DOMESTIC manuals were produced in large numbers in early modern England, and for that reason, they can be seen as an influential genre of prose writing—we can presume that many people read them or heard them read, or at least had access to a copy. And yet, there is not a great deal of direct evidence for their ownership: we know, for instance, that a copy of Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Pietie was bought for Anne Newdigate at the cost of 2s in 1621, and that Nehemiah Wallington, the seventeenth-century puritan and London artisan, bought William Gouge’s Of Domestical Duties. Such anecdotal examples give us valuable information about ownership, but Wallington is almost unique in offering an insight into the way these volumes were used. He helpfully records that, having purchased his copy, he subsequently drew up a list of ‘31 articles for my family for the reforming of our lives’, to which his household set their hands.1 We cannot know how representative Wallington’s ‘active’ reading of his Gouge was, however, as it is an exceptional account. This essay therefore comes at the question of use from a different angle, studying how the manuals work internally—what their prose form might be able to tell us about the way they were used and their potential impact on their early modern readers. In doing so, it addresses the way these prose writers explore the connections between individuals within a household and investigates their methods for forging links between theory and practice.
I focus in what follows on texts about domestic behaviour, as opposed to volumes on household work and on husbandry. The former are more conceptual, laying out ideals of conduct based largely on biblical principle, whereas the latter treat the practical tasks of domestic labour—the preparation of food or the types of medicine which the housewife might need to administer, and the tilling of the soil and the successful cultivation of various crops and animals.2 It is for these behavioural texts that the connections between theory and practice are most complex and most urgent.
The behavioural texts are in many ways strikingly similar to one another in their style and content. They advise on the nature of the relationships of which the household was comprised—husband and wife, parents and children, masters and servants—in order to achieve a peaceful and harmonious domestic life. As William Whately ambitiously states, ‘So shall your loves be sure, your hearts comfortable, your example commendable, your houses peaceable, your selves joyfull, your lives chearefull, your deaths blessed, and your memories happie for ever.’3 To this end, they deal with two major issues—the division of roles between the heads of the family (the husband and wife) and the negotiation of power relations between the household’s various combinations of superior and inferior. With regards to the former, William Gouge maintains that the husband should ‘meddle with the great and weightie affaires of the family (as performing Gods worship, appointing and setling good orders, providing convenient house-roome, and other necessaries for the family: keeping children when they grow great, or waxe stubborne, in awe: ruling men servants, with the like)’ and the wife with ‘some lesse, but very needfull matters, as nourishing and instructing children when they are young, adorning the house, ordering the provision brought into the house, ruling maid servants’.4 Theories of social order are repeatedly reiterated. The patriarchal division of household authority is underpinned by acceptance of the inherent human need for authority and subjection, and the logic of the following statement from Robert Cleaver was to be taken as self-evident: ‘For as in a citie, there is nothing more unequall, then that every man should bee like equall: so it is not convenient, that in one house every man shuld be like and equall together. There is no equality in that citie, where the private man is equal with the Magistrate … but rather a confusion of all offices and authoritie.’5 Avoiding confusion entailed accepting hierarchy—in the majority of cases then, tolerating domestic inferiority.
The writer’s authority to speak on these matters is a significant factor in our understanding of the relationship between theories and practices of domestic life: Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell point out the importance of ‘a conception of the authors [of didactic texts] … as equipped with the expertise to dispense appropriate knowledge’ and the text’s consequent status as ‘a substitute for oral, face-to-face educative relationships’.6 Many of the most popular of these books were written by Protestant preachers on the fringes of orthodoxy. Henry Smith, also known as ‘Silver-Tongued Smith’, began his career as a radical preacher, but was eventually elected lecturer at St Clement Danes without Temple Bar in 1587, where he was famous for his very popular and affecting sermons. William Whateley was known as the ‘Roaring Boy of Banbury’ for his preaching in Oxfordshire, and William Gouge, minister of St Ann’s Blackfriars, preached twice every Sunday and gave a celebrated Wednesday lecture for thirty-five years.7 They were clearly influential and persuasive speakers, and some of them were also married men—a part of that most significantly new type of post-Reformation family, the married clergy.8 As writers of didactic literature then, their claim to expertise lay partly in their own experience as family men, but largely in that gained by ministering to their flocks. The title pages of Whately’s and Gataker’s texts, for instance, foreground their authors’ role as ‘Minister and Preacher of Gods Word in Banburie in Oxfordshire’ and ‘Pastor of Rotherhith’ respectively. Not unrelated to their sermons (which several of them also published), their profession gave their texts a weight of spiritual authority which encouraged Wallington, and presumably others like him, to change their behaviour according to the precepts contained within them.
