare I 323, where he says that in Pierce Penilesse ‘I expostulated, why Coblers, Hostlers, and Carmen should be worth so much, and I, a scholler and a good-fellow, a begger’ (emphasis added).

⁴⁰ On the Erasmian connection, see further Hutson, Nashe, 38–54.

⁴¹ Harvey did not in fact invent ‘materiallitie’, which (ignoring OED, ‘materiality, n.’, with its ambiguous citation from c. 1529; see OED <http://www.oed.com> accessed 18 March 2013) had been used by several authors in the 1580s.

⁴² For Nashe’s representation in the OED, see Jürgen Schäfer, Documentation in the O.E.D.: Shakespeare and Nashe as Test Cases (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). It is now possible to antedate many of Nashe’s apparent coinages using the EEBO keyword search facility. See also the vocabulary measurements in Louis Ule, A Concordance to the Works of Thomas Nashe, 2 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1997).

⁴³ Rhodes, Grotesque, 26

⁴⁴ Rhodes, Grotesque, 140.

⁴⁵ The source for OED’s first citation for ‘dildo’, Florio’s Worlde of Wordes (1598), likely post-dates its second citation in Nashe’s ‘Choice of Valentines’, which seems to be mentioned by Harvey in 1593; see Charles Nicholl, ‘Nashe, Thomas’, ODNB<http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19790> accessed 18 March 2013.

⁴⁶ See further the defence of ‘huge woords’ at Works, III 152.

⁴⁷ Scutes, Pistols, and Portegues were respectively French, Spanish, and Portuguese coins.

⁴⁸ For references to coining, see Works, II 237, 258–9.

⁴⁹ ‘impecunious, adj.’, OED <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/92187?redirectedFrom=impecunious#eid> accessed 18 March 2013.

⁵⁰ ‘protractive, adj. (and adv.)’, OED <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/153350?redirectedFrom=protractive#eid> accessed 18 March 2013; William Shakespeare, The Historie of Troylus and Cresseida (London: R. Bonian and H. Walley, 1609), fol. B3^r.

⁵¹ Nashe had used ‘balder-dash’ earlier, at Works, III 11.

⁵² Victor I. Scherb, ‘Assimilating Giants: The Appropriation of Gog and Magog in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32 (2002): 59–84 (73) notes that ‘early modern writers increasingly doubted Gogmagog’s historicity’. See further Hutson, Nashe, 149; Spenser, Faerie Queene, I viii 24.

⁵³ For a recent exception, see Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, eds., Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).