Table Of ContentText, Food and the Early Modern
Reader
Putting embodied experience at the heart or the stomach of our under-
standing of literary artistry, linguistic innovation and book history, this
landmark collection explores the edible materiality of reading and writ-
ing in the period. With contributions from leading scholars in the field,
Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words fills a signifi-
cant gap in our understanding of early modernity. Its varied ingredients
will delight bookworms everywhere.
Jason Scott-Warren is Reader in Early Modern Literature and Culture at
the University of Cambridge, UK.
Andrew Zurcher is Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Queens’
College, University of Cambridge, UK.
Material Readings in Early Modern Culture
Series editors:
James Daybell
Plymouth University, UK
Adam Smyth
Balliol College University of Oxford, UK
The series provides a forum for studies that consider the material forms
of texts as part of an investigation into the culture of early modern
England. The editors invite proposals of a multi- or interdisciplinary na-
ture, and particularly welcome proposals that combine archival research
with an attention to theoretical models that might illuminate the read-
ing, writing, and making of texts, as well as projects that take innovative
approaches to the study of material texts, both in terms of the kinds of
primary materials under investigation, and in terms of methodologies.
What are the questions that have yet to be asked about writing in its
various possible embodied forms? Are there varieties of materiality that
are critically neglected? How does form mediate and negotiate content?
In what ways do the physical features of texts inform how they are read,
interpreted and situated?
Recent in this series
Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context
Edited by Stephen Hamrick
The Elizabethan Top Ten
Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England
Edited by Andy Kesson and Emma Smith
Print Letters in Seventeenth-Century England
Politics, Religion, and News Culture
Gary Schneider
Singing the News
Ballads in Mid-Tudor England
Jenni Hyde
Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader
Eating Words
Edited by Jason Scott-Warren and Andrew Zurcher
Text, Food and the Early
Modern Reader
Eating Words
Edited by Jason Scott-Warren
and Andrew Zurcher
First published 2019
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Contents
Notes on contributors vii
Introduction 1
JASON SCOTT-WARREN AND A NDREW ZURCHER
1 Carving for knaves 17
JULIET FLEMINg
2 Reading, writing and cooking 31
DEBORAH L. KROHN
3 The kitchen in the printing house 49
HELEN SMITH
4 ‘To dream to eat Books’: bibliophagy, bees and literary
taste in early modern commonplace culture 69
ELIZABETH L. SWANN
5 Skelton and the macaronic book 89
RAPHAEL LYNE
6 Spenser’s vomit: imitation, language, materiality 107
ANDREW ZURCHER
7 The Diet of Worms 126
random cloud-chambers
8 Eating the book, or why we need to digest what we read 168
PETER STALLYBRASS
Index 185
Notes on contributors
Juliet Fleming is Associate Professor of English at New York University.
She is the author of Cultural Graphology: Writing After Derrida
(2016) and Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England
(2001). With Bill Sherman and Adam Smyth, she is the editor of a
collection of essays on ‘The Renaissance Collage’ (a special issue of
the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2015).
Deborah L. Krohn is an Associate Professor at the Bard graduate Cen-
ter in New York. Her most recent book is Food and Knowledge in
Renaissance Italy: Bartolomeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchens (2015). She
has collaborated on a number of recent exhibitions in New York, in-
cluding (in 2008–9) Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, at the Metro-
politan Museum of Art.
Raphael Lyne is a Reader in Renaissance Literature in the Faculty of
English, University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Murray Edwards
College. His publications include Ovid’s Changing Worlds: En-
glish Metamorphoses, 1567–1632 (2001), Shakespeare’s Late Work
(2007), Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (2011) and Memory
and Intertextuality in Renaissance Literature (2016). He has also
written several articles on cognitive literary theory and a blog entitled
‘What Literature Knows About Your Brain’ (www.english.cam.ac.uk/
research/cogblog/).
Randall McLeod is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. The
inventor of the McLeod Portable Collator, he specializes in textual
criticism of English and continental books of the hand-press era. He
edited Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance (1994) and
has published widely on the editing of early modern texts, including
studies of Shakespeare, Herbert, Donne, Ariosto, Holinshed, Hop-
kins and Shaw. His most recent work focuses on early continental
printing and the history of italic type.