Several treatises maintain a residue of their spoken contexts as marriage sermons, an integral part of the celebrations. Henry Smith’s A Preparative to Marriage, for instance, begins ‘You are come hither to be contracted in the Lord’, and other authors discuss a process of event-based beginnings for their texts followed by revision and expansion, an issue of pressing time often hovering in the background. Gataker refers to the ‘happy conjunction’ at which ‘some part of it was preached, the residue through streits of time being for that time suppressed’, and Whately argues that ‘as a Wedding dinner, so a Wedding Sermon, may not be taxed for a little more than ordinary length and varietie, for why should any reasonable creature bee lesse willing to feed his mind than his belly?’9 The lively and potentially interactive nature of such a basis in performance occasionally comes across in the printed texts too: Whately anticipates disagreement with the words ‘But here perhaps some weake spirited man may interrupt me, and say …’.10
The dedication of several of these texts to exemplary individuals gives them a further platform of authority from which to engage the new and wider audience which print allows. William Lowth’s The Christian Mans Closet, for instance, is dedicated to ‘the right worshipfull and his singular good friends, M. Thomas Darcie and M. Brian Darcie Esquiers’ because ‘your worships are Fathers of many children (which I am perswaded are dearly beloved unto you) and maisters of great families’. Authority is shared in domestic manuals, then, between author and dedicatee: it is the combination of the theological knowledge and pastoral experience of the clerical author and the exemplary status of the elevated patron that underwrites their advice.11 Although based on ancient biblical exemplar, they insist upon their relevance to contemporary family dynamics.
And we might imagine the way they intervened in those contemporary domestic situations. Art historian Tara Hamling, analysing how the decoration of household interiors might have been used by their inhabitants, utilizes information from these manuals to reconstruct domestic pious practice. She finds direct connections in ‘the transmission of imagery from the title pages of Protestant advice manuals to the walls and ceilings of houses’, which shows how central these texts were to household life. But she also suggests less obvious associations: for instance, that ‘the godly patriarch could invoke a higher authority’ if his walls were decorated with visual and verbal examples of God’s judgements. This enables us to imagine a potential scenario for the reading out of domestic prose within the household, one in which it interacts with other cultural forms. We have a sense of what we might call the ‘event’ of a prose text—the moment at which it is interpreted, understood, and consumed.12
Such scenarios comment interestingly on the position of this chapter in a section on ‘private prose’. Domestic manuals are specifically addressed to households as a whole, either in the sense that their sections speak to different members of those households in turn, or that their messages are intended to be disseminated from the domestic head to his subordinates, or both. They are not, in other words, written for individuals, but for those who find themselves part of a specific community; and their subject is the relationship between individuals and communal life. This makes them potentially very different types of work to the diary or the letter, the focus of other essays in this section, but nevertheless concerned with life within the household, albeit in a time at which ‘private’ life had very different meanings.
As was suggested in Robert Cleaver’s statement above about the ‘city of confusion’, the early modern household was seen as central to the maintenance of social order. It was the smallest and most intense of a series of interlocking spheres which formed a model of governance which was structurally utterly convincing, if rather harder to put into practice. The monarch ruled his or her realm, giving protection in exchange for subjects’ loyalty; the mayor and magistrates ruled the town and ensured the good behaviour of its citizens. In a similar way, the husband ruled his household: his family in the widest sense of wife, children, servants, and apprentices obeyed him as a representative of God, because the model for these potentially diverse forms of authority was the nature and quality of Christ’s relationship with his church—that of a loving father whose sacrifice compelled the willing obedience of his flock. This is a further element of the priest’s authority to write on domestic matters, given his analogous role in relation to his congregation.13
Because these spheres of authority fitted within one another like a series of identically painted Russian dolls, the smallest, indivisible ‘doll’ of the household was, in theory, the simplest because it was the most direct and straightforward manifestation of a species of social relationship. It is first in historical terms, as Perkins points out: ‘Among al the Societies & States, wherof the whole world of mankinde from the first calling of Adam in Paradise, unto this day, hath consisted, the first and most ancient is the Familie.’ But it is also placed at the beginning of life—the sphere in which men must practise for their public roles, and in which their competency can be tested: ‘And look as the Superiour that faileth in his private charge, will prove uncapable of publike employment; so the Inferiour, who is not framed to a course of Oeconomicall subjection, will hardly undergoe the yoke of civill obedience.’14 Success in the smaller sphere should guarantee the realization of the larger. As Gouge puts it, ‘What excellent seminaries would families be to Church and Commonwealth’ if ‘the head and severall members of a family would be perswaded every of them to be conscionable in performing their owne particular duties’?15 Domestic practice is the very stuff of political theory and the extra-domestic significance of these texts, then, lies in the very high stakes which this political view of the household gives to successful family life. Only seeing the relationship between daily activity and such ideals can guarantee the kingdom’s stability.
The rhetorical style which the manuals adopt in many ways foregrounds a learned, rather than a practical knowledge, one which generates an educated and theologically sophisticated authorial authority. They disseminate and make material the order of which they write through a number of typographical features. Very careful division—often lengthy tables of contents, chapters with subheadings, and marginal notes about shifts in argument—is used by authors to impose an order intended to increase understanding. Listing six parts to his work, William Lowth says ‘I thinke it meete to divide the argument unto you that be here present, to the ende that an order being observed, all thinges may the more easily be understood.’16 Gouge underlines the connections between his sections: ‘For by method sundry and severall points appertaining to one matter are drawne forth, as in a chaine one linke draweth up another … As method is an helpe to Invention, so also to retention. It is as the thread or wier whereon pearles are put, which keepeth them from scattering.’17 Whately states conversationally, ‘Now then, that we may not loose ourselves for want of order, I must needs ranke these duties into their severall kinds and heads, for the better helpe of mine owne and your memories’, and a marginal note marks that division so that it may be returned to easily.18 Typographical order generates social order.
The clear division into sections is mirrored by the analytical distinctions which are made between the contents themselves, in a run of subtle differentiations which attempt to impose an order of sameness by dividing human relationships and behaviours into similar but discrete groups: ‘Next unto parents and children wherby the family is increased,’ says Perkins, ‘is a second sort of couples, which are helpes therunto. And they are Masters and servants.’19 The interlinked responsibilities of household members and the connections between their different types of authority and subjection are echoed in the careful divisions of the text.
In rhetorical terms too, these are self-consciously learned works. Many writers make extensive use of contraries in their explanations of central concepts. Gouge offers the most extended defence of the technique: ‘And because contraries laid together doe much set forth each other in their lively colours, I have to every duty annexed the contrary fault, and aberration from it. For many that heare the duties thinke all well enough, till they heare also the contrary vices, whereby in their consciences they are most convinced.’20 Gataker echoes the dichotomies of behaviour in pleasing verbal forms: ‘And if she be so that performeth not the Office of a Wife; what is she then that doth the contrary? Who when she should be an Helper, prooveth an Hinderer.’21 The function of these techniques is the additional clarity and the variety of approach which will further the authors’ didactic aims. The shape of their works is in the service of familial salvation, national order, and, no doubt, an authorial pride achieved through use of scholarly rhetorical form.
The most obvious example of the transfer of these preachers’ learning and professional skills to the pages of the pamphlets is their biblical exegesis. Robert Cleaver and Thomas Gataker both take Genesis as their subject: from ‘Let us make Adam a helper like unto himselfe’ Cleaver concludes that ‘By the Helper, is signified the utilitie and profit of the service, and by the similitude and likenesse, is signified love’ and goes on to explore the relationship between the two: ‘But as wee would that the man when he loveth should remember his maiestie, so we would that when he ruleth, he forget not his love.’22 Gataker’s assessment of Adam’s state is thought-provokingly simple: ‘Adam in Paradise, though he were truly happie, yet was he not fully Happie: his Happinesse was not compleat; he was nothing so well yet as he might be, while he was yet without a Mate.’23 Such a distinction, between ‘true’ and ‘full’ happiness, shows the complexity of the thinking which lies behind the clear divisions of these writers’ prose. They are thought-provoking sentences in the sense that they encourage meditation on similarity and dissimilarity, and therefore on the theoretical distinctions between states.
There are points in these texts, however, at which such unshakable and authoritative pronouncements weaken and a hesitancy and equivocation creeps into the prose. Such points are most prominent in the writing of Gouge and Whately, two sermonizers who had had to cope with direct responses from their audiences in the past. Gouge’s statements on the difficulties of communicating hard lessons are well known. ‘I remember that when these Domesticall Duties were first uttered out of the pulpit’, he says, ‘much exception was taken against the application of a wives subjection to the restraining of her from disposing the common goods of the family without, or against her husbands consent.’ Print, in this context, becomes a form of defence, a way of pointing up the parts of complex arguments which are lost in the initial rush of audience response to a spoken thesis: ‘But surely they that made those exceptions did not well thinke of the Cautions and Limitations which were then delivered, and are now againe expresly noted.’ Given such a chance to set the record straight, Gouge also makes an explicit connection between the form of his prose, his typography, and his meaning:
Now that in all those places where a wives yoke may seeme most to pinch, I might give some ease, I have to every head of wives duties made a reference, in the margin over against it, to the duties of husbands answerable thereunto, and noted the reference with this marke *, that it might the more readily be turned unto. Yea I have further parallel’d, and laid even one against another in one view, the heads of husbands and wives duties, as they answer each other.24
He also adds a table of contents which runs to twelve pages to aid in this task. The complexities of marriage and the pains of patriarchal subservience are to be mitigated by the forms of the printed manual.
This openness to the idea that patriarchal subjection is arduous and likely to provoke resentment if poorly managed is striking. Whately handles his section on the wife’s subjection to her husband rather differently to the rest of his text, using a distinct mode of address and anticipating problems from the start. ‘This duty had so much more neede to bee pressed, because, though it be so plane, as it cannot be denied, yet it is withal so hard, that it can hardly bee yeelded unto’ he states honestly—the duty is logical (plain) but very testing—the movement from its theory to its practice is inherently fraught with problems.25 This ready admittance that such demands are extremely hard to fulfil points to the endless processes of negotiation between writer and initial audience and between readers and their families which lie behind the distances that these texts imagine between theory and practice. Whately even suggests a kind of censorship by public opinion: ‘I was verily afraid to deliver my mind as concerning the lawfulnesse of an husbands using such a medicine [violence]. But I confessed, that wee must not conceale a needful truth, for feare of inconveniences.’26 In addition to showing very clearly the contested nature of the central elements of patriarchy, these quotes demonstrate the vibrancy of everyday debates on the subject which must underlie so many early modern plays’ engagements with the contests around male authority.