Jason Scott-Warren is a Reader in Early Modern Literature and Culture
at the University of Cambridge. He has published on Harington,
Nashe, Spenser and Shakespeare and has research interests in
viii Notes on contributors
manuscript studies, the history of the book and cultures of reading in
early modern England. He directs Cambridge’s Centre for Material
Texts (www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt).
Helen Smith is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of
York. Her Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production
in Early Modern England (2012) won the Roland H. Bainton Liter-
ature Prize, awarded by the Sixteenth-Century Society and Confer-
ence, and the DeLong Book History Prize, awarded by the Society for
the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, in 2013. She is
co-editor of Renaissance Paratexts (2011), The Oxford Handbook of
the Bible in Early Modern England (2015), and Conversions: Gender
and Religious Change in Early Modern Europe (2017).
Peter Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in
the Humanities and Professor of English and of Comparative Liter-
ature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. He has
published widely on early modern material culture, printing technol-
ogies, Shakespeare and Benjamin Franklin. He co-edits the Material
Texts series for the University of Pennsylvania Press and has curated
exhibitions at the Library Company of Philadelphia and at the Folger
Shakespeare Library. He delivered the 2006 Rosenbach Lectures in
Bibliography on the subject of ‘Printing-for-Manuscript’.
Elizabeth L. Swann is a Research Associate on the European Research
Council–funded project ‘Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern
England: The Place of Literature’, co-hosted by the Faculty of En-
glish and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and
Humanities at the University of Cambridge. From September 2018,
she will be Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, within the
Department of English Studies at Durham University. Her research
investigates the relations between embodiment, affect and epistemol-
ogy in early modern literature and culture. She is currently preparing
for publication a monograph titled Taste and Knowledge in Early
Modern England: Honey Secrets. Other forthcoming publications
include a co-edited collection (with Emilie K. Murphy and Robin
M acdonald), titled Sensing the Sacred: Religion and the Senses in
Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Routledge, 2018).
Andrew Zurcher, a Fellow in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, has
published a number of books on law and literature in the early mod-
ern period, including Spenser’s Legal Language (2007) and Shake-
speare and Law (2010). He is currently working on collected editions,
for Oxford University Press, of the works of Edmund Spenser and Sir
Thomas Browne.
Introduction
Jason Scott-Warren and Andrew Zurcher
In one of his earliest extant sermons, preached at Lincoln’s Inn in 1618,
John Donne deployed gustatory metaphors to explain why he preferred
some parts of the Scriptures to others. ‘Almost every man hath his Ap-
petite, and his tast disposed to some kind of meates rather then others;
He knows what dish he would choose, for his first, and for his second
course’. Spiritual menus resemble earthly bills of fare, and Donne’s fa-
vourite meal mixes the Old and the New Testaments, with the Psalms as
a starter, followed up by the Pauline Epistles. The preacher justifies his
predilections by invoking some weighty precursors: St Augustine loved
the Psalms, St John Chrysostom Paul’s letters. But Donne also offers
‘another more particular reason’:
because they are Scriptures, written in such forms, as I have been
most accustomed to; Saint Pauls being Letters, and Davids being
Poems: for, god gives us, not onely that which is meerly necessary,
but that which is convenient too; He does not onely feed us, but feed
us with marrow, and with fatnesse.1
Casting himself as at once a poet and a letter-writer, Donne finds his
god ministering to him in his favoured forms, and he in turn minis-
ters to his flock through those forms. ‘As a hearty entertainer offers to
others, the meat which he loves best himself, so doe I oftnest present to
gods people, in these Congregations, the meditations which I feed upon
at home’. As Donne expands upon his understanding of the Psalms, his
love of these dishes turns out to be polemical as well as personal. Just
as god speaks to us in a carefully composed poetic form that ‘when it
is made, can have nothing, no syllable taken from it, nor added to it’—
nothing added, nothing taken away—so we should ‘not pray, not preach,
not hear, slackly, suddenly, unadvisedly, extemporally, occasionally, ind-
iligently’.2 The difference between puritan, extemporized religiosity and
traditionalist formality is as palpable as the difference between eating
badly and eating well. Some snack on religion; others sit down properly
at the table to be regaled ‘with marrow, and with fatnesse’.