The careful rhetorical division into sections and the distinctions made between concepts are challenged by domestic practice then, and the former is often explicitly an attempt to contain and control the latter. The manuals are full of injunctions, especially to wives, to consider the theory when faced with the practice. Gouge suggests with his usual succinctness that ‘Though an husband in regard of evill qualities may carrie the Image of the devill, yet in regard of his place and office he beareth the image of God.’ In other words, the material qualities of reality are consistently to be trumped and overridden by the ideals of spiritual perception. Gataker’s reminder that ‘Circumcision is accounted no other than Uncircumcision, if a man be not a keeper of the Law’ makes this painfully clear.27 As a husband, modelling one’s behaviour on the magistrate did not perhaps require too much imagination, and some of these men may have been, or assumed that they would one day be, fulfilling both roles. Thinking through one’s role within the household in terms of the relationship between Christ and his church, however, was a different matter. Perkins shows the move from experience to metaphor clearly in his exposition of the three fruits of the marriage bed: ‘I. The having of a blessed seed … II. The preservation of the bodie in cleannesse … III. The holy estate of marriage is a lively type of Christ and his Church, and this communion of married persons, is also a figure of the conjunction that is between him, and the faithfull.’28 The first two are recognizable aspects of human behaviour, however hard to control, but the third is altogether different. The Russian dolls of analogy, then, are in fact made of very different stuff; the faces which they give to early modern authority are less solidly human as they increase in size—less clearly connected with everyday practice—and seeing their familial likeness to one another often means moving from recognizing the parity of particular actions in the exercise of authority, to appreciating similarity in the quality, rather than the character, of actions, to recognizing a sophisticated set of metaphorical parallels centred on mutual responsibility occasioned by different kinds of loving sacrifice. The manuals offer a version of this shift writ large: a dizzying movement from the bodies of ordinary men and women to the sacred and resonant body of Christ. It is upon these distinctions between similitude and disparity that the project of early modern patriarchal authority rests, and they get to the heart of the wonderful tension between prose style and content which makes the manuals so endlessly interesting, if frustrating, to read.
It was, of course, a central function of both the priest’s role and the role of these texts to make connections between theological concepts and daily practice. Gouge makes this very clear as he examines the relationship between the general and the particular: ‘The life and power of Gods word consisteth in this particular application thereof unto our selves’—the Bible only has power if the faithful live it out as practice, rather than reading it as text.29 To this end, he uses a simile to clarify the relationships between the spheres of analogy: ‘The glorious and bright Sunne in the firmament, and a dimme candle in an house, have a kinde of fellowship, and the same office, which is to give light: yet there is no equality betwixt them.’30 The separation between fellowship in office and equality of nature and effect is shown neatly, efficiently, and in a way which lingers in the mind’s eye. Gouge is not alone in his use of such explicatory techniques, and it is here that we get to the heart of the connection between prose style and the relationship between texts and audiences. It is these writers’ use of simile which bears the theologically significant weight of scaling up or down the concepts of authority and of connecting the spiritual and material worlds to one another, as the remainder of this essay aims to demonstrate.
Authors offer a rich variety of comparisons in order to elucidate the kinds of behaviour they are advocating, and that variety links their seriousness of message and their lightness of delivery as prose texts. The vast majority of the images fall into the following categories: there are figures of husbandry and interaction with animals, images from manufacturing and professional practices, similes of the body and medicine, of domestic activity (including the use of different kinds of vessel and culinary conceits), and of buildings. Moving outside the household, there are military similes, ones around educative processes and those surrounding the purity and controllability of water. In other words, these similes are not unfamiliar ones from other types of early modern prose, but their referents are by and large quotidian ones, grounded in the practices of everyday life, rather than the flights of poetic fancy. Exploring the way this range of images employs its readers’ knowledge of other areas of life in the service of domestic harmony demonstrates what is perhaps the most obvious and distinctive formal strategy used to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Some writers use far more of them than others: Lowth, for instance, employs very few indeed, Cleaver and Smith draw on comparatively few given the length of their texts, and Whately, Gataker, and Gouge use them in the largest numbers. Images of buildings, domestic practice, animals, husbandry, manufacture, and the body are by far the most popular, used by the majority of writers even if they only employ them once or twice. I focus on a few of the most common categories here, in order to show how simile is used by authors in addressing the difficult issue of the joining of human beings into productive and peaceable relationships.31
The most popular images of husbandry are those which employ the processes of cultivation. Gataker and Gouge use the idea of grafting productively, Gataker in respect of the relationship between parents and children:
Children are as branches shooting out of one stem, divided and severed either from other, or as grifts and siences cut off, or boughes and branches slipped off from their native stocke, and either planted or engraffed else-where. Man and Wife are as the stocke and sience, the one ingraffed into the other, and so fastned together, that they cannot againe be sundred.
The extension of the image to treat the subject fully is striking. Gouge uses the same idea to express the relationship between Christ and his people: ‘Christ laying hold on us by his spirit, and we on him by faith, we come to be incorporated into him, and made one body, as the science and stocke one tree.’32 The process is natural and productive, and yet, it involves a significant amount of husbandry.
In addition, there are images of the tending of plants: the instruction to ‘water … the tender buds of thrift, dutifulnesse, and other graces which begin to bud forth, and to appeare a little above ground’, or Lowth’s focus on moderation: ‘Plantes when they are moderately watered, grown and increase the better, but with overmuch, they are choked.’33 The need for an active spirituality comes across clearly in all of these images, and the labour which those who work on the land put into the production of their crops provides a useful analogy for the relationship between natural gifts and cultivated abundance. Work, they insist, has an essential place in spiritual development. The manuring of the land is also well used: in Whately’s colloquial term it must ‘be goodded (according to the country phrase), as well as plowed and harrowed, else it will bring forth very little but weeds’. For Lowth, the potential barrenness of ‘a field albeit it be very fertile, without culture, diligent dressing and manuring’ is instructive, and similarly for Gataker, the image of ‘a cursed soile, yeelded nothing, though never so well manured and managed, but thornes and thistles, but briers and brambles, but hemlocke and henbane, and the like noisome weeds’.34 The knowledge which is called on here is not abstract or abstruse, but rather, a kind of wisdom passed almost silently between generations and amongst communities.
Linked to these powerful images of growth and decay, which gain their potency from seasonal cycles of production and consumption, are those of animal husbandry and the controlling of beasts. The behaviour of animals is used as a way of exploring the godly community, either in positive or negative terms. Gataker identifies man’s desire to work together by analogy to the animal kingdom: ‘Man being a Creature of the kinde, not of those that love only to flocke, and feed, and bide, and live together, as Dawes and Stares doe; but of those that desire to combine, and worke and labour also together, as the Bee and the Pismire; hee stood in need, as of Societie, so of Assistance.’ Similarly, Gouge sees the family as ‘a Bee-hive, in which is the stocke, and out of which are sent many swarmes of Bees: for … out of families are they sent into the Church and common-wealth’. The images join the two levels of the analogy and show how the texts aim at the creation of both ideal communities and perfect households. For Perkins, families in which God is served ‘are, as it were, little Churches, yea even a kind of paradise upon earth’, but their opposite can be ‘compared to an heard of swine, which are alwaies feeding upon the maste with greedinesse, but never looke up to the hand that beateth it downe, nor to the tree from whence it falleth’. The appropriate response to God’s word is suggested by an image of its opposite, as the reader simultaneously holds in their mind the churchly paradise and the wood of swine.
Many of these images, then, are given the considerable status of trying to separate out the behaviour of Christian families from that of reasonless animals—for instance, Whately asks rhetorically of the effects of whoredom, ‘Doth it not transforme men into the savage rudenesse of the bruit creatures, where no young almost can know his sire?’ and questions whether or not ‘it were a bruitish profanenesse for any man, to sit him downe to his table, as an horse to the manger, and cram himselfe with viands without craving the licence and blessing of God first’.35 This imagery is therefore at the heart of one of the manuals’ crucial distinctions, as it vividly represents the differences between those who are able to exercise the power of the mind over the lusts of the body and those who are not. Obvious here is an imagined godly reader already secure in their status as the former.
The majority of animal husbandry images, therefore, centre around the ubiquitous and enormously important early modern parallel between the bridling of the emotions and the controlling of horses. ‘The way to maintaine authoritie in this societie, is not to use violence, but skill’, Whately insists, and the skills which are explored are characterizing in social, as well as moral, terms: gained by those of middling status upwards in the management of valuable early modern beasts.36 These images are sometimes residual, cropping up in passing references to ‘unbridled passion’, but are often considerably extended. For instance, knowing how to deal with one’s wife means applying skills in distinction, ‘Even as he that is to ride an horse, must make his bridle fit for the mouth of the poore beast, a snaffle for one, a bit for another, an hard and heavy bit for one, a lesser and lighter for another, for every bridle will not agree to the mouth of every beast.’ Cleaver applies the idea to the contract of marriage, ‘First therefore, it serveth as a strong bridle to pull backe the force and headines of carnall, naturall, and brutish lust’, and Perkins to children, who ‘are to bee restrained by the bridle of discipline’.37 In other words, the notion of bridling is associated with all unruly behaviour which is not governed by the mind, and it works against natural human tendencies, imagined entirely pejoratively. Although the modern reader tends to find such images offensive, largely because the relationship between superior rider and inferior horse is so often an explicitly gendered one, they were clearly an important part of the explication of control through skill. Lowth applies the analogy to wit: ‘No horse willingly obeyeth his rider except he be first made tame & ge n tle by the dilige n t and wise ha n dling of his breaker, so is their no wit, but yt it wil prove fierce, cruel, & outrageous except it be tamed brideled & subdued by wholso m precepts & good education.’ He separates a reader and his or her wit from one another, seeing the latter as something in need of control if the former is to grow to fulfil their potential. Individuals were to apply such lessons not only to others, but also to themselves, each ‘whole’ (family; husband and wife; mind and body) being made up of superior and subservient parts.
Whately uses a run of images of manufacture in a similar way, connecting the pride felt about good working practice to domestic skills: ‘He never yet learnt to worke well in any worke, that would cast his eye more upon his neighbours fingers than his owne’; showing bad practice as a source of shame, pointing out both that ‘The skilfullest Carpenter, or other Artificer that is, shall yet bungle and worke very unskilfully, if when his head is light and wefty with drinke, hee take his axe or plane, or other tooles in his hand’, and also the effect which this might have on expensive raw materials: ‘A good worke may be marred (you know) by an ill manner of doing it: as good stuffe may be soiled by the bungerly making.’38 Whately appeals to the expertise of the craftsman and his proficiency in making the kind of material distinctions which are analogous to both the horseman’s dexterity and the scholar’s expertise in dividing the elements of an argument: ‘experience teacheth al men to know the proper qualities of those things that are much under their hands’, he points out and, as ‘Those also that deale in metals, give not the same heate to everie metal’, so ‘The husband must diligently observe by his wives actions, whether she be Leade, or Tinne, or Iron, or Steele, or of what mettall she is made.’39 This very material imagistic process has the effect of denaturing women by setting them alongside objects and processes. Seeing it in this explicatory context, however, also situates it as a part of the strange way in which prose brings together the dissimilar to draw out surprising connections—a series of formal, rather than categorical associations. The materiality of these ideas and the notion that sensory skills are analogous to ‘interpersonal’ ones makes human relationships appear logical and capable of being learned, and takes the irrational heat out of actual domestic situations. Such ideas encourage the transfer of skills between occupational and affective relationships, and they aim at a confidence-building sense of coherence in the range of different contexts in which men have authority over their world.
The other ubiquitous husbandry image is the yoking of animals together at the plough, and again, this has wider connotations of human obedience. Whately takes the idea back to Eden in order to point out its connections to fundamental elements of human nature, saying that obedience ‘is a yoake laid upon them in their creation, which also since their fall, hath been made cumbersome, and so they are ever loath to beare it’: it is not the yoke of obedience itself, but rather, mankind’s altered, disobedient nature which is cumbersome. But the image is more often used as a way of exploring mutuality. Gouge uses it in relation to the problems which occur in marriage, when the couple: ‘by their discontent make the burden much more heavy then otherwise it would be: even as when two oxen are in one yoke, and the one holdeth backe, the draught is made much harder to the other’. Later in his work, however, it takes on its most familiar form, as a way of pointing up both the equalities and the inequalities of marriage simultaneously: the husband and wife ‘are yoak-fellowes in mutuall familiaritie, not in equall authoritie’.40 The value of such images lies, then, in an accessibility—a point of meditation on things which must have been seen by readers on a regular basis. They are stable (widely shared and consistent) mental images, whose meanings can therefore be bifurcated—divided into their similarities to and differences from the other half of their ‘simile pair’. In the process, the everyday is elevated as a way of thinking about human connections.
In the wide range of domestic images too, writers appeal to a knowledge of best practice—perhaps not so much to a pride in skill, but rather, to a common-sense idea of what works and what does not. On temperance, for instance, Whately says ‘it is easie to put out the fier by with drawing fewell, at least to keep ye flame within the chimney, by laying on no more matter, than will sere the turne’; or his advice that whores are best avoided: the reader is to ‘consider, that even cold water will become hot, if it bee set too neare the fier’. Gouge’s assertion ‘that husbands and wives should endevour to helpe forward the growth of grace in each other, because we are all so prone to fall away and wax cold, even as water if the fire goe out, and more fewell be not put under’ seems to fall into the same category of appeals to common sense.41 Clearly, then, these images are not simply aimed at women or servants as the most regular providers of fuel to fires, but rather, appeal to a baseline of domestic practice which is especially apt for the subject matter under consideration—the material practices of the household offering an analogy to its social relations.
Like the dichotomy between reason and the senses which is explored through the management of beasts, household images offer writers an opportunity to investigate the connections between the physical and human, earthly and spiritual elements of the household. This is the other key binary on which the arguments of the manuals turn because they aim at a holistic view of domestic issues in order to ensure that sufficient weight is given to the spiritual over the material. Gataker’s run of images on the subject is instructive here. He begins with the commonplace that ‘surely if any outward thing may helpe to grace a Man, apparell, jewels, plate, hangings, house-furniture, attendants, followers, retinue, revenew, issue, &c. then a worthie Wife as much as, yea much more than any such’. The fact that houses contain people and goods, Christian practice and the things of the world, necessitates both connections between the two and a hierarchizing of both elements of the metaphor. Again, there is to our eyes a troubling setting of objects against people in the process of comparison—a wife or one’s hangings. Gataker continues by moving from the physical to the textual, with an allusion to the biblical comparison of spiritual and material worth: ‘She is a greater blessing than either House or Inheritance: and her price is above Pearles.’ However, having begun to think about pearls, he immediately pursues the metaphor back to the mundane to draw out the absurdity of any other kind of prioritization: ‘And if there be so much seeking generally on all hands after the one, much more may there justly be as much after the other.’42 The very visceral connections which the household makes between people and things, as the location which puts them into a close conjunction, not only of use and production, but also of the expression of social status, invites this kind of investigation of human relationships through the quotidian experience of material culture. Individuals and objects are linked through the times and places in which the manuals are likely to have been read, as explored above, but also to instinctive practices and common-sense solutions which might not, without similes, immediately come to mind in the search for salvation.
But the house also offers a way of talking about the body, in a series of metaphors which speaks directly to the concept of the body politic. The biblical idea that the husband is head of the wife’s body is central and striking enough to encourage a great deal of thought about the connections between wholes and parts. This close connection between the two should be the essential grounds for a kind of communication envisaged as internal to a perfectly coherent body: as Gouge puts it, ‘our particular places and callings are those bonds whereby persons are firmely and fitly knit together, as the members of a naturall body by nerves, arteries, sinewes, veines, and the like, by which life, sense and motion is communicated from one to another’. As the husband resembles Christ in his headship, so this model is also one by which body and fully developed spirit are connected: ‘by this meanes is Christ made more fit to doe good to the Church, as an head to the body, and the Church is made more capable of receiving good from Christ, as a body from the head, being knit to it by the soule, and by veines, sinewes, nerves, arteries, and other like ligaments’.43 True perfection is therefore to be found not as an individual, but as an inextricable part of a larger, nourishing whole, and the image makes it clear that these two central relationships, with Christ and one’s wife, are the only source of bodily wholeness, of being fully human.
More often than not, however, the ‘body of the household’ is a monstrous travesty of such perfection. Gataker again has a run of arresting similes on the subject. He begins with another inspirational biblical passage which doubles body parts and subjection, suggesting that woman ‘was at first taken out of man; and is therefore by Creation as a limbe reast from him. And the[n] was afterward joyned againe in Mariage with Man, that by Nuptiall coniunction becomming one flesh with him, she might be as a limbe restored now and fastned againe to him.’ This positive coming together in marriage of things previously separated in creation—a re-creation—is contrasted against the ‘Woman that beareth the Name, and standeth in the roome of a Wife, but doth not the office and dutie of a Wife’ who is compared to ‘an eye of glasse, or a silver nose, or a an ivorie tooth, or an iron hand, or a woodden leg, that … beareth the Name of a limbe or a member, but is not truly or properly any part of that bodie whereunto it is fastned’. As a useless appendage that does not fulfil her role, ‘she may therefore be compared rather to … a wolfe, or a cancer, that consumeth the flesh, wasteth the vitall parts, and eateth even to the verie heart’, and it is only in this sense that she may be considered a part of her husband, parasitic like gangrene. Weaving positive and negative images of the relationship between appendages and bodies together, Gataker creates a discursive field within which the broader concept of connection can be explored.44 The rhetorical use of body parts, it has been argued, offers ‘a remarkable density of implication’—they concentrate the attention of the reader and draw meaning into themselves, broadening thought processes, rather than narrowing them. Common to all in a more fundamental sense than the yoke, the body is similarly, but more richly, susceptible to emblematization in the mind’s eye. A fundamentally ‘lively’ image, its meanings are reiterated with the subject’s every movement. The particular cluster of ideas writers extend in this context are those around different kinds of joining: the appendages’ ‘status as “part” implies by definition a relation’.45 Gataker’s use of a wide range of linked images offers a rhetorical model of this exact process of linking, echoing in his prose style the relationships between parts and wholes which his images explore.
When presented negatively, however, these images of body parts aim to normalize approved behaviour by presenting its comically awkward and/or disgustingly arresting opposite. Cleaver offers the whole and ‘perfect bodie’, achieved when one marriage partner endeavours ‘to supplie the others wants … they both helping and doing their best together’ against which the contorted and distinctly un-classical body of the domestically incompetent is imagined. Whately states, ‘That house is a misshapen house, and (if we may use that terme) a cramp-shouldered, or hutch-backe house, using the rhetorical weight of the absurdity of the image as a way of changing behaviour through the analogy it sets up with ridiculous domestic actions. Gouge uses the language of monstrosity:
Goe therefore, O wives, unto the schoole of nature, looke upon the outward parts and members of your bodies. Doe they desire to be above the head? are they loth to be subject unto the head? Let your soule then learne of your body. Were it not monstrous for the side to be advanced above the head? If the body should not be subject to the head, would not destruction follow upon head, body, and all the parts thereof?
Whately is doing a similar thing when he presents the idea that ‘the head is not always actually stooping unto the foote: for then the body would grow crooked and ill shapen’, when the husband is ‘putting his hand to every little matter’.46 These images mock behaviour, inducing ridicule by giving it a harsh and judgemental visual form. They offer a distorted mirror which reflects back at the reader a monstrous image, as opposed to the likeness of their public form on which their status is based. In doing so, they offer a degrading mockery, a rhetorical jeering which is akin to charivari, to the rough derision through which early modern communities policed themselves.47
Images of medicinal remedies and surgical procedures, obviously closely linked to ideas of the healthy, as opposed to the ailing body, share some of these effects. Like domestic images, some of them are also intended to have the effect of making spiritual matters take on the urgency and generate the common-sense response of practical ones. ‘Wouldest thou suffer thine husband to poison himself’, Whately asks, ‘for feare of enduring his anger, if thou shouldest snatch the poison out of his hand?’ Clearly, the answer here is ‘no’, and thinking about one’s behaviour in terms of an immediate effect on the body is similarly instructive: ‘Who ever kept a bitter thing for any other purpose, than to make a medicine? and is not that a bad husband, that is good for little, but to be his wives purgation? … If he be gaule and aloes in her mouth, is it any wonder, though she strive to spit him out?’ But the lowness of being spat out of the mouth of one’s wife again mocks unsuitable behaviour, offering an image which challenges the pretensions of a husband whose status must be maintained by a series of carefully controlled gestures.
In addition, images which aim to encourage private chastisement employ the boundaries of domestic modesty on which notions of potential shaming play. Whately offers a rather shocking figure of display which sets a householder up as a kind of cheap entertainment: ‘Many a man would be willing to open his griefe to a Physician, and to have a Chirurgion see his sore, which yet would be loath to have it opened at the market place, and shewed to all his neighbours.’48 The household emerges from such opposing images of restorative privacy and undignified exposure as the perfect location for censure—it is within doors that familial issues should be worked out—and the images themselves simultaneously foreground and create a particular kind of domestic context within which they are to be consumed.
So many of the images—from husbandry, animal and household practice—are about the joining of individuals within the household. But there are also, in the context of the bond between husband and wife, more explicit considerations of the way human relationships work. Gouge goes back to first principles and examines the Biblical language very closely: ‘To set forth the firmnesse of the mariage bond he [St Paul in Ephesians 5] addeth this Emphaticall phrase, shall be joyned, (or as the word properly, according to the naturall notation thereof signifieth, shall be glued) to his wife.’ This gluing he expounds as follows:
Things well glued together are as fast, firme, and close as if they were one intire peece. Yea we observe by experience that a table will oft times cleave in the whole wood, before it will part asunder where it is glued: so as an husband ought to be as firme to his wife as to himselfe: and she to him.
All writers address the topic: even the metaphorically sparse Perkins gives the parenthetical explanation that man must ‘cleave unto his wife, (as two boords are joyned together with glue)’. Gataker states that ‘It is easier glewing againe of boards together, that have beene unglewed, than healing up the flesh that is gashed and divided: and the reason is, because there was but an artificiall connexion before in the one, there was a naturall conjunction in the other’, and in doing so, he links these images to those of the body.49 But far from sticking to the translation of joining as gluing, the authors also offer figures of knitting, of cementing, of knotting, of plastering, of soldering, and of joining, in the technical sense of the carpenter’s trade. Read en masse like this, they provide a discursive field within which relationships are explored in various fully material terms—the weight of worldly joinings brought to bear for the common-sense light they shed on this shadier area of human affairs.
Seeing the whole range of images employed on the topic in these manuals helps us to understand how highly variety was valued in the effort to explore practice in relation to biblical models of behaviour. Some authors offer such a process in microcosm: runs of different images in the service of the same explanation: ‘Wherefore now, as thou lookest, that every other thing should be fit to receive the things, that thou wouldst put into them, the vessel the liquor, the ground the seede, the chest the clothes, the house the guest, and other like, so take care that thy wives heart be fit to entertaine thy directions …’ says Whately; ‘as theeves steale in when the house is emptie; like a Turtle, which hath lost his mate, like one legge when the other is cut off, like one wing when the other is clipt, so had the man been if the woman had not been joyned to him’ Smith explains.50 Both men aim to give their reader the greatest possible chance of understanding the point by analogy, in the process flashing a bizarre set of images in their mind’s eye like an eclectic prose equivalent of an early moving picture.
And these different rhetorical joinings of concepts and images show how complexly people might think about domestic life through reading this kind of prose, and how they were being encouraged to make connections between practice and theory, between everyday life and theological engagement. They imbue the everyday with weight and moment as they make these connections. The onslaught of diverse comparisons, which insists that the reader imagine various images and scenarios either in quick succession, as in the examples above, or within a wide discursive field of diverse similes set up across the text as a whole, can seem like a prosaic chaos in which meaning becomes elusive. But it is the focus on joinings, on interconnectedness and relationality, which brings ideas, images, and people together under the umbrella of the text as a whole. The strict arrangement of the manuals contains the variety of their images, just as the structures of house and family enclose and control human behaviour. Gouge’s choice of images of joining involves the contrast between two textile processes, tailoring and knitting. Exploring the nearness of coming ‘into one flesh’ he argues: ‘This is somewhat more then to be of Christs flesh. That shewes we are as it were cut out of Christ: this shewes that we are againe knit to him.’51 The image shows a deeply material way of imagining the connection between the individual and their God, one rooted in familiarity with craft skills on the one hand and generated by biblical language on the other, the whole giving a shape to the consonance between the everyday and the spiritual which is at once quotidian and miraculous. It offers suggestions about the way the texts might have operated within an early modern house, which was itself a repository for a family’s knitted, cemented, knotted, plastered, soldered, and joined objects.
Davies, Kathleen M. ‘Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage’, in R. B. Outhwaite, ed., Marriage and Society (London: Europa, 1981), 58–80.
Glaisyer, Natasha, and Sara Pennell, eds. Didactic Literature in England, 1500–1800: Expertise Constructed (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
Hamling, Tara. Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
Hunter, Lynette. ‘Books for Daily Life: Household, Husbandry, Behaviour’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume IV, 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 514–32.
Moore, Helen. ‘Of Marriage, Morals and Civility’, in Jennifer Richards, ed., Early Modern Civil Discourses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 35–50.
Orlin, Lena Cowen. Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Richardson, Catherine. Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England: The Material Life of the Household (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
Wall, Wendy. ‘Literacy and the Domestic Arts’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73.3 (2010): 383–412.
——— Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).